Heidi Sincuba

Around the bend we call for her
Picturing her current state
For then there was none prettier
Her features weren’t abrupt nor late

The garden in which we were born
Readied us for fair commerce
But why did we prefer to scorn
the very womb from which we burst

We laid her down and had our way
Penetrating each pure hole
Though full we stuffed it night and day
Perfect virgin swallowed whole

‘til this day we invent the schemes
Now devoid of common sense
We dirtied all that we found clean
Ignoring the future tense

She gave us warning here and there
Telling us our our fate
Even then our consciounce dares
Shoot her message at the gate

The time to us was ours alone
Blind ears on the coming age
While chewing her down to the bone
Tight fists for her obvious rage

We made our rules to make pretend
Taught our young to play the game
We thought our reign would never end
Stripping yet more from her frame

We filled our banks with bogus notes
Mining still her soft pockets
We claim it is for food and clothes
Engineering steel dockets

She watches us now in defeat
Practicing what we call fun
We were children at her feet
Now we’re rapists on the run

Of all abusers there is one
You might call her avenger
Behold here comes the mighty sun
Hurting, helping, saving her

This is a story I´ve only just learned to tell
Though it never leaves me, though it haunts me like a spell
Trying to tell a tale a tale of what was good but now is not
Means nothing at all if I deny what I forgot
The one who bore the seed insists this much nust be true
She says disease has distinguished and left the other two
She sometimes still denies her kin to save her dignity
“Who this girl here with rotten skin? She isn´t of my three
I only know a little girl as pure as they may come
Whose reeds grow tall above the World at reach for only some”
At this calm point it came to me, must have been five or six
I asked myself where could it be? Where is my innocence?
Who is it spilled my blood to quench his own unripened thirst
And made it but a fib to find my faithfulness at First
I do long for that little girl that must be somewhere here
I mime her everytime I try to smile from ear to ear
I know she knew a better way to pass up being lost
The way they now call ignorance and oust at any cost
The leaves of trees would sway with her, escape the eyes and ears
The sun was hot and gay with her and screened the golden years
The precious mountain dew, the robust soil, the soggy mould
A time when things were new, nothing bought, nothing sold
I must have known that little girl before I learned to read
Before I knew a farther space, discovered time and speed
I know I lost her somewhere there in that fickle bush
That grows in desperate corners where no one ever looks
Nine nimble servants meddling outside the clerics door
Ten little virgins, truthfully expose a whore
While the preacher fucks her on hs great big righteous bed
Her guilt will grow a rapidly as his sheets of red
Once the knife has cut you, you cannot be uncut
That´s one thing we always knew, we felt that in our gut
If a thing has purity, it´s then doomed to be ruined
Devoured by the very folk who pretend to be fluent
You tell a lie if you are one who claims to posess it
Innocence is identified by those who have lost it

I was walking behind him at the supermarket. I saw him in the dairy aisle and then the veggies. I made sure to stay quite close to him. I didn’t have to, but I wanted to. That is my habit, or rather my fixation. I hold on to them, as tight as I can. I smother them and put everything I have on them. And then I get away with it.

This is a pattern I have given up on breaking. Even while I do it I am aware that it isn’t fair. The least I could do is give them some room. But what can I do when I am bound to the action. It isn’t me – I swear it. It’s just something I have to do.

I guess it might seem strange to others, but it is my nature. Why should I be ashamed of something I cannot alter? Believe me I have tried. I have walked that recommended path – saying and doing what I was told to. I know all in all that is the better way. This seemed prettier, more sensible. But I could not keep it up.

I would wake up at night overcome by the need. It pressed onto me like a ton of bricks, sometimes I felt that I would die – I could not breathe and for some moments I felt I was in that peace itself. But I always returned and when I had the verve again I wanted to hunt again. Find one and have the faith again and then steadily obliterate …

This one I had found quite unexpectedly. I had not been looking. In fact I felt as though I might have been cured. It had been four months and I felt quite at ease with myself. Then I went to an expo of some sort, I cannot remember. And to be sure, there had been many of them that I could have held onto, but I saw him and I chose him above all the others.

I wish I could now say that he chose me too. That we looked at each other and we knew or some bullshit like that. But no. he did not look at me; he did not see me. The madness was in my eyes and my eyes alone. I am the one who decided I would let him down and I would not rest until I did.

It was a Saturday there at the supermarket. The early afternoon sun followed his light vessel and so did I. at the till he paid with his card and brought out his bonus card. Eight Euros fifty five for some fruit, vegetables, juice, yoghurt and bread. I watched how he packed this all into his bag that he had brought with him from his apartment around the corner. He said thank you to the cashier and left, yet with so much promise it seemed as though he stayed as well. This thrilled me so.

Later on he met his friends. They were like him. I imagined I could be stuck onto them in another dimension. Their faces were all fresh, showing no sign of grief. They were all raised well with contentment and care. They had everything they wanted and didn’t bother about those that had none.

I watched them at the café downtown. There were five of them although one left quite soon. He stood up during conversation and gave each of his companions three kisses on the cheeks. As he did that each of them stood up vaguely in turn, embracing him, yet not embracing him.

The one who left had walked away in plain sight and I had watched him repeatedly, the others at the round table on the terrace of the café went on as if he had never left. The one had left, yet they did not seem to be missing much. The picture remained perfect – the terrace at the café with its precious blue steel furniture, quaint porcelain crockery and stiff sparkling cutlery. Even the water they drank seemed immaculately bracing. It’s not the water I was after, but I couldn’t help thinking, ‘if only I could have a sip … just one sip…’

I might have gone in right there. It tempted me so that perfect picture. But there were too many of them. Even around that perfect table were other perfect little round tables. Fair childhoods, fair families, fair futures and fair lives. That was enough to humiliate even me. I could ruin one at a time, but I couldn’t bear it if I were exposed as unfair in front of all those painfully fair eyes.

So I waited there across the road at a dingy canteen. I knew I was safe for their kind never look that way. My only disguise was the knowledge that they do not see things that are not as fair as they are. They know a great many things but to that they are blind.

Their lives are filled with innocent bliss. You see they are not conscious of this, so they cannot be blamed. They are not susceptible to guilt like you and I. if they have hurt you or wronged you, it is your own fault – it is what you have placed on them that ends up hurting you. They truly mean no harm.

This was clear to me as I watched them interrelate. Joyful, kindly faces that looked towards each other with no ill-will. As I say they are not capable of ill will – that is my part.

After some time they left one by one, leaving mine regarding the paper and sporadically checking the time. What a familiar sight. How many of these, identical ones had I loved and hung onto. It was almost as if those experiences were happening again. He wore the same clothes and had the same hair and even it seemed read the same paper. I cannot be sure. But it made me more desperate to follow him – give into him. I had to – I did.

The sun began to set and he got up from his chair. He folded his paper and put it under his arm. Politely he waved to the waiters by the door and he set off towards his home. Quickly I went across the road, knowing even in my haste, he would never look my way. I put my hand into my pocket and readied myself, wrapping my bitter fist around my blade.

I had to cross immediately as I knew his house would not be much farther. Now I was walking a few paces behind him. I could sense he had not sensed me yet, so I began to trot closer and closer. My mind was blank now – my whole body submerged in adrenaline. If I did not hold myself back, I might have done it too soon and I would not be pleased unless I got it right.

Two seconds before I did it, he felt me and he turned around, but it was too late for him. I ran into him and I cut him at precisely the right place and precisely the right moment. He held onto me and fell to the ground still with that look upon his face. I smiled. This is why I do it – that moment … that look. Finally I have seen something unfair on your face. Finally something I can relate to – distress, tenderness, demise.

Try not to hold on to
Those things that released you
You know it was all your choice
Given that you kept your noise
You had a moment in the sun
But in this moment, that is done

Listen, I beseech you
Love what you can see through
Rely on the vivid vice
It will always pay your price
Leave those foggy unvoiced guns
And the myths that they have spun

Flee and you might undo
The ruins that buried you
Left you for routine and death
They can never lie with stealth
While you stand here in your junk
They will merit from the pun

Don’t lessen the value
Of lessons it taught you
You know you are subtly blessed
Though you did return with less
Don’t imitate a one with none
You were left with quite a sum

It shows in how the curtains plunge
Before they clarify again
Burying all what’s worrying
Bending and burning the light

It looks as needy as a sponge
Refuting any evidence
Greedy without becoming
Baseless like a parasite

You see it in the gloom of grunge
Washing what you know as sense
Complicating, transporting
Everything you thought was right

Here you can’t refuse the bulge
You thought you’d leave behind the fence
This is the fiction of reaching
A world unhurt by bias sight

You can’t deny the looming lunge
The dot is lividly immense
Wrought with desire, trembling
The promise of a passive night

And yet you know when you resurge
That it is through a bogus lens
After it clasps your soundless din
You must indeed untie the eyes

Oh would it be! How can you judge?
When things are so demurely dense
And could there be just one ending?
To this fastidious, obscure flight?

It will remain upon the tongue
But trap the unaware lips hence
For when one jumps to deep dreaming
The tilted chaos is too bright

An idea for a short film accompanied by a playlist.

An ex apartheid agent finds himself in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Faced with his victim, he must recall his most dramatic mission in order to recieve amnesty.

Keep reading →

You act as though you weren’t around
As if the depth of duty were past your grip
You feign a one without a sound
A one who has not yet needed a simple sip

As if your lousy lie were capable of capturing a rise
An observer could plainly place precision in your eyes

It isn’t like there is a prosperous glare
Following the force, the infirmity beneath you
It’s not as if it’s just over there
Creeping into you, out of you, taking over you

Let it be known that the dire vermin that hover above your words
Are benevolently borne by the greedy dearth of the hazy hoards

Let it be said that the trembling seat upon which the parasites dwell
Is the very cloth that causes the pompous swines to boast and swell

Make it so that the open fire sinks to the foot of the hill
Make it so that the arduous drizzle waits at your window sill

Sleep with your time, embrace its every whim
Neglect its mishaps and learn how to swim

There is no shame in confessing that your poor soul is haunted
Only in turning your back
It isn’t so hard to imagine why the damned drought is flaunted
Seeing your imminent lack

The brightest brights and whitest whites aren’t spotless enough
Only you cluttered the gun
It’s isn’t so dry that you couldn’t make your barren case rough
Sense was the hardest of sums

Commit yourself to swimming in reachable scriptures and songs
Only you cannot pretend
It isn’t so ready for sitting upon when the trip is so long
You’ll learn. It might never end

As she ran down Station Road, memories flooded by like a mustering river. The people carried on with their lives. Nothing had stopped. Even as she unraveled amongst them, they were oblivious – normal. Her loss and her grief was not enough to make them stammer. They had found their proxy; they had said their goodbyes and their lives went on. What had she expected?

Even the skies resounded with her lover and gracefully promised an eventual reunion. She wondered what the world looked like from that immense distance to God and to Nick with whom she had anticipated a wealthy longevity, so much so that without him she was weightless. On the littered road she tread and the filthy air around her, it was his charisma she felt. In her heart, her soul, there was Nick Kross and after that, there was none.

It had been no less than two months and she was no closer to resurgence. The imprinted scene that had once cost her everything had occurred in one quick quaver. All her life and proud accomplishments condensed into a single moment and hence lost.

The couple had spent the whole day at a shopping mall, accounting for their new house. It had been months since their wedding and yet their glaring love beckoned the other shoppers to filch innocent glimpses at this emphatic duo. The mayor and the jazz singer. Their love was as fain as the sun and as abundant as the Nile. Surely, even the blind could see. What disgrace would dare dispute that?

When there is no one present and her thoughts are not impaired, she believes, warily, that she received a divine caveat. She saw it in the heartless murderer’s eyes and thought to share this suspicion with her husband but discreetly, she chose logic over intuition. Now she knows what she should have done. Logic, like a hungry lion had proven lethal.

Each morning, each night she lives with the torment. No longer does she think of the shiny stage and adoring crowd. No longer does she consider with joy the things she hopes to do. But she wallows in the instant – the moment that embittered her. In a flexion of light, an envoy zipped from a modern weapon to lop her lover’s much loved life. Before her very eyes, a miniature foe pounded the verve from Nick Kross and the consequence of this splattered abysmally onto her perplexed face and she knew that this substance that smacked her facial extent was her husband the mayor’s cultured mind.

She opened her heavy eyes to find a blinding white light from above her, a cold hard surface beneath her and a shrilling sharp pain from within. I’ve died and gone to heaven, she dared to think. At times, recollections of this burning moment make her wish she hadn’t cursed the possibility of death by concluding it so wantonly. But what else was she to think? Bright lights and people in white floating indifferently about. This is heaven, she expected. Senseless as it is to recall, it is inevitable. These parcels of recollection never seem to keep office hours.

There is a temporary freedom looming around her in a mass of ingested drugs. She is running – from something?; to something? – she can’t detect but she knows she can’t look back, nor can she look forward. Her long, dark locks whipping with her rhythm in the brisk air and her feet red-sore from the wretched tar of her little city streets. But it’s not her feet she’s feeling, sore as they as they are. It’s her deep, ripe love for Nick Kross. It hurts still. If not his love, she will feel nothing at all.

The more she runs, the closer she feels to flying, but fly, she does not. Speeding past an oily-smelling take-away, the tv screen displays a sheepish news caster, seemingly worried about the late mayor’s mentally ill wife who’s been missing from the hospital for the past few hours. Viewers at home are to please phone this number with any information on this dark, five-foot-two woman. As she runs from the bustle of the grave city, she thinks with an earnest confusion … five-foot-two?! Am I really so big?

Then as she turns the monotonous corner of Mission Street and Maroon Lane, she hears the sweetest sound a stray could hear. A hypnotic jingle of a saxophone calls to her broken soul and intuitively, she stops her search. Her heart awakens and surrenders to the seductive sound of music. Still out of breath, she turns and walks slowly towards the music, mystified by the automatic effect. In the music of the stranger, she hears Nick Kross and feels Nick Kross.

A man in his early fifties, obviously homeless, plays a lullaby tune with his seductive saxophone. Her first instinct is to break out in song, to run into his arms and weep once again. She might have done it had she not been so hopelessly high. It was in her, but it would not escape. Never before had she craved a song so, to take and drop into this layabout’s hat. The old man stopped and looked at the slattern figure. He did not see her wreckage and her loss, he did not see the hole she carried with her. Nor did he ask her if she was still alive. His words, smaller than a grain of sand: “Hang on! Aren’t you the mayor’s wife?”, slaughtering the oasis once and for all. His vile question made her turn away roughly in distress, screaming piercingly as she resumed her dash, “The mayor is dead!”

Love is not a bus I board
I do not wait for it
It does not come for me

Love is just a winding road
It isn’t on the grid
And has no strategy

Love is not a humbl’ abode
I mustn’t inhabit
It or furnish the dream

Love is not the heap I hoard
It doesn’t fill the pit
It’s not my property

Love’s a thing I can’t afford
Though I should make profit
I choose economy

Love ain’t no ideal award
I should be proud of it
But it is temp’rary

Love is not a mighty lord
It is not something writ
It is not known to read

Love is not a minor chord
It’s not a note I hit
I cannot hear it beat

Nor is it demeaned to nought
It’s not a deficit
That’s an inacc’racy

Other people fit the mould
This much I must admit
It’s my own tragedy

Somehow when I’m in the ward
I soar to the summit
But ne’er flee gravity

Love can’t make my shoulders broad
It doesn’t keep me fit
It leaves me just as weak

It can’t even steer my ford
I can’t rely on grit
To cut propensity

So I mustn’t drop my guard
It seeps in bit by bit
I’ll think it’s voluntary

Kill it with my bitter sword
I cannot e’er permit
This foul discrepancy

See that love is just a war
I do not know it yet
But there’s no victory

Love has left me so distraught
A friend I must omit
It is my enemy

Love is not a hand I hold
It doesn’t give a shit
It isn’t there for me

There halts, at last, the stench of demise
No change, no growth and no compromise
Those who endure devour remorse
They who depart, forgetting their corpse
And all our discussions
And our comprehensions
Are laid to the ground
Condemned to resound
The words that were written in front of the day
That all our creation descended from clay
But what sort of horror
Dare we engineer?
We tremble together
Indulging in fear
But there in the dimness, the cool and the stiff
There in the stillness, the foot of the cliff
Can we be so blinded that we cannot see?
That that is the singular way to be free

But how can I make you understand
I won’t stop
‘til you appear to take my hand?

But why can’t I just carry on
Believing
That soon you will pick up the phone?

I’m never like those other girls
Who hurt you
I wouldn’t spur to whip your world

But I now see that this is vain
Don’t tell me
That basically inflates the pain

But I heard you when you coyly said
You like me
Lying o’er me in my slight bed

But it’s just that we would never work
Together
But you want to fix me for a fuck

But I have love for you
But I never meant to
But you always break my heart

You may shuffle among the tutored sheep
Dawdle among the beasts
You may gather all of the rumored heap
Indulging in the feasts

Let it burn you so that you may know
The scam sees what it sows

Dare to persuade yourself that you are free
Eavesdrop on your seat
We will even permit your slighted knees
Your preference for deceit

Let it tear you apart so that you confess
The soil sums up to distress

You must never forget what you have done
In the absence of the sun
No matter where or how you opt to run
Or how the story’s spun

Let it break you in so you cannot hide
The surge from the other side

You may not believe it, you may shun
The bother you have flung
But lo, there waits your haunted young
The blood all dried and wrung

I found out that I was pregnant the day we took People’s Bank in the Estcourt city-center before the trip to Westgate a week ago. Martin had joked about it when he’d seen me heave my brains out the morning after we’d left in the stolen old BMW, which Martin had ominously obliged all the way from Ladysmith to Jo’burg over the weekend. He was the only one who could drive and had a license and it had happened several times that during a getaway, upon being stopped by police that a simple flash of Martin’s dreamy emerald eyes and driver’slicense got us away scot free.

We left Estcourt directly after assaulting the bank and with the adrenalin pumping through our bodies, settled in at a hotel close to the N3. We always needed to spend the night at a place with a fast escape route. We’d always check in separately so as not to attract any unwelcome attention, but had almost always spent the night together. I remember that Sifiso and Martin often carried guns even when they were naked, sometimes in jest, to make light of it all, but I think mostly, honestly, in sheer fear of what could possibly happen next …

By that time, we had taken to believing hat we had stopped doing it for the money. Sometimes we’d be touring and just elect to fleece a place because it was beautiful or because it had a nice name. When we’d just started, we were shaky, nervous kids fretful of being caught. Sifiso had already been to juvy many times and he guaranteed prison was no place to be. But even Sifiso with his cautionary measures and misleading ruses could hardly ignore what a piece of cake our raids had become. When we robbed little towns in the outskirts of South African hubs, we dared walk away, take a train and even stay the night. We’d become arrogant about it, taking even from the most dubious dupe, just to prove that we could. And believe it or not, it had worked. For two years and seven months, we had made a name and a sizeable fortune from the fluky successes of our rash robberies.

But that day, our sights were set on a shopping mall, one that had just been opened. One whose security was still in trial and error and one who’s loyalties had yet to be established. We had expected it to be swift and easy, the only challenge being the size. We’d done malls only in rehearsal for this event, but we had discovered, it was easier than we thought.

It was also around the same time that I’d begun to receive some positive attention for being the only girl in the Z-team. News travelled faster than money in those days. As soon as people recognized our crimes, they realized there was something different about this group of wild young criminals. Not only was there a girl, but also, more surprisingly … a white.
I remember hearing a few gleeful women chattering about the infamous trio. I never knew where the name ‘Z-team’ came from, but that was what they called us – everywhere, and with such conviction that one would think that we had disclosed our name in a press release. Girls had been impressed and intimidated by the infamous woman robber and the men were enthralled. As far as most people knew, we were an urban legend. Nothing more than a figment of people’s imaginations, but we were still hot on their tongues. There were rumors of a love affair between the girl and the boy, but also rumors about a gay fling between the boy and the white boy. Martin and Sifiso had seen these rumors as a threat. To them it meant somebody was onto us – that our days were numbered. They were afraid. But for me the stories only convinced me that we had a place, that we had nothing to fear and that things would be fine once we decided to pack it in and live decent lives.

Sifiso had been my man since Grade 5. I grew up in Ntuzuma C on 106579 Street, near Richmond Main Road. Sifiso was born in KwaMashu K, but I don’t know whereabouts. We met in assembly in an Indian school called Shri Rhamayan Sabha in Overport. He had introduced himself by making sure that I got to stand in the front of the line when the bell rang. Khethiwe, another girl in my class who had always shoved needlessly, had curled away diffidently as Sifiso ordered her to make space for me.
“Get behind her!” he derided. “And that’s where I want to see all of you every other day”.

I believed instantly that I was in love – at 11-years-old. An unimportant girl from Ntuzuma whose mother had been confined to bed with no conceivable ailments, save that enduring Black Label quart. That wretched bottle which, when Thobile’s heart bopped with delight at it’s predictable emptiness would make itself reappear – fresher and fuller and headed straight for mummy’s mouth.
Whether or not I knew what love was, or what it would mean, I know that we did it. At that pathetically tender age we were feigning love as if our lives depended on it. Maybe … back then, our lives did depend on it. Sifiso would promise me marriage, a house in Avoca Hills and children and I would foolishly eat every word up like a starving beggar. I didn’t know to think it over, to rationalize, I just thought and sincerely believed that I was destined to do what he told me to do. And that fact would define the rest of my sorry life. He was in Grade 6 when he decided to make me his girl. By Grade 7 he was in juvenile prison for petty theft and assault.

My little girl heart was shattered and I thought, for about a week, that I would never move on. The way Sifiso had kept his eye on me and declared his ownership of me at Shri Rhamhayan Sabha – who would ever do that again? But lo, as I moved to Serenations High School, in Sydney, the next town from Overport, I began my pubescent ascent and was instantly over Sifiso. I noticed that the boys in my class who were mostly Indian or Colored were highly attentive to my developing body and this awareness let me cling onto that illusive idea that I was wanted. By the end of the first year of High School, I’d fucked two guys in my class: Gareth, the soccer captain from Newlands whose mendacious charms and slick gelled hair made him one of the hottest guys in school and Asif Khan, the smartest and least attractive boy in our class against whom I often competed in school academic challenges. By the second year, most of my friends were guys and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But at the end of Grade 9 when I was prancing around my school as if that protection Sifiso had given me had been reborn n the form of a vagina, Sifiso came back.

He’d met a man while he was in prison. The story was puzzling at first: This man Martin Olsen had come to prison as an evangelist to help the young prisoners to turn to the Lord before it was too late. He had come with his family, who were in charge of the real holy work, but he was there to hand out literature and set up chairs. Once during an interval Sifiso Ntuli and Martin Olsen had struck up conversation – ‘the rest is history’. It turns out the prisoner had converted the evangelist and after convincing his father that the prisoner in question had exclusive qualities and deserved, they emerged after a slow debacle, as if joined at the hip by an extensive appetite for mischief.

Martin was born on a farm in Kranskop. His family was hardly wealthy but compared to Sifiso and I, he’d led a charmed life. The farm had belonged to grandpa Olsen, who with many other European evangelists and missionaries had relocated to the South of Africa with the hope of saving its dark people with the Gospel around the 1920s and 1930s. Although these families cluttered the Kranskop landscape in large albeit scattered numbers, they trekked every Sunday, some without fail, two hours to the Clear Waters Sacred Church at which they congregated. Those meetings in that church would seal themselves into the little boy Martin’s consciousness and never die away. The women so prudishly understated, dressed to turn their back on vanity and groomed to flaunt reticence. The men were upright and austere, oozing ethics and an ideal example of how to live in God’s eternal light.

Martin’s father John Olsen was a family lawyer with a practice cozily forty-five minutes from the farm in which he was joint partner with three other like-minded Christian lawyers. The employees were younger Christians who seemed to be invariably either men whose careers were budding as the partners careers had once budded and with whom the partners could get along but never bothered or women with no discernable qualities except their bosses always seemed to need them for one thing or another. The cleaning and security staff who shuffled through the corridors of Schneider and Associates might have been among some of the firm’s most deserving clients, but didn’t know the first thing about law or its use, so John Olsen (and his associates) never felt the need to look them in the eyes when muttering ‘Morning’, and it was only their blue overalls, black security suits or pink flowery pinafore dresses which defined these people. They were just the help.

And Francis Olsen – Martin’s mother – stayed at home to raise the Olsen’s seven children Mary, Sarah, Frank, Esther, Martin, Gideon and Joshua. She kept two nannies, two maids and a gardener, as it was all just too much for her to handle. ‘Lord knows my fragile frame wasn’t made for this …’ she could often be heard professing. The large farm grounds with the gardens, the driveway, the pond and four dogs were always well kept, but Mrs. Olsen’s hand was Mrs. Olsen’s mouth. The workers were to carry her orders out with the highest priority at any hour, though their unfamiliar worker’s quarters housed their own extensive families. The maids and nannies, who were always middle aged women, changed steadily through the years. The only thing that was certain was their insistence upon hauling their large fatherless families to the Olsen farm in Kranskop to Mrs. Olsen’s eternal confusion. The Gardener Thulani had stayed on the longest, having been the gardener at the Olsen farm during John Olsen’s childhood years and throughout Martin Olsen’s. He had a family of his own consisting of three wives, fourteen children and even more numerous grandchildren. Three of his sons lived with him at the Olsen farm and were somewhat his apprentices, poised to take over their father’s duties upon his demise. Though scarcely seen on the grounds of the farm by the Olsen family, their presence was felt as the farm’s male head. Although Thulani and his son’s had the smallest ‘servant family’, they had the largest quarters which stood at the top of a small hill by the barbed wire fence and faced the Olsen house.

When Martin met Sifiso, he would tell him repeatedly that he reminded him of Thulani. Always there, like a mountain on top of a hill …

The boys went well together. What began as naughty mismatch soon erupted in a torrent of teachings from flattered Sifiso, gloriously dispatching secrets of the trade to his eager new mate. So deliriously pleased was he that he, an orphan, a black man, uneducated and ruined, should be teaching a rich white boy, telling him which way to go. He roared with laughter when Martin made rookie mistakes and rewarded him obstinately when he thrived.
And Martin in retrospect was positively blind – a civil young man with a good head on his shoulders. None of his reputable Christian family would ever fathom what he had done. A local newspaper would consequently publish many articles claiming that poor Martin had been brainwashed, hypnotized after falling at the hands of the dangerous criminal. But did he feel hypnotized? Well, perhaps … perhaps it was the good kind of hypnosis. The kind that makes you soar away into another world. Into a world where things are happening and people are moving. An ideal retreat where there are no rules, just actions and desires.

All that I could feel when I looked at them was the attraction to that idea of Sifiso and Martin. What if I could have it all? Could it be that my years of solitude and emptiness end with these two men, together, with me? When Sifiso made love to me, I felt my daddy who was never there, whose face I have never seen and whose name I will never call. His love was very hard, but I opened up to him and wanted him to do it even harder. To hurt me even, maybe I felt I deserved it. Sifiso went deep inside me and pulled at my very core. He vandalized me and knew exactly how to make me love it. But when Martin made love to me it was soft and gentle and lasted a lifetime. I would feel his hands in places I didn’t know could be touched, but he only went as deep as I let him. He spoke tenderly to me and I believe that I was even new to him … brand new.

When we went to work we cemented our bond. It’s as if stealing together made us family. We hardly ever had to depend on anyone else to get the job done and we delighted ourselves on it.

Sifiso was in charge of security (he had taken to murdering guards indiscriminately – if he had a clear shot, he would take it; no questions asked), break-in and look-out, Martin was in charge of alarm and surveillance immobilization and I was in charge of getting the loot. Sifiso had been a robber long before Martin and I had joined him, but we had done fifty-six robberies together. We had a system and it worked immaculately. There was never any bickering, we worked considerably professionally and everyone had an equal split. A lot has to be said for chemistry. It was the juice that fed our engine and we had tons of it.

Our entry point was on the second floor parking lot. We arrived at midnight and got straight to work. It was the biggest thing we’d ever done and we were all three of us equipped, but entirely unready. Nobody would bust us, surely, but it’s as if we knew, even then that this was not going to work.

“Whoo!” I heard from one of the tall glossy corridors of Westgate Mall. Martin and I both agreed that we should try and make as little noise as possible in the process of robbing a place like this. Although the place was completely dark and silent and the guards were sprawled dead around it, Sifiso was the only one who felt that we had been unobserved, claiming that he’d never gotten busted because of noise to which Martin rapidly replied, “Well, you got busted for something.” They then commenced with their hourly masculine fixture, this time an alcohol pouring battle.

“I got my baby a Savannah,” panted Sifiso after tiring of Martin’s attention. Impossible that it should be that simple. That an entire story should end with such an abrupt and un-poetic question.
“Oh, I’m not drinking …” I said realizing after I said it what had just happened.
“Ha-ha, not drinking? What are you pregnant?” He was laughing at first. “What are you, pregnant?” That laughter dwindled quickly.
“N .. No …” I stumbled feebly. He was scrutinizing me now, the way he does when he’s either about to hit me, or kiss me …
After a lengthy pause the roar started again and he lifted me into the air like a trophy and kissing me frantically on my bewildered parched lips. As he lets me go, he thrusts his fists violently into the air like someone who has just won something and turns around as if to hurriedly relay to his right hand the tentative news he has so obviously overheard.
“Martin …”
And Martin makes that vile error – the one thing I asked him not to do. I begged him, for his own sake. I said, ‘You don’t know him like I do. He doesn’t care. He’s not like you, Martin. Don’t tell him.’
“Yeah, man, I know!”
“You know?”
“Well, I mean she told me …”
“What he means is – ” I attempted sensing the peril Martin was in.
“Shut up, woman, I’m talking to my boy!” shouted Sifiso daring me to protest.
“Baby!” With that came the first blow, across my left jaw. It landed steadily and felt like a ton of steel ploughing my face. And the second blow to my eye, didn’t even see him coming. And then in his boorish naïveté Martin approaches with a helping hand.
“Get away from her S’fiso! For Christ’s sake the woman’s pregnant!”
“Tell me what to do with MY woman!”
And with a swift uncharacteristically resolute movement, Martin draws his gun and aims it at Sifiso. “Get away from her, man.” You can see he doesn’t want to draw, but has no idea what else to try. A sudden sound of sirens heightens the situation and everything is drenched in dreamy distress.
“ … the fuck? …” And as if by magic, Sifiso’s gun was now aimed at me. He was saying, there is no getting rid of me. This woman comes wherever I go.
“Man, what the fuck is this. She’s just pregnant,” pleads Martin.
“So you think you gonna just walk in here and fuck my woman, fuckin’ knock her up behind my back and get away with it?”
“Nah man, we didn’t … we didn’t –” Martin kept making the mistake of looking me in the eye and not Sifiso. And my eyes raced between the two men’s eyes, begging them to stop this game. But Sifiso’s eyes were blinded by a misled rage and Martin’s eyes were filled with panicked sorrow.
“This is my woman! You want me to prove to you what a pussy you are my friend?” BANG!

Sifiso turns his gun towards an astonished Martin Olsen and runs backwards to make his escape. A policeman speaks words that Martin cannot decipher over a loudspeaker and the police make their entry. As he makes the advance towards Thobile’s body, his mind is ringing with the irrefutable realization: The girl is dead.

Blame me for your insolence
It’s the only way you know
Fish me for your decadence
And let nobody know
We know the truth
Just you and I
We shared my youth
And birthed a lie
There may never be a man
As deep as I will seek
We both know no one can
Although they may be meek

You
I try to figure it out
I do
But there is no way around
It … it’s you
My scars, my sins and all that’s in-between
They’re not mine, they belong to you
And when I fuck and when I dare to scream
It stops at my skin, never seeping through
… it is you
In the crevices of youth
‘tween me and you

At times I feel like drifting
Defying all the laws
To a place that’s meant for sitting
Somewhere to take a pause

I think of all the lessons
My mother tried to teach
And all the haunted sermons
The preacher tried to preach

To say I’m a believer
Would surely be far-fetched
I kiss faith and I leave her
As often as I stretch

And when I love it’s sudden
I try to make it rough
And to that man or woman
It hardly seems enough

Discov’ries of maturity
Have left me dull and bleak
I found authentic purity
Is only for the meek

I wonder through the continents
Questioning their form
And everyone’s deportments
Beseech me to conform

I do not know a many things
It pains me to pretend
But going on my instincts
It all starts, then it ends

Considering my existence
And whether there’s a cause
The only thing of substance
Would be to take a pause

Today King Zwelihle chooses his queen. A horde of Zulu virgins stands in line and wait to be ‘examined’. Having been through many other ‘examinations’ like this one and a tough initiation, it’s nothing new, but the King views them today for the first time. The girls are nervous – you can tell. Some of them are smiling, some of them not, but all of them are nervous. You can just tell.

The door opens to let them in and out and shuts immediately after. The corridors are off bounce but if you’re a Zulu woman, you probably don’t want to be there anyways. We’ve all been there. The Zulu women, that is. Even though we all hate it to bits, it’s the most humiliating thing when you’re told not to return.

There are those of us who stand under the tent. The ones who failed the ‘examination’ (ukuhlolwa). The ones who fell pregnant and the ones who just fell. We have to chop the onions, clean the meat, brew the beer, and stir the pap. Some of us see it as a punishment and others are glad to pay their debt.

“Oh, I can see them! Can you? There they come!”

There in a line, they dance and chant for the King. For our beloved King Zwelihle. There are tourists, taking pictures of the girls. It excites Europeans to see semi-naked girls waiting to be taken or not taken. Like the girls are an exhibition, to be shot and taken home as a souvenir. They’re dancing to the songs the girls sing, they think this is a happy event for everyone. If only they knew what the girls are going through. If only they knew what the parents are going through. Everyone but the tourists is in some sort of inevitable agony. Those damn tourists! They’re so clueless! What are they good for? Why are they here?

“Heeleeleeleeleelee!” Ma Agnes yells. It’s a sort of African exclamation or appraisal. Poor Ma Agnes! Since Buhle was born, Ma Agnes has dreamed of this day. She would have loved for her daughter to be chosen as the new queen. It’s the greatest honour a Zulu woman can hope for. But today Buhle is with us – chopping onions. Who would have thought chopping onions could come with such shame? Ma Agnes yells for other women’s daughters but we all know that she’s in pain. She’s thinking: ‘If only my daughter weren’t such a whore.’ She’s hoping other people won’t think anything of it but they do – they have to. They feel so sorry for her. They’re thinking: ‘If only Buhle weren’t such a whore.’ They’re hoping she doesn’t think anything of it but she does. She can see it in their eyes. She’s thinking: ‘If only I weren’t such a whore.’

And so I look at her to show her that I’m here but she looks away because she doesn’t want to run into my arms and weep.

Ma Agnes yells louder, the other women join in. The girls chant and bow their heads … enter King Zwelihle. Oh, God! He looks … broken. His uncles whisper to him and he makes an effort to recover himself but … Zwelihle is … he’s broken. He tries to look as alive as he can but he was never a good liar.

The tourists are in a frenzy, there are cameras everywhere. King Zwelihle waves to his people and makes another attempt at enthusiasm but it’s no use. He’s broken.

He told me, a few nights ago that he would take his life. I know he would have had Buhle not put him under oath. Buhle – the one he would have taken as his wife, forcing him into wedlock with another. He love-hates her. He knows it’s his own fault but he blames her for it. After all, it’s what everybody else is doing. He’s on his high horse, surrounded by his kinsmen and he’s staring into the tent. Buhle won’t lift her head for him. Only the virgins are required to bow their heads, but Buhle isn’t bowing hers. She’s just not lifting it.

The tourists figure he’s keen for the food that’s being prepared in the tent. They share what they think are private glances among one another. Wondering how such an important leader should be so pre-occupied with kitchen business. They are comparing themselves to him, disregarding that they are civillians and he is a king. After all they are wealthier, they are more ‘civilised’ and they would never waste time loitering around the kitchen tent during such a pivotal event. ‘Is that really their king?’; ‘He doesn’t look at all like royalty to me!’; ‘He’s half naked!’;’How uneducated he must be!’; ‘How hungry…’ They consider these things, but they are certain the natives will not catch on. They are positively clueless!

Zwelihle is eighteen today. It seems like only yesterday that we were mere children. When we had no clue of life’s lessons and were in no danger hence. Wasn’t it just the other day when we played together on the red fields and had no clue of our destinies. Today we’re pathetic souls floating like somnambulists above this gravel we call life. And the tourists shoot on.

Buhle is sixteen. A sweet little thing. Not very popular among the other Zulus but sweet nonetheless. She’s quiet yet brave and bold. She has verve. Unlike Zweli and I, she won’t let anything break her. Her innocence is torture when you think of it in this light. One stupid mistake has cost her everything. Her whole life was built around this event and yet she stands there with her head buried in the ground, chopping onions.

Love is such a strange thing. It comes wrapped in white linen so that one can’t escape. And then when one has acquired the object, it departs with devastating consequences. There’s no reason why things turn out the way they do. Why love can cause so much hatred and provide no consolation. No one is perfect but love itself is perfect and we seldom stop with that realisation. Once you allow yourself to fall into love, another shade of it is revealed. It’s shades are never the same, this transformation can lead the lover into any direction. The magnetism is so very powerful. So devastatingly powerful.

The king lamented as the elders remarked about the maidens who pranced around before him. There was a momentous gala around the king, for the king and yet the king had no stock for any of it. He detested all the people there. His people. As far as he was concerned, they were as ignorant as the tourists. But most of all, he despised his father in whom he had trusted for abiding guidance. King Mduduzi had died during a feud with the Mguni tribe and left his son with the responsibility of being king. Zwelihle is king now. His father is dead and he must guide himself and his people. Everything is dismal in his eyes. His love for Buhle is unshakeable. He will marry whosoever is convenient but he will not stop loving Buhle who is in the tent. If he does not love her, he does not love at all. Here is something he cannot be king of - A love he cannot deny nor occupy. It is like a gravitational force attracting, yet repelling his conforming heart.

The festivities are deafening. He keeps his eyes to himself and attempts to block the world out but they harass him and urge him to make an effort. By and by, the king will make his pick and her family will celebrate and she will blush and he will sulk. The tourists will urge on and try to figure out what it is that’s eating the king. ‘Poor, poor savages. How can this improper youngster be their king?’

There we are – the lot of us – thinking: ‘I wish …’ But we all know, this is the bush. King Zwelihle may live in Natal but Prince Charming certainly does not. We’re there marked as the ‘unmarried non-virgins’ and we’re still foolish enough to think: ‘I wish …’ There are no fairytales in Natal. And no fairytales in the world that lend themselves to a bundi setting.

Since we’re born, we’re tagged – sexually. Ntombi – virgin, m’fazi – man’s woman, s’febe – whore. For us who’ve failed the virginity tests, we can’t help but feel bitter. There’s no other way. Why is there no test for men? Why does everyone have to know? And Buhle, I know, is the bitterest one of us all. How can she not be bitter? As I look at her sloping shoulders, I too can’t help but feel like she gave it all away. She gave it up. She knew what it was worth and yet she let love blind her.

The festivities are a loud business and news is always rushing in of which girl he’s looking at and who’s parent’s he’s talking to. She can’t ignore it. There’s no ignoring it.

Once! It only takes one time. Zwelihle knows that what they did that night cost them both dearly but he cannot imagine what it’s costing Buhle. King Zwelihle was in love and in lust, he had to have her and so she crumbled in the King’s arms.
Today King Zwelihle chooses his queen. Though Zwelihle knows who his true queen is. She could still be his queen today had his manhood not been so destructive.
“Buhle … it’s going to be okay,” I endeavour.
“No … no it’s not,” she clarifies.
She’s right. It’s not. The rightful queen is with child and the King is broken and the tourists are clueless. Nothing is okay?
I hold her hand and look over at the crowd. Sometimes it’s wrong to give up even when things seem bleaker than they should be, but it’s not wrong today. Screw the onions. They can chop their own onions.

Today is the day we have all been waiting for. King Zwelihle chooses his queen and evidently, the only happy people are the tourists. The clueless tourists come to take their pictures.

The women in the tent are shouting for us to come back but we’re walking on. They’ll have to do without us.
I can’t find the words to comfort my dear friend and in my effort to find the perfect words, all I can do is think of my own misfortune. And then she looks at me and smiles in a most terrifying manner, wipes the sweat off her face with her filthy apron and says casually, “You know, Tholi, they’re right …”
I look at her, waiting for a continuation. How can they possibly be right? You’re carrying his child and he’s choosing another spouse while you cook their food. How can they possibly be right? She stops walking, looks up to the sky and shields her eyes from the sun saying, “True love waits.”