II

The Bookshelf

‘All a long summer holiday I kept my secret, as I believed: I did not want anybody to know that I could read. I suppose I half consciously realised even then that this was the dangerous. moment,. I was safe, so long as I could not read – the wheels had not begun to turn, but now the future stood around on bookshelves everywhere!

Graham Greene

The Lost Childhood

1951

The Silent Minaret

AFTER DINNER, FRANCES INVITES KAGISO to sit out on the roof for a while. “It’s only a makeshift affair out there,” she confesses, as she leads the way through the open window, “but in this heat, it provides a pleasant enough escape from a stuffy London flat.”

Once outside, Kagiso walks over to the low wall at the front end of the building and leans out over the bustling street below: a constant stream of commuters still pouring out of the station; the increasingly animated revellers who have spilled out of the pub on the corner and taken over the pavement; a group of kids on skateboards practising routines under a giant, brightly coloured mural across the road; the incongruous bird-like couple outside the station – she in a high-necked frilly white blouse, he sporting a comb-over and black dinner jacket with velvet lapel – anxiously expecting their lift. And all the while the continuous coming and going of buses in the terminus.

He turns around. The image of Frances sitting in the front seat of a sports car, the letters GTi in neon green on the headrest, makes him chuckle.

“Where’s the rest of it?” he asks.

She laughs too. “Issa dragged this up here last summer. He’d ripped it out of an abandoned car that had been down there for weeks. He intended going back for the other seat the next night, but by then the car had been towed. So he got that deck chair instead.”

Kagiso unfolds the chair next to the upturned crate on which Frances has balanced their glasses. He leans back into the chair and throws his head up to the sky. Not the mass of stars he’d been expecting. Not the chirping of crickets, which as a boy he took for the sound of twinkling stars.

“Light pollution,” Frances explains. “In a big city like this, only the brightest ones shine through.”

It occurs to him that he is now in the northern hemisphere once more. “Which is the North Star? Do you know?” he asks, while making a mental note to check the direction in which water spins down the drainpipe. He forgot to do so during a brief visit to DC.

“I’m afraid I don’t and isn’t that shameful? Issa asked me that very question when we were out here once. He was reading about the first European explorations down the west coast of Africa. For centuries, European sailors were terrified at the thought of crossing the equator because they’d lose sight of the North Star if they did. I didn’t understand why that was such a terrifying prospect until he explained that they used to navigate by it and so would have wanted it constantly in their sights.

“Anyway, I expect you probably know all this stuff, but I found it very interesting and we pledged to locate it but never did. In my case,” she shrugs reaching for her glass, “too much sitting around to do.”

Kagiso smiles as he watches her recline. She must be the same age as his grandmother, he thinks, yet she seems so much younger. Though more frail and with none of that big African sturdiness about her, her eyes retain a mischievous and enthusiastic sparkle.

“I remember the first time I brought him up here. It was to see the minaret,” she recalls, tilting her head towards it.

Minaret? Kagiso puzzles, then quickly scans the skyline for clues. I haven’t heard a mosque.

Then, suddenly, there it is, right in front of him, as though it had just stepped out from the shadows.

‘The Silent Minaret,’ he used to call it.

At home, minarets declare God’s greatness five times a day, but here they stand silent, like blacked – out lighthouses.

Kagiso returns to the low wall. From here he can only see the small domed enclosure at the top of the minaret with its windowless pointed arched openings from where traditionally the muezzin would call azaan:

Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar
Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar
Ashadu an la illaha illAllah
Ashadu an la illaha illAllah
Ashadu anna Muhammad ar Rasool Allah
Ashadu anna Muhammad ar Rasool Allah
Hayya alas Salat...

The railway bridge and a criss-cross of overhead electricity cables obscure the rest of the building.

“Another night, he told me about mosques and minarets: the one at the bottom of your road in Johannesburg, the one you grew up under, as he so quaintly put it. And the white mosque in the city centre reflected in the glass building across the road. The mosque in Durban sounded impressive too.”

“I only have vague memories of Durban,” Kagiso interrupts with a faraway stare. “I remember the journey more than I do the place.” He turns to face her, leaning with his back against the wall. She doesn’t seem to mind the interruption, so he continues. “Issa and I went there secretly one weekend. We’d told our mothers we were going hiking with friends in the Eastern Transvaal as it was called then, but we jumped into a taxi to Durban instead.”

“Were you found out?”

“No. But that was down to Issa’s cunning.”

“Why Durban?”

“Oh,” he sighs, “One of his quests. I just tagged along to lend authenticity to the lie.”

“Did he find what he was searching for?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Did you see the mosque?”

“May have,” he shrugs. “We went to so many places, I really can’t recall. Wish I’d paid more attention... Why? What did he say about it?”

“That it was the largest mosque in the southern hemisphere. That it stands so close to the Catholic cathedral that from certain angles the two buildings almost seem one. I rather liked the sound of that.”

Yes Frances, imagine that, a sky that echoes simultaneously with azaan and the Angelus.

She tried:

Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar
The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary
Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar
And she conceived of the Holy Spirit
Ashadu an la illaha illAllah
Hail Mary, full of grace
The Lord is with thee;
Ashadu an la illaha illAllah
Blessed art thou amongst women
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus

 

Ashadu anna Muhammad ar Rasool Allah
Ashadu anna Muhammad ar Rasool Allah
Holy Mary!
Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners, now,
And at the hour of our death.
Amen

“It all suggested such pictures to my mind, such sounds to my ears. I can’t think of such a place or imagine such a mingling of sounds here. That would need to be nurtured with love and respect, not battering rams and riot gear...

“He spoke of the gigantic minaret of the Great Mosque at Samara, for centuries the world’s largest, with its staircase that winds around the outside. He brought me up a picture of that one a few days later. Huge, it was. I’d never seen anything like it.

“The highest minaret in Casablanca. That was impressive too. It has a laser at the top that beams across the Sahara in the direction of Mecca. I often sit here at night and try to imagine what that must look like – a green laser beaming across a clear desert sky.

“And my favourite, the Issa Minaret, like his name, in Damascus, where the faithful expect the Messiah to appear on the Day of Judgement.”

 

The church-like mosque used to be the Roman temple of Jupiter, then the Basilica of St John. It’s where the head of John the Baptist is buried, a holy place for both Muslims and Christians.

 

“I’ve thought about that one often since. I’d never heard of it. I wouldn’t have minded seeing it. Such a link.” A real cathemosdraquel, she thinks.

“The oldest minaret in the world is in Tunisia, and the oldest mosque in Britain is in Woking, would you believe,” she says, rising from her seat to join him at the wall. “And the largest mosque in north London is in Finsbury Park. Look at it! I’m certain it used to be lit up before. You can’t see the building itself from up here, but it’s all boarded up now. Shut down, like a shipyard, because of the threat it poses.” She shakes her head. “Shameful. Just shameful, while all the time we are the ones fighting our second war.”

Remembering Hide and Seek

TONIGHT, SLEEP DOES NOT BESTOW herself freely. From the mattress, he looks across to where the shiny knob of the desk drawer plays with light from the street. He crawls two paces on his knees across the floor, takes the yellowing childhood photograph from the drawer and returns to the mattress to study it. Lying awake, his eyes have adjusted to the darkness and there is no need to turn on the light.

When they were little boys there was sometimes the novelty of playing hide and seek indoors, with their mothers. With each game, their hiding places grew more and more elaborate: in Ma Vasinthe’s secret bathroom behind the built-in wardrobes in her bedroom; behind the geyser in the roof. Once Ma Gloria even took them to hide in the neighbour’s kitchen, where they ate cakes and biscuits while they waited for Ma Vasinthe to find them. Ma Gloria had thrown them over the back wall, before jumping over the wall herself and spraining her ankle.

Wherever they hid, Ma Vasinthe would always find them. As she approached their hiding place she would say, “Fee fie foe fum, I smell the blood of three South Africuns!” And then she would open the door and they would cling, squealing and laughing, to Gloria’s skirt, while their mothers nodded reassuringly at each other.

The game would start with a knock at the door. Ma Vasinthe would look at Gloria who would rush the boys into hiding, while Ma Vasinthe counted slowly and went to answer the door. But the charade soon turned sinister. Once, when they didn’t have enough time to find a good hiding place, they scrambled under Ma Vasinthe’s bed and waited. That was an eerie round and they didn’t enjoy it very much. It frightened them and, even though Ma Vasinthe said that they were imagining things, they knew that from under the bed they had seen the boots of the dreaded Black Jacks come to drag Kagiso and Ma Gloria away. After that, they enjoyed the game less and less.

Purple Rain

SEPTEMBER 2ND 1989 WAS A SATURDAY. When he wakes, still holding their childhood photograph in his hands, that is the day he remembers. Then, as now, his waking thoughts were of Issa, Issa with boyhood lips eternally poised for p. P is for paneer, p is for purple... They hadn’t seen each other for months, not since his birthday in July, in fact, when Sophie, drunk, tripped Issa up and broke his leg. During their years at university, he at the ‘Ivory Tower’ on the slopes of the mountain, Issa at ‘Bush College’ out on the Cape Flats, they had grown apart. But when he opened his eyes on that Saturday morning, he knew Issa well enough to know he would be involved.

The whole country knew about it. He did too. For weeks, the activists in Jan Smuts House had spent their days falling over one another and their nights in long meetings behind closed doors, followed by dinners of hushed whispers, and Tracy Chapman ‘Talkin’ Bout A Revolution’ in the common room, now reserved by unspoken agreement for their exclusive late-night use:

Don’t you know
They’re talkin’ about a revolution
It sounds like a whisper
Don’t you know
They’re talkin’ about a revolution

Their efforts paid off, as thousands took to the streets of Cape Town on that spring day to take part in the biggest demonstration in South African history.

But he wasn’t there, having opted instead for a matinee screening of Dangerous Liaisons in Rosebank with Sophie, Richard and the other bright young things from Upper Campus. Richard Mc Kenna, he thinks. Sophie Scott-Harris. What became of them all?

After the film, they went back to Jan Smuts House; it would be quiet, it wasn’t far and it had started to rain, and town would surely still be a mess.

They had the place and its panoramic vistas to themselves, a welcome change after the weeks of frantic covert planning it had witnessed. They’d stopped for pizza and some wine on the way - Constantia, as Richard rarely drank anything else – and Sophia had brought some hash that they smoked secretly in Kagiso’s room under clouds of incense. The boys agreed that Michelle Pheiffer was gorgeous; the girls did too. Then the girls agreed that John Malkovich was gorgeous, and the boys did too. Everybody agreed that the American accents were distracting. None of them had read the novel and all of them were oblivious to the chaos that had erupted on the other side of the mountain...

The Defence Force, armed with water cannons, had sprayed purple dye on the peaceful protestors as a means of marking participants, and then set about arresting everybody who bore the stains for their involvement in an illegal gathering.

Kagiso and his friends knew nothing of their plight; of the defiant hairdressers who did their bit for the struggle by giving refuge to fleeing demonstrators in their salons, draped them in towels and gave them un-purple rinses; nothing of the desperate crowd who, in vain, sought refuge on holy ground – the police, armed and dressed in full riot gear, raided St George’s Cathedral, in the interest of national security. They knew nothing of the 500 demonstrators who had been rounded up by the end of the day and trucked to police stations around the city.

And then, at around ten thirty, just after they’d heard the punch line to Richard’s joke, the activists – wet, bedraggled and purple – walked under the archway and into a courtyard that was about to explode with gales of drunken laughter. It was not until the tears of hilarity had been wiped away and Kagiso had caught his breath that he recognised Issa, stained purple, staring at him, from among his purple comrades.

jim, ayn, káf, mim, há,

IN HER SUNNY KITCHEN, she closes her reference book and turns away from Karim’s alphabet on the wall. On a clean page, she starts to write down the alphabet from memory – all 29 letters, from alif to hamza, saying each letter out loud as she writes – sound and symbol, sound and symbol. Some letters – bá’ and nún , jim and kha’ – still throw her; like b and d, g andj, they confuse the novice. She has to think carefully whether to place the dot above or below the otherwise identical shapes. Fluency and instant recognition will come with time and practice, she reassures herself.

Her favourite letter is m: mini – – with its loop and tail, a little like a p. She likes the word moemkin – it contains two mims and her other favourite letter, k: kaf – . She likes its look and its sound: m oe m kin. She sometimes talks to herself, making whole sentences with just this word: “Moemkin moemkin moemkin moemkin moemkin!”

Now she writes the word moemkin, remembering that the letter changes its shape to when it appears at the beginning or in the middle of a word and the letter is written when it appears in the middle of a word: . It means possible.

Then she writes his name, Karim: . It means noble.

She smiles. She can read and write her two favourite words. She touches the tip of her forefinger to her lips and then, gently, to the words she has written on the paper, Karim, possible: .

She opens her eyes, takes a deep breath and moves on to the next phase, memorising the mutations of those letters that change their shape depending on whether they appear at the beginning, middle or end of a word: jim, ayn, kaf, mim, has’ .

“I just don’t give a – ”

“THE ANGER,” FRANCES REMEMBERS through narrowed eyes, “came later. First, there was the despair. On that Sunday night, 26 days later, as we watched the bombs start to fall, he fell silent. But I didn’t notice it at first – was too absorbed in what was happening on the screen:

As you all know from the announcement by President Bush, military action against targets inside Afghanistan has begun. I can confirm that UK forces are engaged in this action. I want to pay tribute at the outset to Britain’s armed forces. There is no greater strength for a British prime minister and the British nation at a time like this than to know that the forces we are calling upon are amongst the best in the world.

“The world had lost its moment,” Frances sighs, “and Britain was again at war. Never thought I’d see the day. Of course there was the Falklands, but that was Thatcher’s doing. Wicked woman. This chap on the other hand. I won’t be voting for him again,” she declares, grimacing with distaste and slapping her hand on her armrest with the finality of a judge passing sentence. “And so it wasn’t until I saw his shoulders shake that I realised he had started to cry. I turned -”

Kagiso leans forward. “Frances?”

She shows him her palm. “I’ve just remembered something.”

“that? ”

She starts slowly, like a medium, eyes unmoving, reporting events from another world. “It was a few weeks before he went home for his mother’s inaugural lecture, late August, early September, before the world went mad. He’d started reading a novel earlier in the summer, quite a thick one it was. He read snatches of it to me from time to time.” She shakes her head, annoyed with herself. “What was it called? Never mind,” she says, waving dismissively. “It will come to me later.”

“Anyway,” she continues, “he wanted to finish it before he went home, so he brought it up to the roof the day before he left for Johannesburg. He sat himself down in the driver’s seat while I made some fresh lemonade. When it was ready, I took it out to him and then I let him be.

“Mind you,” she confesses, “I kept peeping out from time to time to see how he was doing. It felt so reassuring to have him out there, his nose in a book. All I could see from here were his big feet stretched out on the crate in front of him.

“When I was sure he’d finished, I peeped out again. This time I saw him hunched over his knees, the book cradled in his lap. I went out to see if he was okay. As I got nearer, I heard sobs.

“‘Issa,’ I whispered. ‘Are you alright?’

“He looked up at me, his eyes red and puffy.”

“Fine thanks”, he said.

“‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

“The book, he said. It’s the saddest thing I’ve read. And then he started crying all over again.

“We laughed about it afterwards, but even when he left for the airport the next day, I could tell that the story was still with him, there, in his eyes, when he turned around to wave goodbye one last time before going down into the station.

“What was it called?” she asks again, staring hardinto the middle distance, a bent finger tapping at her lips. “I can still see the cover. It had a picture of a little girl balancing on a stick... Never mind.”

She turns to Kagiso with renewed focus. “But the night the bombs started to fall, that night was a different sort of crying. I turned to him but he seemed not to notice me. I strained to hear the words he kept muttering to himself, over and over again.”

There’s nothing there to bomb. There’s nothing left to bomb.

“That was when he started listening almost constantly to the World Service. Its muffled, crackly transmission reminded me of the dark days of the Blitz when we would gather around to listen to the news on a long wave Bakelite wireless that took five minutes to warm up.”

“Welcome to Talking Point on the World Service of the BBC. US forces continue to pound the military installations of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors inside Afghanistan.

“The US has declared the military operations a great success, but President George W Bush has also warned that the campaign is only the start of a war against terrorism that could last for years.

“Violent protests against the US-led air strikes on Afghanistan have taken place in Pakistan, which threaten to further destabilise the region.

“What is your reaction to the US-led attacks in Afghanistan? Are the strikes justified? What are they likely to achieve? And what could be the repercussions for the people of the region and the rest of the world?

“The lines are now open. Let’s take our first caller, Raymond in Singapore. Hello, Raymond.”

“Yes, I think it unlikely that Osama bin Laden is going to sit and wait for the US forces to capture him in Afghanistan. I assume that if it becomes necessary, he will go underground in some friendly community. Will the US then start bombing other suspects, presumably Islamic countries?”

“And he hardly ever watched the news on TV anymore. He’d still come up here most evenings – more, I think, out of habit and to keep me company – but he always brought a mangled newspaper with him, which he flicked through while I watched the set, or a little transistor radio which he’d take out onto the roof”

“This week in Talking Point: the worst fighting may be over in Afghanistan but aid agencies warn that the refugee crisis will not be solved for years to come.

“There were at least two million refugees in Pakistan alone before the start of the American bombing in October, more than 200 000 are thought to have crossed the border since then.

“Many of these refugees are desperate to return home, but the UNHCR has been urging them not to return immediately, since Afghanistan is not ready to receive them.

“The primary obstacle to large-scale repatriation now is security, as tribal warlords continue to fight over the spoils of war.

“Jobs and food are both in short supply in a country where six to seven million people are reported to remain on the brink of starvation.

“Does the West need to do more to help the Afghan refugees? What should the new government do to help the Afghan people repatriate?

“We’ll go immediately to our first caller, Paul in England.”

“Here we go, another huge flood of welfare claimers and council house takers heading our way. Isn’t it time we told people to go back into their own countries rather than coming in and sucking ours dry – which is the inevitable conclusion if we don’t tell these people to go back to their homes?

“I wouldn’t mind aiding people if they were willing to help themselves – but people are too ready to cry and whinge. When I saw people dancing in the streets and enjoying themselves in their country, it showed me that it can’t all be that bad, and now they’re out from being oppressed they have a golden opportunity to make something great of themselves. They’d have the backing of everyone if they didn’t send their people over here to claim our money from our welfare system and send it home.”

“No. It wasn’t till several months later, not until the summer, following that dreadful incident in Lye, that the anger started to set in.” Frances slips away again, a pensiveness coming over her. “I can still see him sitting in that very armchair you’re in now, circling words in the newspaper article: riot gear, metal battering ram, mosque – children, refuge, deportation. He turned to me, pleading to know...

What sort of society can make sentences out of such disparate words, Frances – casual, matter-of-fact sentences out of such disparate words?

“‘Well,’ I stumbled for an answer, ‘the same sort that only two generations ago displayed signs like: no blacks, no Irish, no dogs. Things have come a long way since then.’”

Yes, Frances, they have – a very long way. Bigoted signs have become battering rams, detention camps and bombs. A very long way, backwards.

“What did happen at Lye?” Kagiso asks.

“Wait a minute,” she says. “I still have the article right here. He dropped it into my lap before he stormed out and disappeared for days. You can read it for yourself.” She retrieves a white envelope filled with prayer cards and parish leaflets from a folder on the smoking table next to her chair. On the envelope, in her careful, old-fashioned hand, is neatly written, Issa’s article, and the date, 25th July 2002. Kagiso opens the envelope:

Mosque raid causes anger

Police yesterday raided the Ghasia Jamia Mosque in Lye in the West Midlands in order to remove an Afghan family that had sought refuge there after the Home Office ruled that they had no right to remain in Britain. The raid caused anger and has been widely condemned by Muslim and human rights organisations.

Police officers dressed in riot gear used a metal battering ram to break down the door of the mosque. The Afghan parents and their two young children have been taken into custody pending their deportation from Britain.

 

The raid has caused anger and outrage in Britain’s Muslim community. A community spokesperson outside the mosque said that they were angered and disgusted by the way in which the police and the Home Office handled the situation. “Seeing a destitute family hounded and traumatised and our place of worship violated has left us feeling angry and humiliated.”

“That’s when the anger started,” she says resentfully, pointing to the article when he’d finished reading. “After that, there was very little talk of stars or deserts or forgotten histories, no more tears shed over sad books, just an intense, brooding silence. He would come in here, slouch in his chair, and listen with distant glassy eyes as I did all the talking. Not that that was ever a problem, you understand.”

Kagiso laughs. But her smile fades quickly.

“Sometimes I think I may have talked too much. If I’d kept silent more, perhaps that would have made him come out with things, get them off his chest a bit. But I didn’t want to make him feel unwelcome. Didn’t want to shut him out.”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself, Frances. Issa’s always been prone to withdrawal, ever since we were children. He sometimes used to shut himself in his room for days.”

“Well, I still wonder whether if I had – Anyway...”

She removes a cigarette from the box and rolls it in the tips of her fingers for a while. When she has lit it, fearful of the flame, she lays it in the ashtray.

“And I don’t think he was working very much either.”

Kagiso frowns.

“Yes. I came to know when he was writing by a piece of music he used to play. I can hear it now. Oh, it was a beautiful piece. I do miss it. I don’t even know what it was called. Didn’t want to ask. Thought he might think I minded. Didn’t want him to turn the volume down. So I never asked. Suppose I’ll never know now.” She looks up at Kagiso who looks down at his hands.

“Now everything was silent down there, with only the news on the hour, every hour. Beep beep beep, then the announcement of capital cities around the world. If he did play music, it was always that terrible shouting stuff that young people listen to these days. And I’m sure one of the songs – he used to play it often – used to go something like, ‘I just don’t give a – ’, you know?” She raises a palm to her mouth, as if to exclude a child, then mimes an F.

Kagiso nods.

“So if he wasn’t working, then what did he do all day?”

“Well, he washed a lot.”

Kagiso sits up in his chair. “He washed?”

“Yes, his mother reacted to that too. Yes, all the time.”

“And was he... seeing people? Getting visitors?”

“Well, he never used to get any visitors, apart from his friend Katinka, who used to call by from time to time. But even that soon stopped. She buzzed me from outside one night, cold night it was too, when she’d got no reply from downstairs. Thought he might be here with me. I invited her up to wait in case he was running late. But he never came. Furious, she was. And you know Katinka... doesn’t mince her words.”

Kagiso smiles agreement.

“Apparently, he’d stood her up a couple of times before. I tried to ease things over for him a bit – told her I had no idea where he was, that it was unlike him not to be home. Suggested that something must have happened to detain him. But really, he’d taken to going out most nights and often didn’t get back till very late.”

“Did he ever talk about where he’d been?”

“Never. And I didn’t think it my place to ask.”

In the ashtray, the cigarette has transformed itself into a long worm of ash.

‘A road map into our past’

‘The Report that follows tries to provide a window on this incredible resource, offering a road map to those who wish to travel into our past.’

Archbishop Desmond Tutu
October 1998

KAGISO DUSTED ON THE DAY HE ARRIVED. Not that he enjoys housework, only wanted something to do. Decided to start by eliminating the gloomy layer of grime that had settled between him and the flat, as Issa would have known it. The wardrobe was empty, the bathroom and kitchen were left spotless, the small bar fridge was washed, turned off and the door left ajar. Disconsolate relief, everything had been done, nothing to do...

 

Except pack the bookcase.

It is pleasing to look at, the handsome, commanding proportions of the solid oak, the meticulous alphabetical arrangement of the books on its shelves. Katinka has asked to keep it – she remembers helping Issa collect it from an antique dealer in gentrified Crouch End over the hill. Couldn’t believe what he’d paid for it, couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t make do with something from IKEA. Its contents will be shipped back to Johannesburg. But Kagiso doesn’t want to dismantle it, finds it hard to get started, procrastinates, seeks distractions.

Again he handles the mementos on the shelves; the speedometer from their student banger, Issa had removed it after the car was eventually written off in a head-on collision with a drunken driver – it registers 119 251 km; the jar of sand he’d gathered from the side of the road in the Karoo – Kagiso can still see him crouching – where the car clocked 100 000 km; the poem now posted inside, scribbled on a rolled-up travel card: The story of my life / written in the / sands of time / buried in the / warm dunes / – how many more / caravans will / move on / without noticing / the faint shadow / this ripple creates; the special edition R5 Inauguration Coin, stuck with blue tack to the front edge of the middle shelf.

He wraps the coin in the silver foil from inside his cigarette packet to distinguish it from the other coins in his wallet. Then he raises a reluctant hand to the first shelf but quickly drops it by his side with a sigh, imagining, again, the scenario: What if he comes back? Catches me? What will I say? We thought it best. Had given up on you. Decided to pack up your stuff and take it home, to your room in Ma Vasinthe’s house.

His attention is drawn to a bright yellow note, which sticks out of the top of one book. He opens the book. The note is from Issa to Frances: Found this in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Ahead of your trip to Canterbury, I thought you might find it interesting. Kagiso reads the highlighted section:

Part Two:

The Literary Heritage

Chaucer’s Dame Alys, the Wife of Bath, illustrates her expertise in the art of life by quoting two proverbs. They belong to the category of sayings of Arab philosophers which are cited in the Disciplina Clericalis and the Secret of Secrets. But Dame Alys attributes them to the Almagest of Ptolemy:

 

Whoso that nyl be war by othere men,
By hym shall othere men corrected be.
The same wordes writeth Ptholomee;
Rede in his Almageste, and take it there.

Her opinion of Ptolomy and the Almagest is pronounced with the authority of experience of Ptolemy:

Of alle men yblessed moot he be,
The wise astrologien, Daun Ptholome
That seith this proverbe in his Almageste:
“Of alle men his wisdom is the hyeste
That rekketh nevere who hath the world in honed.”

Chaucer, in composing these passages, was following the example of the Roman de la Rose which gives us an important clue to the exact location of these sayings:

[The tongue would bridled be, as Ptolemy
Early in the Almagest explains
In noble words: “Most wise is he who strives
To hold his tongue save when he speaks to God”]

The source “at the beginning of the Almagest,” from which Chaucer and Jean de Meun drew different proverbs, is of particular importance as it confirms Chaucer’s use of Ptolemy’s Syntaxis in the translation of Cremona from the Arabic. The preface from this version was a biographical note on Ptolemy composed by “Abulguasis.” It contained thirty-three sayings attributed to Ptolemy and was taken from an Arabic work, The Choicest Maxims and Best Sayings, by Abu al-Wafa’ (“Abulguasis”) al-Mubashshir ibn Fatik, a Muslim historian and philosopher who lived in Egypt. al-Mubashshir’s work was composed in 1048-49. It comprises short biographies and descriptions of twenty philosophers, accompanied by a series of sayings under the heading of each, and is related to the widely read compilation of “strange sayings” of Greek philosophers by Hunain ibn Ishaq.

He boxes the book. Rising, he notices again the empty space where the postcard of home used to be. Home, he thinks, was here. And so was –

He positions himself opposite the space. Only the foundations of the towering city now remain. Undiminished, they continue to dominate the bookshelf, like five large cornerstones. His eyes move slowly over the thick black spines, the white lettering that runs down the middle – Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report – the red volume numbers at the base of each – Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4, Vol 5.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 / Once I caught a fish alive

He sends out a cautious hand to the first volume and dislodges it, slowly. The gentle tug causes the shelf to creak. He hesitates, does not remove the volume entirely from its secure position, only partially, so that it balances, a little precariously, over the edge of the shelf. Cautiously, he examines the protruding cover: a collage of faces, some known (an oath-taking De Klerk, hand raised in the air, Thabo, Zuma, Tutu) others not. He leans forward to read the gravestone pictured in the centre. It is embossed with flags of the ANC and the South African Communist Party:

The Cradock Community and the people of SA salute you in your heroic struggle for freedom, peace, justice and social emancipation. Your blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Long live the fighting spirit of our leaders.

 

MATTHEW GONIWE
BORN 2721947
DIED 28061985
REST IN PEACE
NOBLE SON OF AFRICA

He studies the faces of the two anonymous women on the cover, wondering who they are, where they’re from – and about the truth they hope to find, whether they have found it, whether, if they have, they are reconciled to it? Then he notices their eyes, preoccupied, haunted.

He steps back.

“A stage-managed whitewash,” his colleague, Lerato, had spat. “And Tutu wants us ‘to close the chapter on our past,’ with this? When it castrates our leaders and diminishes our suffering. And why? To assuage liberal guilt and pacify fucking bourgeois fears. Don’t think for one moment that we are satisfied.”

He pulls a sleeve across his brow and slides the volume back into its slot.

6, 7, 8, 9, 10 / Then I let it go again.

He studies the contents page in the second volume and flicks ahead to the fifth chapter, ‘The Homelands from 1960 to 1990’. On the title page, a photograph: a young man, able bodied, black; his trousers around his ankles – made, like a boy, to stand in the corner and face the wall. In the foreground is a picture of President PW Botha. Smirking. Kagiso goes no further.

On the cover of Volume Three, a soldier takes aim, a woman is comforted, Mandela embraces Suzman and a headline reads: ‘You left me blind – and I forgive you’.

He removes the volume from the shelf and sits cross-legged on the floor with it cradled in his lap, searching it, like a telephone directory, for names, names he knows – names of the tortured, the missing and the dead:

The case of Steve Biko 18

Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko [CT05004/ ELA] was detained on 18 August 1977 in Port Elizabeth and died in custody on 12 September 1977 in Pretoria.

Security police officers Major Harold Snyman [AM3918/96], Captain Daniel Petrus Siebert [AM3915/96], Warrant Officer Ruben Marx [AM3521/96], Warrant Officer Jacobus Johannes Oosthuizen Beneke [AM6367/96] and Sergeant Gideon Johannes Nieuwoudt [AM3920/96] alleged that Biko died of brain injuries sustained in a ‘scuffle’ with the police at the Sanlam Building, Port Elizabeth.

At the inquest, magistrate Marthinus Prins ruled that Biko’s death was caused by a head injury, probably sustained on 7 September during a scuffle with security police in Port Elizabeth – but that there was no proof that the death was brought about by an act or omission involving an offence by any person.

He follows a footnote to Volume 4, Chapter 5 where he finds Biko’s gravestone being watched over eternally by the prayerful pose of a participant at the proceedings:

BANTU STEPHEN BIKO
HONORARY PRESIDENT
BLACK PEOPLE’S CONVENTION
BORN 18-12-1946
DIED 12-9-1977
ONE AZANIA ONE NATION

The death in detention of Mr Stephen Bantu Biko Stephen Biko was a prominent leader of the Black Consciousness Movement in the mid-1970s. He was detained by Eastern Cape security police in August 1977 and kept at Walmer police cells in Port Elizabeth. From there, he was taken regularly to security police headquarters for interrogation. The two district surgeons responsible for his medical care were Drs Benjamin Tucker and Ivor Lang.

On 7 September 1977, Stephen Biko sustained a head injury during interrogation, afterwhich he acted strangely and was uncooperative. The doctors who examined him (naked, lying on a mat and manacled to a metal grille) initially disregarded overt signs of neurological injury. They also failed to record his external injuries or insist that he be kept in a more humane environment (at least that he be allowed to wear clothes). When a physician was finally consulted, a lumbar puncture revealing blood-stained cerebrospinal fluid (indicating possible brain damage) was reported as being ‘normal’, and Biko was returned to police cells.

Finally, on 11 September 1977, Stephen Biko lapsed into semiconsciousness. Dr Tucker recommended his transfer to a hospital in Port Elizabeth, but the security police refused to allow this. Subsequently, Dr Tucker acquiesced to the police’s wish to transfer Biko to Pretoria Central Prison. Stephen Biko was transported 1 200km to Pretoria on the floor of a landrover. No medical personnel or records accompanied him. A few hours after he arrived in Pretoria, he was seen by district surgeon Dr A van Zyl, who administered a vitamin injection and asked for an intravenous drip to be started.

 

On 12 September, Stephen Biko died on the floor of a cell in Pretoria Central Prison, naked and alone. The post mortem examination showed brain damage and necrosis, extensive head trauma, disseminated intra-vascular coagulation, renal failure and various external injuries.

Kagiso returns to the Commission’s findings:

THE COMMISSION FINDS THAT THE DEATH IN DETENTION OF MR STEPHEN BANTU BIKO ON 12 SEPTEMBER 1977 WAS A GROSS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION. [AT THE TIME] MAGISTRATE MARTHINUS PRINS FOUND THAT THE MEMBERS OF THE [SOUTH AFRICAN POLICE] WERE NOT IMPLICATED IN HIS DEATH. THE MAGISTRATE’S FINDING CONTRIBUTED TO THE CREATION OF A CULTURE OF IMPUNITY IN THE SAP.

 

DESPITE THE INQUEST FINDING WHICH FOUND NO PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS DEATH, THE COMMISSION FINDS THAT, IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT BIKO DIED IN THE CUSTODY OF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS, THE PROBABILITIES ARE THAT HE DIED AS A RESULT OF INJURIES SUSTAINED DURING HIS DETENTION.

 

IN VIEW OF OUTSTANDING AMNESTY APPLICATIONS IN RESPECT OF BIKO’S DEATH, THE COMMISSION IS UNABLE TO CONFIRM A PERPETRATOR FINDING AT THIS STAGE.

Kagiso had bought tickets for he and Issa to see Cry Freedom. He’d hoped that seeing the film together would help them put aside their differences, find a way forward – that in it, his love for film and Issa’s commitment to the struggle would find some sort of middle ground. He’d joined the queue early. Tickets were sold out within hours.

Sweet, Issa said when he phoned to confirm their bookings. Very cool. I’ll see you in Rosebank later.

But by the time they got to the cinema, the film had been withdrawn, confiscated by the police at the last minute, even as the first reels had started to run.

Now, sitting cross-legged in front of Issa’s bookcase, it strikes him that, more than a decade later, he has still not managed to fill in all the gaps inflicted upon him by a censorious dictatorial regime. The books not read, music not heard, histories not known, have become, like the holes in the expensive smelly cheese for which he has developed a liking, a part of his truthfully reconciled and liberated life.

He has still not seen the film. To him, it remains a police seizure. That is what lives on, the film itself, a blank space, a smelly hole. He is, he thinks, a little like the front page of a national newspaper stuck in his journal; full of blank spaces:

Our lawyers tell
us we can
say almost
nothing critical
about the
Emergency
But we’ll try:

PIK BOTHA, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, told US television audiences this week that the South African press remained free.

We hope that was listening.

They considered our publication subversive.

If it is subversive to speak out against , we plead guilty.

If it is subversive to express concern about we plead guilty.

If it is subversive to believe that there are better routes to peace than the we plead guilty.

Below it, he has scribbled: ‘I am a collection of blank spaces, defined more by what I don’t know, than by what I do.’

 

But the catalogue of crimes in his lap does not record the invisible forgettable survivable blows to the brain by the censor’s axe. He starts to search for his own name: Mayoyo; Kagiso, left stupid after having been lobotomised by the South African Board of Censors in the interest of national security. He releases the pages of the fifth volume from back to front with his thumb. When the headline ‘Finding on former President PW Botha’ flashes past, he catches the page:

102 Mr Botha presided as executive head of the former South African government (the government) from 1978 to 1984 as Prime Minister, and from 1984 to 1989 as Executive State President. Given his centrality in the politics of the 1970s and 1980s, the Commission has made a finding on the role of the former State President:

[...]

BY VIRTUE OF HIS POSITION AS HEAD OF STATE AND CHAIRPERSON OF THE [STATE SECURITY COUNCIL], BOTHA CONTRIBUTED TO AND FACILITATED A CLIMATE IN WHICH THE ABOVE GROSS VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS COULD AND DID OCCUR, AND AS SUCH IS ACCOUNTABLE FOR SUCH VIOLATIONS.

In the front of the volume, Kagiso finds his name:

 

Mayoyo.

In a list of ‘Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights’.

He shudders. Seeing his own name in print, there, in black and white, in the directory of national horrors, the feeling rises, like when he saw the new gravestone his grandmother had had erected on his grandfather’s grave, the first time he had associated his name – there, carved in stone – with death, the first indication of his mortality passing through him like a cold wind. The feeling rises, as in DC, when he glimpsed his reflection looking back at him from behind the names of the gratuitously dead in the polished surface of the memorial to the vainglorious Vietnam War. Angered by the audacity, he had turned around and walked away. But now he doesn’t close the volume; rather, he lies down on his back and brings its weight down onto his chest.

When he wakes, his head beside the volumes, his eyes move over the open pages:

It was not a secret march – it was in the newspapers. I remember on the 24th or the 25th Dr Boesak was still negotiating with Mr Le Grange, then Minister of Police. He sent him a telegram to say that this march would be peaceful and, to a large extent, was a symbolic march. There was no idea that we would physically go into Pollsmoor prison and break Mr Mandela out.

A breeze flows through the open window and flips a few pages.

Lionel and Quentin were 13-year-olds and they both died. There were thousands of people, but why did the police shoot the children? Karel sat with Lionel while he was dying – now Karel is suffering because he and his brother where like twins.

Now a strong gust throws open the window. It startles him. He leaps across the small room to secure the banging pane. When he returns to the volume, he finds it open on a book-marked page. His eyes seize the heading “‘Trojan Horse’ killings”. The words stand up like Lazarus in front of him. They don’t resurrect mythological images; those have been usurped. His association, vivid, is from his youth.

Shock waves from the ambush reverberated around the country and beyond. After the attack, Athlone, at the epicentre, dropped its hands from its shell-shocked ears and looked around in dazed confusion. Then, as if in slow motion, it saw three of its boys fall to the ground, dead. The angry, speechless wave that had lapped at hearts for centuries, rose again, each time a little higher than before. In its rising it woke mythology from its age-old slumber, took its language, then sent it back to sleep.

The Trojan Horse and other ambush tactics 168 The Athlone ‘Trojan Horse’ incident that took place in Athlone, Cape Town, on 15 October 1985 is well known: police hiding in large wooden crates on the back of a railway truck fired directly into a crowd of about a hundred people who had gathered around a Thornton Road intersection, killing Michael Cheslyn Miranda (11) [CT00478, CT00472], Shaun Magmoed (16) [CT00472] and Mr Jonathan Claasen (21) [CT00475] and injuring several others.

That night, while Cape Town of the Flats mourned its dead and young, galvanised hearts readied themselves for battle, in Johannesburg Issa lifted a rucksack onto his back and made for the front door, determined to defy Ma Vasinthe if it came to that:

“You can’t go to Cape Town! she asserted, barring the doorway. “What about school?”

School? I’m sorry, Ma, but if you mean that bigoted white liberal bourgeois nest you send us to every day, you can forget it.

Outside a convoy of expensive combis hooted, clenched fists and Palestinian kefiyas and V-fingers raised into the air through narrowly opened tinted windows.

Let me pass, Ma.

“No.” She folded her arms.

Ma. Please. Get out of the way.

“Now you listen to me!” she commanded, waving a stern finger at him. “You’re a child and you will do as I say.”

Yes, Ma. I am a child. And if that makes me a legitimate target in this country then it makes me a legitimate protestor too. Now get out of my way!

“Don’t you shout at me, young man.”

Issa lowered his voice. He glared at his mother from under a furrowed brow. Ma, I’d rather leave the house with your blessing, but if –

Vasinthe dug her heels in. “I’m not negotiating with you.”

Hoot hoot.

Suit yourself. Issa swung around and started running towards the back door.

“Gloria!” Vasinthe yelled. “Lock the back door!”

But Gloria did not obey. When Issa rushed through the kitchen, she looked up from the ironing. Issa paused. They exchanged glances, did not speak. A snatched wordless moment in which they understood each other perfectly.

When Vasinthe entered the room, Gloria said goodbye by glancing at the open door.

Then Kagiso was drafted in. “Go!” Vasinthe shouted, pointing up the driveway. “Stop him!”

Kagiso leapt into action and caught up with Issa at the gate. He grabbed onto the rucksack and started tugging and pulling at it.

Let me go! Issa struggled.

“Hold on to him, Kagiso. I’m coming.”

One of the gleaming combis pulled up to the curve. A door slid open.

“Come, Issa!” a voice called out from the dark, shaded interior. “Drop the bag!”

Issa dumped his restraining baggage and leapt into the combi.

Go! he shouted, when he hit the floor, his legs still dangling through the door.

On the pavement, Ma Vasinthe watched as her son was carried away in an expensive motorcade of defiant resistance. As the convoy picked up speed, she saw V-fingers, kefiyas, Issa’s dangling legs vanish from sight as tinted windows were sealed and solid doors slid shut. When the discreet, blacked-out fleet disappeared around the corner, Kagiso stepped forward to pick up the jettisoned rucksack.

The day after the Trojan Horse shooting, an angry crowd gathered at the St Athans Road Mosque in Athlone. A member of the SAP was shot by the crowd, after which police opened fire, killing Mr Abdul Fridie (29) [CT00607]. On 18th October, a massive security force presence was moved into Athlone.

 

Armed soldiers and police lined the streets and searched houses while a helicopter hovered above.

When Kagiso replaces the bookmark, he notices a quotation on its reverse side:

And why should ye not
Fight in the cause of God
And of those who, being weak,
Are ill-treated (and oppressed)? –
Men, women, and children,
Whose cry is: “Our Lord!
Rescue us from this town,
Whose people are oppressors;
And raise for us from Thee
One who will protect;
And raise for us from Thee
One who will help!”

Qur’n S.iv.75

The Monster’s Name

WHEN VASINTHE TRAVELLED TO London immediately after Issa’s disappearance, she brought two gifts, one of them a photograph of her and Issa, which now stands on Katinka’s bedside table next to a picture of Karim. Katinka enacts a little ritual here everyday, laying a flower, sometimes just a leaf plucked in passing from a tree, or tilting perfume onto her forefinger then touching it to the frames – her altar to her missing men. At night she always lights the tea light beside it before she goes to bed.

About the picture, she remembers everything – how she had insisted they have it taken, the warmth of the night, the feeling of his strong shoulders under her hand as she pulled him towards her following the hand signals of the obliging stranger to whom she’d given her camera – the date, 11th February 1990. Her words to Issa...

“I want to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter that I hardly know you. I want to tell it to somebody tonight, now, and then never have to talk about it again.”

The previous day, Kagiso had insisted that they give the stranded girl a lift. “Bloody hell, Issa, she could be standing there for hours in this heat.”

Are you mad?

“But that guy’s just dumped her on the side of the road.”

I’m not getting involved in their argument. He’ll turn back for her. He pays the petrol attendant.

“I don’t think so. He looked pretty angry to me.”

Kagiso looks at the abandoned girl. She kicks her rucksack in frustration then, raising a shielding palm to her brow, turns to salute the shimmering horizon. Issa starts the engine and drives slowly out of the forecourt. When they join the main road, he accelerates.

“Issa?”

Forget it!

But Kagiso pulls up the handbrake bringing the car to a screeching stop just beyond where the girl is standing. She runs towards them.

“Cape Town?”

“Yes,” says Kagiso, throwing open the back door. “Jump in.”

“Thank you very much.”

When she has settled down, Kagiso turns around. “What was that all about?”

The girls sighs despondently. “In this country, what else? Fucking racist doos.”

Issa glances at her through the rear view mirror.

“He picked me up outside Bloemfontein. It wasn’t long before I regretted ever getting into his car. But I was glad to have the lift so I just listened. But after two hours of his kak, I just couldn’t keep quiet any more. So I told him why I was going to Cape Town. That’s when he threw me out.”

“Heavy.”

“Ja well, I’ve seen worse. Thanks for stopping. For a moment I thought I might miss it all.”

“That’s all right,” Kagiso says, not looking at Issa.

“You also going down for the occasion?” the girl asks.

“Yeah.”

“I can’t wait.”

“I’m sure he can’t either.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

She notices a packet of Rizla papers among the paraphernalia on the dashboard. “You guys mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead,” Kagiso says. “There’s an ashtray in the door.” He leans over the seat to show her.

“Woah!” he exclaims when he sees the fat hand-rolled affair cocked in her fingers. “That thing looks dangerous. Is it what I think it is?”

“Do you mind? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“Do I mind? Go ahead, please.” He ignites a lighter. “I smoked my last at a party last night.”

“In that case, you should go first.” She holds out her offering.

“Thanks, man.”

“Transvaal plates,” she comments. “Jo’urg?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Ventersdorp.”

Issa tightens his grip on the wheel.

“Right.” Kagiso says, then holds out the joint.

“Kolskoot!” She exclaims. “That’s exactly it. Ventersdorp in a word.” She takes the joint. “Actually, for an even better summation of my home town, you need to prefix ‘right’ with ‘far’, or better still, ‘ultra’. You get what I’m saying?”

Kagiso nods with wide stretched eyes. “That bad?”

“That bad,” she raises the joint but stops short of her lips. “And my problem with it, to start with, you see,” she says, screwing her eyes to shield them from the smoke, “is that I’m wired differently. As you may have noticed, I’m a left-handed nooi.” She raises the illicit contents of her left hand into the air, “Cheers,” and then brings it to her lips.

“I’m Katinka, by the way,” she says when the music stops.

“And I’m Kagiso. He’s Issa.”

“And does Issa speak?”

“Not very often.”

She nods. “I see.”

“When you guys going back to Jo’urg?”

“Not for a while now. December probably. Maybe June. We study in Cape Town.”

“You’re lucky. I would have loved to study in Cape Town, under the mountains, next to the sea, but,” she sighs, “it wasn’t meant to be.”

“What happened?”

“My father – that’s what happened. He wouldn’t hear about it.”

“Why? ”

“He wouldn’t hear of his daughter going to university in liberal Cape Town. I tried to bargain. ‘Stellenbosch,’ I said, but he had made up his mind and when my father has made up his mind, it’s because his pal, God, has had a say in the decision. So to change it again would be a sin.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to Free State. What else could I do? It was that or stay on the farm. But,” she says with a relieved sigh, as though dropping an unbearable weight, “I’ve finished my course and all that is behind me.” Then she sits forward, squeezing herself between the two front seats to point at the endless open road stretched out in front of them, “and that’s what lies ahead.”

She opens the book on the back seat:

...we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose’.

But at last Dahoun drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. “This,” they told me, “is the best: it has no taste.” My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.

She glances at their silent driver and lays down the book, her fingers brushing the tattered flag pictured on the cover. “What is this music?” she asks of the lilting, sorrowful tune.

“It’s his.”

“What is this music?” she repeats. “I’ve never heard such music. Where’s it from?”

He says his first words to her. It’s –

She is surprised. “But that’s banned.”

Issa doesn’t respond.

“Well, it is beautiful music. Like the desert. Like here.”

It is night by the time they approach the mountains that encircle Cape Town. Scatterings of light betray the sleepy villages in the dark valleys below them, while the golden glow of the city beyond hangs over the peaks above, like a halo.

“I’ve not yet seen the new tunnel. I’m told it’s quite impressive.”

Kagiso looks at Issa.

“I believe they built it from both sides of the mountain. Apparently, when the two tunnels met, they were only millimetres off.”

It’s getting late and he has been driving for sixteen hours. Tomorrow will be another long day. At the fork in the motorway, the moment of choice between the tunnel and the pass, Issa makes for the tunnel.

Minutes later, they are racing down the N1 on the home run to its southernmost destination. To their left, the Cape Flats – a carpet of light stretching all the way to False Bay, glides by. Ahead, a sweeping bend brings Table Mountain slowly into the view, lit up against the night sky. There is an air of anticipation in the city.

At last the sun has set.

Dawn will usher in a long-awaited new era.

And steering the car between the flashing white lines on the freeway, a quote comes to hover in front of Issa’s tired, driving eyes: “The morning freshness of the world to be intoxicated us.” That is all he wishes to remember of it and tries hard to ignore the rest of it. But the passage lingers, demanding to be recalled in its entirety: “yet, when we achieved and a new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.”

“I wonder what he must be feeling now,” she says, almost to herself.

The next night, when the crowd on the Grand Parade starts to disperse, they walk across town to the Underground. Inside, the atmosphere is euphoric. Issa’s entrance is greeted with hoots and cheers.

“Amandla!”

“Awethu!”

“It is true, isn’t it?”

“It’s true.”

Katinka is greeted with cautious reserve.

“Ek sê my bra,” Issa’s friend starts up when they are alone, “leading the way to reconciliation by example, or what? Who’s the lanie nooi?”

Issa looks across the room to where Katinka has blended effortlessly into the celebrations. He felt called upon to deliver his verdict, his final interpretation of the bits of evidence she had laid before him during the course of the day. As he watched her dance, rejoice, hands high in the air, it came to him: The system imprisoned all of us.

He turned to his friend: She’s a comrade from the Free State. So don’t you give her grief.

“Nooit, my bra. If she’s with you, I knew she had to be cool.”

Coolest you’ll meet.

“Vir seker!” his friend nods with envious admiration.

From the crowded dance floor, Katinka catches Issa’s outline, crouching in a dark corner, his neck crooked as he stares into the space above her head. She follows his gaze to the ceiling above the dance floor. Being projected there, are images of the day’s unimaginable events: the huge crowd that gathered outside the prison to greet him, waiting, for hours; the moment when he appeared, actually appeared, there, in front of them, walking into their midst, like the Messiah; the hush that fell, then the rising murmurs, the grappling with the most indescribable complexity of emotion, all of it, pent up, with him, for 27 years; then, the release, the catharsis, the ecstatic jubilation, here, in the city, across the country and around the world.

“Amandla!” someone shouts from the dance floor.

The whole Underground responds with a deafening chorus, which overpowers the thumping sound system: “Awethu!”

The sequence ends with the face of the man as he now is, emerging, slowly, from behind the blacked-out profile of his banned image – till today, apart from a few black and white images that predated his censure, the only image their generation had of him.

Gerry Adams at least had a face.

When she looks down from the ceiling, she finds him looking at her. He does not look away. She walks over to him.

“Wat dink jy?” she asks, crouching on the floor next to him.

Not much.

“Good.”

The response surprises him. Why good?

“Well, if you’re not thinking much,” she explains “then you won’t need to use too much of your daily fifty-word ration to share your thoughts.”

He tries to stifle a shy smile.

She raises her head encouragingly.

I’m thinking of those who can’t be here. My friends. Coline. Robert.

“Ag, forget about them,” she says with a dismissive wave. “If they can’t be bothered to be here, today of all days, they don’t deserve your thoughts. Absconders. Forget about them.” She grabs him by the hand and stands up. “Come. Dance.”

But he breaks free. And if they’re dead?

Her face falls. “Oh my God!” She slides down the wall, back into her crouching position on the floor. She buries her face in her hands. “I’m so sorry.”

Katinka?

Comrade?

Hey! He takes her gently by the hand. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay. Come on.

She crawls out cautiously from behind her hands, wiping tears from her cheeks.

Hey!

“I thought – I thought you were talking about... People like...”

Like?

She sits up with a sniff. “I want to tell you a story,” she says, resolutely wiping away the tears. “It doesn’t matter that I hardly know you. I want to tell it to somebody tonight, now, and then never have to talk about it again. It must die with the old. It’s only a short story. Will you listen?”

Yes.

“One day, there was a brother and a sister who grew up on a farm outside Ventersdorp. When they were naughty or when their parents wanted to force them into things like homework or going to church, which the little girl hated, they would threaten them with a monster, saying that, unless they did as they were told, the monster would come for them in the night, drag them from their beds and devour them.

It was a horrible monster, ugly and cruel, and even after years had passed and the brother and sister had grown up, the mention of the monster’s name still struck fear in some part of them.” She looks at him nervously. “Can you guess the monster’s name?”

He thinks.

What? Not – ? He gestures to the images on the ceiling.

She nods.

Nooit!

Then looks away. “When I told my father I was coming here today, he said, ‘Kies! If you go, you are not welcome in my house any more. You are not my daughter any more. What do you think the people will say? How do you expect me to face them with a daughter who runs after a communist terrorist kaffir?’ And my brother, he said he’d shoot me himself if he ever saw me again.”

She looks up at him with overcast eyes. “Fluit, fluit,” she says with a sad smile. “My storie is uit.”

The Sanctuary

KAGISO HAS FORGOTTEN HIS JOURNAL, so he unlocks the door again to fetch it from the desk. It is open at an insert, an extract he was once asked to read in an undergraduate tutorial. It seems almost innocuous now so that he snatches the journal without fully noticing the open page, but at the time the extract brought his world crashing down around him. It was what first prompted a revision of his black and white mind film:

... Fifteen years later, in Cape Town, comes this brief glimpse of young mother, Lydia. Divorced with one child, she went back to look after her 86-year-old mother who lived with her husband in a house tied to a lime-stone processing plant whose owner forbade anyone else to stay with them. Thus, since Lydia was not allowed to stay there she has been running from the police. She and her one-year-old baby were amongst those arrested in a police raid. They spent the weekend in jail and were only allowed out because of the baby. She had to reappear in court and, at the time of the interview, did not know what the outcome would be because she did not have money to pay the R20 fine. She did not have anyone to support her. She had divorced her husband about six years previously, but although he was required to support her and the child financially she had not received a cent. “She has been in court many times for a maintenance grant but is tired of this because nothing ever materialises” (15:4). Lydia, writes MM Gonsalves, is tired of trying to make ends meet as well as running from the police. She states that no matter where one goes, if one does not work and ‘live-in’, and does not have a pass, one has to run, because of the danger of trespassing. She begs for a live-in job as she cannot stand the thought of being caught again and of being constantly on the look-out for the police (15:5).

When the tutorial was over, he returned to his room at Jan Smuts House and locked the door. He skipped classes for the rest of the day and in the evening, went to see Issa at UWC.

Kagiso roams the city – sometimes with Katinka, mostly by himself. No matter how late he goes to bed, he always wanders through the early morning streets, when security shutters on shop fronts in the neighbourhood are being lifted slowly, like sleepy lids, before the streets become crowded. While the destitute are still visible – bundles huddled in doorways, before being swept away into obscurity. Where faces are obscured, he looks to other features: ears, hands, fingernails especially – large, even and with unusually prominent half-moons – shoulders, hair, scrutinising them, not in order to classify and exclude, but to identify and embrace.

One morning, he plucks up the courage to talk to the fruit vendor, still setting up his stall. “Good morning,” he says, nervously.

“Alrigh’ mate? No’ quite ready yet.”

“That’s okay. I was only wondering if...”

The vendor straightens himself.

“If...” Kagiso starts from scratch. “I believe you know my brother.”

The vendor looks at him, confused. “Bruva?”

“Yes. He used to barter with you, fruit in exchange for the sports section of the paper.”

The vendor throws his head back in recognition. “Oh, yes, sure I do. Yeah, ‘e used to come by ’ere regular. I was only wondering abou’ ‘im the other day, like. ‘aven’t seen him for a while. He alrigh’? ”

“Actually...”

The vendor leans forward.

“Actually, he’s disappeared.”

“Your ’aving me on! Disappeared?”

Kagiso nods.

“When? How?”

“Four months ago. In April. That’s all we know.”

“And you’ve ’eard nuffing since?”

Kagiso shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“You mean to say somebody can disappear,” he snaps fingers, “just like that?”

“Seems so.”

“Well, I am sorry to ‘ear that, mate. I really am. Nice bloke ’e was, too. Mind you, he never said very much. Came ‘ere one morning, bough’ a banana and gave me the sports paper. Always a banana. Same thing ‘appened again the next morning, and the next, till I wouldn’ take ‘is money no more. ’ad to be fair, like, you know what I’m saying?”

“So he didn’t say anything to you before he left?”

“Nah, he didn’t say nuffing, mate. As I say, he never said much anyway.” The vendor scrutinises Kagiso a little more closely. “You say you two was bruvas?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. But he was more kinda Arab looking, weren’t he? ”

Kagiso nods.

“Don’t mean to pry, like, it’s jus’ that, for a moment I weren’t sure, you know, if, we was talking abou’ the same person, you know wha’ I mean? ”

“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Listen, if you hear or see anything,” he hands the vendor his card, “would you get in touch?”

The vendor studies the card. “Johannesburg, ’ay?”

“Yeah.”

“That where ’e was from, too?”

“Yes.”

“See, I didn’t even know tha’ much. Aint life funny sometimes?” he asks, searching the sky. “You can see somebone every day of yer life and know nuffing abou’ them, until they disappear. Tha’s London for yer, mate.”

Kagiso rocks back on his feet awkwardly.

“Sorry, mate, I didn’t mean to upse’ you, like.”

“You didn’t.”

The vendor is not convinced. He places Kagiso’s card down on a box and opens another. “‘ere, take a banana.”

“No, that’s not -”

“Go on,” the vendor insists, stuffing the banana into his pocket. “‘av it.”

Kagiso relents. “Thank you.” He looks at the card. “You won’t forget, will you?”

“Forge’?” the vendor asks.

Kagiso points at the card. “To be in touch. If you hear anything?”

“Sure, mate,” the vendor assures. He slips the card into his back pocket. “Anyfing I can do, mate. Anyfing I can do.”

Later in the day, the heat, inescapable, follows him like a stalker, from Issa’s tiny flat, onto the tube, through the busy streets.

“I’d have thought you’d be used to it,” Frances commented when he complained.

Kagiso muttered a vague, concealing response; at home he rarely has to confront the weather, his contact with it always mediated by his air-conditioned car, his modern office in a shady northern enclave of the city, his spacious, well-ventilated flat with its balcony overlooking the pool. London is a different world; he has twice had to rush off a baking stopping starting swerving turning sitting bus for fear of retching. On the tube, he tries, whenever possible, to stand by the door at the front of the carriage where he can let the window down as he has seen experienced commuters do.

With him, he carries his journal, a water bottle, a camcorder and Issa’s A-Z and notebook, which he found at the bottom of the bookcase and some of the ‘Missing’ leaflets of Issa to distribute when the desperate compulsion to do something takes hold. He visits the places Issa mentions in the notebook, to see for himself the new British Library, impressive inside but which from the street looked to him like a prison (he much preferred the building next door, was amazed to discover that it is, in fact, a station); Trafalgar Square, destination of protest, prestigious location of South Africa House and, to his surprise, just there, in the middle of the city, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, not at all the setting he’d imagined when their evocative soundtracks carried him on sentimental cinematic journeys to magical places, now, he doesn’t even step inside; the parking lot in front of Westminster Abbey, called ‘The Sanctuary’, the location of a black and white photograph in Issa’s notebook: a young Mandela before his eventual imprisonment and total censure.

From here, Kagiso winds his way through the narrow sunless back streets behind the abbey, past the offices of the Liberal Democrats on Cowley Street, then pausing further along to read a sign outside a house, the home of Lord Reith, first director of the BBC, before finally turning the corner into Barton Street. He is looking for number 14, so he starts to count the numbers on the front doors of the neat deserted terraced row – 10, 11, 12, 13 – odd and even next to each other on the same side of the road. Even though he knows it is next, still, in the end, after all the years, number 14 comes upon him rather suddenly, so that he has to step back a pace to study it.

Little distinguishes the house from the other near-identical houses on the quiet street, only a round blue plaque, like the one outside Lord Reith’s, from the Greater London Council, reveals why Kagiso felt compelled to investigate Issa’s mention of this address, also referenced in the brooding quotation above his desk, in his notebook:

TE Lawrence
“Lawrence of Arabia”
1888-1935 lived here

He finds a slight recess across the road and slips into it, looking up at the attic, willing the curtain there to twitch, expectant, remembering the soldier in blind Alfredo’s story who waits 100 nights in the street beneath his true love’s window. Kagiso looks left then right, up then down the quiet little street, barely registering the ding-dong ding-dong that comes rolling over the rooftops. When he moves away from the little house, he looks, one last time, over his shoulder at the attic before turning the corner. He glances at his watch just as, having struck its final stroke at four, Big Ben falls into silence.

Kagiso spends a lot of time at his destinations around the city. He is attentive to them, watches them, their other visitors, finds a good vantage point from which to sketch them, photograph them. Where possible, he always visits the restrooms before leaving, never fully aware that he is searching, always waits for the occupants of locked cubicles to emerge, before leaving.

On Grosvenor Square, he stops to film the sealed-off building on the west side of the square – the barricades, the closed road, the enormous spread-winged eagle that adorns the top of the otherwise unremarkable building. He has been recording the country’s embassies whenever he visits a capital city, storing the images in a folder entitled: ‘The fortressed look of freedom and democracy.’ He does not linger here but retrieves Issa’s notebook from his backpack before continuing down South Audley Street in search of the secluded garden with a secluded bench on which is inscribed the following dedication:

In Memory of Derek Lane

From a select number of friends who spent many hours in his company and together enjoyed the splendour of this city and the tranquillity of these gardens.

Issa had copied the dedication into his notebook alongside a little map of the area showing the location of the park and the bench where he wrote:

Mayfair

24th December 2000

I am sitting on Derek Lane’s bench tucked away in the affluent heart of this splendid city, but, with my own accursed ‘Sixth Sense’, I only see the ogres – the hideous ones, the invisible ones. They roam the city, the unwanted ones, with vacant, distant stares. Absent and preoccupied, here only in unwanted, despised, brutalised, foreign body; Europe’s untouchables.

From the top decks of busses, they scan the bustling pavements of the begrudging sanctuary, searching, desperately, for familiar scenes from home – the smiling face of an old school friend waving enthusiastically from the crowd; the old men at the café on the square, drinking coffee in threadbare jackets, sporting medals from wars only they can recall; the hands of the orthodox priest being kissed fervently by suppliant devotees in the market place; the teenagers with lean, healthy bodies, diving from the old pedestrian bridge – no longer there – into the warm glow of the setting sun.

Sometimes they stare at memories of torture chambers, at missing relatives, at dead friends, right there in the piece of floor between their feet on packed underground carriages, or in the unbelievably pretty shop windows at Christmas time, filled with price tags that could bring whole families to the sanctuary.

At the carwash on the corner, they catch sight of what they fear most in the polished chrome of shiny cars and buckets of dirty water; others see it in mirrors in hotel bathrooms or in the shiny cutlery they lay out before breakfast – reflections of self. Embarrassed, they look away. How could I have imagined that here, this, would be better? When they are still there? Did I leave to live with mocking reflections? Waiting on tables with an apron cut from a graduate’s hood; mending shoes – my grandfather’s trade – with the skilful hands of a surgeon.

Those who believed
And those who suffered exile
And fought (and strove and Struggled)
In the path of God, –
They have the hope
Of the Mercy of God:
And God is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful

 (Qur’an S ii, 218)

For work, they do the jobs these people no longer want to do for themselves. They washed the limousines for Saturday’s wedding in the big church on the hill, tended the garden in the hotel ahead of the lavish reception, which was celebrated into the night. In the morning, they served them breakfast, and then, after everybody had set off on the journey back home, bleary-eyed and hung-over, they stripped their beds and washed their sheets stained with vomit and cum. And at the airport, they cleaned the toilets on the very plane that months earlier had brought them to the sanctuary and which would that night whisk the newly-weds off to their sun-drenched honeymoon, there.

At night they return to their lairs, where the corridors echo with anguished sobs and moans; where memories – of a carefree childhood with siblings, now dead; of frail grandparents, shell-shocked that their many years of toil and sacrifice had not made it all better; of lonely, fretful, wives, unable to escape from under the captive gaze of vigilant government gangs; of anxious parents filled with self-loathing and reproach for not having done more to prevent it all from going so horribly, horribly wrong – all come alive in vivid multicolour home cinema with surround sound on grubby walls and ceilings in the middle of the night, making sleep impossible.

Kagiso inspects the evidence around the bench – the scuffed pebbles at his feet, the recently smoked cigarette butt, the fresh match beside that may have lit it. Somebody has just left. He has arrived too late, will leave too soon, to ever know who. Whenever he leaves a place, he looks, instinctively, over his shoulder, sometimes stepping back a few paces to check.

No longer uses the expression, ‘No looking back’.

He’s heard that destitute people sometimes seek shelter on the Circle Line, so he spends several hours walking the length of the trains on this line, moving, like a beggar, from one carriage to the next at stations around the never-ending line, first clockwise: Notting Hill Gate / Bayswater / Paddington / Edgware Road / Baker Street / Great Portland Street / Euston Square / King’s Cross St. Pancras / Farringdon / Barbican / Moorgate / Liverpool Street / Aldgate / Tower Hill / Monument / Cannon Street / Mansion House / Blackfriars / Temple / Embankment / Westminster / St. James’s Park / Victoria / Sloane Square / South Kensington / Gloucester Road / High Street Kensington / Notting Hill Gate, then anti-clockwise: Notting Hill Gate / High Street Kensington / Gloucester Road...

When the singing man has disappeared into the crowd, he signs the petition then walks down the Strand. In a deserted coffee shop, he opens his journal:

I noticed him when he stepped into the frame. I had knelt down to take a photograph of the demonstration outside Zimbabwe House. He was a big man, very tall, and the unseasonal grey tweed coat he was wearing did not restrain his free, swaying movements. I trained my lens on him for a while; he must certainly be from southern Africa, I thought. There was something in his full face, his easy disposition that was unmistakably home. How unselfconscious he was, to draw such attention to himself, to expose so much of himself to this indifferent town. I photographed him. When I lowered my camera, our eyes met. I smiled. He smiled back and started to make his way towards me. I stood up from my kneeling position.

“Boom chaka boom chaka boom chaka boom! I’m working on this tune, you see, and this is the introduction. Boom chaka boom chaka boom chaka boom! What do you think? Isn’t it great?”

“It’s good,” I say, clicking the cap back onto the lens.

“And, remember, it’s only the introduction! The song proper hasn’t even started yet. And then we go a 1, a 2, a 123... Yela yela ye la la la la. Ay, my brother, now the tune carries us away, away and away! I say, my brother, what do you think of that, man?”

I tell him that I think it’s a great tune, because it is. The man lets out a big roaring laugh of genuine delight, as though I had just given him the best news in the world.

“Ay, thank you my brother, man. Do you really like my music? ”

I nod eagerly. “I’m sure a record company will snap you up.”

“Thank you, man. Thank you.”

“Are you from South Africa?” I ask, struggling to secure the worn clip on my camera case.

The man stands back, surprised. “How do you know?”

“I’m from there myself. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Really! You really mean to say that, after all these years, you can still hear Africa in my voice?”

“Yebo,” I say.

“Ay, come here, my brother. Come here.” He throws his arms around me. “My African brother.” Even though I’m a little worried about dropping my camera – I’ve still not managed to secure the troublesome clip – the embrace feels good. Its sincerity and spontaneity make me laugh. It is as though home has suddenly appeared on the streets of London to give me a hug. The smell of stale alcohol doesn’t bother me that much. Then the man steps back to hold me at arm’s length, with his enormous hands resting on my shoulders. He tilts his head apologetically. “Actually, my brother, I’m from Zimbabwe. Yes, Bulawayo, Place of Slaughter. Do you know the story of Bulawayo?”

I give up on the clip with an annoyed tut, wrap the shoulder straps tightly around the case to keep it shut and return the camera to my open bag where it is kept snug by the pile of ‘Missing’ leaflets, an operation the man watches intently.

“And which place are you from, my brother?” he asks when I have finished.

“Egoli.”

“Ay, man! Place ofGold.Jozi! Egoli! Gauteng!” The man exclaims as if about to burst into song again with the many appellations of the city of gold. “How long are you in London for?”

“Only a few days,” I say. And then I hesitate. The man notices.

“What’s the matter, my friend?”

I decide that I may as well tell him. “I’m looking for my brother,” I say, stooping to retrieve one of the leaflets from my bag. “Perhaps you’ve seen him,” I ask, handing him the leaflet.

The man studies the picture of Issa intently. Then he taps it with his forefinger. “You know – ” He cuts himself short.

“What?” I ask eagerly. “Do you recognise him?”

He starts nodding slowly, knowingly. “I do,” he says, smiling. “Yes, I do.”

I can hardly believe the good fortune of this chance encounter. “Where? When?” I ask, unable to contain my optimism.

The man looks around suspiciously then pulls me once again towards him. He whispers in my ear, conspiratorially. “I saw him just the other day,” he confides, his warm breath brushing my ear.

I step back slightly to see his face, to express my delight.

“Yes. In Buck House,” he continues. “I usually have dinner there with Elizabeth once a month or so. We go back a long way, you know, old Liz and I.”

“Excuse me?” I blink, my heart still racing in my chest.

He pushes a dirty finger to his pouted lips. “Sshh! I don’t want people to know about it. It’s a discreet arrangement. You have to keep your voice down, okay?”

“Yes, okay,” I agree half-heartedly, the anticipation, the hope, starting to drain anti-clockwise from my soul.

“Good,” the man continues. “You have to be careful in this town... Now, when I was having dinner in the palace the other day, he was there.” He studies the picture again. “Yes, it was him. I remember he was chatting to Philip – I’m not so keen on him, I must admit – about the races. And when we played cards together after dinner, he beat us all hands down.” He starts to laugh and is soon shaking with hilarity. “That upset old Liz. Phil and I usually let her win, you see. Ooh, you should have seen her face.”

“Really,” I said to the man, feigning amusement.

But his laughter had already stopped, his face had fallen and his mind had moved on to other things. “I’m looking for my son too. He’s missing you know.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I respond, zipping up my bag.

“But I know where he is, mind you. Yes, he’s in jail. In Gauteng, as it happens.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I hear myself echo.

Again, he pulls me towards him. “Yes, he killed a man. A motor car accident.” Then he waves his Issa-clutching hand dismissively. I start to plot my escape, make a dramatic gesture of swinging my bag onto my back, even glance at my watch, but there is a futility in that gesture, that dismissive wave, which I recognise instantly: it says yes, it’s awful, thank you for your concern, but I’m sorry I can’t tell you more, I’m exhausted by it because it’s always on my mind and I don’t know what to do, but I’ve been through it all too many times to go over again, here, now. I’m sorry I raised it. Sometimes it slips out. Forget I said anything. And then you put on a happy face and try to change the topic. To those who know it, that gesture spells defeat. The man is still being as generous and unselfconscious as he was when I spied him through the lens of my camera. Despite his insistence on hushed tones, he shared his joy and sorrow boisterously and in equal measure, with this indifferent town.

“How long have you been here?” I ask.

“Twenty-seven years,” he answers in five flat, monotonous syllables. “Twen / ty / se / ven / years.”

“That’s a long time,” I exclaim. “Would you like to go back home to Zimbabwe?”

He shakes his head. “Home? Zimbabwe? No. Zimbabwe is no longer home.” Then he gives me a warning look. “And not because of Mugabe, mind you!” I follow the man’s forefinger as it waves, backwards and forwards in the air, like a crazy metronome. No, not because of Mugabe.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“Because of Smith! Remember him? You remember him?”

“I remember him a little,” I say.

“Only a little! How can you only remember a little about a man like Smith?”

“I was very young,” I say defensively.

“Rubbish. I’m sure you can tell me more about Hitler and you weren’t even born then.”

I stutter.

“Well, let me tell you. I think Mugabe’s right! I think he’s great. You know why?”

I shake my head.

“I was this old,” he drops his hand down to his thigh with his gathered fingers, like a closed tulip, turned upwards, “when, one day, I was shepherding my grandfather’s sheep. My grandfather had many, many sheep. So one day, I was shepherding the sheep when two white men came. They came up to me and said, ‘Hey, whose sheep are these?’ I said they belonged to my grandfather. You know what they did? They cut off their heads, like this.” He chops his arms around my neck, as if in a game of oranges and lemons. “Yes, like this,” the man continues. “Chop chop chop. All my grandfather’s sheep. I saw it. With my own eyes. And I was this high from the ground, man. This high from the fucking ground. How can you only remember a little of Smith when I remember so fucking much?” Then the singing man starts to cry.

“Yes, I saw those things with my own eyes. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m here and not there. That’s why I’m fucking here!” He wipes his eyes with Issa’s face as though it were a handkerchief. The leaflet leaves ink stains across the man’s eyes where he has wiped away his tears – and across his sweaty brow. “That’s why I’m fucking here.” And then he steps around me and starts staggering away with Issa’s smudged image staring helplessly back at me from the man’s clutched hand – like Winnie the Pooh, I think – like Winnie the Pooh dangling helplessly from the hand of Christopher Robin.

And now, Kagiso is alone, high above the city. He didn’t see it when he flew in; he had an aisle seat, turned away from the little window and tried to force himself back to sleep. But now he has time to survey it properly. It is the last circumference of the day. He is cocooned inside his own thoughts. Barely registers the other tourists in the glass pod.

It is vast. That is his first thought as the pod rises slowly to reveal the sprawl beyond the dense cacophony of architectural styles that jostle into a façade on the riverbank. Westminster Abbey seems at first to form part of the Houses of Parliament – the kingdom of God indistinguishable from the kingdom of man. He is surprised by the location of things. So that is where that is in relation to that. And from up here that doesn’t seem so far away from that, when it took ages to walk it the other day.

But eventually, he concludes, all cities seem the same. From this height, at such ambiguous times of day, there is very little to distinguish one from another. He recalls some photographs Ma Vasinthe brought back of Paris, taken from high above the city at sunset; there is very little difference. The bends in the river surprise him. In his mind, it was straight.

The sun winks its last and then slips behind the horizon. A cage of metal rods comes silently into view – the structure of the thing, elegant from afar, intrusive at close proximity. He turns to the east, where night is looming. The lights have come on and now the earth is brighter than the sky. He makes a twilight wish, as they did when they were children playing cricket in the street, rushing to hug a lamppost as it flickered into life. ‘Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs / Got to keep the loonies on the path.’

During his first year at UCT, he lived facing the dawn of night. He didn’t like to miss it, always felt agitated when he did. He would watch its approach from his window at Jan Smuts House. From this spot, he felt in tune. He knew when the sun had sunk behind the mountain at his back; its rays would disappear from the peaks ahead. And then, like everywhere in Africa, night came quickly. It would come flooding over the blue mountains in the east, like a tide, flicking light switches in its path. He could see it rushing towards him, unstoppable. But then there would be a lull, a slight pause, a deceptive respite, as daylight hung on and darkness crept its way, out of sight, up the foot of the mountain beneath him, like a silent enemy. It was as though suddenly, everything had stopped, as though nightfall had changed its course. It was a disconcerting moment, like walking into the sea at night. It made him shiver.

In the end, the advance of night was always complete. He would throw open the windows in anticipation of azaan, a comforting sound that reminded him of home. From up there he could only hear it faintly, if at all, from the far distance below as he searched the expansive flats for Issa’s college in the bush. If he did hear the faint call of the muezzins declaring God’s greatness to a starry city, he would know that the sun had sunk over the mountain behind and into the ocean beyond: Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar...

Stepping out of the pod, he cannot decide which way to turn. It is easier to run down the mountainside than further up it, remember? The futility of choice leaves him empty inside. Which is the path of least resistance? What would water do? Stagnate? What are the chances that he’d choose the direction that will lead him through this sprawling city to the road and the house and the room in which he’d find Issa? What are the chances of this night’s twilight wish coming true?

He has been sitting on a step by the river, watching the murky water rise, wishing for it to engulf him, suddenly, and carry him away, the water already lapping at his feet. It rises quickly up to his knees and the step he is sitting on. He lifts his backpack from the step and hooks it onto the railing above his head. The black water rises to his chest, his shoulders and then, splash splash, quickly up his nose and above his head. He feels himself becoming buoyant as the river tries to lift him from the step. And then, with a determined tug, she takes him and pulls him into her. He offers no resistance, lets the river roll him over, caress him gently and take him down to sleep. He closes his eyes and rests his head on the dark black tide.

But then, not too late, just in time, he wakes. No. He rotates himself, like Vitruvian Man in the circle, upright, arms stretched out at his sides. Then he raises his hands above his head and lurches up towards the surface. When the river grapples, trying to wrap itself around his feet, he starts to kick, raising his hands one more time above his head to lurch.

His head breaks through into the warm night above the surface; inhale.

He has not been taken far, a few strong strokes and he is back on his step, walking up out of the black river.

He slumps down against the railing, watches the water drain from his clothes onto the flagstones of the walkway beside the river. He pulls off his socks; he has lost his shoes in his struggle against the river.

Get up, he instructs himself when he is nearly dry, and walk away from this place. He rises, hitches his bag onto his back, and makes his way towards the bridge.

On the empty train, he sits, barefooted and ashamed, scanning the advertisements in the carriage – a row of bags in a police lineup under the heading: ‘Guilty until proven innocent’ – counting the stations to his destination again and again on the route map above the window – Leicester Square / Covent Garden / Holborn / Russell Square / King’s Cross St. Pancras / Caledonian Road / Holloway Road / Arsenal / Finsbury Park – eight stops from central to north London on the Piccadilly Line, northbound, under the sanctuary, to Finsbury Park, N4

Russell Square

KATINKA HAS ONLY MET HER ONCE before, in 1995, when Vasinthe was part of a small group of distinguished female scientists invited to a special dinner, hosted in their honour by the President, at the Groote Schuur Estate. Issa accompanied his mother on the occasion and invited Katinka to join them for lunch at Hout Bay the following day. On the tube, Katinka recalls the meeting:

“So, how was dinner?” she asked excitedly, as they sat down to fresh fish caught that morning in the surrounding seas.

Issa nodded, stifling a smile. It was fine.

“Is that it?” She looked at Kagiso and Vasinthe in disbelief. “Can you believe this guy? He goes to dinner, at Groote Schuur, with the President, and all he can say is, ‘It was fine.’ Come on,” she encouraged, pushing his shoulder. “Show some enthusiasm. Do you know how many people would kill for such an opportunity? It’s your duty to share the experience. I want to know all about it. Everything! What did you eat? What did you...

Kagiso stretched his eyes and tensed his lips at her, but it was too late.

She finished off with a whimper, “... wear?”

The subject had been rekindled.

“Go on,” Vasinthe prodded. “Tell her what you wore,” her tone as sour as the lemon she was squeezing onto her fish.

Issa sat up in his seat, stretched his arms to the sky and pushed out his chest. Katinka noticed the distinctive loopy signature. “You wore that!” she exclaimed.

Issa reclined, smiling broadly. He threw a chip into his mouth and chewed it with big circular movements, as though it were a large piece of gum.

“Can you believe it?” Vasinthe protested. “And he hasn’t taken it off since.”

Katinka let out a laugh of disbelieving admiration, and then, in deference to Vasinthe, cut it. “Issa,” she said with a tone attempting closure, “You’ve the devil in you.” She unfolded her cutlery as noisily as possible from the napkin and smiled a half-smile at Kagiso from the corner of her eyes. Sorry. That wasn’t too bad was it? Then waited for him to redirect the conversation.

Kagiso chased his cue, chewing quickly, with one eye on Vasinthe. It seemed as though he would either swallow the half-chewed mouthful or spit it out on the floor. Wow! Look at that yacht, he would say.

He’d missed his moment. “Absolutely!” Vasinthe agreed, turning to Katinka. “I had brought him a suit which I had had specially tailored in Johannesburg. Do you know he simply refused to wear it? Wouldn’t even look at it.”

I couldn’t have asked him to sign my suit.

Vasinthe banged her upturned fork on the table. The impact sent a tremor through the table, which sent ripples through the ripples through the surface of their drinks and startled the table next to them. She glanced self-consciously around the restaurant, softened her stance and leaned forward to chastise Issa through clenched teeth. “I don’t understand why you needed to get an autograph in the first place, as if having dinner with the man wasn’t enough.”

I wasn’t the only one who asked.

“No, but you were the only one who stuck your chest in his face.”

Katinka tried to stifle another laugh with a lip-licking smile.

What was I supposed to do? Strip?

But then it slipped out with a grunt, like a sudden, unexpected fart. She blushed.

“He’s not funny,” Vasinthe snapped. “Don’t encourage him.” She trained her sights on Issa once more. “Stop making excuses for yourself. You could have taken his biography!”

Ha! He scoffed. That thing was ghost written. This means something!

Vasinthe jerked her head angrily. “Why? Did Guevara weave it himself?”

Katinka buried her mouth in her palm and crossed her legs tightly.

“Ssh,” Kagiso beseeched, rolling his eyes around the room. “Not so loud.”

Vasinthe swivelled her eyes in his direction, inhaled deeply, then whispered rebuke at Issa. “You didn’t have to wear the damn rag. You could have taken it in a bag! If you absolutely had to.” She turns to Kagiso and Katinka in turn to make her case. “There were people there, colleagues, who had gone to great lengths, made considerable efforts, to look their best, to make a good impression. And then, lo and behold,” she points an upturned palm in the direction of her errant son, “in strolls Issa Shamsuddin, wearing washed-out jeans and a faded T-shirt.” She turns back to Issa, her hand now brandishing a wagging forefinger. “That’s how you stir resentments, make unnecessary enemies. I just wish you would develop a sensitivity for these things.”

Issa remains undeterred. But I told you what I would be wearing.

Exasperated, his mother raised her upturned fork once more. Kagiso cleared his throat. She laid the knife down slowly and rested her hands on the edge of the table as if to push it away. “I thought you were joking.”

Have I ever joked?

Kagiso regretted glancing at Katinka; her eyes had started to water with the effort of restraint, her nostrils flared and she had turned the colour of the lobster shells on her plate. Suppressed laughter is contagious. He pushed his upper lip between his teeth as a sort of ineffectual combatant.

“Then why did you fax me your measurements?” Vasinthe demanded.

Because you insisted! In any case, they weren’t even my measurements.

“What! Whose were they?”

His.

Kagiso, suddenly implicated, cleared his throat and attempted a straight face. Vasinthe turned on him. “Were you in on this?”

Laughter still twitched at the corners of his mouth. He struggled to speak. “Um...”

No, he wasn’t. I figured that if you refused for me to go like this, then at least he’d be able to go with you.

Kagiso smiled, but Vasinthe was not endeared. “You stubborn, stubborn boy. And did you figure the security problems that would have caused? I’m sure that would have been very amusing indeed, absolutely hilarious.”

Katinka dropped her head in awkward embarrassment.

Look, what’s your problem? Issa implored with hunched shoulders and upturned palms. I mean, he wasn’t even a wearing a suit himself.

Vasinthe pushed her untouched plate aside and pressed a napkin to her mouth. “Issa, he is the president. And you were his guest. My guest!”

Yes, Ma. The president. Not God, just the president. And I voted to make him so. Did you?

The inference landed, crash, like a dead whale in the middle of the table and drew the attention of everybody in the restaurant.

Kagiso’s jaw dropped. Katinka’s fork stopped in mid-air. She looked at it, contemplating whether to bring it to her mouth or put it down. Issa blinked slowly. He watched his mother’s hand search the table. First, it hovered over the knife. Katinka turned her eyes to see without moving her head. She laid down the fork. Then Vasinthe’s hand moved to the uneaten piece of snoek on her plate. Kagiso swallowed deeply: “Ma Vasinthe?” he whispered, as if trying to rouse her from sleep. Her hand, no longer able to restrain itself, desperate to clutch and throw, seized on the glass of red wine in front of her. Issa raised his arms in a protective gesture, exposing an autographed flank. Guevara glowered. Vasinthe, aiming at her offending son’s face, flicked the glass by its stem with a deft wrist movement. Its contents travelled through the air like a red arc. Plate-balancing waiters stopped in mid-stride, other diners gasped and Kagiso and Katinka watched in horror as Vasinthe’s face-seeking missile hurtled out of control and hit its unintended targets with deadly inaccuracy.

Mandela.

Guevara.

Collateral damage.

Irreplaceable.

Flapping waiters descended on the scene like aid workers at a war. “Madam, are you alright? Sir? Quick, snap snap, get some towels! And water!” Kagiso and Katinka dropped their arms limply by their sides, innocent bystanders, stunned wine-speckled targets of ricocheting shrapnel. Vasinthe slumped back in her chair. In a flash, it all came back to her, the relaxed air of the proceedings, the lack of pomp and ceremony, the way he really does make one feel at ease.

When the last person had had her book autographed, Issa got up from his seat and walked over to where he was seated. Neither of them had had dessert, neither of them had had alcohol. It had been clear to all that Issa, wearing only washed-out jeans and a t-shirt, had caught the president’s eye.

I used to wear this T-shirt on demonstrations when you were inside, he said. I only wear it on special occasions now – they laughed – because it’s getting old and I’d like to keep it for posterity. It would mean a lot to me if you signed it here, please. He pointed his finger at the space above Guevara.

“Oh, I get pride of place,” the president joked.

They laughed again.

He took the pen. “My pleasure,” he said, and signed his loopy signature. “You know, he is a hero of mine too.” Then he leaned towards Issa and, tugging at the T-shirt, whispered loud enough for all to hear. “Maybe you could send me one of these in the post some time, so I can wear it on my next visit to the States.” And then he laughed his infectious laugh as he shook Issa’s hand and patted him on the shoulder.

Vasinthe brought her palm to her mouth. How to take it back? She couldn’t. The shot had been fired. The war would follow its own course.

Mother looked at son, suspended in disbelief, his arms outstretched, head hung, surveying his bleeding side; the final dying pose of another Issa. She wanted to wash it all away, stop the stain from spreading, like a flood, into Guevara’s stern teetotal mouth, stop it from staining a loopy teetotal autograph, stop it sinking into the lean gashed side of her teetotal son.

He looked up at his mother. You’ve killed me, his eyes said. It is finished.

The clamour of the salvage operation penetrated the haze. They watched plates and glasses and bottles and silver pepper pots and pretty flowers being whisked away. Stained linen was stripped, folded and solemnly carried out. The meal was over. The deed was done.

Issa was the first to rise. He peeled the T-shirt from his body and lifted it over his head, revealing the hipbones above the belt, the hollow concave stomach, the stained red chest. He dropped the soggy T-shirt on the table, where it landed with a squelch. They watched the red liquid oozing from the lump of cloth, like blood from a bludgeoned brain – were fixed by Guevara’s unblinking, lifeless eyes. Issa turned away and walked out of the restaurant, bare-chested. When they stepped out onto the pier looking left, looking right, he was already gone, wearing only washed-out jeans.

“This is Russell Square. The next station is Holborn. Please stand clear of the closing doors.”

When Katinka arrives at Vasinthe’s hotel on Russell Square, she announces herself at reception and waits on one of the comfortable sofas nearby. But she soon feels closed in by the oak panels, the marble walls and arches, the sparkling chandeliers. She moves around awkwardly in the sofa, then gets up and paces the foyer. She smiles with relief when Vasinthe descends the grand central staircase a few moments later. When they have exchanged greetings and preliminary pleasantries – Katinka compliments Vasinthe on her exquisite salwaar khamees, which, had it been presented to her in a bundle on a stick, she would have taken for candyfloss and tried to stuff in her mouth – Vasinthe inquires as to her preference: “Tea here in the hotel, or a walk and maybe something outside?”

Katinka does not hesitate. “A walk would be good,” she decides. “It’s a lovely day outside. Spring is in the air.” She finds the hotel overbearing, too unchanged.

Vasinthe drops her key at reception then, in an unexpected gesture, takes Katinka by the arm and leads her out of the hotel. “I see they’ve refurbished the square,” she says, as they step into the bright spring sunshine. “Do you mind if we go for an amble in there? I’m curious to see what they’ve done to it.”

“Of course not,” Katinka obliges. “I haven’t seen it either.” She presses the button on the traffic light and watches as the breeze lifts the scarf that is draped loosely across Vasinthe’s chest, falling elegantly down her back, the weave so delicate it seems it might be unravelled in the wind.

When they step into the square, Vasinthe smiles. “This is so nice. And look,” she exclaims pointing at the new cafeteria. “They’ve done away with the greasy spoon! That was an institution.”

“You,” Katinka says, cringing slightly at the crude word, “seem to know this part of London quite well.” She’s been anguishing over how to address her companion and wishes she could resort to the safety of an honorific pronoun, as would have been the case if they were speaking Afrikaans. She can’t call her by her first name. If Vasinthe were Afrikaans she’d call her ‘Tannie’ or if she were Indian, she’d call her ‘Aunty’. ‘Mrs’, if it were an option, would be easy, she thinks. ‘Professor’ seems formal and Katinka doesn’t want to appear unacknowledging of her academic success, but how does one address an Emeritus Professor during a walk in the park? She decides as far as possible to avoid calling her anything.

“Yes. I studied not far from here. But that was years ago, don’t ask me when!” she says jokingly. “More recently, I’ve been coming and going for conferences and the rest.”

“And do you always stay on Russell Square?”

Vasinthe nods. “It’s my corner of London. I like it. I can find my way around from here. And, of course, it reminds me of my youth, when I was young and foreign, a dangerous combination!”

Having bought drinks and two slices of pastry, they sit by the fountain in the middle of the square. Occasionally, when the jets of water rise to their full height, drowning out the city beyond, the breeze carries a cool mist from the spray in their direction against which Vasinthe shields her face. She has settled, facing Katinka, her left leg draped over her right, her right elbow resting on the backrest of the black wooden bench. The posture makes her look confident, self-assured, like an actress being interviewed, Katinka thinks. Heads turn.

When chitchat and pastry nibbling is over, Katinka makes it easy; she broaches the subject. “I’m sorry about Issa,” she says.

Vasinthe’s expression withers and, inside her chest, her heart sinks. The reason for their meeting has been raised and her secret hope that Katinka would know something the others didn’t, something she couldn’t tell her on the phone, something so significant that it was imperative she wait to tell her in person – shattered. A nervous smile takes over her face, more an embarrassed pulling of the cheeks than a smile. Then, suddenly, this poised, accomplished woman is exposed, vulnerable, like a girl. Katinka watches as she unravels a perfumed handkerchief from her pouch, releasing its delicate fragrance into the air; jessamine, violet, rose?

“Excuse me,” Vasinthe says, pushing her sunglasses to the top of her head. “I’m not usually like this, and definitely not in public.” She lowers her eyes gently to the perfumed cloth, first the right, then the left. “I think it’s being in London.”

“No need to apologise.” Katinka inches her hand towards Vasinthe’s shoulder, but then withdraws it, cautious of penetrating the scented bubble, which seems to mark the boundaries of her sweet-smelling silk-swathed personal space.

Vasinthe clears her throat. “The same thing happened to me yesterday when I met his supervisor,” she confesses with a sniff. “You know what they say about researcher/supervisor relationships?”

Katinka shakes her head.

“That they’re like marriages.”

Katinka laughs nervously. “No, I didn’t know that.”

Encouraged by the response and wanting desperately to kindle laughter rather than tears, Vasinthe continues. “It’s true. I am myself constantly engaged in polygamist commitments. At the moment I have two husbands and a wife of my own in Johannesburg. I know how close the bond can grow.” She leans back to watch Katinka’s enjoyment of the analogy. “So I thought that I should explain to my,” she draws inverted commas in the air, “‘son-in-law’ in person.” She tries to join in the laughter but a swarm of persistent twitches ambushes the corners of her mouth. She purses her lips and drops her head.

Katinka feels a tug. She clenches her teeth in a tight grip until it feels that they might shatter. She cannot cry too.

A few moments later, Vasinthe proceeds cautiously. “Apparently they worked very well together,” she says slowly, pronouncing each word very deliberately. “He thought Issa’s research was very promising. Pertinent was a word he also used. I had to admit that I knew very little of what he was writing about.”

She pauses.

Katinka waits.

“Before I left, he gave me a file containing some chapters from his thesis, a few articles. When I saw his name on the front cover, in his own handwriting...”

Katinka’s exhalations become staggered. She clenches her jaw again. Her ribs start to ache with the effort of restraint, so she hugs herself tightly across her chest. The embrace provides little relief.

When Vasinthe feels capable, she tries again to ease the air. She blows her nose. “What is it with me,” she reproaches herself. “I seem to have you either fighting back laughter or fighting back tears.”

Katinka gives vent to the sobbing laugh that had started to throb like a painful lump in her throat.

When Katinka returns with two bottles of chilled water, the glasses turned upside down over the top, she waits for Vasinthe to secure her powder puff.

“That was quick,” Vasinthe says, hurrying the procedure. When she has slipped the silver case back into her pouch, she reaches for one of the bottles. “Thank you,” she says with a guilty smile. They unscrew the bottles and drink thirstily.

“Issa’s supervisor always sounded to me like a very nice man,” Katinka says with a quenched sigh. “I would have liked to meet him.”

“Yes, very nice,” Vasinthe admits, sliding her sunglasses back onto her nose. “Not a great talker, like Issa.” She looks into the fountain, observing its simple modern design, an almost indiscernible circular depression in the middle of a larger concentric circular space. She counts the sprays of white frothy water, like liquid stalacmites, at once shooting up and collapsing back down on themselves. Thirteen. She follows the trajectory of the tallest spray in the middle – Judas, she decides. “I got the impression they didn’t actually say very much to each other.” Her tone is distant, as though hypnotised. “That they communicated entirely in writing. Reading and writing.”

She cuts short her reverie and turns to Katinka. “You two used to see each other regularly, didn’t you?”

Katinka shakes her head keenly. “Once a week. At least, once a fortnight.”

Reassured, Vasinthe smiles. “And what was he like? With you, I mean?”

Katinka considers her response. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all.”

She lights a cigarette hurriedly and then answers, smoke rolling from her lips. “The same way he was with everybody, I guess. Quiet, observant, never saying very much. You know what Issa was like.”

“Even with you?”

“Even with me,” she concedes with a shrug, then rests her smoking hand along the back of the bench.

Vasinthe is surprised. “Oh,” she exclaims.

“Why? What made you think he’d be any different with me? Issa was the way he – ” She revises her statement. “Issa is the way he is.”

Vasinthe looks at the grassy patch beyond the fountain, as if searching the languorous bodies there for an answer. “I liked to think that there was somebody who he was normal with. At least one person he could gossip with, binge with, get drunk with, have long conversations with. Somebody he could be less lonely with.” She looks at Katinka. “I always imagined that person to be you.”

Katinka shakes her head. “I just can’t see Issa doing any of those things. And as for being lonely, I think he was only ever lonely in company.”

Vasinthe starts fidgeting with one of the silk tassels on the edge of her scarf. “But he counted you as a friend, did he not?”

“I’m sure he did. In fact, I know he did. ”

She wraps the tassel around her finger “And you him?”

“Absolutely. One of my dearest.”

She tosses the tassel aside impatiently. “Yet he imposed his contrary disposition on you?”

Katinka taps her cigarette. “I didn’t... I didn’t see it as an imposition. I didn’t expect him to be any other way. I wasn’t bothered by his silence. Neither, I think, was Frances.”

“So what? You both endured him?”

Katinka refrains from clicking her tongue. “Not in the least,” she says, attempting temperance. She looks up to where the green turrets of Vasinthe’s hotel peer like a fairytale through the treetops and raises the cigarette to her lips. “Look,” she says, when she has exhaled, “there are many people I can get drunk with in London. Everybody drinks here. It’s the norm. An almost obligatory part of life. And there are even more people I can gossip with.” She looks at Vasinthe. “But very few of them listen. Issa was different. He listened. He was the perfect audience.”

When the jets of water in the fountain suddenly collapse into gurgling mushrooms bubbling in the shallow pond at the base of the fountain, the noise of the city comes rushing into the square. Open-topped buses crammed with sightseeing tourists come and go on Southampton Row – the distinctive automatic drone of the black London cabs starting and stopping in the congestion contribute to the din of the coagulated first-gear traffic on Montague Place. Huge coaches with enormous protruding antennae-like mirrors, deliver crowds of walking camcorders to the British Museum.

Katinka and Issa had, just a few weeks before, visited the exhibition on memory commemorating the 250th anniversary of the museum. They paused at a minute depiction of Picasso’s Guernica: three months earlier, the giant replica in the United Nations building in New York had been draped in black so that its stark message would not undermine a vial-shaking Secretary of State’s feeble and, till now, unsustained evidence for war. ‘If there is war in Iraq,’ she had read somewhere, ‘there’s already been the first casualty – art.’

Her favourite exhibit was the aboriginal nautical chart, the simplicity of its structure belying the intricacy of its task. After she had returned to marvel at it again a second time, she left the exhibition and went to find Issa in the magnificent circular reading room. She found him leaning back in his usual seat, A6 next to the General and Ancient History sections, staring up into the impressive domed ceiling with its azure blue panels and gold-trimmed edges. She slipped into the blue leather seat next to him and looked up too.

Ready? he enquired, some moments later.

She sat up and nodded decisively. “Yes.”

I’ll buy you a drink.

They left the reading room and followed its circumference clockwise to the cafeteria.

“I’ll just pop in here to see if they have a copy of that nautical chart on sale,” she said when they passed the museum shop.

Issa didn’t stop. They don’t. I’ve already checked.

They sat down to a drink at one of the long tables in the Great Court. “What did you think of the exhibition?” she asked.

Issa did not look up. It was as much about forgetting as remembering. Not a single thought spared for how the exhibits came to be here in the first place. Chronic amnesia.

In the square, an ice cream-covered toddler on a leash leads its mother towards the fountain. The child screams with delight, stamping its feet excitedly when their dog, drawn by the thirteen rising sprays, bounds into the middle of the fountain, chasing the water jets with a wagging tongue. Vasinthe eyes the dog. The child spots a butterfly. The mother-on-a-string is soon tugged in one direction by the butterfly-chasing toddler and in another by the water-chasing dog. Arms outstretched, she looks from toddler on the left to dog on the right, momentarily perplexed at having to deny one or the other their pleasure. The toddler wins and Vasinthe breathes again when the woman reins the wet animal in with a yank of its retractable leash.

All this, Katinka thinks, in a country at war, despatching duplicitous violence to depose of dubious threat – its own routines and pleasures totally undisrupted by the destruction it is wreaking elsewhere.

Frances’ words at Christmas come ringing in her ears: “As normal,” she had said. “Everything as normal. War is no longer reciprocal.”

Having had no appetite for the numerous excessive celebrations to which she had been invited, Katinka went instead to spend the day with Frances and Issa. She took along a dish of bobotie. When she arrived, Issa was intently studying a recipe for chocolate cake at Frances’ kitchen table. She rolled a joint at one end of the table, while, at the other, he painstakingly translated words and numbers from the recipe into exact neat mounds of ingredients in mixing bowls and measuring jugs. When she’d finished, she suggested they nip downstairs to smoke it in his flat before Frances returned from Mass. He turned down the offer:

I need my wits about me for this. It’s her favourite so I don’t want to muck it up. You go ahead. My keys are on the fridge.

Then they heard a key turn in the door.

Issa glanced at his watch. Already! She shouldn’t be back yet. She’ll see the surprise before its ready.

The door opened and Frances stepped into the living room.

You’re back early. What happened? he shouted, waving Katinka into the living room while he tried to cover up the evidence of baking with tea-towels.

Frances didn’t respond. When Katinka had helped her out of her scarf and coat, she eased herself into her armchair.

“Are you okay, Frances?” Katinka asked. “Can I make you some tea?”

“In a minute. You two carry on in there. I’ll join you when I’m ready.”

Issa, clutching a tea-towel, kneeled on the floor beside her. Are you sure?

“Yes. Now go on.” She patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll be through in a minute.”

They returned to the kitchen, closing the door behind them. She retrieved her red satin pouch.

In church that morning, Frances had started nodding off during Father Jerome’s tired homily now suffering its third unedited rendition since midnight.

“We have gathered here tonight,” he intoned loftily, “to remember the birth of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.” Few observed the mistake. He sounded bored.

In her eye-stretching efforts to keep awake, Frances perceived a particularly well-dressed man in the pew in front of her. She observed the fine cut of his suit jacket, the neat trim of the hair at the back of his neck above the line of his shirt collar. He was poised and nodded earnestly in agreement with what Father Jerome was saying.

When the homily ended, the congregation kneeled in prayer. Frances, no longer able to assume that position, remained seated and bowed her head. Before closing her eyes, she noticed the soles of the man’s expensive shoes protruding from underneath his pew. She tried to focus her mind but her efforts were futile; she had become hopelessly distracted and peeped through narrowed eyes at the shoes. They were new, the soles hardly scuffed, the white stitching around the edges still clean. She reprimanded herself and forced her eyes shut.

Throughout the Mass, Frances tried hard not to be distracted by the man. Nothing worked. When she tried to focus on the ritual at the altar, his broad shoulders got in the way. When she bowed her head to follow in her Missal, there was the smell of his cologne, or the sight of his neatly-trimmed fingernails when he held his hands behind his back.

“Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles:
I leave you peace, my peace I give you.
Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your
Church,
and grant us the peace and unity
of your Kingdom where you live forever and ever.
Amen.”

Father Jerome looked up from his folded hands on the altar and over the congregation.

“The Peace of the Lord be with you always,” he declared.

“And also with you,” the congregation responded.

“Let us offer each other the sign of peace.”

Frances’ palms became clammy. Suddenly, she felt sure that the man had all the time been conscious of her scrutiny and that, when he turned around to offer her the sign of peace, he would stare knowingly at her. Once he had greeted those in the pew beside him, the man turned around slowly. Frances swallowed loudly and hurriedly wiped the sweat from her hands. She looked up. The shock nearly sent her to the floor.

Her jaw dropped. Her heart raged in her chest. There in front of her, with stretched-out hand and poodle coif, stood the caricature she knew from the daily newspapers: the big ears, the glassy eyes, one smaller than the other, the tufty hair, the stuck-on smile. “Peace be with you, Frances,” it said, grinning broadly.

Frances woke with a fright. The homily had ended. She felt flustered and searched her bag for a tissue with which to wipe her palms and brow. She was breathless. When the congregation started to sing, she struggled to find the place in the hymn book. The lady next to her helped. “Thank you,” she said, somewhat embarrassed, then tried to join in. “Sleep in heavenly peace / Sleep in heavenly peace.” The words stuck in her throat. Somewhere, in a church not far from here, the man in the fine suit was probably singing along right now, wringing out these words, she frowned, hollowing out these gestures. She lowered the hymn book.

When they started on the second verse Frances wanted to shout. Shut up! Stop this sanctimonious pretence. Why don’t we sing something more fitting? ‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war / With the cross of Jesus going on before.’ Or what about, ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold! / Bring me my arrows of desire! / Bring me my spear! / O clouds, unfold! / Bring me my chariots of fire!’

She sat down and dropped her head.

“Sleep in heavenly peace / Sleep in heavenly peace.” The congregation fell silent. The lady next to her tapped her on her shoulder. Frances nodded that she was fine.

“Lift up your hearts,” Father Jerome instructed.

“We lift them up to the Lord.”

“Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.”

“It is right to give him thanks and praise.”

Frances looked around at the pious faces, their automated crossings, risings and fallings. Then she looked to the altar. “This is my blood. Take it all of you and drink from it.” The bread raising, the chalice raising, the incense swinging, the bell ringing.

Pantomime. She thought. Repetitive, meaningless pantomime. When the congregation rose to line up for Communion at the altar, she rose and walked to the door.

She joins them in the kitchen. Fresh flowers, a pot of tea and a plate of mince pies are waiting on the table. Frances smiles and sits down.

You were home early.

“Yes,” she says vacantly. “Yes, I was. I think Father Jerome was anxious to get home to his Christmas dinner.”

Katinka pours them each a cup of tea.

Frances stares into the tea bubbling up to fill the cups. “What will it take for people to notice, do you think?”

“Notice what, Frances?” Katinka asks placing a cup in front of her.

Frances doesn’t answer. “They don’t know what war is really like,” she says, staring through the window at the low grey sky hovering above the chimneys. “They think it’s all fireworks on TV.” She shakes her head. “How quickly we forget.”

Katinka looks enquiringly at Issa, but he is not forthcoming, just stares back at her, waiting for Francis to explain.

Frances stirs her tea, pre-occupied. “I wonder how many of the mongers would still support this war if there were the possibility of retaliation. But there isn’t, so they won’t have to suffer what they propagate. Everything continues as normal,” she says. “As normal. Everything as normal. War is no longer reciprocal. Now the world’s strongest countries bomb its poorest. Where’s the honour in that?” She refuses a mince pie.

The square has started to fill up with lunchtime picnickers. Confident, dapper young men with loosened ties and stylised women with sitcom hairstyles in pretty frocks and strappy sandals, unfold expensive sandwiches. Most perch on unfurled newspapers in the sun. A few seek the shade of the full green trees, their crisp new leaves rustling in the spring breeze. Isn’t this just lovely?

When the sun clears the trees, their positions become exposed. They rise from the bench and walk slowly towards the perimeter of the square. Their abandoned seats in the sun are quickly filled.

“I know that research is a solitary, time-consuming, at times all-consuming, endeavour,” Vasinthe says, when they have reached the path that runs along the outer limits of the square. “But even my most committed students have lives beyond their work. Did he really spend most of his time at home, working on his thesis?” She grimaces at the prospect.

Katinka nods. “Although he did occasionally go to the British Library. And he also liked working in the reading room at the British Museum occasionally, but not very often. It’s quite noisy with tourists coming and going all the time. I used to meet him there from time to time.” She wants another cigarette but decides against it. She finds a packet of gum in her pocket and holds it out to Vasinthe.

“No thank you.”

She puts a piece in her mouth. “Issa loved his work,” she says, chewing. “Maybe love is the wrong word.” She tries to think of a more suitable one. “Committed,” she says, pleased with her selection. “I think it was when he was happiest, though he found it hard at first.” Her eyes narrow as she casts her mind back. “I remember when I first came to London, he used to spend all his time reading. That was in the early days of his research.

“He always had a book with him, was always reading. He even read about reading.”

Listen to this, he once told her before reading aloud from the book in front of him: Reading is inevitably a complex, comparative process. A novel in particular, if it is not to be read reductively as an item of socio-political evidence, involves the reader with itself not only because of its writer’s skill but also because of other novels. All novels belong to a family, and any reader of novels is a reader of this complex family to which they all belong.

“I remember he was reading the first time we met in London,” she continues. “I was almost an hour late; he hadn’t even noticed. And even when he eventually started writing, he was still always reading, except now he also carried a little notebook with him that he scribbled in from time to time.”

Vasinthe frowns disapprovingly. “You mean you’d arrange to meet and he’d bring along a book!”

Katinka tries not to sound defensive. “He didn’t bring one specially, more a case that he always had one on him. I didn’t mind.” She sticks her hands in her back pockets and squeezes her elbows towards each other. Only one spinal click today, she thinks. She can usually extract three or four with a tight squeeze. “We didn’t meet – ” she was going to say, in restaurants to have fancy dinners and sparkling conversation. Issa hated all that stuff. So do I – but then quickly rephrased her thoughts. “We’d hang out in parks, like these people here, or some evenings we’d go to our usual coffee shop on Edgware Road for a few hours. You could easily while away a whole night there, drinking mint tea, sometimes playing tawla.

“And besides, what he read was usually interesting so, if I was in the mood, I’d get him to move over so I could read with him, or I’d read the crumbled paper he always had on him somewhere, in the bottom of his bag, in his jacket pocket or tucked into the back of his jeans.

“If I didn’t feel like reading or conversation, I’d play a game on my phone, or listen to the new music he’d downloaded that week.

“We were very easy. Anyway, I knew that if I wanted to talk he’d close the book immediately and then I would have his undivided attention. That was enough.”

For a while they walk in silence, looking down at their feet. When Vasinthe looks up, she sees a man approaching from the opposite direction leading a panting dog on a leash. Observing the animal’s pink, dripping jowls, she gathers her flowing khamees and scarf to her and steps behind Katinka to the other side of the path. When he passes them the man shoots her a disdainful glance, which, leaving go of her garments, she deflects with a slow blink and a slight elevation of her nose.

“You don’t like dogs, I take it,” Katinka concludes when the man is out of range.

Vasinthe tenses her neck and shakes her head stiffly. “I can’t bear them. It’s the one thing about London, England, I really dislike; dogs.” She says the word with a scowl, as though she were talking about vermin. “They’re everywhere. And their owners seem invariably to assume that every one adores their blubbering smelly mutts as much as they do.” She feels a sudden urge to wash her hands and, even though she has not actually touched the animal, she nevertheless reaches for the anti-bacterial waterless handwash, which she always carries with her.

“So that’s where Issa gets it from,” Katinka observes pointing at the tube.

Vasinthe, as though caught shoplifting, opens her palm guiltily to reveals its disinfecting contents.

“He used to use that too,” she says. “Mind you, it didn’t stop him from washing his hands constantly. He was always washing his hands.”

“He was?” She squeezes a blob of gel into her palm then secures the cap.

“Yes, whenever he came to my house, it’s the first thing he’d do. I never understood why he needed to.”

She returns the tube to her pouch. “Why was that?”

“Because Issa never actually touched anything when he was out in public. Not unless he absolutely had to.”

Vasinthe is taken aback. “Really,” she says, tilting her head in interest. “Did he say this much to you?”

“No, but it was impossible not to notice, especially as he grew more and more obsessive about avoiding contact. The more preoccupied he became, the more elaborate his methods.”

Vasinthe rubs the gel vigorously into her hands, as though she is scrubbing up for surgery. “Like?”

Katinka immediately recognises the astringent smell, its familiar freshness crashing into her like a tidal wave from a distant sea. She stops to look at her feet while half forgotten memories, like foamy bubbles on a sandy beach, come swirling all around. “Like,” she recalls, breathing in the smell, “he wouldn’t open a door with his bare hands, he’d always pull his sleeve down to cover it. Or if he were wearing short sleeves, he’d use his handkerchief to clutch the handle. And at cash points, or in lifts, he never pressed the buttons with the tip of his finger, he always used the knuckles of his clenched fist. He never held onto handrails in buses or on the tube; he’d always find somewhere to lean instead. That was why he sprained his wrist that one time. He wouldn’t grab onto the handrail, so he went flying down the aisle. I asked him once why he still needed to wash his hands if he never touched anything.”

You never know. I might have touched something.

“And if you had, why would that be such a bad thing?”

Drop it. You wouldn’t understand.

Vasinthe pats her hands dry. Her meticulously manicured fingers spread from facing palms like the wings of a perfumed butterfly. She points to a secluded bench in the shade. When they sit down, Katinka gives in to the craving and lights another cigarette.

“According to Frances,” Vasinthe whispers urgently, leaning forward, her body taught with intensity, “he washed all the time. Is this true?”

Katinka shrugs her shoulders. “I wouldn’t know Issa’s daily bathroom habits in the way that she does – that conversion is like a house of cards.” She frowns dismissively. “Why? Does it matter? In any case, a lot of people here still see a daily bath as excessive.”

Still, Vasinthe thinks, a word not used very often in relation to western habits. She leans forward. “I mean more than hands,” she says. “I’m talking about ritualised washing. That’s the impression I got from what Frances described.”

Katinka looks puzzled. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

Vasinthe straightens herself. “Look,” she says, “our family is of diverse faiths. Diversity is our normality. It’s what we take for granted. It’s what we nurtured. In fact, homogeny has always been anathema to us.”

Katinka screws her eyes and nods attentively in response to the urgency in Vasinthe’s tone.

“You see, when the boys were growing up, home was always, still is, a secular place. It’s what held us together, gave us a future, brought us to where we are now. School on the other hand,” she shrugs, “that was different. I wanted them to be educated together; in those days that meant Christian and private. It wasn’t perfect. In fact, sometimes it was seriously lacking, but back then there simply was no other choice.” Katinka continues her urgent nodding, trying hard to resist memories of her own, very different, upbringing.

Vasinthe resumes her probing. “At what times of day did you meet Issa? Was he as obsessed with time as he was with washing? ”

“No, no, not in the least.” Katinka protests. “We met at all times. Different times. It just depended.”

“On what?”

“On what we were both doing; on what suited us both. Why?”

Vasinthe hesitates.

“Tell me,” Katinka insists. “Why?”

A woman approaches, struggling along the path against the weight of an enormous, elaborate pram. Does one need to take a test to push that thing, Vasinthe wonders. She waits for a woman to pass. “Katinka,” she says anxiously, “I need to know. Had Issa become religious?”

Katinka is stunned. “Issa!” she exclaims. “Religious? God, no.”

“You sound certain.”

“Absolutely,” Katinka insists. “Without a doubt.” She takes a quick distracted puff before elaborating eagerly on her rebuttal. “Look,” she says, chopping the air in a decisive gesture, “I admit that it wasn’t always possible to tell what Issa was thinking, but it was always obvious what he thought and, I can assure you, he thought very little of those whose principles are governed by a religious creed.”

Vasinthe appears unconvinced.

“Believe me,” Katinka implores. “I can still hear him now.”

Like some Tory MPs, the religious would quite happily drag us all back to the 15th century if they’re really honest.

After lunch, Vasinthe invites Katinka to her room, “Just for a few minutes,” she says, puckering her nose encouragingly. When they enter the room, Vasinthe gestures to the armchair by the window. “Please, take a seat.”

Katinka sits neatly on the chair, aware of the smell of tobacco on her clothes.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Vasinthe says, perching herself on the corner of the bed nearest to Katinka. She holds out a package with both hands. “This is for you.”

Katinka’s face lights up with surprise at the unexpected gift. She rarely receives gifts and, apart from her conservative education, most of which she has had to unlearn and revise, none, ever, from her family. “For me? You shouldn’t have.”

She feels around inside the bag, like a child exploring a Christmas stocking. She retrieves the bigger of the two objects first and brings her hand to her chest in exclamation at the ornate box.

“What is it?” she asks with heightened curiosity. Slowly, she opens the box. And gasps. Carefully, she sets the crystal bottle on the table beside its lavish ornamental box. Sunlight strikes the crystal and a rainbow of colour explodes into the room. Katinka leans back admiringly. “Pragtig,” she says. “Can I try some?” she asks, unable to contain her excitement. Without waiting for a response, she removes the elaborate gold cap and rubs a drop of the rich amber liquid onto her wrist, releasing its perfume into the air like a flock of fragrant flapping wings.

“I hope you like it?” Vasinthe smiles enquiringly.

“Like it?” Katinka exclaims with delight. “It’s wonderful. I’ve never smelt anything like it. Thank you very much.”

When she has secured the bottle and returned it carefully to its tabernacle, she removes the smaller object from the bag. She carefully undoes the wrapping to reveal another box, this one shallow, blue and rectangular. Again she smiles expectantly. She opens the box to reveal the rich velvet rear casing of a picture frame. Intrigued, she turns the box upside down on her palm and lifts it carefully off the frame, like a lid. When she registers the photograph, she raises her free hand to her gasping mouth.

“Oh my God!” she exclaims, “I’d forgotten about this.”

There, cradled in her hand, encased in pure silver, is the Grand Parade on the balmy late summer’s night of February 11th 1990. The moment comes flooding back. She runs her hand affectionately around the frame. “I only knew him for a day, then. I remember asking the guy next to us to take it. How young we both look,” she sighs, scrutinising their ecstatic faces in the foreground. She brings the picture closer. “And see,” she says, pointing at the tiny figure waving from the balcony in the distant background. “He did come out, even if only we know who he is.” She looks to Vasinthe. “Thank you very much,” she says. “I’ll keep it where I can see it everyday. I miss him.”

Vasinthe smiles a nodding clenched-lipped smile.

At the door, Katinka hesitates. Vasinthe looks expectantly at her.

“I never had the opportunity to congratulate you,” Katinka says.

“Congratulate me? What for?”

“Well, it’s been two years, so it’s a bit late, but our country’s past is longer than that, so I want to say it, to acknowledge it.” She becomes flustered, her palms sweaty, fiddling with the bag of gifts like a nervous schoolgirl. Then stops fidgeting, raises her head and looks Vasinthe resolutely in the eye. “I wanted to congratulate you on your Emeritus Professorship. I hope you don’t mind.”

Vasinthe laughs. “Oh that,” she exclaims, waving her hand. “There’s no need.”

Katinka straightens herself. “Yes, there is. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but when Issa told me, it made me very proud. And he was proud too, I know it.”

“Well, I didn’t know it meant so much. I had no idea. Thank you very much.”

Katinka turns to leave, then turns around again. “One more thing, if you don’t mind?”

“Of course.”

“I was wondering, how does one address an Emeritus Professor? ”

Vasinthe laughed. “Well, just call me Vasinthe.”

“No, officially I mean?”

“I prefer Ms, but most people call me Mrs.”

Katinka was surprised. “Mrs, is that it? After all the years of – ? But why?”

Vasinthe shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t really know.”

Then Katinka raises her eye browse and nods knowingly. “So, beyond title then.”

Vasinthe smiles and adjusts her scarf modestly.

“But no ordinary Mrs,” Katinka continues, still nodding.

Vasinthe laughs. No ordinary Mrs. She likes the sound of that.

alif, dál, dhal...

SHE HAS FLED HER SUNNY KITCHEN for the cooler recesses of her bedroom where she is perched on her bed, surrounded by sheets of paper covered in elegant calligraphy. All that remains for her to learn are those letters that can be joined to the preceding letter but not to the letter following: alif, dál, dhal .

Then she reaches for the card she has bought specially. It is of a little boy in a village school practising the alphabet on a hand-held writing board. She opens the card and writes down the entire alphabet with her best pen, neatly and without mistakes. When she is done, she holds it at arm’s length, then smiles. She adds a sentence at the bottom: I miss you.

After she has sealed and addressed the envelope, she sends him a text message: I no da alfabet

Setting aside her work, she turns to the pictures on her bedside table, Karim’s striking greyblue eyes – “Alexander left them to me” – looking straight into the lens. Issa’s look over the photographer’s shoulder into the distance. She opens her tabernacle of smell, then anoints the pictures with the luxurious precious essence.

The Verses

KAGISO FLIPS ONTO HIS BACK. The buses, noise from the pub, his foolishness by the river, thoughts of work, all conspire into a cocktail of insomnia. He is especially anxious about the final order of sequences: history, he realises, can’t always be told in a straight line. The documentary is not being broadcast till next March, to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Mangope’s fall, but a lot remains to be done; he has a big meeting with the SABC scheduled for when he gets back to Johannesburg.

He turns on the bedside lamp to reveal the story of Mafikeng and Mmabatho spread out on the floor like an intricately woven carpet. He knows it all, from siege to siege, by heart. And when he closes his eyes, he can see the cities’ story, from the oldest haunted sepia images to the vivid contemporary depictions, unfold in front of him, accompanied by the rattle of an antiquated projector. He does not like the narrator’s voice, here, in his film, telling his story. He regrets having signed the compromise:

“Well, he is an accomplished narrator. His voice will bring authority and a dignified stature to your film. Without him, we’ll have to reconsider our participation.”

“In that case,” Lerato replied decisively, “I think we should leave.” He rose from his seat and looked to Kagiso to follow him.

But Kagiso saw years of work and energy, months of research – the starting point, Issa’s revisionist bibliography – go anti-clockwise down the drain. He thought it his responsibility to be less petulant, more accommodating – so he compromised.

Lerato’s face fell. And so did his regard for Kagiso. He sat down again, defeated.

Kagiso gets up from the mattress, frustrated. Suddenly, he feels trapped. My bloody broom cupboard in Johannesburg is bigger than this whole flat, he thinks. So is my grandmother’s simple little house. There is nowhere to go, no other room to go into.

He is not like Issa. When he works, he likes to spread out. Already he has turned the whole floor into a workspace. Soon he will have to spread out onto the walls. He stretches his arms out beside him, as if to push out the walls.

They haven’t decided on a name yet, either. He wants something like, ‘Anglo Boer War to Afrikaaner Weerstand Beweging: The Sieges of Mafikeng and Mmabatho’.

“We can be inventive with acronyms of the war and the organisation,” he suggested.

“What!” Lerato argued. “ABW / AWB? That sounds like something a ref would shout out at a cricket match.” He wants to call the film, ‘The Three-Second War: The Fall of Lucas Mangope’.

“Why don’t you just accept that it was a fucking war, man. The fucking AWB had invaded the homeland to suppress the uprising by force,” Lerato insisted, cracking open a Castle. “It was a war with an army of one against an army of three, the last of the frontier wars, and in the end, that policeman was the lone, victorious impi.” He put the can to his mouth and swallowed deeply.

But Kagiso was uncomfortable with the word ‘war’. “I think it’s disrespectful to those who have seen real war. Yes, we can apply the metaphor of war, and we do use it in the voiceover, but to be true, it was more of a coup.”

“It wasn’t even a coup,” Farida interjected. “It had the effects of a coup, but when he pulled the trigger, that policeman had no way of knowing that his actions were going to topple the government. Why don’t we just call it, ‘The Gang Bang of Mafikeng and Mmabatho: Baden-Powel and Mangope’, finish and kla’? Enough of all this psuedo nonsense.”

They agreed to disagree and marked the tape: ABW – AWB / The Three Second War / Gang Bang: The Fall of Lucas Mangope. They will make a final decision on the title when Kagiso returns from London. When they had wished him well and left, Kagiso rolled a joint and rewound the tape to the section of raw archival footage shot on the day at the scene – a dusty road outside Mmabatho, Northwest Province. Capital of the former Republic of Bophuthatswana.

He’d first heard about it from his grandmother:

“Have you heard the news!” she shouted down the phone.

“No,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “What’s happening?”

“Hey batu!” She exclaimed. “You’re sleeping and meanwhile the sky has fallen on Mangope’s head! Turn on your TV.”

Sequence 1 A convoy of heavily armed khaki-clad AWB paramilitaries enters the shaky frame. At the back of the convoy is an old green Mercedes. Its three occupants aim guns into the crowd.

Sequence 2 Shots ring out from the armed convoy. The crowd disperses. A frightened youth runs up to the camera: “Mangope has sold us to the AWB and now he has gone.”

Sequence 3 More shots ring out. The camera tries to locate their source. In the background, armoured vehicles from the Bophuthatswana Defence Force enter the scene. The crowd cheers. “AWB out!”

Sequence 4 The camera settles on the green Mercedes, now isolated from the rest of the fleeing convoy. Two of its passengers seem injured. “Black bastards,” one of them shouts, slumped against the rear tyre. Another crouches between the open doors. A jeering crowd surrounds them.

Sequence 5 The camera zooms in on the crouching man. “Please, God help us,” he pleads.

Sequence 6 Shots ring out. The footage becomes shaky. A Bophuthatswanan policeman executes the three men with a series of shots fired at point blank range.

Sequence 7 The camera settles on the bodies of the three executed men lying in the dust beside their car.

The phone rang.

“Kagiso?”

“Yebo.”

“Your cab is waiting to take you to the airport.”

“Thanks. I won’t be long.”

He put the tape in the safe, grabbed his bag and left the studio.

He tiptoes around the storyboard on the floor, pulls a beer from the fridge and lights a cigarette. Lazily, he turns to the half-packed bookshelf. He takes down a book, another of those enduring blank spaces and, in view of his uncritical support for it — “As a matter of principle” – perhaps the smelliest unfilled hole of them all. A friend had given it to Issa after he’d smuggled it into the country in the dustcover of The Complete Works.

Shakespeare?! Issa grimaced. Enough already.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the smuggler cautioned.

Issa uncovered the contraband. Woah.

Kagiso opens the book. Under the dedication is scribbled:

Proceed with caution. This book can change lives. Don’t condemn without reading, don’t support without reading. Always read. It was that imperative that started the iman.

He flicks through the pages. Nearly all are annotated, with underlining and comments added on all the unprinted areas of nearly every page. The third chapter catches his attention. The annotations are in red:

 

20/11/01

 

I was at immigration. Despite my student visa, perhaps because of it, I was stopped. My luggage was searched. Even sealed packages were opened. Then I was taken to a small windowless room. ‘Where are you from?’ one of the other detainees asked me. I told him. ‘Then why have they stopped you?’ I don’t know. ‘What’s your name?’ I tell him. ‘That’s why. In here, we all have such names.’

Yes, but I’m different, I want to shout. I notice the guard at the door. Let me out of here, I want to shout. Yes, you! I’m shouting at you, with the toned muscles and limp brain.

I wait. That’s when I hear the voices.

I am suspect. I am being observed. I am being described. I am being investigated. My story about myself is being verified. The voices get louder.

An hour later, the immigration official comes back for me. I will be interviewed.

Oh no! I succumb. I grow horns and hooves. Halitosis. When I open my mouth, my interrogator pulls grimaces and covers his nose. His colleague at the door laughs in disgust. My interrogator writes down every word I say. The same questions, over and over again. I lose patience.

Write this in that little book of yours, I say.

He looks surprised.

Write this: First, don’t you look at me with that air of condescending suspicion, as if you know something about me that I couldn’t possibly know about myself.

Sir?

Write it! Then write this.

Sir, I really must insist...

And so must I. Write this: Inaugural.

I beg your pardon!

Yes, inaugural. Do you need me to spell it for you?

Sir, may I remind you that I am in charge...

No, you’re not. You’re a minion, and you have no charge over me. Have you written it? Inaugural? When you’ve done so, write this: Inaugural lecture. Because that is where I’ve been. My mother’s fucking inaugural lecture for her Emeritus Professorship: on the finer points of cornea transplants. I’m afraid I won’t be able to recite the details for your intelligence records; I struggled to keep awake, airport to lecture, you see.

I need to ask you to co-operate, Sir.

And I need you to write this: PhD Yes, Big P, small h, stop. Then big D. Because that’s what I am doing here. Now let me out of this fucking place before I start reciting my thesis for you to write in that fucking little book of yours. You might find it interesting. Bits of it have to do with islands of interrogation, a little like this one.

When Iget back here, I have to verify the voices. I rush to the bookshelf. I feel violated. I feel sick. I want to puke. I flick through these pages...

Yes. It’s me. I am Salahuddin.

Kagiso looks at the time: 4am. South Africa is one hour ahead. He has made up his mind. “We’ll deal with the consequences,” he says to himself. He wants to communicate his decision, to make it real.

“Call a little later...? Fuck it.” He switches on his phone. “I’ll give the bully a wakeup call. He’ll be annoyed, but he’ll like the news.”

“Hello.”

“Lerato, it’s Kagiso.”

“Hey, man. You back?”

“No. Not yet.”

“How’s it going up there? Any... um... news?”

“No... Listen, I’m sorry to wake you, but I wanted to say, you were right. We should have left. I’m sorry.”

“Ja well, it’s done now.”

“No. No, it’s not done. I’ve decided. When I get back, we’ll pull out of the agreement.”

“Hey man, that’s gonna cause shit. We’ve already signed.”

“It would have caused shit if we hadn’t.”

“That’s true. So what we gonna do?”

“Find another narrator.”

“Who?”

“Lindiwe. You think she’ll reconsider us?”

“I don’t know about that, hey. You want me to call her?”

“Yes. And tell Farida too.”

“Sure. But what if Lindiwe won’t come back?”

“Then we’ll have to sort out something, because you were right. Why should we be bullied into having our history narrated by old white men?”

Missing Persons

“MARGARET WILL BE WITH YOU in just a moment,” the receptionist says. “Please, take a seat.”

On the table in the reception area is a pile of brochures. Vasinthe is familiar with them; she’d received a copy in the post that morning. “Read this,” she says to Katinka, pointing at an inside page:

• About 210,000 people are reported missing in the UK each year. The vast majority return safe and sound within 72 hours, but thousands do not.
• Males in their late twenties are more likely to disappear than any other group of adults.
• Adults are more likely to go missing if they are going through a crisis or a difficult transition, or if they are vulnerable due to chronic difficulties.
• State agencies such as the police are sometimes unable to help, leaving the National Missing Persons Helpline to fill the gap.

Katinka, forgetting her reserve, instinctively takes Vasinthe by the hand. Vasinthe doesn’t object; she re-establishes the contact once they are seated in an intimate cluster of three chairs in Margaret’s office.

“Thank you for seeing us in person, and at such short notice,” Vasinthe starts bowing her head. The gesture surprises Katinka, and Vasinthe too; she does not know where it came from, feels suddenly taken over by body language more akin to her half-remembered grandmother. “I do appreciate it,” she continues, “am aware that it’s not your normal procedure.

Margaret, touched by the elegant gesture, finds herself bowing too. “You’re welcome,” she smiles. “Some cases require exception. Issa is foreign and you are returning to South Africa tomorrow. Under the circumstances, we felt this the most conducive way of proceeding. And we hope it will make your journey back to Johannesburg a little easier.” She reaches for an already open file close at hand. “We’ve started compiling a preliminary profile for Issa based on the telephone conversation we had yesterday. Once we’ve finalised it, we can start publicising. I’ll also need to get the specifics from you to complete this poster for circulation.” She lays the incomplete poster out in front of them:

“It’s our standard poster,” Margaret explains. Our contact details are at the bottom and,” pointing at the empty rectangle, “his picture will go here. Did you bring the photographs?”

“Yes,” Katinka says, sitting up in her seat. Vasinthe lets go of her hand while she retrieves the envelope.

“A good-looking lad, isn’t he?” Margaret acknowledges, looking up at Vasinthe.

Vasinthe’s mouth smiles to acknowledge the compliment, but her eyes, fixed on the upside-down image of her son, remain void.

Margaret looks at Katinka. “When were these taken?” she asks.

“In December. Just before Christmas.”

“So,” she looks up to the ceiling and counts the months quickly on her fingers, “nearly five months ago?”

“Yes,” Katinka replies.

Margaret makes a note of the date on the back of the photographs, then gathers them neatly so that the corners are aligned. “Let’s hope they do the trick. People always tend to notice a pretty face, don’t they?” she says optimistically.

Margaret does not close the file, only sets it aside, Issa’sphotogenic image looming, like an invigilator, in the room. “We’ll return to the details in a moment. Do you have any questions, any more information, before we do?”

Vasinthe does not hesitate. “It doesn’t look good, does it?”

Margaret changes her seating position. “Well,” she starts, her eyes moving from Vasinthe to Katinka to Issa’s face staring up at the ceiling.

Vasinthe interrupts. “Before we continue,” she says. “Maybe it would help if I told you that I’m often in the position you’re in now, of having to put a bad scenario to anxious loved ones.”

Margaret leans back in her chair. Her shoulders drop.

“Straight talk isn’t easy,” Vasinthe continues, “and it sounds cruel. But I think false hope is even more so. Please, be frank.”

Margaret releases a nervous laugh. “Thank you, that certainly does help.” She crosses her legs the other way. “Obviously, as I explained on the phone, we don’t anticipate outcomes on the basis of statistics and although there are patterns, we treat each case as individual and unique. But,” she turns her palms to face the ceiling, “Issa’s case, even with the little we know, is consistent with the majority of cases involving young men of his age. They are by far the most prone to going missing and, I should add, are usually only found when they wish to be. Now,” she leans forward to tap the photographs of Issa on the table, “if we add to this scenario the fact that he is a foreigner, then his circumstances become more urgent.”

“And why is that?” Vasinthe asks, sternly.

Margaret sits back and clasps her hands in her lap. “Simply put, xenophobia. Immigrant communities, especially young men, often experience a sense of social isolation and exclusion, which can be very traumatic.”

“But Issa wasn’t destitute,” Vasinthe protests. Margaret listens patiently while Vasinthe elaborates on her son’s academic success, her eyes moving discreetly over the fine clothes, the expensive shoes, the earrings – diamonds, surely – the meticulous manicure. “It’s not as though he didn’t have options,” she hears Vasinthe say in her commanding tone. She does not sound to Margaret, typically South African.

When Vasinthe has finished, Margaret responds, finding it necessary to address her by title and name. “Mrs Kumar,” she says, but then immediately doubts herself. Her only encounter with the name is a sitcom and a quick glance at Issa’s details confirms that he is Shamsuddin. She cringes at her potentially embarrassing slip. “I’m sorry,” she says, blushing. “It is Kumar, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Vasinthe nods, bracing herself for the stock response: ‘Like the sitcom?’ She cannot bear the programme, the grotesquely stereotypical family, the dirty little grandmother, the annoyingly marriageable son; she cannot recognise herself in any of them. ‘No,’ she usually retorts, whenever the reference arises, ‘Not at all like the sitcom. Not all Indians are clowns and I rarely make people laugh.’ “Shamsuddin,” she explains to Margaret, “is his father’s name. But please call me Vasinthe.”

“I see,” Margaret nods, relieved. “Vasinthe, we strive to be a non-judgemental organisation and in our experience, professional attainment does not always act as surety against vulnerability. We have solicitors, teachers, people like yourselves,” she says, gesturing to the two women, “bankers, judges, successful people, who, for whatever reason, have walked out of their lives. And a small minority of them will probably never return.”

Vasinthe looks perplexed. “So you mean that this drastic action on Issa’s part may have been prompted by some sense of social alienation. Would that explain it?”

Margaret shakes her head pleadingly. “I only raise social isolation as a possible motive.” Then she leans forward, elbows on knees, to appeal to Vasinthe. “You know, straight talk and honest assessment is laudable, but as Issa’s case worker, I don’t want us to obsess about the negatives and lose sight of the possibility of a positive outcome. As a charity, we have a seventy percent success rate in reuniting missing persons with their families, most often, within a short period of time. But even in more rare long-term cases, we always believe that there is hope. That is why we are here. And until the day of reunion, however near or far, our role is to plough every available resource ceaselessly into making that reunion possible, and into offering unconditional support for as long and as often as it is required until that day comes.” She turns to include Katinka. “Now it’s still early days with Issa, and hopefully, he will be found soon, but in the meantime, we cannot allow ourselves to become defeatist. The hardest thing to come to terms with in cases like Issa’s is that we just don’t know. Only Issa can explain. We, unfortunately, are left with the agonising uncertainty, the self-reproach. Some people leave notes. Others, sometimes months, sometimes years later, communicate with their families in person or via this organisation. Issa hasn’t yet done any of these things, as we hope he will. In the meantime, who knows what may have motivated him? To speculate and dwell on worst-case scenarios is counter-productive and very wearying in these early days.” She looks to both women for a response before continuing.

Nothing.

“Now, about the possible political motivations which you raised on the phone.” They rejuvenate their attention. “We see instances of politically motivated disappearances all the time, many with far more evidence as to motive than Issa’s. It is true that young Muslim and Asian men feel singled out at the moment and the area of London where Issa was resident has been particularly targeted and affected by a range of worrying manifestations, but to conclude that that is what motivated Issa, is speculation. And we cannot judge. We simply don’t know what may have motivated him to leave, and it would be dangerous, both for Issa and ourselves, to construct hypothetical reasons, reasons that might stick or possibly pre-empt any future outcomes. The truth lies with Issa.”

Vasinthe looks down at her feet. “If he was so unhappy,” she says, her voice quavering, “why didn’t he just come home?”

Margaret starts to respond but Vasinthe releases her hand hurriedly from Katinka’s. She makes tentative eye contact with Margaret: “I’m sorry. Would you excuse me for a moment please?” She makes to rise.

“No, please.” Margaret jumps up from her seat and gestures to her to remain seated. “You stay. I’ll get us something to drink. Then we’ll finalise his profile and I’ll talk you through the support structures we provide for family and friends. Tea? Coffee?”

She has been sitting on a secluded step by the river, watching its murky water rise and rise. She came to sit for a while in the evening, but it is night now; the sun has long since set and the walkway beside the river is deserted. She wants to leave, has wanted to for several hours, but feels too weighed down to get up. So she sits.

If she does not move away, the river will soon engulf her, the water already at her feet. It will rise quickly to her waist, her chest, her shoulders, then, splash splash, up her nose and above her head.

For a while she will panic, but not for long. Soon she will be overcome by calm. She will feel herself becoming buoyant as the river tries to pluck her barnacled sorrow from the sunken step.

And then, with a tug, the river will take her and pull her down. She will offer no resistance, let the river roll her over, caress her gently.

When she closes her eyes and rests her head on the dark black tide, the river will take her gently down to sleep.

Finsbury Park Mosque

“OF COURSE, YOU MAY,” Frances says, offering him the packet.

When he has settled back into the deck chair, she continues. “The last vivid memory I have of him is out here on the roof, standing by the wall over there, and staring over at the mosque. It was during the early hours of Monday morning, January 20th. There’s nothing particular or distinctive after that – just a slow turning down of the volume over the dark weeks and months that followed. Until one day there was only silence.

“I’d had neither sight nor sound of him all weekend, so I had no idea whether he was down there or not. I’d seen him only once the previous week when he brought me back some milk – I had become a bit embarrassed to knock twice and only did so when I was really desperate. But I thought it best to keep up some form of contact from time to time.

“In the wee hours of that Monday morning, I was woken up in the middle of the night by helicopters, flying really low. It sounded as though they were flying right above my roof. I got out of bed and walked over to the window, but I couldn’t see anything from that angle. So I came out here. That was when I saw them, two police helicopters flying directly over the mosque, with spotlights trained on the building, just there. The noise was deafening.

“It was obvious that something serious must have happened, so I went downstairs to see if he was there. I had to knock a few times...”

“Come to the roof, quick,” she orders, when he opens the door.

He rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, cocks his ears, then looks at her. She steps aside. He doesn’t turn back for clothes, but scales the staircase ahead of her.

She follows him to the roof. He seems oblivious to the cold. She has brought a blanket to wrap around his nakedness, but he doesn’t notice. He just stares through the helicopters hovering threateningly above, and into flashes of the past, a Trojan horse, a university corridor...

It was the first day of Ramadan. When the shots rang out, most turned to run. He was at the head of the demonstration with the other organisers. They hadn’t taken the shots seriously. Nor the initial advance from their usual positions across Modderdam Road and up to the gates. Scare tactics, they thought. Didn’t imagine that they would actually cross the boundary and enter the campus. So they stood their ground. But then the casspirs revved and roared, and rolled in.

It was Robbie and Coline who grabbed him by the arms, turned him round, thrust him forward and forced him to run. “Admin!” they shouted. “Run for Admin!”

They leap and duck and dive through the mayhem left in the wake of the retreating protestors. They reach the square outside the overcrowded administration building just in time to see its doors being forced shut against the swelling crowd. The library, to the right, has already been sealed. They get caught up in the desperate crush into the Union.

The throng inside rolls in cascades of mayhem and confusion. He loses the others. Think! Think! But he can’t think. Just can’t think. Behind him, furious batons start to rise and fall, rise and fall. Can’t get beaten. Won’t be dragged away. But what to do? If not that, then what? Get to the grass patch outside. The car’s not far. Can hide in the car. He clamours over shouting heads and tables and shoulders and pool tables. Outside. Now, breathe! Then find the car.

The grass patch fills in seconds with the overflow from the Union. And then, the unmistakable sound of propellers. But where? They search the clear blue sky. Where?

And then – Fucking hell – Hollywood Vietnam descends into view from over the Union building. A blind spot, disorienting approach from behind; police hang out of helicopter, balanced on the landing rail, but not to lift them all to safety, guns at the ready, aimed at the crowd. Most fall to the ground in fear, covering their heads with flailing arms.

“En in die heilige pwasa!” the girl next to him exclaims. She pulls her scarf across her face, collapses to her knees and gives up.

History! He grabs the panicked girl and runs through the parking lot towards English. Not! They’re already beating and dragging away from outside the building. Quick u-turn. Round the other way. There are trees in the back, and the little herb garden. They crouch.

Is jy ok?

“Ja. Waan toe nou?”

History. Jy nog met my?

“Ja. Together we stand!”

Gereed?

“Ja.”

He peers over the fragrant shrubs. She adjusts her scarf The path seems clear.

Kom.

They break through the hedge, and run. He knows the route well. He can’t be distracted. Can’t be panicked. Blind trust. He closes his eyes, tightens his grip on the girl’s hand and increases their pace.

Should be nearly there, nearly there now. In five, leap, four, leap, three, leap, two, leap, one. Open eyes.

They slam through the glass doors and into History.

“Alhamdullilah!”

Jy okay?

“Ja.”

He looks around. You’re on my turf now, you fuckers. Catch me if you can.

Not far now. Just down here. Kom.

They run down the deserted corridor, and then down the next. The senior reading room is just at the end. He has a key. Once inside, they’ll be safe. There are doors, and there are doors, and shelves and shelves, and books and books, and he knows them all, well. He can run rings around them in there. Get them lost. Drive them crazy. But then he hears. They stop to listen. Fuck. The unmistakable sound of boots has entered the building.

Sister. Take off your shoes. This is it.

He kicks off his own and gets the key from his pocket. It usually catches and niggles in the lock, but not if you get it just so. They slide on socks towards the door. The boots get louder. He replays the just so technique in his head. Issa, you miss, you lose. You miss, she loses. What the fuck were you thinking about anyway when you dragged her into this? Out there she may have stood a chance of getting lost in the crowd. In here, with you, she’ll be taken with a prime suspect. So you don’t miss. You owe it to her. He holds the key to the lock. In a few more paces the boots will turn the corner. The girl breathes heavily. She looks nervously down the corridor. He slides the key into the lock. First notch, slot. Boots. Second notch, slot. Boots. Third notch, slot. Boots. Now, turn! His eyes squint in concentration. The girl holds her breath. Boots. His whole body turns with the key. Click click. Boots. Khulja Simsim? Open Sesame?

Click click click.

Just so.

“Alhamdullilah!”

A gust of wind lifts his hair and drops the loosely draped blanket to the ground. She sees his eyes fill with all the resentment and rage she had first seen in them a few months back.

And all for what? For this? All over again?

“Issa! Wait! Where are you going?”

He doesn’t turn around. Just says, as he crouches through the open window:

To stop them.

“I sat up to wait. In the morning, I woke to the normal sounds of the buses in the terminus. For a while I didn’t know where I was; I never sleep in my armchair. The TV was still on. It was just before six. I got up to turn on the kettle. And then, slowly, it all started coming back... But what had become of him? Was he back? Perhaps he’d knocked. Perhaps I’d slept through. And then.

“When I came back in here, there it was, all over the TV, the mosque, the police in riot gear, the motorcycles, the helicopters.

I turned up the volume. They had shut down the whole area, more than a hundred, hundred and fifty of them. From up here I had no idea all that was taking place down there. And for what? A toy gun and a couple of gas canisters? More enemies made than caught, if you ask me.

“But whether they had sealed off the area before or after Issa got down there – ” She shrugs her shoulders. “Several men were arrested. All foreigners. At the time I thought he might have been one of them; the rage he was in when he left here, there was no telling what he might do.”

sifir wahed athnaan

NEXT SHE LEARNS THE NUMBERS, Arabic numerals, starting with the number they invented, zero, sifr:

“The sum total of Arab contribution to modern culture,” a fellow diner at a dinner party had quipped, raising his thumb and forefinger into a circle: “Zero.”

When the laughter subsided, she turned to the man. “You might want to get it right,” she said. “In Arabic, zero is indicated by a dot, not a circle and, just off the top of my head, I can think of at least two more things,” she said.

The man dropped his hand and looked indignantly at her.

“Plato and Aristotle.”

“My dear,” he said with an air of vindication. “They were Greek.”

“So they were,” she conceded. “But I would have expected one who has clearly had the benefit of an expensive education to also know that, when Europeans deemed it best to burn the pagan thoughts of their Greek forebears, their ideas would have been lost for eternity, had their survival not been ensured by the translations of Arab scholars kept safe in the libraries of Baghdad.

“With such glaring gaps,” she said, filling her glass, “I suppose you also believe that the Renaissance was an entirely Italian affair. More wine?”

She decides to make a list, in Arabic, of all the names and telephone numbers stored in her telephone. In future, as an ongoing exercise, she will consult this list when she wants to make a call rather than select and dial the number automatically from her phone. In her list, names, where possible, take their Arab equivalents: Peter becomes Boutros, John Yahya, Mary Miriam, Paul Boulos. And because Arabic has no p or v sounds, Paul becomes Baul and Vivian, Fifian. She loved the way Karim said please, ‘Blease,’ as if spelt with a b. When it is finished, the list, at first sight still little more than a collection of elegant unintelligible strokes and loops, undecipherable to everybody on it, becomes to her access to her life.

 

And when she goes about the city, she pays special attention to its many Arabic signs, reading them slowly, letter by letter, until the vowel-less string clicks into meaning:

She particularly enjoys deciphering the registration plates on luxury cars from the Middle East that glide through affluent parts of the city. It thrills her that she is able to pierce the ‘exotic’ surface of the image and identify the real country, the very city beyond:

One day, a Jeep darts by flashing a registration plate, which she is certain read as ‘mSr’. But this makes no sense to her and Maseru is all she can come up with. But with an Arabic registration plate? Surely not. So she looks up the entry in her dictionary:

A veil is being lifted and slowly, a whole world – its symbols, its rules, its logic – is beginning to reveal itself to her, right here, in London. Where once she was blind, she can now do so much more than see. She can read.