The Heart of Redness: A Novel (6 page)

Fatal pride.

Maybe things would come right, he thought. In a year or two, doors would open.

A gravel-voiced man smashes his thoughts with
“Noyana, noyana, phezulu”
He is slapping his Bible to the rhythm of the bouncy hymn that demands to know whether those congregated here will enter the portals of heaven. The old ones dance around him in a solemn circle. Then the man breaks into a bout of preaching.

“He was in pain before he died, this our brother,” he shouts. “It was the pain of the spirit that was being denied the right to soar in its creativity. It was the pain of a suppressed mind. The pain ended up attacking his body. It ravaged his insides. The beauty of death is that it separates us from the pain that racks our bodies.”

Camagu’s hopes that things would come right were crushed by a strike at the school where he was teaching. The students kidnapped the principal. They demanded that their trade school be transferred from the Department of Labour to the Department of Education. They summoned a cabinet minister, who went cap in hand to negotiate with them.

“We are a liberal and caring government,” said the cabinet minister. “The students have genuine grievances. We are now negotiating with them to release the principal.”

After many days of negotiations the students released the principal. The minister, a man of the people to the last, was seen on the country’s television screens dancing the freedom dance with the triumphant learners.

That incident made up Camagu’s mind for him. The minister was doing a jig of victory with people who had committed criminal
offenses. In the course of the jubilation the rights of the principal who lost his freedom for a whole week were not considered at all. His children counted for nothing. The message was clear: to get your way with the government you must break the law . . . kidnap somebody . . . burn a building . . . block the roads . . . thrash South Africa!

Yesterday Camagu resigned from the school. His suitcase is packed, and tomorrow he is flying away.

Inside the tent they are praying the final prayers of the wake.

“I’ll fly! I’ll soar!” shouts Camagu to the indifferent dawn. “Let me soar to the sky like the creations of the dead man!”

The mourners hear him, for now they are streaming out of the tent. The vigil is over. It is time to prepare for the funeral. They laugh and say madness sets in when people begin to talk alone.

They are all going down the mountain. Abseiling the steep rock faces. Camagu misses a step and almost falls when he finds himself next to the makoti.

“Be careful,” says the beautiful one.

“You sang those hymns beautifully,” says the exile.

“Thank you.”

“What is your name?”

“NomaRussia.”

“You are not from Hillbrow. You do not look like people from Hillbrow.”

“No one is from Hillbrow. Everyone here comes from somewhere else. I am from Qolorha.”

“Where is that?”

“Qolorha. Qolorha-by-Sea. Haven’t you heard of Nongqawuse?”

Of course, Nongqawuse. He has vague memories of history lessons where he was told about a young girl who deceived the amaXhosa nation into mass suicide. But he never associated her with any real place.

The hearthly one tells him that she came to the city to visit her “homeboy,” only to find that he was dead. She is going back to the land of Nongqawuse this very morning. She is saddened by the fact that she
won’t be able to attend the funeral, for her bus to the Eastern Cape leaves very early in the morning. She is pleased, though, that she was at her homeboy’s wake, and was able to sing him a loving farewell.

An old woman drags her away and admonishes her for talking to strangers.

Camagu used to see himself as a pedlar of dreams. That was when he could make things happen. Now he has lost his touch. He needs a pedlar of dreams himself, with a bagful of dreams waiting to be dreamt. A whole storage full of dreams.

While the Unbelievers lament the sufferings of the Middle Generations, Zim celebrates the end of those sufferings. Although both he and Bhonco, son of Ximiya, patriarch of the Unbelievers, are descendants of the headless ancestor, they never see any issue with the same eye.

Zim, the leading light of the Believers, owes his existence and his belief to his great-grandfather, Twin, and Twin’s yellow-colored wife, Qukezwa. That is why he named his first-born son Twin, even though he was not a twin, and his yellow-colored daughter Qukezwa.

Zim himself is a yellow-colored stocky man with the high cheekbones of the Khoikhoi. He has taken more from his great-grandmother’s people. So have his children. Their Khoikhoi features were enhanced by their mother. NoEngland, who was from the amaGqunukhwebe, the clan that came into existence from the intermarriages of the amaXhosa and the Khoikhoi people even before the days of Nongqawuse.

NoEngland died a year ago, and Zim hasn’t stopped mourning her death. Even today as he sits under the gigantic wild fig tree in front of his hexagon, he is wondering how life would have been had the ancestors not decided to call NoEngland so early in her life. And it was
indeed early, for she was only forty-four—eighteen years younger than her husband.

The wild fig tree knows all his secrets. It is his confessional. Under it he finds solace, for it is directly linked to the ancestors—all of Twin’s progeny who planted it more than a hundred years ago. Now the trunk is as big as his main hut. As soon as it leaves the ground its branches twist and turn in all directions, spreading wide like an umbrella over his whole homestead. Some branches reach as far as the top of the
umsintsi
trees—the coral tree that used to be called kaffirboom during the Middle Generations—and the aloes that surround his yard.

Everyone in Qolorha knows that if you want Zim you will find him under his wild fig tree. He spends most of the day dozing under it, listening to the song of the birds. Neither season nor weather deters him from indulging in this pleasure. He is there in autumn when the tree sheds its leaves, and he is faithful to it even when it remains naked during the winter. When the urge to commune with the tree is strong enough, not even the cold wind from the sea can drive him into the house.

There are four different kinds of ancestors: the ancestors of the sea, the ancestors of the forest, the ancestors of the veld, and the ancestors of the homestead. They are all regular visitors to this tree.

Today the spring weather is particularly beautiful. Green leaves are shyly beginning to appear on the tree. The green pigeons, with their red legs and red beaks, are flying around. Soon they will be feeding on the wild figs that will be ready even before summer. The
amahobohobo
weaverbirds are adding more nests to the city that is already dangling and would be weighing the tree down if it had not gathered so much strength over the generations.

Hundreds of birds inhabit this tree. Perhaps thousands. People think it is foolish of the Believer to be so close to so much meat without killing even a single bird for supper.

Zim is musing about NoEngland, and about the joys of belief. He is rudely awoken by a nest that falls on his head. Sometimes a foolish weaverbird chooses a very weak branch on which to build its nest. As the nest grows bigger it gets heavier. The branch breaks and the nest falls. Whenever that happens Zim becomes very distressed. The bird’s labor of many days has been wasted.

He takes the nest and examines the great craftsmanship. It was almost complete. Now the poor bird will have to start its construction from scratch.

He puts the nest on the ground and is about to doze off when Qukezwa arrives and angrily wakes him up. She is shouting, “You see the disgraceful things you do, tata? Now people shout at me at work! Do you want me to lose my job?”

“Why would I want you to lose your job? Dalton gave you that job because he knows you are my daughter,” says Zim. “And where do you get your manners. . . talking to your father like that? What did I do?”

But Qukezwa walks into the house in a huff, leaving her father wondering what it is that is eating her. It must be something serious, otherwise she would not have disturbed her father in his musings. She knows how the Believer treasures his moments of meditation. After all, she grew up with the green pigeons and the bright yellow weaver-birds.

She must be angry. In her happy moments she talks with her father in whistles. The Believers talk among themselves in the language of the birds.

“She is only nineteen but she is as feisty as her mother used to be,” he mutters to himself.

He wipes his smooth-shaven head and face with a handkerchief. He slowly stands up and drags himself into the house.

It turns out that while Qukezwa was busy scrubbing the wooden floors of Vulindlela Trading Store, where she works as a cleaner, a group of girls came to buy beads, calamine lotion, and other items that young women use to beautify themselves. When they saw her they giggled and pointed fingers at her. She glared back at them, and dared them to say to her face whatever it was they were whispering about her. Even though most of them were older than her, ranging from early to mid-twenties, she was not afraid of them.

One girl stepped forward and shouted, “Your mother was a filthy woman! She must be rotting in hell for what she did to that poor girl!”

“Your friend got what she deserved,” responded Qukezwa, rolling the skirt of her dress into her panties, gearing for a fight. “Next time she will leave other people’s husbands alone!”

Missis saw what was happening, and shooed them away. The girls ran out of the store giggling.

“And you, Qukezwa,” said Missis, “if you bring fights in my store I’ll ask Mr. Dalton to fire you.”

Everybody knows that Missis has never really liked the bumptious girl.

The great to-do about the “poor girl” who, according to Qukezwa, has learned never to take other people’s husbands again, began three years ago when NoEngland bought an old Singer sewing machine from Missis and learned to sew school uniforms. She received an order from Qolorha-by-Sea Secondary School for a number of uniforms, and employed the girl as an assistant to put the dresses together and sew the buttons.

NoEngland and the girl worked together in one of Zim’s three hexagons, and became close friends. But the girl had a roving eye which landed on Zim. This interest was quite mutual, for it boosted Zim’s ego. Here he was, an undistinguished aging man, the object of desire of a twenty-two-year-old girl of exceptional beauty. His thirst knew no bounds, and he found himself drinking occasionally from the forbidden well, especially on those days when NoEngland went to Butterworth to buy more material.

But the girl became too greedy and selfish. She was not satisfied with the occasional tryst. She wanted Zim for herself alone. So she went to a famous
igqirha
—a diviner—who would give her medicine that would make Zim leave NoEngland and love only her.

“Bring any undergarment of the other woman,” said the diviner. “I’ll work it, and the man will love only you.”

The girl stole NoEngland’s petticoat and took it to the igqirha. As soon as he saw it he knew who it belonged to. Instead of “working it” he took it to NoEngland.

“Yes, it is my petticoat,” said an astounded NoEngland, “I have been looking for it all this time.”

She felt betrayed, and was angry that the girl to whom she had opened her heart was trying to steal her husband. But the diviner told her, “I can deal with this girl for you. Get me an undergarment of hers and I’ll work it.”

NoEngland contrived to steal a pair of the girl’s panties, and gave it to the igqirha. He “worked it” with his medicine.

Since that day the girl has never been able to have another tryst with anyone. Lovers have run away from her because whenever she tries to know a man—in the biblical sense, that is—she sees the moon. Things come in gushes, like water from a stream.

Even now, long after NoEngland’s death, the punishment on the hapless girl continues. She has seen a host of diviners, herbalists, and doctors of all sorts. They have tried and failed to help. The famous igqirha has told her, “This can only be reversed by the person who caused it in the first place.”

Hence the anger of her friends. It is the anger that many women of the community shared when they first heard of the scandal. Some blamed both women for trying to damage each other just because of a man.
Ukukrexeza
—having lovers outside marriage—is the way of the world, they said.

“What can we do about it?” they asked. “Ukukrexeza has been here since creation. We cannot change the way men and women behave today.”

Now everyone has forgotten about it all. Except the girl herself. And her friends who know the sufferings she is enduring, and want to take their anger out on Qukezwa.

Zim tries to talk sense into his daughter’s head. “Listen, my child,” he says, “you cannot keep on blaming me for things that happened more than two years ago.”

She loves her father. And normally they are such great friends. But the taunts of the village girls are becoming too much to bear.

“We are not supposed to talk ill of the dead, but your mother was not so innocent in this matter,” continues Zim. “How do you think the igqirha knew that was her petticoat?”

And what would prompt the igqirha to betray a paying customer? Qukezwa now begins to wonder.

“Missis threatened to fire me because of those girls,” sobs tata’s little girl.

“No, she won’t,” says Zim adamantly. “I’ll talk to Dalton about this.”

He knows that he usually gets his way with John Dalton. For some reason, the trader has a soft spot for Zim and his family. He is the one who set his son Twin on the road to the untold fortunes that people who have been to the city of Johannesburg talk about, but that neither Zim nor Qukezwa have seen with their eyes.

Twin liked to do carvings from wood. He made bottlelike figures with turbaned heads, and took them to Dalton, hoping that the wealthy man would buy them. Dalton saw that the boy had a talent which could be developed. Although he was not a carver himself, he explained to Twin how he should carve the arms, hands, legs, and feet, and how he could make the face more realistic by carving detailed ears, eyes, noses, and mouths.