In spite of himself, Sunil yawned. It was late, or early, and he nodded off, sprawled on the sectional with papers and photos strewn around him.
Fifteen
The moon was high and fat. Pregnant moon, Water said under his breath, the way Selah used to, the boys in her lap, rocking in the porch swing on those late nights when they couldn’t sleep. A full moon always rises at sunset, he said to himself. Selah used to say that. Water was fifteen when he realized her death would always be inside him. Selah is tree, he whispered.
The swath of light falling through the window, however, was not from the moon but from the violet streetlamp on the hospital grounds. He swung his legs to the floor and got up slowly. Fire was snoring slightly, the sound muffled by the caul. Drawn tight, it would grow warm and then hot against Water’s side, as though he were carrying a hot water bottle.
It was light enough to make it across the room and as Water crossed to the window, Fire stirred, yawned, and then went back to sleep. Water searched the sky as if for some truth. Auguring; that had been Selah’s skill. Reading the future from the sky, by watching birds or clouds. Tracking to see if they were flying together or alone, the truth revealed in their formations. Water couldn’t sleep and lay awake for a long time gazing up at the moon, humming a lullaby, one that Selah had sung to them.
Sixteen
Sunil woke with a start. He peeled a sheet of paper from his cheek and crossed to the window. Below, the Strip was awake, like a sentient being made of neon, all pulse and wink, but it wasn’t dawn yet, probably nearer five in the morning. Sunil closed his eyes, shook his head rapidly, and opened them again. Dizzy, he watched the lights make a new pattern, like a kaleidoscope. He closed his eyes again. This time when he opened them and looked, he was so dizzy he had to put his hand on the cold metal of the window frame to keep from falling over. This was a game he’d played as a child, only the lights had been the stars, and back then he could get dizzy without feeling nauseated.
Dorothy taught him that game, said it was how the old soothsayers read the future. Izikhombi, she’d called it, bones used to divine the way, except she said they used the bones of the stars.
She was a good storyteller. Some people call that being a good liar. But that was just frivolous gossip, as Reverend Bhekithemba would say. Remove the log from your own eye first, he would add. The reverend had a soft spot for Sunil and Dorothy, which of course only made people gossip about the reverend and Dorothy. There has always been in African communities a deep suspicion of the Catholic priest’s professed celibacy. Father Bhekithemba was the priest of St. Francis, the Catholic church on the corner of Sunil’s street. But none of this, of course, changed the fact that Dorothy was a good storyteller.
She came to Soweto in 1960 to study nursing. She meant to return to her small town in the KwaZulu homeland, but no one ever leaves Soweto alive, as the saying goes.
She worked at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital on Old Potchefstroom Road. Baragwanath was more of a city than a hospital, serving about a million people every day. Much of what she saw there — the misery, the pain, the loss, the despair, but also the incredible strength of the people of Soweto — shaped her. She was a good woman who did what she could. Brought home medicines for the local mothers to give to their children. Nothing serious, just the basics — vitamins, cough medicine, painkillers, fever reducers, disinfectants, and iodine for scrapes and cuts. She cut quite the figure striding through the neighborhood at dusk, dressed in her nurse’s uniform — crisp, starched white dress and bonnet, palm flat on her belly, resting on the big buckle of the purple belt that marked her rank, a black handbag draped from the crook. Sunil followed her discreetly, pretending in his mind to be her bodyguard, and if Dorothy was aware she didn’t show it. Meanwhile, Johnny Ten-Ten, sitting on the low wall of the church smoking with other teenagers in the shadow of the statue of Saint Francis, called him Mommy’s Shadow.
Between St. Francis and Sunil’s house was an open lot of land that ran down to a ditch at the back of the township. Over the years, Dorothy put the local children to work turning it into a communal garden. They grew everything there — potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, carrots, peas, and even some onions — and gave it all away to those needier than them.
It seemed like the only things Dorothy kept for herself were the truth of Sunil’s father and the three tangerine trees she planted and replanted by the side fence of their house, a fence made of rippling and rusting corrugated iron sheets.
The trees never really grew much larger than shrubs, but they wore their size well, with all the gravitas of trees. Three trees Dorothy planted and replanted every year. Three trees were all they had room for, crowded as they were by the tomatoes and curry and potatoes and onions overflowing from the communal garden just over the fence. Three trees that seemed so superfluous they could as well have been chocolate trees instead of tangerines.
They always grew to about three feet high, branches thick and low like a shrub, and heavy with the small citrus. As soon as they bore their yellow fruit, and Sunil and his mother harvested buckets of them for themselves and their neighbors, they would begin to die and Dorothy would gather seeds and cuttings that still had green signs of life in them, and replant the tangerines in the cluster of three by the fence, where the off-flow from the kitchen sink kept the dusty Soweto soil moist and fragrant with decay and rebirth.
Always three, a mystical number not intended. Planting and replanting every year until it seemed she, like the tangerines, would die of happiness. Sunil love to peel the zesty fruit and bite into the soft sweet flesh. What a freedom.
But these were still the days of terror, of tear gas in the streets. Of armored Casspirs rolling through Soweto like hyenas on the prowl. These were still the days of beatings, and of the lynching of suspected informers by locals. When police enforced pass law. When they drank from illegal shebeens and then burned them down. When they kicked in the doors of frightened Soweto families and dragged the men out to be shot in the street in the middle of the night. When the police drove by emptying rounds of ammo into the houses of the ANC leadership who crouched behind the cast-iron stoves with their children in the kitchen, the safest place in the house. When rape was a state-sanctioned form of policing. When children playing in empty lots came upon dead bodies decomposing in the heat, or half-dissolved from chemicals. When the ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party recruited young men and women and trained them to be warriors.
If Dorothy had any misgivings about any of it, about Sunil training to be a freedom fighter, she didn’t show it. Maybe she suspected his heart wasn’t really in the fighting but more in becoming an impi, like the one in the story she told of his mythical father, as though he were trying somehow to make a connection with the absence that his father had become.
Maybe that was why she told stories, stories to counter, or perhaps balance, the ones the political movements were telling the children — stories of a different path, and maybe a different future. It was hard to tell, because she kept so much to herself.