Chapter 1
The shirt was still folded the way he had folded it.
That was the thing. She had expected to find the flat wrong; disordered, hollowed out, already becoming a place that didn’t know him. Instead everything was where he had left it. His shoes beneath the bed, heels together as though awaiting inspection. His towel hung straight on its hook, still slightly damp from a shower he had taken four days ago and would not take again. On the bathroom shelf, his razor and his toothbrush and a prescription he had never collected, standing in a cluster like people who hadn’t heard the news.
Rutendo stood in the middle of the bedroom and understood that the flat was not emptied. It was paused.
She started with the wardrobe.
She had no system, at first. She opened the door and looked at the line of his shirts; button-down, button-down, the one with the torn pocket she had meant to mend, and then she began. One at a time. She pressed each shirt flat before she folded it, smoothing the fabric the way she might smooth a tablecloth before company arrived, and she worked slowly, taking each one from the hanger with the same motion, left hand to collar, right hand to hem, a fold down the centre and then in thirds, the way her own mother had shown her, in a bedroom nothing like this one.
She did not think about Simba. She thought about the folding.
In the corner of the wardrobe she found a belt she didn’t recognise. Dark brown leather, still coiled in its shape. She turned it over in her hands. The buckle was brass, beginning to tarnish. She couldn’t remember him wearing it. Couldn’t place when he might have bought it. It occurred to her that there were things about her husband that she did not know, ordinary unremarkable things, and that she would now never learn them, and she stood very still for a moment with the belt in both hands.
Then she put it in the box.
The flat was on the seventh floor of a building in Bertrams, east of the CBD. From the window of the small lounge you could see a water tower and, beyond it, a wedge of sky that changed colour over the course of the day in ways Rutendo had found herself noticing more since the death. She didn’t know what to call it. Since the death seemed right. Since Simba died felt too direct, too close. It had the shape of a name she wasn’t ready to say in that sentence.
They had lived here for three years. She had come to Johannesburg for him, with him, and had arranged her sense of direction around his presence so completely that she could not have said, with certainty, which direction was north.
She knew the flat. She knew the way the bathroom tap ran cold for thirty seconds before the hot water arrived. She knew which floorboard near the kitchen door was loose, and the sound it made, a small complaint when you stepped on it wrong. She knew where the light fell on Sunday mornings, a long panel of it that crossed the kitchen table and made the mugs look like an advertisement for themselves.
She did not know, yet, what she would do.
Naomi arrived at half past two.
Rutendo heard the knock and knew it before she opened the door. Knew the particular patience of it, three strikes and then nothing, no second attempt, because Naomi had never in her life needed to knock twice. She was standing in the corridor with a small bag over her shoulder and her hands quiet at her sides, and she looked at Rutendo the way you look at someone after a long journey: with the specific tiredness of a person who has been moving toward something and has now arrived and is not certain they were right to come.
’Mwanangu,’ she said. My child.
Rutendo stepped back to let her in.
They made tea without discussing it. That was something Naomi had brought from home; the belief that a cup of tea was not hospitality so much as it was protocol, a means of giving the hands something honest to do while the mind prepared itself. Rutendo filled the kettle. Naomi stood at the window with her coat still on and looked at the water tower.
‘You are packing,’ Naomi said. She had seen the boxes in the bedroom when she passed.
‘Some things.’
‘The landlord?’
‘End of the month.’
Naomi turned from the window. In the flat’s particular afternoon light she looked older than Rutendo had expected, or perhaps Rutendo had not looked carefully in some time. The grief had done something to her face. Not the way grief usually aged people, with creases and hollows, but something more complete, as though it had simply revised her, redrawn the lines by which her expression organised itself.
The kettle clicked. Rutendo poured.
They sat at the kitchen table with their tea. Outside, a taxi horn. A child’s voice, far below, carrying the bright edge of an argument.
‘The visa,’ Naomi said. ‘What happens to it now?’
Rutendo wrapped both hands around her mug. The ceramic was still too hot, and she held it anyway.
’It was dependent on Simba’s work permit.’
‘And his work permit —’
‘Ends with him.’
Naomi looked at her hands. She had large hands, Naomi. A farmer’s hands from a life that had long since ended, but the hands had not forgotten. She turned her wedding ring once, the habit of years.
‘Then you have thirty days.’
‘Something like that.’
A silence. Not uncomfortable exactly; more the kind of silence that accumulates around the things both people already know but have not yet agreed to say. Rutendo watched a shadow from the water tower move by degrees across the window. She thought about thirty days in the way she had been thinking about it for a week: not as a crisis but as a fact, the way a wall is a fact, the way the loose floorboard is a fact.
‘Come home.’ Naomi said it quietly, without lifting her eyes from the table. As though she had been rehearsing it and had decided, at the last, that the quiet version was more honest.
‘To Zimbabwe.’
‘To your people. To what you know.’
Rutendo said nothing. In the bedroom, the boxes stood open with their folded contents. She had been at this since seven in the morning, and she was aware that what she had accomplished amounted to less than it looked, that she had folded things carefully rather than made any decision, and that there was a difference.
‘Your family would receive you,’ Naomi continued. ’Your aunt in Bulawayo. It is not a failure, Rutendo. There is no failure in returning.’
The aunt in Bulawayo. Rutendo thought of her. The spare bedroom, the evangelical church on Sundays, the questions that would come with the kindness. The way she would be looked at, there. The particular tenderness of a community that has watched you leave and then watched you come back with less than you left with.
‘And you?’ Rutendo said. ‘What will you do?’
Now Naomi looked up.
‘I am going back to Limpopo. Isaac’s people are still there. There is the plot. It is small, but it is something. I will manage.’
‘Alone.’
‘I have been alone before.’ Naomi said it without self-pity, which was almost worse. ‘I know how.’
Rutendo looked at her: this woman who had raised Simba, who had prayed over their wedding with hands on both their heads, who had sent dried fish and groundnuts and a hand-written note to their flat every three months without fail for three years. Who was sitting now at this table as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world to be telling her daughter-in-law to leave.
As though she had decided, in her grief, that releasing people was a kind of love.
After Naomi left, Rutendo washed both mugs.
She stood at the sink and washed them carefully, the way she washed everything, her hands moving in the water with deliberate attention. The soap made the mug squeak. The water ran clean. She placed them both on the rack and did not look up at the window or the water tower or the wedge of sky beyond it.
She thought about the aunt in Bulawayo.
She thought about the spare bedroom. The church on Sundays. The eyes that would measure the distance between who she had been and who she was now and find in it the confirmation of something they had always privately feared; that the city was not for women like her, that marriage to a man from Johannesburg had always been a flight of ambition, that here she was now, returned, and did the falling prove the height of the climb or only its foolishness?
She thought about Naomi on a bus to Limpopo. Alone.
She turned off the tap.
In the bedroom, one of the folded shirts had shifted when she wasn’t looking. It had slipped from its careful position and lay slightly crumpled at the edge of the pile. She crossed the room and refolded it. The fabric was soft from washing. It smelled, still, faintly, of him. She pressed the fold flat with the side of her hand and set it back with the others.
She stood there for a moment with her hand on the stack of shirts.
The flat was quiet. Outside, the sky over the water tower had gone to the colour of ash, the long last grey of a Johannesburg winter afternoon. Somewhere below a door slammed and then nothing. She could hear her own breathing. She could hear the particular quality of silence that filled a space when someone was absent from it. Not empty, she thought. Not empty. Something else. Something that had a shape, that pressed against the walls from the inside.
Thirty days.
She looked at Naomi’s chair. She looked at the door. She looked at the boxes she had packed so carefully with his folded things and thought, not for the first time, but for the first time clearly, that she did not know what returning meant. Whether it was a direction or a surrender. Whether home was a place you left and could recover, like something mislaid, or a thing that was made and remade in the living of it, and could therefore be made somewhere new.
She did not know yet.
But she knew what she was not going to do.
She took the shirt from the top of the pile and began, again, to fold.
