Always Another Country. Sisonke Msimang
have much to lose, so they stay in line.
Praisegod, it turns out, is a rare and malevolent exception.
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Look at him. Watch him now as he fades into the trees, into the soil and the grass. He knows how not to be noticed. His skin is the colour of amnesia; his eyes have the dark-brown tint of forgetting. His features are nondescript. He is a man who looks down all day, sweeping and raking and planting. You can assign him whichever lips and nose you wish because you will soon forget them anyway. There is nothing about him that will make you think twice about his character or his intentions.
You will assume that he is here only to collect his wages and to excel, in his own private ways, in the menial tasks at hand. You tell yourself, as you look at his blunt face, that he finds some satisfaction in sweeping the driveway and stacking logs. Look carefully, for this is a young man. He is gentle with children and deferential with the father of the house. Barely out of his teens, he listens carefully to the instructions of the madam and inspires confidence because he so rarely meets her eye.
This everyman, this most lowly of African men, a mere uneducated servant, is broken. His soul had probably already been smashed by the time I was born. It must have happened when he was only just a boy. Maybe his father wounded him. Maybe his mother pummelled him. Maybe, because he was left-handed, they tried to drown him in a stream to see if the demon inside would come out. Maybe, on his first day of school, the letters began to swim before his eyes and, in fear and misery, he wet himself. And maybe, after the welts had risen on his buttocks from the caning, as he was running home to cry in his mother’s arms, maybe he was hit on the back of the head by a stone, and maybe he fell, then, and awoke alone and concussed.
And maybe after that, after the headaches and the vomiting had subsided and he was left only with the memory of not being safe, maybe from then – which may have been from as early as he could remember – maybe after all that, everything was too hard and too complicated and little girls like me, with our endless questions and beaming smiles, with our almond eyes and neat braids, with our impossible expectations, and our offerings of brimming cups, maybe we now make him remember the times before he was broken. For those who have never been consoled, remembering is an awful burden to bear. What better way to ease a load than to forget it was ever there? What better way to forget than to be a child again, to play the games that children play, to exist as an innocent, in the time before wounds and pain and memory?
I am speculating, of course. But I have the luxury to do so: I have been a resilient victim, far more capable of survival in the end than a poor, broken man who himself was a casualty – the victim of a stunted revolution. I am not being brave – only honest. What happened to me was a bad thing, for sure, but worse happens every day to people who are in no position to recover. I tell it to show that it is awful and also that it isn’t the end of the world.
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So let us go there. Let us begin with the minute when he says to me, ‘See?’ with all the gentleness of a mild summer day. ‘Come. Come see this.’ He is smiling as though he has a secret to tell, so I crouch down beside him and look at the grasshopper he has captured in his hands. I marvel. ‘Can I hold?’ I ask, fearless as ever. He has something else to show me, he says and so I follow, traipsing behind as he leads me towards his quarters.
This is ancient history now, but I can never tell it without wanting to stop the reel at this moment; without wanting to make myself turn around and walk away before I enter the cool, well-shaded room at the edge of the property. I want Aunty Angela to come out, wiping her hands on her apron, to say, ‘Sonke, let’s go and buy some bread at the French bakery,’ but it’s too late for that now.
I hesitate at the door: I have been warned many times before not to go inside his room, because nobody wants me badgering him and disturbing his privacy. The room is cool and dark and sparse.
His bed is narrow and neatly made up and the room smells like he does: old sweat and tobacco and something acrid and musty and strong.
I enter.
He sits on the bed and pats the space next to him so that we are seated side by side. My legs dangle loosely and I am not afraid. He moves quickly and is suddenly on top of me and then I am afraid. I am very afraid and there is fear in my bowels and drums in my blood and everything in me wants to live and die at once. But it is too late to decide which way it will go – life or death. It is too late and my powder-blue shorts are off and I am fighting to keep my panties on and he is trying to snatch them down and I am clenching so hard that he cannot roll them down any further and then he is ramming against me with his body and trying to prise my legs apart and then his breath is in my face and he is heavy and he smells so awful I want to cry and vomit at the same time and then he asks, ‘Is it nice?’
I say yes.
The ‘yes’ unlocks a door and he tenses up. He stops holding my arms so tightly and he just lies there. He is sticky and so am I. I am sore from where his fingers have gouged, and from where his penis has tried to enter me. He has not succeeded but he has hurt me.
I am hurt.
I lie underneath him and he is hot and he smells awful and tears leak from the corners of my eyes. Then he sits up and buttons his trousers. He does not look at me. I get down from the bed and put my shorts back on and I do not look at him either. I move away from the bed and stand a few feet away, next to the door, waiting as he finds his own feet. Then he takes my hand and we walk, as we have walked many times before, hand in hand. We walk into the bright blinking day and I am not crying. I let go of his hand somewhere in the garden and I pick my way across fallen mulberries and papayas. I slip quietly into the house and then, once I am there, in the cool of the kitchen, away from the garden and the over-lush smell of ripening fruit, once I am leaning forward at the sink and drinking a glass of water, I make up my mind about what has just happened. I solemnly swear that he will never touch me again. I do not even cry, because I just know, in myself, exactly what I need to do to be safe.
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Afterwards 10 Kalungu Road no longer feels like home. Mummy still drops me there before school and I continue to stay after, but now I cross the veranda quickly and never stay in the back yard. In the afternoons I am Dumi’s shadow. I stick to him and Cousin George, even when they are being mean and telling me they have boys’ things to do. When Lindi is home, I glue myself to her side and I don’t even care when her friends call me the tape recorder and shush each other when I appear at her bedroom door. ‘You know she’s just gonna run and tell the grown-ups what we’re saying,’ they snicker. It doesn’t bother me one little bit. I am a hard little ball inside and my mission is simple, clean, crisp. I will be fine, as long as I avoid the garden.
A couple of days after the incident, Aunty asks Praisegod to ride me to school on his bike – as he has many times before. ‘No,’ I say, interrupting her instructions to him.
‘Why not, Sonke? I have to go into town today. It will make everything much easier, big girl.’ No. I begin to cry. It is the first of many times that I will break my crying rule in the long months that follow.
A few times, when Aunty Angela needs to go to the shops, she suggests that I stay behind because ‘Praisegod is here.’ I refuse. I join her, each and every time, and soon she doesn’t bother asking. She simply says, ‘Come dear, I need to quickly run to the bakery.’
While my confidence grows with each new act of rebellion, it doesn’t occur to me to tell anyone about what Praisegod has done to me. Not for one minute do I even consider this. Not as I straighten myself up and walk into the house. Not as Aunty Angela says, ‘Where were you?’ Not when Mummy comes to fetch me. Not when I am in the back seat looking out of the window as we drive home with my babbling sisters putting their jammy fingers all over me. Not even on that day when they try desperately to put me on the handlebars of the bike so that he can ride me to school. Not as I squirm and kick and finally manage to break loose and run up the tree that stands over the gate.
Telling would put everyone in the unbearable position of having to do something about it.
‘Why did