You never know, he said. And it wasn’t my destiny to stop him.
It must have been all that talk of oil wealth that gave him the nerve, that and our desire to leave no stone in this city unturned. We are trying out every rock that may move.
Once in a dark fantasy, strung out by the city and feeling the veins in my temples vibrate with blood, it crossed my mind to write to the college that accepted me asking them to buy my air ticket. Why wouldn’t I? That would solve everything.
But my fears overruled me, loud barking credible things inside me that knew better. The way they saw it, the school had given me too much money, every dollar of scholarship I needed, down to the coins. Why burden the college with you again, they wondered. Why stand up and go again forward, hands full of trembling, bowl in hand, ask, Please, sir, may I have some more?
The way my paranoia saw it, this was one sure way to lose my scholarship, my ingratitude coercing the school to rescind it. How else would my actions be perceived if not as ingratitude? I knew what had happened to Oliver; the exhaustion was making me think funny, flooding my mind with the filth.
I head up Nelson Mandela Avenue toward First Street, the sun full in my face, pass the TV Sales and Hire store where I try to look at the shop window displays and keep telling my reflection one day I will buy the electronics for my home here. Across the road I catch the warm scent of fresh glazed doughnuts rising from the ovens at Sammy’s Bakery. I could plunge into the smell with longing, nest into its crevices and nooks imagining my teeth sinking into the dough. But I have taught myself to redirect the hunger from my stomach, have it leave there, direct it into effort toward working the city.
We handwrite all our letters at the Center, a place we have come to think of as our base, the U.S. Embassy’s educational advising office. A dark auditorium separates this section from the rest of the embassy’s public library, and the air conditioning in it feels like magic. Sometimes before our scholarships came in, before the winter, I would find my way to this dark space just to escape the bright sounds flooding the landscape of my life. For some reason or the other, Cato was always there, typing away. It must have been how we began. Up till then I had carried a healthy reverence for him, how the clean vowels of his laughter seemed to wither away whatever ache or bruise sat within him.
We prefer to deliver our letters in the mornings, delivery rounds we call them, Monday morning being the exception for me. No one wants an orphan clamoring on their doorstep just then—why would they? So I do my rebooking rounds instead. Somehow I think of it as letting the city breathe, allowing its lungs to fill up, to take in the oxygen it needs to course through the veins of its body, and keep the city’s heart beating before I saddle more of my needs on its shoulders again.
It can get tired of you, this city, lose its patience with you and close its fist.
I take a right at the intersection on Second Street, across from Africa Unity Square, and walk toward Eastgate Shopping Mall, where the Air Zimbabwe city offices are located.
For what it’s worth, Cato and I have booked seats on flights to America with a number of airlines. It makes the journey feel real, palpable even, like it’s something that could actually happen. Neither of us has been on an airplane, but it’s a bridge we will cross when we get there, figure what all the talk of bucket seats really is about. For now our bookings have to do. The airline holds your seat for a week at a fixed price, and the best part is you don’t need to pay anything. But after that week your booking is canceled and you must start all over again.
Cato and I rebook dutifully. Week in and week out.
Midmorning we do our follow-up rounds, checking if any of our letters have received a response. I trek down from Eastgate and weave my way through the streets from one office to another, walking beneath the cold drawn-out shadows of tall buildings and the city’s wide spreads of sunshine. But building to building no luck is coming my way today. Flat noes are rare, but We cannot help you at the present time is a familiar line. In a large sunny office overlooking the Centenary Bridge a woman tells me their organization will only give to orphanages and orphans from them, not individuals right from the street. We prefer it that way, the lady says, when I hear myself ask her why. It’s our company’s policy.
Outside the wind is still sharp but a swell of warmth has gathered in pockets throughout the city, mostly in front of buildings in full glare of the sun. I watch a clutch of street kids on First Street busk lazily against a dustbin, waiting for a target to besiege with begging. Any time now the street preacher will set up, prepare to deliver hours of his sermon, get people born again and collect the tithes. I am reminded how in a way I am no different, we are all working the city in the ways we see fit, the ways we have each been equipped. Given the way things are, I think of it sometimes as searching a large comatose body for vital signs of life each day, every interaction the murmur of a pulse, an imperative cue to something viable: no matter how weak, there is reason to hope here, it seems to say, and I resolve I will write more letters in the day, deliver them on my rounds tomorrow.
We have hand delivered every single one of our letters all over the city, tracking down every address on foot. Easily in a day we can clock ten, fifteen kilometers on our calves, working the city. We have a strategy. I think of it as working the city in concentric circles, all emanating from the Center. All places we deliver to must be in the central business district of the city, or at worst, within walking distance to the Center. It saves us transportation costs. Banks are the easiest to get to in this regard; most of them are stacked up on two stretches of Samora Machel Avenue, their large dark glass façades shiny and pristine like mirrors for elephants. Somebody says this is the Wall Street of Zimbabwe, but I know nothing about it. I imagine instead row upon row of computers, black and green screens, people making money in jackets and ties.
A few more banks are located on or close to First Street, all in walking distance from each other. Luckily for us, more banks have opened for business of late; twenty years after independence and finally indigenously owned banks have gained traction. This is before they all start going broke, when the bank runs hit them. For now one seems to open each week, which translates for Cato and me to one more letter for us to drop, one more point to pin our hopes on.
In the beginning, intimidated by their often barren and austere entrance halls, I would end up leaving my letter downstairs at the entrance reception with the guards, which had not been a part of my ambition, which had been to get to the elevator and find my way to the large air-conditioned offices of the bank executives upstairs, certain meeting them in person would enhance my chances at an air ticket. I could picture myself talking to those men, which they mostly were, baldheaded men in dark suits and neckties that flowed down the ample curvature of their bellies, men that I had seen on television talking about growth and profit margins. They had grown up in Rhodesia, under the same conditions as my father, and rehearsing the scenes in my head I could hear myself make sense. But once in the entrance hall something about me seemed to betray my unease in that space, and wouldn’t you know it, the guards just seemed to have the powerful mood detector for it. While I did what I could to keep my cool, they could zero in on my nervousness like it was the epicenter of skunk. I would feel from the back of my head their tall, sinewy frames floating across the hall, coming for me and sending me away, but not before taking my letter and offering to deliver it themselves.
But that was a month ago.
After weeks of no reply I wised up and altered my strategy, had to find a way into the buildings without inviting their attention.
Now when I do my bank rounds, I’m usually assembled in my prom suit, trying not to look hungry and lost. I have all my papers and letters in a large khaki envelope with a U.S. Embassy seal on it, something that dispenses with all manner of questions. Frankly speaking I could have gotten this envelope from anywhere, and I could be armed with the whitest of ill intent, but the seal offers me all the credibility
I need. At worst they mistake me for a messenger but after some cheerful small talk, I get access to the elevator and find my way.
We work the edges of the business district past midmorning but before the afternoon. Around 11 A.M. or so is a good time, after the tea break at 10 but before lunch at 1 P.M. It’s a window when everyone usually is at their desks or at least somewhere within their office building longing for sunshine, trying to kill the lazy hours before lunch.
To keep the hours productive, I head out to seek the travel clinic Cato mentioned last week. It’s somewhere in Avondale, he said, and the TB bubble test is still reasonably priced there. That was the rumor he had heard.
The prospect of carrying a bubble under my skin for three days makes me nervous. With the way I pick at my skin, I could pick at that bubble until I tore it out. I don’t mind bloodying my fingers either, and can go hours watching my blood dry. But the test must be done.
Usually I take an emergency taxi out there when I have some money to spare, an old Peugeot 404 or 504 station wagon from Leopold Takawira Avenue, the seats so worn you can feel the tension in the spring firmly against the bones in your buttocks. Normally, though, I get there the way I am getting there today. I walk from the Center, cutting up along Angwa Street and past Kwame Nkrumah Avenue, onto Julius Nyerere Way, where just before the National Arts Gallery the cool shades of the park, heaps of dry leaves and palm fronds, welcome me in, the kaylite and plastic litter everywhere, the stretches of green lawn so well manicured they could be in an art show.
On the other side of the park the Avenues begin, a well-treed residential neighborhood peppered with street vendors, private hospitals, exotic trees, and clinics. A sign has been hammered into one tree warning of the evils of abortion. Another tree advertises a carpenter, the sign rusting like blood at the edges. Suddenly I wonder why Cato and I haven’t raided this neighborhood yet. It’s somewhere you can’t rule out a wealthy doctor who would understand. I make a mental note of it, and start looking at the signs on doctors’ offices, assessing their qualifications, judging every book by its cover. We will have to start with the guys that learned abroad.
Adjacent to the Avenues are Belgravia and Avondale, neighborhoods where Cato’s travel clinic should be. By the time I find it, it turns out I am a whole week late: the price has changed beyond what I can afford, beyond what I even value to be reasonable.
It has crossed my mind to sit down somewhere nice and sunny and give myself a clean bill of health on those forms. In other words fake the medical exam, then find a doctor’s receptionist who will stamp everything clean. No one will ever know. But this TB thing has me worried. What if I actually end up catching it overseas and end up dying alone in a cold place? What if I end up dying there anyway?
It’s close to lunch hour by the time I get back into the city. Had I walked any faster, maybe I would have gone to the Center, hoping to run into the other guys, nourish myself with their good news. I could have sat down even, and watched The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in the auditorium, evading my hunger until we are kicked out of there for lunch.
Lunchtime is key for us. After we are kicked out, the Center is closed for the hour. Usually we mill about downstairs at the entrance for a while, waiting for a variation to our plans, which these days normally end up with us on the grass in Africa Unity Square. I find myself walking toward there anyway, thinking about how I am running low on working capital. Besides my kombi fare I have nothing, and even that can only see me through to the end of next week. I keep calm and in my head note it as an emergency. It doesn’t have a capital E yet, but it’s close.
Two lovers sit in the grass in the park eating popcorn. A sign near them says do not sit in the grass but no one pays attention, the park lawns are infested with people as though the law has demanded it. Once in a while a photographer approaches the couples, offering his services. I move about and find a bench.
In the beginning, too anxious for any news that could alter our fates, Cato and I could burn the whole hour just walking about the streets, watching how the light pools onto various surfaces across the city while we waited for businesses to open again for the afternoon. Once, busy with our anxiety, we even walked over to Parliament and asked for a tour just so we could expend our energy. Cato put the argument forward that by studying abroad we were going to be ambassadors for our country, which only meant we had to know it better before we took up our posts. That was before things had changed. It’s all cream and maroon in there, the wood a polished shine, warm and rich with the scent of decades-old sweat.
These days, though, the anxiety has sobered us down and we are grateful for the break. When we are in luck and either of us has some money to spare, we head up to Farm & City Bakery, right near the National Railways station. It is not the closest place to the Center, and frankly speaking, given the accumulated ache in our calves we could do with going somewhere closer. But I have convinced Cato that the buns they have there taste like something from a movie; you tear into them with your teeth and so soft is their flesh they practically melt on your tongue. It’s like feeling your mouth getting born again. We arrive for the buns just in time, just as they are leaving the oven, before the syrup is glazed on. With the size nose I have, I can smell them in the air all the way from Wayne Street. And if I inhale right and keep my imagination loose, I can get half-full on that scent alone.
We share everything we have. On bad days we can split a single bun. On better ones we can gorge on half a dozen each, lean back in the grass, and for a moment watch the city like it was something we owned. We call this a buns party. Once we even bought Cokes, and I could have sworn something else was in it besides all the euphoria of the world. It made us talk funny. I sat there afterward dreaming of whole busloads of Africans on the highway to America, a bridge straddling the ocean, one head lodged somewhere in West Africa, Senegal, following the horizon all the way to the American East Coast. Every single person on it had a visa, his or her medicals, complete and paid for.
But that had been that day.
I file away the loud honks and lunch-hour screeches of traffic somewhere in my head, and head down Kwame Nkrumah Avenue, toward Tendo’s workplace.
For years this was Union Avenue, until it wasn’t. I can’t seem to track when exactly the switch was, but I want to think it must have been in the late 1990s, when farm invasions and land reform became en vogue in the papers.
Tendo and his height are both in. He seems to have acquired more of it since the end of high school six months ago. We joke about that, then step out of his office, and after talking for a bit we figure out my working-capital situation. Maybe next week or so, when he is paid, he says, then right there in the street, folds one of his big arms around me, envelops me in a hug.
The hours seem to slide by much quicker in the afternoons, a single outing and somehow I have burnt a whole hour, usually while waiting for an appointment with someone who never comes, or while I am hovering across from an entrance, trying to stumble into a building with someone important, catch the elevator ride with them, explain my case, then it’s 3:30 before I know it, and the cold wind is finding its way down the shaded streets, nesting again where the sun has pulled away, left quietly like a veil. Afternoons are buzzer-beater times, moments to follow up on the leads that are dying out, drop in on places you know nothing will come of, but can’t do with the suspense.
In an hour the pavements are thronged in crowds and carts of fruit vendors, the streets crammed with cars, turned alive by the blare of kombis, colorful refrains from the mouths of conductors searching for passengers. I pull my jacket closer to my body, the cold cutting swiftly through my bones.
Once, after one of our days, I caught Cato standing in front of the large maps upstairs at the Center, tracing his finger over northeastern Ohio, whispering the name of his college.
I wander about the city a while, avoiding heading downtown where I am supposed get the kombi. Something about walking the streets alone moves me, something ab
out standing here watching people and their exhaustions pour out of the city, leaving the buildings behind, leaving the streets alone with the litter and street kids. I can feel the livid pain in my knees, how they feel dry and broken behind the kneecaps from all the walking. I could buckle against a doorway and fall asleep for hours. But I walk about for an hour or two instead, my eyes transfixed from time to time at the displays in shop windows. Somewhere in my mind I am purchasing all sorts of furniture, cramming it into the rooms of a small house I have bought somewhere in the future, one of the suburbs I have never been to in this town. It’s all just talk up there but I can’t help it for a while, until everything in my head is so vivid and alive I can’t help but be afraid of my head. Maybe it’s the hunger, I want to think, half believing, half watching every streetlight light up against that night’s deep blue sky.
Once, beneath it, on a construction block without lights, I saw a beggar woman dressed all in white, wearing my mother’s face. Her lower limbs wrapped in bandages inked in blood.
We have never actually discussed what we want of ourselves once we head off, what it is Cato and I want to achieve by leaving. But I assume it’s something good. Talking may jinx it. I wonder what he is up to at this hour, what tower light he is staring at in his neighborhood when he daydreams. I wonder too, if tomorrow he will come in. His bald head shining, his large smiling teeth.
KENNETH A. MCCLANE
The Best American Essays 2017 Page 16
