How many Disprin does it take to kill yourself, she asks. She calculates just how many would be required, four boxes, five boxes, maybe even ten boxes. She will drink them with vodka, drink them with Mazoe mixed with club soda. She does a comparative evaluation, Norolon versus Disprin. On a balance of probabilities, on the evidence of the gory newspaper tales of Norolon-induced abortions that end up killing both foetus and mother, Norolon would be more effective.
Outside herself, she helps to distribute the toast and tea in the mornings. Outside herself, she stares outside the window in the afternoon, careful not to sit there for too long. In her journal, she writes bright entries, with exclamation marks, about her future outside the Annexe. ‘I am going to Oxford!’ she writes, ‘I am going be a Rhodes Scholar!’
The evening pills empty her thoughts.
In the evening, she does the Annexe shuffle.
And then, just like that, Dr Chikara says she can go back to her life. She and Ezekiel sing ‘Father Abraham’ one more time, three more times, seven more times. Estelle joins in. Hedwig conducts them, insisting that they stand in a choir formation. Sonia applauds. MockingNurseMatilda shakes her head when she sees them. ‘The choir of the mad,’ she says to the orderlies, but there is no malice in her voice.
Emily walks out of the door that has no handle on the inside. The last thing she sees is Ezekiel saying ‘Abraham, Abraham’ while Hedwig hits him on the head. She stands on Second Street Extension, and waits for the little green bus. She re-enters academe to nudges and whispered comments. She is the subject of clever jokes, lawyer jokes.
‘She is not a fit and proper person,’ says one.
‘She is not a competent witness,’ says another.
‘She qualifies under the Mental Health Act,’ says a third.
She is so concentrated on being normal that thoughts of Disprin versus Norolon recede to that part of her mind that is most active in fantasy. Her exam results are stellar; she achieves seven firsts in one year. She receives the University Book Prize three years in a row. Her essay on the presidential pardon and the rule of law is published in the Legal Forum. But for the rest of her three years at the university, she is known as Emily from Law who tried to kill herself when her boyfriend, Gwinyai from Engines, dumped her for Lydia, the tall, skinny girl from Sociology. Even first years that were not there pass on the story, which grows with each telling and retelling.
‘She climbed a tree, that tree opposite the Students’ Union.’
‘She swallowed forty tablets.’
‘She was found unconscious on the floor.’
‘Naked.’
‘She threw herself in front of her boyfriend’s car.’
‘Not her boyfriend’s car, it was the Dean of Students’ car.’
‘He took her to hospital.’
‘Hospital, chii, they put her in a car, on a bus, on a train, on a plane, to Ingutsheni.’
The pinnacle of absurdity is reached in Emily’s third year when a first-year girl, seeing Emily, and not knowing who she is, asks her, ‘Is it true that that Emma girl from Law tried to kill herself in my room?’
It is true; FirstYearGirl sleeps in Emily’s old room on P.
‘Don’t believe everything you hear,’ Emily says. ‘It happened on Q corridor.’ She says this to be kind, but the next time that FirstYearGirl sees Emily, it is with knowledge in her eyes. The Emma Girl from Law of legend has become the in-the-flesh Emily walking towards her. She moves to the other side and walks past Emily without meeting her eyes.
Among the whispers and the pointing, Emily moves as the incarnation of the walking mad. Though she relearns how to be normal, there is incontrovertible evidence that the true lesson of her experience is lost on her: she falls in love again, just as carelessly, almost as excessively, this time with a rugby-playing Economics student known to everyone but his mother as Tuggs. ‘I like you babes, I really do,’ Tuggs says, ‘but this can’t go on, you know that. What if you go all crazy on me like you did with that guy from Engines?’ This rejection is the first of many post-Gwinyai heartbreaks; but she learns this: no heartbreak will ever again be sharp enough to send her over the edge and to the Annexe.
Each heartbreak is a little death, all the same.
Up and down she goes in the little green bus, always sitting on the right so that she looks out at the golf course and not at the Annexe opposite. In her drawer with her diary and fevered poems, she keeps Ezekiel’s picture of the Taj Mahal. In her final year at university, she is three-quarters of the way from the Annexe and a quarter of the distance from Oxford. There is nothing to do but celebrate the end of exams, the approach of Christmas, going home, the unwritten future.
It is Friday evening, and she is with Fadz and Sihle and Kenny and Lindy buying mushroom burgers at Chicken Inn. They will tumble into Fadz’s battered Beetle and go on to a night of clubbing at Circus. They have been drinking vodka, and they laugh at the smallest thing. She comes out onto Inez Terrace, in mid-laugh, and there, holding a box of fried chicken is Ezekiel. His smile is wide as he moves towards her. He says something, a greeting, but all she hears is, ‘Abraham, Abraham,’ as up and down goes the little green bus. She turns away. He sees her pretending and she sees him seeing. She pretends not to see the shadow that falls across his face.
Something Nice from London
The little boy in the orange shirt tells me that his grandmother says that his mummy is bringing him something nice from London. ‘Your mummy will bring you something nice from London too,’ he asserts, with all the gravity of a child whose concerns coincide with those of the world. He runs off before I can reply, and I watch him tear up and down the observation platform that overlooks the arrival hall of our airport. The Chinese built this airport when the old one became too small for the tourists that poured into the country in their thousands. No tourists visit us now. Our almost total isolation means that we have no camera-toting, free-spending visitors to pour dollars and pounds, euros, yen and yuan into our empty coffers. We have an international airport in name only; the twice-weekly flight to and from London provides the only direct link we have to the world beyond our continent.
We wait for the Friday morning flight from London, as I stand with my mother, my brother Jonathan and his wife Mukai, and watch through the transparent glass of the observation platform. Our sombre faces are out of place, surrounded by those that smile in anticipation, with mouths that laugh and fingers that point out to children, there they are, there she is, he is here at last; they arrived on time. My mother stares unseeing at the passengers below us who crane their necks to look up at the platform, anxious to catch a glimpse of a familiar face, arms waving and jangling with bracelets, faces broad with smiles. They have made an effort for the flight, the women in manicured wigs and weaves, their England clothes fitting well, their skin lightened by years, and maybe even by just as little as six months of living out of the heat and stress of poverty. Those receiving them have also made an effort, or maybe it is not such an effort. They will have been happy to put aside their quiet desperation to wear the shining joy of welcome. For these passengers bring with them more than their loved selves, they bring something nice from London, the foreign money that will be traded on the black market and guarantee a few more months of survival.
We wait two hours before Jonathan confirms with the airline that Peter is not on the flight. The flight from Johannesburg arrives next, and we resign ourselves to returning home. We exchange no words as we walk back to the car park; my mother between Jonathan and Mukai, and me two steps behind. The car radio bursts into life as soon as Jonathan starts the engine. A voice reminds us that the land is ours, it will not be taken from us again; the country will never be a colony again. The message is repeated three times in the twenty minutes that it takes Jonathan to drive us home. In between the repeated message there are songs of histrionic patriotism, including one that I have not heard before in which the singer extols the President as a direct descendant of Christ and i
mplores the Almighty to grant long life to him, to his wife and to all his children.
As Jonathan winds into the open gate to the driveway of our garden, the women gathered in the front of the house see us and begin a persistent keening. They are echoed by more women who pour out of the house, jumping in little paroxysms of grief. They cry out, ‘Peter woye, nhai Peter, Peter kani, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter.’ They tear the air with a thousand Peters, each one a crescendo building onto the next. My paternal aunt MaiLisa outdoes them all as she hops first on one leg, then the other, bends low from her waist, raises herself and puts her hands on her head and wails with her face to the sky, tears streaming from her eyes as underarm sweat dampens the light-coloured fabric of her dress. She nearly fells my mother as she embraces her. She almost knocked me over yesterday, so when I see her propelling herself towards me, I head off and envelop myself in the keening of the collected family daughters-in-law. They are the official criers, and they begin the ritual chanting and invocation of Peter’s name.
‘We will not see him again, uhuu.’
‘Why have you left us, oh my father, yuwi?’
‘You have left us alone, and bereft, yuwi.’
‘Regard your mother, she is bereft and inconsolable.’
‘You are too cruel, Peter, come back Peter, kani.’
‘Who shall care for us now that you have left, uhuu?’
The men of the family follow behind, maintaining a distance from this rigorous mourning, this business of women. The sound of grieving tears the air until the moment is over and they want to know what happened.
‘Peter’s body did not arrive,’ Jonathan explains.
This does not satisfy the relatives, and the questions remain. MaiLisa is silent now that explanations are required. She had passed on the message from her daughter Lisa in England, Peter is coming home, she said. Now that Peter is not here, and we want to know what happened, she discovers that she is needed in the kitchen and is now commanding the family daughters-in-law. Their non-agnatic status in the family means that not only are theirs the lungs that provide the loudest mourning, theirs are also the hands that cook and clean at family gatherings. We can get nothing from her beyond ‘I know only what I have told you. Lisa is there. Why estimate the length of a snake using the bark of a tree when the creature is right there for you to measure?’
Lisa calls that evening to explain that when she had told her mother that Peter would be on the morning flight, she had meant only that there was merely a possibility of him being on the flight. She did not actually tell her mother it was a certainty. The situation is more complicated than she thought, she says. In fact, Peter might not be home for some days. She has travelled up to Birmingham from London, she says, but she cannot stay. There will be a post-mortem, Lisa says. Peter died in an area with many junkies. It was a week after he died before he was identified. And it seemed there would be at least one week, possibly two, before he can come home. There may well be two post-mortems, if they charge anyone with his death.
In the meantime, his remains congeal in the drawer of a mortuary in a foreign land. And while his body is there, the family has gathered here to bury their child. Outside, the men of the family sit around the fire keeping a vigil while they argue over whether Motor Action or Caps United deserves to top the national soccer league. There is no hope for Dynamos under its present management, they agree. Inside the house, the women sing of the transient nature of our earthly presence. ‘Hatina musha panyika,’ they sing as they wait to see Peter in his coffin before they can undam the full outpouring of their grief. They cannot mourn him fully without seeing his body. He came from the dust and to dust he must return to be interred whole, intact. They are all here, my grandfather’s brother, my father’s nephews and nieces, the agnatic aunts and uncles as well as the aunts and uncles by marriage. They continue to arrive, preparing their faces to meet the faces that they will meet, composing their faces to masks of mourning as soon as they glimpse the gates to our house. They let go then, wailing at the top of their voices, falling into each other’s arms as they stagger in little dances of grief. Then the moment of emotion over, they ask after one another’s health and that of their families, and their thoughts turn to food.
And in this matter of food lies our anguish.
We cannot feed them all if they continue to pour out like this, and if we must host them for an unknown number of days. We cannot be sure how long it will take to bring Peter home. The small pile of chema funeral donations in a bowl on the kitchen table, grubby notes laced with the sweat of many hands, is barely enough to pay for three days’ supply of black market milk and bread and sugar. Already the relatives on the paternal side who have the authority to command the daughters-in-law march into the kitchen and demand to know when the feeding will begin. But how to tell people: please go away, we have not started officially to mourn? They have spent money to get here; the old aunts from Shurugwi have taken out their notes from the old pots in which they keep their money. And then to tell them, please, find more money, go away for now and come back later, wearing your most sorrowful faces.
We cannot issue an invitation to a funeral like it is a wedding.
And even as we cannot bury Peter without our relatives, the relatives bring complications beyond the pressing matter of food. They do not accept our decision to bury Peter here in Harare. They will not listen to Jonathan as he explains how fortunate we are to have a burial site, how we had to bribe a council official and still pay double the market price. They insist that our customs dictate that Peter be buried with my father and other ancestors hundreds of kilometres away in Shurugwi. Great-uncle Matyaya who arrived last night has been the most insistent. He trembled with passion as he grasped the rounded end of his walking stick and thumped it on the floor in emphasis. ‘Is it not bad enough that Peter died mhiri kwemakungwa, over the oceans where the baleful influence of alien spirits could not be discounted? Never before’, he said, ‘has a son of Chikwiro been buried away from the land of his ancestors.’ Jonathan has reached his limits and has to restrain himself from saying to the fathers of the clan that if they want to bury him in Shurugwi, they have to pay for the bus to ferry the mourners there.
‘The only good thing about Father’s death’, Peter had said in his careless way, ‘is that we will not have to put up with his tiresome relations.’ We learned soon enough that this prediction was premature. Death does not sever the ties; it binds them ever tighter, for it is in death and its attendant processes that kinship asserts its triumphant claims. He had been loaned to us as husband and father, but in death the clan reclaimed him. They buried him in Shurugwi, where we had to travel for hours on uncertain roads if we wanted to visit his grave. Kinship asserted itself through the funeral rites, in the ceremony to release his spirit, and in the accompanying ceremony of inheritance. His family had even attempted to speak on his behalf. They consulted a diviner who interceded between this world and the next: Father did not rest easy, was his uncompromising verdict. It appeared that the reasons for his discomfort were mainly financial.
‘He wants the money that he left behind to be divided between his children and the brothers and sisters of his blood,’ MaiLisa pronounced.
But my father’s spirit, however restless, could not undo the will that he had written and signed in his own hand. And when the Master of the High Court pronounced this as the final word, the aunts and uncles could only curl their mouths into their noses.
They are here, now, the aunts and uncles. They are determined that we meet the costs of their expectations, but that we bear the burden alone just as we shared my father’s inheritance without them. Jonathan is particularly worried about the fuel. He drives at a moderate speed to conserve it. There are snaking queues at the garages, people sleep in their cars, unsure of the hour the fuel will arrive. The garage attendants are endlessly optimistic, the fuel will arrive if not just now, then some time this week. But the queues only grow longer as the attendants become more hop
eful. Jonathan is afraid that we may not have enough to last the week. The garages give priority to funeral parties, but they have become wise to the tricks of conmen who pretend to be part of funeral processions and then sell on the fuel at inflated prices. One man even feigned death, almost suffocating in his coffin to get his precious fluid. The attendants insist on seeing the death certificates of the deceased. We have no death certificate, and we will have none unless Lisa comes through for us.
Lisa is the daughter of our father’s sister, she calls me mainini, little mother, and she calls Jonathan and Peter her uncles. Her mother takes every opportunity to tell us of her latest success.
‘Lisa has bought herself a car.’
‘Lisa has moved into a bigger flat.’
‘Lisa is flying to America, to Canada, to Italy, to France.’
‘She has sent money just today, two hundred and fifty billion dollars she sent, it is only two hundred pounds, just imagine. She insists that I go on a holiday, but I told her, no, my child, not on four teachers’ annual salary. I said a new stove is more important. Can you believe that she sent more money, five hundred billion dollars? Just imagine. I will buy a new fridge from Radio Limited.’
But of Lisa herself we see very little. She has only been home once in the four years since she went away. She was here two Christmases ago, resplendent in her plastic hair and tight-fitting clothes. She brought us a tray decorated with the names and faces of the kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth Windsor, and presented it as though it was the one thing needful in our unravelling lives. She chatted brightly about England in her new accent; she pronounces our city’s first letter as haitch. The sun was too hot, she complained, and she had only been back for two weeks but goodness, wasn’t she becoming dark. ‘Oh but everyone here is so dark,’ she said.
An Elegy for Easterly Page 5
