Mother to Mother

by Sindiwe Magona

  On Saturday, that same week, the two boys were buried. We all feared for Mxolisi who, by nights, thrashed about and screamed in his sleep since that episode. By day, he was a walking zombie; went about wide-eyed, staring into nowhere and never said a word. Stared, not a tear out of those suddenly enormous vacant eyes. Not a tear. Could a child that age grieve? What were those sounds he made that day of the funeral? Sounds that came from deep down his throat? Why, no tears? Why, we all asked, had the child not said a word since?

  In the days before the funeral, we waited. In the midst of all that grief, the wailing and the swearing (for there were not a few who said big words of terrible anger against the boers as a whole and the government in particular), now and then our minds were pulled back to Mxolisi, who had stopped talking. Stopped, once he’d witnessed the children of the words his mouth had uttered.

  Then the day of the funeral arrived. Should he or should he not be taken to the grave site? They were his friends, some said. Therefore, he should go to the graveyard and say goodbye to them. If he doesn’t get to bid them farewell, he will think he is being punished and blame himself forever after for what’s happened, said others. No, said those directly opposed to the latter view. That’s exactly what will make him believe he is being punished; taking him there. Spare the child this much, voiced yet another group. He is too young to grasp the meaning of all these events.

  Mxolisi would not be left behind. Clutching my hand as though the two were welded, stone-faced, wide-eyed, he sat through the entire service. While tears streamed down the cheeks of many, Mxolisi’s eyes had become two deep, bone-dry wells on the plane that was his face; dry as the Namib, his cheeks.

  For days, then weeks, we waited for him to come back. Return from wherever he had gone. Clearly, he was not with us. Had not been since that day those two boys were killed. We waited. A whole month went by. Still, not a word from the child’s mouth? Had he permanently lost his power of speech?

  Mama took him to work with her. Her employer was a resourceful lady; always came through at times of stress. Also, she and Mama had known each other all these years.

  ‘Madam says we must take him to the children’s hospital, in Rondebosch East,’ Mama came back saying. Her mlungu woman had phoned the doctors there and we were to take Mxolisi to the hospital the following week.

  I’d asked Khaya to come and see me over the weekend. The hokkie had a leaky roof. One Saturday, he came with his daughter, Nobulumko. Mxolisi seemed happy enough to have Nobulumko all to himself while his Malume was on the roof. Before his silence, he’d enjoyed playing with her as well as with other children his age. And although she was seven months older, he appeared the older of the two. He bullied and took advantage of the poor thing till, more often than not, I had to step in.

  I held my breath. Would he say something to her? Would the words return to his mouth? But although they played, his cousin giggling endlessly at some antic or her fancy, I couldn’t say, Mxolisi stayed stubbornly dumb throughout the afternoon.

  At the Red Cross Children’s Hospital the doctors and nurses and social workers were kindness itself. We went there several times. But with all their kind hearts and the many clever things they made Mxolisi do, they could not bring words back to his mouth. They could not plant what the police had scorched away by their violent actions.

  They looked into his throat, into his ears, up his nostrils. They made him draw: complete half-drawn pictures, fill out sketchy outlines and make up completely new pictures. They made him imitate the sounds of animals, domestic and wild; watch children’s films and a host of other things besides. Why, one doctor even had him put to sleep . . . talked to him while the boy was fast asleep. However, in sleep or awake, Mxolisi still said nothing to the doctor.

  Finally, they threw their hands up and told us Mxolisi was sick. As though we didn’t know that. But, they said, he wasn’t sick in his body but sick inside. What inside? His mind? No, not his mind, his heart. He needed time, he would get well one day. We shouldn’t push him at all. Ignore his not talking. Just go on as though nothing were amiss. In time, he would surely heal.

  Well, that was something new. The child had been silent for months. What time did he need? How many years? Not push him? Not push Mxolisi? A child who’d made up his own mind before he was born? Decided he would be born?

  It was quite a pleasant surprise to see Nono. She had gone back to school and was too busy with her studies to be a frequent visitor.

  ‘Thought I should stop by,’ she said, finding me stirring a pot of mphokoqo.

  ‘What are you burning there? Smells dreadful!’ she said. When I told her what I was cooking she had the grace to add:

  ‘Oh, that! Difficult to escape burning, isn’t it?’ After all that, she wanted some. Then she asked about Mxolisi, who was at the front house, the house at whose back garden our hokkie stood.

  ‘He’s all right,’ I said. ‘Except he will not speak. He’s become as much good as a baby in that respect.’

  ‘Does he hear?’ asked Nono, explaining, ‘When you talk to him, does he appear to understand what you’re saying?’

  ‘Oh, there’s no problem at all as far as that’s concerned. He understands, all right. Will do what you ask of him, any time.’ I said, going to the door.

  ‘Mxolisi!’ I called out. ‘Boyboy! Where are you?’ The back door of the front house opened and there he was, standing, his hand on the door handle.

  ‘Come over here, there’s someone to see you!’ At that, he stepped out, closing the door behind him. Then, after several tentative steps, he stopped and looked at me, a question in those eloquent eyes that, now that he’d stopped speaking, seemed to have taken over the function.

  ‘It’s Nobulumko’s Mama!’ His eyes lit up and a huge grin painted itself all over his face. He would be disappointed. Nono had not brought her child along.

  But he wasn’t. She had brought something that took the sting of his cousin’s absence away. A toy car — sleek and long and gleaming black. She wound it for him, put it on the linoleum floor and, purring, it zig-zagged its way thereon, banging and clanging against the legs of chairs as it went along.

  Mxolisi clapped his hands in glee, threw himself on the floor, hands darting forward to grab the erratic car. And although she coaxed and provoked and trapped and in many, many ways tried to trick him into uttering a word, or syllable, some discernible semblance of human speech, a cry approaching it, Mxolisi did everything except utter that word or cry or part of a word. In the end, no doubt exhausted by the paces through which she put him, he fell asleep. Car tightly clutched in his fisted hand.

  For a while after I’d put him to bed, we talked about him. Finally, however, we fell to talking about other things. About us. The we we were or had been . . . when was it? How long ago had it been?

  ‘That last school year? 1972!’ said Nono.

  ‘Boy!’ I said, ‘that was a terrible year, all right. So many of us had to leave school.’

  ‘Three girls.’

  ‘Poor Ribba!’

  ‘That was so sad. Mind you, at the time I thought she was the lucky one.’

  ‘Lucky?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. The girl had died during or as a result of a botched, back-street abortion.

  ‘Do you remember the terrible anger we faced? Yes, I know it sounds stupid now, but there were days I wished I were dead, I can tell you that.’

  ‘It seems so remote now, doesn’t it? Our people say, “Thunder rumbles and roars but then passes away!” and those are very true words, indeed.’ All those memories came flooding back. ‘What was the absolute worst, for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, the fear of discovery, first. And then, the shame once that had happened. The shame and the sense of having let one’s parents down horribly, irrevocably.’ She paused and, eyebrows raised, looked at me.

  ‘And you? What was the most difficult, for you?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, memory again plunging me back all those years. ‘Remember now
, things were slightly different, for me.’

  ‘I know.’

  We both knew that the knowledge, the fact, of my pregnancy had come as a total shock, a bombshell to me. I had not at all known I was pregnant. What is more, at the time, I was a virgin.

  ‘Those were sure difficult times . . . hard times,’ Nono said.

  ‘You can say that again!’

  China’s father (for although he had little to do with us now that we had moved away from his sister’s house, my parents had felt it was only right to tell China’s people of the boy’s affliction) came up with the idea we take Mxolisi to see a sangoma. Six whole months had gone by, and still Mxolisi had not regained his speech. I agreed to the suggestion. I was desperate enough to try anything.

  The woman my father-in-law took us to was about my age. She saw us to one of the rooms, made us sit on the floor, our shoes off. Nothing unusual in that, all according to custom.

  Out came her goat-skin. Spread it on the floor before her. But instead of the bones I expected her to throw on it, the bones that would tell her who we were and what we’d come to her about, I heard her call for someone to bring her water. Water? What is she going to do with water? Wash us? Make us drink it?

  Another woman, much older than our sangoma, brought a clear glass of water, gave it to the sangoma and left.

  She put the glass on the goat-skin. Looked at us, at the three of us, one at a time. Her eyes intent, slow, deliberate. Then, gently, she laid her hand on the mouth of the glass, like a cover, but not quite closing it. Next, she closed her eyes. And only then did she slowly lower her hand till it rested firmly on the glass.

  The water in the glass changed colour. Right before my unbelieving eyes.

  Mxolisi gasped.

  I turned my head to him in surprise. That was the nearest thing to a word he’d uttered in more than two years full. Again, my eyes turned to the woman. Now, the water was working itself up as though, in another minute, it would come to boil. But no, instead, the agitation led to foaming and that spilled over, seeping from beneath the sangoma’s palm until it reached the goat skin and settled all around the stem of the glass.

  When the water finally calmed down, she opened her eyes. And, slowly nodding her head at the glass, she made low, grunting sounds before she turned those piercing eyes full strength onto the child.

  ‘Yebo, ngane yami! Yes, my child,’ in Zulu, she said. As one in a trance, eyes focused solely on Mxolisi as though he were the only person in the room with her, voice floating, soft and eerie, disembodied even, she went on:

  ‘For shoulders so tender, so far from fully formed, great is the weight you bear. You hold yourself and you are held . . .’ — she paused before saying the word . . . ‘responsible’. She said the word with a sigh, as though she were a judge sending a young person, a first offender, to the gallows. Sending him there because of some terrible and overwhelming evidence she dared disregard only at her own peril.

  Then she turned to us. Why the wrath in her eyes? I recoiled because those eyes, now narrowed, were fixed more on me than my father-in-law. And out of them shone boiling anger and . . . was it pity?

  ‘Mama,’ she said, her voice once more her own. ‘You must free this your son.’

  I said I didn’t understand.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about. Go home. Think about your child. Children are very sensitive. They know when we hate them.’ After a small pause she shook her head. ‘Perhaps, I use a word too strong . . . but, resentment can be worse than hate.’

  It was my turn to gasp. My whole being turned to ice. Tears pricked my eyes. I felt my father-in-law’s eyes on me and turned mine his way. His brow was gathered, his eyes wide with unasked questions. But the sangoma wasn’t done.

  ‘But to come back to why you have come to see me,’ she broke our locked eyes, ‘this child has seen great evil in his short little life. He needs all the love and understanding he can get.’

  She gave us medicine — roots and powders, with instructions as to how to use which. We paid and left. An uneasy silence between us, between China’s father and myself. What was Mxolisi thinking? How much of what the sangoma had said had made sense to him?

  ‘Will you let me know, Molokazana, of whatever progress the boy makes?’

  I said I would and we parted.

  A few weeks after the visit to the sangoma, Nono and I were in the kitchen part of my one-room pondok, preparing a meal while Khaya romped around with the two children.

  ‘So?’ said Nono making bedroom eyes at me.

  ‘So, what?’

  ‘When are you giving Mxo, here, a baby sister?’

  ‘You’re a one to ask me that,’ I said. ‘Where’s Nobulumko’s brother?’ At that, she pushed her tummy out, hooked her thumbs under the shoulder bands of her pinafore dress and raised her brows to her doek, startled lashes high up, widening the white of the eye till it showed blue. She exaggerated the pout of her mouth till it resembled Donald Duck’s beak.

  ‘I see,’ I said. That explained something she had said earlier . . . that she and my brother were getting married. I had wondered how the two sets of parents had agreed to the marriage. Well, my case was slightly different, now, wasn’t it? ‘Won’t that be a little difficult for me?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Have you seen China, lately?’ We both burst out laughing. Afterwards, some hours later, when I’d forgotten about this little chat, Nono said, ‘Seriously, though, it’s been . . . what? over a year since China went missing?’

  ‘Over two years.’

  ‘And. . .?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘We must find someone, for you?’

  ‘Who said I need your help?’

  ‘Is there someone I should know about?’

  ‘I don’t know about knowing about him . . .’ That had been a blatant lie. What is the matter with you, Mandisa? I asked myself. Who are you saving it for? China? D’you still want him? Are you waiting for him? Or, is it your good name you’re worried about? Your virginity, perhaps? D’you think you’ll ever be that again? Is that what is bothering you? What you’re trying to reclaim . . . what you were cheated out of?

  That is when the words of the sangoma hit me. In all the years of being a mother, I had held on to my having become one in spite of stringent precaution. My virginity was rent not by a lover or husband, even. No, but by my son. This fact, an accident, my people called it, had always set me apart . . . at least in my own mind. I, unlike the likes of Nono or even Ribba, had not been a loose young woman.

  Only now, the inverse of the equation hit me. Where I had often heard it mentioned that a woman will always have a tender spot for the man to whom she gave her virginity, how could I feel that way towards my son? Indeed, how often had I not wondered whether my feelings towards him would have been different had his coming been otherwise? When he cried, sometimes instead of feeling sorry for him, I felt sorry for myself. As though he had less reason for his tears than I for his being on this earth. Did I hate my son? Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! How could you hate him? Surely, you know full well that was not intentional. Boyboy never set out to ruin you. He just happened. Why, he wasn’t even there . . . not yet Boyboy or Michael or Mxolisi or Hlumelo.

  Although she was not yet showing, a few weeks after our visit to the sangoma, Nono and Khaya got married. Nobulumko was the flower girl and Mxolisi, the ring bearer. I used the sangoma’s roots and herbs faithfully, but Mxolisi had still not recovered the power of speech. More than a year since I last heard his voice.

  At the wedding, I met Lungile. Not much to look at — but, could the man talk! Short, squat, heavy-set shoulders, neck almost not there. A thick head of hair. Large forehead. And a nose that made me think of the map of Africa. Lips, thick and pursed as though he hid something in his mouth. Throughout the ceremony, he kept bumping into me till I saw that the encounters were deliberate on his part. My heart started pounding. Oh, Mandisa, Nono was right. How can you be excited by a thing li
ke that? Look at him, short as the path to the faggot just outside the hut.

  On my way home, late that night, there he was. He had obviously been lying in wait.

  ‘May I walk you home?’

  ‘I’m not afraid.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow?’ Then I remembered Nono’s words once again. And the sangoma. How long would I keep my life so uninteresting?

  ‘Let’s go, then,’ I said when he made no move to let me pass. He picked up Mxolisi and we walked back to my hokkie with the boy in his arms. The sight of my child seeming so content, head solidly against this man’s chest, did something to me.

  We spent that night together. And nine months later, Lunga was born. Lungile, his father, had become a permanent fixture in my home although I had made it quite clear, that first night, that I was not looking for marriage.

  ‘See that nail behind the door?’ I had said, pointing.

  ‘Mmhh-mmhh?’

  ‘That’s for your jacket, each time you come here. And when you leave, I want you to take it with you.’

  Lungile was fun. After the initial resistance, Mxolisi adored him. Lungile was patient with him, always trying to figure out what it was he would say, were he to talk. Never getting fed up or hurrying him or giving up when he didn’t get whatever the child wanted to convey in his new wordless way.

  Soon after Lungile entered our life, the two would often leave me at home and go to the shops or to rugby games together. They went grocery shopping in Claremont together. And even when Lungile’s friends came over, as sometimes they did, he would chat away with the boy sitting on his lap, listening, if not saying a word. However, even so, Mxolisi and I still shared what I came to see as Our private moments. Before he stopped talking, he liked whispering in my ear when he didn’t want other ears hearing what he was telling me. This started when he was still on the breast and people, especially my mother, would say he was too old to be suckled. When he wanted his drink, he would whisper in my ear and tug and pull till I followed him away from prying eyes. The habit persisted past that stage and after he stopped talking, he gave me other signs with which to interpret what he wished to say. So, our ‘whispering’ stayed on, if changed.