Mother to Mother

  The next morning, when I brought coffee into Makhulu’s bedroom, where Auntie had spent the night with her mother, I was too shy to out and out look at her, examine her better, see if my impressions of the previous night were borne out by the light of morning. What if she caught me staring at her? Wouldn’t she think I was rude? However, the eye being what it is, so difficult to keep in check, twice I stole a glance at her; twice I found her staring at me, a puzzled frown splitting her forehead.

  How sharp her eye to have discerned what the experienced one of Makhulu’s had failed to see in the more than two months of my stay in Gungululu. Although, upon further reflection, perhaps all Auntie Funiwe did was help peel back the veil of love that occluded the bitter truth from Makhulu’s vision.

  ‘Is this child of Kukwana’s well?’ she asked Makhulu as I left the hut. Kukwana is Mama’s girlhood name.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ I heard Makhulu ask, for Auntie’s words had stopped me just outside the hut, ears against the closed door. My heart-beat quickened. Why were their voices guarded, cautious?

  ‘When did you say her mother brought her here?’

  ‘June,’ Makhulu answered.

  ‘Three months ago!’ Auntie’s voice was slightly raised now. It sounded as though she were alarmed. A pause followed. Fearing discovery, I stepped back and quickly walked away from the door. But not before I had heard Auntie ask, ‘Has she been . . . ?’

  Been what? My mind groped for the rest of that question. Been what? What was it that so concerned Auntie? Her voice had been truly laced with apprehension.

  ‘How do you think I should know about such a thing?’ Makhulu’s voice, now querulous, reached me where I had stopped, just outside the kitchen.

  They both sounded angry now, their voices strident. Neither seemed bothered any more that I might overhear their discussion. Did this mean what they were talking about was not serious? Not something they needed to hide from my ears? Had I made a mistake, earlier, thinking otherwise?

  Relieved, I tiptoed back. From the sound of their voices, they had not moved from where I had left them . . . on Makhulu’s bed.

  ‘Mama!’ Auntie’s voice said she was agitated. ‘What are you telling me? Have you not seen . . . ?’

  ‘Seen what?’ sharp came Makhulu’s irate answer. ‘You know girls these days no longer use rags. What am I supposed to see?’

  Silence.

  How long did I stand there, my feet turned to lead? Makhulu’s words had laid bare an awful fact that I had ignored. How had I not realized that in all the time I had been in Gungululu I had not once seen my periods?

  Oh, the gruelling interrogation. The frantic and futile denials. Eventually, sobbing hysterically, I broke down.

  ‘Yes, Makhulu,’ I choked, ‘I do have a boyfriend.’

  Even so, I clung to the truth. NO NO NO! How could Makhulu and Auntie think I could have so misbehaved. I had done nothing wrong, I told them. Ferociously, I defended my innocence, despite the evidence that pointed so clearly and unambiguously to my guilt.

  ‘You have to believe me!’ I screamed. ‘Makhulu, and you, Auntie, you must believe me when I say I have done nothing shameful.’

  ‘Yes, Child of My Child,’ Makhulu answered, her voice heavy with sadness, ‘but you have to be completely honest with us about this matter.’

  Honest? But that is what I had been all along. Honest. I look at Makhulu, make my eyes look at hers. Long moments of silence follow. What’s the point? I think to myself. They already believe the worst about me. They all do. At last, I heard myself resume the discussion.

  No, I told them, Mama had not told me how to be with a boy. She had told me never to be with one. Never. Yes. Yes, the boy concerned had known what to do, how to keep me safe. No. No, not once. He had never gone inside me but always played outside, between the thighs. Yes. Yes, he respected me. He did. Neither he nor I wanted to do anything to disgrace our families. His father was a lay preacher in the church.

  Both Auntie and Makhulu wanted to know who this boy was. His name.

  ‘China,’ I said.

  ‘China?’ Makhulu asked, her brow creased. ‘From which family is he?’ She did not recall such a name, she said. Whose child was this China?

  ‘Makhulu, China does not live here,’ I explained, lifting my eyes in amazement at the realization that they thought I had a boyfriend here in the village.

  ‘He lives in Cape Town,’ I said.

  If I had said China was impundulu, the firebird, Makhulu and Auntie could not have been more shocked.

  ‘D’you see what I was telling you?’ Makhulu turned to Auntie Funiwe. ‘This child has been indoors every time she was not at school or in church. I’ve known her whereabouts each moment she’s been here with me. And nights?’ here Makhulu raised her voice. ‘Nights, why, she sleeps the sleep of the dead!’ There was a pause. As though both women were going over what had just been said, neither uttered a word. Then, once more, Makhulu spoke.

  ‘So, I kept thinking my old eyes were deceiving me . . . playing tricks on me . . . that it couldn’t be.’

  Again, she paused before adding:

  ‘Remember now . . . remember that her Mama brought her here saying she was whole. She told me herself that she had been seeing this child. So what was I to think?’

  ‘I see,’ answered Auntie Funiwe. ‘I see,’ she repeated as if to herself.

  ‘I told myself to wait and see,’ Makhulu went on. ‘With time, you know that if you have kneaded, the dough will certainly rise. I knew that, sooner or later, therefore, everything would become clear . . . obvious.’

  ‘I see,’ Auntie Funiwe said again. Her voice said she was as puzzled or as confused as ever.

  And it is after that discussion between Makhulu and Auntie Funiwe that Makhulu sent for the village midwife, an old, toothless woman with dry, wrinkled parchment for skin. Wise eyes. A walking bag full of the smell of snuff. The old woman who came and looked at me the way Mama had done. She looked and saw that what I said, that I had done no shameful thing, was true. But she saw something else . . . something I did not know — did not understand. Even when she put what she saw into words, I still did not know what it was she was saying.

  The old woman said, ‘Utakelwe! She has been jumped into!’

  If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget those days. The first days following the old woman’s one-word sentence: Utakelwe.

  Following the words of the midwife, the very next day, Malume went to town to go and send a telegram calling Mama back to the village. That day, too, the baby inside me announced his existence. Out of the blue, there in my belly, was the small, tentative movement of a mouse awakening from deep sleep. Slowly, gradually, the stirring quickened to a tumult. Equally bewildering, were the answering feelings inside my heart. A strong feeling I could not identify . . . too scared to give it a name. But I was warm, all over. And, from myself, I couldn’t hide the wide, wide smile in my heart.

  Two days later, Mama arrived in a hired car; the driver, a man I did not know.

  In silence she received the news. Eyes staring unseeingly, she sat slumped against Makhulu’s shoulders, listening as though the words meant little, if anything at all, to her.

  Then, the flood came. A torrent of tears gushing unchecked down her cheeks. Then followed the wailing. Mama keened as though announcing the death of a beloved, honoured relative.

  ‘What will the church people say?’ Mama wailed. ‘What are they to think of me?’ The shame to the family would surely kill her, she said.

  Auntie Funiwe reminded her that this was a sad accident and that the family had nothing to be ashamed of. ‘This child has not disgraced the name of the family.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know anything,’ Mama continued her wailing. ‘My enemies are going to rejoice. They’re going to laugh at me now.’

  ‘What do you care for such small-minded, mean people?’ Auntie asked. ‘Let them laugh, their turn’ll come,’ she said. ‘Ours now is to look after t
his child,’ she nodded my way. ‘We must support and protect her now. How do you think she must be feeling?’

  Feeling? I was numb, beyond feeling. Mama’s coming, her reaction, had drained the last ounce of feeling from me. Fear. Shame. Anger. All these and more mingled together to form one strong thinning liquid that replaced my blood. A corpse would have more feeling than I had right then, I was sure. Like Mama, the fact that the midwife had confirmed that I was a virgin was little solace. I was pregnant, wasn’t I? What was to become of me now? What good was that precious virginity under these changed circumstances? I wished I would just die. Right then and there. I was so ashamed. So scared. My whole world had simply collapsed and was no more.

  However, despite all Auntie’s solicitations and Makhulu’s advice and admonition, Mama would not be consoled. Neither would she be moved. Not by word or by deed, not once did she indicate that she considered me an innocent victim and therefore someone worthy of her sympathy.

  How had this happened? How could a ‘tadpole’ from China’s ‘life water’ make its way up and inside me without me feeling a thing? How could it have entered me like that?

  Auntie Funiwe. So much store had I put on her coming. Made great plans, banking on her benevolence. But, the very next morning following her arrival, not only did those grand plans unravel but my very life came to an abrupt halt. The life I had known. The life I had envisaged. Everything I had ever known had been bulldozed, extinguished, pulverized. Everything was no more. Not as it had been or had seemed to be . . . or was about to be . . . such a short while ago. Only days ago.

  8

  Three children have come from my womb. Three claim me as mother. Three. But now, since your daughter’s unfortunate death, I have been called mother to so many more: Mother of the beast. Mother of the serpent. The puffadder’s mother. There are those who even go as far as calling me Satan’s mother.

  I know. With a mother’s pierced heart, I know. All these names refer to but one of my children. He who was first upon my nipple. He who came unbid; bringing a harvest of shame to my father’s house. Bitter tears to a mother’s proud heart.

  The journey back to Cape Town was strained, awkward and agonising, most of the time. It was filled with uneasy silences as the hired car rattled along the long, deserted dusty by-roads. We were avoiding the main roads and thoroughfares, the driver said, because of fear of harassment from the Traffic Cops, ‘Who will stop a car driven by a black man as a matter of course.’

  The driver, sure-handed on the wheel, was a taciturn man, quite content to hum along with the tune crackling from the car radio. Making the speech about the Traffic Cops was the most animated I’d seen him. Once the strategy of which roads to take and why had been decided upon, I rarely heard a word from him except, ‘Thank you!’ when Mama gave him something to eat or, ‘Excuse me!’ when Nature called and he had to stop the car by the side of the road and lean close to it or go into a nearby thicket.

  ‘Look at that!’

  The shout woke me up. With a start, I saw that I must have dozed off.

  ‘D’you see that!’

  What was all this screaming about? Without appearing too interested, I looked out the window. Nothing. Cows bent lazily over the grass. Hundreds of them . . . but still . . . cows were nothing over which to get all excited.

  ‘Can you believe that all these cattle belong to one boer? We have been driving, for over an hour, through ONE farm? The man owns half the Transkei, doesn’t he?’

  Surprise, surprise, surprise! The man of little words had suddenly become quite loquacious. On and on he ranted, Mama supplying the occasional ‘Mmhh-mh!’ The driver (whose name I didn’t get to know throughout the trip, Mama referring to him as Mntuwenkosi, Man of the Lord, which means nothing) went on about how the boers arrived in the country, long ago, with not one animal between them.

  ‘Stole them from us. STOLE everything from us. Where do you get to buy a farm such as this one . . . for a copper bangle?’

  ‘Mmmhh-mh! Mmhh-mmmhhh!’

  Bumpity-bump-bump-bump went the long, cavernous car; the driver’s thin frame hunched over the wheel. Mama huddled against the opposite door, and I sat somewhere behind them but in such a way that I wasn’t so much behind the driver that I was kitty corner to Mama, and thus in her direct line of vision should she turn around. At the same time, I had no wish to be directly behind her. That would be too close, certainly for my comfort. I might have been wrong, but I sensed that Mama too had no wish for my nearness. Although the music was not low, the silence between the three people in the car was louder. It nearly drowned the music. It hung over us thick and palpable. It enveloped us, each in a separate cocoon of terrible, unbearable unease.

  Whenever Mama broke that heavy and brooding wordlessness, it was with a haunted voice, a voice that said to the world at large that she had suffered some unimaginable pain. If she’d lost her husband and both her parents in one train crash, I doubt her face could have been longer, or her eyes more waterlogged. Her jaw set, now and then I would hear her grind her teeth. I tell you, that return trip was twice as long as I remembered the torturous journey out. And I had believed that one arduous, trying, and hard. Terrible. Compared to this one, it had been a slice of watermelon on a hot summer’s day.

  In Cape Town, the situation grew worse. If before packing me off to Gungululu Mama had been strict, following my return her restrictions bordered on the ludicrous. I was a prisoner in my home. Mama forbade me even to go to the toilet except during the period between the real dark that comes hours after sunset and the heavier dark that precedes dawn — she actually forced me to use a chamber pot during the day. That concerned she was about the neighbours and their wagging tongues. Like a brooding hen her nest, Mama guarded me that first week following my premature return. She didn’t even go to work, must have taken a two-week vacation, I reckoned afterwards. Those long, interminable days. Torture. Meals were silent, uneasy affairs. But even had I not lost my appetite I’d have found it difficult to eat.

  We arrived in Cape Town in the early morning, on Saturday, a week to the day since the old village woman, Madlomo, had told Makhulu, ‘Utakelwe!’ We arrived to find that in Mama’s absence, Nono had had her baby. What incensed Mama was to be told that the child had already been named. Named, with no consultation whatsoever with Khaya’s parents. Named, furthermore, Nobulumko, Mother of Wisdom, which Mama saw as a dig at Khaya’s family; implying that we had dealt with Nono’s family in manner sly and underhanded, clever or wise in the unsavoury meaning of the word.

  I’d spent that first day fearing the look on Tata’s face while itching to see China. To get word of my arrival to him, at least. Let him know how things stood. When Tata returned from work, that afternoon, he went about the house as though there was no one in my bedroom; as though I had not come back from the village. That whole day, I was confined to that one room in the house. Not allowed even to help Mama around the house, I sat forlorn in a corner of the room, where I’d sat since coming home. I sat there, too ashamed to lie on the bed although every bone in my body ached from the long car journey. I feared looking as though I enjoyed or took the slightest advantage of the unfortunate situation I found myself in. Oh, if only China could come. But I knew that was totally out of the question. I also knew I couldn’t go to see him. I could go nowhere, in fact. Not with Mama’s eyes stronger than a Master Lock. The next day, a Sunday, she didn’t even go to church. However, despite Mama, despite her weird actions, I continued to hope that by some miracle, China would come. Hadn’t he heard? Notwithstanding Mama’s precautions, I believed he would know I was back, that somehow he had heard. That powerful is the location telegraph, and that strong was my belief in it. Besides, our walls are nylon thin; visitors from outside the townships often request their hosts to lower the volume of the radio so that conversation can proceed at normal pitch of voice only to be informed that the radio blaring away is the neighbour’s.

  But China did not come. Not on Saturday. N
ot on Sunday. Not for the seven days of that whole week, including Sunday, our second back in Cape Town. Again, Mama stayed away from church.

  Tata continued to ignore my presence completely. I helped in the illusion, for as soon as it was time for him to come back from work, I made myself pretty scarce, went back to the confines of my bedroom. This seemed to suit him fine. Not once did I hear him inquire about me or my whereabouts.

  Locked in by day, there wasn’t even the chance I might catch sight of China at the back of his house. By night, the window stayed stubbornly quiet, undisturbed, the so-well remembered scratch of nail on glass did not come. It was so clear in my mind, so vivid, that I often imagined I heard it . . . and it woke me up from deepest sleep. Why, not just once I got up from bed and went to the window, believing I’d heard it . . . only to be mocked, laughed at, by the empty and sightless window. Worse still, when the light was on, my own stupid face stared back at me.

  The restrictions meant that I did not get to see China till I’d been back in Cape Town for more than a fortnight. Mama told me point blank to have nothing to do with him until my fathers had gone to see his people regarding payment of damages for what he had done to me. I didn’t see the logic behind Mama’s words.

  ‘Shouldn’t he know?’

  ‘Oh, he will know, all right!’ I knew she meant when men from my family took me to China’s home to present the case before them.

  ‘Isn’t it better that I tell him?’ I didn’t add the word ‘before’.

  ‘Why?’ asked Mama, brows bunched.

  ‘This has happened to him as much as it has happened to me,’ I said.

  ‘What, exactly, has happened to that dog?’ Mama spat out.