The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  Under the bed, I found a little piece. It showed one of Mobhi’s fat legs against the light fabric of my father’s trousers. I held on to that piece of Mobhi as long as I could, before I lost it, and it too disappeared like the rest of the photograph.

  *

  Vernah Sithole explained to me at our first meeting that the best I can expect to get in the absence of a completely new and fresh trial is a life sentence. ‘I am fighting to get the conviction overturned,’ she said. ‘But if that does not happen, the Supreme Court could commute the penalty to life. And there will be no early release,’ she added, ‘unless something changes after the election. There could be an amnesty that affects you too. But otherwise life really means life, you know.’

  She could also have used the words of the recent editorial in the Herald. It was in response to a report by the Goodwill Fellowship that said prisons had become places of despair disproportionate to the severity of the crimes that brought people there.

  With its usual charm and perspicacity, the Herald got to the heart of the matter: ‘Let no one be in any doubt that in this country we really know how to deal with criminals. We put them in prison, then we throw away the key, and leave them to rot there with all the other filth and dregs of society. And if they do not like it, well, they should not commit crimes.’

  Synodia could have been written these words. At her approach the milk of human kindness curdles. To every complaint, that there are too few blankets, that there is too little food, or that there is no water to flush the toilets, or not enough sanitary pads, she says the same thing. ‘It was not me who made you a criminal. If you don’t like living in this place, you should not be a criminal.’

  So life means a life like poor Mavis Munongwa’s, a life with no parole. There is no hope of escape either, no floating to freedom on sacks of coconuts like Papillon, or, like Andy Dufresne, digging my way out with a rock hammer and crawling through a river of shit to come out clean on the other side.

  6

  When I close my eyes and will it to, Mufakose Township comes to me complete in every detail. I still know all the streets that I passed on the way to school; we always took the same route with my father. We passed Chiguyakuya, Mbizi, Kafudzamombe and Mutarimbo. We went past Handira and Mbada and Dapi, and turned into Zongororo, which means millipede, and I imagined that the houses on that road were the legs of a millipede. From Zongororo, we passed the church, turned into Muonde, left into Munondo, then left again into the school gate.

  I discovered when I left Mufakose that it is possible to live in Harare in total unawareness that there are areas to the west and to the south containing the detritus of human existence, that it is possible to be unaware of the teeming townships with the houses that look exactly the same, redbrick houses with a square inch of space around them, houses in which humans, plants and dogs managed to flourish. Families lived together all packed one on top of the other, like sardines in a tin: mother, father, another mother, sometimes; aunts, uncles and cousins.

  You will discover as you walk around the city that it was planned to keep the direct heat of the sun away from the faces of white people. In the mornings, they left the northern suburbs to go into town to work, and the sun was behind them, and in the evenings, when they went back home, the sun was behind them still. The streets of the northern suburbs are lined with avenues of jacarandas and flamboyants that give cooling shade. But in the townships, the sun is always in the faces of the people. And there are no tree-lined avenues, no cool grass beneath the feet, only the hard heat of the dusty streets.

  When I found myself living with Lloyd at Summer Madness, I surprised myself by missing the sounds that I had heard from inside the room that I shared with my sisters in Mufakose. This was the room that my mother called the speya. In the township, the parents’ bedroom was just the bedroom, and the second bedroom, for there were only ever two bedrooms, was always the speya. This indicated rooms so plentiful that one was spare, but as the speya was always where the children slept, it also suggested that our rooms were not our own, and we were mere interlopers, temporary guests who could be evicted at any time.

  In Umwinsidale, with Lloyd, on the other side of Harare, I was as far from Mufakose as it was possible to be. Umwinsidale was still tranquillity. There were no sounds that did not belong to nature. Lloyd’s house, Summer Madness, sat on its own small hill, and when I looked out into the night, I saw nothing but the darkness of the valley, and the far-away lights of the neighbours shimmering like fireflies in a distant forest.

  In Mufakose, the night was torn with sounds of couplings, snoring, howling dogs, the running feet of thieves chancing it in the darkness, and children mimicking zvinyau dances under the huge tower light that lit up the township street.

  In the daytime, the township pulsated to the symphonic movement of the everyday. From the speya, I heard the children of Mharapara Street play their favourite games. I knew all the rules to all the games. I knew it was bad form kuita chiziso when playing rakaraka or dunhu. I knew just how to challenge a rival to a fight by forming a small mound of earth then destroying it while looking around dramatically and saying, ‘Ndaputsa zamu raamai vako. See, see, I have smashed your mother’s breast’, so that the rival had no choice but to fight in defence of the smashed breast.

  I knew all the words to all the games, and sang along to them. ‘Pansapo paribe, askende rimwana, pansapo paribe, askende rimwana auPretty auke aukende sikende s’ke skende sikende auke auke wawa.’

  From the speya, I heard the woman who walked up Mopani Road from Mufakose to Kambuzuma crying out the vegetables that she sold. I heard MadzibabaConorio, with his shaven head and bushy beard, shouting, ‘Mabhodhoro’, as the pots that he collected for mending clanged and jangled against the bottles at his side.

  I heard the beggars, the blind men and women led by their children, pleading from one end of Mharapara to the other, ‘Toooooooooookumbirawo rubatsiro vanhu vaJehovah’, and their grateful claps and acclamations when anyone extended them a kindness. ‘Mwari venyu vakukumborerei, vakukomborerei, vakukomborerei. Mugare kure kwemoto vakukomborerei vakukomborerei vakukomborerei.’

  I heard SekuruAlexio, whose eyes dripped with yellow pus and who spoke in a Malawian accent as he tempted the children into buying mbwirembwire. If a child bought more than one pocketful, he exclaimed at what he saw as the child’s riches and said, in delight, ‘Uri mwana wambozha!’

  We were poor without knowing it. There was nothing ennobling or romantic or life-affirming about our poverty. It just was. And you could say that we did not know just how poor we were because everyone else around us was the same. We accepted the simple order of our lives in the ignorance that other, richer lives were possible.

  We were intimate with the ways of our neighbours and they with ours. Little happened that did not invite the scrutiny and commentary of the township. We knew when our neighbours were having chicken, and they knew when we were having matemba. We knew that, at one end of Mharapara, Nhau’s mother habitually burned the meat as well as we knew that there would be no meat smells from the kitchen of the Malawian family at the other end, who seemed to live on Lacto sour milk.

  What we did not see and smell ourselves, we got from our most gossipy neighbour, MaiWhizi. No one entered any yard on Mharapara without her knowledge. She had countless relatives with endless virtues. She ended up being related to most people on the street because she had an uncle or a nephew or a muramu who had just that minute arrived from kumusha, he was looking for a job, he would get a good job, it was just a matter of time before he got a very good job, an excellent job, and all he wanted was a good wife to cook for him.

  Vero, who lived next door but one to MaiPrincess, married MaiWhizi’s husband’s youngest brother. She had set her eyes on Rispah, MaiNever’s aunt’s daughter, for her own aunt’s eldest son, but Rispah fell pregnant. MaiWhizi knew about Rispah’s shame before anyone, down to the names, heights and ages of all the inhabitants of the house in Mugaragunguwo Str
eet to which Rispah had fled to escape the wrath and shame of MaiNever, Ba’Never and her parents.

  For all that she knew more about Mharapara than any of us, MaiWhizi was more capable of astonishment than anybody else. She compared everything shocking or startling, anything surprising or unexpected, to a bioscope. ‘Ah,’ she exclaimed, and put her hands together in a quick clap in front of her face before quickly releasing them, ‘Zvariri bhais’kopu!’ She spent hours polishing her veranda red with Sunbeam polish or wiping her windows. When MaiWhizi’s curtains twitched, you knew that something was happening.

  Although they later became fast friends, MaiNever once threatened to beat up MaiWhizi because she told MaiPrincess that MaiNever’s husband had been seen at a shebeen in Mbare. ‘Ba’Never vakasvikopikire chipostori zvariini?’ MaiNever shouted in Manyika. ‘Magemenzi andinobvire wonini, andinobvire wacha zuva ngezuva.’

  MaiPrincess was also called MaiMaTwins because she had given birth to two sets of twins. She had six children under the age of twelve. She was the most pregnant woman that anyone had ever seen. She seemed always to have just given birth, be about to give birth or be feeding a child at her breast. Her first two children, the twin girls Princess and Pretty, were followed by their brother, Progress, then by a girl, Promise, and twin boys, Providence and Privilege. For all I know, she had more children after I left Mufakose. Perhaps she had a Prudence, a Praise or a Promotion. Perhaps she had a Prevarication or a Predestination.

  MaiWhizi, MaiNever and MaiMaTwins talked to each other over their buckets of laundry. In the year that I left, they were obsessed with Peggy, the township ghost with red lips, a shining Afro and an alluring bottom. Peggy had been seen in Highfield and at Chitubu in Glen Norah, they said, and was now working her way up Kambuzuma Road to Mufakose.

  ‘She lured a man at Mushandirapamwe Hotel, hanzi they danced all night.’

  ‘When they got to his house she said he was not to light a candle.’

  ‘The next morning, he woke up in the graveyard, right on top of her grave.’

  ‘And he saw Peggy, but now she was a statue, pafungei ipapo, just a statue kneeling on the grave, just kneeling there, stiff as anything, kunge mukadzi waLot chaiye. Just like Lot’s wife.’

  When they were not gossiping over the laundry, the township women tore the air with the names of their children.

  ‘Nhau! Princess! Never!’

  ‘Promise! Providence! Progress! Imi! Chiuyai mugeze!’

  ‘Whizi! Nhai iwe Wisdom! Urimatsisu?’

  ‘Run to MaiNever and give her this pot.’

  ‘Run to MaiPrincess and ask her for sugar.’

  ‘Run to MaiWhizi and tell her she is late.’

  ‘Run to MaiGivhi and give her this powder.’

  ‘Run to the tuck-shop utenge half-bread.’

  ‘Run to the tuck-shop and buy seven candles.’

  ‘Run outside and don’t bother me.’

  ‘Run away and don’t ask too many questions.’

  ‘Run along before I slap you.’

  Run here, run there, run forward, run backwards. The children of the township were constantly moving dynamos, with fast legs but with heads often elsewhere, attending to the tasks at hand with half the mind on play. The ensuing recriminations would ring out across the street.

  ‘You have spilt the sugar!’

  ‘You silly child, you have squashed the tomatoes!’

  ‘Mazizheve anenge ababa! You have forgotten the bread!’

  ‘What do you mean, you dropped the money?’

  Then the sound of a slap, or a walloping with the favoured instrument of the house concerned – a belt, a sjambok or the long, thin branch from a peach tree. Then would come wails and lamentations, ndagura, ndagura kani nhai Mhai, before the admonition to go out and play.

  But the tears soon dried, and the pain was forgotten in chasing the Snowman ice cream man, in shouting, ‘Paribe musevenzo, paribe musevenzo’, while dancing after SekuruAlexio, and in the dizzying round of play and games, rakaraka and nhodo, dunhu and pada, games that I did not play in the township where we lived.

  *

  The strongest memory that I have of the speya is the smell of Mobhi’s urine on the green-and-brown blankets hanging on the washing line outside our houses. I say our houses because those same urine-soaked blankets followed us to hang on other washing lines, as we moved from Mbare to Highfield before settling in Mufakose, from where I was sold, their green and brown stripes fading from the sun and washing. We were one short after Gift was buried.

  I must have been three or four when Gift died. I read somewhere that long-term memory is linked to the left prefrontal lobe in the brain, which only develops after the age of three. I also read, perhaps in the same article, that memory is closely linked with the acquisition of language, that without verbal ability to articulate experience, there can be no memory, and this is why our earliest recollections date from the time we learn to speak.

  So it may have been even earlier than that when my brother died. Or perhaps it is another child’s funeral that I remember, nothing to do with my brother at all. I never knew exactly how old Gift was when he died because no one talked about him, though his name was with us daily in the MaiGivhi and Baba Givhi that my parents called each other – apart from those moments when anger broke through the decorum of naming conventions and they called each other by their first names. It was a shock to us to hear them call each other Moira and Benson; it was almost like seeing them naked.

  Our house, all our houses, had rickety doors and thin, thin windows that shook as the doors were opened and closed, and shook even harder when my mother banged them. There was a small garden around our house; there we had a banana plant. Our neighbours had half-attempted orchards with mango trees and, occasionally, naartjies. The gardens were only just big enough to grow small vegetable patches; however long people lived in the towns, agriculture, like an atavistic instinct, was still in their blood and drove them to plant crops and till the land even on these tiny plots.

  MaiPrincess and her family, who lived next door, had a large avocado tree and wanted to keep each avocado to themselves, but we did not always give back the fruit that fell and rolled under the tarpaulin covering my father’s wood and tools. We mashed up MaiPrincess’s avocadoes and spread them on bread.

  I slept next to Mobhi, who slept next to Joyi, and I often woke up with the smell of her urine on my nightdress. My mother, enraged, would beat us, and command me to wake her in the night. But the toilet was outside and the night held terrors for me.

  In the night, our main door squeaked, dogs barked, insects flew and the witches who ate children mounted an invisible presence and saw through the eyes of the barking dogs. In the night walked Peggy, with her big bottom and big Afro. Then there was the small matter of the haunted house six houses down from MaiNever’s.

  It was an empty house, with all the windows smashed in. It drew the gaze of everyone in the township. At least during the day it held its fascination. In the night, it was a place of terror. People had lived there once. But every time new lodgers moved into that house, they woke in the night to find themselves, and all that they owned, out in the street.

  People said that there was an angry ngozi spirit in that house. Ngozi, if you did not already know, is the spirit of vengeance that follows a violent death. All the people on our side of Crowborough believed that someone had been killed there, and that, until that spirit was appeased, all those who lived in the house would live with the horror of that terrible slaying and wake to find themselves outside the house.

  The haunted house was on the Dindingwe end of Mharapara, nowhere near where we lived, but it was close enough that I preferred not to go out at night. A million times better to hang up our urine-soaked blankets, a million times better to wash daily the old nightdress in which I slept. And when Mobhi drowned, her feet sticking up from out of the zinc bucket in our bathroom, I remember the relief of dry blankets.

  In the township, we li
ved in forced intimacy. We knew which neighbours borrowed which things: shoes for a school trip, sugar, mealie meal, salt, eggs.

  We revered Teacher Maenzanise, who had something that few others had – a car. When Constance fell from the avocado tree at Princess’s house, her mother MaiNever carried her broken body all the way down Mharapara, across Shuramurove and into Mhembwe Street, where Teacher Maenzanise lived. All that MaiNever needed to say was ‘Connie wabvirodonha’, and Teacher Maenzanise put down his Parade and his cigarette and drove them to Gomo Hospital.

  There was no thought of an ambulance. For one thing, there was no phone to call it with. Teacher Maenzanise provided an unofficial ambulance service for everyone on our side of Crowborough Way. MaiPrincess’s daughter Promise had been born in that car, Ba’Nhau’s old Sekuru had died in it, and both had been on the way to the hospital.

  In the year before I was sold, Teacher Maenzanise’s reputation was in danger of being dented because an angry woman came to school and took off her clothes in front of him. Drawn by the commotion, a crowd of children and teachers came to his classroom and heard her threaten to take off her clothes. This was meant to show that she had lost all her dignity; it was to show that the world might as well see her naked because of what he had done to her. ‘Ndokubvisira hembe, I will strip off my dress right here,’ she shouted.

  I did not see this myself, but my sister Joyi did because she was in Teacher Maenzanise’s class. She and her classmates had seen the woman, but could not describe what she looked like naked because Teacher Maenzanise had taken his jacket and covered her up and fought her out of the door. She had held on to the doorjamb and Teacher Maenzanise had had to force her out. The last thing that Joyi and the class had seen were her naked legs kicking her light-blue plastic Sandak shoes to the ground.