by Yvonne Vera
Others insist that nobody fled to Bulawayo on that night but that some men were forcibly taken kilometers from Kezi, dragged way past the hills of Gulati, deep into campsites where many others were being held, tortured, killed, and buried in mass graves.
The road to Kezi is now hazardous. Land mines. Roadblocks. Guns. A bus, if allowed at all to leave Bulawayo city center, is stopped and searched every five kilometers before reaching Kezi, if it reaches Kezi. The passengers are stripped naked and every item that they possess is shaken free; every pocket is searched. Those without national identity cards are asked to remain behind with the soldiers. They are marched into the forest and are swallowed by the tall elephant grass, and told to lie down till the soldiers are ready. They fall smoothly between the trees, the waving grass, in obedience. When the bus is stopped, it is unclear to the passengers who these soldiers leaping past the driver are, what their intention is—to intimidate, to kill, to extract confessions, to resurrect the dead. Kezi is surrounded by fast-paced soldiers, their minds evaporating.
14
Nonceba sees the outline of a chair beside the bed. A wardrobe submerged in a sonorous light. She wakes. The pillow is wet. A hand across her forehead. She rubs her face against the pillow. She turns over. She slips her hands under the pillow. She has been in a dream with not a ray of light in it. In this dream, she moves her hands blindly over each object; her pulse is beating against the darkness. She is standing on a high platform, her arms flung out. Below her is a garden of wildflowers. She is not dressed and shivers in the cold. She will fall naked into the field of flowers. Red.
Nonceba rises from the bed. Her legs are not steady. She pauses. A curtain lifts. Beams of light fall on the empty chair. Under the window. She rises. The bed does not creak. She is light, a feather. But she has always been thin. Like a twig, Thenjiwe would say. She must order her thoughts. She pulls down a cotton dress—calico, sleeveless. She ties the loose bands over her waist. The dress falls to her knees. The water, the mud—she must remember it all. She searches for her sandals. Someone has placed them neatly under the bed. She reaches an arm under the bed. She is strong enough, though she is dizzy, nauseous. She has to pause, and perform each of her labors carefully, turning her neck steadily. She sits on the bed and pushes her feet into the sandals, then pulls a strap across each foot and fastens it tightly. She has had a fever but managed through it. She opens the door, steps outside. She enters the air with her shoulders. The air is cold. She goes back inside the house and opens a suitcase resting beside the wardrobe. There is writing on top of it, in white paint, stating her name, Nonceba Gumede. Thenjiwe wrote that for her when she was leaving for boarding school. They would be a whole three months apart. Then the short school holidays. Then school again. The suitcase is brought out, the clothes carefully packed. She leans the lid against the wall. “Our father was the headmaster at Sobantu Primary School. Do not shame him. Do well at school; then your thoughts can be free.” In the suitcase, a blue jersey—Thenjiwe’s jersey. The arms are too long for her. She slides her arms in next to Thenjiwe’s arms, close to her, feeling the warmth gathering to her fingers, like touch, like breathing. Blue wool, a nice pattern on the front, the wool threaded together, in and out. Nonceba moves her fingers over the soft wool. She brings the collar toward her body and breathes in, inhales, gathering light: lightness. She folds the extra length over her wrists. She slowly buttons the jersey; slowly, each movement makes her stronger. She buttons the jersey all the way down. She closes the suitcase. Nonceba Gumede. Her. And moves out of the room. Laughter fills the room. She has forgotten to pack her comb. She tells Thenjiwe. The suitcase is opened again. It is shut, then locked. Nonceba moves out of the room once more, into the unlit air, colorless. The air is still like water. It is humid. She searches the distance with her eyes. There is less sound outside than her own heart beating. The ground tilts. It shifts. She feels empty.
The mist surrounds the sky. The hills collapse. The sky is a gray-blue fluid suspended. This she welcomes, not that separate sky far away in her memory, far, deep blue, deep and blue, near, which she remembers. The mist descends over the rocks of Gulati and softens their hardness: they are pliant, malleable, insubstantial. A boulder disappears, transforms, melts. Nonceba watches as stone dissolves like salt. The rocks turn to water and sky and lift when the mist lifts, and tremble, and descend. The rocks fade off, smoothed, no longer here, not there, not dark, not present. They are gone. They have lost their weight, their heaviness. They disintegrate into the air. No longer black shadows. Not sculpted beings. Not silhouettes. They are without shape, without resemblance to solid form. No hills or rocks in the distance. They are nothing. Everything has been sucked up, swallowed, hollowed through. The mist is intense, spreading freely, pure and refined, like a powder poured down in a dazzling haze, particles suspended. Then blindness. Her eyes unseeing. Nothing between her and the horizon. Empty air. The rocks unseen. There are no words to describe their absence of form, or shape. They have ceased to be. There are no words. Nothing. There are no words to describe this lack. Suddenly, something sharp. A pinnacle. An edge emerges. In that, she perceives a drizzle of soft rain. Far away. Perhaps there is a strong wind, too. She sees gray streaks, beams of light descending, and shadow. The mist billows in her direction like a net: a transparent cloth, a shredded cloth, a laced horizon. For a brief moment, she sees a complete shape emerge. It hides. The outline of a rock meets the eye. It, too, disappears. To and from. The hills sing. This is light, piercing the horizon, molding the rocks like clay. The rocks are obedient to the light, which gives them form, shape, presence, color. They have height. They are wide. Wider. Light grows and uncovers the rocks. A mass, a conglomeration of rocks. Form and substance. Promontories. Light brushes the mist off. Mist blows off the rocks like white dust. Sharp light, straight and narrow, like shards of broken glass drifting down. Hammering the horizon. Forceful. The mist is completely gone from her eyes. A black rim emerges from the distance, quickly, harmoniously. Buried trees and rocks gain shape from the ground upward. The ground enlarges. The rocks expand. One rock rests on another, falls off another, hangs on another; one part of the rock is suspended in empty air, smoothly rounded, not falling at all. Simply waiting. Like her, Nonceba, not swaying. She is waiting calmly. Silence: a perfect dwelling place, a perfect sound to the senses. She can live off this silence from the rocks. She can feel her blood moving, thudding, from nerve to nerve, faster. She is as calm as a sentinel, watching the changes of the sky. She is alone, without a cry. Her pain is higher than the hills. This she knows. Her grief. This she accepts. The dark blue light breaks in the horizon, like a slow growth into blindness. Dark blue. When the yellow rays of the sun merge, they splash carelessly across the sky. Birds tear through the dense air, a rhapsody of wing sounds: creation occurs often and visibly.
Nonceba lifts her right arm toward her face. Gently, gently, she slides out of her sandals, walks barefoot to the house.
15
I return to the bush. I want to risk my mind, to be implicated in my own actions, having taken a personal resolve against a personal harm. Such a war. I find a prop for every truth, for every mistruth.
I reenter the curve of the hill, of the rock, of the sky. I return to the past of the hills. The earth is beneath my feet. I fall into the dry burning of wind and grass; of rock, of sky. None of them is a hibernation. I endure the war anew. I am an instrument of war. I lose all sight of pity for myself.
During the brief cease-fire, I lived with four thousand soldiers in one camp. I could tell the difference between each man, whose fear was the greatest. Four thousand soldiers with their ammunition laid down. I did not surrender. I did not fight to please another. I dug a pit and covered it with grass. I lived within it, but how long can a man be buried before he turns blind?
In the bush, I discover once more that I have no other authority above me but the naked sky. The cocoon on my fingers: death. Under my soles, ash. Nothing survives fire, not the voices o
f the dead. Nothing survives fire but rock.
The grass is dry and brittle. The rivers vanish; the streams are absent. A cache of arms, safe. I run till I am burning, toward Gulati, to that hiding place, the cave of Mbelele. I fall into the cave, where again the messages of the dead are brought to life with a fire from my fingers. The dry grass beats across my arms, lacerating. I run through the grass, which rises before me like a wall, obscuring the view, but I know my direction without even looking up. I can find my way. I have lived here, possessed by the hills, owning nothing but my own breath; the land is suddenly larger than the sky. I run till darkness descends and only the rushing sound of the grass beats over my skin like a vast wind; the sound as dark as the night, as solid.
Night. The air is cooler. I use it to ascend the hills. I continue till a crescent of moon emerges and gives a profile of the hills, the shape of a woman, whole, above the rocks. A still figure, a woman of stone. This rock is close to Mbelele. I know it well. Blinded by darkness, I run between the hills toward this solitary rock high in the sky. The woman stands at the top of the boulder with one flat side; above, another rock, smaller; above that, a rounded rock, large and flat—the woman of the hills. I near that rock with my knees trembling, my mind whirling, and I know that tomorrow I will vanish alone somewhere in these hills. I do not breathe. I swallow the air. I will crumble like a dry thing. I must reach that figure standing under the moon over the shrine of Mbelele, where I buried not only my weapons but a man. I buried him in water, inside the cave. He could not survive. I placed a rock above him and he lay still. The water in the caves never dries. It is as permanent as stone. My shadow falls on the grass; my body climbs rock, part stone, to find water, enough water to bury a man.
I head back to the hills of Gulati, where the caves never dry.
I, too, have come from beneath the earth, uprooted, like the rocks.
Kezi.
16
Noon. The scent of the marula fruit filters into the air, its fragrance spreading into the sparkling midday light and confusing the senses. Nonceba can raise her arm and breathe in the marula’s scent, a fine layer of perfumed air over her. She inhales the tranquil and intoxicating smell of this tree, and she closes her eyes to see it, closes them enough that she can block from her mind what lies behind the tree, the remains of Thandabantu Store, which is now buried, not there, destroyed and gone. It has never been. The marula tree is alone in the clouds, high branches drooping with fruit, dangling yellow to the ground. The fruit is falling down. The skin of the fruit swells with the heat, then cracks, and the sweetness spills. Large slippery seeds hatch and slide out. The liquid flavor spreads and rises with the heat of the day, carried on the slightest breeze. The scent is everywhere, penetrating each dream, each decision. The sun is shining bright, striking pure and downward and hot enough that everyone says today it will rain, but the only thing raining down is the marula haze, coloring every dream from morning to noon to sundown.
The shade of the mphafa tree where Nonceba sits is a refreshing island of cool air; in its shelter, she feels the heat drain off instantly from her armpits and her entire body, but only the heat moves off her and not the marula flavor, which clings to her; which clings to everything; which is the air itself. From this calm shade, the eye can see some image through the heated air rising and lengthening the view of the hills, a mirage. The plowed fields stretch and cultivate the distance, waiting for absent rain, long absent, while traversing boulders and circle after circle of huts. The water is so absent you can taste drops of it on your tongue. There is no crop growing. The grass is driest, splitting and crackling, ready to burn. The grass frames the foreground of every vantage point, along pathways, dry and brown, along the roadside. The eye sweeps over the quivering grass, into which heat seeps like steam, and the viewer sways, not the grass; first that, and then the eye can rest on hill, rock, or man.
Sitting in the perfumed shadow of the mphafa tree and listening to the smooth calling of doves, Nonceba sees a man emerge in the far-distant horizon, winding purposefully along the pathway, left to right; back to the left, the pathway loops like a whip, twisting. He is coming this way. He is moving on the path that leads eventually to the house. The grass, shoulder-high for her, is only waist-high for him. He draws nearer but is still too far away; his features are blotched, a mask unmarked, dissolving. Then he is closer, and she can see him, no longer a melting shape in the sharp light, but a distinct form. Solid, continual, steady. He emerges from the lonely light. He is tall, linking rock and sky together, grass and pathway. First he has been a still point in the shimmering heat; then his body, thin as an arrow, is moving sideways, shimmering toward her, his jacket fluttering with his own motion, flapping. He is approaching her soundlessly, a man with a hat on, a man wearing a jacket in this surprising heat, holding a small leather bag over his shoulder, surrounded by a burst of hibiscus blooms. I know this man, Nonceba thinks. I know this man and that bush of hibiscus traveling beside him. The closer he gets, the easier it is to see the hibiscus, but the harder it is to keep her eyes on him, and she lets that distant heat swallow him whole. She is dealing with surprise. The hibiscus, she can see clearly, bloom and leaf, full red under the window. The top of the hibiscus tree is too high up; she cannot see it from where she is sitting, not even the sky spread out above it, which she knows is above it, far from her eyes. The man is walking past her eyes and disappearing into that place far from here, so that he is in two places all at once, and her mind whirls with its impossible thought. He is a stranger, but she has seen him before as clearly as she has seen the hibiscus, its large petals open wide and the pith of yellow inside, and the bees on it. As clearly as she has seen daylight.
Nonceba rises from the coolness into the light. Her legs can hardly support her frail weight. She is light, surprised, unsure of her own emotion, her ability to endure, to take any of her own past and hold it before her eyes in any form. She lifts her eyes to the bottom of that distance. Her heart is beating with a fear she cannot name. Far out there where an outline of him emerges, he is already taking off his hat. With a free arm, he lets his hat dangle past his knees and smooth over the grass as he passes by, slow, his movement deliberate and prolonged, intimate, pensive. Her own mind is considering each of his moves. She is absorbing each of his actions, the hat moving down and sliding over the grass, especially that. His arm is easy and free. His arm traces some movement of his mind; Nonceba absorbs each of his slow and deliberate moves. She watches his motions as though he were a bird in the sky. He has almost reached her feet when he finally looks up and meets her gaze. He is standing in front of her, with no words. It is she who has surprised him by her instant presence. He emerges from a secret place.
Nonceba has been moving toward him, without her mind choosing between moving toward him or remaining still, but the moment propels her as she tries to separate this man from the hibiscus blooms and give him a name, a voice, to reclaim him from the dizzy spell of marula and her own memory playing tricks on her. Her legs move of their own accord and she is not conscious of her own movement, simply carried by her instinct and walking in sleep. She is breathing hard as the presence of this man is separating her from the calm, cool shade and moving her into the staggering and blind light, taking away her solitude. She stands still and rests her arm on the wooden post at the entrance of the homestead, holding herself up, bewildered. She knows exactly where she has seen him, but not who he is and why he is looking downward and not up to see where he is going, rolling his hat on the grass in that feverlike air as though the world starts from his knees and then ascends, according to his will and judgment, to anywhere else. He is engrossed in his own activity, a stranger touching the dry grass with a tender stroke that moves from his mind to the motions of his arms and finally melts down to the touch of a single felt hat.
It is him for sure, but her mind contests that certainty, resists as long as possible the merciless act of being thrown violently back to any moment before the calm mom
ent when she was resting under the mphafa tree, letting her mind just empty into the cool air around her so that she could breathe, quietly and alone. It is him now, and with him, the moment before now is him also and no longer her mind quietly handling each of her memories, unhurried. Her legs are trembling in the intense heat; after all, her body can command its own island of grief. Her tongue is dry. When he appears, randomly, all her carefully constructed peace immediately vanishes. She forgot him when she returned to Kezi after leaving the hospital bed, which of course she wanted to forget, not dwell on that memory that visits her without clarity but in a haze of days succeeding days, anger and pain, and an insistent, absolute silence. That is where he had sat watching her for a whole afternoon in her room while she looked out the window and saw the hibiscus bloom. He is here walking toward her, but at the same time she is removing him from her eyes and placing him safely away into that faraway room where he is watching her and not letting go, a room at the back of her own mind, upon which she has drawn a dark and heavy curtain, some cliff, some waterfall, and she stays safely away. He is here, and she can smell the hospital room. Between this baffling realization and attempting to catch all his movements and the details of his jacket and his height and the hibiscus bush, she is asking herself why he is here at all. Is it because he is only passing through Kezi, or is he really just looking for her, and if so, how did he know where to find her? He has ignored her indifference and followed her all the way from Bulawayo to Kezi, to this same spot on which she is standing now, watching him and wondering at his claim, but how? Who is he? How has he come from Bulawayo when the roads are blocked and a multitude of soldiers are disturbing the peace of the land? Is he a policeman, perhaps? Someone who can understand crime and criminal minds and the right punishment to mete out to a deceased past, her past; a man who can uphold what is left of the law? Is this his special pursuit? She cannot imagine why else a stranger would follow her from Bulawayo to Kezi, having waited for a whole afternoon by her hospital bed, watching her say nothing at all, unless he is on guard over some truth that he has to protect even with his own body. What else could exist as a justification for his step and stride here in Kezi and his incredible pursuit? If he had not finally spoken, if he had turned and walked back into the blistering heat, she would have believed for sure he had not been here at all, that she had dreamed him up with all the bits of memory that now lie in fragments in her mind, because that is how she lives now, with her insides all broken up; so he, too, has come together from that pile of the things that are broken up in her head and could be mismatched, any time of day, and combine to produce the most improbable event.