The Stone Virgins Read online

  Cephas has provided her with a home, and a new life. She has no regrets in coming to the city. Certainly their relationship is undefined. It is pleasurable, supportive. They both avoid defining it, embraced by an innocence born of the tragic circumstances of their unity. They do not complicate it with questions they dare not answer. Around 5:30 every evening, the traffic in the city becomes a murmur; by 6:30 it hums. Then the streets are empty—so empty, you can hear the soft sound of tires as a bicycle goes by. When Nonceba again looks through the window, the noiselessness is visible. Dim footsteps. Streetlights. A lone vehicle waiting for the light to change—red, green, amber. Cephas returns home soon after. They do not discuss their relationship, the limits of it. They focus on the things that need to be done, the things they are definite about. Helping: a type of rescue. He helps her. They avoid the most imprecise element, love, the least predictable, the most enduring human quality, the most intriguing, the most difficult to control. They let their feelings exist separate from each task, from their tremors.

  Nonceba is grateful to Cephas, thankful for the existence of his type of gentleness, which allows an imprecise distance. She does not know if she has helped him. She would like to have helped him, somehow. He is no longer a stranger—it has been twelve months—yet in this matter, he is unknown to her. Being here with him is as close as she has been to any man: intimate. She carries visible scars; he shields her from the invisible ones. Sometimes when she looks at him, she sees his hesitation, his absolute hurt. The same hurt she had seen in his eyes when they met. It is still there, like a quiet flame, not forgotten. She has no idea what to say to him in order to banish that hurt. She has her journey. The nature of their friendship is in the elimination of detail, of the specific, in order to free her. They cannot yet discuss matters that concern the cause of their despair. Not yet. Not together. Such thoughts remain separate, lingering in the corners of their minds when they say something to each other about dinner, or about whether the light in the passage should be left on or not, or about the day’s purchases. Their thoughts are completely absorbed by the full weight of the past. The mind is buried in its own despair, but they survive, day to day, in their friendship. The past for them is so much heavier than the present; it exists with an absolute claim. To sip some tea, to pass the sugar, their fingers meet: memory. A delicate act of forgiveness; to be alive at all seems a betrayal. They should have saved her, even by their will alone. This is their preoccupation, and they acknowledge it, and live within it, somehow.

  She has bought large yellow roses from the flower sellers at City Hall. She places them in a glass vase, which she puts on the telephone table. She adds salt to the tepid water. In a day, they will open, and the room will carry a fresh smell of roses, a pleasant scent. She likes the yellow roses most, and sometimes she mixes them with white ones. If she changes the water regularly, the flowers will last longer than a week. She stands a long time looking at the flowers. This sort of flower could never grow on Kwakhe sands. She is amused. A detail like this tells how far she is from Kezi.

  “I have found a job,” Nonceba says.

  “Yes, I have managed to find a job for you. I have been waiting to tell you, until we were sitting down. I wanted to surprise you. How did you know?”

  “You have also found me something?” she asks.

  “I have. A job in the library. Would you like it?”

  “I have to think it over. Tell me more about it. I like the job I have found, though. I met the people there. They seemed nice, welcoming. I like the hours, too,” she says.

  “I thought you would like something to do with books. The public library needs someone. It sounds interesting.”

  “Hmm. I must think …”

  “You will have to decide for yourself about taking the job or not. But they would like to know tomorrow. I said I knew someone. I was there all morning doing some research. I know the chief librarian, Mr. Drake, very well. He is a kind man. You might enjoy working with him. He is very caring about the library, every aspect of it. He is seeking to improve it. The number of users has more than doubled since independence. He needs a hand.”

  “I would like to meet him. Two jobs. It is all good news, in any case.”

  “You will consider it?”

  “I will. Can I let you know my decision in the morning? I would like to think some more about the whole matter. It is so sudden.”

  “We still must celebrate. Imagine finding a job for you on the same day that you have found one for yourself. It is remarkable,” he says.

  He swings from the stove, where he is preparing a meal, and faces her. He does not embrace her. He avoids touch. Too threatening. Especially for her. She is not ready.

  “I have found a job. On my own. In the street. I have found a job for myself. I feel happy about it!” she tells him with delight. Her first triumph. It is important. Though she has said she will let him know in the morning, it is basically decided. It is clear that she would rather take the job she has secured. He agrees with her choice. He must let her find places to inhabit without his help.

  “Duly’s?” Cephas asks, surprised. How does one find a job at a place with a name like that? he wonders. Quaint.

  “Yes. Duly’s. On Wilson Street.” She lets herself fall onto the couch. Exhausted by joy. Happy. Free. A new path has opened for her; she will meet other people at work, build new friendships, have colleagues, discover qualities of her own. She has the strength for it, the resolve. His mind travels. Hers is satisfied.

  Nonceba throws the folded newspaper at him playfully. She is going to keep the newspaper with the advert she had circled and responded to, a task accomplished, a test passed. To have gone through the interview so easily, to have succeeded; there are not many people with a good high school certificate in the city. She has an advantage. Education for everyone is being constantly interrupted by the war. Schools close down. They remain closed. Especially the mission schools located in rural areas.

  Nonceba has an astounding capacity for joy, he thinks. Small, thin, agile. She wears plain clothes, small skirts, white blouses; pale colors wrap over her frame. To him, not unattractive; to another man, perhaps too concealing. A subterfuge, a modest wardrobe, unassuming, like her own nature. When she laughs, he remembers the depth of her hurt; his hurt. When she is as happy as now, he imagines her terror; his pain. On her face are the lingering scars; his capacity for love. Her laughter echoes in him.

  He, too, has nightmares. In the night, he is drowning in blood. He is swallowing, drowning. He wakes in a sweat. He has already walked to her door and touched her feet to see if she is there, to find out if she, too, is as desperate as he is. He stands still, shocked at his own subconscious action, at his loneliness. He peels his hand off her, cautious. He walks slowly back to his room, silent, afraid he has already woken her. His heart is beating heavily. Is it fear? Is it love? Often he would like to enter her room with her permission, her knowledge, and sleep on the floor beside her bed, to roll himself there, a presence. He would shelter her, shelter in her dreams. He would be rid of his own dreams. He returns to his bed, turns over, and sinks into an interminable darkness. He is struggling out of that darkness, out of breath. When he opens his eyes, there is no darkness, no light. He is lying still in his bed. An arm on his forehead. Blood.

  Her movements and speech are unhurried. Nonceba keeps her hair plaited in neat, straight rows, beautiful and precise. He is drawn to her by much more than what is immaculate, orderly, perfectly formed: the beauty of her presence. Nonceba has grown on him like a good song, Cephas thinks. Thenjiwe made him want to seize all of time in his arms and make it theirs.

  Sisters, two sides, but not quite opposite: connected. Their birth, and a life shared, linked. The trace of one voice is in the other, the gesture of one reflected in the other, the easy joy, the shape of a nail, of a bone, especially the voice: oneness. They exist each in the other, and where one life ended, so did the other. He knows that what he sees of Nonceba is only
what is recoverable; he has made her whole for himself. It would be too much to ask her to be entire. It would be impossible. It is enough that she can laugh with him. Thenjiwe made him abandon himself to her, and he knew what it was to exist completely in the realm of another human being, to be as close to her as skin. Nonceba makes him steady. She offers nothing that throws him off balance, nothing of the sort, and regards him without extreme passion, from a far distance really, perhaps even with some disbelief. Of course, she has no reason to offer more than her presence; she keeps him aloof, like a brother, yet has become all that is dear to him.

  Thenjiwe offered him everything: in one afternoon, his life changed completely, as though he had never before lived, never seen sunset or dawn or the shadows at noon. A woman turned and gave him her name like an embrace. He abandoned everything and wanted only the light in Thenjiwe’s eyes. When they considered the future, too much seemed to have already been consumed. That was her attraction—the ability for risk; her total absorption in a single moment, as though all of time were a distraction; her insatiable interest in him, even beyond what he understood or could reveal of himself. He loved her for her intensity, her capacity for surprise. He misses Thenjiwe and the profound love they had found. He misses her. He is not transferring emotions, certainly; there is something new in his current state. New, unknown, recently discovered. He is sure of it. He wonders if perhaps there are different kinds of love possible between a man and a woman, as there are different lives, lived: different melodies to the single theme of love.

  Nonceba is here, with him; this, surely, is trust. She trusts him. He dares not compare them, the living and the dead. He dares not choose. He need not choose, nor even imagine what sort of love he prefers; the image of one is safely in the other. He dares not question his continuity of emotion, of love—a form of incest, loving two sisters. In this case, only a defiance of death, perhaps. No. Certainly not incest. It is more accurate to consider it a kinship of desire. That is where his incest lies, in desiring the same flesh, the same voice, the same nakedness. This is his form of guilt, his type of sin. He approves his own permanent passion, his sentiment—desire that survives, intact, beyond death. He wonders if he is callous, selfish, in his attitude, given the circumstances. He wonders if one can be said to be callous, indifferent, in the matters of love and affection when one is so thoroughly involved. An irony, to be said to be unfeeling when one feels so much. Given Thenjiwe’s death. Given that Nonceba witnessed that death. Herself terribly harmed. Given that he truly loved Thenjiwe. Given all this, how has he allowed himself to feel something new? Is this a love born of hurt, of despair, in a terrain of tragedy and disbelief? Is it a kind of salve, an emotion to heal his fractured being? And if so, is it enough? Can it contain and sustain him?

  Is love an emotion someone can control, suppress, or is it an instant act of recognition? First your vision is empty; then the day seems suddenly short, the time apart intolerable, night too long and filled with that endless loneliness in the mind—waiting. He wonders at his degree of desecration. He is still innocent, to a point; he has let Nonceba decide both their lives. A year has passed and they have lived together. He can wait. Each morning, he wakes to Thenjiwe’s presence; to her absolute absence. Must he feel guilt, as he does? Must his love feel like failure, a house collapsed? A transgression of sorts. He feels the lack of a certain integrity, the sort of stamina that engenders virtues like abstinence, a restraint in the heart. He wonders if he has exceeded his own economy; a man attempting to live beyond his means. There is too much for him to juggle. He is an unskilled and blind juggler who has to imagine not only the shape of his objects hut also their number, distance, and their flight from his own hands.

  Nonceba has grown on him, that is all, like a good song. He wants to help, to sustain, not to contain. He wants her not to doubt her own freedom, to know his distance from her. He knows her frailty. If she decides to move out of the flat, he will help her find another. He will even give her up; this, his final disguise. He will stand by and witness her life move on without him. She has already helped him. To watch her happiness unfold is to know that he has already helped; they have each dealt with the past. It is not only that he wants to help; there is grief. He is grieving. Nonceba eases him, makes him feel pardon from that irreversible death. Perhaps if he had stayed in Kezi … What then? Would Thenjiwe have died in his company, as well? Was she not an easy target because he was not there, two women on their own in a forlorn place like Kezi in the middle of a war such as this? Two women. The soldiers armed, burning villages, intimidating the land with torture, death, and their might? The soldiers in a ceremony of their own.

  The love of a dead sister; the love of a living sister. The love of both. He feels himself located between them, suspended, unable to pronounce love of one of them, the living sister, the one who can cure him of his dreams; he need not abandon his yearning for Thenjiwe. It is too familiar, too near. He has nurtured it since that uncertain year of 1979, when they were both waiting for freedom to find them—indeed, when the entire country was waiting for freedom—and they found each other instead. Then independence arrived and brought with it a spectacular arena for a different war, in which they were all casualties. And she, Thenjiwe, among its first victims. And Nonceba, who at least has lived. He had watched the city change during that year, and he moved to the flat from Mpopoma Township, partly to prove to himself that independence had really come, to share in its immense promise, in its cityscape. He could never have imagined Thenjiwe living in the middle of this city with him, the center of her pulse being Kezi. He had not even considered it till her name leapt from the pages of the newspaper and his arms trembled with a sorrow he could not curtail. First, he had disbelieved every word. Then he had wept, trusting every word.

  He is waiting for a sign from Nonceba. Not the charmed movement of her arm, which engages his mind as he watches her hands disappear under the cushion as she rests on the couch, or when, her elbow bent toward him, she pulls the strap of her sundress back over her shoulder, unaware that he is staring, immobile. He would like to keep such moments, prolong them, return over and again to them, Nonceba the gentle wind in the center of his dream. He condemns himself for noticing her in this manner; for his need to possess each movement of her arm. He does not press her, however. He is waiting for the certainty of her words. He wants to be sure. He can only wait for Nonceba to notice him as completely as he has imagined her. Desire cannot be contained. It reaches out, unsanctioned, willing to be expressed. The more it is doubted, censored, contained, the tenderer it grows, the more effusive; then it overwhelms its source. It tarnishes nothing. The purest moment is when desire is not requited; when it is only an expectation, a belief, a quiet emotion. Desire is like hunger. It attacks the body and makes it bend. His begins with a hurt so enormous, he cannot contain it. He has to find its source. He links the hurt to the absence of its source, to Thenjiwe, but for them, it is too late.

  He will wait till Nonceba turns to him with a wonder to match his own, with an equal wish, till she, too, feels that if he leaves the room, her world will diminish. If he holds her, Thenjiwe will be in his arms, too. Could he survive that? And what about Nonceba? Would his presence then feel like safety or a threat?

  Nonceba removes her sandals and rests her feet on the stool beside the table. Another day. The door opens. Cephas. She looks up at him. She rises and helps him place his folders and books on the table. He removes his spectacles, places them on the table. Broken glass.

  “Oh … your glasses … Did you drop them?” she asks, alarmed.

  “They fell just outside as I was coming up the stairs. They were in my shirt pocket.”

  She moves her fingers over the crack. The surface is still even. He picks the glasses up, puts them on. Light refracts, falls on the opposite wall. He replaces them on the table, defeated.

  “I will have them replaced tomorrow. I need them for my reading; otherwise, I will become slow with my research. I am a
lready behind.”

  She examines the glasses closely. She puts them in their black case. The frame is intact. Secure.

  “When I was a child, I feared finding a perfect hiding place, one in which I would never be found. I imagined being alone, undiscovered, lost. I did not even pause to think that all I would need to do would be to walk out of my hiding place if no one were to find me.”

  She is happy. She teases him. Is it possible she is saying that he has found her? That she can never be alone after this? Is she speaking of her own growing independence? It is the first time she has spoken of her childhood.

  “So. What did you file today?” she asks after he has removed his jacket and put it in his room. He is about to sit down next to her, to ask her how she is finding her new work, if she will remain there. She often refers to his explanation of a year ago, of finding her name and that of her sister, Thenjiwe, in a newspaper. He does not answer. He could bring the paper home, but that would depress her. He knows it is her way of dealing with the incident, with the death of her sister, of skirting the subject, of not focusing on the worst aspects of the event, yet not avoiding the subject completely. This is her way of being brave; they both understand that. She does not talk about Thenjiwe. Not once since leaving Kezi. He does not answer her question regarding the files. He only turns and smiles at her. Her strength often amazes him. They have become friends.

  He works for the archives of the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. He had no business cutting out that particular notice in the newspaper, or filing it away, as he stated to her then. They both know this. He should have simply told her that he had been reading the paper like anybody else. He must have sounded very suspicious to her, a year ago, to link his discovery of her and her sister to his work. His discovery sounded official. He had felt awkward, appearing so suddenly in her life, making proposals that sounded absurd even to him. Two strangers caught in the most difficult situation, sharing the same loss. He had no prepared words and carried only the force of his impulse. His conviction. An incredible and lingering love. The words would come with the moment of their meeting. He had hoped that she already knew about him from her sister.