A Child Called Happiness

by Stephan Collishaw

  They woke very early the following day, and taking the sadza that had been prepared and the beer, they made their way to the burial site of Chimukoko. The weather was heavy and uncomfortable, the air tense as though it might snap. Spreading out the food upon the grave, the women gathered around, a low chant rising rhythmically in the gathering dawn light. They poured the libations of beer across the ground.

  At the appointed time, Tafara was motioned forward. He stood nervously and glanced across at his uncle. Kamba was the younger brother of his father and many of the tribe looked to him for authority. Kamba’s head was lowered and his hand rested on his large belly. He had dragged his feet all the way to the burial ground, hung over from the previous evening’s excesses. Raising his head slightly, he glanced at Tafara and nodded slowly, barely perceptibly, before letting his chin settle back against the rolls of fat on his chest.

  ‘Mudzimu!’ Tafara called out, kneeling before the grave. ‘Spirits hear! We welcome you back home. Come guide your family. If there is anything you need, please let us know. Have patience with us. Treat us with mercy.’

  The earth shook. The heavens clapped with rage and the burial ground was illuminated by a brilliant, jagged flash of light. A sudden silence descended upon the mourners, and Tafara felt his heart rise into his mouth. He jumped to his feet.

  ‘Mudzimu!’ he called.

  Following the brilliant light, the day seemed plunged into darkness. The clouds had been gathering since dawn and hung heavily now over the tops of the baobabs and Msasa. As he lifted his face to the sky he felt the first drop of water. He grinned. And suddenly it was raining; hard, large pellets of water that slapped against the skin and sizzled against the hot earth and rock. A torrential outpouring, which, as they made their way back to the village obscured their view, ran down their bodies, formed a liquid curtain across their path. The red earth stained their feet and ankles, and rode up their legs; it squelched between their toes as they walked.

  The huts were warm and dry. Tafara sat in the centre of the largest, the sound of the mbira and drums drowning out the rain. His head swam with the beer and his senses were stimulated by the scent of the roasted calf and the duiker. He felt taller, more assured; he noted the respect in the voices of the women who brought him food.

  Across the fire sat Kamba, his lips glossy with the juices of the meat they had eaten. Kamba smiled. His face jumped in the heat that rose from the fire.

  ‘You have your father’s blessing,’ Kamba said.

  Tafara nodded. ‘Sometimes I am frightened,’ he said.

  Kamba waved his hand dismissively. ‘There is no reason to be afraid. Your father’s spirit will guide you. You are a young, strong man. For generations our family has lived on these lands and your children’s children will remember you in these same caves. What greater blessing could you want?’

  ‘My father was a wise man.’

  ‘And in time so shall you be. Listen to the spirits. Listen to the elders. Love the land. That is all that is asked of you.’

  That night, Tafara returned to his young bride. It was dark when he went in to her and she was sleeping already. When he lay down beside her, she stirred and awoke, her eyes opening, blinking in the darkness, the faint light of the moon falling through the open door reflecting weakly in her large eyes. She murmured something, but he covered her mouth with his hand. He ran his hand across the smooth expanse of her naked back, down to the rise of her buttocks. He brushed his fingertips against her hardened nipples. He pressed his face into her neck and inhaled the sharp, animal scent of her. She moaned softly and turned onto her back. His fingers traced down across her flat stomach, into the warm, wet crease between her legs.

  ‘Tafara,’ she said.

  Carefully he got on top of her and her hands took him and guided him. He buried his face in against her flesh and she held onto him.

  After, when she was sleeping again, he stood at the door of the hut and gazed out across the village. The sky had begun to clear and the moonlight reflected off the wet thatch. Nothing stirred. Behind the village rose the bulk of the hill, while to the south and east the valley dropped away. His land. The land of his fathers. The land of his children. Tafara leaned back against the doorpost and smiled.

  He had almost forgotten the previous evening.

  3

  Kristine lifted the child carefully from Natalie’s arms, wrapping the thin cloth tightly around its body. With the back of her finger she stroked its tiny cheek and cooed. The baby opened its eyes and began to snivel again, a thin wail that rose into a ferocious complaint causing the dog to look up worried and slink away to a shady corner.

  ‘He’s hungry,’ Kristine murmured.

  ‘We found him up on the kopje,’ Roy commented. ‘Lucky Nat has sharp ears, or the poor little thing would have been food for the birds.’

  Warmed by her uncle’s compliment, Natalie slid down from the back of the horse. She led it around to the stables. In the shadow of the stable block, she paused and leaned in against the side of the horse, pressing her nose against the warm skin of its neck, inhaling its scent. The smell calmed her. Reminded her of being a teenager in Suffolk. She felt her heart slowly calm and the darkness receded. She patted the horse and whispered to it, then turned and gave the reins to one of the stable boys.

  The sun was riding high over the hills and the heat had begun to rise and Natalie’s shirt clung uncomfortably to her back. Flies were gathering on the dead buck her uncle had shot earlier which Bhekinkosi had taken down off the back of Roy’s horse. The flies settled on her skin, too, an irritating prickle on the back of her neck, on the burnt, tender parts of her arms, sticky already with sweat.

  Roy wiped his face with a rag and helped Bhekinkosi to hang the buck. Natalie stood a while watching the two men work, the flies buzzing around them. A thin shaft of brilliant sunlight cut through a window and sliced the dark shadows of the barn. Bhekinkosi disappeared into a small room against the back wall.

  ‘Who do you think left the baby there?’ Natalie asked.

  Roy shrugged. ‘Could have been anyone. Some mother with little enough to feed herself. Strange.’ He shook his head. ‘Can’t say I ever heard of such a thing around here.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’ Natalie asked. ‘That people can’t feed themselves?’

  ‘The crops have failed for the last couple of years,’ Roy said. He straightened up and wiped his hands on the rag. ‘The economy is shot through. If you’re a small subsistence farmer, as many are around here, then things have been tough.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Roy looked at her. His face was in shadow, but his grey eyes were clear and sharp. Natalie’s father had died when she was ten. The image of him was blurred; fractured memories of sitting on his knee, laughing on a beach on the south coast, the rain beating down on them. He had been nothing like Roy. He was a teacher, a gentle man. She wondered what it had been like for her cousin Barbara to have had a father like Roy.

  The sunlight lay in thin stripes across the neatly swept floor, and towards the rear of the building an open door illuminated the gloomy belly of the building. Footsteps scuffed on the concrete and Bhekinkosi appeared wiping his face with the back of his arm, a large, sharp knife in his hand.

  ‘Can you take care of this on your own, Bhekinkosi?’ Roy asked.

  Bhekinkosi nodded languorously.

  Roy put a hand to the bottom of his back and stretched his spine, a small wince tightening his features. He walked to the doors of the barn and gazed out across his property towards the road. Past the house, the lawn stretched down towards the gates and, beyond them, past the brilliant blue of the Jacaranda, was the dusty road to Bindura.

  ‘Well,’ Roy said finally, ‘I don’t really know.’

  Natalie opened the back door of the large house and took off her riding boots, an old pair of Barbara’s, and put on a pair of worn leather slippers her aunt had loaned her. She wished again that her cousin was there. For a mome
nt she stood in the quiet hallway and took a deep breath, collecting herself, and then she slopped down the neat, bright corridor to the kitchen. Kristine was seated at the table, talking. By the sink the maid, a large woman with a flowered dress, held the small baby up in the air jiggling it around and laughing. A thin trail of milk dribbled from the boy’s lower lip onto her dress.

  ‘You haven’t heard anything?’ Kristine asked the maid.

  ‘Not a thing, Ma’am.’

  ‘They could have driven out from Bindura, of course,’ Kristine said.

  ‘Who can tell,’ the maid said. ‘It could have been anyone. She must have been desperate though, to leave such a beautiful baby.’

  ‘He is a beauty,’ Kristine commented with a warm smile. She got up from the table and joined her maid by the window, taking the baby from her.

  ‘It’s a boy?’ Natalie asked.

  Kristine laughed. ‘Yes, it’s a boy. You couldn’t tell?’

  ‘I didn’t really look,’ Natalie muttered, blushing.

  The door opened and Roy entered the kitchen. He had changed and washed, his hair slicked back from his face, accentuating the sharp angles of his features. He wore a blue shirt and fawn chinos and looked smart, as if he were back in the Home Counties rather than on a small farm in a rugged valley in Northern Zimbabwe. Walking over to the stove, he poured himself a coffee from the pot that had been warming there, then leant back against the kitchen counter and observed his wife with the baby in her arms.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  The maid had turned back to the sink, and rinsed the bottle she had fed the baby from. Putting it to dry, she wiped her hands and shuffled away to her room around the back of the kitchen. Roy ran a hand through his hair and sipped from his coffee. He shook his head.

  ‘Shouldn’t you call the police?’ Natalie asked.

  Kristine glanced around at her and then back at Roy. Natalie saw the barely perceptible look that passed between the two of them.

  ‘They’re not much use,’ Kristine said, after a few moments. ‘It probably wouldn’t be the best thing.’

  ‘Miriam could take it in,’ Roy commented, but he sounded less than convinced.

  ‘I don’t think she’s any more keen to go there than you are,’ Kristine said.

  ‘No,’ Roy said. ‘You’re probably right.’

  Natalie was aware of the tension in the air, that there were things unspoken. She wanted to ask, but felt timid. She had flown into Harare three days earlier and her uncle had picked her up from the airport. She had never met Roy and Kristine before; they had immigrated to Africa before she had been born to take over the family farm. Her cousin, Barbara, had visited England the previous year and stayed with Natalie and her mother. Barbara was lively, bright and vivacious and despite being a few years younger than Natalie, they had got on well. Natalie had been looking forward to seeing her, but she had flown down to Cape Town as a part of her university course, Roy told her on the road back to the farm.

  Roy and Kristine had been warm and welcoming, but Natalie felt isolated and alone. The first day she had wandered fairly aimlessly around the farm, and then settled with a book in her room. By evening she had felt the dark mood descending upon her, so the next day she helped her uncle with some of the farm work. Her hands, unused to manual labour quickly blistered, and the heat made her head throb. She had excused herself. Her uncle had nodded curtly. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Actually,’ Roy said, shifting the coffee to his other hand, ‘I thought I’d drive down to Pasi. See if anybody there had heard anything. Somebody there would take him, I’m sure.’

  Kristine shifted, clutching the baby against her breast. She looked down at it and did not answer for some moments.

  ‘You think that’s the best way?’

  Roy didn’t answer. Draining the coffee cup he placed it next to the sink. He glanced at his watch and then leant over and kissed his wife on the forehead, holding the back of her head tenderly. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against his chest, the baby between the two of them.

  ‘You can come,’ Roy said to Natalie, pulling away from Kristine. ‘See something of village life over here.’

  Pasi lay on the other side of the range of hills behind the farm. The Land Rover sped down the road away from Bindura and after a few miles turned off onto a dust track at the end of an orchard of orange trees. Behind them a thick plume of dust rose into the hot air, forming a long sandy tail that stretched behind them for half a mile. The road twisted through the dense undergrowth and began to climb up and then duck down between the craggy hills. A dry ravine cut away at the side of the road for a short way then disappeared.

  The late morning country seemed deserted. The sun was almost directly above the car and Natalie’s blouse clung to her, sodden and uncomfortable. Behind her seat, the baby lay unhappy on a layer of blankets in a wooden box. His cry was scarcely audible above the roar of the engine and the rasp of the tyres on the rough surface of the road.

  The village emerged suddenly from behind a copse of trees; conical, thatch-roofed cottages with baked mud walls, cracked and desolate. Around it stretched small fields. The earth was parched, the crops fading. A malnourished goat trampled the brown grass. The ground was red clay. The road had grown rough and uneven and the Land Rover had been forced to drive slowly, picking its way with care across the gullies and rifts, scars of previous seasons’ rains.

  The sound of the engine alerted the village and by the time the vehicle reached it half a dozen small children had crowded the doorways, hands stuck in their mouths, wide eyed, half naked, bodies pale from the dust. Behind them, in the shadows, adults lurked, peering out from the gloom at the visitors.

  Roy drew to a halt at the edge of the village and killed the engine. The dust settled over the two of them, clogging in the perspiration that slicked their skin. The baby’s scream was suddenly loud and insistent, building in waves from an angry gurgle to a full throated bellow, reedy and ferocious. Roy opened the door of the Land Rover and stepped out.

  A figure emerged pushing aside the children and stepping out into the dazzling sunlight; a thin man in a brightly patterned shirt, his hair had begun to thin but his beard was full and long; grey and white but with patches, still, of the rich black it must once have been. His feet were bare. He wiped his hands on a dirty cloth and pushed it into his back pocket.

  ‘Tikukwazisei,’ Roy said, walking over to him.

  ‘Kwaziwai,’ the man responded flatly.

  Seeing Roy, figures emerged from the shadows. The children sloped out nervously and Roy smiled and held out his hand, proffering a sweet to one of the boys. He approached cautiously and took the sweet as if from a tiger.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and turned and ran.

  ‘Bring the baby,’ Roy called to Natalie who had waited by the car.

  Pulling out the box she carried it across the parched earth towards the shade of a large Msasa tree where Roy and the villager had gone. She stroked the cheek of the baby and tried to calm it, but the small face wrinkled with anger and it continued to howl. Women emerged from the huts, curious; an elderly woman, almost bent double, her head wrapped in a scarf, scrutinised her openly.

  They squatted in the shade of the tree. One of the women brought drinks and old metal cups on a tray, carefully pouring the tea and adding heaps of sugar before pressing them on Roy and Natalie. The villagers crowded around, at first a little shy, but quickly drawn to the baby in the wooden box. A conversation snapped between them, short, sharp sentences that seemed to be thrown like pebbles. Roy nodded and replied and one of the women plucked the child from the blankets and cradled it warmly to her breast. Almost immediately the baby quietened. Its arms reached up and the woman laughed and tossed another sentence over her shoulder to the other women. She loosened her top and pulled out a large breast, guiding the fat nipple towards the baby’s hungry mouth.

  ‘Where did you say you found the child?’ the man asked.r />
  ‘Up on Drew’s Kopje, at the back of the farm,’ Roy explained. ‘We were out riding early and as we came down over the hill the girl heard the sound of it screaming.’

  ‘And there was nobody around?’

  ‘Nobody. We would have seen them. There was no sign of anyone.’

  The man grunted. The women assaulted him with a volley of questions and he repeated the story to them in Shona.

  ‘It reminds me of the old tale,’ the man said.

  The baby suckled greedily from the breast of the woman and the sound of it carried above that of the cicadas and the goat rustling in a pile of rubbish.

  ‘What are you talking about, father?’ one of the women said.

  ‘Kare kare, long long ago,’ the man said, taking on the role of village story teller, his voice clear and loud, ‘there was a woman of the village who had developed a taste for the meat of the buck, the duiker. She begged her husband for it and would fill herself, not leaving a part of it for the dogs, sucking the very marrow from its bones. One day she went out into the bush and there saw a sleeping hyena with a duiker it had killed. ‘Give me the duiker,’ she pleaded with the hyena. ‘I’ll give you my very child for it.’ And so they made their agreement. Later that year the woman became pregnant, and when she had given birth, she forgot all about her promise to the hyena! The hyena did not forget, though.’

  He stopped and nodded and looked about him significantly. ‘This woman has obviously left her child for the hyena.’

  ‘Father, that is just an old tale,’ the woman holding the child laughed.

  ‘Maybe,’ the old man nodded. ‘But this is an old country.’

  Roy spread some American dollar bills on the ground. He counted them out carefully for the man in the flowered shirt. The man nodded, picked them up and counted them himself, carefully, before tucking them into the pocket of his shirt.

  ‘I could take it to the police,’ Roy said, ‘but there seems little use in that, and…’