The Stone Virgins Page 11
I open leaf after leaf of fading ink. The paper folds lightly while the dust escapes and is caught by light. Flecks float in upward strokes of light. Spider-leg light. Time swings forward.
Unless you know too much about spiders, a dead spider crushed between paper is neither male nor female. This sort of weightlessness should be experienced at least once by each human being, and all the time by all nations.
12
Daytime is the hardest to endure. Objects are clean, as though washed, clear and distinct, submerged in light. My mind lacks an equal sharpness. There is no sure light in it. I see less. A blur in the room veils everything. Light is pure. Edges are sharp. My mind dulls everything till I swim in a vast opaque liquid. Speckles of light float in the room in which I dream while I am awake, yet not truly alive. I wake in a sweat, drenched. I wake with Thenjiwe’s name held on my tongue; my mouth is filled with saliva. My limbs are stiff. No part of my body can move; my fingers, my arms, every part of my body is again still. I lie on the bed, listening to my body turning slowly into stone. My jaw is held tight. I do not shout. Then I see a figure move. I see light falling through a sieve like a soft rain. Light is sprinkled through the room. The voice approaching is clearer to me than the light.
Sihle walks into the room, toward me. She wipes my forehead with a wet cloth. She takes my stiff arms into her own. “You are safe,” she whispers. I move my arms, murmuring, my mouth stiff, as though sewn up, stitched like the hem of a dress, folded; heavy with numbness. I am unable to speak, my forehead is heavy. I carry words at the back of my mind, names of things, objects, places I do not know. My entire face is swollen, and it throbs. The skin on it pulls down and tightens; then my words quickly withdraw. My mouth has no words, shriveled. The thread going in and out of me will eventually fall off. I sleep with my arms spread over Sihle’s lap, with her face watching over me like a child. When I open my eyes again, it is already night.
I am alone in the room. My arms rest neatly on my sides. The skin on my mouth breaks and cracks like clay. I move a finger over the edges of my mouth. The skin peels off in small bits like a broken shell. I open and close my mouth. I suck air into my body. I move my mouth all night, in the dark. I am chewing the air. Anxiously, I test my ability to speak. I have not heard my own voice for so long. A sound moves from the bottom of my chest, rises to my throat. A grating, flaking sound, like a cough. I close my mouth, breathing deeply in, till my words dissolve. I hear my teeth touch, hit—a beat of stone. There is no light left in the room. A curtain is drawn. The darkness is a rapid chorus of crickets, shrill, piercing, strident. I would be satisfied to imitate this sound. The hissing chorus of insects, an enviable refrain.
The morning carries a sudden rushing sound like heavy rain, but this is not rain, only the frenzied winds of July, which can last an entire day without a drop of water falling from the sky. I hear the sand lift. The wind is high and turbulent and beats hard against the walls. It sweeps the dry grains of soil and hurls them onto the grass roof, beating down. The dogs bark, with their bodies flat on the ground. Their voices are thin convulsions, like my fear. Through the window I see the air darken and swirl past. The morning has lost its loose light. The wind rushes onward and branches crack. Heavy grains dash furiously against the mud walls. The wind beats over the metal frame of the empty cart that is lodged behind the hut. A silver sound, like pieces of sharp glass, as the sand hits upon metal and cuts like a knife over the edge of the cart. A boulder juts out near the field just behind the huts and the brick house, an obstacle, a high, smooth boulder of polished stone, straight, with a rounded top that stands higher than all the huts. The wind circles and whips against the rock repeatedly, sharp, grinding, unable to move or hollow the stone. I turn. A leaf is stuck against the window. Pressed down. I watch it as the wind moves about in every direction. The leaf is flattened, spread out. When it finally slides downward like a snail, the wind has also moved off. I can still hear the various sounds, the air pushing beneath the door—an enviable sound. The trees are rid of their leaves. My mind is quiet. Not rushing like the wind. Perfectly still. Like the leaf on the window, pressed down by the thoughts rushing against it. Raging against it.
13
Nineteen eighty-two. You can smell the unpicked fruit from the large marula tree for distances, past one village to the next, and another, as far around Kezi as your body can go. If you cannot catch the scent of it, for whatever reason of your own, then for sure you can hear it; it is in all the minds of the otherwise solitary and quiet inhabitants of Kezi. Fruit has been falling off the marula tree endlessly, and now the rains are near—if there are going to be rains at all, that is. Last year again, the maize crop withered and left a starved and violated population even more bewildered. There is no harvest. Now this. The marula tree has been yielding and dropping fruit nonstop since the middle of the year, and in the morning, when the air embraces the first light, simultaneous with that light and that embrace, there is the scent of a divine and almost sinful succulence. As dawn turns to day, dark to true light, the scent outpours. It flows. It wafts into a crescendo, and by noon, women are fanning themselves with mopani branches and throwing handfuls of water in the narrow spaces between their breasts. They are trying everything they can to survive the ethereal and weightless beauty of this air. The air is so sharp, you can taste it. They try everything easy and quiet, sipping water from a calabash, opening the door wider and wider to foster some sort of balance, some harmony, while the sun lowers itself slowly and shifts shadows to the other side of the huts, replicating objects that have height and distance.
Day is deep, sonorous, reverberating. By midafternoon, the body has adjusted and a few tasks can be done to their completion, though the scent is heavier, saturating the air, bathing everything in its drowsy light, a balm for the senses; eyelids close of their own volition. The ground tilts and rights itself. The ground is splashed with yellow marula. The birds swoop down into that evanescent air, spreading their wings and holding them still like fins; they land where human feet can no longer tread, then suck the juice from the splattered fruit. The sun drops over the horizon, and with an equal abruptness the scent is suspended. It vanishes, not gradually, but like a stone thrust, disappearing beneath water, instantly—till morning. The day is split into two halves: the darkness, the pure air, the craving, and then daylight, brimming with marula. Never, never has the village endured such a precise, heady, and unquenchable scent as this, not in quiet times, not during the height of the liberation war, and certainly not at independence. It is a phenomenon too tantalizing for the senses, imperfect yet wonderful. It is the only cherish-able link with dawn, and they dare not cut that marula tree down for their firewood or any kind of escape; they dare not be superstitious, preferring to persevere in that profuse and dreamlike air with its promise of rescue. The marula tree. They hold on to its fecundity, and, indeed, its past memories. After all, there is nothing else left communal since the day Thandabantu Store blazed down. Kezi is a place gasping for survival—war, drought, death, and betrayals: a habitat as desolate as this is longing for the miraculous.
What is left of Thandabantu Store are the memories, now distant, though the stretch of time is brief; so much else has consumed memory, the present overwhelms the past and the future. Once, the setting of a sun engaged them and created conversation, brought comfort, light, to their faces, a dim smoothness of voices, and consolation. The herd boy, with his guide stick raised and the most sustained whistle held under a pinched lower lip, his two dogs circling and barking at the stray herd, brings the cattle to the fold. The flood of cattle goes past the Kwakhe bridge into the yellowing sun; the young boy is barefoot, quick, alert. He lags behind and picks a coin from the bus stop; his brow furrows as he tries to discover whether the face of this coin says Rhodesia or Zimbabwe. One is a relic, but with the other, he can race into Thandabantu and buy Crystal sweets before his herd is through crossing the bridge.
Part of the old Thandabantu veranda is stil
l here, solid and undisturbed; enduring, too, is the thick, flat, low wall built around the veranda, linking pillar to pillar. Even with the dust and the rubble, the platform has the look of a surface, smooth and polished from constant use. Here female soldiers once reclined during the cease-fire; they spread curiosity and awe throughout the population of Kezi, spitting onto the ground, rubbing the smoke of fires from their eyes, bending their hips to pull to a comfortable tightness the loose shoelaces on their boots. The veranda thumps for months and months with the mighty sound of their tread, their long strides, their endless energy, their confident gazes on every curious face. They hug loaves of hot bread under their arms and step away past the huts and glide into the valley, to the Assembly Camp, which they called Sondela; under their feet is the crush of dry leaves, twigs, and insect shells.
They live in tents, thick canvases pegged to the ground on one side; on the other, a canopy is tied to the trunk of a tree. The women are said to sleep in their whole attire, in those boots—along with them are four hundred other soldiers living within the barbed-wire fence that surrounds their campground. Independence is here. Helicopters berate the air and zoom past at any time of the day. The soldiers look up and shield their eyes with their hands, which they hold still over their foreheads as if saluting. They bow under thornbushes in bloom; impervious to scratches, they draw handfuls of delicate hidden petals, throw them into the air, catch them on their hopeful upturned faces. The petals float down. They enjoy the soft feel of those petals, and passersby regard them with a puzzled silence. Walking in the grass. Walking on the Kwakhe River sand under the bridge, emerging on the other side, walking on soft sand till it reaches their ankles, and they are pulling, sinking, slipping, sinking in that deep, soft Kwakhe sand.
Each day, they wander off from the Assembly Camp back to Thandabantu, defying boundaries, banishing time and distance, avoiding the bridge and walking beside the Kwakhe River at any time they please. This veranda was their abode; they transformed it, and they became the ultimate embodiment of freedom. They made independence sudden and real, and the liberation war fought in the bush became as true as the presence of these soldiers. Freedom: a way of being, a voice, a body to behold. From this veranda, independence could be watched like a sun in the distance; an arm held up could capture a few of its rays. Female soldiers envisioning independence tuned their bodies to a slow momentum. Waiting. Here.
Today, stray paper is trapped around the raised platform, feathers, sugarcane peelings. Goats leap over the rubble of bricks and cement, the collapsed wall, the mixture of broken glass, smashed bottles, pieces of shelving, bent metal door frames, melted plastic bottles, burned wooden crates. The counter, shaped out of cement and bricks, is still standing, jutting defiantly out of the rubble. It consists of a large platform a meter wide. Here, the men who have just disembarked from the Kezi-Bulawayo bus unfold their arms. In tones secret and elated, they describe their own predictions of glory, of independence. The storekeeper, Mahlathini, keeps his hands on the till and never looks up; he laughs, but never looks up; he agrees, disagrees, and never lifts his eyebrows. He shrugs his shoulders, slips a bill into the drawer, and clamps it under the tray; he slides coins into the box. He leans back and laughs at something said. He does not want to remember who said what, and when. He does not want to know who heard him say what, and when. He picks up the murmur of voices, this tone, that intuition, the terror in the other voice. The rumor, the gossip, the number of soldiers killed, the war. Mahlathini keeps his eyes down and his fingers on the till. When the shop is finally empty, he looks up, through the doorway, and sees men lingering. He sees a woman selling baskets under the marula shade, the sun in violent waves.
At least Mahlathini lived long enough to witness the cease-fire and independence and to see city men lose their swagger and fall to their knees as the women, newly returned from the war, ease onto his veranda and call out for cigarettes in idle tones, Madison for some, Lucky Strike for others. None of them asks for Everest.
Mahlathini, long the storekeeper of Thandabantu Store, has died. Those who claim to know inch by inch what happened to Mahlathini say that plastic bags of Roller ground meal were lighted and let drop bit by bit over him till his skin peeled off from his knees to his hair, till his mind collapsed, peeled off, and he died of the pain in his own voice. He was dead by the time they tied him to a chest of drawers and poured petrol over the goods and the fabrics for sale and the body lying down—no, the bodies, for the soldiers had walked into Thandabantu toward sunset and found more than twenty local men there, and children buying candles, and the old men who should have been at that ancient Umthetho rock, dying peacefully, but preferred the hubbub at Thandabantu and therefore went there each day, all these. The soldiers shot them without preamble—they walked in and raised AK-47 rifles; every shot was fatal.
Mahlathini. They made a perverse show out of his death, accusing him of offering a meeting place where anything could be spoken, planned, and allowed to happen. He was said to be an expert at discarding the future. Mahlathini had no time to protest; neither was he invited to. The soldiers announced that they knew him, remembered him from the period of the cease-fire, when Sondela Assembly Camp was located down the valley. Did he not remember that one of the cease-fire camps was in front of his shop in 1980? Right on top of his forehead? They know every grasshopper and every blade of grass in Kezi; they know him. As far as they were concerned, there was absolutely nothing Mahlathini could add or deny about what they believed to be his current activities.
Mahlathini never looked up at the man, at the gun, at the voice. He looked down and accepted that he would never see his children again. He did not want to see who was killing him, just in case he recalled something about the eyes, the forehead, the gait of this man. He avoided encountering, right before his own eyes, that sort of betrayal. He did not want to see anything more, even if he understood this had nothing to do with memory. They were going to kill him, and said so while doing it. There was no danger of him recalling anything, of speaking against this soldier. He had a shocked and lingering fondness for independence, the many soldiers on the porch, their bodies spread like new flags under his roof.
Mahlathini’s death would not be registered. There would be no memory desired of it. It was such a time, such a death. He did not challenge the accusations he knew to be false. His mind was racing like a wind past the guns and the deliberate industry of these soldiers, past the liberation war and its years and years of hope, which for him stretched first from his veranda to the hills of Gulati. Only then did the years extend to the various lands of the country, which he would not live to see or imagine, where the war, too, had been fought. His mind raced beyond the cease-fire, the grace and power of the celebrations for independence, the belief, the expectation, the ecstasy, past his own death, till his mind was no longer whirling and turning, but empty. Separate. Quiet. Dead with the agony in his body, melting. He could no longer hear the voices, the gunshots, the chaotic movements inside his store. Everything he knew to be happening seemed to take too long. What was clear and obvious was that he was not important. What was a place called Kezi compared to the charmed destinies of these men? Who was Mahlathini? He was only a storekeeper whom they could skin alive and discard.
He heard the minds of these men as they prepared to kill him. First, they shot his legs. It was when he was on the floor that they tore off his clothes and set fire to the plastic bags. They sliced and emptied container bags of maize meal from the store and used those to separate him from his skin. The soldiers slid pure through the soft mounds of white maize flour and lifeless bodies and blood. With arms powdered, with boots coated with flour, they hooked the plastic bags on metal hangers from which they had recently removed children’s uniforms. They tied him up. Then they let the burning emulsion down. On him. The soldiers focused on this one activity with force and intensity, their faces expressionless as they sliced plastic after plastic, as they let the liquid flame drop, as they set the pla
ce alight, as they slid into the shoulder-high grass, the night empty of a single star. Before they had shaken off the flour from their arms, they had already forgotten Mahlathini and the pillar of flame they had left behind.
Those who witnessed the goings-on at Thandabantu on this night said Mahlathini howled like a helpless animal. When the sound died, his skin was already perforated like lace. Long before they burned the store down, he had died. What followed the series of gunshots, the torture, was a cacophony of sound, which lit the night with its explosion. The odor of charred flesh filled the air and has stayed in the minds of the Kezi villagers forever. On this night when Thandabantu was burned down, babies being weaned had to be kept longer on the breast so that their mothers could survive what had happened, aided by the warm touch of the sightless minds of their offspring. Thandabantu Store was razed, bombed to pieces, and silenced. If there are bodies under the rubble, nobody dares to approach the site, to remove each stone and broken brick and count the bones, one by one, to identify which is which; which the vertebrae that make a man stand.
Some of the men who are missing in the village are said to have certainly died there; the others, it is said, walked all the way from Kezi to Bulawayo, on that same night, having managed to escape, carrying with them the memory of a burning body and an impeccable flame, understanding more than anyone else that Kezi was to endure a time both frightful and unrefined, that whatever else was to happen would be devastating, and final. Those who had already witnessed the future found it foolhardy to stay. They were in flight from a truth they had already encountered. The team of soldiers who had congregated on Thandabantu Store had demonstrated that anything that had happened so far had not been random or unplanned. Atrocious, yes, but purposeful. They committed evil as though it were a legitimate pursuit, a ritual for their own convictions. Each move meant to shock, to cure the naive mind. The mind not supposed to survive it, to retell it, but to perish. They flee, those men who witnessed Thandabantu burn. They flee from a pulsing in their own minds.