The Stone Virgins Read online

  Two people are walking down the corridor. Nonceba does not want to listen to their voices; she is holding on to the broken voice, now distant, of the woman screaming, vanishing, troubled by her own mind dying. But the door is open; she can see past the white sheets of her hospital bed to the light in the passage, and the footsteps are near, slowing down. The burgundy curtain is open, pushed tight to the end of the rail. The window is open only a crack, and outside this large window, a bush of hibiscus is blooming. It is higher than the window, so she cannot see the full height of it. Behind it is a wide concrete ramp. Then an entrance. She listens to the footsteps approaching her doorway. A woman’s footsteps. A man’s voice. The voices bring strong images to her mind of the woman screaming in the next room, a woman whom she has not seen. Though she is not aware of it, Nonceba has been lying here, in this bed, for a week, with the voice right next to her bed. There.

  Nonceba shifts her back. She sinks deeper into the bed. She would like to turn her pillow over. It feels too warm, soiled, damp. Someone has tied her arms down to the metal frame of the bed. She cannot move them. Thick bands bind her body and hold her down. She can move her eyes. She looks outside the room. She looks at the hibiscus blossoms. They have large petals. She does not like red flowers. “Red flowers are the brightest flowers. You must like them.” Why is Thenjiwe saying that? Why is she saying that in her head? She, Nonceba, does not like red flowers. They fill up the entire space in the mind. She does not want a flower to do that, to bloom in her head. She likes white-and-yellow flowers. When you place them in your hair or hold them in your arms, they look like flowers, not blood.

  The voices in the corridor are nearer now, and the footsteps. They are discussing the woman whose voice they have held down. How long has the woman been dying? How long has she been buried in her own voice? Dying, in her own voice. Held down.

  “She has killed her husband. Two soldiers walked into her house and sat her husband on a stone. They handed her an ax. These men were pointing guns at her two grown sons, threatening to shoot them if she did not listen. She fell on her knees and begged them to let her sons go. One soldier pushed her away with the butt of his gun. She fell down and wept for her sons as though they had already died, and for the heart of the soldier, which she said had died with the war. Her husband raised his voice toward her and said, ‘Kill me … Kill me.’ He pleaded. He was desperate to die and to save his two sons. She stood up, silently repeating what her husband had said, with her own lips, with her own arms. She opened her eyes and raised the ax above her shoulders till he was dead. That is what happened to her. The men left her in that state. A dead husband and two living sons.”

  Now Nonceba can see the woman with the ax. She is tall and thin and her legs do not reach the ground. Her body is suspended in the air. It is as though she is hanging from a tree. “Is she hanging from a tree?” Why does Thenjiwe ask that? Why ask at all? The woman is a tree and all the branches are in her head, moving back and forth. The woman wants to cut the tree down with the ax. To cut the tree down, she must move far away; that is why her body is like that, far away. Her body is moving from the tree. Her arms are longer than her entire body; the woman cannot lift them. She cannot move. She knows about the ax, which is in the air, higher than her head, higher than she can reach. The ax is now falling through the arms of the woman. Nonceba moves her arms forward to protect the woman, to remove the ax from her hands. Nonceba’s arms are tied to the bed, so she cannot move. She has to watch and be silent. She can only see. She cannot say a word. Not a word. She cannot speak. Not a word.

  The woman is now standing in a pool of blood. The ax has disappeared. She is no longer trying to lift her arms. She is not part of it. Not part of it at all.

  A bandage goes round Nonceba’s head, round and round and round. A hand is moving over her eyes, a very careful and small hand. “Is this too tight,” the voice says. It is not a question. It is only a statement. It is a touch. Nonceba can only nod her head. She can feel the cloth pressing down, the smell of a medicated ointment. Her mouth is slightly open under the cloth. Her tongue is moving in her mouth. She is thirsty; her throat is burning. She moves her tongue over and over, searching for saliva. She wants to reach the bandage with her tongue. To loosen it. To breathe through her mouth, not her nose. She is hazy, befuddled, and dazed from medication. She sees two shapes out of every object—a dark part of the shadow and a lighter part. Her world is superimposed. When she hears the woman’s voice in the corridor, she hears her own voice beside it.

  She is alone now, looking out through the window. Everything is gone. She is without shelter. Everything is changing. She has a desperate feeling that everything has already changed, gone, not to be recovered. Nothing can be the same. Her own arms have changed, her body. Kezi, her place of birth, is no longer her own. She remembers Kezi, surrounded by the hills. She has loved every particle of earth there, the people, the animals, the land. The sky above her is now different; a sky should carry dreams. The things she remembers have changed: the nature and measure of pain, of joy. She was safe before now, safe because she remembered different things, remembered them differently, without her heart pounding, blinding her. No one had died in her presence and made such an absolute claim on her memory; she had not been involved; her voice had not yet called out to the dead. Now she is in an abysmal place, inert, held down. She is mute. A voice dying. Unable to shape words into language, to breathe freely. She will have to find the sources of sound inside her, a pure and timeless sound. Then she will open her mouth and let the sound free. Words will flow, then language. Only then will she discover a world in contrast to her predicament. She will restore her own mind, healing it in segments, in sound.

  She thinks of the language of animals, which has no words but memory.

  The movement of their bodies, the memory in their bones, of the places they have been. When they have tragic encounters, how do they survive? Do they close their eyes and dream, or do they dream with their eyes open? Do they dream at all? Are they reborn in sound? Do they nurture death inside their bodies like a hurricane, their tongues inaudible? She would like to know the language of all wounded beings. Where do they begin when everything is ended? Is there a language in the ending of the mind, of all minds? She shakes her head from side to side, slowly, suffocating, feeling the insupportable anguish that will soon overtake her, that has been with her each time she has opened her eyes and known she is awake, alive. Before this, she knew how to hold a thought in her mind. Now she is vanquished. She makes no claim to living, to her own survival. Now she is afraid to look away from the red flowers outside the window; she is grateful for their presence, a shape, a form for her mind to absorb, to memorize. An object, distinct, for her senses, with color and no sound. It is better to look at the flowers than to let a thought shape, settle, find a comfortable spot in her mind, where everything has been spilled out like water, emptied, where the sky has changed permanently, the names of things vanished. Everything has changed, and changed her way of seeing, of inhabiting her own body, of being alive. There had always been two of them, one walking beside the other like a shadow; now she is alone, the shadow to her own being. The other is vanished with a sudden and astonishing finality.

  A man is approaching from behind the hibiscus bush. He removes his hat as he reaches the ramp. The hat folds into his hand. He disappears behind the door, hidden from her eyes. He has moved past the entrance, into the hospital building. Nonceba continues staring at the empty space the man has occupied. She can see him again without closing her eyes. His hand moves to his hat; he removes it, folds it just when he has gone past the hibiscus bush. She sees him framed by the red petals. She keeps his face there, among the petals, his head bowed, the arm reaching for the hat, then coming down. She sees only the side of his lean face shaped among the blooms, framed by red petals. He wears a black jacket, a white shirt. When he enters the building, she sees his back, his head without the hat, the doors without him, her mind without the vi
ew of him, empty. Then she brings her eyes back to the flowers, where he is not. Only the flowers. They have large petals. Footsteps interrupt her thought, confuse the image in her mind. The man disappears in ripples, as though her mind is a pool of water, and something heavier than he has fallen in and made his image ripple. The footsteps are again in the corridor. The voice is near, nearer than the petals she has to turn to. Someone speaks to her there, beside her bed. She sees him. Who is this man standing beside the bed? She would rather be alone. She looks closely at him. He has put his hat on the chair. He touches her forehead. She does not know him. She had watched him through the window, and now he has grown out of her mind into the space next to her bed, speaking to her. In this manner, she recognizes him. He has walked through the door, past the flowers outside. A shape. A man outside a window. He does not say who he is. She does not listen to his lips, moving, speaking. She turns away, straining hard, needing to say something that will send him away. Nonceba shakes her head sideways. Faster and faster. She closes her eyes tightly and shakes her head again. Vigorously. His touch. He must not touch her. The hand pulls away. She turns her face toward the man speaking. She would rather be alone, so that she can sleep. She feels angry with this stranger for making her feel helpless. Without words, she cannot make him move away. She is trapped by her silence. There is a chair. The man sits in the room all day. He shifts in his chair often. She can hear his jacket making a soft sound, of fabric sliding over fabric, the cloth of his trousers when he places one leg above another, and changes shape. Otherwise, he says nothing else. He does not come near her again. He watches her from a distance. She watches the hibiscus all afternoon. If she turns her head from the hibiscus, she encounters the man. His job, perhaps, is to sit and watch her. Nonceba opens her eyes and looks steadily at the hibiscus.

  She has never felt more strongly about her choice against red blooms.

  “Look!” Thenjiwe says. “I have picked the most beautiful flowers for you.” Thenjiwe has brought the white flowers from the riverbank, they have double petals and one bloom can cover her whole hand. Whenever Nonceba imagines flowers, she sees only these white double blooms growing along the Kwakhe River after the first rains, at the end of the year. If the rains are late and the flowers are not there, then it has not been a good year, Nonceba can only sit and recall all the events that have caused the flowers not to appear.

  Thenjiwe has placed two blooms in a cup in a corner of the room, near the window, so the light falls easily on them. Nonceba cannot understand why she feels sad when Thenjiwe has just given her the most beautiful flowers she can imagine. Thenjiwe is crying, and this, too, is odd. Thenjiwe never cries. Not even when their father dies. Thenjiwe is silent as they bury him. Nonceba can still feel the sun on her forehead. They have been standing in the sun for a very long time.

  “Tears are for joy,” Thenjiwe says. “Not sadness.” Nonceba walks into the room, very angry, and closes the door behind her. How can Thenjiwe say such things about their father? Their father, who has died. Then the door opens. Thenjiwe follows her into the bedroom. She sits on one end of the bed, nearest to the door. She rises and tucks the bedspread in, gathering it into pleats, neatly inserting the clean folds between the mattress and the wooden base, as though this were an ordinary day, and bedspreads have to be tidy. Their father has been buried. Why should any of them care about bedspreads? Nonceba wonders. Thenjiwe finishes her task and returns to her place above the neatly tucked corner of the bed. The rest of the bed is against the wall; the other has Nonceba sitting on it, obviously not willing to move. Underneath the bedspread is a striped blanket, green and white.

  “When true sadness enters your heart, Nonceba, it is like a piece of the sun. A fire burns everything. A fire burns water. I have a piece of this sun lodged inside me today,” Thenjiwe says. She leaves the room without saying anything else, and Nonceba continues to sit, to think of the sun up in the sky till her eyes are burning, once more, with tears, but she must stop and listen to Thenjiwe. She sees the daylight filling the room and knows that this is the sun; this smooth light has brought the sun right into the room. If she follows a single ray of light, she will arrive at the sun. Nonceba bends down and slowly starts to tuck her side of the bed. She does this so slowly that her arms ache with the agonizing movement of it, for it is only a little task, but she would like to spend the rest of her life folding away, placing this simple neatness into her mind. Tidying her mind.

  One day, she is wheeled into a room in which there are rows of beds. It is a different place in the hospital, a less private ward. Nonceba feels bare, exposed. She has to deal with other people, looking, watching, turning their bodies toward her, wondering about her. She can hear many different voices all around her before she notices that no one is awake; these are the murmurs of those who sleep in pain, with wounds that no one can heal; the wounds are in their hearts. These are the wounds of war, which no one can heal; bandages and stitches cannot restore a human being with a memory intact and true inside the bone. Only the skin heals. At first, she is frightened of this change and longs to be returned to the room in which she has been kept before, alone, where she could look outside, at the daylight, and nurture her own calm. Her arms are now free. She can move her arms if she wants to, but she does not; she keeps them close to her body. She can rise from the bed. She can walk about. She can find a mirror. However, Nonceba keeps her entire body in one position. She is too frightened to move her arms. Everyone in this dormitory is bandaged, at least as far as she can see without lifting her neck and raising herself off the bed: damaged.

  She searches for the woman whose voice has long been with her. She, too, is here. Nonceba would like to approach each bed and ask for her, but she knows this is futile, an impossible search, to follow a voice to its source. She would not know what to ask, how to ask. She is chasing shadows. To speak to the dead, one must assume a silence to exceed their own. She has no doubt that the woman she had listened to has died in the middle of her weeping. She can only listen till she hears that voice rise again. When she hears it, she will raise her head from the pillow and look at the woman. After deciding on finding this woman, Nonceba feels better about being in the dormitory. She must maintain a deep silence, in which she can hear every sound. She will separate all the murmurs, the mumbled words, and find the ache in that single voice that she remembers. She has a purpose now, in the long dormitory, to fill the many hours when she can no longer turn and watch the hibiscus bloom. In this dormitory, she faces a long blank wall, white, along which are many beds. The windows are high up, beyond reach, above the beds and behind her. Finding this woman would be like finding a piece of the sun lodged in her heart.

  Nonceba sees Thenjiwe’s face lift upward, not with joy, even though the sky is bright and blue. Thenjiwe thinks she is alone in her pain, but she, Nonceba, knows how to follow Thenjiwe all the way to the sky, beyond life. Nothing can separate them from each other. She is whispering to Thenjiwe, waking her, telling her that she is not alone; they have died together; they are sisters. Nonceba shakes Thenjiwe’s silent shoulders but fails to bring her back from the depth of that devastating silence; neither of them has lived, survived the other. “To fly, first you close your eyes in daylight, like this.” Thenjiwe covers Nonceba’s eyes with her palms. “Can you see anything now?” she asks. Nonceba places her hands over Thenjiwe’s arms, which are resting over her shoulders, and they stand close together. Nonceba would like Thenjiwe to remain as close to her as this, surrounding her with her voice. It is dark and warm under those hands resting on her face. She is starting to laugh again, like Thenjiwe.

  If you close your eyes in daylight, you can only open them in darkness. Nonceba wishes to tell Thenjiwe this truth, which she has discovered with her own body. With her entire body.

  9

  Independence is the compromise to which I could not belong. I am a man who is set free, Sibaso, one who remembers harm. They remember nothing. They never speak of it now; at least I do not
hear of it. They do not state that we gathered handfuls of honey, each of us. We placed our arms among bees. These scarred hands, the flesh missing, are scented hands. An inch burned from every finger. The smallest of my fingers no longer bends. Something went quiet inside my head. I heard it stop like a small wind. First, my entire left arm stopped moving, or moved but I did not feel it—it dangled. I moved my right hand. I held my left arm in my right hand like something I had picked from the ground, a discarded object. The numbness spread. I moved the arm up and down not knowing what to feel, wondering how I would survive the hills of Gulati, wishing the arm would just drop off, rather than hang loosely like that. It may even begin to rot, I had no idea. If it did, I would be eaten alive by vultures. I bit my thumb and felt nothing. I bit hard and reached the bone. This is how I lost the flesh there. I wanted to reach something, to restore feeling. A nerve had vanished.

  On my hands are the perfumes of fires that we set alight by striking our fingers on dry rock, in Gulati. Rock stretched for miles with nothing above it, seamed with the blue sky. Impervious. From this rose our restless fires, which we did not allow to flame beyond the height of the rounded bone on our ankles; we cupped our hands over them; to hide a fire with your body, this is the most difficult task of all. Skin burns like dry leaves, then hardens like an exfoliated thing. When a body heals, then you discover that a body is made of layers of skin; even the human mind is like this, willing to be unclothed several times, to be naked over and over, healing in patterns like a wound, in scales. Look at the tips of my fingers. These are the fires of Gulati; these are the scars of Gulati. A man lit a fire with his own fingers and survived. He knew the smell of his own skin like a fragrance. The skin burned before he had lit a flame. He was already dead, an exhumed thing breathing. His arms a nest for a continent, a battlefield.