The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  Her case was messy and public. ‘Myself, if I choose,’ she says, ‘I can bring the Olympic movement to its knees.’

  It makes me smile to imagine the collapse of the Olympics. From the naked Greeks racing for laurels to Hitler refusing to shake Jesse Owens’s hand, the whole Olympic movement could come crashing down because of Verity Gutu. She has her Protectors (the capital letter is hers); she has been the mistress of at least two high-ranking politicians, three businessmen and an assistant police commissioner. Between one and all of her former lovers, she is sure that she will be out soon. ‘Myself, I will be out faster than a javelin can land.’

  If Verity Gutu is the Queen of Cynics, Monalisa Mwashita is their empress. She defrauded a European embassy of more than half a million euros over two years. She was a Special Projects and Programming Officer in charge of funding projects on sustainability, governance, accountability and the rule of law, one of those jobs for whom the phrase ‘job description’ was invented – a job that cannot be explained by a simple word like ‘lawyer’ or ‘journalist’, ‘technician’ or ‘accountant’.

  Her job was to determine which projects should get how much of the embassy’s funding. She created two fake organisations, one for the Advancement and Empowerment of the Girl Child, and another to support OVCs caught up in political violence. ‘Girl Children,’ she says, ‘are the easiest con in the world.’

  There is apparently no easier way to raise money from donors than to present a child, female and barefoot, with a plea for money to ward off all the dreadful things that could happen to it: the HIV infection, the orphaning, the household-heading, the poverty-miring and the single-mother-becoming.

  Monalisa also realised that the term ‘political violence’ is to donors what Pavlov’s bell was to his dogs. She diverted funding to the fake group she had set up to ‘assist, encourage and raise awareness to further the empowerment of OVCs subject to political violence’. OVCs, if you are not up with donor lingo, are Orphans and other Vulnerable Children. More than food, shelter and all the rest of it, OVCs and Girl Children need empowerment – empowerment and awareness-raising.

  It was an easy fraud for Monalisa to pull. All that the embassy required of grant recipients was that they produce quarterly reports of how the money was spent, and these she provided, complete with glowing pictures of Girl Children smiling for the cameras.

  When she told me how simple the whole thing had been to set up and pull off, I was surprised that Chikurubi is not bursting with more such fraudsters. Scams go on in almost every embassy, Monalisa said, but most embassies simply fire the persons involved without prosecuting them. They do not want to report to the police for fear of drawing attention to the kinds of activities they fund. In her case, the embassy brought its case against her on the basis of the Girl Child fraud; they said nothing about the OVCs as they did not want too much attention to be given to the political side of their funding.

  It seems strange that anyone would voluntarily choose to come to D with the more dangerous criminals, but I understand why Verity and Monalisa bribed their way in from C. There are more than a hundred women in C, baby dumpers sleeping next to drug smugglers and fraudsters and thieves. And there are sometimes babies sleeping with their mothers. There are frequent fights – one woman can look at another in a ‘funny way’, or someone will get worked up because one of the babies is crying too long and too loud and waking up the others.

  And there is only one toilet bucket in the cell for all the women to share. If anyone breaks the code that says that only urination is allowed in the bucket after lock-up, the acrimony can turn ugly. This is why there is a scurry of activity outside the ablution block every day just before lockdown. Two C-category prisoners, Truthness and Locadia, went for each other in the garden last week. Truthness had accidentally tipped a bucket over Locadia’s baby, and Locadia had her revenge with blows the next day.

  As I am on death row, I should, in theory, live and work separately from the other Ds. I should be in my own section, with my own guards. But the prison is too small and too poor for them to make any real distinction between the others and me. So during the day, I work in the laundry, clear out the Condemn or go out into the garden or further afield, to the prison farm.

  I am even allowed to play the occasional game of netball with them, and have learned, like all prisoners soon learn here, that when there is a game of netball against the guards, we should always, but always, lose the game. Jimmy told me that the first time she played, she led the prisoners to an 11–7 rout, and so angered Synodia that she brought forward lock-up by two hours.

  If I can ignore the inevitability of the sentence that awaits me, there are a number of advantages to being the only one in D on death row. After lock-up is when I most feel the benefits of being on death row. I am locked up in my own cell. And, luxury of luxuries, I have my very own completely unshared toilet bucket. I have my own Catcher of Wonders.

  *

  When I first arrived, I found the usual fear-laced fascination and superstition around my condition. I am the first woman in more than twenty years to be sentenced to death. And it is not every day that one comes across a murdering albino outside a novel by Dan Brown. But it was my skin and my crime that caused the other prisoners to shrink into themselves as they walked past me.

  In those days, a woman called Marvellous gave me the hardest time. She has now been paroled after serving six years for culpable homicide. She told me that all new prisoners had to give their food to her at meal times. In the first weeks, I gave half my food to her without protest, but I soon came to see that I would starve if I did not find some way to defeat her. So I took to giving her long unbroken stares as she ate my food. ‘Don’t look at me with those eyes,’ she snapped.

  I was reminded of my mother. ‘Don’t look at me with those eyes of yours,’ she often said, which never made sense to me, for I could only look at her with my eyes, and nobody else’s, but I know now that she meant those eyes with no colour or pigment to them.

  Three days after I began this, Marvellous received news that her son had died. When she asked if she could go to the funeral and Synodia laughed in her face, Marvellous wailed at the top of her voice for more than an hour and only stopped when Synodia threatened to have them add another two months to her sentence. ‘No need to go to court, either,’ Synodia said. ‘We will just mislay your release papers.’

  At the next meal, I stared again at Marvellous, and again at every meal for four continuous days. After a week, she asked to be moved away from me. Jimmy told me that she had told the guards that the looks I gave her are what killed her son, ‘just like she killed that white man’. Marvellous became afraid of me, and would not look at me when she passed me. After that, I did not hesitate to use my condition to my advantage.

  The chameleon that I picked up in my third month here also added to my mystique. We were out on the prison farm, weeding the maize patch, when I saw a movement among the small green shoots of the new maize. When I saw that it was a chameleon, it immediately reminded me of our old neighbour Liz Warrender, the first person I had ever seen touch a chameleon. I thought of her colourful expressions and her love for gossip. ‘You should see her go after him; I promise you, she is busier than a blue-arsed fly.’

  A wave of homesickness washed over me. Without thinking, I reached out to take it into my hands. The creature changed colour from green to grey to brown as it struggled with the sudden change in its environment. Then it took on the colour of my skin and the greenish colour of my uniform as it made its hesitant and slow movement up to my shoulder. In the fugue of my concentration, I did not realise immediately that the cry that rang out had anything to do with me, or the creature on my arm.

  I looked up to see Benhilda staring at me with a look of revulsion on her face, the same look of shock that I must have had on my face as a child at Summer Madness the first time I saw Liz pick up a chameleon. The others turned, and instantly moved together, as though their solidar
ity would ward off the miasma of my evil.

  ‘It is only a chameleon,’ I said.

  ‘Only a chameleon?’ The whisper went up and down the line of women.

  ‘How can you say it is only a chameleon?’ This was Beulah. ‘Are you some kind of a witch that you play with such things?’

  The chameleon made a more determined effort to go round to my other arm. I picked it up in both hands, and made my way to a cluster of baby dumpers who gave little shrieks of shock as they scattered. I set the creature down and watched it as it changed colour again before disappearing into the maize.

  I had forgotten that, like those creatures of the darkness, like owls and hyenas, chameleons are portents of evil, associated with witchcraft and black magic. The news spread throughout the prison and made me safe from all bullying, at least from other prisoners.

  The fear did not extend to the guards. Synodia and Loveness, assisted by Mathilda and Patience, are responsible for guarding D and C sections. To them, we have no names. We are cattle rustlers and murderers, arsonists and prostitutes. They look different from each other. Loveness, the principal prison officer – she is short and round and light-skinned, with several missing teeth. Synodia, recently promoted to assistant superintendent, and thus Loveness’s superior, is a little darker, a little taller, and a lot more sour-looking. Patience is simperingly pretty, all eye- and lip-liner, and Mathilda is well padded with a slow and heavy gait.

  But they also look the same, as though they are interchangeable one with the other, as though the specifics of their individualities are subsumed into the uniforms that they wear.

  Through the weekly ironing that we do for them, we catch glimpses of their lives outside the prison. Loveness has a daughter and no husband, Synodia three children and a husband who works in some sort of factory; I have ironed his blue overalls. Mathilda’s children, three boys, like to play with toy cars, real or made up, I don’t know; their trousers are frayed on the parts that cover their knees. It is all I can do not to damage them further with the iron. Patience lives alone; she likes her clothes in lurid patterns and wears too much oil in her hair. She is not married, but we sometimes find men’s underwear in her laundry.

  ‘She will never keep the Commissioner at this rate,’ said Benhilda as she waved a pair of underpants over her head. ‘She must know, surely, that the only way to keep a man is to make sure that you wash these yourself.’

  Unlike the others, Patience prefers to speak to us in English. She is in training to be a court interpreter. ‘Irregardless of the absence of water,’ she says, ‘you should make sure the hoarse pipes are connected.’

  ‘You must make sure that your plates and bowels are clean.’

  ‘You have the wrongful number!’ she screamed into her phone the other day. ‘I said this is the wrongful number!’

  ‘Can you believe it,’ she confided to Loveness, ‘there are women, married women, whole married women, five, six children later, who have not had a single organism?’

  ‘You don’t say,’ said Loveness.

  ‘Not even one organism, just imagine,’ she said, and in the next breath she shouted at me for listening and told me to get on with my work. This is what surprises me most about Chikurubi, that we can laugh as much as we do. But there is a hysterical edge to my laughter, because every time I laugh I know that I am laughing into the darkness.

  5

  I did not see my family again after my parents sold me. I remember once sitting at my stool before the long wooden desk in the science lab at the Convent, melting potassium permanganate crystals in a test tube over a Bunsen burner, when the thought suddenly occurred to me that I could no longer picture Mobhi’s face in my mind’s eye. I closed my eyes to see her, and concentrated so tightly that I did not hear Sister Mary Gabriel shouting that my crystals were burning.

  There are some things about her that I still remember. Her fat legs, her pudgy arms thrusting out to be picked up, her laugh against the sky. But over the years, her face has become a blur, like a jelly that has been out of the fridge for so long that it has lost its shape, and I cannot see her face. I remember her feet the most because they stuck out of the bucket in which she drowned.

  I have no pictures that could have helped me remember. I took none with me. My mother’s photo album remained with all the other things that I left behind in Mufakose. And even then, even if I had wanted to take some, there were not many pictures in that album.

  These things that I am telling you about, at least in these early years, all happened in the middle of the 1980s, before the digital revolution, long before the days where every person in the world had a camera. For people like us who lived in the townships, to be photographed was a commitment that required money and serious effort.

  On the rare occasions that we were photographed, we dressed in our best clothes, in our Christmas clothes that doubled as our birthday clothes, my sisters and I in the same lacy dress but in different colours. My brother, Gift, in the few pictures that remained of him after he died, wore a suit and a velvet bow tie.

  Getting our picture taken meant taking the bus to Highfield Township, where there was a photography studio. Joyi and I tried to walk without shuffling our feet; we were afraid to disturb the dust of the township street, which had a stubborn propensity to stick to freshly washed and Vaselined legs. Mobhi was up on my father’s shoulders.

  Past Gwanzura Stadium we walked, past the Mushandirapamwe Hotel, past the Huyaimuone Superette and Butchery, past the Chirwirangwe Cash and Carry and the chemist’s, until we reached the studio.

  The photographer was called Bester Kanyama. This was serious business: he did not like it when we smiled. He posed us with incongruous objects around or before us, an open umbrella in front of a velvet curtain in one case, or next to a radiogram or wireless set in another, or else holding a vase of artificial flowers fashioned from discarded thin wire and coloured women’s stockings.

  When he photographed Joyi, Mobhi and me separately from our parents, he sat us next to a large doll with a porcelain face that had staring eyes and a blank smile. Our pictures thus had a frozen quality; our eyes were brighter than new dollar coins, as though a light had been shone directly into them.

  I always looked pale, paler than everyone else, like a ghost against the others, as though I were a live and large version of the porcelain doll on my knee; the same doll that frightened me in my first week at Summer Madness, or a doll very like it.

  The only time I can remember that we did not prepare to get photographs taken was a few weeks before Mobhi died. My mother was happy, which made us all nervous. This was around the time she had joined Reverend Bergen’s church and he had singled her out and made his great prophecy about her fate.

  A photographer who walked from door to door taking pictures passed our house. He was not Bester Kanyama, but someone else, a man who lived in Kambuzuma Section 2 and whose studio was the street.

  My mother called him into the yard. ‘How much for a picture?’ she asked.

  The man replied, ‘One dollar for one card, and three dollars for four cards, but if you want more we can negotiate.’

  After a long negotiation, my mother led him to the side of the house, from where my father worked. Joyi, Mobhi and I followed. As ‘Mirandu’ played on the radio, the photographer took our picture. He wore a small fedora hat with a red feather in it. When he creased his brow, the hat moved, and with it the feather. We laughed out loud, all of us, my father, my mother, my sisters and me; we burst into hard, sudden laughter. In that moment he took the picture.

  We did not see the developed photograph until after Mobhi died.

  The photographer had said that my mother should come and pick the photographs up from his house in Section 2 after two weeks, which was how long it would take him to move around the township to finish his roll of film and persuade people to have their pictures taken. In the tumult and turmoil that followed Mobhi’s death, the pictures that my mother had ordered lay unremembered
with all the other photographs the photographer had taken.

  After my mother failed to collect them from his house, as he had asked her to do, the photographer returned to our house. When he heard of Mobhi’s death, he took off his hat and tried to give the photograph to my mother. He did not ask for money. She did not take it; she was then in a catatonic state. He left it on the starched-lace doily on top of the display cabinet. In a brief moment in which she came to herself, she tore it up and scattered the pieces on the floor.

  If I try hard enough, I see that image still. My father sits on a half-finished wardrobe with Mobhi in his arms, her face cracked in two by her smile. His head is thrown back. Joyi and I are grinning, arm in arm. My mother’s face is radiant with laughter. I am next to my mother, trying to ignore the unfamiliar lightness of her arm around my shoulders.

  After everyone had gone to sleep that night, I looked for the pieces of the photograph and tried to stick everyone together with my saliva. It did not work. I contemplated stealing sticking tape from the desk of Mistress Nyathi, my class teacher. Until I could steal the tape, I kept the pieces in the stapled middle pages of the novel Muchadura, which I had just won for coming first out of all the four classes of grade threes.

  I thought the picture would be safe in there. Not only was it a novel about a terrifying avenging spirit, but it also had a cover featuring a creepy unsmiling child, the torso of a ghostly woman and a disembodied eye. My father had made me cover it in brown paper. Our neighbour had the same book, and Mobhi used to burst into tears when she saw it and Joyi would not look directly at it. For all her fear of the book, Joyi took Muchadura with her to school one day without telling me and did not return it. Even when I beat her up until she had a nosebleed, she would not tell me what she had done with the book.