Rotten Row

by Petina Gappah

  The White Orphan

  For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

  – The Gospel According to Saint Matthew –

  Vanosunga mitoro inorema, inotambudza kutakura, vaciiisa pamafudzi avanhu, asi ivo vamene havadi kuibata nemunwe wavo.

  – Evangeri yakanyorwa naMateo –

  John Peters always insisted that he and Anatolia, his wife of six years take separate flights whenever they had to leave the country. They flew infrequently, but often enough for John to worry. He imagined himself and Anatolia as statistics in a three-day news story featuring a missing black box and a voice recorder and inclement weather conditions. Every year or so, they flew from Harare to London where Anatolia’s best friend lived in an old council house in Luton. John was English but had no family there. Had it been entirely up to him, John would never again have set foot on English soil.

  They died on the same day, not in an air crash, but in a car accident on the way to the Kamfinsa shops and rumours of bread. They were both thirty-five. From the town end of Enterprise Road came Anatolia and John, in their ten-year-old Toyota Hilux. From the Chisipite end, in a six-month-old Range Rover Sport, came the Chief Executive Officer of a blue chip Major Listed Company. Not only was the CEO speeding, he had also been drinking. He chose that minute to check his phone for a response to a message he had sent that morning. He hit a pothole, lost control of his car and left his lane. John swerved to avoid him, but too late. The cars hit each other with a crunch of metal. His driver-side airbag immediately cushioned the CEO. The impact threw Anatolia against the windscreen. They had to cut the steering wheel out of John’s chest.

  At Rotten Row, the CEO paid a five-hundred-dollar bribe to the magistrate who presided over his culpable homicide trial and three hundred to the man prosecuting him. After his half-hearted prosecution, the magistrate fined him two hundred dollars and gave him a suspended sentence. There was no need, she said, to withdraw his licence: his remorse was sincere. Relieved, he took his family for a celebratory holiday in Mauritius. Six months after his return, he had another car accident. He killed another person, this time, a schoolboy who was the only child left in a family that had recently lost two other children. He paid another bribe. His remorse was, again, sincere. His company posted excellent results in the first quarter. His life went on.

  *

  Life went on too, for the children that Anatolia and John left behind, his son, Jack and her daughter, Manatsa. For these two, John and Anatolia had arranged and changed many things in their lives. The move to their big four-bedroom house in tree-lined av enues of Greendale, far from the untarred streets of Zengeza in Chitungwiza where Anatolia had grown up; Anatolia’s insistence that their children have all that she could not have, including a private education, Hartmann House for Jack, the Dominican Convent for Manatsa.

  John was an economic researcher at the unfortunately named International Institute for International Development, whose acronym sounded like a bad stutter. A colleague had said to him, when he first arrived, ‘There are a handful of schools that have retained the highest standards,’ the highest standards being code for schools in which there was a reassuringly large number of white children and teachers.

  Then came the changes: fast and sudden in some cases, slow and gradual in others. The chaos of the land invasions. The murdered white farmers, their battered bodies beamed around the world with their dogs whimpering about their corpses. Then international sanctions and exclusion, followed by double-digit inflation that became quadruple-digit inflation.

  John did not flee to Perth or Auckland or Dallas, he did not go to London or Cape Town. ‘We are scaling down our Harare Operations,’ the IIID announced. John became the entirety of the Harare Operations. John had come to Harare to settle. Not even quadruple-digit inflation would sway him. ‘I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.’ John had read those words as a boy and had been seized by a violent longing for this place, Africa, where the Equator ran along the highlands and everything for miles around made for greatness and freedom and unequalled nobility.

  He had grown up in the care system, without any written down, traceable roots. His parents were just names on a birth certificate. They were not even a key that could have opened up his past; the names of his parents were both so common that they may as well have had no names at all. He struggled to find an identity.

  Until, at age thirteen, in a book whose title, plot or even author he could no longer remember, he read the words that would be his motto. ‘What matters it what came before? Now with myself I will begin and end.’ He wrote those words down and sometimes, when the yearning for a personal history traced onto a family tree lush with abundant branches got the better of him, he wrote the words in his sloping hand and the compulsion disappeared.

  So that mystical place Africa became his escape from the grey drizzle of the drab streets of Manchester. It was his Secret Garden and his Enchanted Forest, his Narnia and his Middle Earth. In the public library near his school, he pored over maps of the continent, memorising and practising the names of the places, Ouagadougou and Timbuktu, Umdurman and Bulawayo, Krugers dorp and Antananarivo.

  He imagined himself as Stanley doffing his peaked cap as he declared, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.’ He was with Gordon in Sudan, relieving the Emin Pasha. He was at the battle of Blood River, and with Baden-Powell at the Relief of Mafeking. He was Allan Quartermain too, handsome and rugged and, in this version, it was him and not Captain Good that the beautiful Foulata loved, and it was Gagool alone, and not Foulata too, who died. The biggest disappointment of his childhood was to find that the source of the Nile had been located, not in the Bangweolo swamps where Livingstone had died searching for it, but further away in the mountains of East Africa.

  Then he grew up to discover that the mythical place Africa was but a British Airways flight away. By that point, life had gotten in the way of Africa, the dreams receded when he married, but they returned when his wife died, leaving him with a two-year-old son and an opportunity to start over, to find out where it was that he ought to be. Thus came John to Africa, staying first for work, and then for love. He found he loved his job; he found he loved his second wife.

  This is what he loved about his Africa. He felt he could find himself in a place that did not stress personal histories. He was where he longed to be, where he could be just himself, John, married to Anatolia, stepfather of Manatsa, and father of Jack. So he found himself not in his past but in his present, and in Africa, his Africa, Africa, not of proud warriors in ancestral savannah, but an Africa of permanently low rankings on the human development indices, an Africa that valued economists, development and aid experts, like John with their degrees in Development Studies from the University of Sussex, the new type of missionaries and explorers.

  He was a romantic, John, how else to explain the heedless, thoughtless, even careless manner in which he embraced his new country. When the Registrar-General demanded an end to double allegiances in the form of dual citizenship, he found himself at the British High Commission, seeking to renounce Her Majesty’s dominion over him so that he was no longer her subject.

  The official who served him at the British Embassy explained to John that the embassy’s position was that people were renouncing citizenship under duress. Even if he renounced it, he could apply to get it back. John waved this possibility away. There was no need to issue a letter concerning his son, the official said, because the law allowed children to have dual citizenship.

  This renunciation had not been welcome to Anatolia. ‘Everyone wants UK citizenship’, she sighed, ‘and you go and try to give up yours. Why don’t you think of the children?’ He tried again to tell her of the life they would live there. No private school for the children. No pool parties, or bowling parties, no horse riding, no Kariba, no Singita Pamushana, no Mana Pools.

  Of his son’s mothe
r, he said very little. ‘She was an orphan,’ he explained to his son, ‘an orphan like me.’ They had met in the system, clung to each other when they left it, gone on to the same Red-brick University, had a short and disastrous marriage that ended in her death by suicide at twenty-six, two years after Jack was born.

  Anatolia was the jealous type, and was often offended when he spoke of any woman other than her. She did not believe in platonic friendships between work colleagues, and she most certainly did not believe in fond rememberances of even dead wives. John, never one for the path of most resistance when that of least resistance would do, had said as little as possible about what, in truth, had been a painful interlude in his life. To Jack, therefore, his mother was nothing more than a memory brought into shape by a picture of a woman with a soft face smiling from a photograph that his father had shown him.

  So when John and Anatolia died, and both children were left orphans, the children had no closer relatives than Anatolia’s mother who moved in from Chitungwiza for the duration of the funeral wake. The relatives came and after concerning themselves in the matter of who would get which clothes that had belonged to both the deceased, turned their thoughts to the matter of the children.

  Her grandmother’s house was the only place for Manatsa: thus the edict of Anatolia’s brother, the head of the family. He and his family would move into the house, naturally, they would take care of the Greendale house until the time came when the children could take care of it themselves, he said. He caught his reflection in the mirror in front of him, and paused to admire the dark blue blazer he wore and that had once belonged to John. A little long in the sleeve, he thought, but nothing that his wife could not fix with scissors and her sewing machine. At the same time, his wife was thinking that as soon as they moved in, she would take out that bed of herbs and grow real vegetables, maybe even maize. And that cottage at the end of the property would come in handy, they would put in lodgers, extra income was always welcome.

  Then came the catastrophic discoveries.

  The house was rented, the car had to be written off. An examination of the bank accounts revealed that inflation had eaten what money had not been spent on private education and trips to London. The IIID had cancelled John’s contract just two months before he died. There was now no Harare operation at all. The life insurance policies were as good as none.

  Anatolia’s brother could not believe that any white man could be this impecunious. It seemed almost a deception; worse, downright fraudulent, that John should have left nothing behind but his child. ‘I should have charged that white man more for Anatolia’s bride wealth,’ he fumed to his wife.

  ‘But what shall we do with the boy?’ his wife asked.

  It was all right for Manatsa to live in Chitungwiza, her mother had lived there after all, and she could live there too. For the boy to be moved to Chitungwiza seemed fundamentally wrong. ‘Almost as though he were one of us,’ said Anatolia’s mother’s neighbour.

  Yet it seemed more wrong to leave him to the vagaries of social services who would place him, they were sure, in Chinyaradzo, or Vimbainesu or some other orphanage. Anatolia’s mother, Jack’s sister’s grandmother, would not hear of his going to such an orphanage. ‘You remember that child, aka kasikana kakasiiwa naNdomudini?’ she said. ‘You know the one, the grandchild of the eledest daughter of that market woman from 59 Crescent? That child went to Chinyaradzo when first her parents, and then her grandmother died, and then what happened? The child died, that is what happened.’

  Her son tried to convince his mother that the child was probably sick when she went to the orphanage, but the old woman was insistent: orphanages were no place for children. If it came to it, Jack would come home with her and Manatsa.

  When no one came to claim the boy, the old woman had her way, and Jack and Manatsa moved into the house in which Anatolia had grown up. There was nothing left for Anatolia’s brother to do but to throw up his hands and mutter dark predictions about the portentous things that were bound to happen when people tried to raise children whose family totems they did not know. That is how Jack moved from Greendale to Zengeza.

  By the time that Shona fell fluent from his tongue, Jack had become so accustomed to silence that he remained encased within its walls. He looked at them with same colourless eyes that his father had, shaping his sadza into neat little balls and dipping it into his sauce. ‘Is it good?’ they asked, loudly, as if he were deaf. They commented on everything he did as though he were not there. ‘Kanoringinyura sadza wena! Mukonde wese uyu!’ In the early days, his sister’s grandmother struggled to talk to her new ward. With no English beyond ‘yes’, ‘nice’, and ‘very good’, she made do with these few words, and by dint of moving her face and hands, and asking Manatsa to interpret, managed well enough.

  ‘Yes, nice, yes, yes?’ she said. ‘Very good, yes? Nice, yes? Very good.’ With time, his Shona improved enough to release his sister’s grandmother from the constrictions imposed by English.

  He learned to make playthings of discarded objects, bottle caps polished smooth, old fabrics and plastics bundled together with string to make misshapen footballs. He had been an oddity at first, and the children cried murungu, murungu when he came out to play. He had sat silent watching the games, until tentatively he joined in. In the end, the only people who stood to watch curiously were the adults who marvelled at his skilled hands making delicate cars out of wire, his floppy hair in his eyes as he concentrated. ‘Inga kamurungu aka karikutobvumwa nerukesheni,’ the neighbours said, and thus the consensus was that living in the township seemed to agree with the boy.

  With time, Jack became immunised to Chitungwiza. The soles of his feet became hard and callused from their exposure. The clothes that he wore became as threadbare as those of his companions. He piled up car after car, until his sister’s grandmother thought of selling off some of them at her fruit and vegetable stall at the market.

  They fed and clothed him, and tended to his injuries when it was not enough to trust nature to heal. When he developed an abscess beneath one of his upper molars and he woke crying in the night, his sister’s grandmother woke and made him drink hot water and told him stories and sang songs until fatigue made him drift off to sleep. In Zengeza Number Five Primary, he was the best student in English, his maths was barely acceptable, and after only two terms, he was getting sixty per cent for his Shona compositions.

  Every time his headmaster saw him, he said to himself that something had to be done about that white child. He raised Jack’s presence at the school a few times in the staff room and the teachers agreed that, indeed, something had to be done about the white child. One of the teachers went as far as to suggest social services, but life was difficult, everyone spent time queuing for bread, and nothing happened. So Jack stayed, no one came for him. He was settling, settling very well, his sister’s grandmother reflected. Her only regret was that she had still not managed to find a way of cutting his hair so that it fell evenly about his head.

  He settled outwardly, but there was a dissonance, a discord, an unease in his mind. It was not so much that he was among people who did not look like him, he got used to that in time; it was more that sometimes, he longed to see people, even just one, who looked like him. Then he heard that there was another murungu, a man who spoke fluent Shona and had lived in the township so long that he had earned the nemererwa name of Madzibaba Bob or Apostolic Bob, a name given to him because he wore a full beard of the kind normally associated with adherents of the Apostolic faith.

  When Jack learned that this Madzibaba Bob lived a short distance away in Zengeza 4, he decided to find him. On a Wednesday afternoon when he did not have to stay behind for sports, he wandered in the direction of Zengeza 4. If you lingered long enough in the streets, he knew, you could see just about anyone you wanted to. He walked along, keeping an eye out while kicking an empty canned ham tin aimlessly in front of him and eating a mango that dribbled its yellowness onto the slinty red eyes of the
Spider-Man shirt that his stepmother Anatolia had bought him from H&M in London the Christmas before she died.

  Sure enough, there before him appeared a pale rider on a Black Beauty bicycle. Jack followed him until he turned into a matchbox house with bright flowers around the veranda. As the man dismounted, his eyes met Jack’s. Man and boy stared at each other, Jack taking in the blue-grey eyes, the face hidden by long hair and beard, the lean body in the blue shorts, a bright green T-shirt, long brown socks pulled up to the knees and folded down neatly, like a policeman’s, with the socked legs disappearing into thick canvas shoes. Madzibaba Bob took in Jack’s worn clothes, the mango-streaked face, the fading Spider-Man T-shirt, and the dust-covered legs. He beckoned him to come over.

  ‘Where do you live?’ Madzibaba Bob asked him without preamble.

  Jack pointed in the direction of his home. He swallowed; the walk had made him thirsty. The man reached inside his house and brought out a Fanta. As Jack drank, Madzibaba Bob asked him questions, and haltingly, what Jack knew of his own family was gradually told. His dead mother. His father marrying his step mother. His dead father. His dead stepmother. Her live relatives. He finished his drink and began to blow noises into the empty bottle.

  He looked up only when Madzibaba Bob, after staring thoughtfully at him, said, ‘You are British, you know. You have another home.’

  ‘I have a home,’ the boy said, and pointed in the direction of his sister’s grandmother’s house.

  Jack came to see Madzibaba Bob a few times after that. On those visits, Madzibaba Bob told him that he came from America, from a place he called The South. His full name was Robert E. McConkey. His ancestors originally came from Scotland, he said, from Britain where Jack was from. He had joined the Peace Corps, travelled all over East Africa, and had ended up in the country because he had heard there were some McConkey family members here. He had met but not taken to them. He had then met his wife, had taken to and married her, and had never gone back to The South.