African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441) (26 page)

When I told my parents my story Father says to me he says, So long as you are in good health, my child, it is good. The worker dies, work does not. There is always work. I know when I was a boy a strong sound body and a good mind were the biggest things in life. Work was always there, and the lazy man could never say there was no work. But today people see work as something bigger than everything else, bigger than health, because of money.

I reply I say, Those days are gone, Papa. I must go back to the city after resting a little to look for work. I must look after you. Today people are too poor to be able to help you.

I knew when I left Greenside that I was going to return to Johannesburg to work. Money was little, but life was full and it was better than sitting in Phokeng and watching the sun rise and set. So I told Chimane to keep her eyes and ears open for a job.

I had been at Phokeng for one week when a red car arrived. Somebody was sitting in front with the driver, a white woman. At once I knew it to be that of Mrs. Plum. The man sitting beside her was showing her the way, for he pointed towards our house in front of which I was sitting. My heart missed a few beats. Both came out of the car. The white woman said Thank you to the man after he had spoken a few words to me.

I did not know what to do and how to look at her as she spoke to me. So I looked at the piece of cloth I was sewing pictures on. There was a tired but soft smile on her face. Then I remembered that she might want to sit. I went inside to fetch a low bench for her. When I remembered it afterwards, the thought came to me that there are things I never think white people can want to do at our homes when they visit for the first time: like sitting, drinking water or entering the house. This is how I thought when the white priest came to see us. One year at Easter Kate drove me home as she was going to the north. In the same way I was at a loss what to do for a few minutes.

Then Mrs. Plum says, I have come to ask you to come back to me, Karabo. Would you like to?

I say I do not know, I must think about it first.

She says, Can you think about it today? I can sleep at the town hotel and come back tomorrow morning, and if you want to you can return with me.

I wanted her to say she was sorry to have sent me away, I did not know how to make her say it because I know white people find it too much for them to say Sorry to a black person. As she was not saying it, I thought of two things to make it hard for her to get me back and maybe even lose me in the end.

I say, You must ask my father first, I do not know, should I call him?

Mrs. Plum says, Yes.

I fetched both Father and Mother. They greeted her while I brought benches. Then I told them what she wanted.

Father asks Mother and Mother asks Father. Father asks me. I say if they agree, I will think about it and tell
her the next day.

Father says, It goes by what you feel, my child.

I tell Mrs. Plum I say, if you want me to think about it I must know if you will want to put my wages up from £6 because it is too little.

She asks me, How much will you want?

Up by £4.

She looked down for a few moments.

And then I want two weeks at Easter and not just the weekend. I thought if she really wanted me she would want to pay for it. This would also show how sorry she was to lose me.

Mrs. Plum says, I can give you one week. You see you already have something like a rest when I am in Durban in the winter.

I tell her I say I shall think about it.

She left.

The next day she found me packed and ready to return with her. She was very much pleased and looked kinder than I had ever known her. And me, I felt sure of myself more than I had ever done.

Mrs. Plum says to me, You will not find Monty and Malan.

Oh?

Yes, they were stolen the day after you left. The police have not found them yet. I think they are dead myself.

I thought of Dick . . . my dream. Could he? And she . . . did this woman come to ask me to return because she had lost two animals she loved?

Mrs. Plum says to me she says, You know, I like your people, Karabo, the Africans.

And Dick and me? I wondered.

C
HARLES
M
UNGOSHI

Mungoshi was born in 1947 near Chivhu, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to a Shona-speaking family. An acclaimed writer in both English and Shona, he has worked as a bookstore clerk, an editor at the Literature Bureau, literary director at Zimbabwe Publishing House, and writer-in-residence at the University of Zimbabwe. Many of his stories illustrate the tension within families as their members wrestle with maintaining loyalty to traditional, rural values that are in conflict with their desire to be successful in modern cities and a Western European educational system. His work has both won government prizes and been banned; his most prominent novel,
Waiting for the Rain
(1972), is now required reading at many Zimbabwean schools. Mungoshi is also a poet, and the author of the memoirs
Stories from a Shona Childhood
(1989),
One Day Long Ago: More Stories from a Shona Childhood
(1991), and
Walking Still
(1997). Among his many awards are the Commonwealth Literature Prize for Africa and two Rhodesian PEN awards.

Who Will Stop the Dark?

(1980)

T
he boy began to believe what the other boys at school said about his mother. In secret he began to watch her—her face, words and actions. He would also watch his father's bare arched back as he toiled at his basket-weaving from day to day. His mother could go wherever she wanted to go. His father could not. Every morning he would drag his useless lower limbs out of the hut and sit under the
muonde
tree. He would not leave the tree till late in the evening when he would drag himself again back into the hut for his evening meal and bed. And always the boy felt a stab of pain when he looked at the front of his father's wet urine-stiffened trousers.

The boy knew that his mother had something to do with this condition of his father. The tight lines round her mouth and her long silences that would sometimes erupt into unexpected bursts of red violence said so. The story was that his father had fallen off the roof he had been thatching and broken his back. But the boy didn't believe it. It worried him. He couldn't imagine it. One day his father had just been like any other boy's father in their village, and the next day he wasn't. It made him wonder about his mother. He felt that it wasn't safe in their house. So he began to spend most of his time with the old man, his grandfather.

“I want you in the house,” his mother said, when she could afford words, but the boy knew she was saying it all the time by the way she tightened her mouth and lowered her looking-away-from-people eyes.

The boy remembered that his grandfather had lived under the same roof with them for a long time. He couldn't remember how he had then come to live alone in his own hut half a mile from their place.

“He is so childish,” he heard his mother say one day.

“He is old,” his father said, without raising his head from his work.

“And how old do you think my mother is?” The lines round his mother's mouth drew tighter and tauter.

“Women do not grow as weak as men in their old age,” his father persisted.

“Because it's the men who have to bear the children—so they grow weak from the strain!” His mother's eyes flashed once—so that the boy held his breath—and then she looked away, her mouth wrinkled tightly into an obscene little hole that reminded the boy of a cow's behind just after dropping its dung. He thought now his father would keep quiet, He was surprised to hear him say, “A man's back is the man. Once his back is broken—” Another flash of his mother's eye silenced him and the boy couldn't stand it. He stood up to go out.

“And where are you going?” his mother shouted after him.

“To see Grandfather.”

“What do you want there with him?”

The boy turned back and stayed round the yard until his mother disappeared into the house. Then he quietly slid off for his grandfather's place through the bush. His father pretended not to see him go.

The old man had a way of looking at the boy: like someone looking into a mirror to see how badly his face had been burned.

“A, Zakeo,” the old man said when the boy entered the yard. He was sitting against the wall of his hut, smoking his pipe quietly, looking into the distance. He hadn't even looked in Zakeo's direction.

“Did you see me this time?” Zakeo asked, laughing. He never stopped being surprised by the way his grandfather seemed to know everyone by their footfalls and would greet them by their names without even looking at them.

“I don't have to look to know it's you,” the old man said.

“But today I have changed my feet to those of a bird,” the boy teased him.

“No.” The old man shook his head. “You are still the cat in my ears.”

The boy laughed over that and although the old man smoked on without changing his expression, the boy knew that he was laughing too.

“Father said to ask you how you have spent the day,” the boy said, knowing that the old man would know that it was a lie. The boy knew he would be forgiven this lie because the old man knew that the boy always wished his father would send him with such a message to his own father.

“You don't have to always protect him like that,” the old man growled, almost to himself.

“Sekuru?”
The boy didn't always understand most of the grown-up things the old man said.

“I said get on with the work. Nothing ever came out of a muscular mouth and snail-slime hands.”

The boy disappeared into the hut while the old man sat on, smoking.

Zakeo loved doing the household chores for his grandfather: sweeping out the room and lighting the fire, collecting firewood from the bush and fetching water from the well and cooking. The old man would just look on, not saying anything much, just smoking his pipe. When he worked the boy didn't talk. Don't use your mouth and hands at the same time, the old man had told him once, and whenever he forgot the old man reminded him by not answering his questions. It was a different silence they practiced in the old man's house, the boy felt. Here, it was always as if his grandfather was about to tell him a secret. And when he left his parents' place he felt he must get back to the old man at the earliest opportunity to hear the secret.

“Have you ever gone hunting for rabbits, boy?” his grandfather asked him one day.

“No,
Sekuru.
Have you?”

The old man didn't answer. He looked away at the darkening landscape, puffing at his pipe.

“Did you like it?” the boy asked.

“Like it? We lived for nothing else, boy. We were born hunters, stayed hunters all our life and most of us died hunters.”

“What happened to those who weren't hunters?”

“They became tillers of the land, and some, weavers of bamboo baskets.”

“You mean Father?”

“I am talking of friends I used to know.”

“But didn't you ever teach Father to hunt,
Sekuru
?” The boy's voice was strained, anxious, pained. The old man looked at him briefly and then quickly away.

“I taught him everything a man ought to know,” he said distantly.

“Basket-weaving too?”

“That was his mother,” the old man said and then silently went on,
his mother, your grandmother, my wife, taught your father basket-weaving. She also had been taught by a neighbor who later gave me the lumbago.

“You like basket-weaving?” he asked the boy.

“I hate it!” The old man suddenly turned, surprised at the boy's vehemence. He took the pipe out of his mouth for a minute, looking intently at the boy, then he looked away, returning the pipe to his mouth.

“Do you think we could go hunting together,
Sekuru
?” the boy asked.

The old man laughed.

“Sekuru?”
The boy was puzzled.

The old man looked at him.

“Please?”

The old man stroked the boy's head. “Talk of fishing,” he said. “Or mouse-trapping. Ever trapped for mice?”

“No.”

“Of course, you wouldn't have.” He looked away. “You go to school these days.”

“I don't like school!” Again, the old man was taken by surprise at the boy's violence. He looked at his grandson. The first son of his first son and only child. The boy's thirteen-year-old fists were clenched tightly and little tears danced in his eyes.
Could he believe in a little snotty-arse boy's voice? He looks earnest enough. But who doesn't, at the I-shall-never-die age of thirteen?
The old man looked away as if from the sight of the boy's death.

“I tell you I
hate
school!” the boy hissed.

“I hear you,” the old man said quietly but didn't look at him. He was aware of the boy looking at him, begging him to believe him, clenching tighter his puny fists, his big ignorant eyes daring him to try him out on whatever milk-scented dream of heroics the boy might be losing sleep over at this difficult time of his life. The old man felt desolate.

“You don't believe me, do you,
Sekuru
?”

“Of course. I do!”

The boy suddenly uncoiled, ashamed and began to wring his hands, looking down at the ground.

That was unnecessarily harsh, the old man felt. So he stroked the boy's head again.
Thank you, ancestors, for our physical language that will serve our sons and daughters till we are dust.
He wished he could say something in words, something that the boy would clearly remember without it creating echoes in his head. He didn't want to give the boy an echo which he would later on mistake for the genuine thing.

“Is mouse-trapping very hard,
Sekuru
?” the boy asked, after some time.

“Nothing is ever easy, boy. But then, nothing is ever really hard for one who wants to learn.”

“I would like to try it. Will you teach me?”

Physically, the old man didn't show anything, but he recoiled inwardly, the warmth in the center of him turned cold.
Boys' pranks, like the honey-bird luring you to a snake's nest. If only it were not this world, if only it were some other place where what we did today weren't our future, to be always there, held against us, to always see ourselves in . . .

“And school?” he asked, as if he needed the boy to remind him again.

It was the boy's turn to look away, silent, unforgiving, betrayed.

As if stepping on newly-laid eggs, the old man learned a new language: not to touch the boy's head any more.

“There is your mother,” he said, looking away, the better to make his grandson realize the seriousness of what he was talking about. From the corner of his eye he watched his grandson struggling with it, and saw her dismissed—not quite in the old way—but in a way that filled him with regrets for opportunities lost and a hopeless future.

“And if she doesn't mind?” the boy asked mischievously.

“You mean you will run away from school?” The old man restrained from stroking the boy's head.

“Maneto ran away from school and home two weeks ago. They don't know where he is right now.”

Echoes,
the old man repeated to himself. “But your mother is your mother,” he said.
After all is said and done, basket-weaving never killed anyone. What kills is the rain and the hailstorms and the cold and the hunger when you are like this, when the echoes come.

“I want to learn mouse-trapping,
Sekuru,
” the boy said. “At school they don't teach us that. It's always figures and numbers and I don't know what they mean and they all laugh at me.”

The grandfather carefully pinched, with right forefinger and thumb, the ridge of flesh just above the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes and sighed. The boy looked at him eagerly, excited, and when he saw his grandfather settle back comfortably against the wall, he clapped his hands, rising up. The old man looked at him and was touched by the boy's excitement and not for the first time, he wondered at the mystery that is called life.

“Good night,
Sekuru,
” the boy said.

“Sleep well, Zakeo. Tell her that I delayed you if she asks where you have been.” But the boy had already gone. The old man shook his head and prepared himself for another night of battle with those things that his own parents never told him exist.

 

* * *

They left the old man's hut well before sunrise the following day.

The boy had just come in and dumped his books in a corner of the room and they had left without any questions from the old man.

The grandfather trailed slowly behind the boy who ran ahead of him, talking and gesticulating excitedly. The old man just listened to him and laughed with him.

It was already uncomfortably warm at this hour before sunrise. It was October. The white cowtracks spread out straight and flat before them, through and under the new thick flaming
musasa
leaves, so still in the morning air. Through patches in the dense foliage the sky was rusty-metal blue, October-opaque; the end of the long dry season, towards the
gukurahundi,
the very first heavy rains that would cleanse the air and clean the cowdung threshing floors of chaff, change and harden the crimson and bright-yellow leaves into hard green flat blades and bring back the stork, the millipede and the centipede, the fresh water crickets and the frogs, and the tiny yellow bird—
jesa—
that builds its nest on the river-reeds with the mouth of the nest facing down.

The air was harsh and still, and the old man thought, with renewed pleasure, of how he had almost forgotten the piercing whistle of that October-thirst bird, the
nonono,
and the shrill jarring ring of the cicada
.

The cowtracks fell toward the river. They left the bush and came out into the open where the earth, bare and black from the
chirimo
fires, was crisscrossed with thousands of cattle-tracks which focused on the water-holes. The old man smelt wet river clay.