Roy didn’t answer. His eyes were closed. His face was calmer now, but set hard. He did not move when the policeman who had arrested them came out and called his name. Two policemen grabbed his arms and pulled him to his feet and pushed him through the curtain into the office beyond. The curtain fell back down so that Natalie could see nothing. Chair legs scuffed against the concrete floor.
The remaining policeman stood up.
‘You come here,’ he said to Natalie, indicating a door on the opposite side of the station.
Two other men were waiting for Natalie there, one seated behind a rough wooden desk, the other leaning against a wall. One was uniformed, a large man in his forties, with glasses and fingers like sausages. The man leaning against the wall was in casual clothes, brown trousers and a pale shirt. A single chair stood before the desk and the policeman pushed Natalie down into it, before turning and leaving.
The large policeman looked at her, a supercilious gaze down the length of his stubby nose. His fingers tapped lightly against the wood.
‘Passport,’ he said.
Natalie fumbled in her pocket and pulled out her passport, placing it on the table top. The policeman picked it up and flicked through it, coming to rest on the final page with her information on. His eyes flicked lazily between the photo and Natalie, as though he suspected it may be a fake. Finally he dropped it down and rubbed the rolls of his face.
‘What are you doing here, Miss Chambers?’
‘I’m on holiday.’
‘Holiday? You go to Paris on holiday, or Rome. Why would you come to this little, dusty town for your holiday?’
Unsure how to respond, or indeed whether it had been a question, Natalie said nothing. The policeman observed her. She heard the non-uniformed policeman behind her stir.
‘How long are you here for?’
‘I hadn’t quite decided,’ Natalie said.
‘Haven’t decided? You said this was a holiday.’
‘Yes.’
‘A holiday from what?’
Again Natalie felt unsure how she was expected to respond. The policeman’s tone had shifted from ironic to cold. Natalie felt a bead of sweat slip down from her hairline and rest in her eyebrow. She reached up and wiped it away.
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ she said finally. ‘Roy is my uncle. I needed to get some space, a bit of time to forget about things.’ She looked up at him, as though he might understand. He stared back at her, eyes hard. ‘I just came here to get away,’ she said weakly.
‘Tell me about the money,’ the policeman said, shifting back in his seat, his hands folding over his stomach.
‘What money?’
‘How much money did Drew give them?’
For some moments Natalie searched to follow the logic of the questions. Her mind flipped back over the proceeding days and tried to pin down what she might know about money. There had been money, she thought, but where?
‘Money?’ she said, hoping the policeman might change track again.
A firm hand grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. Natalie almost cried out. The plain-clothed officer gripped her hard and brought his face close to Natalie’s so that she could smell the man’s breath, stale from cigarette smoke and beer.
‘We know Drew handed over money this morning. How much did he give?’
The village, she thought. Of course. To pay for the care of the child. She recalled it now; the dollar notes spread on the dusty earth.
‘I don’t know,’ Natalie said. She wasn’t sure how much she should say, she didn’t want to incriminate her uncle. But she recalled Roy’s words; tell them what happened. There’s no point pretending.
‘There was maybe fifty dollars.’
‘Fifty American dollars?’
Natalie nodded. ‘About that.’
‘And you,’ the policeman said, leaning forward. ‘How much money did you bring to Zimbabwe?’
Natalie hesitated. She had to declare her money when she came through customs and she hadn’t wanted to let the immigration authorities know how much she was bringing, particularly as they seemed so keen for her to change it into the worthless Zimbabwean dollars.
‘About five hundred pounds,’ she said cautiously.
‘Have you seen one of these?’
The policeman produced a card, which he held out to Natalie. She looked at it, but the policeman indicated for her to take it. In orange letters it read Membership Card, and beneath that was a logo featuring the Zimbabwean bird and the words Movement for Democratic Change MDC. As she took the card, Natalie heard a commotion from behind her. She half turned to look but the plain-clothed officer blocked her view.
‘Your uncle has one of these, yes?’
Natalie shook her head. Her brain was whirring, beginning to put things in place, to suddenly understand the logic of the questioning.
‘No,’ Natalie said. ‘I’ve never seen one of these before.’
‘Your uncle is a member of the MDC,’ the policeman told her.
‘I don’t know about that,’ she said.
The noise from the other room had quietened.
‘This morning,’ the policeman said, ‘you went with your uncle to pay one of their activists. He supports them. He bank-rolls them.’ The policeman seemed to like this term. He turned it on his tongue, and then repeated it. ‘This is just a friendly little chat,’ he said then. He grinned, hitching his holster up into Natalie’s line of vision. ‘Just a little warning. Paris is nice. You should go there on holiday. Or Rome. You’re a young woman, what is there for you here?’
When Roy moved out into the sunlight he held his head high, his chest out and stepped vigorously as though on a mission to get somewhere. Only outside the station, with Natalie a few steps behind him, did his pace falter and he glanced around and seemed for a moment lost. When he turned, Natalie noticed for the first time the red welt across his cheek bone. Before she had chance to say a word, Roy had turned again and pointed down towards the end of the street.
‘There will be a taxi we can hail down there.’
They walked in silence, Roy setting a brisk pace, kicking up small plumes of dust along the street. Natalie struggled to keep up with him. At the corner they stopped. A number of taxis were lined in haphazard fashion along the pavement and Roy approached one and quickly bartered a price he was happy with. In the taxi, Roy didn’t speak for a long time. He sat gazing out of the window at the dusty town and then the open fields, at the men and women who walked by the sides of the roads, at the small fires that filled the air with the pungent scent of wood smoke.
‘Were you all right?’ he asked finally, turning to look at her.
Natalie nodded.
‘I’m sorry that you got dragged into all this,’ he said. ‘Your mother will be furious with me.’
Natalie laughed. ‘I’ve travelled, Uncle Roy. It’s not the first time I’ve got into a scrape.’
‘No, but I got you into this one,’ he said ruefully. ‘Normally it’s me having to hold Barbara back. She’s the hot-headed one. She’s a real Drew. Fiery, Scottish blood.’
Natalie laughed.
‘Your mother was the same when she was young.’ Roy looked at her. ‘Barbara reminds me of her. I bet she hasn’t told you that. She was the wild one when we were children, always getting into some kind of problem.’
Natalie tried to imagine her mother in trouble. It was true she occasionally had a sharp tongue and wicked sense of humour, but she had never seen her mother as anything other than a quiet, supportive presence. It was partly to get away from her suffocating concern that Natalie had decided to run away to this farm in northern Zimbabwe. She needed the space. She needed to deal with things on her own and neither Lawrence nor her mother helped with that.
‘What did they ask you?’ Roy asked.
‘They told me you were a member of the MDC,’ Natalie said. ‘And that the money you gave them in the village this morning was to support them.’
Roy laughe
d an ironic snort, short and angry.
‘Watch what you say to Kristine,’ he said later. ‘She has enough to worry about.’
It grew dark early. The sun sank rapidly, and the day disappeared so suddenly that it was still a shock to Natalie to walk out and find that it was already night. They had a quiet dinner in the main house and then Natalie withdrew to the small cottage. The air hummed with the noise of the small generator and the throb of the cicadas. She went to sit out on the patio to enjoy a drink looking down over the grass to the flame tree and the Msasas, but the mosquitoes swarmed in thick clouds and she was soon driven indoors, securing the door and windows tightly.
Sitting at the writing desk, she pulled out the photograph and leaned it against the wall. For some moments she looked at the man who stood beside her in the picture. And then her eyes drifted to her own figure and a wave of sadness washed over her. She felt, suddenly, very alone. Glancing around the small room, she acted decisively.
Pulling her suitcase from the top of the wardrobe she emptied the drawers, piling her clothes neatly back where they had come from, pulling her blouses from their hangers in the wardrobe and packing her books in the side pockets of the case.
She took out her passport and laid it on top.
6
Tafara left the village just as the light began to filter across the sky and the sun was about to rise, a bleary copper colour. He had left Anokosha sleeping, bending over her to inhale one last time the scent of her. She stirred and looked up and smiled, but he closed her eyes.
‘Sleep,’ he said.
He turned back once only as he crested the hill to look at the houses down in the village. They looked, to him, suddenly so fragile. Clouds gathered darkening his spirit. He turned, then, towards Nehanda’s village which was a two day walk away.
He cut south below the range that swooped in a semicircle across the land; high forested hills, with sharp granite escarpments, and narrow valleys, dark and forbidding. The hills were littered with caves where wild animals and spirits lived. They were the home of n’angas; of spirit mediums, holy and feared and of tribes friendly and hostile.
Tafara set a steady pace. In a small pouch he carried smoked meat and, over his shoulder, a skin filled with water. From his belt hung a banga, a long knife, its blade sharpened to a keen edge, sharp enough to slice the skin as if it was gossamer thin.
A few years earlier he had travelled this route with his father. On that journey they had come across the occasional settlement of bedraggled and hungry white men, their huts built in the local fashion with thatched roofs and walls daubed with mud. Often the huts were surrounded by covered wagons. These settlers had been thin, their feet badly shod and their cattle emaciated or dying. They had been making their way into the hills looking for gold in the depleted mines of the ancients. Desperate men, eyes burning with determination, or perhaps just greed. They tried to barter with the Shona tribes, but had little to offer beyond beads and calico.
These same settlements had expanded now and the houses were more substantial, built from stone. More like small forts. Occasionally on the top of a tall pole a brightly coloured cloth flew. The land around them had been turned into farmland and the whites looked healthier. In the fields there were occasionally white women.
As the sun rose higher he paused to drink from the goat skin. He rested for some moments, squatting in the shade of a Msasa tree. He had seen Nehanda before; his father had taken him to consult with her when he had been a small boy. Though Nehanda was not old, she was called Mbuya by everyone, grandmother, the traditional title given to a spirit medium. She was a fairly thickset woman who stood with noble up-rightness, a large nose and sad eyes. Her voice when she spoke was direct and sharp. She lived in a cave, in Mazoe.
Nehanda was a mudzimu, an ancestral spirit, the incarnation of the daughter of Mutota, the first king of the Monomatapa kingdom. Mutota had ordered his daughter to sleep with her brother and from them, through this incest ritual, great power emanated. The spirit of this great princess lived on in Nehanda. People would travel from miles around to ask for her advice, to listen to her teaching, to request that she intercede with Mwari, the great God, on their behalf. Particularly over the last few years as the cattle had died in increasing numbers and the crops failed.
At the end of the first day, Tafara rested away from the road, in the shade of a large rock. He built a small fire to keep away the animals and ate some of the meat. He lay down, resting his head on a granite stone and, weary from the long day’s walk, fell asleep quickly. He had been dreaming of a young girl bathing in a stream, when he was suddenly awoken.
The last light of day had long faded from the sky. The moon had risen and the hills were bathed in a ghostly light. His fire had burned low and he shifted over to it, feeding it with some dry wood he had gathered earlier. Sitting up, he hugged his knees. He tried to recall the dream; it had made him feel good, but it melted away as he tried to lay hold on it. In the distance he heard a crackle. The sky was clear. He listened carefully. The noise disturbed him. He tried to remember where he had heard such a sound before, sharp tight cracks, rapid and loud, drifting down the long valley.
He moved early, as soon as the sky began to lighten, determined to reach Nehanda’s cave before the day was finished. He had only travelled a few miles, though, when he noticed a figure in the half-light. He hesitated, glancing around to see if there were others close by. A couple of hundred metres away, down the slope on a verdant patch of the valley floor was the stone built farm of the whites. It lay still in the early morning light.
The figure was inert, face down at the edge of the track, half-hidden by a bush. Creeping closer he saw it was a man, dressed in a goatskin loincloth. His legs were twisted oddly.
Bending down, Tafara saw the small hole in his back, almost directly between the shoulder blades. A small clean, circular hole from which blood had oozed. It was dry now. Insects ranged over the body. Though he could see no one, he had the feeling that he was being watched, as though a wild beast was lurking in the dark brush waiting to jump out upon him. But it had been no wild beast that killed this man. Tafara hurried on. He walked fast and as the sun began to descend, he saw its light reflecting in the lake below Nehanda’s cave.
On the valley floor, below the cave, was a small village. A cluster of thatched huts on a low rise. A blue haze of wood smoke hung above the roofs catching the last of the day’s light as Tafara approached. Groups of men sat around fires, talking. He squatted down, greeting the young men. Their accents were slightly different to his own and he guessed that they were from the south.
The men greeted him, moving apart to allow him to sit.
‘It is not possible anymore,’ a wiry young man said, continuing the conversation he had interrupted. ‘They are taking everything.’
‘That is so,’ another agreed. ‘First they wanted to trade, then more of them came, with their warriors. Then they started to demand we pay taxes.’
‘They are bleeding us.’
‘Why do you not refuse to give to these men?’ Tafara asked.
The men looked at him.
‘If you refuse them they come and take what they want,’ a small, pot-bellied man said sullenly. ‘Mbuya, Nehanda told us. She said not to be afraid of them, that they have only come to trade. We should offer them one of our best cattle, and say, “We greet you with this meat.” She said that should have been enough for them.’
‘But it is not,’ another broke in. He was an older man with white hair and a grizzled face. ‘They came with their guns and they took some of our young men to work on their farms and in their mines as labourers.’
‘They are taking good land too.’
‘And now the cattle are dying and they blame us, though it is obviously them that have brought the curse of Mwari on our land. Did you hear what happened to Chief Chiweshe? When he failed to slaughter his cattle as they ordered him to do, they took him and they flogged him, before a crowd.’
> For some moments there was silence around the fire as they digested this ignominy. The old men shook their heads. The small man rubbed his belly. They talked on for a long time that night, sharing stories of the white settlers. Tafara listened. Darkness fell across the village. The light of the fire threw shadows up against the walls of the huts. It was a clear and cool night and later, Tafara found a quiet corner and slept dreamlessly.
He was woken early the next morning by the sound of people moving around. Before long he joined the procession out of the village and up over the foothills and onto the mountain. They trailed the goat path cut in the brush, following the curve of the slope up, as it grew in steepness, and the brush became less dense and the trees dropped away beneath them. Turning, the view stretched for miles across the lake and the woodland. The sun had risen and steam rose from the damp earth.
Mbuya Nehanda’s cave was high on the mountain. As the procession grew close, Tafara looked up and saw her standing on a lip of rock gazing out across the land. For a moment he paused and observed her; she seemed unaware of the crowd of people winding up the steep path. As he watched she raised her arms to the sun, and the light caught her and she seemed all at once ablaze. Several of the men in the group dropped to the earth and began to mutter her name and to pray for the blessing of Mwari.
When they had assembled, Nehanda addressed them. Her voice was quiet, but heavy with authority. She enunciated each word carefully, as though recalling the voices of those she had heard in her dreams, taking care not to forget or mistake the prophecies tendered to her.
‘They are strangers in our land,’ she said, ‘and it was our duty to welcome them and offer them peace. But they have trampled over our land and they have dug in many places and have not respected the spirits that dwell among us.’
Tafara had squatted in the shade of a rock and listened intently. He wished his father was beside him now, remembering these words to take them back faithfully to the village.
‘When we walk we respect the shadows,’ Nehanda continued. ‘We know that our land is governed by the spirits of those who have been before us; before we settle our homes we ask for the blessing of the spirits, when we dig wells, when we gather the fruits of the earth we honour the shadows that remind us of who we are and where we are from. These strangers have no knowledge of our land or our spirits. They trample them as they trample our people.
A Child Called Happiness Page 4
