An Elegy for Easterly

by Petina Gappah

  Your maid brings you morning tea in bed. She says she did this with the British High Commissioner’s wife, remember to call him Ambassador. You drink your tea at leisure because you do not have to work. Your husband is the Director in the Treasury Department of a Big Merchant Bank. ‘We have branches all over Africa,’ their adverts say, ‘but our roots are here in Zimbabwe.’

  You call your maid Joyce and she calls you Madam. You don’t admit this to anyone, even to yourself, but you employed her only because she worked for the British High Commissioner remember to call him the British Ambassador before he was asked to leave the country for stating the obvious in a country where the truth can be spoken only in the private chambers of the mind.

  ‘She makes flaky puff pastry that is as light as a feather,’ you say to your friends as you drink afternoon tea. They complain about their maids, and you listen and chime in with stories of maids that you have employed, maids that you have sacked and maids that have stolen from you.

  ‘Maidei stole my Ferragamo shoes,’ you say. This happened five years ago, but the incident still rankles. Joyce is not Maidei, she is coming along nicely, you think, you hope because you could not bear to go through another maid; you have been through thirty-five. After you drink the morning tea that she brings you, you get up, but you may as well lie in because in the golden triangle there are never enough things to do.

  You spend the day looking for ways to fill in the hours, to stretch them out so that they run into each other. There are brunches and lunches, and teas, and dinners. You have eaten through the menu at Amanzi and Imba Matombo. There are tombolas and cake-bakes and bring-and-buys. There are concerts at your son’s school.

  Your son was in the same class as the President’s son, before the President complained about the fees and withdrew his son to be home-schooled. Your son goes to a school that was too expensive for the President. It gives you a thrill, just to think about it.

  You leave the house, alternating your BMW with your Range Rover. The security guard whose name you can never remember almost breaks his leg as he runs to stand by the gate which does not need to be opened because it is automatic and electric. He salutes you as you drive out. You head out to the school to listen to your son play the piano. He misses most of the notes. Mrs Robinson, the music teacher from England, sits with a tight smile on her face, but you don’t notice it. You drive with your son to Sam Levy’s. You talk on your phone while he bullies other children off the jumping castle.

  And you think, Maybe I should do some shopping.

  There is very little shopping in the golden triangle. You buy your milk and bread at Honeydew. In the supermarket, every month, you buy three hampers in bright colours, hampers carefully chosen to approximate the basic needs of your maid, gardener and security guard: Perfection soap and coarse maize meal, cooking oil and dry beans, corned beef ground from the unmentionable parts of the cow, dried matemba fish that taste of nothing but fish bones and brains, Lifebuoy soap.

  There is nothing in the shops for you.

  When you want to shop, you fly out, out of the triangle and up, up on the wings of freedom, on South African Airways you travel together with the wives of Cabinet ministers who do all their grocery shopping in Johannesburg, even as their husbands promise to end food shortages. There you buy your proudly South African products in Rosebank and Sandton because as you said to your friend Bertha last year, Eastgate has become just too cheap. You sat behind the First Lady on your last flight.

  She flipped through True Love magazine.

  Your eyes met as you passed to take your seat.

  You did not like her eye make-up.

  In the golden triangle your children speak only English, English sentences that all begin ‘Mummy I want …’, ‘Mummy can you buy me …’, ‘Mummy where is daddy?’ Daddy is often not there, he is out doing the deals and playing the golf that ensures that you continue to live in the golden triangle. You say this to the children, but your son is old enough to know that golf is not played in the pitch blackness of the night. You stop his questions with a shout. He turns and locks himself in his room.

  You breathe out your remorse at yelling at your son but you cannot tell him the truth. That you share your husband with another woman.

  Imbadiki, she is called. That is not her real name; that only means she inhabits the small house while you live in the big one in the heart of the golden triangle. Her name is Sophia. She is twenty-five years younger than your husband. You know this because you had your husband followed. Not that he even tried to hide it. No man can be expected to be faithful, he has said often enough. It is not nature’s intention. He said the same thing to you when you met in secret away from the eyes of his first wife.

  And as you gasped beneath him, above him and beside him, as he put his hands on your haunches and drew you to him, you agreed, no man could be expected to be faithful, yes, you said, oh yes, you said, just like that, you said, right there. You are fifteen years younger than he is, and his wife before you was five years younger than he was. You go to the gym, where you have a girl who plucks the hair out of your eyebrows, and the hair from under your arms, and the hair from your pubis. You pay someone to scrub your feet and to pummel you with hot stones.

  The small house cannot become the big house.

  You worry because you have not found condoms in his pockets. You find yourself hoping that he keeps them in the small house. You watch for the tell-tale signs of illness which crosses over into the golden triangle and touches your gardener Timothy and your security guard whose name you can never remember. They both have the red lips that speak their status. The only red lips you want are from lipstick but you fear that you may have them too if your husband continues to establish small houses all over the city.

  You have parties in the golden triangle, where men braai meat and talk about business while you sit with other women and talk about, you are not really sure what you talk about. You see your friends at these parties, Laetitia, who used to be a teacher before she married a banker. Tendai, who used to be a model before she married a banker. Bertha who used to be a secretary before she married a banker. You talk about your old friend Norma who used to be the small house of a banker before she married him, and who was evicted from the golden triangle, and now lives in a house in Ashdown Park that has a yard of only a quarter of an acre.

  ‘Akadhingurwa Norma,’ you laugh about it when you are drunk with your friends and Oliver Mtukudzi is playing on the stereo. In all the malice of your Schadenfreude, you make it all about her, she was getting full of herself, Norma, you all agree. Away from your friends, the ice grips your heart and you work out twice as long at the gym to keep Norma’s fate from your door.

  You watch Timothy plant birds of paradise in the narrow space between the lawn and the driveway. You imagine the driveway lined with the flowers, driving through four hundred metres of birds of paradise, driving past their purple and orange plumes. You have the sudden urge to scream, but you don’t know why, all you know is that no one can hear if you scream behind your walls; your echoes will be absorbed in the verdancy of your garden, in the garden furniture that you imported from Italy. Your scream will bounce off your Jackson Munyeza tennis court to ripple silently in your Jackson Munyeza swimming pool.

  You see yourself at sixteen, always you go back to how you were at sixteen, surrounded by other schoolgirls in a world where achievement was everything. Who gets best marks, who can run the fastest, who can come up with the best tricks to plague the nuns. You were happy to see an old school friend the other day, and you fell into each other’s arms. Your voices rang out as you cried out in happy reminiscence.

  Do you remember, do you remember?

  She turned to your children and said, ‘Your mother was a really good discus thrower,’ and she turned to you and said it was nice to see you Catherine, and you did not tell her that your name was not Catherine, she had confused you with someone else because you did not throw the discus at all. />
  ‘It was the javelin,’ you say to yourself at the traffic lights. It is all you can do to stop yourself crying. ‘It was the javelin.’ High, high, flew the javelin, higher, always higher. The cars behind you honk. Moments later, you turn into Glenara. You drive over three potholes, one after the other, but in the cushioned comfort of your four-by-four, you don’t feel a thing.

  The Mupandawana Dancing Champion

  When the prices of everything went up ninety-seven times in one year, M’dhara Vitalis Mukaro came out of retirement to make the coffins in which we buried our dead. In a space of only six months, he became famous twice over, as the best coffin maker in the district and as the Mupandawana Dancing Champion.

  Fame is an elastic concept, especially in a place like this, where we all know the smells of each other’s armpits. Mupandawana, full name Gutu-Mupandawana Growth Point, is bigger than a village but it is not yet a town. I have become convinced that the government calls Mupandawana a growth point merely to divert us from the reality of our present squalor with optimistic predictions about our booming future. As it is not even a townlet, a townling, or half a fraction of a town, there was much rejoicing at a recent groundbreaking ceremony for a new row of Blair toilets when the District Commissioner shared with us his vision for town status for Mupandawana by the year 2065. Ours is one of the biggest growth points in the country, but the only real growth is in the number of people waiting to buy coffins, and the lengthening line of youngsters waiting to board the Wabuda Wanatsa buses blasting Chimbetu songs all the way to Harare.

  You will not find me joining that queue out of Mupandawana. When the Ministry despatched me here to teach at the local secondary, I was relieved to escape the headaches of Harare with its grasping women who will not let go until your wallet is empty. Mupandawana is the perfect place from which to study life, which appears to me to be no more than the punchline to a cosmic joke played by a particularly mordant being.

  So I observe life, and teach geography to schoolchildren whose only interest in my subject is knowledge of the exact distance between Mupandawana and London, Mupandawana and Johannesburg, Mupandawana and Gaborone, Mupandawana and Harare. If I cared enough, I would tell them that there is nothing there to rush for, kumhunga hakuna ipwa, as my late mother used to say.

  But let them go, they shall find out soon enough.

  Mine is not a lonely life. In those moments when solitude quarrels with me, I enjoy the company of my two friends, Jeremiah, who teaches agriculture, and Bobojani who goes where Jeremiah goes. And then there are the Growth Pointers, as I call them, the people of Mupandawana whose lives prove my theory that life is one big jest at the expense of humanity.

  Take M’dhara Vitalis, the coffin maker.

  Before he retired, he worked in a furniture factory in Harare. He had been trained in the old days, M’dhara Vitalis told us on the first occasion Jeremiah, Bobojani and I drank with him. ‘If the leg of one of my chairs had got you in the head, vapfanha, you would have woken up to tell your story in heaven,’ he said. ‘The President sits in one of my chairs. Real oak, vapfanha. I made furniture from oak, teak, mahogany, cedar, ash chaiyo, even Oregon pine. Not these zhing-zhong products from China. They may look nice and flashy but they will crack in a minute.’

  On this mention of China, Bobo made a joke about the country becoming Zhim-Zhim-Zhimbabwe because the ruling party had sold the country to the Chinese. Not to be outdone, Jeremiah said, ‘A group of Zanu PF supporters arrives at the pearly gates. Saint Peter is greatly shocked, and goes to consult God. God says, but ruling party supporters are also my children. Saint Peter goes to fetch them, but rushes back alone shouting they’ve gone, they’ve gone. How can the ruling party supporters just disappear, says God. I am talking about the pearly gates, says Peter.’

  We laughed, keeping our voices low because the District Commissioner was seated in the corner below the window.

  M’dhara Vitalis had looked forward to setting down the tools of his trade and retiring to answer the call of the land. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ he was often heard to say to the fellows who idled around Mupandawana. ‘You have no jobs so you can plough your fields.’

  He had spent so much time in Harare that he appeared not to see that the rows to be ploughed were stony; when the rains came, there was no seed, and when there was seed, there were no rains. Even those like Jeremiah who liked farming so much so that they had swallowed books all the way to the agricultural college at Chibhero had turned their backs on the land, in Jeremiah’s case, by choosing to teach the theory of farming to children who, given even an eighth of a chance, would sooner choose the lowliest messenger jobs in the cities than a life of tilling the land.

  M’dhara Vitalis was forced to retire three years earlier than anticipated. His employer told him that the company was shutting down because they could not afford the foreign currency. There would not be money for a pension, he was told, the money had been invested in a bank whose directors had run off with it kwazvakarehwa to England. He had been allowed to keep his overalls, and had been given some of the tools that he had used in the factory. And because the owner was also closing down another factory, one that manufactured shoes, M’dhara Vitalis and all the other employees were each given three pairs of shoes.

  Jeremiah, Bobo and I saw him as he got off the Wabuda Wanatsa bus from Harare. ‘Thirty years, vakomana,’ he said to us, as he shook his head. ‘You work thirty years for one company and this is what you get. Shuwa, shuwa, pension yebhutsu. Heh? Shoes, instead of a pension. Shoes. These, these …’

  The words caught in his throat.

  ‘Ende futi dzinoshinya, all the pairs are half a size too small for me,’ he added when he had recovered his voice. We commiserated with him as best we could. We poured out all the feeling contained in our hearts.

  ‘Sorry, M’dhara,’ I said.

  ‘Rough, M’dhara,’ said Jeremiah.

  ‘Tight,’ said Bobojani.

  We watched him walk off carefully in his snug-fitting shoes, the plastic bag with the other two pairs dangling from his left hand.

  ‘Pension yebhutsu,’ Jeremiah said, and, even as we pitied him, we laughed until tears ran down Jeremiah’s cheeks and we had to pick Bobojani off the ground.

  For all that he did not have a real pension, M’dhara Vitalis was happy to retire. Some three kilometres from the growth point was the homestead that he had built with money earned from the factory, with three fields for shifting cultivation. Between them, he and his wife managed well enough, somehow making do until the drought came in two consecutive years and inflation zoomed and soared and spun the roof off the country. M’dhara Vitalis went back to Harare to look for another job, but who wanted an old man like him when there were millions unemployed? He looked around Mupandawana and was fortunate to find work making coffins. M’dhara Vitalis was so efficient that he made a small contribution to the country’s rising unemployment – his employer found it convenient to fire two other carpenters. And that was how he became known as the coffin maker with the nimblest fingers this side of the Great Dyke.

  We had seen his hands at work, but of his nimble feet and his acrobatics on the dance floors of Harare, we had only heard. As the person who told us these stories was the man himself, there was reason to believe that he spoke as one who ululated in his own praise. As Jeremiah said, ‘There is too much seasoning in M’dhara Vita’s stories.’

  All his exploits seemed to have taken place in the full glare of the public light. ‘I danced at Copa-cabana, Job’s Night Spot and the Aquatic Complex. There is one night I will never forget when I danced at Mushandirapamwe and the floor cleared of dancers. All that the people could do was to stand and watch. Vakamira ho-o,’ he told us. We laughed into our beers, Jeremiah, Bobojani and I, but, as we soon came to see, we laughed too much and we laughed too soon.

  M’dhara Vita’s employer was the Member of Parliament for our area. As befitting such a man of the people, the Honourable had a stake in
the two most thriving enterprises in the growth point, so that the profits from Kurwiragono Investments t/a No Matter Funeral Parlour and Coffin Suppliers accumulated interest in the same bank account as those from Kurwiragono Investments t/a Why Leave Guesthouse and Disco-Bar. And being one on whom fortune had smiled, our Honourable could naturally not confine his prosperous seed to only one woman. Why Leave was managed by Felicitas, the Honourable’s fourth wife, a generous sort who had done her bit to make a good number of men happy before she settled into relative domesticity with the Honourable. As one of those happy men, I retained very fond memories of her, and often stepped into the Guesthouse for a drink and to pass the time. She always had an eye out for the next chance, Felicitas, which is how she came to replace me with the Honourable, and she decided that what the bar needed was a dancing competition.

  The first I knew of it was not from Felicitas herself, but when I saw groups of dust-covered schoolchildren at break time dancing the kongonya. Now, the sexually suggestive kongonya is the dance of choice at ruling party gatherings, so that I thought that they must be practising for a visit from yet another dignitary. Later that evening as I passed the Guesthouse I saw another crowd of children dancing the kongonya, while another pointed to the wall of the building. Intrigued by this random outbreak of kongonya in the youth of Mupandawana, I approached the Guesthouse. The youngsters scattered on my approach, and I saw that they had been admiring a poster on which was portrayed the silhouette outline of a couple captured in mid-dance. The man’s back was bent so far that his head almost touched the ground, while his female partner, of a voluptuousness that put me in mind of Felicitas, had her hands on her knees with her bottom almost touching the ground.