Brutal Women (4 page)

Ro Bhavesh smiled, turned to me.
“You wonder why we have these experiments, Kadru?”

“I do not question the Kell,” I
said.

“We bring this vessel to the ocean
to empty her of her contents and mix those favorable things we find within her
with those favorable things we have extracted from others. That is the nature
of the project. They are the vessels that host those perfect biological
organisms we employ against our enemies. But of course you understand this,
don’t you? You understand what you are?”

“Of course, Ro Bhavesh,” I said,
and I began to feel the apprehension again, the hollow stab in my belly of
something akin to fear.

“Then the next time we tell you to
go to the desert and evaluate vessels we expect that you will remember what you
are, what you could be. This vessel holds more useful material for our cause
than you do, Kadru. Do not question us. If you forget your place again we will
forget it also, and remove you to the other function your people serve.”

Ro Bhavesh stood flanked by its
impassive androgynies. As I looked from Ro Bhavesh to the androgynies I felt a
deep well of hatred for those things without a clearly defined sex. They were
not man or vessel, and stood one step closer to ascendance than I would ever
be. They would never fear the ocean.

The Kell would never transport me
back to the desert of my youth. If I left the city I would be sent into the
gray compounds. I would become a vessel for Kell monstrosities, Kell viruses --
Kell weapons of war. They had altered me, yes, but I could be altered again. I
could become one of those base things again, one of those things capable of
breeding, of production, a vessel of birthing fluid and death. Here was the
truth of my existence. Here it was unfolded before me by a vessel that dreamed
and lied and remembered. I hated her for it. I hated her because she told me a
truth I had almost succeeded in forgetting.

“Empty her,” Ro Bhavesh said to the
androgynies.

I looked away, to the ocean.

“Kadru,” Ro Bhavesh said. “Watch.”

I looked back at the vessel, at
Daeva Four, the creature with the brown skin and lanky black hair. I did not want
to look into the well of her eyes, but that was where my gaze fell. There are
days when I wonder if I ever truly returned from the depths of those black
eyes.

They did not kill her. To do so
would waste the vessel. The three androgynies extracted small vials of blood
from Daeva Four. She began to weep. Tears tumbled down her cheeks and were
swept across her face by the wind. I was brought with her inside one of the
compounds. I stood and watched as she wept and the screaming began. They
immersed her skinny body in an embryonic solution. They inserted the viral
organism. They put her in a long, dim room with the others, a room of cells
made up of transparent glass. I could not hear the voices of those vessels
encased in the glass. But I could see them. I could see their lives stretched
out before them, days of birth and blood and death.

The androgynies did not look back
at Daeva Four, her skinny body strapped down to the soft silvery table that
molded itself to her form. I did look. And I did not forget.

I walked back outside into the
salty wind. I did not ask what the Kell would do with Daeva’s fluid, did not
ask what plan they had to create a creature that remembered the dead past of
others. I did not question the Kell.

Now when they send me into the desert
I look for the dreamers. I look for the liars. I look for the ones who
remember. I do not question my place. I am a teacher of men and androgynies and
Kell progeny. I am a man of wisdom and reason and worth, but my worth is
measured by that which I am not, that which I will never be.

Sometimes I remember the lie I am
able to live because I am able to dream. Sometimes I dream I am halfway to
ascendance, halfway between Kell and vessel. I am a man, I say. There are days
when I believe this is true. There are days when I believe the Kell cannot harm
me.

There are days when I dream of the
ocean.

This story first appeared in the
Summer 2003 issue of
Talebones Magazine
. I’m told it largely made the
cut because it was reasonably put together and just so happened to be about the
right length to fill that issue’s word count hole. Yes, publishing is a
mystical business.

In February 2003, I moved to
South Africa for a year and a half to complete my Master’s in history at the
University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. In the U.S., we’re very good at hiding our
ghosts. We soak them up with movies and popcorn and iPhones and trips to
Costco. South Africa’s ghosts were more real to me, more tangible. In South
Africa, they formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at the end of
the apartheid era explicitly to talk about these abuses. The purpose of the
organization was to allow people to tell their stories of politically motivated
violence, including rape and murder; to uncover the truth and get closure for
relatives and friends who had lost loved ones to violence. Before you can go
forward, you must understand your past, or you are in danger of repeating it. I
wish our own country could be so introspective. If you want to read some of the
stories from the TRC, they are available for free online at
http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/index.htm
.

I remember the day my father came
home from Angola. He had gone when I was too young to remember him, and I had
only known his face in photographs. The big man who arrived on our
stoep
,
with the bruises beneath his eyes and the red dirt in the seams of his face,
did not look like the same man in the photographs.

I remember that he put a big hand
on my head in greeting. I clung to my mother’s trousers.

“I wish you were a boy, Aninka,” he
said. “I brought ghosts home with me.”

Things were never the same in the
house after that.

My father went up to his room and
didn’t come out for a month. My mother started throwing plates. I couldn’t
sleep at night. And the house began to do odd things. Mother would leave
handkerchiefs out on the table, or mismatched earrings on her dresser, and they
would disappear. She said Nan stole them, but one time Nan was out picking up
groceries in town, and left mother’s silver on the table for polishing, and
when Nan came home, the creamer bowl was gone. Mother yelled at Nan and slapped
her, and that was the night that Sizwe, the man who helped around the garden
and fixed the leaky house pipes, the man who built my tree house and a tea
table for my dolls, left. He stole the gun out of my father’s room. Nan said he
was going to free her people.

In this house, none of us was free.

After Sizwe left, I met a black
woman in the garden. She was very beautiful, and she didn’t dress in the nice
clean domestic’s dress like Nan did. She dressed in a big colorful wrap. She
had big beaded hoops around her neck and wrists and ankles. She said her name
was Nkosi. She said she had come back with my father.

When I told mother about the woman,
she said I was a liar. I tried to tell my father, but when I reached the door
to his room, Nan found me and said I wasn’t allowed. She said my father was too
tired to see anyone.

Nan and I watched television when
my mother was at her prayer meetings. One time we watched the news and there
was a black man on the steps of a gray building. He wore a suit, and he lifted
his fist to the blue, blue sky, and all the people around him, a great mass of
black people, more than I had ever seen, cheered and sang.

Nan started crying. She took me
into her arms and said, “It’s over, my child. It’s over.”

But it wasn’t over.

I woke up that night to find two
little girls playing in my room. At first, I was angry with the girls for
coming into my room, but then I saw that they were playing a game with bottle
caps, and I wanted to learn how to play, too.

“Where do you live?” I asked the
girls.

“Here,” they said.

“No,” I said, “This is my house.”

“Not any more,” the girls said.

Mother gave Nan the day off, and
father came down for breakfast. It was the first time I had seen him since he
came home. He sat in front of his toast and read the paper. He said, “The
blacks are going to overrun this country, force us off our farms. They’ll run
us out and the government will go corrupt, you’ll see. They’ll all starve to
death. They’ll wish we were still here, then, won’t they? They’ll beg us to
come back and feed them.”

“Nan says her people are starving
now,” I said, because Nan talked to me about those things whenever we watched
television together.

My father looked at me sharply, and
his eyes were small and black and angry. “These people are terrorists,” he
said. “Mandela is a terrorist. You should see the way they live. What they do
to each other. Like animals -”

“Robert,” my mother said.

“No,” my father said. “She has to
hear truth.” He waved the paper at me. “We cared for Nan and Sizwe all this
time, and all the others we’ve had help us on every year, haven’t we? Where
would they be without us? What would they do?”

“There were two black girls playing
in my room last night with bottle caps,” I said.

My father’s mouth clacked shut.

“And there’s a black woman who
lives in the garden. Her name’s Nkosi. She says she came home with you.”

My mother eyed my father sharply,
but said to me, “That will be enough, Aninka.”

When Nan came back, she had me help
her with dinner, but only because I asked. I wasn’t supposed to clean the
dishes or pick up after myself because that’s what my mother said she paid Nan
to do.

Mother sat in the tearoom talking
to some old ladies who spoke Afrikaans. Mother said that they were so old that
they were already married during the Great War.

They talked about the blacks
overrunning the country - our country - I remembered, even though Nan lived
there too, and mother laughed and said,

“Nan, my girl, if the revolution
came tomorrow, you would stay beside me, wouldn’t you?”

“Like our steady girls in the South
African War,” one of the old ladies said. “They marched with us all the way
through, they did, right into the concentration camps.”

Nan set down more cucumber
sandwiches and walked back into the kitchen. “Ma’am,” Nan said, “if the people
came up today, I would be the one to stick the knife into you myself.” And Nan
cut through the rind of the butternut squash with a knife so sharp the rind
peeled away like butter.

My mother pretended to laugh.

The old ladies left.

That was the night my father
started screaming.

I woke to the sound of his cries. I
lay in my own bed, silent and still, fists full of my sheets. When he stopped
screaming, I heard my mother speaking to him. He shouted back at her. The
voices were loud, but I could make out no words.

I noticed the shadows of the little
girls playing at the end of my bed.

“Your baba did bad things,” one of
the girls said.

“He was saving our country,” I
said, “from the blacks.”

“There isn’t anything to save,” the
first girl said.

“There’s me,” I said.

In the morning, my mother called
the doctor to see my father. I saw Nan bringing bloody sheets from my parents’
room.

“What happened, Nan?” I asked.

“It is the ghosts, my child. They
tear your father apart. He is bewitched. Go watch television.”

I was never allowed to watch
television by myself, but everyone was busy upstairs, and Nan was soaking the
sheets in cold water.

I went down to the living room.
Three black boys were already there, staring at the blank television screen.
They wore jerseys with holes worn at the elbows, and dirty shorts that showed
their skinny knees. I turned on the television. There was a cooking show on, in
Afrikaans.

“We were playing football,” one of
the boys told me. “Men came in on bakkies and shot at us. They had dogs. And
gas.”

“My sisters ran up to the
ambulance,” another boy said. He wasn’t wearing shoes. “The paramedics were
afraid of what my sisters were going to do. They shot my sisters. Then they
threw my sisters into the back with us.”

I turned off the television. “My
father was saving our country,” I said. “He just came back from Angola.”

“
Sisi
, your
baba
could not have just come home from Angola. None of your people has been in
Angola for a long time. He was in the townships. He was killing our people.”

“You’re all terrorists!” I shouted.
I ran to the laundry room where Nan stood over the big washbasin, elbows deep
in cold water.

“Nan, the boys say my dad’s a bad
man!”

“Get me some ice, my child,” Nan
said.

I stomped into the kitchen and
opened the freezer underneath the refrigerator. “They had no right to say that,
Nan. My dad is saving the country.”

Nan took the ice trays from me and
cracked the ice free, into the big basin. “Yes,” she said, “and Sizwe is
fighting for his.”

“There’s only one country,” I said.

“One country,” Nan said. “Many
people.”

“Your people are supposed to work
for our people,” I said. “Mother says God made it so.”

“Your mother, she doesn’t know
everything.”

“Did my dad kill all those people?”
I asked.

Nan looked down at me and crinkled
her brow. “What people?”

“The people in the house.”

“Yes,” Nan said, and she went back
to washing my father’s bloody sheets.

I walked upstairs and found my
mother in my father’s study. She was sitting at his desk, crying.

“I want to see my dad,” I said.

“Go play, my baby. I don’t have
time to -”