House of Stone

by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

  ‘Ah, those people in the box are boring. I prefer to read … eh, Baba?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I saw an advert in The Chronicle, a teachers’ college in a place called Hillside. All you need is basic O-level and I … I was thinking of having something to do …’

  ‘Huh-uh. You want to be getting big ideas now. I want you to stay at home and look after the house. The answer is no.’

  She didn’t want the disappointment to show, and so she tried to swallow it. But it refused to go past her throat, remaining lodged there like a ball of isitshwala that had stayed too long on the stove until it became dry and hard as a dwala. It scratched her throat, so that her words became sullen, bloated her face, so that her cheeks swelled. She cut out the advert in the paper and tucked it beneath her pillow. Oh, how she wanted to go to teaching college! How she longed to perm her hair, stand in front of a class, and scribble with chalk on a blackboard. She would be good at it, she knew. She was better than this. She had almost gone to Massachusetts. And now!

  ‘It’s all about approach,’ MaSibanda, the foul-mouthed woman from next door, told her.

  They were leaning against the sagging fence that divided their homes, as township women are wont to do as they go about their outdoor morning chores, brooms-in-hand, the soil whipped about by a violent August wind around their feet. MaSibanda was busy picking her teeth with a stick of grass. Mama Agnes watched her, wide-eyed, animated by her lack of concern, the wild thicket on her head, her torn, see-through nightdress showing her torn, see-through panties.

  ‘How do I do this … approach?’ she asked.

  ‘Heh! Little gal! Didn’t your aunties talk to you when you became a young woman?’

  She covered her eyes.

  ‘When he’s about to arrive, you take a long bath. Are you listening? A nice, hot bath. You scent yourself with some nice perfume, the one you know he likes. Then, when he gets in, you take his bag. Are you listening? You greet him sweetly, ever so sweetly. You take off his shoes. You pour warm water into a dish. You wash his feet, nicely, and as you do so, you ask him about his day. Tell him what a big man he is! Eh? And then, you cook him his favourite meal. After he has finished eating, when he wants to sleep,’ and here MaSibanda’s voice became husky, ‘you begin to roll and roll on the bed, like you can’t sleep. You mustn’t wear anything to bed, are you listening?’

  Mama Agnes giggled.

  ‘What is it?’ asked MaSibanda, chuckling. ‘Is he not your husband? Grow up, little gal, you are somebody’s wife now. Now, what was I saying? Ah yes, you roll and roll, like you are half asleep. At that moment when he begins panting, when you feel his hands searching you up and down like they have lost control, you just say, casually, how you wish for this and this and this. Just whisper it in his ear, nicely, slowly, sweetly.’

  The woman leaned back and crossed her arms.

  ‘And then what?’ asked Mama Agnes.

  ‘And then you wait.’

  ‘Ah! What if he doesnt hear me what if he forget show will i know he has heard me?’

  ‘Believe me, he has heard you. You just do all I have told you, and you’ll be telling me very soon that you are off to teaching college.’

  ‘Oprah says we must have a talking relationship. That we must be open with one another, and discuss things freely.’

  ‘Who is Oprah?’

  ‘A woman in the box. She’s from America.’

  ‘Heh, so now you want to listen to a white woman from America over me?’

  ‘She’s black. With this nice wavy hair that you don’t have to put perm in to make curly. Black women in Massachusetts-America are very pretty. They are a sophistication.’

  ‘This is not America, little gal. Heh! All right. Choose who you will listen to – Oprah or me. What does America know about our customs?’

  And so, Mama Agnes spent the day practising how she would make her approach to my surrogate father:

  ‘I wish to go to teaching college …’

  Too vague?

  ‘I wish to go to Hillside Teachers’ College …’

  Too direct?

  ‘Oh Baba, you are such a great man, so wonderful and I wish to go to Hillside Teachers College …’

  And so it was that at the end of that week – 12 August 1988, a muggy Friday which she would always remember, for she was certain that was when her life began its path towards Enlightenment, Mama Agnes took a long, hot bath, scented with a perfume called Illusion lent her by MaSibanda.

  Exactly two weeks to the letter, just after supper, as my surrogate father sipped a glass of iced water and perused The Chronicle, he said, casually, ‘I think it would be good for you if I enrolled you at a teaching college, what do you think?’

  To which she, trying to swallow her excitement, asked, ‘You really think so, lovely husband-of-mine?’

  ‘Yes, I think it would be good if I did that for you. You have good O-level. And me, I am a progressive man. Would you like it if I did that for you?’

  ‘Oh, you are so smart. So handsome. You know best. Anything you want, lovely husband-of-mine …’

  The following January, Mama Agnes enrolled at the teaching college, despite the fact that Abednego had changed his mind over his lapse into progressiveness – Mama Agnes was pregnant. ‘It’s not as if I’m moving to another town,’ she said. ‘I would commute and be home every day. Plus, we can hire a maid to help me out with the baby. That’s what working women in the city do.’

  ‘I will not have my child raised by a stranger. You are its mother, you are here, what’s the problem?’

  But it was too late for him to object; permission once received was never going to be relinquished, and by this point, Mama Agnes had become wily in the ways of manipulating her husband. She instead enrolled under the Long Distance option of the college, knowing this small act of defiance would go unpunished while she was carrying his child. In fact, during her pregnancy was the most excited she would ever see him throughout the years of their marriage. His severe glare softened, and he became playful, silly even, taking her to the disco at the beerhall, where he persuaded her to dance, though she didn’t know how to move to the simanje-manje city music, and would just stand, stiff, staring wide-eyed at him.

  He began to take an interest in her past, asking her to tell him stories from her childhood, about her father, her mother, her sister, her brothers. Where had she been during the liberation war? Had she taken part in any radical activity? She wished she had, for he seemed disappointed by her answers, about hiding from the guerillas, for she had been just a child during the war and had been petrified of them, of the fighting and the bombing, which she associated with the unusually tizzy sound of her mama’s voice cracking through her sleep and ordering her to run for the bush.

  My surrogate father took to doing things which at first unnerved my Mama Agnes; he insisted on rubbing her belly with coconut oil, even going so far as rubbing her feet when they swelled. He brought home a stack of books on parenting. He even tried to cook for her – a disaster over which they laughed – and took to bringing her Fanta and pastries and calling her ‘chicken-pie’.

  We were interrupted, Mama Agnes and I, by that yenta MaNdlovu. No doubt she heard the fight from next door between my Mama Agnes and Abednego this morning, and was now here to gather dirt on our family under the pretext of ‘seeing if there’s any news about the boy’. Of course, there was no news. Instead, that scandalmonger’s meddling broke the spell between me and my Mama Agnes. She jumped up when the woman walked in, as though we had been doing something wrong. No longer did her head seek my chest; no longer did she grip my shirt as she remembered my surrogate father’s beatings; no longer was she pliant to my murmurs of ‘It’s OK, Mama Agnes, your Zamani is here … what happened next?’ Instead, she leapt into that gossiper’s arms, as though into an old friend’s, and broke into hysterics. And then she turned to me, quietening down, and asked me to leave them alone. I smiled what I hoped was a calm smile, for I was see
thing, and offered to make them tea.

  ‘Aww, yes, I want tea,’ that MaNdlovu said before Mama Agnes could decline. ‘What a pleasant young man, you are lucky, Naka-Bukhosi, to have such a helpful lodger. Put three sugars in mine, do you have sugar? It’s been so long since I last tasted sugar, uyazi. Where do you get yours, NakaBukhosi?’

  (How I yearn to hear Mama Agnes called ‘NakaZamani’!)

  I made them Tanganda tea, with a squeeze of lemon for Mama Agnes and one teaspoon of sugar for that MaNdlovu, though I told her I had stirred in three. I also made myself a cup, and sat by the cobalt kitchen table in front of the TV stand, pretending to read an old O Magazine while listening intently to their conversation. I was happy to hear that although my Mama Agnes told MaNdlovu about the beating this morning, she didn’t reveal anything about Abednego’s history. Such secrets are for family only. But I was alarmed to hear her tell MaNdlovu that she planned to go to South Africa no matter what. She even repeated what I told her last week at the prayer meeting, that the boy had told me he wanted to go to South Africa after some girl. Meaning the Holy Ghost’s visions were right, her boy was in Johannesburg! She wondered out loud if he was all right, why he had left, why he didn’t call. MaNdlovu squeezed her hand and proclaimed that the Holy Ghost did not lie, and look, it had sent a confirmation of the boy’s whereabouts through me, its emissary. Mama Agnes had to go to South Africa; she should run away in the middle of the night, while her man was asleep, if she had to.

  It was all I could do not to yell at that busybody to shuttup. Mama Agnes was encouraged by her support, and seemed to be seriously considering running off to South Africa. One of these days, we’ll wake up to find her gone!

  How to get her to see that she doesn’t need the boy? That I, Zamani, am worth two Bukhosis, three, even? I couldn’t wait for that MaNdlovu to leave, but she spent the whole day at our house and drank six teas, only heading off when it was already getting dark, after which I couldn’t convince Mama Agnes to let me stay a while. She had had a long day, she said. I lingered, hoping she would, after the bond we shared since my surrogate father’s outburst, invite me to spend the night in the main house again. But she just stared at me, raising her eyebrows expectantly, and repeated, ‘Goodnight’, forcing me to repeat, ‘Goodnight’, in return and shamble back to my lodgings.

  We couldn’t even find some alone time this morning. My surrogate father had slinked back to the house in the night, and was now trying to slink back into Mama Agnes’s heart by trying to cook her porridge with some new luxury-brand mealie-meal. The man has no shy. If you are going to make a woman a reconciliatory breakfast, let it be a full English breakfast, with the requisite toast and baked beans and crispy bacon and fried sausages and eggs sunny-side up and lightly seared tomato slices. It would be even more heroic were you to get hold of these ingredients at such a time of food shortages as this; it would be an accomplishment deserving rendition in these family chronicles, a feat so Homeric in these prosaic times that its telling would merit a whole chapter: Love in the Time of Inanition. But there was no English breakfast to be had from the man, and thus no Iliadic posturing to triumphant love in these pages. Instead, after watching a sombre Mama Agnes spooning his burnt porridge, with me having planted myself in the sitting room like a guard dog, the man finally gathered himself and slipped away, ‘To look for Bukhosi,’ he announced, eyeing Mama Agnes hopefully. She didn’t even look at him, instead turning her pummelled face to the wall.

  I must thank him for his discomfiting presence this morning! For my Mama A seemed to relax visibly as soon as he was gone, and was even pliable to my enquiries about her time enrolled in the Long Distance programme of the Hillside Teachers’ College (I, clearing my throat noisily, that word, ‘Bhalagwe’, stuck in there – but it felt too soon! Softly, softly – I am only now beginning to gain her trust).

  She glowed as she told me how it was at the college library, where she went often to get supplementary texts for her course, that she rediscovered her love of books. She began to find every excuse to go there, lugging her pregnancy at every opportunity to spend time among the seemingly infinite titles. There was a delicious thrill in walking along the stacks, in perusing the pages and pages of knowledge, in partaking across space and time in age-long conversations, in being privy to written secrets willing to be shared. She would always associate the musty smell of paper with this feeling of freedom; would always prefer old books to new; would always lean in involuntarily to sniff a page. Amidst these dust-latticed volumes, yoghurt-smeared paperbacks and vulgar-graffitied Mills and Boons, she watered her bibliophilia, and cultivated and fed it. She began to dream of another self which had once been a blooming aficionada – before the detours of Bhalagwe and Father Reuben – en route to eminence all the way in Massachusetts-America.

  Her Enlightenment began, naturally, with Alice Walker. She found her lying behind a row of books at the library, dusty and neglected. It was the picture of the grey farmhouse on the torn cover that drew her attention.

  ‘The. Color. Purple,’ she mouthed. ‘What a strange title. By Alice. Walker. Walker. Alice. Color Purple.’

  Whatever did that mean?

  She was never sure why she took the book – although later, after having read it, after having cried over it and read it again and cried some more – flinching beneath Mr Johnson’s boot, weeping with Celie, palms fisted over her eyes – she claimed to have been drawn to it by some inexplicable force.

  For one, she had never thought America could have any place that could be called ‘rural’.

  ‘Rural Georgia,’ she read out loud.

  Whatever did that mean? Was it rural like Kezi? Mud thatch huts? Or dapperwood double-storeys, like the picture on the cover? Did they have cows? A Catholic church with devastatingly handsome priests?

  She cried for Celie, especially when she was made to marry Mr Johnson. She yearned to be as brazen as Sofia, ‘large and spunky’ so she would grow the courage to stand up to her Harpo – losing herself in daydreams that ended with her towering over my surrogate father, his steel-buckled belt in her hand.

  She: ‘Will you ever do it again?’

  He: ‘No no, never!’

  Whhoop!

  ‘I say, will you ever do it again?’

  ‘No no please, never never never!’

  Whhoop Whhoop Whhoop!

  ‘Stupid, ugly old man! Now, go and make me some dinner, I’s so hungry I can’t see straight!’

  ‘Right away! Right away!’

  She began to see Celie in herself, so that she could no longer bear to look in the mirror, at her bright eyes and her bouncy breasts, those things that she once thought made her special. For nobody cared. Who dared to care about the big black ugly sorrows of the big black beautiful woman? Not the fellas, no. Neither the Masser nor the Missus. Nobody.

  ‘Eh? And what’s wrong with you?’ asked my surrogate father. ‘Why is your face looking so long, like any moment it will fall off?’

  ‘The world is purple all round.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The world is full of Mr Johnsons.’

  ‘Bring me my supper, I don’t know what nonsense you’re babbling about. I’m so hungry I can hardly see straight.’

  ‘Git it your-sef.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, git it your-sef. I’m darn tired got an assignment to do an’ this baby of yours been kicking me all day.’

  She knew he wouldn’t hit her, not while she was round and large and shiny with what he kept insisting was a boy.

  ‘And what if it’s a girl?’

  ‘It’s a boy. I’m telling you. Anything this huge has to be. I know what I’m talking about, ah ah. My Bukhosi is going to make all the girls cry and grow up to be a big man one day. Better it not be a girl, you are sure everything is OK with you, woman? You’d better be able to bear me sons.’

  She looked up at him then, eyes blazing, and saw, for the first time, how he exuded not an aura but, rather, a meph
itic haze. He couldn’t even speak English right. He was more than just a fearsome fool. He was also a nin-kho-m-phoop. She brought home from the college library Stevenson’s Mid-Level Biology text, and slapped it onto his lap, before plopping triumphantly next to him.

  ‘Page two-zero-three,’ she said, and began to speak verrry slowly. ‘Gal: XX khro-ma-sum. Boy: XY khro-ma-sum. Woman: me. Me carry XX khro-ma-sum. Man: you. You carry XY khro-ma-sum. Me give X khro-ma-sum. You give X khro-ma-sum or Y khro-ma-sum. Who makes the boy baby or the gal baby: you. OK. YOU. Not me. So. If we are having gal babies, it’s because you can’t make boy babies.’

  She noted, and it seemed to me with a little glee, how my surrogate father’s jaw trembled, how he clenched his fists until his knuckles shone, but how he restrained himself from beating her, his eyes blinking at her large belly.

  ‘Well,’ he stuttered. ‘I’m sure it’s a boy. He’ll grow up to be a big man one day. An engineer.’

  ‘There’ll be no growing he’ll do with you working me like a slave all day. Been on my feet the whole day. They is swollen, see?’

  ‘Stop talking like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you’re a character out of Roots. What are you doing to your lips? Stretching them like that? You think you’re in America now, is that it?’

  ‘I is do nothing.’

  ‘Stoppit. I’m warning you. It’s this television, isn’t it? I think I should take it away.’

  ‘You can take away my song, but you can’t take away my spirit …’

  ‘Why are you talking like that?’

  ‘… Mr Johnson.’

  ‘I’m going out. What has got into you? Leave me supper.’

  ‘Slaving away in this purple-all-round world. Purple, purple like a … like a eggplant … like a … like a field of purple flowers amidst a golden meadow speeding away from the barn of doom…’

  Purple-veined like the stillborn tot she squeezed out one evening in May of ’89 under the dazed lights of Mater Dei Hospital. She didn’t tell me this herself, Mama Agnes, glazing over it and only saying my surrogate father turned, inexplicably it seemed, from a doting father-to-be back to a wife beater. I had to let my surrogate father suck on an ubuvimbo-laced finger to get him to tell me what happened; Mama Agnes gave birth to a stillborn baby. I noticed, with alarm, how he announced this with little compassion, and even disinterest, if not a bit of malice. He may as well have been telling me something mundane, like the latest hike in our over-hyperinflation, which unofficial estimates peg at sixty-six thousand and something per cent. I don’t know what that means, but the other day I had to use a whole ten-million-dollar bill on a loaf of bread.