We Are Not Such Things (43 page)

We exited the highway onto Strand Street, the broad thoroughfare that cuts through the city center. I pulled off near the taxi station and hit my hazard lights. From here, Ndumi could catch a minivan that headed south to Hout Bay. She slid out, pulling her bags with her and balancing Ukhanyiso. Then she leaned down toward my window.

“He’s not a good person. He really isn’t. Easy is full of secrets, my loving.”

Soon thereafter, I met Easy at Mzoli’s. He was half happy, half sad. On the downside, Ndumi had blocked him from seeing the baby. On the upside, he had a new girl, Tiny, she of the “sweetlips” texts. Now, he explained, he wasn’t saying he
had
cheated on Ndumi, but
if
he had, it would have been because Ndumi had made him do it. Tiny joined us for a bite. She was a twenty-nine-year-old single mother, smart and even-keeled. When she was mad or sad, she needed to eat chocolate cake or ice cream immediately, and her dream was to one day open a small sandwich shop. She was understated and pretty, with long braids, delicate curves, and good manners. She had pulled out her two front teeth—pulling out one’s top front teeth was an enduring Cape Flats trend—and so sometimes displayed an oddly appealing gap and sometimes inserted her tooth piece with one perfect fake white incisor and one gold incisor. Tiny’s mother had a contract with the city of Cape Town to clean the gutters, which meant that the family did relatively well. Tiny’s twin brother had a car and his own place. Her little sister went to school. Tiny had thus far been paying down Easy’s debts, and trying to manage his various decrepit properties. She adored him “even with his luggage,” but she found him impenetrable.

“He has a pain,” she told me. “Some deep thing, from prison or Amy.”

“What do you get from him?” I asked.

“His love, his everything.”

“What do you want from him?”

“Just for him to change. A lot.”

A crowd of strapping white tourists in long shorts and high socks filed into the restaurant. A tour guide marched ahead, banging a tiny drum.

“Your people!” Tiny exclaimed, turning to me.

“I feel like they’re German,” I countered.

Nearby, a white man and a Latino man, both dressed in neat button-downs and khakis, stared at us. The white man leaned in.

“Is the food okay to eat?” he asked me.

He was British, it turned out, and his companion was Bolivian. They were in Gugulethu to do business—though the nature of that business was not revealed.

“But is it safe here?” the Brit asked. “Didn’t that English lady get killed here?” He was referring, I gathered, to the 2010 murder of Anni Dewani, a Swedish tourist whose bullet-ridden body had been found in Khayelitsha. She had been in Cape Town on her honeymoon when she was murdered. Her new husband, a British citizen, had been accused of ordering the hit, which prosecutors claimed he had had engineered to seem like an unplanned carjacking. After years of court battles, he was cleared and flew first-class straight back to London. One of the hit men, now in prison, had lived on Ndumi’s street.

“Safe enough,” I said, and the Englishman ran off to wash his hands thoroughly.

We stayed for an hour. Our meat was delivered, pap and the spicy chopped vegetable relish
chakalaka,
too, all on a large silver plate, no utensils. A young man wearing a floral shirt with the top six buttons undone flounced by, smoking a cigarette and holding a hot mug of coffee. Easy had a gay brother, a fact he had revealed by saying, “My brother is—” and then flapping his hand from a weak wrist. Since Xhosa culture is not terribly progressive and Easy was fairly traditional himself, I asked him how he felt about his gay brother. His cousins had been around him at the time and they had all shrugged.

“Is our family so we must support him,” Easy had said without any affect, and the cousins all nodded. The man in the floral shirt was a friend of the gay brother.

“I need fifty rand, I am in such love trouble,” the man said. His phone was stolen a few days earlier by a neighborhood skollie.

Easy couldn’t help him with cash, but he could offer advice: “Why don’t you take action to get your phone back?”

“Oh
honey
, that’s later,” the man said, sitting down at our table and dramatically crossing his legs. “I’m waiting for the perfect moment. I’m a well-known bitch!”

Then he ran off and returned with a pile of napkins, which he dropped at the table, and continued his rounds. I had no idea if he was employed by Mzoli’s or if he just enjoyed flitting about, serving and socializing.

“Can we try the story of Amy Biehl one more time?” I asked Easy. He opened a bottle of ginger beer. “I feel like something isn’t right.”

He picked up some lamb and chewed off the meat. Since I had bought the food, Tiny was trying to be polite by pretending she wasn’t hungry and sipping some tap water. When I insisted, she happily picked up a sausage.

“Sometimes I feel South Africa divert my life,” Easy said absently. “If I was not here in South Africa, maybe I be a professional.”

“What happened that day? What are you not telling me?” I was hoping he might corroborate Mzi’s story, but I didn’t want to guide him.

“My friend, honestly, I didn’t stab Amy. Because it was already people around her, a lot of people around her, and we started to make a fire to burn her car but we couldn’t so the police arrive.”

“If you didn’t do it, why did you take the responsibility?”

“The people saw me, the witnesses they know me, each every one. They point me.”

“Mongezi was the only one who stabbed her?”

“The only one.”

“They say she may have died from a rock to the head, though.”

“I still remember they said that she may still be alive if there was no wound in heart. There was a problem with her head, but if she could be taken to hospital, she might still be alive. But the wound to the heart, she could not be okay.”

“But you did throw stones?”

“Mmm hmmm.”

“And Ntobeko threw stones?”

“Yeah, we throw stones. But the person who trip and stab Amy is Mongezi. And if Amy was alive it would be easy for Amy to identify the person in front of them.”

I picked up a chicken wing, took a bite, and then reeled back. Mzoli had a secret spicy sauce that he added to his meat, and it was this sauce that Easy claimed had exacerbated his ulcer. It was hard, though, to stop eating it.

Just then, two little kids shuffled up to the clear plastic sheeting that separated Mzoli’s from the street. They looked longingly at our platter.

“I’m done,” I said, so Easy beckoned them in. They rounded the restaurant and gathered their courage to sneak in past the bouncers. But first, they picked at each other’s hair—one child had a bald patch on his head, and he was self-conscious. He pulled up his hood and took a deep breath. Then they entered with trepidation, looking at us. I estimated that they were around seven years old. Easy took all the pap and all the meat, scraped it onto a Styrofoam plate, and handed it to them, a gift they received in quiet wonder before fleeing.

Easy turned to me and smiled. “Nomzamo,” he said, using the Xhosa name he’d bestowed upon me. “You will learn the truth about Amy, Nomzamo. Nomzamo. Is a big name. Is a tornado. What you need, you get. I see in your eyes.”

Easy called me the following Saturday morning.

“Good news,” he said. “Me and Tiny are marrying.”

“What? When?”

“Nownow. Please, can you come to Gugs?”

I sped over to the house and found Easy crouched on the side of the road, wearing a blue workman’s jacket, elbow-deep in a pungent pot of sheep intestines that he was cleaning.

“My friend!” he bellowed, swerving over. The proposal was a surprise, he explained. Just last night he’d asked Tiny to marry him, and today was their traditional Xhosa wedding. He was over the moon. I gave him a bottle of white wine I’d had in my refrigerator.

“Champers!” he exclaimed, and wobbled away.

For her part, Tiny was less certain about the whole ceremony. She knelt on a mat on the floor of a back bedroom, her hair wrapped in a cloth and a wool blanket slung over her shoulders. Easy’s eldest brother fed her meat by hand and gave her water from a jug. Easy had not yet paid her family
lobola
, the traditional Xhosa bride price, and he hadn’t really spoken to Tiny about the wedding. She was under the impression that they might get married six months later, but in old-school style he had “kidnapped” her, symbolically (she could have easily left if she hadn’t been into it), and she would be living in his house as his wife from now on. She had to wear the costume of a new wife—long skirt, long-sleeved shirt, hair covered, a blanket around her shoulders—for as long as Kiki demanded, and for several months she would be expected to wake before the family, go to sleep after them, and do the bulk of household chores. Easy had purchased a six-pack of Blue Ice blueberry-flavored spirit cooler for the occasion.

“He made the decision without my permission,” Tiny said. “I just came here to chill yesterday. The family was all here and I thought they were having family meeting. Then they say they want us to marry.”

People came in and out of the room. There was a charcoal grill smoking up the backyard.

“Easy has to become a man, take responsibility now,” Tiny said, mostly to herself. “I hope I am marrying a good man.”

“All the men in my family are good,” one of Easy’s female cousins said to reassure her. “They don’t beat women.”

Outside, Easy’s family was boiling mutton over a fire. A relative was also cooking
umqombothi,
a Xhosa beer made for centuries from maizemeal, corn malt, sorghum, malt, yeast, and water. Once fermented overnight and strained, the sour brew would be poured into a communal metal pot called a
gogogo
and passed around. By the time I left, at 2:45 in the afternoon, Easy was passed out in a bedroom.

“He has been overwhelmed by the occasion,” his brother said.

Just days before the proposal, Tiny and Easy had engaged in a debate on love, during which he was pointedly more optimistic than his unknowing wife-to-be, who contended that modern-day township courtship came down to who could offer what. They were sitting in her mother’s living room, a fan blowing, a set of copper pots displayed proudly in the armoire, as fancy pot-and-pan collections were a popular type of decor.

“You take me on a date to Mzoli’s, you give me a Heineken from your cooler and some meat,” Tiny said. She was talking about gold-digging on a township level: some girls slept with guys who bought them a dollar’s worth of phone time, while others wanted Carvelas, a brand of imported Italian loafer—made in brightly colored patent leather and costing upward of $300—that was the ultimate status symbol of the moment.

“What about love?” I interjected.

“Black people? There’s no love,” Tiny said bitterly. “There’s no love. It’s all about money.”

“There is love,” Easy said. “There
is
.”

Soon after the wedding, Tiny moved into Wowo and Kiki’s place, and for a month or so their life was relatively harmonious. Kiki was happy to have a daughter-in-law to do her bidding, which involved demanding that every single task be completed by Tiny. Easy was happy to have a woman by his side and Aphiwe was happy to have a stepmother who would walk her all the way to school and give her a kiss on the cheek. For years, she had been watching other little girls get their cheeks kissed, and now it was her turn.

But after that honeymoon period, Tiny was less pleased that she was required to serve Kiki tea and treats day in and day out. She missed her own mother, with whom she was feuding. Tiny’s mom, who was pro-ANC, didn’t like Easy’s reputation, and so Tiny and her mom were icing each other out. Tiny missed her young son, who was staying with his grandmother, and her twin brother. She had been nicknamed Tiny when she’d emerged into the world because she was the little twin, and her brother was named Ndlovu, or elephant, for his relatively grand size. He tried to visit as much as he could, but Tiny needed Kiki’s permission to socialize, and such permission was hard to come by.

More problematic than all that was the increasingly furious presence of Ndumi, about whom rumors swirled: some people said she’d gone to jail after threatening to kill herself and the baby. Others swore they’d seen her dressed nice at church, pushing the baby in a pram. Either way, she had gotten Tiny’s phone number and had taken to calling her at all hours, claiming that Easy continued to visit her at night. Indeed, Easy did slip out with increasing frequency, his phone now switched off as Tiny paced.