Then Nomviyo comes running from the bus stop in her red high-heeled shoes, because she is just returning from town. She sees all the broken houses and she throws all her groceries and bags down, screaming, My son, my son! What happened? I left my Freedom sleeping in there! Then they are helping her dig through the broken slabs and then Makubongwe appears carrying Freedom, and his small body is so limp and covered in dust you think it’s just a thing and not a baby. Nomviyo looks at the thing that is also her son and throws herself on the ground and rolls and rolls, tearing at her clothes until the only things she has on are her black bra and knickers. The mothers scream to put our hands over our eyes and we put them there but me, I spread my fingers so I can still see; Nomviyo weeps, beats the earth with her head and hands until somebody wraps her in a gray blanket and carries her away.
Then later the people with cameras and T-shirts that say BBC and CNN come to shake their heads and look and take our pictures like we are pretty, and one of them says, It’s like a tsunami tore through this place, Jesus, it’s like a fucking tsunami tore this up. I say to Verona, What is a fucking tsunami? and she says, A fucking tsunami walks on water, like Jesus, only it’s a devil, didn’t you see that time on TV, how it came out of the water and left all those people dead in that other country?
It is a bad dream, and I don’t want it to come, which is why I am being the hare. Now Mother’s man is snoring; I hate people who snore because it’s an ugly sound, how are we even supposed to sleep? Now MotherLove is singing out there. Nobody ever sings like that in Paradise, voice swinging like ripe fruit you can pick and put in your mouth and taste its sweetness. When you hear MotherLove, you know that her shebeen is now open for people to go and drink.
The day the adults go to vote we stand at the edge of Paradise, near the graveyard, and watch them leave. They are silent when they go, none of that talk-talk of the days before. We are quiet because we’ve never seen them silent, not like this. We want them to open their mouths and speak. To talk about elections and democracy and new country like they have been doing all along. We want them to look over their shoulders and tell us they will know what we are doing while they are gone. We want them to say something but they are just silent like they are suddenly unsure, like something crept upon them while they slept and cut out their tongues.
When they eventually disappear down Mzilikazi, we don’t go running to Budapest even though we’re free to do as we please. We don’t go to Heavenway to read the names of the dead, don’t start to light a fire or get inside the shacks to try on the adults’ clothes or mess with their things. We don’t play Find bin Laden or country-game or Andy-over or anything. We just go to sit quietly under the jacaranda all morning and all afternoon.
Maybe they’re just not coming back, Godknows says. Nobody answers him, which means we don’t want to think about the adults not coming back.
Maybe there’s a party and right now they are busy feasting and dancing without us, Godknows says. We keep looking far out towards the playground, where the adults are supposed to appear. There is nothing but trees and dry grass and brown earth and Fambeki and emptiness.
Or maybe they are still voting. Maybe all the adults in this country went to vote for change and there are so many of them there they have to stand in an endless line. Maybe the line is not moving, like when you are waiting for a doctor. Maybe the line will never finish, Godknows says.
Somebody’s stomach makes a loud long sound and I remember I am hungry. We are all hungry but right now we do not care. All we want is to see the adults come back, we so badly want to see the adults come back, it’s like we will eat them when they do.
They will come. Maybe they are just on the other side of Fambeki and they are appearing any minute, Godknows says. He has stood up now and has both his hands on his egg-shaped head. Then it starts raining, like maybe Godknows has made it rain by all his talking. It’s light rain, the kind that just licks you. We sit in it and smell the delicious earth around us.
Me, I want my mother, Godknows says after a long while. His voice is choking in the rain and I look at his face and it’s wet and I don’t know which is the rain, which are the tears. I am thinking I want my mother too, we all want our mothers, even though when they are here we don’t really care about them. Then, after just a little while, even before we are proper wet, the rain stops and the sun comes out and pierces, like it wants to show the rain who is who. We sit there and get cooked in it.
By the time the adults return we are dizzy from waiting. We see the first ones appear from behind Fambeki and we stand up. They are walking like floating and speaking with their hands, and we can tell, even though they are so far, that they are happy. We forget they are not really our friends and take off to meet them. We collide with their bodies and they catch us with those hands with black ink on them, because that is how they have voted, with their fingerprints, they tell us. They catch us and toss us in the air, toss us so far up we see the blue so close we could stick our tongues out and taste it.
That night, nobody sleeps. We all go to MotherLove’s shack, which is the biggest shack in Paradise; the adults don’t even have to bend inside. What MotherLove does is cook brew in huge metal madramuz by day, and by night people go to her shack to drink. The shack is painted a fun color and when dark comes the paint glows like a living thing. We always wait for it to light up in the night, and when it does we blaze towards the light, holding our breath like we are underwater. We get to the shack, touch it with just our fingertips, and run back the way we came, screaming, Fire! Fire!
We crowd in MotherLove’s shack like sand, and it is stuffy and hot inside and smells like adult sweat and armpits and brew. The adults are passing the brew around, even to us, because they tell us change is coming. We don’t drink it because it sears our lips and stings our noses, so we just stand there and fold our arms and watch the adults drink and burn their throats and laugh and talk and what-what.
Then MotherLove stands beside this giant poster of Jesus and starts singing. At first there is this hush, as if people don’t know what music is for, but then they start swaying. Soon they are gyrating and twisting and writhing and shuffling and rocking. MotherLove’s head is tilted up like she’s drinking the stuffy air, her eyes closed. Her mouth is open just a little, you’d think she didn’t even want to sing, but her voice is boiling out of her and steaming up the place. Then we are caught in the arms of the adults and twirled in the air, their skin sweaty and warm against ours.
Get ready, get ready for a new country, no more of this Paradise anymore, they say when they steady us on our feet. They say Paradise like they will never say it again: the Pa part sounding like it is something popping; letting their tongues roll a while longer when they say the ra part; letting their jaws separate as far as possible when they say the di part; and finally hissing like a bus’s wheels letting out air when they say the se part. And once they say it like that, Pa-ra-di-se, we know that it is a place we will soon be leaving, like in the Bible, when those people left that terrible place and that old man with a long beard like Father Christmas hit the road with a stick and then there was a river behind them.
How They Appeared
They did not come to Paradise. Coming would mean that they were choosers. That they first looked at the sun, sat down with crossed legs, picked their teeth, and pondered the decision. That they had the time to gaze at their reflections in long mirrors, perhaps pat their hair, tighten their belts, check the watches on their wrists before looking at the red road and finally announcing: Now we are ready for this. They did not come, no. They just appeared.
They appeared one by one, two by two, three by three. They appeared single file, like ants. In swarms, like flies. In angry waves, like a wretched sea. They appeared in the early morning, in the afternoon, in the dead of night. They appeared with the dust from their crushed houses clinging to their hair and skin and clothes, making them appear like things from another life. Swollen ankles and blisters under their fee
t, they appeared fatigued by the long walk. They appeared carrying sticks with which they marked the ground for where a shack would begin and end, and these, they carefully passed around, partitioning the new land with hands shaking like they were killing something. Squatting to mark the ground like that, they appeared broken—shards of glass people.
They appeared with tin, with cardboard, with plastic, with nails and other things with which to build, and they tried to appear calm as they put up their shacks, nailing tin on tin, piece by piece, bravely looking up at the sky and trying to tell themselves and one another that even here, in this strange new place, the sky was still the same familiar blue, a sign things would work out. But far too many appeared without the things they should have appeared with.
Woman, where is my grandfathers’ black stool? I don’t see it here.
What, are you crazy, old man? I don’t even have enough of the children’s clothes and you’re here talking about your dead grandfathers’ stool!
You know it was meant to stay in the family—my greatest grandfather Sindimba passed it on to his son Salile, who passed it on to his son Ngalo, who passed it on to his son Mabhada, who passed it on to me, Mzilawulandelwa, to pass on to my son Vulindlela. And now it’s gone! Now what to do?
I am not the one who killed Jesus Christ and Mbuya Nehanda; why don’t you go to those who are responsible?
All I’m saying is that stool was my whole history—
And like that, they mourned perished pasts.
There were some who appeared speechless, without words, and for a long while they walked around in silence, like the returning dead. But then with time, they remembered to open their mouths. Their voices came back like tiptoeing thieves in the dark, and this is what they said:
They shouldn’t have done this to us, no, they shouldn’t have. Salilwelilizwe leli, we fought to liberate this country.
Wasn’t it like this before independence? Do you remember how the whites drove us from our land and put us in those wretched reserves? I was there, you were there, wasn’t it just like this?
No, those were evil white people who came to steal our land and make us paupers in our own country.
What, but aren’t you a pauper now? Aren’t these black people evil for bulldozing your home and leaving you with nothing now?
You are all wrong. Better a white thief do that to you than your own black brother. Better a wretched white thief.
It’s the same thing and it isn’t. But what’s the use, we are here now. Here in Paradise with nothing. And they had nothing, except of course memories, their own, and those passed down by their mothers and mothers’ mothers. A nation’s memory.
Some appeared with children in their arms. There were many who appeared with children held by the hands. The children themselves appeared baffled; they did not understand what was happening to them. And the parents held their children close to their chests and caressed their dusty, unkempt heads with hardened palms, appearing to console them, but really, they did not quite know what to say. Gradually, the children gave up and ceased asking questions and just appeared empty, almost, like their childhood had fled and left only the bones of its shadow behind.
MotherLove appeared with enormous barrels in which to brew a potent liquor that would make people forget. She also appeared with songs in her throat and the most colorful dresses in her sacks. Despite the circumstances, she refused to appear like something coming undone.
Generally the men always tried to appear strong; they walked tall, heads upright, arms steady at the sides, and feet firmly planted like trees. Solid, Jericho walls of men. But when they went out in the bush to relieve themselves and nobody was looking, they fell apart like crumbling towers and wept with the wretched grief of forgotten concubines.
And when they returned to the presence of their women and children and everybody else, they stuck hands deep inside torn pockets until they felt their dry thighs, kicked little stones out of the way, and erected themselves like walls again, but then the women, who knew all the ways of weeping and all there was to know about falling apart, would not be deceived; they gently rose from the hearths, beat dust off their skirts, and planted themselves like rocks in front of their men and children and shacks, and only then did all appear almost tolerable.
We Need New Names
Today we’re getting rid of Chipo’s stomach once and for all. One, it makes it hard for us to play, and two, if we let her have the baby, she will just die. We heard the women talking yesterday about Nosizi, that short, light-skinned girl who took over MaDumane’s husband when MaDumane went to Namibia to be a housemaid. Nosizi is dead now, from giving birth. It kills like that.
We get out of the shanty real careful because the adults must not know. We are also leaving the boys, Bastard and Godknows and Stina, out of this one because it’s really a woman thing, so it’s just me and Sbho and Forgiveness. Forgiveness is not a friend-friend because her family only just recently appeared in Paradise—this makes her a stranger. On top of that, she is not even like us; if you look at her real closely you’ll see her skin is too light, and her hair almost wants to be curly. Maybe she was born just different, maybe God couldn’t decide to make her black or white or even albino. We are still reading Forgiveness for now, but we let her come today because Sbho and I need an extra person since Chipo herself cannot help.
We are doing it in the mphafa behind Heavenway; the tree has a nice big shade. Sbho starts by spreading her mother’s ntsaro on the ground. She doesn’t say how she got the ntsaro but I know she stole it because no mother in Paradise will give her things to anybody to spread on the dirt. Chipo does not waste time, maybe because she’s afraid of dying; she quickly gets on the ntsaro and lies flat on her back, her eyes squinted against the sun.
I begin gathering small stones, and after I pick maybe seven I change my mind. I throw them away and start gathering medium-sized rocks. I haven’t decided what exactly we’ll do with the rocks, but since nobody asks or stops me, I just gather and gather. Gather. Maybe we’ll use them to smash the stomach, I don’t know. Soon enough, I have a nice little pile collected beside Chipo, near her shoulder. I pat the pile to make sure it’s steady.
Forgiveness has found a rusted clothes hanger and she is busy with it. We don’t ask her what it’s for, but I lean against the tree and watch her undo it. She is biting her lower lip and untwisting the wire, which is struggling in her hands. Sbho emerges from behind a bush carrying a twisted metal cup, half of a man’s brown leather belt, and a purple round thingy I don’t know what it is. She lines the items up beside my rocks, and put together like that, everything starts to look like an important collection. Chipo is smiling up at us, and we know she’s happy about not dying, and we know we are not going to let her die.
Do you want to pee? Sbho says, looking at me.
No. I don’t know, why? I say.
Because we need pee, she says.
We need pee?
Well, I can pee, Forgiveness says, but Sbho doesn’t even look at her.
I just peed before I came here, so I have no pee in me, Sbho says.
I said, I can pee, Forgiveness says again, her voice raised this time. She is almost done pulling the hanger apart.
I heard you; you think I’m deaf? It has to be my pee or Darling’s pee, remember, we don’t know you yet, Sbho says, and I smile because I am pleased with Sbho for telling Forgiveness.
Well, I will pee, I say, feeling important now. I want to pee.
Pee in this, Sbho says, and hands me the twisted cup. There is a spider and a web inside so I get a stick to squash the spider, but then I just decide to flip the cup and bang it against a rock instead. The spider crawls away and I clean the web off with a stick. I set the cup on the ground and squat over it, my back turned so I do not have to look anyone in the eye when I pee.
At first it comes in small drops; that’s how pee does, if somebody is watching, then it just won’t come. I get more tiny drops, like I’m squeezing a lemon,
so I close my eyes tight and concentrate.
Why are you taking so long? Forgiveness says, irritated-like, like she is somebody.
Leave her alone, is she peeing with your thing? Sbho says. Then when I’m beginning to think the pee is really not coming, it comes, so I turn around and give Forgiveness a talking eye that says Say something, uh-uh, uh-uh. Afterwards I pick up the cup carefully, it is warm now, and the foam reaches about halfway. I hand the cup to Sbho, who sprinkles earth into it and stirs with a stick and then hands the cup to Chipo, who sits up and takes the cup and drinks the urine without asking questions.
Sbho tells Chipo to lie back down, and then she kneels and lifts Chipo’s dress, pushes it up all the way to her chest, exposing her growing stomach. Underneath, Chipo is wearing a boy’s khaki shorts. There is a long scar on her thigh from when she was pierced by a broken branch when we were stealing guavas and the owners appeared out of nowhere and chased us out of the tree and down the road. Sbho and I start poking Chipo’s stomach with our fingers. It feels hard at the front, like she has swallowed stones, soft at the sides.
It tickles, Chipo says, now that she is back to speaking again. She covers her face with her hands and giggles so hard, I stop pressing her stomach and go for the armpits, where I know it tickles for real. Chipo giggles and giggles until tears start coming in her eyes, until Forgiveness says, Shhhhh, if you make too much noise they will find us. I stop tickling Chipo and stab Forgiveness with my eyes; I mean, who does she think she is?
We Need New Names: A Novel Page 6
