I
I was alive. I was dead. That’s as much as I knew.
I want to tell you I woke, but I don’t think I was ever asleep. I had passed through. Or something. There’s no way to explain it, unless it were to happen to you.
I was disappointed at first that I couldn’t walk through things; that I wasn’t a ghost. I could still feel the brush of fynbos beneath me, the grit of rock against my skin. I expected to see blood, to see a crater or an outline of dust around where I landed. I expected to see a rope halfway up the cliff, worn through, probably, in frays, dangling in the wind; or a cracked helmet someplace, and a chalk bag somewhere else. I looked to my hands, no longer callused, left with no trace of chalk. I had no bruises, no bones protruding from my skin.
The sky was blue, but not a blue I had ever known before, hanging over the careering vista of Silvermine, with the green and the scrub and the haze and the ocean, unfolding and gathering and foaming and all of it—just the same as it was before. Then I turned around. The cellphone tower was gone. The buildings were in different configurations, but in which ways, I couldn’t quite be sure.
Eagles circled above me. Jet streams were scarred on the firmament. The world was silent and full. In that moment, I was glad to be dead.
II
The road down was still there, although the substation it led to wasn’t. At that moment, I felt no pain, no hunger. My legs felt light, healthy with muscle—just as they had been before, but as if all their cells had been generated anew.
Animals and plants poked through the scrub that lined the track. I’d spent a lot of time here before—but here were things I’d never seen. These flowers—crimson ericas, three metres high. An arm-length lizard gleamed purple and green on a rock by my feet. Things that had been long dead were here, alive. My nose itched with strange pollen.
I figured I was invincible. The road led to a knot of hairpins halfway down: a waste of walking if one could jump down a short section of cliff. My heart raced at this; at doing things without the promise of harm. A platform of sandstone jutted out about three metres down. I savoured the air on my skin as I dropped.
The soles of my feet tore as I landed. I slipped backwards, impaling my arms on the rocks, grabbing for any hold that would stop me careering down the rest of the cliff. I scrabbled and keeled over near the edge of the platform, with the air and the valley expectant before me. I rubbed myself over with my hands, finding new marks and scars on this body. I fingered a wound, fresh, a half-inch thick, in the side of my abdomen, throbbing and bleeding fast down my hip and thigh. I pressed my hand to it, feeling the quick heaving of my chest and the waves of pain washing through me. I panted. I breathed in dust. I thought about infection, about bacteria unknown to me.
Sitting back, holding my knees to my chest, I could feel the chill of the wind. I saw now that I was uncircumcised. I hunched over. I yelled.
There was no echo.
III
The pain subsided as the sun began its downward turn. I climbed from the platform to where the road resumed—ten metres, perhaps. Nothing large, but harder to climb without rubber-soled boots, chalk or clothes, even, to shield and stem the weepings of my flesh.
Only then, for the first time in years, I thought about my shade. When I was a child, my mother told me about how the spirits of the dead had to be led home so they could be put to rest. I had taken it for granted that was how things worked; when I died, sometime far in the future, I—disembodied, ethereal—would be led back to my birthplace, by whoever my wife or my children would be, and I would—well, I would rest.
But the living weren’t here. Sal wasn’t there—on the mountain, holding the belay rope—when I realised I had fallen. What Sal would be left with wasn’t me, but only what would have been left of me. Something to piece back together. Something to bury someplace where someone thought I’d like to be. Home, perhaps. But there—wherever home is—isn’t where I was.
On the road down, I looked across the valley to the parklands and the buildings, all of them thatch-roofed and spread out in grids. I thought about how Mother died, about how Yia died, about how everyone I knew who had died had died: all far from home. All had needed to be carried back, to be led. How strange these thoughts felt, as the road levelled and I could see what lay before me.
IV
Mother, wanderer: now I know what you know. We are our own shades.
V
At first I thought it was strange how everything was so familiar, but not familiar enough to be a comfort.
I had found a pair of white running shorts discarded on the hard shoulder. They seemed clean enough to wear, although even a rag would have done—anything to shield my nakedness from the stream of motorists on Ou Kaapse Weg or whatever it was called here. My wounds had begun to clog. I was limping. I tried to meet the eyes of the motorists who passed me; ostensibly to try catch someone’s expression, to let a smile or a frown soothe me; to let me know that this was all normal and that I would adjust. But, really, all I needed was a lift.
No one looked. No one stopped.
I was dazed, from loss of blood or vertigo or both. The suburbs below looked as though they had been built from memory—a dreamworld, something hazy and inexact, where the streets and the skylines were not quite in the right proportions or configurations. The buildings were smaller, taller, more densely packed. The golf course had been taken over by houses with hearths and chimneys and gardens. I could see no prisons, no consulates, no malls.
Halfway down I came across a white cross leaning on a barrier by the side of the road. Someone had placed a bunch of puce azaleas under it, wilting in the sun. I tried to read the card someone had attached to the stems, but it was written with words I couldn’t understand.
VI
There were people at the train station: cotton-shirted women and men wearing beads like my mother would. Children stood with adults speaking as equals—in Xhosa, in English, in tongues I’d never heard before. The boys gesticulated and the men listened solemnly: here, I realised, an adult and a child might be the same age.
I didn’t know where the trains on this platform would go. The train I would have caught yesterday would have taken me from here towards Cape Town, passing Retreat. Plumstead and Observatory, and everywhere else I had lived. The stations here were likely different, the routes circuitous and strange. I turned to the couple standing nearest to me—a sun-spotted elder with buttermilk skin and a teenager in slacks and a T-shirt.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said to the old man, “but where is this train going exactly?”
He looked at me, wordless.
“Ah, uxolo baba,” I tried again. “Uloliwe… er, zayaphi?”
The man stared at the wound in my side and tilted his head, his eyes widening. He said something with words like dozens of fingers clicking.
The teenager chuckled. “You’re new around here. Aren’t you?”
“You could say that.”
The man was pointing at my side, raising his voice. His fingers were gnarled with growths like bark. I asked the teenager what he was saying.
“He says you should get that cut looked at.” He laughed.
I didn’t.
He cleared his throat. “Look, this train goes lots of places. Lots.”
“I just want to go to town,” I said.
“Town?”
“Cape Town. The CBD—you know? I want to look for people.”
“CBD?” He paused for a moment. “Oh right—right. Ja, this train goes there. It’s a nice ride along the ocean.”
“Yeah, cool,” I said. “Thanks.”
The pair began walk away, resuming their conversation. “Wait,” I said. “Wait, just a second, please?”
“Ja, what?”
“What about tickets?”
The teenager laughed. “You don’t need tickets, man. It’s a train. Just get on.”
“You don’t have to pay?”
“No,” he said, turning from me again. “Things are paid for in other ways here.”
VII
He was right—the view was nice. The air was clear, the sky abundant. The land heading north was about the same as I remembered it, littered with houses, complexes, apartment blocks.
I had somehow expected more.
The carriage was made of wood and plastic—musty, high-ceilinged and jiggering with the camber of the tracks. I had a bench to myself, away from the people who spoke softly in odd-matched pairs, about the weather and other things I couldn’t decipher. A dark man—darker than me—was walking down the aisle, selling boiled sweets from a woven basket.
Despite what the teenager said, I couldn’t see the ocean. And it figured. Surely one would only see the ocean heading in the direction of Simon’s Town or whatever was there now. But in this direction? The stations we came to had no signs, only numerals, descending as we went towards the end of the line. A voice on an intercom spoke alien names as we arrived at each. I oriented myself by tracking the rotation of the mountain through the opposite window.
When we stopped somewhere near where I thought Rosebank would be—VII—the voice said “Khayelitsha”. My heart went cold. This was nowhere near Khayelitsha. I peeled myself off the bench and limped for the window. This was nowhere near home.
I stared out the glass but could see nothing but the station, built three storeys high from stone and pine, with a quilt work of flags hanging from poles on the eaves. To the left and the right were subways, heading underneath a road, flanked by a frontier of willows. I saw my face in the glass. I looked the same.
The carriage jolted and sent me sprawling on the floor. I felt the wound pulse under my ribs. I was surprised no one laughed.
Maybe the name for this new place was apt, I thought, retaking my bench. Maybe it was a different kind of new home. Maybe it was one that was better.
VIII
I had sat on the opposite side of the carriage, trying to look around the bank of trees as we coasted out of Rosebank, or Khayelitsha, or whatever it was. I was picking at a scab on my foot when the trees began to thin, somewhere near Mowbray, and the most incredible things opened up to me. Blocks of flats, towers of stone and mortar, all among the slopes and folds of Devil’s Peak. Colonies of concrete favelas, houses with pitched roofs all hanging off the rock, connected by poles with wires like spider web. Funiculars climbed the slope, humming all around and across the mountain, all pulsing with movement. Neighbourhoods unimaginable and strange—people were living not around, but on Table Mountain.
Columns of Woodstock townhouses ran parallel from the peaks to the tracks—the most disorienting parallax, opening and closing like accordion bellows. District Six, a garden city in miniature, in octagon and pentagon, lush and glowing in the sun. In every neighbourhood rose dozens of statues on plinths, piercing and needling the pink-edged sky.
Just as suddenly, the train entered a tunnel, and I peeled my eyes from the window. The carriage was now empty, save for a pair of men, shirtless in slacks, with leather backpacks on their laps. They looked like they were Khoi. Or San. Khoisan. I’d never seen any Khoisan person in the flesh before, only in books and movies, worshipping Coke bottles and tracking kudu. One mimed the action of rolling dice. The other clapped hysterically.
The tunnel echoed the clacks of the wheels and the tracks and the engine. A minute passed in the darkness, the carriage lit by a single bulb suspended from a cable bound in rope, which cast harsh shadow of amber and orange. The men were laughing, and I caught myself staring at them, trying to decipher their rasps and clicks. And they stared back, furrowing their brows, stone silent—until I looked away again and waited for us to emerge.
IX
But the ocean. The ocean, cellophane blue, crashing and crinking on itself. And empty. There was no harbour, the cresting shoreline naked of concrete or metal. Highways and high-rises had cut off the city as I knew it from the ocean; from the shelter the bay gave from the squalls and the waves and the deluges of winter; from the entire reason of its existence. How naked it seemed now.
We followed the shore into the city bowl—except I could see there was no city. Just small neighbourhoods, like everywhere else on the flatland, interspersed with the towers and the spires and the statues. Smoke billowed from the top of the mountain like clouds. Signal Hill festered with strange trees.
My heart dropped. This place had a geography that had to be relearned.
X
Later I found that the spires and the minarets I had seen from the train were just that: there were still churches and mosques here, teaching the same things they always had—forgiveness, piety, fear; with scriptures ret-conned into interpretations that would explain this afterlife.
Although this wasn’t the afterlife. This was life. Death was nothing to be feared, for this was death. What was unknowable was plainly knowable; experience, plain experience, unavoidable. And experience was knowledge. As was memory—all of it. Every iteration. Every variance.
Remember this. Number your lives like mysteries on beads.
Every station is numbered. No station can be named.
XI
I got off the train in town because that’s where the train terminated. Tracks extended past the station, towards what would be the Atlantic seaboard. I was curious to see what would be there too, but there was no rush, I figured. I had the time.
The station was cavernous, an arcade with open timber struts running its length. I left through an archway, turned left and, after a few steps, found myself on a belvedere looking over a beach. The Foreshore was gone. It had not been rebuilt, not the ground, its streets nor anything built to replace it. No moors or docks or even a pier. I supposed the slaves who had built those things during their past lives weren’t in the mood to build them again.
The wind picked up. The water lapped against a stone wall below. The sun began to dip behind the forests on the hills. Clouds gathered over the mountain. My skin grew taut.
Out the corner of my eye I saw the Khoisan men behind me, sauntering over Strand Street, towards a park where the Grand Parade used to be. I followed them.
XII
Cecil Rhodes was sat on a taxidermied horse in a cage on a plinth in the middle of the parade. I wouldn’t have known who he was if they hadn’t left a sign. Old men were slinging stones at him disinterestedly from a few metres away. Blood dripped and foamed out his mouth. His chest heaved.
He was alive. He couldn’t die.
There were dozens of them, men and women, caged and shackled on pillars throughout the parade, some neglected and bored, tenderly stroking wounds, some bearing injuries that would have meant death under other circumstances.
Truthfully they spoiled the view. The park was beautiful, filled with sage and yellowwood and unknown shrubs, all filled with the sunset chatter of animals I’d never heard before. Families walked down the lanes. Children sat on benches and ate apples and drank from water bottles, enjoying the last sun of the day. Some of the pillars holding the cages were encrusted with the most exquisite flowers, glowing gold and fuchsia and grey, growing over dried and drying blood, their growth obscuring the gore.
I realised then that all the plinths I had seen from the train were supporting these living statues. I realised too that, if I concentrated hard enough, I could begin to ignore the groans.
XIII
This city was too saturated with memory. Perhaps that’s why they never rebuilt it, letting this park to do all the remembering for them.
I left the park and took a right down a lane flanked with townhouses. Buitenkant, I thought. I tried to anchor myself with memories of this place. I tried to think about the days at the bookshops and theatres on the intersections, about the parties I had stocked from the bottle store, about the nights I had spent at the tavern further up the hill.
The statues were on every corner—supplicating people, begging to be stared at, begging to be pitied. No doubt they deserved their suffering, otherwise then why would they be there?
I asked a man marked with the name of a settler why he was trapped upon his plinth.
“Wat dink jy?” he asked me. His teeth were chipped and yellow. “Dit is net wat jy sien.”
“Jy was ’n slegte persoon in ’n vorige lewe,” I accused him.
“Maar wat beteken ‘slegte’?” he mumbled. “Julle mense vra al dieselfde vrae. Die wêreld bereik ewewig uiteindelik. Dit is net wat jy sien.”
The decades had reduced him to platitudes. I asked him if he wanted to die.
“Maar ek’s alreeds dood.”
I asked him if he wanted to die again. He was silent.
I asked a passing man why the settler was up there, forced to live his life in pain and resignation. He hunched his shoulders, although I’m not sure he understood the question.
XIV
The foghorns began like calls to prayer. The lights of the buildings of the new villages shimmered up the mountain. The cloudbank had settled, and the flashes of streetlights and the pulsing of the electricity and fire came to me in waves, unrelenting, unsettling.
This was no CBD. This was no town. No wonder the teenager had laughed at me. I walked up the entire length of Buitenkant, between the truncated high-rises and the duplexes. On every block was a different living statue, in various poses of torture, with various inscriptions of sins and the pains they had visited on the people with whom they had shared the world before, and with whom they were forced to share the world again. It was as if the people had moved from this place, from the idea of this city, and from this city that had itself been a monument to so much pain—to so much ruin, even in its beauty. Something that had been built on bodies and bones. As if this place was a monument to everything that had come before; to the people that had destroyed their past lives, in the hope they could have the lives they wanted now.
I tried to make my way up to the mountain, to see all the new things, to see what people had remade of themselves, to find someplace to stay. I could start looking for family, for friends tomorrow. I could find them in a phonebook, maybe, if phonebooks were a thing.
I could see the funiculars in the distance; their stations beginning on the edge of Gardens. The foghorns rang loud and true. The streets had emptied, apart from the statues. I felt this creeping inside my chest, this electricity, constricting and hammering at me. I quickened my step.
On the corner of Mill Street, under a bridge, I came across a man—a black man, in a suit—on his haunches, checking his watch. I said hello to him. He smiled at me and spoke in Xhosa. I felt myself smiling back at him. Tears gathered in my eyes—for what, I couldn’t be certain. I asked the man what he was doing. He said he was waiting. I asked him what he was waiting for. He said he liked to hear the music. I asked which music, and that’s when they started to sing.
All the men, all the women, all the statues, all on their plinths, all in their cages. A thin trail of voices rising from the streets nearby, punctuated by the foghorns, softened by the noise of the night. They began a hymn. They sang, well-practised, well-routined, mournful:
Genade onbeskryflik groot
het U aan my bewys
verlore seun ’n wegloopkind
weer in die vaderhuis
They do this every night, the man said to me, and he came out every day to listen to them. He said he liked it. He found it soothing.
I asked him why they sang.
“Why would anyone sing?”
Maar U sien ver, oneindig ver.
U sien my honger, dors.
The man started singing along, softly, to himself. The streetlights flickered on, glowing blue.
I spotted a man not far away, sitting in regalia and shackled astride a stuffed horse. He was set on a wide plinth, flanked by jacarandas in bloom. He led those around him in a monstrous baritone, with his eyes closed and his eyebrows furrowed handsomely. A great thicket of beard moved with his words.
I crouched to the suited man. “Uxolo baba,” I said in a hushed voice, somehow not willing to disturb the sanctity of the hymn, no matter how grotesque its performance. “Ngubani na lo?”
He looked me in the eye and whispered. “Ningazazi?”
“Hayi.”
He grabbed my hand, scarred and bloody, and said solemnly: “uBotha ligama lakhe.”
“Louis?”
“Ja.”
Want toe ek kom, my skuld bely,
druk U my aan die bors.
I stared at Louis Botha, in the same position I’d always known him, as a statue outside Parliament, although Parliament wasn’t there anymore. I wanted to say I felt comfort, but maybe comfort isn’t the word.
I felt an itch on my side. I inspected the wound. A fly had landed on it. I flicked it away with a fingernail. The wound started bleeding again. The man beside me told me I should get it looked at, then continued singing. I nodded and bid him goodbye.
I turned to the mountain and walked.
Nick Mulgrew was born in Durban, South Africa in 1990. He is an associate editor of Prufrock, the editor of uHlanga, and a columnist for the Sunday Times. He has won national awards for his fiction and journalism – most recently the 2014 National Arts Festival Short Sharp Stories Award. He lives in Cape Town.