by Andrea Eames
‘Don’t be cheeky.’
I looked at the waiting faces. Amai and Baba were not among them. ‘Amai is at home,’ I said, ‘and Baba is working.’
‘Then go home and find your Amai.’ He gave me a shove. ‘I am serious, eh. Go.’
‘Yes, VaMakoni.’
‘Yes, VaMakoni.’
We dipped our heads like good children and moved away. As soon as we were out of Simon’s sight, we exchanged glances.
‘Can we stand at the back?’
‘Someone will see us. Come.’
Abel led me past the goat fences and through the long, itchy grass to a half-dead acacia tree. He climbed. ‘Here.’
So easy for him – one quick movement! It took me longer, but I managed to clamber up beside him. We perched our bottoms on the hard branch and balanced ourselves. Just enough leaves to shelter us; not enough to obscure the view.
‘Good, yes?’ said Abel.
‘Be quiet, I am listening.’
But there was nothing to hear. The crowd was silent. My eyes swam with tears, and I blinked. When I opened them again, there were three figures in the centre of the circle.
We had heard of minor troubles in the village for a few weeks now. Tete Patience, one of Amai’s friends, had died from a mysterious illness, and some chickens had gone missing. We had seen the N’anga many times over the past few days, wandering about the village and casting his bones, but Baba had forbidden us to go near him, and we obeyed. At least, I obeyed, and I kept watch over Hazvinei and Abel to make sure that they did too.
‘Is that the N’anga?’ I whispered to Abel.
‘I don’t know.’
Animal skins, rough and matted, patterned with black and white and brown. Faces painted red and black under dried and rustling feather headdresses. The shapes underneath were wrong; neither human nor animal, but hunched, twisted, malignant things.
‘Are they people?’
‘Of course they are people. Don’t be stupid.’
But I could tell Abel was afraid too, from the raised hairs on his arms. We shrank down, trying to make ourselves as small as possible.
‘Do you think they can see us?’
‘No. Be quiet.’
The figures started to jump. As they leapt, I saw human legs underneath the skins. As they leapt higher I saw wizened, shrunken breasts.
‘They are old women,’ I said.
‘Shut up, Tinashe.’
The crowd separated. The women and girls moved to the front and knelt in a circle. I recognised aunties, and some of the older girls from school. I became aware of a rhythm, a pulse at the back of my skull, and a low, insistent humming that made my teeth rattle. I saw the women’s hands coming together in a slow, monotonous clap, and I saw their mouths open, but the sound did not come from them. It came from the ground and shivered up through my feet into a dark-red, secret part of my brain.
The masked women danced. They leaped impossibly high for their old, spindly legs, and noises came from behind their face paint that did not sound human. As I watched, they stopped being dancing figures and became stripes of angry colour, red clawmarks in the dark earth.
I felt myself swaying. Abel caught hold of me, his nails digging into my skin.
‘Tinashe!’
I blinked. The colours became dancers again.
‘What are those?’
They held long switches with tails at the end. I had not noticed them before. Had they been concealed under the skins?
‘They look like zebra tails.’
The rhythm and singing grew louder. I held my hands over my ears and willed it to stop, but Abel leaned forward, intent. It stopped. I realised that I had forgotten to breathe, and took a deep, painful gasp of air. One of the dancers stepped forward. She ran around the circle, low and crouched, holding her switch in front of her and making it shiver and rattle in her hand. The women ringing the circle sat with their heads lowered. A stink of fear rose up to Abel and me in our hiding place.
The dancer continued her circling, but now ululated, a high, vibrating note. The switch moved with its own shuddering life, twitching and jerking in her hands, pulled by an invisible force. It nosed its way forwards, ignoring the chanting and ululation, and came to rest in front of one of the women. She was skinny and tall, with a long face and a cut on her heel covered with a pink plaster. The chanting stopped. The woman raised her eyes to the horsetail switch, and I saw sweat dissolving her face, running into her open mouth.
The woman screamed.
‘Muroyi!’ said a voice from behind the mask. The woman collapsed, arms outstretched. Her skirt spread out in the dirt, and she looked like an old chicken taking a dust-bath. The other women ululated, their voices turning into a shimmering heat haze in the air, an eerie, rising sound like the midnight song of a hyena. Abel stood still, listening. It was my turn to pull at his arm.
‘Abel, come on. We have to go home.’
‘Listen.’
‘I can hear it. It is none of our business.’ My palms and the soles of my feet were cold and wet with sweat. Abel seemed to come back to life. He looked at me sidelong and then jumped down from the tree and started to run.
I looked over my shoulder as we ran back up the hill to our house. Above the shouts and the wailing, I could hear a crackling, as if someone were crumpling up paper. I saw an orange glow. And then the smoke, rising from one of the huts.
We ran.
‘Do not tell Baba what we saw,’ I said to Abel through my gasps, clasping his wrist.
He shrugged me off. ‘Why would I?’
‘Just don’t.’ I was finding it hard to breathe. The smoke clogged my lungs.
‘Abel. Tinashe.’ Amai was standing on the stoep when we got home. ‘Come inside, quickly.’
‘Amainini,’ Abel put on his best innocent face, ‘what is happening?’
‘There is trouble. Come.’
We sat inside and watched the sky redden and boil, the smoke making laughing faces against the clouds, the ululating competing with the evening song of the crickets as the witch’s hut was burned. It smelled like hot fat and woodsmoke.
Women have a natural tendency to become witches. Everyone knew that. And the witch-smellers had a duty to sniff such women out.
Chapter Six
I WAS THE one who heard Hazvinei’s first words, on the day she turned seven years old. I was building little mud-houses for her in the dirt while she watched, piling the mud into a cone shape and sticking pieces of grass on the top to make a thatched roof. I had become impatient with the game, and laid the grass on haphazardly.
‘You are doing it wrong, Tinashe,’ said a voice from Hazvinei’s mouth.
I stopped and stared at her. She stared back, unblinking.
‘Look.’ Her small brown hand took a blade of grass and rested it gently on the top of the roof, making sure that it aligned perfectly with the others.
‘Hazvinei, you are talking!’
She looked at me as if I were mad. ‘Yes.’
‘When did you learn to do that?’
She turned her palms upwards. ‘I do not know.’
‘Can you say my name again?’
‘Tinashe.’ She was contemptuous. Of course she could talk. I felt embarrassed for the times I had crouched over her, speaking in that high, soft voice that you use for babies. She must have thought I was a fool.
‘We should go and see Amai and Baba,’ I said, standing up and holding out my hand. I was eager to show them; to bring this prize home. When he heard Hazvinei speak, Baba exclaimed and embraced her, lifting her onto his shoulder and laughing. Amai, however, collapsed into a chair and started to cry.
‘What is wrong, Amai?’ I tugged at her shoulder. ‘It is good news.’
‘I am happy,’ she said, wiping her eyes with her apron.
Amai walked through the kopje with Hazvinei the next morning, stopping to speak to everyone she saw and showing off Hazvinei’s new ability. The women exclaimed among themselves and
Amai smiled. I could not wait for Abel’s next visit, so that he could hear my little sister speak too.
Now that Hazvinei could talk, she ruled our house with even more tyranny than before, and collected friends among the kopje kids as honey collects flies. I had plenty of friends, even when Abel was away, but I also enjoyed being by myself with ample time to pick at the scabs on my knees or lie on my belly and watch the silent marching of ants. Now a crowd surrounded us at all times, as did shouts, laughter and even tears, for Hazvinei was not always kind to her friends.
No other girl ran with our gang, but the older boys accepted Hazvinei as soon as she could keep up. When she was very small, the boys took turns carrying her when we went on our expeditions. When she grew, she could out-run any of us. Soon, she could out-swim us, too. She moved like a brown fish in the water, curling her body into happy shapes and ducking her head right under. She swam further out into the river than anyone else, just as she ventured further into the bush than anyone else.
When the next term started, Baba announced that Hazvinei was old enough to join me at the village school.
‘It will be nice for you to go to school together,’ said Baba. ‘Eh, Tinashe?’
‘Yes, Baba.’
Hazvinei made a face at me behind Baba’s back – eyes crossed, tongue protruding. ‘Yes, Baba,’ she said when he turned to look at her.
It was unusual for girls to go to school, but Baba did not treat Hazvinei as other girls were treated. She did not have to do all the chores that were customary. He allowed her to sit on his lap after meals, and he bought her presents from the store – ribbons for her hair, pretty pencils with shiny wrappers, Freddo Frogs that she did not share with me. This confused the people on the kopje, for whom tradition and custom were everything. ‘Kudzidzisa mwana musikana kupedza nguva nepfuma,’ said the women of the village – an old proverb meaning that there was no point in educating a girl-child.
Baba gave Amai money to buy Hazvinei new clothes for school. I had outgrown my old clothes as well, and there was a hole in the bum of my khaki shorts, so Amai took us both on the bus into town to visit the school uniform store. Going into town was a great treat. Hazvinei and I pressed our faces against the bus window, ignoring the chatter and the squawk of caged chickens, and stared at the impossibly high white buildings and the hundreds of people, black and white, who walked the streets. Our whole kopje would fit inside one of those buildings. I looked at a smartly dressed black man with a suitcase, who walked with a firm, decisive step, and I knew that I would be like him one day. He was smiling. Almost everyone was smiling, it seemed. The heaviness and the threat of the tsotsis that we sometimes felt in the village did not seem to reach into town.
But I was wrong.
‘Look.’ Hazvinei poked me.
Scrawled words on buildings. Men were busy with buckets and brushes, scrubbing them off. I saw ‘ZANU’ and ‘Pamberi’ and ‘Viva Chimurenga’, scribbled in red paint.
‘Sit up straight,’ said Amai. ‘Come away from the window.’
When we arrived at the department store, we did not go to the bright, clean section where uniforms hung straight down from plastic hangers, but to the second-hand section where clothes slumped in cardboard boxes. They smelled of old sweat and Surf powder.
‘Here you are, Tinashe.’
Amai brought me a pair of grey shorts, a grey, buttoned shirt and a blue jersey. When I tried them on in front of the mirror, I felt like a king.
‘Some of the boys wear long socks and black lace-up shoes,’ the shop assistant told Amai.
I looked at the rows of new school shoes, black and shining and smelling of fresh leather. I would have to polish my shoes every week, and take good care of them, I knew, but I would not mind. I would be careful. I would take them off before playing football with the other boys.
‘I am sorry, Tinashe,’ Amai said. ‘We cannot afford those at the moment.’
‘Many of the boys wear flip-flops,’ said the shop assistant, seeing my embarrassment. ‘And they will be cooler in the summer.’
But I did not want to wear my old flip-flops. I looked in the mirror again. I could see the jersey fraying at the seam under the arm, and the grey shorts had a faint, creamy stain at the very front.
Hazvinei sat on a stool, kicking at it with her heels. ‘I don’t mind not having a uniform,’ she said. ‘Tinashe can have the shoes instead.’
‘Don’t be silly, Hazvinei.’
I did not get the shoes. Amai bought some for Hazvinei instead, because she was a girl and her feet were softer.
‘The shoes are uncomfortable anyway,’ said Hazvinei. ‘You are lucky you do not have to wear them.’
When we climbed back onto the bus for the long, sweaty journey home, I voiced a secret thought. ‘Why do we not visit Babamukuru, Amai? Since we are in town.’
‘No, Tinashe.’
‘We could telephone to let him know that we are coming. He would not mind.’
‘No, Tinashe.’
‘But I want to see Abel!’
‘Tinashe!’ Amai silenced me. ‘Stop this. We are not going to visit Babamukuru.’
‘We never visit him,’ I said. ‘I want to see his house.’
‘It is not possible. He has not invited us.’
‘Why not? Why has he never invited us?’
Hazvinei stared at us both with wide eyes, her thumb in her mouth.
‘Tinashe, we do not speak of these things.’
‘But I don’t understand!’
Amai smacked me on the arm, hard. ‘Be quiet,’ she said. ‘And do not bother your Baba with this when we get home. Do you hear me?’
Silence. Sniffs.
‘Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Amai.’
The glory of the shopping trip and the new clothes was spoiled. We rode home in silence.
Amai did not tell Baba about my questions, and Baba told Hazvinei and me every morning how lucky we were to go to school.
‘You two have an easy life, hey?’
I did not feel like I had an easy life. I had to get up every morning, fetch water from the pump, stack the firewood, feed the chickens, wash myself and flatten down my hair, make sure Hazvinei washed herself and flattened down her hair, and then walk to school. On the walk, Hazvinei made me carry her school things. Baba did not make Hazvinei do anything she did not want to do. Amai tsked and shook her head, but did not complain. Instead, she said ‘Ah-ah, inga munongozvizivawo pachivanhu pedu’ – That is just how things are – a phrase I heard often while I was growing up. There were certain things girls were meant to do and certain things boys were meant to do, and Hazvinei did neither.
She liked to scare me. She had the power to make my heart beat faster, and to make the little hairs at the back of my neck stand up so far that I imagined them straightening out, turning from curly black wires into straight ones, especially when she told me ghost stories in a whisper as we lay on the grass in the evenings. I was not sure where she heard them – whether she had been hanging around the cooking fires to hear the stories of the old women, whether she made them up, or (as she said) whether the spirits really had whispered them to her.
She told me about ghosts who walked the roads at night when everyone was asleep. They looked just like people, she said, but they had no faces, and their feet were on backwards.
‘Backwards?’
‘Yes! Shush. Listen.’
She told me that these creatures wandered in search of a face.
‘How would you steal a face?’
‘They just rip them right off.’ Hazvinei lifted herself up on one elbow and grabbed the skin of my cheeks, giving it a yank.
‘Ow! Stop.’
‘Shush,’ Hazvinei said again. She crept forward on her hands and knees until she was right by the hedge. ‘Listen.’
I crawled over to her. ‘What?’
‘Listen.’
We sat there in silence, looking through the hedge to the empty dirt road. And then I h
eard it. A shuffling, scraping sound. Feet on sand and gravel.
‘It’s just someone coming home from the shebeen,’ I whispered.
‘Shush.’ Hazvinei’s eyes shone. I could see them, even in the darkness. Her body tensed, almost quivering. I felt the hairs on the backs of my arms start to rise, slowly, like a porcupine’s quills.
‘Hazvinei.’
‘Be quiet!’
The footsteps grew louder. I swallowed, and realised that my mouth was sticky and difficult to close. My stomach grumbled.
A figure came into view around the corner – a woman, barefoot. Relief was cold water in my veins. I saw the glint of light off Hazvinei’s sharp little teeth.
‘There,’ she said, as if she had just discovered the answer to a thorny problem. I looked back at the woman on the road. She had stopped, and was watching us through the hedge. Her gaze did not feel right. My eyes rebelled, blurred and refused to see.
‘Look,’ said Hazvinei.
The woman’s face was blank – a smooth expanse of skin where there should be eyes, a nose, a mouth.
I heard someone scream, and realised it was me. I heard Hazvinei laughing. I backed away from the hedge, fell, heard my breath rush in and out. Darkness, dew-wet grass, the spiralling stars, then the cosy yellow light of indoors and the comforting flesh of Amai under her apron.
‘Maiwe! What is the matter?’ She held my tear-wet face in both hands. ‘Hazvinei!’
Hazvinei came in, still snickering, lit up and fizzing with energy. ‘Tinashe thought he saw a ghost,’ she said.
Baba laughed. ‘A ghost?’ He ruffled her hair. ‘Have you been telling your stories again, my little lioness?’
Her wicked, triumphant face!
‘You are too old now to be scared by ghost stories, Tinashe,’ said Baba.
I buried my face in Amai’s lap and willed the tears back up, like snails retracing their shining trails. Ghosts were a bad omen, I knew.
Abel arrived the following morning for his next holiday. The last time he had visited, I remembered, there had been a large bruise on his face, blooming at his ear and sending tendrils of purple and blue into his eye socket and up into the roots of his hair.
‘Eeeeh, mukomana.’ Baba had gripped his skull to get a closer look. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’
