Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Read online

  “Such a Lonely, Lovely Road is at once fascinating and unforgettable. Set in the new South Africa slowly recovering from decades of apartheid, it tells the complex story of Kabelo and Sediba, two men finding love and navigating the difficult terrain of race, homophobia in the black community and family ties. Molope writes a riveting tale of finding self and finding love in this gripping story of men in love in post-independence South Africa.”

  —JUDE DIBIA, author of Blackbird

  Such a Lonely, Lovely Road

  Kagiso Lesego Molope

  ©2018 Kagiso Lesego Molope

  Except for purposes of review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission of the publisher.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge support from the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  Cover design by JD&J Design LLC

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Molope, Kagiso Lesego, 1976-, author

     Such a lonely, lovely road : a novel / Kagiso Lesego Molope.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988449-44-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988449-45-6 (HTML).--ISBN 978-1-988449-64-7(PDF)

     I. Title.

  PS8576.O45165S83 2018   C813’.6   C2018-904117-X

                     C2018-904118-8

  Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd.

  39 Woburn Avenue (B)

  Toronto, Ontario M5M 1K5

  Canada

  www.mawenzihouse.com

  For Motsumi: Be anything. Be everything. Be the best of you.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Home

  Cape Town

  Durban

  Home

  Cape Town

  Home

  Durban

  Home

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  IT'S CONFUSING, YOU KNOW, to feel on the one hand sad and sorry that someone you love is dead, and then on the other hand utterly relieved. Since I am many different things, many different men, I suppose there’s bound to be confusion here and there. So, sorry and relieved is what I felt when, that cold morning in May, Sediba, my former lover, phoned to tell me that my father had died suddenly, without warning.

  I had been dreaming about him—my lover, not my father—and longing for him more than my body could stand. One minute he was in the dream with me and the next I was crawling across the bed on my stomach to pick up the phone, pushing back the pain when I noticed as I did every morning that the bed was too large and too empty.

  Before I could say, “Hello,” he was launching into it, starting and stopping as though he dreaded getting to the point. He told me my father had not had the chance to see his first patient that morning. His secretary had found him lying on the floor near the door, right hand clutching his left arm . . . and so on.

  I let him speak, the details becoming less important as he carried on.

  “Kabza,” he whispered, as if to soften the blow. “Eish! Eish, Jo. Askies.” You know how everyone mixes languages. He and I had always done this, except when we were alone we’d pour in a lot more English. We’d never do it around our friends in Kasi because the way we spoke to each other was as much a secret as we were. I wondered if I might still be dreaming, because even as his voice came from the other end of the line, my flat carried the familiar scent of his skin. I could feel my tongue moving to taste something that was not there.

  I knew I was supposed to be thinking about my father but my mind raced back, sifting through time and details, calculating. How long had it been since the caller and I had last spoken to each other? Had it been months? How many months? I wanted to ask, but first I had to find my voice.

  I made my way to the kitchen to fetch myself some water, phone in hand, hoping to clear my throat. As I walked I got a bit panicked because he sounded so distant, even in offering his condolences. He kept calling me Jo, like he were only speaking to an old friend, just one of the guys back home. My heart ached. I started wondering if he might not remember loving me.

  Above the fridge, the clock carried on at its usual languid pace, unaffected by the news. My feet tapped the floor for the warm spot just to the left of the sink. Winter seemed to have come early because lately I needed an extra blanket in bed and the floor was always cold, nearly numbing my toes.

  “Kabza,” I heard him say just as I found that spot, “Shorty came and fetched him . . . ”

  Shorty. Our impossibly tall childhood friend who worked at the mortuary. Shorty, the one who came in the night and carried out the dead? Then I stopped, thinking: Wait. Hao! My father at the mortuary? I couldn’t imagine it, that he’d drop dead in the middle of the day and have his body carried out for all to see. For children playing on the streets to see. Not my quiet, private, dignified father.

  I started thinking that maybe there had been a mistake. I could call the surgery, and as always the receptionist Neo would answer and hand him the phone. He’d pick up, pleased that it was his son and no one else disrupting a busy day. Then I could ask him professionally if he thought it was a myocardial infarction that he suffered. Would he need a bypass or would a stent be enough? He liked being the doctor even as a patient and we often joked about how he never trusted another physician to be as thorough as he was.

  For a while my mind went on like this, until I became more than a little concerned that if I did phone he might in fact pick up and answer.

  Yes, of course, I wanted my father to be alive but it’s also true that I very much wanted him to be dead.

  When the phone slipped and fell into the sink I made no attempt to pick it up and reconnect us. Now I felt a kind of energy I had not felt in years. That tightness in my neck behind my left ear, the knot that came from nights of staying on one side of the bed with my back to his side because I did not want to remember —that tightness seemed to ease. Even with tearful eyes, I found myself humming to the tune of “Summertime” that was coming through the walls from my neighbour’s radio. I mean the rap, not the melancholy jazz song.

  It’s not that I wasn’t devastated, because there’s no question that I was. I never had siblings and now with both my parents gone, I was the only living member of my family. Just a few months before, as I saw it, I had killed my mother in that way we all fear killing our parents: I had failed to become what was expected of me. But my father was a different story. He and I had been in close touch since my mother’s death and I cherished our now-adult friendship, calling him every Friday to hear about his week and to ask him for advice about my work. The two of us talked now like children who hadn’t been allowed to be friends growing up—like we were just discovering one another. I held his opinion in very high esteem and he in turn told me how proud he was of me. His gift to me (or was it mine to him?) was to never speak of the thing that had ended my mother’s life. I had, I thought, managed not to kill him as well. His death was squarely on him.

  Still, that is not what had me humming a happy tune.

  It sounds absurd and crass, but knowing that my father’s death threatened to turn my life upside down made it the best news I had heard in months. I would have to leave everything I had established: four months into my year of community service, I would have to resign from my job at a township clinic, sel
l my flat, go back home to start running my father’s surgery, and probably never return to Durban. Up until that moment I had been insisting that Durban was great, unlike Cape Town it was peaceful and suited me quite well—and there was truth in there somewhere, but as with other important things in my life, I had found a half-plausible line to explain away something I needed to hide.

  The thing was, I had come to Durban under difficult circumstances to begin with and sought in it a refuge from my life before, from what I secretly called my “Cape Town mistakes.” It probably never works to try and make a home in the place you find in the immediate aftermath of a youthful blunder. It helps to know first what you’re looking for. I’d had to escape Cape Town and Durban was the first place I could think of, just far enough from home. By the time that phone call came, I had given it a solid try. I had thrown myself into the place, thinking that if I insisted, negotiated, coaxed the city long enough I could make it my own. But Durban had refused to embrace me, and the phone call about my father’s death offered an escape.

  So what I did almost immediately was to get on with the business of peeling myself away, packing my bags with the anticipation of a person going on a trip he’d been meaning to take all his life. A whole new world awaited me, filled with things I had been longing for probably since I had left home at eighteen.

  Home

  I HAVEN'T KNOWN SEDIBA ALL my life but I feel as if he’s always been there. He appears in my earliest memories. We grew up on the same street, his family having come to live there only a week after we moved up the hill to the new developments, called Zone Ex. Not X, but ex for extension. I remember the day his family moved in. They were taking the six-room across the street that had previously belonged to my friend Sesi’s family. Her father had painted it a dark grey colour only a month before they moved.

  Sediba’s family arrived on a Saturday afternoon, one day after Sesi and her parents had driven off in a brown raggedy station wagon, its bottom threatening to collapse from the weight of all their belongings. Their clothes and furniture had filled up most of the car, so that all three of them rode together in the front, Sesi sat in the middle, reaching her hand across her mother’s chest and waving goodbye to us. A flimsy rubber cord ran the length of the car, securing the fridge on the roof and a mattress that hung precariously out of the trunk. Sesi’s father had decided to take the principal’s job in Krugersdorp, his childhood home, after all. When he started painting I had been convinced it was a sign that they were deciding to stay, but they moved anyway, leaving me heartbroken without one of my oldest friends.

  For years she had been my favourite person on the street, the best story-teller by far, knowing how to weave each saga from beginning to end so cleverly that I had been known to miss food and play just to find out how it would end. She told stories about boys who wanted dolls and girls who played football. She stopped moving the stones she used as characters on the ground and turned her chin up to demonstrate how someone chewed, or she would stand up to show how someone’s leg dragged as they walked. I loved her so much that I spent the weeks before she left trying to convince my parents to let her live with us until the end of the school year. When I brought this idea to Sesi’s parents, her father had looked down at me with a sweet, pitying smile and rubbed my head playfully.

  “We’re taking her with us,” he said. “Your parents have you and who would we have if she lived with you?” I stared with teary eyes at his paint-stained blue overalls and the uneven, overgrown hair on his chin and decided that I hated him.

  When we waved them away on the street, I saw the car stop and its left side collapse and my heart lifted with hope, but there were too many people around who knew how to tinker with cars for that feeling to last. They were up and running in a minute and we all waved again, pushing back useless tears.

  I can recall what day it was when Sediba’s family arrived because on Saturdays my mother’s shop closed early and that day she had come home long before sunset. We had been playing soccer and had had to rush to move our bricks—our goal posts—out of the way whenever a car came down the street. We were annoyed that we had to make way for her car, and it seemed like only a few minutes had passed before we had to do it again for a lorry, which sprayed us with a cloud of dust and parked in front of Sesi’s old house.

  I stood across the street from Sesi’s six-room holding the ball, which felt perfectly firm because Lelo’s father had just pumped it. I cradled it for comfort as I watched the new family move in, feeling both sad and suspicious. To me it would always be Sesi’s house and I didn’t understand how I was meant to welcome these strangers, who in my view were invading someone else’s space. First, the man stepped—no, jumped—out from the front seat and happily slammed the door shut. I could sense his enthusiasm and excitement from across the street as he gleefully rubbed his hands. He was a very tall man with a beard and no hair on his head, and he wore paint-stained overalls like Sesi’s father, leaving me to wonder if he were taking both Sesi’s father’s house and his old job. I decided right there and then that I didn’t like him. He was too animated: waving his hands in the air, grinning from ear to ear. No sign of being sorry for moving into someone else’s home. I clenched my teeth and shifted my weight with the helplessness of childhood.

  The woman, on the other hand, looked like a dream. She had the longest, straightest hair I had ever seen on anyone. Her white dress came just above her knees and was cinched at the waist with a shiny red vinyl belt, which matched her shiny red shoes and the red and white bag that hung in the crook of her elbow. I was mesmerized as I watched her step carefully out of the lorry, careful not to touch anything that might dirty her clothes.

  “Ah! Oh-ho. They don’t have a child,” I heard one of my friends say behind me, regretfully sucking her teeth.

  Someone else said: “No, they do. Look!” And there, out from the back seat, strode the best-dressed boy our age that we had ever seen.

  “Is that a tie?” someone yelled and everyone giggled but I didn’t join in. I was enthralled. He wore navy blue shorts, a white t-shirt and a blue scarf with white dots that was carefully tied around his neck, a little bit to the side. My first thought was that he looked like someone from a magazine. I forgave him right away because he was the only one who looked doubtful about stepping through those gates.

  In a rather rare moment of leadership I turned to my friends and said: “Let’s go and help,” and we all leapt across the street to greet the new family. All I wanted was to get closer to the mother, so I walked up to her and ever so politely said: “Dumelang.”

  She turned around from giving her husband instructions about where to place the large, square mirror he was holding and looked down at me with the stretch of her lips, revealing perfectly straight, white teeth.

  “Ao! Hallo,” she said and held out her hand. It was a really sweet and sincere hallo, not the amused, pitying kind that most adults gave children. She took the tips of my fingers, a gentle and delicate handshake, and asked my name.

  “Kabelo,” I said eagerly and pointed behind me without turning: “I live in the big white house.” It was unlike me to point out my parents’ large and long house and mention that it was big. I had until then been quite embarrassed of the obvious disparities between my family and most of the others on our street, but I suppose at that moment I was eager to impress.

  “Ah, Kabelo, I’m Aus’ Bonolo. I’m happy to meet you. Do you want to help?” she asked, barely glancing at the house and handing me a blue vase. Her Setswana was pure and refined. I suspected that they were from Mafikeng or maybe even Botswana. She curled her g and her k stayed in her throat a little longer. She sounded like my mother.

  Suddenly feeling important, I carried the vase as if it were the most valuable thing I had ever had in my hands. I stepped carefully past her and then turned around to ask where to put it, but before I could say anything I saw that her attentio
n was already on someone else: her impeccably dressed son. She picked something off his t-shirt with her finger and her thumb and then gently cupped his chin with her hand. The boy was speaking too softly for me to hear what he was saying but I could tell from the way his shoulders drooped and his neck pushed forward that he was aware of the ridicule from the street kids. He was probably already wondering how he would fit in and his mother appeared to be soothing and reassuring him.

  I was caught between my eagerness to impress her and my curiosity about her and her boy, so I walked towards the house, vase in both hands, looking behind to see what would happen.

  After she had rubbed his head, giving him a kiss on the forehead, the boy—whose name we hadn’t yet learned—turned to the pile of boxes on the lawn, picked up one marked ‘kitchen’, turned up his chin and strode confidently past us. All eyes were on him as he headed for the front door without looking at any of us. I think we all parted to make room for him because the change in him and the way he carried himself were so startling. My eyes went from his walk to his mother’s handbag. Behind him I noticed the father’s broad shoulders and realized that his stride was similar to the boy’s. He walked as if he were in a suit instead of overalls. I couldn’t help thinking the three of them seemed to be the kind of people who made you want to fix your shirt and check to make sure your shoes were shining.

  When I stepped inside their house to put the vase down, I noticed that there was already a long credenza under the living room window. My friend Lelo stood at my side as we stared at the polished piece of furniture with its top lid opened to reveal a record player.

  “That’s where Sesi’s mother had put the other sofa,” I recalled aloud.

  Lelo said: “So they don’t have a TV?”