Sawubona

“In the course of your life,” intoned the teacher, “you will be faced with trials. We all are. Never, ever, look down in the face of adversity, children. Look into the eyes of your challenges, smile in the face of its roaring. Hold your head high and have hope. With hope, you will have strength. With strength you will overcome.”

The roof fan struggled gamely to circulate the sluggish hot air around the schoolroom as the youngsters sat spellbound, listening to the man speaking. Not one of them moved, each one almost afraid to breathe. The teacher paused. His dark brown skin shone with sweat, and he reached up and wiped a drop of it from his broad nose.

“And never, ever, underestimate the power of friendship,” he continued. He closed a fist over his chest. “Learn early in life that with love in your heart, and not hatred, your life will be coloured brightly, your path will be smooth. Hold fast onto the love of a friend, for that is a love and a strength that will last a lifetime. There is value only in a friend’s love, there is no value in hatred and conflict.”

He gazed into the earnest eyes of the children before him as he spoke. “Never disregard the small things in your life. Something such as a simple pair of shoes can alter the course of your life, as these did mine.”

Robert Harrison now lived in a mostly roofless room in a derelict building in Selby in the industrial south of Johannesburg and had done so for nearly two years. These were his paltry possessions: He owned a coir mattress that he had retrieved from a garbage site, a threadbare blanket, a deck chair with a torn seat, an aluminium pot, a tin plate, a kettle, a mug, a spoon, two candles, and a brass container with seventy rand in it.

And the last of his possessions, his most precious perhaps, was a small carved wooden heart that he always kept in the pocket of his overcoat. He wore the coat almost all the time, even in the heat of the day, because he knew that a coat left down was a coat that would be stolen. On the very hottest days, when he folded it and carried it under his arm, he always moved the heart to the pocket of his jeans first. Always. The coat could be replaced, eventually and with some luck. The heart could not. These were his possessions. This was his world.

Robert had a routine. This was important to him, more important than he could easily have explained to anyone. He felt that routine was a shape, something to hold onto, and holding onto something was the difference between a life, however diminished his was, and no life at all.

He always woke at first light. This was not a conscious decision so much as a fact of his existence; there was no way to sleep past first light in a mostly roofless building, the morning sky arrived whether he wanted it to or not, grey at first and then pink and then a hard bright blue. He lay on the coir mattress for a few minutes and looked up at that sky and he tried to locate, each morning, something to be grateful for.

Some mornings it was easy. The sky itself, on a good morning, was enough to be grateful for. The stillness of the city at that hour, before it woke up, was also enough. The fact of being alive was certainly enough. On some mornings it was very hard indeed, though, and on those mornings he settled for the most basic thing available to him, which was that he was warm, or sheltered, or that yesterday he had eaten, or that the cut on his knee was healing. It didn’t matter what it was, really. The point, he had decided, was not the thing itself. It was the looking for it. The act of looking upward and forward rather than down.

Then he would get up.

The lines of traffic snaked slowly into the city, the smell of exhaust fumes acrid in the morning air. Bumper to bumper they moved, the occupants each cocooned in their own world, busy with their own thoughts.

“Oh, no, Dad!” she exclaimed. “Not now, please!” She looked towards the man shuffling along the pavement, eyes down as he did his best to avoid the people rushing past him. He lifted his head as Julie’s car reached him, and for a moment their eyes locked.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Julie forced her eyes forward and gritted her teeth. “Shit!”

The man paused and turned to watch the car go by. Tears formed in his grey-blue eyes as he reached into his grubby overcoat and pulled out a small, carved wooden heart. He fingered it gently. “Hello Jules,” he murmured.

She did not look in the mirror again.

She had learned over the last ten years not to. You looked and there he was, a damaged, diminished man receding from view, and then you carried that memory with you for the rest of the day, into the courtroom, into the meetings, into the quiet of the evening at home.

It was not that she didn’t love him. That was the part she could never explain to anyone. Of course she loved him, he was her father. She had spent her childhood years watching him move through the world with his broad hands and his quiet competence and his absolute belief, when he was sober, that anything broken could be made good, and she had believed it too. He was her father.

Robert paused, then reached over to his stock of supplies and opened his food bag, taking out the last piece of stale bread. He contemplated it for a moment, and then, looking over at Sipho, he stretched out his hand, offering the bread to the boy.

“I was on my way to get more bread. You hungry? You look hungry. You want this? Bread, you want it? You can have it.”

Sipho’s dark brown eyes were glued to the bread.

“Take it,” continued Robert. “Come man, you know you want it. Eat, Sipho. Come on. It’s OK.”

The young boy reached out warily and took the crust of bread. In a moment it was in his mouth, wolfing it down.

“There you go. Go for it man,” he said. “Hey, it’s not cordon bleu, I know, but still. I used to bake bread you know. I was a baker. I tell you that already? I was a baker. Of course I did.” He glanced at Sipho. “I was lots of things, Sipho my man. Lots of things. Still am lots of things I suppose. But different things now. Bad things, too. I wasn’t a bad person though, Sipho, you know? I was a good person, just weak. Spirit is willing but flesh is weak, all of that stuff. Weak.” He paused. “Hey Sipho, don’t talk so much, man, I can’t get a word in edge-ways.” He paused and then smiled. “That was a joke, OK. A mukiwa joke.”

Sipho gazed silently at him and swallowed the last of the bread.

“So, welcome to my place. Welcome to my home.” He gestured around him. “It’s not much, but beggars and choosers, you know?” He laughed. “Won’t be here forever, you know. This won’t last forever, I mean. Me, here. I’ll go back. One day, I’ll go back. To my daughter, you know? I have a daughter. Not young like you. Older. She’s twenty-eight. But beautiful. Like you, Sipho, beautiful! I’ll go home. That’s my dream, Sipho, I dream about that. Going home. To my daughter. To my bakery.”