We are heavy with so many stories. We are dying from them.
*
These are the things of bruises and blood and breast-milk.
Of memory imbued in marrow and laden things like family, like feeling. Fallacies and fictions.
These are the things that the body absorbs. That transfer in platelets and haemoglobin hurt.
That knot-up and build heavy monuments on the flattened soft of the shoulder-blades, pulling them up to the ears, head slunk low.
This is what we were given. Our anaemic inheritance - sour and sweet and rheumy, a line of fine fear trailing from the navel down. A feint line in brown splitting the forehead.
The body and its borrowed stories. A woman and a woman before her and the women before them.
See here the things of twilight hours and a new-born baby in a bed, wedged in between two heaving bodies sunken with sleep, satin canary-yellow covers in a backroom in yard in Zola. It is early morning. The light is feather-weight wispy. It rollicks in playful rivulets, whispering through shut windows and it tumbles down and blots out; a double bed, three bodies horizontal in it. Another body upright next to them; the shadow of a woman who appears to be in some kind of uniform, a matching angular hat tipped to the right on her head. The baby, face wrinkled by amniotic fluid and hands balled up with slivers of placenta in the palm, hoisted into the air. Her head and neck cradled and secured, tiny body held up against a fleshy chest in a way that there is no word for in English… ukufumbatha.
The woman holds the child, coos, coddles, hums something indistinct - the notes undulating raspy and wet in her throat. She is the result of a love so forceful it has made death just another thing to conquer. A smaller death. A death that can be broken into its parts and meted out piece-by-piece and allocated appropriately. A bleeding out, a raspy breath, a death rattle one day. Another day, blood gone blue, the body stiffened. Rigamortis. And over a few more days the weakening of the twisted bonds that hold soul within skin. That hook a person in one world, or the next. They say it smells like lavender, the moment a spirit leaks free from its shell. She plays with the baby girl and fills the room violet. She gives it her names. She spins with it slowly, holds it up to the light and lets the airy amber baptize. She rubs the moist from the baby’s chest and sings to it the songs of forever. Nursery rhymes for the shadow-life. Songs of the inbetween. Her voice is like frozen rivers; it twinkles and falls to the floor in shattered crystal.
The mother of the baby girl lies in the bed, silky yellow to the neck, awake but pretending not to be. She squints through furrowed eyes, stills her movement, her breath, the thundering of her heart. She listens to the breaking, the stalactite fracturing into sharp angles. The dead woman playing with her child. Amuthekethisa.
*
The house is four-roomed bungalow in the middle of a street the leads to the public clinic in one direction, and a dry veld, a rubbish heap and the mining hostels right at the back. It has a rouge roof that curves and hangs really low like fringing. Two bedrooms that receive little natural light, a living room that faces out onto small patch of grass, a scatter of aloe to ward off evil eyes and cursed tongues, and a large oak tree that constantly bleeds sap, and then the street. The kitchen in the back has one those doors that open separately on the top and the bottom, and when the top flap is swing out, it opens out onto a garage that has been extended and converted into two outside bedrooms, and next to that, a small concrete and brick cubicle.
If they found her body, it would be in the outside toilet behind the house, behind the back room, a dog leashed to the wall separating this house from the next. A one metre by one metre compartment with those old-school black-and-white cisterns that flush by chain. Perhaps she thought the cramps would pass when they first gripped her, tissue pulling away from the inside. And she tossed and turned and kicked, and tossed the covers off, bucking at them where they tangled and caught her at the ankle. Maybe she stumbled to the kitchen for glass of water - hand holding her stomach in - when a wave of pain like a cold knife bent her over at the waist, one hand gripping the sink. She breathes. Slow. Tries to control it but it sucks in ragged-like, crashing over invisible jagged edges and raised rocks. Maybe as she put the glass on the counter, it tipped over the edge and the water pooled around her feet, washing over her toes, the webs of her feet, diluting the blood spilled down her legs. Would this be the first time she noticed it? The Blood. Stopped low to wipe up the mess and seeing a red that should not be there. This is going according to plan, she thinks. This is the plan, she thinks and she can no longer hold her stomach down. She stays low on the ground, drags herself on knees, on palms out the kitchen, out the kitchen door, crawling on cement to outside bathroom.
*
I walk into rooms and women cry and men cry out.
If you are struggling to imagine this heaviness, picture yourself standing naked in large cylindrical room that is slowly filling with the tears of the people of you love. They gawk at you, point, cry. You lift your arms above your head as the water rises, spinning slowly for inspection, gulping at the saline water when it starts to reach chin level.
*
These are the things of gossip disguised as cautionary tales. Conspiratorial tongues curling around scandal and shame. Whispered loud enough to infect us with the salacious. A story my mother once told me and no-one has repeated it since. Something in her eyes that had no place there. Something gleeful. The saccharine sweetness of the pain of others. We were in the car headed home, my shoes off on the floor of the vehicle, my one leg crumpled against the dashboard. It was hot then, the windows cracked slightly open and I sat in the passenger seat eating a sandwich I had packed for lunch while she sucked litchi juice out of a green and blue carton. I know my mother’s side profile better then I know her face and its features. We are always next to each other, eyeing each other from the side rather that full on. If I had to paint her into immortality it would be from this view. A beautiful half-woman with a sharp nose and a round dimpled cheek. She puts her car into gear and I watch the half-face turn to look out the window, become a full black curly afro and then a nose, an eye, a dimple again. “I mean, angazi, but that’s what I heard.” She shifts the gears back down into second, her wedding ring gleaming against the plastic. “I don’t know. I don’t think she was trying to kill herself. I think maybe she thought because she’s a nurse, she could do it herself.”
The indicators click, a mechanical heartbeat. I swallow hard a bolus of bread and tears and watch swatches of grey and grey smudge outside the window blurring my understanding.
I look into my mother’s eye and there something lightening sits that is too ecstatic. I look away and brush bread crumbs off my skirt as she presses down on the accelerator and lurches the car back into motion.
“Shame. Maybe she was embarrassed that she was unmarried and having another child. Maybe the father of the child was a married man. We didn’t even know she was dating and then the next thing, she was dead.”
We pull into the parking lot of a Kwik Spar and she opens the car door, tilts sideways and steps one leg onto tar.
“Are you coming with or are you going to stay in the car asking silly questions?”
*
When she was a teacher, my mother found foetuses swimming in toilet bowls and lodged in pipes and blocking drains. Water would flow out of tubing, bursting out, drowning the floors in faecal matter urine and foetus, flowing out of drains and into gutters, into streets, into classrooms. Her students drank boiled Coca-Cola with two dissolved aspirins to heave a stomach before it becomes. They drank bleach and vinegar and disinfectant to throw a stomach flat. They drank herbs in hot water to submerge a stomach bloated, and jumped from the top of cupboards, from ledges, from stairs, hoping to dislodge the stomach on impact. They stuck unfurled wire hangers up their vaginas and bled out into regulation uniforms, slumping spent under timber tables, crimson gathering in their leather school shoes.
*
In long drops; in communal outside toilets without doors; wrapped in plastic bags and thrown in illegal dumping sites for dogs to maul; in the dustbins behind the Methodist Church; in paper bags from KFC floating on an open sewer; thrown over the fence into the neighbour’s yard; wrapped in two layers of cloth - muslin and something printed in coltish shapes and colours - in a green municipal rubbish bin outside a busy complex on Honeyguide Road in Douglasdale; in another bin at 7am in Weltervreden Park found by a man digging through the refuse for something to save, spare, upcycle; in a Sasol dumping site amongst industrial waste; at a home for “battered women and unwed mothers”; wrapped in lined Exam Paper outside the back fence of Elandspoort High School; on the corner of Adam and Shilling in shoebox accidently kicked open by a legal clerk running to catch the bus to work; at the station on top of cigarette butts and torn ticket stubs; in a shopping bag searched when the 17 year old carrier was suspected for shoplifting; in a coffin with the body of a bishop; in a handbag.
*
My father is silent man. A quiet something brewing in chipped terracotta. A difficult thing to understand, to hold. We touch each other maybe six, maybe five times a year and I remember these moments by occasions that give them rise. Reason as impetus. A force driving us to recognise each other as blood and as needing. As equally human and hurt and warm somewhere underneath. As broken things desperate to patch up the leaks, we sometimes find each other awkwardly folded into a dead-limbed arachnoid embrace, the orotund weight of so many limping years, a pocket of air anchored firmly between us. There is no circumnavigating it. No way of stripping time of its shadow. We drag these chains, wrapping them taut around our bodies, tucking them into the hems of pants and the sleeves of our selves.
We are not dead. Just dormant. At rest.
It wasn’t always like this. We had more effervescent times; candied things in bright wrappers and other things chocolate coated. A snoring mass passed out in the couch while his daughter stacks books and cushions on his undulating form. Birthday cards with hand-drawn illustrations on the inside. Before time armed us like this, a man and a woman on the opposing ends on history. It wasn’t always how it is now.
He speaks very little about himself, stuffing his life into his children’s. Stuffing his secrets into the hollowed-out calcium of clean, boiled bones.
Have you heard the one about the man, first generation in University, stuck in a car with his daughter and hoping to thaw the years carved in ice?
One night we’re driving to a take-out place in an outlet mall to buy burgers with cheese and bacon. Just us in the car and the radio loud and the stars, shallow luminescence in the sky. I’ve come home from University for the first time and we’re laughing, really laughing about jogging ghosts on Upper Campus and dining hall food. About the kid who said he saw the kitchen staff trapping pigeons in a cage behind the men’s residence. About the rats scuttling on the roof and the woman in the laundry room banging on pipes and crying. Flickering the lights and blocking the pipes and crying. In the car, mirthful and full. There is word I once came across that I have never been able to remember, that slips from reach when I need it the most. A feeling so full that you are immersed in it, so abundant that it is an entire cosmology. The realization that in all the other colours smudging past, their tinctures trapped in your headlights, are moments this full and this complex. Other kinds of lives with other kinds happinesses in various metallic shades of iridescence, of grey, of indigo. In that car - in the metal and glass and hide – he unfurled a little.
He laughs and tells me about leaving for University, the first in his family. He’s still laughing when he says he watched his friends pack to leave years before him, how he stayed and worked and saved. How he arrived on campus with just enough money for one semester, still laughing.
“You know, I got my first pair of pyjamas as a gift when I left for school. Of course, I never had pyjamas before. We didn’t have money for those kinds of things.”
*
In the cubicle she sits on the bowl, head to her knees. Her arms are outstretched on either side of her to prop the walls up, to pull them down. The bones of her vagina are melting and something large, heavy and warm grows there. The waters escape from between her legs falling into the bowl loudly, the waters escape from her mouth, from her nose, from her throat in a scream. The pressure doesn’t lessen. It builds and builds and keeps leaking. The walls had just been painted in an anorexic pink, but the older chalky green still lurks there in corners and glows through the thinner parts of the coat. She breathes quickly now, sits upright on the plastic seat and wipes her wet mouth with a page torn from the M-section of the Yellow Pages lying on the concrete flooring.
*
We drove home in silence, the food in a brown bag heating on my lap. My father’s story dark, its contours shadowy in the back seat, in the rearview mirror, blowing through the plastic air-con vents.
Maybe the word I’m looking for is Sonder. From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Noun. “The realization that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness – an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window in the dark.”
*
My father locks himself in his study. A small room with oversized furniture and books from wall to wall. To walk in you have to really push the door, forcing your entire body’s weight onto it. On the left are three bookshelves, two of them stacked one on the other. A large window looks out onto a gargantuan tree with branches leaning perilously over the room. Every time it storms and a bulky mature branch thunders onto the roof, he promises Ma that he’ll trim its boughs, but he never does. Above his desk, a masculine leather and mahogany thing and on the wall above it, another shelf, and on this shelf to the right, near the windows, an ancient edition of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
I was five or so, just starting school and bouncing between my aunts, my grandparents and my parents who had recently bought their first house in a middle-income suburb. They had planned our first holiday, saved for it, a trip to Cape Town over the long and scorching December Holiday. One day a white man comes knocking on their door. He’s dressed in a suit, cheap polyester and ugly tan but its sharply pressed, neat and clean if not a little too long in the arms and legs. He says he has something for them, that’ll change their lives and secure their daughter’s futures. So they let him in and offer him, tea, coffee, juice, ice-cold water from the fridge. He sits on one couch and when Ma emerges from the kitchen, a tray in her hand, she sits on a navy-blue patterned seater next to my father, opposite the strange diminutive white man in their home.
He adds way too much sugar in his coffee. Ma watches as he hovers the teaspoon above his cup and then upends the sugar bowl into his brew, not so much measuring with the teaspoon as he is creating a diversion in the grainy stream. “A man who throws so much sugar into his tea is not to be trusted,” she thinks. But she ties her tongue, dissolves two pills of sweetener into her cup. “I know you probably get a lot people knocking on your door.” He loosens his tie, uses the hem of his sleeve to dab at pearls of sweat that are beginning to dew above his upper lip. “People selling Tupperware. People selling vacuum cleaners and all these miracle chemicals that clean impeccably and last forever. Huh,” he snorts and turns to my mom, “a woman like you must know what I’m talking about. Surely you get people on this sofa everyday trying to sell you make-up and harsh perfume. Those things smell like air freshener.” His laugh is forced but he keeps at, awaiting a reaction. Ma smiles as politely as she can muster, “I’m at work all day so I wouldn’t know” she raises the cup to her lips. “But I can just imagine them wearing the threads of my furniture thin.” He asks too many questions. Tells too many flat jokes. How many children do you have? One they tell him. A girl or boy. How old? In school? Which school? Ah, very good, very good. That’s a very good school.
“See, I’m a salesman, yes, but I’m nothing like the salesmen who have come here before. I’m not trying to sell you useless expensive things that you’ll never use. What I’m here for is now is not for me. It’s not for you. This is for your children.” My father had been quiet the whole time, barely attentive, laughing and making sounds in his throat whenever breaks in the man’s soliloquy would allow. He snaps to and leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees. The man in the cheap suit unzips his luggage, pulls out a stack of large books and places them on the table with a thud, rattling the crockery. He points at things around the house, a framed painted landscape, a CD on the table, a newspaper next to him and then picks a book, labelled from A to Z, turns to the appropriate page and corresponding entry, and rattles off an impressive list of facts. “So now when you daughter asks for help with her homework, you never have to say that you don’t know the answer.” So they cancelled their holiday and bought a 12 book edition of the black and red Encyclopaedia Britannica.
On the table is a filing cabinet and I’m flipping through files and books and loose blades of paper. At the bottom of a drawer, under greyscale scans of an ID books, a passport, is hand-sized booklet with a navy-blue cover. Bits of the plastic chip off the cover, they cover my hands in scales. On the face of it, a gilded emblem, some embossed crest with two Springboks en-point. On the inside, two sheets from the back is a the “personal particulars/ persoonlike besonderheid” page.
Thulisile Khubeka
Zulu
Female/Vroulik
1955
A stamp marks the date of issue. Wavy lines swim over the page: over a picture of her face, over a signature (Director of Bantu Reference) in the corner. She stares into the lens unsmiling. Her hair is braided into a crown on the top of her head. Her full lips pursed against each other, tight at the edges of her mouth. She swallows secrets. She stares.
So this is her. This woman who, when I walk into rooms makes women cry and men cry out. I let my father’s chair swallow me as I pore over the image, this stranger who has shadowed me, who sits hard on my cheekbones and sad in my eyes.
To recreate this moment, grab as much skin as can from under your jowls, pinching and tugging at until you feel it pop free. Gently, very gently, peel your face off, placing it on a flat surface in front of you. Now you ask yourself, “Do you recognise this woman?”
*
Breathe, she reminds herself searching out for the strokes of green. A bubble, hard and sharp sits on her chest and rises slowly up her throat. Breath. This is the plan. This is what you wanted. She leaks life into the waters of the pink toilet in the back. More is demanded. She tries to get up, tries to steady herself. She places her forehead on the cool of the wall, tilts her head down, parts her legs further and vomits into a puddle of red that has begun to develop there. She turns around and slides down the wall, sits in the mess that is her. Her legs collapsed in red, in brown, in pink, in grey, in fleshy fatty white.
*
Another rumour, mostly unconfirmed. A portrait of the father as young man, maybe five, maybe six. He’s all joints and dermis, knobble knee-caps punching their way skin. Piercing elbows bruising through his arms. There’s a function of sorts and the all the adults are in their second-hand finest. They sit in the lounge talking loudly and drinking quarts of beer from coffee mugs, routinely adjusting their wigs. A woman in apron, his aunt calls the children in to eat. Three plates are put on the floor, one for the meat, one for the cabbage, one the pap. The children stand in a line to wash their hands and then sit in a loose round shape, the food in the middle. They roll their sleeves up their arms and dig the hands into the plates, mushing the pap to soften it and cool it, rolling it to balls and dipping them into the meat sauce. The young boy lifts a handful to his mouth, pops it in, and before he can swallow, is yanked to his feet by the scruff of his neck. His aunt’s rough hands on his collar. “Hayi. Not you. I don’t want my children eating with filthy you.”
*
Luctipathy. Noun. A hollowness in your gut generated but blood sadness, of the pains that swim in your bloodstream that aren’t yours. That are passed down the lineage from generation to generation.
