The Brick
Author: Dangarembga, Tsitsi
Date: 2014-03-19T22:00:00+00:00
Keywords: African Literature; Culture and Conflict; Human Rights; Short Story; Zimbabwe
Publisher: ICAPA

about BREAKING THE SILENCE: Breaking the Cycle

BREAKING THE SILENCE: Breaking the Cycle is a storytelling project about violence in the Zimbabwean society.

Zimbabwe is in the grip of a chronic pandemic of violence, from the domestic sphere to the public sphere. Zimbabwean life has become cheap to other Zimbabweans and perpetrators appear to get away literally with murder while survivors are numbed and intimidated. Silence becomes the perpetrators’ greatest shield.

Breaking the Silence tears through the veil of silence by bringing the debate on endemic violence in Zimbabwe into the centre of the public domain.
Material for these short stories was collected through a call for stories on violence by The Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust.

This is the third story published from the BREAKING THE SILENCE series.

For information contact
projects@icapatrust.org
or visit

BREAKING THE SILENCE

THE BRICK

A short story by Tsitsi Dangarembga

ISBN 978-0-7974-6131-4

There is a green plastic plate of gnawed pigs trotters and left over sadza by Baba Jo’s head.

The bar maid is wearing black canvas shoes. The Tommies lack laces but this is the height of fashion. Even though the corn on her little toe grows out of a hole in the cloth, the bar maid feels good.

“Hey!” the young woman goes. Her name is Clarissa. She shouts at Baba Jo because she feels good.

Baba Jo does not understand what the young woman wants.

“Are you done?” she goes again. She flicks the plate with her thumbnail. Grease globs at the rim. Then it oozes, clinging all the way, past scales of paint, onto the rusty table.

Baba Jo raises his head. Clarissa does not bother to move out of the way quickly enough. The plate empties over Baba Jo’s head.

Alois Madya has never liked Clarissa. Baba Jo thinks she’s all right, but Alois doesn’t. He watches Clarissa shake Baba Jo’s shoulder to dislodge bits from his hair. Baba Jo thinks it’s a caress and smiles up at the young woman’s breast.

“Hm-hm!” Clarissa snorts quietly through her nose and swaggers off with the plate, leaving a trotter under the table.

Alois approaches his drinking mate.

He wonders how long it will be until Baba Jo comes round sufficiently to buy him his first drink today. Baba Jo is one of the lucky ones. His daughter is a nurse at the mission hospital by the bald mountain. She does not come home that often but she sends money each month, regularly. And Baba Jo is a judicious drinker. Even when the e-cash beeps into the cell phone his daughter gave him, he sticks to traditional beer, despises the frothy, gaseous beverages that burst and foam to bubbling puddles around their bottles and cans.

“Shake-shake!” Baba Jo says when he is sober enough. “If not, is it drinking! Never! Not without a beer pot amongst mates. There has never been drinking without any shaking.”

And he always drinks the same amount in the same batches: enough to feel sleepy and then the food to soak it up; and then comes the waking, and another cycle, until his muscles quiver like gelatine.

Alois likes to catch Baba Jo after the first batch of shake-shake and first plate of strongly salted offal. The contents of the meal change with the carcasses sweating in the butchery next to the bar at the dusty business centre.

Baba Jo is most generous after a plate of pig’s trotters. Then he holds the hoof up and laughs and says, “Don’t laugh gentlemen! What were you eating when all you managed was those sons of yours - who don’t do anything for you! This is what I ate when I decided it was time for my daughter!”

Alois Madya walks over to his companion whose head has sprawled back onto the table. What would it be like to have such a daughter, he wonders. The thought does not upset him this early afternoon, as thinking of his daughter, Kuda, normally does, for today Alois Madya is feeling good.

Ba’Jo turns his head and the grease from the pig’s trotters smears his other cheek.

“Ba’Jo, what’s up?” Alois greets his friend hopefully.

Apart from meeting Clarissa first thing in the bar Alois is feeling strong. A little while ago, a matter of days, he admitted that he cannot drown, neither in his sorrows nor in his drink. The only solution for drowning Alois saw was a deep smooth river piled against granite outcrops, with currents underneath that drag a man down. He is not one to get on with water spirits. He has respect for those beings that dive up into whirlwinds and spiral into the caves of a cold, moving world. Alois accepts he is not so much as a visitor to deep wet powerful places. His place is on grass and gravel where the water queen sucks dust into storms when she whirls on her travels.

There is on some days idle talk of climate change, even here at the business centre. From time to time drinkers look through broken windows and grimy panes at the sky. They, Alois among them, wonder how it can rain without stopping for three weeks and how the drought comes in the wrong season for another three weeks before the gods hurl thunderbolts again.

Soil scientists at the Agricultural Research Institute suspect that soon there will be no more dust, no sand, only rock because people are scything out shrubs and going at the sides of mountains with hoes without terracing, and the rain has joined forces with the villagers so that it streaks over the earth like a rake of lightening, and the thin layer of soil, happy to be on the move rushes down to the river beds.

But Alois Madya, having recently made peace with his life, does not think too long about these things. True, the rain took the new drought resistant seed, which Justice for Agriculture and European Technical Assistance in association with the Ministry of Agriculture had provided, that he and Mrs Madya and occasionally Kuda had put down with zero tillage during the last planting season. True what the rain left the baboons took. But that trouble came before Alois’ plan, when it was not yet formed, when his wife looked at him in a way that murmured, a man or no man, there in my father’s house or here in my husband’s what isn’t dying as she came sneezing from harvesting sorghum; and his daughter did not look at him at all, but giggled more intensely with her friends as days went by, and not once could Alois think up anything that should reasonably be said in answer.

Without any reply, all through the season of praying for sun when the rain finally arrived, and interceding for rain when the sun shone blind white light over the earth, the sharpness of his daughter’s laugh prodded Alois’ feet every evening down the path his wife laboured up.

But as this was the time when, all was not well and Alois’ plans were not as his plans should have been, Alois invariably fell asleep in the lookout at the edge of his maize field as soon as his buttocks rested on the bright yellow plastic sheet cut from an old seed sack, as soon as his spine ridged bearably against an outer pole.

They waited until he was asleep. Then the baboons stood up to dance in the moonlight, like a band of villagers at a pungwe urged on by former guerrillas and under-cover CIO informers, the people everyone knew had absorbed too many deaths and too many kinds of it to ever be sober, whether they drank Baba Jo’s shake-shake or water or anything else.

In those days when the baboons loped off with his last few maize cobs before his plans came right, Alois did not go home when the sun rose. He waited as a man should until Mother of Kuda brought him breakfast.

Ma’Kuda had a strange way of being unseen and seen. It was the way shades of her skin blended into the earth with one step and threw her into relief with another so that she appeared first smaller then larger than anything mortal. When Ma’Kuda stepped forward as though out of nothing, she loomed over the wasted field like one of those monsters people captured and pointed at laughing on the faces of their cell phones.

In spite of this, Mai Kuda reverted to herself as she approached, and became, the woman Alois, with a distant flutter of triumph at resisting, knew he did not know. She walked slowly. She balanced on her head a small wicker basket shaped like a pot. It contained a jug of tea, a plateful of sweet potatoes. On a good day there was more sugar for her husband’s cup.

When she reached Alois, Ma’Kuda knelt and lifted the food out of her basket with slow, joyless movements. Alois recounted how in the past night he had joined the dance with a fierce energy that should have intimidated anything or anyone, but the baboons kept on coming. Thus dancing until he was exhausted he had managed to save a corner of the field.

Alois seldom received an answer. He put his hand in his pocket.

It was Alois’ habit to go round the small allotment at daybreak after the baboons left so that there was no danger of angering the invaders, but before his wife arrived with his provisions. On this round Alois nipped off a couple of ears of grain that the animals broke and left hanging. Back in the shelter he sat down and arranged a pocket carefully against its holes. He put the sorghum inside.

Alois did not look at Mai Kuda as he took his food. She was a wiry woman who did not expect satisfaction from anywhere any more. Accordingly she tried with all her heart to avoid expectation. However as this attitude was an expectation of sorts Ma’kuda lived in a terrible state of bitter quandary.

As for Alois, as he spoke of the baboon’s attack he looked into his cup and over its rim at the mountains behind the village. He wanted his wife’s company but her presence made him jumpy so that he wanted her to leave him alone. He wanted and did not want to be as alone as a mountain.

“If it’s like that, Baba, we can both stay here tonight,” his wife said once in that flat voice of hers. Since she was mouthing a formality that neither of them paid any attention to, her utterances always slid out in slow motion, leaving behind the unnecessary words an anxious trace half aglitter with a wish like the slime of a snail. Alois was moved to open his pocket and show her the couple of sorghum ears and tell her what he intended to do with them, but he did not.

When Kuda’s mother did not bring Alois his breakfast, it was his daughter Kuda who carried the wicker basket from the kitchen rondavel up at the homestead, across the yard and down the slope by the cattle kraal to the field.

On those days not a word was said. Kuda knelt down in front of her father and peeled off the brown paper that covered the basket. She lifted the cover carefully from where it was tucked between the containers and the wickerwork in order to use it again. She set a dish of sweet potatoes down before Alois and removed its lid. She arranged the enamel mug alongside, and next to the cup a second metal mug that held sugar. Finally, she lifted the tea cannister out.

When Kuda brought breakfast the tea still steamed.

On some days Alois thought this was because she walked more quickly. He liked to think his daughter was eager to bring her father food after his night in the open. Another thing he liked to believe was that his daughter stood up from her bed a little earlier so that the kettle had ample time to boil, even for twenty minutes as the Ministry of Health taught, to kill carriers of disease. Alois liked to think this was why his daughter’s tea steamed fragrantly and the steam whetted his appetite with its scent before it reached his lips, whereas his wife, Mai Kuda’s did not. Sometimes Madya thought it was one reason. Sometimes he thought it was the other. On occasion Alois liked to believe Kuda’s tea reached him hotter than his wife’s did for both of the reasons.

Madya did not tell his daughter tales of his exploits with the baboons. He found it impossible to lie to her, for at the mere thought of it on his part her smile grew sharper, more jagged and more dazzling like a lightening bolt flung by an irritated god. He sometimes wondered what would happen if he showed her the ears of sorghum in his pocket but he never dared.

When Alois finished eating, one of the women, whichever it was that day, threw the sweet potato peels into the field to rot. She carried the basket and dirty dishes away, with the load tucked under an arm as, its contents devoured, the basket was too light to balance on her head.

Full, Alois, waited until the sun changed its position before he stood up. He did not want to bump into his wife or daughter if either delayed on the path talking to a friend. Before the day he considered his affairs carefully, this avoidance of his family had been Alois’ main experience with planning.

Once, on the way home from the field, the daughter Kuda, had met Tabitha, a young woman who, like Clarissa, also worked at the bar. Kuda set the wicker basket down on a boulder by the path, threw her arms around her friend’s shoulders and the two young women started speaking exactly at the same time. They laughed at this and carried on a double conversation. They stepped with small lively steps here and there, touched each other’s hair and shrilled out laughter, going “He-he!”. They held hands as if to shout “our merriment is so great it will make us fall down this slope by my father’s cattle pen if we do not support each other! See if it doesn’t!”

Alois came upon the two young people as he rounded the bend by the musasa grove. Kuda’s father knew they were not laughing at him, but he could not get the idea out of his head that he was the reason for their hilarity. For Alois knew people in the village did that and imagined so it was with people everywhere. They constantly looked for something to savage with a burst of mirth; and Alois knew that with people like that, it was most pleasing if the something was someone.

In spite of this knowledge, with something like hope, Madya slipped his hand into his khaki trouser pocket. He grasped one ear of sorghum and started to pull it into the morning. He wanted to tell Kuda why he carried them. Even though the friend Tabitha would hear also, Alois was on the point of speaking, for his flesh did not curl from Tabitha as it did from Clarissa. With Clarissa his body congealed into itself and each of his hairs quivered like an antennea. So that morning Alois made peace with telling his daughter about this part of him that women laughed at when they saw, for no reason he understood, in the presence of one of those laughing women.

Kuda watched her father’s hand in his pocket.

There is a drunk in the village. His name is Skoforo. Liquor has burnt up Skoforo’s brain.

The liquor that has engulfed Skoforo’s mind is distilled from tyres generations old. Each car that the tyre serves is a generation. Over many months the tyres are changed from a new vehicle to an older model. This happens further and further from town until finally the rubber is useless for transport and skids foolishly over the road instead of running smoothly to its destination. At this stage the rubber is cut up into flaps and strips of differing size. These are processed into sandals, cheap at two dollars a pair: bargains to thin young men in flapping shirts who congregate on the city’s margins. The sandals hold out for a few months. The most anyone has ever got out of them is three. In the fourth month the owner throws them onto one of the dumps that gently leaks up gases. Or else the young man quietly sells his worn out sandals to the distiller. Skoforo begs five rand from the odd big man from the city. When he gets it, he buys a bottle, unscrews the lid and sips the thinned down futures.

Kuda sometimes goes to the business centre to buy a bar of lye soap when her mother has a bank note from a relative. When Kuda runs her mother’s errand, she passes Skoforo lolling by the bottle store. When Skoforo sees Kuda, he puts his hands in his trousers. Kuda sees that she is powerful. She can move the drunk’s body.

Now on the road, Kuda wonders why her father is standing like that with his hand in his pocket, and that look in his eyes so curious. Her eyes gleam. Kuda pulls Tabitha by the arm, without taking leave of her father.

“He-he!” Tabitha laughs in her high pitch as she stumbles behind Kuda up the slope to Kuda’s home.

Alois watches. He sees the girl who brings hot tea, who has not laughed. His heart immediately forgives his daughter.

The two young people look back over their shoulders. Alois still stands with his hand in his pocket. Tabitha lets out one more shriek. This time, Kuda laughs also.

Alois decides not to follow his daughter up to the yard. Instead, he goes into the bushes to relieve himself. Urine hissing over the earth is a cleaning. His priorities are ordered now. There is no need to wash. He must go to the bar and find Baba Jo as quickly as possible. He is glad he has not told anyone about the two ears of sorghum in his pocket.

The path from his home to the bar runs over a riverbed. The place is a stretch of sand now. It believes in dryness and has no memory of a stream.

On the far side of the riverbed, the village headman’s family has put up a barbed wire fence. This fence, sagging here and there now after several years, surrounds three big trees. It is the headman’s family cemetery.

This area where the headman buries his ancestors is holy. Therefore the surrounding bush is holy too. Noone in the village dares fetch firewood from here. Children do not clamber over the fence to pick the trees clean of hute berries or matunduru.

Alois was frightened here once when he heard rustling in leaves fallen to the gravelly earth from bushes close to the road. His tongue furred like the hide of an animal. Bile bit his stomach with many teeth. Breathing like a marathon runner, although he had merely meandered down the road as usual, Alois kept his eye on a pile of leaves and twigs. Every time the heap shifted he stood still. Each time he came to a halt, his heart beat faster. When the pile was still, Alois circled cautiously round it.

A small head with a red crest moved slowly to and fro, like Baba Jo on the bar table. When he saw this, Alois jumped back, fearing a snake. As soon as he was still, but watching a spotted wing swept despondently over the leaves. Alois shook his head and burst out laughing.

It was a guinea fowl. This one had come off the worse in a fight with another cock. Watching the bird hop and flutter, Alois’ eye shone with a light it seldom had. The taste of meat was on his tongue. It was flavoured with tomato, onion and garlic, was pungent and strongly-salted. It was slightly tough which made it wonderfully chewy. Alois’ stomach gave a grateful rumble. Bending over he crept forward, hands tense but ready by his sides to catch and wring the bird’s neck.

“My Man, thank you my man! Thank you, Chihwa, you who only eat what is standing up!” Mai Kuda would respond in her flat voice as he offered the bird. The sound of a villager chopping wood in the distance was the clap of her hands. He saw his wife plucking the bird and cutting up an onion. A trickle of saliva seeped from the corner of his mouth. When she was happy, Mai Kuda’s cooking could make a man cry for his mother.

As Alois dreamed of a delicious meal, the guinea fowl raised the hoods of skin that hid it’s eyes. In spite of its wounds the bird hobbled chuck-chucking away from danger.

Alois stopped in his tracks when the bird moved. After a moment he followed the hurt creature slowly. He allowed nzambara brambles to snare him so that he paused to disentangle himself. Spear grass pierced, and fell through the holes in his trousers. He stooped to pull out the long filaments. Alois was as wary of the thing that alarmed the wounded bird as the fowl itself was. The thing was always there. When he slept at the lookout it lurched with long herbivorous fangs around the edge of the field. When he drank Mai Kuda’s tea, or even Kuda’s it smacked its lips at him. When he walked to the bar it slouched and when he zig-zagged home it revelled behind him. When he fell into a stupor it stretched out its arms and engulfed him. Each time, he told himself he would spin around or open an eye. He would confront it.

They were small: A man was used to the size of a hens’, Alois told himself, to explain why he did not see the guinea fowl’s in time. He was surprised but grateful he stepped only on two, a waste whichever way a man looked at it. Alois carefully withdrew his foot from the hollowed out nest and wiped it on undergrowth. There were speckled grey and white feathers around the nest, and a little blood. Twenty seven eggs nestled in the blood orange yolk that ran from the other two. He thought of settling half a dozen eggs carefully in his pocket. But there was blood on some of them, qhich made him think better of it. Alois waved away the bush and the fowl and the nest with its eggs and returned to the road to the bar.

The following day Alois was surprised to find his feet turning off the road again once he was past the river. A guinea hen puffed its wings and screeched at him as he approached the bush that hid the nest.

That night Alise settled at the look out as usual. During his round after the baboons left, Kuda’s father snapped off two hanging ears of sorghum. In the morning, at the clump of bush after the river he walked a few steps into the brambles and grass until he approached the nest. He rubbed the sorghum to dislodge the grain. He threw the kernels close to the nest. The hen watched him and he watched her and then they left each other to continue their business. This Alois did every day on his way to sit with Baba Jo at the rusty table. When the keets hatched, Alois offers his little sacrifice from a greater distance.

A hawk has been counting each day, one, two, three and so on, on its claws and beak and then on pebbles on the ground, up to twenty seven days after the guinea hens laid their eggs in the nest and all but one decided they had done with motherhood. The hawk began tightening its high sharp-eyed circles a few days before the keets smashed their way out of their shells.

This morning there are only nine keets left in the scrape. Alois drops the grain as usual. He knows soon all the balls of feather and meat will be taken. Alois realises then he will stop bringing the sorghum and noone will know he did so.

“Look,” there is sorghum growing in the bush someone will say, and invent stories concerning the beneficence of an ancestral spirit or the morals the village girls have discarded .

Thinking of this, Alois decides to get drunk quickly. There is no point labouring over a life that cannot give anything to anyone, not even a small ear of grain to a family of creatures with beaks and short red helmets.

The latrine, a hovel of clay and straw, with stick figures drawn in lime depicting on the right side a man and on the left a woman, stands between the beer hall and the parking bay where trucks to and from Mozambique park.

That girl Tabitha is leaning against a truck door. Pulling a length of cloth out of the truck window, she turns to Kuda who stands, arms across her breasts, her head to one side.

The cloth is a dress. Tabitha, shakes it out and holds the garment against her body, laughing. Kuda shrugs her shoulders, an awkward, unwilling movement, as though she would rather not be there.

It is the awkwardness, an in between movement, neither weak nor strong, filled with indecision, without the definition in the temperature of her tea, that does for Madya.

If she would simply laugh, “I am a whore. That’s how I get my clothing and airtime for your cell phone!” that would not satisfy Madya, but it would silence him with gratitude if not respect, a sense of satisfactory equity. But they are not there yet and may never arrive. Kuda is stretched between two poles and will not take the decision.

Alois steps over Skoforo at the bar’s entrance and keeps on going towards the parking bay.

“Kuda!” he shouts softly. “Kuda, my daughter! You do not listen to me. Everyone knows you do not respect me.”

Kuda neither sees her father nor hears him.

Skoforo comes to investigate the noise. He sees Kuda and puts his hand in his trousers.

Madya does not notice this. He continues shouting softly, “Get away! Go home now! I have told you, Kuda, that I do not want you to play with these Tabitha and Clarissa women.”

The two young women do not see Alois. He veers towards the toilet. When he comes out, the truck and the two young women have left. Skoforo is back in the bar’s doorway. In his seat at the metal table once more, Alois accepts Baba Jo’s shake-shake.

By mid afternoon, he is drunk enough to go home. This is part of Alois’ new plan. He will drink enough to bear the looks his wife and daughter shoot, but not become so drunk that he rages and flails his arms at Mai Kuda and Kuda. Now he is containing his despair and not washing it out in the hours spent at the beer hall. He will also sit in the yard in the morning and evening observing the women as they go about their chores. For he knows women love to be watched by the man of the house even when they pretend to want to be alone as they swish twig brooms over the sand or scour the crusts out of the sadza pot, and he recognises his deficit in this matter. The important thing is that Madya sits properly upright on the mud foundation around his sleeping room and be seen to be seeing what is going on in his home. Once in a while, as he watches, he will throw out a word of encouragement or surprise Mai Kuda and Kuda with a joke.

“Mai Kuda! There’s this story people are saying about that minister, the one who died.”

Mai Kuda will look up in astonishment and for once there will a spark of interest in her eyes.

Alois will continue, “They say he went to see his mother one day. She was watching the television, but when he saw what the old woman was doing, the minister began to cry. Mai, he sobs with water running down his cheeks like that, Mai, everyone laughs at me. Why do they do that? the mother asks. She cannot believe that anyone can laugh at the minister. They say I am the ugliest brute that ever lived, the son replies. The TV is always showing the ministers so the people see me and are always laughing! His mother dries her son’s tears and says, “Don’t worry about them, my son!”. Just as she turns back to the television the news begins and the same minister comes on. “There!” the mother tells her son triumphantly. “Didn’t I tell you. You can’t be uglier than him my son, the one who has just come onto television.”

Alois can see the little family, all three of them laughing out in the yard.

As he takes leave of Baba Jo and thanks him for all the beer, and starts towards home, Alois fills up with doubt. The two women have no idea how much it takes a man to simply live these days. Day after day he must go on, keep breathing, tasting, hearing, seeing and knowing. He does this everyday and nobody recognises this feat of endurance. Will they recognise he is doing it for the three of them this afternoon when he begins his new plan? The frustration stirs up the shake-shake in his stomach so that its strength is doubled. By the time he sinks his feet into the sand of the river bed and pulls them out he feels more drunk than his plan permits.

The bitter thing is that he not so intoxicated as to not know what he is doing. Alois Madya feels each step he takes over the stony road. But his feet have grown rubbery and the stones have grown bigger since he walked to the bar. They fool him with their new dimensions and trip him but do not hurt him. Madya tries to remember. Do the stones do that every time he walks from the bar? He gets up again and again, ranting at the boulders that shrink deceive him by shrinking back to their prefall size. They mock him with their smallness.

Alois tells himself he will not be like the minister, he will not cry. He will make it home even though his daughter does not respect him, and his wife likes him so little she has not taken her daughter to task about the way Kuda behaves towards her father. All Mai Kuda has bothered with is to give her daughter a few half-hearted admonitions to “hear what your father says, after all he is the man of this house!”

The afternoon air is hot on the small coils of Alois’ hair. The shafts drive the heat far into the roots in his skull. There it shimmers and scorches like a sun on earth and it flares to blind him.

Kuda is standing by the dish rack. Fingers of pale grass push out of the ground around the girl’s feet nurtured in some fashion by the soapy water and bits of sadza the women throw out of the tub when they are done washing up.

Madya’s daughter is bent over another young person. Her fingers work busily and expertly in her companion’s hair.

Madya enters his homestead and sees his daughter. He commands the ground to be still and it obeys him. Alois finds he can plant his feet firmly apart. He nails his centre of gravity to the air. The air holds. Alois does not topple. He stares at his daughter.

“Kuda!” says Alois.

The young woman does not move.

“Kuda!” Alois says again.

When his daughter does not look at him yet, Madya succeeds in raising his right arm, but the finger at the end of it disobeys him and droops down limply.

Kuda’s companion steals a glance around her friend’s body and giggles.

“Iwe!” Kuda reprimands Tabitha with a tug on the extension she is doing.

Kuda looks her father over without raising her head.

His trousers are dry. Kuda sighs. She dares not tell him her friend will pay her a dollar for doing her hair so that she has a hair style that matches the new dress from the flea markets in Mocambique the lorry driver brought in. Kuda is afraid her father will want the money. If he says, give it to me, she will have to. But she wishes he would take more interest in what she and her mother do to keep the home together.

“What are you doing! You’re hurting me!” Tabitha complains. She slaps at Kuda’s legs too hard for play, too softly to hurt, somewhere in-between.

Kuda relents towards her father.

“Good afternoon, Baba” she says lightly, her eyes a tight thin sheet of metal through which nothing leaks out or in.

Kuda wonders whether her father is right. Since Tabitha disappeared with the truck driver that morning and came back demanding and getting a dress, she is not so sure of the young woman she walks with. She has asked Tabitha to bring other young women to have their hair done. Tabitha has not brought anyone. Kuda will think about breaking up the friendship.

“Who is that?” says Madya.

Kuda does not answer her father, nor does she tell him what she is thinking.

Madya approaches his daughter. He picks up a brick when he is half way there.

“Kuda!” Alois says again. “Everyone knows you do not respect your father. You play with people who laugh at me. You do not respect what I tell you.”

“Everyone is asking about this respect thing,” replies Kuda, bent over Tabitha’s hair. “They are saying, who can say anyone should be respected. And they are even saying there is no use in any of that respect because, what is it? Can you taste it? Is it nice? Can you eat it!”

Madya strikes his daughter on the head with the brick. She falls down struggling feebly. Madya drops to his knees beside her. He brings the brick down again and again. Tabitha runs to the kitchen rondavel to call Mrs Madya. Mrs Madya comes out and understands what is taking place. She sits down on the raised foundation in around the kitchen in silence. Tremors run silently through Mai Kuda’s body.

Finally Kuda makes no sound and does not move. Although he promised himself he will not cry, Madya takes his daughter’s head onto his lap. He cradles the girls’s head and stretches out his legs. Kuda’s mother remains silent. Madya cannot stop weeping.

***

This short story is also available in print in the anthology FAMILY PORTRAIT published by ICAPA and currently available in Harare.

For more information contact

Breaking the Silence
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