The Hairdresser of Harare

by Tendai Huchu

  ‘It’s Phillip. Do you like your new phone or would you have preferred a Motorola?’

  I stuttered over my words.

  ‘Aren’t you even going to thank me?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Ice broken, we spoke for about half an hour until he said he had to go. No one in my family said a thing and I chose to assume I had their approval. Each time he called, we spoke for longer and then he asked me out for lunch. I had never been taken out before and I said yes.

  We arranged to meet on the corner beyond the shops. There was no way I could have him pick me up at my parents’ house. He was driving a long silver BMW. I had never sat in a car like it and eased myself timidly onto the seat beside him as he helped me with my seatbelt. The aircon hummed in the cool interior and I was amazed by how much space there was. Those days he smiled a lot as we listened to soul music from the nineties. The car hit potholes on the patchy road but I hardly felt them. It was so comfortable inside.

  ‘This is what being in Germany is like,’ he said. ‘Have you ever been to Europe?’

  ‘I have a brother in the UK.’

  ‘That’s very good, is he in the BBC?’

  ‘No he does other jobs.’

  ‘I meant British Bottom Cleaner.’ He apologised immediately when he saw that I did not like my brother to be insulted, even though I was sure he’d said it in jest.

  ‘So you said there were six kids in your family. Which one is he?’

  ‘He’s the fifth.’

  ‘And you’re the youngest, of course. That’s why you two are so close. Maybe when I next go there I should pay him a visit. Where does he stay?’

  ‘Slough.’

  ‘Oh, that place! I have a flat in central London. I could have let him use it for free.’

  He was an experienced man who’d seen the world, and I was just a guileless girl; the furthest I’d ever been was Murombedzi, where my grandmother lived. We went to Nando’s and he asked me what I wanted. Even though I’d read the menu, I could not bring myself to choose, so he ordered rice and peri-peri chicken for me. The rich spices gave the food more flavour than the bland sadza and veg which was our daily staple at home. I’d never used a fork and knife, but Phillip wasn’t bothered if I used a spoon for my rice and my hands for the meat. I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is the high life.’

  I was a shy person those days. It’s not possible to be innocent without being shy. Phillip did most if not all of the talking. He enjoyed talking about his businesses. I loved it when he spoke about stocks and shares, things that I had no knowledge of. It was the opening up of a whole new world for me. He looked at me as if I was the most precious thing in the universe and ignored the stream of people who said, ‘Hello, Mr Mabayo,’ as they passed by. I could feel the stares of envious women with heavy make-up and fashionable clothes boring through me, as they wondered how a township girl like me had bagged the famous Phillip Mabayo. But I hadn’t bagged him. Phillip knew that I had a boyfriend and he said he respected that. He just wanted to be friends.

  ‘Do you want to go to my house?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s fine.’ He looked at the watch and said, ‘In any case I have to head back to work. I won’t be able to take you home. I’m sure you’ll be okay catching a kombi, won’t you? From his wallet he fished out a wad of cash and handed it to me without even bothering to count it. In those days it was still possible to carry money in a wallet.

  ‘This is too much.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ He seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I wouldn’t know how much a kombi costs anyway. Use the change to buy yourself something nice.’

  This amount of money could feed my whole family for a month.

  I told my envious sister all about it and she wished I had brought her a piece of chicken. We waited for him to call but he didn’t phone me that night. I lay on the floor surrounded by bodies. My mind was in flux. Once you’ve had a little nibble of that world, you can’t help but want more. I reflected on my boyfriend, who came to see me wearing flip-flops, and thought of Phillip with the world at his feet. It took a while to fall asleep with all these thoughts swirling in my head.

  I bought new clothes with the money that he gave me. I had my hair done and wore make-up. No one at home asked me where I was getting the money from. Baba remained silent and mother remarked on how lovely I looked. Phillip got me a new phone, one with a camera. I gave my old one, which was barely a month old, to my sister. Looking back, it was all so romantic. I was being wooed for the first time in my life. I stopped seeing my boyfriend and did not answer the desperate love notes he sent me. Phillip began to tell me how much he loved me. I received texts and late-night phone calls. That man had a way with words. I had fallen for him, but I couldn’t have known that lurking underneath his posh exterior lay a monster. There was a heavy price to pay for my naïvety.

  Six

  The phone rang and Mrs Khumalo leapt up as fast as her heavy frame would allow. It was the call she’d been waiting for.

  ‘…I am sorry to hear that… where are you… I see… do you need more time… that’s good… are you sure because there is no rush… no problem, see you tomorrow.’

  A huge smile lit up her face. She looked out into the rain and asked if there were any customers with appointments in the book. There were none.

  ‘You can all go home when you want to. Agnes and I will be just fine. That boy, Dumisani, is starting work tomorrow. His friend died and, because he has no family in Zimbabwe, he had to arrange for the body to be shipped to Canada all by himself. I knew there had to be something very wrong, he looks too responsible for any nonsense.’

  I had the day off on Friday because of my brother Robert’s memorial.

  Taking a kombi home is always a daunting task. The first problem is getting on one, especially from Samora Machel where I took mine, just beyond Fourth Street below the grey multi-storey coffin that is the government department responsible for tax revenues. There were a lot of kombis but they seemed to spend most of the time queuing for petrol — that is, when it could be found — and stalled when they had it. The few petrol stations that had fuel only accepted foreign currency or coupons, though it was still technically illegal to carry out transactions in foreign currency.

  There was a sizeable group of us waiting as cars trickled past on the dual carriageway. It was rush hour but they moved ever so slowly in an attempt to save fuel. I tried hard not to think about the brief period in my life when I moved about in a car. Some drivers stopped to pick people up. We called it piracy and it was illegal. They all seemed to be going towards the affluent northern suburbs.

  ‘Can you tell me what time it is?’ a man in an oversized cheap suit asked me. He looked like a civil servant.

  ‘Half past five.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He drew closer. ‘You look like someone I’ve met before.’

  I ignored him; being chatted up at the bus stop was nothing new. He persisted. ‘Do you go to Christ Ministries?’

  He looked like a typical nice guy. It’s a pity he didn’t know that I hadn’t been in a relationship for six years and had no intentions of changing that. Men didn’t appeal to me any more. They couldn’t be trusted.

  ‘You think you’re special, but you’re not even beautiful,’ he finally volunteered. Getting abused was nothing new either. ‘You’ll die without a man.’

  A kombi came by and I jumped in, glad to escape. Men don’t take rejection so well. It’s like they’re raised expecting that they can have whatever they want. I was sandwiched between other bodies and could hardly breathe. The seat designed for three was filled with four people with the hwindi leaning over our laps because there was no space for him. Crowding to maximise profits. The smell of sweat and bad breath was overpowering. Even after a lifetime of this experience, it was impossible to enjoy this type of travel. I can vaguely recall a time when we had buses that ran to a timetable in Harare. The kombi had no timetable and observed so few rules
that you had to pray you’d reach your destination because quite often they’d just decide to change their route, leaving you stranded.

  The one advantage of the kombi was its willingness to stop anywhere. I dropped off right in front of a ‘No Stopping’ sign and went home.

  The lively bustle of the townships can never be replicated in the low density areas. I passed my old high school where I’d spectacularly flunked my O-levels. It was break time and the children were kicking up the dust, playing football. The streets were full of people moving in both directions. Some carried hoes to tend their fields by the roadside, always fearful that the city council would come and slash their ‘illegal’ crops.

  A cobbler sat on a street corner. Business was brisk. Ever since the government’s Look-East policy, the country had been flooded by cheap Chinese shoes that only lasted a dozen steps before falling apart at the seams. We didn’t throw away shoes. But to be on the safe side, he was also selling manyetera, stocky sandals made of old tyres, ugly but guaranteed to last. I had a pair at home myself.

  There were vendors selling freezits, maputi, maize cobs, fruit, eggs, and vegetables. It seemed as though there were more vendors than purchasers. With no jobs available everyone tried to sell something, just to eke out a living. Almost every second house had a wooden shack near the gate; tuck shops, only a little classier than the vendors with their makeshift stalls. Within each was a family member, no doubt a minor, looking bored, and waiting for the very occasional customers to dribble in.

  I saw the backyard salons where I had learnt my trade growing up. They were brisk businesses and catered for women who could not go to upmarket salons like Mrs Khumalo’s. They used cheap chemicals but their work competed with the best of us in town.

  ‘Sisi Vimbai, long time no see,’ my old school friend, Fortunate, called out to me.

  ‘I’ve been busy sha.’ I offered to shake her hand but she embraced me instead.

  ‘You’re too good for us now.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Then you have a new man. Tell us.’

  ‘I’m still single and not searching. What have you been doing?’

  ‘I have a daughter as well now.’

  ‘Makorokoto.’ I reached into my purse and gave her some money. She took it readily and thanked me.

  ‘Who’s the father?’

  ‘John Chimuti.’ The name rang a bell and I knew instantly that she would be joining the ranks of the many used girls who lived with their parents when the father had done a runner. It was not so long ago that I’d been in her shoes.

  We parted ways and I plodded on. The air hung thick with woodsmoke. No one could afford paraffin, if you could find it that is. A lot of people greeted me as I walked along. I felt an atmosphere of friendliness, violence, innovation, poverty and joy but the one thing that hung over everything else was despair; an air of hopelessness as if everyone was in a pit that they could not climb out of. I knew that feeling all too well. It’s like seeing a plane high up in the sky and knowing that you will never be on it.

  I reached my parents’ house and stood hesitantly at the gate. I wanted to walk in as confidently as I used to but I found myself rattling the chain at the gate and hoping that someone would invite me in. Two dogs, Plato and Aristotle, ran toward me, growling, but quickly began to wag their tails and bark excitedly when they recognised me. The house was the same pink bungalow with an asbestos roof that I’d grown up in. I’ve heard that asbestos can make you sick, but nearly every house in the neighbourhood had an asbestos roof. A curtain was drawn open and I could see someone peeping out.

  The sun pounded on my head as I waited. No one came to open the gate for me. I rattled the chain again and still no one came. I wanted to walk away but my heart yearned to be there for Robert’s memorial. I called out to them to open the gate.

  ‘Go away!’

  The words stung like a bullet. I had half expected this reception. There would be no reconciliation, even at Robert’s grave. I would have to go on my own.

  ‘Vimbai, we weren’t expecting you to come.’

  ‘He was my brother too,’ I said.

  ‘All the same, after everything that’s happened…’ This was my brother Fungai, the third born in our family, suddenly appearing from the tuckshop round the corner carrying a small bag of maize meal. ‘I don’t think they’re going to let you in.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I lied. ‘I’m going to his grave anyway.’

  ‘That’s good. You know I said I was neutral in this whole issue, but I wish you guys could talk. We are family.’

  ‘You try telling them that.’

  Fungai walked me back to the bus station. He fancied himself a philosopher and had even managed a year at the UZ, which he passed with flying colours. That’s why the dogs had the weird names of men who he said were great philosophers. Robert had been paying his fees, but after he’d died Fungai had to drop out of university because there was no money.

  We chatted about everything except the cause of the dispute. Fungai told me how he’d established a philosophy group that met every afternoon to discuss everything under the sun. I promised him that one day I would come to see them if he promised to visit me at the house some time.

  The wounds were still fresh, passions still high. It was disappointing that as a family we could not rise above what was a material dispute and come together for this memorial. I wondered just how Robert would feel if he were looking down on us, witnessing this ugliness. It could not have been what he had intended.

  Seven

  The cemetery was much bigger than I remembered it. It was called Mbudzi, meaning goat. I never found out why. It was only twelve months since we’d buried Robert and the cemetery was twice as large. The rows of earth heaps stretched into the distance. Beyond them was bush. The earth was black, for the grass had been burnt in a random fire that no one had tried to stop. Ash rose high in the sky whenever the wind blew and snagged in your clothes. The dry trees bowed low, seemingly resigned that soon they too would be chopped down to make way for more graves.

  A few of the graves were covered in concrete. Fewer had tombstones on them. The vast majority looked like sweet-potato mounds of earth with sticks on top fixed to resemble a cross. I walked over these unmarked graves looking for my brother’s, a hard task as they all looked the same to me. In the distance were small clusters of people huddled around a freshly dug grave. Some were holding funerals, their sorrowful songs identifying them as Catholic, Methodist, Salvationist, Anglican, etc.

  I found Robert’s grave at last. Weeds were growing all over it and I pulled out what I could, though the hard dry earth meant that I often left the roots intact. I laid my flowers on the grave, then remembered I had to break the stalks otherwise they would just be stolen and re-sold. Grave robbers worked shifts here too. A funeral had been turned into an exercise to prevent theft. On the day of the burial, before we had lowered him down, men stepped forward to bash the coffin and scar it so it would be of no value for anyone who might be thinking of digging it up and selling it. Despite that, there was a risk his suit would be stolen. It was a hopeless battle, as the cemetery had no guards.

  I knelt down and couldn’t believe that my brother was lying under this dry mound. It wasn’t so long ago that we had seen him off at the airport. He wore a black suit, white shirt and the flowery tie that I had bought for him when he got his teaching job. We all shed tears and he promised to be back soon. After all, he only wanted to work in England until he had enough money to buy a house and then he would return. He sent the family money and also worked hard to buy his own home. There was always something more to be done or someone else to educate, so, in the end, he felt he had to stay in the UK to support the family. Then his visa expired and he couldn’t return, not even for a holiday.

  There was a time when he would call me to say that he was on a bus returning from a night shift at one nursing home and going to a morning shift at another. It seems his whole life rev
olved around work. He had hoped to get into teaching but without the right visa it was just not possible. In any case, they didn’t need English teachers in England. He wrote about how stupid the people there could be. I never imagined white people could be stupid. He met people who had never read Shakespeare and couldn’t form a proper sentence in their own native tongue — though in this respect it looked as if my own daughter might be taking the same route.

  We kept wondering when he would tell us that he had got himself a white wife, and a little coloured nephew for me. The last call I ever got from that Godforsaken place was from a policeman telling us that he was dead. They had found my number on his mobile. He had bought his first car and was driving from work when he fell asleep behind the wheel.

  ‘Bhudi Robbie is dead,’ I cried, and dropped the phone.

  ‘That can’t be true,’ Baba had said, rising from his chair.

  Mother fainted, and the whole house was shrouded in grief.

  It cost five thousand pounds to repatriate his body. This was a sum we could not afford, but Robert was organised to the very last. He had life insurance and there was money to bring him home and to pay for his funeral. I was glad because I’d heard many stories about Zimbabweans who’d died in the Diaspora whose bodies could not be sent home. There were families who never found the closure that comes from seeing your loved one committed to the ground.

  However, the unity that we felt when our collective tears soaked the earth was destroyed by what happened afterwards. The house in Eastlea, that Robert had saved up for for so long, had just been purchased and the title deeds signed. One thing about a people who have seen death as often as we have is that everyone knows the question that will prey on people’s minds even before the body grows cold.

  WHO IS GOING TO GET WHAT?

  We become carnivores circling each other. But, once again, Robert had thought of everything. He was only twenty-five but it seems as though he knew he was running on borrowed time. He’d left a will and a lawyer arranged by the British Embassy came round and read it to us.