Title Page
KGEBETLI MOELE
Room 207
KWELA BOOKS
Dedication
To Nare,
who lost his mind and his dreams –
you are still loved
Motto
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”
— T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Refuge
Refuge
1. 207
207
It used to be a hotel, back in the days of . . . you know, those days which the rulers of this land don’t want you to forget. Corner of Van der Merwe and Claim, there used to be a hotel. Once. Then. And now it’s a residential. I stay there in room 207. We stay there, although we don’t really say we stay there: it’s been a temporary setting, since and until . . . I can’t tell. What I do know is that we have spent eleven years not really staying there. Matome always says, “It is our locker room away from home, baba.”
This room is our safe haven during the lighted dark night of dream city.
S’busiso (we call him the Zulu-boy and, from this day on, you will call him the Zulu-boy too), Molamo, D’nice, Modishi and, like you heard, Matome ke Molobedu. For us 207 was, and is, our home.
Open the door. You are welcomed by a small passage with a white closet on your left, full of clothes and innumerable handwritten papers that are more valuable to us than our lives. Bags fill the rest of the space and on the top there is a Chinese radio, a very expensive keyboard, a trumpet, two hotplates and about a thousand condoms.
The floor is wooden, giving away the fact that this hotel was built when wood was the in-thing, fashionable. It needs help.
A door on your right leads into the bathroom.
Open the door.
The place is rotting. Some of the tiles have cracked and some have lost their grip entirely and fallen off. The cream-white paint is cracking, showing the old paint underneath and the bad paintwork done over the years. The air is humid and heavy because the small window is rarely opened and, if you do open it, you will lose your soap or maybe your toothpaste.
Before we made the rule about having the window permanently closed, toothbrushes, antiperspirants, body lotions and toothpastes vanished. Until, one day, a kilogram of washing powder vanished and Matome cried because his laundry was still dirty and no one had washed their clothes. From that day on the window was closed for good and for that reason the air is humid and heavy.
On your left is the basin, still in good condition. In front of you the toilet, missing only the toilet lid; it has never seen newspaper, and, in better times, there is always soft toilet paper – the kind the Zulu-boy prefers (that is advertised by small children on our national television). Even in the dark days, and the even darker days that may be to come, I can bet with my balls that we won’t use newspaper here, Matome will always steal – unroll the whole toilet roll from a public toilet for the comfort of our delicate butts.
Then there is the bath on your right. The ceramic coating is scratched and has, over the years, fallen victim to its own predators (whatever they are). If you had an appetite for a hot bath you’d lose it, I’m sure of that, and you’d wash in the basin instead.
Right above the back of the bath is the geyser – rusty, leaking, with exposed electric cables. Sometimes I feel sorry in advance for whoever is in the bath the day it decides it has had enough. Though, sometimes, I wish it would happen to me and then I could take the landlord to court and have the out-of-Hillbrow party that Matome says we are going to have the day we move out of Hillbrow for good.
Matome’s party doesn’t have a set date, since we all came to the dream city in different ways and, indifferently, became united. He’s always talking about it though, saying that it will be the greatest party in the history of Hillbrow.
Come in, come in.
This is the study cum dining room cum sitting room, you can sit on this single bed or that double bed, or you can just find a spot and make yourself comfortable anywhere you prefer, even on the floor. Brother, you are home.
This is our home, as you can see for yourself. This, our cum everything room, and that is our kitchen. That is the hotplate. As you can see there’s no refrigerator. That, the sink, is always like that. The dishes are washed only when we are about to have our last meal of the day, which, sometimes, is our first meal of the day but the last anyway. After that, we just put the dishes there until the next meal, then we wash and use them and put them there again, but there are no cockroaches here. Believe me, it is a miracle that we don’t have them. Go to some flats and they have forty million of them. Wage war, and sweep them away, dead, and they will be there the next day like nothing happened.
We once had a television set, it was old but it was a television. I guess it just got tired of sitting on the table and being a television, everybody looking at it when it suited them, changing the channel without its consent. One day, Modishi was having the darkest of days and hating everything with two legs and a mouth. He looked at it, maybe it asked him: “What are you looking at? I’m not on and I don’t want to be; it’s my turn to look at you guys.”
Maybe that’s what it told him because suddenly Modishi just picked it up like it was a weightless thing and threw it out of the balcony door.
The radio: Matome’s radio. These Chinese things. It no longer played compact disks and I hate when, in the morning, I’m woken up by the irritating voice of some DJ from dream city’s very own youthful radio station. I don’t hate YFM at all, but I like to wake up from my sleep very slowly. Those seconds. Those seconds in the morning when my consciousness regains itself. Those seconds when I don’t even know my other name, my hopes and dreams, while I’m thinking about my nightmares, sweet or sad, with a smile I only smile for myself – a smile I’m saving for the one that will deserve not only my love but everything that it comes with.
Anyway, it woke me, so I opened the radio up. And, since then, it’s been fighting for space with the keyboard, the hotplates and those fashionable things called condoms, which our government supplies to us, without charge, for our very own cautious pleasures.
The other citizens, those that we share this 207 haven with, the little mice, are not here now, but don’t worry too much because they will be here soon, when the time is right for them to come out. Then maybe you can have a chat with them too. Unlike the rats I kind of have a soft spot for these little mice. They don’t eat our clothes, shoes and papers. It’s like we have an agreement with them; we respect each other and each other’s property.
The only bad thing is that they scare the visiting females. They are so free that they will walk over your head, not intending to offend you in your peaceful sleep but, like you, they are chasing their own sets of dreams in dream city. They don’t eat
