The Secret History of Las Vegas

FAIRY TALE

What possible harm can a story do, you ask yourself as you fetch the small photo of your father from the mantelpiece. You don’t have a fireplace, so it really isn’t a mantelpiece, just a rickety shelf on a wall. There in the small cramped living room with the bare cement floor painted red by your mother because, as she says, poverty is no excuse for uncleanliness. No harm at all, you tell yourself as you nearly knock over the small plastic vase that holds the plastic flowers your father gave your mother on their first date. You have seen her dust around it carefully, every Sunday, wiping each petal with a soft cloth while she sings softly under her breath. You right the vase and dash into the kitchen, although even to you that word seems too big for this space.

Here, you say, showing the woman the picture. She is stirring a pot of beans on the stove in the small kitchen-cum-pantry. This is my real father, you say. I know that for a fact, you insist, although no one is arguing. The one in the fairy tale you are about to tell is your father too, but you don’t say that. I mean, he can’t be your real father if he is in a fairy tale, can he? It is just a story, like Red Riding Hood, and that isn’t real, and telling it never hurt anybody, did it? Although if the truth be told, Red’s big mouth did alert the wolf to Grandma and though everything worked out really well in the end, there can be no joy in being eaten by a wolf, swallowed whole. Even if you are old, even if it is temporary. Like the nine-year-old boy in the homelands that Drum magazine says was swallowed whole by a python, but bit his way to freedom, right through the snake’s belly, from the inside out.

Tell me more, the woman says. Each time you have lunch, since you first told her the story, she presses you to tell it again. And you want to because she comes to you while your mother is still at work and feeds you, and you want to because she is your mother’s special friend. It’s the same every time; you always begin with the photo that is your real father, not the father in the story. Because what harm can it do? What a rarity; a grown-up who wants to hear the stories of a child. Not just any grown-up, but a white woman too, although that is not immediately obvious when you look at her — she looks more colored than white, but this is South Africa in the ’70s and who can tell for sure. This you can understand, because your mother is Zulu and your father is Indian but there is nothing clear about that when people look at you, especially in this land where you are what your father is. But only women surround you, and so there is no clear proof that you are who you want to be. Especially since everyone thinks you are just another Zulu brat with a father lost to the mines, the war, the struggle, the bottle, or all of them, and this story your mother tells is a lie that makes her not the slut she really is, and this photo of a Sikh man in a turban, this photo could not be real. Who would admit to a marriage, a relationship, that clearly broke the anti-miscegenation laws? And you know children are just being cruel when they say this; you know it’s not true because your mother told you it isn’t, but it hurts nonetheless. And then your mother adopts this strange woman who claims she is white, and brings her home and says, Here is your auntie Alice, even though everyone else calls her White Alice.

So what harm, telling her this story?

And like always, like a game she plays with you, this lonely only child half-starved for attention, she asks, Have you ever seen your father? And you say, No, but he is a hero, just like the father in the story. And then White Alice says, Tell me the story, then, Sunil, tell it to me, you know I love it.

And she listens, rapt, moving only to keep the beans from burning and sticking to the pan. And then you begin.

Long ago and far away, but today and so forever, there lived a brave. Then one day, a big ogre invaded his land. He was a strong, evil ogre from a land far in the north where the sun hid its face. At first the people said to the ogre, There is plenty of land to share, why not share? But the ogre began to kill everyone, so the warrior fought the ogre, but it was too powerful, so the warrior fled, escaped to the land of the Shona, a powerful but kind people to the north. And there the warrior made his home, training other men who also escaped to the land of the Shona, driven off by the ogre, how to be warriors.

And where does he live in the land of Shona, White Alice asked.

He lives by a big baobab tree, you say, on an island that looks like a mudfish in a big sea called Kariba. There he and the other impis trained and grew strong to become better warriors and they would return soon to defeat the ogre.

It is a short story, but with each telling, you add detail: the dusty road that leads through the mystical forest of Chete Safan, which is the name of a powerful witch who protects all who dwell there; the strange Sibalians who roam free and are powerful medicine men who can fly to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro; the reeds by the water’s edge that hide the magical fish-shaped island from view like the ones that hid Moses as a baby.

And then while you stuff your face with beans and bread, sipping delicately on the Coca-Cola that you aren’t allowed but which is part of your secret, White Alice spreads a map out and asks you to tell her the story again, pen poised over the map to mark something, and with each telling, the map gets more and more marks.

Today, like all the other days, she draws lines across the map that has Rhodesia printed on it in big letters. She draws lines connecting the Chete Safan area with the small town of Sibalia on the shores of Lake Kariba, looking, searching for an island shaped like a mudfish or a whale.

But it is only a story, and what harm can it do? And if your mother trusts this white woman who looks colored and if she wants to hear your fairy tale, then what of it?

And then a few days later you come home from playing to find your mother crying on the floor, kneeling as if in prayer, shoulders heaving, a telegraph lying like a dead moth beside her. You know someone has died. That’s the only time telegrams come to Soweto. You know better than to ask any questions, better than to approach her. So you sneak to your room and you listen to her prowling and muttering to herself as she deduces the mystery, and you hear the terrible words that confirm a fear that until now has sat in the pit of your stomach, gnawing away.

How did White Alice know the truth, she asks herself. Was it Sunil? Was it Sunil’s story about his father, about where he was hiding, that led Alice to the truth?

And you know she has put it all together. And you realize that this was no fairy tale, even though she had said it was, said the word in Zulu, ignanekwane. This was no mere tale. Your father was the father in the story and he is real. He was the head of an armed ANC faction launching guerilla attacks on shopping malls to bring down apartheid. He fled to Rhodesia to escape and he was hiding in an ANC training camp on an island. The fairy tale contained the directions and White Alice finally figured it out on a map while you ate beans and bread and drank Coca-Cola and told your story. And although you tell yourself you could not have known the truth, you know it is a lie, because you were four when your mother first told it to you, because your father left when she was still pregnant with you, and you needed it. But now you are twelve and if what the Bible says about Jesus is true, then old enough to debate your elders in a temple; and certainly in Soweto, in the ’70s, to be twelve is like being twenty, but there is still a four-year-old who missed the father he had never seen and who needed someone to hear his story. This is what you tell yourself.

But you hear the terrible whispered truth as your mother prowls the house like a hungry ghost. And White Alice, who was once white but turned colored because of a sickness; White Alice, who lost it all — her husband, her kids, her nice home in a white suburb, her white pass card, her privilege — and had to live in Soweto like a kaffir; White Alice, whom Dorothy had taken in, taken to, a fellow lost soul, Alice had betrayed her. Stolen Sunil’s story and day by day reconstructed the truth. A truth she sold to the secret police in the hopes of getting her life back, her kids, her husband, her home, her whiteness. And who wouldn’t, Dorothy muttered, and who wouldn’t. But still, but still. And now her husband and many other men dead, and Sunil without his father, not even a mythical one. And all because of a story, a story and a mouth that told it. She was good at stories.

The last sound you hear that night draws you into the kitchen. And you see your mother sitting there, shoulders shaking with sobs. Terrified, you approach, terrified because you have never seen her this way, this woman whom everyone deferentially calls Nurse Dorothy.

And then she looks up when you call to her, and you scream.

You don’t scream because of the mascara running down her face in black witch tendrils, or the rouge of her cheeks smeared with tears and sweat. It is her mouth that terrifies you. She has sewn it shut, the needle still dangling from a piece of black surgical thread. Not a mouth at all but flesh, meat, raw and bleeding.

And so you run. Run to White Alice’s house.

And then the men come in an old ambulance and take your mother, and though there is a murderous rage in her eyes when she sees White Alice, there is also an understanding, gratitude for this gift of the men dressed in white uniforms.

And Dorothy looks from you to White Alice and because her mouth is still sewn shut, the women can only exchange looks.

Yes, White Alice says, yes, I will take care of Sunil.

Again that murderous rage and gratitude, then Dorothy is gone.

You are twelve.

You never tell your story again.

Johnny Ten-Ten, who lives down the street at Ten-Ten, says: You know why your mother sewed her mouth shut and then got taken to the crazy house?

You know better than to answer, you know that children can be cruel.