The White Shadow

by Andrea Eames

  I wrote a thank-you letter to Babamukuru. Baba – who kept his school-learning carefully folded and stored in his head, like the linen Amai kept between waxed papers in the kitchen drawer – would have written them for us, but Amai persuaded him to let me try, as Baba had been teaching me my letters to prepare me for school.

  ‘Tinashe can write well now,’ she said. ‘He learned very quickly.’

  I ducked my head down so that Baba would not see how pleased and embarrassed I was.

  ‘He will do a good job.’

  Baba put the fear of God into me, or rather the fear of Babamukuru, which was the same thing. Write neatly and do not make any mistakes, because we do not have many pieces of paper to use. Make sure to spell ‘thank you’ correctly, or Babamukuru will think you are stupid. Do not lean your hand on the paper, you will smudge it. And write in English!

  Baba’s eyes did not move from side to side when he looked over my letter. He glanced at it once, and gave it to me. ‘Very good, Tinashe.’

  What a man my Baba was, that he could read an entire letter in just one glance! Flushed with my success and my new toy, I said, ‘Babamukuru is a wonderful man, isn’t he, Baba? To give us these beautiful things? He must be very rich.’

  ‘Yes, Tinashe.’

  ‘One day I will be rich like Babamukuru and everything in my house will be new,’ I said.

  Baba looked around at the vinyl kitchen table and the sagging green sofa. He touched my head, gently. ‘I am sure you will be just like Babamukuru one day, Tinashe.’

  We posted the letter, and I played with my new red truck until the bottom-of-the-hill gang stole it from my windowsill and dropped it in the waterhole. When I fished it out it was scratched and soiled and smelled of old water-weed, and it did not give me the same shiny-new feeling as before.

  Chapter Five

  AFTER THAT, ABEL came to stay with us during every one of his school holidays. As soon as term ended, Babamukuru drove him to the kopje in his silver car.

  ‘It is good for him to spend time with Tinashe. He is a good influence,’ said Babamukuru.

  The idea that I could be any sort of influence over Abel! But I liked Babamukuru to think well of me, and so I did not contradict him.

  Babamukuru and Baba had grown up in the kopje just as Hazvinei and I did – not in a house with a polished red stoep and white-washed walls, but in the poorest of poor huts. It was a testament to Babamukuru’s success that the family now had the best houses on the kopje. The village knew my uncle and father as Mutungamiri – or Tunga – and Garikai. Brothers. Mutungamiri means ‘leader’, a fitting name for an older son, and Garikai means ‘live in peace and comfort’. Babamukuru was destined to go out into the world. Baba was destined to stay home.

  ‘I have a good life,’ Baba said often. ‘I have a beautiful wife, a comfortable home and two strong children. What more would I need?’

  A big silver car, a striped school tie and an indoor toilet, I thought but did not say. Baba seemed so content with village life that I imagined he had chosen not to go to high school, but when I asked him, I found out that this was not true.

  ‘I was put forward for the same scholarship as your Babamukuru,’ he said.

  ‘But you did not win it?’

  ‘I did not go to the examination,’ said Baba. ‘Our father was sick, and I did not want to make the journey to town and leave him alone. Our mother had died the year before. So I stayed with him and your Babamukuru went to the exam.’

  ‘Did you go back to school?’

  ‘There was not money for both of us,’ said Baba, and I knew that I was not to ask him anything more.

  ‘Your Babamukuru has done well for us,’ people on the kopje told me often. ‘He is a great man.’ They also said, ‘Your father is a good man. He is generous.’ I knew, however, that they admired Babamukuru more, and that Baba had a reputation for being too generous – lending money unwisely; turning a blind eye to people’s faults. That is why he took in the three-legged dog that we called twiza, giraffe, for its skinny neck and protruding spine. The dog did not live, and it became a familiar joke on the kopje. ‘Is it going to be a chicken with no head next, Garikai? Or a goat with no udders?’

  Abel grew used to life in the village. He did sometimes roll his eyes and sigh when I failed to understand something that seemed obvious to him, but Abel enjoyed rolling his eyes and sighing. ‘You have such big ears, Tinashe, and yet you hear nothing that I tell you,’ he liked to say.

  We woke up together on the mattress, ate breakfast together and performed our chores together. This was my chance to outshine Abel, for I knew very well how to herd the goats and take care of the mielie plants. I watched my cousin chase the retreating rumps of the animals, waving his arms and shouting, and I laughed until I had a pain in my side.

  ‘You have trained them wrong, Tinashe,’ said Abel when he returned, out of breath. ‘They do not listen to me.’

  We walked the goats to pasture down the long, red-dirt road, flicking at them with long switches I cut fresh from the trees every day. Sometimes we became bored with watching the goats, and fought with our switches instead. Abel became adept at flicking his stick across the backs of my knees, leaving a skinny red welt that stung when my sweat trickled over it. We threw stones at birds in the trees, and caught flies between our two hands.

  ‘One day I will have a gun,’ said Abel, ‘and I will be able to shoot as many birds as I want.’

  ‘And where are you going to get this gun? Is Babamukuru going to give it to you?’

  ‘I will buy it for myself. With my own money.’

  ‘Then you will have to wait until you have finished university and you have a good job.’ I flicked the tender end of my switch against his back, tickling him.

  ‘I am not going to university. I am going to work like a real man.’

  We scuffled and pinched each other in the dust. I did not pay attention to Abel’s words. He was showing off, I knew. Why would anyone want to work like Baba did when they could instead wear a smart suit and drive a car like Babamukuru’s?

  As Hazvinei grew and started to walk, Amai sent her to herd the goats with us. ‘Give me some peace and quiet,’ she said. ‘This one causes too much trouble.’

  Hazvinei walked slowly, and we had often to stop and carry her. Abel became impatient. ‘Why does she have to come with us? She is useless. She should sit at home on the stoep and play with bugs.’

  ‘Amai is busy.’ I did not mind looking after Hazvinei. I liked her pudgy hand in mine; the way she trusted me to lead her safely.

  ‘She is a little demon,’ said Abel, who had never forgiven Hazvinei for biting him. ‘She cannot even talk. There is something wrong with her.’

  It was true that Hazvinei did not talk. She could understand us very well – we saw it in her sharp, clever face – but she made only wordless sounds. Amai pretended that this was nothing to worry about, but I saw her coaching Hazvinei, her hands splayed around her mouth as she exaggerated its movements.

  ‘A-ma-i. A-ma-i. Say it, Hazvinei. You can say A-ma-i.’

  Hazvinei stared at her, unblinking.

  ‘Ba-ba. Say Ba-ba.’

  Nothing. Amai would straighten and brush off her apron. ‘It will come in time,’ she said. ‘You cannot rush these things.’

  Hazvinei adored Abel. She followed him on pudgy legs, keeping up with him even when he walked as quickly as he could. He ordered her about, and she loved to obey. I trailed behind them both. He called her little lioness, as Baba did, but he called me Nzou, elephant, because I was always slow and dusty and lagging behind and I could not keep up with them.

  ‘You have a long memory like an elephant,’ said Abel, ‘but you cannot run. You are as bad as Little Tendai.’

  There were many things that we children were not allowed to do and only rarely was there a simple explanation. Abel and I were told never to urinate on the same spot at the same time. If we did, Baba told us that Amai would get backache. I loved t
o blow into Coke bottles and make a whistling sound. The aunties told me that, if I continued to do this, Amai would chase my whistle into the bottle and become trapped inside. Why did they not just tell me that the noise was irritating? Why create such an elaborate punishment?

  Many rules surrounded the use of the fire as well. You could not sit too close to it, jump over it, warm your feet at it or put your hands too close to it, because each of these taboos carried its own mysterious punishment – illness, infertility, bad fortune. Girls were not allowed to sit in forbidden parts of the kitchen (‘you will damage your insides and not be able to conceive’), nor make themselves garlands of leaves and grass for their hair (‘you will give birth to crippled children’).

  Our future wives and husbands were often mentioned.

  ‘Do not put your dirty fingers in the pot, Tinashe, or your wife will get sick and die!’

  Our spouses would be fragile creatures, if my dirty fingers could kill them off. I did not put my hand in the pot again, though.

  When the moon was bright and fat in the sky, curled in on itself like a chongololo, we boys and girls of the kopje gathered outside to play Sarura Wako, a game where we chose husbands and wives from among our friends. The adults did not mind us playing this game, as they had also played it as children, and their parents before them, all the way back to the place where stories start. Each of us knew that we were one in a long line of ancestors, like beads on a string, and it was our duty to keep that string intact and to add as many beads as we could. We also played Mahumbwe, where we paired up and pretended to keep house together as man and wife. I paired with Chipo, who had a way of putting one hand on her hip and wagging one finger that was truly awe-inspiring, just like a real Amai.

  ‘You were out at the shebeen all night!’ she shouted at me. ‘Why are you not home with your children?’

  We all knew that Chipo’s father drank too much, and that he was often to be found snoring on the steps of the shebeen in the morning. It added a depth to her performance that was very impressive.

  Little Tendai could not keep up with our games, but he liked to tell us stories about how his twisted foot came to be deformed. He insisted that it was because a muroyi had put a curse on him. ‘Sometimes witches do not know they are witches,’ he said. ‘They wake up in the morning covered in blood and they do not know how it got there.’

  ‘Nyarara, Tendai.’ I rubbed at the goosepimples on my arms.

  ‘They walk in the night,’ he said. ‘And they eat children, my father said. What do you think happened to my foot?’

  We all looked at his twisted ankle, even though we had heard this story before. His toes grew strangely, some of them very fat and some of them thin and wiggling like mopane worms. He left dragging, uneven footprints in the dust.

  ‘A muroyi cursed me,’ said Little Tendai.

  Abel said something rude.

  ‘Because she wanted to marry my father,’ Little Tendai continued unperturbed, ‘she put a curse on my mother when she was pregnant. It would have been worse, but my father found out about the curse and he told the N’anga.’

  We listened despite ourselves.

  ‘What happened?’ said Chipo.

  ‘They called a witch-smeller,’ said Little Tendai. ‘And he found the witch. If they had not found her, I would have been born dead. Instead I just have this.’ He wriggled his toes.

  ‘She should have taken your big flapping mouth,’ said Abel.

  We all knew of the N’anga and the witch-smellers. We children were told to keep as far away from them as possible and to never bother them in case they turned us into frogs or monkeys. I only ever saw the N’anga from a distance: a hunched, skinny figure under a mangy cloak, striding through the kopje and leaning on his tall staff, stopping only to point a skinny finger at some naughty child or to spit a fat, brown wad of chewing tobacco into the red dust. The witch-smellers I did not see, because they did not emerge until they were needed.

  In the year that I turned seven, I started going to the little village school, run by the one man on the kopje with a high school education. Little Tendai and I were released temporarily from our chores for our lessons. Sometimes the schoolhouse would be full, but often there would be only two or three children inside. It all depended on how the crops were doing and whether a boy was needed to tend the herds.

  Baba let me go to school for a few hours most days. ‘Because you have to grow up to be an educated man like your Babamukuru. Isn’t that right, Tinashe?’

  Little Tendai was at school most days as well, because his deformed foot made him slow at performing a son’s tasks. Our first lessons consisted of chanting the alphabet in English. ‘A – apple,’ is how we always began. ‘Apple’ was the first word in all our cardboard-covered picture books, as well. B could be ‘ball’ or ‘boat’ or ‘bear’, but A was always Apple. I wondered at the English fascination with this fruit, even more when we started to learn the Bible stories and heard about Adam and Eve and the Snake and the Apple.

  Abel’s teachers gave him work to do during the school holidays, sending him to us with a parcel of shiny textbooks, each containing a satisfying wedge of slick white pages. At the kopje school, we shared one or two books between all of us. I could never have imagined such wealth. Abel was also given a different brown-covered exercise book for each subject. They smelled of something that thrilled me, and I realised finally that this smell was newness – the smell of something crisp and untouched, like ink fresh from a pen, the sheen of newly polished shoes, the smell of my shiny red truck that was no longer shiny and red. To own a book covered with a coloured dust-jacket – this was wealth beyond the magnificence of Babamukuru’s indoor toilet.

  ‘You can have them,’ said Abel, pushing a pile of books to me.

  ‘Really? You don’t want them?’

  He shrugged. ‘The teachers will give me more.’

  ‘They will?’

  ‘They have cupboards full.’ He stretched his hands wide apart to show me how expansive these magical cupboards were.

  I took great pleasure in writing my name in these books – an upright, confident ‘T’ for Tinashe, followed by my last name, in my best handwriting and with my blackest pencil. I craved more.

  ‘I don’t know why you bother,’ said Abel.

  We sat on the banks of the river, letting our feet dangle in the water. I had a book open on my lap, and was tracing the lines of words with my finger. Four-year-old Hazvinei lay on the grass near us, moving pebbles into a mysterious shape that had meaning only to her.

  ‘I like school.’

  ‘Why?’

  I shrugged. ‘I want to go to university.’

  Abel snorted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘University is not that great.’

  ‘How do you know? You have never been.’

  ‘Baba went.’

  ‘And he has a good job, and a nice house.’

  ‘He is getting fat,’ said Abel. ‘He spends all day at the office looking at pieces of paper. He wears glasses. I do not want to be like him.’

  This was blasphemy. Babamukuru was the most successful man I had ever known. That anyone had ever known. He was like a mighty chief from one of the old stories.

  ‘I want to be like your father,’ said Abel.

  ‘Like Baba?’ I was not sure whether to be proud or shocked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he is a man,’ said Abel. ‘He works at a proper man’s job.’

  ‘Baba has always told me that a good job means you wear a suit every day,’ I said.

  Abel kicked his feet and splashed me with brown river water. ‘It does not matter,’ he said. ‘But I do not want to go to university.’

  Hazvinei made a noise. I had not realised she was listening.

  ‘You must not say these things, Abel. She will want to copy you.’

  ‘Girls do not go to university,’ said Abel. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  We heard more and more about the tsotsis those da
ys, but now the radio voice was calling them ‘terrorists’, a word I found very hard to pronounce. They lived outside the borders of Rhodesia, the radio told us, but crossed the Zambezi or came over the hills from Mozambique to do terrible things in the darkness. We heard that a white couple had been killed in Hartley, and the boys started to tell each other stories about the dreadful things that the terrorists did. Abel, of course, was the expert. He told me that terrorists made you cut off your own lips and ears and cook them in a stew.

  ‘Then they make you eat them,’ he said. ‘And you are not allowed to be sick afterwards. You have to swallow them right down.’

  ‘Nyarara, Abel,’ I said. ‘You do not know what you are talking about.’

  After that, though, I checked under my bed for terrorists as well as for tokoloshes and other evil things. But the evil thing that came had nothing to do with the terrorists at all.

  One day, when Abel and I passed through the centre of the village, we saw that there was some commotion. A group of adults had gathered in the dry, swept space in the middle of the village and stood with their arms folded, muttering and looking from side to side.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘How should I know? Come on.’

  Abel and I pushed our way through the crowd to stand at the front. There were the usual smells of body odour, Sunlight soap and ash, but another smell floated above all these and caught me at the back of the throat, acrid and dry.

  ‘They are afraid,’ said Abel.

  I looked at the faces. Abel was right.

  ‘What are you two doing here?’ said Simon-from-the-bottle-shop. We were not allowed to call him Simon to his face, because he was an adult and deserved respect, but that was what we called him when alone. He gave me a clap on the head. ‘Go home.’

  ‘What is happening?’ Abel asked.

  ‘Eh-eh, this is not the place for you. Where are your Amai and Baba?’

  ‘In town,’ said Abel.