Having run out of words, they sent her to identify the deceased in the morgue. In a drawer, someone other than Stephen was waiting for her — eyes closed, pinched nose, as white as a sheet, wearing a skullcap of lifeless hair. The next morning they had delivered this stranger, as rigid as a corpse.
Barring a few exceptions, the neighbors had been beyond reproach, for Death being what it is, when it turns up on this earth, everyone bows down and respects it.
Besides, Stephen had thumbed his nose at them while he was alive, and had now got what was coming to him. His abject death on a sidewalk was proof of this. Forgetting their hostility, they invaded the territory that mourning had purified. One of them told the university, while another informed the family — the half brothers in Verberie, the father in Hythe. Or was it the other way round? This one arranged the flowers in vases, that one discussed arrangements with the undertakers, while another finalized details for the church ceremony. Yet, instead of touching Rosélie, their attentions merely accentuated her pain. Furtively, they eradicated her. They dismissed her to the margins of a life of which she thought she had been the center for twenty years. It was as if Stephen had been repossessed by this world from which he had always kept his distance. As if he had become what he had never been either for her or for himself, that is, a white man.
She was not the only one to remark on this exclusion. Dido, who was no fool, did too. Around noon, she came to join Rosélie in her lair, the room where she was holed up, incapable of tears. Handing her the black clothes she had had the presence of mind to order from her dressmaker, Dido dictated:
“Get dressed. Come downstairs. He’s your husband. You lived with him for twenty years. It’s your house. You must make your presence felt.”
Rosélie had obeyed and confronted this sea of faces, full of hate and contempt under their masks of compassion. They converged on her to haul her far from the dry land to which she was clinging, then push her under and drown her. Shaking, she tried to exorcise her fears by doing her best to mouth the Psalms:
The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer,
My God, my rock in whom I take refuge
My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call on the Lord who is worthy to be praised.
Unfortunately, they didn’t mean anything, just words out of her mouth. In the afternoon at the church of St. Peter’s, amid the funereal smell of wilting flowers, dying candles, and incense, she had collapsed on Deogratias’s shoulder. My night watchman. My cook. Now my only friends.
And the ceremony had been recuperated by the university vice-chancellor — the first black South African to acquire the position, of which he was so proud — the dean, the head of the department, both white, the mainly white colleagues, handpicked students, and students from the colleges who had rehearsed their end-of-year theater performances with Stephen.
Inspector Lewis Sithole’s voice pierced the thick fog of her pain.
“It’s been really a pleasure talking to you. But I have to go back. We have a terrible case on our hands. The public prosecutor’s office is under enormous pressure. They want us to bring it to trial as soon as possible and make an example out of it.”
“Fiela?” she asked familiarly, as if it were a girl she had sat beside on the benches of the Dubouchage school or a cousin, the daughter of an aunt, she’d grown up with in the same family.
He nodded, then added:
“It’s a pity I can’t call on you. I have the firm conviction you could help me.”
She stared at him, surprised he could joke about such a subject. He was only half joking.
“Ever since we arrested her, despite a stream of psychologists, psychiatrists, and communications specialists of all kinds, she hasn’t opened her mouth. I don’t know what her voice sounds like. They assure me, however, that nobody can resist you. During your sessions people recount everything they have on their conscience.”
Rosélie agreed, murmuring:
“Can you heal those whom you don’t understand?”
Patient No. 20
Fiela
Age: 50
Nationality: South African
Profession: Housewife
Don’t keep anything from me. You know full well when you say “I” you mean “us.” Let’s go back to when you were a girl. Your mother died when you were ten. Have you ever got over it? Do you still dream about her at night?
Can you see yourself playing horsey on her lap?
As they headed toward the door, the Inspector continued:
“Oddly enough, she formed with Adriaan, her husband, a very loving couple. They were married for twenty-five years; they didn’t just live together. No, they were married. Legitimately married. Both very religious. They were regulars at the Church of the Resurrection in Guguletu. They didn’t miss a service. Then, surprise, surprise, two years after their wedding, Adriaan had a child with a neighbor’s daughter. But apparently it didn’t affect their relationship. She took the boy in and raised him. The whole business remains a mystery.”
SIX
Fiela, you’ve settled into my thoughts and dreams. No bother at all. As discreet as an alter ego. You hide behind everything I do, invisible, like the silk lining of a doublet. You must have been like me, a solitary child, a taciturn teenager. Your aunt who raised you said how ungrateful you were. You had no friends. You didn’t attract attention. The boys walked past without a glance, without a thought as to what you were dying to give them.
Every weekend since she had been on her own, Rosélie had followed Dido to Lievland, where her old mother, Elsie, had stayed on. The open-air life and visiting places had never interested Rosélie. It was Stephen who, at the slightest day off, had dragged her, moodily, through the game parks, onto the beaches, into the mountains and campgrounds where they ate braais in the company of strangers — who were disconcerted by the presence of a black woman — and on excursions out to sea to spy for whales they never saw. If she had been left to herself, she would have stayed home on Faure Street, moping with her memories. But Dido insisted she should “enjoy” herself.
Now that gangs ransomed passengers, raped and molested women traveling alone, taking the train was like an adventure into the Wild West. So Rosélie rented Papa Koumbaya’s car. Stephen had known Papa Koumbaya’s three younger sons at the university where they taught music. During his frequent visits to the jazz clubs, he had become friends with the older sons, who also were musicians. They had all made him laugh when they told him the story of how they had clubbed together and given a Thunderbird as a token of their affection to their old parents, crippled by a life of hard labor under the suns of apartheid. The parents had thanked them warmly, but nevertheless found the car too beautiful, far too beautiful for a couple of old fogies!
They had kept it in a garage, and Papa Koumbaya brought it out in exchange for a fistful of rand for wedding processions. Being driven to the altar in Papa Koumbaya’s Thunderbird was one of Cape Town’s costlier attractions. Renting his car to Rosélie for mundane excursions showed the full extent of the feelings he had for Stephen.
Rosélie didn’t know who she preferred — Papa Koumbaya or the Thunderbird, red the color of desire, hissing like a snake, which, alas, the old man, an extremely careful driver, reined in along the highway like a jockey curbing his thoroughbred. As for Dido, she complained that Papa Koumbaya stank like a billy goat. And then there was nothing original about his stories. They were so basically South African. As a result, she stuck ear plugs in her ears while Rosélie opened wide her own. Shriveled like a gnome behind the wheel, Papa Koumbaya set about telling them a different way each time, spicing them up in new guises, adding moving details or picturesque anecdotes. For forty years he had lived with six others to the room in a men’s hostel in Guguletu. When his body cried out too much, he would relieve himself by masturbating in front of a photo of Barta, his wife. Then he would wash away his disgust with gallons of bad beer. In the meantime Barta had been relegated beyond the six-hundred-mile limit to a barren bantustan. They made love during his brief leaves. Year in, year out, however, Barta gave birth to a son. In order to cheer up his miserable life as a pariah, he had learned on his own how to play a number of musical instruments, and communicated his passion for music to his sons. The seven of them had formed an orchestra, which played at services in the churches of the Assembly of God. The Koumbaya Ensemble. Strangely enough, the end of apartheid had sounded its death knell. Too rustic, too folksy when all you had to do was switch on the television to get the handsome Lenny Kravitz or the Spice Girls!