Zakes Mda - The Madonna of Excelsior

It was always a spectator sport when someone was arrested. We crowded around the police van. Children and their parents. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Stretching our necks to take a good look at the day’s culprit. Squawking like mynas in a cage at feeding time. A feeding frenzy. Caged birds bearing witness to their fellow being transferred to another cage.

They got Viliki. Whatfor?. I don’t know. Maybe it’s for smuggling dagga. It must be. They say he goes to Lesotho a lot. People who go to Lesotho a lot are dagga smugglers. But the quality of Lesotho dagga is not better than that of Swaziland. You see, there is Sekatle. He must have sold him out. They must have been doing this dagga thing together. Yes, where do you think Sekatle gets his money?. Ja, he works for the system .

Captain Klein-Jan Lombard bundled Viliki into the back of the van, banged the mesh door closed and locked it with a padlock. The captain and Sekatle climbed into the front. Niki stood at the door and watched as the police van drove away. She sighed and whispered, “They want to take away all my children.”

WE SAW Pule getting finished as he walked the muddy streets of Mahlatswetsa Location, his skeletal body dragging itself from one house of a mzalwane to the next. He lived on the hymns and prayers of his fellow born-again Christians.

At night he slept on the high bed in the shack, while Niki and Popi slept on the floor. They could hear his bones rattle as he breathed with difficulty and coughed all night. One morning when everyone woke up, he did not. His soul had escaped his bones in the deep of the night. Deserting it as he had deserted his family.

As we always did when a member of the community left us, we collected a few rands together and bought him a plain pine coffin. Popi and Niki buried him with dignity.

THE METHODIST MINISTER agreed to conduct the funeral service for Popi’s sake, even though Pule had not been a member of his congregation. The born-agains gave him a rousing send-off and Popi, resplendent in her Methodist uniform, sang a heartrending solo.

Viliki could not attend the funeral. He was in detention where the Special Branch policemen were torturing him, demanding a confession. He insisted he had none to make. He would rather die than betray his comrades. The more the electric current ran through his body and his genitals were clamped with a pair of pliers, the more hatred for Sekatle swelled in his body.

After six months, they released him. “We are watching you,” they warned him when they dropped him in a street in town one night.

He did not shed a single tear for his father. He chided Niki for wearing a black doek, a black dress and a black cape — the yearlong uniform of widowhood. Why was she mourning for a man who, according to him, had died seventeen years ago when he disappeared from their lives?

IT WAS a year of blessings. The rains fell. The harvest was good. Pule came home to die.

AYELLOW STAR with six points shines on the baby. Baby in a pink jump suit with a row of black buttons. Pink is for girls. Baby in a blue frilled hat. Blue is for boys. Brown baby, eyes wide open to receive the blue and white rays of the yellow star. Baby stretching its arms to touch the breasts of the two women kneeling on either side of it. Kneeling on a green field of flowers. Each woman holding the baby. A black hand. And a white hand. More accurately, a brown hand and a pink hand. Brown hand with blue fingernails. Pink hand with pink fingernails. Pink woman in a light blue nun’s habit. Brown woman in her Sunday best. Purple Sunday felt hat with white cosmos in front and violet cosmos at the back. Cosmos grows from the hatband. Baby and women bathed in the light of the yellow star. Surrounded by hosts of sunflowers and white, violet and blue cosmos. A wild garden floating in a turquoise universe.

Jesus tussen die Blomme. Jesus among the Flowers. By: Father Frans Claerhout . Popi read the bottom of the postcard with deliberation. Silently to herself. On the side that had space for a message, a vertical line separated the message space from the address space. Both spaces blank. No message. No address. No stamp on the top left rectangle. Blank postcard that she had kept jealously ever since the last time she modelled for the trinity seven years ago. As a freckled girl of fourteen. Now she was a clear-skinned girl of twenty-one. A smooth-skinned light-complexioned woman who wore a doek all the time to hide her God-given hair. A woman who saw herself as a girl. In the guise of a child.

Jesus among the Flowers was her favourite postcard among the three she owned. Its celestial blue calmed her when she had had a particularly bad day. That is how the three postcards had survived the years without showing any signs of wear and tear: she took them out only when she needed calming. Or when nostalgia got the better of her. On normal days she hid them in an exercise book that spent its restful days in the bottom of the cardboard box where she kept her clothes.

She had taken them out today because of a bout of nostalgia. After Niki had mentioned something about the Good Father who had saved them from garden parties having moved from his old mission station to another one in Tweespruit — a reachable twenty-five kilometres west of Thaba Nchu. Her ears had snatched this information from the mouths of Catholic neighbours who attended Holy Mass and baptisms at the church in Tweespruit.

Popi passed the postcard to Niki. Niki went through the motions of looking at it, but then cast it aside, dropping it on the floor. She had seen it before.

“Niki, you will make my picture dirty putting it on the floor!” screamed Popi, taking it and placing it between the pages of her exercise book. She was now the screamer and the shouter since Niki had consigned herself to quietness.

“It is not true, anyway,” said Niki as if to herself. “Jesus was not black. You have seen his photos in church.”

“This is how the Father saw Him, as a black child,” said Popi.

“That’s a lie too,” insisted Niki. “He never saw Him. And which one of these women is Mary? If it’s this black woman, how come she is wearing a purple hat and a red dress like the women of today? Jesus didn’t live today. And if it’s this white woman, how come she is a nun, and how come she is white and her child is black?”

The import of what she had just said hit Niki. She paused and looked at Popi. But nothing had registered.

Suddenly Niki said, “Anyway, that’s a stupid picture. How can a yellow star shine with such blue and white light?”

Popi laughed at Niki’s venture into the world of art criticism.

“How come you remember every detail of it even when you are not looking at it?” she asked.

“You have forced it on me all these years,” said Niki resignedly.

“Admit it, Niki,” said Popi, “it has got into you too.”

They sat silently for a while. Popi looked at the postcard intently, trying to find any traces of foolishness in it. Even in the dim light she could not detect them.

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. They were red. They were crying. Not from her inability to find foolishness. Not from pain either. But from the pungent smoke of the cow-dung that was burning in the brazier. Niki and Popi had moved the “kitchen scheme” table to the side of the room, and had put the brazier at the centre, creating a cosy hearth around which they were sitting. Noisily chewing the maize on the cob that they roasted on the embers. They had closed the door and the window to keep the evil air of the night out and the warmth of the brazier in. The warmth did stay in. With it the smoke. And the tears.

“They got what they were fighting for, didn’t they?” asked Niki out of the blue. “They got what they were fighting for. So now why can’t he stay home?”