by Zakes Mda
‘The what?’
‘It is still there, Toloki. The calendar with the picture you made.’
He had forgotten about the calendar. When he won the national art competition, his colourful drawing was one of twelve that were selected for use in the following year’s calendar. His was chosen for April. Even though Jwara had not shown any appreciation of the books that his son had won as a prize, Toloki hoped that he would be happy about the calendar. After all, it was going to grace the walls of homes and offices throughout the land. In April, everyone would know who Toloki was, for his name was printed just below the picture, together with the name of his school, and his age, and the class he was doing. Once more the big man from the milling company drove all the way from town to the village school to deliver a big bunch of calendars. Toloki asked for three, one each for himself, his father, and his mother. When he got home he ran excitedly to the workshop, and found his father brooding over his figurines.
‘So, now you think you are better? You think you are a great creator like me?’
‘I want to be like you, father. I want to create from dreams like you.’
‘Don’t you see, you poor boy, that you are too ugly for that? How can beautiful things come from you?’
But Toloki’s mother said Jwara was jealous.
‘Ha! The stupid images that you make have never appeared in any calendar. Toloki’s picture will be seen all over the country’
Jwara was so angry that he decreed that the disastrous calendar must never be seen in his house again. From that day, Toloki gave up trying to impress his father. And he gave up drawing pictures. He even – tearfully and with bitterness that gnawed at him for a long time afterwards – destroyed his precious calendar. But at his school they were proud of it, and through all the years, it was always April on the classroom wall. He is surprised to hear from Noria that to this day, after more than twenty years, it is still yellowing April at his school.
When the neighbours wake up that morning, they all come to witness the wonder that grew in the night. They marvel at the workmanship, and at how the plastic and canvas of different colours have been woven together to form patterns that seem to say something to the viewer. No one can really say what their message is, except to observe that it is a very profound one.
Toloki and Noria are working inside the shack, sweeping the floor with branches from a tree and firming it with their feet, when they hear a song outside. They walk out, and meet the singers: a group of children carrying water in small buckets and in bottles. Toloki recognises some of those who accompanied him with song and dance when he came looking for Noria yesterday.
‘We have brought you water for your floor, Mother Noria.’
‘Thank you, my children.’
The two creators mix soil and water to make very soft mud. Then they plaster the mud on the floor, making the geometric patterns that women make with cow dung back in the village. All the time the children sing and dance outside. At one stage they sing the song that they composed about Toloki yesterday. Noria angrily tells them that it is naughty of them to sing rude songs about adults. Toloki says, ‘Let them sing, Noria. Never stifle the creativity of children.’ But they are ashamed to sing the song again. Instead they sing other songs, some of which they have heard their parents, and their brothers and sisters, sing at demonstrations, and at political rallies and funerals. Soon the song becomes stronger, with the voices of adults joining in. The women of the neighbourhood, following the lead of their children, are bringing all sorts of household items to the shack. There are pots, a primus stove, a washing basin, a plastic bucket, a plate, and a spoon. There are even two old grey blankets, which are known as donkey blankets because of their colour, and a pillow. Another neighbour has brought a billycan of soured soft porridge, and steamed bread.
‘We want to lend you these things, Noria. You can use them until your situation has changed for the better, when you have found yourself.’
‘Thank you very much. Just leave them out there. I’ll put them inside when the floor is dry.’
‘You are lucky, Noria, to have neighbours like these.’
‘It is our life here at the settlement, Toloki. We are like two hands that wash each other.’
By midday the performers have all left, and the creators are hungry. They sit outside the shack and eat the steamed bread, and drink the porridge from the billy. Shadrack comes and joins them. He praises their work, and thanks Toloki for helping Noria. Toloki wonders why he should take it upon himself to thank him on behalf of Noria. Where was he when he was growing up with Noria in the village? But he keeps these thoughts to himself, and gracefully accepts the man’s expression of gratitude. Then Shadrack says he wants to talk privately with Noria. She stands up and they go behind the shack. Toloki can hear every word they say.
Shadrack says that he wants to return all the money she paid him for petrol. Noria wants to know why. In a voice that is hoarse with passion, he says, ‘Because I have realised how much I love you, Noria. When we were in the van, and we were talking about our lives, and our dreams for our people, I realised that you were my soulmate. I think this has been growing in me for a while. I do not know why I was blind for such a long time.’
Noria thanks him for his kind words, and says that it is very flattering for her, a ragged woman of hopeless means, to be loved by such a great man as Bhut’Shaddy. Indeed the temptation is very great for her to be captivated by his honeyed tone. But unfortunately she finds it impossible to love at the moment. She advises the lovelorn man to find someone more deserving of his affection. There are many young girls – some of them are even beauty queens and others have education – who would give their right arm to be his wife. Shadrack utters an anguished scream, ‘I need you, Noria. I have no one to eat my money with.’
‘You need me for the wrong reasons, Bhut’Shaddy.’
‘At least think about it, Noria. And please take this money.’
‘I am sorry, Bhut’Shaddy, I cannot accept it.’
Noria comes back to join Toloki, who is watching a disappointed Shadrack scurry away in shame. There is a glint of satisfaction in Toloki’s eyes. But then again, he realises that his glee might be premature. Perhaps Noria is playing a game with Shadrack. Women are known to play such games before accepting proposals.
‘Why did you do it? You know he could make you live like a queen?’
‘I do not take things from men, Toloki.’
‘You do not? I thought . . .’
‘That was long ago, Toloki. Life has changed since then. Even you, I am going to pay you back every cent you have helped me with.’
‘But I was doing it for you, Noria, because you are my home-girl, and we played together when we were children.’
‘I accepted your help because I knew you were doing it from your kind heart. You did not expect anything in return. But I insist that when I have found myself, I’ll pay you back.’
This is not the Noria of the village. In the village, we all knew that by the time she reached her mid-teens, she had acquired a reputation for making men happy. And in return they gave her things, which she gladly accepted. We were not sure whether it was Jwara who started her on this road. After all, she sang for him from the age of five, and he showered her with expensive presents in return.
The Noria of the village. Both she and Toloki began school in the same year. She was seven, and he was ten. He began school at a ripe old age because he had been looking after his father’s small flock of sheep and goats. This was before Jwara sold the animals to Xesibe in order to concentrate on his smithy. Toloki and Noria used to walk to school together. She cut a pretty picture in her khaki shirt and pitch-black gymdress, which was ironed every morning by That Mountain Woman. Unlike the gymdresses of other pupils at school, it maintained its sharp pleats, and it was not patched. Toloki, on the other hand, wore a khaki shirt and khaki shorts that were patched all over with pieces of cloth from his mother’s old dresses.
Strangers would stop t
he two children on their way to school and comment, ‘What a beautiful little girl. And look at her brother! He looks like something that has come to fetch us to the next world. Whose children are you, my children?’ And Noria would give a pained squeal, ‘He is not my brother!’ Sometimes we would stop them when they came back from school. We would tell Toloki to run home while we detained Noria for a few moments of her laughter. She enjoyed all this attention, and as she grew older she devised ways of using it to her advantage. She knew that her influence came from her ability to give others pleasure. She could give or withhold pleasure at will, and this made her very powerful.
The older Noria grew, the further away she drifted from Toloki. She began to wear shoes, and this enhanced her feeling of self-importance. She developed other interests, and no longer played with Toloki. Even in class, ho would not see her for days on end. He would only have a glimpse of her on those afternoons when she went to sing for Jwara.
Noria would leave home in the morning wearing her beautiful gymdress, and carrying her schoolbag. When we saw a schoolbag for the first time, it belonged to Noria, of course. She would walk with the other pupils only as far as the general dealer’s store, where she would disappear in one of the pitlatrines. A few minutes later she would emerge wearing the polka-dot dress that That Mountain Woman had bought her in town against Xesibe’s wishes; he said that village girls of Noria’s age did not wear ready-made dresses, but his words went unheard, as usual. Her face would be pale with powder, and her lips red with lipstick. Her gymdress and khaki shirt would be neatly folded in her schoolbag. She would then catch the bus to town, where she would give pleasure to bus drivers and conductors. Later, when there were mini-bus taxis that raced between the village and the town, she would ride around in these taxis, dispensing pleasure to the drivers, who would buy her gifts and flatter her. In the afternoons, she would go back to the public toilet, change into her school uniform, remove her make-up, and go home.
We saw all the things that Noria was doing, and we made the mistake of telling That Mountain Woman. She was very angry with us, and called us children of puffadders. She said we were consumed by the worms of jealousy in our sinister hearts because Noria was beautiful, and had the power to give or withhold pleasure. She went on to say that our mothers were whores who had regretfully made bad jobs of aborting us. This last one did not surprise us in the least. After all, That Mountain Woman once called her own husband, right there in front of everybody, the product of a botched abortion. Obviously it was a favourite label that she gave to people she did not like.
We did not argue with her. At that time she had begun to practise full-time as a medicine woman, and it was a credit to our wisdom that we did not challenge the razor blades in her tongue. In any case, even before she converted one of her rondavels into a consulting room where people came to be cured of ailments caused by wizards and witches, while she was still using her medical skills only for the benefit of her family and friends, we were wary of exchanging words with her.
There was a young man we used to see sauntering, or perhaps loitering, near Xesibe’s homestead. He was very scrawny, and looked as if his mother had not fed him properly when he was a baby. He would walk up the pathway past Xesibe’s houses, and then back again, whistling to himself. He performed this strange ritual mostly on weekends, in the evenings when the herdboys had already confined the cattle in their kraals, and were sitting around the fire roasting maize, and telling lies to one another. Sometimes Toloki would be sitting with those herdboys, reliving the time when he was one of them before he went to school, and shaping cattle and horses with the red clay that the boys brought him from the river-banks. He was much older than these boys, but he preferred their company since they did not have terrible things to say about him. They did not judge his looks as harshly as their parents did. In fact, he was their hero, as his deft hands could shape clay cattle that looked like real cattle.
Xesibe suspected the scrawny man of being a thief, who was coming to survey his big herd of cattle, with the intention of stealing some of the animals in the future. But the herdboys told him not to worry, the man posed no threat to his animals. Perhaps they knew something that he did not know. However, the fact that Noria would suddenly come alive whenever she heard the whistle did not pass unnoticed. She would put on her shoes and trip out of the house.
‘Where are you going at this time of the night, Noria?’
‘I am going to sing for Toloki’s father, father.’
Xesibe had learnt never to complain about Noria’s activities with Jwara, lest he invited his wife’s scabrous tongue. That Mountain Woman, on the other hand, did not seem to notice what was happening, since she spent most of her time locked up in her consulting room, extracting evil spirits and demons from ailing patients, and administering love-potions to the lovesick and the lovelorn.
Noria did not go to sing for Jwara. Instead she went to join the scrawny young man, and together they would disappear behind the aloes. The herdboys enjoyed those moments, and would tiptoe to the aloes, and peep through the thick pointed leaves. They would then breathe heavily, and those who had already reached puberty would wet the pieces of cloth that covered their groins. They enjoyed these escapades, and whenever they saw the young man, they would become excited, for they knew that he embodied pleasures that were beyond imagination. Spying on his antics with Noria was certainly a much better experience than molesting goats in the veld. Toloki had once joined them in watching one such performance, but was so disgusted that he vomited. Since then, he was satisfied with only hearing the stories that the herdboys told about the pleasures behind the aloes, without seeing them for himself. Late in the night, when the fires had long since turned into ashes, Noria would slink back into her father’s house, with pieces of dry grass stuck to the back of her head.
That Mountain Woman finally noticed that there was a scrawny young man who was paying particular attention to Noria. But at the time she did not know of the adventures behind the aloes.
‘Who is he, Noria?’
‘His name is Napu.’
‘Where does he live? Whose child is he?’
‘I do not know his parents. He lives in town.’
‘What is his job?’
‘He is a labourer in a brickmaking yard.’
‘Did I bring you up to waste your life with mere labourers? Do you want to end up with a man who is as useless as your father?’
‘But father is one of the most successful farmers in the village, with many cattle too.’
‘He is still useless. And don’t you answer me back. Your labourer, what does he have?’
‘Nothing yet.’
‘I forbid you to see him, Noria. You will be married to a teacher, or a clerk of a general dealer’s store.’
A few months later we heard that Noria had run away with Napu. They were living together in a shack in the brickyard in town. That Mountain Woman was not amused. She felt that Noria had let her down. Xesibe rubbed salt into the wound, saying, ‘You see, Mother of Noria, it is all your fault. Now you are paying for spoiling this child.’ That Mountain Woman told him to go empty his bowels out there in the dongas, and that was the end of his I-told-you-so attitude.
We later learnt that Noria ran away because she was heavy with child. That Mountain Woman said she was very stupid to run away from home for such a trivial reason. Didn’t she know that her mother had all the herbs to destroy the stomach even in the fourth month? Was she not aware of the young wives of migrants, who made mistakes in the absence of their husbands, and who came to her for assistance? If she could help strangers correct their mistakes – for a sizeable fee, of course – she would have happily helped her own daughter. Xesibe was more concerned with the shame that his family would suffer. No one from the young man’s family came to negotiate lobola, and no cattle were paid to his kraal for the hand of his only daughter. Surely he was going to be a laughing stock. That Mountain Woman forbade anyone to go to town to see Noria. �
�She will come back,’ she said. ‘I’ll make her come back.’
But Noria did not come back. Although the town, which used to be two hours away by bus, was now only one hour away since the mini-bus taxis were introduced, we did not see Noria for a long time. We heard that after signing papers of marriage with her in front of a magistrate, Napu had taken her to his home village in the mountains, and had left her there with his grandmother. Napu did not have any parents, and was brought up by his grandmother. His intention was that Noria should stay there until the baby was born. His grandmother would help her nurse the baby. It did not worry them much that this was already against the custom that the first child should be born at the mother’s home. Their main concern was that Noria’s parents should not find her. And indeed it would have been impossible to find her in that mountain village, so far away from everywhere else.
Noria later told us of the things that happened to her in that mountain village. Napu’s grandmother was a vicious woman whom Noria suspected of being a witch. Her homestead was composed of only one hovel, and her only means of survival was through the monthly allowance that Napu sent her.
One day, an old man came to visit the grandmother and stayed until late. At night, the two old fogeys mixed some herbs, boiled them, and put the water in an old rusty bathtub. Next they ordered Noria to take off her clothes, and take a bath. But she refused. They were angry with her, and cursed her, saying that she was going to suffer before she could see her child. It was late at night, and the old man did not go away. Noria decided to spread her blankets on the floor, and sleep. When they thought she was fast asleep, the grandmother stripped naked, and danced over her, chanting in some strange language. The old man just sat on the bench, and mumbled unintelligibly as if he was in a trance. Just before dawn the old man finally left, and the grandmother got into Noria’s blankets and fell fast asleep.
The next morning, Noria was extremely uncomfortable in the presence of the old hag. But the grandmother was all sweet like honey, and behaved as if nothing had happened. Noria avoided her assiduously. At midday, by some stroke of good fortune and coincidence, her husband arrived. Noria was besides herself with joy. But for some strange reason that Napu could not understand, his grandmother was very angry to see him.
