They were asked to leave their new village as soon as the headman heard about my condition. My parents moved to town. Unmarried, they remained together, my mother sinking deeper and deeper into despair.
My mother killed Gift when he was three, Joyi was eighteen months and I was just a baby. She drowned him in his bath and told my father that her dead son had appeared before her and commanded it. ‘It was the only thing that could save them,’ he said she said.
They were not detected. He said the child had been playing. This was in the townships, before independence. The war was on; there was a state of emergency. There were so many African children – what did it matter if one died? It was just one less person to demand inconvenient things like majority rule and electricity and education and jobs. If I sound bitter, it is because I am. There was only the most cursory of investigations.
Then came Moreblessings.
My father could not unmake us, or wish us gone. He might also, though Joy did not say this, have believed that this was the curse that was playing out, that he could not prevent it but could delay its dreadful effect.
After I was born, they had seen a traditional healer who had told them that the only thing to do was to make sure my mother returned to her husband. My father was fatalist in his belief that they could not escape.
I now understand my mother’s persistence in seeking out a cure for me. She believed that there was someone out in the world, in Manicaland, perhaps, and maybe even Mozambique, who had a different answer, the right answer. She and my father travelled up and down the country.
Only the war on the eastern border, flowing in from Mozambique, stopped my mother, and defeated they turned to Harare, where they could get lost. My mother remained convinced that there was an answer out there, if only she could find the right diviner to give it to her.
They had spent more than half of their earnings consulting diviners. My father saw, I think, that they might eventually give all they had to finding this mysterious answer. He refused to allow any further trips. When my mother insisted, he fought her like he did the day she took me to the healer. He could not stop fate but he could be vigilant and make sure that it did not act through his wife. He could not send us to our mother’s relatives because they would not have accepted us.
His own mother had taken us in for a few months, when my father had to go to Salisbury for work and could not bring his family. But when the accident occurred that produced Joyi’s scar, the local chief said my parents had to leave.
But something more serious had happened that the chief was never told about: it was at my grandmother’s that my mother tried to kill me for the first time. She tried to drown me in a zinc bucket, and only my grandmother’s sudden arrival stopped her.
My father decided that he would work from home; he decided that he would spend every waking moment protecting us from our mother.
Then she killed Mobhi.
Her son had made her do it, my mother said. My father saw that we could never be safe as long as we were in that house. He did not let us out of his sight. But he did not blame her. He continued to believe that it was not she who did it, but a force external to her, a supernatural force that possessed her and drove her to kill. The best protection he could think of was constant vigilance.
At night, he tied her to the bed. But she broke free. The final straw came two weeks after Mobhi had died, when he found her standing by our bed in the middle of the night, trying to lift my sleeping form from the bed. ‘She needs a bath,’ she said. ‘She is dirty.’
The following day, after he took us to school, he walked along Crowborough without knowing or caring about the direction that his feet took him. He found himself in town and walked to the Harare Gardens. He and my mother had sometimes come here when they first came to Salisbury. He had brought us to those gardens often, passing through on our way to the Show Grounds every August for the Agricultural Show.
He had thought then of his grandfather, whom he had never known because he had died in the forests of Burma in the Second World War. That thought took him to the monument in the park commemorating the fallen from the two world wars. As he looked at the words on the plaque, ‘We fought and died for our King’, the intensity of his emotion moved him from his bench. Perhaps it was the simple beauty of those words, but something in him broke. He put his hands in his arms and wept long and hard. He was not aware of the passing people, or of the man who came to sit beside him. It was Lloyd.
5
I was supposed to be in court yesterday. This is the second appointment that I have missed this month. From what Loveness told me when she came to give me the message from Vernah Sithole that I would not be leaving, it may be another month before anything happens.
From what Vernah Sithole said the last time, the new Minister of Justice has appointed a commission to re-examine all sentences before they announce an amnesty. It is primarily meant for the new government’s supporters who were locked up on spurious charges, but the review will extend to all prisoners serving sentences of more than two years. They have delayed the opening of the judicial year to allow the new Commission on Sentencing to complete its work.
The Minister is also appointing new court officers, magistrates and prosecutors, and the Judiciary Services Commission is reviewing the appointments of all judges. In cases not covered by amnesty, Vernah explained, they may even order new trials.
A flicker of hope leapt up in me when she said this. I found myself making plans, tempting fate. But it soon died. Mine is not a political case, and perhaps I will never leave. That is what Loveness would want. ‘With all my heart,’ she said, ‘I hope it goes well for you. I want them to give you life, or at the very least eight years, so that Yeukai is finished by the time you leave.’
I had not realised before then how pink her gums are or how yellow the teeth that frame the missing ones on her upper jaw. I thought suddenly of Mr Todd in A Handful of Dust, trapping Tony into a nightmare of reading all of Dickens, over and over and over for the rest of his life, buoyed only by the thought that the Amazon jungle termites had disposed of one hated volume.
The new Minister of Justice arrived in person to inspect the prison. In the weeks before she came, detergents and mops appeared as if by magic, along with tubes of toothpaste, soap and sanitary pads and toothbrushes. When we stood before her in our clean uniforms and with our newly cleaned teeth and feet with shoes on them, singing a song that we had been practising while we worked, it was with stomachs full of porridge made with the right amounts of sugar and margarine.
And from the kitchen wafted the smell of fried beef.
The Minister walked among us. When she got to the Ds, she asked, in the cheeriest voice possible, how things were in prison. Just as I was thinking how best to answer such a question, how to address in one succinct sentence the bad food, the poor plumbing, Synodia, how the guards treated us, Evernice said, ‘Everything is very well, very nice.’
‘Everything is just wonderful,’ Beulah added.
‘Just wonderful,’ simpered Benhilda.
Behind the Minister, Synodia, Loveness and the guards smiled their approval. The Chief Superintendent stood next to them, the buttons on her epaulettes reflecting the glow of self-congratulation that came from Synodia and Loveness. After this hearty endorsement, the Minister seemed to lose her assurance and her speech fell a little flat.
She spoke of the standards that the United Nations has set for the treatment of prisoners. Prisons should be places of human rights and human dignity, we were all on the same page, everyone in this room was on the very same page. We all wanted the same things, and those same things were, primarily, human rights and human dignity.
She spoke as though these were tangible gifts that we had only to reach out and take. Indeed, if we had had a piece of meat for every time she said those words, we would have gone to bed fuller than we had been in all of the time we had been in prison.
I cannot say I have seen any human rights sinc
e her visit – or much human dignity, for that matter – but Synodia’s voice is certainly less loud. Her blood-and-thunder seems straggly and ineffectual.
Loveness is even more subdued. No doubt she fears that the Stygian effects of the new Minister’s reforming zeal will flow all the way to Chikurubi. In this, she and I are of the same mind. If I am to stay here any longer, I would rather that my pact with Loveness continues. I can only cling to what I know, which is that my life since I started to teach Yeukai has some even tenor. If I am to be honest, I do not want to think of changes here.
6
Somewhere in the Archives, where I once worked, is a newspaper that has the report of my parents’ death. It will not be very long; maybe just ten lines headed ‘Man, Woman Drown in Mukuvisi’. This is the only time that my parents’ lives will be recorded. Had they not ended their lives, there would have been no reason at all for even this, but a double suicide will have been news.
How did they keep it from the township, their terrible secret? But the township encourages familiarity, not intimacy.
Joy says that Lloyd talked to my father for a long time. He asked to see him again in town the next day. He said to him that my mother was not cursed, that she was ill, dangerously ill, and that their children were in great danger. Could he not send us all to school? Lloyd asked. Then he could help my mother to get treatment.
When my father said he didn’t have enough money, Lloyd offered to pay the school fees for Joy and me. But my father said Joy could go to a school, but what about Memory, his daughter who was always unwell?
‘Could she not go to a special school?’ Lloyd had asked.
When my father had explained my condition, Lloyd had said that he would take me in, that he would look after me until my mother was well. When we met that first day at Barbours, it had been so that he could look at me, so that he could see if my mother agreed. He had told my father that my mother needed help – a doctor’s help, he had said. He had even made arrangements for them to see a friend of his who taught at the medical school at the university. And once they had seen this friend, he would make sure that he would support my father to look after me.
Lloyd had thought that my mother would be locked away for treatment. Perhaps my father thought so, too, because they did not go to see Lloyd’s friend, and they did not go back to see Lloyd.
So I was never meant to live with Lloyd. They had been right, after all, when they told me that I was to go there for a short time.
But then they died.
It was a simple act of kindness.
Our father finally allowed my mother to go to the Annexe. He had woken up to find her standing over him with a knife. He had tied her hands behind her back that night, and the next morning he had dressed her and taken her to Parirenyatwa, to the Annexe, where she remained for six months.
When I told Joyi everything that had happened to me, she wept with her veil over her face. She had been teaching at a school in India when Lloyd died and had not known about the trial until she came back. Through the Goodwill Fellowship, she heard about the albino woman called Memory, a woman who was in prison for killing a white man.
7
It has been two months since Joyi told me the truth about my family. My dreams have gone. The Chimera no longer pulls me down to the water; it speaks no more with my mother’s voice. I understand now that the dreams were not dreams, but faint imprints of buried trauma fighting memories of my mother.
In the first days after Joyi told me the truth, it was hard for us to talk without breaking down. But now, together, we have been sharing the many moments of snatched joy: my father’s music, my mother’s records, and the birthday cakes that were really just rock-hard candy cakes with a candle on them.
The ablution and the Condemn and the corridors are silent without the others. The Commission on Sentencing gave up – there were too many prisoners needing review. So they went for a straightforward amnesty. They released all the A and B and C prisoners. In D, they let go everyone who had served more than half their sentences. The only prisoners excluded from the amnesty were those convicted of murder and aggravated rape.
Vernah is still campaigning hard to have my sentence commuted to life, but that has not happened yet. Mavis Munongwa has found her own amnesty, which means that I am the only person left in the whole prison.
The prison is open to me now; I go where I please, when I please. There is no lock-up. I eat at Loveness’s house, and spend most of my time there. Synodia and Mathilda have asked me to teach their children, too, and that is how I spend most of my time. Teaching the children, thinking about my parents and all the things that I will do if they ever let me leave. I spend most of the time in a small room that used to be the library, and which I have persuaded Loveness to let me rebuild as one.
I am also rereading these notebooks that you sent back before you left for New York. I did not thank you enough for what you have done for me. Even if nothing comes of the magazine feature you were planning to write, I am grateful to you for setting me on the path to the truth.
I asked you to bring them all back because I wanted to go back, to see where it was I made that fatal mistake. My mind keeps going back to that memory of seeing Lloyd hand over the bills, a false memory on which I have built the foundation of my life, or, to put it more accurately, a true memory from which I have made false assumptions. My utter conviction that my parents sold me rested only on that exchange of money.
I understand now why Lloyd adopted me. He was as different as I was and knew what it was to be different. I did not see that he lived in pain and fear. He had paid my father for Joy’s schooling, as promised, and the money took her right up to her O levels. She lived at school during the holidays. When she decided that she wanted to take the veil, the nuns took over her education, and only when our parents died and my father wrote her that letter did she understand how she had come to be there.
There are things that I understand, or that I have grasped. My parents thought that it was a fate from ancient days that controlled their lives, but it was actually random chance. It was chance that led Lloyd to that park bench. He had left his car to be fixed up near Herbert Chitepo. It was not ready when they said it would be, and he had decided on impulse that he would walk to the park and look at the memorial. It was chance that brought Lloyd to that bench; it was chance, too, that my father found himself in the company of one of the few white men in Zimbabwe who understood what a black person meant when he talked about ngozi.
There are still many things that I do not understand. Some I can guess at, but I have no certainty. Above all, I am wondering if Lloyd knew where Joyi was, and if so why he kept us apart. Chishawasha and Umwinsidale are in opposite valleys. I am seeing the times we drove past Chishawasha, the time we drove to St Ignatius to see an old priest who had taught him at his old school at St George’s. In all that time Joyi was in the valley below. Did he never try to find out what had happened to my parents? And if he did, why did he not tell me about Joyi, why did he keep me with him still, without once telling me that my sister was at school in the neighbouring valley?
In one of her prayer meetings before the prison emptied, Synodia spoke about a baptism of fire. I feel as though I have walked through fields of fire to emerge into shining coolness. I tell myself to fight the hope that rises like a flare when I imagine that I might actually leave. I look forward to leaving because finally, my life makes sense. My discomfort has not just been feeling ill at ease in my skin, but a discomfort in myself.
One of the hardest things about prison is the lack of choice. There are choices, even here, and the most important one is the life within. I will not think about tomorrow. All I want to do is to live in the moment. It will not be possible for me to escape the past. But if I go back there, it will only be to find ways to make rich my present. To accept that there are no villains in my life, just broken people, trying to heal, stumbling in darkness and breaking each other, to find a way to forgive my father
and mother, to forgive Lloyd, to find a path to my own forgiveness.
To stop living what has been, until now, this pale imitation of life.
I thought today about the peppered moth. Like that insect, I have had to change my shape and shade to blend into my surroundings. And like the peppered moth, I was fluttering, blindly, changing colour, struggling to adapt, to survive. Maybe that is enough – for me to resolve that I will survive. And to start my life all over again, whether in here or out there, but to start it over with the full truth before me. Maybe that is enough to begin with.
8
Verity, Jimmy and Beulah came to see me yesterday. As part of their amnesty conditions, they are not supposed to visit the prison. But there they were, in the canteen, with things for me: food, drink, toiletries, soap, a new toothbrush, a towel and sunscreen lotion.
As if they had set out to look as different as possible from how they were when they were here, Jimmy wore tight red trousers and a lurid yellow blouse while Beulah’s hair was covered in a long ginger weave that came down to her waist. The sweat shone through Verity’s thick foundation. Her red-and-blue heels were so high that her knees buckled. They had come in her new car, Verity said, as she jingled the keys casually, but not so casually that Synodia missed them.
‘Hesi kani, Mbuya Guard,’ Jimmy said, and slapped her hand against Synodia’s, like they were best friends reunited. ‘Nayo nayo tirongo.’
‘Zvipi,’ said Synodia. ‘You will be back here soon enough. With your temper, Beulah, and your permanently open legs, Jimmy, you will be back with us before you know it.’
Beulah and Jimmy shrieked with laughter and clapped each other’s hands so hard that it was like a small thunderclap had been unleashed in the room.
The Book of Memory Page 22
