When she put on her records, it was a sign for us to get out of the house as fast as we could. When that happened, we went to the back of the house, where, his wireless set drowned out by the music of the records, we watched our father at work, making beds and tables and chairs and wardrobes, cupboards and shelves.
With the leftover bits of wood, he carved little dolls with vacant faces on which we painted eyes and smiles. He made delicately fashioned replicas of cars out of thin wire. Everything I knew about cars, their different shapes and their names, came from those models. He made a Rolls-Royce car – a Silver Ghost, he called it – and Citroëns that looked like crouching frogs, Beetles and Mini Coopers, Massey Ferguson and John Deere tractors.
Those little cars are everywhere now – you can buy them anywhere, along with little soapstone sculptures and baskets made entirely out of bottle tops; you can buy them wherever there is a street and a corner to stand at, but in those days, my father was one of the few who made them.
As we watched him work, the sound of my mother’s music floated out of the house and into the garden. My mother’s taste ran to the maudlin. She liked the more mournful music of Jim Reeves and Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner and Kenny Rogers, particularly the songs that were also stories. She listened to songs about Jeannie, a small child who was afraid of the dark and on whose grave there was always a light; about Little Rosa, a child crushed to her early death by a motor car; about Sue, who was actually a boy but had been given a girl’s name to toughen him up; and about Tommy, who was called a coward because he had promised his father to walk away from trouble if he could.
Her favourite record was about a soldier who was arrested on a long march during the North African campaign and brought before the provost marshal. Even now, in Chikurubi, the words of that song come to me with as sharp a clarity as if I were listening to it from the back of our house. The soldier responded to the charges against him by stating that each card in the deck he carried stood for some theological principle or tenet, and concluded that his cards served him not only as a prayer book and almanac, but also as a Bible. Even as a child, I thought it must surely be easier for the soldier to carry a very small Bible than to remember what each card represented.
Three days ago in the garden, I heard Jimmy Blue Butter sing ‘Coward of the County’ as she worked, and I was again at home with Kenny Rogers on the radio as my mother sobbed and we waited for her mood to pass and the music to cease so that we could get back inside the house.
I do not want to give you the impression that my mother was like this all the time. But I believe that we were afraid to laugh because our laughter so very often had to be switched off if she decided she did not want to hear it.
She was most joyous on our birthdays; she went to great trouble to make vetkoeks for breakfast, which we ate instead of bread. She whisked the batter together before dropping it in little dollops in the hot oil. I liked to watch the balls become round and golden.
After we ate the vetkoeks, we all sang ‘Happy Birthday’, and she put on records and we danced. On those days, she retired Jeannie and Little Rosa and Tommy and the boy named Sue, and instead played ‘Bhutsu Mutandarikwa’ or other happy songs. But even these occasions were not without their fraught moments, as she sometimes got mixed up on the dates.
She thought one day that it was Joyi’s birthday when it wasn’t. She made us come inside to put on our Christmas dresses, which were also our birthday dresses. For everyday clothes, my mother went to Express Stores, but once a year, in December, we took the Zupco bus to Fourth Street and walked to First Street to gaze at the lights on the giant Christmas tree, and do window-shopping at Barbours, Greatermans and Miltons, before going to buy our annual Christmas-Birthday clothes at the Topics red-hanger sale.
Our dresses were always the same, but in different colours. The year that my mother mistook Joyi’s birthday, mine was orange, which made me happy because it was a colour I loved above all others; Joyi’s was blue and Mobhi’s pink. She told us to change into these dresses. We could not start the party without our special clothes.
We were too afraid to tell her that it was no one’s birthday, or that it was not Christmas. Instead we went along with her excitement. She went by herself to the shops and brought back a rectangular cake with pink frosting all over it. While she was getting the cake, Joyi and I changed into our clothes and helped Mobhi into hers.
When my mother came back with candy cakes, she turned on the radiogram to play ‘Bhutsu Mutandarikwa’.
The song played three times and each time it played, she made us dance. Then the music stopped with a harsh scratch as she snatched the needle from the radiogram. We stopped dancing and stood in silence, looking at her.
‘Stop looking at me with those eyes,’ she said. ‘What are you doing in here anyway, what kind of children are you, always indoors when you should be out playing with other children? And who said you can wear those clothes?’
I could see that Joyi was about to blurt that it was my mother herself who had called us in not moments ago and insisted that we change. I stopped her in time and tried to herd everyone out.
But we were too slow for my mother. She took up the record from the radiogram and threw it at me. It spun towards me, just glancing my ear, before smashing against the wall. The cake followed. We were too slow. Mobhi slipped in the cake, came down hard on her bottom and sat in the middle of the mess wailing that her dress was dirty. I walked back quickly to pick her up and ran out with her struggling in my arms.
When my father found us in the sun outside, he held the wall to steady himself before going back into the house.
The next time that my father went to the shops, he bought us a new ‘Bhutsu Mutandarikwa’. At the next real party, which was Mobhi’s party, my mother made us wear our Christmas-Birthday clothes. We danced to the song again and again just as we had done before, like nothing had happened.
I no longer recall where my father was on the day of the false birthday party. He rarely left the house. He did not go out to work like other fathers. He paid a boy to bring him what he needed in a scotch-cart. As he expected his customers to come to him, he did not sell much, but still managed enough that we did not have to eat Lacto or matemba every day.
When he left the house, he usually took us with him. He took us to the Agricultural Show every year, where we headed straight to the horses. My father was mad about racing. Away from the show, racing was part of our lives – even my mother was silenced by Peter Lovemore’s voice. The radio was a part of my father’s every moment.
Our father worked from the back of our house, where wood was stacked. He kept his things under a dark-green tarpaulin to protect them from the dust and the sun and the rain. Before we moved to Mufakose, he had worked in a factory. Then he had ridden his bicycle to work in the Western industries before he stopped working there and began to work from home.
My mother was angry when our neighbour said the factory that made furniture for Mashonaland Furnishers was looking for workers and he refused to go and stand in line for a job.
The other children routinely mocked us because our father walked us to school every day. Only on the first day, and sometimes not even then, did parents walk the grade ones, the very youngest children, to school. While other children moved to school together in little bunches of blue-and-maroon or green uniforms, we walked with our father.
He carried Mobhi on his shoulders, her fat little legs wriggling as she laughed through the smoke and called out the names of any people that she recognised. Joyi and I tried to melt into the road as we passed staring children.
After he left us at school, my father walked back home with Mobhi and spent the rest of the day behind the house doing his carpentry work while she played around him. My mother, prone to headaches and other complaints, usually kept to her room.
When we did not go to school, he often took us to the shops in a group to buy us centacools or maputi. Joyi and I moved around and about them. N
hau, who had appointed himself my tormentor, would come after us, rolling a bicycle rim. With my father beside me, Nhau could only content himself with dancing out his torment and making faces. My father was my bulwark, my protection against my mother, and my protector against the torments of Nhau.
Now that I think about those days, I wonder what happened to Nhau. He was my main torturer, and if he became the man he promised to be as a child, he may well be next door, at the men’s section of Chikurubi, perhaps one of the infamous car thieves for which Mufakose has become notorious. On the streets of Mufakose are Harare’s thieves shaped, forged and burnished. Or perhaps he is a deacon in one of those ever-sprouting churches, a pillar of his community and a father of four. Or perhaps nothing that extreme but rather something in between, a perfectly ordinary man.
I have already said that my father was unlike any of the other fathers of the children that we knew because he did not go to work. He was also unlike other fathers because he did not drink. Lameck’s father always staggered home from the Rufaro Marketing beer garden near the shops. On the nights that it was too hot to sit inside, I sat on the veranda and watched him stagger home, held up between Lameck and his brother Nathan, singing, ‘Vakaita musangano mapositori ekwaMarange, pamusana pekuda kuziva akatipenda nependi nhema, yaive mugaba, mugaba reurombo.’ On payday, he lost most of his money at the beer hall, either spent or stolen, until the manager at his factory agreed to give his wages directly to Lameck’s mother. Sometimes he was so gone that they borrowed a wheelbarrow from my father so that they could wheel him home. He would fall out and Lameck would try to coax him back in.
Rispah’s mother chased Rispah’s father up and down our road when she found that he had spent all his pay on horses at the Mashonaland Turf Club. Nhau’s father had a woman come to their house and threaten to remove all her clothes in public if he did not admit that he was the father of her child.
My father was not like this; he was not a drunk, or a gambler or a womaniser of any kind. His love for the horses was a passive activity; it did not see him gamble his money away at the Mashonaland Turf Club. In our family it was our mother, and not our father, who chastised us. At school, the children were afraid of their fathers. They spoke of the instruments that their parents used to beat them.
Lameck’s father was a policeman and used his truncheon.
Patience’s father liked to use the sjambok.
Nhau’s father made him and his brothers prepare their instruments of punishment: they picked a thin branch from a peach tree and stripped it of leaves, the better to leave a stinging, burning pain on exposed skin.
When she needed to thrash us, our mother used an old woven leather belt that once belonged to my father. She hit us with the buckle of it. Oftentimes, when the punishment was not premeditated, she took up whatever instrument came within her reach.
I know that this will seem like the most shocking abuse to you, but to us it was our everyday reality. We were no different from other families. We even found a certain heroism in the amount of punishment we could take. We admired Nhau for his ability to withstand the most severe lashing without the slightest whimper, and gathered round to marvel at his welts. It was not uncommon to hear children boasting about the scars they had picked up or about the pain they had endured, exaggerating it for effect.
We all pretended that we had not heard each other crying out, ‘Ndagura, ndagura’, crying out in penitence to stop the lashing.
I do not mean to suggest that all levels of violence were accepted. Clarissa is here because she beat a pupil to death. She has lost an eye because the father of the child she killed attacked her outside court. It was not uncommon to find another parent, an adult, come to the rescue of a beaten child, clapping hands in respect to the enraged parent, pleading for an end to the punishment as a child had had enough.
Anything, I felt, could be borne with a sherbet or centacool in my hand and my father beside me – the same father who handed me over to Lloyd at the Post Office on Inez Terrace and walked away without a single backward look.
12
My mother spent most of her time indoors because she suffered from a headache that seemed to have no cure. On the days she was well, she plaited women’s hair from our house. These were the days when only women with money had perms. The women in the township, with little money to spare, distinguished each other from neighbours by plaiting their hair in ever-more-elaborate fashions. They regarded hair as so much virgin territory to be conquered and twisted or stretched with a hot comb until it was compliant.
She was skilled in this conquest, my mother; she knew how to slather hair with Vaseline before stretching it without burning the scalp. She could plait hair into any fashion, weaving a tapestry of zigzags and other patterns across the head.
My skin made it impossible for my mother to stretch or plait my hair. My scalp was too sensitive, and grew hot in the sun.
My mother did Joyi and Mobhi’s hair every Friday. She sat on a three-legged stool outside our house, and they sat on the floor before her. She scratched their scalps to remove dandruff. She then divided the hair into as many sections as the pattern demanded. Then she wound the thread around each section, connecting it to the next. She specialised in plaiting with a needle to create long, thin rows that were evenly spaced and left the scalp gleamingly exposed.
Joyi’s face wore a pinched expression after each hair session; she stuck out her head as though it was now too heavy to rest on her shoulders, or like it carried an invisible load. It was worse for Mobhi, who cried herself to sleep on hair-plaiting nights. It was only after two days that their faces relaxed as the style settled in.
On special occasions, my mother stretched their hair with a stretching comb. It was only when I watched Liz Warrender groom the Compton-Jones’s horses that I discovered that these stretching combs were actually intended to be curry combs for groom horses.
The moments where I was alone with my mother are so few that each one stands out. The only time I left the house with any regularity, apart from going to school and church, was in connection with what my mother called my illness. It was mostly my father who came with me to the hospital. When I was particularly ill and the flies settled on my breaking skin, and I saw the world only through a well of water, my father wrapped me in a blanket and I walked in the suffocating heat to the bus stop to take a bus to Gomo Hospital.
When they were not in school, my father insisted that Joyi and Mobhi come too. They resented this because they would much rather have been playing on Mharapara than sitting in the waiting room full of sickness and a hushed silence that did not encourage giggles and fidgeting. The only consolation for Joyi was that it gave her material to use in her games with the other children. ‘Let’s play Memo Goes to Hospital,’ I heard her shout once, immediately followed by the loud squabbling voices of the other children insisting that they wanted to be the doctor or the nurse – no one wanted to be me.
At the hospital, the doctors lifted my eyelids, and the nurses put gentian violet on my blisters, leaving me with purple-stained skin. They told my father to keep me out of the sun. Mostly we saw the nurses, scowling beings in white who treated my illness as though it were an inconvenience. The white caps on their heads seemed to float, halo-like, in the air above them. They looked soft and clean and made me feel dirty and unwashed.
But their hands when they touched me were rough and strong as they put stinging ointment on my broken skin. They seemed to think that they could scold away my illness if they shouted loud and long enough. ‘Why do you sit in the sun when you know you are so sick?’
I grew to fear the hospital, and when my father said we should go, I threw myself on the floor and grabbed a leg of the sofa and fought him when he tried to pick me up so that he often just gave up, and nature, when it chose, did the healing.
My mother rarely came to the hospital with us. Instead, she talked of consulting diviners. She was convinced that a potion or spell could be found that would make my
problems disappear. Mine was not an illness, but a curse sent to her by her ancestors to punish her. This was the cause of some of the most frequent disagreements between my mother and father.
Oftentimes, my father just let my mother talk, her words a river washing over him without regard. She talked in declarative terms of the people from the east who were the only people in the country with forces powerful enough to counter the might of lightning and direct it to smite their enemies, and about the powerful runyoka spells cast by husbands to ensure that their wives were bound.
I recall an evening, perhaps a year before I was sold, when my father stopped my mother as she talked and said, ‘You know as well as I do why these things are happening. Why do you want to cause yourself more pain?’
She had been angry, and suddenly she changed mood and said, ‘Why don’t you just leave me? I know that is what you want to do. Just leave. That will end everything.’
My father said, ‘I will leave you only with my death.’
They were both very quiet after that, and my mother did not talk about diviners again that night.
Even though my father refused to sanction trips to healers, I recall at least three occasions when my mother and I left the house without my father’s knowledge. Each time, we visited a traditional healer, and each time, my mother swore me to silence. In dusty little rooms in the townships of Harare, my mother waited for ancestral spirits to visit little round men and women who acted as mediums. But I was still unwell, my skin still broke and bruised, and I remained unhealed.
The last time we visited such a place, we found the house empty, except for a small boy of my age who was all mango; there seemed to be more mango on his person than had made it into his stomach. He interested me because he saw out of one eye. The other was big and bulging and covered with his eyelid.
The Book of Memory Page 9