Nomvula

45. Mother

Asanda rubbed her eye as she walked into the kitchen. A glowing oven warmed the chilly air with the spicy scent of applewood logs. The windows behind the five other ovens were misted on the inside, making the stars beyond soft blurs of light against a dark sky. With a good two hours before dawn, the manse was as quiet as it would ever be, and there was only the soft crackle of spitting logs under the chorus of night breezes and cricket chirps. And the clack of a wooden mixing bowl against a stone table.

Asanda hugged her night shawl tighter as she waited for the kitchen's warmth to sink under her skin. "What are you making?"

Her mother didn't look up from her mixing bowl. There was powder up to her forearm and a fixed look of concentration on her face that suggested she had not slept at all during the night. That, and the fact that she was still in yesterday's clothes.

"Just bread." Ma put her whole shoulder into mixing a massive knob of dough. She frowned. "I need more oil."

"Goldflower or flaxseed?"

"Olive."

Asanda found an extra bottle in the corner pantry and set it down next to the mixing bowl. She sat down opposite her mother and tried not to startle at her bloodshot eyes. Girls liked to say Khaya looked like his mother; it was as high a compliment as they could pay him without being overly forward. They were built alike too, mid-height and stocky but not graceless. If Qaqamba's supposed wisdom held true, Ma's best traits were Khaya's birthright. And her worst...

"Anathi said you wanted to talk to me," Asanda said.

"I do."

"About the mission?"

Ma scraped her dough-thickened fingers against the bowl's rim and uncapped the bottle of oil. "About whatever you want to talk about, for a change."

Asanda frowned, then rubbed her mouth smooth. Ma was too good at reading faces for Asanda to ever be comfortable being expressive with her own, though Ma looked singularly focused on her bowl of half-mixed dough. Not that it counted for anything. Her mother so rarely spoke without an agenda, and despite the warmth of the kitchen and the mellow night sounds creeping through the open windows -- or perhaps because of these things -- she was certain of an agenda here.

"I don't understand, Ma."

Nomvula's smile was halfway formed before it snuffed itself out. "What happened in the last conversation we had?"

Asanda squirmed on the bench. "You asked me to plan a double kidnapping."

"And the one before that?"

"You asked me to carry your soul for an afternoon."

"And before that?"

"You asked me to save the life of a man with a green-tier poison in his broken leg."

Ma froze. She stared at her fist buried in the dough, then she sighed, then she kept kneading. "Ask something of me."

"That's not how it works, Ma."

"I know that," her mother said. "If things worked how they were supposed to, my biggest concern right now would be finding someone to organise Khaya's rite of passage, or debating whether Lukhaya would make a suitable wife for him, or if marriage would disrupt his non-womanly longings."

"You know about him and Athi?" Asanda asked, startled.

Ma shot her an irritated look. Of course she knew.

"So ask, Asi, because on the eve of my most dangerous request, I've nought to offer you but answers."

Asanda rested her brow against her forearms on the table. "Ma, I'm too tired to work out your games tonight. Anyone who asks someone to ask them a question already has an answer they're dying to give. Let's start there."

There was a long silence that was barely filled by the crickets and the clack of the bowl. Asanda looked up just as her mother started sprinkling flour on the table top. 

She's not going to make this easy, even on herself. "Confess, old woman. What's on your mind?"

Ma rolled the dough onto the table. "Did you know that you aren't my first child?"

Asanda said nothing. Oh, she had plenty of things to say, but it did not do to thrust a sword when you were grossly off balance, or to open your mouth when you weren't sure words would come out.

"I would have named her Nomvula," Ma went on. She smiled, or rather, her cheeks pulled her lips. The rest of her face did not shift. "My father hated that I'd gotten a child out of a common man from my own village. One day, I told him the child's name out of spite. The child died, because sometimes children do. When your father wed me and I had to take on a new marriage name, my father gave me Nomvula out of that same spite."

"Ma..."

Her mother kneaded the dough with a slow, even hand. "I was your age when I experienced stillbirth, and only a year older when I wed because it was what my father demanded of me. Demanded and never asked if I wanted anything in return. More for my sake than yours, ask for something. Please."

"I don't need anything, Ma."

"Of course you do. You need a mother that won't introduce you to traumas that would break lesser children. You need a brother not fearing for his life and a brother not looking to you to make everything better."

"You can't give me any of that."

"So what can I give you?" Ma asked. Her kneading was a little harder than it needed to be. "If not peace of mind from your mother -- the bare minimum -- what can I possibly give you?"

"Promise me that if Khaya and I do this one thing for you, if we succeed, it all ends."

Asanda expected an immediate answer. She was glad she didn't get one, because it meant Ma seriously considered her request. But Ma, in her own Nomvulaness, answered with a question.

"If your hair ever grew back, would you ever consider holding onto another soul other than your own?"

Even without trying, Asanda could sense her mother's twin souls. There was the large, dark one that sat in the middle of her liver, perfectly still and heavy. Then there was the one just above it, less than a quarter of the other's size.

"The hair is only a bridge, Ma. Even without it, I could carry another soul -- I just would never be able to return it -- even if my hair grew back."

"Would you ever take my soul again?"

Unlike her mother, this was a question Asanda didn't have to contemplate. "No. I never want that part of you as a part of me again." 

Could she help it? A son who imitates his father picks up his bad habits first, Qaqamba had said. A daughter and her mother are the same.

"No, Ma, not ever again. I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Her mother rolled the dough back into the bowl and began lathering it with olive oil. "It's time for you to become your own woman, Asanda."

"I know that."

This time, Ma's smile was genuine. It still didn't last as long as it should have. "Of course you do. Go to bed. You've a big task ahead of you."

Asanda stood, thought about giving her mother a hig, thought against it. There was still a little rawness there, a bruise that hadn't quite faded. 

"Good luck with your discussions with the elders," Asanda said instead.

Her mother sighed. "Good luck with your discussions with Ndlovu. And yes, I promise."

"Promise what?"

Ma rubbed her red eyes with the back of her fist. "Do this one last thing, Asi, and I'll make sure that this whole ordeal is done with once and for all."

"If you say so, Ma."

"I do." She frowned at her dough again, then pushed the bowl aside. "I do."