The Inheritance

by Sheena Kalayil

  But looking at the photo, his strongest memory was not of that day itself. On one of the days preceding the ceremony, he had taken his brother out for a drink. It was a hot summer’s day, muggy and close. Ben had suggested a bar on the Common. They had, he remembered, talked about Disgrace. Ben had just started working at the university, a cause for some amusing comparisons. They had turned the conversation to their father, who had at one point been considered a great white African novelist, in the same league as Coetzee and Lessing. And then they moved on, with a fondness for nostalgia that seemed to arise because Ben’s wedding spelled the start of a new era: real adulthood. For the first time as men, they turned to their childhoods, set, as Ben described, in a past that could not be recreated.

  ‘It’s something Clare and I always argue about,’ Ben was saying. ‘She keeps reminding me the country didn’t disappear in a puff of smoke, that I’ve been back so many times. She thinks I’ve become obsessed with my childhood. But it’s different for her, when she goes back to Brighton. I mean we were born in a country that had a different name. And going back like I do now, it’s not the same. It’s not just political changes, new inventions, me being older. There’s a whole new quality to the light.’ This with a sheepish smile.

  ‘Well,’ he had replied, ‘we lived in quite a privileged bubble, didn’t we? That must be different now.’

  His brother shook his head. ‘You’d be surprised. There’s still a lot of separateness. Not just on colour lines. Political lines, rich–poor, Shona–Ndebele.’ Then he paused. ‘What do you miss most, Fran? Or do you miss it at all? You’ve hardly been back . . .’

  That was true. He had left to study in Cape Town and moved on to Mozambique. Visits back to Zimbabwe became ever rarer; the family would congregate in London. He realised that little in his life now resembled his childhood in Harare, as if, rather than being an idyllic, loving period, it was a time he objected to.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He racked his brain, then threw his hands up. ‘Matilda.’

  They both burst out laughing. She had been a round woman, permanently in knitted cap and grey dress that ended at her knees, shiny stocky legs on show, comfortable black shoes. She smelled reassuringly of carbolic soap, had a powerful hug that they sought when as young boys they ran to her after a fall or a slight. She seemed to be everywhere, all the time. In the mornings: laying out their shoes and bags for school. When they were older: their cricket kit. She would open the door to the little annex she lived in reprovingly when, in his teens, he returned home late, sniffing the air pointedly for traces of alcohol or worse. In the evenings she would be in the kitchen preparing dinner, except at weekends when their mother cooked. Any other time she was in the garden: weeding, raking, planting, watering.

  Ben was grinning. ‘It’s hard to tell people over here about her. That we had a servant. It just sounds so awful, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well,’ he shrugged, glanced around him, at the drinkers gathering nearby, at the woman in a short red dress, who returned his look.

  ‘You know I went to see Peter a few years ago?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Peter. Matilda’s son. You remember him, don’t you?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘What do you mean “vaguely”? I thought you guys were friends!’

  The tone of his brother’s voice had made his head snap back. His brother looked angry; his fingers around his beer were clenched.

  ‘Jesus, Ben.’ He held his bottle to his lips, then put it down.

  There was a silence. Of course he remembered Peter; he had just been distracted by the woman. His brother’s annoyance and the reminder of Matilda’s son were unsettling. Peter. The whole ‘friendship’ had been another sop for the guilt felt by his liberal parents: they did not want their sons to grow up feeling superior. They had encouraged Francois to play with Peter; he had been too conscious of their reasons to tell them that Peter had a cruel, even unhinged streak, stamping on an injured bird once, then smearing the blood on his wrists with wonder. The afternoons when Peter came to visit were not his favourite: he was scared of him. Ben was still looking at him, and so he felt the need to elaborate.

  ‘I’m not sure we could say we were friends. He was Matilda’s son, for one thing. I was the son of the boss.’

  His brother did not say anything but waited as if he wanted him to carry on.

  He continued, beginning to feel uneasy with how he needed to justify his behaviour. ‘He was some years older than me, right? By the time you left, I was what, eighteen? Peter would have been in his twenties, a grown man. He wouldn’t have been visiting with Matilda. Even then I hadn’t seen him for years . . .’

  Ben was tapping a beat on his bottle now, his shoulders hunched.

  ‘Well, I have. I saw him about two years ago.’

  ‘Did you? Did you ever tell me? I don’t remember . . .’

  ‘I’m sure I did. Maybe I didn’t. Anyway, I found out he was married and was living in Mutare. I met him and his wife. He has three kids now.’

  ‘Well.’ He took a swig from his bottle, unsure what to say. ‘It’s nice you looked him up.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Then relenting, ‘Well, I was out there speaking to people for my research, you know? So it made sense that I should look him up.’

  ‘What about Matilda?

  ‘Peter said she died a year after Dad left.’

  ‘Really?’ Now he felt a shock, a sadness that made his body still. ‘She can’t have been old . . .’

  He had stared down at his hands, surprised at how the news had made him cold all of a sudden. When he looked up, he saw Ben was watching him again, with an expression that grated, as if satisfied with the reaction that had been wrought from him. And because he felt then that he had been challenged and failed that challenge, because he felt that his brother had set him on the back foot, and possibly because when he met his brother’s future wife she had left him cold, another memory surfaced, as it often did in times such as this. The memory of the girlfriend his brother had had aged sixteen: Denise.

  She was the daughter of one of their neighbours – more than a year older than Ben, a few months younger than he. Her father was a property developer, at the time submitting plans for an upmarket cluster of shops near the racecourse further north in the suburbs. They had known each other since early childhood, and because they were more similar in age, it was she and Francois who were friends. Ben was the younger brother tagging along. Later she was sent to an exclusive girls’ school and their interactions became less frequent. But they were neighbours, and the parents of each family threw them together. For some years, aged fourteen and on, he had to stay in the house with her after school until her mother returned from work: the parents did not want her to be left alone with the male servants. She was cut from a mould: a girl from a wealthy family. A girl whose affluence and access to luxuries would be untouched by the changing fortunes of the country around them. His wife Paula had come from the same mould. But his resentment, as he grew older, of an upbringing which robbed him of any of the romantic credentials that he felt an artist should have, had forced him to affect a disdain for Denise, pretend to regard her as a pampered princess. Those afternoons he spent as her chaperone were often an occasion for Denise to parade before him, with her long golden waves of hair, the soft swell of her breasts, while he sat outwardly indifferent but inwardly rigid with longing. For, in truth, he had loved her, loved her desperately for many years without having the nerve to approach her, fearful of jeopardising their friendship, but more fearful that if she were to rebuff him he would never recover from that humiliation.

  Ben had not suffered from any such anxieties, and with a characteristic fearlessness had asked her out, cheekily, even when he was younger than Denise. He had spent the tenure of that relationship, many months, in a never-mentioned torture, intensely jealous of his younger brother, coveting the girlfriend who should have, he knew, been his. He was sure that she had been Ben’s first, that his br
other had lost his virginity to her, when it was he, Francois, who loved her. And when Ben had told him, carelessly, that they had split up, that he was going to London anyway, he had felt a rage at his brother and his casual conquest. Now, years later, the hurt returned. He took a long draught of his beer. The woman in the red dress was gone; Ben’s eyes were wandering over the crowd around them.

  He spoke in as offhand a way as he could manage: ‘And have you looked up anyone else when you’ve been back?’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Denise?’

  ‘Denise . . .’

  His brother had raised his eyebrows. Then he shook his head. ‘No, no I haven’t. She’s still out there. I heard she was working for her father.’

  ‘And you haven’t looked her up?’

  His brother shrugged. ‘She’s married, got a kid I heard. Why would I?’

  There had been some kind of altercation at a table nearby which had distracted and amused them: at one point they had both caught the other’s eye and grinned. But when things had calmed and they returned their attention to their own drinks, Ben had resumed their dissection of things past: ‘And do you still keep in touch with Paula?’ quickly adding, ‘I’m not criticising you, Fran, I’m just wondering.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not really.’ Then, as if to further absolve himself, ‘She remarried not long after our divorce came through.’

  Ben was tapping at his bottle again. ‘What happened between you two?’

  He was silent for some time, unwilling to reveal how little he understood of the whole affair. How love seeped out, as if their marriage was made of a fine mesh, unable to hold the concoction of their personalities, their differing ambitions.

  He took a sip of his beer. ‘We got married too young was the first thing.’

  His brother remained looking at him, expectantly.

  He laid his bottle down. ‘And one day I just realised that we were only meant to be together for a finite period of time.’ He stopped. ‘I can’t explain it very well . . .’

  ‘You’ve done all right.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I’m probably over-romanticising things. There were lots of other reasons why we didn’t work. I wasn’t making any money at the time, for one. And her mother hated me . . .’

  He could understand the interest his brother was showing. Even though Ben loved Clare and Clare loved Ben, it was perfectly natural before embarking on such a commitment to have some nerves. But then his brother spoke, his voice become almost disinterested: ‘We just drop people, don’t we, people like us? We just move through life picking them up and then leaving them behind.’

  His brother’s words bit into him. Did he think he had just dropped Paula?

  He stirred. ‘I think that’s a bit harsh. We’ve moved around, that’s what it is. It’s natural that you can’t keep in touch with everyone you knew.’

  Ben fell silent, a pulse beating in his jaw. When he spoke again, his voice was low: ‘That feeling that there is something bigger going on all around you, but that you’re missing it, not quite getting it. Not quite being part of anything. I’ve never lost that feeling.’

  ‘Hey.’ He punched his brother playfully on the shoulder. ‘You’ve forgotten how to drink, Ben. This is supposed to be a celebration . . .’

  ‘No.’ Ben’s eyes had locked on his. Then his brother had grabbed his forearm, squeezed it. ‘Fran, this is great, talking like this with you. It’s been so long.’

  Had that been an apology, an extending of the olive branch, as if Ben had intuited that he had opened old wounds?

  From two tousled-haired boys they had become men. When had they as brothers decided to diverge? As young children and young teenagers they had done everything together: it made logistics more convenient for their mother. She had also treated them as one entity: ‘Boys, time for school,’ ‘Boys, cricket kit to Matilda, please,’ ‘Boys, your father wants you in the garden.’ Francois had possibly been a shade more aligned with their father than Ben, but only a shade. Both parents treated their sons with commendable equality. Then his mother made the decision to leave for ‘home’: England. Francois refused to join her as she had wished; he had been already accepted at Michaelis in Cape Town. Ben had accompanied their mother and ended up at Oxford.

  And for the six months previous to all that, there had been the girlfriend, Denise. Someone who seemed to have been sent by the gods in order for the brothers to form their own separate selves. To see each other as men, stake their own territories, their own areas for success. What would have happened if he had one day taken Denise aside, declared his love and lust for her, reminded her that his brother – two years younger – could not make up for the experience in matters carnal that he had garnered in that significant head start? What would have happened if, having bared his soul to her, she had chosen Ben after all? He had never told his brother about his feelings for Denise; he should have, and put the saga to bed. She was an ordinary girl from a wealthy family, a category into which nearly all the women he had slept with fell into. He was relieved to feel only a light interest in Clare, so worried had he been that some genetic defect would ensure that he lusted after his brother’s loves There had only been that one time, and then soon after his brother had left with his mother, to London. When he and his father had visited them, that first Christmas, there was already a shift: childhood had ended.

  He closed his eyes, leaned against the mantelpiece, the murmur of people behind him a backdrop for the ache in his chest as he thought of his brother. They had been formed in one country and had each embarked on life in another. But they would forever have the memories of those shared first years, before they were scattered like leaves thrown up into the wind, to hover for years before fluttering back down. To settle together again, slightly misaligned, never the same as before.

  9

  IF he had stayed married to Paula he might have offered his parents grandchildren, a thought that nagged at him over the days that followed the funeral, after he left London and returned to his flat. Lisbon was now home. From his spell in Cape Town, he had been absorbed into Mozambique, then slunk away to Portugal: a journey in reverse of the explorers from centuries previous. When all of his immediate family had removed themselves to Europe, he had felt an urge to move closer to them. But he had no wish to live in London: he needed a geographical buffer. Gildo had helped with his decision, having moved to Portugal himself the year before. Those first few months after he arrived, he walked all over the city, climbing its steep hills, listening to the snatches of conversation and scouring the faces of its residents for reminders of its colonial past. It was his first time to live in Europe, aged thirty-four, and if he had not fallen in love with the city, facing out to the Atlantic, turning its back on the petty obsessions of other neighbours, he might not have stayed.

  It was decided Lucie would visit her son, as arranged, but alone. After dropping her off at the airport, he returned to his flat feeling lighter and annoyed with himself for feeling that way. With Lucie now gone, he could wallow, but wallow with a purpose. He had brought back his brother’s books; it was his intention to read them. He was ashamed that he had never read beyond the first pages, and he felt that finally immersing himself in what Ben had spent years working on would be a fitting homage to his younger brother. He phoned the college and arranged another week to himself before he resumed his commitments, which at that time of the year were few. He called Gildo, who immediately entreated him to stay with them, but he refused. More than anything he needed to be alone, devote his thoughts to Ben. He threw open all the French doors in his flat. The sun was still high and strong, and so he lay naked on his bed, picked up the first of Ben’s books, his doctoral thesis, published eleven years previous. My Land, My People: Land Reform Through a Human Rights Perspective in Zimbabwe. The dedication read: To my parents, John and Louise Martin, and on the acknowledgements page, the final sentence: And to Clare Armstrong: for keeping my feet on the ground, wherever I
am. His eyes moved up to the other people mentioned: himself, Patricia Zigomo, then four lines’ worth of names. Samuel Mutadzwi, Annie De Houwer, Johnson Gomo: the list continued. Who were these people? His own life seemed monkish in comparison. He read and re-read the names, then skated through the contents page, to the introduction, which he must have read at some stage, although he had no recollection.

  The possession of land – who it belongs to, who has a right to cultivate, build, inherit – is a defining trope of human history. That the land belongs to the peoples who occupy it on discovery is itself a concept that eludes careful dissection. For without discovery, without contention, possession becomes an abstract rather than a hard-fought accomplishment. When Ian Smith unilaterally declared Rhodesia’s independence from Britain, he unleashed a long and protracted war for sovereignty between the two main tribes – the Shona and the Matabele – culminating in the Lancaster House Agreement. Solomon Moyo, Zimbabwean poet, writes on this treatise in his anthology, Seeds of Struggle: ‘Before the ink had dried/ the seeds of a new nation had been germinated/ nurtured/ thrived/ only to await a cutting down/ and burning/ a scorched earth policy/ in utero.’ What Moyo alludes to is the essential flaw in the agreement. That is, the assumption that a transfer of power to the indigenous peoples would automatically ensure the protection of the most vulnerable members of society, women and children. On Robert Mugabe’s ascendance to power . . .

  He turned the pages, browsed through the long bibliography at the end, then picked up the other book, Daughters of Africa. This, dedicated to Clare.

  Ten narratives of women from varied socio-economic backgrounds in the southern African country of Zimbabwe illustrate the realities of life in the post-colonial state. I use the women’s life stories to illustrate the complexity of discussions related to land tenure and land titling; discussions that have divided gender specialists. While some believe that customary law is entrenched beyond removal and that reform, thus, has to focus on making those same laws stronger and fairer, others reject these decisions, arguing that change will only manifest itself if women’s land and property rights are enshrined in statutory law.