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.
◆ ◆ ◆
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.
◆ ◆ ◆
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 you go there when we have told you not to so many times?’
‘What happened?’
They will ask this with panic squawking through their voices.
And in the telling of the tale, when I respond, I will not know how to explain the quietness of the room and the awful betrayal of my lungs which never once gave me breath enough to howl.
Telling someone, telling anyone, will be the same as telling them all and it will box me for them. It will make me an outsider, a child who trails whispers and who will grow up and be followed by the lingering scent of ‘Why?’ If I tell them they will soothe me and hold my hand and tell me it will all be fine, but I will be marked. From then on, they will wonder, quietly and perhaps in my presence. They will ask why I never screamed. I will still be their child but I will be altered – damaged and no longer innocent. They will no longer be able to say of me, ‘Oh, that one never bothers anybody.’ I will be troubled.
◆ ◆ ◆
A few months after the incident, Mummy and Baba tell us that we are moving. We are going to Kenya because Baba has a new job working for one of the agencies of the United Nations, just like Uncle Stan. This news is no surprise. For weeks Mummy and Baba have been sitting together at the kitchen table, talking late into the night, discussing Something Important.
I am floored when Mummy says that they aren’t taking me with them. I will have to stay in Lusaka for three weeks after they have left so that I can complete the school term here, while they set everything up in Nairobi. Baba’s contract begins a month before the school term ends, so Mummy explains that it makes the most sense for them to leave me here.
She announces
