by Anathi Jongilanga
Vumani comes to her often these days.
His siblings are away: one is married, somewhere in eNgcobo, and three are at work in Kimberley, Cape Town, Jo’burg, and the money they send home hardly covers a month’s groceries anymore. Somewhere along the way, he loses his cell phone, therefore the direct line by which he receives money vouchers from the siblings. Nor does he have a bank account. No more can he now knock on neighbor’s doors borrowing taxi fare for the short trips to town with promises to reimburse it later in the day when he’d come back, grocery-heavy plastic bags hanging at his sides, hunger pushed at bay for at least twenty-something more days.
So, Vumani comes to her.
The first time it happens, she is dishing up for herself when he appears at her door. She cannot continue and leave him out. Without asking if he is hungry, she pulls out another plate from the cupboard. She hands him the food; he accepts gratefully, eats, finishes with profuse thanks.
For the washing of his clothes too, it is to her he hands the laundry. She offers to do it for him once, for the second time he comes by himself. Thence he keeps the rhythm of crossing the little stream Nkawukazi, algal and foreboding, walled by brown-clayed shallow dongas and staring black cracks of earth, to bring the bundles of dirty clothes to her.
Somewhere, the rhythm breaks into intermittent effort. Then the effort dissipates, in its place, it seems to her, takes something even he cannot control. She has to be assertive to make him bring the clothes. She coaxes small promises if he lets her do it for him, at least to keep him clean—which she does not tell him, only to him she coaxes and vexes. Then he ceases bringing the washing. Only his stomach he brings to fill. If it is after breakfast, he goes roaming the village, visiting cousins and friends who mostly never know what to do with him but laugh at his utterances and ways of being.
The nephew with whom he lives is never there. He used to do the cooking when Vumani couldn’t until the nephew wouldn’t.
The cattle and the goats had been a shared responsibility between them, now only Vumani must take care, nephew otherwise engaged in the business of living it up with friends around the village. Later, Vumani discovers a little too late, months later, months too late into his own condition—the nephew is swallowed into the unrelenting embrace of marijuana. By the time the nephew gets to crack it is already too late to save him.
In these months, the nephew had become King of the troublemakers, as the villagers call them—imigulukudu—who break into homes and cars, steal chickens and pigs, intimidate and harass towngoers who make their way back home after dusk, with knives that have edges as sharp as swords, husks of guns with missing magazines, weapons that once were. Once a gun went off, but it didn’t belong to the boys. It belonged to a woman who, when questioned both by the villagers and the police, said that she had had enough!, and wouldn’t live her life on the edge of fear because of disrespectful drug-addicted delinquents who didn’t know what else to do with their lives but caused trouble! Nobody had died, thankfully.
A gun in the mix was good reason enough to leave the group and get yourself together, won’t you? go back to school!—but the nephew never did.
He misses entirely the metamorphosis of his uncle.
Even her. When finally she awakens to it, at the time when she must cook for him, wash his clothes—for often now she sees him—it is too late to breach its malevolence.
Had they noticed, acted upon it then, perhaps nothing could have been done to reverse it, change its course altogether. She comforts herself thus. Yet somewhere in her is the conviction that she could have done something, with her intervention Vumani wouldn’t be what, who, he is today.
It is when it ceases to be apparent but known, indelible as the scars he carries in places invisible to none but he, that she, wife of his cousin’s, must step in, for though there are other family members scattered about the village, their hesitance—reluctance? resistance?—to do so makes it difficult for her to ignore him. It is what propels her to act, mere makoti—she who marries into the family to grow and nurture it. She becomes the one who now must take care of him. What can be done, at least, is within the remit of her powers.
Why wouldn’t she go on then out of the goodness of her heart?
Maybe that: the goodness of her heart—
Not—
It is responsibility.
She feels it as a yoke on her neck, as the unrelenting heat of the summer sun, the very time of the year when she takes to looking after him.
She tells the siblings, rather she tells the youngest of the ones who are away, the one she can reach out to without risking having to field too many questions or be the recipient of the sneer in the voice that would deliver those questions. “There is a problem with your brother,” she states as neutrally, as sensitively as she can. “He needs to go to the hospital. I fear he’s losing his mind.”
She stops there; the words do what they must, conveying the message she cannot fully lay bare. When she started noticing this problem; what she means exactly; where she is getting this information from—she leaves it all out. The oldest, the married sister, definitely is not an option for such a call, nor is the oldest brother. The middle brother she never got off with from the go; no way in hell would she even allow the thought of telling him personally to even take root in her mind.
They support all her efforts, reports the youngest sister of the call some days later. She has spoken to the rest of the siblings, and they all agreed to send whatever money is needed to fix him, make him right, get him back to himself, back to the one whom they know, just the way they want him, the way he must be.
She hesitates, the youngest sister; her voice begins to shake, and she knows that the word that is left out is again, and the call is ended as soon as it has fulfilled its purpose. She does not ask why they haven’t called her about the matter in the interim before this reply, but the answer she gets is one she is prepared to receive. It is useful enough. Thus she is left alone again with the problem, with a possible solution, tentative as it may be, her trust’s clutches too weak to fully wrap around its promise and wring out the hope that truly something can finally be done. Seated on a reed mat outside the main hut, enjoying the late afternoon sun before she has to go inside and begin cooking, for soon he will be here, she allows herself to mull over the sister’s words.
The next day she takes him to the hospital.
Will they? Truly, will they take care of him as best they can from afar yonder, as promised?
Her questions—no, doubts—are founded in her observations of them with each other, the bickering and the finger-pointing, the tension that gels between the lot whenever they are together. How that one does not like this one, and this one never budges, is never forthcoming when big responsibility calls, how this one is never there to begin with, brother for nothing, and how the one she talked to earns more money, boasting a degree and all—the only one who does—and a big job up in Johannesburg, and so must send more money home to keep Vumani and the nephew fed and clothed. Look at how they left him to live and guard their home alone, with that boy. She cannot bring herself to call him young man; he can’t be that to her, he’s too immature to be called anything akin to a man.
As the nephew has not been there all along, so he is not there too when Vumani is taken to the hospital. Absent for the first appointment, so the nephew is absent too for the many others that follow.
It is at the hospital that the diagnosis is pronounced, the change in him confirmed, and the suspicions become fact, and the fact a living truth, and life is irrevocably changed forever.
It lives in the glaring glow of Vumani’s black eyes, in the dull glint of his yellowing teeth, in the boom of his throaty laughter.
Pills happen. White, round, yellow, rectangular with muted corners.
It is not easy at first—for the checkups, for him to swallow the pills. She must convince him to agree that he needs them. There is more convincing needed for him to fight his distilled hatred for hospitals to prevent him from deteriorating into waste. She must choose her words carefully so as not to unhinge him and she would have to deal with the unpredictable consequences of his anger, as sometimes she had seen glimpses of.
“I am not mad,” he shouts, and she feels the walls shake. She thinks she feels the walls shake.
“No,” she says. “You are not. Of course, you are not mad.”
She does not add, “That is why I must take you to the hospital, to stop you from going mad.”
Vumani stops taking his baths. For days at a stretch, for months. His hair has always grown in black, rapid curls as if reaching for the sun, but now, along with his beard, his hair grows with inexplicable haste. It is long and woolly, falling over his ears and forehead, swallowing up his face.
He takes to picking up rubbish for no discernible reason, discernible to nobody else but himself. He laughs with himself—to himself. Without noticing, he slips and answers to the names that people call him, the epithets guised as beguiling nicknames that the clever kids coin. The adults, unlike the clever kids, whisper amongst themselves, now without the empathy with which they covered their words when at first they had noticed the thing that was wrong with him. Sometimes their whispers are loud enough for him to hear, whether they realise if he hears them or not, often taking not to concern if he does:
“Whatever happened to him?”
“Stop wondering and listen to this. I hear he’s paying for his mother’s dues.”
“What are you saying, woman?”
“Let me tell you, the two of you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not his mother but his sister! She is the one who must’ve done him like that. Uthwele ngaye!” She sacrificed him.
They clap their hands and slap each other on the thighs as they sit legs outstretched with the bucket of umqombothi shared amongst themselves.
“Ah ha! So I have heard! They say the big girl has become quite a somebody since this one has become unscrewed.” A jab of a thumb toward Vumani passing by.
“How, woman? Where did you hear such a dangerous rumor with such bite? What kind of witchcraft did she visit upon him?”
“People talk, mfazi ndini! People are talking!”
“Eh, but those girls were never any good. Who wouldn’t believe what this woman is saying?”
“Like mother, like daughters.”
Hahaaaa! Hahaha!
“Witches, all of them! Abatshi, bayanuka bubuthi!”
“And that makoti? That boy is always there, at her house. Huh? What do they do there?”
“Oh, but where else do you expect him to go? You know his people don’t want him. How can you ask such a heartless question, MaNgwanya?”
“Is she his people?”
“Wife of his cousin? Now you don’t know how these things work, mfazi ndini? A woman as old as you? Hayi, suk’ apha, MaKhwetshube!”
“Unxilile ke nogku MaNgwanya!”You are drunk now!
“At least she takes care of him.”
“Ah ha!”
“Oh, la mzi kodwa! That once was a respectable homestead. Now, look! Only a semblance of what it used to be! What a grand home it was. What people!’
“Oh, mfazi ndini! Suyithetha!” Don’t mention it!
“Hayi, ngenene ukuhamba kukubona.” We see things in this world.
They laugh.
He laughs.
They don’t hear him.
“That young makoti, she can’t be trusted. Is it only food she feeds him?”
More thigh-slapping, more laughter rising higher as the beer rises in their heads: they fall onto each other—gasp.
He laughs again, and they suspect he could’ve heard them.
But Vumani is always laughing laughing laughing—at anything, at anyone, at any time—and so they laugh too, as if laughing at this old epiphany, half-laughing at their own conspiratorial gossip, half-laughing to pacify him into thinking that they are laughing with him, not at him.
Ha ha ha! Kwewu mntaka tata!
The voices buzz in his head, and so Vumani laughs. Sometimes they are so loud, the voices. A cacophonous clanging that demands nothing less than his rapt attention to what they say; so big is the noise that he could unscrew his head from his neck and let it rest until the voices are quiet. Sometimes they are so distant, speaking as if submerged under water, calling from the deep hollow of a long cave. Sometimes they speak so long, and so low. He could swear he hears the hissing of snakes whisper in his ear.
He laughs because he knows that he cannot unscrew his head from his neck and let it rest on the side because he is his head. From that truth he cannot get any rest. He laughs because he cannot stop the flow of the stream in which the voices are submerged and plunge them into the mud, into an eternal quietness, because you can’t drown what’s already drowning, what lives in water. He laughs because he cannot go running for the caves to fill them with rocks and cement the gaps with dollops of thick black mud to quieten the echo of voices. He laughs because his fear of snakes drives him crazier than a maniac, to hear them in his head pushes him to wishing that he could actually unscrew it from the pole of his neck, chop the thing off and be done with this madness. To smother the voices, Vumani laughs.
Even after the pills happen, the laughter persists, the voices speak, louder and louder now. Sometimes it seems to him that the pills accentuate the power of that echo from which he gets no respite from his waking hours to the minute he is lulled into a cocoon of sleep at night.
He has to be bandaged often at the clinic for along with the laughter grows into a habit the urge to bang his head on walls to quieten the noise. After three or so months the hospital had transferred him—his file, his data, his madness—there. For convenience’s sake, they’d said. The clinic is closer to your village than the hospital. Wouldn’t it be sensible not to waste money on the transport all the way here, those terrible vans where they pack passengers so tight you couldn’t even move, and walk to the clinic instead, since the service, the nurses were certain, is the same there, anyway?
For now, she’d wanted to say, to calm him, to acquiesce his panic at having to adapt anew. Just be patient; soon now. Only soon. But she decided against it.
Now here they are.
There is another voice that, along with the laughter, booms its protest as to whom must take precedence, which, when the day is done, is the one that matters. His own.
He talks unceasingly. That is the only way he will win, by talking to himself. That is what it looks like to those without. Only Vumani knows the truth. It is a matter of importance, necessitated by what broils inside of him; for he must answer the questions the voices ask, endeavour to end the conversations they start, and dispute the lies they tell.
With each passing day, his voice rises higher than the day before.
“What questions do they ask?” questions the nurse at the clinic. This is their first visit following his official transfer.
He looks to his cousin-in-law.
It is the look in her eyes that makes him smile, the way her lips are touched by the suggestion of a polite smile, prodding him to speak, almost as if granting permission to the breaking of his own voice through his lips. “It’s alright,” she says. “You can tell her.” His smile is neither broad nor thin, dismissive nor petulant. Pliant, it is, obedient, ready to swing whichever way he wills it. His eyes search hers again and find that polite, almost-begging look still there. He casts his own down, giggling to himself. With an unhurried unhooding of his eyelids, Vumanilooks back at the nurse—stares at her.
“I don’t know.”
He shrugs—
—no, it is something else. His shoulders rock up and down. From his chest comes the sound of low stifled laughter like the dragged-out phlegmy cough of a seasoned smoker. Unable to hold back any longer, the hand covering his mouth frees itself and is clapping palm-to-palm with the other, Vumani gone, a bird in flight, reeling in the beating gasps of his guffaws. His laughter carries through the wood of the door, the brick and cement of the walls, infiltrates into the other consultation rooms of the clinic, down the long corridor where tens of other patients are waiting to see the very nurse who looks at him now, and from whose lips tears an uncertain smile, yielding herself, it seems, completely to the helplessness of what has now become, and says,
“I see.”
“You do?”
Like one who has just realised that the joke isn’t as funny as he’d thought, he composes himself out of embarrassment. And like one startling oneself out of that state, Vumaniis animated, lively, eyes astare.
“You also see?” he says. For the first time, someone understands.
“Yes,” the nurse smiles. “I know.”
Maybe she does.
Does she?
How many other such cases has she had to deal with? The cousin-in-law looks back and forth between Vumani and the nurse, but does not voice her apprehensions, how the nurse seems, at the least, impatient to be through with this, to see what else her day has in store for her. To Vumani, the nurse is an ally, she understands, she knows. Though her eyes hold mockery, her hands a stern and business-like mood, her demeanour that of someone deeply impatient to hurry to the next patient, to see what the next lunatic has to say to make her day. It is something in her voice—here, present as a hand that holds gently—that quietens the anxieties of the cousin-in-law, that finally settles Vumani down and the appointment moves on agreeably.
And he thinks Yes, yes, she knows. She can hear them too.
She had said, “I see.”
The siblings send money to clothe and feed Vumani, and she ensures that he is clothed and fed. With what is left she buys him medicines she has heard as advice that they will be good for him. The clothes she washes stay locked up in his wardrobe, along with the new ones she buys. He wears his chosen outfit day after day, the shirt that was once white but now droops heavy with grime, mixing with the various body odours that cling to it with each day that he refuses a bath. Only one thing remains unchanged and is not cause for fights between she and him: the food.
Without fail, he shows up at her door at least twice a day, the supper that helps him sleep and the breakfast he comes for coming back from the veld in the mornings when he takes the cattle and the goats out to graze, herded by his whistles and laughter. Then he is at her homestead, a bowl of hot white maize porridge with a generous helping of milk and two heapful spoons of white sugar. He whisks the food together, pleased at its smooth sweetness rolling down his tongue. He says yes when she asks if he will take a cup of tea. Rooibos tea, since he hates the bitter taste and the stubborn aftertaste of the Ceylon blend tea that seems to be the only other alternative ever served here, known by the people of KwaZaka.
“What happened, Mr. Smokes?”
She calls him by the name that the clever kids have dubbed him. Before she can catch herself, he is already chuckling at her mistake. Easy for her to think of it as just one of his usual, casual laughs.
What happened, Mr. Smokes?
He could be seen walking by himself, all plumes and laughter, on his way to fetch the cattle and the goats from the grazing fields as the sun began its inevitable descent, dust rising around his feet, weed smoke clouding his face. Later, after the cattle and the goats are secured in their pens, enclosures of wood vertical and horizontal, the contraptions standing where they always stood, a legacy as old as his father’s fathers before him, he would cross the narrow stream Nkawukazi and make his way for his evening meal.
By now she knows that she must dish up for him, his arrival is no longer a possibility but an expectation. In addition to her dish, the second must be his, her two daughters and son long left her home to live with their grandmother, her husband’s mother, down at the other side of the village and—
Now when she asks him what happened months after his diagnosis, the picking up of stray rubbish, after the laughing and the smiling and the talking to himself started, the puffing clouds of marijuana smoke that screen his face, behind which gleam his yellow teeth orange in the gloaming as he trudges westward to fetch the cattle and the goats, his somewhat emaciated face with its accentuated cheekbones and sallow brows that countenance unhealthy in the orange dusk, a laughing ghost of a person, a shadow of a once-was self, Vumani laughs. Not because the voices tell him to, or in his quest to quieten their greedy noise, always greedy for space, clamouring and thudding and humming in his head—
good god if only they could shut up!
—he laughs, now, because for the first time she does not call him by his name.
Mr Smokes
Too late she catches herself and the fingers of her fear at offending him are too late at catching the words and shoving them back to where they come from. Like how she had caught on to his sickness too late. And, like how she bore the guilt of seeing the ruins of his illness too late, she struggles under the searing brunt of the guilt of alienating him, calling him by a name that is not his, relegating his name—him—to the fringes of unimportance.
What happened?
She does not repeat the question or correct her mistakes. Too late for reparations now. Too late for remedy. Things have gone far beyond her powers, and with this she consoles herself, her quest to break free from the suffocating choke of her guilt. It must begin therefore with her understanding the root of it all.
Who knows when things went wrong?
When had things gone so wrong?
“I don’t know,” Vumani answers. “I don’t know what happened.”
He does not know what happened, but when it happened.
Its beginnings lie with his mother in the hospital. It was during the penultimate year of his secondary schooling. Only three weeks she had been there. And then one day he came back from school to find the yard in commotion—so many people, so many elderly people whose faces spoke what he feared.
And he knew.
A sickness that the doctors had explained but the children couldn’t understand. Something to do with the heart. Or was it the head? Was it both? An aneurysm? A stroke? A stroke-induced heart attack? An embolism? Something like that. It is something like that. What matters is not the name of the thing but what it had come and done—and left with, and left behind. That was when his loathing for hospitals began.
Eleven years ago, the woman sitting listening across from him now knows because she heard in titbits, but was never told the full story. She had not arrived here yet. Only she knows the year and the event that wreaked havoc in that family, throwing everything falling apart, to culminate, if she understands him correctly, in what has now become—
Then the exodus of two of his siblings to the cities in search of work almost coincided with that historic Soccer World Cup, the first one in the Continent. All of them were gone, leaving him behind. They entrusted him with care for the homestead along with the nephew, the eldest sister’s son. They sent him some money to see him through the remaining year of his schooling, to take care of the nephew, who was thirteen to Vumani’s nineteen at the time. There wasn’t enough to send him to university.
So Vumani got swallowed up, then he sank further, into a chasm he could not name. One that, unbeknownst to him, would eat at his mind and leave him laughing and talking and clapping and haphazard. But that was a long time coming. The pain would take its time to truly sink, to work its way through him, to him now being who he is, who he knows himself to be, whom those without now see him as.
Six years after his mother’s death, his father followed. Vumani’s father had been gone from their home for years, came back in a brown box, an anachronistic contraption that some tentatively called a coffin, and some simply called a box. No one knew what to call it, they no longer knew what to call the man who lay inside it. He’d been gone for too long, they had forgotten his name—they had forgotten him.
When his box met the bed of the grave, a part of Vumani’s spirit was buried with him.
One by one, the siblings went back to their respective places of living and work after the burial leaving him once again with the responsibility of the homestead and the errant boy, now nineteen and wild. There was no one to reprimand the boy, so Vumani decided to leave him be. Let the nephew be the nephew, and Vumani went on living his life, his prime responsibility now had become overseeing the homestead, taking care of the cattle and the goats. His new company was the absolute silence of his parents’ graves at the corner of their garden.
“That was when it happened,” he tells her, “but I don’t know what happened.”
This is the most lucid conversation they have had in a long while, he realises, as does she.
Perhaps her offensive questions are good for him, a thought they both seem to have as they blankly glance at each other. He holds no grudge against her for the name, he understands, now, clearly, why she used that language. Nor does his heart bear a scab from what has been said. She needed to ask him the question, for he needed to answer it too—for himself, too. And now that he answers it, tells her everything he can, as clearly as he can, comes to him a wave of joy at the release. That was when it happened.
What will she ask him next, he wonders. He doesn’t make these thoughts known to her, as she won’t hers to him. She does not ask anything for a moment, and they continue eating in silence.
She slowly nods her head as if finally coming to an understanding of his story after long, quiet rumination.
Nobulali takes a sip from her cup of tea.
Anathi Jongilanga is a teacher and writer from Ngqeleni, South Africa. His fiction appears at Agbowo, Transition, The Tahoma Literary Review, Lolwe, The Kalahari Review and elsewhere. He is the editor of the anthology of short stories Go the Way Your Blood Beats (2019) and co-edited with Moso Semetlane the follow-up anthology Something in the Water’(2021), both published at Brittle Paper.