Still, he was Rambanai’s father, and I expected that she would be grieved at his passing; a father was a father, after all, even one as unsmiling as Ba’muniniBa’Thomas. I did not expect, however, that she would send wails across Immigration and Customs as soon as she saw us. We looked down at her from the observation platform at the airport, with my parents, my aunt and small cousin-brothers we saw her disembark from the aeroplane, cast her face towards us and break into a loud keening that startled the cluster of white visitors waiting in line immediately in front of her. She wept so loudly in the long, slow queue to get her passport stamped that one of the government officials ended up taking her by the arm and fast-tracking her away from the tourists.
In the kitchen, our housemaid SisiDessy whispered to VateteMaiMazvita that Rambanai looked just like her idea of someone who had come from overseas. Having been in America for five years without coming home, she was the star at the funeral; everyone wanted to look at her. She would have given the mourners much to talk about, but she gave them more than they needed. She put her hands to her head. She made as though to jump into the grave. She cried out for her father in a voice hoarse with weeping.
‘We all know how hard it is to lose a father, handiti,’ VateteMaiMazvita said, ‘but surely, this is too much, munhu unochemavoka zvine yeyo. Where have you seen a daughter weeping more than the wife?’
At my uncle’s funeral, a special eye was kept on his widow, both to give comfort – and for fear that she might do herself harm. The consensus at my uncle’s funeral was that a particularly vigilant eye should also be kept on the daughter, so a younger aunt and I were given the duty of staying with her. In the middle of the night of the day that we buried my uncle, I woke to the sound of a commotion. I looked on the bed and got up when I saw the depressed space where Rambanai’s body should have been. I followed the voices outside. I found Rambanai standing in a knot with other women. Their eyes were on my uncle’s widow. Two women held her arms as she wailed with her face to the heavens, the Zambia cotton wrapper that was normally tucked securely around her waist folded into a thick rope around her neck. ‘I will do it, leave me be. There is no reason now for me to live,’ she cried. ‘Waenda waenda, waenda murume wangu waenda.’
‘She tried to hang herself off that tree there,’ Rambanai said to me as I joined her. She pointed at a peach tree with long thin branches barely able to support the weight of its own fruit.
My aunt was persuaded to go back inside, and after this excessive, if belated, outpouring of grief wept only when the new mourners arrived. Nor did Rambanai equal her own performance at the grave-side. It was only later that I understood that Rambanai had been in mourning not only for her father, but also for the death of her American dream.
After the funeral, Rambanai stayed a week, three weeks, one month, five months, eleven. She stayed so long that the question, vakadii vekuStates, moved from vachadzokera riiniko vekuStates to kuti vachadzokera vekuStates. ‘Should not your cousin-sister have gone back to Dallas by now?’ my boyfriend Jimmy asked me. ‘If she stays any longer, she will be here for the kurova guva ceremony,’ he added, referring to the ceremony that was performed exactly a year after a person’s death. I did not answer; I was too busy laughing and trying to stop him from taking my bra off as he drove.
In the eleven months that followed Ba’muniniBa’Thomas’s funeral, Rambanai always seemed to be on the verge of departure. She shopped for the many friends she had left behind in America, packed her suitcase, and did the rounds to say her goodbyes. But to hear her tell it, the fates had other plans. Just when she had packed and said her goodbyes, just when we thought now was the moment to take her to the airport, she would tell us about another mix-up with her visa, or a ticketing problem that involved Delta, Air Zimbabwe and American Airways.
‘I have confirmed my onward connection from Atlanta to Dallas,’ Rambanai said. ‘The flight from Jo’burg to Atlanta is sorted. The problem is really with AirZim. From now on, I will only fly SA.’
‘Rambanai needs to take three aeroplanes just to get to America,’ I heard VateteMaiMazvita explain to our housemaid SisiDessy, and SisiDessy burnt the meat, I suspect because she got carried away by her contemplation of a journey so long. And when Jimmy said he knew someone who worked at Air Zimbabwe, Rambanai gave a small, tight smile and talked about Dallas.
Rambanai stayed with me and my parents in Mabelreign. ‘She wants to stay with her age-mate,’ her stepmother said, referring to me, but we knew that she and her stepmother had only talked because of Ba’muniniBa’Thomas, and now that he was gone, not even her half-brothers could induce her to spend any time at their home in Mount Pleasant.
We spent the days when I was not at work walking around Harare where Rambanai delighted at the most common sights. ‘I want to ride in an emergency taxi,’ she said, ‘let’s take ETs everywhere.’ I went along with her even though I preferred to wait for Jimmy to drive me wherever I needed to go. We followed the rituals attendant to riding in ETs, the emergency taxis that were the only reliable form of transport for Harare’s commuters. In obedience to the conductors’ hectoring commands garisanai four four and ngatibatanidzei tione vabereki nevaberekesi, we sat buttock to buttock, sixteen people in minibuses that said ‘Maximum Passengers: 12’. We collected the ET fares from the passengers behind us, passed them to the passengers in front of us, who passed the money to the passengers in front of them until all the money reached the conductor. Through it all, Rambanai chatted with the drivers and the conductors and anyone else who would listen.
‘The public transport is very different in the States, where I live,’ she said. I wanted to sink into my seat, her voice was so loud, but the driver whistled, lowered his volume, and announced to everyone in the car, ‘Ava sister lives in the States.’ The people looked at us and a woman with a small child made him sit on her lap so that we could have more space.
With Rambanai, I saw Harare anew. Our feet crushed the fallen jacaranda blooms in Africa Unity Square as hawkers cajoled us to buy their wares. We saw the men at the flower market outside the Meikles Hotel who cried out and tried to persuade random passing men to buy random passing women flowers. We giggled like schoolgirls at the photographers who made people strike old-fashioned poses on the grass of Harare City Gardens. When Rambanai wanted her hair braided, instead of going to Mane Attraction or Nice and Easy or Afro Chic like a normal person, she chose to get her hair done in Mbare township. We spent the day with Rambanai seated on a Zambia wrapper spread on the ground as a woman called Manyara braided her hair, while three other women finished off the ends as Manyara told us about all the government ministers she had slept with in the days she was a prostitute.
‘I had them all,’ she said as she pulled Rambanai further between her legs so that she could reach the other side of her head. ‘There was one businessman, you know the one, uyu wetobacco, he had such pink lips you could tell he was sick, but always he said I am an old madhala, no disease. But I never went with him which is just as well, handiti you know how he died?’
She had us in stitches as she told us how our Minister of Home Affairs had found her in bed with one of the assistant secretaries in the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the latter had almost lost an eye. ‘Once they have been here,’ she said, and patted her crotch, ‘they do not, they cannot go back.’
‘Pakasungwa neutare,’ the women said, and laughed as they clapped hands to each other. Manyara ignored this comment about the iron clasp of her loins and said, ‘But these days, ndinofamba naJesu. I walk with the Lord now, and all that is behind me. There is no mountain that he cannot move, no task that is too big for him, for nothing is impossible with Jesus.’
She spoke into the silence that followed this sudden change in subject and said, ‘But, takambofara vasikana.’ This recollection of happy times launched her into another tale in which the starring role went to the Governor of the Central Bank and his male appendage which, if Manyara was to be believed, was inversely proportional to
the length of his monetary policy statements.
The laughter of the finishing women rang out in the afternoon. Naturally merry, Rambanai made them merrier still when she bought them Shake-Shake, the thick traditional beer that I associated with gardeners, miners and other labourers who could not always afford clear beer. I had only seen men drink Shake-Shake, drinking from a shared container in little knots, wiping mouths with the backs of their hands after taking long drags. Shake-Shake was an essentially male drink, I thought, so I was shocked to see women drink it. Rambanai drank too, but I did not like the taste. Manyara diluted the beer with a sweet Cherry Plum soft drink for me, and soon, I was giggling with Rambanai and everyone else. We stayed in Mbare for hours even after Rambanai had finished getting her hair done. Before we left, Manyara said to Rambanai, ‘I have a cousin-brother who is willing to do anything, please help him if you can,’ and Rambanai gave Manyara her number in America and said she would definitely see what she could do.
When we arrived home, my mother shouted and said we should not be walking around at night because people would think we were prostitutes. ‘Pakasungwa neutare,’ Rambanai said and patted her crotch, and I laughed until I felt sick and had to run to the bathroom to eject the masticated purplish mess of Shake-Shake and Cherry Plum.
We walked in all the markets of Harare buying curios and small soapstone sculptures. ‘I will have to get a bigger suitcase,’ Rambanai said. ‘Maybe I will leave these wooden bowls behind and take mainly the stuff from the Trading Company. Oh, and the stuff from Mbare too.’
Our housemaid SisiDessy worshipped Rambanai and could not get enough of her stories. ‘America is the land of opportunity, SisiDessy,’ Rambanai told her. ‘There you can be anything you want, anything at all. Someone like you can be a housemaid today, and before you know it, you have your own TV show.’
‘Musadaro,’ SisiDessy said in admiration.
‘It is true,’ Rambanai said. ‘You can be anything at all.’
It was true that Rambanai had developed in areas we had not expected. ‘She works for an insurance broker in Dallas, Texas,’ I said as I introduced her to my friend Sheila.
‘I am also dancer,’ Rambanai said.
‘But I thought you worked in an office,’ said Sheila.
‘I also dance.’
‘You mean, like a hobby?’ asked Sheila.
‘No, it is what I am.’
‘So you work in an office and you dance?’
‘I am also a poet.’
‘Wow,’ said Sheila, and I could see myself going up in her estimation, ‘do you have a book, or are you published in magazines?’
‘No, not yet, but I am working on it.’
There was silence.
‘What about the dance, are you part of a company or some kind of performing group or troupe, you know, like Tumbuka or anything like that?’
‘I am working on that too,’ said Rambanai. ‘I go to a studio four times a week. I will take up flamenco as soon as I get back.’
I overheard SisiDessy telling her friend Memory the housemaid from next door that in America you could be anything at all that you wanted, you could be a dancer, and a poet all at the same time as you worked in an office. ‘If I was in America,’ SisiDessy said, ‘I would have my own TV show by now.’
‘Musadaro,’ said Memory.
‘It is true,’ SisiDessy said with authority. ‘In America, you can be anything you want, anything at all.’
Rambanai stayed so long after the funeral that she was in the crowd of women dressed decorously in colourful Zambia wrappers that sat around the living room when Jimmy’s family approached my family to pay the bride wealth for me so that Jimmy and I could be married in the traditional way. At the end of the evening, tempers flared because Jimmy’s family thought that my family had been too hard on them.
‘This is what you get for marrying a Karanga woman,’ Jimmy’s friend Tichaona said to him. ‘You know they are the most expensive women in the country.’ But the thing was done, the balance that could not be given on the night of the marriage would be paid over time, Jimmy and I were married, what remained only was the white wedding.
I could live with Jimmy now, and we moved to our new flat in the Avenues, at the corner of Josiah Chinamano and Third Avenue. Rambanai spent all her time with us, and slowly moved her things in, the tight-tight pink tops and the low-rise jeans, the poncho that she said was cerise but which Jimmy said was bright pink, she moved them in one by one until it seemed almost natural that Jimmy and I should live with her.
‘It is convenient here,’ she said, ‘so close to town.’
‘Not so convenient when you are just married and all you want to do to your wife is to …’ Jimmy said, and I put my hand over his mouth and laughed.
When Rambanai was not with me, she crisscrossed Harare in search of the favourite places from her past. She often came back distraught. ‘Can you believe this?’ she said upon her return from one such excursion.
I looked up from my magazine, startled to hear the heartbreak in her voice.
‘There are flies at the Italian Bakery. Flies, imagine. I was so upset; I could not touch a thing. How is it possible that there are so many flies?’
It did not seem to me that the fly population of Zimbabwe had increased exponentially since Rambanai’s departure. I was about to say something when she continued, ‘I went past Avondale Bookshop; it is a stationery shop now. Can you believe they have closed Weng Fu’s? He had the best spring rolls.’
It seemed to her a personal affront that Weng Fu had gone broke, as though he had done so deliberately to spite her. And it was not only Weng Fu’s. The sight of a flea market where there had been a restaurant or ice-cream parlour produced wails of dismay.
‘Oh my God, what happened to Ximex Mall?’ she said. ‘They had the best ice cream there. Remember the time I wore that pink top from Edgars with my white jeans from Truworths and my friend Mandi and I met those guys from Saints? No, hang on, they were from Falcon. We had lunch at that restaurant just inside Ximex, on the side of the Post Office and I had the best chicken and apple open sandwiches. There’s only that awful crap from China in Ximex Mall now, no restaurants, nothing.’
When she tried to track down her old friends and found them fat and fortyish at the age of twenty-seven, she considered this to be a plot against her happiness. ‘It is not fair,’ she said. ‘How can things change so quickly?’
Her Zimbabwe was frozen in 1997, the year she left. Hers had been a country of money to burn, fast guys from Saints and Falcon in fast cars, and party after party, a Zimbabwe without double-digit inflation, without talk of stolen elections. In the absence of the continuity of this life she talked again and again of the old days.
‘Do you remember when I first went to Dallas?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and we had the hardest time explaining to MaiguruMaiSusan that Dallas was a real place but that you would not be meeting Bobby Ewing and Cliff Barnes.’
‘Oh, Dallas! Remember when Bobby died?’
‘Yes, and Pam woke up to find that Bobby’s death had been a dream, that the whole season before that had been a dream.’
‘I am glad they brought him back,’ she said.
‘How can you be? They cheated so spectacularly. Why invest all that emotion mourning a person who then comes back from the dead?’
‘Aiwaka, Matilda,’ she said. ‘Imagine Dallas without Bobby.’
‘You kept me up to date on what I missed, do you remember?’ I smiled.
She had been at school in town, while I was at boarding school.
‘The girls at Chisi thought I was writing to my boyfriend,’ she grinned.
‘At my school, they thought yours were from mine,’ I said.
We laughed.
Into the natural pause that followed our laughter she said, ‘I am not returning to Dallas.’
I looked up from my ironing.
‘There is no way that I can go back to the States,�
� she blurted. ‘I was there illegally. They will not let me back in, I overstayed my visitor’s visa.’
‘But you were at the university …’
‘Community college,’ she said, and added, ‘for only three months.’
‘And the job with the insurance broker …’
‘I worked in a restaurant.’
And the mortgage and the poetry and the dance, I thought, but did not say. And the men; the men, all of them wealthy, all of whom wanted to marry her but there was something wrong with each one.
‘I can’t go back, but I can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘What would people say? They would say I can’t go back, that’s what they would say.’
‘I know Harare is not Dallas, but is it then so bad?’ I asked her gently.
She shook her head.
‘I can’t be myself here. I want a bigger world. I need to go back. But I cannot use my passport. I’ll show you, it has been endorsed.’ She showed me the passport and I saw the words May not be granted leave to enter stamped like angry welts on a face.
‘What will I do?’ she said as she wept into her hands. ‘It is hard, so hard. Everything is so hard.’
‘We have to help her,’ I said to Jimmy when he came home that evening.
‘Help her what?’ Jimmy said. ‘We should help her find a job.’
The next morning, he read aloud to her the few vacancies that appeared in the newspaper. ‘I want a bigger world,’ she said as she put marmalade on her toast. ‘Bigger world yekutengesa mahamburger,’ Jimmy said, when she was out of hearing, and I hushed him for fear that she would hear.
‘Kana ada zvekutsava, there is always Macheso,’ he said. ‘She can be one of his backup dancers if she wants to dance. Or if she wants to be Paul Mkondo, there are insurance companies here too.’
He picked up his keys to go to work and sang. ‘Itai penny penny vakomana ndatambura. Vakomana urombo uroyi. Kana usina mari hauna shamwari.’ It was only after the door closed behind him that I realised that he was singing the song from the old Paul Mkondo insurance programme on Radio 2.
An Elegy for Easterly Page 13
