Hiraeth

[Wyl Staedtler]

For years I've tried to write about where I grew up, to put out my own ragged sum of the African Experience, and for years I have gotten a few pages in and stopped. There is a largeness to this country that resists being pinned down, and the quantity of love and loss which my family has invested in her subsumes me, settles thick and syrupy in my throat so that all I can do is lie back and gurgle through her taste. Africa breeds hard people. She also breeds stubborn ones.

So this will not be an attempt to corral my home, to tether it into some agreeable form. Rather, this is my own grasping try at understanding the harrowing beauty of it all.

To start, here is an ending. Journal entries rediscovered today:



11.12.

1:41 AM

It feels important to keep track of this. To tie myself to something in order not to be lost.

Let me tell you things, as we have always done. Let me tell you because if I don't, I am afraid that I will go mad:

Today I lay on your grave and wept. The earth is new, freshly tilled. There is a dampness to it, a sticky quality borne of the heavy weight of maybe-rain in the air, and though it would be sweet and beautiful to say that it makes of the soil a soft, forgiving thing, it is as hard and given to crumbling as ever. We have buried you there, next to Dad and Ber and Bri and Gran, and we have set a stone that Jonathan painstakingly sanded (just as he has for everyone set to sleep in our land) and because I could not bear to leave you I lay down and stretched out over the mounded pile of earth and imagined that my limbs were your limbs because it has always felt like that; you have always been me have always been you have always been I have always been us. One does not exist without the other.

But yet: I lay next to you in the bed these last few days. Death is not pretty. It is not a delicate affair, there is no gentle daubing of sweat from pale, taut faces. You were in agony, body shutting down and sending you into deep pits of delirium in which you pleaded in gasping, dry-mouthed rattles for us to help you. There was an awful stench clinging to you, a sourness and dirty water flume, and the sheets were stained darkly with your yellowed perspiration. Yet you were still you, fractioned even as you were, and you were strong and familiar and beautiful and I could not leave you. I could not leave you then and I could not leave you today. Letting go is the step too far to take; it is inconceivable.

Jason must have carried me away. Memory escapes me but I am nonetheless here, my cheeks stained with red, red earth and my throat tight and packed with phlegm, sitting in a chair in the back garden of the Foresters Arms. There's a glass of scotch on the table. It will burn if I drink it but all I can seem to do is think of you and even that whisper of thought pulls at my limbs and makes me want to go back down the hill to our boarding field of bones. What if there is something of you in the air, still? A half-snatch of laughter or the taste of your cockeyed smile? I can hear your voice. I can hear the particular edge of your screech as we ran by this place as children, before our village became a ghost town left to grow over with jungle, when everything was full of life and you could choke on the class distinction that sounded like ice cubes in crystal tumblers and conversations about such-and-such under par on the weedy 9-hole patch that passed for a golf course for those South African ex-pats that invaded our countryside and annoyed the hell out of dad. You used to love racing along these dips, all bare feet and reeds of limbs akimbo.

Where are you now? I can still feel you. I can still feel your heart beating in mine. I can still feel the scrape of your skin, the bumps of your wrists, the tickle of your breath against the crown of my head and the painfully thin gauze of your throat where I rubbed cream in to help the itch of mozzie bites. How are you not here? How is that possible? Where is all the space that you once occupied?

I feel as though I could move now, get up from this seat where I am sitting typing this. Break this spell and walk through the night and come across you, hunched over and smoking, staring out into nothing while the roar of the nightly insect chorus swells around you. You are stained with dust, with dirt.

Where are you? Where are you?


11.12.

11:41 PM

I stayed awake all night. I do not think I could take the suspense of going to sleep and waking in a world that does not contain you.

The world came anyway. The world came without you.

This is not my place. This is not where I belong. In the spaces no longer filled by you, I find displacement. Come home to me. Come take me home.

12.12.

11:06 AM

No. I hate this. I hate this I hate this I hate this. Please come back. Please. Oh, my boy. Please.

[Wyl Staedtler]

It's soft, the way the morning breaks here. For one swaying moment - the span of a waltz, played easy over gentle strings - the world is a kind and groggy place, coming to terms with itself. The evenings here happen fast, the sunset burning as if to consume the world and then disappearing in a blink that leaves you dizzy, groping in a blackness so thick that it rubs marks into your skin. But the mornings, oh: the mornings. They trickle over the windowsill, slippery grey fingers of dawn mist, and light follows the shadow's lead and blossoms faintly in corners that need dusting (but which will go untouched because Beauty is too busy keeping us fed and laundered to bother with something as natural and wholesome as dirt, and Jonathon will soon be out in the fields with the rest of the boys (the men), swearing at the cattle and the earth and all the things that we foolishly try to control here.) There is peace in the mornings. Peace, a commodity which does not grow here, not in this hard-packed soil, and which we savour just as much as the seething wilds around us seem to; not even the birds sing during the first, yawning stretch of a new day.

The quiet ease is what wakes me. I have long since grown used to the dawn chorus which will shortly erupt, the bass notes of the wandering Cape Turtledove and the screeching loops of sparrows, bru-brus, francolins, spurfowl and hornbills. Already there is a slow, eery note from a Go-Away-Bird, it's throaty voice whispering from the balloon vines that grow along this side of the house; too ea-rly, too ear-ly, it murmurs before settling back down. But in the absence of noise, some instinctive fear rattles in the spaces between my ribs and not even the sleeping form of my twin brother beside me can set that trembling to rest. When I sit up, shaking still from the deepness of dreams, Fitz shifts and his legs, tangled in mine, twitch. His knee hits a bruise on my shin and he winces with me, perhaps feeling the violent start that jerks at my spine.

Let him sleep. That's what dad would say, because he is supposed to say that. The therapist in Durban who is teaching us the difference between he and she, who is gradually shaping the idea in our heads that we are two separate people, encourages independence.

Because I am my father's daughter, I let Fitz sleep on. The tile floor is cold against my bare feet.

Out on the porch, Dad is sitting in one of the twisted wooden chairs that have been in this house for a thousand years. He looks exhausted, the skin around his eyes pulled taut in the direction of his dark, dark hair, so that he seems to have spent the night on a windswept beach, the salt leeching into his pores and drying him out. Beside him on the picnic table is a cup of tea, thick with milk. It's the first of many he will drink throughout the day, but this is the only one that he will truly enjoy because it is the only one that he will drink while staring out at the silver-grey swelling of the world, allowed to simply soak it all in on the sidelines, rather than being in the thick of it, plunging his hands into the earth and gasping his way through a sweat-soaked love affair with the building of something strong and ageless.

The Dogs - Laska, our German Shepherd; Mac, the little mixed terrier; Bully and Retief, the Ridgebacks - shift lazily as I step out through the hung screen and that's when Dad turns. His brown eyes are sturdy. They are sore. Across his chest is Samuel, the baby of the family, but it's the brother who was born with him who isn't there anymore that I notice more. We buried Bryan last month; two months premature, the twins weren't even supposed to live past their first week, but they proved the statistics wrong and made it as far as nine months before malaria season reared it's head. It's a miracle that even one of them survived.

"Môre, Bokkie," Dad whispers. He loosens an arm from around Samuel's sleeping form (tiny, frail limbs that are ugly and thin; he is not a cute baby, not like Sannie van Koek's little brother in Durban) and gestures me closer. I go, the cool morning air dancing around my bare legs. I lean into Dad's side. It's not soft like it used to be. He's grown thin and rigid like the wood we haul in for the oven, which is why Gran and Granddad are here, sleeping in the guest room with Oom Kent, Dad's older brother who comes every year to help with driving the cattle and re-fencing the land. They used to spend more time here at Bethel, the family farm nestled outside of Mhlambanyatsi, but since my father became a single man with six children - seven, if you still count the one he packed soil over - it's somehow become more his than anyone elses. It's appropriate. He shares a kinship with Swaziland that his older siblings, Tannie Sheralee and Oom Kent, don't; they were born in Durban and still have roots there, still have memories and friends in the beachside neighborhood where Gran and Granddad live. Dad, by comparison, came screaming into this world in the kitchen behind us, drawn out bloody and wet by Beauty. His first breath was taken here, in the dry and the dust.

(Many lifetimes later, his last will be taken here, too.)

The baby makes a soft snuffling noise because I've poked him and Dad pinches my hip.

"When the boys get back, we've got to pack the jeep," he says (in English, first, and then in Afrikaans so I will understand), referring to my older brothers Ber and Jason who are letting the cows out as they do every morning after Dad finishes milking them.

Behind me, in the kitchen, I can hear Beauty humming and the clink of earthenware dishes. There will be tea and there will be mealie pap with fresh cream, like every morning. Granddad will sigh and wish for a tomato instead, like every morning. The sameness of it all feels good this early, when Africa is unrecognizable for her stillness.

"Why?" I ask.

"We're going to visit Oom Mike."

"In Umtali?"

"Mutare," Dad corrects.

"Granddad says Umtali."

"Granddad says a lot of things. It's Mutare, now."

This is worrying. Not the name change - names mean nothing here - but the journey itself. We are not strangers to shifting suddenly. At six, I have already lived on three continents, in twice that many countries. Passports and suitcases and the leaving behind and starting anew are a second skin, as natural as inhaling, and my siblings and I can cross borders better than we can write the alphabet. Traveling is our real mother tongue, and it's this familiarity that breeds my misgiving.

Oom Mike is Michael, my father's lone younger sibling. He's lived on his own in Zimbabwe since he was eighteen, a writer for various newspapers (a profession that makes Granddad livid because it's all half-truths and sensationalism and he is a bred native, born into blood and caste systems and ready to do violence to those who try to explain it and only spit out a strip of the real story), and we have visited him a few times. There are always a few cartons of cigarettes in the barn, currency ready for such trips across the border. I remember only the semi-automatics. Granted, it's hard to forget them, even when the comfort of warm Coca Cola is given afterwards.

"Will the Army Guys be there?" I ask, my heart in my throat. Jason likes to tell stories of the Army Guys. There is always quite a lot of blood and renting apart of limbs and pocketing of bodies with Uzis.

Dad hums an absent noise of affirmation. He takes a sip of his tea, the mug resting on his bottom lip for a moment, milk beading against the scant space between his mouth and the ceramic rim.

"Dad," I demand.

He sighs. The sound scrapes out from him.

"Ja, Dizzy, but you've not got to worry," Dad says. He's looking out at the farmland, studying a distant bowing in the fence which will need to be repaired before we go. "They won't hurt us. Nothing will hurt us."

His hand, broad and cracked around the knuckles, settles over Samuel's back and the unspoken anymore rises into the air and sinks into the dark circles beneath Dad's eyes, darkening the promise there.

[Wyl Staedtler]

Line Break

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Sometimes I forget which one of us they buried. That's the tragic inconvenience of being a twin, an ever-present identity crisis that is funny until it's not. The doctors say this is normal. It's been documented, this strange and upsetting cognitive dissonance. It's more common amongst identical twins, for obvious reasons, but it seems to stagger alongside all of us survivors to some degree, sneaking up on us in lonely corners so that we're left blinking into space without so much as a warning, gaping and startled and unsure of who - of what - we are, now that we're alone. It's not surprising to me to discover that the mortality rate for surviving twins increases after the second year. We're not designed to function as halves.

There are pills for the anxiety, pills for the depression, pills for the sleeplessness and the exhaustion and the headaches and the manic energy.

But there's no pill for reconciliation. It takes time, the experts say. Let it settle.

In this house, there's only one mirror, a recent concession to my vagrant houseguest. There's no way to possibly describe the terror of peering into glass and seeing a ghost looking back. There's no way to explain how deep and unforgiving the comfort is, striking alongside my unease. I've glued a picture of you to it, now. It's the only way to stop seeing your face without having to stop seeing it. It's the only way to reassure my mind that I do in fact, for the moment, continue to exist. That I am real. That I am here.

Or maybe I'm not.

There are moments when I wake up and wonder if I am, in fact, you. Perhaps it's me lying in the earth back home, beneath the comforting weight of soil that used to stain the soles of my feet as a child. After all, you are my bones. You are the marrow and the sinew and the heartbeat of who I am and you are somewhere decomposing, becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. I starve myself because we have always done things by twos, and if you are my joints and braces, then I am yours as well. The thought that we are disappearing together makes my ability to inhale and exhale a little easier to stomach.

Still: when I look in the mirror, it's your face I see. And when I brush my brittle hair there, it's your left-handed reflection that mimics me, as you always did. When the adrenaline becomes too much, I sometimes take the comb and place it in my non-dominant hand and then I see, trapped there in the glass, that I remain present. I'm not lost entirely in you, just as you are not lost entirely in me. We are a tangled knot come halfway unpicked.

How do I live our life alone?