I’m reminded of the story Mama Agnes likes to tell of how she came to be reunited with the Reverend Pastor, that fortuitous meeting that in her telling has always seemed innocuous, nothing more than a spiritual guiding to a good church c/o the Holy Ghost. But now, knowing what I know about their hi-story … I can see her stumbling into him five years ago, in 2002, fluttering on a City Council bin, full-figured and photoshopped, advertising a revival at his Blessed Anointings, the lower half of his body obscured by a growing mound of rubbish congregated around the receptacle, a devoted nunnery of flies swarming him. She wasted no time, my Mama Agnes, in detaching herself from the mundane rituals of the dogmatic Catholics. She had no trouble severing her ties to that Church of her childhood, to St Rose of Lima, to St Barbasymas, to St Mary of Egypt, and all those other countless saints who populate the archives of the Catholic Church, to be dredged up dutifully for worshipful-genuflecting on holidays and mass ceremonies. She had no problem at all, Mama Agnes, in making the charismatic Blessed Anointings her new home.
I feel a little pang as I watch her struggling up from her kneeling position by the Reverend Pastor’s crotch. She takes her place demurely next to him, her motherly countenance now haloed by the bulb light, enriching, despite her bruises, her walnut skin. Last night, I believed, stupidly, that it was thanks to my own powers of persuasion that Mama Agnes shared her youthful dalliance with me. But now, seeing them together, she gazing at him reverently, he beaming smugly at the room, I realize it’s probably this, his Fatherly presence in her life, and not the special moment I thought we were having last night, that made her give in so easily to my entreaties to share her hi-story – of all the things she could have told me about her past, she chose to tell me about him.
And there he is moving away from her, with barely even an ounce of the attention I lavished on her yesterday evening. Her gaze lingers after him as he makes his way magnanimously through his congregants, smiling, shaking hands, mouthing ‘thank you’ to whatever praises his besotted sheep are singing him. What use is all this hi-story I learned about them last night, of what use is it to my Mlambo Family Chronicles, to my redemptive project, to me? Mccm. That’s a part of Mama Agnes’s hi-story I shall have to blot out – this man, like that other brother, must not be allowed to taint our family hi-story. What the hell is he even doing here, out of the pages of the past, in Mama Agnes’s present?
I can’t help but glower at the man – at his back, for the Ladies of the Church have monopolized him. They usher him to the cobalt kitchen table where they heap for him a plate of coleslaw beetroot samp fried-rice mashed-potatoes potato-salad grilled-chicken and beef-stew. Trust a sombre gathering to produce abracadabra delectable delights that you cannot find anywhere on the gaping shelves of OK and Shoprite and Spar and Meikles! The food is a mountain and he climbs it as surely as Abraham, shovelling spoonful after spoonful into his cavernous mouth. I glare at him, shake my head and scowl. I mustn’t let these pangs distract me from my larger project. I musn’t let him derail us.
Mama Agnes has now made her way to my side of the room; she’s standing in front of Bukhosi’s sofa, seemingly oblivious to me crouching between the sofa and the bookcase. She’s busy staring at the boy’s sofa as if he were seated there. I get up, so she can see me.
‘Can I get you anything?’ I say, placing my hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I keep going back to that Sunday when he disappeared,’ she sighs. ‘The last time I saw him, he was standing by the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of water. I remember his head was tilted back, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. And I remember watching him and thinking how much he had grown! Very soon, he’d start to grow a beard. He was becoming a man, my nanaza, bantu! But what was he wearing?’ She blinks at the sofa. ‘What was he wearing? What …?’ She begins to sniffle.
‘Do you think he’s really in South Africa?’ she says suddenly. ‘My vision from the Holy Ghost the other day. I haven’t seen any more but … Do you think he’s in Jozi? Is it a girl, is that it?’
‘Yes,’ I say, without really thinking through what it is I’m saying.
She turns and clutches my arm. ‘Did he tell you that? What did he say?’
I’m just on the verge of correcting myself when I notice that her eyes are as round as coins, her body suddenly stiff. Such beautiful intensity! Is this what a mother’s love feels like? I frown, as though trying to remember. ‘He mentioned something like that to me, about a girl in Jozi, but I don’t really know any more than that.’ I look across the room, at the Reverend Pastor, who is now helping himself to a second helping. How does he manage to shovel down so much food? ‘But if the Holy Ghost showed you the vision, and the Reverend Pastor says it’s true, then it must be so.’
Mama Agnes is practically gleaming. It’s a powerful intoxicant, hope. ‘And he’ll come back,’ I continue, confidently. ‘I’m sure of it, Ma, there’s no need for all this worrying. I have faith in the Holy Ghost. And the Reverend Pastor.’
‘Praise be to God!’
‘You look tired, Ma. Would you like me to get you some food? We can go and sit on the stoep by the back door, away from all this noise.’
‘Yes, I’m so exhausted, it’s been a long day. Wait, let me quickly go and say goodbye to the Reverend Pastor, I’ll be right back.’
She didn’t come back, Mama Agnes. She went to talk to the Reverend Pastor and remained by his side for the rest of the evening. She must have told him what I had said to her, about the boy and the Holy Ghost and his own supposed powers, for he looked up while she was whispering something in his ear, his eyes searching the room until they rested on me, whereupon he raised a hand and flashed me a smile. I nodded and bared my teeth back.
It wasn’t until this morning that I managed to get Mama Agnes by herself. We cleaned up the wreckage from last night’s prayer meeting in companionable silence, at least until Abednego trudged into the house, an old sheaf of my Bukhosi posters clamped under his arm. He claimed to have been searching all night, but I suspect he just wanted to avoid the prayer meeting. He’s a real piece of work, that one. To think I was beginning to look up to him as a father! These days the man wants to act like he doesn’t know me. Heh. Mama Agnes gushingly told him not to worry, the boy is in South Africa. The Holy Ghost came to her, plus I confirmed it, Bukhosi mentioned it to me, about some girl over there.
I smiled sheepishly when she said this, looking at me almost in the same way she devoured the Reverend Pastor with her eyes last night.
‘Why didn’t you say something sooner?’ my surrogate father snapped at me.
‘Ah, he said it in passing, nje, I wouldn’t have made the connection had Ma not mentioned Johannesburg last night …’
He eyed me with suspicion, and then his whole body suddenly deflated. ‘Really?’ he said, looking at Mama Agnes. ‘The boy’s alive?’ He swallowed a sob, and his eyes became wet. And then he turned around and stumbled back out the front door.
We sat side by side on the back stoep like we intended to last night, Mama A and I, with our cups of tea and a breakfast of fat-cooks. Our legs were touching and I could feel every shudder of her plump, motherly figure as she talked and chuckled and swallowed her tea. Her mood was buoyant and I found it was easy to cajole her back to her story – indeed, hope is as powerful an intoxicant as my Johnnie! I sighed wistfully and said I remembered only too well the kind of first love that could send me chasing after a girl to Jozi – and at that moment it really did feel as though I was remembering it, this first love, this best friend’s sister, for I was suffused with giddy bliss. ‘But,’ I added philosophically, gazing at the sky dreamily, ‘first loves are quickly forgotten. Look how far you and Baba have come since this Father Reuben of yours.’ (And not for a moment did I betray that I knew that Father Reuben was the same man who warmed our seats and tried my patience only last night.)
She sort of snorted, but seemed to catch herself. ‘It’s not that easy, you know. With Baba a
nd I, it was an arranged marriage. It takes a long time to get to know someone, to learn to love them.’
She admitted to thinking of Father Reuben every day at first and often afterwards in her new home with my surrogate father, that nest built for my Thandi, so far away and so far removed from her beloved rural home in Kezi. How squashed the city houses were! Side by side like corn in a field, back to front, everything sideways, so that she could hear the dirty laundry from next door flitting in the wind as if in her own house; gudu gudu gudu, from the horny couple next door; the woman on the other side with such a foul mouth, her voice clambering on top of her husband’s, even though Mama Agnes could always guess what was to follow, the muted thuds of his fists and then the sharp register of her screams.
‘But city houses are so ugly!’ she exclaimed to my surrogate father one evening, as she served him his supper.
It had been weeks of fiddling with things, the three-plate stove that was not as scary as it looked; the cold white thing that, strangely, had a very hot back, and which if you placed your ear to it you could hear the food inside humming and sighing; the buttons on the walls of every room, which if you pushed made the sun shine from the glass balls attached to the ceiling, and which if you pushed up-down up-down made the little suns blink on-off on-off, until the little suns blew out, making my surrogate father blow up; the hard, black floor made from cement that you didn’t smear with cow dung like the mud huts back in Kezi, but with a slimy, black polish called Sunbeam; the bed that was too soft and made your back hurt but which was good because that was what town people slept on.
‘But city houses are so ugly!’ she said again.
My surrogate father at last looked up from a page of The Chronicle spread across his lap, startled. ‘They are not … ugly. They’re sophisticated. Something you wouldn’t know anything about. Don’t ever call my house ugly again.’
‘But … no space … everything so close … everyone owns so little …’
‘You think those clumsy mud huts you grew up in are better? Heh?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Then you are truly stupid, and I have made a terrible mistake. Did I make a bad investment, marrying you? I bring you from the bhundu to the heart of civilization, to a place with real substance, like lights and cars and radios and things like that, and instead of being grateful, you insult me. The world is moving on, little gal. Shape up or ship out.’
And so, she began to think of the haphazard landscape before her as ‘sophisticated’. The township houses were ‘intimate’. It was all part of the sophistication. Shape up or ship out. She wrote long, sprawling letters to Nto, describing everything around her, the foul-mouthed woman next door – who Mama Agnes saw one morning wandering in her yard and who said in reply to Mama Agnes’s greeting, ‘You don’t want to be plucking the chicken out of the cooking pot now, child,’ like someone possessed, either by spirits or sadness – the Zupco buses that ferried the people into a big town that just never ended: the noise; how the people greeted you by name as you walked down the township streets, just like in Kezi, but how, unlike Kezi, they didn’t really know you and did not themselves seem to want to be really known; how polished Bulawayo city centre was! Buildings that were as bright as diamonds. Tall structures that were called skyscrapers – because they touched the sky, you see, and if you went up all the floors you could see the soles of God’s feet – ugly cars that were said to be beautiful only because they cost so much, women who wore perms in their hair, painted their lips red, puffed cigarettes like men and danced to Nina Simone – as though Massachusetts-America was a reality you could pluck from the air and inhabit, like someone called Alice who went to a place called Wonderland through a rabbit hole.
‘I’m coming to the city, you’ll see!’ Nto wrote back. ‘I’m going to be that woman smoking cigarettes like a man and wearing perms in her hair!’
It was not such a bad thing, Mama Agnes began to think, to be under my surrogate father for life. He had brought her from the bhundu to the heart of civilization, to a place with real substance, like lights and cars and radios and things like that. She was grateful. Bulawayo was such a sparkling place. Like Massachusetts-America. At least, for a while, before the beatings started, she was able to forget Father Reuben’s betrayal and she was able to forget what it had been like to be a thirteen-year-old Matopo girl in ’84 shuffling in a 5 Brigade pungwe.
Fire on the Mountain
I messed up.
At the mention of the 5 Brigade, I couldn’t resist sticking my fat finger in the hole of hi-story and wiggling it around, asking Mama Agnes what it was like at Bhalagwe. She clammed up immediately, her body stiffening, and I had no idea how to open her back up again. I suddenly wanted to hug her. There was something tight and painful in my chest. I wanted to lay my head on her lap. I have no idea what came over me! I had to bite my tongue and swallow back tears. I dared not touch her. Instead, I back-tracked, and tried to guide her once again to the happier memories of her married life. But my questions came out clumsy and desperate, and I could feel her slipping away. She got up abruptly, though she hadn’t finished her tea, and said she had chores to do. And that was that; though she’s still nice to me, smiling politely at my wack jokes, she refuses to be seduced into telling me about the good old days.
I shouldn’t have brought up Bhalagwe! But it’s the place where our hi-stories cross, Mama Agnes and I, though she doesn’t know it. Just like how, unwittingly, my surrogate father and I crossed paths via that Black Jesus. Perhaps I went too far with my surrogate father. He seems to have come a little unstuck of late.
I’ll be gentle with my Mama A. Though I must get her to tell me about Bhalagwe, that place where I was born, where my mama died, where Black Jesus did his business. If only I could conquer that Gehenna in these pages! For a man cannot shape his own life while still under the thumb of History. History has been known to consume men whole, to make out of them its playthings. No, I shan’t be History’s plaything! I need to know Mama Agnes’s hi-story. I need to know what Bhalagwe was like.
The decision to follow my surrogate father to wherever he goes every night in search of the boy was not one I took lightly. But what else could I do? My charms have failed to work on my Mama A. Her coolness, the way she smiles politely, almost tenderly, whenever I speak to her, though she remains clamped up, is much worse than if she were angry with me. At least then, I would know I matter enough to stir some visceral feeling in her. No, the only two men able to rouse her passions are my surrogate father and that Reverend Pastor. And yes, yes, the boy!
I have no access to the Reverend Pastor or the boy, but I certainly have access to Abednego. And didn’t Mama Agnes tell me her hi-story only after the beating from my surrogate father? All I planned to do was to recreate the conditions that made her open up in the first place. I intended to shake the hornet’s nest just a little, nje. I would make sure my Mama Agnes didn’t get stung … and if she did happen to get stung, well, I would be there, wouldn’t I, to nurse her wounds?
Oh, but what kind of person are you, Zamani! What does this make me? To knowingly put my Mama Agnes in the path of danger. But it is not I who is the cause! It’s that man! He’s the wife beater! And I … I am only here to protect Mama Agnes! What are a few necessary pains in service to the bigger project of freedom, my freedom from the past – and also Mama Agnes’s? Can there be freedom without sacrifice? Our own liberation war the state is always shoving down our throats is, after all, about the sacrifice necessary for freedom. And I would ensure Mama Agnes endured only the minimum needed to get the wheels of her hi-story, our hi-story, going.
And so, there I was yesterday evening, hiding in the boot of my surrogate father’s car, sighing with relief when I heard him finally pipe his usual ‘bye bye, going to look for Bukhosi’ as he drove off. I was lying on my side, with my legs folded to my chest, one hand in my pocket, clutching the ubuvimbo.
(Oh, but what I saw! What he told me!)
It
was a bumpy, uncomfortable ride, only about half an hour, although it felt much longer, what with the car diving into potholes every few metres and Mama Agnes’s bootleg olive oil rolling around wildly, pummelling my poor flesh. At some point, it began to feel as though the air was thinning, and just as I was about to bang against the roof of the boot and beg my surrogate father to let me out, we came to a stop. The car groaned as he alighted. My chest began to heave at the sound of his footsteps, getting nearer and nearer to the boot, but then they stopped, and a door squeaked open. I sighed. I could hear him patting the back seat, and then the door slammed and his footsteps began to recede.
Tentatively, I unclasped the lock, pushed open the boot and sat up. We weren’t in the town brothel district like I had suspected (I certainly hadn’t bought his story of looking for the boy every night). In fact, we weren’t in town at all, but in some sort of field. I could see lights in the distance. It was uncannily quiet, the November moon peach-coloured and bruised, splashing its light on rows and rows of hillocks. Only once I had climbed out did I realize that we were, in fact, in a graveyard! We were in Athlone Cemetery, in Northend. What in our ancestors’ name was my surrogate father doing here?
House of Stone Page 19