I’m Not Here

It had been a week since my phone disappeared through the back window. Just as well I bought one on the bottom end of the market. That is the right attitude with gadgets in this world abound with them – no commitment. Keep them cheap and small. If you lose one, get another, and another, and another. As long as they keep stealing the cheap nasty things, I will keep buying them, until the underworld of stolen goods is saturated with them. Gadgets are not important. ID documents, now those are important.

So you can understand my concern when I looked into the secret hiding spot for my passport only to find it was not there. Being robbed gives me a lingering sense of paranoia. A missing passport on the other hand sends me into an instant state of panic. Once I am sure it is not where it is supposed to be, and not where it usually is, the alarm bells start to ring.

At this point my body becomes overcome with sudden quick movements. Standing in the middle of the bedroom, I begin to twirl around and around as a I look onto every conceivable surface. It is not under the bed. It is not under that pile of magazines. It is not in the pockets of my clothes that are too precious to go into the washing machine. Nothing. By this point, I am tearing the bedroom apart. I have the bed sheets off, the drawers ripped out of the cupboard and everything up-turned. Where could the “bloody thing” be?

Before I can begin to destroy the kitchen in a similar spirit, my girlfriend walks into the house from the car.

“Baby, I have been waiting. What are you doing?”

“I am tearing the house apart, can’t you tell? I can’t find my fucking passport.”

To this, Tobre suffers a brief flash of horror herself. But unlike me she goes for the rational approach and asks “When did you have it last?”

“When I was at the bank last Saturday. But I know I brought it back”

“And then where did you put it?” is the next logical inquiry.

“Here by the bed I think. Right there where the phone was before it was stolen”

“What?!” she responds. I too go into shock. This is more serious. I was robbed of more than just a phone it seems. My passport is missing too. Oh my Mary mother of Jesus. There are few things that could be worse to contemplate.

Tobre then goes for the next rational thing to do – denial. She says, cool as you like, “You must have left it at the bank”.

“Baby, I know I didn’t leave it at the bank”

“Then where is it?” she asks, pretending to herself that it is not a rhetorical question.

“Well it is gone isn’t it. Gone ’till its gone. Gone ’til November. Stolen! Bastard.”

“I am sure you will find it” she says in a flat tone.

But my panic continues. I continue to destroy the house, room by room. I pulled at my hair and I chewed on my lower lip. My memory gave up no secrets that morning. Maybe it is at the office I thought. But nope, I definitely had it after I went to the bank. I began to suffer from Tobre’s denial. And so off to the bank I went, throwing off all the Saturday morning’s programs, which included supervising the construction of a front fence to the house that would allow us to hold our heads up high on the streets of Plumstead. A project that had been weeks in the making.

The bank said they had nothing. I had stood in a queue for an hour in that understaffed branch as if I too wanted to be served and got nothing in return but further disappointment. On the way back from the hardware store, where we bought titanium steel bits for a drill, Tobre said to me in the most lukewarm of tones, “I am sure you will find it”.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I launched with the salvo “This is serious. This bloody serious!”

“You don’t understand” I said. “Without my passport I am nowhere in this country. The bank won’t recognise me, my own university won’t recognise me. I can’t do important bank transactions and I cannot renew my study permit. I am screwed without it. Without it I am not really here.”

“And worse still, I can’t go to Joberg without it. You get arrested within a day there if your without your passport and foreign over there. I will have to bribe them daily. How am I going to do my research over there?”

In reply I she said “I am sorry baby” which was wholly unsatisfactory. But at least she saw the gravity of the situation I thought. Emboldened by this, I continued;

“You’d think it were ok since I already applied for a new passport, so all I have to do is wait for the new one. But that is already  4 months overdue. The Zambian High Commission, after that fantastic delay without explanation finally admitted that they also need a copy of my Zambian registration card. But that card was lost when I was robbed in Zimbabwe in December.”

“So what are you going to do then” she asked and caught me off guard. I thought I was talking to myself.

“Well, I have electronic copies of the registration card so I could use those. But then they do want certified copies instead. I can’t get them certified because the original card was stolen. So I will have to go back to Zambia to get a replacement. But then I can’t do that because I can’t travel without my old passport which is now stolen . . . so basically, I am screwed.”

Later that afternoon, when, by some sort of emotional inertia that allows you to daydream even when your stricken with grief or pain, I began to look past the missing passport. So what if I have no ID document. How can I possibly think a laminated few pages to mean so much to me. Look at me I thought. Everything will be fine. Never mind the endless queues, bribes, delays, photocopies and just plain bureaucratic madness I will have to go to get it all replaced. I could do that later, when I am ready. With this absurd sense of serenity, I went back to the fence project and stopped over at another hardware store to buy about 200 bolts for the fence.

While there, Tobre drove up in her uncle’s car to tell me that the men had arrived to do the fence. Then she helped me carry the bolts into the car (Stormy). When we get there, a bolt drops under the car seat and she stoops over to retrieve it. While down there, she breaks into a vulgar laughter. When she stands up, she has my passport in her hand. It was under the drivers seat the whole time.

“I told you we would find it” she said in triumph.

A Load of Shit

Paranoia always follows a robbery. It does not matter how well you take the initial shock or how calm you are about being outwitted one of societies crafty agents, you remain a little jumpy and doubly cautious about your property and person. Who is that man on the street corner? and what is that shadow in the backyard?

One Sunday morning, Tobre and I came home to find a message from the private police to say the alarm had gone off. Inside the house, the back-window was open but all that was missing was my phone. I thought, in my vast experience of theft, that we had gotten off lightly. The computer, digital camera and my wallet remained untouched. One of my much better robberies.

And yet my equanimity gave way to suspicion and exagerated caution. In the first instance, although little was taken that Sunday morning, the robbery was a little unusual. While the introduer had taken only a phone, he (all burglers are ‘he’s somehow) had left something behind. On the grass at the back was a small deposit of human feaces. The visitor had reason for spite it seemed. It must have been Gift, I thought. He has his reasons for spite. “God will judge you” he said. Perhaps the prophecy had come true (again). If not Gift, perhaps one of the casual labourers that hang about across from the corner shop waiting for jobs, of which Gift was a member. They would know, from the bordom of their daily vigil, when we are out and when we are out for a long while.

This explains why my instinct for sleuth was piqued on the following Saturday morning. Just as we drove out the yard, past the phalnx of casual labourers, one of them stood up and began to make his way down the street that goes past our backyard. The very one, I am sure, who was built slim with a fat nose and a wide hat, that grinned at me crudely that morning after the robbery as I drove past. “Thank you” he seemed to be saying with that smile. I was convinced he was on his way to make another attempt on the houses defences.

To catch him in the act, I drove around the block, drove up to the house from a different direction, pulled into the driveway, disarmed the alarm and opened the front door in the same movement, and then stormed into the house. I rushed to the back window to see who was there. I expected to catch him, with his hand through the window, groping around for more goodies. Or I expected to see him stood in the middle of the yard, caught in the act. I wanted him to see me seeing him. I did not want to apprehend him. I wanted to look him in the eye as I caught him in the act. I wanted to tell him with a subtle nod that I too am always watching. I will be watching him much closer than he will be watching me.

I drew the curtains open in one abrupt and triumphant swing. In the backyard there was no one there. Everything was quiet, except from the constant noise of cars on the motorway yonder. Nothing was broken or missing.