The burden of the truth off her shoulders, Rambanai sang along to Boyz II Men on her disc-man, clogged up the bathtub drain with the artificial hair from her weave, and told me her plans for our money. ‘America is a non-starter,’ she said cheerfully. ‘They will never give me a visa now. I will go to London. At least we don’t need visas for England, being in the Commonwealth. In England, I can get an office job. I will continue my dancing. Or maybe acting, I have always wanted to be an actress. I will get a proper job, go to school at night. I will do something.’
‘But your passport was endorsed …’
She waved away the endorsement as if it were of no consequence.
‘Exactly. I can’t go as me; they have records, you know. I need another passport in another name. That’s what lots of people do when they have been deported, they just get new passports.’
‘Mainini, new passports don’t grow on trees,’ said Jimmy.
‘Exactly,’ beamed Rambanai, ‘and that is why you have to help me get another one.’
‘Oh, and I will need a new name,’ she added. ‘There is a record on me now. I can choose any name I like. Tamera, Chantal, Michelle. I know, I will choose a Ndex name. They have some really cool names. Nonhlanhla. Busisiwe. Sihle. Gugulethu. I know, Langelihle, that means beautiful day. You can just call me Langa for short. I can be Ndebele. Oh, I could even be a Ndebele princess.’
‘But you are not Ndebele,’ I said.
She went on as though I had not spoken, ‘It will be so cool to be Ndex, you know, with the whole Zulu connection. You know Oprah Winfrey is part Zulu, right?’
‘Mainini, I don’t know what they are telling you in America, but from what I remember of my history, no Zulus were taken to America as slaves,’ said Jimmy.
‘You don’t even speak Ndebele,’ I said.
‘I’m sure there are lots of Ndebele people who don’t speak the language,’ she said. ‘I can be one of them! What would they know about it in England?’
‘But your certificates,’ I said in dismay, ‘how will you get a job without your O level and A level certificates? Those are in your own name.’
‘I will just focus on my dance,’ she said. ‘And maybe acting, I have always wanted to be an actress. You remember how I used to act at school.’
In my mind, together with Rambanai as a pregnant Mary in the nativity play in which she appeared when she was eleven, I also saw Ba’muniniBa’Thomas spinning and spinning in his Paradise Peace Casket as he talked in his resonant voice about the value of education.
Jimmy would not give her money, but I brought him round in the end. A new, unendorsed passport in another name would not be cheap. We sold some shares that Jimmy’s father had left him. We postponed buying a new fridge and stove for our flat. These sacrifices caused some strain between Jimmy and me, and I had to make Rambanai promise to send us back our money as soon as she sorted herself out. ‘I will send it within a month of arriving,’ she said. ‘You can trust me, you’ll see.’
We spent interminable days waiting for a new birth certificate, before we waited for a new ID card, and then finally, a new passport. Our mission began in Makombe Building where Rambanai procured the first proof of her new existence in the form of a Republic of Zimbabwe birth certificate. We waited among infants crying at their mothers’ exposed breasts and we listened to the voices of the desperate.
‘I have travelled all this way, please just help me, mukuwasha.’
‘Imi ambuya, there is nothing we can do if you do not produce the child. How do we know the child exists if we do not see it?’
‘What would the point of lying about a non-existent child? It is not as though I get anything from the government. Why would I say I have a child when I don’t?’
‘If you have this child, why not just bring it?’
‘Nhai mukuwasha, kana murimi, how can I possibly bring a child to wait in this heat?’
The man pointed at the red-faced babies crying in the heat. ‘So are these not babies? What is so special about yours that you cannot bring it here? Makazvara chidhoma?’
The babies wailed, their mothers pulled them to their breasts and sat down on the chairs and on the ground to feed them and the babies sucked down the smell from a nearby broken sewer with their mother’s milk.
We did not wait long among the new mothers; we were soon ushered into one of the offices. The man assisting us was all smiles as he said, ‘Have you prepared my parcel?’ When Rambanai handed him an envelope, he opened it, took out the wad of notes, stuck his finger to his tongue and with an expert hand counted out the money. He made a phone call. While he asked Rambanai about America, a young man came with an envelope which contained the birth certificate of Langelihle Chantal Ndhlukula, born on the date Rambanai had dictated, which was two years after the year of her real birthday. ‘I have always wanted to be born in December,’ Rambanai said. ‘This way, I can be a Capricorn. And look, I won’t turn thirty for at least five years.’
This was only the first part; she needed a new ID, and a similarly stuffed envelope secured her a metal ID in record time. That river crossed, we headed towards the grey bungalow which housed the Passport Office, and waited outside Window Number 6 to process the application. The place was crawling with street kids who acted as place holders in the queues while people slept, ate or relieved themselves, and who also offered the benefits of their experience to the waiting applicants. A boy no older than twelve shouted out instructions as more people joined the queue.
‘Make sure you have everything. Long birth certificate, ID, father’s ID, mother’s ID, mother’s and father’s death certificate if deceased, marriage certificate if married, husband’s ID if married, one passport form, two photographs. Hands must be clean for the fingerprints.’
‘Nhai mwananagu,’ a troubled elderly woman asked him, ‘they surely can’t want to see the father’s ID. Does that apply even to us, old as we are?’
‘There is no one without a father,’ the boy said. To another woman he said, ‘As for you, sister, I can tell you right away that you are wasting your time. They won’t accept your photos; you need to show your ears.’
As Rambanai and I got nearer to Window Number 6, we heard a dreadlocked man shouting, ‘But it is my religion, this is my religion.’ The woman he shouted at was protected from his anger by a metal grille. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said and bit into a biscuit, ‘it may well be your religion, but that has nothing to do with your passport. We do not allow dreadlocks.’ To the woman who approached her after the dreadlocked man, she said, ‘Mototorwa dzimwe sister, you are smiling in these pictures. You cannot smile in your passport photo.’
The message spread through the queue. No dreadlocks, artificial hair or any other headgear, no smiling pictures. ‘Why would you be smiling for a passport photo?’ the street kid said with contempt in the direction of the departing smiler, and to the dreadlocked man, ‘As for you, get a haircut.’
When our turn came, we gave the name of the woman who had been referred to us. She smiled as she said to us, ‘Why are you in this dreadful queue, you should have come round the entrance.’ We found our way to the hallowed sanctuary of Office 56, where, in exchange for another envelope, Rambanai was fingerprinted and documented. Thus it went on; in exchange for yet another envelope, someone in Mkwati Building got her police clearance, and a week later, the passport arrived, green and pristine and smelling of new opportunities. Rambanai kissed it when she saw it. She kissed Jimmy too, and I had to nudge him in the back to get him to let go.
‘I will not forget you,’ she said. ‘You must definitely stay with me if you ever visit England. I will repay every cent.’ Ten months after she was supposed to have left for Dallas, Texas, we took Rambanai on another round of goodbyes. We took her to the airport with her suitcase full of sculptures and cloths from the Trading Company. We fought through a crowd of white-garmented people praying over a departing family. ‘Let them go in your name, Jehovah. Guide them through the perils of immigration.
Remove the thoughts of Satan from those who would deport them.’ And though she did not join the prayer, I know that Rambanai’s heart was thud-thud-thudding under her tight-fitting pink shirt as she waved to us and walked across to board the British Airways flight to London.
She called to say she had arrived, but as Jimmy and I did not have a landline at the flat, the phone call was to my mother who passed it on to me. Even after I got a mobile phone and passed the number to my mother and to my aunt to give to Rambanai if she called again, she did not call. I expected daily that I would get a letter or a postcard with Buckingham Palace on it, but there was no word. And there was no money.
I even subjected myself to my aunt’s weekly prayer meetings in Mount Pleasant to see if she had heard from Rambanai. I looked for her name on ZimUpdate and ZimUnite and other websites for homesick Zimbabweans abroad until I remembered that she had changed her name and looked for her in her new identity. But there was nothing, only to be expected, I told myself, because Langelihle Chantal Ndhlukula had no history. There would be no one looking for her because she was nowhere, she was nothing.
I did not see Rambanai on the Internet, but memories of her came to me in Harare, in all the places we had visited. I even went to Mbare to get my hair done, but it was not as it had been. Manyara was too sick to talk much, progress was slow as she hacked a cough into my hair as she plaited it. ‘Do you know, your cousin-sister promised to do something for my cousin-brother?’ Manyara said. I promised that I would call Rambanai and do what I could, and I took down Manyara’s number. I paid her all her money even though she had not finished doing my hair and instead of going back the next day, I undid it. I saw her about a year later at the Chicken Inn on Inez Terrace. ‘Do you remember me?’ she said and I knew her instantly even though she was thin in the face and her lips were cracked and pink. I recognised her but I did not want to talk about Rambanai so I pretended that she had mistaken me for someone else.
Exactly one year after Rambanai caught her flight to London, the British embassy imposed visa restrictions on Zimbabweans. Two and a half years after that, Jimmy and I decided to join the three million who had left the country. It was an economic decision, we explained to everyone who asked, it is an economic decision, we said to ourselves, but in our hearts, we knew that leaving our families was the only way to save our marriage. The time had come for our families to expect something, translucent ears, a bulging stomach, an aversion to strong scents, anything that could be evidence of a baby on the way.
‘Is she spitting-spitting, or frowning-frowning yet,’ they asked, and sent emissaries to enquire whether there was anything showing. We had tried, but nothing was happening, or happening quickly enough, and I could no longer bear the looks and the whispered conversations at funerals that stopped as soon as I entered the room. We thought of England then, and my thoughts turned to Rambanai.
‘Rambanai is somewhere in Birmingham,’ her brother Thomas said the first time I called him. Then she was in Newcastle, then Leicester, then back in London. Our emails bounced into empty air, our phone calls went unanswered.
In the end, we got our visas the same way Rambanai had got her passport, we used the Harare way – someone knew someone in the British embassy with whom we exchanged envelopes stuffed with cash. I gave up teaching and Jimmy engineering to be in England, where the curse of the green passport condemned us to work in the unlit corners of England’s health care system, in care homes where we took out the frustrations of our existence by visiting little cruelties on geriatric patients. I thought often of Ba’muniniBa’Thomas who had believed that education would guarantee our future.
Even as my ears took in the sounds of London, the cries to help the homeless help themselves, buy the Big Issue, the preacher at Oxford Street station who spoke of hell and damnation in such soft tones he may as well have been advertising a weekend at a holiday camp, the thundering sound of the train between underground stations, I listened to my heart as it spoke of Rambanai. Then I saw her, on a biting February morning on an escalator at Liverpool Street station when my frozen thoughts were on the care home job that awaited me at the end of the Jubilee line. She was on an escalator going in the opposite direction, her coat bright pink among the hues of London’s black-clad. The joy in my voice was sincere as I called out her name. She looked up and beamed like I was the very person she expected to see sliding up the escalator at Liverpool Street.
‘Hey, Matilda,’ she cried, and tried to reach out across the space between the escalators. I reached out too and we clung to the edges of the moving stairs, our hands passing without meeting.
We laughed at our failure.
‘I’ll wait for you at the top,’ I said to her.
‘I’m running late and I have to catch my train, yeah,’ she shouted, ‘but make sure you call me, all right? Call me, yeah? Tonight, yeah?’
On that escalator at Liverpool Street station, under the gimlet stares of the suited ones, all I could say was a faint okay that I am not sure reached her. Only as I watched her glide down past the framed adverts for Queen the musical and the latest Harry Potter did it occur to me that I did not have her phone number. By this time, she had disappeared from my view and I imagined her, a chameleon in pink, pushing her way among the dark shapes on the platform, fighting to get onto the train in the rush hour.
The Negotiated Settlement
Thulani did not immediately notice the darkness. Only when he was in the house and reached for the wall switch in the entrance corridor to produce an empty click did he realise that there was no electricity. Load shedding. He walked to the kitchen, singing snatches of Oliver Mtukudzi, ‘Zvimwe hazvibvunzwi, zvimwe hazvibvunzweiwe.’
After all these years in Harare, his Ndebele tongue still couldn’t get around the Shona zv and nzw sounds. It probably never would. He abandoned singing, and hummed as he groped for a candle where they kept them above the fridge. He lit one and opened the microwave oven. Isitshwala and stewed meat and leaf vegetables again. He had to unpeel the skin from the isitshwala to eat it. It had the smoky taste of food cooked over an open fire. The meat was cold and the vegetables clammy in his mouth. He washed his meal down with the remaining half-pint of Pilsener that he had smuggled out of the Mannenberg. It was warm from being cradled between his legs on the drive home.
‘Dinner by candlelight,’ he said.
He found this funnier than it was, and chuckled. He hummed more Oliver as he ate. Eleven mouthfuls later, the candle in his hand cast his shadow against the wall as he walked into the bedroom. The candlelight flickered over the outlined shape of his sleeping wife. He removed his shirt and trousers, leaving them in a heap on the floor and got into bed. His wife shifted in her sleep towards his side of the bed. Thulani felt a stir of desire, but it was a flash only, it died as quickly as it rose. He lay back and tried to recapture his earlier ebullience. What was that joke Themba had told again? He should have been more serious with Themba, it looked like he was really going to marry that woman.
‘You do not need to do this,’ he had said to him, but Themba had only laughed and said vague things about settling down. He should have been firmer, he should have told him that settling down was simply settling, that he was giving permission to fate to stifle him and kill all his freedom.
‘There’s the padlock, see.’
He struggled to remember where those words came from. He gave up the effort, and it came back to him. Arabella, showing off her wedding ring after the remarriage to that poor bastard, Jude Fawley. He hadn’t thought about Jude the Obscure since the last time he read it, almost nineteen years ago, when he had had to cram it for a literature exam. Another passage came to him now as he tried to find sleep: ‘Take her all together, limb by limb, she’s not such a bad-looking piece – particular by candlelight.’
He got up. His wife slept on. Picking up his discarded clothes, he moved into the lounge and dressed himself again. In the darkness, he stretched out on the three-seat sofa. Just after they had bou
ght it six years ago, he had tried to make love to Vheneka on this sofa, anything to kill the monotony, but she had said, no, no, the kids, and he had not tried again.
He went over to the bookshelf, and got down his secret stash of cigarettes. He lit one and lay back on the sofa. His thoughts drifted as he smoked. He saw in his mind’s eye his wife’s naked body, the breasts, the protruding stomach, the scar of Nkosana’s Caesarean.
‘First you undo me this scar, then we can talk about divorce,’ she had said, when three years ago, in a moment of unbearable suffocation he had asked for his freedom. He had not talked about it again.
Had he really wanted to leave? There seemed nothing active about his life now. He no longer desired her, no longer thought about returning home, surprising her, no longer sought her first thing in the morning. He remembered how beautiful she had been to him once, and even now, she could surprise him sometimes, when unexpected, the scent of her came to disturb him, and she turned, and laughed, and he saw, beneath the puffed cheeks and strange hairstyle of the moment, the girl he had seen at the Students’ Union.
He had wooed her on walks to Avondale, with Chinese food and combo-packs from Chicken Inn. Flowers from Interflora and movies at Kine 600. He had endured the endless ragging of his Bulawayo friends who mocked him for falling for a Shona chick, but even they had to admit that she was so beautiful she could have been Ndebele. On the night of her twentieth birthday, he had taken her to Gabrielle’s, but she wanted to go to the Manchurian. The forty dollars he had saved for this night felt suddenly light in his pocket and when the bill came, his insides turned to water.
He would leave his ID card, he had resolved, and was just about to go over to talk to the waiter when she put her hand on his.
An Elegy for Easterly Page 14
