What kind of family hi-story would it be, anyway, that chronicles the surrogate father without also ushering forth the voice of the surrogate mother? Though we can only suppose at fathers, deny our fathers, hate our fathers, renounce and denounce our fathers, even kill our fathers, we can only love our mothers and cling, with a force bordering on the primal, to the mother–child bond, in particular the mother–son bond, which is of the sacred kind and on which whole nations are to be built. Just look at that Helen of Troy! Look at that Mbuya Nehanda! Look at our Queen Lozikeyi! Look at the Queen of Sheba, whose mothering was so strong and whose bosom so bounteous that the Egyptians, the Jews, the Arabs and the Ethiopians fight over ownership of her legacy to this very day. Even the Brits are wise enough to realize the nurturing power of a mother, that’s why they plead over and over with God to Save the Queen!
I wish Mama Agnes had known Abednego before Black Jesus turned him into the man she met. It was her father, of course, who made the choice, back in ’87, of whom she was to marry, when she was but a lassie, barely sixteen, with only hillocks for breasts; he who negotiated the lobola with my surrogate father prior to the arranged meeting. She ought not to have been surprised by her father’s instincts to marry her off, though. Hadn’t he, after all, saved his homestead from annihilation during the past four years by steadfastly applying the formula of profit? When the Men in the Red Berets first came in ’84 to Mama Agnes’s village, Kezi, in Matabeleland South, having been armed and trained in Nyanga at the banks of the Nyangombe River for His Most Excellent Excellency Prime Minister Robert Mugabe by North Korea’s great Kim Il-Sung – a case of the master teaching his prodigy – raping, looting, chopping willy-nilly, screaming Are you a dissident? Are you a dissident?, no answer good enough, hadn’t he, her father, sworn allegiance to leader-and-country, and offered himself up as a spy? Had they not been spared the worst of the horror as a result, while those less practical of their neighbours faced massacres of whole clans? And hadn’t her father done the same thing some six years before that, during the liberation war, when that colonizer Prime Minister Smith’s Rhodesian army had come rat-a-tatting on village doors?
She hadn’t wanted to marry my surrogate father, Mama Agnes. She’d been in love with another, a visiting apprentice priest from the Mashonaland North District named Father Reuben. He was slim, with skin the colour of matured baobab bark and an uncivilized afro, which he said regretfully he would have to trim, thanks to his civilizing vocation. And eyes that were too beautiful for a man, the burning colour of the winter bushveld. Everywhere he went, he wore a rosary and clutched a King James bible to his chest. Mama Agnes likened him to Jesus himself, a man of parables who left gemstones of (en)light(enment) wherever he walked. Now, here was a man who had the power to fill the craters gaping inside her with something more meaningful than the things her mama had said to bury and which she had so desperately tried to forget.
‘Forget about Bhalagwe,’ her mama had said. ‘The leaders of the nation have ordered us to forget. To the future we must attend!’
But who could ever forget a concentration camp? Who could forget the day they took her and her sister Nto, and her brothers Trymore and Mwangi and Promise, how her mama, left behind in the village, had blackouts every single day until they returned, just she and Nto and Trymore, with neither Promise nor Mwangi, Trymore who now had only a stump where his arm had been? Memory loomed everywhere, like an accusation, in Trymore’s eyes, in the eyes of the entire village, in the way they shuffled and the way they whispered and the way their bodies twitched like something was biting them and in the way the maize refused to grow. It ruffled the landscape and filled it with wraiths, so that even when there was nothing there, nothing tangible, Mama Agnes could not survey their compound, with its mud huts arranged like an L – the kitchen buttressing the corner, with her parents’ hut on one side, and the boys’ hut and girls’ hut and the silo on the other side – without some chilli smarting in her chest, like one of her mama’s big red Sahara Reapers. There would always be ghosts lingering there, wouldn’t there always be ghosts? Lurking over there by the kraals at the bottom of the homestead, opposite the boys’ hut, where the Men in the Red Berets had appeared, abracadabra just like that, floating in the evening mist like spectres. And her mama screaming Run you children mani run do you want to die do you want to die run mani!
But forget. That’s what her mama had said, even though I imagine she could feel the memories of that time straining against the confines of her mind, Mama Agnes.
Her infatuation took root the day Father Reuben compared sitting on the fence of religion with being pregnant.
‘You cannot be half pregnant,’ he said, his gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re either pregnant or you’re not.’
That he chose pregnancy as the medium for his life-lesson danced in her head for the weeks to come. It could only mean one thing. He wanted to get pregnant with her. She entertained thoughts of cattle herded all the way from Mashonaland North District scrambling into the Ndiweni kraal. Her mama’s warning about keeping her virginity sacred flew straight out of her head as she fantasized about the feel of Father Reuben inside her. She would not even play the shy, hesitant girl. She would say yes before he finished his proposal, and they would go to the stream…
She pulled away from me, Mama Agnes, and leaned forward, chuckling in the darkness. I could feel her blushing. I feared the spell my surrogate father had put us under was broken. I groped about desperately for something useful to say. Finally, I placed a tentative hand on her shoulder.
‘I know what you’re talking about,’ I said, lowering my voice into a conspiratorial whisper, but with a dash of mirth in it. ‘I, too, remember what it was like to be curious in my teens. Ach, I was so in love with my best friend’s sister!’
I had no best friend as a child, and certainly wasn’t in love with anyone’s sister, but this seemed to land with her just the right way; Mama Agnes chuckled again, and I felt her shoulder slump as she leaned back on her sofa.
‘I found every excuse possible to go to the Catholic church,’ she confessed, though she had turned away from me now and was facing my surrogate father’s empty sofa opposite us. ‘I even signed up to be an Usher, and followed Father Reuben wherever he went. “Father, what do you think of my flower arrangement?” I would ask. “Father, would you like to drink from my dish? The water is fresh from the stream. Father, Father, Father …”’
If Father Reuben noticed her infatuation, he ignored it. He was always cordial, treating her with the same respect that he treated everybody else, which made Mama Agnes feel like just another insignificant sheep in the flock under his patronage. She fell into a depression, eating little and barely concentrating in class. When her teachers asked her why her grades were dropping, for she was an excellent pupil with first rate grades, she shrugged and said the ten kilometres she had been walking to and from school for the past four years was becoming too much for her.
‘You have a bright future ahead of you, Agnes,’ her science teacher said. ‘It’s through education that you will be able to get out of this rural coop, and see the better world. There’s a scholarship offer from the Catholic Church, for one to go and further their studies in a college in Massachusetts. We have put your name forward, but now it’s up to you, to make sure your grades are up to par. Don’t disappoint us. You can be absolutely anything you want, Agnes. Anything.’
Mama Agnes wanted to be Mrs Father Reuben. She didn’t care if Massachusetts was part of the better world. Her ambitions stopped at the altar of a Catholic church somewhere in the Mashonaland District.
‘Oh, I was so foolish then … !’
‘No, no no, Mama A, don’t be so unkind to yourself. You were in love. I, too, know what it is like to be in love.’
(Softly, softly, Zamani!)
One afternoon, after the Sunday service, she found herself strolling side by side with Father Reuben, listening attentively to one of his parabolic life-lessons, and daring to challenge his theories here and there. They were stumbling across one of the village’s narrow, rutted paths flanked by maize fields that stood spare in November. The maize stalks were slowly browning, as though they were being turned over the embers of a fire.
‘Is this all there is?’ she wondered, scowling.
It was so hot that her lilac blouse, which usually hung loose on her frame, clung to her back and refused to let go. Father Reuben stopped and gazed down at her through eyes that squinted against the glaring sun.
‘You’re unusually bright, for a girl,’ he commented.
Mama Agnes blushed. She had heard this many times before, but now, coming from Father Reuben’s lips, it hit her with a sacred iridescence. She opened her mouth to say something, and the next moment Father Reuben’s lips were on hers.
O sweet Virgin Mary, virgin that you are, virgin that young Mama Agnes is but virgin that she no longer wishes to be!
There she stood trembling with moist sweetness, with sweet moistness, for how moist was the sweetness, how sweet was the moistness, ’twas sweet, ’twas moist, the lips of holiness impressing themselves upon her. And the light, O, that overly bright light that made the landscape wriggle before her eyes like a siShikisha dancer, how it flooded her, how it wriggled, how it consumed! She swears, even to this very day, Mama Agnes, how that kiss ushered the moment when she looked up and saw the face of God.
Banished from her mind was Bhalagwe! To Father Reuben she concentrated her energies.
‘See you at the next service,’ said Father Reuben, pulling away.
That week was the longest week in Mama Agnes’s young life. The days dragged by, accumulating into boring, painful hours whose only purpose seemed to be to torment her. Sunday arrived at last; she wore her best outfit, a shimmering dress that she usually reserved for weddings, but when she got to the church, Father Reuben was not there – he was attending a service in a neighbouring village. Rage and disappointment formed an unpleasant concoction that left a bitter taste in her mouth. It was Father Chipato, the rheumy-eyed priest, who conducted the service. He forged through the scripture in a loud, aggressive tone, thrashing the congregation to submission with his Shona. Each time he said ‘Hallelujah!’ the congregation groaned ‘Hameni!’, even though everyone from the village was Ndebele. His language paralysed them, and reminded them of the apparitions in the red berets. They, too, had spoken Shona, as they blessed the villagers with a horror such as they had never known possible. And so, there they stood, wailing ‘Hameni!’, but the louder Father Chipato preached, the more their bodies twitched, flinching against the memories of things they felt but had tried to forget.
When Mama Agnes saw Father Reuben the Sunday after Father Chipato’s visit, she hissed, ‘How could you keep me waiting last Sunday?’
To which he whispered, ‘Meet me by the river, right before the spot where the boys swim, after lunchtime devotions.’
Mama Agnes was torn between anger and excitement. A part of her told her to skip the river rendezvous, just to spite Father Reuben. But the fear of putting him off for good tore at her thudding little heart, so that, promptly after the lunchtime devotions, she found herself sitting on one of the polished rocks that jutted out of the riverbank.
Father Reuben had chosen their meeting place well; large boulders rose one on top of the other on either side, converging to form a crevice where they could not be seen. Several uninterested livestock nibbled at the grass, their lolling bells going nkende nkende in the heat. A dog could be heard barking in the distance, from one of the homesteads sprawled intermittently across the terrain.
She dipped her feet in the water and kicked gently, so as not to make a big splash. This part of the river was shallow and clear. There were several such pockets along the Mpopoma River, where the water flowed with a gentle, almost imperceptible current. From where she sat, she could hear the boys splashing in another pocket of water around the bend. Further down the river was the girls’ spot. Sometimes the boys planned mischievous invasions, during which they’d creep up on the girls and hide their clothes, then begin throwing stones and delight themselves with the sight of a dozen semi-naked, squealing females splashing about in the water.
The afternoon shadows began to lengthen. Mama Agnes was beginning to think that Father Reuben would not come when he appeared among the rocks, like Jesus by the Sea of Galilee.
She wanted to pout and say, ‘You’re late.’
Instead, she smiled shyly and berated herself for being so obvious. She did not know what type of courting game they were playing. He was not bold and abrupt, like the village boys who professed bottomless pools of love and beat you up if you tried to be cagey with them.
She receded, once again, into shyness. I understood perfectly; these were not the kind of intimacies a mother would share with her son. But she was in such a vulnerable, suggestible state, and I, I only wanted to connect with her!
‘You remind me of myself, when I was young, Mama A,’ I said encouragingly. ‘The things I used to say to my best friend’s sister! Why, I had no idea you used to be such a wildling in your youth.’
She laughed, and immediately winced; the swellings on her face were too fresh. ‘I must go to bed,’ she said, suddenly sombre.
I had pushed too hard. ‘Oh? Are you sure?’ I tried to sound casual. ‘I really don’t mind sitting here with you a little longer, if you like.’
‘No, you’ve done enough for me as it is. It’s late, and I’m so tired.’
She stood up and shuffled to the sitting room door, and then paused, waiting for me to leave.
‘Zamani?’
I didn’t want to go. I could feel my chest heaving. Something in there felt strangely tender.
‘I’m not going,’ I muttered defiantly. ‘I’m not leaving you alone in this house. What if Father comes back and you need me? I’ll sleep here, Mama Agnes,’ I said, as I plumped the cushions of the sofa and lay down.
She seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘All right,’ she said, finally. ‘You can sleep in Bukhosi’s room. And Zamani? Please don’t – he’s not always this bad, and, I don’t want the whole township gossiping—’
‘I would never do such a thing, Mama Agnes,’ I said, trying to hide my joy. And then, I dared to add, as casually as possible, ‘After all, families protect one another and keep each other’s … secrets.’ I let that word, ‘secret’, slide deliciously off my tongue.
For the first time, I spent the night in the main house, in those sheets that still reek of the boy. The warmth of it took me by surprise; I remembered this room when it was still mine, when I lived here with Uncle Fani. It was different then, coldly bare, without the mother’s touch that it now had, imprinting itself on the boy’s ironed jeans and tee-shirts bulging out of the old wardrobe; in a teenage boy’s impatient attempt to impose order, I imagined at a mother’s admonishments, as could be seen in his pile of dirty clothes hidden behind the door, and the rubber slippers and Nike trackies shoved beneath the wardrobe. There was the boy’s attempt at personality, too, in the glossy posters of Beyoncé and Kanye West caught in a beam of moonlight looming large on the wall to my right. And beside the bed where I had plomped myself, on an inverted crate that served as the dressing table, stood an empty bottle of Brut, and next to it a shaving stick, Lifebuoy soap, Axe roll on and an open tin of Ingram’s Camphor Cream whose minty scent was fighting a losing battle with the boy’s musky odour.
I imagined myself sleeping here every day, the room reeking of me. The wardrobe filled with my clothes, fresh with the scent of Mama Agnes’s Sta-soft Lavender Fabric Softener, her sweet, motherly admonishments waking me up early on a Saturday morning to clean my room. I could feel my face breaking open, and I was so glad the electricity was still gone.
Mama Agnes was standing by the boy’s door, and I imagined it must have been difficult for her to be there, without the boy. I smiled, imagining that my presence in the boy’s room soothed her, that she saw, in me, Bukhosi. I tried to think of something to say, of what she may like to hear, of what the boy would say to her, but before I could say anything, she had mumbled a ‘goodnight’ and disappeared into her own room next door.
I didn’t go to sleep but sat on the boy’s bed, listening intently to her movements through the wall as she got ready for bed, trying to think up a ploy to get her talking again. I heard the creak of the mattress, and imagined she must have settled herself on her bed, and was now probably snuggling in her sheets. Soon, she would be asleep! I couldn’t let her slip away.
I let out a loud sob, and then proceeded to weep theatrically.
‘Zamani?’
She was back by the boy’s door! I stifled a sob.
‘Zamani! What is it? I’m coming in.’
I waited for her to take a few steps, and then turned my face away from her. ‘I miss Bukhosi,’ I said.
She sighed wistfully, as though catching a breath. ‘Oh, mfanami, I miss him too!’
There, she had called me ‘mfanami’! And though this is but a generic term of endearment used by motherly women for any agreeable young man, those who do helpful things like carry their groceries from the supermarket to their doorsteps, it thrilled me to hear it. I even imagined she meant it literally. ‘My boy.’ Her son!
‘Being here, in his room with his things, it’s brought back memories …’ I said, keeping my voice soft still.
‘I know!’ said my Mama Agnes. ‘But don’t you worry, everything is going to be all right, OK? The Reverend Pastor still thinks he’s in South Africa. The Holy Ghost is never wrong!’
‘What was he thinking, running away like that?’
‘I don’t know, uyazi, I raised him in the church, not to be doing thug things, running away like a guluva…’
‘But then, who knows what the impetuous young think? I, after all, tried to run away with my best friend’s sister! And I’m sure you, too, Mama Agnes, could be impetuous in your youth. Couldn’t you? Just look at what happened with Father Reuben! What … what did happen? What happened, Mama Agnes?’
Here she was quiet; she seemed far away. And then she began to chuckle. ‘Well…’
And just like that, I found I had brought my Mama Agnes back to the conversation at hand! I can only surmise that she lay with Father Reuben. She spared me the embarrassing details of the act itself, only saying how, ‘afterwards’, he had left as soon as he could. And thus, it has been left to my own imagination, virgin that I am, to supply the details of what undoubtedly must have been, for a teenage girl, a clumsy, discomfiting experience of first-time coitus. Nothing pleasurable at all! What pleasure is to be found in a priestly finger prodding between virgin legs? What enjoyment is to be summoned by an ecclesiastical hand gripping a hillock breast? And what of coming face to face, for the first time, with that strange organ the phallus? What can a first-time glimpse of this body part, ebony and thick and erect, engender in the female mind except visions of unbecomingness? For, tool of pleasure that it is, even I know that the phallus is not a very pretty organ! It frightened even me the very first time I stroked myself with pubescent urgency and found it swelling and swelling until it became ramrod straight, demanding to be appeased! It does take some getting used to! So, imagine my poor Mama Agnes assaulted, for the first time, by this unruly body part, wondering how it will ever fit into her lady-parts, and confused also by the heat of her supple teenage body, when, before she knows what is happening, the feeling of something hard and sharp plunges into her, like the tip of a knife. What can she do but cry when she beholds the blood trickling down her thighs, what can she do but bury her sobs in the lapels of Father Reuben’s jacket?
And what does that Father Reuben, fornicator after the priestly fashion, as has become so common over the years among the Catholic order, do?
‘Agnes,’ I can hear him saying. ‘Agnes. It’s getting late. I have to go.’
And off he hurries, without a backwards look, tripping over the underbrush, his eyes instead flitting about for any watchers-by.
This would have only made a confused Mama Agnes cry harder. She would have expected something of a love slap, would have wanted to hear Father Reuben say with that determination of men who are betrothed that he was coming to her home to speak with her father. But he didn’t do any of these things, that Father, and that is perhaps why ‘afterwards’, when she had calmed down and washed the slick from between her legs, Mama Agnes walked to the Father’s lodgings.
What kind of man was this Father, eh?
The priests’ compound, Mama Agnes told me, was behind the Catholic church building. It was a brick block with asbestos roofing that ran the length of the yard and was subdivided into bedrooms, with the privilege of a diesel-engine generator to power the electricity.
She spotted Father Reuben seated on the stoep outside his room, a silhouette against the light spilling from his open door, his movements exaggerated by the shadows on the walls as he gesticulated to the other priests, who were clumped around a gas stove near the entrance of the compound. They looked strange to Mama Agnes without their priestly garb, so, so ordinary, so disappointingly mortal. But not Father Reuben, no. His hairy legs, protruding from a pair of faded shorts, were firm, the muscles of his calves well carved, the chunks of thigh disappearing into his shorts deliciously thick. When their eyes met, he did not make a move to get up. Instead he bent and scooped up a handful of roasted groundnuts from a dish on the ground.
‘Ah, if it is not young Agnes. You know with your enthusiasm for the Church, you ought to become a nun.’
The other priests laughed softly.
Mama Agnes could not meet his gaze. ‘I need to speak with you.’
‘At this late hour? You should come tomorrow.’
‘I need to speak with you now.’
Father Reuben got up, stretched and said something in Shona to one of the priests. There was a ripple of laughter. Finally, he turned to a squirming Mama Agnes, and, grabbing her arm, hastened her to the gate.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he hissed. ‘Go home! It’s late and your family must be worried by now.’
‘You have to speak with my father.’
‘Speak with your father about what?’
‘About my lobola, of course! This afternoon, you made me your wife.’
(I wanted to blurt out here, ‘His wife, Mama A? But you know priests can’t …’ But I dared not interrupt.)
Father Reuben held her firmly by the shoulders. ‘Agnes, listen to me. Go. Home. We will discuss this tomorrow. Now, go home, please.’
‘No.’
‘What?’
Mama Agnes folded her arms and eyed him defiantly. Tears were welling up in her eyes. ‘Everybody will know what I’ve done.’
‘No one will know what you’ve done unless you tell them! Now, go home. It’s dark, no one will see anything, and first thing tomorrow morning, I will come to your father’s homestead.’
‘You are lying.’
‘Agnes, please! Do you want your father to kill me? These things must be done properly. I cannot escort you at this late hour to discuss such an important matter with your father. Are you crazy, woman? Go home!’
‘You promise to come tomorrow?’
‘I have said I will come! Now go!’
She slinked into her father’s homestead just as her mama was dishing supper. She looked up at Mama Agnes, who was hovering in the shadows, away from the light of the fire. ‘Eh, what is it? You look like a ghost, has the hare finally been eaten by the lion?’
‘Ah, nothing, Ma. Just evening prayers.’
‘You need to stop with this church of yours, your father will not be happy. Here, take his food to him.’
‘It’s that priest she likes, Ma,’ Nto blurted.
Mama Agnes whacked her sister on the head. ‘Shut your dirty mouth! S’phukuphuku. It was just night prayers, Ma.’
‘It had better be, because we have an important visitor coming at the end of the week.’
Mama Agnes didn’t care about any important visitors. She begged a headache and retired to the hut she shared with Nto. She lay awake for a long time, staring into the dark, trying to imagine Father Reuben’s impending arrival. She would make sure to stay well out of sight, until she was called to identify her visitor. She had witnessed the ritual several times before, most recently when it had been her cousin’s turn when she was wedded to a Kalanga from Tsholotsho. All the young girls would be called to gather outside her father’s hut.
They would be asked, ‘Do you know any of these men?’
For the suitor would not travel alone. The girls, feigning surprise, would gasp riotously, and the cheekiest of the group would say, ‘I think that one has been eyeing me from a distance.’
Mama Agnes would keep her eyes on the mud floor as she pointed at Father Reuben and acknowledged him as her suitor. Then the group of girls would be dispersed and the lobola negotiations would begin.
Her reverie was broken by Nto. She had not heard her sister come in.
‘I saw you,’ she whispered. ‘By the river with that priest of yours. I saw you.’
Mama Agnes sat up. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You had better not have done what I saw you doing, because there’s a suitor coming for you at the end of the week. A rich man who has a house in the city.’
‘You’re lying! Father Reuben is coming to speak to our father tomorrow. I’m going to be his wife.’
Nto laughed, making the heat rush to Mama Agnes’s dark face. ‘You know, sister, you may be good with the books in the class, but where life is concerned, you are just stupid. Father Reuben cannot wed you even if he wanted.’
‘Yes, he can,’ Mama Agnes spat back. ‘And he will! He loves me. Yebo, he’s a priest, but he loves me and he’s going to leave the Church for me and—’
‘Oh? Is that what he said?’
Mama Agnes glared at her sister, who forged ahead, ‘Besides, you know he’s a Shona, you know Father will die before he gives any of us to a Shona. So, you had better stop dreaming. And you had better not have done what I saw you doing with him.’
The next morning, Mama Agnes heard the whispers between her mama and her sister in the kitchen, about the suitor who was coming all the way from Bulawayo, the City of Kings, to discuss lobola with her father.
Mama and Nto were in the corner of the kitchen hut, folded over a wide, reed sieve, almost flat like a tray, which they held between them, each gripping an edge, shake shaking it from side to side. Dried kernels of maize rattled in the sieve, a cloud of husks billowing in the morning light. She watched, Mama Agnes, out of the corner of her eye, as the debris that was too heavy to float slipped through the holes of the sieve, into the bucket squatting beneath. A separation of the things that were to be kept from those that would be discarded. Her mama’s limbs were sturdy and a deep, glistening brown, the soles of her feet and the cheeks of her palms toughened from a lifetime of use. Her movements were quick and efficient, her buttocks big but firm, contained in every movement. Nto, on the other hand, kept teetering this way and that with the sieve, her skinny arms jostling awkwardly with the air. Nto, as her mama liked to say, was going to make an embarrassing wife one day. She had neither buttocks nor poise, unlike Mama Agnes who, her mama liked to say, had buttocks but lacked poise. But better one than none.
Mama stopped sieving and said, brightly, ‘Hmmm, and uyazi, we have a very important person coming to visit us at the end of this week …’
‘A man from the city!’ said Nto.
‘A man from the city,’ repeated mama.
Mama Agnes’s face remained impassive, for she could feel them watching her now; she continued to frown at the cracks on the mud floor, as though there was something interesting to be contemplated there. But her heart was galloping, trying to drag her with it, and she almost tumbled to the ground.
‘Hmmm! I wonder who is the lucky girl he has come for?’
They giggled, mama and Nto, their laughter at once wise and girlish. Something rattled inside of Mama Agnes, and she couldn’t help it; she grabbed the bucket of discarded things and made a dash for it.
She fled to the well. She knew how much the possibility of a wedding meant to the family; it would be a fresh start, which would cement their determination to forget the past. But who could ever forget? She asked herself, plunging her face into the mouth of the well, staring into its murky depths. She wondered just how bottomless its bottom was? How long before one could hit the dark, mysterious liquid with a splash? If the water would suck you to a deep dark down where you could never be found? If the sensation of liquid ballooning your lungs hurt?
She screamed into the well. But there weren’t rippling echoes, only a bottomless-bottom timbre to her voice.
She had to tell Father Reuben to make his approach before this dreaded suitor made himself known. She dropped her pail and ran, cutting across her father’s homestead and sprinting along the path to the priests’ compound. When she arrived, out of breath, she asked one of the priests where Father Reuben was.
‘He’s gone.’
Her heart attempted to leap out of her chest. ‘Gone where?’
‘Don’t you know? He has finished his apprenticeship with our congregation. He has gone back to his district. He left before the cry of the first rooster, so he could catch the bus to Bulawayo.’
Mama Agnes fell into an indeterminable illness. Because she could not see it, did not understand how a heart could be broken (like an arm or a leg or even a nose), but felt, somewhere inside, a pain of spiritual depths that was strangely almost physical (because a heart could be black, and sag heavy, but it had no bone, and therefore could not snap), she simply claimed she had a headache and then a stomach ache, and spent the rest of the week in bed. When my surrogate father arrived five days later, she rejected him, refusing to be impressed by his yellow Peugeot 504, which farted into her father’s homestead laden with all sorts of town goodies. She snubbed the multicoloured dresses and shiny stilettos, eyed the assortment of sweet, cloying perfumes with a feigned nonchalance. She had resolved that she did, after all, want to see the better world, and Massachusetts sounded like a good place to complete her studies. There were all her black brothers and sisters over there, those slaves or once slaves. She would join them, and forge her path in the great United States of America.
‘Why will you not have him?’ her mother demanded.
‘He is wealthy, he can look after you.’
‘He’s ugly.’
‘Beauty never mattered in a man.’
‘What shall I call him – grandpa?’
‘He’s not that old. Besides, you know your father will never stand for this.’
‘I don’t care what anyone says, I don’t want him. And what kind of name is Abednego?’
‘Abednego is a biblical name, it means “servant of Nebo”, and Nebo was the Babylonian god of wisdom. He’s a man of wisdom, my child, he will be good for you.’
‘Well, they should have named him Reuben or something.’
When her form four results came, she discovered, to her dismay, that she hadn’t done as well as she’d expected. She did not even have a single distinction in Maths, Integrated Science or English, the Important Subjects that were the professed favourites of any self-respecting, forward-thinking pupil. Though in truth, she liked Ndebele the most. It was a singsong language suffused with subtle wisdoms. But too heavy. Not light enough, like English, to carry one on the wings of progress all the way to Massachusetts. The Catholic Church scholarship was awarded to another pupil, and Massachusetts came to lodge itself as another confusing ache in her heart. She turned from the mirror of her life to find that this large, clumsy man – with the yellow face and a prominent lower lip drooping beneath a caterpillar moustache – was the only option she had left.
We were both startled by the sound of the gate squeaking; it was eerily loud. And then my surrogate father’s red Peugeot 405 farted into the yard. Dammit! Abednego, why does he have such bad timing? Just when we were getting along really well, my Mama Agnes and I.
‘Goodnight,’ Mama Agnes said curtly, gathering herself and slinking out of Bukhosi’s room before I could say anything.
No matter, we managed to pass huge hurdles. She even let me sleep in the boy’s bed! I have Abednego to thank for all of this. If he hadn’t … No, that’s no way to think at all. But still, it’s just, I’ve been wanting so long to connect with my Mama Agnes and now—
I heard him come in, staggering down the passage that leads from the back door to the sitting room. Where was he coming from, anyway? He paused by Bukhosi’s door; I could hear his laboured breathing. I held my breath. I feared he would come in. I didn’t want him to find me there, in the boy’s room – he would surely kick me out. He stood by the boy’s door for what felt like forever. And then, he shambled on, and I could hear him stumbling into Mama Agnes’s bedroom. His voice reached me, a dull, mumbling, slurred speech; had he been drinking? I sat up and listened; would he beat her again? I would readily comfort her. But all I heard was grunting, and the sound of clothes being slipped off, and then, the next moment, raspy snoring.
I lay back in bed. I didn’t want him to hurt Mama Agnes again. Of course not. I just wanted, I just wished … I had enjoyed our talk, that’s all. It had felt so good to be there for her and have her open up to me.
I found I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed for a long time, thinking of what had transpired. I thought of Mama Agnes and how she must have felt meeting my surrogate father. She was sixteen then and he was, what, thirty-three? I can see how to a girl of sixteen he would have seemed incredibly old.
I can imagine her dragging herself reluctantly to her father’s hut to meet my surrogate father on the fated day. Her mama flanking her on her left, Nto on her right. Dressed in the white, frilly dress she is wearing in the wedding photo hanging on the sitting room wall next to the portrait of baby Bukhosi. Her hair having been fried with a hot comb to get it to stand in those thin, curled rolls, like half-fisted hands. She looks so frightened in that photo.
My surrogate father would not have gone to meet her alone; he would have needed someone, a male relative, to accompany him; someone like Uncle Lungile.
Was it really so easy for him to move on from my Thandi, just like that? I feel as though I shan’t ever be able to move on from her, as though I can never love again. But perhaps it was the family that pressured him to remarry, to try and rebuild what he had lost.
I can see Mama Agnes blinking at my surrogate father through the haze of smoke spiralling from a dying fire in the middle of the hut. No longer is he the rural boy that my inamorata had to polish into a man of the city! No longer is he shy and inarticulate and naïve!
‘Do you know either of these men?’ her father asks, feigning a frown.
And she, Mama Agnes, she’s as bashful as a rural girl could be … To her this suitor is a large and yellow city man with a huge nose and a lower lip that sags as though from a mouthful of secrets—
‘Do you know any of these men?’ Her father’s voice cracks, as though something hot has been placed on his vocal cords.
Mama Agnes nods, shakes her head, nods, shakes her head, nods, shakes her head …
Gasp!
‘What is this?’ demands Uncle Lungile. ‘What, what is the meaning of this? We are the proud Mlambo clan, and this boy here is a virile young man, a freedom fighter, a hero who fought for his country. Any woman would be lucky to have him. We won’t stand for this!’
Mama Agnes grimaces. I, too, would grimace, were I her! Boy? Boy is her brother Trymore, with his firm (remaining) limbs, why, not even Father Reuben can be called a boy but rather a young man. But this funny, yellow man who looks not at her but through her, with eyes big and brown and woeful, why, he’s almost like her father … She scrambles to her feet and flees. She heads for the kraals, where she crouches behind one of the wooden posts and peers at her father’s hut, just like my surrogate father used to do when trying to listen to that brother read the bible to his own surrogate father.
I can see Mama Agnes’s father unbuckling his belt as he limps out into the late afternoon, his eyes rotating wildly in their sockets. There is her mama, right behind him. She sees Mama Agnes first, and shuffles ahead of her father, whose cracked voice bellows for her to come to him.
‘I’ll teach you a lesson, what do you, what is, what … ?’
‘Please, my king my life my love, let me talk to the girl,’ her mama pleads.
Mama Agnes glares at her father, and at my surrogate father who has emerged, and now stands by the entrance of the hut, staring at her, quiet, unmoving.
‘My daughter, please, Agnes, Agnes—’ She turns to her mama, who cups her face and slaps her cheeks gently. ‘What are you doing, why are you doing this, why are you embarrassing your father like this, why are you? Listen, listen to me. I was fourteen when I married your father, yes fourteen, and he was not much younger than this man who has come for you – listen, are you listening? – he was about twice my age, and I was so afraid of him, the first day in his compound I cried, yes I cried, but look at me, look how happy I am, how good our life, do you hear me, are you listening? You are no longer a child, Agnes, and this day was always coming, listen, are you listening?’
And though she wants to cry, Mama Agnes, something hard and hot has lodged itself in her chest, clogging her tears. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she mumbles. ‘I don’t want to leave you and Nto and Trymore and Father and … Please don’t make me go.’
‘I know, I know,’ her mama says, and begins, suddenly, to cry, a long, loud wail that frightens Mama Agnes. ‘I know. But it’s the way things are meant to be …’
Behind her mama, her father is being solicitous, murmuring apologies to my Uncle Lungile, who is hissing about being greatly offended. Behind them stands my surrogate father, arms folded, his gaze still fixed on Mama Agnes.
‘Come,’ yells my uncle, trying to yank him by the arm. ‘We will not stand for this. We are the proud Mlambo clan. Come! We are leaving.’
‘No,’ he replies. ‘No, Uncle! It is you who dragged me all the way here. Did you not say, my boy, the family needs your seed, we need to replace what you lost? Did you not say, my boy, I have found you a wife, she is a blot-out-sun, just you wait and see. So. We shall finish this. And look at her! Isn’t she an Angela Davis?’
And so it was that Mama Agnes was wedded to Abednego, who must have demanded that she respectfully call him ‘Baba’, like I always hear her refer to him. And then she found herself, Mama Agnes, several months later, in that two-bedroomed house in Entumbane, the house meant for my Thandi.