A group of men meet at the Victoria Hotel on Friday nights, shrunken into their overcoats and Stetsons and scarves. Normally, they wouldn’t have to wear such heavy clothes, especially for the summer, especially for the country they have come from, but this summer, nights are especially cold, as if the chill has become a living thing that wraps itself around everything. They have heard about Lesotho’s brutal winters, how sometimes the snow falls so heavily in the mountains that corpses are uncovered once it melts. They have limited their movements to Maseru, where it doesn’t snow at all, but this hasn’t protected them from the unforgiving temperatures. ‘At least we’re not in Angola,’ they console themselves, ‘like Lesiba’, one of their comrades, or further up the continent where they hear it can get so hot that some of the cadres there can barely lift a gun, can barely do their morning drills because to walk anywhere is to haul their melting flesh off the ground.
Unlike Lesiba, or any of the other comrades placed at various stations across the continent, they haven’t started their training yet, haven’t started anything really, for two and a half months. They came to Lesotho in the winter, when the sky was a flat, antagonistic grey, and now, within the summer itself, erratic bouts of wintertime chill catch them by surprise. Although they do not itch for the steel of a gun, are not restless in the way that men of the organisation can sometimes be, they feel, especially on nights like these, nights when they are all together in the warmth of the hotel, that this is the great calm before an even greater storm. The events of the past few months prove them right. In Botswana, the South African government has just assassinated a family of three. In Swaziland, the same government has delivered an explosive package to a comrade in the night. The storm will come soon; they all know this. Which makes their time at the hotel feel even more precious, because it won’t always be this way.
Some of the men have been enrolled at the National University of Lesotho. The organisation and the Lesotho government pays their tuition fees, and they like to think they have formed a sort of intellectual cabal. Not that they don’t have an education already, but being in the university, in another country, grants them a second youth, and they argue as they have never argued before about economics and politics and most enjoyably, about art. They become sensational on the campus grounds as revolutionaries who are fighting the South African government, and get asked all sorts of questions, but mainly about Nelson Mandela. They are careful though, careful not to drum up unnecessary noise, and careful not to buy into the quasi-youth they have been granted. Yes, some of them slip. A few weeks ago, Kenneth Mthombeni was haunted by a ghost—a girl he made regularly at the university who had started to follow him everywhere: at the house he was staying at, even one time, at the hotel. Paris, always the most outspoken amongst them, had grabbed her by the hand when she appeared at the table they were sitting at. He had gripped her so hard that she had shown her teeth and let out a yelp, and Paris said, so loud that the chatter in the restaurant died down, that sex workers weren’t allowed at the hotel, that if she didn’t go away he would have her escorted out; she should never come back, or else very bad things would happen to her.
This is one of the things that makes Paris a man of virtue, even though a person looking in from the outside wouldn’t call it so. Bad things happen around the men; the further away the girl gets from them, the safer she will be. Though the men are in love with Lesotho’s masculine hills, and love her people even more—people who smile at you in the street for no reason and don’t expect you to smile back at them—they know that it was with their arrival that blood was shed on her streets. So they try to make as few attachments as possible, deliberately staying out late so that they miss dinners, removing themselves from the domesticity created by the families that are hosting them. When Sinclair Khumalo, a South African like them, starts singing at the Victoria Hotel’s club, The Blue Lagoon, it isn’t only communion that brings them there. It is also freedom, because they know that at least one night a week they don’t have to be anything to anyone, and their only preoccupations are to drink and smoke and swear as loudly as they can. On the night Eddie joins them—one of their newest comrades, and also the youngest—The Blue Lagoon is alive with Sinclair Khumalo heat.
Eddie pushes his way through the crowd to sit in the booth where the men are sitting. It feels strange to be surrounded by music and dancing, when just three days ago he and a group of others were smuggled out of South Africa as personae non gratae. He didn’t even get the chance to bid his mother and sister farewell, doesn’t know when he will see them again. He tells himself that this is the life he has always dreamt of living, a life of danger and adventure that he had only read about in novels. And yet, he struggles to see any one of them as heroes: not himself, not the men, not even Sinclair conjuring up a storm of music on the stage.
Sinclair’s band is never full. It seems he is always auditioning new members even though he has been in Lesotho for two years now. On a good day, he sings with three back-up singers, but according to him, the voluminous sound he is looking for—jazz infused with gospel—can only be achieved with a choir. Indeed, he had sung with the National University of Lesotho’s choir at the King’s 43rd Birthday Celebrations. The men listened to the performance on the radio, and realised just how alive the songs felt, like a fern growing between rocks on a mountainside, or something bigger, something more expansive like morning-rise. Isn’t that just the thing with music, how it testifies to unknown gods how it feels to be alive? Nights at the hotel, Sinclair would sing so hard that sweat would cover his face, stomping his foot as if to release some spirit swirling inside him. Listening to him on the radio, it was this image that the men held in their minds, the cries of Umlotha! Umlotha! Umlotha! now buttressed with the sound of a choir behind him, and when Sinclair sang for them at The Blue Lagoon again, they called him a genius.
It is difficult to describe how hot the music can get at the Lagoon, as they sometimes call it. Not that the Lagoon needs describing; the men guard it like a secret, probably as fiercely as they have ever guarded anything in their lives. It is sacred, and they do sacred things there. What Sinclair and his band create on Friday nights fills everyone with heat, and sometimes, it takes a week to fully recover from the electricity flowing through their bodies. In this moment, nothing is more important than the saxophonist, who comes in only on the sixteenth refrain (sixteen refrains, my God!) and everyone at the Lagoon gets up from their seats and holds their heads as if they have discovered the world’s newest opioid. Nothing is more important than the men and women who sing behind Sinclair, not big enough to form a choir, no, not yet, but they hold their gazes steady and their notes unwaveringly because they know to unclasp these vibrations is to cede victory in some war. They have been auditioned by Sinclair himself from all parts of Lesotho, so their isiZulu is weak when you listen carefully, with a musician’s ear that can parse out the various intonations. But only then.
Motebang, a young man who has been playing the djembe for Sinclair since the beginning of his tenure at the Lagoon, and really, the only consistent member of his band, plays so mathematically that it is sometimes easy to miss all the spirits he is summoning for that night. Sinclair likes to say that if there is a secret to his music, a golden ingredient that makes people risk trading his cassettes illegally under South Africa’s censorship laws, it’s Motebang’s hands against that drum. In the middle of the performance Sinclair sometimes stops the others until it’s only Motebang playing and him singing, and they attack each other, and fondle each other, and tease each other, one-two, two-one, two! This dual sound, like lions meeting in the middle of the savannah, rises above the men’s heads until the club seems to shake with the vibrations. Motebang closes his eyes, feeling Sinclair’s words, feeling the thrum of the music swinging through his body. In this moment, he seems not only incredibly young, but incredibly beautiful too.
When the night’s set is done, some of the band leave—most are working men and women who do Sinclair’s gig after their day jobs—but some of them stay behind. Sinclair as always goes to the table where the men are sitting, where Eddie sits as well, unable to remember how to breathe.
’Welcome to Lesotho,’ Sinclair says after a while, and it takes Eddie a second to realise that Sinclair is talking to him, those hazel eyes upon him.
‘Proper, comrade,’ Eddie replies, saluting him. ‘I should buy you a drink after that set. I should buy you a whole country.’
Sinclair flicks his hand. ‘Countries are not bought. That’s a white man’s practice. Where did they situate you?’
‘Ha Abia,’ Eddie says.
‘Do you like who you’re staying with?’
‘They’re decent, dependable people,’ Eddie says. ‘So far.’
Sinclair orders a drink and drums his fingers against the table while he is waiting, and this is how the men know that he is working himself into one of his moods.
‘All these years in this country and I haven’t found the perfect band yet. I listened to a Fela song and it reminded me what an inadequate musician I am. I love Basotho, I really do, but they are not fighters. I need fighters who can also sing. The afternoon we recorded ‘Umlotha’, I was angry. It’s an angry song, but I was angry outside the context of the song. I shouted at them, “Mamello, that note is too flat, this part of the song is lacking in energy, what is wrong with all of you?”… until I realised part of my anger was to put on a show for them, or all of it, I don’t know. It’s not that I wasn’t angry in earnest, but there was such a performance to it that I think I was putting it on for their benefit, to get them angry as well.’
‘Basotho are angry,’ Kenneth says, but the protestation is weak, unabsorbed by everyone who sits at the table.
When Motebang comes to join them, the mood is diluted, and the men are thankful that he has saved them from Sinclair’s blackness.
‘That was splendiferous,’ they say.
Motebang prances away from the table and gives a grand bow, which they all clap at, inviting glances from the people sitting around them in the club. When Motebang joins them again, he sits on one of the men’s laps, Sibusiso, and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek. For a while Motebang and Sibusiso are locked away in their own private world, and it is impossible to hear what they are saying to each other. The spell is only broken when Sinclair nudges Motebang on his hip and waves a hand in Eddie’s direction—Eddie, who has sat transfixed by this scene, and even more transfixed by Motebang himself.
‘Have you met Eddie?’
Motebang looks at Eddie with big, black eyes, and under the faint light Eddie can see that he really is beautiful. Lean and muscular, light-skinned in the way that some of these Basotho are, as if they bathe in milk or come from the sun itself.
‘Eddie,’ is all Motebang says before he loses interest and his attention returns to Sibusiso. Eddie is overcome by his gracefulness, how he seems to be the same person off-stage as he is on. Many musicians are not like this, including Sinclair himself. On that stage, Sinclair had seemed superhuman to Eddie, something untouchable, but the veil had dropped once he sat down with the men. Motebang is different. Looking at him, Eddie is unable to forget how he had closed his eyes as he was beating that drum, and Eddie had thought: invite me in, let me see what you are seeing.
Eddie doesn’t know when Motebang dislodges himself from Sibusiso’s lap, but pretty soon, he is involved in the men’s conversation. Eddie discovers that Motebang has a violent and raunchy humour, and how easily he can slip into isiZulu and isiXhosa despite never having set foot outside of Lesotho. Eddie realises that he is tongue-tied, that he has not said anything since Sinclair introduced him to Motebang, and Motebang simply parroted Eddie’s name back at him.
Eddie thinks he needs a second chance with Motebang, away from the noise of the Lagoon. He suddenly longs for some trick he can perform, some bon mot he can fling in Motebang’s direction to leave his jaw agape. Eddie is not an extraordinary man, but a certain weightlessness in the way Motebang had played that drum makes him want to become one. Something in Motebang’s lean frame, or the way Motebang is leaning into Sibusiso… no, something in Sinclair’s music itself… music doesn’t come from a single person, it’s even bigger than the people who create it… he should be careful not to confuse Motebang with his art because artists are just vessels. Eddie wants to do extraordinary things.
After all, maybe that was why he came to Lesotho. But before he can do or say anything, Motebang and Sibusiso are gone from the table. They don’t come back that night, not even when Sinclair starts one final song to honour the patrons who still stay behind. They sway lightly to one of Sinclair’s sadder songs, as if holding on to some forgotten, dying light.
*
Motebang and Sibusiso are not seeing each other. Eddie finds this out because he asks Sinclair on a Saturday afternoon as they are driving to the town centre to collect an order of fruits. In the car with them is Ts’epo, who is the son of the family Sinclair is staying with. Sinclair lives in a shed on their premises. He does their gardening and is sometimes sent on errands. Eddie considers domestic life. He remembers how easily Ts’epo had volunteered himself for the trip, as if Sinclair were some long-lost uncle who had come to visit, and he, Ts’epo, wished to make the most of their time together before Sinclair left again. For the most part, however, Ts’epo is silent, and this is why Eddie manages to ask the question about Motebang and Sibusiso.
‘He was with Sibusiso last week,’ Sinclair says, calmly, emptying his cigarette out the window. ‘And this week, who knows? I’m not the one to tell young, pretty boys what to do with themselves, or their bodies.’
For a while, there is a bitter taste on Eddie’s tongue. It is obscene, someone like Sibusiso being with someone as beautiful as Motebang. Touching him, too. But to his surprise—and this scares him as well—the bitterness disappears and is replaced with something else. Is it envy? He so suddenly wants to be Sibusiso, to have been Sibusiso in the booth that night, with Motebang sitting on his lap. It’s silly, he knows, but he is angry at Motebang for letting Sibusiso touch him like that.
‘You should talk to him,’ Sinclair says suddenly. ‘Trade stories of a lost youth’
‘Me?’ Eddie says. But there is no use in feigning ignorance, not in front of Sinclair. Sinclair is an artist, and artists can see the patterns of thought one can hide from ordinary folk. And the men, including Sinclair himself, had acted as naturally as if it had been some wayward girl when Motebang sat on Sibusiso’s lap. Outside, it is a metal-bright summer’s day, and looking back Eddie confirms that Ts’epo shows no interest in the conversation that is happening at the front of the car. Ts’epo is happy to simply take in the beauty of the day. Again, the image brings up visions of domesticity in Eddie. Is this what it feels like to have people to belong to, to have a life where you could go pick up fruits in town on a Saturday afternoon?
‘I don’t know,’ Eddie says.
‘What could someone like Motebang have to say to someone like me?’
‘Someone like you?’ Sinclair considers the words, seeming to taste them.
‘Someone like you… Do you play music?’
‘No, I never had the talent.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘I write. Or I used to write.’
Sinclair raises his eyebrows. ‘A writer? Artists are all the same. We are cousins separated by, I don’t know, maybe ego. What have you written? What do you write?’
Eddie drums his fingers against the steering wheel as the traffic stalls, but when the cars move again he still doesn’t know how to answer Sinclair. He hasn’t written a story for two years, and to even bring up the subject of his writing is an insult to people who really write. He’d had a short story in Staffrider some years back, though the moment had gone as quickly as it had come. It had never led to more stories, or even Eddie seeing himself as a writer. It wasn’t anything breathtaking, like Motebang beating the djembe on a Friday night. ‘It’s embarrassing, but love stories.’ Sinclair raises his eyebrows again, and looks back at Ts’epo as if in collusion of some private joke. But Ts’epo only glances at him and keeps looking out the window.
‘I didn’t think you were the type,’ Sinclair says. ‘Love is a very big subject, the meat and bones of every great song. You should sit with me and the band rehearsing sometime, we sing love songs on the odd day. Old Basotho songs that no one remembers anymore, but sometimes we sing them just to get in the mood. You should see us, jamming for so long that we never get any work done. Then we show up at the Lagoon, and we’re there, shrugging our shoulders, waiting for the real music to come to us, and the people are there too, hungry, and we’re up on stage, firing up some senseless tune, but we find it before anyone gets too impatient, and we play. Not the love songs though. Never the love songs.’
When they get to the town centre, Sinclair asks Eddie to wait behind with the car. He and Ts’epo disappear in the crowd while Eddie gets out to have a smoke. He watches the people. This is the most crowded part of Maseru: children with their mothers, young men selling all types of things—toy cars made of wire, cabbages, calendars. Still, Eddie finds pride in this: everyone here is black. And outside of this crowd, there will be more black people. There will be black people in every inch of this country he walks, until he gets to the South African border.
After a few minutes, his attention is arrested by a whistle, and his gaze is thrown into the crowd of people where Ts’epo beckons him. He stubs out his cigarette and follows. When they reach Sinclair, Eddie greets the fruit-seller, she shoots him a big, gap-toothed smile, and he helps Sinclair take the boxes of fruit to the car. Once they have unloaded the last of them, Sinclair wipes his brow and points to a tall building with blacked-out windows. ‘Motebang actually lives there.’
There is no sense of irony in Sinclair’s voice, so Eddie manages to keep his own voice level.
‘He lives there all by himself?’ Eddie says.
‘Maybe,’ Sinclair says, ‘we should go and see if he’s there.’
Eddie does wonder if he is being set up. The tension in his chest is impossible to conquer as they make their way up the steps to Motebang’s flat. But he reminds himself that Ts’epo is there, Sinclair as well, and their presence will enable him to watch Motebang from a safe distance while he figures out his next move. He hates himself for taking so long to figure out how to speak to him, and promises himself that this time, he will be more friendly. More inviting. More like the man who had been audacious enough to think he would be published in Staffrider.
Sinclair knocks and knocks and knocks and Motebang doesn’t answer.
‘Well!’ Sinclair says, shrugging, concluding the business of the day, and suddenly Eddie hates him. Maybe it was a set-up after all; Sinclair seems to be the kind of person who enjoys playing games with young men, watching them flounder for words to say to each other, or dig graves for themselves in public.
When they get back to the shed, the boxes of fruit are unloaded. Ts’epo returns to the house, and Sinclair removes from the fruit boxes small explosives with wires jutting out. He holds the explosives up to Eddie’s nose as if asking him to confirm the resplendence of some rare diamond. Sinclair puts them back in the boxes and sends Eddie to the university, where he meets the rest of the men. They revise several maps and decide whose house the explosives will be kept in. The campus lights glow dimly, the grounds are empty of students. Still, Eddie feels as alive as ever.
*
That Friday night Eddie makes sure that he is as drunk as he has ever been, so drunk he feels as if he is drowning in the music; it surrounds him in a slow, steady drone, and he stumbles, and he laughs, and makes himself bigger than he really is. It is in this state that he feels like he is truly part of the men, part of the hotel and the Lagoon. A few days earlier, he had been taught to fire his first gun. He directed the bullet to a chicken which stayed alive a few minutes after its insides were punctured and it let out a terrific scream that sounded almost human.
Eddie can tell that he is being repulsive from the way Motebang gives him a blank stare every time he tries to spark up a conversation. Motebang entertains Eddie’s self-destruction with polite words here and there, then quickly turns back to the other men.
‘When did you start playing the drum?’ Eddie asks during a brief lull where only he and Motebang are not contributing anything of significance to the discussion. But this time, Motebang’s tone is genial when he answers, and Eddie is surprised to detect shyness in Motebang’s voice too.
‘My grandmother used to play the drum,’ Motebang says, ‘I learned from her.’
For a few moments, there is nothing else to say. Eddie is terrified of this opening that he has so generously been given, an opening that he is unable to go through. A change occurs though, because suddenly, Motebang’s hand rests on Eddie’s thigh. He notices Motebang acting coolly about it, so he does the same, both of them involving themselves in the conversation, now insignificant compared to what is happening underneath the table. Eddie takes it further, curling an arm around Motebang’s waist; Motebang’s tiny waist that feels warm. When Motebang stands up, Eddie follows, neither of them looking back, and they wind through several hotel floors before they are in a room alone. It is beautiful in the way that rooms are beautiful in magazines: puffy chairs with gold accents, muslin curtains that flutter lightly in the breeze and promise to do so until the end of time.
When they start kissing, it is the alcohol in Motebang’s mouth Eddie tastes first, followed by cigarettes. He takes his jacket off as he is kissing Motebang, and Motebang unbuttons his shirt to reveal the milky skin Eddie has been thinking about all week. And now it is here before him. And now he reaches out to touch it, its incorruptible smoothness, and it feels even better than he thought it would. Motebang is kissing him back, but the smell of alcohol is still so present, the cigarette taste biting; Motebang kisses him hungrily, hurriedly, like he is running a race that Eddie can’t keep up with. And now Motebang unzips Eddie’s trousers, and touches Eddie’s dick, but nothing happens.
‘Is this all right?’ Motebang says.
Eddie nods while he is kissing Motebang, but he can sense that Motebang has withdrawn. His hands search stubbornly for the key in Eddie’s trousers that would make him hard. Eddie wants to stop kissing him, but he knows doing so would spoil this dream that he has, through luck or something more divine, found himself in. But they do stop kissing. The curtain, tapped lightly by the breeze, the moonlight spilling into the room—everything about this moment seems frozen and sacred, and Eddie wishes it could stay that way.
Motebang walks to the other side of the room and buttons up his shirt. He sits on the bed and lights a cigarette. Eddie wonders if this might have happened before, with Sibusiso.
‘I’m sorry,’ Eddie says. ‘I don’t know what is happening.’ His voice is swallowed by the room.
‘It’s okay,’ Motebang says, smiling wanly. ‘We’re drunk, it will be better in the morning.’
What exactly will be better in the morning, Eddie isn’t sure, but he nods anyway. Motebang’s beauty, as he sits on the edge of the bed, is remarkable; submerged half in darkness and half in moonlight, Eddie thinks he is the most beautiful person he has ever seen. Nothing about him can be wrong, can do wrong; it is him.
Eddie’s own weakness, his drunkenness, his unmanliness has spoiled this moment. Things like this never happen to people like him; this moment, here with Motebang, will never happen again. He has to be okay with this. He has to be okay with the sadness that comes over him, as suddenly and overwhelmingly as a wave from the ocean, a sadness that is deepened by the singular fact of Motebang’s beauty, people like Eddie should never be allowed to touch such beauty, but through a cosmic accident, or cosmic trickery—like Sinclair taking him up to Motebang’s flat that afternoon—he has, and for that, he is grateful. He should be grateful to Motebang.
‘Sinclair tells me you’re a writer,’ Motebang says.
‘Yes,’ Eddie replies. ‘I used to, though. I don’t write anymore.’
Motebang takes a drag out of his cigarette. ‘I’m a writer too. I write songs.’
‘Oh, can I—’
Motebang breaks into song, and as the cigarette glows dully between his fingers his voice flies through the room to create something Eddie has never heard before, not even from Sinclair himself. Something that unclasps Eddie’s chest and connects him to all the beautiful things in the world. He picks up the SeSotho words here and there, a song about a wife who finds out her husband is leaving her for another woman, and is begging him to stay.
Motebang closes his eyes in the same way he does when he plays his drum. Eddie is overcome by an urge to scoop Motebang up in his arms and take him far away. What exactly they would do there, Eddie does not know, but he feels an affection for Motebang that he hasn’t felt for anyone in ages.
‘That was beautiful,’ Eddie says when the song ends. Sadness lingers after the final note.
‘As beautiful as your writing?’
‘No,’ Eddie laughs. ‘My writing is very ugly compared to your singing. My writing is… It can’t make anyone feel the way your singing made me feel just now.’
For a while, it is quiet, but the silence is different from the one that had befallen them a few moments ago. Less oppressive.
‘You should sing on the big stage one of these nights,’ Eddie suggests. Motebang grimaces and shakes his head.
‘Why not?’ Eddie asks. ‘Have you talked to Sinclair about it?’
‘No… Sinclair—Sinclair needs to sing,’ Motebang says. ‘Sinclair needs to sing alone for now. My time will come, when all of you go. When Sinclair goes too’.
Eddie is silent. Why did he think Motebang was part of the men? It seems cruel that there should be this rift separating them: Eddie, Sinclair and the men on one side, Motebang on the other. Although, Eddie tries to convince himself, Motebang knew what he was getting himself into, getting involved with men like them. But aren’t they at fault for bringing so much violence into this country? Where would Motebang be without all the bullets, the threats, and the politics that had followed them from South Africa?
Perhaps he would be where Sinclair is now: centre-stage at The Blue Lagoon, singing songs for the drunk and sober alike. Giving people that rare gift of healing through music, as saccharine as that sounds. And Motebang would be alive. He would never die the way men like Sinclair and Eddie are doomed to die, with a bullet between his eyes, or flinging himself off a building like Nakasa in New York. But shouldn’t one black person’s struggle be a struggle for all black people? Isn’t this the collective pain that should bind them together?
Eddie nods in understanding. ‘Okay. You’ll sing then.’
He can’t come up with any more words. Something in Motebang closes. As they dress in silence, Eddie realises that something in him has closed as well. They return to the Lagoon and are swallowed up by the men, the dizzying music of the night.
*
That December, The Lesotho Liberation Army initiates a raid near the border post, killing a group of South Africans and a few Basotho. The men know that the attackers are really the South African government, who have been using The Liberation Army as pawns. For a few weeks, the men’s movements, who they talk to, can only be conducted under cover of night. The Blue Lagoon is being watched, they discover, so they do not go there anymore. Where once Sinclair had sung his songs and Motebang had beat his drum now resides emptiness. Some of the men stay in Lesotho and some of them are required to go to Angola.
In Angola, Eddie watches stubble grow on his chin and his shoulders get broader. The tendrils of old-age have started to creep in, or maybe it is the constant squinting against the Angolan sun that gives him crow’s feet. He thinks of his father, and how all young men are doomed to become images of their fathers, even those fathers that aren’t known to them—as is the case with Eddie—and how this sameness is a fundamental cruelty of the world. He feels himself becoming stronger though, and smarter. He has started writing again, if only to leave some scrap of himself to a child he will never have.
One Sunday, their training stops briefly as it sometimes does, and it is as if they are suspended in a bubble of air as they wait. And in this bubble they become, not exactly free, but nostalgic for South Africa, which seems strange, but the feeling is undeniable and seizes them with such a force as anything they have ever felt. Afterwards, Eddie and some of the men visit a local bar where South African music is playing. They are not surprised to hear a Sinclair Khumalo song, and Motebang beating his djembe in the background. But it is the song that plays after, as the men get distracted by other things—the women walking outside, the snooker game inside the bar—that makes Eddie go quiet. It’s a slower song, and it is in SeSotho. There are instruments now, a saxophone and an accordion wailing softly, and the song seems to have no chorus; a meandering prayer released into the air. What hasn’t changed is the texture of Motebang’s voice, as clear as water, and the story in the song itself. Eddie can hear the wife begging, helpless with grief and the wide-eyed wonder of those who have lost too much and lost too young, realising, as her husband packs up his suitcase and starts his journey to a new life, that she will have no one to call her own, and will be lonely forevermore.
