Mkwere Mkwere

By Alex Matthews

The wind pricks through the holes in my t-shirt. My stomach rattles and I shiver, holding onto the hessian sack. Enoch is asleep in the corner with my blanket. He stole it while I waited in the food queue this afternoon.

The traffic hums. An ambulance wails. Where was it when Adonis collapsed? It does not save mkwere mkwere. That much is obvious.

A van roars into the parking lot. From its vent, an Alsatian’s barking anger drifts menacingly towards us in the wind. A door slams. Through the windscreen a cigarette glows. Footsteps.

Torchlight washes the wall. It hovers at the toilet’s sagging green flap then swoops across and downwards.

‘Hey!’ yells the security guard. ‘Wat doen julle mense hier?’

The circular beam shrinks as he walks towards us.

He kicks Marian who is fast asleep. She looks up at him, blinking eyes blinded. She pleads silently as he kicks her again.

No one says anything.

‘Julle mense moet gaan huis toe, jou fokken kaffirs.’

His light stumbles onto cowering bodies, some swathed in tattered sheets, others bare.

‘This is government property. Get out of here.’

Melting into the gloom, his boot thuds into Albert who crumples in a hiss of wheezing.

The other guard joins him, stubbing his cigarette in a clump of belongings.

‘Mense! People! Get out of here! Voetsek!’

Slowly the blanketed blobs shift, coalescing with sluggish defiance onto the pavement beyond the gates. I lie down on the sticky concrete, still warm from the summer sun.

After the guards have driven away, there is a resigned babble of Shona until, at last, sleep claims most. I remain awake thinking. It is the second week I have been here, since the hitch on a rusty lorry. Before that I was in Jo’burg working on a building lot. But the cops are bad there – they hate us even more. They chase us. When they shot Talent I knew I had to leave.

I take out the photo from the sack. Mama, Papa and me standing in front of the frangipani tree. The edges curl; a red blotch seeps across the frame, caught in light pooling from the streetlamp. I stroke it, touching the smiling faces. My eyes water. Stifling a sob, I wipe the tears away. I must not cry. I have to be strong. I know they both want me to be strong.

The wind whistles through the chainlink fence. Above, on the highway, the endless traffic thumps past. I close my eyes. The picture remains, singeing my eyelids.

We were a close family. Mama was a clerk at the university; Papa was a teacher. When I was young, I used to play with wooden blocks at the back of the class while he chalked up sentences on the blackboard. I would long to be like the older boys with their solemn striped ties and big books cramming their desk.

Papa saved hard for a brick house. Across the field, hid by a curtain of swaying grass, was the gleam of the shanties, a constant reminder – until the bulldozers came two years ago, that is. When I got home from school one day, I saw the corrugated sheets collapsing into the dust. Through a gap between the gum trees, three soldiers were pouring paraffin on mounds of furniture (sagging sofas, broken tables, a grey TV). They then set it all alight, the tired fabric flaming into a whoosh of orange and yellow.

When a woman ran up to protest, they shot her, her body arcing backwards as the bullets ripped into her blouse. She lay in a bloodied hopeless heap. Had it really happened? I wondered if it was a dream – but the shots still ricocheting inside my skull would not be silenced. That night I hugged my pillow on my bed and waited.

Papa did not come home.

‘Did he have something on? A meeting?’ I asked my mother for the umpteenth time.

She just wearily shook her head. I knew as well as she did that he was an MDC member. I felt it. I sensed it in the way he turned the TV off or angrily scrunched up the Herald and threw it into the bin. But it was never spoken about; neighbours could eavesdrop (or at least we presumed they could).

A week after his disappearance Aunt Sylvia arrived. Her black Mercedes slid along the gravel like the sound of bones being crunched. The tinted window lowered a little. My mother, pale and dazed, went up to the car.

‘Sister, I have some news about Josiah,’ said the haughty, husky voice from within.

My mother nodded slowly.

‘I could get into a lot of trouble for doing this you know. You could be a little more grateful.’

‘I’m sorry, Sylvia –’

‘No matter,’ she interrupted. ‘He was taken to Hunzvi’s clinic.’

Panic jolted through the both of us. I held my mother’s clammy palm.

‘Why did he get involved in all this nonsense? He’s what? A schoolteacher!’ spat Aunt Sylvia.

That night I saw my mother weeping for the first time. I tiptoed round her as she absently stirred the stew on the stove. The tears coursed down her gaunt cheeks unchecked.

‘He’s not going to come back,’ she whispered when I hugged her. ‘They torture people there! He’s not going to come back.’

He didn’t. A few days later, Mama was fired, the dean accusing her of stealing sugar from the canteen. I knew that was just an excuse. She lost her job because of my father.

The weeks became months. Mama would spend her days in queues. Queues for bread, for milk. Meat had long disappeared off the shelves. Sometimes she would return with nothing. The meals got smaller. Eventually she resorted to knocking on doors in Mount Pleasant . All too often the vast houses were empty. She would pass her brother-in-law’s ministerial mansion but was too proud to stop.

Then a month ago I came home to find her in bed, the blinds shut so that my shadow was splayed like a ghoul across the wall. The stench of vomit haunted the house.

I took her to hospital but it was too late. A harried nurse wheeled her slumped body away, down an endless corridor where, lining the blood-spattered walls, writhing men moaned their last breaths.

I fall asleep. My dream kaleidoscopes into numbed flashes of purgatory – of crawling and barbed wire scratching into my back. Dizzy relief on the other side. The hum of the cicadas. Dogs barking. Roadside baobabs, the pensive grandfathers of the veld, with FUCK MUGABE scythed into them. Trucks lumbering past on the sizzling tar. Always fear – gnawing, clawing at my hollow stomach. The bright lights of Jozi – a forest of towers piercing the smoky orange sky. So many cars – always going somewhere, who knows where? The stories, stories Talent always whispers at night when we sit in the dark five floors up and pray the police won’t come. We see them down below (or do we just imagine them?) – the blue-grey uniforms like ants on the pavement. His stories are about other brothers – and sisters – burnt alive. Raped. Killed. People know; they can sniff us out. They kill us. We are thieves, job-stealers, murderers.

We are mkwere mwkere.