The Hum of the Sun

By Kirsten Miller

After burying their sister and mother, two brothers embark on a journey to the city in search of their only remaining family. On the brink of manhood, Ash must protect eight-year-old Zuko, who does not speak, his words stuck somewhere between his thoughts and his mouth. But Zuko, enchanted by nature and the rhythms of walking, seems more interested in the patterns he sees in the clouds, the stones, and the arc of the light, than in when their journey will end. When Ash finally realises who he is – and who he is not – he must make his first authentic choice as an independent being. But can he offer his brother the same freedom, the same choices, in the face of those who have already mapped out Zuko’s future? Beautifully written, this is a poignant, big-hearted story that is sure to linger in the reader’s mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Apr 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795708350

Kirsten Miller

Kirsten Miller is the author of All is Fish, shortlisted for the EU Literary Award, Sister Moon, and The Hum of the Sun, winner of the Wilbur and Nino Smith Foundation’s Prize for Best Unpublished Manuscript. Her non-fiction book, Children on the Bridge, on working in the field of autism was longlisted for the Alan Paton Award. She lives in Durban.

Book preview

KIRSTEN MILLER

The

Hum

of the

Sun

Kwela Books

I

1.

Within dreams we awaken, and in our waking we dream. Zuko dreamed of singing, but when he opened his mouth there was no sound. He moved his lips. He made shapes that might have formed words, but the utterances that emerged were soft, too guttural, and more like a warble from the throat of a thrush than any song an eight-year-old boy might sing.

Because his mouth wouldn’t move in the way he wanted it to, he took the plate at his elbow and tipped it onto the cold stone floor. The crash sounded, a satisfying smash. A sound that seemed to say, I am here, I am in the world, I have something to express, something that might be a song, if only I could sing.

His capable sounds were reduced to this: the plate, the crash. Enough to summon his mother, Yanela, and bring her running in a way his voice never could.

Yanela hesitated in the doorway as though she might change her mind about the broken crockery and the breakfast and the boy who sat at the table with the voice that wouldn’t work. A beam of sun lay on Zuko’s arm like a blanket. The warmth emitted a frequency like a sound. His lips pressed together: Mmmm.

Zuko.

If it were possible to utter her name too, he would. Mmmama. Mama. How many times had he tried? How many times had she held his face inches away from her own, her lips softly expropriating that sound, urging him to repeat it? Mmma-Mma. Ma. Ma. Eight years al­ready. He was never more certain than now of his own inadequacies. The biggest yet: his inability to call his own mother by the name that sealed their bond.

Zuko! Ash appeared at the door, summoned by the splintering sound. Shit, he said.

Don’t use that language in front of your brother, Yanela said. Here, help me to clean it up.

"He should do it. He broke the plate."

He doesn’t have any shoes on. Please, just get the dustpan.

Zuko wanted to say that he was barefoot because his shoes hurt him. His feet had grown and the old brown canvas pushed too hard on his toes. But they didn’t ask him. And even if they had, he wouldn’t have known the words, or how to say them in any kind of answer. Instead, he put his fingers into the thick air, and they wavered like a conversation in the light of the dusty sun.

Later, he lay on his mother’s bed beside his brother, clutching the yel­low plastic seahorse he’d picked up on the road outside the house. It was a cheap toy that might have fallen out of a child’s bucket on the way home from the beach. A small and insignificant cartoon crea­ture – so incidental. An accompaniment to a full day of laughter and con­ver­sation and the gentle teasing of a family enjoying a picnic to­gether in the afternoon sun after exploring rock pools. The rounded yel­low plas­tic lay cocooned in the cage of Zuko’s fingers. In convoluted sounds, Zuko told the seahorse the things on his mind. The seahorse stared back at him, eyes wide, smiling without judgement or any attempt to unravel the boy’s sounds. The creature didn’t move or try to get away. Its surprised eyes stared, constant and wide. This thing is mine, Zuko thought. He studied the shape of the seahorse, the focused black pupils and the constant expression. It listened to him always, silent and accepting. Zuko clung to the animal and its plastic consistency, be­lieving that nothing would ever change.

2.

This is what Ash remembered. The whitewash of the cold wall. Summer nights too hot to sleep. Insects crawling the breadth of the pillow. The noises that came when the stranger stayed over. Her sighs, his groans.

From the shadowed space on the other side of the wall, Ash thought that they were only exercising, late at night. He’d seen older boys on the mapped-out field beyond the settlement of river houses. Young men who worked their bodies, shaping their torsos into the kind of flesh that youth bestowed and took for granted. The goal posts were imagined, drawn onto the ground with chalky paint that washed away in the summer rains. The way they pushed themselves up from the stubbed grass with bulked muscle arms, their legs prostrate at a forty-five-degree angle, dark skin glistening, eyes focused and hard. When he was eight, Ash longed to be like them, sweating and pushing and striving towards a goal, each exercise session a feat of physical perfection. At night, he lay wide-eyed in the dark, listening to his mother and this stranger from the city. He mapped their movements in his mind as he imagined how they perfected their push-ups, turning over with the bed­springs, marking time like a metronome. He didn’t know that to each other, their bodies were already perfect. He didn’t know that the strides they made towards a greater fitness were incidental. In the sum­mer weeks that year, when he swam for hours in the brackish river water and baked like a fish on the dry bank, the stranger and his mother had made each other happy. They had, in addition and inadvertently, also made his brother, Zuko.

After Zuko was born, the stranger stayed around more often. They played together like a family beside the river with a ball the stranger had brought for the smallest boy. At first, when the child began to walk, the stranger coaxed Zuko to kick the ball. Zuko tried. Gradually, though, he seemed to lose interest. Gliding white clouds distracted him too often. He frequently looked away from the ball at a passing bird, or a shadow that hovered like an egret across the lawn.

What do I call him, Ma? Ash asked Yanela.

Who?

The man who comes here.

Call him what you like.

Ash had thought she might insist on him calling the stranger Baba or Pa. He looked at his mother as she hung washing in the front of the house. His sister, Honey, played inside with a rag doll, and Zuko skirted between the hanging sheets at their mother’s feet.

The man was an outsider in their lives; any word that meant father felt too familiar.

What do you call him? he asked.

His mother took a peg from her mouth and used it to secure a small T-shirt in the wind. Dom. Or Dominic. I like the whole of his name.

What does he call you?

She cast him a fleeting glance. Yanela, she said. Sometimes other things as well.

If he was a real father he’d be here all the time. He’d live with us.

That’s not true. Lots of real fathers don’t live with their children.

Did your father live with you?

Yes. I wish you’d known him, Ash.

Why?

Because I loved him very much.

What happened to him?

A car hit him one night, on the main road. After that I didn’t have a real father any more. And since then, there has always been something missing. She picked up the empty washing basket and took it inside. Zuko followed silently on small bandy strides behind her.

In the kitchen, Ash helped her stack the dishes from the rack onto the shelf. What are we, Ma? he asked her.

What do you mean?

What kind of people are we? Are we brown people? Or black people?

Look at your own skin, Ash, she told him. And decide for yourself.

I’m darker than Zuko, he said. And darker than Honey. But we speak everybody’s languages.

We’re everything, Ash, she told him. We’ve got different people in us. Our ancestors came from both sides of the sea. But you were born here. I was born here. Your grandfather was born on this farm when it was a working farm. He had calloused hands from working. We’re African, Ash. Don’t let anyone tell you anything else.

"Is he African?" Ash asked.

His mother glanced at him. Who?

The stranger.

Yanela’s arm rested briefly on the sink. Her eyes fluttered to the light, long enough for Ash to know that the thought was new to her. I don’t know, she said softly. I don’t know if he completely understands.

Understands what?

She dragged a rag across the sink in a final attempt at keeping order. The history that is the air that you and I will always breathe.

The year Ash turned twelve the stranger came and went for the last time in the final week of summer. Each day their mother rose early, fed Zuko and Honey, and left the house. She stood at the edge of the road and waited for the Hilux with the surfboard strapped to the roof to stop and pick her up and take her to the big house that fronted the river at the bend. She stayed away all day. When she returned in the evenings, her face glowed. She kissed Zuko and held him to her like he was still an infant needing the warmth of her breast.

He’s not a baby, Ma, Ash told her. He’s already four.

She sighed and wiped the moisture from her brow. I know. But then . . . She kissed Zuko’s head. All of you will always be babies to me.

Why do you like him?

Because he’s my child.

No, I mean that man. That stranger. Dominic. The name stuck, heavy and clumsy at his lips.

A man needs a woman, Ash. One day you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Do you need him?

She smiled at her son. I don’t need anything. Apart from food. And my children. This world is a free place, Ash. Don’t be tied up with anyone else’s ideas for you.

The stranger parked his vehicle outside the house in the evenings. He sat with Yanela on the couch in front of the portable television set, his hand high on her thigh. Sometimes he leaned in and kissed her neck. Ash cooked the meat they brought home on the gas stove and served it to them cut into thin strips, the way the stranger liked it.

Thank you, son, the stranger said. His teeth gleamed white behind his pink lips.

Why does he call me son? Ash asked later. Yanela chopped wood on a dry stump outside. She glanced at him, and shook her head, but she didn’t answer.

Why is my name Ash?

She leaned in and put a finger under his chin as though plucking the string of a musical instrument. You’re what’s left of a fire that burned out a long time ago, she told him.

Deep into December, more cars arrived at the house on the river’s bend. The stranger no longer fetched Yanela in the mornings. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she put on a headscarf and walked the dis­tance to make beds and wash dishes and peel the vegetables that the stranger and his family would have with their roasts and braaied meat at night. Sometimes he brought Yanela home early in the Hilux, the surf­board a sturdy identity strapped to the roof. They went into the bed­room and locked the door, emerging only an hour later. The stranger stood outside in a pair of shorts, humming and soaping himself from the bucket of cold water Ash fetched from the communal tap every morning.

Where does he live? Ash asked his mother.

In the city.

Is he rich?

I suppose so.

Will you marry him?

She laughed, and snapped the shirt she held in her hand. Reaching up, she secured it to the line above her head to dry. After that, she seemed to lose herself in her own head.

Ash knew that the stranger came with the summer, and made his way home when the season was over. Ash knew too, without being told, that the stranger was how his brother was able to eat Cheerios for break­fast every morning, how his mother afforded a new dress each year, and how there were always slabs of steak in the kitchen whenever he was in town. Zuko never ate the meat the stranger brought. If his mother offered it up to his mouth, the little boy pressed his lips together and glanced at her as if to ask, why do you make me eat such a disgusting thing? The child whimpered, and looked away.

The last evening the stranger ever visited the house, Yanela was upset when they arrived through the door. Without acknowledging her children, she went through the kitchen and into her bedroom. The stranger barely kept pace behind her on his long legs, his mouth set tight, his eyes dark and not seeing the children. He followed her into the room and shut the bedroom door behind them. All evening, Ash enter­tained his brother and sister while the adults spoke in strained whispers in the next room. Suppertime came and went and the small children whined. Ash cooked mealie meal for himself and his sister, and he put out the box of Cheerios for Zuko. They ate quietly together at the table, while the adults argued.

When darkness wrapped the house, the bedroom door burst open. The stranger emerged, filling the doorway. He spilled into the kitchen, and moved through into the open outside. The door of the truck’s cab snapped open, and Honey and Zuko ran outside after him. Yanela came to the doorway and called out, Dominic! The man paused and turned his head but she remained in the doorway, frozen. For a moment, the stranger seemed about to return to her, but seconds later he left the car and the path, and went to the nearby tree where Zuko now lay on his side, pulling up grass strands from the earth by their roots. The man stood, his fists closed at his hips, gazing down at the boy. Zuko bare­ly raised his beautiful eyes at the attention. His hands pulled and re­leased, pulled and released, a motion that might go on until Ash fetched him to finish his supper. The stranger squatted and said something soft­ly, in­audibly, to the boy. Ash, his sister and his mother watched. The stranger kissed the child quickly on his head, and returned to the ve­hi­cle. Without a glance backwards, he pulled himself into the cab and slam­med the door, revved the engine and reversed the vehicle before he turned it onto the gravel road.

Later, Ash drifted into sleep with the sounds of his mother softly sob­bing. It was the last time the stranger came to the house. Never again did Ash hear his mother cry.

3.

In the house on that small piece of land that backed onto the gravel road there was no telephone. Pine trees grew in patches between stone buildings cobbled together in a country of no snow. There were no horses, no cows and not much of a house either any more, with the roof damaged as it was. Not much of a farm, but Ash called it one be­cause everybody did, theirs the largest stretch set on the other side of the gravel road, the furthest house from the town. The acres that ran beside the river had mostly all been sold off in previous generations to wealthy folk who stayed for summer’s peak and abandoned their buildings and the surrounding lawns in the remaining months. The land had been divided, again and again. But not theirs. In the end none of the permanent inhabitants owned enough of the ground that edged the town to make it work. Ancient women smoked on porches, guard­ing ground the size of a child’s blanket. Men stood aimless, tonguing the lining of their empty cheeks. The women planted potatoes, a few mealies, butternut, but if the birds didn’t get the produce, the monkeys did. The tomatoes came down with blight. There were women who prayed fervently, endlessly. Some still spoke of God. His mother said it was this that sickened her, rather than the reality of no more seeds, no new clothes, and little to eat. The heat sucked the life from the soil, times of drought turned their flesh to bone and sinew, and the river dwindled. They walked like the living dead, skeletons waiting for the crows to peck the last meat from the diminishing muscle. It seemed everyone got sick eventually.

In another life, they might have moved. She told him often enough. She might have put them on a bus and gone to the city. She said she had a cousin there. She might have found out where her cousin lived, found a job, a place to stay, and a school. The mirage of another life lingered. She held onto her children as best she could, but she held on to her reality more tightly, doubtful of any kind of cosmic safety net at the bottom of the abyss. She sang softly as she carried out her work, as if she carried a secret or harboured an undiscovered joy. Empty stretches of arid ground lay bare. There were bodies to bury, skies that promised inedible clouds and a colour nobody could drink. Ash fetched water from a borehole, until it dried. They waited for the rains that almost never came.

4.

They wanted him to talk and they wanted him to do things that were too difficult for his body. They wanted his mind to go in directions not natural for him. He tried for their sake, he tried for his own, and in the end it was an enormous effort that resulted in one or two options: their exaggerated, embarrassing joy, or their futile disappointment. He failed to understand how one small person – him, Zuko, so insignificant in the history and trajectory of people both backwards and forwards – could have such power to make the people close to him happy, or disap­pointed. It wasn’t right that they should be affected by what he was able or unable to do. He felt the wind and the sun and saw the patterns in his head. Making sounds was hard. In the beginning, he’d tried only to see the light altering, one way or another, in his mother’s eyes. As he grew older, he became more wistful, less sure of the wisdom of others. Yanela began to demand less of him. Eventually she asked less that he be like her, or like his brother and sister. She spent more time with him, as she accepted who he was. Gradually, she found her joy in him, when she began to recognise his in himself. On the surface, it might have ap­peared that he was trapped in the idleness of his being. Underneath, though, he was quietly creating his own order. The Cheerios. The circles. The patterns reflecting a bigger existence that he couldn’t yet fathom. When someone stopped or interrupted him, he grew angry. He threw things down, broke things sometimes, because of the nature of the order he had imagined, but had yet to learn to understand.

Once he’d stood at the river with a tennis ball in his hand. His fingers flitted across its furry skin, tracing the circumference of the perfect circle. This is how he learned that there was no beginning and no end. The trees whispered a similar story around him. He learned what mattered with his heart. See those children? his mother said. You need to learn to play with them. Take that ball, and go and throw it with them. That was when she’d been full of directions. She hadn’t seen him yet; exactly who he was. It took her a long time to catch up with what his body knew and understood. Go and swim with your brother and sister. It’s such a beautiful day. These were the kinds of things she’d said to him. But the pain of imagining how his body would have to move in order to take off his shirt was too much for him.

At first she waited for his words to come. It was for him, of course, but also for her. She wanted, for him, the life she’d imagined. Some­thing easier than this, where conversations flowed like ideas and move­ments, as naturally as the tidal river. She’d wanted him to talk because it was the way of the world, the way of people, the way of parents and children. She hadn’t yet seen it was a way not meant for him. And because he had no words, he could not engage in the backwards and forwards of polite conversation between adults and the verbal skirmishes of children, nor the endless human banter about who was right and who was wrong, the rules people followed, who was first and who was last, the dominance and the submission. Instead, he engaged himself with other things. He spent hours examining the way the tops of the pine trees moved in the wind. He watched the colours of sunset, how slowly they changed in the evening sky. He studied the texture of soft ground, the crunch of gravel on long walks. He observed the patterns of the river as they changed with the light of morning, noon and evening, or with the moon’s pull, and back again. He learned the sounds of different birds, and imagined them in association with different states of being. Some birds were light and optimistic. Some called mournfully, as though they would never be happy again.

While his mother stayed busy with her house tasks inside, sweeping the floor with the broom made of a branch, washing the walls, or making the house neat, he’d cry to go outside. No, Zuko! she’d say. I’m busy. There’s no time now. He’d moan and wail and wonder at the emotion inside himself; how he could feel so enthusiastic, and then so desperate. Such extremes in such a short time, and over the same thing.

He learned, eventually, to take his cues from her eyes. When she was happy with him, he noticed the peace there – the approval, when what he did was right. He learnt the other side also – that he could displease her. He alone was capable at times of causing an ancient deadness in her eyes. Zuko came to understand that no one person was ever enough to make another completely happy.

5.

In December at the end of that year, Ash walked the gravel road at dusk. He veered off a certain bend in the river and leopard-crawled through thick bush. Dominic’s Hilux sat beside the large double-storey house that fronted the tea-coloured water. There were other vehicles beside it that he didn’t recognise. All around was quiet and still. He imagined they’d gone off for a walk, or were taking a rest in the soft bedrooms of the house’s upper storey.

He returned later after supper and sank beneath a bush while he listened to a group of people laugh and talk and drink on the wide veranda. The stranger’s voice dominated – familiar. There was the clink­ing of ice, of glasses connecting. A woman laughed, joined in by the others. Ash stayed hidden until the peripheral voices were gone. An hour later, only the stranger’s voice and the laughing woman remained. Ash watched the two walk hand in hand down the steps of the house. He crouched, ready to run, but something stopped him. The pair crossed the wide stretch of grass. She wore a fitted green dress. The braids from her weave reached her waist. When the stranger stopped to kiss the woman’s full lips, the image silhouetted against the moon’s light on the river burned into his mind. It was only when they off took their clothes and entered the water that Ash crawled out from under the bush and sprinted home.

They revered the clouds when they came, because with clouds there was thunder, the lightning, and thickness of sky – and then came rain. The drops hammered their heads, soaked their thread-worn cotton clothes. They danced in the storm, mouths open and thirsty, while mud ran in rivulets down their skin. Women ran to get buckets and tins and basins. Men stood