A short story from South Africa about fidelity and forgiveness
by Yvonne Vera
art by Roger Essley
"A woman who cannot forgive her husband's infidelity can climb the highest tree in her village and drop her infant to the ground," I hear my grandmother say.
We call grandmother Gogo. Today I've come to see her in Luveve Township, where she lives. She is wearing an old red coat that used to belong to my mother. When it starts raining, Gogo removes the coat quickly and hides it in a large black trunk. She pushes the trunk under her bed. "Red must be placed in darkness when it rains. Otherwise the lightning will burn all of us." So when I see her sitting at her doorway, leaning forward as though listening to her past, I know that there is no lightning and that her heart is free.
She looks up and smiles as I reach for her. The jacket is no longer as red as when my mother first bought it. Then, we used to stare at my mother as though she were possessed. She would wear it and listen to Bob Marley singing, "No Woman No Cry." Now she says this song is "no longer relevant." My mother is a schoolteacher. She uses words like pedantic. She can look Gogo in the eye and say "pedantic." At this, Gogo just curls her legs further under her and waits for my mother to be sensible. Gogo speaks only one language: Shona. Sometimes, like today, she says, "Good Morning." Then she throws her head back and you can see her give you all the luck in the world.
My mother does not mind listening to a remake of "Furuwa." This is a song we both liked in 1979. It is the story of a two lovers sitting on the crest of a wave. The music of the waves is their music, and they are swallowed by crystal showers and the clearest sand where water meets land. Then a deep foam surrounds them and they disappear beneath it. They die a happy death. They die like stars falling from the sky. They have been accepted by the great water spirit that blows upon the shimmering fabric of the sea and makes the water ripple in a violent whiteness, then wave follows wave. Neither my mother nor I have ever been to the sea but we know that "Furuwa" is a good song.
When we bought "Furuwa" in 1979, there were many copies of it at Anand Brothers, along 6th Avenue and Fort Street. Now there is nothing. Instead, the record seller looks at us blankly and offers us the new music called Di Gong. In a fit of maternal love, my mother placed the record in an envelope and sent it to me when I was in boarding school. By the time it arrived, it was broken in two. I threw the pieces quickly in the bin and wrote to my mother. My mother says, "If something hurts you, then move quickly from it. It is like the sun. It is foolish to stare at the sun with the eyes wide open." I threw the record away without looking at it a second time. I wrote to her, "Thank you for the waves. The waves have been broken." I could hear my mother cry as I wrote that. Her sound was louder than that of the waves. I thought perhaps if I have a child I will call her Furuwa. It will not matter if it is a girl or a boy.
When she wants to pay the greatest tribute to Gogo, my mother often says, "Your grandmother taught me to hate lightning." My mother will not even answer a telephone when there is rain outside. She goes to her bed at the first sign of lightning and covers her body with a thick blanket. If you talk to her, she will not raise her head from the pillow but answer in a muffled voice, which tells you not to disturb her peace.
Today Gogo has a green peg stuck to her red jacket. She tries to get up when I arrive, but fails. She staggers back beside the blue door where she has been sitting. I rush through the gate, past the lemons and paw-paw trees and the guava tree, which has never given birth to anything but green leaves. I am surprised to see the green peg but pretend it is not there. I rush through the tears that are always welling at the bottom of her eyes. Gogo always calls me a small wind that you can only feel on the tip of your ear. She says I started walking before I could crawl.
"How is your mother?" Gogo asks. "Now that I have finished wiping all the mucus from your nose, your mother says you are her child. Is that so?" I do not answer this invitation for a quarrel with mother, who is not even here with me. Gogo prefers to quarrel with someone who is absent. When they are together, they agree on everything. They offer each other innumerable embraces. "Your mother left you with me when you were a week old, then she went to train to be a schoolteacher. Now you are a woman who wears high heels, and she says you belong to her." I listen to my foot hit the cracked cement block that is her stoep. I collapse beside her like a wave.
The door is wide open and I can see the darkness inside. Gogo has pictures all over her walls. Directly ahead there is the certificate given to my grandfather after he had spent 25 years at Lever Brothers, where he worked as a clerk. On it are all my grand-father's names-Enos Mtambeni Mugadzaweta. He was also given a silver watch, representing time.
Grandfather died in 1986, 12 years ago. This was the first certificate ever received by our family. I like the photograph of Gogo and me in front of Victoria Falls in 1995. We have our back to a large cataract of cascading waters. When we arrived at Victoria Falls after a bus ride that lasted half a day, Gogo said this was not land she could inhabit. She turned away from the falling river. There was so much flowing water, where would one build shelter? she asked accusingly. I tried to explain that she was on holiday. I had tried to remove her from the sight of a bed-ridden son whom she had watched dying slowly for over a year. With her voice struggling against the sound of crushing water, she said there was no place to grow crops. We turned away from the falls and, as per our family tradition, left quickly the subject that could hurt us. It was the shortest time I ever spent at Victoria Falls.
On the left, just near the light switch that I could not reach til I was seven, there is a happy picture of us hugging tightly; behind us are two small wooden elephants. Gogo is laughing and spreading luck to everybody, especially Zanele. On that day, my sister Zanele got married. We were all very happy except Zanele. Her mother-in-law had spent the morning pushing an egg between her thighs in order to see if she had already slept with a man. Zanele emerged looking furious, her new mother triumphant. Throughout the wedding, Gogo was busy trying to give Zanele luck.
My mother is hugging Zanele, calling her Furuwa and spreading rose petals in her hair. When the official pictures are being taken outside in the small garden with only a single struggling petrea bush, Zanele hisses to me that she will never eat an egg again in her life. Her husband Zenzo asks me what Zanele is saying, and I reply that she says I should move to the end of the row. So I move away even though I would have liked to remain with Zanele. Her new mother stands next to her and holds her by the elbow. Mother apologizes, saying that her garden is drought-stricken and holds an umbrella over Zanele's head. The soil beneath us is cracking.
Two girls are enough, my father said, and walked out of the door. He never returned. I was the first girl and was named the most beautiful one, Ntombenhle. Then Zanele was born and my father cursed and said two girls are enough. Because our mother had no husband, it was best to spend time with Gogo, who had grandfather. By independence, my mother had enough money to buy a house in an area where black people had not been allowed to live before. Our country was renamed Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. All of us were Zimbabwe-Rhodesians. She immediately planted a petrea bush, which refused to release its petals. She kept saying that the flowers on it could turn out to be purple or white.
"I have come to collect you, Gogo," I say softly over her shoulder. Gogo never wants to leave her stoep unless there is a death in the family or a wedding. "You know that Zanele had the twins last week."
Gogo shifts her weight from one arm. "Of course, I know Zanele had twins last week. Where did she get the twins? There are no twins from our side of the family," she says thoughtfully, searching through the past she knows so well.
"The children are beautiful, Gogo, but Zanele does not want them. She's refused to look at them. She has not fed them since they were born and the clinic has had to ask other nursing mothers to feed them."
Gogo is silent. I wonder if she has heard me. She rises, without hesitation or staggering, and walks into the house. She has heard me. I feel two years old to see her walking solidly like that and all the past 30 years of my life vanish. I wait outside where she has left me. She closes the blue door. I hear her open and close another door, inside the house. Then a silence in which I can see foam mounting where land meets water. It is a sound more quiet than waves. I know that Gogo has turned away from the thing that will hurt her, the thing that I have brought to her carried in my mouth.
Zanele has said she will not touch or see the children. Her husband says that if she continues in this manner, he will take his children from her and place her on 23rd Avenue. He says he will leave her "on 23rd" as though he will dump her in the middle of the road. However, he will leave her at Ingutsheni Hospital. Ingutsheni refers to a blanket. Apparently when each mental patient arrives at this hospital, the patient is wrapped in a grey blanket and then placed in an appropriate ward. Therefore, the hospital keeps many blankets for its inmates. Zanele will be placed in a blanket if she is not careful.
I have been watching Zanele for signs that she is not about to be delivered to 23rd. Her new mother calls her a lunatic who will murder her children like a crocodile that can even chew its young and swallow them. She likens Zanele to a confused hen that can be seen dripping with the yellow yolk from its own eggs as though it has been offered a feast. Zanele must never be left in a room alone with her children because she will bash them to the ground. Zanele's nipples crack with wounds. The milk is trying to escape from her body.
Gogo returns outside, without the peg on her coat. Instead, she has tied a blue scarf over her head, the one I bought for her when I finished my journalism course in Harare and she asked me what kind of work I was going to do. When I said I was going to write important things down she said, "The things which are not written down are also true."
Gogo walks with me through the gate, past the lemons, the dangling paw paws, toward the place where land meets water. As we walk, I know that even those sitting on the crest of a wave need to be saved from the beauty of the sea. Gogo is going to talk to Zanele at the clinic. She says that I must take her there quickly.
While her husband is leaning over the cots with the two identical faces in them, Zanele leans toward me and forgets about the plate of porridge in her arms now tipping, now spilling over the metal bed-frame. She whispers to me that Gogo, our very own Gogo, drowned her day-old infant in a bucket of water. Gogo, our very own Gogo. It is the memory that burdens her, which weighs like a mountain.
"You are too young to carry a mountain on your head," Gogo says to Zanele.
I whisper back to Zanele, equally stunned, saying that if Gogo had also drowned our mother, the two of us would not have been born. A woman must forgive the infidelity of her husband in order to save her children.
Yvonne Vera is director of the National Gallery, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. She was awarded the Swedish Voice of Africa Literary Award for her novel, Under the Tongue. Her fourth novel, Butterfly Burning, was recently published in Harare.
