Chris Abani - The Secret History of Las Vegas

Sunil woke with a start. He peeled a sheet of paper from his cheek and crossed to the window. Below, the Strip was awake, like a sentient being made of neon, all pulse and wink, but it wasn’t dawn yet, probably nearer five in the morning. Sunil closed his eyes, shook his head rapidly, and opened them again. Dizzy, he watched the lights make a new pattern, like a kaleidoscope. He closed his eyes again. This time when he opened them and looked, he was so dizzy he had to put his hand on the cold metal of the window frame to keep from falling over. This was a game he’d played as a child, only the lights had been the stars, and back then he could get dizzy without feeling nauseated.

Dorothy taught him that game, said it was how the old soothsayers read the future. Izikhombi, she’d called it, bones used to divine the way, except she said they used the bones of the stars.

She was a good storyteller. Some people call that being a good liar. But that was just frivolous gossip, as Reverend Bhekithemba would say. Remove the log from your own eye first, he would add. The reverend had a soft spot for Sunil and Dorothy, which of course only made people gossip about the reverend and Dorothy. There has always been in African communities a deep suspicion of the Catholic priest’s professed celibacy. Father Bhekithemba was the priest of St. Francis, the Catholic church on the corner of Sunil’s street. But none of this, of course, changed the fact that Dorothy was a good storyteller.

She came to Soweto in 1960 to study nursing. She meant to return to her small town in the KwaZulu homeland, but no one ever leaves Soweto alive, as the saying goes.

She worked at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital on Old Potchefstroom Road. Baragwanath was more of a city than a hospital, serving about a million people every day. Much of what she saw there — the misery, the pain, the loss, the despair, but also the incredible strength of the people of Soweto — shaped her. She was a good woman who did what she could. Brought home medicines for the local mothers to give to their children. Nothing serious, just the basics — vitamins, cough medicine, painkillers, fever reducers, disinfectants, and iodine for scrapes and cuts. She cut quite the figure striding through the neighborhood at dusk, dressed in her nurse’s uniform — crisp, starched white dress and bonnet, palm flat on her belly, resting on the big buckle of the purple belt that marked her rank, a black handbag draped from the crook. Sunil followed her discreetly, pretending in his mind to be her bodyguard, and if Dorothy was aware she didn’t show it. Meanwhile, Johnny Ten-Ten, sitting on the low wall of the church smoking with other teenagers in the shadow of the statue of Saint Francis, called him Mommy’s Shadow.

Between St. Francis and Sunil’s house was an open lot of land that ran down to a ditch at the back of the township. Over the years, Dorothy put the local children to work turning it into a communal garden. They grew everything there — potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, carrots, peas, and even some onions — and gave it all away to those needier than them.

It seemed like the only things Dorothy kept for herself were the truth of Sunil’s father and the three tangerine trees she planted and replanted by the side fence of their house, a fence made of rippling and rusting corrugated iron sheets.

The trees never really grew much larger than shrubs, but they wore their size well, with all the gravitas of trees. Three trees Dorothy planted and replanted every year. Three trees were all they had room for, crowded as they were by the tomatoes and curry and potatoes and onions overflowing from the communal garden just over the fence. Three trees that seemed so superfluous they could as well have been chocolate trees instead of tangerines.

They always grew to about three feet high, branches thick and low like a shrub, and heavy with the small citrus. As soon as they bore their yellow fruit, and Sunil and his mother harvested buckets of them for themselves and their neighbors, they would begin to die and Dorothy would gather seeds and cuttings that still had green signs of life in them, and replant the tangerines in the cluster of three by the fence, where the off-flow from the kitchen sink kept the dusty Soweto soil moist and fragrant with decay and rebirth.

Always three, a mystical number not intended. Planting and replanting every year until it seemed she, like the tangerines, would die of happiness. Sunil love to peel the zesty fruit and bite into the soft sweet flesh. What a freedom.

But these were still the days of terror, of tear gas in the streets. Of armored Casspirs rolling through Soweto like hyenas on the prowl. These were still the days of beatings, and of the lynching of suspected informers by locals. When police enforced pass law. When they drank from illegal shebeens and then burned them down. When they kicked in the doors of frightened Soweto families and dragged the men out to be shot in the street in the middle of the night. When the police drove by emptying rounds of ammo into the houses of the ANC leadership who crouched behind the cast-iron stoves with their children in the kitchen, the safest place in the house. When rape was a state-sanctioned form of policing. When children playing in empty lots came upon dead bodies decomposing in the heat, or half-dissolved from chemicals. When the ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party recruited young men and women and trained them to be warriors.

If Dorothy had any misgivings about any of it, about Sunil training to be a freedom fighter, she didn’t show it. Maybe she suspected his heart wasn’t really in the fighting but more in becoming an impi, like the one in the story she told of his mythical father, as though he were trying somehow to make a connection with the absence that his father had become.

Maybe that was why she told stories, stories to counter, or perhaps balance, the ones the political movements were telling the children — stories of a different path, and maybe a different future. It was hard to tell, because she kept so much to herself.

She was a good storyteller and Sunil and the others gathered by the communal garden to hear her.

Have you heard about the Sorrow Tree, she asked them.

No, Nurse Dorothy, they chorused.

Deep in a mythical forest lost to time is the Sorrow Tree. Its existence was known only to the wisest of the sangomas, who kept it a close secret. Once, a very long time ago, the people who would become our ancestors went to the chief sangoma, a man so old no one could remember a time when he hadn’t been there, and asked him to remove the suffering and misery from the world. He told them that he couldn’t do it but that there was a tree called the Sorrow Tree that could bear everyone’s pain for a short while. He took them on a pilgrimage deep into the forest until finally, after nearly a moon of traveling, they came upon a clearing. There stood the most beautiful tree anyone had seen. It was as wide as many townships and as tall as Mount Kilimanjaro, and yet its limbs were thin and wispy as though made of smoke. And though the tree was so big and tall, it took only a few minutes to walk around it and even the shortest person could reach the tallest limbs.

The sangoma told the people to make a bundle of their suffering and sorrow and hang it from a limb of the tree. And although many thousands of people hung their sorrows from those delicate limbs, they barely swayed from the weight of it. At once the people felt a deep happiness come over them and they danced and sang for days. As they prepared to leave, the sangoma told them that there was a condition that he hadn’t mentioned before. They could leave none of the bundles of sorrow on the tree; otherwise the others to come would have nowhere to hang theirs. They must leave with a bundle, but not necessarily the bundle they came with. Everyone walked around the tree examining the bundles, but in the end they each settled for the bundles they had come with. It seemed that no matter how bad their lot was, they did not prefer anyone else’s to theirs. As the people left with their sorrows on their heads, their happiness faded, but they found instead a deep joy.