Introduction by Karen Jennings

Mosotho author, Morabo Morojele, passed away on 20 May after stoically dealing with poor health for several years. While many knew Morabo from his decades as a jazz musician or his important role in developmental work, I came to know him as a writer – that third career of his which he claimed to have come to by accident.

A friend had told me about Morabo in 2023, showing me his recent novel, Three Egg Dilemma, saying it was outstanding. I was sceptical, as I am about all writers who are praised with such superlatives. Yet I read the book and I could see at once that here was something special, something unique and raw and important.

In 2024 I was fortunate enough to be invited alongside Femi Kayode to mentor writers at Caine’s two-week writing retreat in Malawi. Morabo was one of the participants. To my mad rush of excitement about meeting him and having him sign my copy of Three Egg Dilemma, he simply nodded, closed his eyes, and said, “Thank you.” Though others may well know him very differently, to me, Morabo is dignified, humble, authentic, and that is how I think of him, always.

Of course, he was much older than the other participants at the workshop, but that did not hold him back, and I believe he was often the last to go to bed, having been dancing and singing late into the night with the hotel’s band. He made good friends, was encouraging, but also firm, taking time to speak to those who stepped out of line. He became a friend to all of us, and we have all been genuinely bereft by the loss of him.

The short story of his that follows was written during the retreat in Malawi. When I saw the first draft, almost a year ago now, I was filled with that immense feeling that goes beyond joy, that feeling that I cannot name, but which takes over one’s entire body and says: “Here is genius. Here is truth. This is it. This is what we live for, for writing like this.” I said as much to Morabo at the time, telling him that he had a natural, raw, extraordinary genius for writing, for words and rhythms. Morabo may have said that he came to writing accidentally, but the writing itself was no accident. It came from that true place inside him that we do not all have, that place one might call sublime or divine. Much of his writing was still raw, yet that is part of the genius of it. This is not writing that soothes. This is writing that stabs and pushes and prods.

Morabo knew for a long time that he was dying, and in those months, he was impatient to see this story in print, asking eagerly when we would receive our copies of the Caine anthology, eager to hold it in his hands. I am told by his sister that shortly before his death, he was able to do just that. I hope it brought him some comfort in his last days.

Should anyone else wish to hold a copy themselves, it can be purchased here.

To Breathe Again

 

By then, we were accustomed to the pandemic. We had buried people and knew to walk tight to walls, as I was doing in a corridor with my sister. I had no idea where we had come from, or where we were going. I could barely lift my feet as my sister pulled me along, her hand on my arm, her words telling me to hurry, hurry, as if I would die if I didn’t.

There were people behind me, coming after me, and people ahead of me also, who didn’t care to turn around, rushing along the corridor to get home, I suppose – their only place of safety – to put the dying behind them, smelling all of them, of what they are when they are home.

If I could have seen myself, I would have seen that I was feet scatting, bent at the ankles, in my hippy boots. I had a scarf coiled around my neck, though it wasn’t cold. The air was a pumped heat. The light was neon and antiseptic, and everything had been sprayed to die. If I could have had it my way, I would have fallen to the floor and put my back to the wall and my face to the hurry.

But I didn’t and instead spied a black shape at the bottom of the rushing passage, hunched, squeezed against the wall, and yet resilient, and I thought it was following me. It was a cat- like thing with frazzled tresses, a bent back and old eyes lifted towards me.

I tapped my sister Bophelo on the arm. ‘Look. Do you see?’ She didn’t see, but I bent down nevertheless to lift the thing. It purred against my chest, and I felt the warmth of its life and turned to my sister. ‘Can you see, Bophelo?’

She pulled me faster into her car, and then we were at her house. The cat was no longer in my arms, but I didn’t worry; there were stairs in front of me that my heaving chest would barely allow me to climb, and I had a pain that was persistent and everywhere, as if I had been born with it, and yet not so bad that I needed the mercy of someone to tell me to go away and die.

People arrived at my sister’s house. I didn’t hear knocks on doors or see doors opening, but suddenly there were people there in her living room.

They were not her friends or her acquaintances, of that, I was sure. The first to arrive were four mahogany-coloured, identical young adults who sat or stood where they could, at different corners of the room. They lifted their chests to breathe, but otherwise barely moved and did not say a thing. They were well coiffured, with slacks and button-down shirts. They looked like junior managers with prospects in banking or IT.

I went to Bophelo in the adjoining kitchen and told her that the boys were here and the cat, too. She smirked and continued preparing our meal. When I returned to the room, neither the boys nor the cat were there any longer.

A minute later, the cat returned but with an elderly white man with long grey hair. He had thin glasses and bent his head to look over the rims at me. He wore a faded denim jacket and unpolished cowboy boots and looked like a person of old comfort and wealth. He, too, did not say a thing, and when I looked back at him after some distraction, he had also simply disappeared.

Others arrived also, preceded always by the cat: an old woman with knitting needles; a young boy with a rapper’s backwards- facing cap; a woman in a sari with her hands together and her head bowed as if about to say ‘namaste’; the four young men again; and Old Grey Hair also returned, but was suddenly a whiff of white dust, and was the first to disappear.

I told my sister and, though she smirked once again, I didn’t think her heartless.

The next time, only two of the four men returned. I didn’t ask. They didn’t say. They sat at opposite ends of the room, neither frowning nor smiling. They came again the next day, though the next day might have been only an hour later, or even the next minute. My sister being out of the room, I could not know. Then they turned to powder and, just like the old white guy, they were simply and suddenly gone. More dying again – my own private pandemic – but this time, there was no one to bury.

And days later, which might have been hours, or even minutes, I missed the ebony black boys because they had been like my children. I missed the woman in her sari. I missed all the many others, and old Grey Hair most of all, because he might have told me whya thing had come and tapped me on my shoulder and said kindly, gently, ‘Please, please, please, come with me.’

I’d trusted him like I trust old black men and women who wear their intestines inside out, to whom I rushed for comfort, for love. They told me that the world turns daily to a blinding, hubristic sun, whereas the moon lights footpaths that I should take to walk alone to places only I would know.

Whether anticipated, or suddenly, dying comes. One dies alone, diminished and in private. I had anticipated kicking and balking against the trailing ends of life and that I would find nothing there – no love, no emptiness even, no horror, no succour. But I was too close to poetry and to song, and so, to love. I’d brushed the round sides of the universe and had seen my mother after she’d died, flying, flying through space- time and through multiverses until she reached a place where she stood upright in her white gown and spread her arms, twirled around, and said simply, ‘Ah.’ I’d also seen her under the ground, with family there, who roiled and mumbled, but were brown and happy. If I could, I would be with her in either place, but having taken that moonlit path, I had rounded the round, round world and had returned home instead.

***

When Bophelo helped to unload him from the ambulance, he blurted, ‘The world isn’t turning fast enough. I thought it had turned a half, but it’s only turned a quarter. Not in time but in the way it’s inclined. The moon was up and to the right, and to the left, I could see the land to infinity. The world is round after all and deserves to be looked at.’

The nurses accompanying him said he’d shouted at them to jack up his gurney, because if he was going to die, he wanted to see the world through the tops of the windows, uncovered by posters of numbers to call and procedures to follow.

Bophelo’s brother Motsomi was always one for poems and language that often didn’t make sense. Growing up, she and the others grew used to this and would just let him be. But he could also tell a good story, and the kids from the neighbourhood would stand around him, engrossed, as he spun them tales such as the one about how, walking with his white friend through a small forest not far from here, they’d found a pond, decided to go for a swim and had taken off their clothes. Herd boys had suddenly emerged from between the trees and jeered at them, ‘White boy, black. Black boy, white boy,’ and then started throwing stones at them before taking their clothes and disappearing into the forest. ‘We had to wait until it was dark,’ he said, ‘and dogs chased us. My mother beat me with her slipper when I got home, but my friend’s mother didn’t hit him; white people aren’t like that.’ All nonsense, of course.

Or the story he told about how he and another friend had jumped on the back of a van as it stopped at an intersection, sure that it would halt at the next one, but it hadn’t, and by the time they got off, they were far, far away from home. All lies and made up, of course.

And once, on an evening, while boys and girls clustered together outside a neighbour’s gate, he came bounding up to them, breathless. ‘I’ve just seen the devil.’
‘What? Where?’ they chimed back at him.
‘I came across a group of men in blankets standing in a circle at the side of the road. As I approached, they turned towards me, and the one in the middle was naked and pink. He had green eyes. I ran away.’
‘Rubbish,’ they chided him for this latest nonsense.

By now, when he wasn’t at home, he was smoking dagga with other boys behind an abandoned shop or up and down our township somewhere. He had become the meaning of his name Motsomi and had become the seeker, the hunter.

When he got home, Mother asked him what the smell about him was.
‘Sulphur. The smell of the devil,’ he said, stoned, giggling, before running off to his room.

So Bophelo wasn’t surprised when he said the world wasn’t turning fast enough, whatever that meant. Neither was she surprised when he shouted, ‘Wine, or whiskey, please, if you would,’ at the two nurses sitting behind the reception counter at the hospital.

‘He clearly needs a doctor,’ one of them said, as orderlies lifted him onto a hospital gurney to his cries of pain, and she didn’t know if the nurse meant a doctor for his body, his mind, or his soul. And though she was frightened for him, she was comforted that the meaning of her name, life, would bring him firmly back to this earth.

She visited him every day after he had been admitted, and for two weeks, he didn’t say a word. ‘You’ve been very ill, Motsomi,’ Bophelo explained. Her voice was tender. ‘The doctors had to operate.’

He would look at her with an empty gaze and stare at the bandage wrapped around his torso and at the tubes and plasters they had stuck to his body.

They hadn’t shaved him, nor cut or combed his hair, and with his grey, sunken, dull eyes, he looked like he belonged shoeless and standing, perhaps with other men, on the side of a road.

After his third week, he started talking. ‘I don’t know you. Who are you?’ He would turn and face the wall. ‘Who are you?’

‘Who is that?’ he would ask, pointing with his chin at a man in an opposite bed. ‘Turn the television off,’ he would cry. ‘That woman is talking to me. She is telling me to go home. But they’ve tied me, and I can’t get up,’ he said, pulling at his restraints.

‘If I was not here, I would be not here. But if I was, I would. What could I do? Walking. Talking. There was a man with a yellow beard. He only wore one shoe. And also my teacher, Mrs Uhm.’ He thought for a moment and then continued, ‘She used to use the other shoe to hit me.’

He craned his neck to look out of the window and then said, ‘I was with the devil,’ as if on the streets out there. ‘He doesn’t have eyes.’ He tried to raise himself, but his hands were tied with restraints to bars on each side of the bed. He kept pulling at them until I had to tell him to stop – that he would only hurt himself. ‘Am I in prison? Why have they tied me? What did I do?’

He opened his mouth as if to shout, but he couldn’t, and a garbled cough was all he could muster. He used his elbows to try to remove a tube attached to his belly. Defeated, he lay back in the bed and shook his head violently from side to side. Tears sprayed onto his cheeks from his eyes.

They sedated him, the poor fellow, and Bophelo didn’t know if he would ever be the same again. She would cry herself to sleep in her bed at night and think, What a waste if this is what he will be for the rest of his life.

‘I want to go away. Go away, go away, go away,’ he would repeat, making the words into a song.
‘Where do you want to go?’ Bophelo asked.
He jerked his head towards her, stuck his tongue out and wrinkled his face. ‘Go away,’ he said.
‘Should I go away?’ she asked him. He turned to the wall. She stood up to leave, telling herself that visiting hours were over, anyway, though they were not.

***

Bophelo never imagined how many medicines someone as ill as her brother would need, so she had taken an old six-pack cooler bag to keep them in on a cupboard next to his bed. Medicines for his chest – expectorants and dilators; pumps for air; treatments for his liver; pills to thin his blood, to loosen his bowels, to dim pain, to decalcify his bones; and creams to apply to his wounds and plasters and other things. She was most surprised that of all his pills, the ones the size of a baby’s little fingernail were for his madness, and that a person’s whole mental being could be turned by such a tiny thing.

At work, she made a table with columns of days of the week and rows of hours of the day, and typed which pills he had to take at what time, and left space for him to mark with a pen every time he took them so that she would know that he had.

Bophelo had looked at his medicines and read their inserts to see what they were for. She wondered also why they were named – probably by a man in Switzerland or a woman in India where they made the generic – to so trip your tongue, with enough Ks and Zs and Rs to crumple your brain behind your cranium. She wondered if they had retired that wizened old man who had once, many years ago, written a standout novel, who had a way with words they’d said, whom they’d hired to come up with names for the new drugs they were making, telling him first their purpose – for mind, body, soul (though there is nothing you can ingest that actually works for soul) – and then their ‘target market,’ and then that he needed to name the medicines to rhyme with ditties composed by a man dressed in a wrinkled white suit and stains.

He’d named the medicine for the tubercular illness ‘Rifinah,’ and had adroitly, he’d thought, added the phonetically unnecessary ‘h’ to the appellation; he might well have been reminiscing about a hot love affair with a woman from Malawi or from Spain when he’d coined it.

When she came in from work, she relieved the carer she’d hired to stay with him during the day, scanned his medicine checklist and briefly talked to him before going to prepare the evening meal. Afterwards, she sat in his room and asked him about his day. Lonely, his long day with the carer, with a scratchy television, books he didn’t open to read, birds he saw out of his upstairs window, and a UFO he said, that had parked itself in the sky. He had been terrified that it had come for him. She listened the way she’d listened to all his stories over the years. But this time, she listened for his presence, here, now.

Motsomi hadn’t fully returned to himself and would say strange things, like asking if she’d heard from long-dead so- and-so, or if she still rode a motorcycle – which she did not have – to work. He told her he’d had sex with their domestic worker, she sixteen, he fifteen, and how afterwards, he’d cried. Bophelo remembered her and recalled being envious of her nipples, like thimbles pointing through the skin of her dress, and of the smell of the sweat from her armpits and from between her thighs when it was hot.

One evening, he spent minutes explaining the difference between the colour yellow and the colour orange, and how red was, in his words, ‘implicated’ in there somewhere, in case she ever considered art; the sunset had been particularly masterful that day.

But he was much improved, and they would talk about the news on television or how family and friends were faring in the world outside. They wanted to come and see him, but he refused. ‘No. Not until I am who I am,’ and she was taken aback by how emphatic he was for someone so frail of body and mind. But then, no one wants to be seen at their worst, she thought; that is why they dress dead people in clothes they rarely wore when they were alive.

One evening as she entered his room, he did not turn to look at her but lay perfectly still, looking at the ceiling with tears in his eyes. ‘I nearly died.’
The pearly gates for him. ‘Yes, you almost did. Your brother used to say you were quarter to twelve. Thank god we brought you to the hospital.’
‘What did he mean by that?’
‘He meant that of your twenty-four hours of life – everyone is given twenty-four hours – you were at your last fifteen minutes.’
‘That wasn’t very nice.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’ The statement had been an amusement but had no compassion.
‘I almost burnt to death,’ Motsomi continued.
‘Where? At the hospital?’
‘Yes. They had tied me to a cot. I couldn’t get up. It was in the middle of a room.’

Bophelo remembered his hospital room: pimpled walls, first painted a colonial prison green years ago, and then a more optimistic independence green, then a spring green (the colour of a scarf a man had once given her, who had wanted her to love him), and finally painted white. The floors too were painted white so that every abrasion, every little spill of urine, every spurt of blood, every scuff on the tiles made by old fathers and aunties visiting would be noticeable, for cleaning.

‘There was another room next to mine with women talking. They talked a lot, all day and never stopped, and I couldn’t hear what about. And then slowly, I started smelling smoke. Not the smell of burning wood and burning things made from the earth, but the smell of plastics and of man-made things on fire. Then I saw a thin grey cloud floating against the ceiling above my bed. I tried to look behind me to see where the fire was, but I couldn’t sit up. They had tied me.’

He paused for a moment, to remember.

‘I shouted for the women to come. No one came. They continued talking in the next room. Then there was more smoke, and I started coughing. I shouted again, and this time a woman came. She said I should stop making noise or they would inject me. I didn’t know with what and why.’

‘Was the woman a nurse?’ Bophelo asked.

Motsomi looked at the floor and blinked, to remember. ‘Yes, I think so. I told her there was a fire, but she didn’t do anything. She just left the room. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew the fire was growing, because the smell, like that of tar when they have just sprayed a road, was getting stronger.

‘I couldn’t breathe. I was gasping for air. But I didn’t want to breathe, because the smoke was going into my lungs, and it pained. I tried to turn my head against my pillow, so that I would breathe through it. But it didn’t make any difference.’ He paused to dredge up the memories of going to die such a death. ‘Then the nurse entered the room. With a man. They didn’t seem to see the smoke and what must have been the raging fire crackling behind me. The man had a bag with him, out of which he took a mask, which he put on my mouth and nose, and slowly, slowly, I could breathe again. There was a strange taste and smell to whatever it was they were pumping into me, but I didn’t care. I could breathe.

‘The man then pushed my bed into a corridor, and I remember going along it past shut doors and then into a lift, I think, which made a whirring sound, and it felt as if we went down, down.

‘The nurse then gave me an injection, and I don’t know what happened after that. All I remember is my whole body being very numb. I couldn’t feel myself lying in the bed, or my one leg on top of the other. I couldn’t feel anything, except the air around me, a breeze almost, for which I was thankful, because there is no life without breath. Then there was a bright light in my face, and I thought that maybe I had died. You know how they say you see a light when you die?’ He chuckled.

Motsomi had been to the edge of the world. He’d stood at the precipice and looked down at all the things underneath it, but couldn’t tell me what he had seen because he didn’t have the words.

***

On the other side of a tall hospital-green curtain hanging from railings on the ceiling, a man was screaming. I’d never heard a cry such as that, so I knew it was of terrible pain. People talked hurriedly around him, and he gradually stopped shouting and started whimpering and gasping instead.

‘It will be all right, my son,’ I heard a voice say. ‘But they’ll have to take off your leg.’
Another voice asked, ‘What happened to this patient?’ ‘Motorbike accident,’ someone replied. ‘We have to take his leg off.’
‘Let’s move him to theatre then.’

There was a shuffling about behind the curtain and the squeak of a bed with a limping wheel being pushed out of the room.

There were curtains on both sides of me. In front was a beeping machine with lights on a tall pedestal. To the side of it was a television. A man was mouthing what I assumed to be the midday news. There was a mask attached to my face, through which a white mist seeped out. There was a tube inserted in my arm, fixed with a dressing, and monitors plastered to my chest.

A male nurse entered. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘We have to start shutting you down now.’ He turned around to the machine and pressed a button, which emitted a beep. ‘One at a time,’ he said, disappearing behind the curtain.

I felt quickly deflated, weak, as if the air had been taken out of me.

Minutes. Hours. And then more shuffling about on the other side of the curtain.
‘This patient?’ someone asked. ‘Suicide, we think.’
‘Why are they bringing them in here?’ ‘Emergency is full.’

The nurse returned. He pulled the monitors off my chest, rolled up the tubes affixed to them and put them in a cupboard below the machine. He then pressed another button and left as unceremoniously as he had before.

I felt decompressed, and that I might implode, not all of a sudden, but slowly, preciously.

There was more scuffling about and hurried talking on the other side of the curtain. They were trying to bring a life back. Then someone said, ‘We’ve lost him. Let’s close it down.’

The nurse returned. ‘I’m taking you out of here now. There is nothing else to do,’ he said with indifference, and I thought, he has done this many times before. He pressed a switch, and the machine was silent.

He then lifted my arm and pulled out the tube injected into it, and then pushed my bed beyond the curtain, and turned it past the neighbouring space.

‘Don’t look,’ he said, but I did, and saw a body on the gurney in there, uncovered, and it looked like a young person with a blue bruise on his neck from when he had hung himself, and liquid stains on his pants.

The man wheeled me along a corridor – I knew corridors now – and parked me in a white-walled bay with nothing in it. I tried to get up to get away, but my arms were bound to the bed.

‘Why am I here?’ I asked.
‘This is how we do it,’ the man answered. ‘Do what?’
‘Let a person go.’ ‘Go where?’ I asked.
‘Nowhere. Your family is coming now, so be still,’ he said, walking away.

My sister entered the bay with my brother and my son, and then cousins and some of their children, until there were about fifteen of them standing there. They were talking and laughing amongst themselves as they would at a family gathering but did not say a word to me. They then stopped talking and stood there as if about to take a family portrait, the tall ones at the back, the short ones in front of them, and a cousin’s two children thigh- high at the very front.

Days might have been hours, or minutes even – time had shrunk and dilated, and I did not know what day it was, or even where I was in the day – and so I did not know how long they stood there, staring at me and snivelling. And then as suddenly as they entered the alcove, they shuffled out, my sister leading, holding my son by the arm, then my brothers and finally the others, until they had all left. I heard them walking away, laughing and joking as if it was any ordinary day.

They were gone, and I was all alone, tied to a bed, with white walls around me, white tiles on the floor, and a single square light above.

Three female nurses entered the cloister. They stood about for a moment without saying anything and then started to softly sing a hymn.

It was a common enough psalm, played nightly on the radio after they had read the daily notices of the dead.

‘That’s enough!’ I suddenly exclaimed. ‘Why are you singing to me? And why am I tied up?’
They stopped singing, and the nurse who had come before said, ‘Sisters, let me be with him to talk to him for a moment. I’ll call you back so that we can pray.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘At a time like this, this is what is done,’ she answered. ‘And what kind of time is this?’
‘You are no longer for this earth. You should prepare yourself,’ the nurse said coldly.
‘I am still here, and I would get up and go away if you unfastened me.’
‘You must ready yourself for what is to come.’
She crossed her hands and patted her chest. ‘When we die, we go to one of two places. It’s your choice to make, although it’s probably too late.’
‘What do you mean too late? Do you mean heaven or hell? How would you know? There is no heaven and there is no hell,’ I tried to bark, nearly depleting the last of my air.
‘There are no two options. If there is anything at all after this, it is a little more or a little less of the one thing or the other.’ I tried to get up to lean on an elbow.
‘And anyway, what is to say that we aren’t already somewhere along that line; I nearer to your hell than you, because you have me trussed up like an animal, and you there in your shoes, and if you let me go, believe me, I would be closer to the good place than you could ever imagine.’

I was feeling strangely chirpy, but also combative, because there was nothing left.
‘You still have time,’ the nurse said, looking at her watch. ‘Let me go and call the others so that we can pray.’
‘What for?’ I asked again. ‘I am not interested in prayer. I do not know these women and what difference their being here would make, if, as you put it, I am no longer of this earth?’
‘Your family and friends? They will pray for you. Afterwards. I saw them when they came. There are many of them, and you probably have many more family and friends. But in the meantime, we will do what we will.’
‘You pray to God, I take it?’ She nodded.
‘Does God listen harder if more people pray, and that’s why you want the others to come? So that he listens to your pleading for me?’
‘I am not sure, but sometimes the whole nation is called to pray for rain when there is none, and –’
I interrupted her, ‘And then it doesn’t rain afterwards, does it? Ever.’
‘That is why we have churches. So that we can pray. And priests.’
‘Would a priest being here improve my chances?’

I tried to laugh, but there was no air inside me; one needs air to laugh, and to do most every, every other thing – like walking to a place to make love to a woman; her rooms perfumed; a beer in a bucket to make it cold; chicken pieces from the Chinese shop to fry with onion and orange-coloured tomato into a sauce; and then at four o’clock in the afternoon, because she works tomorrow, and so do you, her coy, dimpled smiles, sitting on her bed, and the family next door, with no ceilings, so you can hear them and they you; their school talk, their prayer, the father shouting at his radio soccer match, the mother banging spoon to pot. The father hears and goes outside to roll tobacco into a torn piece of newspaper.

I needed to laugh to continue with what was left.

A quarter to twelve, my brother had said. The bastard.

Bophelo had pushed the hands of the clock back, to a quarter past, and that was enough. Because days are only as long as they are, and anyway, I had dilated and condensed time, so that things happening were only simply happening, and time only matters if there is a beginning and an end.

The nurse had said, ‘This is how things are done.’ I had balked and had not let it be.

***

These months, these weeks, these days, I don’t know, I’ve walked corridors to visit the bugger. I always thought I’d brought him comfort by the things I carried in my tired arms, after work. They were not heavy. They were a slice of cake most days; dried meats; sweet biscuits – I would eat some before I came to him, to push salt away – and as we masticated the gifts I brought, I would tell him stories of the ways of the earth, because the world had continued to spin, without him.

When we were young, it was Motsomi who used to turn this tiring orb for us. He would come from the streets to explain a yellow sunset, or to predict the coming rains, or to point out to us the push-me-pull-you of a neighbour’s dalliance with another – a widow, for god’s sake, and we would put our chins to the windowsills to watch as he arrived, to watch the woman as she flounced, opening the door to him, and how for the rest of the year, he would come, for sex, obviously, and, we hoped at least, for love. Fat Martha (her panties crept up her buttocks, which made her walk sideways on the road) said sex was a rough thing, and no one would return to it if there was no love. She knew this, Fat Martha, because the boys had fucked her, and she’d had a baby at fifteen.

Motsomi was a ne’er-do-well and did not have sufficient soul muscle for the world. At least, that’s what I used to think as we were growing up. I knew that life was short and narrow, and that one must decide which future, which path, if you will, to choose. My brother had applied himself to many things, was capable of all of them, and didn’t know which one to choose. So even now, I don’t know what he does. Granted, he lived his life and was never a burden to the rest of us who had chosen paths and were all of us along them somewhere.

His life was as apocryphal as were his stories. He had disappeared for years, and though he always kept in touch, we never really knew what he did and how he survived. He had odd jobs, some of which paid very well, so that he could buy a car, second-hand of course, having written off previous ones, and he would travel, not far, but at cost, nevertheless. He started building a house and hired a truck to bring cement, aggregate, and bricks for its build, but stopped when he ran out of money. He once took me to see it, and all there was, was a concrete foundation and walls half-built, encircled by high weeds and neglect.

He had women, but he hid them from us, and we never, ever had the chance to ask them about their lives with him. He said once that he had a child, but when properly asked, he answered that he didn’t, but that he wanted to have one, one day.

And then over the years, I started thinking that it was not him but the world that was deficient. The world had not been enough for him, and that was why he chased every one of its tendrils he came across. That was why, as we were growing, he always disappeared and would come back with stories, because it wasn’t enough for him to be in one place, and he needed to see all of the word. He had been in a hurry, it would seem, and so now, worry. That was why he was so indulgent in everything he did: in drinking; in dancing when he could; in his love for women – which he explained was because he wanted to find their essentialness, to find the final beauty lodged in all of them.

Like others around us, Motsomi was an aberration. I got to thinking that he didn’t belong here, that his making had been an almost unforgivable error, and that he should perhaps have only been imagined. But he was resolute and jealous for himself. He had never seen the devil. There hadn’t been a cat following him. There had not been four black boys, no white hippy man in boots, no lady in a sari, and his pandemic had been his alone.

They were all a chimera, and perhaps he needed them to allow him to return himself to the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Anirudh on Unsplash