THE VISIT

"08-20098-KO3!” The effervescent guard shouted. His eyes were fixed squarely upon my face.

 I sighed, stood up slowly, as if measuring my guilt with a ruler, and then checked my watch. Then I lifted the plastic bag off the tiled floor. I had been in the queue for exactly two hours now. The room was dreary hot. I looked at the piece of paper on my hands. That number on the paper was his. He was known through this number now. For a moment, I shuddered at the thought, and then moved hastily toward the other end that was going to be our place of meeting

 This was it...finally. Finally, after all those years…

 He was already seated on the other side. A huge man still undwarfed by the columns of iron around him. He was silent, and his whole body looked solid, composed, and for a while, we could have swapped places; and nobody would have known the difference. He was waiting. Had been waiting for all along this time…

 Waiting for me. Waiting for the explanation… for an absolution...

 I stepped forward, and let the woman whose visit time had ended, pass by me. I could feel my legs wobbling and the reason I felt like this was very clear to me. The woman who moved past me had tears in her eyes, and I could not tell whether the person she had been talking to had been her son or a loved relative. It could have been the father of her children, all left at their matrimonial home. It could have been anyone that she loved.

 It could have been me…

 But I did not worry myself about the man she had been visiting. All I could have cared to ask would have been to know what her story was; how she had been coping with the thoughts, how she slept at night, and how she managed to eat, without thinking of him in this squalid place. I wanted to ask about whether she had been having the haunting dreams that still taunted me in the dead of night, and whether she was always seeing him in her mind. I wanted to know whether she had left the children at home, their children, and what story she had to tell them every time they asked about him. Did she have to lie, or did she tell them their father had passed on, or run away from them. Had she married another man? But she had disappeared before I could utter a word, and I remained pondering whether I could have had the guts to ask her all those battering questions. I knew had she come closer to me, I would not have dared to ask the questions that had roamed my mind for the so many years that had passed. And I knew that for her, he was someone who had people out there who loved him. Her tears were infinite; tears of joy for a son, for a man who had been lost but now had staggered back into the road of life. I coveted her tearful joy, and wished I could ask who the other departing shackled man was, and why he was in this treacherous place. But the woman had gone from the place, and I had lost another chance. The guard motioned with his head at the other man who was now sitting on the chair, and I nodded back, and then approached nervously.

 This was my first visit since that day.  Since that terrible day when it had happened, nineteen years ago…

 The prisoner was a large man. He resembled an overdrawn, worn-out caricature, and I could not make out whether it was him in front of my eyes, or whether he was a mere shadow of himself, lost in a figment of hopelessness,. His little eyes staggered slowly toward me, and they fixated themselves on my face, choking me until I could barely breathe. I was now standing close to the cubicle that was going to be our house of discussion for the next thirty minutes or so. He was sitting down, his eyebrow raised at my tall silhouette. He nodded for me to sit down, and I obeyed.

 I looked at the window that separated us from reality, and felt my stomach muscle tighten around my chest.  Placed between us, we each sat down on the uncomfortable metal chairs, and faced each other. There was a small circle cut in the window, through which I could talk to him. Through the circle ran some four-iron bars, a constant reminder of the place I was in.  I looked at the prisoner for a while; at his huge handcuffed arms, which seemed to outweigh his small face. They were rested carefully on the steel table in front of him. He smiled at me, but there was a shed of bitterness in his voice when he spoke, which he did first. “It has been long. Where have you been all this time?”

 Long was a mere understatement. It had been nineteen years. Nineteen long years.

 I shook my head slowly, and then smiled at him, wondering whether a smile could refute the emptiness of the place. “I have been trying to find myself.” I began. The words felt empty from my mouth, like a hunger pang. They were seasoned with bile, and I wanted to choke on them.

 The huge man couched slightly, smiled, and then frowned in a knowing manner. “I understand.”

 I wanted to scream at him. How could he say he understood? How? What did he understand? In this lifeless and desolate matrix, what was there to understand? What could he grasp from this desert mould and come out to the world and show for it?

Nothing…

 He did not understand because there was nothing for him to understand here. This place had not been built for men to understand. But I stared at him for a while, surprised by the calmness of his statement. It was always going to be a hard thing for me to say, but I had no other choice. “Your wife,” I began. “She sent me her regards.”

 The huge man smiled again, and his white teeth glinted under the artificial light. He faced downwards, and I thought I saw his arm muscles twitch on the table but he looked at me then, the smile still plastered on his face. “How are the girls doing?” he asked, his eyes penetrating into mine. I felt them, and they burned me ferociously, and I felt like a demon being exorcised at that moment. And I knew just then that of all the people I had ever known in my life, this stark honesty was going to hit my belly insides with a severity, and in the crudest manner as well. He had always reminded me that his two girls were the only things that he lived for, even before the unfortunate day.

             “How is life…here?” I stuttered another question, deciding not to answer his first. How was he ever going to understand that there was a new man in her life? Was he going to accept that the two girls he had sacrificed for, for so much, were slowly erasing him from their memory? Would he be able to grasp tenaciously the truth that he was not their father anymore? I shuddered at the thought. Today was not the right time for me to tell him. The prisoner stared at my forehead for a while, and did not reply my question. The he looked at the roof, as if seeking some divine answer from a higher place. I followed his gaze, somewhat expecting to see angels hovering about his head. There were none. Not at least in this dilapidation of space.

             “This place sucks the life out of you. “ he began. “It grasps the spirit, yanks out all the light there and then drains all thoughts of living from you. Everyday becomes a torment here, especially when you know that you are here for the rest of your life.”

 Then he began to tell me. To him, the story might have been simple, but I found myself intrigued by it, and at the same time very afraid and hushed by it. And he did not rush his conversation, for he was a master storyteller, and I knew him for this art. It was all about this place, home he called it, for there would be no other for him. They had homes here, families and wives, and husbands, he said. Men cooked, men laughed, and cried, and men lost themselves in the din of life. Men died and were buried, and some were born out of redemption and some sought the right hand of the Lord. Men entered this place everyday, and some poured out of it, only to come back again, severed because the outside world had become too idyllic for them. Some who came, and who had been vagabonds, turned to professors of life between the squalid walls. Some had the devil riding on their backs, but came out with a refuting smile and with salvation pasted on their foreheads. Some could now break a fist of triumph in the air, for the prison had shelled out a new man in them, and yet some still cowered in the darkness during the night, under the severity of their heavy crimes, and they could not take the terrible nightmares anymore. And they screamed too, horrendously in the clock of night, and called out all the names of the women and children, victims they had killed, mutilated, raped and had butchered in a moment of crazed insanity. Men had come here innocent, and still left not knowing a thing. Some had received a prison sentence, but yet when they got out in the end, had achieved a goal. Men had come expecting to receive a change, and had yet attained a quiet bitterness within their lives, and a message of revenge to the world had grown to into their skins, palatable and visible in the words coming from their mouths. And these types of men dared the world, and swore never to change nor to repent, nor to seek the light of calmness and forgiveness for a fellow brother who had wronged them. Men had come seeking an interpretation of their failed lives, being told that ‘we send you not to prison but to a rehabilitation centre where you can rebuild your life..’  but they only thing they rebuild was anger and confusion, and the only thing they left with were cold stones where their hearts had been housed, and thorns and steel wires where their nerves had been. Here, men became remorselessness spirits and borrowed unforgiving attitudes. Here the men knew that change was inevitable. They knew that their fate lay upon their heads. Here you heard voices in your head, and spoke with both God and Satan’s demons.

 He stopped, and stared hard at me. I swallowed something in my throat.

 

            “This is no place for a sane man. It saps all his strength, his ideals, and sinews of survival.” He continued quietly, and I could have sworn that a tiny tear was forming at the back of his eye. Then he stopped talking again, and let me digest what he had fed me. After a few seconds, he digressed, “How are you doing?”

            “Fine. Things are working ok. I just wrote finished the University exams.” I lied. I was lying about my life being fine. I was lying about everything. That was the reason why I was here. To stop lying to myself. But how does a man tell another man that he is afraid of the life he is living when he appears to be in a better position than him? The life I was living was slowly warping into hell. He would not understand it at all. To him, it was better being outside than inside. Would he understand if I told him about the dreams that kept on haunting me during the dead of night? Would he offer any help on how to rid myself of the voices that roamed my mind for countless hours on end? I stared into his face, and he looked back at me slowly. And at that precise moment, I knew he understood my lie. No matter the place he had been, he had always been my brother, and he had always known when I was lying.

             “I brought you some items to carry you through the day.” I said, showing the plastic bag to the guard first, who nodded at me to go ahead. He took it, and stared inside it for some seconds.

  “Thanks, I miss eating creamed biscuits, but I have taught myself to live without most of the things you brought here.” He said, smiling, and taking out an apple. I could tell that he wanted to know why I was visiting him, especially since after all these years had passed since the incarceration. He wanted to know why I had avoided him so much.

             “How is…?” I began, but he had stopped me with a question. I swallowed my tongue as it came.

             “Why have you come? Look, I why you are here, but why have you really come?” he said, playing with the apple. I looked at him, but his eyes were on the apple in his hands. He had always had the audacity to ask the most difficult of questions with ease.

             “You are my brother.” I said. “Shouldn’t a brother visit another brother?”

             “After nineteen years?” His hands were crushing the apple on the table. Still he did not look at me. The apple groaned under his touch.

             “I have made mistakes in my life, and I know it. But no matter what happens, I think we should let blood be always thicker than water.”

 A moment of silence passed acutely, and I could hear my heart pound slowly. Slowly, he looked up at me, and smiled wryly. The apple was freed from the metal grasp. “I gave up waiting for my wife to come here a long time go. Some people are transparent. You can see the stuff their hearts are made of, and that is my wife But of all people, I have always waited for your visit, even though sometimes I felt the hope waning, but I waited still, for there is no patience which killed a man, even though it may douse his fire of hope. But here we have all the time, and so I kept on waiting, and waiting, but you never came. And then one day it hit me hard when I realised that the brother I was waiting for was never coming. My hope had become a figment of a rope, and I had dangled on it for so long and I knew I had to sever it. I still do not understand why a brother I have believed in so much has decided to abandon me. Why the only man I trusted would not see the languish I have gone through in this piece of hell.”   

 I did not say anything. I did not have anything to say. He continued. “Do I shame you?” he asked, his eyes sinking into mine.

             “Never in a million years, my brother.” I replied truthfully.

             “So you think I deserve this?”

 I did not reply, but looked at the guard for a while, and then stared back at him, my tongue suddenly stuck on the floor of my throat. The tone of his voice was increasing, and I did not want to cause fury, especially after not having heard it from him for so long.

             “Or is this a curse?” he asked.

             “I do not believe in such things,” I replied dryly, “and I know that you don’t too.” I knew that sooner or later, I would have to tell him the real truth about that night nineteen years ago. We had both been heavily drunk that night, and the body of the prostitute had been found lying next to him the next morning. I looked at him. “I’m sorry for everything.” I said.

 He looked at me, the smile on his face again. “It is life. We are always sorry for one thing or another.”

             "You do not understand. The reason I came here was because I want to tell you about what happened those nineteen years ago. I want to tell you about the person behind the murder. I know that you have always had a doubt about your sentence.”

 He looked at me, the roof of his eyelids growing slightly. ‘Let’s not go there brother. You were drunk also. How can you know now?” He paused, and the lines on his forehead grew. “Have you known this all the time?”

 I nodded my head slowly. “Ever since that day, I have not forgiven myself.” As I turned, I saw the guard nodding at me. My time was running out. I had no other choice but to tell him.

             “Who was it?” he asked, his voice lulling into a whisper. I had etched his curiosity now. And there was no turning back. “That night is still running on my head. I still…”

             “Just give me the name!” he suddenly erupted, almost shouting. “Give me the name! Who was it? Who was it?” he looked at the nodding guard, his eyes burning furiously. “Do one right thing right! For once in your life... for once! For once think about someone else but yourself…for once.” Then his voice subsided.

             “Ten minutes left!” The guard shouted at us.

 This was it. I looked at my brother’s eyes. They were calm now, but I could tell that they were still burning with anger. In all my life, I had never braced myself for something like this. But it had to be done and I knew that I had been hiding for far too long. Even some skeletons hidden deep in the crevices of closets must come out and face their demons once in a while. Even that bridge of burdens must be crossed. The consequences were always going to be bitter, and I had known that when I left the house in the morning. But today, come what may, the skeleton was finally coming out its box, no matter what happened in the end. The fire had been raised, I could only reduce it to ashes now. I coughed slightly, knowing that I had prepared myself for it all. From whatever would come after this moment.

 For  whatever end…

          “Today I will tell you the real story.” I said.

 

- END-

(July 2008)

Mbonisi P. Ncube©