by Gaile Parkin
As well as Sifiso, Mr and Mrs Simelane had brought Giveness and his aunt. Eh, Benedict was so happy to see them!
‘Eish, Benedict, you look smart, nè?’
‘Thank you, Mr Simelane.’ Benedict noticed that Mr Simelane’s trouser was also a little short above his own white socks. Titi was right. It really didn’t matter.
Giveness’s aunt was untangling her shawl from one of the spokes of Giveness’s umbrella. ‘Something is smelling too nice!’
‘There’s a whole lamb cooking!’ Benedict told her excitedly.
‘Eish!’
‘Ag, come up and get something to drink, hey.’
The next people up the steps were the bigger Mazibuko children, followed a few minutes later by the smaller ones with Uncle Enock and Auntie Rachel. Soon after that, some of Baba’s work colleagues arrived, together with their families. And by the time the Ubuntu Funerals van brought Zodwa, Mrs Patel and three of the cake ladies, Mavis already had many glasses to wash in Mama’s sink.
Mrs Patel looked different. She was dressed for the party in beautiful swirls of orange and yellow, with part of her stomach showing. Maybe part of her stomach showed every day, Benedict didn’t know. He had never before seen her without the high counter of Mr Patel’s shop in front of her. She had brought with her a big plastic container of warm, spicy samoosas, which Lungi emptied onto a plate and placed with the other snacks on the dining table.
Benedict had invited both Mr and Mrs Patel, though in truth he was just being polite and he only wanted Mrs Patel there. Mr Patel was a little frightening, with his funny hair and his mouth that wouldn’t smile. Okay, he was doing good things, keeping drugs away from schoolchildren, but eh, it was like sharp pieces were sticking out of him, and Benedict didn’t feel like getting close. He had guessed that Mr Patel wouldn’t be able to come on account of somebody needing to be in the shop, and he was glad to be right.
He even managed to be a little glad that Jabulani and the rest of the cake ladies weren’t able to come on account of being busy with orders. That meant that business was good. The cake ladies who did come brought a box with them. It had a secret inside it, and nobody was allowed to look, not yet. Mrs Levine made Mavis stand on a chair to put it on top of the fridge, where it would sit until it was time.
Together with Giveness and Sifiso, Benedict made a point of going to each of Baba’s work colleagues and their wife or their husband, one by one. ‘I’m Benedict,’ he said to each of them, shaking them by the hand like a grown-up, ‘Dr Tungaraza’s eldest boy. This is my friend Giveness, and my other friend can introduce himself.’
‘I’m Sifiso. Sifiso Simelane.’ Each time he said it, all three of them grinned. Every sss was perfect.
Together with Lungi, Mrs Levine made sure that nobody was ever left with an empty glass or an empty throw-away cup. First she told the children to get stuck in to the snacks, then she told them to stop or they wouldn’t be able to eat any lamb.
‘Is there cake?’ Sifiso asked Benedict in a whisper, his eyes darting around the table.
Benedict shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Mama wasn’t allowed to do anything, it’s all Mrs Levine.’ He imagined a cake sitting on the large table in the kitchen of the other house. Auntie Rachel or Lungi would have made it from a box, and all the Tungarazas were going to have to pretend that it was nice.
Leaving Sifiso and Giveness to eat cashew nuts sprinkled with pilipili, Benedict went looking for Nomsa. She was in the garden, talking with Vusi.
‘So you’ll live here, with Gogo Levine?’ She didn’t look happy.
‘Uh-uh, I’ll still be at home for meals and sleeping. But I’ll have my own study-room here, with a desk. I can stay here late as I like with my books.’
‘That’s nice.’ Nomsa didn’t look very sure. ‘But you’ll be with us for meals?’
Vusi nodded. ‘I promise, nè?’
‘Good.’
It sounded to Benedict like they’d finished talking about that and he wouldn’t be interrupting if he spoke now.
‘Nomsa, you know my hoopoe?’
‘Mm?’
‘I don’t know what Mrs Levine is planning to do with the garden. Can you help me with siSwati asking Samson never to dig under the tree? It’s her grave, he mustn’t dig up her casket.’
Vusi made a strange face. ‘What are you talking about?’
Benedict told him all about it, and then he showed Vusi and Nomsa exactly where it was, and together they called Samson over and explained everything to him. A little way into hearing it, Samson took off his hat respectfully, and Benedict knew that he understood and that King Solomon’s queen was always going to be safe.
Then Mrs Levine shouted that the lamb was ready, and everybody came to watch and clap as Uncle Enock carved off pieces, putting them on a big tray that Lungi held for him, while Mrs Levine used a long, metal spoon to dig the blackened silver onions out of the hot coals.
Their plates loaded, Benedict, Giveness and Sifiso sat to eat in the shade that the sun was making with the house. They began to talk about what they were going to be, and Benedict told them he was going to be a game ranger.
‘Eish, with a rifle?’ A splodge of garlicky butter rested on Giveness’s upper lip.
‘Only for just in case,’ said Benedict. ‘I’m not going to shoot any animals.’
Sifiso said he was starting to think about being a teacher, but Giveness wasn’t thinking anything yet.
‘You could be a game ranger, too,’ suggested Benedict, unwrapping the foil from his onion.
‘With my skin? Out in the sun all day?’
As Giveness rolled his eyes, Sifiso began to giggle.
‘What?’
‘Giveness with his umbrella in one hand and a rifle in the other!’
Benedict giggled, too. ‘Say a lion comes and Giveness has to shoot it, then he gets confused. He aims his umbrella at the lion—’
‘I shoot the sky with my rifle!’
They began to laugh, and giddy with excitement at the amount of food, dizzy with the excitement of no more school and Christmas coming in just three days, they couldn’t stop. Benedict knew that if anybody asked him tomorrow, or even tonight, what it was they were laughing about, he wouldn’t be able to say. They began laughing at something, and then they went on to laugh at nothing and everything, and they laughed so much that other people came to sit with them to try to find out what was funny. Grace, Faith Innocence, Nomsa, all of them came, and soon all of them were laughing, too. Then Titi came with Mrs Patel, and in no time Titi was reaching into the neckline of her dress for a tissue to wipe her eyes, and Mrs Patel’s bare stomach was jiggling and she was throwing back her head and showing the gap where the teeth were missing from her dentures.
Afterwards, after Mavis had cleared away all the plates, Mrs Levine asked Uncle Enock to get down the box from on top of the fridge, the box with the secret inside it. Everybody gathered to look as Uncle Enock put it on the dining table and Zodwa opened it.
Eh! It was a cake, and it was Mama’s oven! People looked at the cake, then they went into the kitchen to look at Mama’s oven, then they came back again to look at the oven-cake sitting on the dining table.
‘Eish!’
‘Exact-exact, nè?’
‘Ag, even that silver nut where the knob is missing!’
‘Ooh, nè?
The cake ladies beamed and Mama took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with a tissue, and Zodwa told everybody that Mrs Levine had ordered a cake to remember the family by, and they had chosen the oven because everybody who knew the Tungarazas had tasted cake from that oven. One of Baba’s colleagues said that was true, and everybody else agreed and looked around to see that everybody else was nodding.
Benedict had spent a long time worrying how people would ever celebrate Mama with a cake. It would have to be a cake about cake, but how could anybody make a cake about cake without it just looking like a cake? The oven-cake was perfect. And even though it had come out of a
box, it wasn’t the kind of box that a cake from the other house would have come out of. It was a proper cake, made with proper flour and eggs and butter and sugar. It was almost as delicious as Mama’s own cake, but not quite.
After the cake, while Mrs Simelane was still wiping some of it off Sifiso’s face, Benedict slipped off to his bedroom and changed from his suit into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. He had promised Mama that he wouldn’t take anybody up to the dam before the meal was over, and that he wouldn’t go in his smart suit and spoil it. Okay, the suit was too small for him now, but it was still good, it could still go to another boy.
He gathered Giveness and Sifiso, but he couldn’t see Nomsa. He would find her in a moment. Meanwhile, as his two friends stood outside the kitchen door, he sat on the small step there, putting on his old pair of shoes.
‘There’s a bridge at the dam,’ he told them. ‘We can walk along it right to the middle.’
Giveness looked excited. ‘We can stand in the middle of the water?’
‘Mm.’
Sifiso was a little giddy with sugar after too much cake. ‘Eish! Can we shout out our names there?’
Benedict smiled. ‘Yes! Let’s do that.’
Nomsa came round from the far side of the house as Benedict stood up from the steps. ‘We’re going to the dam,’ he told her. ‘Do you want to come? There are still some nests.’
‘We’re going to stand in the middle and shout our names,’ said Giveness.
Nomsa smiled. ‘Okay,’ she said.
Inside the kitchen, washing up at the sink, Mavis heard the children talking. Eish, a name was a very important thing. The remembrance cake for her boy, the cake that Titi’s madam had finished making just that morning, was safely inside the wardrobe in the room she shared with Lungi. After church tomorrow morning, Doctor was going to drive her with it to where her mother lived on the far side of Manzini. She would have one week for her Christmas, and then she would come back and Lungi would go for hers. Mavis’s sisters were going to be waiting for her with their mother, and together they were going to cleanse themselves of the loss of her baby boy and let him go. The ancestors would know who he was, the ancestors knew everything. But how would her boy know who he was? He had been pulled from her belly already late, and they had never given him a name. They had never spoken about him, what would a name have been for? Eish! When she finished here, when everything was clean and nice, she would phone her mother and ask her to speak to the priest. They would give her boy a name before they let him go. He would have a name to know himself by. He would have a name to shout into the world.
Benedict led the way up to the dam, going more slowly than he usually did on account of Giveness’s umbrella catching in bushes and needing Nomsa to free it, and on account of Benedict practising at being a game ranger by pointing things out and stopping to tell his friends about them. There was a bird’s nest high up in a tree near the water-tank, and close by there was a large spider’s nest with a small spider in it. He didn’t know what kind it was, but they all looked at it carefully, and Nomsa said she would look it up in Uncle Enock’s spider book. Benedict couldn’t help hoping that his new sister Josephine was going to be the kind of girl who would know about looking something up in a spider book.
Giveness was nervous of getting spider-web all over his umbrella, and Sifiso teased him by pretending there was a big spider sitting right on top of it. Then they all laughed and said sss because Sifiso had said spider, and then Benedict and Nomsa said shh because soon they would come out of the trees onto the plateau and they mustn’t make noise that would scare away birds.
For the last few steps they were as silent as they could be. Leading them, Benedict broke from the trees first, but quiet as he was, his movement startled a bird into flight – not from a tree, but from the ground to the side of the dam. It flew up and away, then it circled back and flew towards him.
Eh! It was a hoopoe!
As he held his breath and watched it flying directly above him, its beautiful black and white wings seemed to move in slow motion, with every beat almost meeting below its cinnamon body as if it was clapping silently.
Benedict imagined it was the same one he had buried so respectfully. Maybe it had come from Heaven, just to thank him.
Then he caught his breath as a new thought came to him. Imagine if it had come to show him where King Solomon had hidden all his gold!
Eh!
Imagine.
How a statue of the Indian god, Krishna, came to be buried deep in the mountains of Swaziland is a puzzle which will probably never be solved. The head was unearthed at the entrance to the Mlawula gorge in the Lubombo mountains during the building of the Swaziland-Maputo railway line in the early sixties. There is a body as well, this may have been found with the head, accounts vary.
Although reliably identified as a late 18th or early 19th century statue of Krishna from eastern India, its presence in Swaziland cannot be explained.
The statue was never put in the hands of the Swaziland authorities (there were no relevant authorities in the colonial early sixties).
Its present whereabouts are as mysterious as its past.
A Traveller’s Guide to Swaziland
Bob Forrester
POSTSCRIPT
IN AUGUST 2005, KING MSWATI OFFICIALLY ABANDONED the anti-AIDS campaign obliging girls to wear umcwasho tassels and to practise abstinence. Only four of its intended five years had passed, during which the king himself had ignored it, his teenage daughters had flouted it, and many girls in urban areas had refused to participate in it.
Swaziland continues to have the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world.
