Read time: 9 mins

A Song Sung in Secret

by Jayne Bauling
26 July 2024

Some still wear masks. Neither his mask nor the weight of all the years separating you can hide him from you. He is unmistakable. Or perhaps not. It is possible that others would not recognise him grown old and that you only know him in some part of you that has not forgotten. 

Until this moment, you have been preoccupied with the length of this line outside the post office. The line of people and the heat drawing sweat from your skin. On arrival, you stood and shuffled forward in the shade of the ageing wild fig around the corner. Ahead is the mercy of the post office’s overhang, beginning at the wheelchair ramp. For many metres between tree and overhang there is only the sun. 

You looked back to take comfort from those behind you: to congratulate yourself on being ahead of so many, with a shorter wait. Such are the high moments of an old man’s day. You should get to the counter today. There have been months when you needed to return for a second day in line. 

Your eyes fall first on the woman behind you, seated on one of the plastic chairs set out by the post office staff or the SASSA people; you aren’t sure which. She has been coughing since she joined the line, two hours ago it feels like. It is a weak sound, but it troubles you. You stopped wearing your mask after those young men mocked you. Were you cowardly then? Or are you cowardly now, fearing what the woman might pass on to you? A mask might also protect you from the stink of passing traffic. What is it that makes her cough? Probably it is some condition peculiar to her or an allergy. You hope it is. You have always been a fearful man. 

In addition to the evenly spaced chairs, there are fading painted circles on the pavement and along the cement walkway at the top of the ramp, reminders of the time of the virus. Everyone ignores them, as they ignored them then. Social distancing was never for those in pursuit of their pensions; someone might push in and get helped before you. 

Another man behind the woman, standing. He looks as afflicted as you feel, overheated and fretful. 

Behind him, Solomzi. A mask and a hat—what do they call those hats? He was always a hat man. Between mask and hat, not much to see, except lines where he once was smooth. 

You think you are falling. Do you make some sound or a movement? He looks straight at you. Will he know you? 

Will he wish to know you? The words he said to you that last time have burned you at low moments down the years. 

They burn you now. You look away, still the thing he called you then and you call yourself now. 

You hear your name and look at him again. He knows you. 

You have not fallen, but your head feels light as if it is empty. It is not empty; it is teeming. 

He gestures, beckoning for you to come to him. 

Do you hesitate? You think so, but not for long. You move back to stand with him. There is no complaint from anyone; you are not pushing in. The old woman and the other man gain an advantage of one place. 

Solomzi’s smile. The mask hides his lower face, but the smile is clear. In youth, it was a blazing thing. 

He does not greet in the usual way, asking how you are. He was always too direct for such niceties. 

‘Solomzi,’ you say, and you would still offer the conventional greeting, but his breath of laughter stops you. 

‘So,’ he says, and you brace for something; you don’t know what. ‘For all our choices, the different ways we’ve gone, this is the end to which we both come, part of these monthly lines. Together, it appears.’ 

He used to laugh if you called him a philosopher, but he was the one with the deep thoughts. He never minded that you couldn’t share them. At the time, you believed he even liked your inability to pick up on his reflections about whatever he found apt or ironic. 

‘You’re back then? Where, Masoyi?’ 

Most of you waiting here have come from there, the fare chewing into the funds you’re waiting to collect, especially if you have to come back a second day. 

‘It felt like the place to be, at the end of everything.’ 

Everything, consisting of what? It hasn’t pierced you in decades, but you easily recognise the pang assailing you now as jealousy. 

‘The end of what exactly?’ you dare to ask.

‘Life?’ He’s refusing to play. 

‘What sort of life?’ What is this recklessness that makes you persist? 

‘Where have I been? What have I done?’ He waits a beat, so you nod. ‘Where the work was, mostly Emalahleni.’ 

Where he wanted you to go together. You quail now, as then.

‘And the rest?’ You are forced to ask because he’s not offering. 

‘I’ve lived mostly alone.’ He knows what you’re asking; he always knew, knew you. 

Mostly? 

He doesn’t enquire after your life. Perhaps he has heard the surface of it. His family remained in Masoyi. You would catch sight of one or other of them at intervals over a few years, with resentment; you did not welcome what the seeing evoked. Then you stopped seeing them, so perhaps they had moved elsewhere, or something else had happened. You didn’t want to know. 

He won’t be aware of the deeper matters under the public surface: of how unhappy you made Bindza or how your child is estranged from you. These things are cause for shame. 

You don’t want him to know, yet it is your shared past, his and yours, that has led to this present and to your own mostly alone later years. No, an untruth there. Entirely alone. 

‘And now, Masoyi. It hasn’t changed.’ You hear that you sound defensive. ‘Bigger.’ 

‘Not the minds.’ 

The minds you feared. His idea was that you would leave them behind, leave and be together. Your argument was that things would be the same everywhere; the minds would be the same. 

‘Sipho One-Time is still around,’ you say, your thoughts pulled back to those he would have had you leave behind. ‘Remember him?’ 

You laugh a little, to show him—what? The upper part of his face moves with the smile behind the mask, its lines altering their lie and curve. 

Neither of you laughed or smiled when you were trying to avoid Sipho One-Time, Bizo, Pilasande and those others. Your friends until they found out. Those times you were the fearful, Solomzi, the angry, one. 

‘That fool,’ he says, tolerance the tone, no anger now. ‘All those fools. Your sister Popi?’ Including her among the fools, one of those who censured.  

‘I heard she died. Six years ago, I think it was.’ 

‘You heard?’ 

‘We…There was a rift.’ You are uncomfortable admitting it. ‘After my marriage ended. Bindza was her friend.’ 

‘Ah.’ 

Is this to be all his reaction, this absence of either satisfaction or sympathy?

‘She…They both blamed me.’ Something is pushing the words out of you. ‘They were right. I was—distant.’ 

They believed it was more than that, the women, not realising you didn’t have the courage, as only Solomzi knew. Knows still? 

‘You used to talk about breaking your family’s hearts.’ 

Making excuses, he called it then, but the judgement is gone from the way he refers to your feeling for family. 

‘I did it anyway.’ You look away from him, to where a pair of myna birds are in contest for a piece of bread, dropped on the pavement from someone’s breakfast. ‘Not my parents’ hearts. They didn’t know; they had what they wanted, my marriage that was supposed to put everything right—put me right. The others. My wife and child and sister.’ 

‘I think because you couldn’t be one thing or the other?’ 

You are surprised that he makes it a question. In youth, he was so sure of himself and his judgements. 

‘If that is what you want to call it.’ You say it carefully, unsure if you welcome the increasing intimacy of this exchange. 

At the same time, it carries potential for something missing from your life in the years since Solomzi left: understanding. 

‘How would you name it?’

‘I felt…lost. To myself.’ 

‘Yes.’ Something in his eyes. ‘Lost again, as we both were before we found each other and found ourselves.’ 

‘Lost again,’ you confirm. 

Another breath of laughter from him. ‘Pastor Mhaule? He liked all those lost and found images. Parable, metaphor, what was it?’ 

‘He said the devil had found us.’ 

‘He only knew anything about us because other people found us out. 

More remembrance. It crashes down on you like a cloudburst on a summer afternoon. Solomzi saying such things, always clever in his talk, playing with words, twisting them. 

‘If people hadn’t…’ 

But you are unable to add to that, longing stilling your tongue. All that you lost, all that you haven’t had—with no warning, they are a great grief, overwhelming you. 

You were something beautiful together, you and Solomzi, a poem or a song. A song sung in secret. 

In the end, it couldn’t remain secret. Someone saw something; someone told someone. 

Sipho One-Time and the others, known to you since primary school, turning on you both, coming after you. 

Running from them and from strangers, the only sensible action when outnumbered. Bruises and scraped skin from the time they cornered the two of you. A swollen face and cracked ribs another time when it was only you, caught in their trap. 

Someone said something. Rumours spreading, questions asked, the pastor called in, Solomzi banned from your house, you from his. 

‘But people did,’ Solomzi takes up the theme. ‘Something so simple. Holding hands. A kiss.’ 

‘And the world exploded.’ That was how it felt to you, assailed from all sides, talk of penance, of punishment, of prayer— 

Disgrace was a word you heard too many times. Cure was another. Marriage would fix you. 

‘My responsibility,’ Solomzi says. ‘That, and everything that came from my leaving, your staying. I was impatient, first to go public when you hesitated, then to leave Masoyi. My way felt like the only way. I walked over things I…valued. Your softness, vulnerability. The way you cared.’ 

‘Or feared.’ You are shaken to hear him. ‘A coward, you called me.’ 

A flicker, a tightening and pulling in of the lines surrounding his eyes and their folds as if against a twinge of pain. 

There is movement in front of you. The woman two ahead must ease herself up from her chair, moving a place forward. The man between her and you shuffles forward. You and Solomzi do the same. Age puts a heaviness in the feet, you have learned; it is work to lift them. 

‘The hot speech of youth,’ Solomzi says. 

It is not an apology but an acknowledgement. 

‘Today’s young ones.’ This is a subject you frequently reflect on, with some envy but no answer to the primary question. ‘Do you think they have it easier?’ 

Perhaps he too has reflected on this because he doesn’t pause to consider his answer. 

‘How much has changed?’ 

‘A lot, and only a little, is what I think.’ 

‘Yes, even now, even today.’ Then, as if shouldering off such meditations, he says, ‘It is good to see you.’ 

‘The same this side. Welcome back.’ 

For a moment longer, your mind dwells on today’s young men, how brave they can be and the price they pay. So many stories, heartening or terrible. 

But old men don’t have to fear, have no need for courage, at the end of it all— at the end of everything, nothing matters. 

Forget people. You reach for Solomzi’s hand. His fingers are dry like winter leaves, lacing themselves between yours. You pull in a tremulous breath, seeing from his upper face that he is smiling behind his mask. After so many years, it is the two of you, holding hands again. 

About the Author

Jayne Bauling

Jayne Bauling is a South African writer best known for her youth novels which have won several awards. She also writes short stories and poetry, and has contributed to the FunDza Literacy Trust. Her tenth novel for youth, Things I Learned in the Forest, was published by the NB Publishers imprint Best Books in early 2023. She lives in White River, in […]

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