Rotten Row

by Petina Gappah

  Washington’s wife put down her book, lowered the car window, and said, ‘Mati chii? Mati chii? What did you say? Kushaya anodini? What do you know about whose car it is? Mbuya yepi inotongera mwana imba?’

  So incensed was she that she opened the car door roughly, in the process almost hitting VateteMa’Kere who had come out to enjoy the spectacle. ‘Washy, kana uchiri kuda nezvangu, tell that woman not to address me ever again,’ Washington’s wife said to Washington as she left the car.

  ‘That woman? That woman? Who is she calling that woman? Is it myself, the granddaughter of Bambo Mutimhoryo, Madyirapazhe? Is it me she is talking to? Ini chaiye chidinhamukaka mhuru inobva muGona? Myself, being called that woman by this woman? If I am your mother, Washington, you must tell your wife to watch her mouth or else she shall know straight from my mouth what it is that prevents the dog from laughing even though it can show its teeth,’ Washington’s mother said to Washington. ‘She will know straight!’

  ‘You can tell your mother that today, this very day, I spit on this ground in front of her and say enough is enough. Pthu. Oh. Ndatopfira,’ Washington’s wife said to Washington. ‘Nonsense mhani! Handilikiliki munhu inini. Mbuya yepi inongoda kungolikwalikwa pese pese. I suck up to no one. And you can also tell your mother right now that I know what she did. I know. I know that she tried to give peanut butter porridge to Tino. She thinks I don’t know but I know what she tried to do to my child. Hee dovi rinokudza, hee dovi, hee dovi kuri kuda kundidyira mwana. Enough is enough. Handilikiliki munhu.’

  Washington’s mother responded: ‘Surrender, bhazi rekwaMusanhi! This is why I said my son is too good for the likes of you. Hee, ndini mukadzi waWashy. Hee ndine maallergy, handigoni kutsvaira nomutsvairo. Hee ini mukadzi waWashy ndine maallergy saka ndinovata zuva rose. Allergy pwallergy iwe wakafuratidza mwoyo wemwana wangu. What did you give to my son that makes him so docile, so stupid that he cannot see you for what you are? Where have you heard of a graduate from university marrying a woman who is not even good enough to be a housegirl, to be someone’s maid? Seka zvako mwana waDenford!’

  As she spoke, Washington’s wife moved towards her mother-in-law and gave her a ringing slap that knocked her bright orange wedding hat from her head to the ground. Washington’s mother reacted with a thump to Washington’s wife’s chest. The two women grappled with each other.

  ‘Kamani, kamani!’ said Washington’s mother. ‘Kamani!’

  ‘Handilikiliki munhu ini,’ said his wife.

  The vanyarikani found themselves in a position of the greatest difficulty. The only way to stop the fight was to separate the women, but there was the risk of touching one of the women on a body part or in a manner that was culturally inappropriate for a munyarikani to touch. They stood stupefied until Washington, praying in his heart that he would not have to touch his mother inappropriately, seized his wife by the waist. As he grabbed her, his wife kicked out and struck her mother-in-law in the face with her foot.

  ‘Kundikava ini? Did you just kick me?’ she shouted as she held her hand to her face. She made for Washington’s wife but was restrained by a wall of pleading vanyarikani. Unable to reach her daughter-in-law, Washington’s mother resorted to the only weapon she had in her arsenal. ‘Ndinobvisa nguvo,’ she shouted. ‘I will strip naked here in front of my son, in front of vanyarikani. How can you disrespect me so in front of my own son? I will strip naked.’

  As the prospect of seeing his naked mother was even more horrifying than that of accidently touching her inappropriately, Washington, his arms still around his struggling wife, joined the vanyarikani as they pleaded for forgiveness. No, no, they said. Pakonekwa, mhai, pakonekwa. Zvokwadi vatete mwana wakonewa. So much wrong had been done, such terrible things said, there would be time for those who said what they said to redress it. Nguva yokuripa ichavuya, vanoripa vacharipa, pashata pachagadziriswa, zvokwadi pakonekwa. But whatever the wrong, the vanyarikani said, it was not right that a mother strip naked in front of her own son.

  Not pleading with the vanyarikani was Melody’s mother, whose chief characteristic was to take every single thing that happened to anyone and make it all about her and the success of her family. She raised her face skywards and wept loud sobs. ‘What wrong have I done to anyone that I should deserve this? Is it my fault that we are a family that others look up to? Nhai zvondoshinhirwa pamuchato womwana wangu Melody! Chava chitadzo here kuti ndine vana vangu vose vanongochatawo zvakangonaka?’

  Also not pleading was VateteMa’Kere, who had been enjoying the spectacle as closely as she could get without being in the path of attack. She shouted to her daughter, ‘Get a blanket to cover her. Tora jira mumba iwe! Kana zambiya rangu riya rekwaWhiriyamu! Zvokwadi vachafukura. Keresenzia!’

  Her daughter ran to the fence that enclosed the swimming pool, and on which she had, just that morning, hung out to dry the blankets and sheets on which her son Tapera had urinated the night before.

  ‘Ndinomubvisira nguvo!’ Washington’s mother shouted again. From inside the house came the shrill peal of the telephone. SisiMaidei, Melody’s mother’s maid came out and touched Melody’s mother on the shoulder. ‘Mhamha, it is the next-door neighbours. They said they have called the police.’

  Furthermore, she said, a hysterical Precious has been calling for the last forty minutes to say the church was filling up and where was everyone. Melody was crying that she could not possibly get married without her mother there, it was all too much and they have been circling the church waiting for the rest of the cars.

  ‘Now listen to that. The police are coming. You can’t strip in front of me, Mhamha,’ Washington pleaded. He tried to leave the scene dragging his wife with him. She chafed her resistance and shouted, ‘Handiliki munhu ini! Ngadzibve tione hembe dzacho.’

  Close to a cluster of Elephant’s Ear plants next to where the Honda Civic was parked stood VateteMa’Kere, clutching the urinated-on blanket and ready, at any time, to pounce and cover Washington’s mother should she expose herself. Already, she was rehearsing in her mind just how she would tell this story when she got back to Bhasera.

  Melody’s mother gave up on the matter, brushed the tears from her face, picked up her hat and matching handbag, and, with her two sisters, headed to the Range Rover that was to have taken the Mother and Aunts of the Bride to the church before Washington’s wife had decided that enough was enough. As they drove out, they passed a police car, blue lights on, heading in the direction of their house. Melody’s mother closed her eyes and insisted that they drive on.

  The police found Washington’s wife still daring his mother to remove her clothes while Washington’s mother still threatened to strip naked and the vanyarikani still pleaded with her not to disrobe. It was left to Sergeant Mafa of Borrowdale Police Station to have the last word. Formerly stationed at Matapi, he made every house call he could in the Borrowdale area, and afterwards sent to the Metropolitan exclusive inside scoops on the scuffles of the well-to-do, for which he was handsomely rewarded. When the news of the scuffle made its way to the Metropolitan under the headline: ‘WEDDING PARTY STUNNED BY STRIPPER GRAN’, Sergeant Mafa was quoted as stating that members of the public are urged to refrain from using violence to resolve family disputes. Public nudity, he added, is encouraged under no circumstances.

  Miss McConkey of Bridgewater Close

  But he saveth the poor from the sword, from their mouth, and from the hand of the mighty.

  – The Book of Job –

  Asi iye unorwira paminondo yemiromo yavo, unorwira unoshaiwa pamavoko avanesimba. Saka murombo unetaririro, kuipa kunozifumbira muromo.

  – Buku yaJobo –

  When I saw her yesterday, Miss McConkey looked vital and frail at the same time, like a cross between Doris Lessing and poor, murdered Cora Lansquenet in that Agatha Christie novel. She stood in the queue for the only cashier inside the Bon Marché supermarket that replaced the OK at Mabelreign Shopping Centre. I immediately thought of cake and porterhouse steak.

  As
often happens with sudden flashes of memory, the association made sense just half a minute later. ‘You can bring Pearl she is a dem nice girl but don’t bring Lulu. You can bring cake and porterhouse steak but don’t bring Lulu.’ In my mind, I was a child again and in the school music room, Miss McConkey’s fingers were flying over the piano keys and we were singing that song. Miss McConkey was at the piano and a knight won his spurs in the stories of old. Morning was breaking, like the first morning, blackbird was singing and I was a child again and it was the Allied Arts competition and I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and he, I galloped Dirk galloped, we galloped all three and there was a whisper down the line at eleven thirty-nine and the night train was ready to depart.

  She carried her head as she always had done, slightly tilted to the left, and her hair, all white now, was pinned into a large bun at the top of her head. When I was a little girl, her hair reminded me of Mam’zelle’s at Malory Towers. Not Mam’zelle Rougier, who was thin and sour and never any fun, but Mam’zelle Dupont, who was plump and jolly. Her eyes, unlike Mam’zelle Dupont’s, which were never still and sparkled and gleamed behind her lorgnettes, did not twinkle behind her round glasses. For all the time that had passed, I would have known her anywhere, and besides, you can count on all eight fingers the number of white people left in the whole of Mabelreign, from Sentosa to Bluff Hill, from Meyrick Park to Cotswold Hills.

  She took an inordinate amount of time to get her things onto the counter, sugar, and pasta, tomato purée, a packet of onions and two cans of condensed milk, Mazoe orange crush, a loaf of bread, a crate of eggs, seven packets of candles and three packets of Pedigree Pup pet food.

  ‘That will be five billion three hundred million and six hundred thousand dollars,’ the cashier said.

  She took out four bricks of notes, unpeeled some from one and handed over the rest. The cashier took the bands off the bricks and put the money through a money counter. When the whirring sound stopped, and the red button blinked to indicate the amount, the cashier said, ‘It’s short by five hundred million.’

  ‘That can’t be,’ Miss McConkey said. ‘Your machine must be broken.’

  The cashier counted out the money, spreading the notes in little heaps of billions and millions across the counter. By now the line of shoppers holding their shopping, mainly the packets of candles that had been rumoured to be available only at the Bon Marché in Mabelreign, were murmuring mutiny. The counting continued. The machine was not broken.

  ‘Do you have enough?’ asked the cashier.

  ‘What?’ said Miss McConkey.

  The cashier scowled and sighed and said, ‘Money. Do you have enough money?’

  ‘More money,’ Miss McConkey said.

  ‘Pardon?’ said the cashier.

  ‘More, not enough. Have you more money is what you should say.’

  ‘Have you more enough money?’ the cashier said loudly.

  ‘There is no need to shout like that,’ Miss McConkey said. ‘Wait.’

  She rummaged in her bag to find the notes she had unpeeled. As she fumbled with it, the bag fell from her hands, spilling its contents to the floor, keys, dirty handkerchiefs, old dog biscuits, two more packets of candles, biltong dog treats and two boxes of matches. The security guard who had been watching from the door moved over to the cash register. On his nametag was the name Boniface.

  He picked up the candles, matches and the dog treats and shoved them in Miss McConkey’s face.

  ‘What is this, Medhemu?’ he demanded.

  Miss McConkey looked at him and blinked.

  Behind her the muttering rose.

  ‘You come with me, Medhemu,’ he said. ‘You come with me right now. Come, Medhemu, come.’ His manner and voice were a mix of obsequiousness and officiousness.

  ‘Kanotofidha imbwa mari kasina,’ said a voice behind me.

  When Miss McConkey did not move, he grabbed her arm as though to drag her off. I moved forward to the security guard. ‘I know her,’ I said to him in Shona. ‘She is very confused, she does not know what she is doing half the time.’

  The security guard looked doubtful. I repeated myself, and added that she was always doing this, but not to worry, I would pay for everything. His anger melted before my authority. He gathered up the rest of her things, even the dog biscuits, put the pilfered items before the cashier, and said to Miss McConkey, ‘Have a nice day, Medhemu, thank you for shopping at Bon Marché.’

  If she was confused by this turn of events, Miss McConkey did not show it. In English, I said to her, ‘I would be very happy to help you pay for your groceries.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Miss McConkey said without looking at me.

  ‘Miss McConkey,’ I said.

  She looked at me then.

  ‘You live on Bridgewater Close,’ I said. ‘At number seventeen. I know your house, and I can always get the money later.’

  I ignored the mutters coming from behind me and continued, ‘You were my headmistress at HMS Junior.’ Then I told her my name. She looked blank. When I realised that I had given her my real name, I told her my school name, the name that she had insisted I should use to make it easier for my white teachers and schoolmates to call me, creating for me two identities, one for home, and another for school.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You were in Kudu.’ She repeated the names of my brother and sister who followed me.

  ‘You have a good memory,’ I said.

  I gave the cashier the money for the groceries and paid for mine. After a tussle, Miss McConkey agreed that I could carry her bags to her car. Her car was parked on the other side of Stortford Parade, facing the market and the church. It was the yellow Datsun 120Y that I remembered, the car that made my heart beat as I saw it drive past.

  ‘I was not headmistress for long after you got there, was I?’

  She looked straight into me, and I was a child again, but gone was the old fear that used to grip me when I thought that she must know that it was because of me that she no longer stood on the stage of the school hall, flanked by the Merit and the Dux boards, as all of HMS Junior, from KG1 to Grade 7Blue sat cross-legged on the floor and with one voice said, ‘Good morning, Miss McConkey.’

  *

  We were always the first at the things that mattered to my parents. So it was no surprise to anyone when my parents moved to Cotswold Hills, when I was seven, the year that Rhodesia opened up the residential areas that they had closed to black people.

  My father worked for Barclays Bank in town. Our family was the first in the street to own a car, a yellow Citroën called bamba-datya in the township because of its crouching frog shape. I was the first child I ever knew to get on an aeroplane, to the resort town of Victoria Falls, to see the waterfall and my father, who worked there briefly for six months.

  For years after that, my mother kept the tickets stuck prominently in the photo album, next to a picture of us standing by the Air Rhodesia plane. When visitors asked to see the photo album, and they asked what the tickets were, my mother, in a voice that worked too hard to be casual, said, ‘Oh, these are just plane tickets from the time we went to Vic Falls.’ She made sure to call it Vic Falls because that is what the captain had said when we landed, ‘Welcome to Vic Falls,’ he said, ‘on this bright and sunny day,’ and she never called it anything else after that.

  Shortly after the plane ride, but long after he bought the car, we moved out of Specimen and into Glen Norah B, to one of the smart flats that were a street from the township, where we were not the first to have a car, but we were the first to have both a telephone and a television. My father was not content to live in the African townships, in Mbare and Highfield, Mabvuku and Glen Norah; nor for him the African suburbs of Westwood, just one road from Kambuzuma, or Marimba Park, ten steps removed from Mufakose. On Sundays after church, he took us for long drives along Salisbury Drive and pointed out Borrowdale, Ballantyne Park, Cotswold Hills, Marlborough and Mount Pleasant, Highlands and Avondale, Bluff Hill and Greyston
e Park, places whose very names evoked wonderful lives that were closed to us because the Prime Minister had decreed that not in a thousand years would black people ever rule Rhodesia.

  We moved in the year of the internal settlement. The houses were quiet on undusty streets. There were trees, flowers and lawns everywhere. There were green hedges, and low gates with signs on which a silhouetted dog snarled at a man with the words ‘Beware of the dog, bassopo la inja’. Milkmen deposited bottles of milk with gold and silver tops outside, and no one stole them.

  We no longer sat around the radio listening to our favourite show, The Surf Show Pick-A-Box where the announcer shouted, ‘Fifteen dollars, money-or-box,’ and the player responded, ‘Box,’ then the announcer said, ‘Twenty dollars, money-or-box’, and the player insisted, ‘Box,’ before finding that the box contained something disappointing like coackroach powder or shoe polish. Instead, in our living room with a fireplace and a maroon fitted carpet, we watched television adverts for Solo, the margarine for families with an appetite for life, for Pro-Nutro, the balance of nature, and Sunlight, for that fresh, sharp clean.

  That Christmas, my parents had a party for all our relatives. My father danced my mother around and around while David Scobie sang ‘Gypsy Girl’. All the guests cried enko enko enko so that by the time I went to sleep that night, I knew all the words to the song and the tanatana tanatana tanatana of the chorus wove its way into my dreams.

  *

  In January I started at my new school, Henry Morton Stanley Junior School. Everyone called it HMS Junior. On the morning of my first day, I met Miss McConkey. ‘I can’t pronounce Zvamaida,’ she said, as she wrote my name down. ‘Has she no other name?’