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death of a hunchback In the summer of 86 a stranger arrives to take up with a reclusive old woman on the margins of a secluded settlement

in rural Transkei. Enigmatic in his walkabout, he stays on and mingles with the people, imposing himself upon their daily routine. Much to their anticipation, and sometimes displeasure, he remains unspecific in his intentions, past the death of his host. This until they decide for themselves his meaning

death of a hunchback
by S. Ayanda Skolo

1 Shadow of the forest

In the depths of the Eastern Cape, between the towns of Maclear and Mount Fletcher, is a place of pristine landscape that lies like a flyleaf, unwritten and untainted, incarnating a million millennia of nurtured perfection. Its a suave sweep of turf dunked in an earthy-green hue and chiming with the easy breeze of dozy summer noons. The sun-drenched terrain glimmers in the midday heat and, after it rains, a whiff of soggy sod is wafted across the green rug, lacing the valley with a tantalizing earthy scent. The sun sifts through rifts in the clouds and twinkles the terrain to prove the exuberant animism that is present here. The humble hummingbird narrates the gorgeous hills and peaks that sprout carelessly under the green spread to impose mounds of gentle irregularities on it: countless mounts of the grounds ripples that swell the open bowl like a softly corrugated nape on the neck of the earth. In the dry season the breeze shivers the tall grass and it sways with a tinkle, soothing the peach trees that have been flogged by cold winds. When the nightingale roams north it commits this jingle to memory and recites the song in its migration. If you visit this place pause on the grassy hill overlooking the settlement and steal an eyeful of the amiable scene while you listen to the lyric of the rocks and the bubbly spurt of the river, which may be heard from the height of the hill. The green trend reaches from sunrise to sunset, with the settlement, eThunzini lehlathi, situated at midday. This is the deathbed of Ngubemnyama. The valley bears the tale in its breast that young Ngubemnyama and his people were a migrating horde of cattle-drivers from the south, where they were escaping a particularly harsh winter. It was on their passing through the land that they heard word that some relentless king farther north was purging tribes like mice and they were fleeing southward. Out of dismay the chief and his flock stuck between a fierce winter and a pitiless tyrant decided to stall and set up camp right there to bear the icy winds. From then onwards furious drumbeats could be heard on festive nights. The place has seen at least nine generations from Ngubemnyamas line. As the years jogged on, the population swelled in the settlement, spilling over to Nomatholo and kwaNdlobongela neighbouring land that the chief had bequeathed to his two sons as independence from him and to establish themselves into greatness. The settlement is still socalled because the horde did not intend on staying long but were mesmerized by the exquisiteness unleashed by the land when the rain season came. They chose to stay on just a little longer and built their huts of reed mats not far from a forest in the vicinity. As the sun set in the west the forest wrapped its idle shadow over the settlement, which lay on its east. Ngubemnyamas ochre-smeared warriors ran the landscape in bloody campaign against whites, cannibals and marauding tribes. Folklore claims that its their blood which stimulates the soil. Legend has it that some still run the valley as lost souls straddling the trivial and the spirit world looking for belonging.

After showing their courage in the many battles, Ngubemnyamas herd settled down to pay their dues to the gods. Their feet pounded the earth with the force of iron pestles as they danced to the leather drums in the hands of the drummers. The story goes that thered been a rain season, which had bore not a single raindrop to lap up. The peoples food reserves were running empty. Early one morning they took their drums to where they buried the dead and invoked the rain dance. They matched their frames with the suns tempo and thumped their soles on the bare dirt, seized by the drummers raps. They danced until they were drunk from the sweat trickling down their glinting forms. Their heels pounded the earth with such force that it shook and collapsed, causing the hills and mounts. By Joves left foot the gods rose from their snooze and cheered with much-needed rain to slay the looming famine. The inhabitants have not stopped bidding for rain at the start of spring. Every year anklebeads and rubber anklets of the purest maidens bounce off their ankles as they shake the gods from sleep to come and join the dances. The earth cracks under the pressure but, as rain dribbles, water permeates the parched loam to cast a green spell over the country. The first rains are a call to till and the land mentors them as they sweat and teeter after each days work. Every spring the soil revives from drought, itching to be gored and so yield the harvest in surplus. Iron strikes hard to shatter the brittle earth with the pounce of a hoe in a wielders vehement hand. Oxen spans lug the ploughshare as planters scrape back the dust to unhood its richness, which they see dazzling through plump ridges and tracks in tints of terracotta. Those who have sown will then reap for the taste of the first fruits and stash the seed back in the earth to laud its good health. From the lands hefty breast they scrounge and eke out their worth. Winters are harsh here owing to heaps of snow crowning the passing Maluti range. The ice caps unleash a spate of gales that claw and tear the fittings from the terrain, dissipating the ample flora to a threadbare wretchedness. The grim winter sun then invades, fading the turf to a blonde dale of rustic mournfulness. The scant river empties too, exposing its sand-bed. Whats left of its flow runs mucky like a fetid oozing laceration on the hurt earth. As the icy grip desiccates all what was ever so ornate, only a teensy stint of cheer remains as a token of mercy amid the rude assurance that divine beauty too is mortal; a beauty retrieved only by the gods noble charity. Its cold comfort, then, when the night draws down and veils this drabness to bare it another day, perhaps not so glum. To this day the peoples ego remains tied to the sun and moon. It is said that they can stand and stare at the sun from its rise to its rest without blinking. Their tempers droop when it doesnt rise. They heard that the gods exist behind the wind and you may catch them staring at that with keen eyes trying to catch a glimpse of the spirits the same spirits whose tall hearts lift us to cosmic heights.

In the summer the fancied freedom lies as a green shawl, skin-tight through ditch and mound, right under Thunzinis wake. At this instant in the morning, if you were a sleeper in the valley, you would see the flamboyant bullfinch pirouetting gracefully in the breeze and hear the spry nightingale puncturing softly at the somnolent dawn with its prickly skirls. Clarion calls to the secret hollow. Presently the breeze lifts its waves high, strumming even the introverted trees into tuned soughs. Its like a symphony in minor in the sonorous and porous morning, which you do not hear. This is a time for peace. When we watch the soft morning exhale and see the sun snatch its breath as if it owns everything, we may turn from our grudge knowing that the daybreak has taught us peace. At this time in the dry season we exist in the space between the wraithlike chill and the earth beneath, waiting for the sun with bated breath. And all of us who watch it bulge and gild the dull grass know that the day is golden. We know that bloom will not be long now. The grassy hills steep face, uglied by rugged rocks, scowls out over the settlement, which lies some thousand yards to the fore. If you stand over the creased front and try to fly its a thirtyfoot drop to the protruding belly and from there you tumble some sixty feet down to its foot. If you mount the hill from the rear the ground accumulates to heave you to an overview of the setting. Your heart may leap when you peak the rise and see what lies afoot. Its from here that you hear the winds eloquence that stirs even a trees heart. Its from here that you see the mornings delicacy shift right under the blue skys golden eye as it grows into a day, and a stray young girl, or perhaps a boy with active eyes, will stand here and watch the pitter-patter of the scattered rain soak the grass and drench the soil as if the sky is gently, teasingly, licking the earth into shape. Rondavels and square huts of wattles and daub are the habitual dwellings in these parts. Each man builds his own home or else, for a brick house and the funds for it, he calls up a bricklayer who also lives among them. The houses face sunrise for the full eastern exposure. On a winters day the sun heats up the mud walls and the heat is trapped to afford warmth for the night. People draw their water from a well thats situated southward on the decline to the river, and which empties into it. At the well is where women teem with tickly tongues for the juiciest gossip, all snubbing the fact that they have meals to cook! They tattle about everything from who left for the city and came back high-stepping to nattering about whose husband bought her a water tank and now she thinks shes better than us because she doesnt fetch water like we do! This on account of gold-diggers who had left and came back so well-heeled they made old timers, whod been plodding it with the plough their whole taxing lives, throw tantrums and stamp a foot on the dirt. The river is a foaming swirl of frenzied waters and the locals call it inyokebomvu [the red snake] by its gurgling wrath in the rainy season. The deluge has carved the landscape and lies

entrenched in the earth like a butt-crack in it. It slithers westwards in zigzags and into the forest. Theres no bridge to cross it and for this reason it splits the planters from their fields after hard rains, when even its ford is flooded. Animal dung is used in the fields to cure the soil, which yields plenty sacks of rich grain. A stretch of gated barbed wire runs between them and the river, cut off by a dip-pool on the eastside, to block unguarded cattle from ravaging crops. Livestock is to be kept away by cowherds: an animal found in another mans field is held for ransom for damage done. The forest is a clump of cuddling wattle trees and dense shrubs, with bird-infested glades in its midst. People use it for firewood. Alternatively, they burn dry cow ordure, dry corn-cobs and every other combustible thing to get the fires going when they need to let it recoup. Rabbits, skunks and the occasional wild pig may be caught in the forest and they provide delicious cuisine for the famished hunter. On the eastside of Thunzini theres a stretch of land that holds only an old church building and a Mission house, founded by white missionaries who swarmed the eastern frontier in hind times. They used the church as a seat of worship while they tried to lure the nave and unwitting native to their religion. Stories told by old people go that the missionaries happened during the time of Ngubemnyama, clutching scriptures and announcing a religion that was to save the native from himself. They claimed that it would subdue his primitiveness and, in death, deliver him to a place where he would meet his Maker, face to face! They rambled on some more about a man who had died nailed to crossing poles, martyring himself to save humanity, eternally. It remains a puzzle why the chief let them stay on and build a church in the neighbourhood. Some suppose that he was pretty amused by their character and found their features rather queer. But who can say? The natives and missionaries settled in peaceful regard of each other for a while, until one day Ngubemnyama blew his top and turned on them. He made a claim about their transgression over the bounds of his kindness, swearing to make them regret ever treading on his land. He sent for them to the foreground of his quarters and lashed out, letting them know he was of the opinion that they lacked the sanctity they professed to have because, if not for their bleached skin, they were men just like he was. This verbal bashing on the preachers came about when one of them flattered and fornicated with a young maiden, impregnating her. The chief, now beside himself with fury, told them to decide what it was they came to do: preach or court his women. He suddenly declared that he did not want his people overwhelmed with teachings from a book that the priests themselves probably wrote. He dismissed as hogwash a god that spoke through a team of lustful appointees, who themselves showed no devotion to what they were teaching. Ngubemnyama wasnt sorry to put it to them that they relayed a half-true teaching designed to favour themselves and others like them. He hit out at them about this

holy pope from whom they were claiming to be taking orders. The chief enunciated it to them that Ngubemnyama and he alone was ruler of his domain and no white man would surpass that, especially one to whom you had to travel countless days across seas. His insatiable appetite for mischief overtook his temperance when he ordered the disciples to strip themselves of their robes for the settlement to see that indeed they were men like others. They gave him vacuous stares, stupefied. When orders turned firm and came with a vow to pluck out their fingernails and shave their stringy hair, they submitted. They stripped off cassocks and all only to pat his hunger for petty damage to a proud self. They stood in front of sniggering men with faces two shades redder than when they had first arrived. Women and girls stood in the background chuckling shyly. After their nude parade the preachers were told to vacate the land. Ngubemnyama swore by the blood of those who had slogged the earth before him that if they did not scatter as he spoke then hed toss them into a pyre of oak and urinate on their scriptures. The preachers frowned at his vulgar tongue but picked up their baggage and left him and his subjects to their pagan ways. They said he was an infidel and cursed him on their departure. His people said he was a merciful chief as they bade goodbye to the blushing missionaries. They all agreed that he was an old head on young shoulders. The missionaries tale did not end with their flight from Ngubemnyamas realm. They scrammed in such haste that they forgot to inquire any further. They fled westwards and stumbled into Cilikishes caves. He and his men were head-hunters. That was the last anyone ever heard from the missionaries in these parts. Their stoles were used as headband in battle by Cilikishes scarlet-hearted warriors. The few converts who had been lured by the zealot preachers were fined two heads of cattle each for their treachery. Ngubemnyama wanted to know from them whether conceding to the gods had become so onerous a task that they were willing to juggle beliefs. He ordered them to renounce their religion and abandon the Mission house. Yet he retained the buildings as monuments of his no nonsense approach to matters of belief. In 1986 the two structures stood as a fixed encroachment, but their design offered a distinct and far-off touch to the landscape. The bell above the church tolled for a different reason as the block was used as a school, which only went up to standard three. One teacher, alternating days, taught all levels. For the rest of their education the children had to trot it twenty kilometers to the next village, kwaNdlobongela. None of them were interested in doing that, thus snuffing out any hope of further learning. The sportive loafers could instead be caught dangling from apple trees or playing hide and seek in ruined houses, or maybe toiling at the fields in the relevant season. On unbearably hot days they could be seen scuttling down the riverside in their birthday suits to crash into the rivers shallowest pool. Older boys herded

livestock, but those who had none played football on a dusty field by the pasture, or they just mooched about chewing grass stalks. With the current school only recently opened, it was just the young adults and children who were literate. But not in their entirety, as many of the parents were reluctant to send theirs to a place that would yank them from their chores. And with education a treasure whose reach eluded many of the full-growns, this especially meant that letters received were read by children their own, if literate, or a neighbours willing. In this way adult news reached them before the people they were meant for, so flouting all secrecy. Everybody knew old peoples business and how much money came through the post. But that didnt bar the slick oldies from stuffing it in the folds of their breasts and pleading poverty. Since young men had received no higher schooling, when they did go to the city they did so for menial tasks for white people, and as gold-diggers. Not all the people who went there did so for purposes of work, though. There were the young girls lucky enough to have an uncle or other relative in one of the cities townships, where they would spend no more than a fraction of an instant but return thoroughly citified, scatterbrained and downright stuck-up. They wore their chins quite determinedly high and when they spoke they nosed their speech and spoke sarcastic, adamant in their roles as know-it-alls. They were stupid, steadily running their traps and speaking even when not spoken to. These were the ones snooty the heifers. Heifers because they were young babyless runabouts; heifers in their wayward frolics; heifers at noon, heifers at night. Heifers! Plus, old people said that it was only the babies they didnt have that would chip that tall edge off their strut. The white missionaries massacre must have sent waves afar because they were the last white men to ever set foot on the land, until 1986. Doctor Cloete came from Maclear every six months to prick us with his needle so we could live longer lives, we were told. Meneer Johan Wilhelm Coetzee, the woollen merchant, came in his van every shearing season to buy our wool. He rode with his bloodhound snug on the front seat and a dusk-skinned and woollyhaired man in the back, and about whom people, when they saw riding in the rear, would say: ibhulu yinja! [the boer is a dog!] It remained unclear then whether these two palefaces knew the history of the white messengers who applied curious tactics to lure people from their true being. The chief of all realm during their engagements was Nyawulemfene: direct descendant to Ngubemnyama, holding rank by primogeniture. He was a more moderate man in manner, put against his jokey ancestor, and wished no mischief on pallid men who dropped by. The foreground to the chiefs house was spent as a court of justice and he took up the role of arbitrator in litigation, with elderly clansmen as the jury. Strokes with canes of willow, dipped in aloe sap, was the penalty for deviance. A ranger lent the chief a hand as guardian of the land and checked that the forest not be overused, that the dip level would not drown animals and

that barrier fences were still intact among other errands. On Nyawulemfenes term the sociable folk of Thunzini were still glued to their customs. And they had kept them with ease, as ever since the missionaries skittish flight there were no churches to snarl at their traditions. But certain aspects of their lives were inspired by church practice; most notably the dirges they sang at burials. Despite this resistance to change by the people, lately the evils of the cities were spilling over to this side as more young men set out and came back shameless in their indulgence; as the heifer-girls went and returned springytoed with polished nails, wavy hair and loose thighs, thinking nothing of marriage; and as the western liquor came in many a case. The white mans way was creeping into these parts. Not that they could keep this in check but in their attempt to do so the people pinched from it only what would elevate their euphoria. They sought to shun anything that was sure to disregard their established order and collective idiosyncrasy, or hold them back in their desire to suck out the sweetness from life. So it was with loathing that they viewed the police, or any agent of the state whose batonwielding and gun-toting techniques would impinge negatively on their enjoyment of being. The Transkei homeland police were there, if rarely, because the liquor was. Otherwise they chose to let punitive measures for crimes other than murder rest with the chief. They would swoop in from Mount Fletcher to raid a few houses, which they had been tipped off to be public houses making illegal sales. They confiscated the bulk before arresting the house-owner and the drinkers. At these three or four spots is where festive people gathered and where quarts were stored under beds to chill the product. It was the younger men and a few detached women who were regulars here. The older figured that they were too delicate to stagger about holding on to fences while trying to find home and then blacking out at front doors in embarrassing stupors. Other young men with family burdens pressed their wives to brew them umqombothi when they too needed to stagger. So the revellers learned to look out for police vans when they flayed dust off the dirt road to the settlement on a rush to trash their good times. The sellers would bury the cases in their gardens or hop a fence to hide them at a colluding neighbours. They knew that the police had a penchant for handling people like they were motherless if they found you with such. Rajah entrepreneur and owner of the retail trader, Rajahs General Dealer was yet another tenant of foreign origin who was present in the area. His business and dwelling house were situated north of the settlement, on the strip of land between the hill and the railway tracks below it. Scraped open along the train tracks past his store was a gravel road leading to Mount Fletcher in the north and Maclear and beyond in the southwest. The Indian earned his wealth by trading basic goods and articles that people could not produce on their own. Because of this he saw handsome gains in the winter months, when they couldnt grow vital veggies and had to

purchase light groceries and warm clothing. His was a superstore with everything that could be sold, including items he didnt need to be selling to the respectable folk of these parts. Always clad in a prim grin, Rajah had a fondness for playing peek-a-boo on buyers while they shopped around his congested pick-what-you-like heaven. His proficiency in isiXhosa, the native dialect, left him free to stir up chitchat that was devoid of content and telling dry anecdotes. Rajah was also the miller and ground corn at a reasonable price for those who preferred home-grown mielie-meal. The task of postmaster lay with him too: telegrams and old age and disability grants were collected from him, acting for the Transkei governments welfare department. At reaping time he bought peoples excess grain and vegetables to sell them, along with his own yield, to a goods train that passed through destined for the east coast. Some people, who grew one crop, bartered their speciality with others for what they didnt grow before selling the leftovers to Rajah. He charged on spot prices by the quality brought in. One season could be harvested twice in Thunzini, if the rains came early. The sparkle in his eye grew marvellous as he garnered the produce an index that business was good and he wouldnt have it any other way. At every harvest time in the settlement maize was put in canvas sacks and onto creaking sledges, towed by cattle that foamed at the mouth, to be hauled up the incline to the foot of the hill. Women carried wicker baskets with vegetables, or foisted them onto donkey-back to present them to Rajah. A shiny new donkey for the fool who brings in the most sacks per season!

Onto the hill overlooking the settlement, and on the foot of which Rajahs General Dealer sits, a man who looked to be in his late thirties early forties, maybe was making his way with some difficulty. He bore a load on his back and it seemed to be this that was hassling him on his ascent up the mound. In the gaping sky above him clouds were rapidly banding and would form a dribbling umbrella over the shimmering late afternoon. After considerable effort of tracking between saplings and boulders while trying to keep his balance as he stepped over loose pebbles, the climber managed to crown the hill. Upon reaching level ground he paused to catch his breath. He didnt shed the bulky load but found a rock to rest on and sighed as he heaped onto it, feeling that the burden was lighter now than ever. For a while he scrutinized the underlying Thunzini with some contentment. He took off the worn-out remainders of what used to be his shoes and wriggled his sweaty toes for air. From blisters on his soles he saw that the distance had been harsh on him. He tended to them by rubs and squeezes until the blood had cooled. He then pricked the blisters with a grass stalk to drain the fluid.

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After a loosening stretch he felt at ease and walked to the edge of the hill, just above the steep slope overlooking the train tracks. Statue-like, the burden bearer stood on the spot eyeing up the sprawled settlement before him. He drew a box of matches from his shirt pocket and took out a matchstick to put it between his lips, all while carting his eyes over the grassland and the infinite background. A while later, and satisfied with this estimation, he walked back to his seat. Once seated he fumbled in his trouser pocket to pull out a skilfully crafted reed windinstrument. A small bottle of some green water slid out too but he caught it with swiftness and gripped it in his closed hand, emphasizing its worth. He stared at it before slipping it back into the pocket. The burden bearer then blew the flute trying to whistle a tune; it only hissed and popped out a small pebble. Upon clearing out the pipe he put the mouthpiece to his lips and began to blow, but lazily strumming this, his sole possession. After only a jiffy of playing he glanced up at the sky to see that dusk was falling fast on his destination as the sun had flopped into the western trenches. He sized up the rain-clouds, trying to guess the rains span. The scattered black shades were closing in on the flecks of white and the whole sky was moving to complete gloom. The deep sky crashed and birds fluttered from shrubs in panic, ambushed by the thunder. He strummed a few more times to bid the sun farewell and then put the flute away as soon as raindrops hit the hilltop. The rising wind had a chill to it so he unravelled his shirtsleeves and slid into the battered shoes to make it down the hill, towards the settlement. The old woman sat slouched on her bed in the candle-lit room. She was watching a black and white portrait on the wall while caught in a soliloquy. Unfulfilled promises of life that fade like floating words blown by winds. Though her eyesight was waning and she wasnt able to see very far in the dim light, she could see the outline of the portrait and knew the image inside the frame very well. Outside, the wind flapped and rattled the bolted old stable-door to press into the still room. The flame waved on the wick, casting dancing shadows on the wall and making it seem as if everything in the room was in motion. She could hear the rain thrashing down on the thatch above her and considered that it might cave in if the thunderstorm continued for too long. She soon heard patters and saw water spots on the mud floor: the roof was starting to let rainwater seep in, as it always did when the rain hit too hard. The old woman rose from the bed with aged sloth to place two mugs and three basins under the leaks. She muttered a curse, thinking of the large sail that lay outside useless. It should be spread over the roof to make the rainwater slide over it instead of leaking through the weatherbeaten straw. She got back to bed and peeled back the patchwork quilt and mohair blanket, preparing for sleep. She slipped in and once again stared at the portrait, muttering continuously. Her eyes absently shifted to the calendar next to it, still representing 1985 the

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previous years dates. She gave it a blank stare while her mind was pinned on the picture. But then she paused, thinking she heard a knock on the frail door that stood between the safeness of her round room and the mayhem outside. She listened. Nothing. She could hear the rain falling lighter as the flapping wind changed course. She listened for a sound distinct from that of the rain and thunder. Feeling that her hearing was playing tricks on her old age, she moved her hand to put out the bedside candle. But the knock came harder this time. She stopped as she realized that someone was at the door in this storm! She peeped out of the soaked windowpanes above her bed just in time to see intricate veins of lightning dance across the northern sky. She deliberated over whether to open for the imposing presence outside, or just ignore. Before she could decide, the knock came again, impatient. She stepped out of bed, took the candle and ambled to the wooden door in her nightdress. She paused in front of it, her startled bulbous eyes fixed on the rickety latch. With her mind made up, the old woman slid the pin back from the staple and cracked the top door a slim cranny to sneak a peep at the nuisance. She cast the candlelight to the outside and was met by a short man dripping water at her doorstep. Lightning cracked behind him, flashing a water-logged yard. Just then he flinched and looked back before returning to her with cowed eyes. On his turn she had seen that he bears a burden. She stalled some more before opening the door in full to let the stranger into her round-walled home. The Burden Bearer stepped into the house, sopping wet, and thanked the old woman for opening her heart to a traveller in the night.

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2 A stranger among us

It was at an opportune time that he came. The time when silvery-yellow tassels were beginning to frill from young cobs inside the layered pockets of the first corn, and a drop of butter-soft sun stole into a sparrows nest to savour the pinkish complexion of the perky nestlings. His was not a predicted arrival, as of one whose coming had been hinted. He came like a scavenger a vulture descending over a kill on which the hunter has not yet feasted. Such was his manner. They said he came from the mountainsfrom the forestfrom the river. They say he came in ragged clothes as a tramp would. They said he strayed in foaming at the mouth and looked like a rabid mongrel, no wonder the howl of dogs well into last night. They dont know how he came. He came from the night. It wasnt until they spotted him prancing about that they knew he was among them. A strewn troop of dogs as their sopping tongues waxed their fair coats with the fresh spit of a new day smelled him first, or sensed something in the air change and it distracted them. One barked. Then two. Soon enough there was a string of barks as others heard the alarm. Spurred on by his plain contempt for their yapping, they left their yards to meet with him. There was a snarling rush as more dogs scurried up, barking and repelling but always keeping to the roadside. By now faces were sneaking from houses and those already outside were leaning over to see who would emerge up the pathway through the settlement. Two or so people stepped up to intervene and the dogs drew back with touchy growls. Past the din the day came to a startling standstill. A stolid quiet, so that the housewives stopped and forgot while trying to spark their morning fires; the milkboys, who had tapped the fat udders of milking cows until the calf is but bone, froze and the fragile breath of the newborns broke as if the soul-reaper lurked. In that prying stillness their nightly dreams had been weaned off their eyes, yet, in their hazy sight he happened like a twilight phantom a figment of a dawning horror. They saw him. With the rising sun in their eyes, those staring to it could not draw him out completely, only a silhouette of a roundish lump of something not knowing what to make of it. Some peered through chinked eyes trying to see beyond the mounting smoke of fresh fires. But others saw him with their own cloudless eyes. Here was what? A man undergrown. Or maybe overgrown to the inside because he had that thing in him, which gave him shrunken humpyness. They wished not but he was precisely so an exact sketch of what they thought. A hunchback! A staunch and sudden old hunchback! Humped and halved, he hobbled forth

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wearing their long eyes with a smugness that made the silly children titter. Still, their daftness was muted by caution. They scowled on, though, wondering how a stumpy man could bear this, the nastiest burden, with such resolve. It stuck out from his back so he bore it trying to look composed, as if he could just shrug it off and stroll straight on. He tried to look tall, flexing up and puffing his chest. But he couldnt accomplish height his neck was lodged too deep in his shoulders. So he waddled on regardless, bouncy as he propelled himself forth: not quite a candid march as a high step. Cocksure, if you ask any old gossip. Surprise! He cropped up and stepped into their lives. He marched into their lair, never missing the glares. He heard the murmurs. Voices started behind him, cautious at first, and then became loud banter to even those across the road as he swaggered out of ear-range. They sized him up: those apish arms so disproportionate to his stockiness. He was barefoot and shabby, rather gross. By now they hung on, sometimes patient, itching for him to get into any yard and claim relation. But he endured, never veering. He had woken with the roosters to go for a scrub at the river and play the flute, not wanting to trouble the old woman with lighting a fire to boil water. Plus she needed time to wake up and collect herself without having to expose her core to a strangers stare. He felt fresh now and was on a roundabout of this new spot. Mucous-infested with a holed T-shirt, and naked from the waist down, the little child stared at the passer-by. He thrust his thumb in his mouth and halted, baffled into muteness by this spoof on this dazzlingly auspicious morning. His star-struck face snapped in exclamation, yet his eyeballs were steeped in gobsmacked wonder. The Burden Bearer too saw the scruffy little thumb-sucking rascal of no more than four years posing nude on the roadside. He caught him in that bamboozlement and glanced around as if to frisk the set. In a hoarse but discreet voice, he asked: What are you looking at, you little shit? He looked around again and swaggered off in cool pose. Some of the homes have sheepfolds holding shorn sheep, goats and astrakhan-coated lambs. Most have cattle kraals with herds in them. But some houses stood as vacant or ramshackle buildings that had spewed their dwellers to Cape Town and Johannesburg in the name of urbanization. This is the heart of KwaXhosa. The remainders realize that the land must be nursed and praised and cannot be discarded. They appreciate the hills and mounts that stand for their ancestors protest in hunger. They know about the crashing dances that spoiled the sleep of their gods, who rose and gave Earth its soul back so its creation could thrive. Any man who turns his back on the soil for reckless reasons can expect a lashing from poverty wherever he may be. A truce with the earth is a truce with self. The natives are one with the set and the dust beneath their soles. Theyre fluent in the speech of the creatures in their pens. Theyre children of the sun, born to gore and scrape the earth for their well-being! The most powerful man is the one who swings a bullwhip at the longest span of cattle, tailed by the sower who

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breaks the most clods as he urges the soil. But it was the festive season now: most of those who had left and missed home had come to visit their dearest before returning to the cities. A crow cawed out from the top of a blue-gum tree, thrashing the still air, and brought the Burden Bearer to mind. The old woman should have fully woken by now, he remembered and swung around to start back to the house. The settlement was a sprawled out assemblage of houses he couldnt walk its entirety. Three main pathways ran through Thunzini. People whose homes were hidden from the roads accessed them through narrow passages between fences. He saw the church buildings lying farther down the road but didnt have to guess that foreigners had been in the area. Back up the road the bystanders saw him turn back and not enter any house. Voices hushed up on his retreat as he neared their yards. He marched on, unwavering against their stares, which now escorted him as he sliced a path in the middle of the suspense and left a gap in conversations. Those passing him on their way saw him the closest. In halting voices they greeted, Molo, bhuti, [Greetings, brother] as is customary in these parts. But they gazed as if he left a trail of something foul. They blinked. They stared some more. They frowned. And then, convinced that he wouldnt run up on their blindside, scale their straight backs and start to grow there, they walked on with newly found flawlessness. But some wouldnt let it go. Behold! Hes not like us. They gaped at him. Who is he? They gazed. Smaller children also brought to see by the adult banter now stood forward to follow him, held back only by threats from their mothers to wring their ears until they droop. Everybody stared hard until it seemed that all of the restless souls laid just last week would turn too and look. What does he want here? Where did he come from? He couldve lost his way on a forking road, or been strung along by a silly bird! It was this stretched imagination that prompted two neighbours of a man who was at the top in Thunzini not quite in charge but just under the chiefs thumb to urge him to probe from the traveller if he was friend or foe, and just where he was trying to follow his nose. But Langalibalele said he would do no such; there was no need to slight the man just yet. Let him carry on for a bit, see if he finds his want on his own. The hunchback kept on the pathway, luring them until the suspense was spilling. His brief journey came to a curious end when he slid down a passage between two yards and veered towards an unfenced house. A lone round house. Whose? MaGadlelas? Of course! Thats how he came? She lived at the edge of the settlement on the decline to the well. A reclusive life hers was. In their seething curiosity they had forgotten. They remembered her now. They remembered. The door stood open, held back by an anvil, and the house belched out heavy smoke from an

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indoor fire. He knocked first and entered the hazy room. Molweni, he greeted, seeing that there were now two people in the room. The other was a girl who could not be older than sixteen years. She held a big jug of water and poured it into a small three-legged black pot, which sat on a trivet over the fired hearth, in the middle of the room. As she filled the vessel the loose trivet leaned slightly, threatening to give in. She finished pouring and closed the pot. He sat down on a small bench, which the girl swiftly placed against the wall for him. From her other efforts around the house he reckoned she was aiding the decrepit woman through old age. The old crock, meanwhile, sat quietly on a straw mat on the other side of the hearth with her legs stretched out before her. She kept breaking sticks from a branch on her lap and tossed them into the fire. She was breathing through the mouth, trying to draw air amid the throttling fumes. He couldnt see her too clearly past the haze but her pleated skin and floppy face implied her seniority. Strings of grey hair peeked from under her headscarf and looked like twining threads of some old pot-scourer. Her eyes were ash-coloured and weary and on her scrubby neck were popping veins stuck to skin and bone. She had emaciated arms that were adorned with two black wristbands on each wrist. The figure looked ghastly and sat dejected, as if she expected a knock from death soon enough. From the way she rested hunching her back and sagging her head it was evident that she relied on a weak spine for backing, her strength waning so. Despite that, he could see that she still had a lot of fight left in her. So Old woman sat there mask-clad and muted, like an idol whose meditative silence is waiting to be worshipped. She wasnt even affected by his fixation on her. Small wooden-framed windows on the sides of the house were open but the smoke still lingered inside, stinging his eyes: the wood was probably wet from the nights rain. A short cackle drew him to peer deeper into the cloudiness. Next to a concave slab of grindstone was a lidless box in which a hazel-coloured hen sat on a calico bed-sheet, most certainly hatching eggs. It twitched its neck and cocked its head, clearly flustered by the girls walkabout. The dcor of the house was simple, if not lacking. A wooden dish rack with three shelves clung to the wall and also held pots, pans, a primus stove, along with a glass jar in which there was basic cutlery. An outdated calendar was pinned on the wall next to the rack. Next to that there hung an aged black and white portrait in a cracked frame. The picture was of a bespectacled man who wore a black pin-stripe suit and held the hand of a little boy, who stood with an index finger in his mouth, staring beyond the eye of the camera. The two stood with their backs to a stone-block wall of what looked like a large city building. More than a simple depiction, this looked like a relic; traces of her past life invasive through it.

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He let his gaze sail through the room, his mind tagging where curiosity took his eye. Three three-legged black cast-iron pots were placed upside down on top of a wooden cabinet and their lids were on the floor. On top of a square table were tin plates, basins and a few mugs. There were two blue plastic barrels in the house. Next to these was a foreign-looking rosewood armchair that was badly torn and had groggy front legs: a 20litre paint container stood as a substitute for its hind legs. This here was a trim little capacious room devoid of sophistication. In this spacious arc was the sum of her worldly possessions. Her belongings, it seemed, were meant to whisk her through life with maximum simplicity. But there was no place else in a house with no corners to conceal things not meant for the eye of a visitor. So she hid them under her bed, the same place into which she had swept the joy and unkempt laughter of the house with her straw broom to make place for the sombreness that prowled now. Left on show were replies, not to nosy questions asked by the rabble. They were merely hints kept to ban a strangers probes whose groping eyes are to be contained. Also under her bed was a small brown suitcase and a rusty metal trunk that, he guessed, held keepsakes. The furled sponge-mattress with which she had made a simple bed for him was there too. Gracious old woman: she had lit a fire so he could dry himself after hearing his story. The sun sparking the room revealed a parched mud floor and the damp spots from the leaking roof. He looked up and saw that in some places reeds had been beaten thin by the weather. Strings of deserted spider webs, browned and thickened by everyday smoke, dangled from the thatch. He studied the shelter and its insides. This was her house. This ancient lodge. All of it, her salvation. In changing fortune in both foul and fair all of this ring wrapped her until it became her and she it, warding her every peril. But now it was as potholed as she was; her core had been gouged out like this walls and, similar to this wall, she was inconsolable. She, old woman, cradled leftovers of a finished life. Finished times, broken dreams. And by now she was abstracted from the conceited farce that crept outside in the guise of reality. A recluse. She is that, then. And this wall has wrapped her since it was raised from the dirt. Her compact little coop, as if she were good to go. Yes, she has not long now to her rest, yet she seems querulous about that end. If you have any qualms about being housed in a pit then throw the dirt off you and kick your path to a second life, you old striker. Do it! The busy girl scooped up two mugs of water from one barrel. She was pouring it into a basin of maize powder. She stirred this into mush before emptying it all into the pot of boiling water. She stirred, still. She was making porridge, their morning meal. It was plain to see from her fleshy breasts, capped with nipples that poked from under her shirt, that she had amply grown into her maidenhood. She had a fresh face that had not seen the times. She was beaming and

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lifes spangled hopes were borne in her easy eyes. Or it was naivety carved into the polite pose of chastity. She had docility the substance of youth and her slogan was caution, hence she stayed receptive, unruffled by her ancestresss affliction. Old woman, for her dismal role, sat worn down to a meagre wakeful corpse. Her crimped face was rife with anguish, plus she had that mortal gaze in her eyes, though her style was persistence. She had been properly careful not to endure the whole of death. Thus, not in her eye but in her house lay the numb portion of dying. The girl placed the empty basin down, knelt and blew on the fire. He could see it in the way she crouched, throwing up a firm rear in disregard of his manly presence, that she was somewhat ignorant of the opposite sex. She resumed and stirred the pot while his curiosity fledged. He inquired to learn that she was Nomalongwe, daughter of the chief. She was helper to the old woman, lending her a hand in cooking and washing clothes tasks that had gotten laborious for her. She also fetched water from the well when the barrel in the house ran empty. Now she sprinkled salt into the pot and some granules fell on the coal, causing flying sparks. After the small query Old womans demure manner was felt. She sat twiddling her thumbs and stared endlessly at the fire. The whole of an index finger was missing from the left hand, causing an abnormal vacancy between the thumb and middle finger. Now and again she would poke the fire to dampen it. Her scanty fingers coiled around the iron poker on alert as Nomalongwe blew on the coal. From the girls puffs the flames flapped and flared up to engulf the black pot. And from that flush rose the feisty sparks, which the old woman was afraid would reach the tinder-light roof. So she poked trying to dampen the flames; the girl blew trying to cook the pot. Old woman poked to dampen. But the girl blew, perpetuating this speechless correlation between them. And between her fanning and the old womans dampening he couldnt decide what the two wanted to agree on. It seemed to him that outside of age this was the sore point of their contrast. He glanced up at the broke roof and this time Old woman noticed. It needs to be patched at places, my child, she clarified. That shouldnt be a hard job, if I can get swaths of grass, he replied, offering his help. Theres a large sail on top of the car. It should be spread up there, she said, gesturing towards the door and then to the roof. He only nodded, not really knowing what more to say as the job was quite obvious. And by now he had sort of figured it out that she lacked a masculine presence in her life. The three people sat caught in their own heads while the porridge bubbled in the pot. The house had less smoke now but he got up to exit the room, leaving the both of them to it. Outside, the car that the old woman spoke of was the scrappy remainder of an old Chevrolet sedan. Everything inside had been stripped out and it was left on brick blocks on the foreground

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as a coop for some six chickens. There was no glass on the windows either; instead straightened wires were used as bars to keep the chickens in. He rounded the house to see what else was in the unfenced yard. Behind it there was a pile of logs for firewood but there were no mud hearth-walls anywhere, which could be the reason they burned the fire inside in the middle of summer. A wide cement floor on a brick foundation was laid out next to the rondavel: a house was being started but had been abandoned before raising the walls to completion. Now the floor was riddled with large cracks weeds and wasteland shrub sneaked from them while cans and broken bottles lay about on puddles of water. The roots of a large tree, which towered next to it, also protruded and showed through the biggest cracks on the cement. A home-made ladder and a perforated paraffin container, obviously used as a brazier in chilly weather, lay useless there. It would have been a big house had they finished it. The yard held only the rondavel, which stood desolate on the margins of Thunzini. The house remained only a premise to what could have become a full homestead. At one corner of the bottom yard was an outhouse with a canvas sack for a door. Next to this was a sty with a black sow inside. The swine paced the swampy cage and nuzzled its snout between the loose planks, expecting food on his arrival. Inside the sty there were two halves of a sliced car tyre as dishes for the pig. A small plot next to the pigpen had radish leaves and cabbage heads growing. The rest of the large garden was unplanted. It grew the longest grass and was pestered by all types of weeds. He could not recall seeing any tools in the house, which would indicate intent to do work on it at some future time. He looked to the opposite end of the bottom yard and saw no mounds of soil there. The two people in the portrait should still be alive then, he concluded. The picture had a dreamy out-of-the-way quality about it; he wondered what story it told. It and the armchair, though wrecked, defined luxury in that place of simple things. But there was a certain oddness in their being in that room. With all of the perimeter ventured and measured, he made his way back to the house for a serving of porridge.

Have you checked the car for eggs? the old woman asked of the girl. No, grandmother. You should have, you know these dogs are quick to snatch them. She was somewhat impatient. She gestured for the girl to pass her walking stick. Behind the door, hooked on a nail in the wall, was a crooked stick with a tarnished ferrule. The old woman got on all fours, raised herself to a stoop and stood up like a toddler who has yet to master the skill of rising. She wrapped her brown shawl tight around her waist and moved towards the door in a slothful scuff that bordered between a downward flop and

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forward trudge, all while mumbling something to herself. She walked un-shoed with two hard five-toed hooves that looked like a platelayers hammers. If she took a leg off and clobbered you with it you would fall on the first strike for sure. Her calves were still tough as rubber with bulging veins, as of someone who had pulled and pulled. Her lean body tilted over her stick like it would topple over. A few more toddles and shell be muscle-bound, he thought, watching the shakiness of her step. The fire had died down and the room was smoke-free now. The girl had her back to him and fixed the dishes to the rack after washing them. The man observed her movements with wonder. So whos this chief whose daughter you are? he asked. Nyawulemfene, she replied, without looking at him. Are you his first born? She had three older brothers. Do you go to school? No, she replied, emptying the dishwater into a small bucket with scraps from last night and this morning this for the pig. Why not? Is there no school around? There is. But it only goes up to standard three. Did you pass standard three? Yes. Whats the name of the school? She fetched a straw broom from behind the door and proceeded to sweep the room, raising dust. She replied at her own time: Its just a school at the church building. It doesnt have a name. Who teaches there? Its teacher Tshazimpunzi. Does he teach alone? Yes, she said, now pursing her lips and looking at him, wondering just where he was trying to arrive at with all the questions. All classes? Yes. He hassled her with some more questions and learned that she was not related in any way to the old woman but assisted her for no pay; that her fathers oxen span pulled the firewood from the forest for her, with her brothers the woodcutters. He then watched her strut about the room, boasting rounded hips with chunky thighs that stood bare from her nylon skirt. She scooped up a handful of corn from the other barrel and threw it next to the hen-box. She then

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stood to watch it peck the grain for a moment before carrying on, now tight-lipped about anything. He wondered many things, very aware of her. She wasripe. The old womans entry averted his eyes from the girl and into the dead fire. She held two eggs and cabbage patches in her hand. She threw the leaves into the bucket with leftovers and put the eggs in a dish on the table. Dont forget to feed the pig, she reminded the girl. After sighing onto her creaking spring bed, Old woman laid her stick down and fumbled into her tunic pocket. She fished out a snuff container, opened it and took a pinch to hoover it up one nostril a turn. She let out a polite sneeze and wiped her nose. Wishing to leave the two women alone, he rose and excused himself. She watched him carry on to the door and exit with his enigmatic presence. This was no simple man, she knew. At 81 years old if her book of life, hidden in a suitcase under her bed, was precise she ought to know. Her wisdom sat in the deep gashes on her face and in her eyes waiting to be employed. He was no dimwit. He had the shrewdness of a man who observed and knew things. He had a knowing look. Piercing eyes. He reserved himself when speaking, as if he knew something about you but did not wish you to know that he did. At times he deflected his eyes from yours a rare trait in a man and brought them back again showing new thoughts. A disguise. She had not seen threat in those eyes in the rainy night and had unrolled him a spongemattress. But now she saw mystery. In this clear morning she knew he was not lost. He had eyes as if he followed the route of the sun. He knew where was headed when he took his journey from his onset wherever that is. He said he came from kwaNdlobongela, about a forenoons walk from Thunzini, in a southward direction. That remained a doubted truth. His face showed relief, as though he had reached his destination from a farther off place than that. He could be from beyond, and probably was. A rover, if MaGadlela ever saw one. She did see his shoes last night, tatty and deadbeat, as if he walked from the end of the world to here. And his feet were all crusty and sore roughened by the road, no less. Hes a traveler! Them of itchy feet and heels that bounce. Whether theyre looking for a fable or for what never seems to come along, or indeed for a plot to their fate, they wander the girth of the realm free and wispy as firewalkers in their tread. Theyll manifest at a doorstep, dripping wet, to sojourn in the good peoples sympathy. It is that they enter vouching for our meekness and trying our traits, lest we have abandoned our vows of virtue. We must be compassionate then, for their sake. He is that, then. And he is from beyond.

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3 The Dreamer

Dream fairy, dream fairy, look me a dream with these sore eyes. Cry me rose petals on all thats awry. I dream to be free. I dream to sit on a mountaintop for victory and to hear the rooster and robin in concert pronouncing a new day amid the coating mist. I dream to hear the stiff crack of dawn and watch the tangerine sun wriggle free from the earths shackles to kiss the frowning hills; to watch the sun chafe the green grass and see dew droplets sparkle like diamond rocks across the terrain. I dream to smell the morning fog melting under the weeping willows quavering leaves and stretch my breath til I cant even breath; to ride on the rippling wind and float in the wide ocean and billowing sea of carnations. In this trifling world of senseless where we keep our emotions quiet and still as a mountains heart; where we drown in frowns trying to keep our wooers at bay, he puffed his flute and dreamed. He sat on the rivers edge, his hump silhouetted against the setting sun, and blew for the world. He dabbed and tapped the fingerholes playing in a thrilled mood and inflated ego. He smiled in himself tickled by the draught thrusting his fingertips as he skimped the notes. Yet, not far from where he sat but beyond eyeshot a boy of no older than fourteen years heard the tune and dreamed too. Drink deep from the cup of milk grandmamma filled to the brim. Bottoms up for every last drop and dream infinitely. Cry in it and make a libation to this land of your making. Close your heart to this coercing world of odds. And live. He was crippled. A malformation of the left arm made it shorter than the right and he held it close to his chest, bending it inward at the wrist. The right hand could hold but the left trembled weakly. His mouth was misplaced on his twisted face and it hung open, drooling at times. He drawled his speech from deep in his throat and wouldnt complete his words. The kneecaps stuck out from bony legs with one foot on tiptoe like a pigs trotter. He walked in spasms and stood with the shakes of a wagtail tripping on a fence; tilting his misshapen head to the side as he dipped on. Celebral palsy, Doctor Cloete had said. He hid in the buzz of fantasy and lived. He cast off his casing and flapped his wings to endless ecstasy devoid of meaning. The river splashed hard as he rode the gush and tanned stark-naked with the sun whipping his ashen buttocks. He conquered the unseen and collapsed in fatigue to bask in reverie. He would lie sprawled on the grassland, all the while laughing endlessly, startling herons at the marshes. There was no method to his vagrancy there didnt need to be:

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he was child! He was in the prime of his youth and his had no burdens. He saw the mound of clouds bury the sun in the horizon and cheered as dusk smeared the earth; he didnt scorn a world he never made. He was home and had a zest for being. But his mother hated him. She beat him for his depiction of his father sluggish and idiotic. She beat him for her own repressed girlhood. She hated his father. The son of a bitch was too lazy to stand up like a man! Instead he threw himself to liquor and was rubbishing his own name in the streets of Langa in Cape Town. She heard from telltales that he blacked out in shebeens and was worrying township folk for money. A disgrace. Hed been laid off from a shoe-factory job after an assault on the supervisor while in a drunken state. He was jobless now. Just as well, because he spent his wages on drink and sent home nothing. He was nothing! He had taken her from her fathers house as a girl of eighteen and settled half of her lobolo. Well into the union and right after the birth of their son he left for Cape Town to find a job, as many men did. He never returned. She wrote letters but wrote no more when she heard that he was living with a woman in a tin house. But that whore left his idiocy when his loot ran out. The bastard had ditched her to mind an invalid. What nonsense! She often wondered what would possess a man to let loose scourge on his own family. Maybe he couldnt see himself in the flaw that professed itself to be his son; for there can be no pride in nurturing what one does not regard as a reflection of self. Whatever the reason, she lived in whim and dream as any deserted wife would. That was before the pain. Not that shed been told what to do with it once it heaped up, but she forgot as she sat there. She forgot to do like a dung-beetle with a piece of shit: knead it, then roll, and push. And roll and push and roll. Push, until it shapes into a ball round enough to roll without hitches. Now shove it off into ruin. She lived with the pain instead. She felt it creep into her midmost until it stifled her; until she saw herself down on the dirt, yawn-mouthed like an old hen hassled by gapes. Then, everything her maternal glee and her tears clogged up like a frozen river. She weaned his idiot son to cornbread at infancy. She would not suckle him from her youthraise him while his father romped about with shebeen whores! Mama, what have you for a starved infant? Bitter milk and nothing! He was a hindrance to her pursuit for her girlhood delights so she dumped him in her mothers arms while she japed and jaunted. But he just would not go away, the little retard. His grandmother passed on at nine years old and he returned to her house to steal what was left of her bliss. So she did to him as any girl would who caught a thief in her pocket she mishandled him. Everybody heard his squalls when she beat him, and they were frequent. He reached the teens and talked back. She hit and he kicked back. She hit harder and he ran bawling out curses. He would flee to the neighbours and they took pity on his cries. But eventually they stopped caring: if he was no good to his own mother then what good was he to anyone else? Besides,

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they hardly had enough rations for their own welfare, let alone an extra mouth. He ran to his paternal kin but he was spastic and no good he couldnt carry their name farther than he could reason and as far as it concerned them he was a bastard. Thunzini shrugged him a steep shoulder: warriors are able, but a lame costs a fee in these times of hustle. Young men were leaving for the cities and remaining there until the old people could count the broken homes in two full-fingered hands many times. Theyd say: Her husband left her with child and has yet to settle the remaining value of three cows. Her and her chicken-hearted and blue-balled husbands have sown other seeds in the city. Some of the wives had given up waiting. After four or so festive seasons of receiving no visits and no money in the post, they had simply lost track of what it was theyd been missing. Some read it in letters from long-gone hubbies declaring how they favoured taking new wives, or had taken new wives and would be returning with them but needed the house mud-smeared new. Or how theyd moved in with new girlfriends soon-to-be-wives, were paying rent for the backyard shack and from the way the money was finished it didnt look like theyd be returning home. Bruised and tired of living with their hands on their hips while cursing the sons of bitches, the forsaken wives flocked together to agree on the next quest. And, as age took them on, they whinged like some old turkeys with flaking feathers, bewailing the harm to their prospect of flight but knowing in their secret mind that it had always been a muddy hope. All of them, fouled and socked down by the vicious tricks of some cruel man, proclaimed their girlhood and threw their headscarves off as they moved to self-will, to slatternliness and then straight to whores. Whores because whoring was it and couldnt no man tell them a thing! Some grandparents seeing this reckless abandon and predicting a sure extinction to their bloodlines were quick to snatch their grandheirs from these carefree sluts and left them to indulge as they pleased. So, while the descent wives, whose task is cast in stone, ground the grain into mash and hoed down carefully between rows of potatoes, the whores snuggled up to their ways and found eternal girlhood in the favours they performed for men. But they were still serving these men when they were struck by a pang. They needed relationship. Real love. They needed to love and be loved in response. They felt this need grow strongest as the terrific gloom of the shadow of spinsterhood placed itself over their outspread thighs. They looked at this threat and at themselves and then at the men who ran through them. They were not thrilled at all. They needed real peers. Each was aching for a savior, a champion. If he peels away the yearning there will be the underlying pain. And if he traces the straight link between her deeds and the pain and measures the extent of her desire if he strokes her just right he may restore her womanly substance. They found this love in the men of the public houses. Not in the narcotic waifs who lived on

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liquor and slept on the puke of their last cents. Not in the scrooges either, who bought a single quart with their hard-earned keep and gulped it to the finish to tramp on home in heedful halfdrunkenness. No. They found it in the sneaking timids who admired them shyly through fits of intoxication shy that they may fail in unravelling the profound mysticisms of woman and succeed only in making laughable flops of themselves. These suckers made their share by an occasional odd job: painting a house, filling in a tattered thatch or erecting a lazy fence to restrain some old womans straying fowls. They wanted a quick job, get paid quick and squander the proceeds with quickness. They were the few good men who had given up both hope and trying; who had tiptoed to the corner of defeat and now lived there as cowards who pinched from their mothers purses and lay in foetal forms, pissing themselves if too drunk. They too were stingy but could turn spendthrift, or let you drink from the same bottle, if tempted with a promise of something special later on. Above the bubblegum music and overlapping laughs in those boisterous shrines, this love revealed itself in the way the girls shook their rumps to roaring ovations as a favourite song was played. They shifted closer as another round was served and got to know these beautiful males. They saw them anew and laughed louder to jokes by the dopey-eyed rescuers who tickled them with attractive teases until they were bursting at the sides with self-desire. They felt better then. Better than all the women, and even better than the twinklee-toed heifers who had just landed from the cities. In return for this merriness they sought to make warriors out of them, so they gave them strength. The strength to salvage them from the deepest waters and hoping, and knowing, that if theres a Good Force out there It will turn them into princes. So taken were the girls by the brawn of these new warriors that they waited upon them, rubbed them down and bedded them. And their warriors bore this same strength as they combed the hollows of their empty thighs and huffed away like great beasts for the faintest pleasure that may remain there after they had opened so wide for so long. Their beautiful, powerful warriors. She found her youth in the raucous mirth of those smoke-plugged rooms, where shadows shuffled on the walls bobbing to Brenda Fassie. She ran with the like-minded sluts who shared her grim fate and learned to juice men until they inspired whore qualities in her. Men relished her acquaintance and would slap her on the rear, commanding her to fetch another beer. They towed her this and that way like puppies with an old rag, each always forging a ruse to use to pull her to his lap. They pinched and stroked, slapped and nibbled. She, of course, cherished her value among them, especially since her own man had left her pop-eyed and wondering just where she had gone wrong. After bingeing bashes she would always leave with one, staggering in each others arms and hugging fences like lost chickens, but always knowing very well what they were up to, even in their daze. They took their turns on her and she knew the game; she would wake in the night to dig into their trouser pockets. She got slapped for it time and again

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but she was never deterred. Meanwhile, people watched her and her kind with an everreproachful eye because their very flesh and the spirit with which they carried on with their lewdness was the vilest hint of calamity. They were a sneering crack in their glass room of morality. He sat in direst poverty while she whooped it up and forgot about him. He didnt play with the boys: he couldnt kick the ball or mould clay playthings like they did. The girls shunned him too he couldnt hopscotch or skip the rope. And since nobody pushed him to do so, he never went to school either. Instead he fled to the pastures and the hidden river to typify his boyhood. He remained in outer reach and watched himself stray from the norm and roam in gaiety. After each spree he would fold up and lie on the turf, missed by the trickery going on in the wider world. He sprawled himself on the rivers sandy shore reminiscing. He remembered his grandmother. He loved the curds on the sour milk. She would thicken the milk by the placing it in the sun and then scoop up the fat to give only him. She never laughed about the way he spoke or mocked him about his bubbled navel. She spanked him with her large hand when hed been bad, but he remembered her. He was saddened that she would never come back. He wept for a father who went and never returned from a faraway place. He sobbed for his own autistic character and dozed off in boyish tears. Other mothers, with their far-reaching instincts, never once pitied him. They simply praised themselves for having wombs healthy enough not to bear cripples. Only the chief eventually intervened. He understood the formative years of a child and tried to embrace him. But the boy didnt want to be held it had been too long without affection. He wanted to run jubilant, lie satiated and seek shelter in the unquestioning song of the land. Nyawulemfene recognized this free will and let him loose to watch him from his garden. He felt the swishing breeze that soothed a foundling and knew he was better off catching daydreams by the riverside. He gave him a place to sleep and the wife dished up the meals. It was to her that the boy turned when he came down with a fever or his tummy felt queasy. She, too, understood this agitation and never tried to deplete it. So the boy wriggled free and snatched his pride from the cold chains that sought to be his narrative. He ran triumphant, his shadow slithering on the grass next to him, his closest companion. He was boyish and overwrought with childishness. He ate apples from the Mission yard and picked mushrooms from the grassland. In the wild there were gifts in abundance. But with such excess comes overindulgence, so he held his boyhood erect in his hand giggling nervously and played too often. Not even the chiefs watchful eye could have seen to that extent.

In the darkening evening he knocked and opened to find Old woman sitting on her bed with a

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pair of black trousers on her lap. By the light of a candle next to her, she held a needle and stitched. Her face looked like a giant prune half-wrapped in a headscarf in the weak light. Molo, gogo, [Good evening, grandmother] he greeted and closed the door. Molo, mntanaam. [Good evening, my child] He sat down on the bench on the other side of the hearth and noticed the spread out ember, which still smouldered. The girl had gone home just after midday, so now the old woman sat alone in the heated silence. She had no form of amusement in her round house not a blathering wireless or a chitchatting chirpy child. The only audible sound was the cheepcheeroo of crickets outside and the faint cracks from the coal. Nakukutyetafileni, mntanaam, [Theres food on the table, my child] she offered, tossing her head towards it. Ohenkosi, gogo. [Thank you, grandmother] He got up and approached the table. A tin plate, on top of which was a spoon, covered another. On the bottom one there was papa and mashed pumpkin. You travel with no clothesnothing. Just a whistle, she remarked once he had settled. He chuckled and gave no answer. These were my sons, she announced about the pair of pants on her lap. There was also a black pair of mens shoes on the straw mat at her feet, along with a brush and a tin of shoe polish. It looked like she had just polished them. He nodded in response but asked: Where is your son now, maam? She remained silent for a pretty long stretch, letting him hang. When she spoke her voice was exact: Mmhh! My child, some things are best left alone. She shook her head and disengaged. With barefaced nonchalance, the old woman then kept up her needlework. The speaker had spat the words with ease, as you do the air at the tip of your tongue. But they lingered in the room scolding the snooping query. Resounds came and went. And then an awkward quietness followed. Silence. The kind that shrills in your ear because youre so riled by the soundlessness. He scooped up some food and tossed it in his mouth just to curb this. The sound of his grinding teeth appeased him. He was left wondering what exactly she meant by her reply but, chilled by her cool words, he chose to let it slip. He figured from her plainspoken point that she would stint him the details of her life for now and maybe forever. He looked at her now, unequivocal in her reticence. Her face was overcast and her frankness was contained in her meticulous hand as she diced with the needle. He ate in that rejection for some time until she eased it. When youve finished eating, my child She stopped and threw him a probing eye: I hope you can read? He nodded with a mouthful of food, so she commenced, taking her time. Theres a letter that came today. Id like you to read it to me, if its not too much trouble. He nodded again and it was settled.

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Old woman then lifted one trouser leg to examine her work. A reel fell from her lap and onto the straw mat. It lay just out of hand reach but she struggled with her outstretched hand. On her failure he crossed the floor to her rescue. Mmhh! Old age will find you, wherever you may be, she declared, rattling her bony frame with a hearty cackle. What old age, maam? Youre hardly of stooping age. Youll outlive even death, he appeased with witty charm. Are you trying to quieten me to my ruin, young man? They both giggled and let the topic slide. Dont worry about the dishes, Nomalongwe will do them in the morning, she assured as he scraped up the last scoop before putting the plate on the table. She pointed to a book on top of one barrel; it had a light-blue envelope buried between pages. He picked up the loose-leaved book and leafed through to learn that it was a short-story collection in isiXhosa. He then took out the envelope. It had already been opened and was addressed to a Mrs Edith Gadlela, c/o Rajahs General Dealer, Thunzini location, Maclear, 5480. He pulled out the content, opened it and scrutinized the scrawled note of a careless or perhaps urgent hand. He read out the very brief isiXhosa-written letter:

Dear Mrs Gadlela, We wish to inform you that Mr Andile Gadlela, who was admitted to the institution on 12-06-1955, will be released into your care as stated legal guardian in a period of approximately three months. We wish to further inform you that his condition has improved, although steadily, and his release has been approved by both the correctional authorities and the Justice Department. We therefore find no reason to keep the patient with us any longer than is necessary.
After some hitches and huffs of breath between words he finished reading. A stamp from the Umtata Mental Prison closed the letter and a fuzzy signature bore witness. He glanced over to her. Seeing no reply as she sewed, he folded the page and put it back in the envelope, back in the book and back on the barrel. Enkosi, mntanaam, [Thank you, my child] she uttered, much later. She then lifted the pair of pants up by the waist for inspection. I hope theyll fit you, she said, handing them to him along with the shoes and a blue shirt he hadnt seen. He smiled and warmly thanked her. She had sewn the pants to his exact size!

Although the timing people of Thunzini didnt like to wait on anything, they waited this time.

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They waited to see what he was about, this fast-eyed new guy with that hump on the back. They themselves couldnt be sure if he kept them in wonder or in worry, or both. But just before they worried he left them in a little scare. A scare enough to make the heated whores wish to renew their vows of chastity; virgin maidens flashed cowering smiles at their matchmakers, hinting not for a hunchback. But the lustful men were the most fearful, though. They feared that the same free-loving sluts in whose frowsty thighs they bobbed and sank when their hope declined would now swallow him too. Some mostly righteous souls who had nothing to hide feared nothing of him, just as long as he didnt cross the space joining them to their good forces. The worry that took the people came with a realization. They realized that they hadnt even heard him arrive in the shallows of their slumber. And if he could pussyfoot into their middle, as he had, then they were susceptible to other shifty things of the night. From then on they bolted their doors extra-tight and thanked their forebears he wasnt kindred.

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4 Trials of a madman

Gcobani Ngcambu lives in a house of cold brick and hard sweat for mortar. Except for two golden retrievers that stalk the yard, he and his reluctant wife are the only tenants in this tough house. But each day she chips at its format and he fears that hell have to raise it fresh from the dust, brick by brick. Each day she drapes gloom over his hopes. She brings shame to this house. She dishonours his name. This man is trying to climb and reach his gift but she has gone and greased the ladder. Now its slippery. Now he cant get up. His fury swells as her spite rises to blot out all he had ever hoped to be. Yet, this feud is a trial he must brave. His sanity depends on it. Presently, just three cockcrows to sunrise he stood on the grassy hill and stared down at the shadow, like a conqueror does after a siege. Columns of smoke rose from several yards before settling in the overhanging fog: the yawning morning was just now exhaling over the slouching Thunzini. But Gcobani stood here not with the heart of a lion. He lingered at the edge of sanity with a lambs terror held by the neck to the slaughter. A fear that the same dreams he dreamed just yesterday will come to nothing after all. The madness is there. Its been there. But he nips direly at the tiny crumb left of his sanity. He sensed it now, creeping closernearingthreatening to tackle him while he stood alone; he felt it so close that he need only lift his hand and poke it with a finger. But it didnt quite reach him. It lingered there, unobtrusive yet unsettling. He shivered as though he were waking to it for the first time. He felt yet more tingles as the throbbing breeze fondled his face. Below him he could hear the void expand and end in the distressed bleat of a nanny goat, maybe orating her misplacement of a kid, but he wasnt really listening. A stray glance upwards had caught him an object high in flight. Well above the hill a big bird flew in drawn-out arcs at a steady pace. It hovered with such poise that he thought he was having illusions. He blinked to wipe his eyes but the buoyant bird prowled still, bending the sea-coloured sky. He saw that it was a vulture and gazed at it now with troubled intrigue, wondering what died. The sun emerged in the east, first as a lurid half-light and then grew to a round island of drifting magenta and the land started. The day began, jubilant in its progression like the refrain of a spontaneous song. Sublime, he thought, seeing the morning sheen grow and letting his glee flood all of his heart. His eyes rambled and he watched the chain of far mountains form a curvature and scoop the valley as if it were in an earthen bowl. On one end of the land, in a crack between two mountains, the red snake appears and cleaves a path in the middle of the bowl to steer its flood. It scurries past the many eastern hills, past the vermin-killing waters of the cattle dip, past the terraced fields along the riverbank, past Thunzini and then straight

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through the forest. Still unrelenting, it flows to where the land drops, strained by the flood. There the current cascades into a spume-filled basin and runs in the open for some time until the ground rises again. It hastens down to where the converging mountains try to curb it and slips through a gorge between them, to flow forever. A perky breeze is skipping through the grassland and picking the soils dampness from the last rain to sprinkle it in the air. A shiftless puff of smog shrouds the deep-set settlement on this motley morning. He threw a cursory glance around and saw that the valley was speckled with wild colours: the green of the grass, the red of the soil, the grey of the river, the dark green of the forest and other extreme colours all curbed by the stretching blue of the roofing sky. Its a riotous mixture that only Gods nimble fingers can assort. At his height it looked animated, like a patchwork quilt with fantastic shapes. For an instant the vibrancy of colour stirred him so that his heart too became eager, like the smitten boy up a bough who saw the golden sun dappled through the green leaves of an apple tree, and he whispered it in his lovers ear. He huffed a deep, bright breath and exhaled just in time to catch the busy breeze switch elevation, lunging and pushing the sluggish smog along like an irritable shepherd. In due time the cloud dispersed and the breeze eased. He could see the houses clearly now. In that house, unlike many others. Like its own self, in fact. He eyed it the zinc of the home scintillating under the new suns glare and amid the mostly thatch houses. In there was the cause of his woes. So swamped in regret, he sat down on a nearby rock and pulled out a reefer he had fixed for himself. He deemed it before sticking it between the lips. He pulled out a matchbox. A matchstick. Friction. A spark flashed a flame and the tree was blazed. And so his path is illuminated. Halt dementia! He begged the gods to cure his toxic madness. He blames this on them and bids them to topple this lunacy! He toked the foul oxide: fhhtfhhtfhht! He sucked until it stung his thumb and index then flung it down to blow the last smoke out through the mouth. The measly roach reeked at his feet a residue. He squashed it with the heel of his Moccasins and looked into space so that Natures whisper turned serenade in his ear. His taunting yearn had been tapped and contained. He knew at that moment that he was not where he sat: he was somewhere between a grey cloud and the black sky above it. High. Zonked out! Picture a man floating there in the peaking stillness. Eyelids sagging. Heartbeat dragging. Half-dead dreaming. Just levitating there, nowhere. Just static, and calm. He looked up at the wide sea sky and saw some birds just some five or six birds not flying too fast and not flying too slow either, and pondered for a second. Just for a split second he wondered, what if Well, what if birds flew backwards? After a hooey stint in limbo he heard a familiar sound and loosened his trance. On the tracks below him he saw a goods train about to skate into the loading dock of Rajahs General Dealer.

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The rush with which it had rolled up dwindled to a lumber as it slackened, but it stopped with a head-splitting screech and slashed clean through the rift. He felt a nail spike his skull; his heart gonged and he choked as he clinched lunacy. It hit him like a blitz and he groaned, clutching his temples. He flung his head sideways but it seized him. As he swung, he lurched to one side but pitched a leg and brought his weight back up. Steady now. He raised his eyes and didnt move until he was wary of the goings-on around him. Disorder. Barking birds. Tails wagging dogs. Complete disarray! Hes trapped in it. Madness. It chokes him like a strong mans grip and he jumps out gasping and sweating, the strength of two hearts beating in his chest! This is his tussle. Remember the little boy of eight who was mauled by a white mans Rottweiler on a farm in Maclear? It caught him by the throat while he bickered for breath. The white man stood by! He stood in dance watching the scrap. You bloody kaffirtjie! he chanted. You should have never fucked with that dog in the first placerunning through my grounds like that. You got what you want! You got it, bloody kaffirtjie! And he danced. And there was death. Death tore at the piccanninny, all for some blackberries at the bramble by the baass toolshed. But right about now, where he sat, the hill breeze twirled round him to clothe him in its heaving freshness. He drew back in himself, stirred but not shaken by it. Yet, wrapped in that cool cloak, he longed for somethingsome frequent asylum; some assuring space beyond the mishmash where he lived. So he got up and strolled to the edge of the hill, over the steep face. Right there, he looked ready to advance to the shadow of the valley just leap and tumble to his finish. But he stopped and stared into the day, only really gazing at himself grieving and shrouded in that satin-textured breeze. And the benign morning now embraced him until he felt himself surrender trustingly into its wing. Until he felt that even if he just let go it would catch him and hold him dearly close to its breast. From his sorrow he was retrieved by the freight train stirring to resume its travel. In a slow splurge the locomotive began, chortling while it scuffed on, its spout spitting soot. It wasnt sliding but jostling forth in detached spasms until its chortles fused as it skidded eastward. He gave it a long shifting gaze, counting the last of the components as all of the slither vanished behind a rise in the earth. He stared until the knives of his madness didnt stab so deep and he forgot his predicament. It was thoughts of the mines that threw away this attempted madness. He recalled the pits where he drilled: the men there hummed a song about a train that manoeuvres mountains and crosses borders, while their beefy arms handled pick-axes, goring the thick earth for gold. He felt his drill-wielding bulges under his shirt and was appeased, now remembering his purpose. He would let it be known, not blurred by some madness he may have. I got these drilling a mine! he would declare proudly to anyone. He would hold himself that much higher.

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He mopped his brow, growing calmer, and stood so tall to his proximity and in himself, his madness now fairly tamed. He retreated from the expanding sprawl and stumbled into full consciousness. Gcobani Ngcambu rose but stopped, remembering that something was there, neither too near nor too far just there in the space between the real and the figment of his lunacy. He tensed up, now wondering if it was any bigger than he had made it out to be. Maybe he had exaggerated. He thought to turn around, intent on walking off the hill, but he knew that engaging it could end him on this very hilltop. Maybe as long as he didnt look at it then it could be eluded. Yes, he would not look but would cautiously move around it and flee. When he turned around there was nothing there. He felt glad but looked around, still doubtful, trying to see something. He looked around and around and didnt see it. It was placid all over not in a pleasant way but like something was lurking. Like maybe the quiet of an absence of something you had thought to be there but which turns out not to be there at all. He gathered himself, newly encouraged as if nothing could touch him. He smiled not believing he had feared his own shadow. He picked himself up and rose in resilience as the Man from the Mines. She dishonours his house. She smears shame on his name.

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5 Festive people

Some came on foot and some came on horse on horseback. But they all dropped in at fever pitch to share a heritage that would see them stand together in hardship and in revelry. Three generations of Ngubemnyamas litter met to reflect on their pride, the depleting morality and the ways of the time. A resident rich man with three sons had gathered the people to compliment his youngest on his union to a common girl from a local house. The old mans generosity was their chance to gather in festivity well, this and the feast of the first fruits, for which they collect at a hill in their skimpiest leather; there where bachelor men suit the nudechested maidens as they pound the soil and make their bare thighs jiggle; where the hasty ones who have wives look at the sprouting girls and thank polygamy. Lauding songs had been sung and well-wishers had passed the gifts of straw mats, baskets, blankets, plastic or zinc tubs and other showy things to the bride and groom. Now the spellbinding praise-singer paced the foreground, seized by the moment. After buzzing the audience with his spirited sermon he sat down to let ululations die and the dust settle. Both the young and old the ancients who came on three legs too thrilled to mingle in their prime endured the trying wait for the meat. Furrow-browed old men fiddled with walking canes and carved senseless shapes on the dirt, perhaps trying to versify their hunger. On occasion one would grumble to grease a dry throat, or lick his lips and wipe his brow as if it was all too torturous. Young men chafed rolling papers to do up tobacco joints. They tossed their eyes at the fires, whipped by whiffs, which wafted past them. There was feminine babble from the hearth-walls as young women reared the fires. Old females idled on straw mats against the houses; some took grumpy drags at their long-stemmed pipes cursing the younger for holding them in eternal famine. At this time, even in their peevishness, they know that their hearts have been pried open like doors in favour of this fuming jubilation. Little niggles are saved for tomorrow, or for the barren season when the crop has been reaped and they havent much to do except to beat pods and fan the grain-chaff to the slewing winds of autumn. For now everybody meets up: the diligent and also the dejected layabouts who know where drink is most brimful. Even mangy old mongrels that leant on scrawny loins and scratched at bloodsuckers were allowed to just be scouting the yard with timid tails for that early snack. Everybody was famished! Lately feasts were a rarity, as people were reluctant to slay their beasts. They didnt knife them as much as they used to in the springs beginning or around Christmas. Instead they kept the tendered bull or cow for a boy who would hike up to the mountains for circumcision in the next years winter. Or they kept it for the future taking of a bride for the same boy her rank

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being six cows, and an extra one or two of gratuity if she was a stunner. Because the masses did not observe Christmas, those who slaughtered did it for kinfolk returning for the festive season. A sheep was the habitual victim. The ceremonial goat was saved for sensitive occasions, but even when it did fall it was too little to go around so people just summoned closest family to feast on that. Those with no cloven-hoofed creatures, and the ones too stingy with theirs, honed their knives for a turkey, a cock or that no-egg-laying hen theyd been eying in the year. Those even stingier and those with neither beast nor bird to spare waited to be summoned by a sharing neighbor. But this time there was plenty for all: the hide of two bulls and eight sheep lay on the kraal-roof while everybody hung on for the unwrapped goodies. New arrivals were trickling in driblets and there were friendly reunions inside the yard as some met up with long-missed kin or yearned old friends. Those who watched the long-timeno-see handshakes and jolts of laughter sat thrilled, feeling the vibe pulse through the horde and tickle their own delight. Bored with the wait, a few seated women chanted a merry-maker to the rhythm of handclaps. Their throaty song seduced some six unshy ones who were quick onto their soles, jigging in spasm and tamping their heels down to expel lifes daunting tensions that festered just under their collars. They gather this way when the plough has been laid. They eat and have a drinking bout. But even as the last morsel has been gobbled and the littlest finger licked, a tiny tang will remain just under the tongue to remind them that as they relapse into oblivion as forgotten denizens in a secret pocket of the endless and ditched earth, sceptical of each other and each others friend and whatever the four winds blow in the might of oneness may still beckon. That they may then tag their allegiance and come fronting the tenant love that exudes from them by their salute, the way a branch forks from a tree. The Burden Bearer arrived with the latecomers to a full yard and found his place among young men who sat against the wire-fence, nearer to the gate. He greeted and sat at the edge of a large log, next to a man who had a pig-eyed expression and a sore on his chapped upper lip. This character looked to be in ill-health and had wrapped himself in a small blanket in the thick of the heat. All squinted at him. They looked. He looked. All eyes turned to the fires. He was different. Not long after sitting down he inquired about the occasion and who was who. Slow as he was, the ill one was able to direct him to the involved people. Inside the large kraal, men sat on long benches leaning against timber whose rusted nails shrilled with every lean as the aged planks took the bodies. Among them was one who was fresh in his old age and who threw his hands around, apparently relating a tale. He was Langalibalele, the patriarch of the homestead. His riches were measured in livestock and his wisdom was appreciated among elders in Thunzini. At times he would spit poetry for the lay minds of the settlement and was revered for his craft-

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manship with words. The elder had a greying head and beard with a sharp face and lively eyes. He spoke with emphasis and looked every man in the eye as he rambled. It was plain to see from their nods in agreement that he was influencing their views. He ended his speech with a jest. There was a jolly outburst from the hearers before everyone settled and wiped the laughter from their mouths to let live the hunger. Vumani, the old mans last born son and now groom, was doing a round of the kraal and shook the mens and old timers hands, thanking them for their presence. He was a youth who should be in his mid-twenties and looked to be of polished manner. Later he took a seat next to one who looked rather out of place among the common people of the settlement. He wore a red checked shirt, brown hessian pants and shiny red shoes. Especially odd were his shoulderlong curly hair, permed to the root, and glittering neck-chains to butter up his nifty guise. He had his gold-ringed fingers spread over his thighs in obvious show of his treasures. From his proper posture and the way he eye-frisked them, as if he were sizing every man up, it was clear that he felt majestic in his place. Yet, the eye-luring sparkle stayed pasted in his rippling crown of permed hair. But for some reason the Burden Bearer was watching one man in particular, who didnt look very restful in the midst of all the loud murmur. He was seated across him, not far to the gate. This individual sat eyeballing the many women who were flitting in and out of the houses and gazed at the ones who stood at the foreground tending to the fires. He slouched in his seat, as though he wanted eyes to skip him when they scanned the others. But he could not be missed: he was of burly build and a head taller than the rest. He had dirty-yellow eyes that looked jaundiced. A cleft dug into the prominent chin that divided his horse-like jowl, while his square shoulders imposed weight on his hulking form. His hair grew into the nape, coating it like a nappy mane, and his long arms ended in fists that looked like two knuckled mallets. He kept pounding these lightly onto his thighs, obviously anxious. The Burden Bearer stared at him for some time until their eyes came to meet. Somewhat surprised by the fact that he was being stared at, the giant guy shifted his eyes from the observers and fidgeted. It was clear that he wanted to take a look at the newcomer but every time he tried to do so he was met with piercing eyes from the Burden Bearer. Suddenly he rose, perhaps feeling that the watchers eyes were jabbing too deep. He began towards the gate in shin-high Wellingtons but stopped when a man hed been sitting next to called out: Sandile! He looked back and the caller handed him a folded pocketknife he had dropped on his rise. He proceeded to the gate with a knock-kneed clump and walked as if he were bothered by severe haemorrhoids. But he didnt exit; he took a turn and walked along the fence to the bottom of the yard, where he took a leak. The watcher deduced from his reaction that he must be a sulky one of boorish manners.

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It was late in the afternoon when the people finished eating the meat and gravy-soaked samp and the boys feasted on the offal. The dimple-cheeked guests who had mingled in selflessness left on full stomachs: they flowed out of the yard with fluid glides as if they were water people. They left appeased and as sure as truth that tradition and code will survive them as it devolves to the succeeding generations. Some remained. Young ragamuffins loitered behind the kraal and crumbled heads of weed to steal their half-time dose of the sedative. Men who drank dipped into calabashes and fuddled themselves with the brew. Another calabash went to the women; they didnt hesitate to tip it up to the last trickle, and were thirsting for more. There were about five straights of that bitter-sweet white mans liquor for the senior men. But those who abhorred the bile-bitterness of it, or were too shy to scorch their livers to a crust, felt friendly with the home brew. Some just knew straight up not to touch that sin that faded their morals and turned young men into foul-mouthed demons who flopped near somebodys fence to wake up the next morning dripping dew, missing shoes and looking a fool with trouser pockets turned out. The Burden Bearer also stayed behind to drink and then approached the cleaning women at the round house for a hunk of leftover meat. They looked at him with disquiet but wrapped the steak in brown paper and handed it to him. He left bloated and bum-drunk, mumbling and veering this and that way, his shyness all frayed. He arrived at the old womans quarters in a daze and handed her the meat. Mindful of the fact that he was inebriated, she asked him to fetch her old-age pay from Rajahs, as Nomalongwe had not been able to. By then a veil of darkness had settled and he wondered if hed make it back in one piece. But he found himself on his way to the foot of the hill. As he neared the store he could hear a generator buzzing from the back of the building. One of the double doors to the entrance was closed a hint that they were soon to shut up shop. A half-dozy watchman who had his face wrapped in a peaked balaclava and cradled a knob-kerrie sat back on a chair on the veranda. The Burden Bearer climbed the three steps, hailed him and entered the light of an electric bulb on the ceiling, which threw a beam into the whole store, unveiling the farthest nooks. The fragrance of something charred a smell unfamiliar to his nostrils hung thick inside as he crossed the room. It was a supermarket-type enterprise and it looked like everything that could be of use to the inhabitants was sold in it. There were blankets, buckets, dishes, counter books, pens, shoes, clothes, tools and implementseven caskets. There were four short isles with shelves on either side dividing the store into sections. A long wall-to-wall counter ran crosswise at the end of the room and split the food section from the other goods. Shelved behind it were tinned and packaged eats, sauces, spices and other useful things in cooking. At the right end of the counter was a glass display with blonde-haired dolls, bangles, watches and other queer-shaped objects

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whose purpose he did not recognize. The trader was stacking much money with his scheme, without a doubt. He approached the counter, behind which an Indian man waited with a beard the size of a bush. A smile began from him for the customer and got wider until it went stiff right on his furry face. A cat thatd been napping it up on the counter jumped up in full alert on sighting the Burden Bearer. It stood bearing its teeth with back humped and ready for anything. He stepped back, cautious of that spite. For a second the storemans smile seemed to limp as he looked from the wacky cat to the stranger. The cat then shrieked and vanished behind the counter. Molo, mhlobo. Kunjani namhlanje? [Hallo, friend. How are you today?] the Indian greeted, another smile now pasted evenly across his downy mug. Molo, the Burden Bearer replied, surprised by the vernacular courtesy. He moved closer. Not wanting to say too much, he handed him the old womans I.D. and requested the money. At that the storeman pulled a black counter book from beneath the till and opened it on a page. He scanned the names there, all while he himself was being scrutinized. Upon finding the one in the I.D. he put a tick next it and took out a hundred and fifty rands from a moneybag to hand it to the stranger along with the document. Siyabulela, bhuti, [Thank you, brother] he assured as the visitor turned his back on the counter. The Burden Bearer said goodbye to the watchman and made his way down towards the settlement, guided by a crescent moon and a twinkling mass of stars. Greatness embraces he who neither seeks it nor is lured by its rewards. But the youngster stood expecting this greatness. He hid beneath the night with flick-knife at hand and ready to snatch anothers wealth. His tongueless Chuck Taylors were laced tight for a quick flight swift on his toes. The sly figure loomed on the corner of the first houses yard by the long path from Rajahs General Dealer. He had a vulture-like form with his oversize coat and beanie, worn to hinder. The collar and flaps were pulled up to conceal his face. His popped eyes rolled in sidelong glances and he leaked from the armpits, starting to sweat. The youngster had a dream of greatness. He wanted to be like the majestic man from Johannesburg and smear pleasant-smelling oils on his flowing hair for that He-man glitter. He who rode his bike with bragging fluency, tinkling his bell at little pests on the dusty roads. The spokes had reflectors and the rims glistened when they met the sun. The sprocket was welloiled for hitch-free ridesfor that wafting motion. And the rider? Whoa! He was all so suave with sparkly chains and finger rings to sign him off as of a pruned pedigree. That poshness was matched by a tidy pose by his flawless highness he was straight spruce! A sight to gawk at. Never had he seen a smoothie like him anywhere. He rode with suchpanache! He clutched his knife for assurance. All this greatness, it was possible indeed. He hunched a

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tad lower trying to shrink to the size of the pole he leaned against. He lurked, waiting for a short man who would be carrying an old womans hundred and fifty rands. Too soon he caught sight of the humped figure, now nearing the corner. He tried to check his throbbing heart, afraid the loud pounding may snitch him out. He flexed up and rubbed the ball of his thumb to ease the sweat that would grease the knife. The dwarfish body neared the corner, all but blind to the dangers harboured by the night. Sure of the moment, the stalker stepped out to snatch what he could. The dwarf caught the transpiring figure from the tail of his eye. Unsure whether his drunken mind was playing tricks on him he looked in full. As the spectre crept from the night his hairs stood on end. He paused, startled. From its outline he could make out the kit and guessed that this was no friendly encounter there was a prize at stake. Just then he heard the flick as a blade sprang from a knife handle. Saphimali! [Give me the money!] a shaky voice barked. Immediately he picked up the strain in the voice and decided to stall: Ungubani? [Who are you?] he queried, defying the order. Sssaphimali, there was doubt now. Ungubani? This was resistance! The night prowler had not predicted this. Saphimali! he ordered, unsure of the next line. Ungubani? quizzed the defiant dwarf. The nightly villain panicked. He thrust forward with the knife in attack. The dwarf saw the forward move and sidestepped the stab to arrest the hand. He sprained it to a pained wince and the knife fell down. A blow followed from the left fist but he blocked that too. He let loose his own punch on the intruder it breached the coat and struck his right ribs. There were fisticuffs. Punches were pitched in the night. The dwarf nipped the beanie and yanked it over the crooks face. He pulled his coat sideways, trapping him in it, and turned him into a punchbag. The youth flung his fists blindly, hampered by his wardrobe, but blows thumped in as the dwarf made a quick snack of him. Stunned and trying to fix his coat, the youngster crashed to the ground. The dwarf kicked twice on the ribs but he flung his hat off in time to dodge one in the face. He scrambled up from the dust and stumbled off back to his dogs life. His aims had been foiled and he was left bruised and knifeless.

Sometimes a man may be stupefied such that his sanity is maimed. It was probably the way the wheelbarrow was placed just inside the gate, blocking the entrance, that made him suspect all was not normal on that day when he returned late from

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the feast. He had no idea what to make of this as his wife should have picked it up and placed it behind the house, after the neighbours put it there to avoid the dogs. Lamplight seeped through the closed curtains convincing him that she was inside. As soon as he stepped into the yard two golden retrievers came at him tail-swinging. He paid them no mind and crossed the foreground with the wheelbarrow to put it in its place. He then inched his way to the front door, feeling the festive brew tilt him and make his vision jiggle. It was upon entry that he paused, surprised to hear whimpers lustful moans spring from the houses walls. He stayed still, wondering if this wasnt the wrong house; thinking that maybe by some error in his drunken judgement he had blundered into another mans lair. But the walls and furniture looked too familiar. It was his house. He listened. There were moansa creaking bed. Gingerly, he stepped in to proceed to a door that led to the stir. Dumbfounded! He froze at the doorway unable to take another step. What the? What? Surprise gagged him and he could say nothing. She lay on her back on top of the bed with her legs apart and naked as a snake. She held a black object, which she kept shoving in and out of herself. With eyes not looking, she was squirming and moaning with every thrust of the thing. Right there in the doorway something in him went Qsh! (Yes a man may break. Take a man in your hands. Now snap him in half. There, you have a broken man right there.) At first he stood there only flummoxed. And then his heart raced and he became afraid. He buried his face in his hands and would have dropped to his knees but swiftly caught himself. He evened up and lived. Meanwhile, she carried on hard at her play and neglecting that he was right there. She had heard the door creak open and knew that someone was there at the doorway and he belonged in some corner in this house. But there were fierce forces under her skin: there was a rush in her veins, blood was bubbling and her nerves were fit to burst. So she let him stand there wide-eyed a baffled bystander. She let him stand glowering while she tried to complete this chapter in her pleasurable monologues. Like a sleeper yanked out of the deep of a good dream, she looked dazed had that lazy eye thing and peered at him through half-closed eyesthrough her pleasure. By now a well of disgust had filled up in his mouth. He spat out the goo and charged towards the bed. He held her active hand back, snatched the gizmo and flung it across the room. Her heat was dowsed and her pleasure trounced. Her blood cooled now and the nerves calmed as she left her trance to stumble upon a man-face looming over her. Are you crazy, woman? he roared, throwing his hands from his head. Yes, I am! she retorted and coiled herself on the bed before pulling a blanket over her nudeness, up over her head. Her blood was going cold from the sudden break in stroke. But he snatched the cover off and scowled at her to taunt her cheek. Leave me alone! she snarled and nabbed the blanket back to wrap herself.

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What whoring is this with no end? Whoring? Then why am I here if Im a whore? He had no reply for her lip. Instead, fully fuming now, he scoured the floor, grabbed the black object in the shape of a penis and asked: Where did you get this? Without waiting for a reply, or expecting one, he stormed out and left her cowed. He marched down to the long-drop and flung the thing inside before cursing the foreign shopkeeper for perverting his wife. Quake-kneed now and swooped by a sudden fit of infirmity, Gcobani trudged back to the wheelbarrow behind the house. He sagged into it, dizzy from both the festive concoction and the brunt of the instant affair. What demon has found a home in my house? he wondered, hopelessly. In his own house he felt like an outsider; an intruder. A meddler whod just barged in on two lovers feeding each other passion. But as sudden as that question had popped up, a gruelling sadness slowly weaved into him, toppling the bewilderment. Her promiscuity had stretched to rubber things! For some time he sat outside crushed to a pulp. In some corner in his head a hand has a machete and is hacking at the stems of his sanity, wiping out the green and leaving a blunt grey of barrenness. He worked in the mines like many men and flexed beefed up biceps, the same as they had. From the get-go Gcobani had staged himself as a go-getter and then proved it by building the brick house he lived in. He had baked the bricks himself, fixed the walls and posted up the roof plank, zinc and clinched the last nail! At twenty years old and new to manhood he packed his metal trunk, doubled a blanket over his shoulder and boarded a bus at the big stop in Nomatholo, a half mornings walk from Thunzini. The spot was a pick-up point for mine conscripts and city-goers from the vicinity. The bus was to drop them at the doorstep of the mines. Foreman Ryk Bezuidenhout smacked the young kaffirs rugged bulges and saw the strict face. He pulled him out of the recruitment queue and said: This one, send him straight to the drill! For six years Gcobani bore those holes before he came home dressed to the nines and grinning with one side of his mouth. He spoke an eccentric tongue and puzzled everyone with this gibberish. He called it isifanakalo and got dimple-cheeked with self-sureness as they became amazed. When he returned he was a thriving man and city-slick, with gold-chains swinging from his neck and his hair greased out of form. He shouldered a boom-box, bumping Chicco Twala. It was the youngsters who were made to gawp at his allure. They knew him by his dainty dress code and his stable grandeur, laced with that gifted peacock grace. A true dandy who rolled mothballs on his clothes and spit-shined his shoes if they soiled while he was out and about. His leather caps were swayed to the side like this, while he rode swanky on his bike.

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With their profoundly simple imagination the people stayed thinking he had been paid in some of this gold that he mined, what with the way he had gone off and came back flaunting and putting up a strong house at will. Gobsmacked and smitten, they all agreed that his lodging a gabled brick house adjoined by a six-corner hut was regal. This prompting the matchmakers to rush forward their favourite girl, and mothers to trip over each other, charging to nab him for a nubile daughter. But it puzzled them why out of all the fresh girls his eye would itch for her, Chwayita. He had taken her as his upon returning from the mines but with no woman to call a wife. He had to define himself, as must every man in these parts. Her parents, eager to marry her off, didnt stall for him to worry them any more than hed already done with requests for her hand. A man whose tenure in the city had earned him wealth was the prized husband. He was able to settle her lobolo without delay. When she defied the order she was flounced onto donkey-back and cantered off to a mans house to take up her wifely chores. Unlike the newly loose women, whod been led astray by their husbands desertion, Chwayita had been at it before marriage and she didnt drink. Yet, just like them, she roamed with the heart of one who had been ditched. Those who had nothing but disdain for her were muzzled to silence upon her marriage. But their scepticism could not allow them to see a wife out of a bubbling whore. They knew she was loose and nothing not a chain with an iron lock could shut her legs. And, as if to concur with their misgivings, she went on to drag her ways into a mans house. She left a trail of her obscenities leading to the gate and thats where her men found her in the heat of those horny nights. It was the descent men who did her; those for whom the privileges of polygamy would be too costly in cows. They didnt want to do the disreputable ones of the public houses but nonetheless needed some unfamiliar thighs to plunge into. For her part she simply enjoyed men the way a child enjoys playthings. It was not to be possessed or obsessed over, not their company; only what they had to offer. In turn she offered herself as a place for them to measure their worth outside the dreariness of marriage. The men knew this and gave each other way, never laying claim or squabbling over her. They werent going to pamper her either, they would simply take their turns and fuck her until the day she announced that she couldnt be fucked anymore. It seemed that every man had had her, except those whose impotence rendered them ignorant of the pleasures of the flesh. She did them all, looking for the one who could thrust the deepest among them. Even the charmers, who liked to think they had wheedled the cookie out of her with their venomous charm, found her loose. Of course, when the housemaster was present she parted ways with her playthings. But the house got rowdy with vengeful bickering as the two carried on inside and outside. He saw in her a spiteful hussy whose hysteria was calculated to plunge him in ridicule. The pair stayed

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dejected from the lot and existed in their own outrageous solitude, bashing each other and suffering a wrangle of mutual hostilities. Theirs had long become a mind game: he wanted a woman who would praise his winners momentum, while she was trying to crumple him into a ball she could toss about in the air. She was determined to disprove that she was something to be handled and tamed. People knew their verbal bouts, led by her frenzied curses that made men clench their fists and women fold their lips in tight squiggles and say, Mmhh! She was drastic and they couldnt forget that. They couldnt forget that day in front of the house when she had a brick in her hand and was threatening to smash his face. Do it! he snapped, calling her bluff. It was a flaming day and in the previous one a man had marched his young wife back to her fathers house for her cheek and riot, wanting his herd back, after she refused to grind the corn on the stone; instead she wanted to mill it at Rajahs for a price. This because she claimed that her hands were scuffed from the task. As our blunders foul us with indelible shame, so the macho men of Thunzini would have a field day with this one. When they passed the concrete blue-painted house theyd point at it and say a coward lives there. A man so gutless he let his woman put her finger in his face. Theyd call him sissy or pathetic but never by his name. Even when someone would exalt him or say they fancied his style, the authentic men would be quick to object that he was henpecked and needed to check himself. The fact that he had taken the bus to the mine, dipped down to its ends and slogged for six solid years wouldnt count. Thereafter, when the sun shone too hot, as it had on that day, they would declare that a day of cowards and of that man whose mouthy wife threatened to reform his face with a brick. That incident by itself was a teaser. It kept people on tenterhooks. They frowned at a woman who wouldnt think twice about wrecking a mans house. They stared at the place upon passing it and the path in front of it diverted closer to the wire fence. They wanted to hear anything: a raised voice, a breaking plate, a smack or any equivalent to spice up their gossip so that each could say, I too heard them. But for all her cheek and sloth he couldnt hit her. He did smack her once but had to pay her family a ram of amends. She was a defiant woman, still, but he knew that beating her anymore would only serve to make her despise him. But the cheated women, jealous with their oversexed men, hoped he would put bruises where her beauty was for hers was as if the heavens had opened and poured a pail of it all on her. They themselves had tried and failed dismally to be beautiful. They had waited seven days for better faces under those skin-lightening lotions; they had smeared themselves with ochre, calamine, soggy ash and even lime mixture. They puffed their faces until Meneer Coetzees buttermilk skin seemed dusky when compared but nothing came of it. Yet, she remained the most delighting among them, without even half-trying! With the women wanting to be beautiful so much, their ugliness became most conspicuous

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both in their features and in their hearts. In their scandal-trading and scheming on each other they had found concession and she was it. But, despite their hostility towards her, that episode with the brick made them cautious about what looks to direct at her. So instead they found relief in howling at the well, hands on hips and fingers wagging, promising to flatten that bitch! She sensed this enmity and didnt fetch water when they did. She went before them, or after if she had errands to run. Two years into the marriage and she wouldnt settle. By now she was supposed to have been undressed of her bridal attire a headscarf and German-print dress that flowed right down to the ankles but her husband wouldnt have this done until she learned to be a proper wife. She wore the outfit on without the least bit of anxiety. He couldnt tame her, not if he left her tied to the bedpost when he returned to the city. Her mother-in-law, the inclined overseer to an absent mans young wife, would have nothing to do with a vile and chaotic one. Gcobani was war-worn and tired of chiding a woman for one thing one day only for her to wake up and do the same thing the next. He cursed the day he put her in his house and at times would toss out her suitcase of clothes, point her to the gate and slam the door in her face. She would hurl curses at the shut door and drag the clumsy luggage while raving on her way to the gate. But she never quite exited to start on her own. She always rounded the house and sat behind it, still speaking vulgarities. She was unachievable. But he kept her and one time took her to a diviner with superior faculties. Her head is not right, Mathambanamehlo had said. He had rattled and thrown his bones to see the sporadic chaos that was squaring her head. He spoke her conduct with such vigorous effusions that there had been relief in Gcobani after the session. They were given a bottle of some green concoction for her to drink when she felt her head start to swing. She never did. He offered it to her many times but she refused it and it became a subject in their quarrels. Why dont you take me back home then? Why dont you take another wife? she would burst out. He kept her, as nutty as she would be. The mean people sucked it from between their teeth that he was as sterile as a gelded mule and was of use to no one but the maker who made him why else would he house a ranting shrew? They said he didnt want a woman who would expect his children. Meanwhile, she had been ran through so much that her womb was yawning and nothing stayed in there long enough to grow. So together they paired up this illfamed duo: she a barren hellcat and he a henpecked eunuch. The truth is he was escaping solitude. Desolation. The kind you encounter underground digging for gold and suddenly the tunnel caves in. Theres panic. Everybody is fleeing ahead. Chaos! You try to scamper forward but rockfall blocks your path and you stand still, stranded. You look both sides but the shaft is sealed shut. Theres nowhere to run. The dust settles and as

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quick as that youre alone. Deserted. You scream and beat the barrier, calling out to whoever. Suddenly your helmet torch fails and youre alone again. Youre alone in the dark pits of the earth and without the preciousness you had dipped to those depths for in the first place. And then you start to sweat from the heat. You sweat and sweat and get scared and sit down because youre alone. He knew that loneliness and wished it not on himself; the underground is no place for a man. She kept him on his toes, in case the tunnel caved in! But whether it was his wifey woes that her neurosis was starting to take on him or that the city had twisted him into a dark and grudging man, the change in Gcobani could not be ignored. NoSandile, chieftainess of gossips all, saw this for herself when one time she went into the brick house to borrow a half-cup of sugar to make a quick cup of tea for her late husbands second aunty on his fathers side, who had dropped in for a quick one. She was pretty sure it was weed smoke that had stunk the house when she entered and found him sitting on the dining table. She knew the smell because her brother had been smoking it before one day he declared that there was a gang of bearded midgets tailing him. Later, he had heard them on the wireless calling out his name. With this perplexed mind state he fled to the forest with them in pursuit and now lived there, with or without these characters. The women at the gossip spot had never known NoSandile to be one to lie about such truths, so they nodded and wished theyd gone with her that time to see for themselves. They tied this revelation to the fact that lately Gcobani had begun to fix a sjambok to the crossbar of his bicycle when he rode. There was something curiously odd about him. His paranoia could or could not have been about his woman, but they all agreed that her beauty was like a fig-fruit: pleasant on the outside but blemished on the inside.

Everybody to the gold mines! Those man-gorging gullets that had nearly every young man lined up at the bus stop twitching and tizzy; had them pumped up and zealous, each teasing over whether the white foreman will like him enough to let him handle the jerking drill. Theyd been juddering to the plough for too long, too much, and they knew by this that they could handle anything any white man pointed them to. Each stood with a set of throbbing slabs of anxious muscle: many men lined up on their marks, set and ready for something anything! Their greed for nothing less than victory could not be diminished, not by the sad faces of their suckling wives as the trunk was packed and ready for the great road to the city. Nothing mattered; they were willing to dip down the deepest canal and split the craggiest rock just to wield this craving strength. So the fattest bird in each yard was chased, decapitated, scalded and plucked. Snack-tins were

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packed tight with butter-smeared cornbread and pepper-sprinkled chicken so good that they finished the packs at the bus stop and lasted the trip on churning stomachs. They left; left expectant or feeding wives astonished, who had thought they would stay around to cherish their induction into womanhood. Some newly married men were so rushed that they dashed off on the morning after consummation night, not patient enough to wait for a pregnancy, or to try again for one. Theyd read about it in melancholic letters doodled in a standard three level of literacy. The would-be miners left their wives under mothers-in-law who were cold-driven to break them of the flightiness of girlhood until all thats left is a conquered housemaid obedient to their every set rule. Mothers-in-law who were constantly sneaking up on them to catch them in the act, any act, and be quick to point out that this was not done in a mans house. These snappish witches played foul and finger-swept the windowsills and doorframes for the thinnest and newest coat of dust. In their steadfast will to domesticate the young wives they tasked them from the roosters first crow to the muffles of night. They worked the pregnant ones to the day their womb water streamed down their legs and they sank to the floor from contractions. The new wives, for whom marriage had turned into a dreaded drill, rued the day they were pushed into wedlock. But their blood-curdling hatred for their task-mistresses could not nearly measure against the fear of growing old with no house and no man because they were too delicate to handle duty. So they stayed, grinned and bore the strain. They nursed their pregnancies and kept the home fires burning through the cheerless winter. They waited, hoped and waited, still, for the ferocious December heat to gargle their men to the brim of those faraway cavities and straight home. Some men came back: those in whom the citys tall body had imposed an inferiority complex. They returned to remember that they were heads of households. Either that or they missed the tongue-wetting festive meat garnished with the housewives pepper-flavoured love for cooking. Some didnt return for a while. Others just stayed in the city never to be seen again. Two or three homes got a telegram saying a tunnel had caved in on a son or nephew and they needed to fetch a body. The homing ones came back looking dinky and sporting swaggers. They wore brimmed hats, tipped over their heads skew enough to give them distinction; some would doff theirs when passing the old timers. Ones who had left looking the skinniest came back formed and fatted. Wives were bought sequined dresses, high-heeled shoes and felt hats they had no place to wear to. They were just trying to ladify them. The miners took one look at their manicured houses and well-bred children and at once made heroines out of their women, even as they saw that the rural dust had blunted the lustrous eyes of girlhood into two flameless exhibits to

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a terribly longing soul. They merely wiped the dust from the corners of their ladies eyes to restore a sparkle they once saw. Then they remembered the urging finger of the underground boss and, understanding what its like to be subject, were ever so gentle in their copulation. Love grew in those houses. Not the imposed love of arranged unions, or of a slave for a master, but a notion that would extract a beloved from the deepest burrow and back to familiar eyes. Tasks that had been unpleasant for the wives were performed with a pervasive willingness and the warm meals were served with a bob and curtsey, for they were in the presence of the truest warriors. They endeared themselves to their men, listening unflinchingly to tales of neck-breaking toil and of callous and shamelessly insulting white men who saw slaveworthy kaffirs inside every dark skin. Being the only two white men they had ever known, the wives couldnt imagine a vulgar one against Meneer Johan Wilhelm Coetzees smooth modulations through the megaphone as he rode through the settlement pleading for their wool. Or Doctor Cloete who, even as he spanked their terrified babies to screeching tears just before the injection, did it with such motherly heed that they remained sheepish enough not to protest or ask what that is hes putting into their babies. These women had accepted that so pale a creature could and, indeed, felt the same way they did about their offspring. Sure they saw the offence in Coetzee in the way he put a grown black man in the back of his van while a tongue-lolling and gasping hound took up front, but they had always dismissed this as a mere slip of courtesy, or even a voluntary act from the darkie. They found it hard to lay these tales of intentionally insolent white men on these two, whose long time dealings with the citizens had enabled them to be fluent in the local language, and were compromising enough to speak it. But they listened, as wives should listen of toiling husbands. The city with its uppish ways had given class to some. These few men would have snailed their way home after a lifetime and a half, if they could help it, but had to return for one pressing reason or another. Now in the presence of their rural wives they smelled the soot-stained clothes or saw the ash in the chipped nails. Instead they yearned for the township girls with their musk-scented roll-ons and hot-combed hair lined with plum-flavoured gel. They looked again, saw the grey garden eyes and suddenly heard the loud bang of dynamite and recalled that there was gold to be dug somewhere in a faraway and just deep enough shaft. In this season of homecoming several hopeful of the shebeen girls, now remembering that they were somebodys wife, shifted from the slovenliness of the liquor dens and renovated themselves. This just in case a truant husband was finally coming home, or had sent word of a pending return. Suddenly the unblinking love offered by their stupid warriors seemed not to matter anymore as they chased a memory. Now, just now, there was something silly about a place where triflers blacked out in their own urine and smacked each other over who spilled the

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beer. Now more than ever before for them the sour stench of puke was prominent in those places of common resort. Meanwhile, their strength-given warriors, who had figured that merely having the strength was so impressive that spending it on anything wasnt coaxing, were foisted off to the shebeen corners to snivel in pity. Since by the girls they were made, in the same way they could be broken. The tickles under the chin and the flattery stopped. The nit-picking and the lap-dances ended too. Right then the fogs of fantasy peeled back to reveal a cunning reality. And with that the warriors could slowly feel their good fortune change. So there was none of that brotherly intimacy of tribesmen when the miners returned. Instead envy glared with the salty eye of a snake before it tacks its fangs to its mark. The miners stared back unblinking, but envy looked away in fright. And then they spotted it in the losers: in the muddy dog-day eyes was that starry gleam dead in them in them. Pity had survived it. Yet, behind that was a shameful gang of shirkers trying to live on fluke. The miners recognized this eyesore as a far side of themselves a side they had rode to the farthest lands and dipped down the deepest hole just to rid themselves of. It was the very reason for their aching arms and this protuberant mass of muscle. This simply because life for them was not some lousy bestowal to be lived and died in a rut. But this infantile scum they saw before them was a jibe at every hustling man and his hard-earned keep. It was a mockery of manhood! However, the gloss-laced gold-diggers had only returned so that they could leave again. And they left, each time tailed by a worked up crew of new recruits who were greedy for gain. The true stories of grub-up toil had vitalized these juniors until they too had boundless strength to burn. They were the impressionable young bucks who had just graduated through the rites of circumcision and were now pushing for swollen muscle, which would, by bulge and bulk, confirm their manhood. They had seen the gold chains and other flash and twinkle and wanted in on the actionwanted a hard house, cassette players to box the ears and whatever else could be bought with money made. So they, too, waited with nervous wiggles at the bus stop to fall under some pettish and blue-eyed foreman. They, too, would return to be heroified as immortal men of formidable stature. Young men left in driblets and in droves, roused by the promise of riches. The clean-living homekeepers waited once again for money in the post, a scrawled letter renouncing a marriage, or that tragic telegram. The loose-living losers and their courtesans, along with the drudging men who were attached to the land and found ease in the gentle welting strokes with the ploughshare, remained. Later, when they had seen the futility of waiting anymore, the girls soon sauntered back to their sloppy old ways; back to their half-witted playmates who had a hyper love for all seasons. They found them in the same shebeen corners harassed-looking like has-beens. They were propped up against the walls with heads hanging between their knees

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and sapped to the verge of lifelessness. The girls condescended once more to lift them up and lend them the strength to be men enough for a moments delight. Being ungrudging forgivers, the boozy warriors awoke to give back a love that had never dwindled. These scaly whores subsisted this way, as fair-weather wives sharing a mutual love that lasted only as long as the liquor was flowing; only as long as they could throw their heads back to the forced laughs of a fragile happiness knowing there was another quart to be drunk to wash down the bitterness of life. But all through the drunken joy they kept a hopeful eye to the door, as if they had a choice between the curative bottles and a whores paradise. Their lust for these men was not founded on some grimy wish to be matched with them; for they knew that their warriors were grossly hopeless and would be so for as long as the year. It was only to conquer them: to know that they wouldnt be left washed up, rather they could do the leaving at will. And the warriors could be conquered any day and everyday, save for hangover days when the preceding nights binge had them battered and limp; when they were parched and queasy and nothing could faze them from the hub of their idleness. Not even twenty pussies stacked together.

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6 Echoes of a travelling man

Many men have fallen as one looking for glory. But true glory can only be one mans. What the rest get is consolation for their efforts! The old man was already harsh in tone. He was talking so frantically that spit bubbles peeped from the sides of his mouth. He bent down to raise the calabash with both hands, took a few gulps and grinned stiffly at the brews spiky tang. He placed it down again to give his mouth a backhand swipe, all set to keep on rating. The two of them sat by the kraal, the old man taking swigs of yesterdays remnants of what had been a splendid affair. He spat words of reason while his youngest son listened halfheartedly, wishing he were in another place and time. Langalibaleles revulsion was starting to flare, fanned by his sons ignorance of things he felt only the most foolish of minds would fail to grasp. At twenty-eight years old Vumani had taken a wife just the previous day and wanted to build his roost away from the homestead. He was looking to go and work in the mines but needed only a nod from his father. The white man! Thats who gets the glory. Its your sweat and spit you spill but white man gets all the glory therell ever be! The old man tweaked, looked to the northern sky and said: Ive been to Johannesburg, son, and what I saw was pity. Pity! Father, Im old enough. I have to see this for myself, Vumani begged, thumbing his own chest. See for yourself? Many men are still stuck there seeing it for themselves. You dont go there to make a living, son you dont! You go to subject yourself to slavery. In this case they deck it with a little glitter and make it look pretty to you. I say stay and be your own man. Stay. Stay to what? The same old theft every harvest? We work too damn hard for half what we reap to be snatched up by Rajahs fat fingers and sold as stock along with our reasoning. Its you choice to sell to him. Whats the other option? Fill up all the barrels in the yard and eat up all I want? Father, I want to measure myself with something more than how much food I have left to last me through the winter. I want to be in a place where a mans skill and patience gets him his strengths worth in hard currency. Aahand youll get this from cringing at another mans feet as if he were the Almighty in flesh? Whats the difference? I mean, you talk of exploitation as if it doesnt exist here. What do you think an Indian man is doing here? Pecking on chicken feed? No! Have you ever asked him how much he gets for your sack at the train? And the white man, Coetzeehow much for your

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wool where he sells it? In every place theres a gain to be made and I might as well make it in the city than here. Wheres the sense in sweating for minimum gain when I can do it for maximum? Langalibalele was silent. Vumani took up again. Those two are the only foreigners here and they still have us by the balls. The both of them! Should we sit in our place blind to all were being robbed of? If this Johannesburg lies on the same stretch of land we walk on, then shouldnt we be there prospecting for our share? That spurred the old man on: When you slave for somebody youre getting nobodys share but what the man decides youre getting! From what I see thats more than the What you see is the fog over your eyes, boy! Look at your uncle. A job-hopping drunk who died of liver disease because liquor is where he chose to hide after no luck came his way. Look at Jwarhas boy. That Gcobanifriend of yours, is he? Is that something to be proud of? He speaks that gibberish too. Where is the pride in that? Is it in the slick hair? What did he raise after six years of sweat? That toy whose bell he clinks every time hes crying out to be noticed? That right there is a pat on the back from your baas for having the makings of a good slave. A fool for your pains! Now he comes back here acting like he left his footprints in Johannesburg. All he is is a runaway slave, man. Hell always have the stench of that place hassling his nostrils. His head is never going to work straight. Look at himsix years. Six years in that dump and he couldnt even get a proper wife! Father, no! What no? With a woman like that hell never get respect around here. Hell never raise his head to the clouds when he mounts that two-wheeled scrap of his. Should we draw our aspirations from a man who cant even control his own wife? Dont say father no! What? Do you also want to discover your flair for bike-pedalling is that it?! It was a question sagging with the weight of the old mans abhorrence for pettiness. Vumani said nothing, prompting him to draw back a bit and calm his tone. The township has worked on that boy, he observed. It undid all we had achieved to make him a man. It rotted his mind. How do you expect to rule a woman when you yourself cant grow up? His is a flimsy house. Does a man ever stack bricks with no mortar? Does he then stand before that and call it a house? The old man was only awed by the reasoning of men. But, now parched from it all, he adjourned to tip the calabash. More to himself than to his son, he then asked: What is it in this gold that has many men so dumb? White man points us to the nearest deepest slave hole and we will run, run, run to it! Trade the last of our land for a pickaxe and helmet to dive into the depths of oppression headlong. There are men who leave their families for Johannesburg and

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sell them out for less than the worth of a grain of gold. They lie to their wives and tell them they ought to be where theyre goingthat they ought to slave. Some of them dont even make it to the mines. They live in those pigeon coops and try to wind their way to the street corner, where theyll loaf the day waiting for crumbs to fall into their hands. Nothing ever comes their way. All this in the name of gold! And then when the township is full in their heads when it has sucked them dry of the importance of being men, they come back here pottering blind, wanting their families to nurse their wounds and cheer them on back to despair. They return here thinking the white mans logic is so correct they end up hating themselves for having been foolish for so long. Come back silicosis-sick coughing their lungs out! But they come questioning the very things we dorubbishing our rituals! Now, to his son: Our own people look at us like were backward scum! The son never replied: there was heat too hot to touch. But Langalibalele was stopping for nothing. The white mans is a flashy life, posted up by no foundation. We cannot be that. All that twinkle is perfectly alright for him. Let him be. We have our land. Let us gore and stab it until it grants us our yield. Let us scrape the earth with our fingers and wipe our arses with straw because thats who we are. Many men go and Many men, father. Many men! Am I not allowed to deserve more like these many men? Many men are not smart. And when many men are stupid all around you its very tempting to be stupid right along. You, my son, deserve all this treasure before you, the father assured, sweeping his hand over the terrain. This here land is your heirloom. So now, theres no sense in you living in a room with ten other slaves waiting to make the white man rich. None! Not when you have this. Dancing to a masters whip? Dont want to be master of your own fate huh? But father, youre the one whos always wailing on about how a man is here for nothing else and theres nothing else here for a man if he doesnt work. Yes, so. But you may not be a dummy to another man! This situation was impossible. With every reason he put forth the son was flumping deeper into the sticky mire fabricated by his father. At last resort he said: Father, Im a man now. Right now my priorities are to make money to feed my family. No, your priorities have been pissed out along with your senses! My eldest sonyour brothergave up his freedom for a few coins. Hes in Cape Town now picking grapes off vines at thirty-seven years old! Hed rather do that than work his own field. I see you want to be just like him. I see you want to play. Its all a game to you boys. Its all about whos got the heaviest jingle in his pocket! As though the old man could taste it on his tongue As though the acrid taste of greed were

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swilling in his mouth as he spoke, he grunted, grating phlegm from his throat to spit it out with a disgusted phlew! He was done now fed up with the quarrel. He stood up and fished out three ten-cent coins from his pocket. You want to play? You want money to play with? he asked and flung the coins onto Vumanis lap. There. Go and play. Go spin the coin like these little boys do. Go have a jingle in your pocket! Langalibalele picked up the calabash, clutched it under one arm and took only three steps before he turned back to his last born son: Ask my approval for anything. Anything within reason. But never that! He continued to the house with a restrained stagger. Only the previous day the yard had been full to burst with people who came to rejoice with his son on his union to a local girl. No proof of that remained now except two flea-bitten mutts that gnawed at clean bones. No sooner had Langalibalele entered the house and sat down than he felt uneasy there. Tipsy by now, he took his pipe and tobacco pouch and lurched back outside to where he and his son had been sitting perhaps to catch their echoes and read deeper into Vumanis babble. The sun had already gone down. He looked over to the hill and remembered that right about now three young men with the keenest night vision would take up their posts on the hilltop for night watch. Theyd set their ears to all winds, on the alert for rustlers stalking this way on horseback coming from the southeastfrom Qumbu, if anybody could claim to know. Those damned thieves; lately everybody with livestock slept with one ear to their byres. He scratched inside the bowl of his pipe and then knocked it on the kraal to clear out the gunk. He stuffed in fresh leaves and put the stem to his lips but he stopped and lowered it as he suddenly realized himself. Put your best foot forward and play the fool. Toil up steep egos to reach vacuous minds that are at comfort in their everyday trifles. It was all a no-brainer to him. Vumani had taken a wife only yesterday, yet, it seemed he was still hoodwinked by boyhood fads. Langalibalele had known that going to the city was an impression lurking in his son since manhood, but he had never known it to be one ripe enough to drive him to idiocy. It was this he was trying to hit at: strike him hard enough to maim him from leaving. He lit his pipe and took stuttering puffs until the leaves burned freely. Meanwhile, his mind did a freestyle of thoughts. We wake up long before sunrise to work in our fields. By midmorning were sitting in our houses easing our arms. This has been so since the soil began. What has suddenly become wrong with that? Our fathers modeled themselves on this soil. They were men of sensible

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hunger who saw no dignity in slaving for another man: diligent men of detail who were fixed on proving their mettle to the land! They too stole out at dawns weakest light in droves, if only to repay their debt to the land. Langalibalele remembered his own mother and a troop of women hiking on to the fields, hoes wilting their arms. They worked the tracts on their bare feet and felt the soil lilt and give them the healthiest yield of their years. They never skipped a seasons pick. They were of this land and all that beat down on it. They pissed, cried and sweated on it and it gave them life! The health of this land is their legacy. If we are to scorn their pains then let us crouch like lepers and die of ignorance, for we are worthy of a fate no less cruel. He pored over the total valley and thought of the many fields that would lie fallow because young men wanted to work for bicycles; wanted shiny jewellery and oils to grease their heads and their bicycles. But as he deliberated, he knew that houses were already empty and many fields lay unplanted. He was stunned by the unswerving manner of his own son. In that stubborn resolve he saw the same recklessness with which young men divorced themselves from the land. Capable young muscle crammed themselves into buses to go and slide under the white man: get swindled out of their true worth! How can they rise up as men with so much burden on them? How can they even say theyre trying? Soon the old man shifted back to himself. He squatted, took a twig and drew on the dirt, trying to draw out the overbearing thought. He was in Johannesburg all over again as a younger man. He was groping about looking for an older brother who had not written home in a while and who should return in order for the both to bury their mother. Following an address his brother had last used in his letters, Langalibalele did eventually trace him to a prison, where he was being held for not having a pass allowing him residence in the territory of South Africa. After much pleading with the authorities he was allowed to pay a fine for him and they returned for the funeral. Afterwards, his brother found it fitting to go back to Johannesburg where he stayed until his death some three years later, penniless and without a house by which to call himself. Upon his return Langalibalele had not talked very much about his quest. Only occasionally he would let chiding outbursts every time he heard that someone was going to Johannesburg. But now he remembered it, properly. He recalled the deflated city dwellers, marching in hypnotic mode and wearing pain-screwed faces: their souls bore the chubby bulk of the city. The tranquil opulence of the land had been thrown from their eyes and in its stead was the aridness of the concrete. Yet, some had hardened to the burden, so they held the city in their limp eyes like a concrete grudge. He recalled the ugly raking glares of slouching cornermen and street boys, watching for bulging pockets and ignorance. Sly eyes that could spot one not of their swarm. Eyes that leered at him and frisked off as swiftly as they had settled on him, as if he were

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nothingas if he were an entire walking nothing. He could still smell the concrete streets and hear the many feet that pounded on them all day, everyday: klakklakklak! Going nowhere and everywhere. But above them, far beyond hearing, was the frequent knell of the death they inhabit. Who made that Johannesburg? Langalibalele would probe himself, regretting the massive blocks that curbed every which way he was trying to go. He, being of sound mind and body, would never again set foot in that raucous hell. He had heard grown people talk like children; seen children jostle into musty rooms trying find a place to rest their heads with no sense of origin, self or purpose. May the gods rock them to peace, that is no place for a child. But all that to him was the black mans failure to rise above the depths into which he had flung himself. The Darkness will always have a niche, he concluded now and spat on the dirt. The old man picked himself up and had a few more puffs at his pipe while staring into the squatting dusk. Freedom is lawless, it never put any man in chains. These hills that crouch before us are our freedom. Why want anything else? But even in his puzzled mind a distressing hunch existed in his heart, as he knew that the land would eventually be orphaned. Young men were bigoted. He looked down at the drawing at his feet with a sense of loss. He ran his shoe roughly over it, meddling it. Johannesburg. Damn it! he swore and retired to the house, fatigued in mood. Take a dream and beat it with a hammer to shape it politely to what the eye desires. Thats about all that his father was trying to do with his hopes to go to the mines. But he could not bow down to that high-pitched ire from the old man. His mind had amplified this dream until it flurried into a fully-fledged fixation. So compelling it was that it crept under his skin to be the rhythm of his very breath. And there, held by the strength of his defiance, was an obsession so strong he found it strange to himself too. He knew the place for his manhood and this here wretched seclusion was not it. With half the young men of the place off to the city, most of what remained was the selfrestrained half that tread coyly in their tether range, never once questioning their bondage. These busters are the ones hoppled by a chronic fright that what lies beyond those curbing mountains might be the summit where manly glories perch. Right along with them are the middle-aged, who stagger to the jerk of the plough in rueful endurance; their exasperation at the fruitless toil lies in the folds of their stiff upper lips. But their tight patience is fast collapsing into hopelessness with every clod they crumble as they wonder all along if theres any other means to eat. The rest, and perhaps the bleakest of them all, are the doddery grey beards sticklers for custom who are up to their eyeballs in ignorance and see no reason why things as they are should be any other way. They all cram their hate for success into their bold-faced lies

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about the city. They all like to point out arrogance when a man is spending the rewards of his diligence. So then, how could one pride oneself on his manhood if he could only measure his against so few a few so hopeless? To Vumani the city was the oasis: a place where the man with the biggest hand will scoop up all the nuggets from the earths pockets. On that conviction alone he felt lifting tides reach for every muscle. He thought, or maybe had already seen, that the measure of manhood is the stretch from the curve of a mans biceps to the crown of his dream. His task now was to establish the strength of that muscle. The trip to Gcobanis house was for that, and to fuel that same lust for conquest, which, hed been afraid would easily fade to a mere wish, what with such scorn shed by his father. He needed some type of backing that the tiff with Langalibalele was not for nothing. Grown as he was, Vumani could have easily caught the bus to the city to take up a job. Its just that it was a goading sense of obligation that put him at Langalibaleles doorstep. Instead what he met with was the same boozy eyed tongue-lashing he had encountered on his first request as long as eight years ago. But it was still a riddle to him why the old fogey saw it proper to stage a row with him whilst each grain and each sack they drew was only grist for Rajahs mill. Vumani was as galled by the Indians schemes as Langalibalele was by the city-goers. Rajahs fingers extended beyond the ten that he used to pick up their harvest or so he gathered. Only ever since the man arrived to trade some five years to the day did they start getting paid for their excess harvest. Nobody knows how he happened; just that they opened their eyes to him one day as he unloaded a cow from the truck he drove. He was beaming and asked whos in charge. He met with the chief and since his proposal for a chunk of land was with a full cow far from the traditional bottle of brandy tendered by the locals that gave him a right to point it out. He chose a remote piece by the train tracks. Rajah may or may not have aimed for Thunzini but where he arrived was a place of humility where he was embraced as a peer in community. It didnt take him long to speak their language slickly enough to offer them money for their grain and in turn dealt it to the freight train. So he became a self-serving intermediary who showed his mathematics: to every calculation the equation is profit. He hit the gate to find Gcobani clutching a bucket and sprinkling salted water onto the front yard. The discontent in him could not be hidden. Though Vumani already knew, he asked him: How are you, man? Not too bad. Nothing I cant solve. He stood aside and watched him throw the last drops onto the lawn before vanishing into the house. After a solitary pause a woman emerged with two chairs, trailed by Gcobani with half a bottle of brandy and two glasses. The wife said a courteous greeting, placed the chairs on the

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veranda and went back into the house. So pleasant and yet so cunning, he thought, watching her retreat. He recalled Langalibaleles charge and had only sympathy for his friend. That was nothing a man should be condemned for. They sat down and Gcobani poured a drink for both. Ive been thinking Vumani started. Im going to Johannesburg in January. What? It was jovial surprise. Sure. Well, what does Langa have to say about that? Has he blessed? You know the old man. He was severe. He threw a fit and said something about slavery. But youre still going? Man, the days of hunting mice have long gone. I have a house now. I cant live old fashioned, waiting for the rains to come before I can reap my share. Very true. Hands were shook and they drank to Vumanis marriage and to his self-rule. So tell me the real buzz about this Goli people are always on about. Vumani wanted to hear it all, as if for the first time. He heard of a place of ninety-nine choices and neon lights, with jobs in the mines, factories, taxi-driving, security guards, gardening for white people etcetera. Gcobani counted until he ran out of fingers and came by them again. And while he brayed on to the detail, Vumani turned to a future experience, wrapping his nose around imagined whiffs of success and making his mind dovetail into gold-rimmed whims and cravings for tough grind. Men come from all over. Men as black as pitch, theyre all jumbled up in there. They come speaking in all tongues. But the common thing is everybody wants to be something to themselves. Thousands of people gushing this way and that, each trying to make a name for themselves. Its a cutthroat world. So what else is there besides those jobs? Well, not much for a black man. The truth is the white man has everything else taken. Gcobanis keenness was undiminished as he divulged the facts. But opposite that enthusiasm was a voluble contempt for his own clansmen and their kin, of whom Vumani should be careful because they look for signs that you have changed; that the city has somehow worked on you and you think youre better than they are. But its only them who treat you differently so they can have somewhere to point their crooked fingers and plot your downfall. They want to mould you and then turn around and break you. Therein he advised that: Go out there and make yours and dont come back sorry about it either, because people will talk until their damned tongues are in knots and still have something to say. Gcobani spoke with resolve well into darkness and Vumani listened with the same intensity,

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occasionally evacuating their chat in bright spells of edginess to quiz his own nerve in a place like the one being depicted. He let the tales soak away his angst and sustain his drive. When he did leave for home he was appeased: he had found reassurance that Langalibalele did have matters twisted after all.

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7 The errand runner

The house was but one room but they homed it up. He slept on the sponge mattress across the hearth from her with the patchwork quilt that had been her bedspread. It seemed that the gracious old woman was glad for some company in her house, though she didnt talk much and would sit with a pensive stare most of the time. She was silent. Like the silence of the wind beside a house before it huffs it all away. It was a vindictive quietness, as though she was trying to get at somebody. The gashes of old age on her face gave up no clues and she spoke no wisdom, as all who grow old are inclined to do. He could see she was restful in her state and didnt try to squeeze a tattle out of her. With the trauma of old age assaulting her hard, Old woman desperately needed an antidote to ease the strain. The herbalists potion was good to get and Nomalongwe had handed him a plastic container before directing him to the house. But he wondered why the old woman had not sent her instead, as she probably knew what was needed better than he did. All the same, he paid that question no further mind as he, too, was interested to see the kind of man the herbalist was. On his way he strode down one of the rutted pathways that cut through the settlement. There were not many faces glaring from the yards on the morning, so he guessed that they had seen all they wanted to see of him. He had been to their rendezvous and seen them up close: the myriad of characters that stole shy glances at him but shifted their eyes every time he looked at them. He had left the feast with a certain acceptance of their impulses and now strolled through Thunzini with some sense of belonging. Two little girls flitted about in high jinks on the front yard of a house to his left, which he neared, and where a myrtle shrub matured in luxuriant bloom. But he heard a distinct clap to his right and turned to look. Two rams were going at each other inside a vacant yard and among a grazing flock of sheep. He stood to watch the bout as horns crashed, fascinated by the refusal of both to back away from the altercation. He was still watching heads bang when he was worried by what felt like a stone hitting his left shoe. He dropped his eyes to find a fluffy tennis ball and when he looked to its origins a teensy figure was capering towards him in hot pursuit. She stopped a few feet away with arms stretched forward and tiny hands wide open in a begging gesture. A fine little girl full of fun. She couldnt be more than six years old and wore nothing but pink panties. He wavered and, for a still moment, was sunk in her unguarded frailty, with no recollection of why she stood before him. Throw, she implored in the teeniest tweet, flashing him a cordial smile. She said this without rudeness but with the enthusiasm of a child who must have everything now. By her

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tactful haste he realized he was hampering her game. He picked the ball up and was about to throw it back but differed. The prettiness of her was just so awesome. He wanted to watch her some more get a double scoop so he withdrew just as she fixed to catch. Instead he held the ball in his outstretched hand, indicating that she should fetch it from him. With her ball in his charge he knew he had this manipulative magnetism. He lured her. She did hesitate but moved closer and stopped short, demonstrating her docility. He still didnt throw. Instead he affirmed his offer by tensing his stretched arm. She took a step forward but he withdrew just as she nearly touched the ball. Meanwhile, little girl knew this game that adults like to play. All she had to do was stand straight and spread open her two hands. In unsullied politeness she had to plead: Please throw, and then wait for the shared generosity. Even at six years old she had this cultured meaning of manner. But the ball didnt come. Out in the wildest meadow a young native lily will unwrap to relish the dewdrops in the chilled fresh breath of a springs morning. With velvet-textured petals it reigns in pale-white and gallant blossom, oozing this naked innocence. Its fastidious majesty can be persuaded only by the purest glow of morning sun. If its splendour dazes you and you must see it up close, simply bend to watch it from its stem. But by evil golly do not pluck it off, for if you do so it will not keep on long in your hand; its persistence is much too fragile. If the sun strokes it a tad too harshly or if its deprived of it; or if the tiniest dewdrop comes to nothing before it pitches up in its ovary; or maybe the rain comes too late, it will wilt and die. And this abortion is irreparable. She charmed and stole him with just this quenching pureness, stressed by her teensy frailty, which he found himself flirting with while insanely gloating over. Her pulpy lips were cherry-red with powder spots on the chin: shed probably been lapping up the sugared delights of sherbet powder. The way it was smeared all over her chin and plump cheeks he didnt find clumsy at all, only an assurance of her artlessness. Shes a little girl! Little girl slip-ups and little girl misdemeanours. And that winsome twinkle? What with the world so deceitful and discordant, must we all feed from it, or starve? What with this reality so imposing and uncivil, he found it right to hold her up. Like a father wise enough to school his seed on the ways of the wisest men, he deemed it right that he, perhaps, rest her on his lap and recite to her the wisest of fables in all the world. And all this while soothing her that with this much beauty and courtesy she would do just fine. She would be alright. She didnt know what she was doing to him. She could never have known of the grief that adults wear, which mows the soul with the jagged cruelty of a fiercely plied sickle. A torment that can be eased only by spying on the guiltless indulgence of the tiniest humans. He was not stingy with her ball but really spellbound. He held her captive while he selfishly fed off her comeliness.

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She had been utmost cautious not to be rash in her pleas for her ball, but the unpredictability of it all was steadily wearing her out. Edgy now, and wary that this whole episode may have no end to it, she knitted her eyebrows and lowered her sparkly eyes. Her smile eased, flickered and fell into a frown as she fully surrendered to his despotic mercy. She became shy. She felt his eyes harassing her so she covered her own downcast ones with one arm, leaving the other stretched forward, begging. The jubilation with which she had ran up to him and the firework fun of her ball game had been all tamed in her. That exclusive beam of childish politeness had been stolen by a cold stumpy man who wouldnt pass her ball back. Gone was the flattery he had fallen so fond of and her displeasure was rough on him now. He started to raise his hand to give the ball back. But just then they were both startled by a voice calling from the yard. Xoliswa! He looked up and a woman stood next to the other little girl, repeating her call: Xoliswa, come and bathe! Now they both looked at the woman. Xoliswa looked back to the strange man, her one hand still out. His eyes were on the yard. Swiftly, she snatched the ball and turned on her heels to scuttle off back home with the merriness of childish triumph. She nestled against her mothers leg as they saw his grotesqueness hobble on. A harnessed stallion was parked under a tree outside what was certainly the said house. But on entry into the yard the Burden Bearer was struck by a sudden cramp to his right flank. He paused, clutching his side, and held on to the fence as the pain shot through. Inside the house a man sneezed agitatedly and glimpsed out of the window to see. The Burden Bearer resigned until the pain broke. He then made his way to the door, knocked and entered the hazy room, which smelled of boiled leaves. Inside, an old frail-looking man sat with eyes that were disproportionately large to his head size. Another man, no doubt the herbalist, squatted over a primus stove and stirred the contents of a large can. The healer immediately requested that he wait outside while he served the present attendant. He then went on to stare in puzzlement at the new arrival as he turned his back on the room. He had felt the vibes fluctuate at his entry and now looked to his patient for validation, but the oldie sat listless, too spent to heed whatever. The Burden Bearer hadnt been sitting long when the old man emerged from the house latching onto a plastic bottle of some liquid herb. He toddled towards the horse and stashed it in the saddle-pouch. He then tried to reach the stirrup with the right foot. It was no bad guess that he wouldnt be able to get on top of the animal by himself, so the Burden Bearer stepped forth to assist. He joined his hands and bent lower to pick him up, whereas the old man stepped onto his interlaced fingers with one foot and was lifted onto the horse. The hoary horseman

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thanked the stronger one as he straddled his stud to be carried off by clip clops. The Burden Bearer then stepped into the house for his turn. The herbalist was a middle-aged baldhead man with a trimmed goat-beard. He wore a brown singlet with dice shapes and a white loincloth. Coloured bead necklaces hung from his neck while thin bands of goat-hide were tied around his beefy upper arms and wrists. The Burden Bearer sat on a chair by the exit and the two men commended the good weather of late before the herbalist asked: What can I do for you? Im from MaGadlelas house. Ohand how is she today, the healer posed, but before he could be answered he commenced: Does she want the usual? The Burden Bearer nodded and he disappeared into another room through a brown sheet. There was smoke in the house from something that had just been burned on the primus stove it smelled like charred hair. He glanced around and found the room unpretentious. A wooden table with four chairs stood in the middle of it. On the floor there were wall-to-wall straw mats, simple furnishings and added upholstery. A wooden cupboard with a few tin mugs and plates stood against one wall. On another wall there hung only an emblemed picture of a football team in gold jerseys and black shorts. A few of the men had permed hair with shiny faces. All had their hands behind them and wore cool expressions while their tamed eyes were fixed on the camera. The picture was framed, hinting that the house-owner was a backer of the Kaizer Chiefs squad. The rest of the room was ornamentation, including a life-size wooden carving of a stout but paunchy half-naked man. The sculpture wore brown goat-hide for the loins and pointed forth a spear with one hand ready to stab; a shield of elephant-hide and a knob-kerrie were held up with the other hand. It was a warriors effigy at war with somebody, or with all of mortal man. The icon was elaborately featured to the vaguest detail: from the grooves on its brow to the etched crows foot on the corner of each eye. Its locked lips formed a tense curve and it had fiercely set eyebrows. The whole face was contorted into a grimace of dormant wrath. This nasty mug was in turn flanked by large ears, weighed down by two hoola-hoops for earrings. With such artifice the only aspect missing from the carving was its soul. Deadened, yet undead, if one focused on that scathing frown of unspoken rage. It was so bellicose, and fearless. But the sculptors omission set his creation outside the animation of man. Regardless; the Creators handiwork had been axed down for its core to be chipped and carved to forge a man who will, for all days grey and blue halt in that stolid stance, sneering at that nothing and relishing the dry, gritty taste of lifelessness. With so much rage it was right to leave him soulless, lest he perform his hate. How is MaGadlela today? the herbalist quizzed, coming through the sheet door with a

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calabash held with both hands. Not too bad, though she needs the blend more than ever in her old age. He passed on the plastic bottle hed been given by the girl and, whilst he poured on the tabletop, the medicine man kept glancing at the visitor. His curiosity prevailed: Which house are you from, brother? He was asking his clan name. The seated man hesitated and seemed surprised that someone should ask that. He shifted in his seat, cleared his throat and started to say: Im from Only he was cut off by the splash of liquid. The mixture had filled the bottle and slopped over onto the table and floor! Damn it! the herbalist exclaimed. He fetched a cloth from the other room to wipe the bottle and handed it back to the caller. Tell MaGadlela I wish her good health, he directed as he saw him out. Upon his exit he couldnt help but look after him out of the rooms tiny window. He had felt it something beyond bizarre about him. He went on to wipe the mess off the table, baffled and wondering who came? Im feeble, my child. The potion helps me to do the little I can around the house, the old woman explained, justifying her putting him to what she thought to be the inconvenience of running her errands. Indeed she was feeble. Her floppy face seemed to have sagged farther down every time he looked at her. Skeletal arms hung limp on the sides of a timber-thin and frightful figure: it was a rapid disintegration of her physical frame and she seemed to be in need of her stick more than usual. Despite her frailty, Old woman had a little restlessness in her and would not fully surrender. She did simple chores: eradicating weeds from the garden to throw to the pig, picking firewood and cleaning the chicken coop in the morning. Occasionally she would rub balm oil on her legs to prevent blood clotting. Should I pour you some tea, the girl asked, lifting the teapot. He shook his head to that and she poured for Old woman and herself before placing it back on one corner of the trivet. She then poured three spoons of sugar into eachs cup. He watched the old woman watch all of the girls actions, as if maybe she expected a blunder. He had noticed on a few occasions, when he listened to the twos exchanges, that the madam seemed somewhat irritable with the younger. She herself an old recluse, he had no doubt that she appreciated the girls gratuitous service. But he couldnt help noticing her lack of calm when she related to her. He wondered what the two had to say about each other, because it was not as if the girl was clumsy or slow, which would give Old woman reason to haul her over the coals. Another hint was that she had not sent her to fetch the money the other day. Instead she had waited for him and had him fumble about in the dark when he hardly knew her business. And when he had sat down to eat she had

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said, rather tetchily, about the girl: That child doesnt have to skimp when shes dishing up, were not poor. Theres enough food to feed all of them. All of them, who? he had wondered then. The two women sat sipping the hot tea with excruciating slurps and ignored the third person. Theyd been talking when he came in more than usual, if he could claim to know them. The girl, though usually coy, had been prattling away like there was something of dire importance to be said. He had entered as she was saying: one woman saw who he was and wanted to tell my father but they say his mother went to her and told her that he was done with her so she should shut up and keep her dignity. She then asked her what she was doing away from her house and children at night anyway and threatened her if she ever told anyone. Now she wont say who the man is or his mother but they say he wears a balaclava and Mmhh! Be careful of this place, my child, the old woman had cut in, hushing their chat before he presented her with the bottle and the herbalists well wishes. He wondered now what it was exactly that the girl had whispered with such haste to the old woman. Their silence felt awkward at this point so he stood up to leave the room. He went down the garden and scraped up a handful of dry grass before disappearing inside the latrine. It was not too deep into the day. Up in the sky there was no sign that rain would come after noon, but he decided that this would be a day ideal for placing the sail over the roof. He rounded the house to estimate the damage to the thatch and then went inside to let the old woman know of his intentions. She pointed him to the rusty metal trunk under the bed, whose lid he had to prise open with a knife. Inside he found loose spanners, two drills, a pair of pliers, a wrench, a brace, two bits along with a trowel and a sickle. He took the sickle and headed for the marshes by the river, aiming to mow down reeds for patching the thatch. He left the last houses bordering the middle path and exited Thunzini, going east. Far down the road was the old church building, its spire peaking over two queues of serried firs. But he wasnt going so far as to reach it, so he veered off to the right and into a track that heads for the rivers ford. This course had been scraped open by a tractors plough only to be worn down further by rainwater. No sooner had he made his turn than he came to face a rug of turf rinsed in the lushness of a rampant and green detergent. The chunky grass stalks had been cured of all blemish and laid out in their glitz. Now the valley was full of thrill in body and in everything held in its indomitable spirit; in everything that emanates from an unruffled vibrancy, translated from a depth he could not fathom. Right here, in this vast outlay of a cosmetic green, was borne the essence of all things existent. Its totality embraced him as a sore loser, soothing him like a long-

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missed agony aunt. Out here everything spoke in undertones; a latent experience that whispered a homing call to him. Yet he approached, yet it beckoned. He felt the call in his core and uncloaked now, discarding the deceits of existence and stripping to a bare-naked child to tread cheerfully into harmonys ample magnificence. The river cuts up the valley and hed have to cross it to reach the marshes. He approached the ford, took off his shoes and rolled up his trouser legs before sneaking into knee-high water. The flow was not so rushed as to sweep him off his feet but he was still cautious not to slip on the slime-laced rocks. With careful steps, he plotted through the width of river. The other side yielded a different kind of calm the calm of destination. To his left, beside the fields but before the dip pool, flocks of sheep cropped the bountiful grass. On their upside, to the rocky mounds, were young shepherds huddled in a circle and engaged in some boyish pastime, all eyes off their herds. After putting his shoes back on he went through the barbed wire gate and instantly turned right to press on along the fence, beside the rivers hum. To his left were tracts of tiered fields with rows of corn. He strolled along but would pass the marshes on his right, now deciding to follow the meandering snake farther downstream and jaunt into the forest. Right after the marshes, though there where the boggy zone ends to let the ground harden, and where some cattle grazed now a lone boy was jesting about simulating a soaring bird. He was whizzing back and forth in something like a limp, chasing low-flying storks. The Burden Bearer spotted that oddness and imagined that he must be crippled. As soon as the flying boy saw him he stopped his gallops and ran for a split in the fence to make for the river. He disappeared into the trench but a head peeked from hiding to watch the hunchback go past. Spirited singsong of the rife bird life seized him as he penetrated the woodland. He hacked into it, still close to the river, and threaded through light thickets while shielding his face from flute-willow branches. After a while he left the river trail and set off into raw jungle. He was combing the mane like a seeker out for something, for who knows whats to be found in the neck of these woods. But he hadnt pushed too far into it when he was surprised by erratic barks. A spotted terrier soon cropped up livid and yapping out of restraint. He waved the sickle at it until he heard crepitations from the same tangle. Soon enough a dog-handler crept into the scene and slated it quiet. With the dog now shut up, the two men stood probing each other but kept their distance. The dogman was a rather slovenly one whose traits could only have been inspired by the jungle around him. He was capped with a shaggy pad of hair and wore only tattered khaki Bermudas. The filthiest frown cuffed his face now for the stranger who encroached into his realm. Upon a head to toe scan the Burden Bearer perceived him to be detached and ill-tempered. He hollered a greeting out to him. The scruffy woodsman only gave a sly look and slinked back into

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the bush, mascot on track. Right then, by that surliness, the Burden Bearer felt unwanted. His quest ended instantly and he turned back to catch up with the river and trace his way back to the clear. He didnt see the crippled boy as he approached the morass and concluded that his elation had dampened and he had left. Locusts scattered as he shuffled through and the ground around the marshes was sludgy. He took off his shoes before squelching deeper into the swamp with the sickle. He mowed down reeds and placed them into two swaths, enough for the thatching. With this job completed he needed to weave some stalks for two ropes with which to tie the bundles for easy carriage. For this task he needed to get to hard land rather by the river so he carried the batches there in turns. He had found a proper spot to rest at without jumping the fence to get to the current. It was adjacent to a wide pool; a place that absorbed the descending surge born from a rocky point in the river. In this puddle the gurgle was cushioned into a tuneless flow of dead water. Here he dumped the bundles and looked over at the settlement far across the rivers commotion. A clean eased washed over him once more as he felt the void: a day light with the absence of hard leers that bear down on him with sullen conviction. He sat down on the furry grass, not yet champed to tough stalks by grazing cattle. He was still seated so, weaving the simple ropes of straw, when he suddenly sensed an arrival in his arcing space. He looked up at the wire fence, some ten feet before him, to see a couple of birds just as they settled upon the top strand. It was two acquaintances on repose from their flings. They sported bright-brown feathers with creamy breasts and their necks twitched endlessly as they probed their new perch. He knew that they were conscious of him so he slowed down, mindful not to make fast moves. Presently he stopped weaving fully distracted and watched the pair with growing interest. The left bird was slightly lustier and most agitated, winding its neck the fiercest in some sort of mechanical movement. It frisked the far scene for any odd moves, paying him only the nearest eye. The other slender and less aloof turned its head less, maybe almost content that everything was tranquil. Was this the female? Were they man and woman? Two lovers? It could be. But they both stood like stern figurines upon their place. The bigger bird no bigger than a mans balled fist stood elegant with a thicker neck and creamier breast. Still, boths wings were a shiny tan with trim tails and slim black beaks. She stood as a flimsy figure posted up on lead-grey and stalk-thin legs like a twiggy bird girl with stilts for legs. The Burden Bearer could not instantly classify their kind as their clawed feet wrapped tightly round the cord, yet he was wary not to stir in his place. This for the fact that the sentinel sustained its vigilance, knowing that in a split instant the cruel claws of a hawk or a stone from an ill-willing boys slingshot may destroy all that it was nurturing. Any peril could discard this budding love that was held so expensively between it and its mistress, who now stood

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somewhat unstimulated. Were theytruly in love? A space existed between them. It was not a too-wide gap but it was one conveniently loose if the girl was still to be wooed. From this break and the way the male darted looks all around but never at her, the Burden Bearer guessed that they were not an item, yet. But the man-bird must have been working on it: he was perked up like a proud charmer whose sweetheart is becoming beautiful, and as if this growth must be tutored. He hadnt summed up this point when he saw that the males neck turns had slowed to an occasional lookout. It then took two quick sideway jumps like hops of hopscotch closer to the female and propped itself by bonding its legs and cocking its head. She didnt react, only stood there unfazed. Coquetry? Or maybe this was because a gap still remained and he should seal this to win her. He did it again as quick as the first time: two hops and then twitched his neck once and twice, still on the alert while trying to shut the remaining room between them. The narrowest gap between two things remained now. But this time she felt his frequency. She cringed away, not in a full sideway hop, but in like a reflex sway of the body and a side shuffle of the feet. He was too much, too soon or she was scared to suffocate. Or maybe she was just trying to shrug him off. She stood still, then, and there was a prinked up balance in her posture. He didnt push up on her. By her reaction he had become newly cautious of their dissentof the procedures; like love etiquette that must be complied with. So he depressed. All in good time then. The watcher then saw it. Just a brief slip of time after she slinked away, the male affirmed itself in a huffing perk. No it was not a move aimed to flatter, or to sauce a girl who had stinted him of her affection. Rather it was like a tidy nod to his own birdie self. At first the watcher had thought it was a prop up thats the footing for a spell of patience. But then he saw the haughtiness of it the unmistakable spunk of manhood. The man bird had assumed airs of faultlessness as if to say: Shell come around soon and she knows it! It waschutzpah! He wondered why he should be so assured about winning her. Straight arrogance? Or perhaps he knew that in all the realm and its sidekicks only this tiny bird breast of his was wide enough to bear the bulk of her woes. And that by leaning on it just a little, or even hard, she may find the strength to lift her weighty wings again. She must have felt this self-assurance in him and been pleased, for her own posture changed now. She flexed and stood firmer, like a leggy maiden in the charms of a confident male. She did this in both submission and defiance. But both their chests were up this time: shed been roused by him just as hed been by his own potency. Quick as a crick now each threw a glance to the other and they spotted themselves. Just by that glimpse they were one! So there was love after all. All along there had been. But had they exchanged their vows? If not what would they be?

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Maybe she would say: I, boniest girl of the zenith wind, confess to have neither mouth room nor strength in these frail wings to bring you objects of material form. In this stead I vow to give to you all I can possibly give of the rarest gift of all the gift of song. In reply he would say: And I, flightiest gentleman of these antique skies, who has neither penchant nor room in this mammoth heart of mine for paltry objects of affection, in return come bearing a gift of promise. A promise to abide by the virtues of love: to understand, worship and shelter you. It is only the sincerest love that will rouse me to shelter your frailty from the scallywags of these winds; that will make me worship your high repute as first lady of the zenith wind, and that will nudge me to understand you for the way you breathe song from the pits of your heart when you wish to tell me love. Honey, I will love you in these three ways and in every other way a man should love a woman. He seemed thrilled that he could sustain this patronizing pose without so much as a flap of her wings in flight. So, like a rightful suitorlike a protagonist in a love play that he himself had written, the dude hung this way powerful and patient while flattered by his loveliest one. They would both fly away if the wire even trembled, or from a slight wave in the breeze. But for now they held that uprightness on this spot, with the love and tension that remains between two strangers who know each other. Between lovers. Two lovers parked abreast and feeling their love pulsate through their heaved chests. There was no speech between them not a chirp or a responding tweet; just two matching heartbeats and the transcending love that kept each of them poised on that stretch of wire. At another time, another place, there would be room for other snags in a birds life. But for now dallying away next to each other was alright. A perfect match. But where did they meet at the peaks of the wind while not looking for each other? What attracted thembecause she was not even prettified, just a wisp of twiggy bird girlishness? And her beau was only a jerky guy with a pompous pose. Yet he perched so vehemently proud as if his task were to guard her and never let her from sight. You, man, take this woman and teach her strength then. Strength from what? Perhaps to curb a pain that throbs beside her every heartbeat. What pain? He knew. And in his bird wisdom he knew also that in all of the earths vastness and the overheads subtlety both as hatching space for their love and as Gods private room there is no pain beyond healing. But she was touchy, trying to conceal her affliction and afraid it may blot out this seemly love she has craved for so long. But he knew that a love born from grief is as pre-eminent as the infinite blue backdrop against which it is set. He tried to snuggle up now, tried to fondle; one hasty hop towards her. But he was clumsy so he overleaped and bumped her, shaking her out of pose. Now starting to question his intentions, and ruffled already by his attempt at canoodling, she turned away and looked to her right before taking two hops to it. In response he took a full leap towards her. She took two

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away. He took two towards. She took three more but the pursuer kept keeping on each time until she fully stopped and he was still right next to her, the caramel-coloured sheen of their feathers almost touching. She stood flustered now, like a pestered damsel in the hasty hooks of an old suitor whos lost his hand at courting. He wanted her and would have her by all tricks. But she couldnt be had just anyhow. Something, some vibe in the air changed. It could have been the faintest wave in the breeze, or the lustful aims clotting his perverted bird mind. This provoked her. With a twitch of her wings her ladyship took off in a chirping flurry not a split instant before him. There was a concerted prrr from the two as he tagged her tail, gathering momentum until it seemed they flew flanking each other. They rattled away like flapping paper sheets against the tilting breadth of the sapphirine sky. Whatever their stance, whatever their story, they scudded to the high east until they were one nimble speck headed to conquer the heights of the wind. He should have let her go throw her away just to search for her and find her all over again. For the seeking thrill. She would forgive his restlessness and theyd run on a whim, carrying a whole love between them to post it up high above the turbulent wind-pool and out of all pitfalls designed by man; up high as the highest wind where they found it, and where skinny lovers dwell. Lets run to the sun for perpetual light on our love. Yes, lets. The wire-dancers had swifted away leaving no tangible proof of their presence. But on the wire an apparition remained at the same spot, defying the speed with which they vanished. This delayed image stayed the only impression that he had not been alone. It lived like a secret autograph he could keep and build a moving picture with if he liked to. He knew that if he blinked it would perish; he couldnt wipe it away just like that, so he stared at it for some time and made an exact copy in his head. He stared until he felt the sting of the breeze in his eyes. Assured now that he had captured it all, he closed them, just until the prickles were out. The ocular spectrum was there projected in his underlids and he could just shut his eyes and see it all over again as it fell like a screen. He opened them instantly. Lethargic now and nauseated by the wee lovers skipping play, he put the half-finished rope aside. There was a crispy essence about the mid-morning spell, making him think of seared autumn leaves and the wafting ease with which they would deck a sleeper beneath a shedding tree. With the two birds sudden leave there was a repose in activity: a collaborated hesitation from the set, to which he responded. He whiffed in a long complying breath and lay back into the light grass to recline most slothfully. Up in the sky, bits of drifting clouds were strewn about in shambles. He watched their slow-

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changing array while fantasizing about the lovely birdies. Their erotic charm was highly infectious on him by now, making him fiercely lovesick. He high-tuned to the encircling vicinage, detecting every chirrup, every pulse of every grass stalk, every fine curve of every silver cloud, and the thin dim line between brevity and perpetuity. This insight and the rivers intonation the way it trailed into a sleepy surge as if it were humming him a tremulous tune turned him fancy. He pasted himself to the acres of sky and imagined what it would feel like to unfold his wingspan, scale the wind and stroll the stratosphere; to exist as a bird in the sky life and lie prone on the extensive wind-bed like riding piggyback on the wind. You could be rising, or sinking, yet you do not care. Up in buoyant belonging and the only thing worth a thought is the ethereal shift of the wind beneath your wings. Lying so and sated with these schemes of flight, he thought: wouldnt it be fair if tomorrow was like this with a touch of gold oh, and peacock-blue for the puff-chested lovers whose hearts skip as one. But the intensity of it all was too much for an idler. He shut his eyes instead and listened; like when the day is a drag and the eye is strained and you need to let it rest cozily. As soon as he closed his eyes he was swamped by daydreams, steered by existing hallucinations of the two companions. He delighted in this play, never once glancing out. He only loosened his limbs and ravelled himself in the tight knots of a snug babyish sleep. Winding slyly between his toes and up his legs, up his bulk and armpits, was a new looping breeze. Now craving the lushness of full dreams, he nipped his whims by the fringes and hung them out to be winched up by this draught and unfurled to the reaches of the far-flung mountains. Surely now deep dreams swarmed him. He couldnt quiet catch their substance or the place he was in: some region of obscure matter, some twilight. He groped around trying to touch the walls of this place, looking for things of an outside existence. But nothing was textured, nothing touchable only a deceptive semblance of light fluffy stuff. It was a room filled with figments, with only the soft gush of the river as a memory of a distant actuality. A place of perfect rest with only faint features of a waking reality. Nobody saw him there except some two women who passed by nosing about for the driest cow poop to be burned to ash. They passed just above him on top of the slope, where the ground swells like a tough calf on the devils leg. It was in the way he was tossed into the pastures cuddle that they knew not to disrupt the air around him. They clutched their plastic tubs tighter to hush the clods theyd already picked. They didnt need to ask; they knew who it was, absconding in sheer idleness. They paused to look again but didnt overhear his whims. They looked at each other. No words were spoken, only mouths agape and eyes as baffled. They looked at him once more and then at each other with the same mind. Eyes got wider and lips cracked to reveal sneaky little girl grins. Then one laid a finger over her smile and said a soft

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shhh, followed by a silly teehee with a gleam in her eyes. Now both smiled with the same beady eyes and rustled thievishly away. They knew. Like two gossips who had stumbled upon somebodys secret, they knew now. Half-concealed in the lofty grass, he heard none of the deeds around him; not even the two telltales-to-be who were just now stealing cautiously away with lopsided grins and tongues itching from a good secret. Outside his sleep the breeze dropped successively to let the sun beat in harsh progression. The thumping heat turned his fancies mild to shallow sleep and finally ruined his dream-swamped spree. He woke to a dense shroud of pure sky and sat up, flightless as a cynic. He browsed his surrounding and saw none of the cloud-fluffy stuff that built his dreams. Feeling deceived, he stood up, stretched and sighed with regret for the shortness of all bliss. Now seeing the unfinished rope, and the stalks for another one, he remembered that he had a task to complete so he sat down again. It was while he sat that his eyes were lured by a moving speck up in the sky. He looked in full to see a big bird. A vulture. He watched it soar in drawn-out hoops of restful flight, as though it were scavenging something on the ground. He imagined there was a dead horse or some other cadaver lying somewhere, but he wondered why the bird did not descend to earth. Suddenly he felt a pang in him. His heart jolted and he clutched his chest, feeling as if his breath was being sucked from him! He heaved deep and steady breaths until he came to his wits. He looked up in the sky again. There was no bird, nowhere. He went back to weaving, not knowing the fright that choked him.

They remembered. They remembered a wretched witch who carried on a solitary life on the margins of their neatly cherished existence. She had clung on to them so cunningly that they had been swayed to forget her. Like a shameful secret, which neither of them desired to summon up, she had quietly slipped from memory. But now with him in her house they remembered. Now their eyes had shifted from Old Man Sgqwathi, who played the concertina and dragged children all around the settlement with his jingles and whose trousers sometimes fell to his ankles while he played to lock onto him. The clownish old songster had lost his touch; there was someone else trifling about or something. Although they didnt like to think of it at the time, lest it hassle them out of their composure, they knew he was there to stay. He would lounge in their sunshine, scoff down their coal-sizzled steak and lick his fingers too and he would have whatever they were drinking. They saw this in the insistent mode with which he ran her errands: thatching and hoisting up sails, etcetera. Giving her the grandest comforts, of which no witch is worthy. They didnt know what to make

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of him and, as yet, they harboured their misgivings. But they knew what they had made of her. They remembered her felonies. One gossip was quick to recollect and dated this from the time everybody got scratchy throats from drinking well water. Children came up with itchy skin and the red rash from playing near it. Somebody said that theyd seen her sprinkle black powder into the basin in the middle of one dark night. But even before that incident and the pursuant testimony against her they had long been alerted to her wicked methods. So, when they got sick they didnt think very long over whom to blame. But being the lenient individuals they were, the people of Thunzini could never persecute anyone on their own bargain. Thus, they had worried and waited in tingling suspense for a day the chief would proclaim as one for stoning witches. They could just imagine it already. Each one was marking a spot on her where a flung rock would land. Much later, a faint bit of the anxiety was still there and she would be on their minds when they were bored stiff and they longed to round up and pelt all the witches and thieves of the neighbourhood, just to train their idle swing. But once again, and each time after that, their tolerance would prevail. Instead they had cast her off and had her boxed up in her measly hut, carrying on as a dismal witch. In their subsequent enjoyment of kinship and good health they had simply let her be forgotten. The people had had ominous ordeals over the years and their triumph over each one of these assured them of a feat against anything the Dark force threw at them. They lived in this state of relief, priding themselves on their communality. Therein they knew that nothing could come into their middle and reign over their fortune. So, with this collective mind they were marking him too. They knew that evils form and capabilities could not be underrated. For now, though, they were merely letting him exist among them, like they did at the feast. As long as he wasnt bothering anyone then he would be left to himself. But if he exposed himself sooner than that, then bham! They would be on him sling him out in the same way they had banded against a witch and shunned her to her shack. They knew what to do with evil and its cohorts. And in times of peril they would do it again!

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8 Who broke the silver cup?

There is no harmony in this home. She brings dishonour to this house. She smears shame on the name of he who heads it. He often sits in his Mothers womb draining the high from Her gift and waiting on his birth, bothered by the never-ending gestation. He often sits in a haze, gilded and dreaming. There are sharp giggles of a childish voice rising from the murky room. He rubs his eyes to see a girl of no more than twelve years. She wears a frilled white dress and sits on the floor patting a wavy-haired plastic doll. A burning candle, which sits on top of a small table in one corner, kindles the black-walled room. But for the table and a full-length mirror that rests against a wall, and in front of which she sits stroking her dolls hair, the room is empty. Seeyoure beautiful, she commends, hugging the doll and swaying sideways while adoring her own mirror image. The set seems to be fading, so that he cant see clearly from the doorway where he stands. He starts to enter but breaks when she speaks again. Youre beautiful. A beautiful little girl. Everything flows in slow motion and her voice trails as she speaks. She gets up before the mirror and nips the dress on the frills with both hands, spreading it abroad. Shes done up with trinkets and wears a gold anklet on her left leg, ritzy to self. See, you look like a flower, she tells and completes the praise with a bow to the looking glass. She twirls round on her toes and then frisks about the room in a drifting jog, giggling loudly. As she whirls by the candle the flame waves and flickers weakly. The wick sparks up again to cast a brighter glow in the room. She runs and titters in that tizzy squeak of little girl laughter. But she suddenly halts when she spots a smudge on her white dress: something vile smirching its pureness. She dabs a fingertip on her tongue and rubs on the stain, now mumbling snappily. The stain remains but she ignores it to carry on her gay lope around the room. She doesnt know that he stands at the doorway watching her tickled play. He steps inside and repeats her compliment: Youre so beautiful. A beautiful woman. She stops her frolic, warned of him, as he slowly advances with a cup of something before him. Drink this, youll be alright. Youll be fine, he assures, offering it to her. No! she barks and hits the cup from his hand in a tantrum. The cup breaks at her feet and the green juice spatters her dress. She darts around the room, frantic. He proceeds towards her with open arms, beckoning and pleading. But she skulks from him and sinks into a shady corner to be unseen. No, dont be scared, he begs, rushing to the corner. But the young girl is nowhere there. He

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finds only the smudged white dress and lifts it to his nose to be repelled by the stink of burnt feathers. Horrified, he throws it to the ground and in a panic of his own he scours the dark corners listening for her sobs. Shes gone. He hastens out of the room calling: Chwayita, Chwayita! Dont leave me! But he jerks awake, shook by his row. In the pitch-darkness of the room he felt her. She lay next to him and breathed intensely, evading the demons that steer her waking turmoil. He wanted to wake her to know that she was still there on the same stretch of bed he lay on and not off somewhere without him. She slept, sounding friable but was conniving to kill if given the time of day. She wanted to be a girl and nobodys woman and for this she was a shrew. Her only appeal was for sanction to rekindle a spark that had dimmed when she was sworn into these roughcast walls. It had glowed unhindered as a young girl, and winged hopes she had held with both hands to send airborne had been throttled and gutted by this man of this same scowling house. She wanted only to be a girl. She needed a place thats infinite where shed unfold her girlhood and roll on it endlessly like a bubbly little girl with oodles of thrill before her. She wanted to be had; to be disarmed of all apprehension, allotted wings and flown to climaxes unequalled. All she had to do was delve deep into her sugar nook and know its tricks enough to predict the spontaneous flood that immersed every pleasure point in her body. The waters rose anytime: in her sleep, in the morning and in her eccentricity. It felt different every time more exhilarating so she plunged deeper. She shed her qualms and severed her link to this forbidding cement house. She fled from disdaining eyes and the helter-skelter of the trivial world. She shut her eyes to a griping husband and opened herself to fulfillment wetness. Everything was wetwarmsugary. Her girlhood was sparked and it flared with a dazzling flame. She lay on her back in a boundless field of swaying yellow things and picked their taste with her nose. It was the seeping scent of ripe sunflowers and it didnt make her nauseas: an aphrodisiac that pricked her urge as she lazed in lustful surrender. Two bodies collided in gentle understanding and gratitude. She lay cushy in her girlhood, tickled by sensual strokes to her softest spot. With legs apart and jigging her hips, she was trying to get the best of the moment, yet trying to check the gush of delight welling up so quick in her. It was too much. Too little. She loved the trance-inducing thrusts and the leap of heartbeat as ecstasy touched every cranny of her jolting frame. She winced at every stroke and expelled the pent-up rage that robbed her of sooo much bliss. Her head swelled with dizzying visions as she rushed for climax. Suddenly visuals quickened. Head clotted. Pores brimmed. Flesh tightened and she let out a screeeam as she witnessed her birth. She came to life! She was born as she had been many times before. Her existence began and finished in this imploding world of hers with no corners. Her outbursts were the only proof that she bonded with the real. She lay on her back, woozy and trickling bliss from every pore fulfilled. She snuffed out the

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flame and it died with a fizz as she turned on her side in sleep. Right then she woke with a twitch, startled at her return, and felt the wetness between her legs. There was the cold stench of bare cement as she unlocked her nostrils; so she knew where she was. She felt him lying next to her, breathing not deeply, and guessed that he must be awake, thinking. He wanted a wife. In this dreary house they live as husband and wife. These walls have seen brawls and tears in this comfortless dungeon. She will not match his hopes. Her sole quest was for that fiery spark, which she felt freed by. But freedom to where exactly, she could not be sure. Chwayita knew many women but none so free as to unbind themselves. The housebound wives who succeeded to the grindstone and worked it with mind-sapping tedium seemed quite secure in their dismal tasks and had no use for freedom. Only the shebeen whores, whose freedom was so loud it rang in the hollows of their empty thighs, had given theirs a face and had known it well enough to pursue it. They were at it now, luckier than spring chickens. That was more identity than she could ever sum up. And without identity to her desire she knew shed have to submit to her definite chore as a compliant wife for the rest of her conscious days. That to her was the most agonizing death to be imposed by her Makers condemning finger: a death she had foreseen but couldnt fend off because she had failed to unmask the cheerful face of her salvation. Since she neither wanted to be like the brain-dead housewives nor the sluts and their brand of sleazy self-rule, Chwayita saw that her cause to tear down the walls would be as hasty an act as that of a ground mole wrecking through hard ground and shoving to the surface to retrieve a light it would never see. With this enfeebling awareness, there came rage in her. This rage would in turn spill over onto whoever took it to be his job to define her. This was her father, her uncles and most heavily the husband they renounced her over to for a mean bunch of wretched cows. So rage she did. But for all her dust-kicking she knew, as the deathward noose drew tight around her neck, that better was death inside this forced marriage. Here you could bequeath to your killer that haunting death stare and curse him for all eternity for your predicament. She knew that the direst end was the one outside marriage, in an aimless course as a woman alone. Chwayita needed an enemy to scuffle rough against. A jailer on whom she would lay the blame for her capture and swear revenge on for as long as she had a throbbing hope to ever be free. So she stayed, as was expected, made an enemy of her husband and evolved into the dangerous wife: the one who slits her hubbys throat in his sleep just to watch the blood tint the sheets with its tepid red. And she would worship that spot forever for its vivid solace. She kicked hard, putting all the jolt of a mad rebel into that last able kick to make sure she would not go into her leash and muzzle so poorly. Her freakish deeds were that assurance. There was a thrilling element pasted to this mission: men were as excited by her defiance as they were with their own depravity for indulging in what was not meant to be theirs. They saw

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the unruliness in her and for this she was game. But for wives they needed polished women: the plain ones whose parents keenness to marry them off had put them up at a bargain of two or three cows less than the traditional lobolo herd. Maybe it was indeed her resentment for her plight that drove Chwayita eccentric beyond restraint. Maybe it was just the heat. It was hot when it was. A rankling heat that unveiled the gruffness of those forlorn nights, and a yearning missus purred kitty-soft for a stroke of sleek affection. For the wives, whose hubbies had jinked off to the city, there was little cure for the deprivation of sweets of wifehood and lusts of woman. Some, still new to marriage after a nave spell of girlhood virginity, had just now located the exact spot of pleasures pure. They still reeked of that sexual hotness so taunting. But since their men broke them and left them midbliss to tyrant taskmistresses, whose tone would break from sociable to bashing without so much as a flit of a nose hair, the wives anxiously needed therapeutics. Rajah was messiah and he didnt buckle. In one corner of his counter the Indian had reserved a stall where he summoned the young wives of all husbands and barefacedly tendered to them rubber tools for sexual amusement. The wives, caught between the shyness of owning such apparatus and the drubbing heat that caught them in the early dawn and at sunset, erected their pose, bought these devices and stashed them in deepest keeping. And when all pleasures had been achieved and all hungers hushed theyd brush up the house or daub the walls while sporting happy grins that were worn higher than the jutting chins of the stuck-up heifers. Or theyd sway their heads to some secret tune that made their tone-deaf drivers wonder what gives. Their ever-drudging hubbies would have been little pleased to know that tads of the cash they mailed home were devoted to this comfort. Rajah knew about those bothersome nights when the wives lay cursed with owl-eyed insomnia and were starved for attention; when their mens absence was so prominent and silence had a face so grim they could hear the sneaky spiders stretch their spit on the farthest corners of their neatened huts. A lonesome wife would squeak with the heats rise and the fall of her resilience. Shed squirm and tear the sheets off as symptoms like fever pierce her huskthin skin. Shed climb the walls not knowing what to do with herself and fall to a mortifying itch so hot it snuffed her very breath. So hot she must die. Die! That was the heat to beat for these good wives. But they didnt know that as they lay like beached shells in the candle-lit dimness, yearning the quietest yearn, they would wonder about him his endowment and his endurance. In their private rooms, left leaking that luscious scent but with no man near enough to catch a whiff, they would remember him; someone to sponge the sweat from their pooling skin. Anything. A puff of wind. A wafting hand to trace the hips curve. They would obsess about him. In the daytime, after the older wives have buttered the steamed cornbread and placed it on the soiled palms of their kiddies; after theyve stirred three

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sugars into tin cups for that sweet water the little buggers love to drink, theyll pause over the kitchen table with hands on hips, not to ponder what to cook for supper or what the recipe is for that soup-dipped mutton chops. Theyll muse about this bachelor with a guise so crafty, who could for them be both saviour and secret lover. They would wonder, what abouta hunchback? And when theyve wondered enough and proceeded to squash fleeting thoughts about dwarfs and humps, he would reign in their most muted passions. He would top their nightly wish-lists. There was sex in the air on those heat-stroked summers of bloom. The set was heavy with the scent of ovulation and natures genders were craving each other, synchronized by a push greater than the rigid lust of sexual beings. The crocked old women knew this as they mooched under tree shades or tottered home from their favourite place. Thus, their minds were far from the chatter they kept themselves in. Their interest was usually captured by the brightly hormonal girls whose cornbread-grown thighs were scintillating with the lubricants of fertility, and whose peach-size breasts were perking forth for publicity. Plus, their counterpart boys were at that age ready to aim and thrust their foreskinned willies into anything and the loaves of bread their mamas sent them for. So the careful old crocks, even as they sat to slurp Rooibos and shoo flies, kept a slick eye on that horniness. They watched that the first fruits be not picked too soon to maturation by greedy hands from trees they had not sown. These adolescents were twinkling too much, awakened from their passive outlook by a freshly found awareness that they had a centre and were sexual creatures distinctly present in this compact social collective. Their inner flare of spirit was reflected on the out in a mesmerizing curiosity over each others parallel being. The young boys, jinxed by this obsession with all things female, were sure to stray. By now their fervor for the head-butting bouts of tree trunknecked Brahman bulls had been dulled. They drifted from their herds in pursuit of a gesture that flaunted more finesse than the shift of a goats jowl munching on hemp. They found this with the darling girls, who pranced like walking on eggs and whose bursting rear cheeks fluctuated with a teasing intimation. They were pulled to them by some kind of kinetic action and so gave them the primal regard of sanctified objects. They had no preference outside of girls and had the notion to let their flocks plunder all the greenery in all the fields of their folk. They pined for female company. Where there was girly huddling these wily boys were sure to be lying inconspicuous behind the thinnest grass stalk. But not yet schooled in gaining their love, they were driven to draw it anyhow. They were wolf-whistling, yelling out offers or just playing the meanest pranks on them, like splicing grass stalks across the pathway to trip and injure or spook them. It didnt matter, they would have done the obscenest things to elicit the slightest reaction. Meanwhile, the exquisite girls, already radared to the backdrop by their twitchiness, knew by other than the ear-burning whispers and the silly tittering that someone

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was creeping. They knew what traps were set, so they reworked their struts to flaunt their wares and grew flowery sparkles as they fell in love with themselves. They worshipped the attention, when they werent flushed by it. With the girls being so physical and stirred by the sheerest of feels a flap in the breeze that tickles an earlobe, or the rousing touch of nylon against thigh skin and the heated boys so pursuant, that tension lingered in the stifling air of a sizzling December. The genders spoke this subtle lingo and boasted a shared love that couldnt be foiled; not by the nastiest old crock who thought it their divine chore to trim this devotion at the stem.

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9 Denuded flower: a dandelion in the wind

Yellow as gold. The wind rushed swiping the spores. Riven beauty scattered on the treacherous night. Left was nothing but a barren stem. They came in his sleep with fired eyes! He found them in a clearing in the forest. A pack of five black dogs feeding on something. He snuck closer but far enough from harm. It looked like It was a human carcass! Off! Off! he shrieked. The beasts turned to him and bristled their back hairs. Bloodstained fangs was all he saw before he faltered backwards scared witless. They snarled and crept towards him. He spun round, fled and they chased. He ran down the woods. In front of him, between trees, he saw a round hut. He reached it and tried the door. The knob wouldnt turn. He glanced back and they were coming. He jerked it and it came loose but the door was barred. He was stranded! He swung around with his back to the door, face to face with death. The feral dogs slackened and stalked. They growled and gnashed their teeth. This couldnt be it! He banged the door with elbows and heeled out fierce kicks. Suddenly it swung open and he stumbled into the empty room. Instantly on entry it drew his eyes. In the middle of the room where the hearth might have been, there was a fresh mound of soil. It looked like a grave. In the room! He woke from shock, drained and somewhat dizzy. Cold sweat drenched his whole chest and forehead. He sat up and browsed about the room to adapt his eyes. In the dark he could see nothing but he heard Old woman wheezing in deep sleep. He also heard trills from somewhere around the hens box new chicks. He rose, grateful for his flight from the ordeal. The Burden Bearer dressed up before gently pulling the squeaking door to exit the house. It was still too early to be up but not long before first light would leach the eastern horizon. He stood outside for a while, trying to read the dream. Yet, too anxious to make sense of it, he returned indoors, folded the bedding and took his flute to head down to the river to ease his collywobbles. He left the yard and caught the narrow path that fell to the well. He could hear rub-a-dubs of a drum rise from some point in the vast settlement. Nomalongwe had said there was intlombe somewhere not too far away. Weak light was coming through already, enough to tell his way down the trail without straying. Soon he left the winding pathway, which would have sent him to the well, and shuffled through the long grass to go on toward the river. But it was on his passing the wells trench that he heard a sound distinct from the gruff croaks of bullfrogs. He paused to listen. It came as muffled groans of distress followed by thuds, maybe from a struggle. He veered off his course and went the way of the well, treading lightly on the scuffing

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grass with his breath on hold. He came into view and saw it. Inside the wide dugout a woman was struggling against the grip of a balaclava-clad aggressor. He had her against the wall, arms pinned to her chest and another hand over her mouth. The Burden Bearer stood over them, on their blindside, and called out: Yhey! alerting the both. The masked figure quickly abandoned mission and took to his heels. He ran down the water channel, leapt out farther down and turned to sprint out of sight. The Burden Bearer jumped down to the woman who had her hand to her chest, breathing hastily. She was upset by the encounter and no doubt by the ulterior aim. Are you alright? he asked, getting closer. She nodded, wiping tears from her powdery white face. Besides being overwhelmed she seemed physically unscathed. She picked up her headscarf, dusted it and wrapped it on to conceal a head of kinky hair. She then picked up a tin basin from the ground and went to a half-filled bucket by the water hole. Can I help with that? he offered, moving towards her. No, she replied, without looking at him. He stood back and let her to it. She towed her bucket without filling it, ascended to higher ground and left without another word. The woman was dressed in full bridal wear but he couldnt make out her face under the heavy calamine. He could only see her eyes and it was something in them that made him stare curiously as she hiked on to the settlement.

MaGadlela awoke and saw the neatly piled linen on the other side of the room. She had heard him slip out earlier than usual and wondered now how he had slept in the night. Instantly departing from sleep and still inundated by that slothful bug, she sat up and raised the pillow to sustain her back. This way she propped herself up against the headrest of her spring bed. Her spine was frail and she couldnt brace up without backing anymore. She then peeped through the four-pane window and saw clear light outside, although the sun hadnt risen yet. Her hand moved towards it and she scraped a finger across one pane. It gathered dust. The old woman weighed up this detail, quietly peeved. Nomalongwe hadnt cleaned them for too long now. The floor also hadnt been smeared with cow dung for weeks now. That girl She does the little shes told and for the rest shes defiant and lazy. But whos to blame her for not showing thoroughness if shes never been taught it at home. Her heedful eyes streaked through the rest of the room and were drawn back to her brown shawl, a fringed side of which was sprawled over her lap as she sat up. She traced the deeply notched tassels sagging in a rambling flurry from the main textile. At first she fiddled aimlessly with them. She then combed the tangles with her fingers, nagged by the eccentricity with which they straggled from the close-knit webbing of the coverlet. When they had all straightened she

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began to brush them down politely with her open hand to peer-size them; she was adamant that there should be method to all arrangement. Now not only were they straight but the twists were even and compressed there was parity. So then it whacked her! It wasnt an uncoordinated tattiness at all that ruled these tassels. That was all a hoax. In fact, if you looked closer, there was some devoted intent to the design. At first the shawl itself a coarse union of tightly interlaced fibre conveyed this cotton tightness into a tousled mayhem of strings on two opposing sides, like all of the weave work was coming undone. But it wasnt disintegrating no because the hem had been turned in to secure the flow of the shawl. What worried her was the vagabond style with which the twirled filaments dripped through the porous hem, and had been left tattered to imply a snarling disorder. Yet each strand was equal to the last and to the next in length, in thinness and was as deeply notched as the rest. Obviously there was some important aim to this tight beginning of loose ends that she may not know but must accept, as this was the way of the shawl. She proceeded to stroke, then, until in both her hand and in her psyche this action became a habit. Habitually now, she was steam-rolling these sprouts with her flat hand. But just as she was certain that no force could meddle with them she provoked her fingers to rush the tasselled side. The chaos was revived. Again she restored the balance by combing and then ironing them. Every time she aligned them this seemed to be some suggestion to her evidence she had long sought that she alone was in control of the order of things. Even the shawl-weaver with his meticulous hand could not promise this rightness to his creation. He had mastered the fabrication of it but it was upon her, the incumbent, to ensure order in the sprouts. Yes, there was structure now but this was so because she desired it! MaGadlela linked this order to the morning stint, where she sat indulging in the calm thats present after the break of dawn, when nothing stirs but the waiting day. Only the stressed breathing of a throttled old woman pestered this peace. She shut her breath to redress this transgression. The silence stayed but before the count of three she gasped a lungful and marvelled: old age was on attack even holding ones breath for just a second was dicing with her life. She wasnt done yet. With a prerogative that was only hers, MaGadlela coughed to test her silence. The crispy cluck rang hollow with no proof that it had struck its barriers. It did ripple it, though, and the silence shook but never broke. Just as it fell again a cocks cutting crow split it from outside. She reclassified it, listened again and heard the mythic stillness that held in it a true promise of permanence. Right then she knew that this calm was all there would ever be of this day. She renewed her vow to brand this stretch as a sacred time to lounge in. Now truly affected, the old woman saw that there was order everywhere in her house: from her shawl right up to the lifeless items congesting its circumference. But this fully clad tidiness

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had not always been so, she recalled. Her eyes coasted to the wall to consider the portrait, as if she were attributing the present order of things to it. The picture hung there, washed out. She gazed deep into it and was rushed by vigorous thoughts of her past. Is it all fate? she wondered. Though life abides by our reasoning, but is fate nailed to our souls only we do not feel it? Does it hover above us to mend our broken selves and turn nightmares fantastic? Is life all but fate? MaGadlela begged this from herself in unending bemusement. She made her thoughts skim and skirt her archives as she fumbled backwards into a life she had lived. She remembered it clearly. She could never claim to have forgotten it. When Nobantu Edith Somhlahlo was a young woman she was taken in marriage by a reserved and diligent man of refined taste. He was well-learned and worked in the city of Cape Towns magistrates court as an interpreter. Siphiwo Gadlela would then relocate his wife from her home in Mount Fletcher to Thunzini and settled her in a marital hut he had built for them among his own people. They had a boy child and on one of his annual homecomings Siphiwo had taken his then six-year old son with him to the city. But the two returned home not too long after getting there. He was on sick leave attributable to an illness that could not be diagnosed. Despite the ill-health hed been able to drive back in a car he had purchased for himself after twelve years of employment. Later, he fully resigned from his place of duty owing to his recurrent condition; he would come home to stay for good. With his generous savings he summoned a bricklayer and they laid out the ground for a house. But his health worsened before the walls could be raised. He just started deteriorating and had to be passed on to Umtata for an operation. He died before this could be performed. That was some fifty-four years ago. At twenty-two years old, some sixteen years after his fathers passing, her son was committed to the Umtata Mental Prison. This subsequent to his sodomy of a boy of nine years and his assaulting a man to death with a brick. He was cursed with split personality and could give her no grandchildren to bring her joy in her old age. The sun was already shoving hard against the stable-door and spilled in streams of light through slits in the wood. The old woman put on a proper dress over her nightie. She climbed off the bed and employed her stick to sustain her to the door. The herbalist with his heal-all herbs had none to fend off old age and she needed the stick more and more; walking to and fro was getting harder with every crow of the cock. A few days ago shed seemed recuperated and could totter around without it. But now feebleness was bearing down on her with the ruthlessness of fate. She was pressing out whatever little strength she had left in her to go about the yard. A flood of golden sun sploshed into the room as she pulled back the frail door to sniff the

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cheery splendour of morning. She set the door-stopping anvil into place and reached under her bed for the chamber pot. She took it outside and emptied it on the patch of grass behind the house before leaving it there to amble down to the pigsty. The pig went bratty; grumbling and sticking its snout between the planks, expecting something to chew on. She had brought in a boar on many a heat season but the sow would not farrow. She didnt know why she kept the barren sow. It surprised her too that the filching scoundrels of the settlement had not snatched it, since the sty was way down here in the unfenced yard. She measured the large garden, hardly missing it: it had been green by the year until about three harvests ago when her back locked as she stooped to collect tomatoes. Shed never worked it again. MaGadlela dragged her way back to the front yard and came to sit on a corner-stone of the cement floor. He was fixing to put up a brick house. Oh, what noble myths the future had boasted to the wife of a man. Only shed been duped. Duped! She had lived in the same hut of mud that had held together her sanity after his death. Where else would she go from there? Her blood ties were in Mount Fletcher, a bleak memory. No living parents. She only had two sisters and they were both in marriage she could live with neither of them. She had sought belonging with her in-laws but they would have nothing to do with her upon their sons death. Instead they took everything he had ever owned and left her with nothing but the skinny bed she slept on. They would have taken the car too if he hadnt taken the keys with him to hospital and theyd gotten lost there. At least thats what she told them. She had flung them down the toilet upon seeing that they were paying themselves from the wealth he had piled. When they realized that it wouldnt move without the keys they stripped it of its engine, wheels, seats, pipes and every other thing that could be had. His two brothers were too proud to work as he had done, and theyd rather rob a dead man of his lifes profits. They went on to strip the yard of the new fence and its iron poles. Even his body was buried in their family cemetery. She was left bare, upon which they assailed her with accusations. When they couldnt get his bank savings, which he had explicitly bequeathed to her and his son, they banished her, charging her with witchcraft. Did his youngest brother, Monwabisi, not point her in the face and call her a bloody murderer? Did his mother not fuel it by barking, Witch! Witch! Greediest witch! A money-hungry bitch they called her, did they not? They hollered it to Thunzini that she had poisoned their brother and tricked him out of his money. The people easily followed this mischief. They threw jeers at her house, yelling: Hambapha, gqwirha ndini! [Go away from here, you witch!] They then diverted the path leading to the well away from her yard because they feared her black magic. They refused to mark plots and build around hers. Rumours were spread that she kept demons in her hut and horsed around on baboon back at night. If she ever spotted you in her yard she would snatch your soul and pack it into one of her zombies. Shed strain you with toil and make you drive a loaf of bread on her errands. She ate human tongues

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and fingers and guzzled dog blood. And lately: Nomalongwe had long been possessed and could never stop slogging for the old witch even if she wanted to. Nomalongwe, too, swapped roles and played her part. She came in and out of the house and told everybody the goings-on. She lied like they did, maybe to show it off that she was nobodys dummy. She stole too. When MaGadlela sent her to Rajahs for groceries she would short-change the old woman. And with everybody else so loath to lend their children out to a blood-guzzling hag who was sure to forge zombies out of them, MaGadlela needed the girl and could do much nothing about the diddling. A witch. Thunzini was secured on that lie. They breathed it and it putrefied their guts. She let them keep up with it, for she was too sore to confute this. They loved this fact of her reticence because then they could point the outcomes of all of Satans deeds to her door. Occasionally they would rig up more lies to back the ones theyd already stewed up. They spared her not a moments breath and paired these fibs up with the morbid hate they exhumed from the deepest rot of their souls. And if they didnt have it in them to hate then they surely inherited it from the ones who did. Reclusive so, MaGadlela could not blind herself to the truth that her foreign origins were what aggravated peoples loathe; they were the core cause of her banishment. Some people dared to remark that had Siphiwo taken a resident wife she wouldnt have poisoned him for his money. Met with this eventual struggle from the onset, a bereaved widow would have been defeated by the sheer size of her loss. She would have done anything to circumvent this, even mingle with her hecklers. She did that. Though she had not one festive bone in her, on a few occasions she tried to blend with them, as is required of a woman in these parts. At gatherings they prattled away saying nothing; only babbling the same lies and bonding in devious scheme. She would sit strictly quiet and stare at their mouths, intrigued by the way their lips, teeth and tongues worked in concord like cogwheels to craft clicks and sounds. Running mouths were everywhere speaking in riddles and backed by wily-eyed grins. She found herself staring at grown people trying to decipher their cryptic speak. She had eyestrain from gazing and boggling. They spoke a foreign tongue to the one she had adjusted to. Pretence. Lies about this and suchlike but never about her when she was present. Only they would twist their stretchy lips into ugly smiles. It was then that she felt fully awkward hemmed in their deceit. She felt the alien she was. Those were to be her last mingles. Hoping to pore over them from another angle, MaGadlela retreated from their circle and exiled herself in her friendly house. Back then she was still a shiny-eyed she-fox and might have been marriageable had she been looking for it. But all the name-calling and yapping on about poison had kept all suitors away who might have courted her. Since there was no going back to her origins to face an aimless existence as a widow with a child, she stayed and reared a mans memory. She would honour a solemn oath she had made to keep a mans house strong and

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preserve his legacy. She raised his son until he was old enough to kill. But when he was committed there was no lineage to see to. Instead she found herself destitute, living trying to defeat more of the insolence that was being hurled at her. Her in-laws were quick to blame her sons state on her witchery, saying he saw one of her demons and it crooked his mind. Of course, MaGadlela had expected this and so felt no more distressed than she already was. Instead she recoiled to stick it out on her bare lonesome. Upon that recoil as soon as she closed the door in that stark seclusion she had heard a bleat from the depths of herself. A shrill despair that honed the very sharpness of her muted pain. It wasnt new but raspy and tattered as the rankling creak of a rusty hinge: it was an old longing, ancient as the wind-torn wail of a bare-naked tree in the middle of the valley in the middle of the wind, perhaps. The scalding cry ripped the silence she had achieved so well. It fetched the prickly pain from her past and let it hack at her nerves with the rumpus of a ceaseless bell. It was so strident she could feel its pulse in her thoughts. And in that tirade she sat clutching her temples, getting brain-wrecked by the most excruciating pain to ever taunt a woman: the tintinnabulation of desertion. Through one sane eye, MaGadlela saw her looming freefall into that shrill abyss, where the sum of her pain derived, with not the thinnest strand of rope to dangle by. In those depths was the sure death of her. To survive she had to juggle things and solve the topsy-turvy state of her life. So, she summed up the strength and pushed the pealing uproar of her cry to the rooms centre to buoy it above the hearth. There she simply gathered a pulp of silence all around it. By skilled alchemy she then congealed this padding silence, thus abating the dins effect. This prim stunt stood like a seething core tucked in by a cooling pulp or like the order of glair and the yolk that centres it. It was a compassionate silence that stood impassable, for it dare not speak her pain. Her house only had to rind this form as a coherent mass to keep intact the loudest jangle she had ever known. Where she sat now, far from the madding toll, she reincarnated herself in the silence to mount its wave to heights beyond time, into a mode of virtual death. But hers was a fortifying seat of consciousness where she drifted to nod to this silence: its downy texture, its elating rise, its remedial fall and its mollifying magnitude. Her reply was demure when the silence spoke. Here she sat to mend her ego in proportion to its defect and worked to immunize herself to an anguish she knew, whilst its action was deferred, would exist for all time. She shrugged her grief away as an honour that life had found reasonable to bestow on her: this was a gift for none other than her and every blow had to be taken without a truckle. She reasoned that the perplexities of this world are not matters one should whimper over; that temperament itself is not infallible, but one should never question this or she would find herself in perpetual awe. Yet, she often shook her head asking: What type of people are these? But the question

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remained hers to answer and one that would baffle the ages. Happiness lay as a broken tale at MaGadlelas feet. She poked at the inextricable pieces that were fragments of her past existence, held together by the round wall and all that been in it. Her life had never been hers. It played out nightmare-like; a work of art painted by Fate and her name inscribed thereon. It owed her no favour. But she knew that shed never been advised to expect anything more favourable than she already had and so she found no reason to. And, still, as she pushed her decrepit ego to the porch of old age she knew that at death there would be no reward for ones manoeuvres of lifes tortuous paths. Suffering the soul is but Lifes chore. As if her resolve was not enough, she went and bought herself some fowls and a sow, which she penned hoping to obtain collateral and divide her stock. Old woman wrapped her shawl around her waist and roamed the yard with her arms behind her back, living. She lived simply because life was made to be lived every last drop of it. She worked her garden, tended to her leghorns and fed the grumpy sow that showed no promise of fertility. Her fowls became objects of her affection and tending to them became a salutary task. They depended on her as she did on the hope that one day the sow would farrow. It was that she saw a reflection of herself in the pig. For leisure, she cringed into a soliloquy where she lived in the centre of her piece, pronouncing all that simmers in the subconscious. She spat her lines and personated her life in monologue, yammering away her thoughts until she could feel nothing of their sting. She lived and lived, until the day a stranger walked into her house. She couldnt ignore the peculiar glow that cloaked him. A sheeny emanation from him of some calming force. At first she had thought she imagined it. She had thought she needed a rescuer so much that her eyes had imposed it on him. But it was there stinging her eyes every time he entered the room: a leaping light that clutched every item and smacked it with a tinge of that phosphorescence. She would watch the hulking shadow she lived in recede as it stole into her bleak centre, even glittering the lime-washed wall. And despite his absence at times, he left a portion of this blush imprinted in the room only to jazz it up some more on his return. In the morning she would size up her house and it was this aura, coupled with the golden sun spying through chinks in the door, that lit it up to replace his amiable presence. Lovely, she would remark, only gloating. She would go on to bask light-heartedly in the afterglow of his warmths exit. It could be that he reminded her of a son who couldnt cope in a tricky world of contrasts. In his presence she felt consoled, like she could just empty out her woes onto the earthen floor and he would do like Mathambanamehlo did with his bones: splay them out and prod them to ponder her pain. He would then say: Well, then, fate is in your favour you old hack you. And shed easily believe him because he droned his words with that guttural brawn. He was chaste, almost shy, but when he did speak his voice was imposing and it coaxed you into meekness if

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you were hyper. A most decent man who was no trouble at all and seemingly didnt want also to be troubled. At the clunkiest of times, too, his eyes would spark to catch a loud action from the girl, trail it to its end only to blank out again. Or maybe pause like a smart arachnid whose hawkish eyes stretch wide over the threads of his own impulse. And if you encroach into his space, or request his ear, he effects a come-down from his lofty post bowed by his humbleness to linger at the border of his secrecy. From there he engages you with that shrewd-eyed courtesy, but twined with the gravest interest in your tale. And then, your every word probed for its meaning and replied to, he sneaks airily up each silken rung to centre the shadiest jungle of himself. She had seen too many loners in her day but never one who purported to be so inscrutable. She remembered her own unflinching solitude and had only sympathy for him. She wondered if thats how he felt, and if there could possibly be any brand of loneliness beyond that which had once been hers. But, nonetheless, one belongs to oneself before one belongs to the world. It had been MaGadlelas fear that his arrival would force her to dismount the silence and induce a change in its draft and layout. She had thought shed have to paraphrase her character with lame talk: gobbledygook he was less interested in than tracing the grief published in an old fools accent. What she didnt know was that he would want a chunk of this composure for himself. With his steely demeanour he urged the peace on and was so unperturbed by it that it was as if he had crept out of this very silence to be himself. So it felt all wrong for her to abdicate it. Of course, they chatted sometimes: remarks about naughts and nothings, tailed by chuckles that were as abbreviated in their end as in their start. The rest of the time they lived loudly alert of each other. The girl also didnt talk much when she came around. But hers was childish diffidence and when she did speak she whined away with extreme heedlessness. She brought that rashness up like a honed knife to the soft throat of the silence. His was a selfsubjection to a regime where all things, slow or sudden, had to adapt to this abstinent quantum of motion. And when he spoke to break the silence he did it with such caution that it could be easily mended afterwards. With him quiet too, this quiescence had amplified to lie two-fold and contain a reclusive twosome whose incidence to each other somehow spoke in telepathic pitches. But she let it be his accompaniment that conferred an uppish repute to it, to which they both tuned in, she here and he yonder, their thoughts and their fancies deriving from opposing flanks and unparallel in progress, yet converging in this one silence. A silence with no suffix, no caption just an abrupt orchestrated void; extreme sometimes in its wordless utterance but just right for two people who had no need for words. On many occasions as she sat alone she would be beating her brains with the same question: who is he? He came with no clothes, no blanket, no knob-kerrie either as one on the road

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usually does. He would be as bare as air if not for the whistle. And what of that load he bears? Her mind relapsed to that rainy night when he stood sopping wet at the parched lip of her hut. She had thought he would shelter in her house for the duration of the rain and leave, possibly in the morning. But as she looked at him after that she saw that this man had no obvious finish to his journey. She couldnt deny that she needed strong hands in the house, so she let him stay just until he could remember where it is that hed been off to. Hes a traveler, certainly. Where from? Night must have caught him on his way and hers was a place for him to rest. They live the bird life: fold their wingspan where they settle only to slake their thirst from this reservoir of peace. But theyre edgy, waiting on the shiftless wind to pick up. She knew that shed soon see the back of him scurry off to the twilight and fade in a flash like the fleet-footed wind in which he belongs. She couldnt blame him. In her archaic wisdom she knew that parts and pieces of us are scattered across the vastness of this earth, and were to comb the last thicket looking for the last piece. Any day now he may depart. Could this be it? All along he had hinted no desire to get on his way but today he woke early. Could he be rounding up his spots for a departure? Old woman dodged this thought. That chance alone was too irksome to dwell on. But if he should choose to set out as soon as today then shed pack him five pints of silence and a sack of good luck and let him to the road. MaGadlela stood up off the concrete floor. She would have eaten the millet meal left over from supper but her tummy was still bugged by that morning queasiness. Instead she would wait for the girl to cook maize porridge, something tender. Meanwhile she could start the fire. She traipsed on to pick some kindling and twigs from the log bundle and also checked the car but found no eggs among the chickens. Then, just as she was to drag on towards the house, she stopped and looked over to the roof, decked with the sail. She wasnt saying he must post it up when she said theres a sail outside that should be up there. Even so, he went and did it and the house looked so flashy. Everybody else the builders and thatchers wanted a fee for their effort and she had very little money to spare on that. She would patch it with mud spats when hail had scored the wall and that was it she couldnt build it again. But it seemed the elements had the upper hand anyhow because there wasnt much left of the hut now. Soon its luck will run out: the storm will come and tug it to the ground in one fell swoop. Theyll talk about it, the blathering bitches. Theyll be glad. All that guff with no end to it, as if theres a prize to be won for mouthing off about MaGadlelas business. She didnt stand for long, as she could feel her legs get wonky under her. She merely swept her eyes over the weed-riddled yard before stick-walking towards the entrance of her rondavel. When losses seem to exceed blessings, who cares to count? she muttered and shook her

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head as she entered the house.

Old womans conduct had become predictable. She would sit fingering the rift on the left hand, as if she still missed what had been there. At times he would catch her staring at the picture on the wall. He looked at it for himself and could only guess who the two people were after reading the letter to her the other day. She had displayed neither concern nor exhilaration upon hearing the news. He imagined that ties had broken with whoever it was of the two she was being written about. He couldnt tell fully because her version remained concealed in the maze on her raisin face. Even her eyes were fixed in an unresponsive phrase. There was no conversation to retain him after the breakfast porridge theyd just had, so he took the short-story book and stood up from the small bench. As he did so a box of matches fell from his back pocket, attracting the old womans eyes. He picked it up, put it back and felt for something else that was supposed to be there. She stared after him as he walked out a question mark on her face. Shed never seen him smoke and could not recall smelling tobacco on him in all the time that hed been there. Or maybe thats what a drifter only needed a box of matches. And a whistle. For a reason unknown to her, MaGadlelas eyes leapt to a shelf on the dish-rack to the letter there. She recalled his question. The invasive query that had capsized her: Wheres your son now, maam? That knifing question. It had been raw. She hadnt expected it to be asked when she hauled the trousers out from her suitcase, sewed them and said, These were my sons, before handing them over to him with the shoes. The question had stabbed her so hard that shed been left wondering about a rational cause in this world for not having a child, or a family. Shed dug into the odds and ends in her head but found no constructive plea. And between her unpreparedness for the question and her digging for a defense, she had had no time to devise a lie either. Shed been bewildered. It wasnt that she didnt know where her son was she knew very well. It was just that shed never thought there might be a person who didnt know. My child, some things are best left alone, she had replied. In her mind everybody knew where her son was and they were laughing about it. They lived on her misery, drank it for tea and flossed with it too. Who is he who doesnt know? How come? But amid her astonishment she had realized that there was no way he could have known he wasnt from around here. She had felt guilty about her flippant answer so she asked him to read the letter to her and get a clue. She couldnt tell it with her own mouth. Where would she start? Her life was full of questions only she should be able to answer but she, too, could not; nothing made any sense and she herself hated to dwell on the many questions, without having somebody else asking them too. But long after the evasive reply and long after the letter-

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reading, the question had nagged her on: Where is your son now, MaGadlela? She couldnt snub its rage so she had only tucked it away to think it another day. He settled in the shade behind the house and took off his shoes to ease his feet. They were free now from the blisters that had afflicted him on his arrival. He fiddled with the trousers trying to roll up the legs. Old woman had made inside turn-ups and stitched the pants instead of trimming the cloth. Maybe she expected him to grow in them. Gracious old woman. He hadnt been too long into the book when he heard remote clatters of a basin inside a bucket. He looked up just as a woman slid into eye-view. She was marching down the thin path to the well with a bucket hooked on one arm. She saw him too before they stared at each other. He remembered her from the feast NoSandile they called her. Shed been employed with other women in the house where hed gone to ask for leftover meat. The way they were all prattling on when he found them, they were most likely the big hens the queen chickens of the gossip league. But shed been running her mouth the most and had the rest of them gripped with her cackling. Likewise, she had that long bobbing neck and spooked eyes, the way a chicken is made. She spoke with a scroopy voice, like the sound of a shovel scraping mud off a hard floor. She also had tawny teeth and a blotch on one side of her face. He locked his eyes onto her. She averted her own from him to watch the road, but he was still staring when she came round. It was clear that she felt awkward under his look, yet he stared not budging. She returned his gaze, mulishly. But she stared too much and strayed off the pathway to stumble and nearly ploughed to the ground face first. She promptly caught her drift, fine-tuned her cool and strode away, still feeling his eyes. From then on he sat reading but didnt see her emerge from the well. Shed obviously taken another route, like she had something to be shy about. * * * Blessed is the burdened infant who toddles to contentment in these trying times. His handicaps tickled the other children. He saw it in their faces when they pointed and made jokes about him. He tried to talk like they did but sometimes the words justthey just wouldnt come out. He would look down when he passed people on the road, just so they wouldnt frown at him like they did. Hed seen the same look on his mothers face. She would stand and shake her head again and again. Something was wrong with him. His father had left because of it and it was what made his mother the meanest to him. He remembered her before she would fling objects at him. She was not his mother. She would lock him outside when men came to visit and would beat him afterwards for sitting too close to the door. He cradled his inadequacies and played free in the comforts of orphanage. He chased the

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speckled butterflies of summer and flushed fat ducks from the marshes or he would digress and watch mother duck roll-call her refined little quackers into single file just behind her. The peoples communion, always paraphrased in their sympathy for the weakest among themselves, still skipped him as they cast their eyes to the meadow to view the royal yellow dandelions in bloom. They didnt see his distraught innocence either, that was spilling to trickle into the draining earth. In that bleakest isolation, in the boundless confines of untamed thought, he would obey his own rules, right or wrong. Dandelions were dry now and stood at their chanciest frailty. He plucked one out among their sprawling sea and laughed joy over the unpredictability of beauty. Just the other day they were a healthy yellow, but now fluffy spores were lightly notched in a cluster around the head. He nipped the stem in two fingers and spun it both ways, giving the spores the effect of a constellation in eccentric orbit around a magnetic core. He then plucked out a single one, huffed and blew the rest away. They scattered in a fluttery display of twinkling smithereens, some drifting with the sluggish breeze. What had been a nucleus hoarding the dinkiest beauty now stood a dry and nude nothing. He flung the barren stem aside, wholly indignant at the superb fragility of beautys pose. He skipped down the meadow from here to there trying to discard the luggage that would deplete his pride. But suddenly from nowhere the down feather of a moulting bird, a dove maybe, appeared floating higher than hand-reach and still gaining height. Instantly it caught his fervour and he tasked upon himself to chase it. He ran, first in an airy gallop, leaping and reaching only to swipe empty air, for the feather was rising, paying no heed to gravity. He chased faster, springing and wiggling his frame in mid-air but the feather flipped and rose higher until he wasnt chasing it anymore it was flight he was chasing. And not sure how exactly to achieve this, he ran until the petty breeze grew rash and then rapid. The wind jostled him now as it did the feather. It bubbled his clothes and whooshed into his gaping mouth, swelling him almost to lift-off. He was fleeing, pushing the wind apart like an overgrown fledgeling, wading and flapping with one wing, the other so stunning in its style that it had to be tucked jealously under his skimming frame as he tried for the thrilling freedom of aviation. He ran and ran. He needed to take off shift from earthbound inhibitions. Already pumped up by the whisking wind, he trusted each fleeing step to boost him into the air. Yet the very earth that heaved him up by every leap delayed him as its own and he would rise no higher than the height of a hoppled cripple who sought to cheat gravity. Realizing this capture, his legs took over, giving no thought to proportion or restraint. They streaked him forward, stretching him to a speed and haste unachievable to a creature so fragile and gawky. He ran now with the daftness of a slow boy who had no faith in catching up with the rage of his own legs. He ran until he came to a panting halt above the rivers shimmering back. Both drained and

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rapturous, he stopped and turned to walk the slow road to the well, where he knelt, steeped his one hand in and scooped four times to drink to satiation. Upon treating himself he remained kneeling over the basin, maybe flossing the flat taste of water from his teeth. But as soon as the ripples had smoothed over, his mind was drawn to the two tiny eyes of a camouflaged something inside the well. In the muddy bottom of it a tan-coloured crab stood halfway from under a rock, not waiting for sunshine. As the well grew still it cautiously sidled out of cover, togged up in that brown carapace and brandishing pincers for artillery, with pointy little buttons for eyes. This was the guardian of the well. Selfless giver of water. He didnt flinch, letting the armoured guard flounder into the middle of the basin with that sideway slide and stalk-eyed caution of all crabs. There it stalled and kept a stare up overhead, surely alert to the face that lurked between the wells sheltering surface and the canopying sky. It was a face from an outlandish world devoid of protection for a smart crustacean like itself. He leaned forward to bring his stare closer to the water. But the crab tweaked and scrambled back into hiding. It had been poised there a jiffy, but a jiffy enough for him to deem its horridness: an ugliness deserved by no creature, less so a prudent crab. He wasnt quite done with it, so he plucked out a long grass stalk from the side and leaned over again to harass the thing out of hiding. But before he could achieve this mischief he became aware of a monstrosity leering back at him, looking like it was scolding him. Under his startled gaze it was steadily morphing, growing uglier. The bowing sun was low enough to strike his face as he knelt over, so that he could see it on the water. Where it should have been there was a wry visage of a pained expression: an ugliness he would have thought to deny was his own, except hed seen it before in the very same bowl. That higher-grade hideousness did hint at the torsion of his spirit but it was not kind on the eye in this prairie of good looks. Quickly, he snatched his warped face from the clear water and stood up to hark on back to damnation. In the aftermath of sighting that horror he felt a whoop rising trying to undo himself: a bitter protest against his predicament. He tried to scream out but his voice wouldnt stretch. It only burbled and furled inwards, into the asylum of his dumbness. As he tried to retrieve it he plunged to the rock-bottom of his hurt, which became his introspection. Here he rediscovered the jail of his debased ego. Just like that his soaring fantasies were crushed. It was then that full fury inherited him. Roaming the prairie, mood fluctuating between wrath and sorrow, he dithered forth before stumbling upon a quails nest. Cuddled up inside this deep crib of grass-stalks were three delighted little birdies in the prime of purity. He sat on his one heel and pried inside to take one out. He held it in his open hand and the nestling was staggering clumsily, clawing his cradling palm as the bliss of existence billowed through its infant bulk. He closed his hand and draped

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the warm bird with his fingers, to check it from staggering off it. By its quivers it tickled his palm and made him giggle and feel a meteoric peace pat him where it ached. This seemed to appease his sadness. As he clasped the bird in his kind palm he questioned for a moment the disparities between mercy and cruelty, life and death. This because he came to realize that just by drawing his fingers in he could squash it dead if he wished. Suddenly that soft clench as it stood became an ultimatum for the weakling, its sinless life subject to his leniency. Right then sanity would have prevailed and he would have put it down, leniently. But, looking around, it must have been the stretch of empty pasture that roused an air of lordly reign in him. Nobody was looking, nobody would see none would stop him. In retort to that quivering purity something sinister evolved in him. Bored with the payless feat of chivalry, he resorted to the jolliness of murder. His fingers the same that had plucked a fluffed dandelion from its notch so intimately that the whole batch of spores didnt spill wrapped the birdies feather-free figure hard. At the height of its happy chirps the nestling twitched, stunned by the constraining palm. It squeaked frantically, trying to undo his hand, but he just squeezed and squeezed until the pulse of life in it grew faint and faded in his ruthless grip. He opened his palm slowly, half-surprised yet half-thrilled at the outcome of his rancour. Without so much as a sob for death he flung the flabby corpse aside and licked his healing wound. Now crowned king of sorrow, he bent down and reached into the nest once more. He did the same to each of the remaining two birds to quench the raging bloodlust that niggled him. It was a lust that stole from him his faith in the glory of the land. From there on he went on a rampage, raiding nests and crushing eggs in his way, or hitting out at the flitting butterflies. The clench of his fingers became the gallows where winged life was stifled and death was the penalty for innocence. He was trying to instill in everything of God the lugubriousness of a deformed face. Fully fledged in him was a sobbing ugliness made from a murderers neglected cries. Little crippled boy, born to jeers. The red snake prowls the valley in rampant rapids and weaves its pliant spine to hasten its lithe stroll through Ngubemnyamas posh heaven. There on the banks of the hurried river, dangling his feet freely, youd see a young boy rapt in pipe tunes, which thwart a deliberate malice that would trample his self-worth. Its in this recess where he gathers himself to flee the shackles of conformity and match his poise with the breadth and depth of the rivers forlorn soul. Lullabies of the flute nick and glean from him his ache, which he palms off onto the rivers bare back and it whisks it all away in good riddance. Like the whirring rivers flanks that constantly gnaw at the curbing walls to unleash its expanding form, so the tunes lick the hurt until it recedes, and freedom, like a river, erupts to drown the full anguish of him.

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10 A watcher among us

Who is he with a hump on the back? They wanted to know. Tongues wagged. Blabbermouths babbled. At the well women gridlocked and forgot to fill their buckets. With arms akimbo they watched him surface from his sunup sprees. Fingers jogged elbows. Elbows prodded ribs. Look! See! Up to now he was still annoyingly puzzling to their astute eyes. And like all brainteasers, he lingered on their lips waiting to be blabbered about. He was good feed for the presumptuous gossips who sat butt-flat by the well, gnawing at the days toothsome bulletins. Theyd watch him happen from his morning jaunts or descend for sundown with his whistle. Word was out that he slept in the pastures. Hed been told on by two babblers who had spotted him stretched about by the marshes. They said this to some friends who tittered and tipped it to others. This she-said-she-saw soon found the ears of NoSandile, captain gossip, who confessed an encounter of her own. She was held in some high regard as the bearer of news and had rightly earned her rank as the capital hen. NoSandile was mean. She was one of those no-shit-taking, roll-up-my-sleeves-and-tussle type and she didnt think twice about it either. She was quick to draw her claws if there was a pressing matter to be solved. Her solemn vow was to never be out-tussled by anything that squats when it pisses. If there was a rave and wrangle involving some women you could bet your slimy boogers she was in the middle of things. If she wasnt in the scuffle for herself then she was coaching one or other of her combative tattler sidekicks. Her sidekicks were wicked fiends to the nasty gossip and they were out to look for themes to snigger about. They were a gang of tormentors who laughed with that depraved bitchiness and preyed on people with the same hellish eyes, hissing the same breath and flicking the forked tongues of the slandering snakes they were. She represented them and they her, perpetrating and putting lies in peoples mouths but as soon as she heard something about herself she would stop at someones toes and quiz them through. A straight nag, pushing up on people and speaking in everybodys face with her offensive breath. She was the nastiest. NoSandile despised and vilified every woman and man, saving only her own twenty-five year old Sandile: a swivel-eyed local rogue who had done all the roguish deeds to be done in one lifetime. Only the demon driving him knew what crime he would exploit next. Just as well she stuck up for him, because he was the only other thing walking this earth who had her genes bopping through his veins and was as bull-headed as she. But her bellicose airs did nothing for her when she found herself under the rigorous gaze of one hunchbacked somebody. She confessed this instance to her disciples, which gave them

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cause to sit and chew on him. They agreed that it was not so much that he looked at you but the stern-eyed way he did it when he did, if he met you on the road. He had sharp eyes, accentuated by an unblinking stare that weighed you down to rummage you thoroughly. Even the chatty ones, who would have liked to milk a conversation out from him, found their gumption slipping under that eerie gaze. And while they were plucking up the nerve to lift their ducking eyes and look back at him he was marching off already. They were seeing the hump of him. He never sat and chatted with the men, never made advances on the women, which kept the ladies wondering if they were fine enough in his grades. With this detachment he restrained them from concluding about him and shunning him on those assumptions. Thus, by their reservations, he had posted himself up as a constant thread to which each of them clung for their daily craving; for their completion. But the most abrasive of the people didnt need to solve any riddle, so the first verdict came from them. He was a jolly jester, no different to that loopy concertina-pumping clown, Sgqwathi: something to amuse them. Although they didnt pick or paw at him to feel what he was formed of, they did wonder whether he even knew he had that thing jutting from his back, what with the way it sat on him like a mean prank. Like an afterthought by his creators cruel craftiness. To them it didnt matter his origin or destiny, his wisdoms or his wants, his faiths or his doubts, his likes or his loathes, his fun or his woes, his triumphs or his losses, his clan or his tribe that prized hump was all that spoke for him. Old Man Sgqwathi was the neighbourhood goof and a staunch friend of the children. He was no waif, never lackey, never drunk, never high either just smartly mad. He was of reedy build and lived happily half-dressed, only clad in an oversize pair of washed-out black trousers that were strangled at his waist by a curtain girdle. But he gave not a fussy hoot as he pumped his organ and crammed the studs for the smoothest weep. Sgqwathi owned nothing but a draughtmule and eked out a livelihood by shearing peoples sheep, either for pay in cash or with a sack of wool per half-dozen sheep to sell to Meneer Coetzee. When it wasnt that he was pestering everybody at their doorstep for odd jobs and other paying errands, or he gathered glass bottles to sell to Rajah. The chipper children made it a rule to be fan of him and his organ. All the time he had them teeming in tow, skip-hopping in gaiety, like a carnival troupe heeling an idol. They trailed him as he shuffled past their homes, through to his engagements and right up to the first rung of the climb to his tree lodge. He would jingle on, paying no heed to their fiery delight, nor to the loosened girdle about to drop his pants to his ankles as he bellowed out anthems like making love to a wife he never took. The little critters, tickled by the silliest of fads, were won over by his clownishness, up to the point where they took to worrying their mothers with requests for

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their own concertinas. As an arty know-it-all, Sgqwathi always had something new to show the children; unlike the party-pooping grown-ups who were always meaning to muzzle them and kill off their buzz. With him they knew it was time to wild out. They reeled like cartwheels and swung from his yard tree like chirpy silly little apes. They adored him more for the hand-made presents he gave to them: wire cars, tyre-soled sandals, garlands of beer bottle-tops, and other fripperies he had imagined they would derive pleasure from. He himself, having sampled adult life and found it desperately wanting of that juvenile jollity, had sunk back to immaturity and rekindled done days. He had settled into full-grown adolescence; his mind as small as theirs and his restraints as loose. Even the rude ragamuffins who gob-spat at each other for sport had bounds and their coarse humour was surpassed only by Old Man Sgqwathis anal rat-tat-tats as he revealed to his young chums the sheer delights of passing wind. Children, being copycat and all, loved this feat so much they performed it without stint and were letting loose in their mothers houses. Nothing slick enough to dodge their detective nostrils, the mamas got whiff of the fart and the stinky culprits were getting pinched or caned for this sin, even prompting them to crush down aloe for enema or mete out castor-oil to relieve their foul guts. With Sgqwathis go-ahead his recruits were rebelling against all rules and turning into rotten scoundrels. Old people couldnt send them anywhere, as they would dash out of sight when called upon to dash to the store. Or theyd swarm up trees and stay there when came bath time. He had tampered with their ingrained morals, undoing all the good it had taken their mothers their lifespan to instill. He was determined that they fully enjoy the plots and intrigues of child life. So in his vile teachings he skipped nothing from the putrid raspberry to armfarting to blowing spit-bubbles, and a set of other gross gestures that children must know. For their part, the snot-nosed gangsters were gladly content to unlearn all their constraining civility. And now expert in his asinine acts and radiating this brutishness, they leapt around with pockets full of tricks and mouths full of curses. Their intentions got meaner as they sought to prove their tricks on each other, and someone else. People who watched his happy-go-lucky pomp laughed out loud at Old Man Sgqwathi. They forgot a bubbling pot on the fire or a nasty hurt left by a taunting taskmistress. They laughed alright, but beyond these heartening guffaws they saw the unfunny face of it. Even as he jested on, adding a silver splash of happiness in their lives, they knew that there was something horribly amiss about a grown man acting the child. So resolute in their stance, the mean people reduced the humped stranger to this absurdity. He was an unsightly thing of value to no one but the maker who made him, and for them to laugh at. But the toothless and pokerfaced crones who, if there was something to laugh at, chewed the laughter with their bare gums and gobbled the glee, were not fooled. They knew

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bullshit from cow-dung at a careless first glance, so they fastened their strict eyes on the bulge on his back. Here they traced the succinct expression of their deities: a caricature of the grand gods and the burdens of us they bear. Their fully evolved wisdom had long alerted these oldies that they were lesser selves in a cosmic concept they can never fathom. They knew by his unruffled mood that his presence with them was not for himself. He came from the house of the gods; a veiled and unobtrusive existence beyond touch. An actuality higher than definition on the outer edge of human faculty. In this laden creature the sublime spirits were stooping to human status in tangible form. To the oldsters this was an indisputable fact and their faith in this premise was renewed with every blink of a pondering stare at him. They recognized also that the ways of the gods may be preposterous but not so much as to be senseless: there was something of dire importance to be set straight here; something so urgent they had to manifest themselves in flesh. And, of course, its not in the gods nature to craft themselves to our liking, but theyll shock us so far as to be repelled. They transpire from their high place in any veneered form. They surface as the gods of odds, through a warped being of piteous ugliness. Hell stride amid us, teasing us for sneers and heckles, which we will gladly give from the pits of our ugly hearts, for we are fallible. True fools to this trickery, we throw our heads back tickled to the gut. But its ourselves and the hatred we exude who are repulsive. By this, the good old people had convinced themselves not to belittle their patrons by sneering at this gimmick of superficial ugliness. They recalled that their fate was reliant on the gods mood mood which would swing from tender to scathing displeasure in one quick tick. In their long lives they had seen the harshest face of the gods: the outcome of strained relations with them. They had seen thrashing days when the sky was as sterile as the thirsting dust below and nothing, not a lucky stalk of weed, would spring in their fields. Ill-omened days when a tirelessly sweltering fireball split rocks and sent trees up in flames, and night was as torrid as day. They knew of worm and rodent plagues that raided crops and left nothing but wreck and woe. For this reason they kept a little space for him in their days and secretly held him in high esteem. In this way they sidled up to the gods mercy, for the wrath of the gods is a curse impossible to overcome. The rest of the people, who couldnt predict him, hesitated their verdict. They considered that he may be a strategy of the Bad Force or the Good: whichever was in command, its way was the way of the day. They recognized that these polarities of good and evil may coalesce in a mutual host in equal measure. Thereby drawn in him was the inclination of all man; the singled purpose of all mankind. Their only task was to wait and see which Force would conquer him. And the burden-bearing stranger sits in the deep of the day. If you pass the round house youll

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see that he rests outside staring nowhere. He does this at times: shuts his eyes and opens his ears, as though he were trying to catch voices from the wind. He lives in this interval listening to commands from the spirits telling of restless souls to be calmed and infants strife to be soothed. This journey is burdensome at times and a traveller seeks solace only in pipe song. We see him pose in solitude among us. In our scorn we shut our eyes and laugh out loud. But in the midst of our glee, our burdens are snatched from us. He kept watchwith all eyes.

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11 last days of slavery.

The sun bobbed up to a rain-touched newness of mood and carved the free terrain into a pageant of sun-soaked hill-brows, lilting contours and high hemlines. Sparkling dewdrops dangled from the cusps of maple leaves; leaves like cellulose chandeliers in the splendiferous day. This display stood as the sum of their commonwealth: a plateau of high opulence infinite like the deep space between a daydreamers whims and the raw reality he shuns. About this time in the morning a ranger would be doing a routine check of the fences for holes by vandals, and out in the woods hunters would find a catch in their spring-traps. The children, too, do wake with the sun to feast from the decked out tray of their childhood. They invade the morning with lewd slogans as that hyped up army of rogues. In this street of childishness they live and shimmy on in a corner of hilarity where the silliest kid is king. But theyre all eluded by the intellect that has the value of gem to the untutored adults. Yet, in the settlement two men of high rank were convening to review matters of crucial worth in the times. One was the teacher at the church school and the other was the grandstanding chief. As guardian of the land, his headship had heeded a request by old Tshazimpunzi for a chance to be heard and to lay matters down as he perceived them. This was Tshazis overture to him to suggest a resolution to an issue that had bugged the teacher for too long now. As is custom in these parts when a proposal is being made to the chief, he came clutching a bottle of spirits to help clarify his point and perhaps squeeze a favour or two out of him. For his part Nyawulemfene brought an eager ear: a man with knowledge had to be heard. What with so many people approaching him about trivial complaints, the teacher was a stint of fresh air blowing to school him on matters he had had very little knowledge of. Tshazimpunzis seniority was apparent from his sophistication in many matters that his superior was still nave to. His outspokenness was quashing the youngers voice and any selfassurance he may have had. The chief had resolved to hush up and now sat straight-laced, his mind trailing with every piece of enlightenment. Now, Mfene That theres been no means to a higher education to this day for the children of this area is a subject that bothers not only myself but a whole lot of the horde, whove come to appreciate the value of education. As youre already aware, it was a promise made to us by the Education Department in Umtata, around nineteen eighty-one, that they would look over the area to see if a high school would be possible. That waserfive years ago. To this instant you know that theres been no word from them. Now, as such, I have concluded that our welfare as simple people is not their priority. Well, then, since thats the case, my proposal is that the parents of every child of school-going age sign in a paper that will be made a petition

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to be sent to Umtata, letting these politicians know of our collective concern. My thinking was that your role, Mfene, as the authority is to point us to a vacant piece of land that will lie as proof to them of our seriousness. The chief was listening. Our children are working in the fields or playing hide and seek when school should be their occupation. After standard three in that old Mission building they must walk over twenty kilometres to kwaNdlobongela to get a higher education. Where do we think the plot is in that? The plot is lost in the distance, Tshazi. Precisely, Mfene. Now, I wish you knew that theres a struggle going on out there in Cape Town, Johannesburg and other places. Out there the township streets are in smoke. Men and women need help to throttle a terrible monster and bring it down to its knees. There is a struggle going on out there! This struggle is about making it to tomorrow without having another mans foot on your neck. When everybody is sitting around with their eyes fixed coyly on the ground, Mfene When everybody is scared shitless of standing up against the white man, there are men and women who carry a race on their shoulders and are brawling with him. Those are the burden bearers for us all and they need our assistance. Nyawulemfene heard him but he couldnt bring the picture to mind. Though hed never been to the city he had heard a lot about Johannesburg from people who returned from the townships. It wasnt near to what he was being told now. He had heard that women there drank liquor, wore trousers and practised polyandry. He had no wish to go there, not to save any man from any beast! Now its my opinion, Mfene, that this struggle could have been long over and this monster felled, if it was not for the masses sitting on their sympathy because they think that another black mans oppression is not their own. The white man is a paltry minority and yet we as the greater population find it so taxing to get up and liberate our fellows. Here, in this Transkeiso called homeland for our peoplewere sitting folding our hands because our freedom is still intact. The chief was listening. As black people, Mfene, were quick to claim that were communal that we are one. But what bugs me is that if were so one then why is that struggle not over? Why are our heroes still languishing in white mans dungeons and yet theres plenty of manpower to topple the monster? The chief had to chip in: Well, thats always been our reaction to the white man, Tshazi. Anyone who wishes to oppose him has always been left to his own accord. Maybe in these times its the case, the teacher bid, agitating his head in decline. But our

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fathers before us galloped this land for a hundred years fighting off the white man in the frontier wars. They were submissive to no man! Have we lost that vigour? Well, seemingly so because They were able to do so because they knew the corners and caves of their own land. The white man did not! Rusty muskets could not fade our warriors nerve. Where is that now? Where is our strategy? Where is the spirit Ngubemnyama fought with? It was mention of his great ancestor that tickled the chief. He nodded proudly but chilled, opting to let the teachers furore simmer. Freedom is mutual, Mfene. My freedom should be your freedom by your shackles being mine. But thats not so because were purebred cowards! And cowardice is the shame of our struggle, which will not be told. Why? Because we must soft on ourselves. Nurture this cowardice! Tshazi then calmed his pitch, hinting that a point had been made: But the rear side to this assessment, Mfene, is this I was of the view that since we seem to be of yellow blood then we should equip our young ones so that they may carry out the task. We need a proper school. We need more teachers. Education is what our children need. We cannot allow them to leave here with a standard three report card and a submitting grin. Standard three?! Where will they go with that? Thats slave education. Itll take them straight to a slave pit. Were rearing slaves here. Gardeners and shoeshine boys! Have you ever seen a ten year old gardener, Mfene? The chief shook his head, to which Tshazi said: Well, thats what they become with that standard three education. Me? Thats only as far as I can take them. After that, look at themthey play too much. The chief concurred but held the silence long enough for Tshazi to picket again. Perpetual childhood is where theyre headed. Their childishness will encroach into everything they do and theyll embarrass themselves out there. Here KwaXhosa, Mfene, he pointed to the ground, we send our boys to the mountains for their initiation into manhood, so that they must stop with the childishness. So that they must stand up as men among men. And so that they never let another man whip them and reduce them to boys again. Yes? Yes. Your sons, chief. The three of them. Theyve been to those mountains and they know not to take nonsense from another man each and the last of them. Not so? A nod from the chief. School will do exactly the same for these childrengive them height. Right now were stunting their growth and that will do good for nobody except the beast itself. And O the beast will love us for breeding imbeciles. White man needs boys to work his garden and wash his cars. He wants boys for his leash and reigns and hell be sitting in the shade with his whip urging us

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to foolishness. The chief was keen to corroborate so he said: Indeed, were fools already by this flight to the cities. Isnt the white man drawing us to himself by offering us jobs and money? Were fools already by obeying this lure. Now look at our children. They come back perverted. They come back looking down on uslaughing at us. I mean, thats the point of foolishness, isnt it? It starts with you laughing at yourself. Then you laugh at the next man. And then everything is hilarious. And eventually you are the joke. Precisely! But no, no, Mfene, let them go to the cities. Theyve been wanting to go and theres little we can do to stop them. But lets give them the pride of education. This pride will flout the white mans schemes. Were about to educate them so that they never believe the claim that they were born to grovel. Yes, of course, these children go to the citiesto the minesand take their place in the yoke to suffer a heavy nothing on a never-ending journey. They return here without so much as a piece of the self they left with. Enough of that! The pursuit is for freedom now. Do you understand freedom, Mfene? Do you understand the freedom that a raging madmans sanity is dying for? Yes, I hear you, the chief replied and put it down. He couldnt say he knew for sure what his elder was referring to, but he knew a madman who lived in the nearby forest. A savage he was. He was deviant and was pilfering from hard-working folk. They had flogged him just yesterday for stealing chickens from a good and honest old woman. He was defiant too, to the point that no matter how much he was lashed he just wouldnt admit to stealing the fowls. But neither could he substantiate the claim that he hadnt stolen them. Theyd been unable to talk the truth out of him. They had to whip him to denounce his ways; just to show him and others that Thunzini has no place for a common thief. Education is that freedom that will swell their minds and uncloud their eyes. The educated shall be the blinds seeing-eye-man, a mouthpiece for the dumb and ears for the unhearing. Through education we want them to know this freedom and be able to invoke it in everything they do and every journey they may embark on. Were offering them a means to save themselves, because to us elders, standing up and saving each other seems to be a weighty task. The chief nodded, seeming to grasp, if only Tshazi would concluded. An educated kaffir, Mfene. Thats what white man calls you when you see different to how they teach you to see. Now what we should do is multiply these educated kaffirs and send them out like ants. You see that gravel road? Send them out like a surging flood of ants, to go and claim what they deserve. When they get to their destination they must mingle, he revealed, partly whispering, as if someone were eavesdropping on their chat. They must mingle and be able to go head to head with those who dictate their new world.

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And the ant will strike back at the termite, the chief concluded, completely cottoned on. Yes! Tshazi was pleased. And ours is to arm the ant with plenty of fight. But will they return? My worry is that once children see what they think is a better situation theyre quick to discard the old. Look around us. The city has already robbed us of so many young men, because theyre running to what they suppose is a better deal. When a man is running from himself hell go anywhere where he wont encounter his reflection. And if he stays in another mans skin long enough, at some point returning to his own wont even matter. Now, you talk of unleashing them by education. But a slave unleashed will fly straight to destruction. You deprive a man of his freedom long enough, hell misuse it when he gets it. Hell run amok, probably back to the same yoke that had him by the neck. I hear your qualms, Mfene, but if we taught them right they will return. Well teach them that the wealth they should be out for is of the mind. Its only when theyre out for material gain that they deviate and turn their backs on us or return and stare down at us. But if their minds are right, then theyll be back here, just like homing pigeons because this soil is who they are. When they do return we will receive them with ululations. When they get back here they must tilt their heads and pour out everything they ever learned. They must tilt and empty out their contents like the spout of a teapot! Teach us timid folk a thing or two. You know, were sitting here with our land and wealth, content with everything. We dont understand why they would ever want more than Ngubemnyama gave them. But why wouldnt they? We cannot stop them from leaving, because young people are steered by curiosity. Lets just lend them the stamina, and after that I say let them go. When they get to their intention they must know to never place their well-being under another mans chaining mastery. They must know not to negotiate their lives with another man for a pittance. They will not sell their own land for a daily dip into the gloom of a gold mine! Hopefully not, Tshazi. Weve already relinquished too much of ourselves and our land to the settlers. Look only here in Maclear, in the belly of KwaXhosa They took it and called it South Africa. Now white man is sitting snug in mansions behind attack dogs. White people cooped up in their own little paradise to our exclusion. We, by our meekness, made that possible. Now they cut us a slice from our own land and say, Here, now scat, kaffir! Yes! Apartheid is exposing our coyness. And O ours is the horrific type! The two men waned somewhat, busy reflecting on this. It was a while before Tshazi spoke again, and his voice was sober and longing. Just a small plot here in the shadowerMfene, for a bigger school and enough teachers. That will be your incentive to me to do what I can. He then sat back but hastened to say: I have a choice, as if suddenly remembering that he did. I can retire with my know-how and tend to my poultry and livestock. But it would be a sad day for Thunzini if I left with all I know.

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People will say, there was once a man who knew beyond, but he left and took the lot with him to his grave. The gods would curse my seeds for a thousand generations. I would be the end of my name. Let that not be. Let our children not stand over our graves and point at us with sore fingers, blaming us for the relentless imbecility that pesters them. Lets stop them huddling in creeks and hiding places. Huddling never worked. We need to separate heads and exploit each of its potential. If we do that for our children then they will see the last days of slavery. Ill certainly do what I can, the chief guaranteed. But Ill need you to present me with the estimation of how wide you think the plot should be. I will then comb the valley to pick the best spot for the school. Thank you very much, chief although, Im sure it will take some convincing for the other parents to sign on that piece of paper. Be that as it may, the children must learn. Tshazimpunzi stood up and put his brimmed hat back on, saying: Im glad for your endorsement. Now, I probably wont be here to share the outcome of this investment with you, but I promise you the results will make you smile. The chief only chuckled and said, Long may you live, my friend. They said their goodbyes and Nyawulemfene stood at the gate and saw the lecturer off. A long-sighted man indeed. On numerous occasions he had gone to Tshazis house for conversation, and to drink the foreign liquor he kept. There he had seen too many books for one man to possess. Reading of that amount was sure to drive anyone into the clouds. Maybe even now it had been the books talking. But the chief had trust in his wisdom. Many men do speak but a few speak such words. Hard words precise like transpiring prophecies through a mystic mind. And the shine in his eyes is the force of his faith the glint of his iron truth. Men have spoken iron words with simple tongues until you start to learn that the simplest of men indeed have iron wisdom.

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12 Poetic Justice

It was still the festive flurry that had them hypnotized. A phase whose jauntiness was spotted in the rhythmic totters of three-legged old toppies, whod seen a favourite son or grandson after too long an absence. It was felt in the shebeens; those hives where the spread-legged sluts were holed up doing a slow dance in a dopey trance, half in love with themselves and half in love with the night, but ignorant of the romantic warriors who invented this love. When the horniness hit them, these drunken twosomes were plotting giggly sneak-outs to serve each other behind the houses, stowed away by the nights conniving hand. This hypnosis was also pasted in the grins of the miners, whod been away for so long that they went coy at finding they had wives already. Everybody was bubbly at this time, including the haughty heifers who came flaunting their airbrushed lives, oozing snootiness to the front and to the back of them. But the heifers were elite. They pranced along swaying their hips in a little feline tease that supplied the answer to the pubescent boys, who were just now starting to wonder about the difference between catty and feline. And if they were ever tickled, these hotties served their laughter in harp-like squeaks that split easily into music. They were determined to offer their own beauty as the oasis out here in this rural drabness. So they went and bought hand-size mirrors if they hadnt brought them with from the city. What they saw screened on the glass were fly ones twin to their own beauty. Now doubly sure of their flyness, they would proceed with airy struts to the ninth cloud of their floating love for themselves. But the house-crafty mothers-in-law, along with the bent back old fossils, wouldnt let down their guard just because of the festive hype. Instead they upped their hissy fits and doubleloaded the young wives. Their fussiness was still roused by the pettiest of things: a popped stitch on a sons trousers, or the overlap of a shirt cuff into the palm, that made them jab at those shoddy tramps who would no doubt wreck a house with that sloth. They wouldnt let them adopt the pompous vacuity of the citified girls. These mothers had the whole set monitored and were constantly craning their rubber necks to see who was doing what and if they were doing it right. This at least had the outcome of waking the new wives up to the strains and snags of wifehood, if they had ever forgotten. They upped their grind and hustled with equal the stringency with which they were being drilled. But by the old crocks gutsnapping coughs, the wives were hoping these bullies would die sooner than in half the time they had left to live. The peoples delight had swung them away from their daily pains even from the humped one. Whereas on his arrival they had their eyeballs stuck on him like he was treacle, they had now downed their focus low enough to be on nodding terms with him when he passed. They let

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their tight attention loosen and border between suspicious acceptance and complete disinterest. Sort of the way they viewed the Indian man and his everlasting grin, which they had accepted but suspected that it must be excruciating to sustain. They brushed the hunchback off to attend to matters that were making inroads into their lives. Like how the chief had given an order that no more plots were to be marked on the eastern space, as it was being saved for a possible school. As they savoured this small measure of their advancement and waited on the full incentive, the people couldnt be bugged by random drivel. The children also, while still detained in his hooping allure, did not pester him. The jumbo-size mania he had inserted into their lives had turned to caution when they saw that he wasnt the clownish wag Old Man Sgqwathi was but had a rather surly reply to their mischief. The denizens were still feeding from this annual blessing when news broke that there was a rapist abound. They lifted their eyes, unhurriedly, from their trough and attached them to him once more, trying to rate the bounds of his lust. But they found it too short in measure to reach beyond that eye-frisk he gave the women when he passed them on the way. The other misfits the forest slouch and Old Man Sgqwathi didnt seem to fit the deed either. The tree-dwellers recent whipping put him too far to fetch. And Sgqwathi? Well, he was hectic happy: best-friend to the snot-eating six-year olds was all he would ever be. It was settled then that none of these three persons fitted the detail of what a rapist might look like. So it was left to the people to search among themselves for the culprit, though reluctantly. The folk had never been overwhelmed by anything; not by the rising youngsters who were showing signs of deviance. Their mothers only remembered the pangs of childbirth like it was this morning and beat the common sense back into them, or they hurt them with nettle. Nyawulemfenes upright society was quick to employ the corrective whip in incidents of delinquency. More so with the rude ragamuffins, a squad of stray boys whose parents were too shy to instill order in their vagabond manner. Their vulgarity was in sniffing benzine and petrol, with a penchant for bumming or thieving for whatever they needed to get by. However, the same whip-wielders who inflicted this order were seemingly unperturbed by this rapist matter. Maybe reluctant to spill their cauldrons of bubbling happiness so soon, they rather treated it as an inconvenience to their merriment. The usually assertive men resigned their knob-kerries under their beds; they put out their candles and slept well. Meanwhile, the women sucked in their tongues and were as docile with this issue as they were with their mens nightly liaisons with Chwayita. Just as she remained a sore point that they tried to arrange their lives around, so they would avoid the raping menace if they could. They made sure that they were off the scene and in their homes by dusks first shade. There they would batten down the hatches and hug their infants close to their palpitating bosoms, wondering when the entrance would come crashing down and evil flaunt its terrible fangs.

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The most aloof of the populace reasoned that the rape victims were casualties of a nuisance that was as earthly and of flesh as themselves. One that could be beaten in total by staying away from it. They didnt think it was real evil, because real evil could not be stayed away from: its supernatural trickery and ferocious intent against societys whole body would demand them to pick up their weapons when it raised its claws. The rapist was only one pervert who deserved no gnashing their teeth over. Rather they left him to the creator who creates rapists to be the one to pacify him, as it was he who had spurred his lust. It could have been that this was not the face of the evil they wanted to see. The thing they had their goggle eyes on, and claimed to be most abhorrent of, lived in a lone round hut on their borders. It was in the form of a gaunt witch who had just now received a live-in guest to collaborate. This terror had death and annihilation in its eye and moved with stealth, trying to inhabit their souls. It was that evil to which theyd been alerted, and for which they must save all their possible strength. Anything else was just a distraction while that real evil breeds. And God forbid they could not be distracted! So the people did nothing just waited. But in that vacation evil found permanence. With the wickedest of thoughts tucked conveniently into that hateful little heart of it, it carved a niche in the fertile gloom of night, giving the women ultimatums. Somebody knew. Somebody always knows. His mother had made no second guesses when she went into his room and dug for dirty laundry, but found the balaclava and a pair of underpants with bloodstains on the crotch. He was the one doing it and she knew it. People had been talking about it. There was a rapist in Thunzini there had been for some time. She had caved in on top of the bed with her face in her hands, flabbergasted. Pity on him for the punishment they would subject him to. He could never talk himself out of it, if they ever got wind of who he was. The chief would send a mob of men and theyll go and whip him to the bone. Theyll tie him to hug the bulk of the willow tree at the chiefs forecourt and flay him with the leather thong until he sank into the bark from dreadful pain. They would whip and maim him. They could never find out! NoSandile had fetched a bucket of water and poured it into a zinc tub in the room. She threw in the undies and rubbed them hard with Omo powder. But the stains wouldnt rub out theyd been there too long. She had thought of leaving them to soak off, but no! She could never be that patient, knowing what she knew. She would burn the garments. Bury the sin in ashes. What else could she do he was her only son? At the feast she found herself sneaking in on peoples chat. Did anybody know? She knew that he would never stop, no matter what she said to him. So she went ahead and blamed the women. As long as they were fluttering about in the dark he would never stop. She

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had put this to a ravaged one who was said to know who the balaclava-clad night pest was and would name him at the chiefs court. NoSandile had told her to shut up if she knew whats good for her; her son had done nothing wrong but merely took what he was being offered. What had she been doing out at night anyway was she not a woman with a house and small children? NoSandile had told her to shut up and keep her dignity. The young wife had ducked away in dismay. * * * It must have been the stench in the room that woke him before daybreak did. He sniffed again, fully awake now, and his nostrils were accosted by a pong most horrific. He dashed his eyes around the room but there was nothing foul-looking. He dressed up and it was only when he stepped outside that he established it. A dog carcass crawling with maggots, right next to the doorway. He didnt know what to make of this discovery and didnt wake Old woman to tell her. Instead he fetched a rope, noosed it around the head and dragged the dog down to a ditch by the river. He did his bathing while there and was afraid that shed be bothered by the smell when she woke. He himself didnt let his finding trouble him, nor the awareness that a few early-risers watched as he descended down to the riverside with the carcass. By the time the sun rose the Burden Bearer was kicking through rock plants on the river bank, on a pleasure stroll towards the forest. He hadnt quite reached the massed trees when he heard the bark of a dog from behind a clump of nearing bush. He froze, alertly, and the barking ceased. Instead a head cropped up from behind the same bushes. The tree-dweller was familiar with his scruffy comb before the head dipped back into hiding. He walked warily toward the spot and found the ruffian on his stomach, strewn across a grounded rock busy with nothing. His back was covered with whip marks and he kept swatting gadflies off him. These wounds had been smeared with some white sticky-looking stuff. He imagined it to be sap from one or other curing plant to keep them aseptic. How are you, man? the Burden Bearer saluted, expecting the saltiness he had met with on their first contact. Im fine, the tree-dweller responded, somewhat loosened. The Burden Bearer sat down on a bunch of grass not far from him. Soon, Tree-dweller switched and sat upright with arms hooked over his knees. The welts were gruesome and they slit open when he arched his back. But he showed no signs of stress and only stared out over the river. What happened? the Burden Bearer asked. The other day, they lashed me, he said, cracking his fingers in a whipping gesture. Who did?

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Them, he replied and threw his head to the settlement. Them, who? They came here to the forest and they said, Hey you, chicken thief. Youre wanted at the chiefs court, now! I tried to run but there were six of them and they came with dogs to get me. Chicken thief? The Burden Bearer was perplexed. When we arrived there they tied me to a tree and there were other people there sitting down. They said I stole three chickens. Three! he reiterated, putting up three fingers. They asked me where the chickens were. I said I knew nothing about any three chickens. They said, No, the boy saw you with the chickens going into the forest. They pointed to some crippled bastard and said he saw me. I swore on my mothers grave I knew nothing about some chickens, but a cripple said he saw me and they took his word. They said, We will lash you until you cough up three chickens. He stopped and then asked: Why did they lash a man who swore by his dead mother he hadnt stolen some chickens? The Burden Bearer only shrugged his shoulders and said, Its people, man. They didnt speak for a while but the Burden Bearer took a closer look at him. Tree-dwellers fleece was adorned with two spotted quill-feathers of what looked like a guinea fowl. He sported a long beard, from which he had plaited one long braid. Along his left forearm, tied to it by thin strips of leaves, was a sheath made from a broad leaf and holding a large knife. He was built brawny and durable with the thick calves of a grown man. But it was his spluttered speech that betrayed his childishness. He was clearly snug in his detachment from social decency. He raved on some more about the apprehension by the six men and how they gave him thirteen strokes with a leather thong because they said he showed no remorse for his deeds. He found it absurd that someone would suggest that hed been prowling around stealing peoples chickens. He was of the view that there had been a prejudgement on him because he was not like them. This because they refused him their mercy and punished him on the strength of testimony by a cripple who couldnt even speak properly. What seemed to rile him even more was the fact that there were women present at his flogging. He closed his tirade by declaring that, even if he did steal the chickens, why did they still whip him knowing that he could not make amends? This because chickens were made to be eaten. He then sat quietly, rocking to and fro, wholly sour against his punishers, and the whole of humanity. Im not scared of them. Ill get that little rat, he swore later. Then, in a quick twist, he asked the Burden Bearer: So where are you going that way? He was nodding toward the forest, maybe apprehensive about intrusion into his ground. ErIm looking for incense.

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Suddenly the dog barked, eyes hung skyward. In the airspace above them a bird was gradually closing the distance to the ground. Tree-dweller stood up and stretched out one hand in a beckon. It circled over their heads a few times and instead perched on the nearest tree. He drew nearer to the sapling, clapped his hands twice and the bird dismounted to settle on his hand. It was a falcon and he stroked its back while murmuring to it, for it screwed its neck round with rapid cricks, obviously tense. But all of a sudden he said a loud Woo! and threw it into the air. It didnt fly off, only whipped above them while he clapped his hands in some covert command. Each time he clapped, the bird flipped and dipped with acrobatic withes. He clapped out the loudest one and it finally flew skyward before swerving east while they all watched. Still bogged in this active mode, Tree-dweller stood to face the near forest and coned his hands to shout the Woo! towards it. He had a slender smirk on his face as he cupped his ear for the echo. Did you hear that? he asked, now with exclusive joy. But he hastily sat down again before turning to the Burden Bearer with improved interest. Whats your clan name, man? he quizzed. The Burden Bearer hesitated and then declared: ErMqungu, as if suddenly remembering. Where? Here in Thunzini? ErKwaNdlobongela. He was pointing westwards. KwaNdlobongela, that side? the tree-dweller asked, pointing more to the south. Yes. Where do you stay here? At MaGadlelas house. Youre a relative? Not exactly. I see you coming to the river and playing that pipe. What is it? Can I play it? Its a flute. Where is it? Can I see it? Can I play it? I left it at the house. Thats nice music you play. Where did you learn to play? An old man in my village taught me? Thats good. Silence passed between the two before the Burden Bearer asked: Where are you from, then? Here, said the shabby one, tossing a careless hand to the settlement. No specifics. The Burden Bearer nodded and let it slip.

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Suddenly up on its paws, the terrier barked, looking farther upstream. What? the handler quizzed, looking out to the same way. Seeing no one there he stood up, picked the dog up in his arms and took three steps before hurling it into the river! The terrier splashed into the current, vanished and resurfaced floundering desperately. It was struggling towards the bank but the current was dragging it from the waters edge. Tree-dweller stood and did nothing. Instead he jiggled and did an ants-in-his-pants dance, yelling, You see, you cant even swim! After gratifying himself with this little fete he unsheathed his knife and took the feathers off his fleece to dive into the river. He stroked back to shore with one hand while yanking the dog by the scruff. Both came out saturated and the terrier wiggled, splattering droplets all over the place. The tree-dweller then picked up his feathers and knife and started towards the forest without another word. He did a hand-walk and travelled for a short distance before taking to his heels at full tilt with the dog in hot pursuit. He was fiercely agile and it looked to be the animal that struggled to keep up. Strange person, the Burden Bearer thought and stood up to leave him to his drift. The citizens knew him by his madness. Hed been one of their own before he fled to the middle of the forest. There he built a log shack and draped it with a black sail. He would live alone hunting rabbits, rodents and wild pigs, until one day he retrieved a stray pup on the borders of the woodland. He kept it and taught it to speak in tongue clicks and all. Children scattered and ran from him, stinky as a friendly skunk in the forest. Goatherds said he milked their flocks if they grazed too close to the trees. Men didnt think much of him: he was a grown boy who should outgrow himself and take a wife. Girls and women went in cliques for their wood-picking; if they went alone he would snatch them and keep them as wives. Theyd be made to fetch water and cook rat stew, his favourite meal. One day a young girl vanished from the settlement and four men were sent to the forest to look for her there, because somebody claimed that theyd seen him drag her into the trees. They looked in his shack and found no girl there. They asked his dog but it kept mum. It turned out that she had slept at a boys house where shed been deflowered. Her father yanked the boy by his ear all over the settlement demanding her flower back. Mama, where is the milk an infant is to grow on? All a son heard were the bearers wails piercing the morning fog a cry for lost girlhood. Inside the river trench, Little Cripples aim had been to mould toy bulls when he sampled a bit from the hunk of clay he got from the well. He kneaded the doughy paste against his thigh and rolled it to create the first oblong piece big enough to work with. He then foamed up some spit to line the clay, so it wouldnt stick to his fingers as he fiddled. When it had all smoothened he

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tried to nip it into mounds to shape the hump and snout and then taper it for the horns, legs and tail, from which he hoped one proper bull would happen. But he was working with one hand against his thigh, the other so jittery it wouldnt hold steady. Nothing came correct and he ended up with a thing of warped horns and a bent frame that could never be mistaken for the bull he tried to do. From flunking this task, he squashed the clay and rolled it smooth to try again. This time hed hold the lump with his left the trembling hand while shaping a bull out of it with his right. But the reflex twitch of it crushed his aim and he was steadily staling in effort while achieving nothing. He couldnt get it right. Useless. It was all useless! Yet, with the achievement of this aim utterly hindered, he wasnt short of things to create. He turned to weapons manufacture. He had sinned; lied about the forest lout stealing chickens and got him whipped. He knew that this contempt would not go unpunished, except he didnt know when. He had to protect himself. Now he rolled the whole slab of clay against his thigh until it was perfectly fused. He then portioned it into eight sizeable dumplings, which he reeled on this same thigh to proper roundness. Thereafter, he picked up the sharpest little stone pellets to granulate the balls all around, until each was as prickly as the head of a spiked club. He would leave them in the sun and when theyd hardened they would be lethal missiles against an advancing enemy. But, while he waited for the balls to dry, he would engage in target practice. On the ridged wall in the river he picked a spot and scratched out the shape of his foe with the edge of a stone. He then gathered more pebbles, which, if employed in battle, would make no impact except to tickle the enemy. He aimed his eyes hard on the sketchs head and flung one stone at it. He retried this action to perfect it; until it was simplified with each careful aim and his pitch was as lethal. Even with a careless hand now the fling was with the precision of a premeditated stroke. He was ready for war. He was dangerous. From here onwards only rage and bravery would spur his arm on and propel the balls. What to an untrained eye would look like a clumsy boy helpless against anything was in fact a highly trained stone-flinging warrior. But to outdo his enemy hed have to strike first, and relentlessly. With this war drill done with, Little Cripple would have retreated to his hideout to wait for his sworn foe. But, up by the well, two little girls were skipping down with buckets in their grip. The Burden Bearer hobbled along by the current, aiming to leave the riverbank farther upstream and then branch into the settlement. Walking so, he passed a point in the river that looked like somebodys place, just on the waters edge. Here he saw a set of clayballs laid out on top of a broad bedrock. He decided to jump down and inspect. Now in sight of the whole place, he saw nobody there excepttwo chickens! One was alive and hoppled with a thread

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and the other had been plucked and gutted, obviously ready for roasting. Immediately, he caught a stir to his hidden left. He looked to spot a little girl trying to pull her one arm free from a grasping hand of someone he couldnt see. He peeked around the blinding ridge and recognized him. It was the crippled boy and he had his shorts at his ankles, pulling her towards him against her tearful defiance. Realizing the motive, the Burden Bearer shouted, Hey, you! Surprised, the boy looked to see him and instantly unhanded the little girl. He recognized her too. It was Xoliswa the girl who played with the tennis ball. Little Cripple tried to pull up his shorts with his one hand but couldnt keep them up in his haste. The Burden Bearer closed in and demanded: What are you doing? The boy sidled away and tried to dart off but tripped on his own shorts to nose-dive into the sand. The Burden Bearer leapt forth and with a few quick steps was on him. He held him by the neck with his face in the dirt and then turned him onto his back. He sat on his chest, pinning the arms down with his knees. The boy was kicking and scuffling trying to throw him off but he was no match against the might of the hunchback. After squirming about in vain, Little Cripple lay back exhausted and breathless. The Burden Bearer reached into his pocket for the bottle of green and pressed hard between gritted jaws to prise the little lechers mouth. He spoke some indistinct words before tipping some of the fluid into it. Little Cripple gurgled it, refusing to swallow, but a slap on the face made his throat open kindly. Directly after that endeavour the Burden Bearer got up off the boys chest and staggered from the weight of a load newly burdening him. The little girl was already up by the well, hurrying along with one arm over her face. He went and threw the dead chicken into the rivers jogging waters. He undid the thread on the live one and climbed out of the trench to hike back to the settlement with it. The foul-mouthed pervert was hurling expletives and flinging missiles at him, but he walked away carelessly. He freed the chicken where the houses began and hoped its owner would be warned to it before somebody would nab it again.

Whats the matter, maam? he asked upon entry and on seeing that Old woman was still in bed well into daylight. Mmhh! My child she then faded to collect her breath. I cant move. Im stiff. She affirmed this in a shivering drawl, as though talking had also become a mission. She was sitting in bed and slouched against the headboard. Her hands lay idle at her sides while her head was shored up by a stick-thin neck. She looked like a discarded string puppet and it was true that all vigour had been drained from her. She drew in long snore-like breaths, as if a boulder sat on her chest. The stubbornness that had been so implicit in the old woman had

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finally given in. Nomalongwe would not be coming in on that morning and the next day, possibly. She had left a full pot of samp, which was to be their food. He knew that hed have to take over her chores and coddle the old geezer, probably for as long as she stayed away. He didnt want to grill Old woman on the girls whereabouts, in case she took it to imply that he didnt want to be saddled with duty. Instead he went over to her bed and gently lifted her by the underarms; off her back to sit her properly against the headrest. He then put her dress on over her nightie and tucked the pillow behind her before pulling the blanket up to her waist. She drew a great sigh from her soul and said, Thank you, my child. He emptied the chamber pot, collected firewood and resumed tidying the house while the porridge cooked. He then fed Old woman and she was able to finish the meal with slow swallowing. He ate his bowl it wasnt as descent as Nomalongwe would have made it but it was porridge nonetheless. After eating he scooped some maize from the barrel and fed the fowls before kneeling behind the grindstone to mash some for the chicks. Later, he took scraps down to the pig. By the time he was done with the housework it was already past midday. He poured the old woman a half-mug of the herbalists concoction after hearing a whooping cough from her. That sent her into an eternal snooze. By mid-afternoon she had fully woken and seemed less fatigued. He made her a meal and some tea to break the chill from a pending rain. She instructed him to slaughter one chicken from the car, which theyd eat with samp for supper. He did that, though he had no doubt that curried samp would be enough for them, without the old woman having to surrender one of her fowls. Her chickens had increased in number by the hatchment of the five chicks, and by her diligence in hiding them from the frequent hawk. It was probably that increase that prompted her to want to make a meal of one of them.

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13 The owl hoots at dusk

Langalibalele sat on the long bank against the kraal and spread the goatskin out on his lap. The simple work on the hide would provide some relief from a deposing thought in him, which reason could not lighten. It was fine skin from a mountain goat, glossy and tough. The inside was stiff now but a regular chafe of the dry fat with an abrasive stone would wear it into pliant pelt. It would sit nicely as a bedside mat. He pressed the weight of his mind onto his hand and leaned down on the blunt stone to rub, softly at first, and wear out the skin. His hand got vigorous, whittling the fat down and it was crumbling instantly into fluff. He rubbed some more in long back and forths, so intense sometimes that it seemed to be the stone that was flaking. He scuffed on, his rhythm ruled by the strokes. The attrition strengthened his wrath and it swelled at his fingertips. His scrapes grew shorter and shorter grew into incomplete scratches heightened by rage. He scraped until he peaked his speed and a stream of sweat-beads exuded from his forehead. He stopped. His hand was hoary with fluff and the dandruff was also there heaped in his mouth. He summed up some spit and rushed his wrists across his brow, grinning at the recollection that the limberness of youth had deserted him. Old age was fuming now, leaving him singed, as if hed been licked with a tongue of fire. The old man put the stone aside and paused. Despite all his best efforts to ignore it, the thought snuck up on him and stirred his tetchiness. If they all leave, then whos going to tend to the land?! They were a rather greedy breed these youngsters; fleeing the land with a mind-defying intrigue for glitter. They would coast up the spine of the earth to harvest the distance, willing to go anywhere the bus takes this greediness. This petulance concurred with his previous finger-wagging onslaught, steered by his disgust at his sons small-minded aims. In that bull-headed haste Langalibalele saw the black mans desperate tussle to suppress his wisdom for a pat on the back and a jingle in his pocket. Yet, the old man partly felt remorse over the tongue-lashing that had demoted Vumani to a mere fool. The youngster was a man of his own, enough to be deemed with respect in spite of his wayward aspirations. The two had kept a distance from each other since then, and this detachment had been a prickle on Langalibaleles pride. Thats why he had sent for him now. Vumani stood at his fathers side waiting to be acknowledged, so Langalibalele put his work down and flicked his hands together to clear the fluff. He then shifted to one side of the bench to let space for him to sit on. Thus, began the old man. There was once a man who announced it that he could run a full day without stop. He sucked

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in the breath of a days run and was on his way. It was only because he trusted his feet to carry him on a days breath that he vowed so. And he delivered on it. Now, son, you have to ask yourself the question do you trust your feet to carry you for the length of your hope? Then Langalibalele stopped, in both thought and in sentiment, anticipating some concession he didnt like to divulge. After three blinks and a lick of the lips, he finally spoke. Go to Johannesburg, son, and find what you think you will. The son nodded, sheepishly, thrown aside by the fathers sudden resolve. But the old man wasnt done just yet. Go to your Johannesburg but dont you come back here whining. People like to hurl themselves into the harshest chaos and are quick to cry oppression when that situation gets the better of them. Who sent them to Johannesburg? Who said they must go there? Vumani part shook his head and part heaved his shoulders, but Langalibalele went on. So now that you feel youre your own man enough to test your mettle against the city, I would like to give you some advice, as a father should give a son. So he held up the smallest finger as if that were the start of a count. Dont fall slave not to yourself and not to your surroundings. Look around you and learn to detect slavery. Get away from it. If you start feeling constricted, run as far as you can from whatever that be, because slavery has no reason and it hates a free mind. Once you call yourself free, slavery is sure to come and hunt you down! The son nodded. Now, slavery happens in threes Liquor. Women. Laziness. So the second finger came up before he said: Stay off the bottle. Dont touch that. Theres no pride in a grown man delving into his tattered tickey-pouch for the last one to buy a pint because it will be liquor then the corners. Once you sit in those corners, and those shebeens, you will never leave them. Your children will do the same after you. The third finger, then: Stay away from women. Stay away! I tell you, many men have lost their heads trying to figure out what God meant when He created that. The son nodded, still. Go to the city to be diligent. No half jobs. Dont go on a stand-about in those townships living on fickle luck. Too many of our men who go to the cities get distracted, get tired and stray off course. They leave here shiny-eyed and come back with chump change only because theyre lazy. Too lazy to drive their own fate so they grovel at other mens feet! Now holding up four fingers, the thumb came up: Give your house a dignified name. A mans house reflects who he is. Look at each mans house that you go into and see in it the wrongs that you dont want to happen in your house. Thats how you build and keep your own. After a swipe of the brow the old man decidedly came clean: Im talking about your friend

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Gcobani. Dont be that. That boy is infatuated with himself. But all that flashy jewellery is just a blanket to hide under. Now go look in his house because theres the real him. That bickering and mayhem with that frisky thing he calls a wife. He cant run away from that. It sticks to him like a fib to a fibber! You should knowyou go in there often. Vumani nodded, yet he screwed his face to the side. Now this is to you, son I hope you know what your wife is about so that it never gets to fisticuffs between you and yours. Once you seize her by the throat then theres no marriage there. You may as well take her back home and get your herd back. His five-finger point now done with, Langalibalele picked up the stone and fixed the hide to work on it. The son nodded for the last time, stood up and, in a halting voice, said, Thank you, father. He strode off with a smile in his pocket.

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14 Ballad of an old woman

In a withered round house that stood alone on the margins of Thunzini, a lone candle glowed weakly, nearing extinction. Inside, an old woman sat on her bed perched on a wave of calm that exalts her beyond the roving decay of a sulphuric reality. Now and again she would mutter words to no one in particular as she sat alone in the evening hush. In the same room there was a constant chirping that she didnt hear, because it rang outside the bubble of silence in which she hooded herself. Something heavy was pressing down on her chest, shown by her fretful panting as she tried for air. It was as if her breath had curdled too thick to slide up her windpipe: instead of her nostrils she had to despatch it through her mouth and coach her own breathing. If she left it to itself shed come to realize that she wasnt breathing at all. But despite her distress she felt incredible strength. She wondered why so much strength. She felt like she could shift the whole house with just a push with her forefinger. A long time ago she had had this much strength, but shed been alone with a six year old son. After all the sorrow had thawed out shed been sprung by a powerful mood. She remembered it clearly. She remembered panicking and thinking: if I chop a limb off then Ill have a drawback, some hindrance to work against each day, so that this much strength does not go to waste. But she was able-limbed and the tremendous strength was there and she was alone. Alone with a mans six year old legacy. Her strength would fluctuate over the years and now, by some meaning, it was at its topmost again. With nothing left of her but skin, the nightly draught pouring in through an opposite window was jabbing straight at her bone. She shivered, despite that she had a shawl arranged about her shoulders to evict the cold to which her scrawny frame was becoming susceptible. On the hearth in front of an armchair where she had sat earlier as her guest cooked there was coal from the fire. She felt for her walking stick and rounded up the strength she felt so animated by. She got off her bed and lobbed along in a sloppy shudder, like a doped-up puppet quaking forward on two jointed legs too flimsy to sustain it but determined with each step to get to where it had set out to go. After closing the window the old woman made for the hearth. She held on to a nearby barrel, shuffled on a bit before aiming and flumping her body onto the ragged armchair. Upon settling she poked the cinder with her stick to expose it from under the coat of ash. But as soon as she had done that, her eyes wandered elsewhere as something suddenly became apparent to her. She fixed her shawl so as not to slide off her shoulders. She then rose to lug her weight to the end of the room. On the bottom level of a wall-pinned wooden dish-rack there was a lean blue envelope. She reached for it and took also the burning stump of candle from the table back to

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her chair. Old woman placed the candlestick on top of the water barrel and sank comfortably into the armchair. She pulled out the note in the envelope, opened it and slanted it to the candlelight to peruse its content. She didnt read, only watched the broken and sparsely laid jottings on the page, scrutinizing the creation of each word. But what she was seeing was nothing sensible, apart from a queue of shaggy symbols. They curved, looped and stretched to scramble down the fine lines on which they were laid. Every scrawl rippled towards the fringe until the last would strain that line and tip out to the next. Yet, she could not deduce the penmans art; to her the words were only abstruse figures captured by ink and trapped in paper. They had assumed a complexity she had never imagined on a message so grave. The writing meant something in its crabbed sequence because the girl, and later her guest, had confirmed it. She had not trusted the girls version; she had thought it was that lampooning nastiness of children that made her translate it the way she had. But then he, with that soothing drone in his voice, had officiated it. And, even though she didnt want it to be true, he had bestowed onto it an enduring truth she could not deny. Both of them the same allusion in translation and with the flair and eloquence of ones who were gifted in deciphering such cryptic symbols. Now the tangled text stood indisputable, its thrust leaping from the page. A few lines only there were, but their impact on her was untold. She turned the page, now wondering if the readers had not missed other words written elsewhere on the flipside, perhaps. This here graffiti was professing to speak for a Mister Andile Gadlela crying the arrival of him. It had all been penned with such stern candour. But did the penman stop for an instant to predict the impact of his vocation on the addressee? Or could he not resist the mighty pens paw and the hands push in its thrifty urge to relay a tale? It had to be told to someone apparently and unlucky her who endured the burden of birth. She saw the icons clearly now. They were designed for despair: barbed figures whose cruelty shall wrench the heart of the receiver. The slim lines were laid across the sheet like whips to flog she from whose rearing breast grew the devil. Old woman put the letter back in the envelope, placed it on top of the barrel and drifted. She muttered something to herself as she pasted her mind onto the still picture, which kept on like a mural to her ring room. Her eyes sat on the glass while she gazed blindly into it, not thinking of the depiction beyond it. The picture hung there dream-like; an epitome encroaching into her present. Its colour was of olden times, as was the image it portrayed. She made her eyes slide and glide and then dip through the pictures opacity to retrieve the farthest memories repressed by it. She locked onto the two peoples hands. The smallest one was raised to meet the big one, which fell to fetch it. There, where the two limbs pegged, met a fathers love for an only child. He had been so fond of him, she whispered, dotingly. She mumbled other tributes,

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which bounced off the wall to haunt the room with whispers. Trapped in this recurring coil of her own form, the old woman sat in soliloquy, reminiscing. She recited her lines with fluency as her mind zipped at twinkle speed making her head spin. Suddenly the wall started to twirl. It dragged the portrait until its rounds fused into one spool of flashing memories. Like a revolving card-rack, random images flickered in this dizzying roulette in which she sat statue-like: an inert core in a nimble game of recall. Unforgotten chapters of her life posed in graphic snapshots, from which she only had to pick one and submerge. But she chose none. Each image was equally riveting; each enticing her into a time-warping chamber corridors long sealed by times shutters, which now broke open, rousing her to retrace each phase with dust-whittle precision. In this radial axle of slurring flashbacks, drowned in her mental hotchpotch, MaGadlela encountered herself. When there are no more tears to cry as one has cried fit for two lifetimes, a retching motion starts, yielding nothing but the air we breathe. An absence takes over that replaces the going of a good companion; an absence that eternal living cannot fill. Now in her end days, time had become a high hurdle drawn between herself and her resting place. Days were immortal and the sun rolled across the sky with utmost sluggishness. But she could see the valley of dusk, where old acquaintances await the arrival of lifetime chums. Where lost souls push up daisies making place for snatched souls. She could smell the freshlydug loam and saw the pit that signalled a transition into oblivion. She knew to close her eyes and hold her breath when she went under. Whos the man in the house, they wanted to know from the girl? The nerve in them! Even with her husband long dead? Forty-nine years of widowhood, and barrenness! How long must a woman wear her widows weeds? They had stripped her of everything. They had thwacked her good until deaths door but still wouldnt stop with the bashing. Now they sought to rule the ins and outs of her house. The gall in them! Hes a traveler, of course! Not that hes theirs to fuss over. Hes her guest what do they care? Who do they think was going to saw the logs and split the firewood? Collect her pay from Rajahs? They certainly werent. They werent going to lay reeds over the battered thatch that had rain seeping through. What makes them so cross about his presence in the settlement? Hes springing the traps they set for her thats what. Hes an outsider who didnt come to back their bullying! She sent him on errands just to rub it in their funky faces that she was taken care of now. He came into her house and made old age seem like a step into shallow waters. Through him she saw no reward in sitting, hoarding a 20kg grudge while vowing revenge. In front of him she felt like a little girl. Like a clumsy little girl with a ball of grudge falling and rolling from her hamfisted hold. He snatched it and left intact everything that was hers. All their schemes seemed

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trifling now and she yielded to his quiet power, letting his calming presence count against the sluggish passage of time. To grow old together, she whispered, suddenly returning to the portrait. A need for affection jumped her and threw away any shyness she may have had about taking the picture down. She got up and wobbled forth, holding on to the barrels and the table to arrive at the wall. She raised one bony arm, reached up with her cold scrabbling fingers and unhooked the twine from the nail. There was fondness in her eyes when she stared at it, now seated. She observed it with a love for things that hide lovely secrets to be known only by the proprietor. But its force was nothing secret. She felt it; the same coercion that had reigned sovereign over her life, sponsoring her strength of heart. She herself was not in the picture but it remained the only hint that she had existed in this life, as a woman should exist. It had hung over her like a silent master whose fierce eye swayed her to live on. Over the years it had equipped her to endure things she had never thought shed be able to. Now, she placed her hand over the brittle glass, hiring this force that was obscure to the curious eye. She was overawed because it somehow knew the overbearing stance of the external world on her. The two figures kept still, waiting for her to conjure up all her occultist tricks had she any to cause them to live. But she knew so late in her yearning that they were dead stiff, even if she huffed and made as if to blow life into them. Instead she turned playful with it, swinging and angling the picture this and that way, until something caught her eye. Every time she held it a certain way she was cautious of a giant presence looming over the two tidy figures. She stopped and tilted the picture back to find it. When it met her own face her eyes retracted from the portraits subjects to the glaze shielding them. What came into view was a wrinkly mug of awestruck starchiness. As soon as she spotted it she had a stinging hunch that this puckered up thing was her own face. To test it, she pinched her face tight to the side. It reacted! It flinched, duplicating her own puzzlement. Her eyeballs just popped out in exclamation. This was her! This antique mask of stiff anguish? Nobantu! Old woman had known there was a face to this body, and she knew she had aged. But this wry piece of old rubber she had never thought likely. She touched it and it felt as doughy as always, yet, on the glass the flesh seemed to slide from the facial mould. She pinched and poked it all over while staring at her image. Wow! But then the truth slapped her. Suddenly she found the purpose of it all: she had gained the houses age. This sobbing house, chipped and ravaged by the years, had been cribbed onto her face like a diary by times sly hand. An exact replica! Now she sat looking everything like it: her fissured face for its scored wall, the tatty thatch for her whittled hair and her waning strength for its jaded aura. In the end she sat in it, limp from age. She knew she could never have brawled her way through life and emerge unscathed. She

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would suffer gashes, no doubt. But she had thought her scuffle of the years was a calamity that may have pillaged her soul but didnt touch her flesh. But it had in the cruellest way. So this is what they meant when they said MaGadlela. Nobody had told her that they were implying this crabbiness. This was a surprise she found no reprieve in. Instead she felt ridiculed somehow. She placed the picture facedown on the barrel, actually hiding from herself. She then turned to other troubles in an old moles mind. The readers had said her son was coming home. Coming home? After too long. That newsflash had startled her, jerking her back to the preludes of her pain. It had her jittery, for he only existed in that hung portrait as a small boy of innocence. He was dead to her. And the lineage he bore dead right along with him. Now he sought to jump out into touchable life. Who would he be? He wouldnt be the little boy who had been his fathers prized gift. Not the same one he had touted to carry on his name. It would not be him. It would be a middle-age empty vessel a ghost to her. He had sodomized a boy of nine and killed a man. He had a mans blood on his hands! Anything living or dead that is attached to this house I will guard and rear, even if theres nothing to be reared but this ruin itself. It was a pledge whispered in a dying mans ear: to obey his house while he slept in the other house. This because life is for duty our gratification and our peace is in fulfilling the tasks that are dealt out to us. It seemed to be at that exact moment that MaGadlela was grappling with a riddle over which she had previously pondered with no resolve. She was trying to flick something off her chest but every time she began she was dumbed by the silence with its despotic quality. So instead she whispered it through her breath between her distressed heaving for air and the quivering expiration of it: He is not my son, she declared, desperately. Like a foul secret too lousy to keep, she discarded him. Although still burning, the candle stub had melted down to liquid wax by now. She stood up and trembled back to her bed but didnt see the wraithlike darkness sneak forth to gag the coy evacuating light. It was a vivid shade, not sudden, but that had cunningly loomed, soaking the auburn shores of the light with its thirsting grimace. The candle glowed its last life and a mist of gloom settled in full as wet wax engulfed the wick.

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15 The darkness that engulfs

The flavour of candle smoke still stank in her nostrils when he came in. Youre sitting in the dark, maam, he remarked. A thrumming voice leaped from a parched throat to prise the clenched jaws of the darkness: The candle has extinguished, it confessed from a point in the room. Everything was woven trickily into the gloom so he remained at the doorway. Where is the candlestick? he asked, not sure where to go. On top of the drum by the hearth. Her voice was loud enough to be heard but not deep enough to drain her. She had spoken in breathy speech a sort of whisper rising to a painful tone upon which she still flexed her chest and dragged a good gulp of breath. She exhaled and he knew from the consequent wheeze that she was in distress. He wished for her to say no more, so he hung his arms out before him to shuffle through the room, bumping the armchair as he moved. Watch your step, she mumbled. But he fumbled on in a blind mans bluff and reached for a candle from a pack in the cupboard, where he knew them to be. Only then did he dig into his pocket for the box of matches. Light revived the room to shove back the pitch of darkness. Instantly, a helpless figure transpired with the same old prune face. She was bundled on her bed like a foetus in the womb of a female whose hymen has never ruptured. He saw the portrait and the unsheathed letter placed along with the candlestick. The food was cold and he thought it best to warm it on the primus stove. He then dished up their evening meal and placed a half-teapot of water for the old womans tea. He had to crush the samp on her plate for her to chew and swallow freely. She seemed to like the chicken better and ate only half the food he fed her. He ate his plate and washed the dishes. By the time he was done the old woman had dozed off and was gasping in sleep. He took the candle to his place and read the book with no spine before snoozing away. Theyre onto him! In the trees, in the forest behind him. There were snarls and he looked. There was barking and he ran. Five black beasts, frothing at the mouth! He ducked between bushes trying to hide, anywhere nowhere; trees were too tough to climb. He ran but suddenly it was quiet. He looked over his shoulder and slackened pace, surprised by the dogs withdrawal. They had halted and one kecked on something it was trying to disgorge. It coughed out some object. He moved closer to see it. A finger!

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Off! Off! he snapped, shooing them off. But he stopped, drawn by an eerie cry somewhere in the woods. Help! the voice came again, scarcely audible. He began towards it and saw a lone hut in the midst of some aloes. He ran up to it and busted the door open to peer into the hazy room. There was clarity. A body hung by the neck from the roof timber! An old woman naked! As he stepped in he found that there was no floor, just a hollow. He drew back terrified. Help! she cried. She jerked and stretched out her left arm, reaching out to him. Her hand had four fingers the index was missing! He staggered back and left the house running. There were no dogs in sight but the finger was there at the same spot. He retrieved it and as soon as that, the barks erupted. Out of nowhere the five brutes sprang at him with rabid swiftness. All he saw were fangs and bloodshot eyes as they tore at him. He woke up screaming and jolting. He was sweating all over and his whole back ached. Tiredly, he sat up against the wall to catch his breath. But, in the dark, he heard none of the old womans wheezing; none the snoozy gasping. He felt for the candle and matchbox, lit it and lifted the flame above his head to look over to her side. He rose and then went to her bed to listen first and poked her: Gogo? There was no life in her. Death takes us in whatever form it may find us. If you might see it come and gape your mouth in awe, or ball your eyes in thickest terror, it will seize you in that shape. But Old woman had prepared for it and had known how to die, even in sleep. She showed no hint of any qualms over dying: she only lay slumped on her back with a half-question on her face, maybe halfdazed by the outcome of life. It was a hint of the same issue that had always been in her stare, always seemed to bug her. She half-boggled, then, like an antique prophetess whose epiphanies were coded complex beyond her own perception. Her caginess about her life had left him with no clue. Now, too, she was smartly secure in her silence with all the reluctance of a neat mute. He pulled her shrouding blanket up over her face and waited for early light, when he found himself seeking through her house for intimations. First he went to the big brown suitcase under her bed. There, among clothes, he found the I.D. he knew and other papers and old letters from a Siphiwo Gadlela, which gave no direction on what he should do on her departure. The rest of the room was open bare, hiding nothing, yet all its secrets were there hidden with artful austerity. His search ended at the portrait on top of the barrel. He suspected that it had hung in the room for ages. And yet, behind its aged dullness hid an image to not see, a tale to be never told. Trounced by this diffidence, the Burden Bearer pulled out the letter he had read to her not so

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long ago. He was scrutinizing the note, trying to see if other words had appeared on it that would simplify things. This Andile Gadlela mentioned therein, who would be released from Umtata, should be her son. The husband would be Siphiwo, whose letters were in the suitcase under her bed. But why was the son in a mental prison? Where was the husband, commander of the homestead? He stared at the letter some more, not decoding the self-reserved characters. It was arcane in the most irksome manner. He saw clearly now how their roles had complemented each other through the letters obscurity to each of them. She couldnt read but could grasp the message, while he could read but was evaded by it. It was not long after sunrise that Nomalongwe appeared and found him loitering outside, horse-faced. He told her the disheartening news so that she looked at him absently, as though he had spoken dead words. It could have been that she didnt understand death, or she understood it with careful indifference. But in her eyes he saw some impression near to remorse, yet shallower than hurt; something you would find only in a childs eye because an adult would do their best to hide it just before they instill sympathy in their unmoved hearts. He asked her some questions about the deceased, which she could not answer. He felt no better off than hed been before her arrival. This was before she set her eyes on the ground, anxious to be standing before him. She lifted them again to search his face for something he didnt say. He realized it, upon which he let her know that she shouldnt come anymore as he could cook and sustain himself. The relief in her was unhidden as she turned and hastened away with an instruction to tell her father the news. The chief came some time before midday; a man of a stalwart edge and imposing stature. He looked to be firmly into middle age but with this athletic tip that was sure to restore his youth well into old. They sat and spoke outside for some time where the chief clarified some things to the best of his knowledge. The Burden Bearer showed him the letter but he already knew the content from his daughter, who had apparently read it to the old woman on its arrival. Indeed it was her son who was to be released from mental detention, for reasons the chief revealed. Her husband was long deceased and lay in his familys burial ground. He explained this anomaly only by saying that shed fallen out of favour with her in-laws and had been estranged from them. The chief pretended to break the old woman down to the tiniest grit. He filled him in on everything, up to her missing finger, snapped off by her sow as she fed it cabbage patches. The two agreed that since there were no concerned relatives, no car and no money to take her to the mortuary in Maclear, the old woman should be buried the next day. Her sisters in Mount Fletcher would be notified thereafter, as it was just too perilous to delay and try to reach them so far off. There would be no slaughter of any cow and no night vigil either, since, the chief was adamant, not too many people would be keen on coming. He backed this stance with such conviction that the Burden Bearer was certain to agree. After their exchange the chief

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left, having engaged about nothing more than the matter at hand. Long after the chief had gone the Burden Bearer found himself deeming the portrait, musing over the fact that she had died loath to let him appreciate the poverty of her existence. He didnt fail to notice the mood around him by the lack of tributes for, surely they had got wind of her death by the slump of that day. His belief remained unabated that the chief had not told him all there was to it. The full blow of this hit him later in the night when he found himself in sole wake with a lit candle, commemorating a selfless old woman he knew. But he accepted that what was left unsaid was most fitting unsaid. He continued sitting the night and kept dozing off to be woken by his head scraping down the wall. The house had fallen most quiet with her heaving gone. He missed a presence newly absent and the bitter stench of death was welded properly into this posthumous dreariness. At dawn two young men arrived and introduced themselves as Thamsanqa and Fezile, sons of the chief. They brought three spades and a pick-axe and the three men began with the pit at the bottom of the garden. Whatever eachs motive, their devotion was translated in the firm grips on their spades as they stabbed spit-deep and tossed the loam aside. Had they any doubts about their righteousness, then his labour was the stoutest proof of their decency. They dug deep and diligently, for they would live to declare to all how they delivered a reclusive old woman to her Maker. This so that in all wrong they may commit, all scheme they may contrive, then that sole deed of selfishness would, in some blessed way, seal their pact of redemption. The two diggers left around mid-morning. Right after that the wife of the chief and Nomalongwe arrived to do whats to be done on a corpse bound for pit. Almost at midday the chief, the same two sons and some half-dozen men three of whom were old enough to be arch-backed arrived with cowhide. They gathered in the house and burned incense before the oldest of the old men summoned the gods of the house to sit near, as their daughter-in-law was about to bunk her home. They draped the corpse in the leather and the Burden Bearer slipped the portrait in the old womans chilled hand. Then, just as trees mounted their shadows, they all declined to the dugout at the bottom of the yard. In this corner of the realm, as anywhere else when a witch is being buried, most people hid away. Maybe theyd all been tipped that He would be there too, because its only to take back whats His that He descends on the soil. And maybe He might see their ugly hearts and decide to fell all of them and pack them into that tiny four-corner pit. So they even stayed clear of each others eyes, only to keep peeping through straw-mat screened windows. They were muttering in low tones when speaking, afraid of something. They knew she was a witch, though they couldnt recall precisely what provable act she had perpetrated to wear that title. The gossip who remembered things was nowhere to remind them either, but they had it in their light little

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heads that she was a witch. Children were missing from the scene. They were nowhere not at the river brimming with oomph and flapping the water like happy ducks in the buff. Neither were they at the church yard where theyd be trooping up in the firs, their high hoots booming from bough to bough as if youve stumbled in the midst of a tirade between the trees. The youngest ones were held hostage inside houses. Theyd been persuaded by their mothers that the sky would turn black and it would rain frogs, and they certainly didnt want those slimy crawlies creeping down their oversized shorts. Shepherds had taken the herds way beyond the pastures out near the foothills of the Maluti. Nobody would work on the day under deaths curfew. Wild tongues who had babbled with loud relief over a witchs demise had now been pacified by deaths commanding hand. They had suspected but had never admitted that, though the will was theirs not to be part of the rally, death still held sway over everything. The mourners assembled over the pit to bow their heavy heads while masked in repentant faces. But all their present sorrow was folded neatly on the top shelf of their hearts. They were not as yet sure that it was alright to hurt openly, thus, they had their grief minced. They needed a centre where their tributes would be aimed and their sorrow met and would be validated; so they were stealing shy glances at him as the closest accomplice to the deceased. They were trying to touch him with humble hearts, as if hed been hurt the most. But he stood unresponsive, unconscious that he was the centre of anything but a fitment to a situation he never fully grasped. Two men straddled the breadth of the pit to deliver her to two others who had dipped inside to receive. Six feet deep they slipped her into the age of the soil. The oldest hand then implored the gods to open the portals of their haven and seat her in their dwelling, in the room where unflawed souls rest easy. The few men present took turns with the spades to shelter her from an agony she never begged for. As they drowned her belly-up in this tomb, the chiefs wife crooned a dirge of three couplets above the unbroken tink of spades. Stern yet poignant, her song became a thread stitching each of them to the occasion; it plucked the loose strings of their own grief to let it exist. Her voice soared to the seismic span of her despair and her eyes wetted from the gravity of her lament. When it peaked itself, her wail declined in a sudden plummet to respite in a harbour of its own. She blinked a stray tear that fell not for the corpse slumped in stark solitude below her, but for a song she hauled from her core. She never knew her own pity ran so far. When her voice recoiled it left a space that became the rift between themselves and those with no compassion for the dead. By her lament the mourners regret had been detailed and their heartache validated. For the first time they recognized not only the cause for their own presence on the occasion that they could not let MaGadlela the witch remain her epithet in

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death but they realized that it was they who had been hurt more than the hunchback stranger. They stood fully wounded now and lumps of true grief grew in their throats as they acknowledged deaths timeless supremacy. They became aware, too, that lifes only purpose is a climax towards a dissipation: death. Even as the two pose as a dichotomy in fated combat, life is in fact the artificial and death, so, the authentic. They felt this authenticity in the days feeble theme sketched by the limp corpse below them. There was limpness all around: their heads drooping in mourning, their hearts sagging with woe, so they clutched their hurt in clenched fists like a wilting bouquet dripping the pus of the decay romping around them. But Death knelt at their feet and licked the pus. It loved the rot. Death. Flesh sinks to the dust to fill the bloated belly of this voracious earth, were it ever starved. In death sorrow is our song of pray, dialect for the dead and remedy for our tribulations. Under sorrows calming wing we hide to seek assurance from doubtful truths: from death. Death, throned victor. Death the tyrant, death the tormentor, death unquenchable, death clichd death, death, death! Death. The truants obedience of the day had broken and their hushed voices were starting to lift as the funeral dissolved. By their poverty, their failed hopes and all other hardships, which they blamed on witchcraft, the people had been too long at evils mercy. So they saw their truancy as no retaliation, merely a wilful omission of ones who had been wronged. As victims they said nothing but bore the day with sour relief, waiting for their task this the heaviest to mend what had been damaged by this evil. And though they had expected it to rain frogs, and all the souls she had abducted to be resurrected in flesh, there was not a single drop of frog-rain or a revival of any sort. There shone only a good sun that laid out all of the kept promise of a superb afternoon.

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16 A thikoloshe among us

Children tied rocks to their bent backs, staggered on and let out a rattling string of ha ha has at the hump-bearing hermit. Adults hid their thrill behind muffled snickers, pretending they werent hard up for a good giggle. It was a blissful time of teeming green, yet there was a voiceless agitation playing in the mood of the public. Everybody was feeling a sudden inexpressible something a slide back to a peevishness of spirit. Whether this sentiment would surface in a cautious commotion or in frenzied jeers, nobody could predict. They remembered that he was different an atrocious beast of burden and he dared to swagger in the middle of their flawless sort. They were appalled already and had reverted to tossing stares at him as he went about his route. But they didnt move in on him just yet, for he tamed the looming havoc at the tip of a serious glare. His invading look still drilled through their eyes, where he gleaned from them the gold of their worth or the bronze of their flaw. They didnt blurt out abuse at him either. Still, they stored it on the cusps of their knife-sharp tongues, squaring up for the day the stabbing would begin. They knew it would happen, soon enough. He was a joke they told. A public joke meant for the raucous delight of those who would back it up with the crassness of hoarse guffaws; one from which one old wife, when she saw it, went so giddy with laughter she grew a fluffy tail and wagged it fiercely. There were gags about him doing the rounds. Jokes that would knock him off his pretty stride, if he were to ever hear them. But they told them and laughed their funny faces off. They couldnt laugh about Old Man Sgqwathis half-witted flapdoodle anymore because he was one of them and it didnt feel right to taunt one of their own. They sniggered and became enthused as the mirth dripped from their lucky eyes to daub a dry day with a dazzle. The joke was him, the hideous one. They thought he was an insult. An insult! Like when a low-flying bird shits on your head and flies on and youre too embarrassed to wipe it off because youre scared you might smear it all over your head so you leave it there to dry and you feel insulted as long as it sits there on your pate, drying. That insult. Their revulsion became apparent in the impishness of their fired-up children. He had needed to cleanse the grave-digging spades on the morning after burial, before returning all implements to the chiefs house. It was on his way whence that he walked past a brood of some mucous faces who romped on the roadside, some baking mud-pies. Hed just passed them when one in the batch came up from behind, gabbled some insult and flung a mud-pie at him splat on the back of the head before flitting back to her co-scoundrels. They fled every way when he turned to seize her. That deed done, he observed something else that woke him to the present vibes. Not one of

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the adults from the bordering houses, where they lazed against a kraal, milled around at a fence, or spied from a doorway, feigned a move to chide the culprit for that sullying mark of disrespect. They just stared and let it pass. He may not have known the thoughts behind the stares but he did peel his own eyes to see their gladness. They sniggered alright, at a public joke in the privacy of their huts. Women laughed at the well. They tickled and tittered the type a wife lets out to, just for that instant, snub the truth that her husband is fucking that slut from the brick house. Men let out a careful little neigh just to show that they knew humour but were still boss of the house. The ugly people, cornered in their own ugliness, scorned him for emphasizing themselves. The less-than-homely wives, who had known that this unattractiveness had cost them one or two bonus cows, recalled this and didnt stint on their nastiness. Without delay it was NoSandile, gossip-in-chief, who thrust the loudest guffaw. She caught sight of him as she opened her door bound for the well. Remembering some local joke something somebody said she drew back into the house seized by a dizzying whirl of laughter. She laughed so hard she crouched on the floor, her spleen hurting terribly. An insistent yearning to be perfect, and a wounding awareness that they would never be so, was what prodded this hate in those smutty little hearts of the ugly people. But despite all their grudges, he made them receptive to their own worth. They saw that they had never been ugly at all. In fact, put against him, they were most dashing. So when they felt tortured and had that brutal sinking feeling, they simply remembered their favourite hunchback and didnt feel so bad. And when they moved they had that winning swan in their step. Others merely inherited this spite from the ugly people, never once quizzing the motive for it. The good people, for whom virtue was an indispensable trait, kept their composure to begin with. But behind their gritted teeth were wild tongues waiting to let off loud hee-haws! They were dying to unleash the pent-up tension that good people stock up with their composure their elegant, constipating composure. They wanted to jig about, fling their hands to the sky and feel furbished, because what person doesnt burst at the seams of their skins every now and again. But, alas, they remembered that they were good people and werent to be bothered by such pettiness. On second glance this civility in the good people seemed out of place, hemmed in by all the candid offence from the extroverted people. So they kindly strayed, chucking aside the myth that cruelty to a disfigured being would be paid in kind on their offspring by the unfaultable Creator. They realized that theirs was not so vengeful a God as to curse them for throwing scoffs at a buffoon handed to them for precisely that. Yes, so he was a slapstick clown of highest ugliness, bequeathed by His Highness for their exclusive delight. They found themselves toying with this new-found gaiety, and theirs was a liquid laughter that drew them out of their

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courtesy. But when they passed him on the road the good people shifted their eyes anxiously, not sure where to put them. Theyd end up staring over his head, as if no person existed under that space. And maybe when they woke in the morning they glanced over their shoulders to make sure that they didnt have anything unwanted on their backsanything protuberant just over their right shoulder-blades. That horridness of his sat with the people, wagging their tongues. Blabbermouths babbled. Questions began to surface, obsessive now more than before. On his debut they had thought that he had something to do with MaGadlelas relatives. She was dead and laid now but he lingered on with tough guts, bouncing stiff as if he were proper than all of them. And that hump, springing as such from him? He was dumpy and stinky likelikelike a thikoloshe! Somebody said it. It was Nopotyi, colleague of NoSandile. It had been simmering on their minds like a deserted cask of home brew, but when she said it she gave it quality. They wanted only a reason and she gave it to them sooner than theyd hoped. His likeness to a thikoloshe was now more conspicuous than he or his witch boss would have been willing to concede. He was a fiend for malice: a witchs pawn. A little imp who harvests souls for witches and their evil intrigues. Witches who suffer souls and who aim lightning bolts and wield power over the elements. But without her sleight of hand he would have power over none of them. Yet they stalked his every shift and stir. In his warped form they saw a probable harm aimed straight at them, so they snarled back at it with damning eyes. They began to believe against him. It emerged that he was pestering their women and children. They heard that he had molested a crippled boy down by the riverside and groped him with his big fat hands! They heard that he tried to hold back a young bride from her errands there by the well. The pervert! He stole a chunk of meat at the feast to feed the old witch. He came back in a jumble and was pissing in the middle of the road while people passed. One youth, Simphiwe, claimed that hed been attacked by his dwarfness one dark night on his way to Rajahs. That sealed the verdict. Hoodwinked by this new rush of temper, the folk remained ignorant of the contagiousness of their hostility. Thats when the children caught the demon by the tail and made it theirs. Already slave to reckless deed, the young scallywags had no qualms about this bequest. Only they were keen to improve it with their crude brand of humour, pranks included. It became apparent that there were songs about him in the settlement; not from the adults, of course, but from the children. The adults were just glad that the children were taking care of everything the wonderful snot-nosed and heartless children. This mischief swept Sgqwathis legion like a hyperactivity disorder. They let loose those spurts of sticky laughter, capping them with idiocies that made their captain do a silly jig in jubilation. This laughter in turn reversed to the adults and they blew it into a torrent of hate. There were jeers now. They spat on the dirt upon seeing

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him. They called out to him behind fences: Hey hunchback, what do you want here?! Before him they had, at their most pissed-off times, tried to hate some odd somebody; tried to hate the land-snatching and kaffir-hating white man. But this was a tasteless hate: white man remained too distant to ever be faulty and too unmoved by their schemes for them to hate in full. So they looked for the weakest or the most absurd among themselves and hated those with a rhyming constancy. They despised the bone-lazy ragamuffins who pilfered their hard-reared stock; they hated the shebeen-runners and their crab-lice-ridden whores who made indigents out of grown men, and they hated Old Man Sgqwathi for bending their brood. But now they had realized that the hunchback was more target for taunts than all these villains had pretended to be. The laughter ran amok, endemic to all except the reclining old fogeys who had long vindicated him of any human flaw. Their archaic scruples would not allow them to act like asses, and theyd sooner strangle the jeerers with the drawstrings of their penny-pouches than talk them down. Or theyd have their own ears plugged up and their eyelids sewn down, if not to hear the cutting joke or see the sneers on him. * * * The spinach was gritty and hadnt been cooked right. The papa was soggy with unmashed lumps of powder. The pigs feet had not been boiled to tenderness and the soup was thin and just plain bland. The whole meal had been cooked with haste it tasted like a lukewarm dishrag! He looked at her and then at the plate in front of him. Right then he would have put the spoon down and thrown it at her. Only the previous night hed eaten half-cooked rice and had woken with a knot of tummy pains. But woman didnt care. She stood now at the table below the kitchen window with her back to him, rinsing the pots and pans. She turned around to put some on the dining table, just in time to catch that sulkiness on him. Dont eat it if you dont want to, she ordered and shoved the saltshaker across the table to him. She then turned back to the dishwashing bowl under the window. She was sapped and tired of slaving for a man who played chief to everybody and her. Nothing ever pleased him. He did this at times had that scorn on his face when he felt important and liked everybody to know. She wrung the dishcloth in that frazzle, spilling water on the table. She slammed it down and went on to wipe but soon stopped. A drifting gaze out of the window stole her swiftly from the room. Who threw me in this house? It was the most vicious of all her questions, rough but with no edges. My father and my uncles did. They had nothing but joy in their eyes. They shook hands with

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many men and didnt forget to let me know that a woman needed a man and to do housework and kill cockroaches and have children and scrub the little chimps until they bleed! The windowpane stood secure between herself and a shining promise of ageless girlhood. If she should smash it and walk away She hated this house the barring walls that couldnt be thrown down for a clean getaway. She hated the furniture. She hated the flowerbed by the gate and worse were the bumblebees around it. It was so fake and so ridiculous, just like him. And himalways lurking and barking No this and No that and locking gates and closing doors and greasing his hair. He was as stubborn as a hard brick wall smack dead in the middle of her sunflower field. What man is this? She wanted to cry, stomp the dirt and scream! Climb a cliff and fling herself down! Presently, on the meadow, her eyes locked onto a shifting figure yet to creep into the knitted forest. With arms hooked over a yoking stick, and a stride to kill a girl, she knew who it was. One day last week I went to the well and that madcap was there lapping up the water. He laughed at me. He laughed yes so loud it made me want to hide in the tall grass until he was finished. I dont know why he laughed but I ran away without filling my bucket because he laughed too loud and threw his head back bearing his hind teeth. She touched the window, testing the glass. Maybe if I climb out of this house and run to him he might help me escape. He might know a secret place deep in his forest where I can hide and never be seen. Maybe hell have a tireless stallion that can climb mountains and drop me off anywhere because this grouchy house with no fluff is not a place. But wait I dont even know his name. Does he like running alone? Is he free? I wish he would duck by the well and snatch me from this house. Hold me for a ransom I couldnt possibly pay and then Ill be in his keep forever. Oh no, not to be his wife I could never be that! Hell only lay me on a bed of flowers and let me sniff that tree bark-rough manliness on him. And while we lie back satisfied Ill untie the knot in his head. Little by little, I will surely tame him. Then we will lie cozy to watch a single speck of cloud grow furry and wrap the full sky with fluff. We will live in this secret silence and treasure it as a priceless find never to be squandered not for a mean glance in this direction. This prickly sucker can spot us sitting at the rivers edge on a Saturday noon sprinkling tinsel at fish weddings under water. And if he should tickle me I will laugh easily. Oh, I will love him. Love him for love and for that tight-lipped silence thats as divine as the sunflower field he will lay me in. Yes. Our love so plenty well even cuddle the foul skunk who saw us kiss. Its settled. Tomorrow Ill wake at cock oclock and fling this headscarf to the dogs. Ill run to him and if he thinks Im beautiful then hell have a saddled stallion for me. Hell wait with a sweet-scented posy of wild roses. Shall we kiss, then, he will say, fearlessly. My heartbeat will hop or skip, I know, but Ill keep on my feet and Ill climb up. Ill cling to him as we gallop off,

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with my head pillowed on his silver back. She loitered on, flirting with the terrains roomy lushness and brooding over a hunter who ran it with the sprint of a wild hawk. Her fancies had her in an erotic mood and her nerves were stirred thin. She played her fingers over her cleavage, wondering what of the spark that sets her on fire? The wet, warm, sugary feeling that Hand me the dishcloth, somebody ordered. All fantasy fell to a stop. Diminishment. Hand me the dishcloth, the disruptive voice called again from behind her. It was the middle of summer and if you went outside and looked up in the sky there was a wide chance that a gay bird might shit in your eye. It was no time for nonsense. But he had spoken, feeding fire to the heat. Hand me the cloth to wipe my hands! The rag was in her hand but she was handing it to no one. Hey, woman! he bellowed, thinking she must have gone deaf. A sudden nausea took her. She shook her head slowly as her quiet wishes congealed into a ball of concrete rage. A red shade fell and veiled the green of the terrain. Her breath rushed and she clenched her fists, growing madder. The red was all around her now, swathing everything. When she swung around she was half-blind with hate. She didnt care. She just didnt care anymore. She made for the dining table, grabbed a frying pan and lurched forward in attack. She gripped the handle tight and wailed out as she aimed for his temple. He saw it and ducked to the side. She missed his head and the pan flew across the room, shattering the windowpane. He caught her arms but she squirmed from his grasp, stepped back and charged with doubled fury. She was flapping her hands wildly trying to seize him by the hair and drag him all over this fucking house! He pushed her from him and ran around the table but she made for the iron woodstove. She picked out a damper, took aim and flung it with all her might. He sidestepped it and it smashed the glass set on top of the cupboard. He then ran to her just as she picked out another one. As he caught her, she tripped backwards and they both fell to the floor. She pounded fists onto his head and back and slogged him until she could slog no more. Then she collapsed, wailing wildy. He pinned her down to defuse her. He wouldnt let go of her just yet, until she calmed. She was psychotic like a rabid dog, snapping at everything. He looked down at her fuming face and thought to show her whos bosswhose house this is. He, Gcobani, was a made man and deserved his respect! Twenty-eight years hed built himself. Twenty-eight years! He was as hard as this brick house he raised from the dirt and he wouldnt let some devious shrew push him to nothing. He was tempted to put five fingers across her face and slap the crude talk off her

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tongue. She had crossed him too many times before, with anything she could get her hands on. He didnt get it it seemed as if she was charged by vengeance! In some corner in his head two hands have a drill and are ripping at his sanity. Theres too much jangling. Something moved. Something dark shifted, threatening to tip him off his senses. He panicked, rose and rushed out without a word. She lay on the floor sniffling and empty of tears. She couldnt understand why did he want her? Couldnt he see? Didnt he know? She wasnt a wife. She had turmoil. Why did he want to change her? Why did helove her? She stayed down, sobbing and hoping to die cradling that ache: a yearning, jangly, and louder than the loudest frantic wail of a woman in bondage. But her death was muted, softer than tepid wax trickling down the perfect grooves of a waning candle; softer than Doctor Cloetes motherly hand on an infants buttocks. She crouched on the floor and died to be a wife. If she didnt have a care in the world, Chwayita would have long packed up and fled for some city. But she cared for something. She couldnt say what it was and to what end, but she cared just a little and thats why she stayed. Yet, she feared that he kept her in his house in cahoots with her father and to ridicule her failings. Sore from her own turmoil, she would fly at him in a temper. Not too long ago in the days she came at him with a pot full of hot water. He dodged it and it splashed one dog, which lay behind him. The fur on its back and side peeled off, revealing pinkish skin. It was a gruesome sight. He had to put it down.

The slow shift of a shielding cloud soon laid bare an untarnished gibbous moon. This hint of a full moon in a night or two foretold a brazen divulgence of mood with the sureness of fate. Not far away, an owl whooped frantically, tormenting the night with its blurt of the futures secrets. On its hoots drop there was a civil repose, born from the conquest of darkness over light. But even from this dark victory beauty must manifest: thus, the inky sphere hung pocked with twinkles and the sheen moon latched on like a fluorescent mole to the dazzling black face of the night sky. The Burden Bearer stood pasted to one corner of a certain wire-fenced yard. He was feeling exposed as the moons beam snatched the mask from the nights face. Out on his elusive mission, his eyes were fixed on the foreground of the enclosed house for any activity there. Seeing no movement, he cautiously walked to the open gate and crept towards the building with a plank in his hand. He didnt approach the door but sneaked past the house to stall behind it. Soon, he placed the short plank against the wall and made his way to the front left corner where he peeped to see if there had, as yet, been no exit from the door. He then leaned back against the wall.

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Standing there, he was pricked by an impulse to turn away, knowing the size of the task he was about to meet. But he stood, for better or worse, and instead hardened himself to this apprehension. The strong plank was his backup, in case it all became too hard to bear. He felt for the bottle in his pocket. He hadnt dallied for long when he heard the door open up and throw candlelight on the foreground. He peeked. A bulky someone came into view and, as they lumbered to the other side, he went around the back and picked the plank up on his way. He stood on the right back corner now and spied around it. A bush blocked his view but he heard him relieve himself, most likely with his back to the house. Spotting his chance, he clutched the plank tighter and tiptoed with his wits about him. He was aiming to spring and whack the target. But he was only halfway there when a donkey brayed out somewhere, way behind him. The siren crashed the nightly calm and the mark looked the stalkers way. The Burden Bearer tried to dip behind the bush too late. He was seen. Whos that? said the deep, rigid voice. He sank behind the shrub but was soon tipped off by the shuffle of grass. He didnt wonder why. The large man came into view and stood surprised to see the figure low behind the bush. The Burden Bearer stood up with hardihood and, in the smooth moonbeam, they stared at each other. There was recognition. Each instantly knew the others trade. Emotions stirred and at once there was hatred. The big man stepped up in a fit and tried to seize the dwarf by the collar. But he bobbed and stepped back with the plank in hand. He then took three steps and swung the wood with both hands aiming for the jaw. He didnt aim high enough it banged the upper arm and slipped off his hands. Quickly, he stepped up and threw a jab to the stomach but the giant never felt that. Instead he drummed a fist on the dwarfs head, dazing him sideways. He seized him by the throat about to thrust his mallet fist into his face. The dwarf slipped from his clutch and struck him with punches on both flanks before pushing one in the groin. He kicked him on the shin and the big man doubled up in pain but recouped. He stepped over, grabbed the dwarf and flung him against the house. The hunchback fell but stood up with quickness. Now he charged at the hefty man to shove his head into his belly. This knocked him backwards and they both fell down. The scuffle grew rougher with the two going at it on the ground. The dwarf elbowed his face, knocking the giant to the side. He then got up, leaving him holding a bust up nose. He saw that the altercation would end with him a loser if he didnt swap his fists. He went for the wood and took three steps toward his rival who wasnt fully up. He swung it with both hands, aiming for the forehead. It broke in half from the strike but knocked its target back to the ground. He was out cold. Exhausted and short of breath, the Burden Bearer stood with his hands on his knees trying to

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catch it. He took out the small bottle of a green concoction, that was sure to rid a perverted mind of its morbid thoughts. He spilled some into the mouth while uttering some insensible words that seemed to have their own power over him. Upon achieving this he put his hands to the fainted mans head and held tight, now shuddering beside himself. He finished this task and stood up to stagger off with a burden that he must snatch. In the house a woman had her ear to the wall and had heard the thuds from the bout. Hearing now the sudden calm, she fixed her balled eyes on the door, expecting her son or whatever it was that hed been wrestling to bust through it. She then inched towards it with her hand to her chest, ready to pass out. Whos there? she called out from the open door, looking to the corner of the thuds. Hearing nothing, she went out and looked just in time to catch a figure flee down to the bottom of the yard. Yhey! she yelled after it, and then: Sandile? rushing to the one lying on the ground. She bent and tried to wake him with light slaps. The Burden Bearer jumped over the fence and ran down a passage, past some two donkeys lurking there. Farther down, he stopped to see if the woman would raise the alarm. When after some time she didnt, he walked off nursing bruises.

He couldnt be sure if he was dreaming when he heard chickens screech out in distress, like maybe they were being strangled. There was a rapid pounding like footsteps. Someone was running past the house. Then he felt heat and the smell of burning grass. Something was not exactly right about this dream. He woke up petrified! Smoke was already thick in the room. He looked up at the thatch and saw the flames the roof was on fire! He didnt hesitate but scrambled up off the floor, grabbed his pile of clothes and leapt for the exit. He slid the pin back and pulled the frail door open with one hand, yanking it off its hinges to trip out into the fire-lit night. Somebody had set the roof alight. He saw the piece of clothing a ragged T-shirt dangling from the edge of the thatch. Fluid was dripping from it and he thought he smelled paraffin. Wisps of smoke grew to the sky as the blaze shed the sail and tore at the reeds. He heard shrills of the chicks inside when the bracing timber caved in, but he stood outside and didnt try to salvage anything. He, instead, put on his pants, shoes and shirt. It was then that he noticed the window-barring wires on the car. Theyd been ripped out and the chickens were gone. He suspected something else, so he walked to the bottom of the yard. Half-expecting it not to be there, and half-knowing it wouldnt be, he looked in the pigs pen. Sure enough, the sty was empty. They had stolen the pig too.

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But for the whooshing flames billowing from the roof, the settlement was deep in sleep. The radiant moon had vanished from the sky leaving full gloom to reign. He couldnt be sure what time it was, though he hoped it wouldnt be long before daylight would seep through the east. But not long was too far if he was stranded in the hub of the openly aggressive night. The dark was slickly quiet and harboured all things not to be known. The perpetrators too were buried in its weave. He tramped back to the front yard and rested on top of the cars bonnet, thinking about the fiery attack on his lodge. This was no simple sabotage to flush him out, he knew. It was an attempt on his life. They had thrown a stinking dog carcass at the house and sent their rowdy children out to harass him plus they jeered as he hoofed it among them. But there was finality about this: it was a deed more audible than any words they could have spoken. It was a tip-off that they wouldnt unhand him until he yielded. He pulled out the bottle with the remaining stuff and stared at it. With his refuge razed to ash, this venture should end. He sat on the car until there was a concerted crowing of roosters hailing dawn. It was still slightly dim when he left the yard with his flute in hand to find a place to finish his sleep. He went and toiled up the zigzagging incline to the hilltop.

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17 When dusk settles

It was a sombre days morning. The sun would not rise due to a low-hanging mass of twillthick black cloud. Under this ominous heap was a clamouring shadow that kept the days progress on pause; it was as if night had overlapped into daytime, restraining their routine. Housewives lit candles to fix morning meals and cowherds wouldnt let the flocks out to the grazing pitches. The inhabitants waited for the heavy rain forecast but not a slight drizzle fell, making the cynics conclude that this was surely their day of judgement. They were expecting everybody to come out with humps on their backs the instant darkness lifted. The sinister cloud did slim down around midmorning, leasing light enough for skewed vision, but not so thin as to pale the shady day. At that interval, long enough before the singeing heat, there was already a sharp slump in the mood of the good people, who sensed that something was looming to counter their heavy hate. The only pleasure was the sunshine grins of the uglyhearted ones who knew that everything which needed to come was already there and they were having their way with it. On that morning the manikin figure sat on the hilltop destitute and burdened by the habitual hump. He never made it to the river but stayed leant against a boulder, ruminating on his eviction from the settlement. He mused some more and grieved for a strong-willed old woman whose trudge through a life of hardship was not eulogized. The essence of righteousness is a good heart and hatred is the curse of the human heart. So said a solitary mind. He pulled out his favourite instrument, saw it and fell in love. He got up and walked to the edge of the hill. Above the slope, he tapped lightly to mollify the gods sleep and not ruffle the morning glory that lay over the settlement. He mourned a saintly old mortal who gave him refuge and lived in gloom, embittered by the hearts of man. This was her elegy and he evoked his best tunes on this day of her remembrance. He blew for simpletons who lived their routine, paying scant attention to what lay in front of their eyes; for a wretch who lived a life of vagrancy languishing in desolation; for a grieved son who walked a muddled future, grappling with Lifes strong arm. He blew for his own trounced ego lying in the burned ruins that had been his refuge. He blew trying to appease his immutable fate. Relieved and sobered, he went back to his sitting place to wait for fullest light. A good mile before midday the full speck of sun did sneak through. It decked the firmament and blew life into all it came to pore on, staging a flamboyantly blue day. And then the heat began. Enmity. Disharmony of the four elements. It was a clouting heat that roasted the valley before raking it of all the dampness that would have eased their discomfort. The day got piping hot. Nauseous dogs lolled out their tongues

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and sagged their heads to the ground, panting to save themselves. They crashed under the hot shades of trees, up which they had ran the scare-faced cats. Drought-stricken pigs grubbed deep into muck-filled pens grunting for mercy. But the advance of day was stoking the scarlet flare. By midday the boil had rendered everything inactive, choking them all into a floppy posture. The layabouts who had snoozed through the eclipse woke up stunned by the spiky sun right between their eyes. They mooched on and joined the snuffed out weedsters who had their air heads in the dead space between vacuity and sad luck. The lame old farts who had seen all types of weather had their foreheads rumpled like Old Man Sgqwathis concertina straight stumped! They were quick to concede that this was a day unlike any theyd ever lived through. They knew by this fiercest heat that small and tender mercies had been revoked, and that the next rung from this was despair. By the remains of the burnt hut, they didnt need to be told that they had failed their guest. This drove them to beat their chests hard and repent. Some remembered their bloodstained knives sitting unrinsed from yesterdays chicken slaying and now wondered why Gods creatures were to be murdered to appease others incessant hunger. But they soon assured themselves that it had been the chickens own throats that leaned so impulsively into the blades ruthless edges. The cynics stayed on alert waiting to redress what came to be amiss, if it was in their power. But, by the high-pitched heat, there was an ebb in emotion and the scorched people defaulted to sleep with their regret cuddled on their laps. Instead they served their sorries through gurgling snores. Mothers-in-law sat flopped in their seats muffling misfired tempers, while the bobble heads of the snoopy grannies now sagged on their laps in potent stupors. The heat had everybody shiftless, except the leisureless wives whod been worked to a delirium by their tutors. They were tormented enough to plot murder on them with frying pans in hand, not knowing whether to whack them over their heads or wait for the heat to drop them and choke them dead. So they just stood there waiting to decide, options too hot to pick. And with the wives in murder mode and dry trees up in flames, it was all enough. Enough! Enough to make the tree-clinging cats piss on the languid dogs below! Midway into the afternoon the heat did subside when it was killed by a nippy breeze that lulled hot dogs and made church doves coo with satisfaction. And while the sun-whipped Thunzini sighed through the receding heat, vanity surged forth in bounds for the slinky heifers, whod been held down to suffer the indignity of the rural sun. They now fumbled about holding up hand mirrors to see if the insolent heat hadnt burnt their prized faces to a sooty black. They traced their beauty from inception to completion and found it all there in its God-given entirety. From then on they spent daylight trying to outstare their images while brimming at the eyetips with unreserved love for themselves. The coolness caught the compulsive gossips idle-chatting and already fanned by their dry

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laughter about trivial things. The glee was now gushing down their facial contours where the sweltering days sweat had ran. Menopausal females were cooled enough to drag deserved puffs from their long-stemmed pipes, while resting men were already leaning on kraals with every lazy bone, who loved to sit and chew it with every tooth the tale of how a mans wife became the neighbourhood slut.

He heard her come down the narrow path that would drop her at the well. The rhythmic clunks of a steel basin inside an empty bucket promised him that she was near. Meanwhile, he hid on the downside of the bowl, where the deep trench channels overflowing water to the river farther down. She arrived with the hum of a simple song and he heard the repeated slosh of water as she filled the bucket. He felt the bottle in his pocket before deciding to unveil himself. Molo, sisi, [Hallo, sister] he called out to the woman squatting over the well. So startled she was that she lost her foothold and her grasp on the basin, almost plunging face first into the well. She broke the fall by rooting both arms into the water, mucking it. With eyes as big as golf balls, and her wet hands spread over her chest, she quickly stood up and recognized him. You scared me! she exclaimed. I apologize. He was sincere. In reply she flashed him an obliging smile and there was a loss of speech as each of them savoured their previous encounter. Thank you for what you did the other day, she began. He nodded, not really interested in words. She continued to chat but he had instantly lost all hearing. She was riveting! He saw her well on this day that she wore no calamine. A dimpled diamond smile had curved into his room to delight his cockles. She had pouting lips made from the dusty black and plumpness of ripened grapes. If she bit down hard on them he was certain they would burst, but he couldnt vow to keep his own lips from nibbling the sweetness that would trickle down her chin. Deep-sunken eyes, made from moonlight, sent out naughty little insinuations in ambiguous tones. Her skin was of high-value basalt smoothened to a glowing blackness that nearly blinded him. He stood there breath-robbed and dazed: hers was a provoking and tranquil beauty all at once! As he stood, riveted, he was itching to wolfwhistle. He almost whooped in praise but bit his lip to quell the euphoria. Thirsty from the days heat, yet more to put her on trial, he asked for water. He then leaped over the channel to her side and deliberately watched her. With an exactness attributable only

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to things feminine, she skimmed her basin over the water to scare the gaily-wafting tadpoles. She scooped it up, then, as clean as she desired it. She handed the vessel over to him, held with both hands, and he received it with equal courtesy. Although already gratified by her beauty, he put his lips to the rim and began to quench himself, all while staring at her over the frame of the dish. On seeing his gaze she dropped her moon pearls but picked them up again, daring to stare back at him. He was treated and threw aside the bottom water before handing the basin back with a thank you. An awkward hush followed as neither of them spoke. But she boldly broke this when she made a surprising move towards him. With two casual steps forward, she slowly leaned in and muttered no, she crooned to him an earful of some proposal. She then backed off just an inch to watch his reply. Now he became shy. She saw this hesitation in him and took charge. She raised her hand to his right cheek to stroke it, tracing some magic no one had seen there before. She traced it down his neck to the cleft in the collarbone, where it welled up, charming her too much now. She infested his space and waited for protest while her beauty let off quietening spells. Conquered and curious, he submitted: he was disarmed and lost all battle. His sense of person was liquefied and he stood in trance-like slavery lost to himself. She had baulked his recollection of what it was exactly that had brought him to this spot. With a fond hand, Chwayita cupped his chin and pushed it politely upwards for his face to meet hers in full. In her glinting eyes, beyond the loam-brown but before the pearly worth, there flickered some flirty wish meant to tease only him. She delved deep into his road-worn eyes searching for something his manhood. She leaned forward once more to mumble remarks and he twitched as her sudden breath hissed in his earhole. She wanted him. Him. She wanted to feel how deep he could thrust! In this world of coarse madness he felt like the only man in existence. Lust clawed at him and scribbled obscenities in his mind. He um-ed and ah-ed, wondering about his flair in matters of the kind she was proposing. He tried to protest but his mind wandered elsewhere, into redundancy. Thats when she led him from the open well and deeper down the trench, where he found his pants at his ankles before he could say Virgin! As casual as ever she then bent and lifted her bridal dress up to her waist. On a spot where soft patches of grass grew because the stream had sank away from it, she lay on her back to receive him. They copulated. Through the slenderness of her sugar nook he snuggled up to her cloying beauty to sip ecstasy. She scarfed him up with the craving of one who had long wondered about him simply curious. Their heated bodies tied a knot and drew the shape of lust. Now fully sensing her hunger, thick and tense, he made it his and worked her properly, the narcotic taste of lust numbing his mouth and his mind. Shook to dizziness, he grabbed onto tufts of grass and

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plumbed her deepest canal for the thing that for her held the weight of bullion. He sipped from her passion as he would from the cool well, frequently pausing to taste his mouth. It was a sizzling endeavour apportioned among them: for him, new and overdue, and for her, old and unappeasable. Yet the affair ushered both to a gorgeous opulence of spirit. Each worked each, the weight of their lust lodged in the void between their horny breaths, but the calibre of it was staked at the apex of eachs pleasure. They cast off all caution in the pell-mell of this pleasure, ignorant of the trivialities that existed outside the trench. There was a hump and huff of irrepressibly loud moans. This new sound the grisly tone of lust leapt from their binge to echo above the saintly valley; it ruffled the stretch of equilibrium. So a startled face tiptoed forth and peeped into the trench. It saw the entanglement. Somebody saw the deed. Somebody saw them! Theres a line that stretches like a rule from a matrix to a deliberate equation. Its the receding hairlines of withered old men that implies wisdom of age. Its the lineal descent of those of a proud pedigree when they brace up their spine in majesty. It exists in conjugal links and the bragging wives of the miners trace this line in the seams of their viscose pants, where they run the hot iron while remarking to themselves how money made their men marvellous. The hard taskmistresses trace it to their morals, for weighed on it is the ethical purpose of their existence and the premeditated sequence of their lives. And if they should ever wonder what the base is for a rule, they need only track this line to the reaches of their forebears philosophy to know. It stands as the reason for things; the line by which tradition devolves to the succeeding generations. The young must toe this line or theyd see the wrath in the faces of the old if they dared to breach it. It marks the bounds of secrecy, splits order and anarchy and lies as a recess where morality and indecency would overlap. Thus, by it they find unanimity in their plural idiosyncrasies. This by the suspicion with which they regard thieves, rapists and the sex-happy whores whose covert obscenities straddle the borderline of decency. They may overlook certain transgressions and adjust this line just far enough to mark the scope of their tolerance for deviation. But beyond that it marks a pitfall for opportunists. It guides them to pursue reason over their seething lusts; like how it stands guard to suspend excesses of emotion and the sometimes overwhelming desire for anothers assets. The sticklers for order know that beyond this desire unchecked lies the core of chaos like a line that detracts from its axis and throws the order of time and law into mayhem. This extent of it to them is unfathomable. The late noon coolness had swarmed the whole set by now, and while old men were sputtering smoke-rings from mangled pipes, and weedheads busy lathering up spit to beat cottonmouth, a boy of no older than fourteen years reeled along in a half-run into the

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settlement. Not in his hand but in the eyes mind was his intrigue and he ran carrying it with the enthusiasm that accompanies a new discovery. His plan was to mount the main pathway that cuts through the settlement. Any other day he would have spurned it, except this time he was swayed to it by urgency. But, immediately upon turning a corner to ride it, he came face to face with a snot-nosed jamboree that played hopscotch on the dusty road. Kids who practice laughter like an art that icy laughter also vile. They spotted him on his urgent advance and were already whipped by that lynch-mob feverishness of theirs. They pinned their eyes on the trot-hop caused by his pig foot. It was in the style he ran a gawky spasmodic jerking and the clownishness of it all that roused their smuttiness. One in the lot jested, unwrapping a volley of piercing haw-haws from the rest as the runners body matched the joke. By the time he came up to them he was accosted by clatters of laughter; laughter like a hung noose seeking to thwart his crucial mission. Or it stood posted like a cobweb whose trapping detail sprawls before him and he, an eager bony insect-boy, must skim through the thin spacebars with supreme audacity. It was an ultimatum for him to shy back an ultimatum he rejected. Long alerted to the snag that may flout his mission, the runner didnt leap or duck the trap. Instead he jostled through it and doubled his pace, trusting only his feet to whisk him from that din. But not quite contented yet, the laughers hurled their jeering mirth after him and then wheeled it back and let it idle to laugh it another time. They continued to play. He continued to hurtle on past wildly barking dogs and past a few yards before heading for one particular house. He entered that yard where some men sat on benches under a tree downing a bottle of spirits and conversing about the good rural life, or the mystic weather of late, or maybe about the foxy women of Thunzini. He arrived breathless and came to a halt right in front of them. They duly paused from their chatter to heed the hyperventilating runner. He tried to utter something but his stammer got the better of him, making him choke on his words. The four men sat patient, as they knew him to be retarded and from his breathless urgency it seemed like he had something important to say. He caught his breath and jabbered something to them. Somehow fluent in his blurred babble, or not, they had got the message. Enough said, three of them grabbed their clubbed sticks and one his sjambok, mad enough to kill. There was a flurry of disbelief among the men as they hurried to the gate and onto the main road. They began to run, as if only now grasping the full size of the message. They ran past the snot-nosed troop who still wore their skin-tight glee, their laughter squatting where they thronged. They scuttled on and hollered out to more people as they passed other yards. There was a rapid rise of excited men and a sizeable mob hived onto the well like blood-thirsting beasts fleshed and let loose to fetch game from the deepest bush. Sure enough there they were she as lecherous as ever, and the wife-snatching dwarf flaunting that lifetime hump. Theyd just surfaced and were still cozy in their post-coital teasing: the aftermath of a quickie that should not have moaned its delight. Instantly on the mobs

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landing there was bickering. Rebukes. A blameful finger gored into the dwarfs chest. It flinched. One grabbed it by the neck. A fist was balled and a blow was thrown. An open face collided with knuckles; the dog fell backwards. It scrambled up and tried to flee but they were on it on step two. They tripped it down and hurled themselves at it, clobbering and pelting with knuckles, shoe-soles, clubbed-sticks a half-brick. They bashed it to a pound and squashed the enemy with swiftness. The lewd bitch stood away with her hands on her mouth and crying tears. She stole off just as they stood over it to watch it drench in a pool of coagulating blood. They spat at its vulgar remains and kicked it into the same crevice. Hard-hearted warriors then disbanded from the corpse with frigid faces of unrepentant triumph. The sweet reprisal of a cuckold. The diabolic mob turned their backs on the well, each wearing a fitting piece of the man they just felled. A few of them lauded the sufferer with pats on the back: this insult could not have gone unpunished fucking peoples wives in trenches is a spitting dare! But behind them there was no mothers weep only a blood-cloaked carcass with no belonging. From the middle of Thunzini, slithering on the ground, eddies of dust and loose grass rose in the swiftest sweep to spiral into a sizeable whirlwind. The whirl graduated as it scurried ahead through the settlement. It rolled into a vortex so furious that district dogs and cats whinged into safe corners and under beds. A sensation passed with it so profound it made the newborns though fed, burped and changed whine relentlessly in their frantic mothers dandles. The spectral loop then sped towards the forest and ripped through it, wailing while raking up loose twigs and shuffling cankered trees. In the depths of the woods a hunter was on tiptoe chasing the spoor of a wild pig. He heard the frenzied wail as the wind tore at bushes, startling his prey. He stopped to see whats afoot. Seeing the swift dust-cloud course through, he gave in and retired from the spoilt game of kill. Forest birds took to the sky fluttering their wings in a squawking craze. As soon as it passed the forest the whirl took off from the ground to gyrate in a vacuum. But with no strength to gain from the open air it soon lost force and dwindled. The swilled debris dropped from the soiled air to expose a faint sun hung over a mellow horizon. After the wind-rush everything lay still: not a blade of grass shifted or a loose leaf rustled. It was a peculiar peace not the peace of a jilted lover after the wickedness that sweeps the mind. It was a pardoning calm so that even he, the man who was whipped for stealing chickens he knew nothing about, could feel it resolve his grudges. The gripping day was waning to an end but it was as if it had cleansed them of something they knew not the truth of. Over the dense forests shadow a dusk settled upon the drowned sunlight, and an owl hooped

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a cryptic message in its wake. On the horizon a new dawn would emerge after the rule of the full moon. Its a dawn that will not break with the rise of the harsh Thunzini sun and it will not crack like the angry whip of a slavemaster. Its a temperate feeling that brings a love and an embrace that squashes the wrongs of a straying wife. Its honed like a poets spoken sonnet, themed as a plea, and it lights an impeccable sons path back to a longing mothers cuddle. In this way it restores the balance of a forsaken good and a mounting evil. Yet as the forest birds squawked an obituary at the blind face of dusk, we were to live and die, laugh and cry, oblivious of all that we had been and were never to be. We were to lay together as kin and trade secrets in brotherhood. In the trench, through which the well issues its overflow into the river below, a stranger lay in repulsive death, broken-hearted. We didnt even know his name.

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A glossary of Xhosa words and phrases in the book

umqombothi bhuti molo molweni gogo


mnt'an'am

(i)papa Qsh! isifanakalo/ fanagalo (i)lobolo (i)Goli (i)ntlombe (oo)tikoloshe

- traditional sorghum beer - 'brother', used to address older male person as sign of respect - good day (used to greet one person) - good day (used when greeting more than one person) - grandmother - 'my child' - dish of maize powder cooked in water - click sound denoting a breaking stick - lingua franca of the diverse population of men in the Johannesburg mines - cattle brought by husband's family to the bride's for their union - 'place of gold', Johannesburg - initiation ceremony of traditional healer ~ (00= pronounced 'oR' - used in plural) small fairy elf reputed to cause mischief, evil at times

Afrikaans words baas boer kaffir kaffirtjie knob-kerrie meneer sjambok


- boss, master; used to address white employer - 'farmer', refers to white man of Dutch origin - offens. - black (South African) person, ( fro Arabic = infidel) - offens. - a young black person - stick with club at end, used in fighting - Mister - a hard whip made from the hide of rhino or hippo

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