The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  ‘Jeremiah thirty-three verse three,’ we chanted in unison.

  ‘That’s right, girls,’ she would say, her face beaming. ‘“Call to me and I will answer you.”’

  Poor, sweet Sister Mary Gabriel, with her nine types of angels, her cherubim and seraphim, her thrones and dominions. Her Christianity did not have the formal stamp of Rome’s approval – it was based entirely on the non-approved gospels, with a dash of Milton thrown in for good measure. She told us stories from the Apocrypha, from the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Book of Judith, stories about the boy Jesus moulding pigeons and blowing life into them so that they flew high in the sky like the first birds on the fifth day.

  Instead of doing what she was most temperamentally suited for – founding a religion in some backwater, like my mother’s Reverend Reiner Bergen, or standing at street corners thundering the more stirring passages of Amos and Hosea – it was poor Sister Mary Gabriel’s lot to be a sister at the Convent, with its deadening self-effacement livened only by teaching girls with reedy voices to strum-strum-strum on cheap guitars in accompaniment to songs of saccharine banality. D change to A, A change to G, G change to D. One-two-three, one-two-three. Bind us together Lord; bind us together with cords that cannot be bro-o-ken.

  I have a Good News Bible here. It is the only book that Synodia will allow us to read. It is a simple one, this version, with none of the grace and majesty of the King James that Sister Mary Gabriel taught me to love.

  I only mention this Psalm because I wondered often, when I was a child, how I would die, from which you can rightly conclude that I was a particularly morbid child. I was simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the idea of the guillotine, with that glinting steel that was sharp enough to slice off a royal head while the knitting needles clacked.

  Safe in the knowledge that I was not a French royal, I imagined other deaths. Being poisoned by a tarantula, for example, and dying in a paroxysm of ecstasy; do you remember an Inn, Miranda, do you remember an Inn, and the tedding and the spreading of the straw for a bedding.

  When I began to ride Copperplate across Umwinsidale with Liz Warrender, I was terrified that I would fall and break my neck. But the exhilaration of guiding my horse over the downs and of riding across the Nyanga hills soon came to conquer my fear of falling.

  It was drowning that terrified me the most, because with water I associated the njuzu that people said lived in the Marimba River. I am not quite sure how to explain njuzu to you; there is no direct equivalent in your mythology. It is convenient to translate it as a mermaid or a water sprite, but it is more sinister than either. Mermaids sit sedately on rocks; they flick their tails and comb their hair. They sing and seduce. Water sprites cavort in, well, spritely fashion. Njuzu are violent, they are wild beyond taming. They rise up in the air and become one with the clouds. They become hurricanes and storms. They transform into snakes and crocodiles. Njuzu capture the unwary and pull them down, down beneath the waters. They are especially fond of children.

  Under the water, they train you in the art of magic. And if any member of your family weeps for you, njuzu will kill you at once. But if no one weeps, if your family allows you to go unmourned, you emerge after years and years with gifts of healing and prophecy.

  I had no distinct image of njuzu in my mind. It was all fear and speculation. It was only when I was sold and sent to Umwinsidale that I gave it form. Njuzu became, to my imagining, the frightful creature that I saw in one of Lloyd’s books, Bellerephon’s Chimera, the fearful beast of immortal make, snorting terrible flames of bright fire.

  In my dreams, it pulled me to itself; it dragged me down into the water. Umwinsidale gave my fear its form, but it also cast it out. The fear of drowning stayed with me. Not even Lloyd’s doomed attempts to teach me to swim in the chlorine-blue safety of the pool at Summer Madness helped me.

  There is an old English superstition that holds that if you escape death by drowning, you will be hanged. You could say I escaped drowning twice. I try not to but it is hard not to imagine the coarse, woven noose around my neck, my feet scrabbling in the air. I imagine people talking of me as the albino woman who was hanged. I find that idea repugnant, almost as abhorrent as the thought of my feet dropping into that empty space.

  ‘They will not hang a woman,’ Vernah Sithole said to me.

  ‘They hanged Nehanda,’ I said. ‘And Dorothy Strydom. Loveness told me about her.’

  ‘Nehanda was in 1898,’ was her rejoinder. ‘And the Strydom woman was pardoned. The same could happen to you; anything can happen after the election.’

  But there may be yet another reason to hope. Last week’s Financial Gazette carried the headline ‘Country Lacks Hangman’. It would appear that, in addition to all the other shortages – no doctors, no nurses, no teachers, no books, no democracy, no sense – we are enduring a chronic shortage of people willing to tie nooses, slip them around the necks of their fellow men, string them up and drop them to their deaths.

  ‘The country’s severe economic crisis is having an effect on the delivery of justice,’ a Ministry of Justice official was quoted as saying. I laughed hard, great whooping laughs that made me choke. My eyes watered and the Financial Gazette became a film of pink in front of me.

  There are currently fifty men and one woman ‘eagerly anticipating’, as the journalist put it, ‘the hangman’s noose’.

  The same journalist wrote another story in the same paper about a crowd of women at the airport who were also ‘eagerly anticipating’ the President’s return from Asia. The country anticipates the President’s return as eagerly as we anticipate our death. From such unintended statements often comes the truth.

  ‘The fifty men and one woman on death row,’ the story continued, ‘might wait for ever. The last hangman resigned his post ten years ago.’

  There was a large paragraph about my case, with Lloyd’s name misspelled. As the only woman on death row, I could not escape attention, but it was still strange to read about myself.

  A few metres away, on the men’s side of this complex, are men who have been waiting for more than ten years for the hangman, living each day without knowing whether the vacancy has been filled at last. Loveness told me that there are five men who have been waiting for fifteen years to die. They have woken up every day, those men, expecting each day to be their last.

  And at the end of the day comes the horrible reprieve, and they have gone to bed again and woken thinking: maybe this is it. Have they seen the paper, has anyone told them that they are waiting day after day because there is no hangman? Have any of their guards told them why they wait?

  It was Loveness who brought me the newspaper with the news about the hangman. In the last two months, she has been bringing me a variety of papers. It is just one of the many odd things that Loveness has been doing lately.

  She let me keep these notebooks and pens that you brought me, even after Synodia protested. It was strange to me that Synodia did not put her foot down; all that she did was was flick the fake hair of her hairstyle of the month and look at me in that way that suggests that, if I am not invisible to her, I should be.

  Loveness has become considerate – chatty, even. In fact, she will not stop talking when she is around me. It is bad enough to have to spend all one’s time here without a prison guard going on and on about her interminably dull existence, which seems to centre on her church and her daughter. If I did not know better, I would think she wanted something from me. Loveness is not nearly as odious as Synodia or as dismissive as Patience, but in the last month or so she is positively the soul of benevolence.

  ‘This is for you; something special today,’ she said as she gave me the paper.

  It was all I could do not to snatch it from her. It was the first complete newspaper I had seen in the two years that I have been here. This is what I have missed most in here, the simple, unremarkable wonder of having the printed word within my line of vision, on stop signs, adverts, newspapers, billboards, packaging
on products.

  The paper you discard without reading it, the books, the books, the glorious books. The crackle of an old manuscript, the dead smell of a hundred-year-old letter. Until I came to Chikurubi, I had never gone more than three hours without reading. Whenever Loveness brings me the newspapers, I drink them in quick, thirsty gulps. When I first got here, I thought I would go mad. I hallucinated pages rising like mirages before me, the letters dancing away when I reached out to touch them. I felt restless and unrooted. My thoughts chased each other. I understood finally what a desert-island book was.

  I kept my mind sane through a constant repetition of the things I remember. ‘The House will once again, Mrs Dombey, be not only in name but in fact Dombey and Son. Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home: is this a holiday? It little profits that an idle king, by this still hearth, among these barren crags, match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race. I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg’larly grow’d up took up.

  There were books here once, Jimmy said. There was a small library of circulating books. But since Synodia’s religious conversion, the Bible is the only book that she will allow. Before that, the guards used to wade through the books that the Goodwill Fellowship sent, to weed out tales of homicide, suicide, crime, politics.

  Monalisa once suggested that some of the more qualified prisoners could teach the less educated, as there was so little to do after lock-up.

  ‘We can have a small library,’ she suggested.

  ‘Pwlibrary, pwlibrary,’ said Synodia. ‘Who said you are here to get an education? If you are so educated, why are you here? You come here with your English and you think you are special. Let me tell you something. Here I will give you all the education that you will ever need. Here you will feed on education kusvika wazvimbirwa and your stomach bursts from education. Pweducation, pweducation.’

  Every time the Goodwill Fellowship donates books to the prison, covering all sorts of subjects, science and history, novels and poetry, the guards sell them. So when Loveness gave me the paper, after all these months, it was all I could do not to snatch it from her. I devoured every page of it. I read the perplexing story of a baby called Kingsize who changed sex overnight. ‘When we put him on his bed to sleep that night, he was a boy,’ his mother said. ‘But when he woke the next morning, we found that he had turned into a girl.’

  I read a long opinion piece on what was wrong with the new constitution; I read every letter to the editor on why the country is now ready for the coming elections. I even read the sections that I would normally not have glanced at, like the property and motoring reports. I drank in the technical specifications of the latest Range Rover.

  I read the special supplement about a new shopping complex near Warren Park that is operated by a Chinese company. ‘This image shows the magnificent balancing rocks made out of hardened plastic that are exact replicas of the rocks cleared away in the construction of the building,’ an admiring caption said. I studied the congratulatory faces of the Chinese manager, the smiling passivity of the workers in yellow hard hats and blue overalls, and the bonhomie of the fat-bellied minister who had cut the ribbon around a fake rock.

  Loveness’s act of generosity is both incomprehensible and alarming. The guards are not supposed to bring us whole newspapers. When we get them at all, the newspapers are always at least a month old – the opposite, in fact, of news. And they are, well, incomplete does not begin to describe it.

  The first time that I saw a newspaper here, I thought there must have been some mistake. Parts of it had been cut out so efficiently that when I held up the whole thing, I could almost see through to the blonde hair extensions falling with wild abandon on Synodia’s mammalian graces. Synodia took great pleasure in telling me that the guards cut out all the court news and any reports of crime, so that – her words – ‘You lot will not get any ideas if you ever get out.’

  The guards also cut out the politics sections because they do not want us to get agitated. I must concede that this is a fair point. The inaccuracy of your average local newspaper is enough to raise anyone’s blood pressure. They cut out the business news, presumably for the same reason. What’s left are the sports and entertainment sections, the adverts and the classifieds, but even they are not guaranteed to remain, particularly if Synodia is on newspaper-cutting duty.

  She applies the scissors with such zeal that we often end up with just the adverts and the classifieds and empty margins with gaping rectangles. The empty spaces hide the news we are not allowed to know, the collapse of the fragile agreement that has held the government together, the coming new constitution to be followed by more elections. And everyday news, such as how many pupils passed their O levels, and by how much the prices have gone up.

  But if you read carefully, the classifieds are revealing in their own way. When I saw that the price of baked beans had gone from three million dollars to one dollar fifty, it meant one of two possibilities: the unlikely one, that our vertiginously collapsing dollar and found a way to shoot upwards; or the more likely, and correct, one, that the currency had been changed.

  The guards sometimes leave in the occasional headline. ‘President Returns from M’, said a section with a huge rectangular space below it. I suspect that most of the cut-out space was devoted to the President’s image. Returns from Mwhere, I wondered? Given the President’s predilection for travel, it was probably somewhere Mforeign. Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Malta, Madagascar, Mozambique, Malawi.

  ‘It would be easier,’ I once pointed out to Synodia, ‘to just cut out the bits that we can read and hand them to us in a pile.’

  For that bit of wit, Synodia confiscated my Bible for two weeks. She must imagine that it is the ultimate anguish to be without the Good Book. But to make assurance doubly sure, as it were, to make sure that my physical person was punished in addition to the spiritual deprivation she had devised for me, she assigned me to sanitary duty, a polite way of saying that I spent two weeks collecting foul-smelling and bloody pads with my bare hands before piling them into the large metal drum that serves as an incinerator.

  Haven’t there been studies that show that, when groups of women live in close confinement, their cycles become synchronised? This is how it feels here, like there are two to three hundred women who are on at the same time.

  Once a week, in the evenings, the prisoners on sanitary duty collect the sanitary towels in one bin and lug them to the incinerator behind the Condemn. As we had no gloves, we improvised with old plastic bags, stuffing the repulsive things into the incinerator, where they crackled and burned and sent up a stench that covered our clothes and hair and which we could not wash out because there was no water.

  When there is water, it is normal for the women to wash out the blood from the pads before disposing of them. ‘If you don’t,’ Jimmy advised me when I first arrived, ‘Someone is sure to use your blood for something.’ Something being, of course, the witchcraft rituals that everybody here accuses everybody else of. So you wash off the excess blood before throwing it in the bin. That week, there was no water to be had. No water to wash in, no water to flush the toilets. It was not as distressing as it could have been because it has happened far too many times to cause comment.

  Jimmy prefers to be the last to get the paper because she likes to pore over the classifieds without worrying about the next person in the line. She laps up the mansions that cost billions and trillions of dollars, occasionally emitting a sibilant sigh of admiration when she finds one that seems particularly impressive. ‘Inzwaka,’ she will say to whoever is near her. ‘Mansion available in Ballantyne Park, ten bedrooms, six bathrooms, four en suite. Kidney-shaped glitter-stone pool. Floodlit tennis court. Massive entertainment area. Lock-up garage for six cars. Landscaped garden. Self-standing three-bedroomed cottage. Imported tiles and fixtures from Dubai. Right in the heart of the golden
triangle. Must-view.’

  She was almost beside herself when she found out that I once lived in a ‘mansion’. ‘Hesi mhani, Memo,’ she said, and spent the next hour asking about it. Jimmy uses the diminutive of my name.

  Jimmy Blue Butter does not know that I lived in Mufakose once. No one here knows that part of my past. I have told her very little about myself, but things have nonetheless managed to reach her and the others. I trace it all to Evernice, who seems to know everything about everyone. Within days of any new prisoner’s arrival, Evernice will have found out everything she can about her.

  Having been convicted of killing a white man gives me an almost talismanic effect. Even after the killings on the farms, there seems almost something surreal about the violent death of a white man; it does not seem real in the way that everyday deaths of black people are real. It is so out of the ordinary as to be fantastical, like something out of history: Nehanda ordering the death of Pollard.

  To Jimmy, it does not seem to matter that I have been convicted of killing a man. All that she sees as essential in me is that I lived in a huge mansion in one of the northern suburbs. I once told her, exaggerating slightly, that each of our bedrooms had built-in closets and en suite bathrooms. ‘Hesi mhani, Memo,’ she sighed. ‘Jealous down!’

  It was nothing at all like this. It is always hard to remember the impression that things made on you when you were a child. It is easy to recast what you now know to how you first saw them, and to see them again with an adult’s understanding. The first time I saw Summer Madness, I saw only a big house with pillars and columns and a veranda that seemed to go all around it.

  What I see now is a house of heart-stopping gracefulness. It was one of the few private houses designed by James Cope-Christie, the neoclassical architect who put his graceful stamp on the city’s first buildings. Its simple purity, its almost unbearable loveliness, shines against the monstrous promontories that surround it now. It is the type of house that people with new money, diamond money, money from steel deals in China and Saudi Arabia and oil deals in Angola, will destroy to replace with a mansion of ten bedrooms, a kidney-shaped glitter-stone pool, a lock-up garage for six cars, and imported tiles and fixtures from Dubai.