She got up and showered and ate a light breakfast, then took the Kawasaki and rode out along the road to the village. At the top of a rise she stopped and pulled the bike off the road and looked down the valley at the farm nestled below the kopje, at the stream, the trees and in the distance Bindura, just visible. The morning haze had burnt away and it was hot now the sun had risen higher. The view was beautiful and she tried to drink it in, to dispel the knot that held her stomach tight. To forget about what had been, what she had left behind.
Memories was sitting outside one of the huts carefully washing the enamelled metal bowls for eating when Natalie parked the bike at the end of the track and walked down the slope towards the village. Beneath the Msasa tree, Moses was talking, squatted down close to the earth, beside him, on the chair was a tall, thin man with greying hair. Memories looked up and smiled and waved a hand; drops of water caught in the brilliant sunlight that fell in columns between the leaves of the trees.
‘How are you doing?’ Natalie ambled down to the buildings.
She was about to squat down close to Memories when, with surprising agility, Moses bound over, waving his arms demonstratively. Behind him, the other man rose from his chair and watched.
‘No,’ Moses said, ‘no lessons today. No.’
He pushed Natalie back, and, startled, Natalie stumbled and almost fell. Moses’ face creased with annoyance. His lips were open and he breathed heavily. Perspiration ran down his forehead. Memories rose from the doorstep.
‘She is busy,’ Moses continued, indicating the girl behind him. ‘They are busy. They do not have time for playing at school. There are jobs that must be done.’
‘But… ’
Behind Moses the other man had walked over and stood close. As Natalie glanced over Moses’ shoulder she caught the gaze of the tall man and seemed, momentarily, to recognise him. Moses was shaking his head adamantly. Memories did not speak. She looked at Moses and at Natalie, and her lips moved, but she did not say anything. After a minute or two she sat back down and resumed the washing of the dishes, handling each one carefully, keeping her head down.
‘Go,’ Moses told her. ‘There is no time for this playing. Go.’
Natalie moved away. As she walked she looked back. Moses followed her out of the village, wafting his hands as if he was herding a cow. Behind him the tall man followed and again Natalie felt that she knew him, but she could not place where from.
It was only after she had kick-started the Kawasaki, and was negotiating her way up the heavily rutted path towards the road that she remembered where she had seen the tall visitor.
She pulled up at the end of the track and gazed out through the haze of heat, across the metalled road and down the side of the slope across the trees and fields. A startlingly clear image played before her eyes of the evening at Boyle’s farm: the crowd of war veterans spilling across the neatly cropped lawn, the sound of dogs barking, the smell of smoke. A small, squat man carrying a large machete, and behind him a thin man, shirt open to the waist, wooden club dangling from his left hand. He had been one of the men who had gone around to the barn just before it was set on fire. She hadn’t seen him again after that.
She half turned around on the seat of her bike. What had Moses been doing with one of the War Veterans? The man had shown no sign of having recognised her, but why had Moses been so hostile? She opened the throttle of the Kawasaki and the bike shot forward, grit and stones scattering in her wake.
‘You not down at your school today?’ Kristine asked as she entered the kitchen.
Roy was seated at the table finishing a large breakfast and the maid was by the sink washing dishes. Natalie sat opposite Roy and accepted the coffee Kristine poured for her.
‘I went to the village,’ Natalie said, ‘but Moses was really hostile. He didn’t want me there.’
Roy scraped the last of the egg from his plate and put his knife and fork down. He looked up at Natalie.
‘There was somebody with him,’ Natalie continued. ‘Somebody at the village. A tall guy. I’m sure it was one of the War Veterans that were at Boyle’s farm.’
‘Really?’ Roy said.
‘Do you remember the one with the club? He went around to the barn just before it was burned down.’
Roy’s eyes flickered as he thought. He nodded slowly as if picturing the man in his head.
‘Don’t you think that’s odd?’
Roy shrugged. Getting up, he took his plate over to the sink where the maid took it from him. He smiled and thanked her. ‘Why odd? Everybody knows everybody around here.’
Natalie noticed the look that passed between Kristine and Roy as he made towards the door.
‘I thought it was odd,’ Natalie said to Kristine, as Roy went out. ‘Moses was really unfriendly. He never has been before. He wouldn’t even let me speak to Memories.’
Kristine sighed. ‘It’s probably nothing,’ she said. ‘Moses can be an odd man.’
It was early afternoon when Natalie looked up from the desk where she had been writing a letter. She had heard the sound of a car approaching the farm. It pulled off the road and onto the gravel path, and from her window she glimpsed the white, blue and gold of a Zimbabwean police car.
Natalie got up and walked around to the main farmhouse. Outside, standing in the shade of the flame tree, stood two police officers. Bhekinkosi had been sent to fetch Roy. Kristine paced nervously in the hallway of the farm.
‘What do they want?’ Natalie asked.
‘Nothing good,’ said Kristine.
When Roy entered it seemed as though a weight had been placed upon his shoulders. He stood in the hallway and looked around.
‘Well, here we go,’ he said.
‘It may not be,’ Kristine murmured.
Roy raised his eyebrows.
‘Where are they?’
‘They’re outside. I couldn’t face inviting the bastards in.’
Roy turned to Bhekinkosi, who stood in the doorway. ‘That’s all Bheki. You can go.’
They sat around the table in the kitchen. The two policemen were sweating; dark patches circled their armpits and their foreheads glistened. They placed their caps on the table. Kristine had sent the maid away and poured them an iced lemon drink herself into glasses cooled in the fridge. The policemen drank thirstily. Roy’s drink remained untouched.
Natalie recognised one of the policemen; he had interrogated her at the police station. He was large, in his forties and wore glasses that he took off regularly to polish on the tail of his shirt. He pulled out an envelope and pushed it across the table to Roy. On the front of it was the stamp of the Zimbabwean government. Roy did not glance at it, but kept his eye on the two policemen. His gaze was hard with hostility and Natalie worried he might say something that would prompt the two men to arrest him again. Kristine seemed to share this concern. She walked behind him and rested her hands on his shoulders, massaging him gently. Her eyes did not leave the envelope.
For some moments the table was silent. The two policemen watched, expecting Roy to pick up the envelope, and when he did not they seemed a little unsure how to progress. The larger of the two men broke the silence.
‘I think you know what this is about.’
Roy shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’
The large policeman took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. The lenses were thick, and when he took them off, his eyes seemed suddenly small, squeezed between rolls of flesh.
‘Under the terms of the 1992 Land Reform Act,’ he said, replacing his glasses and squinting across the table at Roy, ‘the government has written to inform you that your farm has been designated for acquisition… ’
Roy was shaking his head. A thin smile played on his lips. ‘No.’
‘What do you mean?’ The large policeman seemed to be genuinely surprised. His colleague stared sullenly at Roy as if he was tired already of the whole game.
‘I’m not giving up the farm, Comrade Gombera. You can come w
ith whatever fancy papers you want. You know they are all illegal and that they won’t hold up in court.’
Gombera grinned. He stood up, placing his hands flatly on the table. Leaning over, he reached out and pushed the envelope towards Roy.
‘The papers are served. Your notice has been given.’
His colleague also stood up. He seemed about to speak, but Gombera shushed him. They turned, pushing back their chairs and walked out of the kitchen. Nobody moved until they heard the sound of the front door opening and then closing behind them. Kristine seemed to collapse then, as though suddenly the life had drained out of her and she held onto Roy. Roy whispered to her, stroking her hair.
‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Be strong. We knew this would happen. It was only a matter of time. They’ve had their eyes on this place for years.’
‘Roy,’ she wailed. ‘What will we do?’
There was a pause, an awkward silence. Natalie gazed down at her hands in her lap. From outside came the sound of the engine of the police car turning over. Finally it burst into life and they listened as it drove off down the gravel driveway.
‘We’ll fight them,’ Roy said. ‘We won’t make it easy.’
19
Grace Mpedzisi was twenty-one when Zindonga met her; tall and thin with a soft voice. The voice was deceptive. Her family had come from the highlands, the temperate, fertile land in northern Zimbabwe. They had been uprooted by the white government and sent to live on a reserve where the soil was poor; it was overcrowded and farming was difficult.
After their first night together it was some days before Zindonga saw Grace again. He was walking through the leafy campus at Fort Hare when he caught sight of her perched on the edge of a bench beside a smartly dressed young man. Zindonga paused, long enough for her to raise her eyes and see him. She smiled and beckoned him over.
‘Hello.’ She greeted him cheerfully. ‘I wondered whether I would see you again.’
Zindonga nodded to her acquaintance, who was regarding him through a pair of heavy-rimmed spectacles. He was wearing a suit, jacket done up, and a tie despite the heat of the day. Zindonga felt a little unnerved by the frankness of his gaze.
‘This is Robert,’ Grace introduced them.
The young man rose from the bench, picking up a pile of books and pushing his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose.
Zindonga raised his eyebrows once he had gone.
‘He will be a great man, you’ll see,’ Grace said.
‘I would like to see you again,’ Zindonga said.
She paused, a book in her hands and smiled, and then rose from the bench. The bench was beneath an arbour weighted down by bougainvillea; the colour of the flowers reflected off her skin, giving a rosy glow to her cheeks. She pushed the book into his hands.
‘Read it and then we can discuss it.’
Zindonga watched as she walked away, her step light and confident. When she had disappeared from view he turned the book over and read the title. An Introduction to Marxism.
Cutting his lectures that day, he devoured the book. He read on until the light faded. As his roommates went to bed, he lit a candle and continued to read deep into the night, his eyes straining at the dense text. When he finished his roommates were sleeping, their snores rising in a steady rhythm. But Zindonga could not sleep. For an hour he tossed about on the hard bunk, then he got up and dressed and let himself out of the hostel.
He was waiting the next morning when she appeared from the women’s hostel close to the university building. She glanced up surprised when he approached her. He felt her eyes slide over his rumpled clothes to the book in his hand. Her eyebrows rose in query.
‘I read it,’ he said simply.
They went to a small café where labourers and truck drivers stopped for a coffee or a beer and settled in a corner. Grace was wearing a light cotton dress. He recalled the feel of her body, the way her legs had wrapped around him, the hunger and abandon in the way that she had given herself to him, and he longed to touch her, but he did not.
‘When I was young,’ Grace said, ‘I loved the home that I was brought up in. It was small.’ She glanced around the café, which was little more than a shack. ‘Smaller even than this place.’ She sighed. ‘This place looks like a palace in comparison. But I didn’t realise that then. There was a tree at the back of our home, a jacaranda. I think it was perhaps the only tree on the god-forsaken bit of land. I loved it when the petals fell, purple, pink, it was like heaven, all across the roof of the house, across the dry dust of the yard, across the wooden table.’
She looked at Zindonga. He reached out and took her hand, but she pulled it away. She smiled and stroked one of her fingers down his cheek.
‘My father worked the land, and when we were old enough we helped. The ground was poor and we grew barely enough to feed ourselves, never mind have enough to sell. We had a cow; she was thin and barren. It was only as I grew older that I realised that we were poor. And it was only then, that I realised that it had not always been that way; that it was not fate, or my father’s poor judgements, or lack of work that caused our impoverishment – it was because the whites had taken our land.’
Zindonga was nodding vigorously. As she spoke he thought of his father and of the stories that Tafara had told him, of how the land had been before the whites had come.
‘The whites,’ Grace was saying, ‘make up only three per cent of the population, and yet they control 75 per cent of the economically viable land.’ She paused and pushed her coffee cup away. ‘Ninety seven per cent of black Rhodesians control only twenty three per cent of overcrowded, unfertile land. Robert told me that.’ She lowered her head and looked at her hands, holding the thin fingers out and examining them. ‘Robert thinks that we should fight this injustice, that we should not allow them to take away our land, to force us to carry passes so that they can control our movement. To treat us like third class citizens.’
Later they walked out towards the edge of the town. They thumbed a lift on the back of a truck and got out where the bush started and walked up over the hills to where a river ran, pooling in a grove in a cleft between the hills. It was a popular spot for the students, but was deserted that morning in term time. The air was cool beneath the trees, by the side of the water. While they walked Zindonga told Grace about his father, about his stories of the way things had been and about Nehanda.
Zindonga talked about Tafara’s first wife, Anokosha, and how the whites had taken her away and of the dreams that Tafara had and then the messenger telling him that he had a child and that they were both dead.
Grace leaned over and took his face between her two slim hands. She kissed him. Nervously, Zindonga reached out and pulled her body closer to him. Their bodies touched and clung. Her slim thighs wound around him. Her breath was sweet. She was lithe and quick and graceful and reminded Zindonga of a gazelle. He remembered seeing one once, as a child, it had been early morning and he had been out with his father. As they walked back towards the farm they startled the gazelle that had been feeding in the bushes. It passed by very close to him, so close that if he had reached out he could have touched its freckled flank. So close that he could smell the sweet, hot scent of it. It was so light on its feet that it seemed, almost to be flying, rather than running.
When he entered her he gasped and she drew him close and sank her teeth into his neck. His fingers clawed at the muscles in her back.
When, later, they were lying side by side, looking out across the water and the dense thicket on the other side of the pool, she turned to him.
‘When we have a child, we will call him Happiness.’
Zindonga smiled. He reached out and kissed her and it was decided then, that they would marry.
They moved back to Zimbabwe just in time for the general strike, which paralysed the country in 1948. After working for two years as a teacher in Salisbury, Zindonga took up a job at the mission school back in his home valley.
And that was where I was bor
n: in the valley farmed by my ancestors.
At first Zindonga was welcomed at the mission school. He was an inspirational teacher, who put his whole heart into education. Our family lived in a small hut in the township that had grown around the mission, a basic one-room home, that Grace kept clean and neat. In the evenings guests would be invited around and then there was talk late into the night, often by the light of candles, or even out under the stars, around a small fire roasting nuts on a flat pan.
Occasionally on these evenings there would be singing and dancing, a gramophone was the one item of luxury that Zindonga and Grace owned, along with a small stack of Swing wax discs; Count Basie, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. But more often than not the evenings were opportunities for passionate argument about the future of the country, about the newly emerging leaders like Joshua Nkomo, about Communism, Socialism and revolution.
Vaguely I remember those days. I recall wandering through the chairs, the legs, or lying on the one bed in the corner listening to the sounds of the voices as I drifted off to sleep. The sound of my father. Though I can barely remember his face, I can recall now the sound of his voice; authoritative, warm. I loved to listen to the sound of him talking as the night fell and the people gathered.
Now that Reginald Drew’s farm was flourishing, and as one of the earliest white settlers in the valley, Drew became active politically. He was elected to the Southern Rhodesian Parliament as a United Party MP. The United Party preached an ideology of partnership with the black majority. Drew did not have much time for the concept of partnership, either with white opponents or black. He ran the valley as his personal fiefdom and took a keen interest in the developing police force and its control of crime.
A Child Called Happiness Page 12
