I looked up, surprised. Lloyd had never been comfortable with guns.
He noticed my surprise and said, ‘Alexandra gave me a gun, but I sometimes forget that it is there.’ That conversation came back to me the night that Lloyd died.
12
I have replayed in my mind, over and over again, the events of that last Friday in November, my last day of freedom. I had woken up just after six to go for a run. I left the house through the kitchen. Mrs Harris lay in her basket next to the pantry. She raised her head and panted. I made a soothing sound and tickled her under her neck. Exhausted with the effort, she put her head down again and went back to sleep. I left the door open so that she could go out.
The rain had come down the night before. The ground was soft beneath my feet as I made my way down our lane and turned left into Umwinsidale Drive. I met no one in the first stage of my run. It was two hours before the road would be filled with the children of Umwinsidale’s domestic servants, chattering as they walked to their school in the Chishawasha Valley on the other side of Enterprise Road, and leaping out of the way when the Range Rovers and Jeeps of their parents’ masters zoomed past.
Only the birds kept me company. From the stud farm on Umwinsidale Drive, I heard the sound that I had missed the most in my absence, the sound of horses. At the intersection of the drive and Hazlemere Lane, I ran past three white women who were walking at a brisk pace. We said ‘Good morning’ as we passed each other.
On the first day that I had seen them, I saw in their faces the look of confusion that I often see on strangers. From a distance, I looked like I could be one of them, but seen closer, the difference became visible. They were used to me now – we had passed each other on the same spot every day since I had started running. It was customary for us now to exchange nods or greetings.
‘I promise you,’ said the woman in the middle, ‘I am absolutely the only one in Africa who does this.’
I smiled to myself as I ran on and my mind idled over her words. She was the only one in Africa who did what? Was she the only person in Africa who gave French pedicures to African poodles? The only person in Africa who made small scarves for bats? Who knitted mittens for kittens? Who made velvet gloves for monkeys’ paws? The only person in Africa who eats her peas with honey, who has done it all her life; it makes the peas taste funny but it keeps them on the knife?
The morning was right for running. The air was crisp and cool. I ran up Hazlemere Lane and rested there for a minute as I looked at the valley stretched below me. In the distance, a small herd of zebras from the private game park grazed in the morning mist.
I ran past the new houses that had come up in my absence, hideous promontories jutting out against the sky. I ran on, up the hill to the Compton-Jones’s place, then down again. By the time I ran back to Summer Madness forty minutes later, I was breathing hard. I did some stretches on the veranda. In my bathroom, I showered, careful to keep my face away from the rushing water, washing my hair with my eyes open.
Lloyd was up by the time I returned. From the kitchen came the smell of the coffee. As I walked to the kitchen, I sang along to the music that he was playing that morning, about becoming lovers, and marrying fortunes together.
He was sitting at the table, eating toast and marmalade with his coffee while he caught up with the news on his laptop. He said something about Obama and the election in America. I turned down the music, poured myself some coffee, and sat in the chair opposite him. I took a naartjie from the fruit bowl on the table, peeled it, and ate it with my coffee. Mrs Harris moved from where she sat at Lloyd’s feet and came panting up to be patted. I ruffled her head and neck. She thumped her tail and nuzzled my hand.
‘You should eat more than that,’ Lloyd said after his morning greeting. ‘You are all skinny mabhonzo.’
It was the same discussion that we had had since my return.
He finished his toast and got up to go. ‘We may need another voucher for the Internet,’ he said.
‘I will pass through Sam Levy’s on my way back from the Archives,’ I said.
‘See you when you see me,’ he said.
He closed his laptop, shoved it into a bag that he slung over his shoulder, and left. Mrs Harris lifted her head and dropped it again. In the old days, she would have scampered after him, but it was all she could do to lift up her head and watch him out. Her head between her paws, she went back to sleep. In the background, I heard his car making its way down the lane to join Umwinsidale Drive.
As I got up to make toast, I saw that he had left his phone behind. Lloyd was so absent-minded that I had sometimes thought that his household, such as it was, existed for no other purpose but to find the things that he lost.
I hummed with the music as I chuckled at the headline stories on Gawker, read the news story that Lloyd had talked about on the American election, brushed my teeth and drove for the Archives. I would take him his phone around lunchtime, I decided, because the university was just a few minutes from the Archives.
I stopped for a newspaper at the intersection of Enterprise and Glenara. A vendor in an Arsenal shirt ran into oncoming traffic, shouting a triumph as a speeding van almost hit him. The lights changed as he reached my window. He threw the paper into my car, and then, like a runner stretching for a baton from the team member ahead of him, ran alongside the car, his hand outstretched for the wad of notes that I handed him. I drove up the Enterprise bypass, round the roundabout, into Churchill and turned into the Archives.
I spent the rest of the morning going through photographs in the picture archives. I was curating an exhibition of photographs for display at the National Gallery. I selected my pictures: the first young woman to get a medical degree in Rhodesia, market women in Mbare in the fifties, colonial wagons pulled by a team of zebras, naked warriors from the 1896 rebellion hanging from trees, southern fruit in the Rhodesian bush.
At lunchtime, I drove to Sam Levy’s. At the intersection of Churchill and Borrowdale, nimble-footed young men thrust their wares towards me: flotation devices shaped like the Teletubbies, chargers, adapters, Springbok and All Blacks flags – South Africa and New Zealand had a rugby match that weekend. A man with dreadlocked hair and beard ran up to my car; the three national flags billowing behind him made him look like a demented Rastafarian.
When I first came back, Alexandra had encouraged me to buy a flag to hang in the car. It was the only way to get past the police roadblocks, she explained. ‘You’ll get less hassle that way, I promise you,’ she said. Like many whites under siege, she thought flying the flag from her car was a badge of patriotism, a visible sign that she was not a ‘detractor’.
Lloyd had mocked the talismanic effect of the flag. He used to joke that he would fly a Union Jack instead. If he could be sure that the police would know it, he would fly the old tricolor, he said. Alexandra had obviously not seen the funny side of this.
Lloyd was right; I had been amused to see that the focus of hatred on the nightly news was not the Rhodesians, but the British. According to this new history, the war had been fought not against a white minority regime that had opposed black rule to the extent of unilaterally declaring independence from British control, but against the British themselves.
I was even more amused to see that Alexandra and Lloyd had exchanged places. Lloyd, who had fought in the liberation struggle on the side of the black forces in favour of majority rule, could joke about the flag of Rhodesia, while Alexandra, whose husband and favourite brother had defended it, was anxious to show loyalty to the flag of Zimbabwe.
At Sam Levy’s, I was thrust into the middle of the usual lunchtime crowd, skinny white girls in denim shorts that skimmed their butts, aggressively coiffured black women tottering in vertiginous heels, walking like they had something uncomfortable between their legs as they tried to sneak up on a particularly skittish rabbit, and workers in blue overalls queuing to buy a cheap lunch from TM. I bought my lunch at Antonio’s, shopped for a bagful of groceries at TM,
and bought an Internet voucher at the Apple store.
In the TM parking lot, a man with an armful of flowers ran up to me. ‘Some flowers, madam,’ he said in a wheedling voice. ‘I have some very nice flowers – nice, nice flowers.’
Our eyes met. There it was again, that familiar double take, the recalibration that played out on his face as his mind adjusted to the reality of what I was. He immediately changed to Shona, his voice stronger, cockier. ‘Some flowers, sister. Zvakadhakwa nhasi, sister. Come on, sister, you are my first customer today.’
I smiled at the switch from formality to familiarity, from ‘madam’ to ‘sister’. He pushed his flowers at me, flame lilies and calla lilies, strelitzias and proteas. I bought two bunches of strelitzias. They were Lloyd’s favourite flowers. I liked their other name better – birds of paradise. I put them in the back seat with my other parcels and drove back to the Archives.
I ate my lunch in the garden, finished selecting my pictures and drove to the university. Lloyd was still in a lecture, his department secretary told me. As I followed her directions to the lecture room, it occurred to me that I had never been to one of Lloyd’s classes. I threaded past little knots of students. I wrinkled my nose against the pungent smell from the toilet in the corridor.
Lloyd was in a large lecture hall but had only a few dozen students in front of him. I took a seat and listened. He was in the middle of lecture, and he spoke without notes. In the vastness of the lecture room, with a few students before him, his voice echoed a little as he spoke.
‘Nothing operates by chance. If we hold a fatalistic worldview or believe in fate, we give that fate a name or series of names. Giving fate a name is a necessary imaginative act that permits us to establish a relationship with the controlling forces of our existence. We can convince ourselves that such fatal presences do listen to us, that prayer can persuade them, as can sacrifice, blood or penitence.
‘Take our local concept of ngozi, which appears in various forms in African and other ancient cultures. How does it differ from the Erinyes, the Furies who followed murderers and drove them mad? The idea that mhosva haiori, that a crime as serious as murder is felt until it is appeased is a common belief across humanity.
‘In Shona mythology, you can propitiate a ngozi spirit in the same way that the Greeks poured libations before the Oracle at Delphi. A ngozi can be appeased with live animals and with a young girl to carry the children the murdered victim was unable to have.’
As Lloyd spoke, I looked at his students. A girl in front of me scratched her head and played with her phone. A boy two rows beneath her was taking notes with such ferocious speed that his pen almost tore into his paper. Two were entering notes on laptops, and one, I saw, was open to Facebook. I turned my attention back to Lloyd.
‘Oedipus was pursued by ngozi. And it was Antigone’s desire to avoid the ngozi that drove her to defy Creon and bury the corpse of Polynices. When we talk of fate, when we talk of a fatalistic vision of human experience, what we mean is that the most important forces that shape human lives are out of human control.
‘It is to say that there is something, an external force that controls the rules of our lives, that determines the things of particular importance to us, our good and bad fortune, our happiness and sorrow, and, above all, our death. To have a fatalistic sense of life is to hold that our destiny is out of the control of any human being and that non-human actors will always determine the outcomes.
‘This is both comforting and terrifying. On one hand, we have no control and can give ourselves over to the forces that control us. On the other, we have no control, and are carried along on a tide we cannot control.’
I realised then something that I could not have not known as a child in his house. Lloyd was a fine teacher. He finished the lecture, and I waited while the avid note-taker spoke to him. When he left, I gave Lloyd his phone. He had a department meeting to go to; he would see me at home. I am glad that I saw this side of Lloyd because when I went back home that Friday, I found him dead in his room, a dry-cleaner’s plastic bag over his purple face.
13
I have had more than two years to think and reflect on everything that happened to me from the moment that I found Lloyd in his room to the moment the judge pronounced my sentence. And I have concluded that the judge had no choice but to reach the conclusion that he did. What else was there to believe? They had a confession. They had a witness who had seen me moving Lloyd’s body. They had the gun.
The police came for me on the day that Lloyd died, the second last Friday in November. By Christmas, I had been tried, convicted and sentenced.
The speed and swiftness of my trial also had something to do with other events that took place around the time of Lloyd’s death. Vernah Sithole will tell you that the trial was quick, much quicker than any murder trial has ever been. Within two weeks of the start of the trial, the judge had reached his verdict.
I have become convinced that the death of three white farmers in the month before Lloyd’s death had something to do with the swiftness of my trial. There had been an outcry around the world about these deaths, but no one had been arrested; no one had been tried.
So when Lloyd died, another white man over whom the world would make a hue and cry, something had to be done. And there I was, a readily available suspect, caught with the body, ready to make this a simple domestic murder, nothing at all to do with the vexed and anxious questions of land and its ownership.
I did not go back to Summer Madness after they arrested me. I was deemed a flight risk. I had no apparent ties to anyone in the country, and so I spent my time on remand in Chikurubi.
On the first day of the trial, I was brought to the High Court. I was led up to Courtroom A through a series of quadrangles, passing groups of lawyers in gowns and jabots, crow-like figures bursting with mirth and legal glee.
In the wood-panelled courtroom, the judge and his two assessors sat on green leather chairs with backs as high as gravestones. The judge spent much of the trial looking into the middle distance. The assessor to his right was asleep. The assessor next to him, a woman of Indian origin, had a face that was twisted into a rictus of concern.
The door behind the judges’ dais opened every few seconds and from the corridor behind would come snatches of conversation that floated disconnected into the courtroom.
‘Ende makafitwa nekaweave ikako vasikana.’
‘Ndakafitwa? I wanted to take it off.’
‘He was abusing me in the vilest terms, with the utmost contempt and contumelia.’
‘Kafish aka kari right manje.’
‘Yah, he always brings good fish.’
The dock I sat in was in the middle of the courtroom, facing the judges and assessors; the prosecutor and my lawyer had their back to me. The prosecutor wore a lace jabot that did not connect at the back of his neck, the ends stuck out of his gown as he talked.
Behind me was Alexandra. I could not see her, but I could feel her gaze on me, burning me with the heat of her hatred. After giving her evidence, she sat on her own, on a bench behind the journalists. She was the only witness. Beyond her statement, there was no other evidence. There were no forensic reports, and no post-mortem: the last pathologist had long left the country. The signed confession that the prosecutor produced sealed my fate.
The judge concluded that I was guilty of the crime that I was charged with, a cold and calculated murder: an unnatural act for a woman. The motive didn’t matter. The law, the judge said, is concerned only with action and intention, with the necessary combination of the actus reus and the mens rea. Was the mental element present, was there an intention to kill, and did the intention to kill translate into the action of killing a human being who was alive at that time? Both elements were present in this case.
The deceased’s own sister, a competent and credible witness, had seen the accused with her own eyes, dumping the body of the deceased into the pool. The demeanour of the accused told against her, the judge said
; she had been particularly remorseless and cruel.
The relationship between the accused and the deceased was unclear, but it was not necessary to go into the exact nature of that relationship. What was beyond question was that the deceased had left the accused his house in his will, and his money. So the accused had also acted out of greed; she had killed for money that she would have inherited anyway had she been happy to wait for the natural course of events.
The accused had committed murder, and he had not been able to find any extenuating circumstances. He could not discount that the accused had confessed, thus saving the state from wasting valuable resources to prove what was essentially an open-and-shut case. In any other circumstances, that confession would have gone some way to mitigating the sentence. But it was important to send a message to the world that this country did not condone violence. The only competent sentence he could impose under the law, and in view of all the circumstances, was the death penalty.
*
Lloyd was dead when I found him. I had spent the day at the Archives. I reached home around seven in the evening. His car was in the garage, but he was not in his study, or the library or the living room. I called out his name, but I met only silence. I thought he might have gone to bed early. When I found him, I did not understand immediately what I was looking at. The naked body, dressed only in yellow socks, the plastic bag around his face – but it made no sense to me then.
The Book of Memory Page 19
