Call and response, p.1
Call and Response, page 1
VIKING
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Copyright © 2023 by Gothataone Moeng
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These stories were previously published in slightly different form in the following: “Botalaote” as “Botalaote Hill” (Oxford American, 2017); “A Good Girl” (American Short Fiction, 2021); “Small Wonders” (One Story, 2020); “Bodies” (A Public Space, 2017); “Homing” (Virginia Quarterly Review, 2022); “When Mrs. Kennekae Dreamt of Snakes” (Ploughshares, 2022).
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Moeng, Gothataone, author.
Title: Call and response: stories / Gothataone Moeng.
Description: [New York]: Viking, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022016236 (print) | LCCN 2022016237 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593490983 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593490990 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PR9408.B683 M63 2023 (print) | LCC PR9408.B683 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20220520
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016236
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016237
Cover design and watercolor art: Lynn Buckley
Cover images: Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images
Designed by Amanda Dewey, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother Ntlale Refakae, and to my mother, Teko Botshameko Moeng
In my world people plan for themselves and dictate their requirements to me. It is a world full of love, tenderness, happiness and laughter. From it I have developed a love and reverence for people. I foresee a day when I will steal the title of God, the unseen Being in the sky, and offer it to mankind. From then onwards, people, as they pass each other in the street each day, will turn to each other and say: “Good morning, God.”
—Bessie Head, “Why Do I Write?”
We complained to our parents, “We never go anywhere!” and they replied, astonished, “Where do you want to go, you’ve got all you need right here!”
—Annie Ernaux, The Years, translated by Alison L. Strayer
CONTENTS
BOTALAOTE
A GOOD GIRL
SMALL WONDERS
DARK MATTER
BODIES
HOMING
WHEN MRS. KENNEKAE DREAMT OF SNAKES
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
THE FIRST VIRGINITY OF GIGI KAISARA
Acknowledgments
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Botalaote
In the morning, woken by the two gunshots, I heard the rising flurry of ululations that followed and knew immediately that I would go to the wedding, no matter what my mother said or did. I understood that the two cows to be slaughtered for the feast had collapsed upon the swirling red dust, that an old man would be stalking toward them to plunge a knife into the quivering warmth of their necks, that soon the whole yard, only five compounds away, would be swarming with joyous people. My friends would be there, and I wanted to be there too.
In my cousin Tebogo’s room, which I shared, I lay in my bed, listening to my mother’s feet thumping up and down the passage, forcing the whole household awake. Doors slammed in her wake. In the kitchen, dishes clattered, hot cooking oil splattered, and the aroma of frying potatoes rose. In the bathroom, where my parents conversed, water streamed into the plastic tub my mother used for the patient’s bath, her voice weary and my father’s distorted by the toothpaste foaming his mouth. Water slapped at the sides of the tub as Mama lugged it into the patient’s room—formerly mine—on the other side of the wall I was tapping my foot against. As I did every morning, I imagined I could smell the Dettol disinfectant Mama eddied into the water with her fingers; I imagined the steam fogging up the mirror I had bought for myself and stuck up on the wall, warping my books and posters, my photos and my magazines.
I did not want to think about my mother’s hands bathing the patient—her sister, my aunt—so I thought about the wedding. I knew that the men would be draining the cows of their gushing blood, peeling off the skins to reveal the fatty meat underneath, slicing the bellies open and offering up enamel bowls to receive the tumble of glistening intestines. I knew that the men would be kicking away the intrepid dogs slinking toward the meat and at the same time playfully jostling with the women about which cuts would go to the men for the seswaa and which to the women for the beef stew. I knew that a congregation of aproned women would already be working at the fire at the back of the yard, boiling beetroots and potatoes, peeling and slicing and cubing cabbages and carrots for the salads for the coming crowds. I knew that the women would soon break into their songs, celebratory and caustic—The cakes are delicious, but marriage is difficult; we are leaving, you stay and see for yourself—and that they would dance and ululate and whirl around the bride—Come out, come out, come and see, this child is as beautiful as a Coloured—as she walked on the carpet, which had been laid out so her white dress would not touch the red dust of the yard. I knew that almost all the people in our ward, Botalaote, would be at the wedding, everybody except the very old, the new mothers, the newly grieving, and the sick.
It was three weeks since Tebogo and I had finished our form two exams and a month since the patient had been brought home from the hospital. After completing my exams in October, I dreamt of doing things, of going away while my mother and father were at work, of visiting my friends in their wards and wasting the luxury of the day with our talks about boys and such. But since the patient had arrived, it seemed my mother did not even want me to leave the house.
In my and Tebogo’s room, I stayed in bed listening to my father complain about how much time my mother was taking, about Mma-Boikanyo, the day has begun, about Mma-Boikanyo, what will people say?, about Mma-Boikanyo, people will think we are scared of work. Mama was a big woman, with a lot of energy and a miraculous capacity to complete half of her daily chores before the rest of the household awoke. Before the patient came into our house, when Mama woke Tebogo and me up at five thirty a.m.—talking her old stories about a woman needing to be up before the sun—she would already have a pot of soft porridge and a kettle of Five Roses on the stove. On weekends, she left early for funerals, and often by the time Tebogo and I awoke she would be back, her shoes kicked off, sighing over her tea, poring over the funeral program, an addition to the pile she kept in her bedroom. Before, she was just like the other mothers. She shouted orders and called instructions for chores. But since the patient had been brought to stay with us, Mama was different. She still rose early, but sometimes she would put on a pot of water and forget to switch the stove on. Sometimes she forgot the name of the woman she had hired to take care of the patient during weekdays. Sometimes she called home from the furniture shop she worked for and forgot why she had called, or called home when really she wanted to call the district council office to talk to my father. On weekends, when she had to go for a funeral or a wedding, she came into our room, apologetic and full of bribery. I knew she would soon come.
Mama knocked and opened the door.
“Banyana,” she called softly. Tebogo started snoring, the sound seesawing, seesawing, and I wanted to laugh. I kept my face to the wall and my eyes closed.
“Girls,” Mama said again, her voice invading the room. “Are you awake?”
My bed sunk under her weight as she sat down.
“Boikanyo,” she called my name. I turned around. I opened my eyes. I yawned and stretched my body.
“Dumelang,” I greeted her. Mama looked all fancy in the dress made from the blue German-print fabric that the married women had chosen as their uniform for the wedding, but her hair was still covered by the brown stockings she wore to protect it overnight. The skin on her forehead was raised and pulled back, so I knew her cornrows were tight and still painful. She reached her hand out to touch my shoulder.
“I am up,” I said before she could touch me, and sat up on the bed.
“I made you some fresh chips,” she said.
I folded my arms and leaned against the headboard, shivering as its coldness startled the small of my back.
“I put a bit of brown vinegar on them,” she said. “Just the way you like. And some chilies.”
My mouth watered at the thought of the chips, cut in thick chunks, heaped in a bowl, vinegar-drizzled, speckled with red chili flakes.
“Mma-Boikanyo,” Papa called from outside the door, “please, woman.”
My mother turned her head to the door. “Everybody knows we have a patient, Rraagwe-Boikanyo.” She turned back and smiled at me.
“Ao Mama mma,” I said, “I also want to go to the wedding.”
She had said this to me before, on a day I wanted to get my hair braided. I considered bringing that up, but, though Mama had changed, I was not yet sure of how much back talk she would tolerate without an instinctive back-of-the-hand slap, without calling in the reinforcement of my father. I had never minded obeying my mother, doing everything she wanted—sweeping the yard, cleaning the house, making tea, watering the peach and mango trees, doing my own laundry, going to the store for fatcakes and paraffin and meat—but since the patient had come, all the buying of forgotten necessities went to Tebogo. It was her pocket now that jingled with change from trips to the shops. She returned popping gum, her pockets full of toffees, and, always, she would toss just one toffee and one piece of chewing gum my way.
“Okay,” I said. “But Tebogo can’t go either.”
“It is you your aunt needs,” Mama said. “Now, come on, get up, what kind of woman are you if the sun finds you in bed?”
I got up and watched Mama and Papa leave. Mama switched the stockings on her hair for a headscarf. An apron hid the pleats in the skirt of her dress. Under her arm she carried the pale yellow enamel bowl that she used at every such function; she had her initials—DB—written on the bottom in brown paint. My father, in his dark green overalls and a wide-brimmed khaki hat, looked different than when he went to work. He looked like he was going to dig a ditch.
I went into the kitchen. I uncovered the bowl of chips on the table. I took one and bit into it. The potato was only half-cooked, so I spat it out.
* * *
—
Outside, the sky was a vast blue dome, steadfast and distant, enshrouding the whole ward, the whole village. Tendrils of white clouds trailed on the sky’s surface. The air was already dry, so I knew it was going to be another hot day. From Mma-Tumo’s yard several compounds away, where the wedding was being held, the intermittent sounds of car hooters and ululations taunted me. Standing on my tiptoes on our veranda, I could see the green top of the tent where the bridal party would sit to be ogled by everyone. I wanted to see the multicolored balloons that I knew would be strung all around the entrance.
I went to my old room, the patient’s room, and cracked open the door. It was November, yet she lay on her mattress on the floor—asleep?—under a sheet and a blanket. Above the blanket, her head poked out. What used to be a full head of hair was now just dust-brown and reddish fibers. She was on her side, facing the wall. Sometimes we lay face-to-face, I realized, with only the wall coming between us. I shut the door and went into the bathroom.
When I walked back into our bedroom from the shower, Tebogo kicked the cover off her body. She stretched and yawned loudly, wide-opening her mouth. I applied lotion to my body in silence and put on my favorite yellow sundress with the spaghetti straps.
“What are you getting dressed up for?” Tebogo asked.
“Mama said you have to stay home,” I told her, “to help with the patient.”
“You are lying,” Tebogo said. “She didn’t.”
“Yes, she did.”
“I wasn’t sleeping, ngwanyana, I heard her.”
“You have to help me,” I said. “Papa said.”
“She is your aunt, not mine.”
Tebogo was the only daughter of my father’s only sister. When her mother found a job in Mahalapye, Tebogo stayed in Serowe with us because her mother lived in a one-room house in a yard full of other one-room houses. We were both fifteen and had only a two-week age difference. I was the older. When we were younger, our mothers would dress us in the same sets of clothes, differing only in color, and in primary school we told everyone that we were twins. We looked too different, though—I was all dark, all skinny, all gangly. She was shades lighter than me, but not light-light, not yellow-light. She was on the girls’ football team and had huge muscles in her legs. Whenever she came from football practice she would eat a pile of phaletshe—whether there was beef stew or morogo or not.
“Mama made me some chips,” I said. “You can’t eat them unless you help me.”
“In my own uncle’s house?” she said. “You won’t give me food in my uncle’s house?”
“Mama made them for me.”
We raced to the kitchen. I got there first and held the bowl of chips high above my head.
“Okay,” she said. “Fine. I will help.”
We put the chips back into the pot, which was full of oil, and switched the stove back on. Then we sat at the kitchen table eating the chips with slices of bread, washing them down with cups of tea. Tebogo speculated about what the bridal party was wearing and in the same breath said they were probably not as well dressed as the one she had seen at a wedding in Mahalapye. The previous year, her mother had taken her off Mama’s hands for two weeks during the second-term break. Since then, nothing in Serowe was ever as good as anything in Mahalapye. The town was only two hours away, but Tebogo acted as if she had been all the way to Gaborone, or even to Johannesburg. She explained everything on the television and tried to convince me that she had learned new dances up there.
“Ao mma,” I said. “Still talking about that wedding?”
“I am telling you,” she said. “That bride was beautiful, and the bridesmaids, wena, heish, and the men. I am telling you. Even you, you would say so if you had been there.”
The wedding sounds followed us into the kitchen: Brenda Fassie songs and, just before noon, a cacophony of car hooters and a swelling of ululations.
“They must be arriving from the church,” Tebogo said. We ran outside, she still in the shorts and T-shirt she wore to bed. Cars inched past our yard, balloons blooming all over their windscreens and their side mirrors. Tebogo ran out through the gate, alongside the cars, without even bathing first or anything.
“You smell!” I yelled at her. My stomach clenched and my chest ached with the frustration of not being there. I sat on the veranda, shouting greetings at all the people who walked past our yard.
I went in to check on the patient. She seemed asleep. My Boom Shaka and Arthur Mafokate posters were still on the wall. I removed a plastic bag with two rolls of toilet paper in it from the magazines I kept stacked by my wardrobe. I wrinkled my nose against the smells of the room: the Dettol disinfectant, the damp towels, the stale urine, the adult diapers. A half-finished bowl of soft porridge and milk sat on a side table far from her, jostling for space against the giant bottle of Dettol and a roll of cotton wool. Her breaths were loud and ragged, taking so much effort that the blankets rose and fell with each one. Sometimes the breaths ended in moans. Her cheeks were so sunken it looked like she was perpetually sucking at a mint hidden in her mouth. Sometimes when I went into the room, she tried to talk to me. I could not look at her then. Her speech, interrupted by coughing, trailed wisp-thin and low, required me to lean in, to look at her disgraced and hideous face. It made me angry, that she required this of me, as if she were still my aunt Lydia.
Before she was the patient, my aunt Lydia never looked like this, pitiful and vulnerable as though she were a newly hatched chicken. Before, she had her own car. A Corolla that she took on drives from Orapa, where she lived, to Pilikwe to see her and Mama’s parents, and then, always, to Serowe to come see Mama. Whenever she came to visit, she would share my room and my bed. At night, I fell asleep to her stories about her and Mama’s life when they were younger, way before every household had a landline, about the boys who made bird sounds behind the house as a signal to the girls to come outside. Mama spent a lot of time in the room with us, for Lydia was good with hair. She would often plait Mama’s hair first, then mine and Tebogo’s. Lydia sat on my bed, and Mama sat on the floor between her legs. They fought over the mirror the way they must have done when they were younger. When Lydia did my hair, she would turn me around so I could face her.
“Look at you,” she would say. “You are so beautiful, you are going to give these boys some trouble.”
