Her customers included university students, interracial lovers hiding from anti-miscegenation laws, sangomas, curio hunters, rare-book collectors, and more. It seemed sometimes to Sunil that all the misfits in Jozi met up there.
He had been coming to Gogo’s since he stumbled on the store as a sixteen-year-old and Gogo had given him a torn paperback copy of Tropic of Cancer. He came because he imagined his parents must have met in a place like this. Gogo’s always smelled of frankincense, which she kept burning on coals in a small black cauldron behind the counter.
Keeps the customers honest, she said to Sunil once with a wink. Besides, it smells like church, holy and mysterious.
He had to agree. Seen through the thin haze of smoke, everything looked mysterious. The mummified animals; the mummified human hand and head; the strangely formed rocks; animal pelts and skins; freshly killed owls; bones; dried herbs; the books — stacked everywhere; and strange jewelry from Tibet (malas and turquoise rings) — amber with insect fossils, and rings and necklaces with butterfly wing fragments encased in resin.
It was the last place Sunil expected to meet Jan. He’d never seen her at the bookstore. She looked up at him when they both reached for the same book. They each knew the risk of it, in those days, but that only made it more exciting; and during a conversation on the amazing hummingbird moth, held over the book neither would let go of, she touched his hand and asked if he would like to go back to her place. Her forwardness both attracted and frightened him.
Her small flat was made smaller by the glass cases and frames that covered every surface: walls, tabletops, couch, the dining chairs, and the floor.
Come in, she said, walking in and dropping her handbag in the middle of the rubble. He followed somewhat timidly, fighting a strong urge to tidy up. Jan grabbed mugs from the draining board in the kitchen, poured wine from a half-empty bottle, and handed him a mug.
Cheers, she said, clinking. Well, it’s not much, but it’s all mine.
Quite, yes, Sunil said, thinking the untidy mess of her apartment didn’t match the somewhat severe Jan of the classroom. But then, that wasn’t uncommon among white South Africans. It was common knowledge that most led a double life. What was shown in public was a repressed, conformist, and exaggerated morality. But the home life was completely different, revealing everything from messiness to deviant sexual behavior. A double life, however, was a privilege no blacks had because while whites were safe from scrutiny behind their front doors, blacks were always under scrutiny.
Come see this, Jan said, and sat at her kitchen table, bent over a butterfly she placed carefully under a microscope. Come see, she said. He shook his head and sipped the cheap wine. Watching her, he’d loved that she could get lost so easily in her study. He thought it a wonderful thing to sort and label whole species, to mount them behind glass as proof of certainty. She smiled up at him and he smiled back, wondering in that moment if what Lacan said was true: that loving someone else is impossible. That all we love is the space between our own desires — to be seen and to be wanted. It wasn’t unusual, he supposed, that as a psychiatrist-in-training he would think of Lacan when he thought of love, but he did find it irksome the way his mind seemed to get between him and his body, between him and the world. He imagined it was different for Jan. She seemed to have a more visceral engagement with things when she was in her own world.
And he knew her power, her raw power, when she got up from the table and came to him covered in the tinsel from the butterfly’s wings — iridescent and multicolored. Knew from the way she moaned when they made love later that night, from the way she got out of bed and ran into the cold kitchen to get something to eat because sex made her hungry. Knew from the way she bit into a pear and closed her eyes for a second as though tasting it for the first time. For him it was second-hand always, the facsimile of the experience.
That night passed in a blur of sex and sleep, and he woke to a proliferation of color and wings, and in that cold morning light irradiated with butterflies, he felt an ache unlike anything else before or after. He knew then as he watched her sleep that he would leave and never come back. If he stayed, his life would never be the same. The mystery of it, the danger of its change, also carried with it the terror of healing. He wasn’t ready for that. The ache he felt could never be filled, not by her, not by anybody. He knew enough to know that if he stayed, she would become the scab over a deeper wound that he would pick and pick until there was nothing. Before she woke, he left.
That day he went to Gogo’s and bought a beautiful men’s signet ring in silver with a Blue Mormon wing fragment in a clear mount. Beautiful, it was more than he could afford. When Gogo found out it was for a girl, she slipped it onto a silver chain.
For her neck, she said. Strange gift for a girl, but she will never forget it. Bound to make an impression, she added.
The next day in class, he sat next to her. She ignored him at first, but then he placed the unusual gift on top of her red Bible, blue on red, and she blushed and smiled, her hand coming to rest on it.
For me?
Yes.
Thank you, she said.
But before class was over, he left, and a week later he was on a plane to Holland on a government educational exchange program. While he was away, he found out through an old acquaintance that Jan and Eskia became an item, that they even dropped out of school to be together. He would not see Jan again until Vlakplaas.
SUNDAY
Thirty
The sunlight was filtered to a muted blue by the stained glass of the kitchen window. It was the only room in the house that had only one window — high up and small, like the opening in a monk’s cell.
Asia paused in front of the fridge, her reflection catching her by surprise. Long black hair, full lips still stained a little red from last night’s lipstick, a long lean neck, and a body taut from dancing. The pristine steel of the fridge door bothered her, and before she opened it to take out the eggs she made sure to smudge it a bit with her fingertips.
Normally Asia would be turning in after a long night. The only other time she was up this early was when she’d slept over with a client who’d paid for the whole night. Then she would wake and sneak off, unless of course there was breakfast. But everything was different when it came to Sunil. Even the money he still left in the Bible for her was now a mere formality for her. She took it and paid it into a bank account that she never touched. She only took it because it allowed her to maintain a certain distance to protect her heart. He’d called her late and asked her over, and even though he was a client she’d spent the night with, she was up making him breakfast. She never made breakfast for herself.
But there was something so ordinary and everyday about cooking for a loved one that left her breathless with anticipation. Coffee percolating in the pot, made from fresh, rough-ground beans and distilled water; toast burning slowly, held down twice in the toaster because he loved to scrape the burned crumbs off with a knife, the sound like metal on wood; and scrambled egg whites; and for her, a quartered grapefruit and green tea with honey.
It was like a curtain being pulled back on a magic show. The quotidian nature of other people’s lives was fascinating to her. She had grown up in the cold, crowded squash of Chicago and had loved nothing more than riding the train, staring into the lit windows of other people’s lives trying to read something about them from those brief glimpses. She came to believe that those lives were better than hers, the tease of those windows proof of the fact. Breakfast was just one of the ways she pursued the lives hidden from her.