Johan wrote these letters to Zimkitha to save himself from going mad. He kept them, in the vain hope that one day he would reunite with her. He fantasized about how she would read them and forgive him.
Before Zimkitha, the only person who had threatened to break his well-molded idea of black people was Sihle, the sole black student who studied medicine with him. Missionaries had pleaded to get him into a university that did not allow blacks in their classrooms, and the lecturers grudgingly taught him, but secretly wished he wasn’t as smart as he was because he was proving them wrong about young black minds. Sihle was sensitive to this, but his determination to complete his studies was stronger than any discrimination he had to deal with.
Johan now guiltily remembered how he was one of those who had made Sihle’s life hell.
If he ever got that second chance with Zimkitha, would he be brave enough to face up to his father and his family? His thoughts consumed him and he changed into a ghost of his former self. He began operating on autopilot, finishing his medical studies at Wits University, but his mind was barely there. He became addicted to sleeping pills, popping them night after night, as Zimkitha’s burning eyes came for him.
When his family suggested Petra, the daughter of another dominee, for a wife, he did not object. He was tired of fighting. He replaced sleeping pills with stronger, numbing drugs. He was a doctor, he kept telling himself, he was not a common addict.
Petra knew she was competing with something powerful for her husband’s affection. She sank into her own depression, in a loveless, childless marriage. She took comfort in the fact that she was married to a doctor, with a family that appeared to love God. She dared not scratch the surface. Things lurking under the peaceful façade were too frightening.
Zimkitha broke when they threw her into a dark, silent cell and left her there for months. The only sound was the dripping tap, day in and day out. She had grown desperate and had made a plan, which she waited to execute. On the morning that she went into labor, she grabbed hold of the hand that popped in to drop her one meal of the day. She sank her teeth in and locked her jaw like a pit bull. The screams of agony from the warden brought others running. They opened the cell and were confronted by the stinging smell of Zimkitha’s stale urine, and the horror of blood in her mouth. She looked like a crazed animal, her overgrown, unkempt bushy hair covering most of her face.
Right there her water broke. They were shocked into action. While some tended to the bitten woman warder, others busied themselves assisting her to give birth to Nonceba. A new life has a way of making hardened hearts forget about everything else.
Zimkitha decided to name her golden baby Nonceba, “mother of sympathy.”
The baby became her ticket to freedom, but the experience left her too damaged to carry on. She left Johannesburg and went back to be with her mother in the Eastern Cape. Her father had gone out of his mind with worry when he heard about her arrest and had joined the struggle and led strikes. He had been shot and killed for fighting for her release. Then Mae’s talk of returning to America began, but Zimkitha simply refused. Her mother had told her the stories about how she had suffered there, and she didn’t want to be in another country that was spiteful to her.
She wasn’t coping with the baby and with the continued killings of freedom fighters. She became listless. Her spark was gone and the fight had drained out of her. On Nonceba’s first birthday, as they were blowing out the candles on the little girl’s cake and clapping to her joyful, childish squeals, the radio announced a train massacre. The announcer talked of black on black violence, but Zimkitha knew it was so much more than that. Hers and Mae’s faces fell in dismay. They looked at each other and Nonceba, young as she was, sensed the change of mood and began to cry. Her grandmother picked her up and walked about trying to calm her.
Zimkitha began to tremble. The frustration of it was choking her. She couldn’t breathe. Mae held her close and rocked her until she stopped shaking. “I don’t know why I thought we could win this. I don’t know why we even fought this,” she told her mother through her tears.
Young Nonceba was looking at both of them with big sad eyes. Mae switched off the radio and they listened to the sound of the ocean humming nearby.
Zimkitha waited for her mother to take Nonceba with her to the craft circle where Mae worked with community women making baskets.
Then she calmly walked into the waves.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Things turned when Sipho joined Nonceba in the States. He always knew that she was a contained fire that would consume flesh and lick bones clean if she was given the chance. When she met him at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, the cold February air hit him in the face like a strong fist of that beautiful legend, Muhammad Ali. He wanted to turn around and take the next plane back to sunny Africa, but Nonceba was there, bright with joy at meeting up with him again.
He only had to look into Nonceba’s eyes to know that whatever it was that he would face in America, he would stay, because she had his heart. She told him about her grandmother’s funeral. To distract herself from the pain of losing Mae, she had started working in her old law firm again. She said it was just while she was figuring things out about coming back to Africa.
Her apartment was large, with windows that overlooked Lake Michigan. Sipho was amazed that she had left behind such a good life to be with him in Mkhumbane. He laughed long and hard about that.
When he arrived, she made a barbeque at a friend’s house in Oak Park. To get there, they took the L train, crisscrossing above the city through the maze of tall buildings and passing the magnificent home of the Chicago Tribune.
Sipho loved Oak Park. He told the gathering of friends stories of Mkhumbane and Skwiza’s shebeen, and about the first time he had taken Nonceba there. As he spoke, a realization dawned on him, that he belonged in Mkhumbane. He carried on talking, but he knew then that he would not last in Chicago if Nonceba decided to stay in America permanently.
The cold was freezing hairs inside his nostrils and something inside of him was losing balance. He was not used to walking on ice and he kept falling and hitting his ass hard against the cold ground. Then his tailbone started giving him pain.
He laughed and kept drawing strangers towards him. Unlike the tsotsis in Mkhumbane, these people were different. They didn’t want anything from him. They didn’t need his money, and they didn’t bask in the light of him being a lawyer. They were lawyers themselves. They had PhDs at the end of their names and they engaged with each other at an intellectual level.
Sipho held his own comfortably among these intelligent people. It fascinated them, because they could never have imagined this from a real “Aaafrican.” But he became exhausted with the mask he had to wear. He missed Skwiza’s and indulging in mundane small talk about the Soweto soccer derby, his brain soaked in whiskey.
He loved the view of Lake Michigan. It was shiny at night. But the neon lights frustrated him because they added an unnatural golden light onto the water’s surface. He wanted the silver lights of the moon that he was used to where he grew up in eMpendle. Moonlight made everything beautiful to him. He felt spiritually connected to the moon. Lake Michigan gave him comfort.
He struggled to find work and it threw him into a crisis that he never thought possible. The problem for him was that he was a man being supported by a woman. For the first time in his life, he felt the fears of women who had to depend on men. He began to understand why women would do anything to keep their men. He thought of Zola and how different she was; how much courage it must have taken to leave him. Fear gripped his heart like the icy cold Chicago winter air. His laughter was no longer deep and joyful.
He began to feel insecure around Nonceba, who was out climbing the merciless corporate ladder. She worked day in and day out, with double the intensity that she had when she was with Sipho in Mkhumbane, and she became short with him. She had no time to spend with him.
The cold was taking its toll on Sipho too and
he fell into a deep depression. He slept all day, hating the thought of waking up to another grey sky. He stopped taking baths, changing his clothes, and brushing his teeth. This put a nail in the coffin of their intimate lives. “I don’t know what to do, he’s not the man I fell in love with.” Nonceba was in tears on the phone talking to one of her friends. “He’s a shell of himself. He repulses me now. It pains me to say it but, this man who used to make me feel like a queen, now I dread coming home to him.”
Sipho had become so clingy and insecure that he listened to her conversations from the bedroom that only he used now. He wept silently on hearing what he had suspected, but dreaded to admit.
He woke up the next day after Nonceba had gone to work, and looked into the mirror, and what he saw reflected back at him was a picture of his brother, Mzokhona, the river debris. His hair was unkempt, his teeth were coated with a yellow film, and his tongue was furry. He sobbed under a hot shower. The water revived him, then he scrubbed himself and Nonceba’s house clean.
He waited for her to come back to tell her that he was going home. He wanted to be where his feet were planted on the ground. This strange place left him feeling wobbly, like a child learning to walk. Like an exile, he could no longer laugh. A heavy rock sat on his chest, making it hard for him to breathe. Inhaling the air was painful. It felt as if his lungs were being assaulted with ice. He wanted to get back to his work, practicing law and helping those who were on the periphery of society in Mkhumbane and the neighboring shacks.
It was late in the evening when she finally got back. “I knew this day would come,” she said.
He ran out of words, and she cried.
Then, for the first time in a long time, they talked like they used to. She apologized for getting sucked back into her old workaholic ways. She had done some thinking of her own and knew that it was also time for her to return to South Africa. But it was clear to them both that it was time to go their separate ways.
“Just do me one favor,” she said, wiping away her tears. “I will be going to my grandfather’s village when I get to South Africa. Don’t try to contact me. I’ll contact you when I’m ready to face you as a friend and not as a lover.”
She felt that she had unfinished business in the country where her mother had taken her life, her grandfather had died a violent death, and possibly she still had a living, breathing father.
They fell asleep on the carpet, spooning like the children of the shacks who share a single bed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sipho’s house was a sight when he got back to Mkhumbane. In the couple of years that he had been gone, his brother had managed to break everything. The television had a hole in it, the microwave had been sold, and the electricity was unpaid and had been disconnected. Half his towels and linen, bought by Nonceba, had been sold. The rooms were rented out to the strays of the township. They were using paraffin, primus stoves or good old-fashioned firewood, campfire style, to cook on the floor. The whole house smelled of a mixture of paraffin and wood smoke. The walls were black with soot. Even the bathroom was being used as a sleeping area for two homeless children.
Sipho’s brother had the telltale signs that drinking had taken a toll on him. He looked older than Sipho by a number of years, although he was ten years younger. It was hard to work out if he was smiling or sneering when he revealed his red gums and greenish teeth. He was surprised by Sipho’s unannounced return and scared of how he would react to the state of the place.
Sipho was shocked by what he saw. He headed to the only family he knew, Zola and Mvelo, at their shack. They were still there, and their home was clean and welcoming.
Mvelo thought she was dreaming when she lifted her eyes and saw a tall, familiar figure walking towards her. A scream of joy lifted from her chest and rang out across the shack valley. “It’s him,” she shouted, “he is back. Ma, Sipho is back!” She ran towards him, crashing against his broad chest. His laughter rang like music in her ears. Zola stood at the door, leaning heavily against it, trying to keep her face neutral but she couldn’t suppress a smile. She didn’t want to show too much excitement. The history between them had taught her to be guarded, but the love she felt for Sipho remained.
Nonceba was not with him, but Mvelo settled for the fact that at least he was back. She still enjoyed the care packages that Nonceba sent.
Sipho regaled them with stories, showered them with presents from America, and before they knew it, it was deep into the middle of the night. The excitement of it all finally got the better of Mvelo, who gave in to a sweet sleep. Sipho and Zola surrendered to the pull of familiarity with each other’s bodies, for old time’s sake.
It was a beautiful Saturday morning when Mvelo woke with Sipho and Zola under one roof. She began to nurse abandoned hopes that perhaps they would be a family again.
Zola had a small tune on her lips as she prepared breakfast for them, like she always had when she was happy. Sipho and Mvelo looked at each other and smiled. It made them happy hearing Zola singing like that.
After finishing their porridge, they all went back to Sipho’s house. Zola took two buckets, a scrubbing brush, Jeyes Fluid and liquid soap to help him clean the house.
His brother had seen the writing on the wall and told all his “tenants” to disappear, threatening them with Nonceba. “You better scram, the great witch of Mkhumbane is back. Find other shelters because this one is no longer available.”
Bringing up Nonceba’s name was the magic word. They disappeared faster than cockroaches at the sight of light. Some didn’t know her in person, but the stories were enough to make them pack what they could and go.
Sipho sighed with relief when he saw that they did not resist their eviction. His brother winked at him, pleased with his own quick thinking. There was no stiff formal apology between the two. Sipho took a hosepipe and sprayed him down and playfully chased him around as he sputtered. Life went on. He was Sipho’s leech, and Sipho obliged as part of that unquestioned family obligation. They were brothers.
Zola and Mvelo spent the weekend cleaning, scrubbing down the walls. Sipho’s friends from the tavern joined in when they heard that he had come back alone without the witch. His brother, of course, wormed his way out of everything. He developed “crippling flu,” and just as the house got back to its old shining glory the following week, he recovered miraculously with an unquenchable thirst for a “cold one.” After he was refreshed, he had enough strength to start teasing Zola again. “Now that my brother is back, you know who I am, don’t you? You wouldn’t give me the time of day before. Don’t get comfortable, Nonceba is coming back.” Sipho shot him a warning look, but he wouldn’t stop.
When Zola packed up after the cleanup, and got ready to return home, Sipho was surprised. He had assumed they would be moving back with him. Zola had entertained no such idea.
“But what about the other night?” he said.
“What about it?”
“Well, can’t we forget about the past and try again?” he asked, exasperated.
She laughed and said, “I see things haven’t changed a bit with you. Please take us back to where we belong. I have helped you with your house; now please take me back to mine.”
She had recovered from Sipho’s charms. She had been surprised beyond belief when he’d showed up like that. In her state of shock, she had done things she’d vowed never to do again with Sipho.
A few days of thinking while cleaning had jogged her memory and brought her back to her senses.
Sipho was taken aback. He didn’t know what he had really expected. He just knew that he needed someone to make him feel like a man again, someone to adore him like she and Mvelo used to. The fact is, they did, but they also had their own lives that did not have him at the center. He discovered that Zola was still soft and gentle on the outside, but pure steel on the inside.
She was no longer bitter towards him. In fact, it was quite the opposite. She was happy to see him, and made it known, but she wouldn�
��t let him into her life as a provider and rescuer again. She no longer needed his protection. Life in the shacks had taught her to stiffen her spine and get on with surviving and providing for her daughter. Sipho was no longer the god he had been to her back then.
It drove him crazy. He was feeling lost and vulnerable. He wanted Zola to anchor him, to ease him back to the old, assured self that he was before he began depending on somebody else’s salary. He still couldn’t promise Zola that there wouldn’t be others competing for his affections. But at that moment, she was the one he wanted.
Zola’s refusal drove him into the arms of many desperate Mkhumbane floozies. He called it sexual healing. He needed to affirm his manliness and balance himself again. From a distance, Zola watched with disappointment. Even Mvelo knew then that what he was doing was wrong.
She was growing up and she had come to believe that there were certain expectations when someone said they loved you. It didn’t seem right just to spread the love all over the place. Also, at school they were learning about the spread of HIV-AIDS, and she was worried for Sipho.
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