The Night of Shifting Sands
Lisa-Anne Julien
That night I was at my retreat. The place where contemporary women talk freely about love and relationships. (Ok, ok, sex and the inappropriate men we are having it with). Our kids and the teachers who hate them. Home renovations. The unending grind and occasional promotion that sums up employment. The maids and what they’re stealing (yes, try living in the suburbs of post-apartheid Johannesburg and avoiding that conversation). And, despite every effort, politics.
It was book club night.
Look, I won’t lie. We were and still are an under-achieving bunch that eventually gets around to talking about the book, although a lot of wine-label bottle reading gets done first. I can’t, in the last eleven years, recall an instance where we’ve all read the selected book to the end. The best we often hope for is that at least one person got to the end in order to tell the rest of us what happened. And that another reached the half way point, so that at least some degree of benignly antagonistic dialogue could happen. The rest of us normally pipe in, quite garrulously I might add, about what we think the book is about, what it perhaps should be about, and any other books by the author we knew about. No super avid reader is ever welcomed into the book club - what we lack in attention span we make up for with an acutely developed sense of shame.
That night, the five of us were spread out in between the open plan kitchen and eclectic living room in Aura’s Johannesburg home. A photo of her austere Chilean grandparents gazed down on us, sandwiched between an oil-on-canvas jazz scene in a township tavern and a framed sketch clearly intended to honour Frida Kahlo. Aura’s two gigantic Rhodesian ridgebacks moved easily between us and a couple of standing figurines, black men carved out of wood with colourful jackets and suffocating ties painted on, giving them a persona that stood in limbo between African wisdom and colonial comfort. The dogs were frightful to anyone seeing them for the first time, bounding towards you with such enthusiasm you knew they were clueless about the meaning of personal space. But it was easy to see they were harmless giants, imbibing none of the revolutionary fervour bound up in their names - Simón and Fidel.
I was catching up with Zethu and Mariama in the kitchen, picking at the corn chips about to go onto the table. Aura was leaning over the heavy oak table she’d so often described as too dark and oppressive for the carnival of tastes that was her home, laying down forks with symmetrical attention. Claudia was on the phone, probably chatting to her partner and asking if their one-year old son was managing to get to sleep without her.
All at once, the room looked fuller, darker, and it wasn’t the oak. Some kind of additional life came upon the space. It happened slowly but at the same time, immediately, like those wildlife documentaries where the sunset, with the aid of technology, accelerates over a savannah and within a few seconds, night appears.
In the time it took a corn chip to fight its way down my suddenly dried throat, a new reality was upon us.
Aura sat down very slowly, carefully, as though she didn’t want her actions to be construed as anything but her about to sit down. She looked at me, or maybe she was just looking beyond me. It’s finally here, her look said, did we think we could outrun it forever?
Thinking about it now - yes. Some of us did. The ones who lived middle-class lives in a steady, low-level state of anxiety about crime. It had become normal. Like that quiet hum of an old fridge or the staccato hiss of a florescent ceiling light we no longer notice. But we didn’t ever think it was going to go beyond that. We’d convinced ourselves that the constant state of fearful anticipation about crime in South Africa was crime enough.
Two men were beside Aura. They were in. In our space. Our stupid, sacred space. They strutted around as though to occupy the room and all its crevices with their scent, their beingness.
A short one approached me. As I think about it now, he was the short one. But at the time I had no idea of the number of men in the house far more for height differences among them. He wore something over his face that looked like a worn, grey carpet where slits for eyes were cut out. He held a gun in his left hand.
Something about it didn’t look real.
No, not that it didn’t look real. It didn’t look as though it worked, as though it could fire.
Maybe I was expecting a real gun to have a weight, a heaviness that distorts the hand that’s holding it. Unless, of course, that hand is familiar with that gun. But there was something about the little body shuffling towards us with a mask so make-shift and theatrical, that made it hard to believe he’d warmed to the gun. Or it to him.
But let’s be clear – I don’t know the first fucking thing about guns.
“What’s this then?” Zethu asked, reaching for a handful of chips. “Is someone putting on a play?”
Yes, such was the level of incredulity before us.
“We’re being robbed,” I said softly, touching her shoulder to move her towards the dining table where the men were rounding everyone up. “Act accordingly.”
When we all got to the table we all looked at each other but I’m not sure we saw each other. Sure, our eyes connected for a brief second to make sure we were all understanding the same thing - yeah, I see the gun too, and the knife and the screwdriver, our looks said. But I knew in our own way, we were all looking beyond what was in front of us, zooming ahead like laser vision to our loved ones, safe and warm, in a place that wasn’t this.
Would we see them again?
I looked up at one of them, the tallest of the group, the one who gave orders to the other men, not to us. In fact, to us, his voice was measured, and dare I say, gentle.
“Don’t look at us. Sit down. Hands on the table. Close your eyes.”
Another voice said, “How many people in the house? Where are your husbands?”
I wondered, in such a situation, what relationship status would be a guaranteed get-out-of-potentially-fatal-robbery free card. Surely, if they thought we had men in our lives they would less inclined to hurt us? Surely, if we said there was no-one else in the house but that our husbands were coming to collect us soon this would dramatically reduce their timeline for-
“My father’s in the bedroom,” Aura’s voice cut through my thoughts. “He’s old. Please, please don’t hurt him.”
Perhaps with my eyes closed my senses were in a state of clumsiness. Or maybe the opposite was true - perhaps my ears were working overtime because Aura’s voice, with its cracks and pleading undertones, clearly barrelled through my skin and occupied bits of my insides.
Aura’s father was here? When had he arrived from Chile, and why didn’t she tell me? It was a ridiculously stupid time to feel like the girl left in the middle of the sports field after both captains had picked their squads. We’d often spoke about her dad. My home country of Trinidad and Tobago was considered, in some circles, South America. Why hadn’t she shared with me that he was coming?
Yes, it seemed like a weird time to appear narcissistic. But it wasn’t that. I was going to die without really knowing my friend.
“Aura?” The deep voice leapt out in front of him. I heard it milliseconds before I heard the feet moving towards us. I imagined him with a weapon at his back, coming down the long corridor, holding onto the walls on either side to steady himself and at the same time, move his feet quickly along. Criminals generally had little patience for the elderly.
“Papa,” Aura called out. She said something my high school Spanish didn’t catch but I assumed she told him to calm down, to just do what the men asked.
He listened to her and didn’t speak but I knew he was easing his body into the prison of a chair. I thought about how cruel life was to him at that moment. How he, who’d stood up to the Pinochet regime for so many years, who avoided being one of ‘the disappeared’ in a sandy grave in the Atacama Desert, should end up like this. How he must want to place every inch of his eighty-something year old body in front his daughter to protect her. How he would opt, if he could, to gesticulate in a sad attempt at a universal sign language, to show the men that he understood them. That sometimes, your back really was against the wall.
I was thinking for him, giving him a story I wasn’t even sure was his.
“Make sure he doesn’t give us any trouble,” one of them said.
I wondered what Aura was thinking. Aura, more than the others because maybe she too was wrestling with the irony that after all the years we’d both worked on programmes focused on violence against women, we should end up like this. Scared and voiceless and utterly vulnerable.
What did any of those policies matter now? When there was a man’s hand patting the pockets of my jeans for my cell phone, while I prayed his touch didn’t go left, right, up or down of that pocket. It didn’t. But I did feel his arm brush mine as he reached to get something off the table.
A cork popped, followed by the swishing and swashing around of liquid in the bottle. I wondered if it was the Merlot. Damn. Criminals with a palate. I hoped he wouldn’t finish it.
But another worry surfaced from inside me at that point. Drunk people felt invincible. Drunk people grew balls. Drunk people got horny. What would I do if he one of them told me to get up and follow him to another room? Could I dissociate my mind from what might happen to my body? Perhaps I could just put it down to sex I didn’t want - it wouldn’t be the first time in my life. And if rape was about power, could I keep my power in another way, even if I didn’t have the power to stop a penis pushing its way into my vagina?
Maybe I would have the courage to follow the advice one of my high school teachers - get coy, act like you’re willing, take him in your mouth and then bite that shit to hell off. Yes, I settled on that. I would fight. I’d make him drag me like a screaming bat out of hell. What was the worse he could do? Shoot me? Nobody would want to rape a bleeding woman. Maybe he was going get the pussy but for the rest of his life, one of his senses was going to have to work really hard to compensate for the one I was going to fuck up. I was either going to stab him with something in one eye, shove something sharp down one ear, or pretend to kiss him then bite out his tongue. Or all three. I was ready to get all kinds of creative.
“Where’s the safe?” one asked.
I sensed his irritability, probably from the meagre takings thus far. They’d already emptied our handbags on the floor and clearly found little to suggest that this had all been worth it.
After Aura told them there was no safe in the house, they ordered us to pull off any jewellery on our body. I struggle to get off a thin gold ring my niece and nephew gave me Christmas twenty years ago.
Mariama told us later that she’s instinctively clenched her left hand at this point, not wanting to give up the ring she’d only just put on. A few months before, her father sitting in the front pew, she’d walked up the aisle on her own to get that ring. None of that, hand-over-from-one-man-to-the-other bullshit. She’d stretched out her left hand, happy and smiling, for that ring.
“I’ll cut off your finger if you don’t take it off,” our jailer had said in a calm, nasty voice.
I don’t know why, but with that, I decided instead of the bloody scene I had envisioned early, I was going to feel compassion for these assholes. I tried to remember a pray to Buddha but kept getting confused. As a recovering Catholic, St Anthony, St Catherine, St Joseph and the names of virtually all the disciples came to me easily. But none of the Buddhas. I could only remember Buddha Shakyamuni but figured as the main Buddha, El Jefe, remembering him was all I needed.
It felt like five hours we stayed still. I wondered if I’d fallen asleep. The voices and movement felt further and further away.
And Simón and Fidel? How strange the robbers hadn’t flinched? I knew very few black people who weren’t scared of dogs. They usually gave me the didn’t-you-know-dogs-were-trained-to-attack-black-people-during-apartheid story. Yeah, most black people would’ve had a heart attack at the sight of Simón and Fidel.
Except, of course, if they knew them.
A click. The back door closed quietly. How nice of them.
“Are they gone?” Claudia asked.
“Yes.”
“But what if they come back?” I barely recognised my own voice. My eyes were still closed and although I didn’t really believe the men would return, how could I pretend to know anything for sure at this point in my life?
“I think they’re gone.”
I opened my eyes and Aura was getting up with an impressive briskness. She locked the offending door, the one that let them in.
Then as though someone unclicked the pause button, life, with a certain degree of trepidation, slowly returned to the dining room table and the house. We seemed to warm up to living again. We looked at each other and asked, without words, did we really just survive that?
Neighbours were called over. The security company and the police arrived. We gave statements and then compared them. There was little consensus on physical descriptions. Two tall guys and one short? One tall, two short? One tall, one medium, one short? Some never saw a gun. Had the men spoke isiZulu or Ndebele?
But we did all agree on one thing – we made the worst witnesses.
Once the police were gone, we did something that shocked even us. We sat down. We dished out the soup and salad. We poured what was left of the Merlot – bastards - and opened the Chardonnay. And we ate. And talked as though in a haze. No-one cried. Perhaps that might’ve upset the comedic trauma we were all clearly experiencing.
The cream in the butternut soup was heavy, beating out the sweetness and delaying the exotic kick I usually enjoyed in that dish. The lettuce felt wilted on my tongue. Not sure if anyone even passed the salt or reached for the dressing. But still, we ate.
Was this some sort of internal mechanism that Joburgers developed over time? This feeling that no matter what, there’s something that’s not going to be taken? You came, you took but I conquered goddamnit.
The insanity wasn’t letting up - we even began talking books. Someone mentioned Anne Bronte and some other guy I didn’t know. But even within my psychotic episode I couldn’t bring myself to discuss Fifty Shades of Grey.
We talked about them. Not the gun, or the knife or the screwdriver or the mask. But the fact that, relatively speaking, they were decent and polite criminals. There was no blood to clean up and, most importantly, no rape kit to complete or to worry would go missing at the forensic lab. On the gradation-of-crimes trajectory, we were lucky. We were grateful. We thanked them for not killing us. We even, and we were good at this, put the entire thing into socio-economic and inequality terms, employing a holistic view of the problem, analysing in an academic robotic fashion the structural forces that make guys like that do stuff like this.
No-one ever mentioned to me that trauma could sound so eloquent.
We left close to midnight. Five women spread out in different directions like a flat hand.
******
Our lives shifted that night with some shifts bigger than others. Zethu and Mariama accelerated their emigration processes and left South Africa a few months later. Aura and Claudia visited therapists. I went to my Buddhist centre and kept busy with the process of moving house that had already been underway.
A few weeks after the robbery when I thought I was over it, I turned a corner in a shopping mall and came face to face with a woman in a niqab. A second wasn’t long enough to analyse and rationalise. It was simply a flash and my body reacted. My heart quickened and there was an actual, pulsing pain in my stomach. My legs had no more solidity than a bowl of Jell-O two hours away from setting.
The woman walked pass me, probably accustomed to peoples’ stares or attempts to not stare that were always seconds too late.
*******
A few months after that, I was moving house, again. I listened with a heart threatening to beat its way out of my chest, the tall black guy employed by the moving company barking orders at the other two, one short, one medium. It was stupid, I said to myself as I handed them the cushions off the couch with, I can imagine, a blank and idiotic look. I watched their hand movements, the way they walked, whether or not their eye sockets move around too much. Delivery guys moonlighting as criminals? Or the other way around? In the end, I accepted that I was not channelling Sherlock Holmes and just put it out of my mind. I tipped them generously.
Unpacking boxes in my new home a couple hours later, I discovered my daughter’s cell phone missing.
Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Lisa-Anne Julien now lives in Johannesburg where she works as a consultant in the non-profit sector and a freelance writer. Lisa-Anne’s feature and travel writing has been widely published in commercial magazines. Her short story, Pulling Seine and Catching Souls, was awarded a Highly Commended prize in the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story competition. In 2011, her romance novella, More than Friends?, was published by Nollybooks. In 2020, Lisa-Anne’s manuscript, Season of Promise, was long-listed in the Mslexia First Novel Competition. It was eventually picked up by Kwela Books and is due out in July 2021. www.lisaannejulien.co.za.
