The White Shadow

by Andrea Eames

  ‘Maiwe.’ Little Tendai nudged me as we turned on to the school road. ‘Whites.’

  Three white men – boys, really, only a few years older than we were. They were walking towards the village with quick, firm strides. Clearly they had some business to attend to. Tendai and I looked at one another – it was best, we agreed silently, to stay out of their way.

  ‘Mangwanani,’ said one of the white boys with a dreadful accent. His hair was cut too short, making his ears look like the wide, dusty wings of a moth.

  ‘Mangwanani,’ said Little Tendai and I. Smile, look stupid, be polite but say nothing of importance. We would be past them soon, and gone. Hazvinei, however, still striding ahead of us, stayed silent.

  ‘Hey,’ the boy called after her. ‘You. Mangwanani.’

  Hazvinei turned to stare at him.

  He took a step back, still enough of a teenager to feel embarrassed when a pretty girl ignored him. Then he remembered the gun on his back and the cigarettes in his pocket, and rallied. ‘What’s the matter? You deaf?’

  Hazvinei gave a toothy smile, turned, and kept walking. The white boy spat in the ground at his feet, leaving a dark spot in the dust and a bead of saliva trembling on his lower lip.

  ‘You teach your nanny some manners!’ he shouted to me.

  Smile. Look stupid. Be polite. Those were the rules, and Hazvinei was breaking them. I waited until we were out of sight of the white boys before running to grab Hazvinei by the elbow. ‘What is wrong with you?’

  She shook me off. ‘I don’t want to talk to them.’

  ‘You do not have to talk to them. You just have to behave like someone with a brain.’

  She stuck out her tongue.

  ‘You are going to get yourself in trouble today,’ I said. ‘Why are you in such a bad mood?’

  ‘She is strange, I told you,’ said Little Tendai.

  ‘Leave me alone.’ And she ran, her feet kicking up a cloud of red dust.

  ‘She has been strange all day,’ I said. ‘All this nonsense about a njuzu.’

  On the morning of Abel’s next visit, I arrived at school to find Farai and Tatenda kicking each other in a circle of chanting boys.

  ‘What is happening?’ I asked my friend Moses.

  ‘They are fighting.’

  Moses was not very clever.

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘For Hazvinei.’ At first I could not see her, but then I spotted the small figure watching with a smile. Although all around her the red dust kicked up by the fight stained clothes and settled in hair and eyes, she was clean and untouched.

  ‘Why are they fighting for Hazvinei?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  After seeing the njuzu and becoming a woman – or at least, insisting that she had become a woman – Hazvinei had become even bolder than before. She swaggered through the house as if she were a boy. Baba found it amusing; Amai told her off and made her scrub the floors and clean the pots.

  ‘I am grown-up now, Tinashe. You have to respect me.’

  I shoved her. ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘You have to be nice to me. Otherwise I will tell the njuzu about you.’

  ‘Be quiet about this njuzu, Hazvinei. People will think you are crazy.’

  She stuck out her tongue. ‘She tells me things.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The njuzu.’

  ‘You saw it again?’

  ‘I see her every time I go to the river.’

  I shivered her words off my shoulders as a mombe shivers off a fly. ‘Hazvinei, you must stop talking about this.’

  ‘Why don’t you believe me?’

  ‘Because you always say these things. You told me a chidhomo ate my peanut butter, when I know it was you.’

  ‘This is different.’ Her eyes were bright. ‘The njuzu told me that I could only see her once I became a mhandara. She said they have been waiting for me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The njuzus have things to teach me. That is what she said.’

  This is one of Hazvinei’s stories, I said to myself. I clenched my hands into fists.

  ‘They said that they taught the N’anga too.’

  ‘Hazvinei, go to sleep.’

  ‘I want to talk to him.’ She hugged her knees.

  ‘The N’anga?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must not talk to him. He will think you are crazy.’ He will think you are a witch, is what I thought but did not say. I had heard stories about women who ate their own children and wandered naked at night hunting for animals. Varoyi – witches. The word was enough to make even Baba shudder. The less Hazvinei said about this, the better.

  ‘I really did see it.’

  ‘Fine.’ I rolled over. ‘You saw it. Now go to bed.’

  I did not hear her go. I leaned my head on my arm and breathed in my skin’s sharp scents of river water and soil.

  Boys continued to fight for Hazvinei’s attention. They pinched and hit one another. They climbed trees in front of her, kicked footballs as far and as hard as they could, swam across the river and stood with their legs apart and their hands on their hips when she was watching. The other girls made tutting noises through their teeth and whispered to one another, but Hazvinei did not care. I told Abel about this as we walked back from the river together in the shade of the evening. Hazvinei, Little Tendai and Chipo were with us as well, trailing behind and kicking at stones.

  Abel fell back to pinch Hazvinei’s arm. ‘What are you doing to these idiots?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘You are just a skinny piccannin,’ said Abel. ‘Why would they fight for you?’

  ‘Shut up, Abel.’

  ‘No, tell me.’

  She shrugged. ‘There is nothing to tell.’ She looked over her shoulder at Little Tendai, who was lagging behind us, watching her walk. Even he seemed to have fallen under her spell these days.

  ‘Nothing to do with the njuzu, then?’ said Abel.

  Hazvinei scowled.

  ‘I was just joking.’

  ‘I want you to stop joking about that,’ I said. ‘It is not funny. Stop encouraging her.’

  A can skidded past us, followed by a gang of boys playing impromptu football. They shouted and pushed each other, fighting for the can, but their eyes were on my sister.

  ‘The njuzu?’ said Little Tendai, who had overheard.

  ‘Yes.’

  Tendai made his crazy-ghost face at me again. ‘I told you. There is something wrong with your sister.’

  We scuffled in the dirt for a little while, but stopped when Hazvinei spoke.

  ‘The njuzu told me to go somewhere,’ she said. ‘Not that you care.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I am not telling.’ She strode ahead of us, knowing that we would follow.

  ‘I’m coming,’ said Abel.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I am coming too,’ I said, which was not necessary. Everyone knew that where Hazvinei went, I followed. Where Abel went, Little Tendai followed. And Chipo trailed behind all of us. We laughed and talked as we followed my sister. This was a game – it had to be. Hazvinei would lead us in circles and then laugh at us for being so gullible.

  Little Tendai’s feet made strange footprints in the earth. One foot was bigger than the other, too big for shoes, and Tendai’s Amai had made him a little sandal out of the base of one his father’s pata-patas and a length of string.

  ‘Your foot will keep the tokoloshes away,’ said Abel, who had somehow become the second-in-charge of this expedition.

  A lazy, dry-grass-smelling, heat-heavy evening, with a sleepy whirring and clicking underfoot – crickets, asleep under the earth, who had woken at the vibrations of our footsteps. We collected red mud on our ten still-damp feet, and blackjacks and ticks on our still-damp clothes. Soon the cool water of the river seemed impossibly far away. We had never been cool. We had always been hot and panting, eyes stinging from the salt of sweat. Through the heat haze, Hazvin
ei looked like a spirit floating above the ground. A spirit in a green and white gingham dress with a white collar. If I stared at her for long enough without blinking, she disappeared in a mess of colours.

  ‘We are back where we started,’ said Abel after a while. I woke from my hot, sweaty trance and saw that he was right. We were almost back at the kopje – just on the outskirts. We stood on a small rise, among lightning-blackened granite boulders, looking down on our village.

  ‘I’m going back to the river,’ said Abel.

  ‘No!’ Hazvinei hugged herself, full of her own cleverness. ‘Look.’

  A hut, separate from the others, with a white-painted stone at the front and a black chicken pecking optimistically at the dust. The witch doctor’s hut.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ said Chipo.

  Hazvinei skipped. ‘I am going to go inside.’

  Four pairs of eyes stared at her. ‘You are crazy,’ said Abel, speaking for us all.

  ‘The N’anga will be inside,’ said Little Tendai.

  ‘No, he won’t.’

  ‘Yes he will. How do you know?’

  ‘The njuzu said.’

  ‘Stop talking about the njuzu.’

  Abel pushed her. ‘You are making this up to get us into trouble.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You wouldn’t go inside anyway,’ he said. ‘You just want to look like you are not scared.’

  ‘I am not scared.’

  ‘Bet you a shilling.’

  ‘Fine.’ Hazvinei spat on her hand. Abel shook it. ‘I want to see inside. I am going. You can stay here.’ Hazvinei lifted her skirt in two hands and stepped down the rocks as carefully as an old goat. We stood watching her. She paused and looked back at us.

  ‘Come!’

  ‘It is too far,’ I said. ‘We are not allowed to play out here.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You are just showing off,’ I said.

  Hazvinei stood with her hand on her hip and one bare foot already outstretched to take the next step. Beautiful; precarious.

  ‘Usaita semukadzi,’ she said to us. Do not behave like a girl. Stung, Abel jumped over the rocks to join her, his strong legs having no trouble leaping from one to the other. Little Tendai looked at me, his black eyes completely surrounded by white, and then followed Abel. I looked at Chipo, and she looked at me. I saw her wavering. I started to walk down and, after a moment’s hesitation, she followed.

  ‘Why do you think he lives here?’ said Abel as we climbed down. ‘So close to the rocks?’

  We all knew not to climb on the rocks when there was a storm and the lightning licked them with a hot tongue.

  ‘He is the N’anga,’ said Little Tendai. ‘The lightning would not strike him.’

  ‘So you are the big clever know-everything now?’ said Abel.

  ‘He talks to the spirits. The spirits control the lightning. Everyone knows this.’

  The shriek of the N’anga’s rooster made us jump. It blinked at us with knowing, reptilian eyes.

  ‘Hazvinei, are you sure we should be doing this?’

  ‘Don’t you want to see inside?’

  Of course we did. We walked softly, softly, to the hut. The rooster glared at us, swivelling its wrinkled neck to watch our movements.

  ‘He will put a curse on us,’ said Little Tendai, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear him.

  The door was shaped like any other hut door – nothing frightening about it. Hazvinei clasped the handle.

  ‘It will be locked,’ I said.

  It was not locked.

  ‘He will be home,’ said Abel.

  He was not home.

  The door opened into a room like any other room. Except for the shelves. And for what was on the shelves.

  ‘They are dead babies!’ said Little Tendai.

  Abel clapped him around the ears. ‘They are animals.’

  Rows of tiny skulls, gleaming toothpaste-white in the gloom.

  ‘Where do you think he gets them?’ Abel, fear forgotten, ran his finger along the rows of bones as you run a stick along a fence.

  ‘He finds them?’ I ventured. I had an uncomfortable vision of the N’anga throwing live dogs into a pot of boiling water and watching as the flesh and hair melted off their bones. The air smelled of decay.

  ‘There are so many.’ Abel stopped. ‘And look at these!’

  A tinful of teeth. Just an ordinary shoe polish tin, still stinking of black licorice and eucalyptus.

  ‘Are any of them human teeth?’ Abel sifted through them, ignoring the chalky, unpleasant sound. He was determined to find a corpse somewhere here, I could tell.

  ‘I have found it,’ said Hazvinei. We had forgotten about her in our ghoulish rummagings.

  ‘Found what?’

  ‘His medicine stick.’

  The N’anga’s medicine stick! The source of his powers, as we thought, and the thing that had caught so many of us around the back of the knees when we got in his way. The stick that pointed out witches and criminals. The stick that talked to the spirits. The stick that had once turned into a snake before the whole kopje (or so we had heard from our parents).

  ‘Here.’ Hazvinei waved it, struggling a little under its weight.

  ‘Put that down!’

  ‘Why? Are you scared?’ She narrowed her eyes and pursed up her lips in a way that was meant to imitate the N’anga. She shook the stick and made ghostly noises.

  ‘Hazvinei, please stop.’

  The gourds on the stick rattled and banged against each other. I smelled that strange, sickly smell again.

  ‘It is just a stick,’ said Hazvinei.

  ‘We need to go,’ I said. ‘We have seen inside. You have won the bet. We need to go home.’

  Abel held one of the monkey skulls on his hand, and made its jaw open and shut with a snap. ‘Look, Tinashe.’

  I looked. And so I did not see what had happened when the scream came from behind me.

  ‘Tendai!’

  Hazvinei, standing with the medicine stick in her hand. Little Tendai, on the floor, writhing.

  ‘He is playing,’ said Abel. But I knew he was not. I knelt beside him and watched his teeth chatter around his pink tongue.

  ‘Hazvinei, what did you do?’

  ‘I did nothing!’ Indignant, drawing herself up to her full height. She crossed her arms against her chest, letting the stick fall. ‘I did not do anything.’

  Only the creak of the door told me that Abel had left. Running home like a scared lizard darting across the wall! It would have made me laugh if I were not so frightened. Chipo looked at us with wide, black eyes, and then followed Abel. I crouched with my sister on the dusty floor, holding Little Tendai’s shuddering shoulders.

  ‘Hazvinei, help me turn him over.’

  Tendai’s body did not feel like a human body anymore. It was stiff, and jerked as if he had been struck by lightning. His eyes were open, but had rolled back in his head and turned white. He looked like a drunk man.

  ‘What do we do?’ said Hazvinei. She stared at Tendai’s crazy-man face with more interest than fear.

  ‘We have to take him back to the kopje. Pick up that stick. Put it back.’

  ‘What, over the rocks? You are crazy.’

  ‘What else can we do?’

  Hazvinei shrugged her slim brown shoulders. ‘All right.’

  Little Tendai was so heavy in my arms that I wondered if he really had been cursed. Surely no boy could weigh this much? Or perhaps my own arms were weak with fright.

  I had a foolish hope that when we left the hut Little Tendai would recover – or, perhaps, that he would stop shaking, smile and say ‘Fooled you!’ I could feel my laugh bubbling inside me already, waiting for my fear to evaporate in the bright sunlight. But he did not wake up.

  When we arrived at the kopje, Tendai was not convulsing as wildly.

  ‘Perhaps he is getting better,’ said Hazvinei. ‘Perhaps we should put him down here and see?’

  �
��No. We should take him home.’

  Hazvinei followed us. Soon she was not the only one following us: others spotted us, and saw what we were carrying, and started to exclaim. One of the mangy kopje dogs sniffed at Little Tendai’s head. I felt the burn of tears behind my eyes, and held them back so strongly that my head began to ache.

  ‘What has happened here?’

  ‘Is that Little Tendai?’

  ‘Where is his father?’

  ‘What happened?’

  Simon-from-the-bottle-store came out to see the commotion, as he always did.

  ‘Simon,’ I said, ‘we were playing, and Tendai fell over and started to shake. I can’t find his father.’

  Simon loved nothing better than a Situation. ‘I will take him to the clinic!’ he said. ‘You. Go and find the father of Tendai. You, fetch water.’

  Other adults scurried to obey.

  ‘Where is your sister?’ Simon asked me.

  I turned. Hazvinei was no longer behind me. I had not seen her go.

  ‘She has gone home,’ I said, hoping it was true.

  I ran to our house. It took me ten minutes. The sun hardly moved and my shadow was still a noon-time puddle under my feet.

  ‘Hazvinei!’

  Nothing inside but the cool of the shade and the smell of floor polish. A lizard on the wall raised its head to blink at me with flat eyes. I stood outside, feeling the sun’s accusing stare on my head. I looked down. And saw the footprints in the dust.

  Baba would feed me to the night-time leopards.

  I followed the footprints, cursing Hazvinei in my head, feeling my eyeballs grow hot and full with tears and my bladder grow hot and full with nervous urine. They led into the bush. I should have guessed that Hazvinei would go into the bush.

  You did not go into the bush by yourself. The youngest child in the kopje knew this. When you were older, yes, when you were tall and had knowledge and a weapon, then you could venture into the bush on your own. But Hazvinei was not tall. She was not wise. Snakes; animals with teeth and claws. We all knew about the spirits that whispered to you and led you astray when you wandered too far. They opened up paths for you, paths that looked like they had been made by human feet, and then closed them when you wanted to turn back. They led you on with distant voices and little lights.