The Stone Virgins

by Yvonne Vera

  As he stands briefly where the Shoeshine bus has been, he knows that the swing in her walk places a claim on the entire earth. He is part of that earth, so he follows her like a shadow, seeing her enter the narrow footpath to her village, seeing her fail to raise her eyes to meet that fiery horizon breaking all around them.

  Thenjiwe moves without hesitation, with lips ripe and forgiving, she, losing gravity from one day into the next, she, finding strength, flung out of each day into the next; she rises, swinging, her mind free. She is surrounded by amavimbandlebe, that multitude of wingless insects scurrying beneath her feet, burrowing the ground for a hibernation that will restore their sense of flotation and their desire for distance. To fly in rain once more, first they must be buried. Rain time, from November to January. October. Hot and dust-ridden, saturated with the steadfast intensity of a season almost over. Steady, like the resolve of this man.

  She takes the stranger home. She has a lot to forget, so this is all right. She has no idea now, or ever, that some of the harm she has to forget is in the future, not in the past, and that she would not have enough time in the future to forget any of the hurt.

  Time is as necessary for remembering as it is for forgetting. Even the smallest embrace of pain needs time larger than a pause; the greatest pause requires an eternity, the greatest hurt a lifetime. A lifetime is longer than eternity: an eternity can exist without human presence.

  A man around her knees. That is all she wants, a man touching her knees and telling her his own pursuit, no matter what it is, just some hope of his, however faint. So here he is, this man. And if the man has followed her all the way from Thandabantu Store like a helpless child, what is she supposed to do? What does a beehive do with a multitude of bees but harbor them and provide each a delicate task, each a shelter? He loves her heels, he says. She lets him follow her home.

  He loves her fingernails. He loves each of her bones, from her wrist to her ankle, the blood flowing under her skin. Does she know that tears are flowing under her eyes even if she is not crying, flowing inside her, before her own entry into her own truth? He loves her bones, the harmony of her fingers. He loves most the bone branching along her hip. The sliding silence of each motion, tendons expanding. The stretch of time as she moves one foot after the next, slowly, and with abandon. White bone her inner being, her hip in motion. He places his palm along her waist and announces, as though she is a new creation, “This is a beautiful bone.”

  Does she know that bone is the driest substance of being, like all substantial forms that give form, that support wet things such as flesh and water and blood? Bone: the only material in us that cracks, that fractures, that can hurt our entire being, that breaks while we are still living. This he loves, this bone in her, as it is the deepest part of her, the most prevailing of her being, beyond death, a fossil before dying.

  He takes her whole wide foot and folds it into his palm. He presses hard on the bone, pushing outward on her ankle till she feels an ache grow and move straight up her hip, where he has been, to every place he has been, where he wishes to be. He takes her fingers in both his hands and folds them into a ball. Her bones fold as she expects them to. The bones beneath her breasts, a cage for memory.

  Thenjiwe lets him follow her on that road from Thandabantu Store, leads him across that hot tar and the intoxicating smell of marula seeds falling everywhere. It is a season of marula. The ground is bright yellow with their peels. The ground is hard with their seeds. He picks his way, as she has done, beyond any sweetness the marula could afford if he were to linger and try their soft liquid.

  He has been sitting at Thandabantu Store, watching her, and when she notices and does not look away but looks right back, he understands that she has offered him her hips, her laughter, her waiting thighs. What he does next is spectacular and welcome: he follows her home like a shadow.

  She does not catch the sound of any of his footsteps because of the blood pumping all the way through her body, bone sliding on bone, her limbs moving. In any case, he places his foot where she has left her imprint on the soil, wanting to possess, already, each part of her, her weight on soft soil, her shape. He wants to preserve her in his own body, gathering her presence from the soil like a perfume.

  He loves her breasts, her thirty-two-year-old slope, firm, just as when she was fourteen or whenever it was she first woke to the scent of her own flesh, knowing at once that she was not a man.

  She takes home the man who gives her all her hips, who embraces her foot, who collects her shadow and places it right back in her body as though it were a missing part of herself, and she lets him gaze into her eyes till they both see stars through their tears. Gazing into the deep dark pool of her eyes, the man sees places he has never been, she has never been. She drops her arms and lets him encircle her with his arms, with his cool breath, his calm being, till her back succumbs and she folds her arms to her chest and lets each of her elbows seek him out, behind her, where he stands circling her. He frees the entire weight of her body except for her elbows, which he keeps and claims. He warms these with his beating heart, guiding her down to the floor, her mind heir to an eternity. She takes this lover home and gives him a few labors.

  He counts each circle of bone on her back. She knows that her emotion is perfect; it is backbone-true. She wishes to conceive a child from this man. He would be a dream child from head to toe. She would name him Mazhanje.

  Mazhanje is the name of a fruit from Chimanimani, in the eastern highlands, whose seed this man has brought stuck to the bottom of his pocket, then planted it in her mouth like a gift, days and days after they have met. She has stopped considering time and only considers him.

  With the tip of her tongue, she slides the seed around, intending to spit it out into some corner of the room, some dark space where it can lie unclaimed till, with a desire to tidy her mind and her shelter, she sweeps it away with a broom; dried, tasteless, the vanishing evidence of a single encounter with a singular man. However, with one touch of her tongue tip, she loses the rest of her senses. After she has sucked the dryness off it, she is breathless. Breathless.

  Mazhanje. Thenjiwe flicks the seed to the roof of her mouth and pushes the man aside, way off the bed. She has been hit by an illumination so profound, so total, she has to breathe deeply and think about it some more. She wants to lie down, in silence. She wants a pause as cool as a valley. The seed in her mouth is sudden and sweet. She wants to sink into its sweetness. She breathes deeply. Solitude.

  She forgets his name.

  She never wants to be reminded of the name again till he tires of her and wakes one morning and catches that Kezi-Bulawayo-Kezi bus without even looking back at her waving arms, which are asking him to stay. He has tired of a woman who no longer has an interest in his full name, but gives him instructions with her body, turning her full weight over to his side of the bed in order that they touch each other, sliding her palm against his for a greeting, turning his fingers over and bringing them to her quiet tongue; the tip of her tongue licking the moisture off the bottom of his neck, raising her knee high to his navel in order to seek his comfort, gazing kindly at him to draw his body nearer, each embrace offered mutely; parting her legs, offering him the silent but astounding warmth of her thighs.

  She never calls him by his name again; this truth he observes, absorbs, and then flees from her magnanimous silence. He leaves before she has said he can, before the rain has stopped beating all around her. He leaves with all that rain around her and no man to hold her while the lightning leaves the sky, and the anthills, melting.

  He has to leave even if he is fascinated with her and has not yet figured out all she is about, not even her silence. He remembers how on that fateful day when he followed her from Thandabantu Store to her home, she never looked over her shoulder, but he knew that she knew he was walking behind her all the time. He knew, the way she held her head high. The way she swung to a stop at the end of the pathway and laughed out loud. Her head in the sky.
Talking to him without even turning her head. She knew about him and his need. She must have recognized him the way he had recognized her, except he had attached his future to hers, instantly, and she had not. He marveled, the way he saw her in his mind, moving past him while he held a rainbow high up in the sky and she passed beneath it. How he wanted to provide her nothing less than a multicolored sky. Of course she wanted him to follow her all the way along that well-worn footpath with its low grass brushing both their heels; wherever he placed his placid heels, hers had already been.

  As he contemplated her presence from the height of that tin can, he knew if she was living in a place called Kezi, and if this was the place called Kezi, and if this place had an imprint of her, a touch of her zeal, then Kezi was a place he could love and get used to. So he followed her all the way home, though he had just disembarked from the bus and was just waiting to get on it again back to the city, and well, Kezi was a place he had been told about, where the bus could carry you to and if you befriended the bus conductor, you could return at half price and tuck a full twenty-pack box of Kingsgate cigarettes in your top left pocket, and keep one cigarette on your lower lip, unlit, all the way back to the city, and if you chose, light it, tap the ash out the window after the schoolchildren and egg sellers had gone by. He wanted to see Kezi, to see more than Bulawayo, after coming all the way from Chimanimani; he wanted to see the mopani shrubs, the Mtshwankela, the Dololenkonyane, the balancing Matopo hills, the gigantic anthills of Kezi. Thenjiwe had made him stay, he was certain, even though she had not said anything precise, nothing in words, but the way she, without parting her lips, held his attention. She was beautiful. True. It was not the details of her face, not the elegance of her neck, the shape of her lips, the nose, the height and force of her limbs, the earth brown skin, not that; more than that. He let the bus leave for Bulawayo without him, even though he had befriended the conductor and already had his half-price ticket in the left pocket of his checkered shirt.

  Barely two months, and now all she wants to know is the name of the fruit caught between her teeth. Just that and nothing more. Nothing about him. Only the lost flavor of that fruit. She is possessed by the dry sweetness she has roused from its hard skin. Her tongue seeks it like comfort. And now she makes love to him, with panic and envy, as though he is an unreliable lover. She rises out of his embrace only to sip some water held in a tin cup on the side of the bed and to ask him on what soil the mazhanje grows, how long before each new plant bears fruit, how fertile its branches, how broad its leaf. She rises to ask what kind of tree the seed comes from, the shape of its leaves, the size of its trunk, the shape of its branches, the color of its bloom, the measure of its veins. Does it indeed bloom? Which animal feeds on its fruit, on its leaves, and can its branches bear the weight of a child, more than that, more than a child? Could it grow on the edge of a cliff, on a hanging incline? Near a river? Inside a river?

  First, he answers each question patiently, knowing he will be rewarded by a sudden flash of gratitude in her eyes as the mazhanje tree is brought into being. Then he is impatient with this passion and this desire, which takes her more and more away from him, from their touch and caress, from their moments of peace. Which takes her away. Certainly. It is in her eyes, which no longer look at him. Past him. Looking into his pocket for bits of leaf, of sand, the skin that has fallen off this fruit. She lives, now, under its skin. Wanting nothing else but more, and more, of the mazhanje tree. Had he plucked this fruit himself, with his fingers, which she was holding in her own? Had he? He fails to remember that or anything else, so she puts his fingers away, gently.

  One day, she draws a resemblance on the ground and asks for the shape of its roots. She wants to know the shape of the roots of this tree. He says he knows nothing about that. He has no business looking at the roots of trees: tentacles. He pushes her away, and her voice, asking about the roots. She asks for each detail as though pleading for mercy.

  Instead of holding on to him and letting their love be what it can be, she slides off the bed and stands away from him; her large arms hold to her waist, not letting anything be what it can be, not even their touch. She asks him again about the roots. Thenjiwe knows that the roots of trees have shapes more definite than leaves.

  She prods him; she tries to make him remember. She makes him promise to dig up one of these trees when he returns to his village and send her a letter, by bus, on the Kezi-Bulawayo-Kezi route. If it is addressed to Thandabantu Store, it will reach her quickly. The owner, Mahlathini, will send a child with the letter the minute the conductor of the Shoeshine Bus Service hands it to him. Of course, she is already sending him away.

  She takes a piece of paper half burned from the fire and blows the flame out. Then she spreads it carefully on the floor, near the firelight. She holds the paper down with her elbow. Using a piece of charcoal, she makes a pattern for him of all the roots she knows. Some of the roots are thick, smooth, lost treasures between a man and a woman. These rise toward the trunk like palms held up, like veins on the earth, capillaries. Some roots spread farther and farther apart, and it is clear that though they have the same source, they will never touch again. These are the strongest roots of all. She slips the paper with her drawings under her body and rises to meet him as he holds her and loves her. She has tears in her eyes. He pulls her away from the fire onto the mat and holds her firmly under his body till the fire is vanished and the light from the fire is vanished and they are alone in the room. The room is dark. The room quiet, the shape of their bodies also vanished. Like the fire. Her voice, naked in the dark, unable to locate form or shape, of tree or man, is vanished, too. The fire is in their bodies, merged, by the dark and silence.

  Before he leaves her, he washes her body with milk. He brings the milk in a horn and pours that all over her body. Then he scoops the milk off with both his hands while her arms are held up past her shoulders; the milk trickles white against her dark skin. As he watches her body soak in that liquid, he speaks.

  “You are beautiful like creation. Nothing exists that is more beautiful than you. Nothing I can hold. No one is like you. When I strip wet bark off a tree and it slides off distinct and separate like skin, the soft space between the bark and the stem is so pure, I could lick it. No single fleck of dust has ever been near, and it has never breathed the sun, never breathed day; no one has ever laid eyes on it but me. I feel like that when I look in your eyes. Nothing has ever been but your eyes. Nothing.”

  His every word to her is true. He offers it like a gift. It is his way, this milk, of turning her into that soft bark.

  “I want to wash your body with drops of dew. If I could gather all the dew from all the grass along that path we walked on from Thandabantu Store, I would, and pour that liquid over your back. We must meet and love in the grass, one early morning before anyone is about, with the rocks of Gulati watching us from above. It would be as though I had poured the dew over your body, drop by drop. Then we will bask in the first rays of the morning sun. And the dew will ease from our backs. We will lie still and listen to the rays splash out from the sky. We will watch as the sun dries each single blade of grass and every insect wing, translucent. When we hear the locust flutter its wings, our dance in the dew will be over.”

  He cups her toes with his hand, these toes, which have already felt the dew. She moves her toes toward him, and this makes him stay his hand over them, longer.

  “When I am not touching you, I am nothing. I am not whole. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I am a leaf tossing in the wind. Nothing is as beautiful as your skin.”

  He is leaving her, but she does not hear it in his voice. She does not hear at all his leaving, desperate voice, even though he goes on and says, “If you died and I could only save one part of your body, I would save this bone. I would carry it with me everywhere, and it would be as though you were alive. Death is when every part of us vanishes, especially the most precious part. We are here. You are in this bone, and it is my most precious mem
ory. When you move, its motion tells me something intimate about your mind. I am inside you. If you die in my absence and I find that you have already been buried, I will dig your body up to the moonlight, so that I can touch this beautiful bone. Touch it, touch it, touch it, till you are alive. Then I will let you rest. With my fingers on your bone. I tremble to imagine you not here, somewhere in the world, when I am alive, somewhere in the world. What do you think? Thenjiwe.”

  He places his hand on the arc of bone and lets it rest there. He calls her. She does not answer. She has said nothing throughout. He realizes that she is listening to that lonely sweetness she has already found, not him. She has not heard him. She is one of those women who never miss dawn; it resides in their arms. Her silence sifts into the room like fine dust. He slides from light to shadow. He has to. He decides to leave this body of milk and dew and mazhanje seeds. Leave it as apart as it already appears to be, as fulfilled, without his voice disturbing its silence. He leaves with a terrible thirst in his own bones, of loving her.

  She loves him but wants to rid herself of a persisting vision of him, a passerby, a stranger sitting at Thandabantu Store, swinging, swinging his knees and whistling a wicked and irresistible tune, casting his glance this way and that, and holding the earth still. She wants emotion of another kind; more than that, she wants to be alone with him, find him again in their silences, and know him with an intense knowing that she herself would never wish to escape. She wants to nestle into him, to forget everything, including Thandabantu Store, whenever she closes her eyes and tries to recall his eyes, his hips, his voice alluring. She would start, perhaps, with the marula tree. She wants to discover the shape of its roots and show them to him till these roots are no longer under the ground but become the lines planted on his palms, each stroke a path for their dreaming. She knows that if she finds the shape of these roots, at least, he would know a deep truth about her land, about Kezi, about the water buried underneath their feet. He would never forget the marula, the scent of its roots and the watery smoothness of a tongue full of seed sliding over and under the senses as you suck it sweet and dry. The flavor of that would never leave his lips or desert the cave of his mouth.