by Yvonne Vera
“My name is Cephas Dube,” he says. She almost believes his presence. He is creasing his eyes against the sun. He extends an arm toward her for a greeting, his motion tentative. She turns away and walks slowly in the direction of the house, as though she has forgotten him. Leaving him behind like her own shadow. Telling herself he is not there at all. When she reaches the door, she will turn back and look again. “My name is Cephas,” he says again, looking over her shoulder. He has followed her from the gate.
She is moving past the mphafa tree and can almost feel its cool shade over her shoulder, but she knows she must forget about that piece of placid earth and consider this stranger splitting her mind. She stands, waits, but not under the shade. She waits for him in the baking heat, looking away. They both pause, waiting for her to speak. She is waiting for herself to speak, knowing he is waiting, too, for he has spoken not once, but twice.
“I do not know you,” she says finally, without turning to look back at him. He stays a safe distance behind her.
“I left a message for you while you were at Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo. Did you not receive it? I left my name there.”
“I do not know who you are,” she insists.
Perhaps the message was received, passed on. She realizes this. Her effort has been to separate herself from her loss. She does not remember what the message said. Certainly not his name, which he now offers to her as though it should be a revelation. Perhaps his name lies unread, on a piece of paper, in the house somewhere. Unread.
“Is there somewhere we can talk? Inside the house perhaps?”
She mistrusts him, yet she responds to his request as though something in the quality of his voice makes everything all right, the most absurd action, the least considered, given the atmosphere in Kezi, and her own ordeal. Nonceba walks on silently, ahead. His voice is sincere, but should she take him into the house? She dares not take him into the house. Yet she opens the door to the main house and walks into a small room with a table and two chairs at its center. She turns back; his footsteps have ceased suddenly. He has disappeared. He has not followed her in. Had he asked to enter the house? Was that her own mind making up conversation for him? Making him real? He is only in her mind. She moves around the table and goes back to the door, anxious to find him there, real as daylight. She looks out, and almost bumps against him. He is lingering at the entrance, with the hat held in his hand, dangling it near his knees. His confidence has vanished. He seeks her absolute permission before walking in. He wants her approval.
“Do you wish me to come in?” he asks cautiously. He has sensed her distance, her distrust.
“You may come in.” She turns away from him.
He enters. He pulls out a chair while she takes the tray with the candle from the table and places that on a smaller square table in a corner of the room. A basket with some dried vegetables in it, a wooden spoon—these, too, she removes. She moves all the remaining items to one side of the table. Now there is room for their voices. She looks up at him, his brow creased in concentration. Not trusting him at all, telling herself that she will accommodate him only for a while, hear him out. She is no longer frightened. He is still separated in her mind, a silent stranger sitting in the hospital room; a shadow rising from the distance up the footpath and moving toward her; a man sitting familiarly before her. Who is he?
“I remember you from the hospital,” she confesses.
“I came to the hospital to visit you. I thought I could talk to you then. I tried. It was not possible. I left and decided that I would visit you here, after time had passed. I have come finally.”
“Who are you?” she insists, wondering at his presence, his tenacity.
“My name is Cephas Dube. I live in Bulawayo. I have lived there for some years now. I work there.”
“How did you manage to arrive here? The roads are so difficult.” She waits for his answer, as though it will either raise or dispel her fear of him.
“A man I know was coming to Kezi in a truck. I asked for a lift. He was kind. He let me ride with him. We had an easy drive. He has gone on.”
“You had no problems in your journey?”
“No. We had no problems.”
He has not told her who the man with the car is. Why was the man prepared to come all the way to Kezi? There is nothing here anymore, not even a store. Kezi is only a place for those who were born here and have nowhere else to go. A place for the trapped. Boulders, ruins, burned villages, the dead, a naked sky. Many people have left and most of the homes are empty. He does not explain about this man, the driver who can dare that stretch of road, not as a means of escape but merely to enter this bleak wilderness, Kezi. She does not want to ask him direct questions, but the information he holds back seems crucial to her. He places his hat on the table, setting it between them. He is nervous, unable to start saying whatever it is that has led him to her. She can sense that he has something to tell her. Something important. She waits for him to speak.
“I only heard about you when you were in boarding school. Are you a teacher now?” He is looking searchingly at her.
“I was a teacher last year, but this year I am staying at home. The school has closed down. The children no longer go to school.” He has not said yet who told him about her, why he had to know about her at all.
“I lived in this house once, for a few months,” he says.
She looks up at him more carefully. He bears no resemblance to her uncle Mduduzi or any member of her family. She wonders if he might be a relative of her mother. She does not know any of the people from her mother’s side. Everything about him is new to her; she is sure of it. Her aunt Sihle will be passing through here soon so that they can walk back together. Nonceba asked to remain behind for a short while in the afternoon, but she has lived in the village with Sihle since her return from the hospital. However, not everything has been moved from the house; this table, these chairs are yet to be moved. Strange that this man should arrive on one of the days when she has chosen to be here.
“I work in an office in the city. I file documents in an archive. One morning, I was clipping items from the newspaper. I saw a picture of Kezi in it. I read what happened to you and Thenjiwe here in Kezi. I knew immediately that I had to see you. I found out you were in the hospital. I could not believe that Thenjiwe had died till I saw you and sat within your silence for a full day. Then I believed everything that had happened. It was not important that we did not talk. It was not the best time for us to meet. I realized that I had to wait, perhaps for some months. Thenjiwe and I … well, we were very close once. We were with each other for a short time. It is difficult to explain; it was such a different time. Then I decided to go to the city. Had life been clearer—it is too late to think like that, but the mind wanders off, and one imagines the possibilities missed. When I read what happened to her, I could not just stay away … I am here now. I want to help you, if I can.”
“My sister never mentioned you to me. She always told me everything in her life. Why was she silent about you?”
“Perhaps she wanted to keep this to herself, or she might not have been ready to tell you. I cannot explain it. There are matters about which someone may wish to be silent, even with those to whom one may be closest. She told me about you, however.”
“No. I believe she would have told me everything. We had no secrets between us. We were very close. She might have done so, perhaps, in the future, if she had lived. If it is true, that is, she would have told me in the end,” Nonceba insists.
“Loving her was like living in the stars. I wanted to marry her. We were both afraid. Impulsive, but extremely fearful. We did not know each other well enough. I should have returned sooner than I have. She has been with me all the time. We all live our lives with a foolish sense, never believing the worst that could happen to us. We may think about death, but belief is another matter entirely.”
Nonceba believes but mistrusts him. He has a gentle manner, which appeals to her. He has n
ot explained what kind of office he works in. He does not say why he is collecting information from newspapers on persons like herself. For whom is he collecting it? How would this information be used, either presently or in the future? Why had he been, on that morning, collecting information on what had been done to her, and to Thenjiwe? She has no knowledge that her name had been printed in the newspaper. Does Sihle know about it and has not told her? She resents this man for telling her about this public exposure, which she knows nothing about, for his time with Thenjiwe, which again she knows nothing about. She wonders what else is hidden. He has put her name in a file. Stored her. Pinned her down. Now he is here to find her. Determined to see her in the absence of Thenjiwe. She feels a heavy and sudden anger and wants him to leave immediately. Perhaps Thenjiwe loved him, which would mean he had been good to her, but time has passed and everyone has changed. Nonceba cannot rely on that bond he claims to have had with Thenjiwe to judge his worthiness. After all that has happened, it is hard to trust anyone; people change like chameleons. How can he come here when there is nothing here for him, not Thenjiwe, whom he claims for his own truth?
“Are you not afraid living here on your own?” he asks.
What does he know about fear, about what she has endured? What does he know besides his own intrusion? “No. I am not afraid. I grew up here. The rest of my family lives in a home nearby. If I raise my voice, all my uncles can hear me.”
She sounds ridiculous, she knows, but she is reluctant to admit to him that she no longer lives here—indeed, to admit that it is because of her own fear that she has had to move. She has no wish to admit anything between them. He is right, but she has no wish to confirm his thoughts in order to make him believable; that is his task, not hers. She objects to his actions—coming to Kezi, asking questions as though he were a policeman, claiming Thenjiwe’s memory in terms that she cannot even imagine.
“After what has happened here, you should be afraid. It would be wise to be afraid,” he insists.
Here, he says. Here. Does he know exactly on which patch of ground she, Nonceba, experienced her loss? Does he know where Thenjiwe died? On which spot of ground she was killed? Here, he says, as though he knows exactly what happened here. He knows nothing about the here of it. The feel of that here. The sight of it. The moment so full of here. He has no memory of her here in which her sister died, not like a living thing, but trapped in the arms of a stranger. She wants to laugh, curiously and maddeningly, at his coming here and talking about Thenjiwe and saying all he has to say about his own version of events, of here. Nonceba feels removed from him, solid in her own memories. Her pain is her own, untouchable, not something to be revealed to a stranger who just happened to follow his past here. Here, he says, knowing nothing about it at all, the past, which has vanished. Does he not know how the ground beneath your feet can simply slide away and never come back? That here vanishes without reason and leaves you not here, but nowhere at all, and the rest of your life is this persistent loneliness eating away, and your mind is crumbling down like a wall, just like that, while you walk and wallow between the sky and the earth with no other thought but this loneliness?
“I live here. I have my wounds. I am not afraid.” She rises from the chair and walks into the next room, needing desperately to be alone, away from him, but she returns quickly, wanting to speed the time between them. She has opened a window in the room.
Again she sits down across from him. She is impatient for him to leave, to stop stirring her mind like that. She sits down, wondering how long before he will raise himself up, pick up his hat from her table, and retrace his footsteps back to the main road, leaving her comfortably alone to contemplate the measureless distance between here and now.
“I think you should leave Kezi,” he declares.
His voice has changed. She feels it. He is talking to her as though she is a child—his child. “I have no wish to leave Kezi. Nothing worse can happen to me now. Why should I run away? The war is everywhere. Is it not there in the city?”
“Worse things can happen if you continue to remain in Kezi, unprotected. I want you to come with me—to Bulawayo. It is not bad there. The war is mainly in the villages. I want to help you; for the sake of Thenjiwe, allow me to offer my help. I want to help. Perhaps for my own sake. Let me help. Then I will leave you alone. I know I can help you. Please let me do what I can.”
The sweat hardly dry on his forehead and he is asking her to leave her home and go with him to Bulawayo. This is why he has come. He says it finally, the words tumbling, emphatic. He wants to take her with him. He insists. She feels confused by this wild expectation of his, which is based only on the intimate memory of her sister. What did they share? she wonders. What promises did they make one to the other? More than this, why has she been the outsider, knowing nothing about it all till he rose like a savior and claimed her sister and all her pain and made them his? She is both stunned and intrigued by his confidence, frustrated, angry, wanting him to move away even if for a while so that she can adjust her thoughts to the sound of his words, to his sudden presence, to Thenjiwe’s secret intimacy, to her heart hammering away. How can she think about all that she has to consider while he sits and watches her and waits for her to speak? He pleads for her to agree without allowing her a moment to herself.
All her thoughts gather like dust, and through that she watches his arms resting on the table while he looks directly at her as though he has nothing to hide, and she knows that she is free to ask any questions, and he will answer her, politely and patiently. She does not know what to ask in order to clear a path between them—no, a path in her own mind. Instead, she is quiet, knowing full well that this has nothing to do with questions to be answered, but about her own intuition, her own claim to life. His request hangs over them, suspended in the room. A kindness. A request. A threat? He is waiting to be answered. Could he harm her? Is that his intention?
She had seen him at the hospital. This memory is in her mind. Were his reasons for visiting her there as direct as he now states them to have been, as kind? She knows about harm. She knows the presence of someone who will harm her—it is equally intimate. She understands how that presence can reach to the back of the mind and see right down into the pool of fear underneath. How can she listen to the outrageous proposition of a stranger who has walked up a grassy path and found her desolate heart, full with all its memories, waiting for a stranger to turn his eyes and his voice toward her and say that he is offering her life, not death? This same stranger now challenging her presence and letting her know that all she has before her is death, not life, telling her this when she already knows all about it and carries this knowledge firmly in her own eyes. Is that not what he is offering, some kind of life after everything is buried? An escape?
“Kezi is a naked cemetery,” he says. “Is this not what everyone is calling Kezi, a naked cemetery where no one is buried and everyone is betrayed? There is no certainty of life, only death. To die here is to be abandoned to vultures and unknown graves. No one knows how many people have died. No one knows when it will all end, or if it will end. You cannot remain here any longer. Let me help you. You can return again if everything changes.” He pleads, as though to accept his offer would be to grant him life.
She thinks of Thenjiwe and tries to link her with this man, this stranger pleading before her, offering her something akin to existence, to life. Had Thenjiwe really been with this man? She examines his face, knowing the exercise is futile but wanting to find out somehow if Thenjiwe had been with him, if he was the sort of man for Thenjiwe to like, at all, to live with, even if only for a while. She looks at his arms still resting over the table, his wrists. He has hardly moved since sitting down on that chair. He is neatly dressed, polite. Thenjiwe had been with this man, touched him. What had Thenjiwe loved about him? Was it his eyebrows, like dark ink? His voice, gentle, forceful, confident? His kindness? His offer perhaps at all times to help, his capacity to surrender his life to others, he
rself, the sister? His spontaneous will? His ability to grasp another’s pain? Was that it? Nonceba looks into this stranger’s eyes, searching in them for the distant place where love, not hurt, begins.
Nonceba is not entirely surprised that Thenjiwe had not told her about this love and this man. The surprise is that she, Nonceba, has not found out about it before now. For if Thenjiwe had loved this man, even briefly, she had to know about it somehow, because she knew Thenjiwe so preciously, so precisely. She would have known about it but continues not to, not even while the man calling himself Cephas Dube is sitting across from her with all that love in his eyes and the elaborate claim in his mouth and not a single doubt in his eyebrows; she feels she still knows nothing about it at all, not even the first half of this tale. When was it that passion had unfolded? In which season had they loved so hidden from her, the person who knew all there was to know about Thenjiwe, including the things that Thenjiwe hardly knew about herself, which she could not express and only Nonceba could, and did, and they both accepted how necessary they were to each other?