A group of children played a game in the open space before the houses. The girl whose turn it was to be in the middle had tucked her dress into her panties. Her thin legs kicked up with practised agility.
‘Sweetie, sweetie, day by day,’ the children sang. ‘Upside down. Tula madhebhula, tula madhebhula. Oh fish!’
‘And fish!’ cried the girl in the middle.
‘And upside down!’ echoed the others.
A toddler sat in the mud, splashing dirty water over herself in happy disregard.
As soon as the children saw Loveness, they ran to her, shouting, ‘Aunty, aunty.’
Was this Loveness, this aunty, aunty that the children clamoured around with laughing faces?
‘Where is Yeukai?’ Loveness asked.
‘She is at Tadiwa’s house,’ a little girl answered.
‘Tell her to come home,’ Loveness said.
Two small girls broke from the rest and ran as with one motion towards the end of the row of houses.
Loveness opened the door to her house. ‘Come in, come in. This is where I am,’ she said. There was an unmistakable note of proprietary pride in her voice as she ushered me in to the pinneat, overstuffed room.
The room felt suffocatingly familiar. The lace curtains at the window, the lounge suite with cloth covers, the display cabinet with miniature figures on doilies, and in the corner, a dining room table, which did not appear, from its resolute position squashed into the corner, ever to be used. I was in a more expensive version of the living room in Mharapara Street from which I had watched the children play.
And just as it had been then, the voices of the children came through the open windows, continuing the game that they were playing as we walked past them. ‘Oh fish,’ they cried. ‘And fish, and upside down.’
‘I have just the one bedroom and a spare,’ Loveness said. ‘I should have moved into the one at the corner after my promotion, the one that is occupied by Patience now, even though she has not been promoted like me, but, well, you know, there is this thing between the Assistant Commissioner and Patience …’
She indicated that I should sit. I took the armchair nearest the television and turned towards it. It had a sleek, flat screen, with the store display labels saying ‘high-definition’, ‘40-inch LCD’ and ‘Phillips’ with two Ls stuck in the bottom corners.
‘Patience brought this from Dubai,’ she said as she switched it on. ‘Just three hundred she charged me, can you imagine, what a bargain, and she paid no duty, no nothing. That is the good thing about being connected.’
She surfed though the channels until she found a Nigerian film. ‘Oh, my daughter,’ said the television. ‘What have you done with my daughter? I want my daughter, wo-o.’
‘Your daughter will not come back. She has married a creature of the waters.’
‘She has married a marine husband!’ screamed a voice.
‘A marine husband,’ echoed the first.
Mesmerised by the television, I did not realise that Loveness was not only talking to me; she was also handing me a glass of Coke that she had poured out for me. As I drank greedily, I tried to focus my attention away from the television.
Loveness was uncharacteristically nervous – bashful, even. She talked in a circumlocutory way about how much she liked Nigerian films, the problems with teachers these days, the things that Patience brought back on each trip to Dubai and why it was good to have Patience on her side. It was obvious that all of this was a lead-up to something. But I could not think of anything that would warrant such hospitality. I concentrated on my drink and the television, until finally she came out with it.
Her daughter was having problems at school and she wanted me to help. I had gone to university, she said, so I knew all about it. She was writing Cambridge exams in two years. She had saved and saved for her daughter because she wanted her to write the very best exams.
‘You have been where, you have been to Cambridge, there where they set the papers,’ she said. ‘Can you help me?’
‘Ajana says the girl must remain under the sea.’
‘Will you help me?’ said Loveness again.
‘Yes,’ I said, and turned my attention from the television. ‘Yes, of course I will help.’
The door opened and in came a little girl with that robust thinness that only very young girls have. The sound of the television receded, and even Loveness seemed to be speaking from a long way off. She was a small girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, a small albino girl with freckles on her face and arms and thick glasses on her nose. In that moment, I understood everything that had baffled me about Loveness. The little girl blinked and scratched at the alabaster skin of her right arm. In that gesture, I saw myself again.
*
Every afternoon, after Yeukai returns from school, Loveness takes me to her house. Yeukai is not at the prison school, but at a government school in Highlands. Funnily enough, it is Alexandra’s old school. It was once a government school only for whites, but it now takes mainly the children of the domestic staff who work in the affluent areas surrounding it.
The uniform is still the same, the children are obliged to wear hats, but they are fifty children in each class. Yeukai is behind in every subject. For this term, I am teaching her history, geography, English language and literature. In February, we start on biology and chemistry. They are not my strongest subjects, and I have to stop at physics and maths, but Loveness said not to worry: they had been Synodia’s favourite subjects at school.
With the reawakened memories of the children at my first school in Mufakose in mind, I asked Yeukai if the other children gave her problems at school. She was not the only albino child in her school, she said; there were three others, so everyone was used to her. The school absences are Yeukai’s only problems. I have said that in her I saw myself again, but we differ in one respect. She wears glasses, but is otherwise healthy and well cared for. Loveness told me that there is now an Albino Society that gives out free sunscreen and advice.
I would rather that you not tell Vernah Sithole about this arrangement. I know that she will not approve of this – she has, after all, been appointed to the new Anti-Corruption Commission. She will get into a tizzy about corruption and get Loveness into trouble for abusing her position. It is corruption, but it is a form of corruption that happens to benefit me.
In Loveness’s house, I get to shower in hot water, the first hot water I have had in two years. I get lotion for my skin. I watch the television when there is electricity. It is limited fare: Loveness sticks resolutely to Nigerian and Korean melodramas and channels with Pentecostal preachers, but I have managed, on one or two occasions when she was not here, to catch reruns of sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends.
In the effusion of her happiness, Loveness even offered me some of her old clothes until she recalled that I could not wear them in prison. If Yeukai passes this term’s tests, I intend to ask Loveness to buy me a bottle of wine. I can almost taste it in my mouth.
Above all, I get books.
I suggested to Loveness that she should go to the flea market at Avondale and buy any books she could find. She brought back the I, Claudius books by Robert Graves, and some Frederick Forsyths and Jeffrey Archers. She apologised because the only books she manages to find are old. I have told her that this is what I prefer.
The world has changed, but the curriculum has not. I am teaching Yeukai all the things that I learned myself. I find myself looking forward to the lessons, planning them, impatient for the next one, and missing them when they are cancelled. I teach her about the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, I teach her about igneous rocks and sedimentary rocks, I try to smooth her way as she stumbles through the iambic pentameter.
We had started on the Russian Revolution when Loveness came to see me last week; it was on the day that I normally go to teach Yeukai. I was thinking already of ways to make the revolution come alive for her. Maybe I would tell her about Rasputin. I would teach her the standard story in the text,
about the rightness of the revolution, but I would try to make her see the pain of the children shot one by one, the pitiful waste of it. My mind was on the little Tsarevich and I did not immediately understand what she said.
‘Your sister is here to see you,’ she said.
I thought I had misheard her as soon as I saw my visitor. Sitting in the visitor’s room was a small, light-skinned woman in a plain grey skirt, a white blouse, and a short veil covering her hair. I had misheard Loveness. There is a sister to see me, she meant, a Catholic sister, perhaps a volunteer from the Goodwill Fellowship. As I hardened myself to meet her platitudes, she looked up from the book she was reading and smiled.
Then my heart contracted because my mother faced me across the years. ‘Memory,’ she said, and burst into tears.
Immediately, I saw my mistake. My mother’s face had never been this gentle, or her voice ever this soft.
2
How do you begin your life again after you find out that everything you thought was true about yourself is wrong?
How do you begin to understand your life all over again? My mind is in the Mukuvisi with my parents, in the murderous waters of the river in which the Baptist almost drowned me until my father put his strong arms around me. Had those same arms pulled my mother to her death? Who had killed whom? Had they died at the same time, weighing each other down?
I do not even know if there was a funeral. But who was there to bury them, when they had died together? How long had it been before they were found? Did our house on Mharapara find new tenants? Or did it become another place of horror, like the haunted house that we were afraid of when we were children? MaiWhizi, how did she take it? Did she go from house to house, spreading the news to those who had not heard about this bioscope in which her neighbours died?
All these questions, but they are all really one. How do you begin again? How do I begin again?
3
Mavis Munongwa died last night.
From my cell I heard her crying out, but I was too filled with my own pain to think that the sounds meant she was in any particular distress. When the siren went in the morning and Synodia unlocked the cells, she did not come out to wash in the ablution block with all of us.
No one noticed her absence until breakfast.
When Synodia came back, she held a whispered consultation with the others. They all left together, and it was then that we knew that something must be wrong.
After a few minutes, Synodia said, ‘Let us now say prayers for our sister Mavis, who has gone to sleep with the Lord. She has gone home, to a better world.’
Loveness ordered Jimmy, Evernice, Benhilda, one of the baby dumpers and me to fetch Mavis’s body and put it in the sanatorium. She weighed so little, her eyes had been closed, and she was light to carry. We carried her out feet first and laid her on the bed nearest the door.
Loveness said Mavis had no family, and she would be buried in the grounds of the prison. We buried her the next day. The December heat meant that she could not be kept in the clinic for long. From the window of the Condemn later that morning, I saw in the far distance some khaki-clad figures from the men’s prison digging a grave for Mavis, in the shared cemetery at the corner where the men’s and women’s prisons touch. Separated in life, together in death.
Only the old graves have gravestones. The new mounds of earth have no gravestones above them. It was to a new grave that we carried her the next day, wrapped in a prison blanket, and threw her body into the ground. She landed with a soft thud. Jimmy must have seen something in my face, because she squeezed my hand and whispered, ‘Iza, Memory, iza.’
Synodia led us in singing. The women’s voices were beautiful in the hot afternoon. They induced in me a terror, not just for Mavis, but also for myself. This could be me one day. Even if I escape the hangman, I might still end my life here, in a prison blanket, buried by Synodia. Maybe I would even watch the men from the prison digging my grave.
After the funeral, I went back to my cell. I was unwell, I said; could I lie down. Loveness let me go. I had been looking forward to reading the old edition of I, Claudius she had given me before the meeting with my sister; I tried to read it now, but the words of Robert Graves blurred and mixed with the horror of what my sister had told me.
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, am now about to tell you that your entire life has been a lie. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, am now about to write this strange history of how your mother killed her children.
4
When my sister was eighteen years old, and I was seventeen and falling in love with Zenzo, a policeman called Constable Mapfumo came to her school in Chishawasha to tell her that our parents were dead. They had both drowned in the Mukuvisi River. Perhaps it was a murder-suicide, or a mutual suicide pact, who knows.
What matters only is that they both died.
Joy says that when people rage against the police and talk of corruption and inefficiency, she remembers that man, Takawira Mapfumo, who drove his own car to see her because he wanted himself to put in her hand the letter that my father had written. He sat beside her in the headmaster’s office as she read it, and afterwards held her hand while she cried.
This is what our father told her.
My father was not my mother’s first husband. He was not even her husband, because she was not his wife but rather belonged to another man. She had been just thirteen years old when she was married, or, I should say, when her parents married her off to a man four times her age.
She was married off to this man because a very long time ago, before 13 September 1890, before Lloyd’s Pioneer Column ancestor dreamt of Zambesia, of England’s El Dorado in Africa, long before there was a war of liberation, before the Internet and electricity, an ancestor of my mother had killed an ancestor of her first husband.
The story of this murder was passed by one generation down to the next. The spirit of the dead man came back as an angry ngozi spirit and wreaked havoc on my mother’s family. Fields failed to prosper, children rotted in their mothers’ wombs. My mother’s father was told that something had to be done, the debt repaid. A life for a life.
That life was to be my mother’s.
Her family decreed that that long-ago death had to be honoured through the gift of a girl to the family of the murdered. My mother was to be the currency that paid the debt.
Pledging girls is illegal now, of course. As Vernah will tell you, the government outlawed it almost at independence, but this was in the late 1960s, deep in rural Rhodesia, where the chiefs decided what was law and appeasing the sins of the past mattered more than securing one girl’s future.
So there was no one to protest, no one to dispute the authority under which a girl, a child, my mother, should be given over in marriage to a man to appease a murder committed long before she was even thought of. There was no one to stand up for my mother.
At the age of thirteen, my mother found herself married into a family that was poor, polygamous and plentiful. She became the third wife. The other wives lived in acrimony and conflict, and their children carried on their mothers’ quarrels. Into all this violence and ugliness came my mother. She could not escape because continuing in this marriage was necessary to appease an angry spirit.
She was unhappy and she was lonely. She ran away and escaped to her father’s house. Her father beat her and brought her back to her husband, who also beat her for her insubordination. With little education, and a family that had approved this enforced slavery and desired her marriage in the first place, where could she go? She tried to hang herself but was caught and tied down for three days. She was locked in her hut to prevent it. They would not let her go but they feared that, if she killed herself, her own ngozi spirit would come back and haunt them, and begin another cycle of endless death and despair.
In the end, my father was her escape route.
She met him four years after her forced marriage, when she took one of her stepchildren to the clinic nea
r the new school in her village. He had a job there as a carpenter, making shelves and cupboards. He saw her when she came to the school and fell in love with her at once. That she was married did not deter him. But by this time she had a young child, a boy of three years. She was afraid that her husband would hunt her down if she took him. So she left him behind, that little boy whose name I will now never know. She left him to be raised in that family, and with my father she began a new life.
The loss of the child caused her great unhappiness. After a year together, she and my father could not bear it. They were expecting a child. They returned to her home to make an offer: my father would repay the family of her husband; they would take her son and my father would marry my mother.
My mother then learned the horrible truth: her little boy had been drowned in the river while bathing. She and my father saw it as the ngozi striking back in terrible vengeance. I can see her weeping at the news, weeping like she did at Mobhi’s funeral, tears running into her mouth, hands clasped together behind her head, body moving from side to side.
My mother’s father refused to accept the money that my father offered as a penance. ‘You cannot marry another man’s wife,’ he said. And in addition to the original ngozi of her family, which remained unpaid since my mother had run away, there was now the ngozi of her dead child. There was only one thing to be done: my mother had to return to her husband. My father would pay compensation for having run away with her. But my mother could not bear that thought.
They went to my father’s village. Gift was born there, and soon after, Joy. A cow drowned in the river and the family blamed my father. ‘She will bring nothing but tears to you. You shall suffer every day of your life.’
They left to live in another village. And then I was born, with no darkness in my skin, with no pigment, an albino, murungudunhu, with my ghastly whiteness. My mother believed that I had been cursed inside her womb. Joyi says my father told her that my mother was unable to feed me, and that I spent my first year at a mission hospital.
The Book of Memory Page 21
