Dreams and Other Deceptions

Keletso Mopai

The moment you take off your night gown at dawn, you know today is the last day at the market. No longer will you sell your mother’s tomatoes in the sun while women your age sneered and men bigger than your father whistled at you. You are leaving the country; you tell your family. The announcement is met with frowns and threats, from your husband, Bobo.

What kind of a mother leaves behind a three-year old child?

The question stabs you at the back of your neck. You can beat me or kill me, you say, but don’t you ever call me a terrible mother! Anita, you are twenty-six. You are a graduate. You are also stubborn—you are not going to back down even when your legs say, stay.

It is your mother who accompanies you to the bus station, carrying your daughter, Tariro, on her back. Tariro is wearing a dusty pink dress, the one with baby elephants all over it. Your mother does not to tell you how concerned she is about you going to Johannesburg, but you can sense the discomfort in the little words she says to you. I won’t be alone, you say to her, Lundi will be waiting for me. She stretches her lips—attempting a smile. Your only confirmation that she is not angry with you. Unlike your daughter who starts crying when you arrive at the bus station, that even the tender forehead-kiss you rest on her velvety skin does not appease her. When the bus leaves, you watch them together and wonder how long it will take before your daughter starts to call your mother, Mama. 

When you arrive at Johannesburg Park Station, you find your half-brother sitting on a bench. He is dressed in a long black coat and a clean white shirt, his polished shoes shining in the brisk of the morning. You have always been jealous of Lundi. Even as kids, you thought life opened for him wider than it did for you. It didn’t matter that you were equally smart and as talented—he always surpassed you. Lundi hugs you when you step of the bus but says he needs to get back to work. Despite his soft tone, you feel insulted. You smile and nod when he drops you off at his house. A house built with bricks, water, and cement, and not sheets of corrugated iron. Inside, you wonder if Lundi ever feels his bones too heavy, to sleep on his mountain while his parents are crammed on a bed with wires sticking out. You wonder if he feels guilty when his milk goes sour without ever being opened.

Three years ago, when Lundi phoned to tell your parents that he finally had a proper job after a year living in Johannesburg, you were ecstatic. You imagined him coming back to Masvingo in a Benz, saddled with loads of groceries and other expensive items. You are stunned to discover that Lundi lives well but somehow always returned home with one plastic bag, sometimes two. Constantly, he told your parents that the university he worked for did not pay. Because I am foreigner, he’d said.

— —

The walk every day to look for work gives you time to dream. You stare up at the buildings under construction from the sidewalk and wonder which one will have a desk for you someday. The newspapers you buy from the old woman by the traffic robots have job adverts of everything except what you had studied for, economics. You aren’t sad when you start working at Chicken Licken, mopping the floor after customers who leave muddy and slimy footprints with their boots and sneakers, because this is where you meet Kagure. Kagure has big front teeth and a big nose. You often look at it, the nose, and wonder if it doesn't weigh down her face.

Like you, Kagure isn’t from here. In 1981, she moved from Kenya to South Africa with her father, a businessman, who was then shot in the head by a stranger in a bar. Kagure became a homeless teenager in a country brimmed with violence. She wandered Johannesburg, collecting food leftovers from bus stations and bridges. Until she was offered a job by a white man she met in her mouth, while giving him a blowjob. He was kind, she says as she describes him to you, that even though he was white, he never treated her like a “Kaffir.”

Kagure worked at the white man’s printing shop for a year until his wife discovered she was sleeping with him. But she didn’t go back to the streets. Instead she found another job, then another, then another, until she ended up behind the cash register at Chicken Licken.

Kagure always offers you coffee when you sit together at lunch time. You disclose to her that it’s been four months in this country and that you will not go back to Zimbabwe without anything to show for coming here in the first place. You also tell her you can't sleep at night without Tariro by your side, although your mother assures you that Tariro is fine and no longer pooping horrendously like the week before.

You express to Kagure that it was your husband who had named your daughter, Tariro, after his own mother. You like the name, but you wanted to give her a name so different that no one else in the world would be called by. You love your daughter, you proclaim between tears, that when she sucked your breasts too hard you still wanted her. Even now, you can feel your nipples yearning for her lips. She was born out of love. You and Bobo grew up together, went to school together, went to the leaver’s dance together, went to university together, and so it felt right that you should have a child together. However, your father was greatly offended by this. He’d watched Bobo grow up in front of him, and yet he didn’t have the decency to marry his only daughter before plunging himself into her. 

It was agreed between your parents that before the baby bump would show, you and Bobo will be a married couple. It is only right; your father had said.

After the wedding, you tell Kagure, that you were not immediately afraid of Bobo or his fist. You still love him, because you miss the boy who used to call you Anita Baker.

— —

Lundi fires his help because she uses too much detergent and hates how his pillows always smell "acidic." And that her cheap deodorant gives him sinus infections. The woman doesn’t protest. Instead says she is tired of working for him anyway. That the old Afrikaaner couple across the street wants to hire her and will pay her a better salary. The woman, who has a hoarse voice and a big scowl on her face, tells your brother in Zulu, a language you are still learning to speak so not to sound foreign at work, that he should "go back home to Zimbabwe and hire a Zimbabwean maid!" since he can't afford her. Following the woman’s departure, Lundi's clothes are washed, ironed and folded by you. You cook all his meals and have them served on a tray, just the way he likes it.

Six months living in Johannesburg, you start to resent your brother, this is because one morning you take a twenty rand note from his dressing table to buy a loaf of bread and a newspaper. When he comes home later, he sits you down in his study and asks why you stole his money. You stare at him, astonished. The next day at work, you confide to Kagure, that your sudden distaste towards Lundi has nothing to with cleaning after him and cooking his meals after an eight-hour job but everything to do with his tone when he speaks to you. Wasn't it him who left your mother's breast for you to feed on when hungry? Was it not him who held your hand firmly and walked with you for your first day to school? What changed? You ask Kagure. She shakes her head and wrinkles her nose.

— —

When you go back home for the first time, you don’t tell your family about how your work shoes feel icy in the winter because they are too old. Or that the reason you cut your hair is because maintaining an afro requires a comb, conditioner, coconut oil, and a special pillowcase; all things you cannot afford. You don’t say a word about how your brother buys his own groceries and locks the food cabinets. In return, no one asks why you have gotten thinner, the dullness in your eyes is more frightening.

Your parents ignore everything because you’ve come home with some money, food, and clothes for Tariro. You watch your daughter as she plays enthusiastically with the yo-yo you bought from a vendor in downtown of Johannesburg. You smile at her and wonder if she can tell that the toy isn't brand new. That it belonged to someone else's child until someone else stole it and sold it for R15.

Your mother tells you that Bobo has been living with another woman, that he hasn't come to see his daughter in months. This does not really surprise you. Bobo had called you one evening to say he was leaving Masvingo and wanted a divorce.

Anita, your daughter might not remember this, but when you leave for South Africa again, you tell her — while tenderly brushing her cheeks — that you love her. You also tell her that when you come back you will take her with you because you will be living in your own place soon.

You return to find your belongings outside Lundi's house, this is because of the heated argument you had before you left, when out of fury you had stated that you were moving out, but you never thought he would leave your things in the rain.

You find Kagure waiting for you outside her flat in Hillbrow, dressed in a red mini dress, a loud purple lipstick, and big, circle-shaped earrings. She helps unload your things from the back of the van and offers to pay the driver on your behalf. Inside, she tells you that you can say here as long as you want. Her pink bedroom wall has posters of Brenda Fassie and Bongo Muffin, and has paint coming out at the door. Kagure leaves you with her keys and tells you she is going to her night job as a sex worker. When she had told you about this job one late afternoon as you waited for a taxi after work, you had wanted her to take back the words as quickly as she’d said them. It would have been better if you didn't know, because then you wouldn’t have to pretend that the money, she had given you to buy clothes for your daughter had not come from giving blowjobs.

When Kagure does not return at night, you find yourself staring into a cat's eyes you come across in the hallway on your way to buy food for supper. That's when a man, with big hair and a mole on his right cheek comes from behind and grabs your boobs and proceeds to poke his penis on your back like a gun. You turn around, stomp his feet and spit on his face. You run down the stairs, listening to your heart beating in your throat.

By the end of third month living with your friend, you realise that living here is like a claustrophobic holding her breath in a dark room. But you have nowhere to go. You then become agitated with the salary you earn as a cleaner, and so you start applying for work at other places, but the response is the same: we are not hiring at the moment. Your calls back home lessen, and you stop picking up your phone. Your bank notes become creased and sweaty because of being counted way too much. Your smell becomes that of an alcoholic. When you tell Kagure about your predicament, she doesn't waste time to notify you about the job at a hotel nearby, where you discover that having sex for money is as dirty as it sounds. Where men with sweat between their necks will ask you to open your mouth as they pour down your worth for the night. This will go on as long as you allow it, because from now you will no longer buy secondhand toys for your daughter. Anita, you will wear fur like the other women in Johannesburg. Your hair will grow as big as your ancestors meant it to and no longer will it clasp your scalp like blonde hair under water.

When your mother calls to ask you for the hundredth time when you’ll be coming back home, you ask if the money you sent last week wasn't enough.

The money is good, your mother tells you, but your daughter cries for you. What do Itell her when she asks why she hasn't seen her mother in a year, Anita?

Mama, you tell her I am working. You don't know how hard it is here.

Your mother sighs heavily. She then tells you that Tariro is as bright as you were at school, and that her teachers won't stop bragging about her. Your mother giggles, the sound comes out as if her throat is knotted. She also tells you that Tariro keeps boasting to her friends that you’ll bring her to Johannesburg. You rush your mother to end the call when a knock comes through the door. It is a man you have never met before. He licks your ears, undresses, and then climbs on top of you.

With faint eyes, you stare at the tall buildings through the fourth-floor window of the hotel—you admire them glimmering through the city lights like candles ascending to Jerusalem. You wonder which one of those buildings will have a desk for you someday.