She straightened her clothes, wiped away the blood between her legs, and walked home without a word. She put one foot in front of the other until she got home to Zola, whose face was burning with hope. She could not tell her mother what had happened, it would kill her. She was already fragile. “Did he think you can make it in gospel music? Will he put you in touch with Rebecca Malope? Did he—?”
Mvelo’s tears cut her off. A dam burst inside of her because her mother’s reason for living had been stomped on and trampled over. Through her tears, Mvelo could see her mother’s face drop and age from thirty-one to eighty years old.
Mvelo cried for her mother more than for her own pain. She wanted to forget what had happened. She needed the strength to nurse her sickly mother into her grave with dignity. So she smiled through her tears, summoning all the courage she did not have. “No, he just prayed for me. That’s all he did. The tent is moving to another town,” she said.
They fell asleep silently in each other’s arms. It was all they had.
After the tent, Zola lost her ability to speak. She had no energy for it. She just made horrible sounds of pain that came in small weak howls. Mvelo could feel every labored breath Zola took. It was hard work; she would be drenched in sweat just from breathing in and out. Her eyes, although sunken deep into her head, still had a shine when she looked at her daughter, her only reason for living.
Since the revival tent left, Mvelo tried, but she had lost hope, and was withdrawn and sadder than the smell of paraffin and candle-smoke, the smell of poverty. It permeated every piece of clothing and every shack in the informal settlements. She hid the sordid story from Zola, but a mother close to the grave senses things. She knew that something terrible and ferocious had touched her daughter’s soul.
From a brick house to this place, Mvelo cried, thinking again of the warmth and safety she had felt in Sipho’s house, what felt like a long time ago now. In this forgotten place, girls could not play in the sun in their underwear, splashing each other with water. They had to sleep with one eye open at night. At any point the crude cardboard door could be violently kicked down by night-monsters who, like vampires, were coy to come out into the light.
Uncles. One too many of Mvelo’s friends had fallen victim to them. They came and went, leaving behind destroyed lives and broken hearts. They played boyfriend to the struggling single mothers who never seemed to learn; playing house and father to someone else’s children bored the uncles. Wolves in sheep’s clothes, they turned to the daughters, causing physical damage and a lifetime of mental scars. Mvelo was one of the lucky ones. She was at least able to count Sipho as a father. Though he had let her down, he had never abused her. But through many of her friends and classmates, she knew to be wary of men who called themselves uncles. They could be dangerous.
With these thoughts going round and round in her head, one night it all got too much for Mvelo. She simply gave up any illusion of her mother getting well, and decided to stop giving her the pills. She held her close and said, “Ma, you are not getting better, and we do not have food to help the pills to help you get better. It has become too painful. I have to let you go and I am asking you to let go and rest.” She spoke like a woman who had lived many years. She didn’t know where it came from.
Zola tried to prop herself up on one elbow and looked her daughter straight in the eye. “Mvelo,” she said, “I know something happened to you on that last day of the revival. I can see your stomach is getting bigger and your breasts have lines and color. Promise me you will not do anything to harm the life growing inside you. It is an innocent life. And I will let go on one condition, that you promise you will not allow them to put me in a box. Whatever happens, wrap me in a blanket and send me to God, but please do not let them put me in a box.” Her bony fingers were digging into her daughter’s wrist. Mvelo promised, even as she didn’t know how she would manage to do it.
Zola had always been afraid of closed places. She knew she was being selfish to place this burden on her daughter, asking her to promise something that was going to be difficult. Neither of them had tears; those needed energy they both did not have.
That night they slept without much disturbance. Mvelo was convinced that she would wake up to find Zola gone. But it wasn’t to be, she was still laboring on when Mvelo woke up in the morning. Mvelo didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.
It was Monday and she went to scrounge around the bins in the suburbs. From one house to another, she would look for anything—glass bottles to sell, dried up bread for her mother. She would take anything that spelled survival. Unlike other beggars, she never rang at gates or looked to make contact. Just their rubbish. She did not want their pity.
For months after Mvelo had stopped giving Zola the pills, she hung on.
The elephant in their shack, Mvelo’s belly, grew bigger, revealing the truth of that cruel night in the tent.
Then, one evening, Mvelo herself was struck by a fever that left her delirious. The neighbors found them the next day. Zola, unconscious in a pool of blood she had been coughing up throughout the night. And Mvelo, delirious in a river of sweat from fever. Zola did not make it. The doctors said she died of malnutrition and full-blown AIDS.
At the hospital, when the doctor found life growing inside Mvelo, her eyes were judgmental. She coldly broke the news that Mvelo already knew.
After the harsh words, Mvelo dropped off to sleep.
She dreamed she was being chased by a monster. She was terrified, until she remembered a torch in her pocket. She stopped and faced the creature, beaming the light onto it. Her actions were calm and deliberate. She told herself that she would shine the light onto the beast until she robbed it of its power. It was caught off guard. Now she was no longer the hunted. She was the hunter.
The monster let out a terrified cry and tried to run in the opposite direction, away from the light. She felt sorry for the creature that was now whimpering as she stood over it.
The batteries in her torch were dying, like the monster in front of her. She looked around and realized that everything had become completely still. The only sound was the beating of her heart.
When she woke up, she knew that she would no longer be easy prey. Whatever she decided to do about her baby, it would be her decision. And one way or another, she would carry out her mother’s wish of not being buried in a box.
CHAPTER THREE
Mvelo found the perfect person to help her in her mission to free Zola from the coffin. She turned to Cleanman Ndlovu, a dreadlocked Zimbabwean who had made a home among them in the shacks. He had been a teacher in Zimbabwe. Unlike most refugees, he came to South Africa in the early nineties, trying to outrun his pain, only to find hostility in the cities, until he wandered to the shacks where it was possible to get lost among everyone fighting for survival. In these shacks, unlike some places, no one hassled others on the basis of their origins.
Besides, with a surname like Ndlovu, and Ndebele as his mother tongue, he did not stick out. In fact, he fit in more easily than the Xhosas and Basothos who had moved to Durban for a better life. It was his name, Cleanman, which got him teased. He used to help Mvelo with her homework before she dropped out of school.
He held in him horrors of war and secrets that were unspoken. Mvelo told him about Zola’s request and the promise she had made to her mother. “But young one,” he said, “that is illegal. The municipal laws would not allow such a thing.”
“Who cares, Cleanman?” Mvelo was exasperated. “Who cares what the laws have to say? Look where we live, we have nothing. We are thousands here and we share six toilets. Please,” she cried, “you have to help me.”
He couldn’t stand tears. He walked away without giving her an answer, but she knew that he would help her. He would understand that it is unnatural for a body to be confined in a box.
Cleanman loved poems and he read one at Zola’s vigil by a man called Dylan Thomas.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light—
But she shut him up, maDlamini, the loud mouth of Mkhumbane. “Wena, Cleanman,” she said, “uZola was not of old age, and she sure wasn’t a man. Sit down and stop this English nonsense—”
She was going on but her voice was drowned by the chorus. Women began to sing to disguise the argument. It was the custom of their social graces and discretions to cover any sort of public humiliation or shame. Cleanman looked sad and embarrassed, but he didn’t argue. He was not one for public displays or emotional outbursts. He simply closed his thick book, with the dog-eared pages, that had seen better days.
Zola’s vigil was beautiful. The whole of Friday night, people came to the shack. Her body was brought back from the mortuary in a simple coffin bought by the neighbors from donations collected in the area. No one listened to Mvelo when she said Zola did not want a coffin. They looked at her with those oh-poor-14-year-old-orphaned-and-pregnant, I-am-glad-I-am-not-you eyes.
Her voice came back at Zola’s send off. She sang away her fear about the life that was growing inside her belly, she sang away the dread about digging Zola out of the grave, she sang away the hard road ahead of her as a lonely orphan. She sang until she felt warm inside, like the color orange. She opened her eyes and Cleanman was next to her. “Welcome back, young one, your soul is back in your eyes. It is good to see,” he whispered to her. She, too, was released by sending Zola off. She felt free, and was sure that the people who stayed for the vigil had enjoyed themselves. They sang, and one by one they reminisced about Zola.
A woman from the big houses nearby came with a pot of biriyani. She looked nervous to be in the shacks, but was determined to speak. She stood up to say a few words about Zola, who used to do washing for her before she became too weak to work. “Zola is someone I will never forget because she blessed my house with a gift that I will treasure forever. My only child, Sunil, could not speak. The doctors thought he was autistic. He stared into space and sometimes he would bang his head on things and scream.
“When Zola came to work for us, he would follow her around. One day I found them sitting and communicating. They had developed their own language. She told me she thought he had speech locked up inside of him. He is now a happy boy who is doing well at school. When I heard about her death, I wanted to come and pay my respects.” Ms. Naidoo had intended to drop off the biriyani, say a few words, and leave the shacks as soon as possible, but the atmosphere held her there through the vigil.
In her death, Zola had unified people, regardless of their social standing. Neighbors had improvised tins, bricks, and beer cases as seats in front of her shack where they held the vigil.
A nurse from a clinic where Zola had been banned came to pay her respects as well. Mvelo noticed her in the crowd, and thought she was brave to show her face after how she had treated Zola. “It is because of me that she was banned from the clinic,” the nurse admitted. “I am burning with shame when I think of it now. I myself am positive, and I had not come to terms with it because it was through my own stupidity, trusting a man that I should not have. When I found out I was positive, I became very angry and I took it out on my patients. Most did not respond to my rudeness. But Zola fought back when I said hurtful things to her. It was my fault, and I want to say, in front of her child here, that I am sorry. I should have been more understanding—”
The nurse was becoming emotional, so the women started singing again.
People Mvelo had never seen before stood up and said things about Zola. It was a beautiful night, the moon was red at first as the sun hid behind it, and later the night turned silver as the moon took over its shift from the sun. Most of the neighbors apologized for gossiping. “Bantu bomphakathi, you know me, I just like to talk. Now when I hear you using the Holy Book to rebuke those with loose tongues, I am repenting. I ask you to forgive me,” said maDlamini.
One drunk shouted, “Ya, Mamgobhozi wendawo,” and people chuckled, loudly punctuating her speech. The chuckles encouraged the drunk to get louder, “UmaDlamini, uNdabazabantu, Home Affairs, Ugesi waseLamonti. There is nothing that she doesn’t know under the roofs of these shacks.”
Another song rang out to drown the unflattering comments made by the drunk. “Ai, I am just a bored old woman,” maDlamini said. “I am sure Zola will forgive me, God rest her soul.”
Cleanman looked at Mvelo and nodded. The plan was on. They marked Zola’s grave and in the dark they would come back and dig out her coffin and free her into the soil as nature intended. Her coffin was simple and Cleanman watched closely how it closed and opened during the viewing of the body.
Zola had detailed her wishes for what she wanted when she died. She asked for Skwiza, her only surviving blood relative after Mvelo, to read what she had written. Skwiza stood up—her outfit hugging her tight around her curves softened by age, her eyebrows drawn in that clownish way some women like to do, lips bright red and a sweet perfume that could be smelled all the way from Durban—ignoring the sniggers from the mourners. She was perfect in her delivery, with gestures in the right places, pausing for emphasis where it was needed.
“It is my wish,” Zola wrote, “that people should know I died of AIDS. Not a long or a short illness, as they tell us kills most celebrities. Not pneumonia, not TB, not insanity, not witchcraft, but AIDS. This is my gift to all the gossipmongers of Mkhumbane. I give you permission to gossip loudly, not in whispers. Tell whoever cares to know that I lived positively with HIV, and I died of AIDS. Tell them that you heard it from the horse’s mouth.”
She asked Mvelo to read her favorite passage from the Bible, from 1st Corinthians. “If I speak with the languages of men and of angels, but don’t have love, I have become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but don’t have love, I am nothing. If I dole out all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but don’t have love, it profits me nothing.…But now, faith, hope, and love remain—these three,” Mvelo concluded. “The greatest of these is love.”
Mvelo looked at her mother’s face in the coffin. It was peaceful. She would never say another word to her again.
Mvelo imagined that if her mother could say one last thing, it would be, “Sing, Mvelo, you were born to sing.” So she did.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mvelo had not known that graveyards were busiest in the dead of the night. When she and Cleanman set out to free Zola from the coffin, the police were chasing and arresting grave diggers who were digging up expensive caskets to resell them to the bereaved. The gunshots rang in her ears. She was terrified and suffocating under Cleanman’s sweaty armpit as he shielded her. She had stubbornly refused to stay behind and let him do it alone. She waddled along with her pregnant stomach. Now Cleanman was on top of her, trying to protect her from the gunshots. She couldn’t breathe or move.
Then suddenly it was as it should be in a graveyard, dead quiet.
But the silence did not bring her any relief. Instead there was a feeling of approaching doom. She tried to wriggle her nose out of Cleanman’s armpit. His body on top of her was becoming heavier. He snored softly against her ear, a sound that would be peaceful and reassuring under normal circumstances, but right now, in the intestines of the night, in a graveyard, his snoring told her she was all alone.
His snores triggered hysteria in her and she began to giggle uncontrollably. The shaking of her body jolted him and he woke up with a start, like a guard caught napping. She pushed him off. “I think they have gone,” she said. He had taken vodka to fortify his nerves for the task ahead, but it had made him sleepy instead of brave.
She was wrong. The gravediggers were gone, but the police were still patrolling. They spotted the two of them as Cleanman resumed digging up Zola’s grave. “Hheyi, there are more. Look over there,” a policeman called for back up.
Cleanman knew it was too late to run or do anything, so he dropped the spade and lifted his hands to surrender. The vodka drained right out of him and he sobered up. He was in deep shit. He was an illegal.
Mvelo felt helpless and racked with guilt. She had got him into this mess. She prayed fervently that they did not realize that he was not a South African. “It’s my fault,” she told the policemen, who were shocked to find a young pregnant girl in a graveyard at this godless hour.
She told them the whole story about Zola’s request. Cleanman, being Ndebele and with the surname Ndlovu, spoke the kind of Zulu that is considered proper, similar to the dialects of the northern regions of KwaZulu-Natal. He asked the police, “What kind of a man would I be if I could not help a desperate girl like Mvelo?” His display of respect for the officers flattered them and softened them immediately. He even convinced them that in true African culture, “We really shouldn’t be buried in coffins.” He gained momentum when he saw them nodding, and went on to explain that this business of coffins was an extension of capitalism, a moneymaking scheme.
“Just now, my brothers, you were engaged in a gunshot battle with the owners of these funeral parlors who make a fortune selling caskets, and then they come back to dig them up and resell them.” There were murmurs of agreement among the police.
It turned out that two of the three policemen shared the same surname as Cleanman. On hearing this, Cleanman broke into a traditional praise song of the Ndlovus, calling out all izithakazelo, praise-names of the Ndlovus–Oboya benyathi, oGatsheni–thoroughly impressing the men. Of course he gave them his real Ndebele name, Nkosana Ndlovu, instead of the nickname Cleanman, otherwise they would have caught on very quickly that he was from Zimbabwe. If they noticed anything in his accent, they must have chalked it up to the rural areas of KwaZulu.
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