An Elegy for Easterly

by Petina Gappah

  Bishop Muzorewa’s voice boomed out across the township. ‘Vote for the internal settlement. Vote for an end to war. Vote for schools, for electricity, for a future for you and me.’ The next time we heard his voice again was on the radio, when he was announced as the new Prime Minister of our new country, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.

  The war continued in the nine months that we lived in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and we did not leave Salisbury. SekuruLazarus told us that there would be meetings in England to end the war, in a building called Lancaster House, meetings between the guerrillas, and the old white government and the new black and white government. As the year ended, we heard that the talks had ended and there were to be more elections, this time with the guerrillas taking part.

  We did not go to Mr Vaswani’s shop again, but Juliana brought us news of the schism that had developed between him and his brother. ‘Handiti, you know the brother never really comes to the shop,’ Mainin’Juliana said, ‘but today he was there half the time, and when there were no customers, they were shouting at each other all day.

  ‘The brother said he wants to go to South Africa. We can’t just leave, this is our home, your son was born here, said Mr Vaswani. Home nothing, look at Uganda said his brother. Don’t take the boy, leave the boy, said Mr Vaswani, and the brother said, he is coming with us, then Mr Vaswani said, who will take over the shops, and the brother said, he is my son, Sanjiv, not my fault you and Suri can’t have children.’

  ‘They should consult healers to open the wife’s womb,’ my grandmother said and SekuruLazarus pulled his mouth into a moue and made a sound of disgust and said all Indians should just go back to India if they were so afraid of our independence.

  The new elections put Mr Vaswani out of our minds. Everyone said this would mean real independence. My grandmother found herself singing the songs of the moment. ‘Na nana ayiyaye Zimbabwe. Africa ayiawo Zimbabwe’ along with Bob Marley became one of the familiar sounds of our house. She was not the only one with Zimbabwe on her lips.

  ‘From tomorrow onwards,’ our neighbour on the left informed SekuruLazarus, ‘my business will no longer be called Trymore Panel Beaters, but Zimbabwe Panel Beaters.’ Not to be outdone, the man who collected bottles from Mufakose to Glen Norah followed suit, but could only manage Zimbab above the already present Bottle Collectors, unable to fit the rest on the small space of his pushcart.

  Throughout the changes visible and invisible that were occurring all around us, my uncle continued kupaumba. ‘I will never vote for UANC,’ he said, ‘ZAPU is the party to beat. Joshua Nkomo was there from the beginning. Imagine it, Prime Minister Joshua Nkomo, hela!’

  Not even SekuruLazarus swallowed independence with such gasping thirst as my aunt Juliana. She told us of the gutsaruzhinji that the guerrillas would bring, the socialism, she said, that meant that there would be no servants and masters, no oppression because everyone would be the same. ‘There will be none of this business like you and your madam,’ she said to Susan. ‘MuIndia had better be careful. If he doesn’t watch it, something will happen.’

  Mainin’Juliana planned all the things that would happen. ‘He will have to give us higher wages. We will not work on Saturdays. And with more money, I can do my secretarial.’

  ‘Juliana, I smell a burning pot,’ said my grandmother.

  We ate our sadza and leaf vegetables with charred black meat that night, but we dreamed along with Mainin’Juliana and shared SekuruLazarus’s certainty that the Prime Minister would be Joshua Nkomo. Only Susan doubted that the changes would change her life. ‘It may well be that there will be this socialism, Juliana,’ she said, ‘but I can tell you right now that no amount of socialism will make my madam wash her own underwear.’

  Two days before the elections, we went back to Mr Vaswani’s shop to buy shoes for Danai. ‘It’s like you have fertiliser in your feet,’ SekuruLazarus said to him. Mainin’Juliana had promised us pork pies, and we were looking forward to this treat.

  Mr Vaswani’s voice stopped us as we left. ‘Now, now, Juliana, what is this, where are you going?’

  ‘You said I could leave early today, I have to take the children home,’ she said.

  ‘Well, yes, but you look now, there are so wary many customers.’

  ‘I am going,’ Mainin’Juliana said. ‘That was the agreement.’

  As she turned to go, Mr Vaswani pulled on the sleeve of her jersey. There was a cry from Mrs Vaswani. The next thing we saw was Mr Vaswani lying on the floor of the shop, blood streaming from his nose, his spectacles beside him, the right eyeglass smashed. Still crying, Mr Vaswani’s wife ran out of the shop, a bright pink whirl into the street. She returned just minutes later with a policeman who marched us all to the Charge Office, Mr Vaswani with a handkerchief to his nose, Mrs Vaswani clucking beside him, Mainin’Juliana on the policeman’s arm and Danai and I following, Danai clutching his shoes to his chest.

  The Charge Office was a confused mass of policemen in red-brown shining shoes and khaki uniforms, and people complaining about crime, people accused of crime, and people enquiring about people accused of crime. ‘Just sign an admission of guilt, and the whole thing will be over,’ the policeman who arrested Juliana said to her in Shona.

  The old Mainin’Juliana may have done that, but this new Mainin’Juliana was drunk on gutsaruzhinji. ‘Handina mhosva,’ she shouted. ‘I have done no wrong. This is Zimbabwe this, we left Rhodesia behind. I will do it again if I have to.’

  ‘You see how she is threatening me,’ said Mr Vaswani. He glowered at Juliana through the still intact left eyeglass. ‘Arrest her, arrest her.’

  ‘Arrest me, arrest me,’ said Mainin’Juliana. ‘If you don’t, ndinomuita kanyama kanyama, you will have to sweep him from these Charge Office floors. Arrest me, arrest me.’

  She was arrested.

  And this is how Mainin’Juliana spent three of Rhodesia’s dying days at Salisbury Remand Prison.

  SekuruLazarus was wrong: the new Prime Minister was not Joshua Nkomo after all. After the results were announced, the people on our street crowded into our neighbour’s house to watch Prime Minister Robert Mugabe on television. He said it was a time for reconciliation, for turning swords into ploughshares. He said we should reach out our hands in friendship so that black and white could work together to build the new country. Perhaps Mr Vaswani, though neither black nor white, watched the Prime Minister’s address too, because two weeks later, he sent Timothy to tell Mainin’Juliana that she could have her job back if she wanted it.

  ‘Ende futi MuIndia thinks he is funny,’ she said after her first day back in the shop. ‘He is now saying to people that if they steal, he will set me on them. She will beat you like she beat me, he says.’

  It took her another three years to achieve her dream, but eventually, Mainin’Juliana got a job as a typist at the Ministry of Employment Creation. Mr Vaswani was there with his wife, clapping beside Timothy, SekuruLazarus, my grandmother, my parents and Danai and me when Mainin’Juliana received her secretarial diploma.

  ‘No room for layabouts in this world,’ he said again to Danai and me. ‘See how hard your auntie works.’

  We continued to remind Mainin’Juliana about the day she punched Mr Vaswani. Even after she married, and put violence behind her as a staunch pillar of the Anointed Church of the Sacred Lamb, she never quite shook off the reaches of the past, so that even her husband used the incident to cajole their children into behaving. ‘Your mother is a boxer,’ he said. ‘She will deck you like she decked that Indian.’

  Mr Vaswani became as much a part of her children’s lives as he had been a part of ours. She took them to the shop like she had taken us, only she went as a valued customer the week before the school term. She often came back complaining that Mr Vaswani was getting soft in his old age. ‘It is bad management practice to give so many freedoms to employees,’ she said.

  When she died, Mr Vaswani came to her funeral. He sat with the men of the family while the women whispered his nam
e. When the mourning became too heavy, we laughed at the many ridiculous episodes of her life. We asked one of the family daughters-in-law to imitate the actions of the deceased. Her fist punched the air and the room rang with our laughter as she acted out, without prompting, the right hook that Mainin’Juliana gave to Mr Vaswani.

  The Cracked, Pink Lips of Rosie’s Bridegroom

  The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie’s bridegroom. They look at Rosie’s own lips that owe their reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. Can Rosie see what they see, they wonder, that her newly made husband’s sickness screams out its presence from every pore? Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair; it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin.

  He smiles often, Rosie’s bridegroom. He smiles when a drunken aunt entertains the guests with a dance that, outside this celebration of sanctioned fornication, could be called obscene. He smiles when an uncle based in Manchester, England, calls on the mobile telephone of his son and sends his congratulations across nine thousand kilometres shortened by Vodafone on his end and Econet on the other. His smile broadens as the son tells the master of ceremonies that the uncle pledges two hundred pounds as a wedding gift; the smile becomes broader still when the master of ceremonies announces that the gift is worth two hundred million dollars on Harare’s parallel market. He smiles and smiles and smiles and his smile reveals the heightened colour of his gums.

  The wedding guests sit in the rented marquee from Rooney’s. It is resplendent in the wedding colours chosen by Rosie, cream and buttermilk, with gold to provide the contrast. They chew rice and chicken on the bone and wash it down with mouthfuls of bottled fizzy drinks, beer and an intensive colloquy on Rosie’s bridegroom’s reputation.

  This is his second marriage, everyone knows.

  He buried one wife already, even Rosie knows.

  What Rosie doesn’t know: he also buried two girlfriends, possibly more.

  The evidentiary weight of his appearance, circumstantial in isolation, is corroborated not only by the death of one wife and two girlfriends, but by other incidents in the life of Rosie’s bridegroom.

  For instance: it is known that he was often in the company of Mercy, now deceased, formerly of Glen View Three, notorious Mercy with men from here to Kuwadzana.

  Another thing: he drank nightly at the illegal she-been at MaiTatenda’s house, with MaiTatenda who has one Tatenda and no BabaTatenda, MaiTatenda who provided her clients with home comforts and then some, MaiTatenda who was seen only last week, just skin and bones, coughing-coughing and shivering in this sweltering December. One doesn’t want to be unkind of course, they say, but that is what happens to whores who wrap their legs around men that are not their husbands.

  And finally, incontrovertibly: Rosie’s bridegroom’s car was seen parked outside the house of a prophet who lives in Muhacha Crescent in Warren Park, he of the hands that can drive out the devil Satan who has chosen to appear as an incurable virus in their midst. This prophet has placed an advert in all the newspapers. He responded to that advert, Rosie’s new husband, he must have, for his car, the silver Toyota Camry that was always in front of MaiTatenda’s house, was seen outside the house of the prophet.

  ‘Is any Sick among You,’ the advert says, ‘Let him call for the Elders of the Church; and let them Pray over him, Anointing him with Oil in the Name of the Lord. And the Prayer of Faith shall save the sick, JAMES 5:14–15. Jesus of Nazareth Saves,’ the advert says. ‘Come to have His healing Hands placed upon your Troubled Hearts. All Illnesses Cured. For Nothing Is Too Hard for Yahweh, GENESIS 18:14.’

  There is but one disease that drives men to turn their Toyota Camrys, their Mercedes Benzes, Pajeros, BMWs in the direction of Warren Park. There is only one illness that pushes both the well-wheeled and un-wheeled to seek out the prophet. It is the big disease with the little name, the sickness that no one dies of, the disease whose real name is unspoken, the sickness that speaks its presence through the pink redness of lips, the slipperiness of hair, through the whites of the eyes whiter than nature intended.

  They are gifted with prophecy, the wedding guests, they look at Rosie’s bridegroom’s lips and in them see Rosie’s fate. She will die first, of course, for that is the pattern, the woman first, and then the man. The woman first, leaving the man to marry again, to marry another woman who will also die first. They will keen loudly at Rosie’s wake; they will fall into each other’s arms. Their first tears shed, they will talk of the manner of her death.

  In the public spaces they will say: She just fell sick. Just like that, no warning, nothing. She woke up in the morning; she prepared food for the family. Around eleven she said: My head, my head. And by the time she should have cooked the supper, she was gone. So quickly, they will say. No one can comprehend the speed with which it happened. It burdens the heart, they will say. Where have you heard that a person dies from a headache?

  But in the dark corners away from the public spaces they will say: Haiwa, we knew all along. Her death was there in the bright pink lips of her bridegroom, how far did she think it could go? Remember the first wife, remember Mercy, remember MaiTatenda, remember the two girlfriends, possibly more? How far did she think it would go?

  But that day is still far, it is not here, it is not now. Here and now, the wedding guests clap and cheer and sneer as Rosie dances with her new husband. They pass rice and chicken through their own reddened mouths, and complain that there is not enough to eat, not enough to drink. The master of ceremonies cries enko, enko, and the wedding guests dance.

  My Cousin-Sister Rambanai

  My cousin-sister Rambanai came back from America with two suitcases crammed with too-tight clothes in vivid shades of pink and a new accent. The clothes eventually faded from frequent washes with Cold Power and from hanging in the harshness of the Harare sun, but the accent did not. Her new voice rose and fell in our house as she talked of her life in the States, the problems she had juggling her nine-to-five job with an insurance broker in downtown Dallas and her hectic social life, the leaky fawcet in her duplex. ‘Take this route,’ she said, only she pronounced it rout instead of root. And our housemaid SisiDessy said to her friend Memory the housemaid from next door that Rambanai sounded just like someone on television.

  As the daughter of my father’s younger brother, my uncle Ba’muniniBa’Thomas, Rambanai was my sister in Shona, my cousin in English, and in Shonglish, my cousin-sister. Both she and her older brother Thomas lived outside the country but only she came back to bury their father. Instead of coming, Thomas wired seven hundred and fifty pounds through Western Union from Manchester, England where he lived.

  ‘Five years. Five whole years without coming home, not even to bury a father, heh,’ said my uncle’s wife, my uncle’s second wife. She was the mother of my twin cousin-brothers Tadiwa and Tadiswa, but not Thomas and Rambanai. ‘Is this the behaviour of a responsible son? Handiye nevanji? Is it not he, as the new head of the household, who is supposed to be here?’

  For all that she complained, it was the money that Thomas sent that enabled the family to bury my uncle in the splendour of the Paradise Peace Casket, a gleaming white coffin with golden handles and a gold frame on the surface into which my aunt put a photograph of my uncle in his University of Leeds graduation cap and gown. When VateteMaiMazvita complimented my aunt on the magnificence of the coffin, my aunt blew her nose and swallowed back a sob to say, ‘It is a casket Vatete, not a coffin. A casket.’ She covered her face in her handkerchief, and began again to sob softly into its black folds.

  Rambanai had not been particularly close to her father. His forbidding exterior made it impossible for anyone to feel any warmth towards him. When I was a little girl and my uncle’s first wife was alive, she had a picture of Jesus on their living room wall. His limpid blue eyes would follow me everywhere. Under
the flowing hair, the all-seeing eyes and the pink and blue robes of Jesus were these words: ‘I am the silent guest at every meal. I am the silent witness to every action. I am the silent listener to every conversation.’ The menace in the words alarmed me and sometimes, after we had visited their house in Mount Pleasant, I woke up screaming that Jesus was in the room and he could hear me breathe. As the picture hung above his favourite seat, I associated the omnipotence of Jesus with Ba’muniniBa’Thomas, who sat there without talking, never once laughing in all the time that I knew him, only responding with a grunt when we clapped our hands to him in the traditional way and asked after his health at the beginning of every visit.

  The only time he said anything of any length was at the beginning and the end of each term when he sat us down, Rambanai, Thomas, my brother Godi and me, and gave us all a lecture; it was always the same lecture. In his deep slow voice, he called us by name, one by one from the eldest to the youngest.

  ‘Godfrey. Thomas. Matilda. And you, Rambanai. You must understand, children,’ he said, ‘the value of education. Every parent hopes that his children will be better off than he was. Every parent looks to education to achieve that hope. Remember, children, the value of education.’

  This was the speech he gave, and nothing beyond this, so that when I saw him lying in his coffin during the body viewing on the night that he spent atop the coffee table in the living room, it seemed as though in just a matter of minutes he would raise himself to talk about education before sinking back into his usual silence.