The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  The township gossips said it must have been her fault if she was pregnant, didn’t she know he was married, she was a slut who deserved everything she got.

  ‘Who would say no to being married to a teacher?’ said MaiWhizi.

  ‘Especially a teacher with a car,’ MaiNever said.

  ‘Imagine marrying a woman like that, ukaroora zvakadaro unenge wazviparira ngozi,’ was MaiWhizi’s conclusion.

  MaiWhizi would come over and comment on the hairstyle my mother was working on. She was also obsessed with other women’s complexions.

  ‘Ende vasikana Rispah mazotsvuka,’ she would say. ‘Murikuzoreiko mazuvano, what lightening cream are you using?’ Like the bi-coloured rock python in the Just So Stories, her face was two different colours. The cheeks were black – from using Ambi lightening cream, everyone said – and the rest of her face was the colour that she should have been, the colour she kept changing.

  But this was all in my mind. I longed to play on Mharapara with the others but I could not join in. I could not join in because, if I went out and stayed in the sun for any length of time, my skin cracked and blistered. I spent my days indoors with the sound of the township coming through my mother’s shining windows, or I sat and observed them from our Sunbeam-red veranda. And when I did venture out, it was to be greeted as murungudunhu, so that I thought that must be part of my name.

  7

  The nights that I spent at Highlands police station and those early nights at Chikurubi in the cell that I shared with Mavis Munongwa brought back the old dreams that had shuddered me awake, the dreams that had not disturbed my sleep since my first two years with Lloyd.

  In my dreams, I see a njuzu that is shaped like the Chimera. It moves beneath a dress of poppies that are brighter than the blood gushing from its mouth. It speaks in a voice thick with blood and water. ‘You are dirty, you are unclean,’ it says.

  It pulls me down, down into its throat. I jolt myself awake just at the point that its throat closes over me and my face is submerged and my lungs fill with water. Sometimes the njuzu’s voice sounds like my mother’s, other times like Lloyd’s. In the water with me is Lloyd’s swollen face, his eyes open, his neck constricted by the creature’s tail. As it pulls me into itself, I hear the clanging crashing of a thousand keys. A scream that begins as mine merges into Lloyd’s sister Alexandra’s before becoming the shriek of the Chimera.

  I don’t know if you can smell in your dreams, Melinda, but in mine the creature comes wrapped in the suffocating smell of camphor, as though it has washed in it, as though its very marrow is made of it. And as it was then, I can never go back to sleep after my sudden waking. I lie listening to the sleep sounds of the prison, the stertorous breathing of Mavis Munongwa in the next cell, the high whine of a million mosquitoes, the creaks and sudden sounds of the prison talking to itself. I listen to the beating of my heart, until four thirty in the morning comes and with it the strident siren that heralds a new day.

  *

  Vernah told me before our second meeting that you are learning Shona. I didn’t know that you are planning to stay as long as that. Whatever you do, you should not allow yourself to be discouraged by the many people – white people, I mean – who you are certain to meet who will tell you how difficult the local languages are, how they twist the tongue and confuse the mind.

  Lloyd and his friend Liz Warrender, who I will tell you about, were both fluent speakers. Liz had picked up hers at the farm in Melsetter where she grew up, while Lloyd’s was the result of years of assiduous and conscientious study. It was partly this facility and ease with the local language that got them labelled eccentrics. Lloyd could not only speak Shona fluently, which helped me in that difficult first year with him, but he could also write it better than most Shona speakers that I know.

  The main passion of his academic life was to translate Homer and Aristotle into Shona. He took pains at it, insisting that the only pure translation was one that came from the original Greek texts. For Lloyd, using the English texts would not only have been a lamentable shortcut, it would also have destroyed the integrity of the project, and taken away all its fun. They are still there, I imagine, Lloyd’s books and manuscripts, on the shelves of his study in Summer Madness. ‘Mambo Idhipasi’. ‘Idhipasi wekuAntioch’. ‘Rwendo rwaOdhisiyasi’. If they are not still at Summer Madness, I imagine Alexandra threw them out.

  Lloyd’s written Shona was much better than mine. My spoken Shona is still fluent, but my writing is frozen at the age of eight, which is when I last wrote it in school. This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as the whites do not value local languages, the best-educated among us have sacrificed our languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.

  So I never learned how to write with lyricism or beauty in my own language. I never learned the proverbs and metaphors that give colour to the language. But there is a proverb that I still remember from Mistress Nyathi’s class in grade three, which goes ‘matakadya kare haanyaradzi mwana, memories of bygone feasts will not feed a hungry child’.

  My memories are not of bygone feasts, unless you count the birthday parties that my mother had for us. The day that my mother and father sold me to Lloyd is the day that our different lots, his and mine, collided to form the thread that brought me here to this cell in Chikurubi Prison. Until that day, I had been going in one direction, my sphere limited to house number 1468 Mharapara Street in Mufakose, to my two parents, my dead brother and two sisters, to my school, to my small joys and sorrows.

  Fighting Nhau’s daily torments and the hissing of the children. Struggling to conquer the twelve times table. Longing sharply for food that we did not have, ready-made, store-bought food like candy cakes and Colcom pork pies and cream doughnuts. Fearing always the heat of the sun, and the smell of Mercurochrome and the purple stains of gentian violet that were dabbed on my blistering skin by the rough, callused hands of the nurses at Gomo Hospital.

  Trying to be invisible. I spent much of my life trying to be invisible. But I was never truly invisible. Even in London, or Sydney, where I should have blended in with everyone, the world’s gaze came with a double take. On the surface, my skin looked like everybody else’s, but seen closer, my features are very obviously not Caucasian. I could feel the puzzlement on the face as the mind tried to work out what was different.

  The most hysterical reaction came from a pregnant inmate called Melody, who looked at me with her one eye round with fear before screaming so loudly that the guards had to take her away. Jimmy said that she was afraid that I would infect the baby she carried. Years ago, this might have hurt me, but it doesn’t now. It no longer hurts with the acid pain I felt as a child. It is a long time since I wanted to crawl out of my own skin.

  I once found, in an old book at one of the antiquarian bookstores on Charing Cross Road in London, a facsimile of a handbill exhorting the public to witness THE AMAZING WHITE NEGRO, YOURS TO SEE FOR 2S ONLY in Piccadilly. By then I had left home, but I had not completely let go of a childhood game that I had once played alone, in which I moved myself across time and space and imagined the alternative lives I could have had, had I been, for instance, born in Pompeii or in Egypt or in Atlantis or the Wild West.

  It struck me as I looked at that handbill that any alternative life that I might have had in a freak show in Piccadilly in the seventeenth century would not have been particularly different from my childhood in Mufakose. The only difference was that, in the twentieth century in Mufakose, I was a freak who made money for no one.

  In a township, everything odd, particularly oddities of appearance, is remarked on. But in my case, even the people who looked odd, like Sekuru Jonas, who limped on his left leg and lived across the street and made manyatera sandals at Siyas
o, spat whenever he saw me.

  MaiTafadzwa, who could only afford to feed her family on Lacto sour milk and matemba, muttered something under her breath and spat. The Phiri family two houses down from MaiNever’s place, generally mocked because they were Malawian and the father had a sing-song voice and joined the zvinyau dancers on the banks of the Marimba River, looked at me with eyes of pity.

  And when my family made rare visits with me outside the township, the children of other townships did that thing that children do, they shouted to remind me I was a murungudunhu, and not content with that, danced around me and announced my presence to everyone.

  What made my situation worse – at least, as I saw it – was that I was not the only albino person in the township. The other was Lameck, who had a squashed face and red, blotchy skin that broke over his arms and face.

  His hair was almost orange. Mine was just as strange, not black like everyone else’s but closer to white, the same colour as my skin. Lameck stood in the same place every day; he sold tomatoes and maputi at the market that sprouted at the corner of Mharapara and Kafudzamombe Avenue. He had placed himself so that the people who lived at our end of Mharapara did not need to go all the way to the shops at kwaMhishi. For all the convenience that his store provided, he was not exactly inundated with customers.

  When he was not selling tomatoes, Lameck squinted at a James Hadley Chase novel, his fingers as white as the almost-naked women on the covers. He wore one of those transparent tennis visors on his forehead – they were the rage in the township then, along with those tiny Adidas shorts that barely skimmed the bum. His visor was red, and its shadow cast a bright light on the pages of his novel.

  Every time that I passed him, I saw the flies that settled on his mouth. I did not wonder that people were so afraid of me – I, too, was afraid of Lameck. It was terrible to me that he sought me out, that he offered me this solidarity; it was terrible that people should look at us and conclude that we were the same; terrible that when we passed him with my father on our way to school it was always to me, and only to me, that he sent his greetings. ‘Hesi, Memo,’ he called, each time, his cracked face smiling.

  I gave him no affirmation at all. His attempts to get me to enter some sort of melanin-free club failed. On those only-too-frequent occasions when I had to go to his stall to buy tomatoes, I looked down as he chatted endlessly about the novels he was perpetually peering at.

  Lameck always contrived to give me things I had not asked for, masau when they were in season, or mazhanje. I ate them quickly, with no guilt. I did not want to say anything that might suggest kinship. I see now, of course, that he was just as much a misfit as I was. I do not imagine that his parents named him after the original Lameck – Lameck, the father of Noah. Sister Mary Gabriel told me that Noah was an albino; that God had chosen to save an albino above all the people he flooded in his wrath.

  And my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lameck, and she became pregnant by him and bore him a son. And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful. And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very bright.

  That day, when I went home to Lloyd, he said to me, ‘It is your choice, Mnemosyne. You can spend your life feeling sorry for yourself, or you can simply choose not to. You can invite people’s pity or you can refuse to be an object.’

  Lameck in Mufakose had no Lloyd or Sister Mary Gabriel to tell him of the wondrous origins of his name, or to spend money at the dermatologist’s and buy creams and lotions with sun filters, as Lloyd did for me after he bought me, ointments that healed and mended my skin.

  I wanted to believe that I did not look to others as Lameck looked to me. He looked incomplete, as though he had been fashioned at mahumbwe play by a careless child, and then been fought over before being abandoned to be stamped on as the children hurried in to their suppers.

  Like Lameck’s, my skin often blistered, but it was never as bad as his. My father made me wear a large grey school hat, and he made me wear it everywhere. Consequently I did not have the protuberant pustules that Lameck had all over his face.

  On Mharapara Street, I had a torrid time of it, but at school, where children from other streets in Mufakose joined the children of my street, the tormenting reached unbearable levels.

  Nhau and his gang ran up to me to form a cordon beyond which they hissed at me and shouted or laughed. I was at least lucky in one respect – they never touched me. In grade two, when we had first moved to Mufakose, a boy had slapped me in the face. If my skin had been like the others’, the slap would not have left a visible mark, but because of the absence of colour in my skin, his hand had left its outline on my face.

  From this incident had come the children’s fear, and the saying that ukamurova anotsvuka ropa – if you hit her, they said, her blood rises to the surface. So no one touched me.

  Once inside, I could get my revenge on the children who hissed and called out to me when I walked outside. In here, I could humiliate them by showing them that a murungudunhu like me had better brains than them.

  Had it not been for my condition, I would have been every teacher’s dream. I sat quietly in class, in the front of the room, where my father insisted to my teachers that I sat. I was not one of those children who eagerly put their hands in the air and yelled, ‘Mistress, mistress, mistress’, but when called upon to answer a question, I always knew the answer. I was quiet and watchful, and my report every term spoke of a one hundred per cent pass rate in every subject.

  I longed to be like all the others. I tried to get as dark as the other children. I longed to belong. I felt a sharp and burning envy of everyone I saw. I sought out obsessively the children with flaws. I would have given anything to be Nhau, who had a slash across his face. Lavinia walked with a limp. The grade four class had cast her as a cripple in their end-of-year play, and she had added a gritty sense of realism as she walked on the stage, exaggerating her limp as she moaned, ‘Ini zvangu mushodogo, hee mushodogo.’ Whizi was cross-eyed; it was never clear if he was looking at you or not. Never, who was tall as a man but still played in the street with the children, and who talked out of the corner of his mouth, was given the nickname Drunken.

  I would have taken Whizi’s eyes, and Lavinia’s limp, and added to it Nhau’s scar and Drunken’s speech, only to have some colour in my skin.

  I prayed every second I could for God to darken my skin. After Reverend Bergen said, ‘Ask anything of me, says the Lord’, I redoubled my prayers. I made all sorts of bargains, made promises about being good, about coming top in class. I promised not to slap Mobhi, and I even vowed not to hate my mother. But my skin remained what it had always been.

  Religion having failed me, I turned to science. When my father was not looking, I sat in the sun and wished for my skin to darken. It only made my skin red and sore and blistered. I noted obsessively the different shades of the skins on my family.

  My father was dark brown.

  My mother had a smooth, light caramel complexion that was almost the same colour as her feet. Joyi looked like her, but it seemed to me that, in me, my mother’s skin had lightened to the point of disappearance. The lightness of skin that made my mother and my sister beautiful had been bleached to the point of distortion in me. I was just three, possibly four, shades away from beauty.

  I tried my mother’s Pond’s Foundation Cream, and her face powder, the same caramel as her skin. Its brown colour lay invitingly in its blue compact plastic case, and I smeared and smeared it all over my face until I realised that I would need more than one compact to cover my hands and arms. I hid the evidence of my attempt, and washed the cream away from my face.

  Over and over again, I ran my fingers over the faces of the women in my father’s Parade magazine. Joyi liked Parade because of Max Eagle, the private detective with gravity-defying karate kicks, but more absorbing to me were C
aroline Murinda and Sarah Mlilo, the two Miss Luxes who advertised Lux Beauty Soap. I stared for hours at Caroline Murinda’s cream dress, and the yellow belt that matched her yellow hat. I was dazzled by Sarah Mlilo’s neat Afro hair and by her slim fingers making a chord on her shining guitar. But most of all, I was drawn to the radiant beauty of their brown skin. ‘She cares for her beautiful complexion with Lux Beauty Soap’ said the captions below their smiling faces.

  I believed that my skin could be as beautiful as theirs if only my mother bought Lux instead of Choice or Geisha soap. I even thought of stealing from my mother’s purse so that I could buy the soap that would cure all my problems. Or perhaps it was not Lux, but Cleartone that I needed. If I could not be like the others I would be invisible. To befriend someone like me would defeat that desire to disappear, to melt and only observe, and so I ignored Lameck, because to acknowledge him was to see that in myself which I would rather not have been.

  8

  There is a Psalm Sister Mary Gabriel loved that also forms the basis for a supplication in the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Let me know, oh Lord, my life’s ending,’ it goes, ‘and the measure of my days. Let me know how frail and fleeting my life is. You have made my life a mere handbreadth. Each man’s life is as a breath to you.’

  She wanted us, she said, to know that our days in this life were numbered, that we were mere blinks in the life of the universe, and that our lives should have a purpose. ‘A life without a purpose, girls,’ she often said, ‘is like a needle without a point.’

  Sister Mary Gabriel was not blessed with either felicity of expression or originality of thought. ‘And what,’ she often asked, ‘is God’s telephone number?’