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If anything, it’s taught me humility. I think I had a big head. I thought I was special, immune, exceptional. That these sorts of things wouldn’t happen to me. But I’m not. I’m just another South African rape statistic. There’s nothing extraordinary about my story, it happens everywhere, every day. It doesn’t matter that I’m highly educated, a doctor, that I started a petition that made the newspapers.
I have a vagina. That’s all that matters.
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Some people say there were times in history when women ruled the world. The same kind of people who claim that there was a time when black people ruled the world. Fanciful nonsense. Even just physiologically, it’s improbable that women ever lorded over men. Physical strength has always counted for more. The weight of a man on your chest, multiple men, one after another, empties your lungs. Even if your mind is sharper, with them on top no oxygen can reach your brain. It’s impossible. Just try to picture a country ruled by the women I know. Ma, Nyasha, me. Ma rising and falling with the shadows, Nyasha cussing and swearing at history, and me: a bloody mess. It would be a joke.
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We went back to the police station this morning. They showed me the initial statement that was taken, and explained that they were still busy with the case. I wanted to tell them they’d written it all wrong. That the men didn’t say, “Where are your friends now?” But that they said “Where are your kwere-kwere friends now?” I wanted to point out that it was my mouth they forced open, not my eyes, and that one first put his penis in my mouth and I had to suck it because I was scared. They left out that it felt like something was tearing inside. I’d told them that the second or third penis in my vagina grated like a fork against a brick, but they didn’t write that down. The statement the officer had taken and reinterpreted was written on a page torn from an exercise book. Why did he use blue ink instead of black? At medical school I was taught that legal documents needed to be in black ink.
I should have corrected them. And I should have told them I thought one of the men was the same man who used to stand at the security box issuing keys for the doctors’ rooms, and the other might be the voice on the switchboard, the voice that always sounded like it could see me from the other end of the line, that seemed to want to say more but didn’t as it transferred me from Emergency Department to Surgery, to Outpatients. But the police station smelled of urine and the officer of drink, and I didn’t want to upset Ma. So I said nothing.
The lawyer we saw later asked why none of my colleagues that morning noticed anything different about me. “Different like how?” I had asked him.
“If you’ve just been raped ma’am, you don’t just go back to business as usual, and if you do, unless you’re dead inside, there’s something different about you.”
Maybe I am dead inside. Or maybe I’m just pragmatic. You can’t cry in the operating room. You can’t let your unsterile teardrops fall into an open abdomen. And you can’t cry between cases, either. The patients need drips, the blood results need to be fetched, preoperative medication needs prescribing. And even when you get home, you must shower, cook, eat, study, and try to get to bed early enough to bank up some sleep for the next day’s call. When is there ever an opportunity to cry? You cry at church on Sunday if you’re lucky enough to have the day off. Crying is a luxury we just don’t have time for.
“Different like how? You think I’m making this up? Why would I make this up? You think I’m crazy?”
Ma said not to shout. The lawyer was just trying to get a clearer sense of the sequence of events. All of this was very confusing for everyone, and I mustn’t get so angry. Nobody wants to hurt me. They just want to understand so they can help.
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As a doctor you learn to endure anything. How to plunge your fingers into a pus-filled vagina without scrunching up your nose. How to look a mother in the eye and lie to her about her baby dying inside. How to carefully wipe infected amniotic fluid off your face without gagging. You learn to work with difficult people, crazy people, dead people. You learn to stay up, and continue staying up. To shrug off criticism, and to eat your lunch in between dissecting cadavers. So as I lay there, I thought, okay, this is bad, this is really bad, but it will only last a few minutes, at most fifteen. That’s it, fifteen minutes of your life. Just forget it ever happened, don’t let fifteen minutes of your life haunt you forever.
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There’s not much in this life one can count on to be there forever. Everything goes, everyone fades. There are peaks and valleys, then more peaks, but always more valleys. Some people call it exciting. They use words like “adventure.” All I know is, I look forward to it coming to an end. Then,
