Counting the Coffins. Diale Tlholwe
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DIALE TLHOLWE
Counting the Coffins
KWELA BOOKS
To Maseloane and Puleng Tlholwe
“You can put a tree in a river for a thousand years; it will not turn into a crocdile.”
Malian proverb
Prologue
It begins.
It should not have been such a beautiful morning. The new sun should not have been shining with such promise or the spring breeze blowing with such freshness and the greenery sighing so sweetly. In fact, none of what was happening should have been happening.
It should have been cold, dark and gloomy. It should have poured slanting sheets of rain and hard hailstones. The wind should have been demented and howling bitter curses. Memorial stones vast and small should have been bowed in pensive melancholy. Instead . . . instead . . . they were the same as they had always been. Our little cortège meant nothing to them. They followed and obeyed the seasons and the hands that had crafted them with unfailing loyalty and constancy.
It should not be happening. Yet all of it was happening, here in this graveyard, with its well-tended graves and swept pathways between them. Long-forgotten monuments not far off watched sardonically as we unveiled our own, pledging never to forget the small, cold relic lying six feet below.
The mother had screamed and threatened suicide if she was not allowed to come to bid her child farewell. I had pleaded and argued to no avail, until the doctors had once again sedated her when they saw that I was losing my resolve.
I turned the scene over and was perplexed by my distance from it all – my separation from the others who were making these noises of grief and consolation. I saw them, heard them but could not understand them. Finally, I could not bear to look or listen, so I sidled to the back.
A tall female soloist dressed in severe black and caught in the balmy atmosphere of this warm late-spring morning struck a poignant yet jazzy tune about children at play, happy children forever at play . . .
“Lebelela hodimo, dinonyana di bapala hamonate – Look upwards, and see all the birds in joyous play,” she sang.
The treetops, the wind, the clouds and the sun – all at play with little baby Morena amidst them, at the very centre and happy heart of things. For a moment something cold and hidden gingerly unclenched and thawed inside me.
It was soon all over and done with and I was shaking hands, patting the backs of some and deflecting the hugs of others. The lacerating anguish had settled into a dull ache that now sought only privacy.
We then all turned away and walked to our different cars to re-enter the frantic fray and turmoil of our separate lives, leaving the serene dead to their eternal dreams. What had brought us together was now history for most. Except for a few of us, who were walking into lifelong waking nightmares – those few of us who refuse to forget, because forgetting is also abandoning.
Chapter 1
The depth of the pain of loss, the breadth of its torment, is far greater than all the plagues in the entire expanse of the universe, its permanence too obvious to ignore.
Some insensitive fool once said work is the best way to take your mind off your troubles. A multitude of pathetic fools parroted the one who had first said it until it became an established truth that allowed no contradiction. It always happens with all these old sayings, incubated in the brains of halfwits.
So I was allowed no break in my work – to do so would be an admission of weakness on my part. I could read all this in the eyes of my comforters. It was now almost a month since the dreadful accident had happened and I was expected to have snapped out of it and moved on.
So, on this Tuesday morning, I sat at my desk in my disorderly cubicle (which I call an office when I feel grand) and looked blankly at an orange file. All I could see was the Lesego I had left at the hospital that morning. The inconsolable Lesego had lost our unborn child when her car skidded and rammed into a concrete wall while trying to avoid a drugged, misbegotten teenager in his father’s car. That the boy had overturned the car and killed himself trying to flee the scene did not comfort me. He was now just another body in another coffin in a country of coffins, beyond all recrimination and blame.
It was the parents I had found objectionable.
I had listened to them trying to justify their child’s actions at the scene. They went so far as to almost blame Lesego for the tragedy. Modimo – God! How I nearly went for that stupid man, the father, but Thekiso’s stern eye had been on me as he shook his head in warning. And, of course, the police, the media and the paramedics had been all over the place. It was not the right time or place to be hysterical. Not with Lesego on a stretcher looking at me with pained and questioning eyes. So I had got into the ambulance with her and held her hand, even after she slipped into merciful unconsciousness.
We had not even been properly married yet, according to our more censorious relatives and other like-minded types. We had had just a small private ceremony and lunch and a limp party afterwards with close relatives and a few friends. The Big Bang Wedding was scheduled for after the babies were born. Only the girl twin had survived the crash and was now clinging desperately to flickering life in an incubator in the same hospital in which Lesego was confined.
“Have you started on that file?” Thekiso’s uncompromising voice interrupted my thoughts. He is a firm believer in the “work as a palliative” adage. He is also the chief partner of our firm – Thekiso and Ditoro: Security Consultants and Private Investigators, a highly elastic and useful tag that encompasses everything from providing bodyguards to minor celebrities and politicians with delusions of grandeur, to investigating dubious business people on behalf of suspicious associates. But there are genuinely frightened people out there with real enemies, just as there are indeed virulent human viruses polluting the ethical bloodstream of this city, if not the country.
“I thought you might find it interesting, Thabang,” he went on in a softer tone. A tone I did not like at all. Surely Thekiso was not going to go mawkish and sentimental on me? I could not handle that. I would take a leave of absence if that was the way things were going. I would resign. I would lock my personal desk drawer. I would work from home. I would call a staff meeting and tell them . . . I fumed and did nothing.
Though Tex Thekiso was a fully qualified lawyer, he had never practised. Still, I did not expect this kind of putting-a-fragile-witness-at-ease tone from him. It was vaguely disorienting.
But I was reading all the while as these furious ideas churned and tumbled in my head. A name caught my eye. Here was a name I would never forget: the name of the drugged boy’s father.
I turned around sharply but Thekiso had already left. I nearly overturned my chair as I leapt after him. He was seated behind his desk when I burst into his large, comfortable office.
“What is it now? You want to go home?” he asked with a straight face.
“What is this?” I dumped the orange file on his desk.
He frowned and then, unbelievably, he smiled. Once, maybe twice since I began working with him had I seen that crazy, lopsided smile. It was boyish, disarming in its own wry way, and removed a dozen years from his forty-year-old face. Why he was so stingy with this asset was not the point now.
“This is a file, if I am not mistaken,” he said.
“But where did you get it?”
“You mean the notes? I wrote them. The information I got in the usual way. Someone wanted us to check on something.”
“When was this? It can’t –”
“It is an old file. The client never turned up for a meeting and we put it aside and forgot about it. No client, no money, no investigation.”
“But you remembered.”
“I always remember.”