The Stone Virgins Read online

  The Kezi bus arrives in the late afternoon, as usual. It is dust-ridden, creaking, and sinking its weight of people and possessions downward and then way up the bridge to the sudden end of the tarred road; the wheels hit the dirt road and dig and slide out of it, sideways toward the marula tree; the cloud of dust is thick with the sound of abrupt wheels. The sudden stop. The weight. These women view the men getting off this Shoeshine bus and neither smile nor curse. Their look is complacent; their thought is undisturbed. The men who have arrived from Bulawayo walk with bold and curious steps into the store. They pause on the first step, caught by nonchalant voices. They go in. They emerge with open bottles of Fanta and cream soda.

  They lean on pillars and cautiously look around and examine the air. They have read enough and know that these women are not mere pictures from the newspapers folded under their arms, papers announcing a landslide victory for the new prime minister, but beings they could greet with care and due respect. But they do not. These women have known the forest in rain and sun, survived its darkness and light, equally threatening. These women, alive now sitting on the edge of this smooth wall, are the most substantial evidence of survival there is, of courage, of struggle. Alive now and looking right past their own shoulders, as though they are invisible beings, interested in the things beyond, the secret things that only their minds have known, alive here now and as close to their bodies as their own perplexed and curious minds can endure. Survivors, sitting here now, on this veranda, today, looking terrific and undisturbed, as though they have just been away somewhere fine, picking wildflowers from some gentle groove of the earth. No, their fingers are not made for delicate acts like that; they have just been away overnight somewhere. Somewhere dark enough that when they return, as they have, they carry this dark place in their gaze. They are so impenetrable, the Bulawayo men can only wait for them to say something first, but they meet a dead silence.

  If they could speak first and exchange a few words with them, it would be like touching the same leaves in the forest that these women have touched, the same branches; the skies they have seen would also be here on this veranda. The men keep their distance, lean even farther away from these women, from their penetrating gazes, unsure of words, the tone of voice necessary to be tolerated, to be indulged, to gain the response of these mighty and serene women whom nothing seems to disturb. The killing of doves, is it different in the forest? They would like an account of something simple like that, an answer about killing doves. If they placed their question carefully like that, innocently, plainly, perhaps they would get an answer that would satisfy all their questions. Did they kill doves, and if so, how? If they started by asking about the doves, could it not be that some other revelation would tumble out, a truth they could not even imagine, some astounding fact that would gain them their own legitimacy, some facet about this war beyond their own conception? Instead of asking this one question, they are gathering the shape of these women into a treasurable memory, knowing they owe them too much even to begin to speculate; to owe a woman a destiny is more than their minds can deal with right now, under this veranda. To owe desire, that would be quick and easy, but life, its pattern and progress, this they quickly banish and return their minds to examining the burnished, glossy, dark skin of these undisturbed women whose charity is equal to their capacity for harm. Their fascination is irresistible, and the men watch, and sip their drinks, and move into Thandabantu Store to deliver empty bottles, and return to slide down with their wares and sit on the cement floor, since all the crates are occupied. The fingers peeling skin off sweet marula fruit, how many lives have vanished into those arms, how many doves?

  The men stare and let themselves be enamored by the possibilities of freedom. Who would have thought that one day, within this confined place, they would congregate with women fighters and listen to the soccer score between Highlanders and Dynamos announced over portable radios while they stand stunned to silence, unable to imagine anything at all they hold in common, not even independence or the soccer score, nothing to discuss. They panic, knowing there will never be a time like this again and that the next time they see these women they will no longer be these women and no moment at all like this will continue to exist and that this is the only time that can make the air tremble and their own voices vanish and when no words can be found to greet a woman at noon. No words at all. They fumble and fail. With disbelief at their own inability, they submit to a lengthening silence. They linger, too curious to walk away, yet too afraid to speak, too inferior in some intimate detail of existence, some risk they have not taken. They stand like apparitions. They want to ask if any of them ever met any of the new leaders of the country and shook hands with them. They dare not ask some personal and frenzied detail like that and so bury the question in their mouths. They lean on those pillars and stand their ground, claiming some part of this veranda. They linger, like moths to flame.

  A breeze stirs the air. The women love this shade as cool as water could be.

  1981—1986

  5

  Streetlights and luminous balconies, doorways, drinking houses, tailor shops, bus stops and fish-seller porches. Shoemakers in makeshift shelters. Milkmen in shirts with torn and faded blue collars, ice-cream vendors chatting to forgetful prostitutes, ambulance drivers, blood drying on their fingernails. Husbands carrying loaves of bread to their lovers, bespectacled priests, dogs barking at half-masked nuns from mission schools. Painted rooftops and bright tower lights. Barbed-wire fences and open-air markets. Naked hips dance Jerusalem dances at the small city hall for the first black mayor. School buses and doorbells. Dragonflies drink from potholes on the Luveve Road. Funeral parlors are scented with hibiscus bushes.

  The war begins. A curfew is declared. A state of emergency. No movement is allowed. The cease-fire ceases. It begins in the streets, the burying of memory. The bones rising. Rising. Every road out of Bulawayo is covered with soldiers and police, teeming like ants. Roadblocks. Bombs. Land mines. Hand grenades. Memory is lost. Independence ends. Guns rise. Rising anew. In 1981.

  6

  Kezi.

  The man places his hand over her left shoulder. Her thoughts turn blind, ashes stirred by a small wind. He presses his hand down on her limp arm. He turns her body toward himself, looking for something in her he can still break, but there is nothing in her that can still be broken. For Nonceba, there is only the scent of this man, the cruel embrace of his arms, the blood brown of his shoes, the length of his neck, and the gaze bending close. The distance in her mind is infinite. No … no … no …

  Between them is an absence measured by pauses and suspicious silences. Perhaps, in one of these absences, he may recover and feel something akin to kindness, not pity. It is remote, pity, in a man like this. He may forget why he is here, why she is with him, who she is. He, too, may be stunned by his own dramatic presence.

  A knee lifts up to touch the bottom of her legs, from behind her, then slides to her thighs, moving sideways. “Sit here, on my knee.” He moves away briefly, carefully, then returns his touch to her body. He returns his touch as though it were something he has taken away without permission, guiltily, yet like a kind act.

  He is close, touching her; she knows what he is doing, where his arms are, his legs, his knees, that neck, that voice. Then she is certain of his arms. Only then.

  Her thoughts are as precise as his—splinters of glass. It is important to locate his brief absences. She is a caterpillar—she can hide inward, recoil, fold her knees and her elbows, and all the parts of her body that can bend, that are pliable, in her mind.

  I am waiting. I am alive, now, a companion to his every thought. I am breathing. My temples, beating. She closes her eyes and her body listens as his movements pursue each of her thoughts. She breathes. Harm.

  He enters her body like a vacuum. She can do nothing to save herself. He clutches her from the waist, his entire hand resting boldly over her stomach. He presses down. He pulls her to him. She hesitates. He fo
rces her down. She yields. She is leaning backward into his body. He holds her body like a bent stem. He draws her waist into the curve of his arm. She is molded into the shape of his waiting arm—a tendril on a hard rock.

  He is at the pit of her being. Her anger rises furiously. Her saliva is a sour ferment of bile. She would like to speak, to spit. She swings forward, away from him. He is close. A knee, a shoulder, a leg, moving over her own thighs. His arm is moist, warm, the scent rising from each of his motions is a thick paste of desire.

  He pulls her body up and holds her still. As suddenly, her thighs feel pain, a hot liquid coursing down to her own knees. He draws her entire body into his own. Mute. He is a predator, with all the fine instincts of annihilation. She, the dead, with all the instincts of the vanquished.

  To survive ambush. These are her thoughts, hot fluid floating. She follows the force of his hand like a map and walks backward, heel-first, the journey longer and longer as she listens to the surprising pain. Her legs moving. Step … back … step … back … only her toes reach the ground. He drags her. She moves on her toes, backward, with no weight on them, with all her weight in his arms, with the force of his presence swirling in her mind. Her heel is above his shoe, weighing down, her arm in his arm.

  She holds on. Has she lived before this moment of urgency and despair? Is there something whispered before a cataclysmic earthquake, sleep, before a frightful awakening to death? Is life not lived backward, in flashes, in spasms of hopeless regret?

  The cruel surface of his body as it accompanies hers, solid. He leads her, moment by moment, to a place that only he has imagined. That cry comes directly from her mind, not from her mouth. Where is he taking her?

  He bends. Away from her. He pulls a stool from the entrance of the house, as though getting ready for amiable conversation. Nonceba hears the stool hit the wooden doorway, while the door swings and hits the wall, returns and hits the frame as he again pulls the stool, roughly. The sound of the hinge dims, weakly, near to her. Sound dies like a living thing.

  She does not look at him. Her face is turned from him. She is silent, without worth, with nothing precious but time. She is nothing to him. An aftermath to desire.

  She feels him inside her body. Near. He is as close as her own tongue, as close as her arms are to her body, her hair on her skin, close like her heartbeat; his breathing is her breathing. She is breathing in. His sweat is in her nostrils. His perspiration.

  A jingle in his pocket, coins, keys, what …

  She falls, sinks into his lap, and meets the hardness of these objects, a bundle jutting, something made of metal, unknown instruments that she fears. He pulls her down into himself, holding on to her wrists, leaning the rest of her body into himself, a companion. His arm is under her left breast, lifting her, pressing into the softness of her being; her nipples are hard, stiff, meeting the rough edges of his fingernails. Her mind is scalded with the presence of his arms.

  “Are you afraid to look at me?” he whispers. He cups her chin as though parts of her are crumbling, falling, blowing off with the wind. He turns her and pulls her face close to his own. She is solid. Like a mirror.

  His fingers part her lips, dry skin, find her tongue. His fingers are on her tongue … move into her mouth … over her tongue. He curls his fingers and slides them over the top of her lips.

  Her breathing slides between his fingers, her warm saliva. He bends his fingers farther into the warm spaces beneath her tongue. Nonceba tastes him. He is dried salt, a ferment—the dried, dead blood. He scoops her being, her saliva water to cleanse a wound.

  She is only a dot in his mind. Something that can vanish.

  He places her arms around his neck as though she were a child he would raise in kindness. He rocks back and forth. Forward, rocking back. He seeks the inside of her thighs, her dark skin, hard, over her knees. He holds her dark bone.

  “Hold me. Touch me here. Look at me. I said touch me here.”

  She drops her arms from his neck. His left knee moves back and forth under her thighs. He parts his knees. He parts her knees.

  He portions her to a dead past.

  Suddenly, he tears the sleeve off her dress and it falls to her elbow, hanging uselessly; white threads dangle from her shoulder.

  He waits, patient as an entire season, as disobedience, as a thief. He can see the shape of her disbelief. He owns her like a memory. He is the type to own the intangible—hallucinations, fragrances, death. So, though she breathes deeply, it is with a stillness that he owns, with a hope he has banished. He commands. She dares not contradict him.

  He can see past her to that tree bare of leaves. She sits inanimate, a receptacle for his dreaming. She breathes, afraid to shift, to move her back against his arms, afraid to ease her shoulders, afraid. Calm. With desperation.

  He cradles her like a wounded child. Nonceba almost believes him, in him, almost removes him and his lullaby from this scene, almost. He offers words that could heal. He closes his eyes and moves his lips against her neck. His words flood her earlobe, slip between her legs, where her blood falls like burnt water. She feels it. He could heal her, shield her with his body. He just could. Her legs hang, empty, within his parted thighs. Then his legs close and hold her tight.

  There. With him. His whispers over her neck, heated air. His words move slowly over her. He is so close, she opens her eyes and conquers the darkness burning beneath them. She moves into light. She is floating without direction. She lets her eyelids fall. Darkness descends. Light is sharp. It penetrates.

  On the other side of the doorway, where the wall curves and disappears, she sees her sister, Thenjiwe. A part of her. Thenjiwe, fallen, breasts pressed to the ground, bare soles, blind eyes, bent arms folded, legs stretched out, a body pleading, a stillness visible.

  I am afraid to close my eyes. I am afraid of myself. I am darkness.

  He is an ordinary man, wearing a blue shirt with buttons not white, not black. Gray. Short sleeves. Khaki trousers. A safe attire. A shirt you can trust, with buttons you can trust. Her eyes swallow him whole, the blue patches remaining on his shirt here and there, dry, the rest soaked, pasted against his body like a skin. Here a patch of fabric that matches the sky. Half the collar is folded inward. His skin is taut, glistening. His trousers are frayed at the bottom. Large feet. Shoes. Thick shoelaces. Thick soles.

  He means it: he wants to be held by her; he needs it. I will live, she thinks.

  “Your fingers are warm. Touch me with these smooth hands. Move your arm this way.”

  He lifts her legs off the ground and places her across both his knees, like a bride. He guides her thumb to his pulsing temple. An ordinary day. Just the heat. Above, the sound of wings, birds: weightlessness. In the long distance, a dog barks, and dies, and barks. It whimpers, a straggly sound. On such a day, dogs have found new voices. Already the flies are turning the entire ground dark. The blood on the ground. Death.

  The creases down his own thick neck are covered with sweat. Now she must put her fingers in his. She is already escaping while his hands are approaching hers. Their fingers touch like a greeting. They touch and hold. He smiles, though not at her, needing to be touched. The sun is hot. The flies are here, turning the sun dark.

  I am alive, on this knee. I am waiting. I am alive.

  She sees a silver bucket approaching from the bright blue of the sky, carried above the head, her sister’s arm holding it up along one side and her fingers curling over the rim of the bucket brimming with water; then the arm drops and the bucket approaches, steady, steady in that teasing blue. Now she can see the bucket leaning over, filled with water, the tiniest drops breaking like a spray, spilling; then the bucket crushes its contents to the ground; water breaks like stone.

  The silence that follows is astonishing, quiet, like breathing. She runs forward past the water now vanished, now a patch of dampness and mud. The bucket is in the sky. Nonceba’s mind is loose like a whip. She retreats, moves back from the water splashing forwa
rd toward her naked feet, vanishing into her mind.

  “Thenjiwe …” she calls. A man emerges. He is swift. Like an eagle gliding.

  His head is behind Thenjiwe, where Thenjiwe was before, floating in her body; he is in her body. He is floating like a flash of lightning. Thenjiwe’s body remains upright while this man’s head emerges behind hers, inside it, replacing each of her moments, taking her position in the azure of the sky. He is absorbing Thenjiwe’s motions into his own body, existing where Thenjiwe was, moving into the spaces she has occupied. Then Thenjiwe vanishes and he is affixed in her place, before Nonceba’s eyes, sudden and unmistakable as a storm. The moment is his. Irrevocable. His own.