The Water Man's Daughter (30 page)

He told me he loved me. And my mother too, if only she wouldn’t make things so hard all the time. He told me
he was leaving. And I asked him to come home soon, knowing that I had no effect on him.

Then he walked across the street, leaving me behind. He wasn’t going yet. He wasn’t due to leave until that night at least; they always travelled by night. But he was done with me. He found a friend at the grocery across the street, lit a cigarette. I stood watching him. He never once looked in my direction.

I don’t know how long I was there for. But after at least an hour, my cousin came, sent by my mother, to see if I was okay. He was always trolling the streets for good games. Without him, my childhood would have been nothing but cleaning with my mother and schoolwork. I didn’t want to take my eyes off my father, but Mira dragged me away from where I stood. He brought me to a nearby alley where his friends were hanging out.

These kids were tough. The oldest had a gun he carried with him everywhere, though I’d never seen him use it. In the alley, there were bullets strewn on the ground and the boys were sorting through them in a group. I knelt down to join, fascinated, until I was the only one left playing in the sand.

It wasn’t until the oldest boy pointed the gun he had at me that I knew what I had to do.

I asked for the gun, and Mira encouraged the boy to hand it over. They went on playing, scuffling behind me, as I walked to the edge of the alley, right where the shadow’s cover ended. I found a bullet in the sand, loaded the gun, and clicked the chamber. I knew how to handle the heavy
thing as if by instinct, had seen too many people load guns too many times – my father just one of them. I knew he was standing close, across the street to the left. I raised the gun. He was there. I could feel him. Chatting and pulling on a cigarette, wasting time until he could leave for good.

I trained the gun on a dog across the way. I should have chosen a wall, a signpost, but something about the dog, about picking something living. I just knew it would matter to him. It would show him that I had real courage. I clicked the trigger twice, felt the empty response of the gun, clicked the trigger again and was surprised as the kickback bolted through my arm. The boys ran to where I was, but the dog barely moved. He was hit and fading. He looked behind him, turned to see the source of the pain. Then his head fell to the dust.

I didn’t worry about the dog. I felt powerful, justified. All I could think about was finding my father, hoping beyond hope that he had seen what I had done. I was sure he would be proud. Sure he would march over and sweep me up in his arms and carry me to the house a hero. See my daughter, just like me, a fighter like me.

But he did not.

He looked at me, holding the gun in my hand still. He looked at the dog. He stamped out the end of his cigarette, nodded goodbye to his friend, and, as if none of us existed, he walked away.

His expression didn’t change. I was left with all the feeling, pain in my arm and chest and eyes, and I felt like
collapsing under it all. If my cousin hadn’t dragged me home, I’m not sure I would ever have been able to leave that spot.

“M
Y FATHER WAS PART OF THE MK LEADERSHIP
. H
E
travelled in for the Sasolburg attack. He met Walter Sisulu. He was a hero. That is what people understand. And that is what everyone remembers. Everyone but my mother and me.”

Claire sits very still. Her eyes are full of sympathy, which is not the feeling Nomsulwa was hoping to inspire, the relief she had tried to bring to Claire. She speaks with more urgency. “You need to understand, the people who hate your father think of him only as the water man. They don’t know what a good father he was to you. They missed that part of the story.”

“Does it matter?” Claire’s expression hardens.

“Does it matter that my father was a man who beat his wife and kid?” Nomsulwa stops, not believing that she has said this out loud. She feels like she might cry and takes a sharp breath in to stop the tears. This is not what she had planned. The ring is in her pocket. Now is the time to give it over. But Claire’s hands are on her face and Nomsulwa can’t move.

“You deserved better,” Claire whispers, leaning in to Nomsulwa. Pressing her cheek to Nomsulwa’s, letting her face stay there, as though to become accustomed to such closeness.

“So did you,” Nomsulwa responds, unable to breathe. Claire kisses Nomsulwa’s face, her forehead, her cheeks.

Claire exhales audibly. In that second, the sound of Claire’s breath around her, Nomsulwa imagines the water man’s daughter is hers.

Then she pulls away.

Claire stands, brushing Nomsulwa’s hands off her shoulders, keeping her at a distance. “How can it be? How can a place have someone like you and also have people who –” Claire stops short, takes a breath, tries to blow out the anger. It doesn’t seem to work. “How can people … cut a man’s heart out after he’s already dead … just for fun?” Her voice breaks completely.

Nomsulwa is not thinking. She watches Claire, but her mind is still in the moment when the girl was next to her, face close. “The 28s,” she says, almost by rote.

“The men who killed my father.” Claire sits back down on the bed, defeated.

Nomsulwa doesn’t register the information right away. The 28s. Her mind is full of Claire’s hands on her face and so the gang, the knowledge of the gang and what they did, stays as a lone thought for a second. Then she remembers the shreds of cloth in Mira’s front yard, the panic Mira felt in the desert. She puts them all together. It seems impossible. He couldn’t have done something so barbaric.

“You deserved better.” Nomsulwa gives herself one last moment of peace, resting her lips against Claire’s forehead, willing Claire’s shaking body to quiet. Then she stands up, forces herself to back away, slings her bag over her shoulder, and surveys the room. She takes the ring out
of her pocket and places it on the edge of the bed. She turns and walks out.

She doesn’t look back. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to let the water man’s daughter go.

N
OMSULWA MAKES IT OUT INTO THE OPEN AIR
. S
HE
feels lighter without the ring, without the pipes, without Claire to anchor her. Even the pain in her chest from leaving Claire is an emptiness. Relish this freedom, she thinks. Because the other part of her knows that it cannot last long. The other part, the larger part of her, realizes what has been done. What Mira did for her. How he took the knife from his family’s kitchen, took a rock from the lot next door, used all this strength to open the body, break through skin and muscle and bone and remove the heart. Against her will she visualizes every second, every detail of the night. She imagines her cousin, knife in hand, arms raised over the body underneath, the flesh split apart, revealing coagulated mounds of blood and tissue. He strikes, his sweat mixing with blood in the crevice of the water man’s chest.

He did this for her. Sacrificed everything for her.

Nomsulwa gets into her car. She drives the highway back to Phiri maybe for the last time. She passes her township’s streets with a new appreciation, letting the personality of each corner, each store and shebeen, wash over her. She tries to soak it all in, to accept what is to come. She tries to relax as she turns the corner and pulls into the parking lot of the Phiri police station. There isn’t much to lose now.

There isn’t much she is giving up. At least that’s what Nomsulwa tells herself when she knocks on the door to Zembe’s office, walks in without an invitation, and sits down.

“I know what happened to the water man,” she begins.

Zembe stands and closes the door without a word.

T
HE RAIN GOD SENT DOWN SHEETS OF WATER TO FILL THE
riverbed’. The water flowed clear, past the mothers gathering reeds for their roofs and baskets, past the boys tossing rocks across the dip to screaming girls trailing bright cloth. The village thanked the Rain God. They pulled large basins to the river’s edge and sank them under the water. The basins filled, and men and women hauled the great vats up the bank and to their homes. They drank the water freely, they mixed it with their corn flour for bread and cakes, they poured it over their parched bodies
.

Men noticed the power the rain gave the great bull. They noticed and they wanted it for themselves. So they took the water from the river and directed it through shiny silver pipes and let it fall from hard metal faucets into the villagers’ waiting basins. In return, the village gave the men gifts, and songs and stories were created to honour those who had harnessed the water
.

But soon the gifts ran out. The people’s throats grew too dry to sing. The pipes held the water fast. And the villagers died one by one until there was no one left who remembered the night the Rain God transformed himself into a great bull and descended to earth on a bolt of lightning
.

No one left who remembered what the girl had sacrificed, and how, in the end, it had not been enough
.

T
HIS IS HOW SHE REMEMBERS IT: VIVID, SHARPLY
detailed. It will not fade.

Nomsulwa sinks into the sticky surface of the couch – May has not brought relief from the heat. Last night’s pipe “recovery” and today’s meeting and march through downtown have taken their toll and she feels the shake of exhaustion in every muscle of her body. Mira, across from her, holds Pim’s hand, clutches it hard enough that Nomsulwa can see in the grip all his investment in the woman next to him. He retells, for the second time, the way he had led a toyi toyi at that day’s protest. The way the group of
PCF
protestors had danced in front of the water cannons and the police officers’ decision to step aside when they reached the City Hall.

The kettle rattles on the stove and Pim gets up to pour the water. Mira closes his eyes for a second, seeming to relish the sounds of the household. Nomsulwa watches the happy man in front of her.

They are all sipping deep-red tea when Aluta, Pim’s oldest, emerges from another room, done up in makeup and tight, bright clothes. She is fifteen, but she looks younger with all the blush and eyeshadow she has put on. Pim freezes mid-sip.

“Get yourself back in your room and put on some clothes.”

“I’m going out.”

“Not likely.”

Another girl, a friend from school, steps up behind Aluta. “We are just going to visit with some friends in the city. This is what everyone is wearing.”

“You’re not dressed like that,” Pim accuses the friend who is wearing simple jeans and a sweatshirt.

“I’m on my way home now to change.”

“All right, then. Call your mother and let me talk to her about these plans you say you have.” Pim puts her hands on her hips.

“Yeah, you could do that.” Aluta drags her friend through the living room. “If what you thought mattered at all.”

She leaves and marches down the block. Pim rushes after, yells out to her daughter, but Aluta keeps walking, long, awkward steps in heels too high for her.

At the front door Nomsulwa puts a consoling arm around Pim’s shoulders. “Don’t worry. Mira will go with her to the city. He’ll keep an eye on her.”

Mira rolls his eyes, but Nomsulwa knows he’ll go. He understands Pim won’t relax until Aluta’s home. He grabs his stuff and leaves, following the girls down the street.

I
T IS BARELY TEN AT NIGHT WHEN
N
OMSULWA GETS
a call from Mira telling her to come to Skybar, a club downtown. He’s spent his taxi money and they’re in trouble.

She doesn’t pause to finish her drink. She collects her bag, straightens her pants and shirt, and nods goodbye to the shebeen owner. She gets into her car and begins the drive
to the club district. The night is black, no moon, and the few street lamps seem to flicker more than usual. Nomsulwa hopes she can avoid the huge potholes and sharp breaks in the road by memory. The drive passes too slowly. She is sweating when she finally arrives.

Mira is standing outside the club holding Aluta in his arms. She stares over his shoulder, immobile. Nomsulwa approaches.

“What happened? What happened to her?”

Mira’s eyes are wide. “A man, in the club, a white man, he took her into his minibus and …”

His voice fades out, but it doesn’t matter. Nomsulwa can see the blood dried on Aluta’s lip, the wrinkled fabric of her clothes.

“Where were you? Why weren’t you watching her?”

“I … was. I turned around for a minute and … she was in a big group … it was safe.”

“Where is he? What does he look like? Did she describe him?”

“The American, she says it was an American. White. Blond hair.”

Nomsulwa doesn’t put her hand on Aluta’s shoulder to soothe her. She doesn’t hug Mira or forgive him for his carelessness. She walks into the club and begins to circle the room.

In the corner, an Indian man chats up a waitress. His head is bald and he stares at the woman’s breasts as he speaks. Directly to his right, a line of young coloured boys
lean against the wall smoking cigarettes and eyeing the dance floor. There is a thicket of black men and young girls grinding to the music. The only white man in the bar is seated behind the gyrating throng, dishevelled and drunk. His eyes swim, lids close intermittently. His skin glows red, pulsing red in his cheeks and neck. Nomsulwa imagines the red head exploding. She walks to the corner of the room and leans against a wall, blending in with the crowd.