The Stone Virgins Read online

  I fall in a spiral. The ground comes toward me. I am on the ground, my ribs pressed down; my head is throbbing. I feel my blood slide over my arm, my face down, over my arm, sliding with blood. I am alive: I will bury my sister with my own hands. I will live. I crawl. I look for Thenjiwe. I scramble across the ground. My mind tosses, reaches, touches something solid outside my own body. I pull my arms apart, and stretch them as far as I can reach. I find the shocking stillness of her shoulders. The softness of her body, which is soon dark under my fingers. Everything darkens. I see nothing more. I do not hear my body sink to the ground, buried in that bottomless silence.

  Later. I hear voices surrounding me. There are movements everywhere. I feel the ground pounding. Then I am being lifted from the ground by a voice weeping. A voice splits the air, so close that it seems to emerge from my own body.

  The voice is that of my father’s eldest sister, Sihle, who lives not too far from our own homestead, in my grandfather’s kraal. Sihle’s voice rustles like leaves; it is so low that she searches for every word. Feeling that whatever she has said has not been heard, she repeats a word, then another, stammers, grasps.

  Everyone calls her Sihle, even though all the mothers in Kezi are called by the names of their children, especially if these children are sons. She lives with her four children—Samkelo, Zenzo, Bongani, and Nkosana. Her eldest, Samkelo, even has a wife and his own small daughter, Thandolwenkosi. When my father was still living, he called my aunt by the name of her first son, Zenzo, only when he was chastising her, telling her not to answer back or telling her to take her foolishness away from his daughters. Thenjiwe and I both loved her. So did my father. We slip out of Father’s brick house to her warm embers as often as we can. At night, we wrap our shoulders in moonlight and take the winding path to her hut; the crickets sing beneath our feet; the tree is shaped like a woman dancing. We are not afraid. We know no harm and lie on the mat near the hearth till morning. And laugh till we have swallowed all the smoke from Sihle’s fires. She has the tiniest voice possible, and we listen carefully whenever she talks. We halt our own restless voices. There is silence and speech, fall and rise, whenever Sihle is about. There is a steady rhythm. The silence marks the times when Sihle talks and gives us our histories, like treasures. We hold our voices still, eager for our pasts, for our futures. When there is no light, our dreams emerge out of a thick darkness that we can gather with our arms.

  Sihle is not married to Ndabenhle Dlodlo, the man with whom she has had her four sons. However, everyone in the village calls him by the name of his first son … sekaZenzo. In the mouths of all the people of Kezi, they are as married as if they lived together. Sihle refuses to leave the home in which she was born. She confides in Thenjiwe: “If I do not marry him, it is best. Look at your father and the grief still resting on his forehead. Your mother went back to her village because she had tired of his desire for a son. After you were born, she lived with him only another five years and then left. My brother did not remarry. Your mother took his heart with her and buried it under a rock. I do not want to have to steal a man’s heart and bury it under a rock because of a desire that has decided to visit his tongue.”

  It is Sihle who is blamed for anything the women in the Gumede family fail to do or do improperly—talking to strangers, our inability to secure husbands, and stubbornness. Blamed by the men in our family, that is. And at such times, Sihle is referred to in the most polite terms, naZenzo. My uncle Mduduzi, my father’s brother, also lives nearby. He has a voice like a whip.

  I hear Sihle’s voice. She is calling upon all the names of her children as though the existence of their names in our midst will attend to our desperation. She moans a lullaby that flows from the sky to the earth. She awakens all our ancestors. “Mpilo Hospital,” someone says, “in the city.” Voices are muddled. I hear one voice over another; words swallow words, die within words before I hear them, catch them. They slip out of my head before I have understood their source or gathered their ability to heal. Sibaso’s voice is the closest. It crushes between every other word before I can hear. His voice makes every other sound perish. I cannot hear, and tremble, lost and blind to everything except his version of events, his persistent pursuit of what has happened here. His question. Frantic. It has happened. But what is it? He asks and asks. Who did this? Who? He is asking no one. None of us was there, not I, who is being carried from it, not even Thenjiwe, who has died from being here. Who?

  The headmaster of Kunene Primary School is going to drive us to Bulawayo in his truck. “There is a roadblock every thirty kilometers,” Sihle says. Her voice is very far away, but determined, resolute. “Will we reach Bulawayo?” she asks. “When they see us, the police will let us through,” someone else responds. It is my uncle Mduduzi; his voice is sharp against all the other voices. “These roadblocks can be dangerous,” Sihle whispers again, her arm under my shoulder, under my arm, holding tight. I am safe in her arms. I feel the silence of her voice. I must live. I do not want naZenzo to be blamed for my missing voice, for Thenjiwe dying.

  I try to speak. I try hard to move my lips. I want to tell them everything I have seen. The water falling from the bucket that Thenjiwe was carrying. The sliding mud, red with blood. The man, Sibaso. Perhaps he lied about his name. I do not know. I want to describe him, each word he spoke, each strand of hair, his violent contempt of the living. I want to speak.

  My voice is low; not even I can hear it. I fall deeper and deeper, till no voices can be heard. I cannot feel my lips moving, or find the shape of my words; a shape to match my words. My mind struggles till I am breathless and a dark pain penetrates my body, and spasms shake me to the root.

  When Sibaso’s voice vanishes, I know that this is worse than his voice burning over each of my nerves. I listen hard to his voice again and keep it near. I wake. I do not sleep. I hear a car moving, sliding onto the tarred road. I listen to car wheels. I breathe carefully, afraid of my own body. A radio at Thandabantu Store, the sound of a group of people talking calmly among themselves. We turn into the road and go past as their voices fade under the running wheels. First, the dirt road, then the ground is smooth, tarred. I can see the marula tree as we drive past and leave it behind us. I see it and the sky above it. The leaves are moving softly. A woman calls from one side of the road. No words on her tongue. Perhaps the beginning of a name. She calls till her voice has fallen far behind us as the car moves on. Perhaps she is only calling for her child.

  Ahead of us are the mountains of Gulati. I can imagine this view as the car moves forward, though I am not looking at it; only the blue sky is brushing over my forehead, so close that I am floating through it as we move down the road, as I lie at the back of the truck, as I measure my frail memory against the movement of a car and the expanse of a horizon. Sihle has removed the scarf from her head and tied it all the way around my face, over my mouth. The cloth is wet with blood. I rest on her lap all the way to Bulawayo. Then my eyelids drop, and the darkness is comforting.

  I feel the cradle of her arms, wet with blood; my temples are throbbing. “You must live,” Sihle says. “Then I will show you the very rock on which you were born. Do you know that your mother gave birth to you on her way to the river? You were born suspended between water and stone. How can you be weak when you are made of the two most stubborn elements of the earth? Nonceba … Nonceba …” she calls. Sihle has a way of scolding you just to prove how much she cares, but my body is dead as we travel from Kezi through the Matopo hills, past the encircling hills of Gulati, dead. We do not see a single policeman or a soldier. None. We travel smoothly, as though this were a new day. I cannot absorb the distance we have traveled. Though I am awake, I am unconscious to the frenzied passage of time. There is a storm in my head. I reach the end of an eternal darkness. When I think of Sibaso, I feel a revulsion so deep that my body heaves forward and Sihle whispers that I should keep still. She holds my body down. I sink into the comfort of her voice, surprised to be alive, to be at the ot
her end of this blank horror and be alive, able to open and close my eyes as though it were no great matter to open and close them, and find each time that same death flashing past my eyes, the man Sibaso majestic in his own discovery of the human heart—malevolent. I hear him throughout this journey, and underneath it all, a part of me wants to stay awake, and hear him. It is a long time before I realize that I do not need to keep on saying quietly to him, “Let me go … Let me go.”

  Nothing is said. Not about Thenjiwe. Not about the war. Nothing said can return Thenjiwe to us. Nothing said today or tomorrow. Nothing.

  11

  I fought in the hills of Gulati. I am a man who is reconciled. My mind is scalded and perfectly free. My mind is a ferment. What is it to live? After a certain point, reality stops coinciding with our wishes. When I was born, my mother had already died. She had stopped breathing. I swam out of her body, which flowed like a river. It is this to be alive. I am among the drowned, those with a feline imagination. How many times have I lain awake in the forest to see the sky give birth to a multitude of stars? I rest my palm open. There, in my palm, a thousand strokes of light, a thousand years. How many years, with my palm spread to the stars, before all my senses are restored? I count each nameless ancestor on my dead fingers. The one buried in a noose. Nehanda, the female one. She protects me with her bones. I embrace death, a flame.

  The city. I move past the semidetached houses of my former street; two rooms for each family. I move in an unending dream. It is good that it is raining. I do not meet many people. D 43874, D 43875, D 43876, D 43877. On and on. The numbers of the houses appear in black ink under the low asbestos roofs, above each front door. The houses are painted in pale blue, a green tint, lemon yellow, peach. Each house is held together by a fence, never more than a meter high. Small bushes are cut neatly back. A series of stones painted white—any boundary will do. To enter each yard, there is a small gate: the rusted old door of a car; panels of wood joined together, shaped into a square, painted; a mesh fence twice folded, then hooked to a metal frame. These I see from the edge of my vision; the water is running from my forehead and circling my eyes. It is raining. A brief rain. On my right a tree, bright, clustered with lemons. I walk. Nothing matters. My arms, moving in the rain.

  This is independence. Arms wave through windows. Arms voiceless, shaped behind glass. Dark branches moving. A whirlwind. Raindrops. A window opens. A voice shouts, tearing the air like cloth. I am in Njube Township. When I raise my arm and knock, someone else opens the door. It is a voice I do not recognize.

  “Yes. Can I help you?” he asks. I know immediately that this house is now his.

  “I am looking for my father.” I give him a name: Sibaso. He shakes his head and keeps his hand on the door handle, from inside. He is wearing a vest and white cotton shorts. His feet are bare.

  “He does not live here. I do not know him,” he says, shaking his head again as though to banish sleep from his eyes. I look at him. He has flat, innocent eyes, and high cheekbones, too beautiful for a man. His figure is lean. He could be thirty. He searches my face, too.

  “I was in the struggle. I have come back, with the others. I used to live here.” His face does not change. He is afraid, perhaps.

  “I do not know your father. I bought this house from another man. A year ago. His name was different from that. He may have known your father. But he died. He died from malaria. He had been taken into prison. The prison said there was no quinine. No one came to claim his body; that is how I know. They found this address on him. It was said his only son was in the bush. That was why he had been detained. To answer questions. His name was different from yours. I could look it up, if you are willing to wait.” He retreats into the darkness of the room. The kitchen. I used to live here. I know the house.

  “That is all right. I will talk to the neighbors. Perhaps they remember him and have an address. Perhaps they remember me.”

  I turn away and leave. I have no intention of talking to the neighbors. Perhaps my father has changed his name, as I have. It might not be my father who died. I allow this opportunity to exist, to connect me to my past. I wonder about the new tenant, not my father. Why is this man not joining everyone on the streets? This whole street is celebrating. A thief could go and steal from every home, and no one would notice. No one is inside. There has been daily and spontaneous festivity. An individual wakes from sleep in the middle of the night, and moves from house to house, knocking on each door, announcing that independence is here. This solitary act is not only tolerated; it is emulated. To celebrate is to be joyous without measure. After all, an entire nation has sanctioned your joy, demanded it of you. Your response must be immediate; if you wait till after independence, you will dance alone in the streets. Everyone will have closed their doors and their windows, tired of celebrating.

  Before my feet have moved down the last step leading from his door, the new tenant calls to me.

  “Perhaps this will help. I found it in the kitchen. It was the only thing left in the house. Please take it. You may give it away afterward. It was in the house, in the kitchen. There was nothing else.” He hands me a book. Feso, by Solomon Mutswairo. I receive it. I have read this book. I read it in my first year at university, and abandoned my studies at the end of the year. How could this book have survived all my journeys? I lift my hands, the palms held flat, the thumbs raised. He places the book between my burned forefinger and my thumbs. He stares at my hands as though understanding me for the first time. I shift the book to one hand, my left. He watches my movement the way one watches a chameleon, wondering if it will reach the next branch.

  “Thank you,” I say to him, while he remains glued to the door. His eyes pull away from the sun. He must have stayed in all morning. I walk away with the book in my hand and search the naked air for waving arms, for joy.

  Joy: It is a task to be achieved quickly. Yet there are those, like the new tenant, with restraint. They stand in front of mirrors and seek their own truth, and wonder what the new day can possibly be about. Such a different individual will take independence as a personal matter, and stay indoors, lock his door and cover his windows with a torn cloth so that the sun can come through but no one will believe he is alive. He will hear a knock. He will open the door or leave it closed, as he chooses. I liked the new tenant; he was cynical in the midst of the loudest joy. He has failed to understand what people have been doing waving miniature flags in the air for weeks. It has made him shrink to the core, and when he saw me, perhaps he pitied my involvement. He has not adorned himself like the rest, and has shunned those who suddenly wear expensive garments all day, and go to the beer garden in nicely ironed shirts to drink Chibuku. Their women, whom they used to leave behind at home, suddenly appear pressed to their arms, wearing polyester skirts and georgette blouses, and shoes with three-inch heels and leather tops. The elaborate hairstyles of the women give the false impression that everyone has a wedding to attend.

  In the middle of the street, just before reaching Njube High School, where I intend to get a bus to the city center, I decide to open the book. I search the small print on its opening pages. I feel an explosion in my head. I hold on to the fence of the school, like a prisoner. I cling tightly, my mouth dry. Held between the old pages is a folded map. Creased. There is a single arrow on it. My escape. Those many years ago. Between the map and the first page of the book, I find a crushed spider weighed down by time. This spider is stark on the print. Was the spider trapped when the pages, once opened, were suddenly closed, too quickly for its lengthy but bent legs to carry it past danger? No time for that speedy spiral upward on a single line of silver web? Spiderwebs. I have seen spiderwebs in the rain, in Gulati. There is more than one rainbow in a web. The most complex web carries many rainbows. No matter how heavy a rainbow is, it cannot break the back of a spider: A spider’s web does not break. It stretches, just like time. For this spider, a rainbow has broken its web. In war, time weaves into a single thread. This thread is a bon
d. Not all bonds are sacred. The present is negotiable; the past, spider legs that once were needles.

  I have found a spider stain beneath the aged surface of this map. A word hides under the brittle smudge where the spider sinks into the fraying paper. This paper is old, but not old enough for a spider to evolve into a different shape, to smudge the stain, like spilled tea. No. Not that old. I lift the sheet and this shape falls off the web of words, a fossil floating in noon light, perforated like a dry leaf. I wonder if spiders bleed before dying, before drying.

  The crushed spider is an outline, the shape alone a faint sketch in charcoal—its skeleton raised to the surface after being crushed between pages; possible to be held between pages; cannot merge with words. Humans become fossils by being buried in stone, not by being held in air. In fire, they burn. In stone, bones are held still. Of all continents, only Africa has known the crushed solitude of a dead spider. Charcoal perfect.