Mother to Mother

by Sindiwe Magona

  To leave at six, China had to be up at five. Being China, the moment of getting out of bed was always but always postponed till it became inevitable. Usually, to just a quarter of an hour before he had to leave. One morning, I heard Bhabha cry and went back to the hokkie. Seeing that it was half-past-five, I woke China up.

  ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ I said, patting him on the shoulder.

  ‘Shut up, will you?’ barked China, rolling over onto the other side.

  ‘Oh, excuse me,’ I said, attending to the crying child. The cold tone of voice must have surprised China. He shook the blankets off his face and growled:

  ‘Do I work for you? What d’you care when I wake up?’

  ‘I thought I was helping.’

  ‘It’s too late for that, now,’ he said. ‘When you could have helped me, you chose not to.’ I finished pushing the pin through the baby’s napkin and fastened it. Then I looked at him.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Look at me!’ roared China, finally springing up and out of bed. Beating his bare chest with the thumbs of his balled fists, he screamed, ‘Look at the mess I’m in. Just look at me! Not yet twenty and already out of school, doing a job I hate!’

  I knew he was talking about our being parents. No. About his being a father and a husband. The dog in the patch of nettles. The dog and I. So soon, though? So soon, he had started feeling his life a waste . . . something he would always resent?

  ‘What’s that got to do with your being late for work?’

  ‘Don’t you see? I wouldn’t be working now, doing a stupid job, getting peanuts for it.’

  ‘That’s my fault?’

  ‘You could have taken your stomach out!’ China flung as he left the hokkie, punching his arms through the sleeves of a jacket as he stomped out of the door.

  Surprise sprung my jaws wide open. For a full minute they stayed like that. Mouth agape. But no scream came.

  All morning, all day, Ribba’s face stayed before my eyes. Her throaty chuckle that flashed the uneven but strangely attractive teeth; her carefully careless gait; feet always in shoes; always so beautifully attired. Ribba. Dead, long before she was twenty. Dead, trying to take her stomach out. Each time I thought of what China had said to me that morning, I sucked my teeth. Sucked my teeth in and shook my head. Each time I held my baby in my arms, put him on my breast. And die? For what?

  If China was fed-up with his lot, I could hardly wait for my period of ukuhota or initiation to come to an end. Ordinarily, this event is marked by the arrival of the first child or the end of what was deemed a significant period — usually, a year. Since China and I had put the cart before the horse, I hoped I would get a discount or abbreviated sentence. Six months, perhaps.

  My day was longer than China’s, who seemed not to notice that fact. When he left, the baby was getting his first feed, the adults had already had their morning-in-bed coffee, and breakfast was waiting in the wings. When China went to bed, Mxolisi drank his last bottle for the day. Between that bottle and the next morning’s, I nursed him at least three times. In the course of the day, I seldom put my tired bones down, not a moment’s respite. Early morning: coffee — breakfast — schoolchildren and adults — wash the younger children and get them ready for school — dress them up and collect their books, scattered throughout the house and in some of the outside hokkies — empty chamber pot now that the adults have left for work — get the children off to school —- pick up night clothes strewn all over the place — make up beds — sweep through the house — do laundry, iron yesterday’s — attend to the baby — it’s time to start supper — the schoolchildren will be back any minute now, get their snack ready — dinner almost ready — there — there, the first adult has come home: make tea — later, everybody’s back from the saltmines: feed the tired army — then much later: listen to China whine about his job, about the tiredness of his feet, about how much he doesn’t make a week.

  Lucky him, he got paid. He had money in his hands, and he had a week, with a beginning and an end. My week was one long round of chores, with no break whatsoever. Sundays were the worst. At least, during the week, I didn’t have to serve lunch. Not Sundays. The deacon, my father-in-law, had to come back to a meals-ready house. This, after the hefty breakfast I had served, had to serve, before they all left for church. And cooking for my father-in-law was no easy matter. The man perpetually reminded me of his prowess as a chef at the Grand Hotel in Muizenberg. Big abelungus ate out of his hand, he bragged often.

  As the year drew to a close, I began to feel better, to dare to hope. Things had to get better next year. They would get better. Would I not be taking evening classes at St Francis Adult Education Centre? When that happened, my in-laws would be forced to share the chores. Besides, my year’s initiation would be over. Yes, my heart danced, things would be much easier for me next year. I just knew they would.

  Early in December, fearing schools might close before I had registered at St Francis for the following year, I brought up the matter of schooling with China.

  ‘We’ll have to talk to Tata about it,’ China said. My father had already talked to his father about it. Way back during the marriage negotiations. Why did we need to do more talking?

  ‘Your father agreed I would go back to school.’

  ‘Well then,’ said China, ‘we’ll just let him know, then.’

  ‘Molokazana,’ my father-in-law said that Friday afternoon. He never did call me by my married-woman name, Nohehake, which Tooksie’s whole family used religiously. ‘My son mentioned you’re thinking of school, next year.’

  ‘Yes, Tata,’ eyes lowered, I replied.

  ‘Is it not too soon?’ My eyes flew right up.

  ‘I mean’, he said quickly, no doubt seeing the look of consternation on my face, ‘is the baby not too young still?’ I had no intention of waiting for my son to start school before going back to school myself. But how to approach this man, who wielded so much power over my little life?

  ‘Mama will look after him, when I’m in school.’ I could hear my heart knock against the rib cage. Painfully. ‘And’, I added as an afterthought, ‘it wouldn’t be every evening.’

  ‘We’ll see. Let me think about it, then.’

  That year, the baby was too young for his mother to be about at night. I had to understand that babies were fragile. All kinds of evil roamed about at night and I would bring him some of that evil. Did I want to kill their child?

  I waited. What else could I do? Mxolisi turned one year. A part of me hated him. Not him . . . but what he was . . . had been . . . the effect he seemed to have on my life. Always negative, always cheating me of something I desperately wanted. I shrunk; because he was.

  As for killing their child, now, that was a laugh. If I had not scrimped, scratched around for odds and ends, and stretched the scraps my father-in-law brought back from the hotel on the days he was off duty, their child would have starved to death. Why, on occasion, I had to take money or food or both from Mama. And I mean for the baby.

  ‘Don’t forget to leave me some money for the baby’s formula,’ I reminded China one morning.

  ‘Have you taken him off the breast?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘You seem to be using up a lot of his SMA. Didn’t we just buy him two tins, the other day?’

  ‘Two small tins.’

  ‘Try to give him more breast than bottle,’ said my husband, reminding me his father gave him but so much a week.

  Mercifully, the interminable year drew to a close. Again I raised the question of my schooling.

  This time, money was scarce. My father would give me the money, I said. No, came the reply from my father-in-law. No, they had their pride. How often would I run home each time there was a problem in my new home? Would that not say to my blood family, their abakhozi, that my husband and his family could not cope with looking after their new daughter, now their own child? I saw then that the promises my in-laws gave, certainly as far as the matter
of my education went, were water to a sieve. Those promises would be postponed, deferred and broken till my dreams were finally forgotten. Till they had died.

  Then, one shushu day, without warning, without saying goodbye, China just upped and walked right out of my life. These past twenty years, I have not heard a word from him.

  In the new year, we had celebrated Mxolisi’s second birthday. Two weeks later, his father was gone. Just like that. One Monday, he didn’t come back from work. The next morning, everyone looked at me as though I had done something wrong. Or, in some manner I could not fathom, had failed.

  ‘He must have gone to his father,’ Tooksie’s mother said. Her brother still worked at the grand Grand Hotel out in Muizenberg and came to us at weekends, when he was off duty. On Friday, my father-in-law arrived. He was furious that we had not called to tell him of his son’s disappearance.

  ‘Makoti, My Child!’ shaking his head, his eyes looking anywhere and everywhere except where I stood, he said in a low voice full of despair. ‘I thought I could trust you.’

  I was stunned. How could it possibly be my fault China had taken himself wherever it was he had gone? But his father was not quite done with me. Not by a long shot.

  ‘I leave you here with my son,’ he said. ‘And now, I find him gone. He is not here. But you are still here, with your son and you didn’t bother letting me know mine was gone.’

  ‘We thought he was with you, Tata,’ I said.

  ‘I see.’ But I could see that he did not see. That my words made no sense to him at all.

  After that, without even having had the cup of tea I had put before him soon after he came, he left. He was going to China’s place of work, he said. See if something had happened to him there. Since that was the last known place where he’d gone, that’s where he’d start looking.

  China had last been seen at his job on Monday. Knocked off at seven, as usual. Then he didn’t show up the next day, or the next. When he didn’t come on Thursday, his boss broke into his locker and found it bare. He hired someone else in his place.

  What was so clear to China’s boss was far from clear to his family. His face long, my father-in-law told us of his findings and then announced:

  ‘How does that mlungu know China ever kept anything in that locker, in the first place?’ The search had begun in earnest.

  Maybe he had been arrested for a pass offence or something else. His father went to the Police Station,. Then, to the hospitals. Phoned each and every one of those that had wards for black people. Took the train and went to those within the vicinity of Cape Town: Groote Schuur. Conradie. Wynberg. Up and down he went, up and down, that whole day. No China. Not a trace of him anywhere. A whole week my father-in-law spent looking for his son. Took off from work to do that. No pay for him that week. Looking for China. Everywhere. Everywhere. But the ground had opened up and swallowed him whole.

  Nearly twenty years later, I have not heard from him. Not a word from the father of my first-born child, in almost twenty years. I don’t think he ever got over not knowing, till I was full three months pregnant, that he was about to be a father. Going to Gungululu certainly messed things up properly for China and me. Perhaps. For, I can never say for sure. Will never know. Sometimes, though, when I think about it, I say to myself, perhaps if that whole sad situation of our finding ourselves about to be parents, when we had taken all necessary precautions, had revealed itself to both of us at the same time and place, things might have turned out differently. But, as I say, I will never be sure about the truthfulness of that.

  Meanwhile, with China gone to only God knows where, I soon found I needed a job. His father was so distraught, he couldn’t bear to come to Guguletu any more. He stayed away from his sister’s house. Naturally, that meant we stopped seeing the colour of his money too. And soon, it became obvious, although people kept calling me makoti that whose makoti I was, was a puzzle. A burden.

  I took a job. What else? As a domestic servant. Sleep out. That didn’t mean I was excused from my makoti chores. So I had to get up two hours before dawn. To get myself and the baby ready for work and then give everybody their breakfast before they went to work and I, baby on my back, made my way to my job. But, within the first six months of working, I left Tooksie’s house, where I had become a real square peg in a round hole. Which is why, desperate as my situation was, I didn’t go back to my home, my girlhood home. Instead, I looked for and found a hokkie for rent at the back of someone else’s house. A hokkie of my own.

  Mxolisi grew as though he were a sapling during a summer of bountiful rains. As fast as he shot up physically, other aspects of his development were even more spectacular. At two, he could say things in a way anyone could understand, not just his mama. By that age, he knew more words than children twice his age. He ran the day he learnt to walk. Of course, he never crawled. He was such a marvel child that everyone loved him. Mama and Tata absolutely adored him. More so when, following his losing his father, his other grandfather, China’s father, soon also disappeared from our lives.

  While I would be lying if I said these developments brought me any regret, still I felt Mxolisi’s distress at the abrupt changes in his little world. Certainly, to me, he appeared to miss the old geezer. And for a long time after China’s disappearance, he would ask me to do some of the things China did with him, such as kick ball or spin a top for him. Also, he would repeat the word tata tata tata to himself during play. Especially when he was all alone while I was busy around our little hokkie. In time, however, I found him saying it less and less. But, not once did he ever directly ask me for his father. Not once, until one day when he was three times the age he’d been when he last saw that father.

  Meanwhile, we did everything together. He went to work with me, and I played with him, when we were home in the evenings and over the weekend. He loved peek-a-boo and, later, hide-and-seek. What fun we had teaching him imfumba and qashi-qashi! Later still, I learnt a lot of little boys’ games. We learnt to kick ball and spin tops together.

  One day, Mxolisi was at the big house at the back of which we lived, where I almost always left him when I went to work or to do grocery shopping. He liked staying there because there were older children who doted on him. The two boys, Zazi and Mzamo, both in their early teens, took him everywhere they went: to the field where the location boys gathered and played soccer, a game of marbles, spun their tops, or just spun yarns about those things of interest to boys that age . . . boys knocking at the door of manhood.

  On this day, however, the boys had left Mxolisi behind as they did when going to school or somewhere else where his presence would be a nuisance. Recently, that had been happening with increasing frequency and not because of school either. Students were boycotting classes. Again and for the umpteenth time, in the past five or so years.

  Suddenly, gun shots rang.

  ‘Unganyebelezeli, kuza kudlalwa!’ piped Mxolisi’s little voice, calling for daring and defiance. To look at him do the war cry of the Comrades, poised in a defiant stance, his tiny fist up in the air, couldn’t but send all those who heard him into paroxysms of laughter.

  There was nothing unusual about this. Mxolisi, now four years old, could already tell the difference between the bang! of a gun firing and the Gooph! of a burning skull cracking, the brain exploding.

  This day, however, minutes after the onset of the firing, Mzamo, mouth frothing, ran into the house; Zazi, eyes hanging out of their sockets from fear, close on his heels.

  Quickly and with the help of their father, they opened the back door, flung out Zazi’s jacket, threw it far to the back of the path cutting through the hokkies and going to the back fence. The mother then squeezed the boys into the wardrobe and locked it.

  ‘Don’t move! Don’t breathe!’ said the father to the boys.

  Everybody went to the back in ‘witness’ to the fleeing boys.

  A few minutes later, the police stormed into the house. Casting caustic glances left and right and into
the eyes of those present, they stomped through the house, into the bedroom, into the sitting room, into the kitchen and out onto the backyard.

  ‘Where are they? Where are the boys who ran in here a minute ago?’ they barked.

  Mute with grief-tinged fear, those at the back of the house pointed reluctantly over the fence.

  The police went to the fence, realized that the boys had cleared it and ran out of the yard of the adjacent house.

  ‘We’ll get them next time,’ they vowed.

  One policeman viciously kicked at the lifeless jacket on the ground. Kicked it till it jumped into the air, which filled it up, momentarily ballooning the sleeves. Then, slowly exhaling, the jacket danced its way back down. Slowly came down. Till, finally, it fell limply back onto the ground. And lost all its airy life-likeness. At which, one of the uniformed men viciously stamped on it and, with both feet, ground it to the the dirt-strewn earth; battering it although it offered no fight, no resistance at all.

  Then, epaulettes gleaming under beefy biceps, the three trooped back into the house on their way out.

  ‘Tell them, we’ll be back. They will not escape, next time!’ the leader, sandy, sparkless eyes narrowed, growled, standing at the front door, glaring at those inside the house.

  The last of the three men had one foot out of the door when he suddenly whirled around, stopped short by a small, shrill voice.

  ‘Naba!’ clear as spring water high up the mountains, rang the voice, once more raised in excitement.

  ‘Nab’ ewodrophini! Here they are! Here they are, in the wardrobe!’ screamed Mxolisi, pointing to the wardrobe. A clever little smile all over his chubby face.

  He said those terrible words and, swift as a wink, witnessed their outcome. The boys jumped out and made for the window. But when they hit the back garden the police were waiting, and shot them then and there. He was struck mute by what he saw the police do to the two boys. His beloved friends. After that, he zipped his mouth and would not say one word. Not one word more — for the next two years.