Old man have long been preying on young girls in rural areas and small towns. Mafikeng is no exception. Although its not a rural area, neither is it a small town, the trend persists. They raise these girls and then take them to bed as soon as they are old enough. Sometimes, they are not even old enough. But no one says anything. No one is ever accused of raping a young girl. Maybe they see it as a necessary step in a young girls education. When the young men have gone to work, the old remain to educate the girls.
When Tumelo met Keneilwe, all he saw was a woman with sad eyes. He was used to sadness. He was good at recognizing it in other people because his heart was also filled with it. The sadness and loneliness accumulated through the years. There was nothing unusual about sadness in a woman. Most women lived with sadness for most of their lives. This world was not made for the happiness of a woman. This world was not made for happiness at all. But Keneilwe tried hard to hide her sadness. Yet it showed in each of her expressions. It was there when she laughed with her tongue hanging out. When she talked loudly to people standing next to her. When she made jokes and commented about how silly her jokes were, so that no ones else would point it out to her. Mostly it was there in her silent moments. In the way she looked at him when they lay in bed together. There was this pleading in her eyes. Silently asking him not to hurt her like all the men in her life had done.
The first time they slept together, Tumelo was invaded by a rush of emotion. It went through his whole body infecting every particle of his being. He had never felt something so overwhelming before. His own lifetime of accumulated sadness seemed insignificant in comparison. After Keneilwe had left, Tumelo closed the doors and went to the bedroom. He broke down on the bedroom floor, crying for what seemed like an eternity. His sobs where like painful blows to his body, they ripped through him, tearing him into pieces. He was rendered helpless by the pain of another human being. By the time the sobs subsided he was exhausted, and a bit embarrassed that he had allowed himself to cry like that, even though no one saw him, the universe was witness to his weakness. He got on the the bed and slept. A deep dream-less sleep. Thinking how strong a person has to be to live with such pain each day of their lives.
“You have been through a lot havent you?” said Tumelo when he saw her next
“What do you mean?” she says, looking at him with an inquisitive smile. The smile that hid nothing.
They were sitting on a couch in her mothers house. The mother who died when she was still a child. Leaving her to raise her siblings alone. They were grown now, the siblings. Two men who now had lives of their own, and never came to visit. It was now her house, hers and her three children, whose fathers all disappeared after the children had been born. The sound of the television was muted, and Tumelo sat some distance away from her, afraid to be too close. He didn’t want to feel her pain anymore. He knew he couldn’t handle it. He needed everything to be out in the open. If her experiences were expressed verbally, he would not have to keep feeling it each time he was intimate with her.
“I felt it, all your pain you know, yesterday after you left I broke down because of it.”
“What are you talking about?” he could see from the expression in her eyes that she knew exactly what he was talking about. She was trying to understand how exactly he could ‘feel’ any of it. “Baby?” alarm grew in her when he moved further away from her when she tried to touch him. “What’s going on?”
He moved to her now. Drawn by the fear in her eyes. Her gave her a light kiss on the mouth, a little brush on the forehead. He squeezed her body to his own, as if he wanted to merge himself to her, and form a single body. He looked her in the eyes and was struck by how beautiful she was, in this her vulnerable moment. He wondered why beauty was so often born in suffering.
“I’m scared.” she said “You scare me. We have just met and, I don’t know what is going on between us. This thing between us is crazy. And now it seems, you know things about me, and I have not told you anything.”
It comes to him, the possibility that he had to travel half way across the country to meet the woman that God had made for him. He never imagined that she would be five years older than him, with three children, and with a past that has thought her to be distrustful of men, although it was not in her nature to be distrustful. He could imagine her when she was a child. Happy in the knowledge that nothing in the world can hurt her. She woke up each morning and gave the world her innocent smile. The adults in her world posed no threat. They drank a lot and said foul things to each other all the time, but they did that out of love for each other. There was no malice in anything they did. She never once imagined that these men who gave her so much attention, would one day be the source of so much of her pain, so much of her suffering.
“I never thought that I would ever love another man in my life ever again.” she said.
She once bought a man into her house, and allowed him to live with her her and her children. Tall and handsome he was. Strong hands that promised to protect her. And he wanted her to carry his blood in her womb.
“I can’t have children anymore.” she told the man “I removed my womb after the last child was born.”
His attitude changed after that, not explicitly, but implicitly. Yet she could still see. She saw when his eyes lingered on her sixteen year old daughter. But eyes have a way of doing that, unbidden. She refused to believe that this man she loved and trusted enough to give a key to her house, and a key to her heart, would one day act on his unnatural lust. Guilt comes from things foresaw and ignored.
A fragile hope, that the world, and the people in it, are not as bad as we imagine. The people in her life, she hoped, would protect her from the evil out there. But they didn’t. She knew though, when she found her boyfriend on top of her daughter, that evil was already within her own four walls.
It had been going on for weeks. And that final realization of the truth tore her apart.
When Tumelo saw Keneilwe for the first time he felt an uneasiness. Like the feeling you get when you know you have forgotten something but you don’t know what. There was nothing about Keneilwe that should have made him notice her, except the very ordinariness of her. Her lack of makeup, the ashy face that made her look as if she had not had a bath for some time, the clothes with dirt stains all over, like she was a child who had just come from playing in the dirt with her friends. Perhaps that is where the uneasiness came from. There are women who seem like they have given up on life, and the only thing that keeps them alive is their lack of courage in taking their own lives. They walk around as if they have nothing to lose, they spend their days at the tavern, looking for a man to buy them alcohol, they neglect their children. They are ostentatiously loud. But their eyes reveal a struggle that would bring down most men. She had an easy smile and made others laugh. But there was an echo to her own laugh, going deeper into cold and dark caves.
In recalling this Impression, at a later time, he would also recall the impression that her vagina made on him, not the sensation of it but the look of it, the perfection of it, the beauty that lay in the barely perceptible folds of her womanhood.
They had just taken a bath together, lying naked on his bed, and he was rubbing lotion on her legs. And invariably, his hands went between her legs.
“You said you wanted to see it, now is your chance.” she said, opening her legs for his explorations.
Earlier on, he had traced the scar that ran across the base of her belly, and she had to explain that all three of her children were delivered through caesarian
“The operation is very painful” she had said, making him imagine that they had cut through her without any anaesthetic at all “afterwards, when the injection wears off.” like a woman who had avoided the pain of childbirth. He would come to understand too, that childbirth, being a temporary pain, would have been much easier to endure than the pain that carries on constantly, present when you wake up in the morning, present when you go to sleep at night. The pain of her being went beyond the physical.
But at that time, when he saw her for that first time, he knew nothing about her pussy, her body, her scars, her pain, except the fact that seeing her felt like seeing a dear old friend whose existence he had completely forgotten about. Perhaps it was the shame of that which drew him to her, the need to make it up to her, a kind of apology for forgetting her, for not coming to her sooner, for the fact that she had to live so much of her life without him.
“All your children should have been mine.” he would later tell her. But none of her children would ever be his. After the last one was born she removed her womb.
Tebogo was a dangerous looking man, and it was easy to guess what he did for a living. Especially since Mafikeng had a reputation for criminality and gangsterism. He had passed by the house a few times, and was generous enough to greet Tumelo as he passed. But Tumelo knew that he would not want to be friends with a guy like that. It was all in the eyes. The cold stare, perhaps. The eyes that have seen too much. All the things he had done reflected in them. It was not in the way he acted, he spoke softly and mostly with a smile. He did not go around stabbing people in the streets, he did not pick fights in taverns, but everyone feared him, respected him, the old and the young deferred to him. He was in his late twenties but his smooth skin made him look much younger.
It was on a public holiday, it does not really matter which because none of them meant anything to Tumelo. He was alone, and drinking a bottle of four cousins wine. When the wine was finished, he felt like a beer, so he went out to get some. A decision he would not have made if he was still sober. When he got there he found only two people at the tavern. A strange thing for a public holiday but he did not want to question it. One of those people was Tebogo, and the other happened to be Keneilwe. They were sitting together, huddled conspiratorially over the table, a single beer between them. So he bought two beers and put it between them. Again, a decision he would not have made if he was not drinking earlier. Keneilwe was surprised, a bit unsure of what to do. Tebogo accepted the beers, and invited him to sit down, smiling knowingly, as if he already knew the destiny of the two people now sitting with him. Perhaps he already knew. It was he who informed Keneilwe that Tumelo was in love with her, even before Tumelo knew it himself. He would have said it was lust. The alcohol playing a disproportionately large part in the whole affair. It was a strange night. Where he found himself making a friend with someone he never thought he ever would, and falling in love with a woman he never intended falling in love with. At the end of the night they found themselves at his house, the three of them, after the tavern had closed.
“I’m cold.” Keneilwe had said.
“I don’t have a heater where I stay, and we will probably find the gate locked anyway.” said Tebogo.
“I have one.” said Tumelo.
And that is how they ended up in his bedroom, the heater taken out but not plugged in because the bedroom was warm. They were drunk and there was more alcohol to be had, since they had bought some before the tavern closed. Occasionally they would dance, Keneilwe doing most of the dancing, while protesting all the time that she could not dance at all. But she danced quite well, provocatively in fact, and Tumelo watched her intently, anxious that no one should see the raging erection which tortured him.
“You know I have never drank with guys like you.” Keneilwe said “I mean I feel safe with you guys.I feel that I can be free without worrying that afterwards you will want something from me.”
“You know you don’t have to worry about anything when I’m around.” said Tebogo. And Tumelo agreed, although the erection in his pants seemed to say otherwise.
Later on, when Tebogo had left; Tumelo offered to accompany her home. And that was when he proposed his love to her. She was surprised by it. Surprised that someone should say such words to her.
“Your friend told me how you felt about me, but I didn’t believe it, I mean…”
“How did he even know, I mean I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Are you sure, how did he know then?” she said, stopping to smile at him and look him in the eyes, perhaps to see if he was lying.
“One of those people who are extremely intuitive I suppose.” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“Intuitive?”
“Oh.”
They would discuss that word often. Intuition and empathy. The ability to see and to feel what others see and feel. To get inside the skin of other people,especially those closest to you. It freaked her out that he too was intuitive, he too had the empathy to get under her skin and see what she had seen, feel what she had felt, so much so that he would break down over it. At the time it didn’t worry him that she knew nothing of the word. But over time it would grow on him, her simple lack of intellect. At time it seemed she had nothing more to offer than her body. But he knew that was not true. She was opening up parts of himself that had lain dormant for a long time, she was reflecting him back to himself, and he didn’t know how she did it. There were unexplored parts of her soul which fascinated him, and he felt that he could probably spend the rest of his life exploring them.
Her soul, whatever that meant. He thought often about the story of the little soul from the book Conversations with God, about how the little soul wanted to experience forgiveness.
“There is nothing to forgive.” God says “All is love, therefore there is nothing that anyone can do that you would need to forgive them for.”
But the little soul was insistant, he wanted to know what it meant to forgive experientially. So an older soul comes along and offers to help.
“In your next life,” the old soul says “I will come into your life and do terrible things to you. I only ask one thing from you, that while I am doing these things, that you will remember who I am.”
That you will remember who I am. He thought, so much of the people he had met in his life, he had forgotten who they were. He had forgotten who Keneilwe was. And he suspected that this was the woman he had made a pact with before he was born. He hoped that it was a pact of love, a pact of healing after all that had happened. But, increasingly, he feared that it was a pact of pain, to add onto the pain that she had already experienced. If it was the latter, he hoped that she would remember who he was, even if he had forgotten himself. Perhaps she would help him to remember, and also remember who she is, and bring them to a full understanding of why the two of them had to meet, and will probably keep on meeting, for a very long time to come.