The year was 1975, the summer at its wettest, the month December, the day dusk, the air rain-plump, the crickets cricking, the cicadas cicadaring and the sky leaking marigold and tangerine and ginger. The loamy Lupane soils were waterlogged, making my surrogate father and our beloved Thandi slip and slosh through mud. They’d been walking for almost five hours, from the stop where the Shu Shine bus had dropped them off, a distance that my surrogate father could easily cover in two and a half hours, but then they’d had to make regular stops along the way on account of Thandi and her pregnancy, asking for water and respite from several homesteads. (So, Thandi was pregnant! Ha, but why am I surprised? With all that marathon humping on her mother’s peacock sofa, what did they expect?) So that, by the time they reached my surrogate-surrogate grandfather’s residence, word had already reached the bull of the Mlambo clan that they were on their way, and a motley crowd of nosy villagers had made itself available to witness their arrival.
There! The nosy villagers thrust their nosy fingers at the couple appearing over the hill of the north-east, their nosy bodies trembling with barely concealed excitement as the two silhouettes tromped through the mire, he leading the way, she shambling behind, their shadows stretching with the sinking sun. To their left was the Thornton Farm, with the dapperwood, double-storey farmhouse lying on the brae, flanked by a pair of baobab trees, its windows reflecting the last teary streaks of light. Next to the farmhouse, outbuildings slanted into the valley below, gloomy where the light could no longer reach. Abednego paused, squinted, and shaded his eyes; he could make out, lined up along the incline, the bulkier shapes of soldier trucks, their veld-green tarpaulins flapping in the breeze. Next to him stood Thandi, huffing and puffing. He appraised her, her hand on her hip, barrelling his five-month-old pregnancy, and smiled. She scowled. On they trudged.
He found Baba sitting in his same spot in the shade of the mopane tree, though he’d never seen him in such strange garb before; the old man was wearing a white robe, like a dress, with a green sash across, and leather sandals. A green, plastic rosary swung to-fro from his neck.
‘Baba!’ he cried, spreading his arms wide as he strode towards the old man. ‘Mlambo kaMdlongwa!’
The old man neither responded nor looked up. Instead, it was my surrogate grandma who unplastered herself from the crowd and flung herself into his embrace. She felt smaller, frailer. The village, too, which had once been for my surrogate father a source of wonderment, seemed to him to have shrunk, and to carry about it a provincial fragility. It wasn’t disdain he felt for his village, no, not in the way Frankie and Mvelaphi and perhaps even Thandi had once had disdain for him, but something altogether more intimate, an anxiety for its rustic nature, which he felt could not withstand the inevitable assault of the metropolis. He wasn’t the only one who felt this change, which he took to be a change in the village, but which was really a change in him; he could see it, in the way his mama stepped back and regarded him, in the gawking of the nosy villagers, and especially in the way Zacchaeus studied him from a distance, goggle-eyed at the sight of his cerulean seersucker suit, now creased and the hem of the trousers muddy, and taking in also his matching tie now loosened and his pink shirt with the top buttons undone. It was his only suit, the only smart pair of clothes he owned, but it had been important for him to arrive in his village with a metropolitan bearing, a decision he now felt unsure of, for he hadn’t thought it would separate him so harshly from his past and the people and things he loved.
‘Ma, Baba,’ he said. ‘Meet your makoti.’ With that, he nudged Thandi, who’d been standing in his shadow, into the limelight.
‘Ah, welcome, makoti,’ cried my surrogate grandma. ‘Oh, my son, look how beautiful she is!’
I can imagine those nosy necks turning giraffe-like from that motley crowd, everyone straining-for-a-look-see; some shuffling and some shoving, and then nosy lips murmuring:
‘… But see how she grips her mother-in-law’s hand, firmly like that, for shame shuwa, no shyness, she doesn’t even look away …’
‘… Not even a curtsey …’
‘… Isn’t she supposed to go to the father and kneel…’
‘… Ah, hear how loud she laughs, what kind of makoti …’
‘… Pregnant already, when did they do the bride price negotiations, me I don’t remember …’
Out of the corner of his eye, Abednego saw Baba getting up and, without looking his way, threading through the crowd to his hut. He hesitated and then, smiling blindly into the twilight, followed the old man.
‘… Ah, did you see …’
‘… Not even one look from the father …’
‘… Not even a greeting, nje …’
Baba sat in the dark, away from the entrance. Atop one of the mud walls, leaning against the thatch roof, angled to catch a ray of sun or a glint of moon squeezing through the tiny window in the wall opposite, was a framed painting of the Liberation Hero Jesus Christ. He wore his thorn crown with majestic forbearance, Comrade Jesus, dangling from his cross in the martyr spirit, dazzling, saintly eyes painted in the commonplace blue staring back at a staring Abednego. My surrogate father frowned – he did not remember having seen the Liberation Hero dangling there before.
‘May my poor ears be protected from the sin of blasphemy!’ launched my surrogate-surrogate grandfather. ‘To hear from the blessed lips of my own brother that my son has turned away from the glorious path to slither into bed with the slimy terrorists!’
My surrogate father stood wordless in front of his surrogate father, seething from his Uncle Lungile’s betrayal and also struggling to understand why-the-hell Baba was speaking to him as if from a pulpit.
‘Curse you, boy, curse you! I hope, for your sake, that you have not been entrapped forever by the fowler’s snare!’
‘I don’t understand, Baba.’
‘You don’t understand? You don’t understand? Of course you don’t understand, boy, what man floundering about in the dark was ever able to pinpoint a thing? Repent, boy, repent! Repent from the terrorists and accept Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour!’
‘Eh …’
‘Eh? Is that all you can do, eh? Grunt like a pig, while Satan squeezes the very life out of you, leading you away from the path of righteousness to the dark alley of death? And who is this heathen girl you bring here with her swollen belly? Is the belly yours?’
‘Yes, Baba. I … you are going to be a khulu.’
‘Don’t call me father, I’m no father to no fornicating infidel! Why do you lie with a woman without the blessing of the Lord? Do we know this Delilah? Were we ever introduced to her family? Where is she from? Do you know? Does anybody know from whence this Delilah came?’
‘Her name is Th-Thandi and she’s, she’s an Angela Davis …’
‘Heh? You picked up a stray city girl who has no roots to speak of, is that it?’
‘No, no no, she comes from Hwali, near Gwanda, I … we—’
‘Shut your mouth, boy! You shall speak not of your sinning in my house!’ With this, the old man produced a bible, which Abednego recognized as belonging to Zacchaeus. ‘Kneel before me and accept Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour! We shall scrub you clean, and that Delilah of yours with you, and I shall speak to Father Dlodlo at the church to arrange a wedding as soon as possible. Meanwhile, you shan’t lie with that heathen in my home, is that clear?’
He stared at his feet. In his head, he heard Thandi’s protests just before they’d left Bulawayo for Lupane: ‘I’m not a rural girl me, I can’t live in the village!’
And his entreaties, which he’d actually almost believed: ‘You’ll have a good time, my cream-pie, you wait and see, my father has many cows, and Lupane is not even like a village, we have the St Luke’s Mission Hospital just nearby, there is no work that you shall do, no pail on your head that you shall carry, you’ll live like a queen, it’s only for a little while …’
His heart sat stone-like in his chest. In the city, the
impending baby had quickly overtaken the passions of the liberation struggle; with a dictatorial spirit it took over the weekend bio-scopes and the night dancing and the intoxicating inculcations of Frankie and Mvelaphi; at one of the secret meetings, a quivering Thandi playing The Mother in Césaire’s Et les chiens staggered midway through the play and barfed on the Rebel himself; their friends who were watching, mistaking this for a part of the performance, flung themselves into the stuffy air in effervescent applause, seeing the metaphor of their existence so earnestly enacted. Thandi was forced to abandon her revered role and attend to maternal duties and, what was worse, the play took off shortly thereafter, touring the towns and cities of the country and even foraging into neighbouring Zambia and then Mozambique, where it caught the wandering eye of a French-British director who, with his obsession for all things L’Afrique and African women especially, demanded to be allowed to turn it into a movie, in which would feature not only Mother and Rebel Son but also many pointless scenes of ebony belles writhing half-naked to ancestral drums, leaving behind a livid Thandi who would for the years to come lament this missed opportunity at stardom. Before the young lovers knew what was happening, the practicalities of love had colonized the carefree pitter-patter of romance. Where to stay with woman and baby? Abednego could not very well ask to continue sharing lodgings with his Uncle Lungile, who, after the Sun Hotel incident, did not hold Thandi in very high regard. And anyway, no women were allowed in the hostels. Even now, he was harbouring Abednego illegally, and if the police found out … When was he planning to move out, anyway?
‘How about you continue staying with your mother while I sort things out?’ Abednego had suggested to Thandi.
‘Stay with my mother, do you think she’ll allow me to stay in her house pregnant and without you even coming forward to pay damages? She’ll kick me out and tell me to go and live with the man who has made me into a woman!’
And indeed, her mother had.
‘OK, how about you go to your rural home in Gwanda for a while …’ Abednego had then dared to suggest.
To which she broke into a terrifying fit, scratching and clawing at his face. ‘Go back like this, with this big belly and no man and no freedom fighting to show for it? I am never going back to that bhundu unless I am dragging not a baby belly in front of me, but the carcass of the liberation struggle behind me. I’m a freedom fighter, you hear? A fighter. I shall give birth to the struggle—’
‘Yes, my love, I hear you, but first you must give birth to a baby, and we must make preparations.’
‘This is all your fault! You did this on purpose! You wanted this to happen!’
‘Never, my love, never never never! But now that it has happened, I shall never leave your side. I shall look after you and my baby.’
‘I’m not going to live in the bhundu.’
‘We have to go, only for a little while.’
‘You’ll have to drag me kicking and screaming.’
‘We have nowhere to stay here.’
‘Perhaps you are not hearing me.’
‘You’ll love it.’
‘There’s nothing to love in that cesspool of backwardness.’
‘We’ll go just for a few months. Until after you give birth and you are strong enough to return. My mama is good with babies, I promise.’
‘It won’t be more than six months? Promise me. I can’t stand that backward bhundu living and all those terrible rules women must follow. Angela Davis would never stand for this.’
‘Six months, I promise.’
On the fourth day of my surrogate father’s return, he found himself labouring on a wall for the hut he intended to share with his beloved, my beloved Thandi, who had since usurped a glum Baba from his throne beneath the mopane tree, where she now sat, and could be found sitting always, cradling her belly, moaning theatrically about the heat, the flies, a glass of iced water, please thank you.
As he stood to wipe sweat from his forehead, he saw two figures wandering into the Mlambo homestead. He recognized Father Dlodlo immediately, with his eyes bulging like a dragonfly’s, making him look perpetually frightened. The other was a lanky fellow whom he had never seen before, dressed in tattered jeans and a flimsy, black-netted vest. Zacchaeus appeared suddenly beside Father Dlodlo and began fawning over his robes. The priest patted his head.
‘Look at how big he is!’ Father Dlodlo exclaimed at my surrogate father, his dragonfly eyes almost going pop! ‘My, my, the boy has filled out, he’s practically a man now, yoh! Come, Spear-the-Blood, meet a boy who has been to the city.’
The lanky fellow just stared at him, long and hard, his thumbs tucked into his jean pockets, his left shoulder slouching as though he were leaning against a doorpost. Abednego half-raised a hand, nodding at the fellow, who made a point of not nodding back. Smiling hesitantly, he turned back to the priest. ‘And how are you, Father?’
‘Oh, I’m excellent, very excellent! Your brother here has been doing excellent things, he took all the subject prizes in his year at the school, just excellent!’ Dlodlo grinned at a half-scowling Abednego. ‘We pray that he follows in your footsteps and goes to make something of himself in the city.’ Here it was my surrogate father’s turn to beam. ‘Eh … boy,’ the Father ventured, rubbing the back of his head. ‘Your father came to see me about wedding preparations and eh … atonement …’ He inclined his head towards Thandi, who was sitting in her usual place beneath the mopane tree, her swollen belly squatting sinfully between her legs.
Abednego lowered his eyes. ‘Oh … we weren’t thinking, hadn’t thought about a wedding yet, I’d have to ask Thandi, city girls are different, you see, you can’t just—’
‘What is there to be asking?’
It was Spear-the-Blood who had spoken, his voice raspy, and when Abednego looked up, he was met with the fellow’s mocking gaze.
‘Is she not your woman? Is the belly not yours? So? Stop nuisancing and let the Faader do his job.’
‘Spear-the-Blood here is a friend,’ Father Dlodlo said quickly. ‘Eh, forgive his manners. But he’s been doing important work here in the area, him and the comrades.’
‘Very important work. In fact, why not be coming and seeing for yourself? We’re having a pungwe at the school in a few days,’ Spear-the-Blood clucked, clearly pleased to be finally the centre of attention.
My surrogate father shrugged, motioned to his muddy hands, and resumed plastering the half-erected wall. ‘As you can see.’
‘Everybody else will be there,’ said Spear-the-Blood. ‘If people see you are not going, they too might think it’s OK not to be going, and I don’t want you to be setting a bad example, you see. Or you’re traitoring like your old man, fighting for the white man?’
‘Don’t call my father a traitor.’
Father Dlodlo shot Spear-the-Blood a warning look.
‘All right, so he’s a little bit loosing in the head. OK, I am understanding that. Anyone living in this godforsaken country and all the supremacist bullshit we are having would be getting a little crazing sometimes. OK, I am understanding. But you, you are not crazing. You are very sober boy from the towns, and the other people, especially the young boys, they are looking up to you. So, you will be setting good example and you will be coming to the meeting.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘This is not a requesting.’
Abednego narrowed his eyes. Through the netted vest, he could see the fellow’s oversize nipples glinting in the morning sun like a pair of polished buttons. ‘What type of meetings are these, anyway? Why are they held at night, and why are they compulsory?’
Spear-the-Blood moved closer, putting his arm around my surrogate father’s shoulder. The fellow smelled of dagga and sweat. ‘Look over to the white man’s farm. Can you see it?’
Thornton Farm looked little different to Abednego than usual, except for the line of tarpaulined trucks in the driveway he’d first noticed on his trek to his father’s homestead four days before. H
e hadn’t paid them any mind then, but now, he could see clusters of men busying themselves behind what looked like a barricade.
‘A scout post,’ Spear-the-Blood continued. ‘A whole platoon down there. As you are knowing, there is a war going on, comrade. We, the guerillas, are trying to be taking back this country from the whites. But we can’t do it alone, can we? We are needing everyone to be participating. We are needing food, clothes and supplies. We are needing young, able men like yourself to be joining the fight, and young able women like your pretty wife over there,’ he nodded towards Thandi, ‘to be cooking for us, bringing us water, helping us out, things like that.’ He took a step back, grinning, but the smile did not reach his eyes. ‘Now, anyone who is reluctant to be playing his part in this very important mission may be mistaking for a spy, for traitoring. And you don’t want to be knowing what we are doing to traitors, comrade. Are you understanding what I’m saying?’
Abednego nodded, reluctantly.
‘So, I will be expecting to see you at the pungwe in a few days, comrade.’
They had flitted in and out of the community like spectres for the past several months, Spear-the-Blood & Co., having conducted, first, secret meetings with the dragonfly-eyed Father Dlodlo, and then having summoned the whole village to their pungwes, their night gatherings, before recruiting young boys to go and fight as guerillas in the war, which was quickly escalating, against the rogue Republic of Rhodesia.
On the night of the next pungwe, Thandi was, to my surrogate father’s dismay, excited. Of course, she would have been excited! This doesn’t surprise me at all; this was everything that she had wanted, all along; to be at the frontline of the revolution. I imagine Spear-the-Blood’s visit to the Mlambo homestead energized her and pulled her back to her activism. I can see the old, charming Thandi resurfacing here, and her idealism propelling her out from under Baba’s mopane tree.
House of Stone Page 7