The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  ♦

  Tendai and his mother had been living at Wreningham for nearly as long as he could remember. In fact, there was only one clear memory Tendai had that was not of his life at Wreningham. It was his first and it was of his father dying.

  He must have been just three years old. It was after the uprising and he and his mother were hiding with other mothers and children in a cave in the kopje near their village. He remembers the dark, wet smell of the rock that had never seen sun. The flapping and screeching of the bats above them. And then hearing the explosion. No, feeling the explosion in the cave next to them. Like a giant hand through the rock, pushing them away from the wall. The explosion in the cave next to them, in the cave where his father was hiding with the other men.

  But that is not really where Tendai’s memory begins. That is just where he thinks it does. Really it was his mother who told him about the dark, wet rock, the bats and the giant hand of the explosion. His own memory begins afterwards, outside the cave, in the searing midday sun, when he feels his mother’s scream through her chest. Then looking out from behind her arms to see his father, crawling out of the other cave with his hands clawing at the ground and the red, red blood, like the blood of the goat, gushing where his legs should have been.

  His father was a proud man. He made brass in their village, melting the spitting, sparking metal in his furnace. He was the only father who knew how to make brass and that is why he was a proud man. But in Tendai’s only memory of him he is a begging man. Begging the white men who stood over him to shoot him with their rifles. But they would not, so Tendai watched him die slowly instead, his mother holding his head in her hands and crying, screaming along with the other women who held their own husbands in their arms, already dead or dying.

  ♦

  Since then Tendai has lived with his mother at Wreningham, sleeping in her rondavel, helping her with her farming and going to Baba Cripps’ school. But now he is not allowed to sleep in his mother’s rondavel anymore. The elders have told her he is too old and he must sleep with his cousins in another rondavel instead. And that is really why Tendai has not gone to bed tonight. Not because he wants to wait for Baba Cripps, but because he doesn’t like sleeping with his cousins. They are older than him and roll on top of him in the night, or kick him out of the way, or claw him with their toenails. He misses sleeping with his mother. The warmth of her body, the smell of peanut-butter oil on her skin, the way she sings him to sleep, quietly, so only he can hear. But even she says he must sleep with his cousins now. That he is too old to sleep with his mother, that he must become a man.

  So instead of going to bed Tendai has decided to wait for Baba Cripps and tell him the n’anga is here to see him. He waits there, outside the rondavel, as the sun sinks and the light drains from the day. Every now and then he creeps to the edge of its wall to look at the n’anga and he is always there, in the same position, motionless. Crouched on his haunches, his elbows inside his knees, staring across the mission compound at the sky through the trees. Even in the dim light Tendai can see the black empty sockets of the baboon’s head, and the sharp teeth of its upper jaw, crowning the n’anga’s stern face. The baboon skin terrifies him, but there is something pleasurable in the fear and he finds himself looking at the blank eyes, the sharp teeth, again and again.

  It is dark by the time Baba Cripps returns and Tendai, who has been falling asleep against the rondavel wall, his chin dropping to his chest, again and again, only sees him when he is very near. Rubbing his eyes he watches the shadowy figure approaching. He looks hard, checking it is indeed Baba Cripps, then gets up and jogs towards him, saying softly, ‘Baba, Baba, the n’anga is here to see you.’

  ♦

  Arthur is surprised when Tendai comes running out of the darkness towards him, but he is tired after his walk and he says nothing as the boy tugs at his jacket, pulling him towards his rondavel. Once there, however, he understands the child’s excitement. Gufa the n’anga is sitting on the ground waiting for him. He has never spoken to Gufa before, but he has seen him and he has heard about him from the villagers around Wreningham: a diviner and a chemist, a herbalist who, for the right price, will cure most ills.

  Arthur pulls his stool out of his rondavel and places it before Gufa. He sits down, feeling exhaustion wash through him like a swelling tide, and tells Tendai to go to bed. Then, turning to Gufa, he asks how he can help.

  Gufa speaks but Arthur cannot understand him. Arthur asks him to speak more slowly, ‘Taura zvishoma, ’ but it does no good. Even when the shaman articulates his words as if he is deaf, still he cannot understand him. He turns around. As he thought, Tendai has lingered at the edge of his rondavel. Arthur calls him over.

  ‘Handinzwisisi. Unoti chii neChiShona? Ungadzokorere here?’ (‘I don’t understand. How do you say this in Shona? Could you repeat?’)

  Tendai frowns, comes closer and crouches beside Arthur. He looks intently at the n’anga as he speaks, then slowly, he begins to translate, whispering into Arthur’s ear in the pauses between the n’anga’s speech.

  As Arthur listens to Tendai’s steady translation he suspects he knows why he could not understand Gufa. The n’anga can speak perfectly good Shona, but he does not want Arthur to be able to understand him. He wants him to feel like an outsider, and so he has chosen to speak in a local dialect instead. Arthur listens as Tendai continues, his lilting voice soft as ash in his ear.

  ‘He says he has seen the white n’anga lying in the bush in his red and black, like a rain spirit, but the white man is not a real n’anga. The white n’anga cannot make magic from the plants. He cannot read the bones. He cannot make lightning strike a rondavel. He cannot stop the sun setting with stones. He cannot test a wife with water or speak with the spirits or know the land. He says he has seen the white n’anga walking the paths that bend like the river and that everyone knows n’angas do not walk on these paths. Real riangas go in straight lines. Like the birds that fly and the elephant that walks.’

  ♦

  That night, after he has watched Gufa’s baboon-covered back disappear into the darkness, Arthur falls asleep fully clothed on the mattress in his rondavel. His body feels light and yet heavy; the blister on his heel burns and his shoulders ache, but he sleeps a deep sleep. And all night he dreams. Of n’angas walking through trees, of the sun setting like a stone, of flannel trousers flapping in the breeze, of lions jumping out of flags and prowling through towns, of wives with their hands in water, of light across roads and of the sound of a gramophone, impossibly far away, playing the scratched record of a dead queen’s waltz.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  1 AUGUST 1952

  Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

  ‘Zwinorwadza papi?’

  Fortune is washing him. Through his one good ear he can hear her hand dropping into the calabash bowl of river water and swilling the cloth around, then the run of drips from the cloth into the bowl, fast then slower as she lifts her hand out. Then from sound to sensation as she slaps the cloth to his body, squeezing it so the water spreads and rushes over his skin. It is cold, but the shock of its coldness is good. It wakes his flesh, brings it back from the stupor of the night’s heat. Her hands are gentle but thorough, scrubbing across his naked back, sending the water running down his spine like a cool, dark shadow.

  He is sitting on a low stool outside his rondavel. He can feel the morning sun reflected off its pale walls onto his back, and a slight tingling on his skin as the water evaporates.

  ‘Zwinorwadzapapi?’ she asks again. ‘Where does it hurt?’

  He knows she is probably speaking loudly, but her voice comes to him through a fog of thickened sound. Some things he can still hear well, but voices seem to get lost, and he has to work hard to make them out.

  He points to his stomach. ‘Zwinorwadzaapa’, he says. Then he points to his head, ‘apa’, and his legs, ‘apa’, and his back, ‘apa’. He starts laughing, still pointing all over his body.
‘Apa, apa, apa.’

  Fortune knows now he is making fun of her, and he hears her laugh and admonish him all at once. ‘Aya, Baba!’ she says, slapping him extra hard with the cloth again and rubbing it vigorously up and down his legs. When he has stopped laughing, he says to her, more quietly, ‘Ndiripo kana, wakadiniwo?’, ‘I am fine, how are you?’ A splash of hand in water, a cold explosion on his shoulder, her fingers, massaging his skin, and her voice, matter of fact, full of song, ‘Ndiripo kana, Baba’

  ♦

  Fortune has lived at Maronda Mashanu ever since Arthur pulled her from her grave thirty years ago. Her parents had asked him to perform the last rites for a pair of premature twins who had not survived their early birth. When he arrived at the kraal a few miles outside Enkel-doorn she was already lying next to her twin sister, both of them wrapped in the one blanket, in the one grave. The family was poor, so there would be no coffin. And there were no other mourners either. Twins are not seen as good fortune among the Mashona, whether they are Christian or not.

  The babies’ father was throwing the first handfuls of soil over his dead daughters when Arthur saw Fortune move. No more than a tremor in her fingers, but enough for him to reach into the grave and lift her out. He brought her to his ear and listened at her tiny chest. A heartbeat as fragile and faint as a butterfly’s wings fluttered irregularly under her skin. He didn’t wait any longer, and carrying her as she was, wrapped in his vestments, he ran back to Enkeldoorn and the hospital.

  When she was ready to leave the hospital Fortune’s parents did not want her back. They said a child brought back from death is not a good omen. She had been to the spirit world of her ancestors, and some of those spirits may still be with her, from when the white mufundsi pulled her from her grave. So Fortune came to live at Maronda Mashanu, where Arthur put her into the care of another family who lived on the mission. He christened her Cecilia in the river that flowed below the church but she rarely answered to that name and everyone called her Fortune instead: because she had been so lucky to be born twice, once from her mother, and once from the earth.

  Now, thirty years after Arthur wiped the dust from her face and the dirt from her ears and ran with her at his breast to the hospital, their roles are reversed, and Fortune carries him instead. Not miles to a hospital but a few feet from his stool to his bed in the cool of his ron-davel. She lays him on the mattress and pulls a blanket up to his chin, stroking it smooth across his body. As her hand passes over his chest she feels his heart there, its beat as soft and irregular as a butterfly, flitting about the cage of his ribs, brushing its wings against the paper of his skin.

  ♦

  He is sure it is Thursday, but he wants to check, so he asks Fortune, ‘Nhasi Chingani?

  He feels her hands on him again, soothing and fresh over his body, and her voice, with a laugh in it. ‘Nhasi China, ’ she says, ‘It is Thursday today’, then she adds, in English, ‘VaBrettell, he comes today.’

  Arthur lies on his back and listens to her pick up the calabash bowl from outside and walk away, singing quietly to herself. Fortune was always singing. When Arthur once asked her why she sang she had explained to him that she was singing with her sister, who went everywhere with her. They liked to sing together because their voices were the same and the songs sounded like they were sung with one voice twice; like when the Mbira player plucks two frets with his thumb at the same time and they make one note.

  A light suddenly turns on in the darkness of his right eye. The sun has edged higher in the sky and slipped its beams inside the frame of his door. He lies there, enjoying the heat on his face and he drifts again, into his memories and his dreams.

  All morning the fifty years of his life in Africa have come flooding back to him: forgotten faces and names, moments in time as clear as photographs in his mind, all carried on a tide of recollection. Loosened by his sickness, his mind has unlocked the floodgates of his past, left itself vulnerable to memory, filling with the years he has lived, the people he has met and the things he has seen. Through all his memories, though, one act and the shadow it throws wells up like a dark lava threatening to break the surface of his consciousness. But he will not mine it, and so he tries to bury it instead with other memories, other events, although he knows in his heart it will not go away. Because it is the one act of his life that both made and broke him, that has both denied and given him liberty, and as he rises and falls through his half-dreaming state he knows that the memory of it is circling above him: a vulture, waiting until he is weak enough for it to land and begin its undoing of him.

  ♦

  The sound of a bicycle’s wheels whirring with grass in the spokes brings him back to the day around him. He must have drifted again, his consciousness, loose from its moorings. Time has become fluid. Was it the afternoon already? Had Brettell arrived?

  ‘Mangwanani Baba.’

  But the voice is not Brettells. Arthur smiles. ‘Mangwanani Leonard, titambire.’ The words crack in his throat.

  ‘I have brought you some letters, Baba,’ Leonard says, preferring to practise his English rather than speak in Shona.

  ‘Thank you,’ Arthur replies. ‘I wasn’t expecting letters for another week at least.’

  ‘The post is very quick now Baba,’ Leonard explains. ‘One of these letters came on an aeroplane.’

  ‘Really?’ Arthur thinks of the planes he had sometimes seen or heard above the veld, catching the sun with their silver bodies, like lonely angels in the empty blue sky. ‘Will you read them to me, Leonard?’

  He hears the scraping of a stool across the bare floor and the faint tearing of paper as Leonard opens the first letter.

  Leonard Mamvura is the teacher at Arthur’s school in Maronda Mashanu, and has been there ever since Arthur extradited him from a police training camp in Salisbury fifteen years ago. Leonard’s mother had come to Arthur complaining that her son had been forced to join the police, that he did drill all day in a hot parade ground surrounded by wire when all he wanted was to train to be a teacher. Arthur wrote a letter to the police chief in Salisbury, requesting Leonard for the post of teacher in his school. He got no reply, so he sent another letter, and then one each day for a month until eventually he got a response, not in the form of a letter or a telegram, but in the form of Leonard himself who arrived at the door of his rondavel with a suitcase in one hand and a bundle of his letters in the other.

  ‘The chief said to bring these back to you, and to take myself while I am about it,’ Leonard had explained.

  Over the last ten years Leonard has added the job of secretary to his post as teacher in the school, writing the letters that Arthur dictates and reading the replies that still come in from societies, family, friends and publishers. Arthur insists on signing his letters himself and he makes Leonard read them back to him several times before he lets him seal them in an envelope and address them. When the letters are to Arthur’s family though, Leonard secretly writes his own postscript, telling them how Arthur really is and sometimes asking for money to feed him. The letters are fewer now than they used to be, so many of his friends have passed away, but Leonard is still the bringer of news for Arthur, releasing him from his confinement with each letter he reads just as Arthur released him from the police camp with each letter he wrote.

  He lies back on his mattress and listens to Leonard’s clear voice. His well-defined words placed one after the other, carefully, building the sentences like a bricklayer laying his bricks tenderly in the wet cement to build himself a wall.

  The sun rises higher and its heat falls over Arthur with the words; words written thousands of miles away and sounding on his ear from different countries, different lives. The words of the world, resting in their envelopes, flown and shipped to Africa, carried by rail, donkey and finally a barefoot boy down the dust road from Enkeldoorn to Maronda Mashanu, where Leonard sits beside Arthur reading, bringing them to life on his careful, considerate tongue.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧


  PART THREE

  And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another.

  Revelation, 6:4

  Rev. L.M. T. Mamvura,

  Maronda Mashanu

  P.O. Box 62

  Chivhu

  Zimbabwe

  5th October, 1999

  Dear Mr. Owen,

  I hasten in replying your kind letter received today with open arms dated 28th September, 1999. Thank you very much for writing.

  I will be only too pleased to be meeting you and if I could be helpful to you for your Research work about your uncle, our ‘Hero’ the late Beloved Father and Noble Friend, the simple Missionary Poet, Father Arthur Shearly Cripps.

  We will only be too pleased to be with us at our Shelter if you approve of it for any time you wish to be with us and stay with us at our Shelter. We are KM. 9, from local town Chivhu. It will be cheaper for you to be with us than to stay in our Town Hotels for they are very expensive.

  You can come with and friend or friends and stay with us for any time you so wish to stay. Life is very expensive in with the prizes of things rising every day. The cost of living is indeed very high here.

  Please do write and phone me when you arrive in Harare and tell us when you are coming to us after your arrival on the 10th of November, 1999.

  Yours very thankfully for writing and expecting you your arrival with red eyes!!

  Leonard Mamvura

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  22 NOVEMBER 1999