‘First they came for the gold, now they hunger for our land and for our young men. Their greed is insatiable and they will not be content until they have sucked the marrow from our bones, and the spirits have been driven from their ancestral homelands.’
She was silent for some moments. She had been gazing up into the air, but now she looked down at the assembled crowd. She examined each man before her. For a moment, Tafara felt her eyes upon him. He squirmed under her scrutiny.
‘The time has come for us to repel them,’ she said.
‘Fan out through the forests and the mountains,’ she said. ‘Take spears and your bakatwa, your sacred weapons. Your ancestors will protect you from the guns of the white strangers, their bullets will turn to water and harm you no more than the rain. Bloody your spears. The time has come.’
Tafara felt his belly burning. He was not a violent man, but he felt a flame kindled inside him. As he listened to the words of Nehanda he felt the spirits awaken and swirl around him. Later there was music, drumming. A n’anga, dressed in the skin of a lion called for the blessings of the spirits and they drank millet beer brewed by the women.
During his stay at Nehanda’s village the weather had been clear and bright, but large, dark clouds had bubbled up from the east threatening rain as Tafara hurried back, the fire still burning inside him. The elders of the village gathered in the chief’s hut and seated themselves to listen to the words of Nehanda. The air was hot and heavy. Tafara’s face glowed with perspiration as he told them of his journey, of the white farmsteads, of the stories of the men he had met in Nehanda’s village and then of the ascent to see her and to listen to her message.
‘They will not be content until they have sucked the marrow from our bones,’ he recounted, the words singing in his brain. All his fear that he would forget the message had disappeared when he listened to her. He would never forget those words or the way that she had spoken. ‘They have driven the spirits of our ancestors from this land. Rise up and repel them. Fan out through the forests. Their guns will not hurt you; their bullets will turn to water and harm you no more than the rain.’
When he paused and glanced around at the faces, his own eyes burning, the sound of the rain hummed against the thatched roof of the hut. Mhuru and Mbudzi gazed at him, tense with excitement. Kamba nodded his head. Only Ngunzi seemed unsettled.
‘War is a heavy burden,’ he said. ‘It is not something we should rush towards. Far better that we live in peace with our neighbours.’
‘But it is not possible to live at peace with the white men,’ Mhuru said, his voice tight with frustration. ‘They want to enslave us, to take away our land.’
‘Chikomo, shata divi, rimwe ritambire pwere. One side the hill may be difficult, but on the other side children play,’ Ngunzi replied. ‘The white men may be difficult, but they may bring blessings too.’
‘What blessings? Will taking our land be a blessing to us? Or enslaving us in their mines?’
Silence descended inside the hut. Outside the rain ran from the roofs and hissed against the earth. Thunder rumbled around the valley. Ngunzi was the eldest in the village and had been a close friend of Tafara’s father; he had been his teacher and was much respected. Tafara knew that to argue against him and side with the young men would be disrespectful and would seem hot-headed.
‘Nehanda has called us to it,’ was all that he would say.
For some days after that life in the village continued as it had. One of the cattle had begun to grow thin, and the men slaughtered it fearfully. Cattle-plague had been ravaging the herds on the plains of Mashonaland. So far their valley had seen little of it, but all around herds had fallen sick, dying in a matter of months. A few days later a second cow showed signs of the disease, developing a fever and diarrhoea. Tafara watched helplessly as the animal gave in.
It was the day the second cow died that the white men reappeared. Five policemen on horseback, smartly dressed in uniform with a number of Shona warriors. The translator, the same one they had met previously, approached them with the warriors, while the white mounted police remained at the edge of the village.
‘We have come to collect the hut tax,’ the translator told them, in his heavily accented Shona.
‘We have no tax for you,’ Tafara told him sullenly. ‘Our cattle have begun dying and we have little enough to survive on ourselves.’
The translator grunted. He turned back to the men on their horses and stammered something in the white man’s tongue. The white man sighed. He gave a curt command – his pale eyes glancing around the assembled crowd in the centre of the village.
One of the warriors stepped forward. He pointed his spear towards Mhuru who was seated behind Tafara. ‘We will take this one as a labourer.’
‘No,’ Tafara said, standing up.
‘And this one.’
The warriors moved forward, six armed men quickly overpowering Tafara. They grabbed Mhuru and pulled him away kicking and protesting. They also grabbed Ngunzi’s grandson, a tall, thin boy who looked older than his thirteen seasons. From her place among the women they pulled Anokosha, who screamed and looked about desperately for help. Tafara shouted out but as he tried to approach them, the warriors threatened him with their spears.
Tafara approached the white men on their horses. The first wore a peaked cap. His face was sun-reddened and his eyes an icy blue.
‘You can’t take them,’ Tafara protested. ‘If you want to take somebody, take me.’
The white man coughed up a mouth of phlegm and spat in Tafara’s face. He felt it seeping down his skin as the white men turned and rode away. The warriors forced the captives into a run. Tafara began to run after them, but Ngunzi held him back.
‘They will just take you too,’ he said.
Anokosha did not turn back to look at the village as they led her away.
7
Natalie woke the next morning her skin sticky with sweat. The bed sheets were knotted uncomfortably around her legs. She stumbled across to the shower and stood for a long time beneath the water, delighting in the cool flow of it through her hair and across her skin. A small window opened from the bathroom looking down over the back of the farm towards the Msasa trees and Natalie gazed out at the beautiful view as she showered. One of the farm workers was cutting the grass, slowly, methodically with a primitive scythe.
On the chair by her bed her suitcase was packed. For some moments, the towel wrapped loosely around her, she regarded the luggage as if unsure, which was not actually the case. The first emotion she had felt upon opening her eyes that morning had been of relief that she had made the decision to go back home to England. The only thing that made her hesitate was the thought of telling her aunt and uncle after all they had done for her. A part of her, too, did not like the sense of defeat; that she was going home so quickly.
Stepping across to the writing table she picked up the photograph she had left there. Once again she looked at it closely, examined the image of the two young people. Gently, she stroked with the tip of her finger the belly of the woman scarcely visible beneath the loose cotton shirt. Her heart squeezed painfully. She tucked the picture inside the flap of her case and, after taking out some clothes for her journey, zipped it up, dressed and sat on the edge of the bed.
She was startled by a knock on the door. One of the boys who lived on the farm was stood outside. He wore a long shirt that was creased and dirty and short trousers, frayed around the knees. He could have been no older than seven or eight, Natalie thought. She smiled, but the child looked petrified. When the boy said nothing, Natalie bent down to his level.
‘Is everything okay?’ she asked.
The boy nodded mutely. He pointed behind him, towards the fence along the edge of the property that bordered the road to Bindura.
‘What is it?’ Natalie asked. Immediately she felt the flow of adrenaline. She calmed herself. ‘What did you want?’
‘There is somebody that wants to speak to you,’ the bo
y said, then, solemnly.
‘Who?’ Natalie said. ‘Who wants to speak to me?’
The boy shook his head. ‘I cannot say.’
Natalie got back to her feet. She glanced over towards the fence, her brain working fast. Was it some kind of trap? Who could want to see her?
‘Well if you can’t say, then I’m not going to go,’ Natalie said to the boy, a little impatiently.
‘She told me I couldn’t say anything,’ the boy said glumly, hanging his head in an almost exaggerated scene of embarrassment.
‘She?’
The boy said nothing more. He pointed towards the fence again then turned on his heel and quickly ran away, around the side of the main house towards the small houses of the domestic staff. Natalie followed the direction the boy had pointed and tried to make out any sign of a figure behind the shrubbery and hedge; she could see nothing.
Closing the door, she walked cautiously across the lawn, beneath the shade of the trees towards the road. Behind her she could hear the slow hiss of the scythe as it fell through the dry grass. In the trees the birds chattered and the slow pulse of the cicadas gave the day its rhythm. She stopped a moment, close to the shrubbery, listening carefully for the sound of movement on the other side.
Before her was a Glory Lilly, its leaves succulently green, expansive, spreading up the hedge, its flowers, newly budded, a glorious delicate deep pink with inward curling petals, its scent, honey sweet, hanging heavily upon the air. ‘One tenth of an ounce of its root,’ her uncle had said a few days before, when they were wandering around the property, ‘could kill you outright.’ The thought came back to her now, perversely, as she stood listening for her visitor.
Moving close to the fence, she glanced over and at first saw nothing. The fence was chest high, and as it was difficult to approach, she could not get a very good view. For some moments she thought perhaps the boy had been having some kind of joke at her expense, or that perhaps whoever had wanted her had wandered off, and she was about to turn away, when a head rose before her.
For some moments she did not recognise the face.
The girl was perhaps twelve years old. She wore a red sleeveless shirt, with white braiding, and a blue dress from which the pocket had been half torn. Though thin, she looked healthy, and between her parted lips, Natalie noticed a beautiful row of teeth, white and straight. She did not smile, rather she looked at Natalie seriously, her noble face perfectly still and clear except for the slight crinkling of her forehead between her eyes.
‘You’re from the village,’ Natalie said, trying to remember her name. She was sure she had been told it. Vividly she recalled the girl leading the children away to sit beneath the tree and play at school. The girl nodded. When she didn’t speak Natalie tried again. ‘The little boy said you wanted to speak to me.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She examined Natalie boldly and Natalie felt a little uncomfortable under the scrutiny.
‘Perhaps I should come around there so we can talk a little more comfortably,’ she said.
‘Will you be our teacher?’
Natalie gaped. The girl stood on the grass on the other side of the fence, close to the road. Her hands hung by her sides, neither limp, nor tense. She moved from one foot to the other, not turning her eyes from her for a moment.
‘Your teacher?’
‘We have no one to teach us. Our last teacher was arrested, and now we have no school. With no school there is no chance that I can go to university. Will you be our teacher?’
‘Listen I… ’ Natalie regarded the girl, bewildered. She did not know how to respond. She could not say that she was not a teacher, as she was. She pictured the girl seated beneath the Msasa tree with the little children gathered around her. Recalled the beaten squalor of the village.
‘But I can’t,’ she said.
The girl gazed at her. The early morning heat was already oppressive and Natalie felt a bead of sweat ease its way down her spine. She ran a hand through her hair.
‘You don’t want to?’
‘It’s not that.’ Natalie shifted uneasily. ‘Look, I’ll come round,’ she said. ‘It’s impossible trying to speak over this hedge.’
To get out she had to follow the path around the house, out through the gate beneath the Jacaranda and onto the road. It took her a couple of minutes and she feared that when she got around the girl would be gone, but as she emerged onto the dusty verge of the road she saw her stood there still, gazing across the hedge towards the bungalow just as she had left her. The girl turned when she heard Natalie and watched as she approached.
‘We have no one to teach us,’ she said again, as Natalie came close to her. Her bearing was proud and her chin tilted back slightly and there was no change in the expression on her face, but Natalie felt there was the slightest hint of desperation in her voice. Of disappointment. ‘I want to go to university to study to be a teacher,’ the girl said, the words blurting out of her now, ‘so that I can come back to the village to teach the children.’
Natalie nodded. She crouched down close to the girl, squatting in the dust. The girl stood above her, looking down into her eyes.
‘We used to have a teacher from England,’ the girl explained, ‘when I was small. But then he went home. After that we had another teacher. He was from Gweru. He was a good teacher and he taught me how to count and to say my alphabet and to write and read.’
She bent down suddenly then and with her finger began to write in the dirt at the side of the road. She formed beautiful neat letters. A tidy, careful script. At first Natalie thought she was writing out the alphabet, but soon she realised the letters spelt out a painstaking sentence. She walks in beauty like the night.
‘Byron?’
‘Our teacher taught us the poem.’
She clasped her hands before her and, casting her eyes up towards the sky, began to declaim the poem. Natalie gazed up at her astonished. She did not falter and told it through to the end. When she had finished, her hands dropped back down to the side of her skirt, and she glanced down at Natalie, and Natalie thought she saw the hint of a smile at the edges of the girl’s lips.
‘That was very impressive,’ she conceded.
‘But now we have no teacher,’ the girl said, her face suddenly solemn again.
‘Listen,’ Natalie said. ‘I’m going home. I’m going back to England. I’m sorry.’
The disappointment was apparent in her face. Her shoulders, which had been held beautifully high and proud, slumped slightly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Natalie said again.
‘You don’t like it here?’
‘It’s very beautiful here,’ she said.
‘So why are you going home?’
Natalie shook her head and stood up, brushing the dust from the seat of her jeans.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult here.’
She looked at the girl and her words seemed inadequate. The girl did not respond. She gazed at Natalie evenly and it was hard for her to read what she might be thinking.
‘I’m sorry,’ the girl said.
She turned and walked away, down the road from Bindura, back towards her village. It had taken twenty minutes to make the drive in the Land Rover, though it was true that part of the journey, down the final track towards the village, they had driven little quicker than walking pace. It must have taken the girl at least an hour, if not longer to have walked to the farm. Natalie watched her as she walked, a steady pace along the edge of the road, her bare feet kicking up the dust. The road shimmered, and soon the girl’s body seeped liquid into the waves of heat rising up from the tarmac.
Memories, she thought. That was her name. She turned back to the farm.
Kristine was cheerful when Natalie entered the kitchen. She had lain out breakfast on the large wooden table and the family gathered around it. Natalie felt unable to eat, not even the fruit that Kristine pressed on her. The chatter continued, good-natured banter and laughter.
The bruise on Roy’s face was blue, but neither he nor Kristine seemed to be bothered by it and no mention was made of the incident the day before. It was as though it had not happened at all. Natalie felt like shouting at them. How could they just ignore the brutality, the bullying?
‘I was thinking…’ Natalie began as they cleared the table. ‘Perhaps I’ll be going back home.’
Her voice trailed off. Kristine paused half way to the sink while Roy glanced up at her. Natalie looked down at her hands. Roy nodded slowly, Kristine’s face moved barely perceptibly, almost as though she was about to smile but decided not to.
‘When were you thinking of going?’ Roy asked.
‘Well I need to check when the flights are,’ Natalie said. She paused. ‘Today, if there is a flight.’
Roy nodded and stood up. He took the plates and delivered them to the sink where the maid was stood looking out of the window, obviously listening to the conversation. He touched Kristine’s arm, a gentle, tender caress. She glanced up at him and half smiled and turned away.
‘Okay,’ Roy said. ‘Kristine will call the airport and see when the next flight is and if they have any seats. I’ll drive you there if they have something available.’
In her bungalow, Natalie slumped glumly down on the end of the bed. She felt as if she had let her aunt and uncle down. She felt, too, as though she was running away at the first hint of trouble and it made her feel like a coward. She felt homesick and longed for the dull normality of her life in England: work, the trip to the pub on a Friday night. And Lawrence. She missed him. There had been a time when the thought of him had hurt her, when she could not bear to see him for what he reminded her of, for what she had lost. But she missed the sound of his voice, the closeness of him. His touch. Being touched.
A Child Called Happiness Page 5
