The orthopedic surgeon hangs up the telephone long before Maki, who sits in silence, frozen in her chair. He called to announce that he had received her X-rays that afternoon, and that she would, no doubt, need to have her left knee replaced sooner rather than later. She barely got a word in. What was she to say? Just over a year ago, she underwent a knee replacement on her right leg, which she had not fully recovered from, and which had rendered her relatively inactive, at the young age of sixty. On a given day, Maki moves between a firm red leather chair and a rocking chair, each plonked in opposite corners of the lounge. From both corners, she can access over seventy-five channels, but she often switches between two, an American reality TV channel, showcasing the odd, dysfunctional, and unpleasant realities of people’s lives, and a local gospel channel.
Now on low volume, almost silent, the Soweto Gospel Choir moves their mouths to a melody. Troubled by the phone call, Maki doesn’t bother to increase the volume. She tries to get up from her chair and walk to the kitchen to boil a cup of tea, but she immediately sits back down when she hears a suspicious sound coming from her left knee. After a few seconds, Maki slowly rises from her chair again, and this is when it dawns on her that what she is hearing from her knee is not the sound of a pop, a click, or anything that could be expected from a joint, but a voice. Broken up and fragmented, but still, a voice. Over time, Maki has grown accustomed to hearing her joints creak when she walks up a set of stairs, when she simply rises from her bed or a chair, as she has now, but a voice speaking from her knee is beyond belief, and Maki drops back onto the chair. “Pieter,” she says, under her breath. Pieter is what she thinks she heard the voice say, the tongue rolled back on the r.
Since her first knee replacement, an unemployed relative has traveled twice a week from Vereeniging to Maki’s home in Diepkloof to help out with the odd task here and there and to do the ironing. They never speak for long, and when they do, their conversations are limited to the three-hour one-way journey that the relative has taken. When it occurs to Maki that her relative is due to visit her today, Maki reaches for her cell phone and messages her.
My dear, ke ya tshepa hore ha oso tlohe hahao. Ho na le ntho e etsahetseng. Ke kopa o tle ka letsatsi le leng. Tshwarelo.
Her relative immediately phones her, and when Maki doesn’t answer the call, the relative responds:
I was counting on the money I was going to make today.
Followed by:
I was already on my way.
Maki responds:
Ke kopa o ntshwarele, dear. I’ll pay you back the transport money.
The relative replies:
And the work money? Will you still pay me?
Maki does not respond to this question, and the relative calls her four times back-to-back. Then she messages Maki to say:
I need the work. You know I need the money.
Then:
What am I meant to do now?
Then:
I can’t work like this!
Finally:
What about this evening? Will you be home?
Though her relative’s persistence causes Maki stress, the repeating sound of the message alerts comforts her. The familiar crackling of the fridge in the kitchen, some chatter from outside, an aircraft flying over the house, and even the recent matter of a ringing ear (which had concerned her) now put her at ease. But she still can’t find the courage to rise from her chair again.
Maki considers who she can call about her problem. She unthinkingly taps her foot against the ground while weighing her options, but immediately stops when she hears the voice again. Startled, Maki adjusts her spectacles and examines her knees. She notices nothing out of the ordinary. Both her knees have always been many shades darker than other parts of her body (she wears pantyhose to hide them in public), and both ache, throb, and are swollen with tiredness. Maki runs her fingers over a long vertical scar from the surgery performed on her right knee and then over two dents on each side of her knee from a suction tube which was used to siphon away an infection that had formed after her knee replacement, and this prompts an idea. Maki considers calling a friend she made in the doctor’s waiting room after her first knee procedure. This is a friend Maki calls from time to time. Well, not a friend per se. She’s a 1652 straight off the boat but has become perhaps her most relevant contact. After her knee replacement, Maki’s social circle split into two: those who had undergone the surgery and therefore knew and understood, and those who hadn’t. This friend knew, and her badge was worn on her hip, shoulder, and knees. She would call to ask Maki how she was holding up with her physio exercises (there was always a slight challenge in her tone), offer helpful advice, listen to Maki’s woes, and then proceed to share a story about her journey with osteoporosis.
When Maki calls her to explain that a voice has spoken through her knee, her friend is at first silent and then replies:
“You think the knee is something to joke about?”
Maki wonders if her question is rhetorical. Her friend’s TV must be on the highest possible volume, because Maki can hear the news anchor reporting about a white boy who has been filmed urinating on a Black peer’s schoolbooks and laptop. The white student sounds apathetic and concludes it’s what they do to Black boys in the university.
“Not at all,” Maki responds.
“Look, Mags. No disrespect, but I can’t help you with that one. Auditory hallucinations are not my expertise. You’ll need a neurologist for that.”
“I understand.”
“Sure. But if I were you, I wouldn’t worry. These strange things start to happen in our minds when we begin to age. When it comes to me, for example, sometimes I wonder if I am really in my body. Has that ever happened to you?” Maki says nothing. The friend continues, “Like there are days when I am convinced that I am not really here. That I am the one who died in my sleep that night, not my late husband Ollie, and I’m a figment of his imagination.”
“Mm. You’re right. Maybe I just need to put my head down for a bit.”
“Try that and let me know how it goes, and sorry I can’t help you further . . .”
“No problem.”
“But when it comes to little arthritic noises, you know I’m your woman.”
Maki hangs up. She feels a range of emotions. Not regret or embarrassment, though those are undoubtedly there too, but rather clarity on her next course of action, and then the courage to see it through. Maki stands up from her chair. She puts her left foot in front of her right, right in front of her left, repeatedly, until she is walking. As if spools of audiotape are wound up around her joint, with each step, a set of words string together until a sentence blares out of her knee. When she takes steps backwards, the words rewind to the beginning. . . . Kleynhans Pieter of command the under were arrivals new the all [low hissing-crackling sound].[1]
In haste, she grabs her handbag and walks out the house.
It’s early summer, which makes this a surprisingly cold afternoon. The jacaranda trees are turning blue-purple now, though not where Maki walks. Greenery, too, has been racially distributed, and the sidewalk in Zone 4 is covered in a stony, yellow-brown sand from the mining dump. Maki steers clear from the busy road to avoid the chance that others will hear the voice. She walks along a secluded, decaying part of the neighborhood. She knows where she is going, though she is uncertain what she will do there. The voice from her knee, which speaks in a little more than a monotone, is familiar to her. Yes, she knows it well. It’s her ex-husband’s acquaintance from the struggle, comrade Mzikhaya Mkhabile, sharing his accounts as a political prisoner. A subject Maki is well versed in.
She met her ex-husband, Ephriam, in the early ’70s, at the Miss Soweto pageant. Maki arrived late from nursing school to support her sister, who was competing. He was sitting in the back row of the auditorium, reading a newspaper banned by the government. She sat next to him. His broad face, square-shaped nose, and thick neck reminded her of a pit bull, and occasionally he looked up to Maki to grumble about how the pageant’s judging criteria were informed by whiteness and Eurocentric beauty standards. His voice sounded angry and self-important, and she smiled courteously, nodding at his remarks while quietly cheering for her youngest sibling, the crowd favorite. Her sister modeled a white swimsuit, showing off her long legs, tiny feet, and sturdy frame. Nothing like Maki. The only feature the sisters shared was an afro.
Maki’s afro had always been the centerpiece of her face. Soft and round as a puffy cloud. But lately, it has shrunk. She doesn’t remember when the shrinking started, the way she fails to recall when her gums started receding and became tender. To perm or not to perm is a question that has occupied her mind since she entered the final third of her life. Now more than ever, Maki understands that body alterations should be considered as carefully as an artist considers the final stroke of a portrait.
Some months after the pageant, Maki met Ephriam again. She had just finished buying work shoes from ABC on Eloff Street and walked out of the store to a typical Jo’burg thunderstorm. She would have waited out the storm, but curfew for Black people was about to begin, so she started speed walking to the train station. That’s when he stopped her and offered to help carry her bags. This time, she couldn’t help but notice that he was tall, robust. He held up his umbrella to shield her from the rain the whole way to the station and assured her that she needn’t be nervous about the police presence, as long as she walked beside him. They married a week later. One month after the wedding, he was imprisoned in Pretoria Central Prison, then transferred to Robben Island, for his involvement in anti-apartheid resistance movements.
Maki crosses a large recreation ground where a small, scattered group of people stand huddled around a fire. Her eyes water, and she covers her nose as she walks through the smoke of the burnt tire, which offers them warmth. Ahead of her, a stray dog with an amputated hind leg forages for food in a heap of rubbish. Like her body, the park is in bad shape, and with each step, Maki listens more closely to comrade Mzikhaya Mkhabile. Under the guard of Kleynhans we took wheelbarrows with iron wheels and we had to dig until white sand appeared and then we had to plant . . . [the sound of the page being flipped makes some of his words hard for Maki to hear . . .] scars which turned septic as we only washed on Saturdays.
In 1980 Ephriam was released from Robben Island. He returned to their home in Johannesburg and withdrew from all political activity (to Maki’s relief). Ephriam offered Maki no information about the five years they spent apart. She relied on rumors about the island to surmise how he had come to now give the impression of a pit bull without its teeth. Ephriam spent his weekdays working in a factory, where he assembled building material along the conveyor line, and on weekends he devoted his time to building a bathroom in the house, since apartheid-era Black housing had none.
It was in 1996, two years after the country transitioned from apartheid rule, that their odd living arrangement at last drifted into something that resembled a marriage. The government had set up a commission tasked with granting amnesty to perpetrators under the regime who confessed their crimes, as well as to listen to the testimonies of those who had suffered gross violations. Ephriam rejected the commission’s mandate and did not present his accounts (which Maki still did not know) to the commission. He argued that justice was a prerequisite for reconciliation. Nevertheless, the couple listened for hours to the live hearings broadcast on national radio each day. They had been in the kitchen having afternoon tea when comrade Mzikhaya Mkhabile’s testimony began. He was giving an account of the tortures he experienced on Robben Island when the comrade fleetingly mentioned a group who had reached the island from Pretoria and worked with them in the fields. “One of the guys,” the comrade said in the makeshift courtroom, “had blisters on his hands,” and the comrade continued to explain that he had tried to help this guy but was noticed by a supervisor. Before the comrade could explain the consequences brought on by his concern for the man with blisters, Ephriam switched off the radio. Without giving Maki an explanation, he stood from the chair and ran himself a bath. Had her husband been present on that day? Maki wondered. She was cautious not to pry and kept her questions to herself, to avoid puncturing the invisible blisters she had sensed since her husband’s release from the prison. After bathing, Ephriam returned to the kitchen with a peculiar glint in his eyes and a vitality she hadn’t seen in him for sixteen years, and after that afternoon, something promising began to bloom in their marriage.
By now, Maki has been a divorcee for just under two years, and she’s long since moved from Ephriam’s matchbox-style family home to a modern yet modest two-bedroom where she spends her days alone, recovering from the surgery on her right knee, now known to her as the quiet one. Maki walks past a bench and a man experiencing houselessness peeks from behind the bench he is lying on. She wonders if he can hear the testimony too, if from where he is he can pick up the rattling of the ceiling fan in the hall the comrade spoke in, the low and distant chatter in the room, and what sounds like bangles, perhaps from someone standing close to the comrade’s microphone.
When Maki arrives at her destination, her eyes wander around the off-pink bathroom. Ephriam’s body is stretched out in the bath, and he lies under the water with his eyes shut. His right arm is bent so his fingers can hold his nostrils shut. Maki notices the new bath-mat set and the curtains with matching bathroom accessories. Otherwise, everything has remained the same as when she had lived with him: the mold on the walls, several tubes of half-used toothpaste, the cardboard inners of toilet rolls scattered on the shelf, and the cassette player droning familiar words from the tape Ephriam habitually plays back while he bathes. For almost ten years, Maki had been involved in Ephriam’s bathing rituals. She would sit beside him while he bathed and listen to the hearing where his comrade recounted the monstrous treatment he received at the hands of the prison warders.
Falling back into her old routine, Maki gently closes the toilet lid and sits beside him. She lowers the volume on the cassette player by a notch. Mzikhaya Mkhabile continues, We took our wheelbarrows and our spades and we worked there. We were beaten while we were working. We came back in the late afternoon and the following day it was back to work again. A group came from Pretoria who were also deployed under this same boss and we told them that this place is only for tough guys not just for the ordinary person as it’s very difficult to work here. One of the guys had blisters on his hands and I tried to help him but unfortunately I was noticed by the supervisors who were with us. I was busy pushing the wheelbarrow and I heard them saying here he is. They beat me on my head with a big knopkierrie[2]—
Speaking of knobkerries, Maki suddenly wishes to interrupt. She wants to talk about herself. About a fall which left her with a large knob on her head. It was the size of a fist—or a tennis ball. Just above her right brow. It was all unexpected. She’d walked down that step before. Of course she had. It was outside the kitchen of her new home. Her new home, only six blocks away from you. She was carrying the rubbish out. Wasn’t in a rush or anything. Shoes were solid. Comfortable. Flat. The ones she’d worn during her nursing days. And in a flash, she lay on her stomach on the concrete ground. She shouted for help. She called for him, too. For hours, she prayed that someone would find her to lift her from the ground. She waited. And waited. No one came. Then, finally, she got the attention of the angels. She rose like the souls of believers will on the day of the rapture. The walk to the clinic wasn’t long. And a young off-duty policeman offered her a lift. “I’m not sure the clinic can help you with that, Ma,” he had said. The hospital doors flung open the way the gates of heaven do. They must have, she thought, recognized her as a victim of some horrific event. The injection in her forehead had been terribly sore, and the doctor had promised to stitch her up beautifully. But she didn’t think he did a good job. No.
Sunshine pours into the bathroom and lights the water. Maki feels the urge to stir her finger in it to check the temperature. The impulse first startles her, then repulses her, and she wonders if she should leave before Ephriam notices her. She briefly catches the reflection of her thinning hair in the water. The intervening years have made Ephriam unrecognizable too, and what appears to be boils are scattered on his jawline. From her point of view, his belly looks like a piece of land floating in the water, an island. The tip of his penis, a boat sailing the calm waves of a foamy, milk-colored, and Dettol-scented ocean.
Pieter Kleynhans handcuffed me. They dug a grave and with my hands behind my back they put me in this grave with only my head sticking—
Maki presses the stop button. The player ejects the tape, and the cassette door opens. She knows what follows in the testimony. She doesn’t have the liver to hear it. At the silence in the room, Ephriam sits up and opens his eyes. The water spills over the lip of the bathtub onto Maki’s feet, and she feels alive. She then notices that her handbag is still slung over her shoulders, so she removes it and places it on her lap.
Ephriam’s not startled by Maki’s presence. At first, his expression is serious, and then he half grins. Not in a way that expresses remembrance or affection. Not even in a sexual way. No, he grins in a self-satisfied way, as if a point has been proven. He says nothing to her and reaches for the empty yogurt container with which he pours water over his arms, back, and chest repeatedly and deliberately. Maki quietly watches on.
For years after that afternoon when they listened to the radio broadcast in their kitchen, they had a delightful companionship. When they got up in the morning, Ephriam would pack Maki’s lunch and drive her to the clinic where she worked as a nurse at the pediatric unit. He was promoted to manager in the factory, where he was paid a little better. He used to fetch her from work, and they would talk about their day’s events in the traffic. He enjoyed listening to talk radio in the background; she preferred silence. He cooked, and she washed, dried, and packed the dishes. She hung the washing, and he ironed, folded, and put it away. Saturdays were devoted to the garden. He would mow the lawn and water the plants while she weeded and pruned the shrubs. He always wore protective gloves. She much preferred to dig her bare hands into the ground. At lunch, they would braai fish using an apricot jam marinade and enjoy the view of the blossoming growing vygies, roses, and birds-of-paradise. In the evening, they bathed together. He would help her remove the splinters in her hands, clean the earth collected under her fingernails, and massage oil on her back, legs, and arms. Over time, this warm and sensual ritual no longer needed to end with sex.
Gradually, it all ended. It started one afternoon in the garden when Ephriam was walking from one side to another; he tripped over a flowerpot and got minor cuts on the palms of his hand. He began to worry that it would develop an infection and that he would become severely ill. There were alcohol-free wipes and bandages in the bathroom cabinet, but to him, it seemed the most sensible thing to do was to take a bath. Over time, he avoided the garden and its tools to prevent injury and bathed several times a day to ward off a skin infection while listening to the testimony recording he had acquired. Like the Earth orbits the Sun, for ten years, the strength and gravity of his condition kept Maki in orbit. It was terrible that the bathing had disrupted his life. It was sorrowful that he preferred divorce over getting the help he needed.
Ephriam finally pulls out the bath plug. He will, Maki thinks to herself as she watches the water drain, only clean the ring in the bathtub right before his next bath. She calls to mind the scenario that will soon play out: just after putting on his pajamas, he will get to the edge of hysteria about an unbearable sensation and will need to wash the “funny feeling” from his skin again. Ephriam climbs out of the bathtub, and that is Maki’s cue to leave. She thrusts herself from the toilet lid she has been sitting on, managing not to embarrass herself despite her knees giving in. Maki’s eyes wander the bathroom walls for her crutch, and it occurs to her that she walked the distance to his house without it. She carefully maneuvers around his body while he wraps a towel around his waist then rubs aqueous cream on his arms. It’s the only lotion that doesn’t cause his eczema to flare up. Ephriam’s eyes drift over the empty bath and then return to her. His face is now hard. Though Maki knows this expression, she’s never understood it. He wore it after he’d climaxed too.
Maki drags her legs out of the house, across the street, and towards the traffic lights. The knee that has been replaced is stiff and does not bend, and her other knee makes its usual crunching sound, which is what made her get it examined in the first place. The traffic light she waits at has been dysfunctional for as long as she can remember, the green light signaling pedestrians to cross while the red light flashes. While waiting for the traffic to slow down so she can cross, Maki feels weighed down by her emotions. It isn’t the heaviness of regret or self-loathing she feels; it isn’t even the disappointment that he didn’t notice the scar above her eyebrow, but rather an anticipatory dread to come up against the thing that might, again, draw her back to him; the weight of a blanket, the unfinished food on her dinner plate, the cold chill in the night air, the splendor of the color red, the quiet uncertainty of heaven and hell, the fear of dying in bed alone, the hours in the day, the directions north and south, the months April and May . . .
[1] See Human Rights Violation Hearings, Day 3, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996) (testimony of Mzikhaya Mkhabile). Accessed through “Truth Commission Special Report,” South African History Archives, https://sabctrc.saha.org.za/hearing.php?id=56160.
[2] This is the spelling from the official transcript. While engaging with the archives I have encountered other errors such as cassettes which are inaccurately or inadequately marked, transcripts which are incomprehensible, inconsistencies in the spelling of people’s names, and other issues. This has led me to think that the “fragility” and “formal weakness” sociolinguist Christine Anthonissen reflects upon in “On Interpreting the Interpreter: Experiences of Language Practitioners Mediating for the TRC” in Journal for Multicultural Discourses 3 (December 2018): 165–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/17447140802376284. The “poor spelling and punctuations” in the transcripts can be extended to all the Truth and Reconciliation Committee staff involved in the archiving process; the errors may be a trauma response from all who engaged with the material in real time.
