The Stone Virgins Read online

  How did a man slice off a woman’s head while a bucket was carried above it? How did a man slice a woman’s throat and survive?

  Then he holds the dead body up, this stranger, clutching that decapitated death like a rainbow. He holds Thenjiwe up. Then he seems to hold Nonceba’s body up, too, for it is impossible for her to continue standing, for her own mind to survive by its own direction. He holds both their bodies up. Frozen.

  He slides into the dead body as though into a mute stream. Thenjiwe’s blood flows from her body and curls around him, pulsating.

  What kind of instrument has he used to cut her head off like that? The head is now dangling on Thenjiwe’s breast, separated. The bucket, the water, her own voice running out into the yard, running into the stream of clear water sliding forward from that incredible death. Nonceba keeps her eyes up, in that bluest sky, while her body sinks willingly to the ground, absorbs the fatal agony like water into earth. Her body falls in the same way sound disappears, the way it moves away from one without shifting boulders the way water does, without disturbing even the most weightless object, not the lightest feather, without changing the pattern of stars. Sound departs without substance, like a torn veil lifting, greeting the air, like burning silk.

  Her feet are on the ground.

  This water is red, mud. My toes are sticking together, sucking the ground. I stand still in this pool of water, with my toes sticking together and the mud red, the red mud, the mud with blood.

  What did he use to cut Thenjiwe’s head off, so invisibly, so rapidly?

  Nonceba stands still, suddenly, and her body heaves forward. She has to pull back, pull her feet from the mud red and take a few steps back. The mud red step back.

  A few steps and the moment feels immediately like safety, her feet sliding. Memory slips; red, mud, dead.

  In that quickness, moments before that, Nonceba sees the right arm pull back and grab the body by the waist, a dancing motion so finely practiced, it is clear it is not new to the performer. It is not the first death he has held in his arms, clutching at it, like a bird escaping. It is not the first death he has caused. The body falls forward and he stumbles and then pulls the body back; bone-bright white flashes, neck bone pure, like a streak of light the bone vanishes into the stream of blood oozing out, the knees buckle forward, and the body twirls on its heels, the legs together, then dragging sideways—a soft ankle held to the ground. He flips the body to his left and the legs turn their weight, and death, over, an ankle held soft and dead to the ground.

  He pulls the body back on its heels. The body succumbs. His shoulder is high, determined, his legs together and kneeling forward; he pulls the arms back and holds on to the weight. Everything is still. Nonceba is not breathing. The body is his, pulse and motion. He pulls the arms back, only the arms, and this brings the chest forward, the breasts outward, pushing against that thin cotton cloth of blood. The blood ripples over the breasts.

  He stands a long time in this position, unchaining the arms and hoisting the body up just before it collapses, dangling it from his left shoulder. “Thenjiwe …” Nonceba calls. “Thenjiwe …”

  Again he holds. He holds tightly, as though this part of the game requires courage, an ingenious tenderness, this part when his mind dances with a dead body. Then he changes his thought and looks over his shoulder and over the body. He looks all around. Frantic, he turns, heaving the body with him; he turns around again, twice, then stops. His back is turned toward her.

  From behind him, she can see the bare arm is limp, as though her sister is simply tired from hard labor. Nonceba longs for the flight of eagles. The flight of thought. There is only discord; release as deaf as stone.

  The mud, dead, dried, red. She calls again for Thenjiwe. Dead.

  He carries the body spread on his back, an arm limp on each shoulder, his motion forceful, true with blood. He is stepping sideways, and back, forward and sideways. On his back, the body presses down along his spine. He turns steadily, with the movements of a hunter who kills not because he is hungry but because his stomach is full, and therefore he can hunt with grace. He stops. He abandons the body right there where he has been standing, no longer nursing the body, removing this burden from his shoulder instead, throwing it off like a stale thought.

  The body is no longer his. The body is hers.

  Then he moves swiftly toward Nonceba. He pulls her toward him.

  I am alive, waiting on this stranger’s knee.

  Nonceba moves her left fingers down his arm like a blind woman searching for a man she once met in a dream: the one who attacked her, who held a flame to her eyes and brought blindness. The flesh swells and ripples down this arm nearest to her. Her fingers continue downward. Here the skin roughens. Dark. Veins swollen. They ripple under the skin. The wrist. The nails are flat, as though they have been held beneath rock for too long. The fingers, burned. This is her only act of courage—to identify his arms.

  Then he pulls her down, as though measuring the weight of her thought in his hands. His fingers approach hers. She cannot avoid him. The driest palm is in her palm. The skin on his palm, furrowed. She looks down at her feet, at the red mud. Blood dries quickly, and cracks.

  Each measure of touch anticipates a violence she already knows.

  His hair, cemetery flowers. That is what Thenjiwe said about hair like this, white and black mingling together, intertwined. The black hair, youth, the white in celebration of death. The head has a way of gathering its own flowers, of gathering time into a bouquet, Thenjiwe says. She, who knew how to gather languages and wisdom with the same mouth. What would she say in such a moment? Who would she be? That was not true about time moving relentlessly forward, leading us toward the grave. Time stands still, like now.

  Cemetery flowers never bloom. No one waters them. Wildflowers with strong hearts take any season to bloom. Just to make sure the flower outlives the planter, it must be the sort to bloom fiercely during a drought, shedding petals like old skin. To know this sort of flower, you need to have buried a lover or a child. They were meant to laugh when Thenjiwe said that, to accept the inevitable, the ending of all beginnings, the dying of the wise, who have seen the sun set and rise so many times that the smoke from its flame has turned their hair white. Those who have known such passion and desire that this, too, has burned portions of their memory. Those who have known laughter and made reckless journeys into the mind, into betrayals, and danced with their own shadow at noon. Those who no longer care much for trust, who know absolutely that lust eventually dries up and curls ridiculously like a leaf: it desiccates. Such sentient beings who laugh at death and welcome sleep like an inane gift and then wake as though to the sound of a clanging bell. Those who pluck a sliver of hair like a root, knowing full well the sound of their own feet moving like a slow hallucination to the grave. Those who have seen the bloom fall off trees, who have seen fish mate in rivers and tadpoles lose their tails. They had such hair.

  Here was a man with just such hair.

  He thinks of scars inflicted before dying, betrayals before a war, after a war, during a war. Sibaso. He considers the woman in his arms.

  He sees her dancing heels, her hands chaste dead bone, porously thin, painted on a rock. Her neck is leaning upon a raised arrow, her mind pierced by the sun. She is a woman from very far, from long ago, from the naked caves in the hills of Gulati. She does not belong here. She bears the single solitude of a flame, the shape and form of a painted memory.

  He thrusts the body to the ground: a dead past. Nonceba falls. She spins her head away from him. She falls over her arms, her hands trapped between her breasts. She views him from one side of her body, sees only his shoes. She crawls away, on her stomach, away. Then she is up. He has raised her from the ground.

  He holds her face close to his own. His eyes flicker past her like a ray of light. The moment is brief, too lightning-quick, a time before she can question his too-quick action, or act, or move, or think, or wonder what, where is he, what
, before all that. Motion by motion, step back, her heel borne on the tip of his shoe, just a fleeting touch is all she feels, not lasting—except the incessant pain afterward. She thinks it is just that, his touch along the chin; instead, it is razor-sharp.

  It seemed he had only touched me briefly with the back of his hand, mildly, and moved his right elbow near my left shoulder, raised it high, it seemed then. I did not drop my eyelids, raise my arm, shout, move away. His motion was simple. It was soft and almost tender, but I did not know that it was no longer his touch tracing my chin, not just a touch on my lower lip, but more than that. For a moment, all this was painless. I felt nothing. He sought my face. He touched it with a final cruelty. He cut smoothly away. He had memorized parts of me. Shape and curve; lips unspoken.

  He closes her hand. Her wrist bends, veins striated. Nonceba mourns with a hunger caught between rock and sky. Her mind inert. She shivers, like smoke rising.

  Alone, afterward, she turns Thenjiwe’s body over and pulls the blouse down to cover the wet breast. Wordless. She slides her fingers under the red cloth. Her touch is warm and longs for life, this lingering heat in the flesh, this threshold. Wordless.

  7

  His name is Sibaso, a flint to start a flame. Him. Sibaso. I follow him closely. My life depends on it. I follow the shape of his body. I follow his arms. He has killed Thenjiwe. He is in the midst of that death.

  I listen, unsure of any of his words, what he means, what he needs, claims, pardons, affirms, but the rise of his voice could mean anything, and silence, an assertion of death.

  “Is there anyone here besides yourself? Who else lives here? Do you expect someone? Are you with someone?”

  He whispers in my ear, as though someone else will hear his deep secret and uncover his camouflage.

  I dare not move. Is he asleep? Is he in an embrace of his past? He knows how to sleep in the midst of any reality, of several realities. He can inflict harm as easily as he can retrieve it. He has lived to tell many illicit versions of the war, to re-create the war. Here he is. Him.

  “Spider legs,” he insists. In my fear of him, I envy this kind of perfect truth, which sounds exactly like a well-constructed lie. While he closes his eyes, I have the sensation that I am drowning, and see a multitude of spider legs stretch into the darkness. “That is the other strange fact about spiders, their ability to walk on water while humans drown,” he says.

  Sibaso had eaten handfuls of spider legs throughout the war. He knew where spiders went to die. He knew their alcove of death. “Is this not a great secret to know?” he asks.

  There is a tragic innocence that knows nothing but death, that survives on nothing but death.

  My name is Sibaso. I have crossed many rivers with that name no longer on my lips, forgotten. It is an easy task to forget a name. Other names are assumed, temporary like grief; in a war, you discard names like old resemblances, like handkerchiefs torn, leave them behind like tributaries dried. During a war, we are lifeless beings. We are envoys, our lives intervals of despair. A part of you conceals itself, so that not everything is destroyed, only a part; the rest perishes like cloud.

  Independence, which took place only three years ago, has proved us a tenuous species, a continent that has succumbed to a violent wind, a country with land but no habitat. We are out of bounds in our own reality.

  During a war, it is better to borrow a name, to lend an impulse to history. It is necessary to supply a motive to time, moment by moment, to offer a stimulus. Life has to be lived, even if not believed. A man must grow openly like a tree, with nothing between his cry and the elements. Instead, it is a war, and a man becomes a stalker, always a step behind some uncanny avenue of time, and he follows all its digression, its voyage into tragic places. He finds himself in dark places, unlit sites, dark and grim. A shadow when he walks, a shadow when he sleeps. His mind is perforated like a torn net and each event falls through it like a stone. When he stands, his head hits against something heavy—he discovers that history has its ceiling. He is surprised. He has to crouch, and his body soon assumes a defensive attitude; he possesses the desire to attack. If he loses an enemy, he invents another. This is his purge. He is almost clean. He seems to have a will, an idea that only he can execute. Of course, this idea involves desecration, the violation of kindness. It is a posture both individual and wasteful. He cannot escape. He is the embodiment of time.

  There is a type of spider that turns to air, its life a mere gasp. This type of spider gathers all its kin before an earthquake, sending its messages through the air. Together, the spiders gather into a cubicle of time, a bowl in a peeling rock, a basin where the earth has been eaten by rain; this takes place before an earthquake, before the advance of an enemy, and war. Spider after spider piles into a mound, into a self-inflicted ruin, seeking another form of escape. Then the top of the spider mound is sealed with spit, thick and embroidered like lace, bright with sun rays, and rainbows arching like memories. A stillness gathers before an earthquake, before war. There is a stillness such as has not been witnessed before, and a new climate in that trapped air. Turning, again and again, till something is freed, like a kindness. A spider falls like a pendulum stilled. This is not hibernation for a death: the bodies take flight, free as time. The body vanishes, from inside out, the inside pouring like powdered dust, the legs a fossil. This is the end of creation, the beginning of war.

  I have harvested handfuls of spider legs while they remained interlocking like promises, weightless, harmless needles. Time’s shadow: life’s residue. I blow life’s remains off my hand like a prediction. On my hand is a dark melody, shapes that curl and twist into thin marks, like tiny words on a page, a handwritten pamphlet, some spilled ink on ancient rock. I wipe my palm clean. Our country needs this kind of hero who has a balm for his own wounds carried between lip and tongue, between thumb and forefinger, between the earth and the soles of his feet, who is in flight toward an immaculate truth.

  I have seen a spider dancing with a wasp. This type of spider hangs from asbestos ceilings in every township home. Most men watch the motions of such a spider. Every survivor envies a spider dancing with a wasp.

  There is a type of spider that changes color when mating. It devours its own partner and rolls him into a fine paste. With this, it courts its next partner. It offers him this round, perfectly prepared sacrifice in exchange for a brief but sweet liaison. This kind of spider hangs between trees and can only be viewed in the light of a full moon. Such a spider possesses a valuable secret—the knowledge that love cannot be founded on mercy but that mercy can be founded on love. It knows the true agony of ecstasy, that violence is part of the play of opposites, and that during war, there are two kinds of lovers, the one located in the past, and dead, the one in the future, living and more desirable. The past a repast, the future a talisman. This kind of truth also belongs to the fantasy of a continent in disarray.

  There is a spider with long, long legs that are terrifyingly thin, ready to disappear. This spider is almost transparent, its legs wisps of a dancing dark light, like pencil strokes. The legs keep it high off the ground, and there is nothing to it really, just a pale body. An apparition. I saw it walk across a mirror one morning. Then it stopped moving. The mirror looked cracked. I could see my own broken face behind it. This is a postwar spider, a hungry spider. It is fragile, like the membrane around dreams.

  When this spider passes by, it seems as though you could blow its awkward legs with a whisper. The joints upon its legs are mere full stops, abbreviations for a death. Its outline is a parenthesis. You find this spider in the early hours of the morning, gawky, sliding into corners, its body weaving like thread, shining like muslin, like malice. It has no predators. It lives off starvation. Whoever would hunt it would have to lick its invisibility off the ground, like spilled salt. It knows how to live on a margin, brittle, like a shard of glass. Who would want to eat such an already-dead thing? In the future, there will be no trace of it. It dies outside time.
>
  Yes. I am asleep. I feign death, as I did in the bushes of Gulati when a dangerous-looking spider crept over my arm. I would watch it, holding my breath, remaining as still as a rock. There was no mistaking a poisonous spider; all the evidence was there, the legs ferocious, hairy pincers. It had a deadly weight about it, on your arm. A confident weight. It strolled all over your arm like a deranged dancer, outrageous in its design and coloration. You could feel it trying to make a decision, wondering if you were human, and if you were, whether you were already dead. A spider never wastes its venom. You could feel its belly graze your skin. Poised. It made an art out of inflicting harm and approached you in daylight. It had a swiftness about it that seemed not to belong to the species. A lithe body. An elongated design. It lingered suspiciously. If it moved off quickly, then it had granted you a reprieve. The encounter was ironic—death near and far. They have a name for this sort of spider: umahambemoyeni—“the swimmer in the air.” I thought I had left this sort of spider in the bush, where its charm and dismay belong. Survival is a skill hewn from the harmonies of nature.

  He whispers. He mumbles, delirious. He throws me violently to the ground, suddenly. Then he brings me up again, back into his arms. I feel him pressed against my body, only that, then a pain invisible. He throws me back to the ground, and vanishes.

  8

  A woman screams. Her voice sweeps down the corridor like a hot liquid. Her voice is high. Something pitiful is pouring out of it, something unstoppable. Her voice is muffled, suddenly held down. Many people are holding her down. The woman is destroying a thought in her mind. She is getting rid of something. Only light and sound can cleanse a mind, not touch. She is cleansing her mind. The woman calls endlessly, down and down the corridor. How long is the corridor? How long has the woman been crying? Something is vanishing. Snuffed. She is dying. She is silent. No, her voice is louder. She is alive in the room. Her voice is in Nonceba’s mind.