A Child Called Happiness

by Stephan Collishaw

  Natalie felt her blouse damp with sweat. The back of her neck prickled. She glanced enviously at the young blonde girl by her side who seemed as cool and beautiful as ever. It was hard to gauge the mood of the veterans; some laughed and sang, while others looked drugged and carried long sticks and the occasional machete.

  The sound of the dogs grew more ferocious and shouts echoed from the walls of the courtyard on the other side of a tall hedge; a group of the farm invaders beat a hasty retreat onto the lawn, the dogs, two Dobermans, following, snarling and barking. One of the white farmers whistled for the dogs, but they paid no attention. Janet laughed softly.

  ‘Get them,’ she breathed.

  ‘What papers have they got?’ Boyle demanded of the policemen, reappearing, his face dark with rage. ‘They have set fire to one of my barns. Aren’t you supposed to be policemen? There is still the rule of law in Zimbabwe – you’ll be held to account.’

  The policemen shifted their feet uneasily. They moved back across the grass and Boyle followed them.

  ‘If this land has been appropriated then there should be papers,’ he shouted at their retreating backs. ‘Have you checked their papers? Who has authorised this?’

  The policemen broke into a slow jog, making their way back to their car on the other side of the fence. The engine started and they disappeared, the cloud of dust rising in the still, hot air and hanging in an ominous cloud above the broken gates of the farm.

  The veterans had begun to wander around the farm aimlessly, as if not sure what they should be doing next. They kept away from the dogs, which snarled menacingly and kept up a volley of barks. From the courtyard, on the far side of the hedge there was an explosion and flames shot up into the air.

  ‘There goes his gasoline,’ one of the farmers remarked.

  With the police gone, the atmosphere had begun to change. Roy and Boyle had joined the white farmers by the house and they conferred quietly.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be any one in charge,’ Roy said. ‘I think we need to make a move, gauge how serious they are.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Let’s turn up the heat a little. See if they respond or not. You three,’ he turned and indicated two of the elder farmers. ‘Hang back by the house and be ready with the guns if it turns nasty.’ He turned to Natalie and Janet. ‘Now, perhaps you two should go inside.’

  Janet merely nodded vaguely. She and Natalie moved up towards the door of the farmhouse while Roy and Boyle opened the back of one of the Land Rovers and took out their rifles. Roy and Boyle led the other farmers out towards the main group of veterans. The dogs came with them and Boyle grabbed two by their collar, twisting the leather slightly, tightening them so that the dogs strained more, rearing up on their back legs barking.

  ‘You’ve no right here,’ Roy shouted, moving close to one of the veterans. ‘Tell your friends to get off the property. It is private land.’

  The group of veterans gathered closer. Natalie felt behind her for the rifle that was leant against the wall. The barrel was hot from the sun. She slid it up into her hands and rested in the shadow of the doorway.

  The veterans circled, but as soon as one drew close, the dogs lunged at them and they scuttled away quickly. Roy turned his back on the man he had been speaking to and shouted across to Boyle.

  ‘Let the dogs go, we can’t be held responsible for what happens if they trespass on private property.’

  Boyle made as if to set loose the two Dobermans. The crowd of veterans shouted in alarm, their clubs and machetes raised aloft. A rifle cracked close to Natalie, and she jumped and thought for a moment that it had been she who fired. At the sound of the gunshot, the veterans moved suddenly, turning and running for the fence. Boyle released the dogs, which bounded after the men. For a few moments there was chaos as the veterans raced back to the road and the farmers gave chase. Janet lowered the sporting rifle and grinned.

  Back at their own farm, Natalie withdrew to the cottage. She sat on the edge of the bed and suddenly found herself shaking. She could not stop. It had grown dark and she should have got up to turn on the lights but she found she could not move.

  Later Kristine knocked at the door softly and came in. She sat beside her on the edge of the bed and put her arm around Natalie’s shoulders. Kristine was an attractive woman in her mid-fifties with greying hair neatly clipped back from her face. She looked a lot like her daughter, Barbara. She was quiet and reserved but gentle in her manner, not unlike Natalie’s own mother.

  ‘What if they come here?’ Natalie said, her voice unsteady.

  Kristine had flicked on the light, but the curtains were open and the windows were black with night. For some moments she said nothing.

  ‘They will,’ she said finally. ‘It’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘How can you put up with it?’ Natalie said, turning to face her.

  Kristine paused again before she answered. Natalie glanced at her. She had a good profile. Her skin was tanned and there were creases around her eyes. She looked tired, not scared.

  ‘It’s home, Natalie. This is my home. We have nothing else, nowhere else to go. We have no money beyond what is invested in this land, this farm. I’ve been here all of my adult life. Barbara was born here. She grew up here. It’s where our friends are. This farm is my life. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.’ She stood up and walked across to the window. ‘Particularly not back in gloomy England. I don’t think I could stand it.’

  She gazed out into the darkness, her reflection staring back, pale and hollow. After a few moments she pulled the curtains closed and turned back to Natalie.

  ‘This farm has been in the Drew family for almost a hundred years. It’s our land.’ She smiled. ‘It’s our land.’

  She sighed and walked over to the door, stroking Natalie’s hair absently as she passed, as though she was her own daughter.

  ‘And besides,’ she said, half turning at the door. ‘I love it here. The bastards are not going to drive me out.’

  It was very early the next morning when a timid knock at the door awoke Natalie. She glanced at her watch; it was not yet seven o’clock. She got up and pulled on her jeans, ran a hand through her hair and opened the front door. Memories was on the step, the sunlight slanting through the branches of the flame tree turning her skin copper.

  ‘Memories… ’ She smiled. ‘What are you doing here so early?’

  ‘He is dead,’ she said.

  Natalie felt the blood pulse in her ears. A long, slow beat. For a moment, the world seemed to recede as though she was looking through binoculars the wrong way. Memories grew smaller, distant and the sounds of the morning faded and she remembered with vivid clarity the darkness, the feeling of emptiness and loss.

  The world came back with a sudden rush of noise in her ears.

  ‘Dead?’

  Memories turned her head away, looking out across the valley, across the green pasture land that dropped away beneath Drew’s Kopje.

  Natalie did not believe it. Could not.

  ‘He died from a fever,’ Memories said, her voice uncharacteristically quiet and subdued. ‘I am sorry.’

  17

  I was four years old when Zindonga, my father, died. Zindonga was cursed with good looks. He was a handsome child, doted upon by his mother and his elder sisters, and even though life was difficult in the late twenties and the early thirties, with white hysteria at the ‘Black Peril’ at its height, he was a happy child, smiling often, with a laugh that was infectious.

  I have no photograph of my father. Only the words of my mother and my aunts and that one image in my mind, as I saw him last. That image wiped all the others away, and for that I hate them more – not only did they kill him, but they stole my other memories with that brutal act.

  It became clear quite early in his life that Zindonga was intelligent. He mixed easily with the other children, spoke early, and picking up a discarded book left by the white children behind the b
arn, he quickly began deciphering the shapes, ordering them, fitting them into a system he picked up from odd fragments he over-heard in the house, or noted from the white children’s play, from the words they would scratch in the dust.

  Tafara watched Zindonga grow with pride. He noticed the boy’s quickness, saw his mother’s acuity in his bright eyes, saw her humour in his flushed cheeks, but detected his own stubborn anger buried deep down in his son’s soul; too deep for the boy to understand or articulate.

  The mission of Father Bruce, which Tafara had helped to build, expanded as the years passed, all the way down the valley. A mission school was set up by the Mazowe River, with the energetic Father Bruce doing most of the teaching. Zindonga’s mother was an early and devout convert of the Catholic Church and attended Mass every Sunday, taking Zindonga, her youngest boy, with her.

  Zindonga loved the Mass: the crude altar, the incense, the singing, so different to the singing in the village. He took great pride in the fact that his father had helped build the church, despite the fact that Tafara never once stepped inside the building.

  ‘The white men took away our young men, they took away our fields and our pastureland, and now they want to take away our gods,’ he said.

  Zindonga sat at his feet and listened, looking up at his father who had become stooped with age and whose hair had turned grey and whose skin sagged from his face and chest and his upper arms.

  ‘Our gods will always be here,’ Zindonga said. ‘Our fathers will always walk this land.’

  Tafara nodded and laid his hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘the people will rise up as they did when I was a young man, and they will take back this land.’ He looked out from the entrance of their small hut and gazed down across the fields below the kopje that had once belonged to his family, where he had grown up as a child, nourishing the cattle on the rich pastureland. ‘It will be ours again,’ he promised. He waved his hand. ‘This is your inheritance. Mbuya Nehanda has sworn it.’

  ‘Yes, Father, it shall be so.’

  And still, Zindonga loved the church. Inside the building small windows let in thin shafts of light. The walls had been built from brick and were thick and even in the hot weather inside the church it was cooler. The incense burnt during Mass mixed with the earthy, pungent scent of the worshipper’s bodies. Most of the early congregation was made up of women, but Father Bruce had as his helper not only Bernard, the tall, thin, Shona convert, but a young man from the village, little older than Zindonga. During the Mass the young man helped Father Bruce and Bernard dress, like them, in a black robe. Zindonga envied the young man and dreamed that he, too, could serve at the altar and wear a black robe and have all of the women of the neighbourhood fussing over him.

  When he was old enough he began attending the mission school, and with his bright and cheerful personality he quickly became a favourite both of the other children and of the teachers too.

  When Father Bruce died, a young Irishman took over the mission. Father O’Leary was a lean, dark-haired man in his late twenties. With his dark cassock, and his pale face hidden beneath the brim of a wide hat whenever he ventured out, he looked a sickly man; but his appearance belied a will of iron and a quick, intelligent sense of humour. Father O’Leary quickly identified Zindonga as one of his brightest and most able students, and took special care with him.

  For Zindonga, those days were some of the best of his life. Whenever he was sent out to work in Drew’s fields looking after the cattle, he would go with a book tucked beneath his arm, and lie in the long grass, head buried in the text as the cattle lowed and trudged around the ancient fields.

  In the evenings he would share with Tafara the things that he had learned at school; about the world and the great sweep of Western history, of the writings of Augustine. He taught his father odd words of Latin, and recited poems: Shakespeare, Virgil, the Bible. Tafara watched him grow with pride.

  Occasionally they would go up the kopje, which overshadowed Drew’s farm, to the cave where the spirits were worshipped, and they would pour out a libation for their ancestors. Squatting in the mud, Zindonga felt slightly uncomfortable with these pagan rituals, but as he grew older he rationalised it to himself that really it was no different to the Catholic saints. And he prayed with his father the old prayers and poured out the beer upon the ground. Later they would sit on the granite peak of the hill and gaze up into the night sky and Tafara would tell him the old tales again; of how this valley had been when Tafara had been a child, of the village that had nestled in the shade of the hill, of wise old Ngunzi and of Mhuru and Mbudzi, and of his first bride Anokosha and of how the white men came and took away first their cattle and then their land. And Zindonga learned these lessons too, just as well as the lessons he learned at the mission school, but these lessons he did not repeat; he stored them deep within his soul, feeding the anger that burned there too deep for him to understand.

  Tafara died soon after Zindonga’s fifteenth birthday. Zindonga wanted to bury him with the ancients in the cave in the hillside, but Drew would not have it, and he was buried in a dismal plot at the mission, down the valley, away from the farm. The land was barren there, scorched hot in the long months of sun and regularly washed away in the rains. Zindonga crouched down by the humble wooden marker and looked across at the dreary view of the growing shanty town, the rubbish that was accumulating, and felt the anger beginning to dislodge deep within him and begin its slow ascent to the surface.

  Following the death of his father, a darkness descended upon Zindonga. Often he was consumed by an inexplicable rage that burned so fiercely within him he was fearful he would lash out at those around him. During these moods he would seek solitude up in the caves, or on top of the granite kopje where he would listen to the sound of the wind as it blew across the valley, and up through the crevices of the rocks and caves.

  One morning as he had stumbled down from the top of the kopje he heard the whisper of the wind in the tops of the trees and it sounded for a moment like the voices of many people whispering to him. Zindonga stopped and listened. The previous evening a burning fury had driven him from the hut where he lived with his mother. He was filled with a desire to hurt someone, to kill, even. He had run up into the hills and lay that night on the top of the granite boulder and gazed up into the vast array of stars and recalled the stories of his father, Tafara.

  The air was alive. It was very early and the sun was about to rise. As he listened, the sky lightened and a few moments later the sun crept up over the line of the horizon. The light changed as if the brush around him was glowing from some internal energy. At that moment, as he watched, the top boulder on the kopje burst into flame, a brilliant, blinding moment of illumination. Within minutes, the three rocks that made up the head of the kopje were consumed with light, glistening brilliantly in the rising sun. Zindonga fell to his knees.

  ‘Father,’ he whispered. And then the names of the gods. Not the Christian God he had learned to worship, but those other gods his father had taught him.

  Whenever the dark moods descended upon him, Zindonga recalled that moment, and it comforted him, and he turned his back on Jehovah and called on Mwari instead and the spirits of his fathers, his ancestral spirits and upon Nehanda, Mbuya Nehanda.

  Zindonga’s efforts redoubled at school after the death of his father, and Father O’Leary became something of a father figure to him. Often he would stay at the mission, studying late into the evening by the light of a kerosene lamp. Under the guidance of Father O’Leary Zindonga went to Fort Hare University in South Africa.

  Established in 1916, Fort Hare was the first university open to black students in Africa. There Zindonga met young men much like himself. They were bright, keenly intelligent and smouldering with anger. It was there that he joined the ANC and there, too, that he met Grace Mpedzisi.

  One evening, Zindonga arrived at the hostel, where the international students at Fort Hare were housed, carrying a bottle of whiskey
. Grace was one of the company. She was small and thin and beautiful in a natural and understated manner. As the students partied, she stayed aloof, watching but not participating in the drunken discussion. There was a nobility and a purity about her that attracted Zindonga.

  It was close to midnight when somebody burst into the room of the student hostel in Fort Hare to say that there was a demonstration outside the Dean’s residence. Drunkenly the crowd emptied out of the room unable to resist the lure of a protest.

  ‘You are not going to join them?’ Grace asked Zindonga, who was slouched with his back against the wall nursing a glass of scotch against his stomach. Zindonga did not answer.

  When he looked at her, Grace shivered involuntarily. Emptying the whiskey into his mouth, Zindonga ran his hand across his lips and stood up and walked over to her.

  Grace wanted to say something. Something that would distract him, to engage him in conversation, to discuss the protest they had been on that day, to talk about the war raging across the world, about their homes, about growing up, their hopes and fears for the future. She opened her mouth to speak, but could find no words. She was silent. Like a deer – a duiker – quivering at the approach of a lion.

  When he touched her, his hand was gentler than she could have expected. His breath was hot against her face. And she surrendered herself to him. It felt like dying, she thought, but beautifully. Every wall she had constructed, the careful monitoring of her body, the constant obedience to the morals of her mother, the nuns, the faith in which she had been raised – each one of them she discarded with her clothes so that she felt doubly undressed. Totally naked.

  I do not care, she thought, as she gave herself to Zindonga. I do not care.

  18

  When Natalie woke the dream was fresh in her mind. She lay for some time without moving, the light streaming in through the curtains and, from far away, she could hear the sound of an electric saw. She closed her eyes and tried to recapture the images, but it was the feeling that came back to her; the weight of the child in her arms, the baby she had been carrying close against her heart. When she opened her eyes she thought of Happiness: but it had not been him that she held in the dream. It had been her child. She had known that by the way that it had felt in her arms, by the sharpness of the pain that pierced her heart.