Still, we hid together that day.
Like always, Werner told us his parents didn’t allow Africans into their house. He called us blacks, to which we nodded, and then he threw the controllers through his burglar bars like bones on a leash. My brother and I scuttled after them on our bare and calloused feet. If Werner didn’t win a game, he’d switch the console off and turn into an image of his father, barking us back onto the tar like a disgruntled meneer at the store, his face twisting as fierce as a boar’s, fanning out a spray of saliva. When he did win, when Werner felt he’d won enough, he’d say his parents were due home in the next few minutes. Then he’d hoist the controllers back up and wipe them down with a wad of toilet paper. It was the same toilet paper he used to wipe semen off his plush toys, Luthando would later say to me.
He’s a pig, your bhulu friend, he’d say, I’ve seen tissues of it all over his bedspread.
That day, Werner’s parents came home early for a long weekend and he hid us behind a sparse rosebush growing against their newly built fence. The day was gray, like most of them that summer, but the bricks in the wall were still warm. My brother and I were caught not thirty seconds later. Maybe Werner wanted us to be caught. The maid watched us with a blank mask from the kitchen sink while Werner’s mother lost the blood in her face and his father, a large, balding architect with sleek black hair around a hard, shimmering pate, came after us with a roar, waving his belt over his head and shouting, Uit! Uit! Uit!
We were only twelve years old, so we ran.
Later, back home, Luthando found me in the kitchen and squeezed my nose between his thumbs from behind. We hadn’t spoken since our escape from Werner’s house, and I’d been making us coffee, watching as two of the neighborhood mutts mated lazily in the yard across from ours. My brother led me to a mirror and mashed my face into the cold pane. Luthando was in a rage, and he asked me if I liked looking that way — with my nose pinched — and nearly broke the glass with my forehead. I struggled and elbowed him and we both fell to the floor and fought. When he tired of pressing my face against the bathroom tile, and with my saliva pooling against my cheek on the floor, I asked him why he was hurting me, even though I knew the reason. Luthando said everything else about me was white, so why would I mind having a pinched nose on my face. Then he heeled my cheek again, and I thought it was to spite him that I smiled at what he’d said, but I knew even then a part of me was charmed by it. Eventually, when he got up and started to walk away, I tried to spit on his heels, and then I called him poor for the first time in our lives. This was me and my brother Luthando.
Masks, Ruan announces to us, dragging the word in a drawl through each syllable. Cissie and I watch him from the other side of her coffee table. We’re inside the following day, just a minute after noon, and Ruan’s voice sounds weak but determined.
Just because some people wear a mask, he says, that doesn’t mean they’ve done something wrong.
Cissie and I nod.
Ruan sits across from us, printing out three paper masks for us to use.
It’s been about forty-eight hours since we took the client’s money, and now we’re back at West Ridge Heights, again, watching as the sun slides itself past Cissie’s living-room windows, throwing its rays across Cape Town’s countless bricks and bonnets. With the weary ghosts of Newlands still keeping vigil in their comatose gardens — only now, according to Cissie, beginning to smell our wealth inside her cream-colored building— we pass around her kitchen scissors and knit together links of rubber bands, and then we pull our paper sheets over our faces and turn into people more important than we are. I guess this is what we’re doing instead of discussing the client, and instead of discussing Sylvia, Cissie’s aunt, whose body gets flown out in a pine box to Joburg today.
Cissie opens the biggest window in her living room and sighs. It’s hot all over Cape Town today, she says.
I nod. You can feel the heat bouncing off the walls and sinking into the sectional couch, and when we get up and walk around the flat, we have everything off but our underwear. The way we drink, also, is by putting everything into Cissie’s freezer: as soon as we’ve finished one bottle, we replace it with a full bottle of something else. We’ve left multicolored stains all over the kitchen floor.
In the living room, Ruan passes me another bottle of champagne and I take a deep swig. Then he stands up to tell us who he is today.
I guess this is how it sometimes starts with us. We have these games we waste our lives on just like everyone else, and today, Ruan’s up first and he tells us we should call him the country of Zimbabwe. The way he’s standing in front of me and Cecelia, we’re both sitting still on the leather sectional, and we’re looking at the Robert Mugabe scowl pressed against his face. The gray printout hangs over his Adam’s apple, a contrast to his wide, pale shoulders, and the way it’s pulled back against his face, it looks like the beginning of a grimace, or like someone about to laugh. Then Ruan tells us he has thirteen million people inside of him, and lying down he’s four hundred thousand square kilometers wide, and the way his pockets are set up, only seventy percent of his people live under the breadline.
In response, Cissie and I clap for him.
Then Cissie hands me the bottle of champagne and gets up from the couch in a white bra and boy shorts. She fixes Charles Taylor with rubber bands around her face, and tells us she’s a hundred thousand square kilometers in size. Then she says she only has three million people living inside of her, and that the way her pockets are set up, only eighty percent of them live under the breadline. When Cissie’s done, she drops herself next to me on the sectional couch, and I hand her the bottle of champagne.
Then I get up in front of them for my turn at the game.
I’m in my boxers, with a picture of Joseph Kabila on my face, and what I tell my friends is that overall, I’m two million square kilometers in size. I tell them that I’ve got sixty million people living inside of me, and the way my pockets are set up, only seventy percent of them live under my breadline. Then Cissie reaches over and I take the champagne from her and sit back down.
The three of us lie on the sofa and drink a while.
What if we had more money than any of the people in those countries? Cissie says. Or more money than their presidents.
Ruan lights a filter and shakes his head. I don’t know about the presidents, he says.
Definitely not the presidents, I say. I get up for another bottle of champagne.
Then Cissie says, what if? She says, you know when people say the people? I always think presidents are what they mean when they say the people.
Explain, Ruan says.
I hand Cissie the bottle and she says, well, think about this. You remember about South Africa’s first decade, right, from 1990? For years, South Africa was basically this one man. People used to call him uTata we Sizwe, the father of the nation.
I tell Cissie, sure. I remember this.
Then she says, that’s around the same time we were born, right, as citizens? She says, so we all shared a father in that sense, didn’t we?
Shared, Ruan says. What do you mean?
Cissie laughs. Okay, she says. I mean, sure, it’s easy to dismiss the whole thing as some bullshit nationalism thing, isn’t it? I get it, but that isn’t my point. I think my point is more like, on a physical and cultural basis, we were all him, you know, we were all this one man from the island. Cissie asks if we understand her.