The Death of Rex Nhongo

by C. B. George

  The woman from the Alliance, for example, told a horror story of discovering her maid selling the kids’ hand-me-downs at the flea-market, which prompted the fresh-faced American governance expert to announce, expertly, that a Zimbabwean domestic worker had familial responsibility for an average of three other adults. Tapiwa, from the embassy, said, “Seriously. You let a stranger on your property?” She shook her head and issued a high-pitched hum of doubt, followed by a relished “Uh-uh!” as if to seal her authenticity. “You are asking for trouble! Did you not read what happened to Rex Nhongo? And he was the former armed-forces chief and his wife is vice president!”

  “The problem is,” Tom Givens opined, “they just don’t plan long term. You might think, Why would they rip me off? They’re on to a good thing with me. But that’s not how they are. They don’t plan beyond hand to mouth.”

  Givens was the embassy’s head of legal. Jerry stared at him, bewildered—was this truly how the head of legal spoke? And who was this they he was referring to? Domestic workers? Zimbabweans? Black people? But if he expected Tapiwa, for one, to jump in and defend her race, nation or at least the working class thereof, he was going to be disappointed. Instead, she just nodded vigorously and said, “You see now?”

  April looked at him directly, gave a prim little sniff and said, “It’s just common sense, Jerry.”

  And now the mildness of her husband’s tone didn’t even pretend to conceal his growing anger. “I never knew you were such a natural madam,” he observed, and it was a remark that horrified the lot of them to silence.

  Jerry was vexed and he was being intentionally insulting. But not until he’d spoken the sentence did he fully comprehend the degree. He’d have been better off if he’d just told his wife to stop being such a cunt. To call an expat the M-word was the lowest of blows, and it offended not just April but the sensibilities of all present, who widened their eyes, looked at one another conspiratorially and regarded Jerry with a mixture of pity and thinly veiled hostility.

  The atmosphere was only broken by Shawn, the New Yorker, who, apparently oblivious to the political niceties that had just been recklessly trampled, took a swallow of beer and said, “Where I come from, you find a nigger you don’t know on your property? You shoot first and ask questions later, for real.” Then, when nobody responded, he smiled slowly: “My bad. What shock you more, my language or my attitude to gun control?”

  The cultural director of the Alliance made a curious shrill noise in the back of her throat. It might have been a laugh. Tom Givens coughed into his hand. He said, “So, where you come from, you’d have shot the maid’s husband?”

  Shawn shook his head. “Where I come from, Tom, I ain’t got no maid.”

  He chuckled softly, and now the rest of them were confident, more or less, that Shawn was making a joke, possibly even deliberately defusing the atmosphere, they laughed too, their amusement augmented by both relief and the exhilarating sense that they were with a black guy who felt comfortable enough to use the word “nigger” in their company. Only Jerry and April didn’t join in.

  19

  Shawn Appiah had met April the first and last time he went to yoga at the Ubuntu Natural Health Center in Rolf Valley. Shawn wasn’t especially surprised to be the only man at the class, but he was taken aback to be the only black person, as he said later to Kuda, “This being Africa and all.”

  The Ubuntu Natural Health Center was run by a woman called Toney (“with an e-y”), who had a nose ring, a wiry middle-aged frame that spoke of excessive exercise, and a clientele that was exclusively white, apart from Shawn and a light-skinned Indian called Natasha, who turned out to be Canadian Indian and married to a Zimbabwean Indian, who owned the local Mahindra tractor franchise.

  At the end of the class, Toney offered around green tea in delicate china tumblers. Shawn and April were the only takers. Shawn had no pressing reason to get home and it seemed April had a pressing reason not to, since her husband had agreed to put their son to bed and she didn’t want to interrupt the process.

  While the two of them sipped their tea, Toney began a long and elaborate monologue of a kind Shawn recognized as ritual for white Zimbabweans when engaging for the first time with foreigners of any hue. It was a testing of the water, a play for one voice, a sophisticated sonar establishing the shape and substance of nearby obstacles: “No, but this place, it’s the lifestyle, hey? You don’t get this lifestyle anywhere else, I swear. But it’s a beautiful country.

  “Of course, it’s not like it was before. I mean, killing each other? Even in the government. That general he was, like, right at the top of the whole bloody thing!

  “But listen to me. How long have you been here, Shawn? You like it, isn’t it? I wondered if you are one of those ones who left after Independence. I mean, there were black ones as well as white ones, hey? I’m telling you.”

  Shawn looked at her with amused bewilderment and said he wasn’t one of those ones. In fact he was from Queens, New York, but his wife was a Zimbabwean. “I’m an American by birth and upbringing, if not ancestry.”

  Toney said, “Is it?,” an idiom Shawn thought he’d never get used to (the way it offered the courtesy of a question without any requisite interest in the answer). Then she launched into a convoluted and incongruous recommendation of a trip to the Eastern Cape where she’d spent much of her twenties, only now it was more touristy, but that was no reason not to go, hey? And there were some radical music festivals, and last year she’d taken acid with some trance DJs from Antwerp…

  As Toney went to refill the teapot, April made an apologetic face at Shawn. He wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for—presumably her race or gender unless she felt particular ownership of (and responsibility for) the yoga class. When she spoke, however, he clocked that she was English, so perhaps she was apologizing for that. It was a familiar, insincere trait he’d noted among English colleagues at Brown Brothers Harriman.

  She said, “Have you done much yoga?”

  “Never.” Shawn shook his head. “But we moved here and I thought, you know, it’s a new start. Let me try out a few things.”

  April smiled. “When I saw you, I thought, He’s done some yoga. Then I glanced over when we were doing the full boat and I was, like, Maybe not.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “It’s a compliment!” April protested. “I mean, people who do yoga look like they’re in some kind of shape.”

  Shawn raised an eyebrow and the corners of his mouth twitched. “You and me just in the same class? I mean, no dis­respect, but that German lady, Astrid or whatever? What she going to look like if she don’t do yoga? Man! And I thought the US patented the fat motherfucker!”

  April laughed in spite of herself and told Shawn that she was having a braai at the weekend and he should bring his family.

  He’d mentioned this to Kuda when he got home and she said she didn’t want to go—of course she didn’t. He might have hoped that bringing his wife back to the city of her birth would relax her, maybe even build a few bridges between them, but the opposite had happened and she’d just retreated further behind those eyes that seemed to speak of nothing but her hurt. However, he’d let news of the “party” slip in their daughter’s presence and she’d nagged her mother hard and long enough that she eventually agreed.

  Rosie almost burst with excitement. She said, “Can Sasa come? Can Sasa come?”

  “Who’s Sasa?” Kuda asked.

  “You ain’t met Sasa, Ku?” Shawn exclaimed, in faux surprise. “He’s Rosie’s best friend, these days.” And when his wife looked at him blankly, he said, “Just invisible, that’s all.”

  “An imaginary friend?” Kuda said flatly. Then, with some animation, “I don’t want our daughter to have an imaginary friend, Shawn. I don’t know who that is. Sasa? What does he want?”

  Shawn looked from Kuda to Rosie, who was wide-eyed, confused. Her lip was trembling. He felt his temper rise. He took the little girl by the wrist and led he
r out of the room, simultaneously calling to Gladys, the maid. When he returned to his wife, she was wearing the familiar look of wronged defiance and he struggled to control his voice as he hissed, “Jesus, Kuda! Jesus! You need help, you know that? You really need some help!”

  “I need help?” she spat back.

  “Yeah, you do,” he said. “The fucking African queen.”

  The braai was nothing special: the Brits, apart from April and her husband, were kind of dicks. But Shawn enjoyed having a beer with some fellow foreigners and was pleased that they seemed as thrown by Zimbabwe (even if they claimed the oppos­ite) as he was himself. It wasn’t like he’d expected his first trip to Africa to be some kind of spiritual homecoming (after all, Kuda’s parents and sister had visited them in New York so he’d already experienced the full breadth of the cultural chasm), but he hadn’t expected to feel quite this alien either. There was a simplicity in talking to his fellow countrymen, the French woman, that Italian couple, even the British, which made him feel like he was relaxing for the first time in a month. And, of course, it wasn’t just a break from Zimbabwe, but a break from his wife too—Kuda just sat on her own, sipped her juice, kept herself to herself and only spoke when spoken to.

  Shawn told the other guests about his background at NYU Stern, his time at BBH and his plans now he was branching out on his own with a little seed capital. He said, “There’s money to be made here. I know there is. I mean, the mineral potential in this country’s just crazy. But the way they got the law set up so you need a local partner—I already had meetings and it’s, like, who you going to work with? The trouble is, you never know who’s in whose pocket. And everything’s so hand to mouth. They make fifty dollars, they not figuring how to turn it into a hundred, they already working out how to spend it.”

  The others applied this to their own situations, whether in embassies, NGOs or day-to-day in the supermarket or wherever, and they all enthusiastically agreed. Soon after, the English lawyer (Tom?) even borrowed Shawn’s turn of phrase in the midst of a quasi-racist diatribe about his staff.

  The lawyer’s clueless rant was an unwitting contribution to a bigger argument between April and her husband. Even coming to it cold, Shawn recognized the tension between them at once and couldn’t believe it wasn’t obvious to everyone. Then again, perhaps for him it was all too familiar and he sympathized with both, even cracking a quasi-racist gag of his own in a futile attempt to defuse the situation. It was a technique he’d learned on Wall Street: dropping a “nigger” onto a white argument was like hosing a dogfight. All parties stopped and stared at you with horror and newfound respect. On this occasion, though it shocked the onlookers, the couple in question remained locked in their anger. Their shit was deep, Shawn thought.

  20

  Later, when Shawn was devouring a plate of salad, April approached him. She said, “You don’t want a burger? Or ribs?”

  Shawn answered through a mouthful of carrot and beetroot. He said he was keeping it ital. She raised an eyebrow. “Ital,” he said. “You know. Like, vital. Just natural foods. It’s Rasta.”

  “Are you a Rasta?” she asked doubtfully.

  Shawn smiled, “Only like I do yoga,” he said.

  April smiled too, nodded, then looked around, like she was scared she was being watched. She told him she’d been listening to what he’d said about needing a black Zimbabwean to comply with indigenization; someone honest, down-to-earth and, you know, politically acceptable. She said maybe she knew the guy: a lawyer she’d met, older, kind of an idealist, war vet, but seemed like his heart was in the right place.

  Shawn said, “Cool. Thanks,” and asked her why she looked so nervous. She shrugged. She said she didn’t know. She reappraised that: hooking up business deals wasn’t exactly part of her job description at the embassy, though she kind of wished it was since her job was somehow conspiring to be stressful and tedious all at once and what was that about?

  Shawn dropped his chin a little and looked up at her. “Well, thanks.”

  “No problem.” She shook her head as if she were trying to loosen her curls. For some reason she couldn’t identify, she felt momentarily embarrassed. “I’ll call you.”

  “Great,” Shawn said. Then, “I’m sorry about Kudakwashe.”

  “What?”

  “My wife.” He glanced over to where she was. “She’s not usually like this—antisocial. She’s not been well.”

  “I didn’t think anything,” April said. She was lying. “What’s…” she began, then reconsidered the question and asked another instead. “Is that why you came back to Zimbabwe?”

  “Something like that,” Shawn said, and he was lying as well, only better, and he experienced the light-headedness that told him he’d entered the realm of deception, a comforting world where he could make sense of everything with a few unimportant untruths. “Yeah,” he said, confirming it. “That’s why I brought her home.”

  April now regarded him with such sympathy that he had to look away, back to Kuda, who was sitting alone on the corner of the veranda, staring straight ahead. He followed her line of vision and saw Rosie leading Theo, April and Jerry’s two-year-old son, by the hand. A smile played on his lips and fixed there as his daughter opened the gate to the pool fence, which should have been locked shut. Everything slowed as she closed the gate behind them. Shawn looked to his wife, the closest adult, but she was still just staring. Later, he told everyone that he’d shouted, but he wasn’t sure if that was true. He wasn’t sure what was true. Certainly, he watched, seemingly transfixed, as Rosie took the little boy to the water’s edge and then, with a mixture of pulling and pushing, heaved him quite deliberately into the pool.

  Shawn said, “Jesus,” and before the child broke the surface he was moving at a run. He shouted, “No!” and he heard voices behind him, April’s scream, the shift of group attention.

  He reached the fence. For some reason, he couldn’t open the gate. He could hear his breathing. Rosie was looking up at him from the poolside. Her expression said nothing. She was unmoved by her daddy’s panic. The little boy was under water. Shawn stepped back. He tried to vault the fence, caught his trailing foot, flopped heavily onto the paving around the pool and then rolled into the water. He opened his eyes and there was Theo below him, not thrashing around, just sinking. Shawn kicked down, grabbed an arm and pulled. The boy was dead weight. Shawn tried to control his rising panic. He was at the bottom of the pool, perhaps ten feet down. He put his shoulder into Theo’s midriff and pushed off from the floor. It must have been less than a second before the two of them broke the surface, but it felt much longer. And now there were hands reaching for the boy and hauling him easily out of the water.

  Shawn clung to the side of the pool, choking snotty fluid, sucking deep breaths. He opened his eyes and they stung with chlorine. He found he was millimeters from the boy’s small, pale foot. The foot twitched. He heard the sound of retching. He heard Jerry say, “He’ll be all right.” And then again, only sounding this time as if he actually believed it: “It’s fine. He’s fine. He’ll be all right.”

  Shawn was pulled out of the pool by two or three of the other guests. They slapped him on the back. They said things like “Thank God!” and “Fuck, man. I mean, fuck…” He wrung out his shirt. He sniffed. He emptied his ears of water. He looked to where his wife had been sitting and there she was still, apparently unmoved.

  Part Two

  21

  Jerry Jones drained his beer and ordered another while Dr. Tangwerai was in the Gents. Jerry had never met anyone who needed to piss so much. Tangwerai was on his fourth piss after a fourth Castle. Jerry was coming close to outpacing him two to one on drinks and had yet to spring a leak.

  He looked around the Jameson Hotel’s public bar. He checked the time on his phone: half six. The bar was probably around peak capacity: ninety percent men at the end of their working day, ten percent prostitutes at the beginning of theirs. At five thirty it had been more or less emp
ty and in an hour it would be thinning out, but right now it was heaving with what Jerry identified, admittedly projecting for all he was worth, as a kind of desperate, booze-fueled garrulousness.

  In recent weeks, particularly since the braai fiasco, Jerry had taken to regular heavy drinking, a pattern of behavior that April had decided to counter with a contained fury in which the effort of containment was all too plain. Although her chosen attitude had unarguable moral superiority, it meant that she had directly addressed his drinking only once: in a sustained volley during which she blamed it for the state of their relationship, which had unquestionably slipped to an all-time nadir. Of course, Jerry knew this was ridiculous and said as much with (somewhat drunken) moral superiority of his own: if one insisted on establishing a sequence of events, there was no doubt the failing relationship had driven him to the bottle rather than vice versa. But later, in the self-imposed exile of the spare room while staring dazedly at the mysterious paisley shapes of pitch darkness, he had had to admit that playing the game of cause and effect amid the complexities of a collapsing marriage was inherently deceitful, and the only thing that could be said with any certainty was that his current behavior was resolving nothing and helping nobody. Consequently, he became a regular at various bars around town, recruiting a variety of drinking buddies, since the only possible outcome of his late-night moment of clarity (other than to stop drinking) was to drink more, and more often, in the company of the like-minded.

  He soon discovered that Harare was full of these: every bar stool was seemingly occupied by some fellow, somewhat inebriated, who would happily swap anecdotes about wives, girlfriends or both in a tone that was sometimes frustrated and sometimes lascivious but always contemptuous. Jerry didn’t know if this phenomenon of clubbable male estrangement was specifically Zimbabwean or if his experience of it simply reflected his new circumstance (after all, back in the UK, he couldn’t remember ever sitting in a pub alone), but he took guilty pleasure from his membership of what felt like a louche and daring secret society.