Note: If, by chance, you have not read the previous inserts of Fikile’s Letter click here

Let me begin by saying that I was not particularly shaken by her death. When she died I was where I always am when things aren’t going too well. Where I am now. Alone, in my study with the lights on or off. When they told me she was gone I never cried. I never cried while rushing to Soweto to see her cold lifeless body. I never cried when they came to take her away and there were no tears in my eyes when I peered through the glass of her casket on the morning of the funeral to see her face one last time. When all around me were grieving in all the ways I cannot bring myself to understand I remember feeling nothing but an unshakeable sensation of peace and serenity that I will not forget anytime soon. I remember looking down into her grave as the soil rose closer and closer to the surface with every shovel full of sand thrown into the pit sealing her away from the light of the world and sealing a part of me down in that box with her.  I was not particularly shaken by her death, but I remember wishing I was.

After the wedding Nontobeko and I started our new life together in a penthouse we received as a wedding present from my father. He and I don’t always see eye to eye but he took enormous pride in telling the world that his son was getting married. Embracing me in a way I was not too familiar with when I first told him. Kissing me on the forehead like a four year old child and saying “this is my son!” repeating the statement as though to remind himself that I am indeed his son. Our relationship had not been very stable and even his new wife who had more in common with Nontobeko and I knew very little of me and had not even spoken to me at their wedding. Not that I had wanted to speak to her. As Nontobeko and I started our new life together I had taken a vow to slow down and enjoy the luxuries of my life more. I spent my nights at home in bed with my wife laughing about politics and how nobody should trust the president. I spent weekends following her around all her favourite malls that I could have sworn kept their doors open from the amounts of money she spent on clothing and the little fairy figurines she had started collecting just before we moved into the penthouse. She watched me read my books on Sunday mornings as if I was her favourite character on one of the reality TV shows she would watch sometimes. On week days we both had fairly demanding schedules but we always managed to find time for calls filled with sentences like “What do you want for dinner tonight?” “What did they do wrong this time?” and “I’ll be home early”. Life was good.

Although I wasn’t living there anymore I still maintained the house in Rosebank and a lot of my mail still went to that address. I reminded myself to change it all the time but never really got around to doing it. We had moved but I had not left either one of our maids without a job. One of them came in to work at the penthouse and the other was responsible for keeping the Rosebank home clean and tidy. Because I trusted her more, Lesedi was the one I asked to stay at the old house. She did a good job of everything, even watered the garden even though the sprinkler system worked just fine and the gardener came to do his job twice a week.

I have always struggled with sleep and the last couple of months in the penthouse have been particularly hard on my sleeping pattern. I often got out of bed to go watch the news in the living area. It bothered Nonto at first, thinking that she was somehow responsible, but after I assured her it had nothing to do with her and that I was perfectly happy with her she made peace with it and it became as much a part of our lives as the porcelain fairies carefully placed around the house. I left Nonto in bed early one morning after having an unpleasant dream. She always seemed so peaceful that I didn’t want to risk waking her. I put on a gown, grabbed a set of car keys silently and made my way down to the parking lot. Even though I had my own access card I always stopped for brief exchanges with the security guards at the door. Vusi and Mandla guarded the day while Samuel and Tshepo had the night watch. Since I was leaving the building so early in the morning I got to the lobby as they were switching shifts. “Where are you off to so early in the morning on a Saturday?” I heard Vusi ask in a friendly and familiar voice. “Just going to check the mail at the other house. How are the kids?” I responded with a casual smile hardly waiting for a response. I left and got into the car, taking a slow drive to the house and enjoying the silence of the morning accompanied by the subtle humming of the engine. I called Lesedi a few minutes before arriving to make sure my presence didn’t alarm her. She was waiting for me outside when I got there.

“I was beginning to think you were getting ready to sell the place the way you hardly visit anymore” I laughed and smiled because she knew I could never sell this house. She knew that I always had every intention of moving back here in a few years.  We walked together towards the house making jokes about how marriage can change a man for better or for worse and how happy she was that it seemed to be changing me for the better. “You have not once told me about work or some new business venture since she came back into your life. It makes me happy to see you happy.” As I sat in the kitchen going through the mail Lesedi made me breakfast and a good cup of coffee, she could tell I hadn’t slept very well but didn’t ask me too many questions about it. She knows me well enough to know when a question is worth asking, and better still she knows the type of questions I would consider worth answering. “Do you remember the phone calls I was telling you about last week? The ones I kept missing. I managed to answer one yesterday” I nodded giving her the go ahead to tell me who had been calling. “It was your uncle, he said his name was…” I stopped her immediately “I don’t have any uncles, my father has no brothers… or sisters for that matter” she continued “He said his name was David. Your father may be only child, but your mother is not” the coffee burnt my tongue “My mother? What mother” I said nonchalantly. “You should call him back and hear what he has to say. It sounded urgent.  I took down his number.” She handed me the electricity bill she had scribbled his number onto. I put it at the bottom of the pile and finished my breakfast slowly. “Lesedi, thanks for breakfast. Everything here seems to be in order. I’ll see you soon. I’m sure my wife is starting to wonder where I’ve disappeared to. I’ll pass on your regards.” I stood up, deliberately forgetting a few letters, among them the electric bill with the numbers scribbled on its back. I had no interest in dealing with any old wounds. I had been through enough, seen enough and known enough pain. I had enough scars. This was my time to be happy.

When I got back to the penthouse Nontobeko was up and getting ready to go for a run. She had waited for me since we usually go together but she could see I wasn’t in the mood to run that morning. “I’ll be back in an hour” she said while planting a kiss on my cheek before dashing out. All I wanted to do was sleep. I went back to our room. The bed had already been made and I felt a slight tinge of guilt for throwing myself onto the pillows like a corpse. A tired and sleep deprived corpse. The guilt was short-lived, cushioned by the scent of Nonto’s hair on the pillow covers and sheets.  Lying there on my back, facing the ceiling. I closed my eyes to steal a few minutes of sleep before she came back so we could decide on what to get up to. As I began to feel myself drifting away I thought about the future and the dreams I still had. Dreams of starting a family, retiring young and traveling the world without a care in it. I thought about holding Nonto’s hand in all the different cities of the world finding new ways to tell her how much I loved her. I saw vivid images of a little girl with my nose, Nonto’s eyes and heaven’s toothless smile. With my eyes closed I smiled at the ceiling. Before finally falling into well-deserved sleep.

Let me not deceive you into believing everything between Nonto and I was perfect. An Ideal such as the perfect relationship or marriage is not one I would encourage anyone to buy into. Nonto often felt that I was not affectionate enough and even though she has always known how immeasurable my love for her is, she often wished that I was more expressive. I didn’t flood her ears with “I love you”s first thing in the morning and our chat history had no “I miss you” texts jumping out at anyone bold enough to scroll through it. I often felt that she was too extravagant and that her expensive porcelain fairies with their pale pointed ears and insincere moulded smiles and eyes that stare piercingly into the abys were a waste of perfectly fine Saturday afternoons. I complained that we ate out to much, she complained that we didn’t go out enough, but I never had a shred of doubt in my heart about her love for me. In all the things we disagreed on we always managed to find a healthy compromise that kept us both happy. I would show my love in gestures and tried to maintain a good frequency in my expression of it in words. She exercised some restraint regarding how much money she spent on fairies and clothing. I cooked from time to time to keep us in on the nights I didn’t feel like eating out and we went out to see art exhibitions, plays, movies or just to have dinner at least once a week. All these things we could find a way to reach a harmonious consensus to, but for the life of us we could not agree on whether or not to have children.

I was generally the cynic between us but on matters of parenthood her cynicism shrunk mine down to a soft and subtle infantile cry. Nonto had never known her father and lost her mother during childbirth. Although her grandmother had cared for her deeply and sincerely that care was not sufficient enough to mask the pain of having been rendered half an orphan before birth and made a complete orphan just after her first cries and gasps for air. Having been raised by an emotionally absent father and an entirely absent mother my upbringing was not ideal either and it brought her no closer to anything resembling solace on the matter. Compromising on something like this is not as simple as it is in other cases. Although King Solomon may have approved, we couldn’t very well cut a child in half and make do with that. Not while maintaining a certain degree of sanity. We went back and forth many times, each time reaching a lovers’ stalemate.

When she returned from her run she could see I still wasn’t in good spirits and pestered me into telling her what was on my mind. I chose not to tell her the details of my dream but I did tell her about David and my mother. She didn’t speak much after hearing what I had to tell her but I could tell she was upset that I hadn’t told her immediately after finding out. It didn’t seem like she would hold it against me for long so I put her subtle anger aside. “We should shower” was the first thing she said to me after I told her. Before I could ask her why, she walked towards the bathroom and spoke again as she threw her training top into the laundry basket. “We’re going to Soweto”.