how many years…I’ll talk to my father. It’s better if I take him alone.—
There’s still—always—something distancing about Jabu’s bond with her father. For Steve, who did not know any such unique relation to his, only felt the loss for those few moments when his father was dead. He got up and folded his arms around her back, she turned not to release herself but so that they could kiss, their secular blessing, whatever happened to pass between them.
Jabu and the boy came back late on the Monday, last holiday night, she lively, not tired by the long drive and he bounding, in charge, out of the car with the usual spoils of her natal place, this time avocados and eggs—Gary brought them from my mother’s hens himself, she told. Steve cooked a second supper, some of the eggs with leftover meat and he and Sindiswa ate again with her and the boy, praising the taste of the bright golden yolks, Gary unusually talkative telling of the calf he had touched, just born, all wet, and the bird— inyoni , Jabu prompts with the Zulu name—that nearly hit the windscreen, these events in the sum of days he’d passed.—You lucky thing—Sindiswa presented him with her admiration.
In bed, before turning out the light above their pillows—Your father, what’d he say.—
—We’ll talk tomorrow. Lala now, masilake manje. —
Tomorrow was a working day, breakfast, Wethu demanding news from home, how-is-Baba-mama-auntie—all right, delivery of the children, routes divided by alternative maps drawn by traffic, Jabu in her car the Greek school, him to Gary’s primary before the science faculty, her destination Justice Centre. So it was night again when the children were in bed that there was time for her to tell him her father’s thoughts, advice about the naughty boy. The loyalty of her mother love to persist in seeing him as just that despite behaviour gone beyond the happily mischievous.
Boys will be boys. Yes, will be seen, lived with differently in KwaZulu her home (no other home will ever deny its status) than in the suburb of freedom. That’s really what there is to hear about.
Whenever she’s approaching that way back it’s a route inside her as well as a road taken, and it is her father, whose stance imaged above the road. Only when she slows the car for the safety of the children who recognise it, leap alongside calling out Jabulile Gary Elias, wozani ! to be the first to announce her—does the entire familiarity of the place of origin come to her as if she were pinching peaches from the tree before they were ripe, being pulled along wild tumbling rides on the fruitbox sleds of the boys, sitting with the Church Ladies at their prayer meetings.
Her mother comes to greet her and the grandson in the usual attendant women, everyone embracing her as also a mother and not sparing the grandson, who presses his elbows tight against his body in attempt at evasion.
Her father stands on the red-polished cement steps of the headmaster’s European-style house, his stance that is there, imprint in her mind. She moves to him and he down to her in the respect with which the women back off. He and she, father and daughter, embrace, enfold in one another’s arms almost like some special wrestle, but do not kiss. She can’t remember Baba kissing her even when she was a little girl. He doesn’t have to; the way everybody’s father husband boyfriend does among comrades in the Suburb. He takes her palm and walks her away into the house after she’s made a brief halt for his grandson Gary Elias to be greeted with a grown-up grasp of hands, and to be released among the boys who have already claimed him, always taken up from where previous family visits left off.
Her father leads her to the cabin-of-a-room which is the only completely private space of the house except for the brief use of the combined bathroom-lavatory. Her mother hastens up with some half-reproach half-concern about tea and food, but the exchange with
There’s still—always—something distancing about Jabu’s bond with her father. For Steve, who did not know any such unique relation to his, only felt the loss for those few moments when his father was dead. He got up and folded his arms around her back, she turned not to release herself but so that they could kiss, their secular blessing, whatever happened to pass between them.
Jabu and the boy came back late on the Monday, last holiday night, she lively, not tired by the long drive and he bounding, in charge, out of the car with the usual spoils of her natal place, this time avocados and eggs—Gary brought them from my mother’s hens himself, she told. Steve cooked a second supper, some of the eggs with leftover meat and he and Sindiswa ate again with her and the boy, praising the taste of the bright golden yolks, Gary unusually talkative telling of the calf he had touched, just born, all wet, and the bird— inyoni , Jabu prompts with the Zulu name—that nearly hit the windscreen, these events in the sum of days he’d passed.—You lucky thing—Sindiswa presented him with her admiration.
In bed, before turning out the light above their pillows—Your father, what’d he say.—
—We’ll talk tomorrow. Lala now, masilake manje. —
Tomorrow was a working day, breakfast, Wethu demanding news from home, how-is-Baba-mama-auntie—all right, delivery of the children, routes divided by alternative maps drawn by traffic, Jabu in her car the Greek school, him to Gary’s primary before the science faculty, her destination Justice Centre. So it was night again when the children were in bed that there was time for her to tell him her father’s thoughts, advice about the naughty boy. The loyalty of her mother love to persist in seeing him as just that despite behaviour gone beyond the happily mischievous.
Boys will be boys. Yes, will be seen, lived with differently in KwaZulu her home (no other home will ever deny its status) than in the suburb of freedom. That’s really what there is to hear about.
Whenever she’s approaching that way back it’s a route inside her as well as a road taken, and it is her father, whose stance imaged above the road. Only when she slows the car for the safety of the children who recognise it, leap alongside calling out Jabulile Gary Elias, wozani ! to be the first to announce her—does the entire familiarity of the place of origin come to her as if she were pinching peaches from the tree before they were ripe, being pulled along wild tumbling rides on the fruitbox sleds of the boys, sitting with the Church Ladies at their prayer meetings.
Her mother comes to greet her and the grandson in the usual attendant women, everyone embracing her as also a mother and not sparing the grandson, who presses his elbows tight against his body in attempt at evasion.
Her father stands on the red-polished cement steps of the headmaster’s European-style house, his stance that is there, imprint in her mind. She moves to him and he down to her in the respect with which the women back off. He and she, father and daughter, embrace, enfold in one another’s arms almost like some special wrestle, but do not kiss. She can’t remember Baba kissing her even when she was a little girl. He doesn’t have to; the way everybody’s father husband boyfriend does among comrades in the Suburb. He takes her palm and walks her away into the house after she’s made a brief halt for his grandson Gary Elias to be greeted with a grown-up grasp of hands, and to be released among the boys who have already claimed him, always taken up from where previous family visits left off.
Her father leads her to the cabin-of-a-room which is the only completely private space of the house except for the brief use of the combined bathroom-lavatory. Her mother hastens up with some half-reproach half-concern about tea and food, but the exchange with
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