Archives for October 2014

Zu watches the snub nosed revolver hover in front of her face. Its pocked marked holder emboldened by his rage and the cool grip of the weapon in his hand screamed escalating obscenities at her, working himself up for that that first and final shot.
41 minutes previous.
“It’s MY fucking house!”
She hadn’t meant to be rude but the flight had sapped every last piece of energy from an already weary body.
“Look I got rent agreement!” the smile on the dark round face was stuck on, unwavering in the onslaught of harsh words.
Zu took the pathetic piece of paper between thumb and forefinger.
It had been torn from a note book . The jagged edges and faded blue pen scribbles stating that Hessie Kabongo would pay R400 a week for room and board, including the use of the kitchen and bathroom facilities. The signatories to the ragged document, Hessie pointed out with a shaky scabbed finger was hers and a Mr M.T.I. Amardien.
She had used the last of her Army money to pay for the tickets and car, hoping that at the end of her flight from the States would culminate in a semi furnished house, hot water, a meal and a 12 hour nap. Then she’d phone the lawyers and sell this relic from her grandparents’ life and move the fuck on.
“Lady, I know you a foreigner, refugee or something but I don’t have the time and strength to get the police or a lawyer out here.” Zu stood over the woman with her hands on her hips, her bags left resting against her legs all but forgotten.
“No police, please. My permit is renewed. Look.” Hessie held up another piece of faded paper wrapped in plastic. Zu caught the words “Asylum” and “Expiry date” before Hessie whipped it back into a pocket on her oversized sweater.
“What I need right now, is a meal, a shower and place to sit. In what is my house.”
Perhaps it was the mention of police, or her tone that prompted Hessie.
“You come in, I make food for you.”
Then a little girl dragged Zu’s duffle into the house.
Zu watched the little girl struggle with her bag her red faded corduroy pants scuffing the wooden floors as she drags the duffel to the kitchen. She was 7 years old and short for her age. Zu picked up the signs. Malnutrition and starvation left marks on everyone, the kids especially.
“I didn’t think I’d see this here,” she whispers.
She grabs the duffle from the struggling girl.
She’d visited twice when she was a child, so all she had were memories of emotions; Feeling scared as she sat on her Grandmothers lap. Happy as she ate the deep fried coconut covered cake they had called doughnuts . So different from what she knew was a doughnut.

She walked from the sitting room into long wooden passage leading off into a number of rooms. At the end, in the kitchen Hessie stuck her head into the passage.
“Come. Come. Eat”
The kitchen was large, furnished with a rickety wooden table and 3 white washed chairs. Hessie had laid a chipped white plate and cutlery on the table.
“Sit. sit”, She says, white teeth flashing into a quick almost genuine smile. Zu gives her a disbelieving look.
The smile freezes in place, and a plaintiff “Please,” convinces Zu to take a seat at the rickety table.
She remembers sitting at a larger table in the kitchen listening to her Grandmother tell her stories about the first Amardiens that came to Cape Town. She talks while she cooks with onions, cloves, garlic and cinnamon swirling around the young child’s head.
Grandma Amardien turns to Zu and says: “Zuleikha, please get the Jeera in the cupboard for Ma?” Zuleikha was her full name but everyone just called her Zu. Her parents called her Zuleikh for a while but eventually it got cut shorter to Zu.

Hessie puts down the plate.
“Thank you” she says distractedly, entranced by the gleaming eggs, sunny side up.
“You eat. Ok” Hessie says laying a hand on Zu’s arm.

Hessie puts a bowl in front of the girl, and sits across from Zu with a bowl of her own. The child starts eating the stodgy mess while Zu and her mother look on.
“What’s’ that?” Zu asks.
Hessie tilts her bowl and shows it to Zu: “They call it Pap here. I think you call it Maize”
“Oh, yeah. Maize”
They call it, she had said, Zu thought.
“How long have you been here” she asks between two bites of toast.
“6 year. Me. And Jacky. And Tracy”.
Zu points at the little girl: “Jacky?” she asks. The little girl manages a smile with her full mouth.
“And Tracy?”
Hessie frowns .“Working.” Then silence.
Zu takes a sip of her coffee. Strong and black no milk – it wasn’t half bad, better than the crap they served on the flight down.
“You American?” Hessie ask quietly.

Zu hesitates a little before answering. “Yes and no”, she says.
“Oh hell,” she mutters as she begins to explain.
It was the same explanation she had given since she had started school.
Her Grandmother had been an activist against Apartheid and was subjected to numerous ordeals by the apartheid government. To spare her family some of the pain of her actions, she had sent her son to Philadelphia to keep him safe.
Nazier Amardien, had grown up with an Aunt and Uncle as surrogate parents, visiting South Africa every 3 years or so to see his real parents. When his father was found dead on the street in a suburb called Belhar, the State had forbade him, his Aunt and Uncle entrance into the country as a means of punishing his mother.
Nazier eventually didn’t ask to go back home, and instead focussed all his energies on schooling. He met Mathilda Robinson at a club on a weekend away to New York.
A Year later they were married and a year later, Zu had been born.

She only found out about her Grandmother when she was 6, when she had visited along with her Dad. Her parents divorced a year after they came back from South Africa.

Zu was sent to Philadelphia to be with her father’s Aunt and Uncle, and Nazier continued to pursue his career in advertising in New York before settling into a comfortable life in Seattle.
When Zu had graduated High School he sent her an invitation to his wedding. Matilda didn’t get one, she died in a car accident 5 years earlier and Fatima Amardien, women’s right advocate and apartheid struggle veteran was too sick to travel. In fact, she didn’t know her only son had remarried.

“When I got back from deployment, I got this letter and deed saying that I had inherited this house.”
“You sell the house” Hessie asked, punctuating the question with a quick stab at the kitchen and the passage.
“I dunno.” Zu answered. Truly not sure of what her intent was.

She was running away from her old life, and the house or the sale of it could buy her a new existence. Perhaps one that might let her sleep through the night.

“May be I’ll stay a while, huh?” she says slowly, smiling at Jacky. The child returns her smile without malice or insult and Zu feels her heart skip just a bit.

The bang at the front door shakes Hessie and Jacky so visibly that the child jumps off her chair and runs to her mother.
“Hey open up, you old Makwerri!” comes a plaintive and clearly masculine voice from the door.
“Jacky not here!” shouts Hessie down the passage.
“I know, because she’s with me. Now open!”
The last two words come with a bang at the door.
Hessie, tells Jacky to stay with Zu. The girl looks at Zu, her face a mask of fear.
“It’s ok, darling. You can stay with me,” she reassures the girl as Hessie walks down the passage.
I should’ve get them gone thinks Zu, it’s my house after all.

She listens carefully as the door is opened and the whiny plaintive voice makes another demand:
“Listen here, you open the fucking door faster makwerri, otherwise there will be trouble. Ok? ”
Zu hears some shuffling then a bedroom door opening .

The footfall on the wooden floors is heavier than either Hessie’s or Jacky’s but not by much. Zu thinks it might be someone 5 foot 3, maybe 110 pounds.
She doesn’t want to look to confirm.
Looking implies being right about his weight and height, it also implies that the necessary force you would have to put on that persons carotid artery to render them dead or unconscious. It implies the average weight the knees could hold and the corresponding pressure needed to dislocate it or crush the patella, the bone-cartilage compound covering the knee joint.

“Hey Hessie, give money, man.” the plaintive request as it filtered down the passage.

“No money,” Hessie courageously managed.
“Hessie” and then Hessie made a sound that raises Zu’s neck hairs.
“Be a good little Makwerri Bitch and get me some money, or else I will make sure that Tracy works the shit streets, where she can’t earn anything. And then I will have to put up the rent or sell that little girl in there to a bunch of fucking Nigerian pimps. Ok?”

The footfalls on the wooden floors make him stop.
He looks up to see a tall delicately featured dark woman. She looked like some of the Muslim bitches that worked his section of the road.
“Get your hands off her?” She says with an American accent nogal.
“Girly, where the fuck are you from?” he says.
She just looks him straight in the eye. The bitch was tall.
“Leave her and get out of my house?”
Her house? Who the fuck did she think he was.
“What you American’s say: ‘Possession is 9 tenths’. I possess it and you d…”
“That rule only applies in the movies. What does apply is the little piece of paper in my bag that says title deed, and a lawyers’ letter that says proof of transfer.”
He kept quiet, let the bitch talk he thought and slowly slid his hand into his pocket.
“You have been illegally charging rent on a house you don’t even own. Which makes you a fucking douchebag, but that pales in comparison to the utter heinous shit that comes out of your mouth. And that elevates you to the status of dumbass. Now get out of my house and don’t ever come back. “

You think you can talk to me like that bitch?” he says pulling the snub nosed revolver from his denim jacket pocket.

Zu watches the snub nose hover in front of her face. Its holder emboldened by his rage and the cool grip of his weapon screams ever escalating obscenities at her, working himself up for that that first and final shot.

Hessie closes her eyes and screams.
Zu moves.
The moron forgot the first rule when pulling a gun on someone: Don’t stand to close.
As he moves the gun level with her chest, she grips the guns and twists his wrist.
As he tries to pull, she brings her arm up and using his own leverage pushes her arm up and breaks his arm. He screams, shouting and swearing at her, sweat beading his face.
(In hindsight, she should’ve stopped their but instincts that she had hoped should be buried forever claw their way to the surface.)
So she takes out his knee.
He’s going to come back again, she rationalises.
When he does come back he’s going to hurt them worse than before, because his ego’s been bruised.
With her heel, Zu dislocates the knee joint that it pushes the patella until it punctures the skin.
Hessie’s screams brings Zu out of her adrenaline fuelled actions.
“Is he dead?” she asks.

Zu looks at the mewling man on the floor.
Hormones flood her body calming the muscles and breaking her focus. He wasn’t a threat anymore.
She let it happen. Zu had learnt the hard way to not run hot unless she needed too. That way laid destruction and madness; her instructor had told her in his odd accent.

“Nah. His done,” Zu says, turning away from the moaning and putting an arm around Hessie.
“Why don’t you take Jacky to the kitchen and I’ll…” she looks at him, wondering again if coming here was the best decision she could have made.

There is a loud bang from one of the rooms. A pretty dark skinned woman lurches forward, swaying a bit with each uncertain step. She barely registers Hessie, when her eyes fall on the figure laying on the floor.
“I guess I’ll call the police, “ Zu says. Walking down the passage leaving the rising screams behind her.

The police were there is about ten minutes.
A tall police officer, Officer Meyer was more interested in getting Zu’s details than he was about the guy on the floor with a destroyed knee and arm whose name turned out to be Lionel Jackson.
Zu knew a Lionel once; he turned out to be just as big as asshole as this one was.
Officer Tembise wasn’t too impressed with Zu or Hessie and Tracy for that matter. Zu got the distinct impression that Officer Tembise didn’t like the idea of calling an Ambulance or waiting for the Ambulance or even waiting for the suspect to regain conscience.
An hour and a half later, he was gone and Officer Meyer (Yuri) promised that a case number would be sms’ed within 24 hours.

Zu stood on the porch watching the police go down the block, presumably heading off to an oddly named Victoria Hospital after Lionel.
Hessie stood next to her, keeping quiet, watching Zu.
“Tracy?” Zu asked. “She sleeping, now. Jacky sleeping too.”
“Good”
“You think about what you do now?”
Zu turned to look at Hessie.
“Lady, at this point, I don’t know.”
Hessie nodded her head sagely.
“When do you know?”
Zu smiled.
“Ask me again after six months, okay?”
Hessie smiles not exactly sure what Zu’s meaning.
“Let’s go inside and discuss by how much I should lower your rent.” says Zu.
Hessie smiles and clomps her way into the house.
Zu follows, closing the door behind them to the screaming sirens in the distance.