Out of Shadows

by Jason Wallace

  He stretched out a giant hand. I flinched and he retracted, looking hurt.

  “Leave me alone!” I threw at him.

  Then I was on my feet again, and this time I didn’t stop until I’d stumbled onto the strip road that would lead me home.

  I stayed in my room the rest of the afternoon and listened to music with the curtains drawn. Both my Spandau Ballet and Nik Kershaw got chewed because they were local cassettes and instead of trying to fix them I just flung them across the room and listened to my older English ones. Ivan was right, nothing worked in this country. He’d also said Spandau Ballet and Nik Kershaw were gay anyway so I didn’t care.

  After five o’clock the TV channel started broadcasting. I was bored so I went into the living room and switched on our black-and-white dinosaur. The picture stretched and I groaned as yet another Special Bulletin came into focus.

  There was a group of soldiers, proud and pleased and leaning on their guns. They looked like the ones Pittman had messed around with, red berets in their waistbands, and they joked and laughed for the camera while still managing to look menacing. These comrades, the commentator read, had repelled another attack by rebel forces in Matabeleland, in the southwest of the country.

  The picture cut to the roadside, where Matabele bodies lay scattered. Maybe fifty of them, men and women. And children. I couldn’t see any of their guns around them, though, only sacks of maize.

  My father returned from work. I was going to ask him about the TV report but he seemed irritated so I simply turned off the set.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  I didn’t answer, so he knew where. He went to be on his own in his study.

  Over dinner, he and I sat at other ends of the table while a tray lay outside my mother’s door. The room clattered with the sound of cutlery on china.

  “You’re very quiet. What’s wrong?” My father’s beard dripped gravy.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  “Did you speak to your mother today?”

  “Yes.”

  “About your grandmother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.” He puffed and put his fork down. “Yes. She said she might. I thought it could have been handled better but there we go. I still don’t think she should have . . . I mean, I thought she could have . . .”

  He coughed.

  “Your grandmother and I never saw eye to eye, and when your mother and I got married . . . Life’s complicated, Robert, you’ll find that out one day. This hasn’t been easy for anyone. Your grandmother’s friend Marjorie Downe has sorted it all out, so let’s leave it there.”

  Sorted it all out? What was to sort out? She’d only gone to a care home. Hadn’t she? Why was everyone acting so weirdly?

  I wanted to ask but he changed the subject. “What else did you do today?”

  “Nothing much,” I told him. “I found a statue.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Right out there, off the strip road. Lieutenant Willington BSAP, or something, he found gold and built the town. I guess this town used to be helluva rich, hey?”

  “That’s nice,” he said again, “but only the whites in the town would have been rich. The poor Africans who lived here and did all the work wouldn’t have got a penny. And don’t say ‘helluva,’ Robert, it’s common slang. Say ‘very.’ Maybe you could show me this statue one day.”

  “Ja. Lekker.”

  “When I’ve got more time on my hands. The office is very busy at the moment. My assistant still isn’t pulling his weight.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t want to have to fire him. And don’t say ‘lekker,’ say ‘great.’ You sound like a colonial.”

  I scooped another piece of meat into my mouth and chewed.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, Robert?”

  “Do you think the Kaffirs hate us? I mean, they were fighting against us in the war, they hated us then.”

  My father pushed his plate.

  “First of all, Robert, don’t ever, ever let me hear you use that kind of language again. We’re not sending you to a school that demands the kind of sums it does to raise a racist. Do we have an understanding?”

  I nodded.

  “Secondly, there is no reason for the Africans to hate us. We didn’t fight them. Britain and Rhodesia severed ties long ago. Britain was on the Africans’ side in the war.”

  “Yes, but Britain made Rhodesia. Britain took the land to start with, and you said that was unfair.”

  “It was.”

  “So the blacks should hate us, too, then, shouldn’t they?”

  He rubbed his forehead. Once upon a time I might have read that sign and stopped, but I remembered how Ivan hadn’t stopped the argument with his dad and I wanted to be more like him. He wouldn’t have run away from those two men in the bush as I had.

  “You’re right. Maybe they should. Europeans treated Africa abominably. Don’t get me wrong, I think some good was done during the colonial era, but mostly it was for the extension of power. And, believe me, when power goes to people’s heads it all turns very sour, very quickly.”

  “So . . .”

  “So Mugabe is here to put things right. If there is any hatred in the country, black toward white or white toward black, he’s the man to douse it and make sure it never flares up again. He won’t tolerate it, I truly believe that. He’s proved himself to be a very forgiving man. Sadly there are few like him.”

  “Ivan says there were black Rhodesians who didn’t want Mugabe, like the Matabele workers on his farm. Some didn’t even want the country to change.”

  “Who the devil is Ivan?”

  “A friend.”

  “Well, tell your friend he has a weak argument. I thought even you might have seen that. The people he’s talking about had no freedom, no choice. They said what they were told to say.”

  “Ivan says it wasn’t like that. The enemy . . .”

  “I hear what Ivan says and he’s wrong. The enemy, as he insists on calling them, were fighting for freedom. The real enemy was actually the white government. You can’t rule by minority and discriminate against the majority, least of all in a country that wasn’t even yours in the first place. It’s an unfair, morally twisted, and utterly wrong use of power. Like I said, power is a wicked, evil thing. It . . . corrupts. It gets under the skin and turns people into something else.”

  “So you don’t believe the blacks hate us?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And they don’t want to hurt us? You know, for revenge. Because of all that power used against them in the Old Days.”

  “Unthinkable.”

  “But Mugabe has power now, and you just said power is evil.”

  He waved his hand in the air like he was trying to catch escaping thoughts.

  “This country is led by a good, unselfish, peace-loving man with the grace and humanity to forgive and forget. He wants the best for everyone. He wants to see a prosperous country because it’s in everyone’s interest. The word is reconciliation. Trust me, history will remember the name Robert Mugabe for a long time to come.”

  I stared into my food.

  “Ivan said he promised the blacks he would take all the white land and give it to them if they won,” I said quietly, “and that all the whites would have to be culled. Will we have to give our house to them?”

  “White settlers stole that land by force. They drove families apart and killed innocent people without recrimination. Do you think that’s right?”

  I shook my head.

  “No,” he underlined. “If there is to be land redistribution in this country it would only be fair. But Mugabe wouldn’t do it by force, he knows two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “So he won’t fight us? Like Ivan says he will?”

  My father said nothing for a while, just finished his meal. I could see his jaw muscles working overtime.

  “He won’t,” he said at last, as though he’d spent all that time thinkin
g about it. “If you’re bored maybe you should ask one of your chums to come and stay. One of your other chums. The little chap you bunk next to.”

  “Who, Nelson?”

  “Yes, Nelson.” And then: “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing, just that he’s a . . .”

  My father waited.

  “He’s not really a friend anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged and got a grunt.

  “Whereas Ivan is?” He moved his plate to the side and spoke toward the table. “Friends will only let you down in the end. They always do.”

  His face was drawn and sad as he said it, he looked lost. I ate the rest of my food in silence. When I was done and asked to be excused, he simply added: “I’m not sure I think much of this Ivan. I’d even go as far as to say you’d do a lot better than hang around with the likes of him. Maybe I should have a word with your housemaster.”

  Now, I wish he had. Things might have worked out better that way.

  TWELVE

  I tried to find out where my grandmother had been re-homed, but my mother refused to tell me and in the end even stopped looking at me when I asked. If she felt bad I didn’t see it because she didn’t come out of her bedroom again for the rest of the holiday, pretty much, and I didn’t come out of mine.

  I’d packed my trunk a good twenty-four hours before I was due back. My father merely arched his eyebrows.

  “I think you could polish your shoes yourself next time. I see no reason why Matilda should have to do it.”

  As it was my last night, my mother made a special effort and joined us for dinner, but my father had to lead her back to bed when she started nodding into her dessert.

  “Hey! Jacko’s here!” Ivan cried as I walked down the corridor into Selous.

  “About time, Jacklin.” Klompie threw a pair of hockey socks into my face so I nearly dropped my tuck box. “Ivan recks he’s checked his wife-to-be, says this chick Adele makes him jags.”

  “Jeez, man!” Osterberg barked. “You ever heard of a tan?”

  Davidson simply came up and twisted my nipples.

  It was great to be back.

  I slipped easily into the routine I’d missed: rising, breakfast, chapel, classes, rest, sports, clubs, prep, lights out . . . The solid footing of regularity I didn’t get at home, even things like squacks’ duties and cold showers. In a bizarre way, Greet was part of it; at least I knew where I stood.

  The only real changes were headline sports (cricket and hockey this term as we returned to summer) and afternoon clubs—I got out of having to go to computer club with Simpson-Prior and joined photography with Ivan and Klompie instead. But almost straightaway photography closed because there was no film in the country, so Ivan managed to get us into the rifle club. I’ve no idea how he managed it.

  The other new thing that term was chemistry, or rather the chemistry teacher, because old Mr. Pines, who must have been teaching since the white man first stepped foot in the country, was increasingly ending his experiments with his pupils having to open all the windows. Mr. Bullman had reduced his classes and got someone else in to help. However, even private schools couldn’t pick new teachers at will without the government having some input.

  He was trying hard not to, but I swear Mr. Bullman looked distinctly embarrassed as he stood center stage at First Assembly. Of course we’d all spotted him by then, one shining black head in the sea of white staff.

  Ivan nudged me. “Uh-oh. We got a fly magnet.”

  “. . . Haven is proud to be able to offer this position to the school’s first black teacher,” Mr. Bullman was saying. “A symbol of willing unification as we all look to the future,” he read.

  As we jostled out, I heard senior boys swearing about fucking government spies and the thin end of a wedge.

  If Mr. Mafiti was a government spy then he wasn’t a very good one because he clearly loved his job, especially the experiments, and he often ran over the bell just so that we could see the final explosion or extraction of gas or whatever it was. That was the only point to chemistry, after all, so the more we enjoyed it the less time he spent on giving us prep or doing boring dictation.

  Even when a lesson was dull it would have been hard not to like Mr. Mafiti. He had a kind face, and outside the lab he possessed an endearing naivety toward all things, often floating around the school like a dazed child at the fair. Some boys teased him, of course, flicking bits of chewed paper when his back was turned, or patting his jacket with the board eraser so that it went all white. But he never got angry. Not once. He found these things funny. I guess we enjoyed him because he was such a breath of fresh air.

  As far as a few boys were concerned, however, he was weak, so they were cruel.

  Ivan really pushed it and started smoking at the back of the lab, ducking low behind the bench to take drags while Mr. Mafiti wrote on the board. Mr. Mafiti would pause and sniff the air, but if he suspected anything he never said so.

  And then there was Pittman, who once put up his hand in the middle of an experiment and asked, “Excuse me, sir, are you a bastard black?”

  Mr. Mafiti’s everlasting smile dipped momentarily.

  “I . . . ehmm . . . I did not hear. What did you say?”

  “I said, are you pleased to be back? In the country? You said you lived in Tanzania while the war was on.”

  “Yes, I am very pleased to be back.” The smile reappeared. “Thank you for asking.”

  Another time, someone locked an owl in Mr. Mafiti’s lab so that in the morning he walked in to find feathers everywhere and an extremely agitated bird of prey banging into the windows.

  The culprit was never found; all we knew was that he must have had a tough time catching something like that. What I am sure of is that he was there to get his satisfaction as we watched Mr. Mafiti come running and shrieking with tears in his eyes.

  “It’s only a stupid owl.” I tried to cover the fact that I felt sorry for our chemistry teacher. “It wouldn’t harm him.”

  “He’s a Shona,” Ivan told me matter-of-factly. Unlike the rest of us, neither he nor Pittman had had much to say about the whole episode. “And Shona hate owls. Bad omens. Some mumbo jumbo about seeing one during daylight means something really bad will happen. They actually believe shit like that.”

  Chemistry was the only class Ivan seemed to enjoy, but that had nothing to do with learning. End-of-year exams were coming, yet, while my own grades hovered typically somewhere between average and must-ask-more-questions, his rolled around the bottom.

  “The way I see it, I can either work hard and sweat or I can take it easy. It won’t change anything because you don’t need exams to farm. I feel sorry for you guys.”

  Around the middle of term a Mercedes with government plates appeared outside the Admin Block and was there for hours.

  That evening, Taylor gathered everyone for a house war cry out on the lawn. He said he wanted us to remember which was the best house in the school, that it would always be the best, and that we had every right to feel proud to be a part of it. For a moment it looked like he had tears in his eyes. He wiped them and then told us there was to be a special announcement so the whole school had to go to the theater hall before supper.

  Questions buzzed as we took our seats. When Mr. Bullman showed he looked really gray and serious, as if the skin on his face had come loose. He climbed the stage and swept back the longer strands of hair from his forehead. He stared straight out. There were no notes.

  “As you may or may not have been aware, my boys”—my boys—“today was the Annual General Meeting of school governors. And this year we were joined by a special . . . guest, the minister for education, Mr. Chapalanga. The Ministry has decided it should sit with the boards of all schools from now on. It wants, it said, to listen, to learn, and to have the chance to provide input of mutual benefit.”

  Was this it? Was that all?

  “Our school, Haven School, is proud to have been
built on a foundation of history and tradition, upon which we have endeavored to establish a sound education system. It is why the boardinghouses are named as they are, after the founding pioneers of our once nation. And we believe that we, the providers of this education, have been successful in delivering this strong foundation as we prepare you for your tomorrows.

  “You may not realize it now, but you belong to a very privileged club. This is a special place, and you are part of the granite upon which this establishment was founded—solid, immovable, and here for a bloody long time to come.”

  He was smiling broadly so everyone laughed. Bully had made a joke!

  “But as solid and unmoveable as we are, we must still adapt to our ever-changing surroundings, as all things must. Change should not be denied. Change should not be feared. Change by its very nature requires malleability. If we are to survive we must embrace it.”

  Mr. Bullman steadied himself. He swallowed hard.

  “This is why we have been made to . . . have made the decision with the government to bring the school up-to-date, and to commemorate the modern era.” He paused. “Specifically, we shall be renaming all of the boardinghouses.”

  There was a shared gasp. Heads turned one way and the other.

  Mr. Bullman had to raise a hand.

  “Heyman, Forbes, Burnett, Willoughby and Selous . . .” he spoke loudly over us.

  The names peeled off in slow succession, doleful shots into the air.

  “. . . Next term, at the start of the new academic year, we shall celebrate the founders of our current ruling party and rename the houses respectively: Sithole, Takinira, Nkala, Chitepo, and Hamadziripi. Your housemasters have been informed and, of course, welcome this . . . necessity.”

  This time he did nothing to stem the mutterings that rose like a flood.

  “All I hope,” he said, “is that . . . All I ask is that you . . .”

  He bowed his head.

  “Dismissed, boys. Dismissed.”