Читать книгу Counting the Coffins - Diale Tlholwe - Страница 5

It begins.

It should not have been such a beautiful morning. The new sun should not have been shining with such promise or the spring breeze blowing with such freshness and the greenery sighing so sweetly. In fact, none of what was happening should have been happening.

It should have been cold, dark and gloomy. It should have poured slanting sheets of rain and hard hailstones. The wind should have been demented and howling bitter curses. Memorial stones vast and small should have been bowed in pensive melancholy. Instead . . . instead . . . they were the same as they had always been. Our little cortège meant nothing to them. They followed and obeyed the seasons and the hands that had crafted them with unfailing loyalty and constancy.

It should not be happening. Yet all of it was happening, here in this graveyard, with its well-tended graves and swept pathways between them. Long-forgotten monuments not far off watched sardonically as we unveiled our own, pledging never to forget the small, cold relic lying six feet below.

The mother had screamed and threatened suicide if she was not allowed to come to bid her child farewell. I had pleaded and argued to no avail, until the doctors had once again sedated her when they saw that I was losing my resolve.

I turned the scene over and was perplexed by my distance from it all – my separation from the others who were making these noises of grief and consolation. I saw them, heard them but could not understand them. Finally, I could not bear to look or listen, so I sidled to the back.

A tall female soloist dressed in severe black and caught in the balmy atmosphere of this warm late-spring morning struck a poignant yet jazzy tune about children at play, happy children forever at play . . .

“Lebelela hodimo, dinonyana di bapala hamonate – Look upwards, and see all the birds in joyous play,” she sang.

The treetops, the wind, the clouds and the sun – all at play with little baby Morena amidst them, at the very centre and happy heart of things. For a moment something cold and hidden gingerly unclenched and thawed inside me.

It was soon all over and done with and I was shaking hands, patting the backs of some and deflecting the hugs of others. The lacerating anguish had settled into a dull ache that now sought only privacy.

We then all turned away and walked to our different cars to re-enter the frantic fray and turmoil of our separate lives, leaving the serene dead to their eternal dreams. What had brought us together was now history for most. Except for a few of us, who were walking into lifelong waking nightmares – those few of us who refuse to forget, because forgetting is also abandoning.