The other burial society
Feziwe had driven across the country to bury him so she felt annoyed to open her eyes to the beginnings of a headache that morning. It was really important to bury people, and especially those who had been part of your life since its inception. They were important whether you liked them or not. They were in touch with your very essence and so you went to their weddings, their manhood rites, their bridal ceremonies and their funerals. So she had come to attend the funeral of this man who had affected her life for almost three decades. Later that morning she would catch herself taking inappropriate pleasure in applying her make up just before she sneaked out of the house to smoke two cigarettes back-to-back quickly while her mother and her aunt were in the bathroom. She was a grown woman sneaking out of her parents’ house to smoke cigarettes she really had no business smoking. Especially now that she might be pregnant. But Khaleni daughters simply did not shame their mothers by smoking in front of them. It did not matter that her mother had known for years that all four of her daughters smoked. Nor did the fact that some of Feziwe’s mother’s friends, the non-relative aunties, seemed to have a cigarette permanently between their index and middle fingers make the slightest difference. Feziwe still could not smoke in front of her mother, or even her aunties.
She had expected the funeral to be difficult but, as she looked around, she noticed the gathering had all the makings of a ceremony honouring a well-loved man. Many had come from far for the funeral. Looking round at the crowd Feziwe marvelled at realizing that Mr Manyala had played some role in the lives of all the families gathered around here. He had been many things to many people.
The usual speeches were made about him before the service was over. He was dead now and so it became very urgent suddenly to narrate his entire life. So men and women of various ages climbed the podium to relate how they knew him: as a child, at teacher training college, as a young teacher, how he joked around with his family, his wisdom as an inspector, and so forth. There were the obligatory hymns in between. The congregants sat silently fanning themselves with the programmes as they listened to the speeches about this man they had known all their lives. The women moved about in their seats, wishing for a breeze, trying not to sweat as they crossed and uncrossed their stockinged legs. The men loosened their ties, re-read the funeral programmes, approximated the length of time it would take for the service to be over. The few children who had been allowed to attend fidgeted uncomfortably. Occasionally a speaker would require that a specific hymn be sung as he rose from his chair and walked to the podium. Feziwe had always found this tendency of the especially devout to have their favourite hymns sung before they uttered a word particularly tedious. But funerals were religious gatherings and there were few other assemblies where such antics could command an audience.
As soon this thought emerged fully formed inside her head, Feziwe reprimanded herself and resolved to revert to the solemn thoughts befitting a funeral. She even half-seriously repeated the rebuke Xhosa people loved to utter as justification for their misplaced sorrow at the passing of a person who really was a nuisance in life: he is dead and that requires taking note, no matter what he was in life. Everybody frowns on speaking ill of the dead, and so we all become liars at funerals.
The woman next to her smiled and then shook her head before Feziwe realized she had articulated the idiom she had intended only to think. Soon, however, it was time to begin the procession to the burial grounds, and Feziwe was enveloped by the hope that outside would be cooler. Although the sun would still be out in all its southern African glory, there would be a breeze. At least it was the end of February and he had had the presence of mind not to die in December.
At the graveyard she noted the absent look on his wife’s face. It was not the look of a widow. It was the expression of a woman who was at the end of something that had taken too long. Her eyes were cast down into the hole long before the coffin was lowered into it. They were clear and empty, and she seemed tired. It was as though the body inside the flawlessly cut linen dress, covering all the appropriate places for one in mourning, belonged to a woman whose soul had travelled elsewhere to take care of matters that could not be postponed.
Feziwe tried in vain to read her feelings. This woman had been his wife, and had borne him six children and watched as he fathered close to twenty others by different women in the years they were together. They had spent thirty years in Khaleni, a town so small that everybody breathed everyone else’s air.
Feziwe noticed the widow’s darting eyes checking whether anybody else had noticed her silence. She had not wailed along with the female relatives, nor bent her head with the men of the family as the pastor committed the body to the ground, with the familiar “Ashes to ashes”. The moment of finality, of absolute confirmation that the beloved had departed, always managed to wrench a cry from even the most stoic of mourners. But the widow’s lips had remained firmly together, her eyes dry. She had only checked later that nobody had noticed.
There would be talk afterwards about how she probably killed him. There was no escaping such rumours. The people of this area were obsessed with the blood of dead husbands being on the hands of their surviving wives. It was a suspicion with mysterious origins, for Feziwe did not remember a single confirmed case among these people of a husband-killer.
The widow had eventually sighed and slowly let the fistful of earth fall from her hand onto the coffin. Her eyes found no echo in those of the family who followed immediately behind her. The children, now adult men and women, walked past in a file and said goodbye to their father. Their swollen red eyes were lost. They wore the heartbreaking look of the bereaved family. Everyone else sniffled and looked down into the hole where the coffin lay before it was covered with red clay.
Feziwe was already at the home of the bereaved before she noticed the extra women at the funeral. It was a big funeral for an important person but these twelve women were especially noticeable. There was a certain quiet in their manner, all of them striking in a way that made you think they belonged together even though they never once talked to each other that morning. Perhaps they were some of the later mistresses for they looked too young to be among the ones Feziwe remembered from her days as a child.
She almost fainted when one of them, in impossibly high heels and a stoned cherry suit so deliberately red it was a breath short of being too cheeky for a funeral, walked up to her and asked how she was doing. The woman was roughly Feziwe’s age and the face held traces of someone she could once have known. Khaleni is a small town. If this woman had grown up here she and Feziwe had probably gone to the same school, may even have sat in the same classroom. The two of them along with about seventy others in rows of mini-desks in standard four or five.
Who was she? She looked the picture of success. She took off her sun shades and then Feziwe knew this was someone she should have recognized. Yes, it was Thobeka, and she had asked her with a pinch of acid in her voice, “How are you, Feziwe? You’ve been scarce!”. Her lips had seemed barely to part as she spoke, in the way women asked other women little questions whose answers they had no interest in, but they had to speak because open hostility was neither appropriate nor lady-like. The true venom of the interaction came from the pose of the head and the cold eyes which pointed accusingly at the dishonest lips. Feziwe’s textbooks had described this kind of thing as passive aggression.
Then Thobeka had smiled and reminded Feziwe that she had been the dead sports master’s favourite in primary school. Feziwe, playing along, tried to suppress the bile that rose to her throat at this memory. He has been the last person she had wanted to be favoured by as a little girl. But this was not the place to tell Thobeka how insulting it is to be favoured when every day you fear the place you’ve secured in hell for wishing harm would befall this teacher whose pet you are. You will that he would collapse at assembly and never wake up. Feziwe thought about how once, when Mr Manyala had been admitted into hospital, she had prayed all day to be forgiven for her lack of remorse for successfully wishing him harm.
Alas, it was only a minor operation and he was soon back. She was brought up properly, however, so she was not able to admit to this woman she barely knew that she came here to make sure he was really dead. So she returned the false smile instead, and referred in mock friendship to how old they both now were. It was such a long time, she could not even remember this teacher’s pet business to be true. She was sure Thobeka was mistaken, she lied, for she really was no good at netball and could not have been the coach’s favourite.
Thobeka laughed at this and, turning away, said goodbye as she walked to her car. The funeral food had not touched her lips for she had come only to wash her hands of death. Feziwe saw a handsome young man join Thobeka in the car. He must have been at least a decade younger, and Thobeka was really too young to have a toyboy already. The realization that he too looked familiar dawned on Feziwe only seconds before she knew where she had seen the young man’s eyes before. Her fork hit the cement of the drive way so that those around her turned to stare before realizing there was nothing to see and returned to their conversations.
The young man had his father’s eyes but had thrown no roses, petals or earth onto the departed’s coffin. Feziwe now remembered what had happened to Thobeka. She was the one who had fallen pregnant from that year’s team. Each year, from the senior team, one girl who had barely been bleeding for a year would become pregnant.
It had been at once a mystery and obvious. There would be talk of children forced to grow up too quickly, of how the numerous stay-aways and school boycotts left children with too much time on their hands precisely when their hormones were fluctuating. Pregnant girls had not been so unusual in those days. Once Feziwe had overheard someone explain premature sex as the only activity open to Black children which never put them in the line of fire for apartheid’s men in uniform. Ruining their own lives was the only thing not considered subversive in the eighties. Besides, what was sex to children who had to think about death and prison every day from the time they were able to talk properly? When lying was necessary to save lives, what was a little lie about sex?
To her twelve-year-old mind all of this had seemed interesting enough but it never erased the shame. There was plenty of other talk too about the girls who fell. Every year girls would get pregnant just as they were getting ready to enter high school. The netball team girls seemed particularly fertile. Its members had grown used to the taunts from the competing teams for having a male coach. What was a man doing teaching netball? Feziwe’s team, like the ones before, and those which would follow, met this with a staged dismissive superiority: losers always had something to say. Mr Manyala’s team needed no defense as it held on to its winning streak.
Nobody talked about how, when the team was alone, each girl hated the breasts that grew out of her chest. They did not discuss the shame of those who had never felt his hand up their skirts or the guilt of those girls who sooner or later would have to drop out of school. They never mentioned their fear about having practice on four out of five afternoons. The team kept winning with or without the girls who had got pregnant and stayed away. Everybody pretended they did not hear the whispers, and the team kept on winning shamefully. But participation in this famous team would be tippexed out of lives, and never be mentioned in cvs many years later.
Back in the present, Feziwe’s thoughts returned to her aunt standing opposite her, talking about how good she looked. When she turned around to face the others, continuing all the while her conversation with her aunt, Feziwe’s heart sank. It was almost impossible not to notice what was wrong with this funeral. It was not grief that made the occasion so bizarre. Many conversations had taken place but not in the usual manner of post-funeral talk. It was not peaceful. It was not animated. It was ...
Feziwe did not know whether she was going to throw up. The bile she had been swallowing seemed finally to have overwhelmed her saliva and taken on a life of its own, like the description for somebody who will not be controlled, who forces her way through: unenyongo – s/he has bile.
She turned to look at each of the immaculately dressed women. Twelve had stood out and she had been unsure why earlier. Now she knew by virtue of the one who had left that they were special in a different manner. They had all come to bury him and, unlike Thobeka, had stayed and eaten the food after the burial. Each wore her triumph like a shield or a war medal. This was no accident. That much was clear even though they never spoke to or acknowledged one another. And there must have been others too, who had stayed away from the funeral of the man who had almost taken their very lives from them.
Although the ones in attendance did not speak to each other, they contributed to the shame that lay like a pall over the town. Feziwe tasted it again, saw it spread like a thin film over the funeral food, cling to the women’s hair and the men’s hands. It tasted like the black pepper in the red meat stirred up in the big pot. It was in the blood oozing from the beetroot salad that her people had decided could not be missing from any occasion from Sunday lunch to weddings to celebrations marking the initiation into manhood. Feziwe thought she tasted its sour consistency even in the custard that spread over the green and yellow and red block of jelly in her pudding bowl.
He never stuck his hand up her skirt and yet he still shamed her. People would have thought he did. Calling attention to her by making her his pet like that! Her guilt was the guilt of those who survive, having thrown all the blame on the pregnant girls. She had thought them dirty, too grown up. But she had never forgotten the pain of being pampered by somebody she hated but against whom she dared not act.
She exhaled and turned to find a place to smoke another cigarette. She was not a little girl anymore. It had taken her years in therapy to get over this nonsense, almost. Many expensive, shameful years during which she told not even her lovers that she visited a therapist. Mental instability is shameful too. But this was all self-indulgence. What was her self-pity compared to the little girls whose lives he ruined? Yet they were here, unruined, unsad.
The widow strolls over to Feziwe and her aunt which means the cigarette has to be postponed. The aunt had been a friend of the dead man. The widow seems relaxed, she smiles genuinely and broadly as she talks to them. She has made all her rounds, thanking all those who came to help her and her children bury him. She has not shunned the mistresses and those whose connections to her husband she does not know. The widow had noticed that the illegitimate children, or most of them, were missing, wondering all the while if all these people had come to help her keep up appearances. These were the same people who had continued loving and honouring him in the days when they should have cast him to the dogs.
She makes mental notes on her packing arrangements as she makes her polite rounds. She is leaving this town and would not wait for the obligatory length of time in black mourning clothes to pass. She would disrobe herself no matter how disrespectful that was to the dead. In death she would not be tied to this man she had not been able to leave, who in life had been her burden because to leave your husband is embarrassing and unforgivable to your children. She knew, and felt a breeze blow through the space where her guilt should have been, that the town would convince itself that she had killed him and refused to mourn his passing. He had died in a car crash leaving the bed of yet another mistress, possibly his fiftieth. But that the widow killed him somehow would be obvious to them from how dry her eyes had been, how she’d had the presence of mind to use waterless mascara which would not run in all that heat, how at a funeral of a man killed violently she had had the galling insensitivity to serve meat.
“How inappropriate”, they would all complain, picking their teeth with the toothpicks she provided. But she did not care. She was old enough at last not to care.
The day before, when the four policemen had walked into her house like their hearts had stopped pumping blood, she had set herself free. These poor policemen would have been pale if they’d been white, really, she had told herself. How many families would they each have to visit during the course of their careers with nothing but news of a death? Each time, burdened by their knowledge, the blood would leave their faces. And for a few seconds the widow remembers to worry what people might think of her smiling like this to herself at such an inappropriate time. She quickly pretends to be smiling about something one of her grandchildren had said, embracing him and letting out a small fake laugh. The child, looking puzzled, nonetheless allows his grandmother to welcome him into the arms he is almost too big to be lifted into.
Walking back into her house, for once the widow notices that she does not care about how the sun seems to be cutting her head in two at precisely the place where she had parted her new braids. Now she knew he had not given her the disease she was sure he would have, some time, she let the sun be. He had always been lucky. How had he managed never to get kicked out by any of the schoolboards for his antics with the children, how had he got himself and made an inspector? And without restraint, after a while he had moved his activities to another town after he had been with all the women he stood a chance with in Khaleni. And then, after all of that, he had died with uninfected blood coursing through his veins. Shaking her head at this, she turns around and looks at the thinning crowd in her yard and realizes for the first time that the women whom she had not protected as children are nowhere to be seen. They have all gone, and now she will never tell them what she failed to say during all those years.
Feziwe is tired and she and her aunt turn into her parents’ yard. Her parents had left a few minutes earlier. She is still thinking about the women at the funeral. We have buried him, she thinks. But she knows that nothing is really over, except the funeral.
