FRIENDSHIP
By Nzinga Nzinga
For Makini Nzinga Crosskill
Cedet amor
rebus; res age, tutus eris:…Ovid.
You
who seek an end of love, love yields to business. Be busy and you will be safe... Ovid
PART 2
There I go again criticizing
her. I believed her only to find out too late that I was the one to suffer from
the break brought about by her. I wanted to hear her say in her positive
assured way that it was finished. To bring it out into the open and discuss it
the way we used to sit around and discuss everything under the sun any time, any
place.
How I had loved her! I
noticed that it was now love in a past pluperfect time.
Slowly and heavily I went
back to the kitchen and the stack of dirty dishes which confronted me. I
attacked them with desperation, a humiliation and an extreme distress born out
of the revelation. It reminded me that after the war, the veteran has to get on
with or rather adjust to the daily routine of peacetime. After the honeymoon,
the bride and groom have to be transformed into wife and husband and settle
into the ups and downs of marriage.
The present she brought me
leered drunkenly at me from the bookcase where it “kotched” dangerously at an
angle too close to the edge. It was one of those expensive bottles in the shape
of a potbellied man containing a drop of whiskey.
“We were up all night
discussing and discussing. That’s why I’m late. We got high on this stuff but I
had to save you some.”
She had travelled so far from
me that she had already forgotten that I hated the smell much less the taste of
whiskey. We, she and I, used to stay up all night too, discussing and
discussing and getting mildly high on homemade wine, never whiskey. Those were
the times best forgot! I drained her whiskey down the sink and put away the
bottle beside the bin to be thrown out.
Did she ask herself why this
break was necessary? No, she probably never saw it as a break but just as a way
of getting on with another phase of her life that could no longer accommodate
so binding a friendship as ours. So it was only I left to wonder. To ponder.
Could it not have withstood the pressure of time? It was more defined than
that. It was clearly a case of economics, expediency of the social will. She
was moving on. I was stuck in the same groove dubbing the same old tune, an
uncertain solo.
It occurred to me that I had
no one with whom to discuss my problem. How could I? We were so safe in our
private world, so committed to each other that we had no need of others, not
even my ex-husband. I felt ashamed. It is never enjoyable to eat crow. I ate
crow in the presence of my ‘ex’ whom I had shut out because this friendship was
so fulfilling. He was right. There is a difference between the love of a woman
for her man and that of a woman for her best friend, who was also her
bridesmaid.
My eldest brother, who I
thought would be triumphant, looked pained, almost shy. “I had hoped you two
girls would have carried it, yeah, pulled it off,” he said.
“We tried.” I conceded
victory with an unpalatable taste of crow in my mouth.
“You are too intense. You tried
too hard. Don’t worry. I don’t have one single friend and I survive. You will
survive. Have your memories but your regrets let them be.” He actually hugged
me tighter than he had ever done since our mama died years ago. As if he was
hugging me for mama too. He was right. I would survive.
My listless spirits took me
for a walk. They turned my steps into the public library. It was fitting that
the librarian asked, “Where’s your friend? Haven’t seen her since last two
weeks. Like twins you are.” I could have mouthed something but this was England
where no one seems to mind if you don’t respond. I smiled weakly and browsed
about for exactly fifteen minutes. We used to spend an inordinate amount of
time among books, in libraries, in bookshops, anywhere books abound. I was
being hounded by memories. I couldn't separate the memories from the regrets. I
hurried out of the place back to the house that I shared with my eldest
brother.
How I had loved her!
My brother was lying on the
carpet in our large library.
“So you are back. Good. Fix a
grown man something substantial to eat. And while you’re at it, fix yourself
something too.”
We both laughed. My eldest
brother loved to make people laugh. He was not having much success making me
eat but he certainly made me laugh. We shared a delicious meal of tossed salad,
pizza with everything but the kitchen sink, hot garlic bread and homemade wine
to the music of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. It was a leisurely meal. My
eldest brother ate a lot, I but little. Then we listened to Bob Marley while we
ate homemade ice-cream and ginger bread. My eldest brother is six foot three
inches long, lean and invariably hungry.
I got up from among the
crumbs, dishes, tapes and my eldest brother’s long gaunt figure with a clear understanding
of friendship that I didn't have before.
I understood that there is a
time and a season for everything, especially when it comes to human
relationships. A time to bind and a time to cut loose. A time to hold tight and
a time to cut asunder. A season of passion and a season of cooling. I learnt
that wisdom teaches us to recognize that the time when such a relationship is
cut out or away from beneath one’s grasp, is always the right time and we
should not use force to hang or hold on to it. I learnt that it is also the
wise person who understands that such a recognition or revelation rarely comes
to both parties at the same time.
I had spent lonesome, lonely
moments of anguish reminiscing and rehashing what had been, and fantasizing
what could have been between her and me. As I said, I couldn’t yet separate the
memories from the regrets. Under circumstances like these, it is very tempting
to become acrimonious and malicious about the departed. Our solidarity had been
a source of learning together, of fun and laughter, of shared confidences and
tears. Now the end has come and our friendship has expired. It has died but I
am reconciled to the fact that I have to let it and her go, no matter how
difficult the exercise.
I was able to appreciate more
fully the following quote from Elizabeth George’s A Traitor To Memory:
“It’s odd, isn’t it,” she said to me. “One can
earnestly believe one has a particular type of relationship with another
person, only to discover it was never what one thought in the first place.”
(p 595 A New English Library, Hodder &
Soughton. ISBN 0-340-76708-1)
While we were eating, my
eldest brother remarked in a very serious tone, “As you know, my personal
experiences with that complex involvement called friendship, leaves a lot to be
desired. With me, friendship is all cerebral but I imagine that each time there
is an end to any relationship, especially friendship, for which one had
entertained hopes of being a lifetime bond, the dear departed takes fragments
of one’s heart away with them whether they realize it or not. They depart with
some essential part of one’s being but they leave one with happy lingering
memories that remain indelibly printed on one’s consciousness, expanding and
supplementing one’s collective treasury of experiences. If one chooses to be
understanding and wise, one can use them to promote and enhance one’s own
growth and development and that of others with whom one happens to form new
relationships.”
After understanding comes wisdom.
With wisdom comes acceptance; acceptance, that this estrangement is a part of
growth and that in spite of everything, she and I had loved, even if for only a
season. I consoled myself with the Yoruba proverb:
“Twenty
children cannot play together for twenty years.”
My eldest brother, a
well-known bestseller novelist whose books, extolling the inestimable value of
friendship, occupy a lot of space in bookshops and libraries nationally and
internationally, wiped two tears from my eyes.
“Is she really gone to get
married next week?” he asked.
“Gone with the wind,” I
answered.
“Are you devastated?” he
asked.
“Almost.” I couldn’t be
totally honest. I couldn’t admit that I was the last to hear the news.
“Go, child, go and write it
out. Write it out, I say. It’s therapeutic. It’s healing. I do it all the time.
Learn from these wise words of Roman Ovid:
Cedet
amor rebus; res age, tutus eris.
Let me translate: You who
seek an end of love, love yields to business. Be busy, and you will be safe.”
My eldest brother, a classic
scholar, had a quotation for every occasion.
“Write it out on paper. Just
write. Don’t worry about literary competence. Just put your feelings on paper.
I’ll get my publishers to look at it”
He was replete with food,
music and magnanimity. He was yawning as he left the room and would soon be
fast asleep. Could I do as my eldest brother advised? Could I write? Why not? I
had spent so much time working away at friendship, why not write about it? I
would give it my best effort. I went swiftly to the typewriter in the far
corner of the library. My eldest brother has a very large library. I inserted
paper and tapped out the opening paragraph of my first real life experience in
fiction intended for public consumption:
“As I watched her walk away….”
The keys of the typewriter could scarcely keep pace with the speed of my thoughts. I was clicking away, when from a seemingly far distance came the drowsy voice of my eldest brother who has won several prizes for his books and who has been acclaimed by international literary critics as ‘one of our foremost exponents and sensitive writers with an exquisitely clear insight into the delicate interactions of human relationships’.
“Hermoine!”
“Yes?”
“Hermoine!” his voice
bellowed from afar.
“What?” I yelled back
One would have thought my
eldest brother would know better than to interrupt the train of thoughts of a
wannabe writer-in-action.
“Don’t forget to stress that
point!” His raucous voice drowned out the noise of the typewriter.
“What?” I shrieked above the
din.
“Don’t forget to get the
message across.”
“What message?”
“That friendship is a bitch!”
"Friendship is a bitch"? I will keep that in mind;)
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