Note No. 4

July 2020

You told me, Bongi, after our relationship began to blossom in Lusaka, that the first time you touched an AK47 your fingers tingled and your heart pounded – not out of fear, you said, but awe, even perhaps love. (I didn’t want to tell you then, and now I know the telling will change nothing, but that is precisely how I felt the first time we touched. No, not as you may jump to conclude, the first time we made love, but the first time your small hand settled on my forearm as you sought my agreement in a disorganised political discussion in the crowded sitting room in Lusaka with the open bottles of duty-free spread chaotically on the table.)

Yes, you had said, the AK carried in its surprisingly trite mechanicalness the heart of you, the heart of your people, the heart of your ideas about life, the world, and our distraught corner of it. You described running your hand over its wooden butt, stroking your fingers along the length of its barrel, feeling the give of its trigger, holding it up to your shoulder as you had seen in the Soviet movies they showed us in the house of waiting in Lusaka and peering down its length through the tiny V close to your eye, to the little metal sight at the other end of it, imagining – I’d imagine – an enemy at the other end, target of your newly held power.

I slipped my arm behind your head there on the bed where we lay in the small hours as you told me of that other first love of yours: hard, powerful, metallic, with the hint of softness in the wooden butt. Your head turned towards me and you told the rest of your story with your mouth nestled against the side of my chest, the moving of your lips as you spoke giving small unintended kisses where they rested. Indeed, I told you of my own first time with an AK, the overwhelming emotion, and it struck me only later that we lay there talking about the rifle of our revolution as other lovers, in different times and circumstances, talked in that moment in a new relationship between insecurity and comfort of past lovers, comparing notes perhaps, but always with the assurance that none was like this relationship.

And, perhaps just as old lovers always hover in the bedroom of new love, after the ANC had allowed us to marry, your AK and mine – His and Hers – always leaned against the wall on either side of our bed in the house we were now allowed to share in Lusaka. Ready to be grabbed in that dreaded, always awaited, moment of mid-sleep disrupted by a raid of the special forces. Ready, as we were, always, to fight together shoulder to shoulder, just as we slept, and, yes, in those days, to die together and for each other.