The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  After the third night of her weeping, I could no longer take it and I shook her to keep her quiet. It made no difference. Again and again she called out, ‘You have eaten my husband. I have eaten your children. James and Lydia, Cecelia and Boniface. James and Lydia, Cecelia, Boniface,’ she sobbed. She put her hands to her cotton-white hair and rocked herself as she wept with no tears.

  So when they put me on my own, I was relieved to escape. Mavis rarely goes out. The guards don’t like that she frightens the other prisoners. She sometimes acts as though she sees the dead children before her. She smiles at the empty air, holding out food and saying, ‘Eat, eat.’ When that happens, the guards put her back in her cell, from where she shouts for James and Lydia, Cecelia, Boniface.

  Verity is convinced that all that time alone has made Mavis mad. Jimmy argues that it is no mere madness, but the spirits of the dead children that have come back as ngozi to haunt her. When they can find them, which is not often, the guards sometimes give her sedatives to go along with the casual, easily given diagnosis of madness. But no one has called a psychiatrist to make any kind of official diagnosis.

  ‘Who is going to pay for a psychiatrist – is it you?’ Loveness said, the first time I asked if Mavis had been seen by anyone. ‘And even if we find that she is quite, you know, quite mental, where will she go? There are no women in the mental ward.’

  Mavis may well be better off here than on the mental ward. If they can barely afford food for us, what means do they use, without drugs, to calm the prisoners? And what of the torment that the strongest there visit upon the weak? She is better off here, poor Mavis, where every wrong name is a rap on the knuckles, where Synodia imitates her to her face and the rest ignore her when they do not mock her.

  Mavis did not hang because the judges found extenuating circumstances in her case. Vernah Sithole told me that Mavis Munongwa’s was the case that set the legal precedent that a strong belief in witchcraft, like excessive alcohol or catching your wife in an adulterous coupling, could be considered extenuating circumstances in mitigating sentence, and could even go as far as amounting to provocation, which, more than mitigation, is an actual defence.

  As you travel around the country, you will find that a lot of people believe in the power of witchcraft and dark magic. Jimmy is full of stories from her village in Chipinge about wives who put spells on their husbands so that when they go with other women, their genitals disappear. ‘The men become as smooth as anything down there, Memo,’ she told me. ‘Kuite smooth kunge wonini, kunge chidhori cheplastic chekuChina chakagadzirwe ngeplastic, just like a plastic doll.’

  I told Jimmy about the baby in Loveness’s paper, Baby Kingsize, who had changed from boy to girl overnight. She clutched my arm and nodded. There were many such examples in Chipinge, she said, but they did not all make the papers. Perhaps this is a comparative advantage, sex-change operations without hormones and surgery, all eased through the wonder of African technology.

  Jimmy did not understand what I was talking about. I explained about sex changes, but it took time to convince her that it was possible to take hormones and undergo surgery to change your sex. She only accepted it because of the authority that enveloped me, from having lived with white people. Monalisa, too, had some of this authority, but she had only worked with them. I had lived with them; I knew them inside out, thought Jimmy, so that meant if I said such things were possible then they must be possible, even though it seemed to her like a form of unnecessarily complicated witchcraft.

  But it is not only Jimmy with her little education who believes in witchcraft. Even Verity Gutu, smooth, urbane, Zurich– Harare-hopping with a stop in Dubai, believes in the power of a n’anga from Malawi called SekuruMuchawa, who specialises in restoring stolen property. If anything goes missing, she believes, like when her car was stolen, SekuruMuchawa flicks a whisk, asks, ndiani aba mota, ndiani aba mota, and rattles some bones, and just like that he restores your lost property, or, at the very least, he tells you who stole it.

  I do not believe in any of those things, at least not any more. I had those beliefs once, too, but I was a child then. I believed in the haunted house on Mharapara. I also believed in the God of Sister Gilberta and Sister Mary Gabriel, the God of incense and Mass and the Benediction and the Trinity.

  It has been the work of many years, but I no longer believe in anything. That these beliefs can shape a human life is horrible to me. It frightens me how much something like this can change a life. One minute there are four children, James and Lydia, Cecelia and Boniface, and the next they are just gone.

  I no longer believe, but sometimes I find myself envying those who do, just as I envy Synodia’s certain assurance that there is hellfire waiting for all of us prisoners. How much easier must it be to navigate a Manichean world in which black and white are so starkly marked.

  But for the most part, I am glad that my life has not been touched to this extent, that I left superstition behind with the dust of Mufakose. I am glad that my life has been untouched by this, as it is untouched by that other belief, that there is heaven and a hell in which, in the words of one of Synodia’s songs, we sinners shall gather and stand at the throne of the Lord, weeping for the kingdom we have lost, after the people of the Lord have gone away.

  10

  If I am to tell you the truth, Melinda, I had not expected that I would enjoy this. I am enjoying these words, crafting sentences, seeing paragraphs form. I am well into the first notebook already, but I already feel like I could write all day, and every day.

  Vernah sent a message last week to say that my appeal has been set down for the end of July, which is when the judicial year begins. That means that I have five months to complete this. But it is all confusion at the moment because, before the opening of the courts, there is the election.

  Vernah is convinced that things will really change this time and that the opposition will not only win, but will actually be allowed to take power. But that’s what we thought in the last election, too, and in the one before that one. I am not pinning all my hopes on anything that might happen after the election. Even if there is an amnesty, Vernah has explained that it does not apply to death row prisoners.

  I am writing this for you and for Vernah, for the appeal, as she told me to, but I am also writing it for myself. Around the time that Lloyd and I met Zenzo, I was in a Stephen King phase, gulping down stories about rabid dogs, pyrotechnic children, telekinetic aliens and demonic cars. My favourite then was a book about a writer who was forced to write a novel by the deranged fan who held him prisoner as her own modern-day Scheherazade. But in the end, he wrote to keep himself alive.

  That is the sense that these notebooks have given me. It is the best part of my day when I can go back to my cell and write. Scheherazade told stories to keep her head where it rightfully belonged. I am writing to keep myself alive. But I am also laying out the threads that have pulled my life together, to see just where this one connects with that one or crosses with the other, to see how they form the tapestry from which I will stand back to get a better view.

  But, as it turns out, writing this is not as simple as I had imagined. I had thought that when I sat down to write, it would be to tell a linear story with a proper beginning, an ending and a middle.

  I did not realise the extent to which my current reality and random memories would intrude into this narrative. I do not flatter myself that I am writing in the tradition of the prison diary. There is an imprisoned writer who wrote a whole diary on tissue paper. I can’t recall whether it was Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o or Albie Sachs, or all three.

  This would have been in the sixties, or seventies, perhaps; before the invention of three-ply tissue paper. The tissue must have been particularly tough to withstand all that ink. I wonder how many rolls he used. How did he get it out? And who transcribed it afterwards, unrolling roll after roll?

  Loveness allowed me write in my cell without me asking. She continues to make these unexpected ove
rtures to me. She talks constantly of her life outside these gates. I have generally met her overtures with silence, but that has not stopped her talking.

  Her conversation is so dull that she makes the option of gazing at the grey concrete walls of my cell seem wildly attractive. When I stare at the wall, my mind is free to wander where it pleases. With Loveness, my mind cannot stray. She can spend more than thirty minutes just talking about groceries; telling me that it is better to buy bread from this supermarket than from that one, because the bread from that supermarket does not last as long. Toothpaste is more expensive in the supermarket with expensive bread, but washing powder is more expensive in both so it is best to buy from yet a third.

  More than anything, she talks about her daughter. She has talked enough about her that some of the details have seeped through and stuck. I know that her daughter is called Yeukai, and she is in primary school. I would know this even if she hadn’t told me because I iron her school uniforms every week. I know that she has some sort of illness that Loveness is vague about.

  ‘Yeukai is having problems at school, such problems.’

  ‘There are no teachers at all.’

  ‘They have been on strike for three weeks, and the only time they teach is when you pay for extra lessons.’

  ‘You need six million a month these days, just to survive.’

  ‘I am going to South Africa month-end to buy clothes, weaves and hair extensions to sell on. This time I will buy lots of blonde weaves. It is not just loose women who wear weaves now, even the very yellow ones. Even proper women, like Synodia, women who go to church and who have husbands, like to wear them now.’

  I pricked up a little at this: so it is Loveness who sells Synodia the raw material for her extraordinary coiffures. She has hairstyles like none that I have ever seen. All her hairstyles are named after celebrities. ‘This one is a Naomi Campbell,’ Synodia said once, as Patience, Mathilda and Loveness crowded around her.

  Evernice, ever ready to curry favour, crowed about how good she looked. ‘Ende makafitwa,’ she cried.

  All I can say is that the short-fringed blue-black bob may have been de rigueur as Naomi strode down the catwalks of Milan and Paris, but on top of a round-faced, short-necked woman straining in her prison uniform, it looked more like a very small mushroom atop an unusually bulbous stalk.

  ‘And this one is a Rihanna,’ she said a month later.

  I can assure you that there is nothing more menacing than a prison guard glaring at you out of one eye while the other is hidden, Veronica Lake-style, by a mane of flaming red plastic hair with gold highlights. The ghostly presence from The Grudge, all sodden hair and wild white eyes, had nothing on Synodia in the Rihanna.

  But back to Loveness. In the week after she gave me the newspapers, she also brought me a tub of camphor cream. ‘I picked this out for you,’ she said as she handed over the green-and-white tub. ‘I thought better camphor than, what, than Vaseline.’

  The feeling of dread that began at the pit of my stomach spread up and up my body until I was vomiting my lunch all over the floor of my cell. As Loveness exclaimed over me, I tried and failed to ignore the pungent smell that came from the open tub. Again I heaved, but there was nothing left to expel. She soon connected my reaction with her gift. From the time I was a child, I could not bear the smell of camphor, but I had never had a reaction as violent as throwing up. Wonder of wonders, she not only brought me a cup of water and a bucket for me to clean up the vomit, but she also came to my cell with a large bottle of unscented aqueous cream the next day.

  Her apparent friendliness to me is all the more remarkable as she vacillates between indifference and callousness towards the others.

  *

  Have you ever heard of the Little Ease, Melinda? It was a cell designed in the Dark Ages so that the inhabitant could not sit nor stand nor lie in it. The last man to be imprisoned in the Little Ease lived a long time in it, and an even longer time out of it. Chikurubi is like that. You learn to live with it. Some days are obviously harder than others, but you learn to live with it.

  As you read this, I do not want you to get an overly romanticised or sentimental understanding of how things are. I worry that I may be giving you a wrong impression of Chikurubi. Take my friendship, such as it is, with Jimmy and with Verity Gutu. It didn’t emerge from heroic exploits, as it would have done were my life a film. I did not save either from bullying or beatings, nor did they save me. It all began about six months ago – or, at least, I can trace it to the day that Synodia targeted Sinfree. Until that day, every woman at the prison had kept her distance from me.

  The chameleon incident meant that the others left me alone, but it also meant that, until the day of the incident between Sinfree and Synodia, no one talked to me if they could help it.

  Like all bullies, Synodia goes for the weakest person in any situation. No one radiated weakness more than Sinfree, the new girl who arrived six months ago. She was a fragile, thin thing, flung into a world that expected obeisance to rules that she did not know. There is no induction or orientation of any kind. Synodia, Loveness and company prefer you to learn by what you might call the Montessori Method of Prison Instruction: you learn by doing, picking things up as you go along. The more mistakes you make, the more they hit you and the faster you learn.

  So you soon learn that a prisoner is allowed to talk to the guards only when she kneels before them. A prisoner may not look directly at a guard. A prisoner’s hands, those dangerous implements, are to be in front of her at all times that she appears before a guard. No prisoner is called by her real name.

  Sinfree knew none of this when she arrived. Three days after she got here, she sat crying at breakfast. The women around her kept their eyes focused on their plates.

  ‘Arson!’ Synodia called.

  Sinfree wept on.

  ‘Iwe, Arson!’

  Someone must have nudged her to indicate that her name had been called.

  She came and stood before Synodia.

  ‘Pfugama,’ Synodia said.

  Sinfree spoke in Ndebele and said, ‘I do not understand.’ She turned to Loveness and to Patience, the other guard there. ‘Please,’ she repeated, this time in English. ‘I do not understand what you say.’

  ‘Who said you can speak English?’ Synodia said. ‘Who said you can speak English in here? Do you hear anyone else speaking in English? You think you are special, don’t you, with your English? Pwinglish, pwinglish.’

  By this time, my blood was boiling. I did the very thing that I have spent my life flinching from: I drew attention to myself. ‘Can’t you see that she does not understand you, that she does not speak Shona? Why shouldn’t she speak in English to you?’ I turned to the girl. ‘She says you should kneel – that is what pfugama means. She is asking you to kneel.’

  In the silence that followed, Synodia walked slowly and deliberately to where I sat. She gave me a long look. Then she walked back to where Sinfree still stood. She raised her hand and slapped the girl.

  Her hand left visible welts on Sinfree’s face.

  Jimmy, Verity and I all made the same, almost involuntary movement. From our separate tables, we stood up as though propelled by the same force.

  Synodia gave Sinfree another slap before pushing her to her knees. ‘Did you not hear what the murderer there said?’ she said to Sinfree, still speaking in Shona. ‘Hanzi pfugama. You want English, well – we will give you all the English you want. Here is some English. And some more English.’

  Each ‘English’ was a slap that spun the girl’s head. After Sinfree collapsed, Synodia turned to the three of us.

  We continued standing.

  ‘And so, you three are the new guards then, are you?’ she said. ‘Let me show you how we train new guards.’

  She came up behind me, and held me by the neck of my dress. She pulled me out of my place. She pulled at my hair and gave me a slap, then another. She pushed me to my knees. ‘This is how we train new guards. Thi
s is how we do it. Like this. Like this. Like this.’

  Her spittle landed on me as she spoke. The smell of her rage enveloped me. Perhaps it was just the smell of cheap hairspray, but I found it more suffocating than the slaps. She then went for Jimmy, and for Verity.

  The next morning, Synodia made Sinfree stand at breakfast and watch us eat. I was in enough trouble and I figured: what could be worse than the Condemn? I got up to her and gave her my bread. Synodia’s voice shrieking my name was like a whip through the air but on I went. I pressed a slice of bread into her hands. In her shock, Sinfree stopped crying, though I don’t know whether the shock was from my defiance of Synodia or from being touched, probably for the first time in her life, by an albino. Then Jimmy got up, too, and gave Sinfree her bread.

  The others began to shout and whoop and bang their metal plates on the tables. Mavis Munongwa slapped her hands on the table and laughed. Benhilda Makoni said, ‘Beat them, Mbuya Guard. Nyatsorovai.’

  The siren sounded ten minutes later.

  We were locked down for the rest of the day, with no meals.

  Jimmy, Verity, Sinfree and I were sent to clean the Condemn, the filthiest part of the prison. In a prison film, Verity and Jimmy and I would form a little band of sisterhood and Synodia’s cruelty would crumble under the strength of our sorority to a soaring John Williams score. It did not happen like that. Until she decided that she had had enough – of Synodia, of Chikurubi, and of the world at large – Sinfree was more scared of me than ever and Synodia more triumphant. But this is what I mean, that I am making a bad job of it, that I am still stuck here in the prison, when I should be telling you about how it all began; about my father and my mother, our house at 1468 on Mharapara, and how I left it one August day and never went back again.

  11

  I have said that my mother comes to me in a cloud of fear. Perhaps a better word for the feeling that my mother gave me is uncertainty. In that uncertainty lay fear. I never knew when she would laugh or cry or shout at us; I never knew when she would tell me to go outside and stop looking at her with ‘those eyes’.