Davids

Hers was a city of winds and storms, of fierce sun and chilling fog, of long cold rains and terrible droughts, of unexpected hails and gales, and sometimes all those things in one day. A city of unease, Cape Town. A moody city. A place of rock and water. Rock and water. The mountain and the sea had long ago broken and brokered its shape, but history had pushed back at the natural rim of the coast and formed a place out of careful division.

When old women sat on stoeps in faded house-dresses saying terrible things about their neighbours one day and weeping like hired Greek mourners at their funerals the next. It was where men never quite outgrew those first longings for German engineering, and that rite of passage, the purchase of a Mercedes Benz, new or used, could happen well into middle age.

It was an act of nature. Or God. Or fate. Perhaps all three. What everyone did know was that the tree had crashed onto the roof of one house and tipped up the foundations of the other. It had stood between those two homes for just over sixty years and with the disregard that nature has for walls-as-boundaries had sunk its roots deep into the ground of one property and curved itself over the gables of the other. The two houses had been locked in a no-speaking spell for almost thirty years. A slight had passed between the oldest man of each house - who had said what had been lost somewhere in the dim decades of the argument, but the cudgels of the fight had been taken up with great enthusiasm by the next generation (and the next). A promising friendship between the youngest daughters of each family broke off, the sons began ignoring each other when they backed out of the driveway, the children obeyed the cement line between the two properties as though it were an electric fence.

... he had always cherished the idea of writing, the romance of late nights and strong coffee, the ecstacy of a well-turned sentence or a phrase that references five things at once, that sense of invincibility that comes when things charge and move and arrive unbidden, when the world is brought to heel, when the violence of the outside is contained, order is enforced, logic is remade. But those days were fragile and few.

Nasreen chewed for several moments, staring at Alia before answering. “Pushing boundaries. That’s the only way to change things. You ask for more than they’ll give, but as much as you deserve. Have you learned nothing from this country?

What did that mean, an African city? Why? Because Joburg was soundtracked by the maquamba beat? There was nothing un-African about Cape Town. He felt the old sentences begin to take shape, the old argument begin to coalesce. This city and all its fucked-up divisions and casual cruelties was the way it was because of slavery and colonialism and you don’t get more African than that.

But this was what had come to him, this was what woke him up and led him to his desk, and Waleed, uncertain about so many other things in his life, was always sure about his writing. He had started with a small memory, one in which he woke up in a sudden fit, damp with the sweat, alive with panic.

After the move from the District, Waleed had begun to have nightmares. He would wake up shouting, calling for his mother, telling her the roof had been blown off, the ground had given way, their house was nothing but dust and rubble, rubble and dust.

There was a question Nasreen could not stop asking. She wanted to know, once he realised what was happening, if he regretted sanctioning those hours at that table; she wanted to know if, during those last moments, he hated them, as she did now. She was convinced he must have, even as she hoped he didn’t.

Nothing was neutral, there was always something attached to it, clinging to it, triggering, pulling, insisting, asking her to look, telling her not to forget. She’d tried explaining this one to Adam, but he had shaken his head and insisted that she was going to exhaust herself, that it sounded like she was living several lives at once, all stacked up on her, weighing her down, bottoming her out. Waleed had understood, a little. He had told her it was the same for him, to walk through the city was to walk with ghosts.

He just kept thinking, if people are hurting each other now, when we are at our most hopeful, what’s going to happen in ten years, in twenty years? So he hadn’t read it. Didn’t mean he didn’t love her. Should he say that? Right now?

Waleed offered his friend a non-committal smile, and the two men began to walk back to his place in a companionable silence. He didn’t tell Rashaad that he hoped never to stop being angry, not because he wanted to live in a state of perpetual rage, but because the anger was a way of remembering.

On insomnia-plagued nights, she told herself that she could have learned to live with and inside those stories, she would have found a way to meet them, offer to bandage him up, return him whole to himself. It was only much later when she realised that it wasn’t the stories, it was the constant fluctuation between being showered with attention and then abruptly ignored, being loved with a totalising force, and then treated with an arctic disregard. It was the knowledge that, at any moment, she could be made invisible: that terrible swing between being alive and dead.

She knew that what she had wanted back then, when it felt like they would live there forever, was the option to leave. That she’d found the noise and the filth and the constant nosiness of the neighbours unbearable, that she’d wanted to be able to visit for the Carnival. She’d wanted windless seasons of trees and land and space, the Kirstenbosch home of her girlhood, before they’d been moved from there too. But she kept the longing a secret, knowing its impossibility, knowing the law’s indifference to her preference.

Last week he took us to one of the kramats in Camps Bay - we walked up a path thick with the smell and scratch of fynbos, and at the top, the most incredible view of the ocean. It’s good to talk to him: I think he’s helping me understand everything a bit better, even though I don’t always like what I’m understanding.

It is still night in Cape Town. The kind when one cannot imagine its terrible winds, its past pains, when everything feels new, just-born, a history made up of stories, gentle and good.