The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  She picked me up, but the creature struggled with my mother and took me back from her and in my father’s voice, it said, ‘Not again. Not this again. She is clean, she is clean, Moira, let’s go to sleep.’ Then I thought that the Chimera would swallow me but all that happened is that I fell into a deep sleep interrupted by sounds of weeping, long harsh sobs that made it seem as though the whole night, the whole house, and the whole world beyond it was also weeping.

  16

  In the days after Mobhi died, I sometimes woke up in the night to hear my mother struggle. My father sank into himself. He spent most of the time cooking for us, feeding us and watching us play with each other. He sometimes stopped work and would sit for minutes staring into the middle distance. We had to call out to him more than once to make him hear us. He became much more affectionate in physical ways than he had been before. He had always been an easy man to touch, but now he seemed always to be lifting us up or holding us to himself.

  He ate very little. I was a reasonably good cook by then; all girls who are raised in the townships and villages can cook something by age seven. Of course, it helps that most of the food I cooked was boiled, nothing too complicated. I decided to boil him an egg, and to make him some fried bread. I fried the bread, and put it together with the peeled boiled eggs on a plate. I made him tea, with powdered milk. The tea had floating lumps. I carefully walked to where he was. He was staring out of the window. ‘Baba,’ I said. ‘Look, I made you some food.’

  He looked at me as though he did not remember who he was. Then he looked down at the food that I had made. He put his arms around me and wept hard as he held me. When he let me go, he said, ‘It is just what I needed.’ But when I came back later to collect the dishes, I found that he had not touched the food at all, but had fallen asleep. I thought I would give my mother the food, but she too was asleep, the rope still around her hands.

  The morning after one of my dreams, I had gone into my mother’s bedroom with a plate of bread and jam. The room was in darkness. My mother lay in her nightdress on top of the bed. Her hands were tied behind her.

  My father sat with his head in his hands, on the floor, in a dark shadow cast by the bed. ‘This is so that she does not harm herself,’ he said when I entered the room.

  It was still the holidays when Mobhi died, so Joyi and I did not have the distraction of school. In our room, there was no Mobhi to sleep between Joyi and me, no Mobhi to wet the bed.

  About two weeks after Mobhi died, my father said he was going to town. He left us in the house of MaiNever. We were not to disturb my mother, he said. This was easily done: MaiNever had a television, and we sat dazzled before it, watching cartoons. MaiNever gave us rice and chicken, which we ate while trying to keep our eyes on the TV.

  Then she put before us a bowl of peaches, and seeing them, I looked up into her face. She had tears in her eyes. Joyi took the peaches, but I said ndaguta, and fixed my eyes on Voltron forming arms and legs. I did not eat those peaches. I have not eaten a peach since.

  *

  After we got back to school the term after Mobhi’s death, I got into a fight with Nhau during break.

  Nhau had told Joyi that, if witches didn’t eat her flesh first, Mobhi would soon turn into worms. Joyi cried. When she told me what Nhau had said, I went after him with no further thought than that I would make him pay. I was still angered that he had taken the peaches for which I had received the blame, and so I lunged for him. Around us the children started to shout, fight, fight, fight. Nhau hit me a hard blow to my chest that left me winded.

  I rushed at him as though to push him, but he stepped aside. I fell down hard. When I got up, I ran straight at him and knocked him down. He was afraid to hit me, afraid of seeing the blood under my skin. I felt a savage satisfaction as I hit and hit, and stopped only when Mistress Nyathi lifted my hands from his bruised face.

  Mistress Nyathi asked what had happened, and I would not say, and neither would Nhau. She punished me by making me sit outside for the rest of the day. I refused to go to school the next day, and my father said he was going to ask me to stay at home that day anyway, because he wanted to take me to town with him. I was to dress up in my Christmas dress, he said, my favourite dress: white, with a purple sash.

  This was simply too wonderful to be real. The idea of going to town with my father soon eclipsed the pain of seeing Nhau again. My mother insisted on coming with us. She was better, she said; she wanted to do some window-shopping. This was the first time that my mother had been out of the house. She looked very thin; she wore a blue costume with a pink blouse that had a bow tie at the neck. We walked Joyi to school, then took the Zupco to town. My father sat in the middle, while I looked out of the window.

  I have vivid memories of that wonderful morning. It was as though my father could refuse me nothing. We walked up and down First Street, looking at the windows. I had two ice creams. I had candyfloss that my father bought from a Coloured man on First Street. I was still hungry when my father said, ‘Now we need something to eat.’ I kept stealing glances at my mother, but she was too taken with everything around her. She looked happy, and she laughed with my father. We went inside Barbours department store, something we had never done before. It seemed like some sort of treasure chest of glittering bottles and sweet-smelling women. A white woman in strange-looking glasses who stood behind the chocolate counter gave me a dollar. I looked like an angel, she said, just like an angel.

  On the third floor, we stopped at the toyshop. I asked my father to buy me a doll – a real doll, like Princess’s but much nicer. He looked at his watch and said he was hungry and why didn’t we eat something now. We went to the tearoom behind the toyshop. I felt as if every eye was on us because the place was filled with lots of white people.

  We sat in a booth, my parents and I all on one side from my mother. As we ate our chips and chicken, Lloyd came to our table. He called my father Benson, and talked to him with a familiarity that suggested they had met before. My father introduced my mother to Lloyd. She nodded and said nothing.

  I was struck by the wonder of a white person talking to my parents so familiarly. I had never talked to a white person before: I had only heard Reverend Bergen speak to us, but never talked to him. It filled me with wonder that my father could be talking with this man; at eye level they were the same height. I was so lost in the wonder of it that I did not immediately realise that the man had stopped talking and was looking expectantly at me. ‘What is your name?’ he said.

  My mother nudged me. ‘Why don’t you answer?’ she said. ‘Why do you act as though you do not understand such a simple sentence? Is this what you come number one for?’

  I did not reply. I felt that the white man was my amulet against a sudden smack, and indeed, my mother did not touch me at all despite her irritation. My father spoke for me and said, ‘She is called Memory.’

  Then Lloyd said, ‘Speak, Mnemosyne.’

  That is the thing about memory. Sometimes you come to understand the things you cannot possibly have known; they make sense and you rewrite the memory to make it coherent. I did not understand then what he said, and looked at the ground. He and my parents talked; I only understood fragments of their conversation but they seemed to be talking about my illness and me and what grade I was in at school. I continued to eat my chips as they talked. Then the waiter brought the bill, the man paid for our food and we got up to leave.

  ‘I will pick her up at twelve tomorrow,’ the man said. ‘I am glad that your wife approves, because I could not have done it otherwise.’

  He took something from his pocket. It was a large wad of green bills, twenty-dollar bills; they were the highest-denomination notes in those halcyon days, before our million- and billion-dollar bills. He handed the money to my father, but it was my mother who reached out to take it. She took the money without counting it and stuffed it into her bra.

  We went back home. That night, my father said to me that I was to pack my clothes, and s
ay goodbye to Joyi because I was leaving Mufakose the next day. ‘You are going to live with that man we saw today,’ my father said. ‘He is a doctor and you will live with him. You are going to go to his house, and you will live there with him and his wife, and it will be better for you, and you will go to a good school and you will stay there just for a little while, for just a short time until you are better.’

  He said all this very fast, almost as though he wanted to believe it himself. Even believing, as I did, that anything could happen at all, that anything was possible, it seemed the most fantastical of things that a white man that I had never heard of, and whom I had only seen once for a very short time, could take me in for no reason other than to heal me, send me to school, and then return me to Mufakose.

  It was when my mother made vetkoeks the following morning and let me eat all of them that I realised, as I vomited all over my new dress and still my mother said nothing, that my father had been serious. I was leaving my home and my remaining sister. I was leaving my mother and my father and everything that I knew.

  PART TWO

  SUMMER MADNESS

  1

  The dreams that startled me awake in my first years with Lloyd have come back to me in Chikurubi. And when I am not dreaming of the creature that comes to me at night and speaks in my mother’s voice, I find myself walking through the rooms and corridors of Highlands police station, past broken furniture and windows coated with what seems like centuries of grime, past peeling walls, the laughing faces of the officers, past the ceiling leaking blood.

  I see chairs with cracked leather through which the discoloured stuffing shows. I smell the fetid smell of too many unwashed bodies in the airless space. Above all, I hear the mocking laughter of Officer Dimples and Officer Rollers in the interview room. I hear their echoing questions.

  ‘Where in this country do such things happen?’

  ‘Where do people sell their children to complete strangers?’

  ‘If such a thing really happened as you say it did, such an outrageous thing, why were your parents not tried?’

  ‘Why did no one report it?’

  ‘Why didn’t you report it?’

  ‘Why were they not arrested?’

  ‘Why was there no prosecution, no trial, no public shaming?’

  Perhaps Vernah Sithole, surrounded by law reports and books that set out precise punishments to be meted out for the kind of crime that my parents committed, is reading these notebooks and asking herself the same questions. Perhaps, reading this, she will regret that she agreed to represent a fantasist. And even you, probably conditioned to believe in the worst that can come out of darkest Africa, are asking yourself whether this really happened.

  Those questions from the police officers at Highlands, the questions that you and Vernah are probably asking yourselves now, are questions that I have asked myself countless times over the years.

  It all seems so utterly improbable.

  And yet it happened.

  I used to think sometimes that all those books about abandoned Victorian waifs that I feverishly devoured as a child had somehow confused me; that I had mistaken my life for that of Elizabeth-Jane Henchard, sold along with her mother, or Oliver Twist, sold to be a mourner at children’s funerals. But I did not imagine the wad of notes that passed between Lloyd and my parents in the tearoom at Barbours. I did not imagine my mother stuffing those same notes into her blouse. I did not imagine my father then handing me over to Lloyd at the Post Office without so much as a backward glance.

  Most objectively of all, incontrovertibly factual: I have not imagined my own reality. I spent the first nine years of my life with my parents and my sisters, Joy and Moreblessings, and with the memory of our dead brother, Gift, at 1468 Mharapara Street in Mufakose. I then spent the next nine years with Lloyd, and Poppy and Namatai, at Summer Madness in Umwinsidale. I have not imagined Poppy, with her paper-thin skin and Ella Fitzgerald records. Or Lloyd. Or Liz Warrender and Sandy Knight-Bruce. I have not imagined Zenzo.

  For as long as I lived with Lloyd, we did not talk about the circumstances that had brought us together. Whenever I felt the subject looming between us, I did everything I could to deflect it. Lloyd did the same. On the rare occasions that he spoke of how I came to be living with him, he spoke only of ‘taking me in’, of ‘giving me a home’. He did not speak of buying me, of purchasing me as you might an appliance or piece of clothing.

  ‘I took you in, Mnemosyne,’ he said to me once, ‘because giving you a home was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. You will understand it all when the time is right.’

  I thought that if I said it out loud, that if I said, even to myself, that my mother and father had sold me to a stranger, it would make it more real than it already was.

  You see, I thought at first that I was going to be returned home. It was all my mother’s idea, I thought, because she had taken the money. She would see this as the truth of Reverend Bergen’s prophecy. My father would make her see sense, I thought, and he would come for me. They would go home, and they would see my empty place on the bed in the speya, they would see my clothes in the wardrobe and say, ‘We miss Memo.’

  Or perhaps Lloyd would return me himself.

  When I thought of this particular possibility, my mind seemed to freeze. I could not see how this could ever happen. I tried to imagine it, Lloyd getting into the battered Land Rover that had brought me to Umwinsidale, driving down Enterprise Road into town, past Rugare and Kambuzuma and into Mufakose, crawling up the street while Nhau and Promise and Mharapara’s children ran in the dust that he left in his wake.

  MaiWhizi would watch, open-mouthed, from her veranda. ‘Zvariri bhais’kopu,’ she would say, and rush to tell the news to neighbours as far as Zongororo Street. I simply could not see it.

  On the day that I left home, Lloyd met my parents and me at the Post Office. I did not look directly at him, but glanced from the side so that I saw him only in glimpses that I then assembled in my mind.

  I sat rigid without moving. I did not look at the city streaming past the windows. I had no curiosity about where we were going. I sat stiff with my hands under my knees. I kept my eyes fixed on the little doll that hung from his driver mirror and swung to and fro as he drove. I focused on its pink hair and half-naked body and grinning face.

  He saw me look at it, and unhooked it. ‘It is a troll,’ he said. ‘It was a birthday present from my sister. You can have it.’ He placed it in my lap. ‘You can keep it,’ he added.

  I did not pick it up, but let it sit on my lap where it moved with the car. When we stopped at the traffic lights, it fell to the floor. I bent to pick it up and clutched it. I was still clutching it as we walked up to the Wimpy at the Union Arcade, next to Brentoni’s.

  I looked for that Wimpy when I came back, but like other places that I knew, it has been erased from the face of the city. There is another Wimpy now, further along the same road, but on the other side of First Street.

  If people stared at our odd pairing, I did not notice it. I kept my eyes focused on the little troll doll. Lloyd ordered a plate of chips and a strawberry milkshake. I looked at the doll and wondered how something as ugly as that could be so comforting.

  When he talked, he mixed Shona and English. His zva sounds came out like zha and it made him sound like a small child, like Mobhi. That made me less afraid of him. I watched his mouth move as he ate my untouched chips. He took out a packet of cigarettes. It was this that finally broke me down. They were Everest – the coolest taste in smoking, said the packet; they were the same cigarettes that my father smoked as he whistled to the radio. As the smoke swirled around our table, I finally gave in to the tears I had been holding back.

  The smoke floated around us in that Wimpy, he watched me cry, and I could not stop it. I held the troll doll to my face and soaked its pink hair with my tears. He ordered an ice cream sundae that sat and melted until the little coloured grains that were sprinkled on it, which I la
ter learned were called hundreds and thousands, disappeared into little coloured blobs in the milky mess.

  When Lloyd registered me at the Dominican Convent, I knew that my sale was final. He needed my birth certificate, you see. He needed it to register me.

  I had last seen my birth certificate at our house in Mufakose when my father registered my brother and sister and me at our new primary school in Mufakose. My father had then returned the certificates to the Manila envelope inside the briefcase that he kept locked on top of the wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom. The birth certificates were usually in protective plastic folders together with Gift’s, and later Mobhi’s, death certificates.

  So when I saw my birth certificate on Lloyd’s desk together with an application form for the Convent, on which he had put his unreadable scrawl in the space above the words ‘Signature of Parent or Guardian’, I knew that only my mother or father could have given it to Lloyd.

  It was the final confirmation that my sale was irrevocable. It was then that I knew there was nothing at all that I could do about it; and there was no one that I could tell. Who could I have turned to? I was nine years old. I was alone. The people who could have helped me were the people who had sold me in the first place. I did not know how to get back home; I did not even know in which direction home was.

  The pain was made bearable only by the thought that, if my mother and father could get rid of me so easily, I did not want to be with them. If they could do without me, I resolved, then I could just as well do without them.