The intractable sound of steel

I have been haunted, these past few days, by the memory of a sound.

The metallic clash of soldiers’ bayonets. A trap door snapping shut that no amount of charm or wit can open. Helpless in front of a power greater than yourself.

The military of my country is well trained. Not only in war and bullying, but also in how to recognise an enemy. No expense has been spared. They are subsumed in hogwash and truly think that people of Dirinda and Natal’s tribe are dirty, defective and out to murder our countryfolk in their beds.

I can’t blame the poor soldiers, really. When I say poor, I mean they own nothing. Of course the soldiers believe everything they are told. Dependency renders them childlike.

What does it take for a rookie to ignore what his seniors tell him? It would take a mind of steel. Or maybe it’s another element – that of water.

A fluid mind may ask: Why are they telling me this? Do they have a motive? Can I judge for myself?

But where does the fluid mind come from? I often ask myself this. Kheila, for instance, has never slavishly followed her elders. If anything she has taken the opposite course. Was she born like that? Or was there something in her family upbringing that made her feel secure enough to trust her own thoughts?

Sometimes, out of three children with the same upbringing, you get one maverick. While two are docile, the third asks questions.

I have spent my whole life toeing the line and admiring the mavericks: Kheila, and now Dirinda.

I thought I would never have the courage to join them. Until the night of steel.

Dirinda and I were hurrying across the square. The moon was full and Dirinda’s moon shadow tagged her, bumping over the cobblestones.

The bayonets came from nowhere, barring our paths. The clash of metal made my breath draw in so sharply, I couldn’t breathe out. I sensed Dirinda stiffen, beside me.

“Permits,” ordered a disembodied voice.

The lights from the square shone yellow on his outstretched hand. We fumbled in bags and pockets.

“Are you being slow on purpose?” said the second soldier, with a hungry voice.

The one in charge held his bayonet at ease.

“Your scarf,” he said to Dirinda.

She pulled it back from her head, revealing her black hair. There was enough light to see its shine.

He inserted Dirinda’s card in the scanner attached to his belt. A weird electronic glow lit up his face as he studied it.

“A religious one, are you?” he asked. “Your elders don’t like their women out so late. Can’t see the problem myself. No one would want to touch their dirty holes anyway.”

He gave both cards back.

“You won’t be so lucky next time, witch woman. Even if you are in the company of a legitimate.”

As we turned the corner away from the square, I could hardly walk, my legs were trembling so. Born in this country, I was safe, a legitimate. But Dirinda?

“Now do you see?” said Dirinda. “It’s getting worse. I knew it. Now do you understand why I have asked you to take Natal?”

The challenge of sharing

Dirinda was Natal’s mother only I didn’t know him then. I was vaguely aware Dirinda had two teenage sons but I wasn’t curious. They were shadowy figures in my mind – my relationship was with her.

Women can be possessive of their female friends. We are like lovers, bristling with jealousy if forced to share our loved one with someone else. So I wasn’t interested to hear about her children (my rivals to her attention).
“Sharing is the hardest thing,” said Dirinda. She had, as always, the knack of expressing the very thing I was thinking – but did not dream of voicing. Dirinda’s talk of sharing was not personal was not personal however; she was talking about a nursery kid in the school where she worked.

Or did it apply to us too? The three of us sitting in the Night Owl cafe.

Kheila as usual took a theoretical approach.

“The current system rewards greed with big salaries,” said Kheila. “We need a law that makes sharing compulsory.”

“Not exactly a vote catcher,” I said. Kheila was my best friend but I didn’t share her political convictions.

Kheila and I had known each since we were little girls, living in the same concrete high rise block. We never ran out of games because we were endlessly inventive.

We lost touch in our twenties when Kheila went travelling. Our separation was like a river, which splits in two. Our lives went on energetically but separately. We built different worlds for ourselves. But as soon as we met up again, the two streams reunited.

It was Kheila who introduced me to Dirinda. They were colleagues, as well as comrades. Then Dirinda and I hit it off so well, I worried about leaving out Kheila, my oldest best friend.

My country was marching towards dictatorship and here I was obsessing about my female friendships. I was 46 going on 14. Would I ever grow up?

Death makes life neater

Death makes life look as if it happens in a straight line. Beginning, middle and end. Death tidies up the loose ends. A broom to sweep the old bits into a neat pile.

It was because of Dirinda that I took Natal in. She asked me to look after her son and I could not refuse her. Well, I did at first. I knew what hiding an infidel would mean. You live looking over your shoulder, careful who you trust.

See how I am darting around with the telling. Like I said, life is not linear. Our memories pop into our heads at random. Children of my unconscious, they have no thought for order.

I must say I thought the concept of an “infidel” laughable – a cartoon attempt to find a scapegoat. Surely no one would take those newspaper headlines seriously?

But some did. Maybe they needed someone to blame for their own violence.

That’s why Dirinda asked me to take Natal, because it all got ugly and he was in danger.

Dirinda’s scarf

I love a rebel – I find them glamorous and long to have their daring. Dirinda was wild at heart but circumspect in her behaviour.

So she kept silent on the new laws and registered as religious in order to wear her scarf.

I couldn’t help teasing her.

“Are you giving up chillum too? That’s also forbidden by your elders.”

“You think I am wearing this to please those old men?”

I was relieved to hear her spirited reply. A cowed Dirinda would be like grass flattened to mud.

“My scarf is a symbol that freedom will come again. Bad laws don’t last. You just have to live long enough to see the back of them.”

“That’s the trick then,” I said. “Staying alive.”

Chapter two. Only a note

In my twenties I chose to be an academic. I knew I had no head for business, finding it more natural to bargain up than down (“Oh that’s too cheap, surely I need to pay you more?”). As a child, I loved libraries, the ordered way the books sat on the polished wooden shelves. The atmosphere was deceptively demure. Just about any book I opened transported me to another world, often wild and unknown.

So I had opted for the sanctuary of studying. There was so much going on in my imagination, and no limits on the ideas that could feed it, that I congratulated myself on making the right decision.

But I was intrigued by people who threw themselves wholeheartedly into the real world. Take Kheila, for instance, my dear childhood friend. When the exit laws relaxed (a temporary measure as it turned out), she took herself off travelling. She was not satisfied with reading a book about the desert, she had to see the never-ending baking sand for herself.

When the exit laws got tough again, Kheila returned. Perhaps she was worried about exile and never seeing her family again. Anyway, before long, she was caught up in all sorts of shenanigans. I had lived in our city of birth all my life but it took Kheila coming back to realise what it contained.

Kheila teased me for my intellectual existence while I marvelled at her recklessness.

I once asked Kheila: “How did you get involved in the Resistance?”

It turned out she had started as a nurse, before she went travelling. When she got back, in her early thirties, she quickly found her old contacts, and found the atmosphere more charged, more serious. It was no longer a talking shop but a place of action.

Kheila took her long draw on her chillum and blew out the perfumed smoke. It was thanks to people like Kheila that women could do that in public now.

“Like everything momentous, it started small,” she continued. “Someone asked me to deliver a note. Secretly of course. I did it for the excitement.”

I thought Kheila brave.

“I didn’t realise what I was doing,” she said. “So it’s not bravery, really.”

Kheila’s words never left me. They made sense: that an act of insignificance can jump-start your new life.

Because if we really knew what lay ahead, surely we would stay at the crossroads forever, clinging on to that wooden post for dear life?

I meet Natal

At the appointed time, my doorbell buzzed, twice. I opened my flat door, checking no one was about, and ran to open the communal door, quietly. Dirinda’s son was waiting on the doorstep. From behind the big door, I gestured him to step inside. Not the usual way to greet your friend’s son, and on first meeting too. But these were strange times.

My flat is on the first floor and I fairly flew back up the stairs, with Natal close behind, shutting my flat door gratefully behind us both.

I gave him a reassuring smile. Then my stomach told me something that might matter to my heart. Natal was beautiful. What would he see when he looked at me? A woman, flushfaced, his mother’s age.

He might judge me for my extra years. I might judge him for his youth. Either way it’s wrong. As for his beauty, (black eyes, red lips and slender nose), it’s a lottery. “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” my grandmother said. Of all the things to pop up into my head – her words must be embossed on my bones.

When my friend Dirinda asked me to hide her son, I could not refuse. Natal depended on me. No wonder my grandmother was appearing centre stage in my mind, to remind me not to fall prey to my seduced eye.

Worried he might think me unfriendly, I turned warm.

“Ah Natal, it’s good to meet you at last,” I said.

Natal followed me down the corridor. Trying to get my bearings, to keep me pinned to ordinary reality, I noted everything. I am not sure how reassuring this was. My bicycle glinted, as if to say: “Things will never be the same again. We may look like your everyday objects but tonight it’s all going to change.”

I hurried to the stove when we reached the kitchen, the cook’s role being a good diversion. Doing something practical, central to life. My wooden spoon stirred the kamut grains bubbling in hot water, and I lifted the lid to the steamed carrots and wild garlic.

“No one saw me when I came in,” said Natal.

We all reach crossroads in our lives. Even if the signposts are well displayed, the names of the destinations legible, nevertheless they can only give an indication of what to expect. We are like tourists, dependent on guide books, which give a sketch – a place’s potted history, where to stay depending on your budget. But it is not until we reach the our chosen destination that we really get a sense of where we are have landed.

But we are not tourists. We cannot simply return to our familiar homes after the excitement of travelling. Once we are on a particular path, we have to stick to it, or take another one. We can spend the rest of our lives looking back to that crossroad, saying: “What would have happened if I had taken the other path?” But really, we will never know.

Natal was 19, the same age I was when I chose not to carry on with my pregnancy.

Future Story

The future is happening now. It is in the making.