We Are Not Such Things (46 page)

But after two years, I stopped. I saw that for the most part, well-off black and colored people, also secured in their pods, absently shook their heads, too, when the wretched approached. Once, I’d been so racked with guilt that I bought a bunch of dead roses from a drug addict for top dollar. Once, I’d handed out peanut butter sandwiches and smiled at every single unfortunate to make my acquaintance. Once, a beggar asked for the soda in my hand and I handed over the bottle that I’d been in the midst of drinking. But soon enough my expression was as austere as the next lucky guy’s, and I had stopped giving to the people with their outstretched hands.

It felt, on some level, like playing God, a sensation both hideous and satisfying, for with money—however little—I was powerful; I could deny those I considered undeserving and reward those I dubbed worthy. I shook my head when the street children in their filthy blankets, their skin giving off the chemical scent of glue, came toward me. I shook my head when the old lady on the milk crate asked for some change. I shook my head when the cheerful man who sold periodicals told me about his sore leg, or his empty cupboards. I felt sorry for him, but not adequately sorry. He and his compatriots were screwed, royally and chronically and perhaps terminally, and what could any one person do about it? It was like drinking from a firehose.

Meanwhile, for my birthday, Sam and I dined at the Test Kitchen, one of Cape Town’s most famous and overpriced restaurants. The meal, enjoyed in a light-filled, open space with soaring ceilings, cost nearly $200, and was, as far as we could tell, a series of flavored foams arranged on a series of elegant plates. The Test Kitchen was in Woodstock, a largely colored neighborhood, with an impoverished population that lived in tenements surrounding the refurbished hipster-friendly Biscuit Mill, the shopping compound that housed the restaurant. On Saturday mornings, Cape Town’s elite—all races, all ages, all with money in their pockets and nice outfits and the glow of health and plenty—gathered in a heaving crowd at the Old Biscuit Mill market. They were there to buy expensive miniature cupcakes, organic fresh-squeezed juices, artisanal smoked meats, Taiwanese dumplings, imported Kenyan coffee. They sat around at picnic tables, seeing and being seen. The local children lined up just outside the wall surrounding the center, unable or unwilling to pass through the invisible barrier between their crumbling neighborhood and its gleaming beacon of gentrification. They rattled cups full of change and sang off-key harmonies and followed wealthy people down the street, calling them “mother” and “father” and hoping for a treat.

One night, after dinner at Sam’s parents’ home, where the silver had been shined by an old Xhosa woman who herself lived in Gugulethu, we drove by the parking lot above Clifton Beach. Earlier that day at that spot, we had met a man, his skin coffee-colored and his eyes bright blue, who had cried, saying he had no brothers or sisters and was alone in this world and needed our help.

“Please don’t forget me,” he begged.

We pulled into the empty lot again and called his name in the dark. We did not speak of this to each other, but I think we both imagined we would be received with gratitude, a poignant interaction between the blessed and the damned. But when the man crawled out from under his tent made of garbage bags, his eyes were blank. He took the offered container of soup and bread with little enthusiasm, and disappeared back to his makeshift cave. He seemed to have no memory of us at all.

On Aphiwe’s tenth birthday in 2013, Tiny arrived at her classroom bearing Nik Naks cheese puffs and boxes of juice. I was in charge of bringing doughnuts. Birthdays were not yet big business in the townships, so the goodies were especially treasured. The kids jumped up and down and stuffed sweets into their mouths beneath a pink handwritten sign that said
NO EATING + RUNNING AROUND
. Aphiwe stood on a chair, her hair in a messy ponytail, her shoes worn. Her teacher and classmates clapped and sang “Happy Birthday” in both English and Xhosa.

“How old are you now? How old are you now? How old are you now?” they bellowed en masse. “Hip hip!? Hoo-
ray
! Hip hip!? Hoo-
ray
! Aphiwe!? Hoo-
ray
!”

“Say thank you,” Tiny prompted, and Aphiwe, her face flushed with joy, muttered her thank you. She was shocked, she whispered to Tiny. Her daddy had promised her a birthday surprise, but he was always disappointing her. For a year, Easy spoke of throwing Aphiwe a tenth birthday party at Mzoli’s, inviting a hundred people, handing out beer and wine coolers to the adults, passing around platters of chicken and sausage, and ordering pink cupcakes with candles. But when the day came, he’d had neither cash for a cake nor the capacity to organize anything. Tiny had saved the day.

Soon thereafter, I found Easy outside the Caltex where Amy had been killed. We had arranged to meet that morning, but he had not been at the agreed-upon spot. Instead, having failed to find him at his usual haunts, I passed him as he was weaving across NY1, wearing a heavy cardigan in the searing heat. I pulled over and he struggled with the handle, got into the passenger seat, and fell fast asleep. I slapped his cheek lightly and he opened his eyes. To the side was Amy’s marble memorial. Next to the Caltex, an intricate AIDS awareness mural had been painted on the wall: the South African flag, black hands intertwined against gold rays, condoms, a bottle of booze, a needle filled with blood.

“What can sober you up?” I asked.

“Chicken.”

I drove to the KFC at the Shoprite Center. A newspaper salesman stood on the median, displaying that day’s
Daily Sun
headline:
SANGOMA STOLE MY LIFE!
While I went in to buy a six-piece, Easy sat atop a large paint container by the hardware store and nodded off. A young female acquaintance of his passed by and laughed at him.

“I’m not drunk, I’m exhausted from exercise,” he said, miming a few punches in the air.

She laughed harder.

“Will you kiss me?” he asked.

“No!”

“We
gonna
kiss.”

“We are
not
gonna kiss.”

In the car, Easy ate a couple of drumsticks and perked up. I gave him a ginger soda, which he spilled on the floor. We parked outside his house and Aphiwe leaned through the window and poked her father’s cheeks. She had cut out pieces of paper in the shape of long nails, doodled on them, and taped them to her fingertips. Kiki, seeing my car, wanted us to do her errands. Everyone reached in and took a piece of chicken and Aphiwe slid into the backseat. As per Kiki’s request, we drove to the Gugulethu Mall, a shining new development built in part by Mzoli, owner of the barbecue restaurant, in 2009. In addition to bringing chain stores and banks to the township, Mzoli the butcher tycoon had set up an annual Gugulethu wine festival, where the black diamonds sipped local South African wines. Across the street from the mall, a man was selling fish from the back of a bakkie. Easy left me and Aphiwe in the car and stood in the long fish line. We watched him. She examined me. She touched a mole on my shoulder.

“Do you have any?” I asked.

Aphiwe shook her head. She was wearing a pair of shorts, the fly undone, and a pink T-shirt with sandals.

“I have lots more,” I said, pointing to my shoulder, my chest, and finally to my stomach. She lifted her shirt to show me a small matching spot just above her belly button.

“What is your favorite food?” I asked.

“Pizza,” she said softly.

“Plain?”

“With mushrooms.”

“Raspberries or strawberries?”

“Raspberries.”

“Math or English?”

“English.”

“Soccer or rugby?”

“Soccer.”

“Soccer or cricket?”

“Cricket.”

“What did you do at school?”

“Played with my friends.”

I sneezed. Aphiwe looked at me.

“You know what you say when someone sneezes?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You say, ‘Bless you.’ ”

“Bless you.”

“Achooo,” I said.

“Bless you,” Aphiwe whispered.

Easy was across the street, chatting with people in line.

“Aphiwe, what is your favorite thing about your dad?”

She thought for a while. Then she cupped her mouth onto my ear and whispered, “Pride.”

Easy came weaving back with a plastic bag dripping fish. Aphiwe got out of the car to help him wrap it up. Then we drove back toward NY111.

“Achoo,” Aphiwe said, hopefully.

“Bless you,” I said.

Once we’d dropped off the fish and Aphiwe, Easy directed me down NY111 to a dirt yard next to the railroad. Trash was strewn across the barren land, letting off a stink. Across the tracks, in the colored area of Heideveld, a Kaapse Klopse band practiced. The Kaapse Klopse are a Cape Town institution: since the nineteenth century, troupes of colored musicians have dressed in flamboyant uniforms and marched down the streets, singing, dancing, and playing instruments. They compete against each other in contests and at the annual Kaapse Klopse festival. Like the colored people themselves, the music of the Kaapse Klopse players has breathtakingly diverse origins, influenced by musical styles brought over by early West African slaves, Southeast Asian slaves, European settlers, and indigenous Khoisan choirs. The members of the bands call themselves “minstrels” and “coons,” and the Kaapse Klopse Carnival had once been called the “coon carnival,” but tourists found the wording distasteful, and so the city had worked to rebrand it.

“Nobody can bother us,” Easy informed me as I parked on the dirt patch. “This is my plot.”

This was the land Linda had bought for Easy years ago. Dry puffs of grass and weeds suffered in the dust and sand. An ancient brown-and-white trailer, its exterior stained with dirt and oil and water, was balanced on cement blocks on one side of the property. Inside, a middle-aged man in a floppy hat—technically Easy’s tenant, but I did not imagine he paid much, if any, rent—presided over a deep-fryer. His ripped menu, taped to the front of the trailer, offered several confounding items: “Chips and Russians,” “Gwinya and Liver,” “French Polony.” Everything cost around 60 American cents. There were two other structures: a red one-room shanty, no bathroom, grounded by broken bricks arranged at its borders, in which subsisted a bleary-eyed young man who, in exchange for free board, kept an eye on the land. He apparently did this poorly, for the flat-roof wood cabin next door was nearly falling in, its two windows reduced to broken shards of glass. We wandered over to inspect the dwelling. You could peek through the cracked glass, past a gray curtain that had once been striped yellow and blue, past the cardboard taped to the windows, to see a pair of unfinished rooms with cement floors and dirty walls halfheartedly painted a shade of buttercup. The rooms were strewn with dust and debris. Paper seemed to have been glued onto and then ripped off the walls. This was the house, abandoned, in which Easy and Aphiwe’s mother had briefly tried to make a life together.

“What is this tattoo?” I asked Easy, back in the car. It was a faded mark, vaguely in the shape of crudely drawn letters “NTA,” on his inner forearm. He had previously told me—euphemistically, I later realized—that it was a sign of local pride, though Ndumi had let slip that it was in fact a gang tattoo. “In a way, we all gangsters if we live in Gugulethu,” she had explained. Easy had long insisted that he had been a political prisoner and had never taken part in any gangsterism, but time and again, people I met casually insisted that he was a member of the 28s gang in Pollsmoor. Mzi had told me that, even before his stint in prison, Easy was a favorite of the leader of the ill-famed local Ntsara gang.

“Never Touch Area,” Easy said and sighed, rubbing his tattoo. “It mean that nobody can come to our area.”

“And this one?”

“Cape Town Scorpions,” he said.

“Which means?”

“There was fighting on my streets and other streets. These two are for the same gang. Okay, Nomzamo? Before Amy died, I
was
arrested. I stab one guy from another gang. I did get stabbed, too, when I was fifteen. I was five minutes to die, but I went to hospital. Ntobeko also was stabbed in the head. They stabbed him.”