We Are Not Such Things (41 page)

“She look up to me,” Ndumi said, squeezing out a smile. She knew I was fond of Aphiwe, and she was trying to follow suit, but she had very little affection for the child.

When Easy arrived, he scooped up his boy and kissed his head, and Aphiwe leaned on Easy’s shoulder. They sat by the door on the hand-cobbled wooden bench, and a sheet of sun warmed them.

On the day of Ukhanyiso’s birth, Ndumi’s father had found a minuscule and underweight black and brown male puppy with the ears of a bat mewling on the street. “I hope he does not lose his life,” he said, and named the puppy Diskie. He had taken to nursing him back to health with powdered milk. Energized, Diskie often rushed into the shack, yelping for attention, only to be shooed away by Ndumi. Then, relenting, she brought him a margarine container full of formula. Ndumi felt that Diskie was some sign from above: she’d been blessed with two baby boys all at once, both born small and weak but growing big and strong every day.

The happy days were short-lived. First off, Diskie nearly died after eating rat poison from the trash that littered the streets; he survived only because Ndumi’s father spoon-fed him yogurt and ferried him to a free SPCA clinic over in Philippi just in time. Tension was also growing between Easy and Ndumi. Much of it had to do with money. Ndumi and Easy were exquisitely attuned to each other’s every penny. When Easy had exactly 27 rand in his pocket for Aphiwe’s school taxi fees, Ndumi would demand precisely 27 rand worth of mutton for herself. When Ndumi collected cash from the backyard renters behind her house at the end of the month, Easy glued himself to her side. When Easy’s paycheck was wired into his bank account, Ndumi put her hand out, demanding his debit card. All Easy wanted to do, he moaned, was to “chillax,” but Ndumi made chillaxing impossible.

They had differences of opinion on the subject of how to spend money, especially when it came to the baby: Easy wanted to buy single no-brand diapers, instead of a pack of Pampers. Ndumi refused the spaza store diapers. She wrapped Ukhanyiso in a blanket dotted with stars and Mickey Mouse and spent an inordinate amount of time gazing at him and cooing. A few days earlier, Easy had found Aphiwe’s old stroller in the back room, and had offered it to Ndumi. Ndumi refused, disgusted: Linda had bought that stroller years ago, and Ndumi didn’t want a decade-old stroller for her kid, not when Aphiwe had rolled around in a shiny new one.

“She say she want quality,” a defeated Easy moaned. “She give me headache, and her voice is very up. She is not right.”

The days were clear. A pungent stink emanated from the drains in the street. Gugulethu’s one white resident walked by in a red shirt, looking cracked out but friendly, talking about Marxist theory.

“Very township boy,” Easy said admiringly. “He even smoke tik tik and fight on the street with his girlfriend.”

In the distance, shacks burned down, the smoke spiraling up and fanning out across the township. The close-set dwellings over in the settlements were always burning, just like the shacks I’d seen leveled on my first trip to the townships. The nights were cold in July, and petrol stoves got knocked over a lot. We all leaned on the wall surrounding Ndumi’s fence and regarded the fire as one might a passing car.

Ndumi was increasingly jealous of Aphiwe. She feared that Easy would favor Aphiwe, and the forensic evidence of this rift lay in material goods. Easy, for his part, claimed that times had simply changed. When Aphiwe was born, he hadn’t been so saddled with debt, and the Biehls had been in and out of town often, helping him buy bottles and onesies. These days, Easy was near broke. He had natural tendencies toward disorganization and absentmindedness—he was the type of person who loses an average of three cellphones annually—and was nearly financially illiterate.

In 2002, before their friendship had crumbled, Easy and Ntobeko had approached Linda for loans. Two plots of land were available near NY111, for around $1,000 each. Linda purchased the plots outright, in Peter’s memory, but that was the extent of her gift. Ntobeko had since built an adobe-style single-level place, painted a rusty red and surrounded by a tidy wall. His interior decor was inspired by his trips with Linda to Santa Fe: spare wood, clean walls. His three well-dressed girls did their homework at the kitchen table and attended prep school outside Gugulethu. Ntobeko kept his growing fleet of private school transport vans in the driveway. When Kiki walked to the train station, she had to pass the place, and her face warped with envy.

Easy, meanwhile, had failed to pay the rates on his land, and had never built on it. Aphiwe’s mom had refused to move there. It was too close to the Nofemela clan; wouldn’t Kiki come knocking at the door every day? So Easy ignored the notices to pay his taxes on the NY111 plot and landed a high-interest-rate mortgage on the house in Khayelitsha, overpriced at 270,000 rand (about $25,000 at that time). Aphiwe’s mother moved in with him, and then, soon thereafter, left him. Easy rented the house out to a series of tenants and returned to his parents’ home. For the first year, he dutifully paid the bank back. But he soon began to ignore the notices collecting at his door. His tenant was pregnant. She didn’t have a job, and how could he go banging down the door and making that poor lady pay? Once in a while, she did cough up the cash, but by then he was behind. He also owed on all his other loans and debts. And it was nice to be holding a wad of money. But even if Easy had been an excellent finance manager, he had plenty of factors working against him.

As a member of a poor, close-knit family, it was nearly impossible to put away a bit of cash in an “emergency” savings account, since emergencies hit with great regularity. People living close to the ground were always laid low by circumstances; something as simple as buying a child new school shoes could tilt the monthly budget and exhaust the savings. Living in close proximity to a vast extended clan meant that everyone knew exactly how much you were making and when you got paid. They were always asking for help, and if you had any extra cash around, even in a savings account, you’d be hard-pressed to resist if your sister was in the hospital or your nephew didn’t have a winter coat. Keeping an account that could be accessed simply meant that the account
would
be accessed.

Easy had also gotten his salary tangled up in a variety of overpriced and poorly understood emergency plans specifically marketed to low-income people who could not save money in conventional ways. The plans, once joined, automatically deducted their rates directly from your salary each month. First, a funeral coverage plan deducted a large percentage of Easy’s paycheck. This plan covered Easy, Kiki, and Wowo, and Easy had been paying into it for a decade, though you only really benefited from the plan if you died right after you joined, since the coverage was capped. By now, Easy had paid far more than he’d ever be able to claim back and would continue to pay in perpetuity, but at least he and his family were guaranteed a proper casket and a decent celebration. Funeral coverage plans were big business in the townships, where the deepest humiliation would be to be buried in a pauper’s box, and where glory might be found if not in life, at least in death.

Easy had also been convinced to help buy Kiki a sofa set on layaway, and the company deducted the payments directly from his salary. Kiki’s eldest son, who had a job with the postal service, had a strict wife, so Kiki could not go to him for favors. Nobody else had a steady paycheck. And Easy owed Kiki, what with her raising his kid. Plus, how could he say no to his own mother?

Then, he paid into an education fund for both Aphiwe and his brother Monks’s son. Since Monks could not work, the family had taken up his ten-year-old son’s cause. The son himself was something of a phantasm, a silent, slender child whose father lay unmoving on the couch and whose mother was never around.

A year earlier, Aphiwe had needed school supplies and new school clothes all at once, which would cost over $80, which was exactly $80 more than Easy had at the time. Easy had taken out an interest-free loan that the Amy Biehl Foundation offered its employees. Over time, the foundation repaid itself the loan by garnishing wages.

Easy usually received an annual windfall, but this year’s was gone. He belonged to a group of twelve staffers who each month put a portion of their pay in a communal pot—$100 each, around a quarter of their salaries. Then, once a year, each employee collected $1,200. It was a way to simultaneously save and keep those savings inaccessible, because the money went into the pocket of your colleague and thus could not simply be withdrawn on a whim. Over time, Easy had used his yearly bonanza to, variously, buy bricks to build on the undeveloped plot that Linda had purchased for him and to purchase a used turquoise VW Jetta that two of his brothers crashed while drunk and that had been languishing at the mechanic’s for nearly four years. Most recently, he’d used the $1,200 to drive to Johannesburg to see a live performance of the Nigerian televangelist Pastor Chris.

Pastor Chris was one of a collection of Nigerian pastors who traveled the continent, commanding enormous stadiums full of mostly black believers. He claimed that he was God’s vessel, and as such he could cure cancer and HIV. More important for Easy and his family, Pastor Chris was able to faith-heal cripples up from their beds and onto their feet. Back in Gugulethu, Easy, Wowo, and a couple of other brothers had lifted Monks up and laid him down in the back of Wowo’s Nissan bakkie. Unable to afford a hotel, they powered through the Karoo to Johannesburg for sixteen hours, passing by Colesburg, that dusty desert town where Sam and I had slept the first time I cut through the country. They stayed with family members in a township and attended days of sermons, all with the goal of Monks rising tall. But Monks never did stand.

So Easy was essentially skint, which Ndumi refused to believe. But she was right about one thing: Easy did favor Aphiwe, as Ndumi suspected. She was his “angel” and his “miracle” and his “firstborn.” He adored and doted upon Ukhanyiso, whom he called “my boy,” but his sense of responsibility was heightened when it came to his daughter. In Easy’s mind, Aphiwe would always need protection, whereas Ukhanyiso, on account of being born male, would be able to make his own way. The hazards faced by a daughter in Gugulethu were enough to make Easy particularly vigilant. He constantly worried about the day, creeping ever closer, when Aphiwe would get a boyfriend, and he worried further about the possibility that Aphiwe’s boyfriend would hit her, which was not an uncommon occurrence.

Ndumi was unforgiving on the matter of Aphiwe versus Ukhanyiso. She was spending a full day every month standing in line at the social services office for her monthly grant: 250 rand for her baby, or around $30. Anything Easy had, she wanted. Whenever he received the remains of a paycheck, they went shopping and she bought unnecessary items out of spite. She needed diapers and formula, but instead she bought both a strawberry-shaped pacifier and a banana-shaped pacifier, a pair of expensive bibs with trucks on them, a blue spoon in the shape of a dolphin. Then, rather than stocking up on much needed groceries, Ndumi demanded that Easy take them out to eat. She knew full well that she should have purchased staples, but she was also sick of eating beans at home for every meal. The family went to KFC and blew his extra cash on the nine-piece bucket with a mini-loaf, sides, and soda for everyone. Ndumi angrily consumed her chicken legs and sat back, semi-satisfied.

For the rest of the month, Easy had to borrow a young relative’s school pass to board the train. He scrounged around the sofa for single-rand coins to buy loose cigarettes. He borrowed money from friends for beer, which he would often pay back before he helped out his family, to save face. He tried desperately to not think of his debts and his bills.

From a cultural standpoint, Easy had pressing expenses from every angle. In addition to the cash he needed to support Ukhanyiso and Aphiwe (who again owed school fees and needed a uniform), he also owed Ndumi’s father for knocking her up out of wedlock; such a payment was known as a “penalty,” and was standard in Xhosa culture, the reasoning presumably being that the family of a pregnant and unmarried girl or woman would be saddled with an extra burden when a baby arrived. It is also a way of showing respect to a pregnant woman and her family by making sure a father acknowledges a baby as his. Without this payment, a father would traditionally have no rights of visitation, and the baby would be raised at the mother’s homestead and with her surname. But while Easy talked endlessly about the value of Xhosa cultural mores and had based his identity within the Xhosa structure, he ignored the rules when inconvenient or unaffordable, which accounted for his ability to buy beer but not to pay the pregnancy penalty. He was always going on about the beauty of African hospitality, and one day I lost my patience.

“You talk so much about the Xhosa way of treating guests, but nobody at your house has ever so much as offered me a glass of water,” I said. “What is that about?”

Easy’s face fell. “Is so embarrassing,” he said, shaking his head, and then ran off to get me a mug of tea. That day was the only day he ever did such a thing, and I visited at least once a week for well over a year—and then on and off for three more.