Alive Again Read online

  Andre Eva Bosch

  Alive Again

  There’s a place of hope & courage inside all of us

  Tafelberg

  Sometimes life is hard and the world looks dark and hostile. At those times, we often do not want to read about the true-life suffering of other people. Their struggles could open our wounds and rekindle our pain.

  Alive Again sounds like a real-life story, but it is a work of fiction. Many works of fiction have a message. A message is an insight that is revealed in a story. Some books contain “universal messages”. A universal message is an insight that touches all readers in one way or another, and which can lead to change.

  Nandi’s story contains many such universal messages, but they all combine into one single, powerful message: All of us can step out of the dead darkness of despair into the brilliant sunshine of a new life by holding on to our dreams and reaching out for help.

  In Alive Again, Nandi shows us how.

  A.E.B.

  1

  Do you know what it is like when you have a dream that you treasure above all things, only to have that dream dragged through the mud, trampled on, broken into a thousand pieces?

  I do.

  But now when I look back to when my dream turned into a nightmare, I know there is a place of hope and courage inside each one of us. We just have to find that place. And the best way to find it is to seek out the company of those who respect our dreams. Those who believe in us. Those who help us hold on to our dreams. Come what may.

  My dream of studying law after school was something I grew up with, grew right into until it became a part of me, until I could feel, see and touch it. It started when I was six years old, like this:

  My mother, Eunice Dube, worked as a cook in the boarding house of a school. The school was in Nelspruit, now called Mbombela, the capital of the province of Mpumalanga. One day a teacher at the school, Mr Khumalo, ended up next to my mother in a taxi. The taxi was heading for KaNyamazane, where I lived with my parents and two brothers, and where Mr Khumalo also lived. My mother had often seen him at school and at the taxi rank. One couldn’t help but notice Mr Khumalo. He always wore bright shirts with bold African prints – Madiba-type shirts. So of course she had noticed him, but he was a stranger to her. That day, however, sitting beside each other, Mr Khumalo and my mother began to talk. From town to KaNyamazane is a taxi drive of about thirty minutes, so they had a lot of time to get to know each other.

  My mother told him that she had a very bright little daughter. Her six-year-old Nandi was born talking. She started talking long before her friends of the same age.

  “She always asks questions, non-stop,” my mother said. Nandi never told lies to get out of trouble, and when she visited a friend and the friend secretly took sweets out of her mother’s cupboard, Nandi refused to eat the sweets. And when naughty boys beat dogs just for fun, her little girl shouted at them to stop being so bad. And when those same naughty boys teased old Joseph (the madala who was a bit mad and who always sat under the marula tree near our house), her Nandi leant her little face against the wire fence which surrounded the house and warned them that she was going to call the police, she added.

  Mr Khumalo listened with great interest, my mother told me later. And then he said, “Your Nandi should come to our school in town. It’s a good school, especially for a little girl who sounds as if she could be a good lawyer one day. Come tomorrow. I will help you with the application forms.”

  By the time my mother walked through our front door, she had made up her mind: I would attend the school in town and my brothers, Sandile and Jabu, would follow as soon as they turned seven.

  My father laughed when he heard that she was going to enrol me the following day. “Where do you think the money will come from for the taxi ride in and out of town every day? And school fees?” he asked.

  My mother, with a face like a thunderstorm just about to break over KaNyamazane, replied that she would work overtime. She would work on Saturdays too if necessary. As long as her children were going to a good school. She dared not tell him that she had been saving for years for her children’s education.

  When she tucked me in that night, she said, “Today your footpath turned towards the rising sun.” I had often heard my mother use that expression, and I didn’t understand it, but I knew it meant something good so I didn’t bother asking her where that footpath was that she was talking about.

  After a short prayer and a kiss on my forehead, she said, “Mr Khumalo says you will be a lawyer when you are big.”

  I remember asking her what a lawyer was. She said it was someone who helped helpless people. It was true, she said, that some lawyers she had heard about were dishonest and only out to make money. “But you, Nandile Dube, you will be an honest lawyer and make sure people are treated fairly and with respect.”

  I still didn’t understand what a lawyer was, but that didn’t matter. All I cared about was that I was almost seven years old and that after Christmas I would be going to school, just like the big children who walked past our house in their school uniforms early in the mornings on the way to the taxi rank. And I would be travelling to town every day in a taxi.

  Ever since that day, I never once questioned my mother and Mr Khumalo’s decision that I would be a lawyer.

  * * *

  Every morning, very early, we would all walk to the taxi rank. My mother would walk ahead and my brothers and I would follow, dressed neatly in our clean, ironed school uniforms, which my mother had bought at the second-hand shop at school. Every day my mother would look at us over her shoulder and say, “Do your best today. Listen to the teacher. Remember that knowledge makes you free.”

  And if we didn’t listen, if we were waving to our friends along the way or begging my mother to buy chips in the spaza shop or staring at a shiny new car speeding past us, my mother would wait for our distractions to pass before stopping in her tracks.

  She would turn to look at us, with her thunderstorm face.

  “Every day you get chances to learn new things. Use those chances. So that one day you will have choices. Choices which I never had.”

  When my mother was young, she was one of the best learners in her grade. It was her dream to become a teacher. But then she fell pregnant with me when she was only seventeen and she had to marry my father. My father was older and he had a good business as a tree feller, and my mother’s parents were happy to see their daughter married to a man with a small bakkie, two saws and a three-roomed brick house. But they didn’t know about his drinking, or that he beat my mother up. And they didn’t know that she got pregnant because he forced her to have sex with him. He had overpowered her and she was too weak to fight him off.

  “Your father told me he would make me pregnant, and he did. He warned me that he would make sure I did what all women were born to do: stay home to look after their husbands and children. There’s one thing you must know about your father – he means what he says. That is what makes him so dangerous,” she said to me once.

  My mother had no choice but to leave school and marry him. Before I was born she realised that my father would never pay for a good education for his children, and she knew she had to make a plan. So she made a clever plan. She liked to cook, so when I was a baby she found a job as a cook at the Themba Hospital in Kabokweni, not too far from home, knowing he would agree to it. He would have refused if she said she wanted to study again. But as long as she cooked and cleaned, he was satisfied. In that way she began to save money for our education.

  “One wrong choice can put an end to your dreams,” she always said to my brothers and me when she came home, tired from working a double shift. We would be sitting at the kitchen table doing homework. She always looked at our schoolwork o
ver our shoulders while she made supper.

  “Good work,” she would praise us with a soft, proud voice. Sometimes I saw her wipe a tear from her cheek with the corner of her apron, so quickly that my brothers would never notice. But I did.

  I loved my mother with all my heart and it hurt me to see her suffer. But I took that hurt and I did something good with it. This is what I did:

  One day I read in a magazine that we can use our biggest hurts and turn them into our biggest strengths. I wondered how I could do that. I thought about it a lot. And then, out of the blue, I knew what to do. I would use that hurt to remind me never to give up on my dream of studying law.

  I made a promise to myself that I would let nothing stand in the way of me getting the best grades I possibly could. I said, “Nandile Dube, I promise that I will never let you down. And I will do my best to make good choices.” I closed my eyes and wrote these promises in an imaginary place deep inside my heart, which I called my Place of Promises. It was a secret place where only I could go.

  “Make good choices, Nandi, and life will reward you.” How often did my mother say that to me!

  “Are you boys listening?” she would ask my brothers.

  With serious faces they would always nod. Like me, they had heard these words a hundred times. Like me, they would never dare to ignore my mother when she spoke these words.

  My mother could be soft as the fluffy, fleecy blankets she bought us with her Christmas bonus one year, but when she had her thunderstorm face on, we did what we were told.

  Even so, we were never afraid of our mother. Sure, we didn’t like it when she punished us with jobs like weeding the vegetable patch when we had been cheeky. And we complained when we had to keep our rooms clean and tidy or do the dishes at the very moment a friend arrived to play. My mother was strict, as strict as the strictest teacher at school, yet we never feared her.

  It was our father we feared. Especially when he was drunk.

  2

  For as long as I can remember, my father had got drunk over weekends. Friday and Saturday nights were the worst. He would get home late after hanging out in the shebeen. His loud voice would wake me as he drunkenly called my mother from her bed, demanding food. On really bad nights I would hear his shouting go on and on while I lay shivering in bed.

  “You’re a useless woman!” I would hear him shout on so many nights. “All you care about are your children and what they do at school. I will go to my other woman. She gives me what I want!”

  Then the sound of a kitchen chair flung against the wall and the muffled sound of my mother’s pain. On those nights I wished my father would go and live with his other woman. I wished he would drink himself to death and leave us in peace. I wanted to run down the corridor and grab my father and push him out the kitchen door into the dark night. I wanted to lock the door so that he could never, ever come into our house again. Lying there, my fists in two hard balls, I wanted to run to the kitchen to help my mother.

  But I had done it once, and it had made matters worse. My father had looked at me with his bloodshot eyes, smiled his crooked smile and said, “You think you are better than your father? You think you are going to be a lawyer one day? Girls are made to please their men. I, your father, will make sure you get married long before matric.”

  And then my father had struck out, hitting me across my head so that I fell against the kitchen table. My mother forbade me to ever run to her rescue again.

  So I would listen helplessly to my father’s cursing and shouting on those terrible nights and then, as soon as the house was quiet again and I was sure he had passed out on the couch, I would creep into my mother’s bed and lie down beside her.

  “Is there blood, Ma?” I would whisper. If she said no, there was just a swollen patch of skin on her cheek where he had hit her, I would be relieved. No sign of blood was good news to us in those days.

  “I’m scared. Scared of the Bad Boys,” I would whisper in the dark.

  My mother would stroke my head. “Always be careful,” she would say, her voice thick with fear. “And always remember never ever to walk alone, especially after dark. Bad Boys like pretty girls. But you, Nandi, are my African princess. You will have a man one day who will respect you. And who will respect your dreams.”

  * * *

  I knew I was pretty. I could see myself in the mirror, after all. I had big, brown eyes with long eyelashes. My hair was thick and braided. I had high cheekbones. My skin was smooth and shiny. I had full lips. I was tall and slim. A shop assistant once said to me that I was one of the lucky few: “You can wear any old baggy shirt and you would still look like a model,” she had said.

  I didn’t wear old baggy shirts. I didn’t have a lot of clothes, like some rich girls, but I loved wearing fashionable clothes. Who doesn’t? But whenever a Bad Boy watched me, I wished my skirt wasn’t so short. I wished I wasn’t wearing a tight-fitting top. When Bad Boys swaggered towards me in the street, whistling, calling, jeering, my palms sweated. I lowered my eyes. Struggled for breath. A brick hit me in the stomach. I made sure I got away, fast.

  Who were the Bad Boys? They were boys, my mother told me, who disrespected girls. Who forced themselves onto girls. Boys who regarded girls as objects, as things. Cheap things. Things that could be thrown away. Thrown around. They were boys who used girls to satisfy their need to feel like big, powerful men. And every generation of KaNyamazane women had stories of the Bad Boys of their time.

  Because my father had been a Bad Boy, my mother warned me against the Bad Boys of KaNyamazane from a very early age. I knew that a Bad Boy could shatter my dreams in the blink of an eye, just as my father had shattered my mother’s dream.

  And so, another promise which I kept in my heart, in my Place of Promises, was that I would never, ever be with a Bad Boy.

  My best friend at school, Maryke Malan, knew how I felt about boys. Maryke and I were exact opposites in every way. I was black, she was white. I had brown eyes, hers were green. My hair was frizzy and black and short, her hair was sleek and blond and long. I was tall and slim and never put on weight. She was short and always on a diet. I was serious; she was outgoing and a real party girl. I studied every day and my essays were always finished on time, even before time. Maryke often begged me at the last minute to help her get her work done.

  But one thing we had in common was that Maryke and I both wanted to find a Special Boy. A Special Boy was the exact opposite of a Bad Boy. We even made a list of all the things a Special Boy was, and wasn’t. I showed Maryke my list: he was good looking, kind, funny, cute, clever, friendly to my friends, exciting, and he smelt clean and fresh. He wasn’t a flirt, a bully or a boy who drank or smoked, did drugs or dagga. He wasn’t the jealous kind, and he wasn’t the type who got nasty when a girl got better maths marks than he did. He wasn’t the kind who told his girlfriend what to wear or which friends to hang out with. And he definitely was not a player who cheated and lied.

  “Your list is just the same as mine!” said Maryke. But she did have one thing I did not have on my list: he must be a good kisser.

  “You have to put it on your list, Nandi,” she teased. “It’s high time you kissed a boy.”

  I knew Maryke had kissed boys before. But I was funny that way. I believed in real love. I couldn’t understand how girls could kiss any old boy just because everyone else did it. I would keep my first kiss for a boy who was everything I dreamt of. Nothing less would do.

  But although Maryke was a kisser, she and I knew enough about HIV to know that we were not ready for anything more than kissing. Going all the way was not for us, not after all we had heard about HIV and AIDS at school.

  Maryke’s father was a doctor and he often came to school to talk to us about sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and AIDS. I liked Dr Malan. He was kind, and when my brothers or I were sick my mother always took us to see him when he consulted at the KaNyamazane Clinic on Wednesday afternoons. Between my mother and Dr Malan there was no cha
nce I would sleep with a boy. My mother’s favourite line was, “You can become a lawyer or another HIV statistic, Nandi. It’s your choice.” Dr Malan always said, “Saying no to sex is the best AIDS cure I have ever heard of. The best way to ensure that you can follow your dreams.”

  And so, when other girls spoke of going all the way with boys, I kept quiet and renewed my promise to myself, over and over again, that I would get to university and complete my law degree, come what may.

  * * *

  I loved having conversations with my favourite teacher, Mr Khumalo. Mr Khumalo was that same teacher who wore the Madiba shirts and whom my mother had met in the taxi so many years earlier, the one who said I should be a lawyer. During our conversations, he helped me decide what kind of lawyer I wanted to be one day. More than anything else, I wanted to protect women like my mother against men like my father. Mr Khumalo said it made sense – and I had hands-on experience. He said I should specialise in human rights law.

  Mr Khumalo was not only my favourite teacher, he was also one of my greatest supporters. Because we didn’t have a computer at home, I would stay after school to do homework on the computers in the IT-class, and one afternoon he suggested I have a good look at the University of the Witwatersrand website.

  “Not long before you’re in matric. Start now to focus your attention strongly on your dream. Wits has a great law faculty. Believe with passion that you will be studying there one day soon. I can see you there already, Nandi!” he said.

  At that moment there was a little flutter in my tummy, as if a soft feather was tickling me on the inside. I knew for sure in that moment that my footpath was turning towards the rising sun.

  Later that afternoon, going home in the taxi, I imagined the following scene:

  I am a qualified lawyer. In my handbag I always carry my business cards in a white-and-gold holder. Nandile Dube, Human Rights Lawyer. Each time I hand a card to someone, I want to burst with happiness.