The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I longed to know what had happened to that eye but feared to ask because to ask would be to expect a response and I had learned that children did not always like to talk to me.

  So I looked with longing at the mango; I watched him pull it out of his mouth with a plop. He said, without prompting, ‘You have come to consult the Great-Ancestor.’

  ‘We have come to consult the Great-Ancestor,’ my mother confirmed.

  ‘Mhamha,’ the child yelled, ‘there are people to see the Great-Ancestor.’

  The shout was directed to the veranda of the neighbouring house, where a woman looked up from a group who had gathered to plait her neighbour’s hair. She had her own hair in a perm; the waves in it were damp with excess hair oil. Her breasts jutted from underneath a tee-shirt that bore the words NOT MY TYPE in shining gold letters.

  ‘You have come to see the Great-Ancestor,’ she said. ‘Wait here and we will call you in when he is approaching.’

  ‘Well,’ my mother said to me, ‘she is not what I expected but at least she is from Manicaland.’

  The child reappeared. Cleaned of mango, he wore a small skirt of feathers and beads around his waist and carried a pair of traditional rattles in his hands. The Great-Ancestor had arrived, he said, and he would see us now. Inside the house, the medium had hidden her hair under a crown of feathers. She wore a cloth of red and black that fell from her shoulders like a cloak.

  She let out a belch that must have fallen into my mother’s ears with added reassurance. Here at last was something familiar, a spirit that presaged its entry, as such spirits did, with grunts and groans. The spirits never announced themselves in anything that might resemble a normal human voice.

  The woman took snuff, began to shake, and then she was still. In the midst of clapping and the child’s rattle-shaking, a deep voice issued from her mouth and said, ‘You are here because you are greatly troubled.’ The voice stopped; the woman seemed to go into a deep sleep. We waited and waited but nothing further happened. Only when my mother prodded her did the woman come back to herself.

  After her return to earth, she and my mother had a slanging match, because my mother said she could not be expected to pay for nothing, while the woman said what was she to do, she could not control the comings and goings of the Great-Ancestor.

  While our mothers shouted at each other, the little boy looked at me with a frank and unhesitating stare. His navel, I saw, stuck out in a little lump like on one of MaiPrincess’s twins.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and offered me a mango. He put down his hat of feathers, and sat next to me in his feathered skirt. I took the mango, and we sat on the stoep of their veranda, a small space between us, eating our mangos side by side as we listened to the voices of our mothers.

  I will not pay, said mine. Oh, but you will pay, said his, otherwise you will find yourself facing worse things than your daughter’s skin. They went on like this for some time, but in the end my mother slammed down the money, stormed out and yanked my arm so that I dropped my mango.

  I said, ‘Mhamha, my mango.’

  ‘How many times have I told you not to eat at people’s houses?’ she said, and gave me a slap. I held back my tears and did not look back at the boy. Instead, I held on to the remaining taste of mango until we reached home.

  That night, when my father found out where we had been, he hit my mother full in the face with his fist. This was the only time that I recall my father ever hitting my mother. Until that day, he had been, like my sisters and me, the recipient of my mother’s blows.

  It was always she who attacked him, hitting him in his face while he attempted to restrain her and cover his face at the same time. He would hold his arms to his face as she went for his chest and his arms. He held her fists sometimes, and it was then that he called her name, and pleaded with her and said, ‘Moira, Moira, ndapota’, and it was terrible to hear them, more terrible than it was to hear the sounds they made in their room when my mother cried out in the night.

  That night I heard a sound from the back of our house. It was my father, crying deep gasping sobs, like he was out of breath after running a hard race, a race that he had won but had somehow still managed to lose.

  13

  If there is one thing that I can say I like about prison, it is that there are no baths. I have always hated water. I could not bear even to wash my face in it. I get through that morning ritual only by holding my breath and washing very quickly. It is an irrational fear, but I cannot bear to be near any body of water. This is why the hardest thing I did that night was not to dress Lloyd’s naked body, or remove the belt from his neck, but to drag his body to the swimming pool at Summer Madness.

  I still dream of drowning. Perhaps it is because I almost did when the Baptist held my head under the waters of the Mukuvisi, and again when one of the girls at the Convent pushed me into the swimming pool.

  That was on the fourth day of my first week in school. As I stood and shivered by the side of the pool, one of the girls came laughing at me and pushed me in. I have never known such terror. When our games mistress, Miss Flack, came in to get me, I struck out at her. Lloyd tried to teach me to swim at home, but I spent most of our lessons shivering with terror, and eventually he gave it up.

  And then there was the day the Baptist almost drowned me. My mother was restless in her church attendance. She had been to different churches over the years, dragging us with her, almost as though she had to try them all out before she finally settled on one.

  For a short period, we joined the Salvation Army. I loved it there because of the marching and the uniforms and the whistles. After that, my mother became one of the white-robed Apostolics, and sat with other white-garmented people under the shade of msasa trees. Here the women sat separately from the men, and always there were more women because most of the men had at least two wives.

  Feeling my skin burning, I watched the sun glint off the shaven heads of men with long beards who said angry prayers that made their spittle fly out over their held-out staffs and land on my face. The group she joined worshipped near the Mukuvisi River. It did not matter whether it was wet or dry – we sat outside and worshipped in our long white garments that never seemed to get dirty, no matter how rough our surroundings.

  Three Sundays after we joined this church, our whole family was baptised in the Mukuvisi, which on that day was no ordinary river in Salisbury but stood in for the River Jordan. The baptism was a wet and violent process. The whole person was submerged not once, not twice, but three times.

  My mother was baptised first, then my father, then Joyi. When it came to my turn, the Baptist asked whether I accepted Jesus and rejected Satan. All I could think of was that vast, terrible river, and the water that was muddy and brown. There was something in that murderous water, a njuzu; I just knew it, something that stole children. It would come for me, it was coming for me; I could feel it pulling me down, down.

  ‘Do you accept Jesus? Do you reject Satan?’ the Baptist said.

  There was only one way that I could think of to save myself from the terror of all that water. In deadly fear, I clung to the Baptist. ‘No, no!’ I shouted. ‘I do not accept Jesus.’

  My mouth filled with water and I could say no more. The choice was a simple one for me. Rejecting Satan meant putting my face in that river. Accepting Jesus meant the flow of that water over me.

  ‘Accept Jesus!’ the Baptist was now shouting. ‘Reject Satan!’

  I screamed and swallowed water as I fought against him. I was now full of terror and all my strength was directed at making him stop.

  He ducked me once more and when I came up, it was to scream louder than I had ever screamed before. The man ducked me again and I swallowed huge mouthfuls of the Jordan.

  When he lifted my head out, I spluttered and screamed, ‘No, no, I do not accept Jesus!’

  ‘Legion!’ shouted the Baptist. ‘Satan, I command you. Release this child. I command you, Legion,
in the name of Jesus, release this child.’

  When he ducked me the third time, he held my head under the water. I struggled, then let go. I went limp and thought: it is coming, the thing is coming for me. It was then that I felt strong hands, familiar hands grabbing hold of me.

  It was my father. He held me to him as I trembled. He and the Baptist then got into a shouting match. My father said he had frightened me, but the man said I had a strong spirit, an evil spirit that was in me.

  ‘Did you not hear her?’ he said, turning to the small band of congregants. Did you hear her refusing to reject Satan? Look at what she is. This child is an instrument of Satan.’

  I clung to my father all the way home. We did not go back to that church again. For days afterwards, I dreamt of being pulled down, down, into the river to be received by a creature with long arms that gripped me and would never let me go.

  My mother then discovered MaiChaza’s church, where the primary means of salvation was through elaborate rites of public confession, the confessions becoming more and more detailed and the sins confessed more outrageous: one woman confessed to performing as a witch from the age of three, while a man claimed to have killed his father with an axe at the age of seven. Three women confessed that they had eaten their children.

  Then my mother met Sister Lucia and Brother Patrick. They belonged to a happy-clappy-tambourine church, the Church of the Felicitous Tidings of the New Gospel.

  In the fields of the Apostolics, the songs were lugubrious and soporific. But in the community hall at Highfield, which served as the Church of the Felicitous Tidings for one and a half hours on Sundays, before giving way to the next church whose turn it was, the songs were catchy, happy, uplifting and infectious.

  I began to look forward to going to church. I loved the music. I longed to be like Sister Lucia, beating along in time with her jangling tambourine, her red and white ribbons flying from it. My eyes closed in rapture as I sang about a wonderful treasure God gave without measure; we are travelling together, my Bible and I. One day, I vowed, I would own my very own tambourine.

  The God of the Church of the Felicitous Tidings seemed like someone who actually cared. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I prayed for something other than dark skin; I prayed for a tambourine of my own. I imagined that I would adorn it in my favourite colours, in purple and orange ribbons. I fantasised about playing it with the expert flicks that Sister Lucia gave.

  When the frenzy took them, the women in the church dropped their tambourines, and raised their voices to speak in a babble that they called ‘tongues’, a large wall of nonsense that seemed to rise from the congregation and make its way to heaven. After only two weeks at this church, my mother, too, started to speak in tongues. Her tongues had to manifest in a special way. She took to fainting and falling about on the floor.

  For all the falling she and the other women did, and it was only ever the women, she never exposed her underwear, and even though she shook violently, the Holy Spirit very chastely confined his visits above the waist, and never once caught her in spiritual disarray.

  Her tonguespeak and falling fits established my mother as a stalwart of the Church of the Felicitous Tidings of the New Gospel. It was at this church that the momentous event in my mother’s life happened. It was here that she received the prophecy that led directly to my sale.

  14

  The world outside comes to us through the snatches of conversations that we overhear from the guards, and through the news from visitors. The big news at the moment is the coming election. Loveness told me that all the guards have been attending meetings at which they have been instructed how to vote. But to hear them, you would not know that an election is coming. The guards are much more exercised about hairstyles and clothes, and the everyday things that happen to them, than they are about the election.

  I overheard Patience and Mathilda talk about a funeral that Patience had attended at the weekend. ‘They tussled at the graveside, can you imagine. They fought until he fell in and smashed his head on the coffin, and just like that he was deceased. I have never seen such boomshit. We were all in mayhem.’

  I sometimes wish it were Patience, and not Loveness, who had taken such a shine to me. Her stories are so outlandish that I think the newspapers must use her as their regular source. ‘There was mayhem at a grave in Warren Hills when mourners fought at the graveside.’ ‘There was pandemonium in Warren Hills when mourners fought one another and one cracked his head on the coffin.’

  From what I have described of the prison, it is probably hard for you to believe that things were much worse here once. There was a cholera epidemic the year before I arrived. Ten women died. It could have been more but the women are not packed as tightly as the prisoners in the men’s section. Still, we are so much on top of each other here that I sometimes forget that there are just over a thousand women in prisons in all of the country. There are some open prisons, and some in Shurugwi. The men are just over twenty thousand, with almost two-thirds of them crammed into Chikurubi.

  Every time there is a death from their section, we hear the voices of the men rising in the night to sing away the dead. Loveness says in the cholera days they did nothing but sing, in the day, in the night, all through the months until finally the cholera died out.

  I wonder if the first prisons in the country were called penitentiaries, as they were called in England, which gave us prisons along with the rest of our penal system. This is one of those things that Lloyd would have known. The Victorians founded Rhodesia, bringing with them their rigid view of religion, in which there was no difference between a crime and sin; either one meant damnation. They would have seen jails as places of penitence, where sinners and criminals, being so close together, would make their peace with their maker.

  In America you call them correctional facilities, as though the buildings are factories and the inmates within so many faulty bottle caps needing to be mended. ‘Jere’, ‘tirongo’, ‘college’ are the slang terms for prison. Nothing suggesting rehabilitation, just being shut away, exile.

  Synodia would have been at home in the world of the penitentiary. She has found a new form of tyranny. She now belongs to a church of the type that my mother attended just before she sold me. It is a Pentecostal church called, of all things, the Church of God, headed by a man who calls himself Evangelist Ishmael.

  You probably know more about him than I do, but from what the papers say, he draws huge crowds to his services, where he performs cures. The lame walk. The blind are healed. The overweight experience instant weight loss. The short gain centimetres. I read in the paper last week that he has paid for doctors to perform eye surgery on people with cataracts. Considering that he claims to have the power to heal without medical intervention, I would have thought that it was cheaper to place healing hands than do the surgery, but what do I know.

  It is not enough that Synodia’s own salvation is secure: she wants to save us all, too. But first, she wants us to know the full extent of our own damnation. She insists that we attend a morning service on every day that she is on duty. Being saved is enough to give her absolute authority not only to interpret the Bible, but also to tell us how we are all to be judged. Who will protest that the prison is state territory, that she should keep her private views to herself?

  The separation between Church and State is as foreign to Synodia as her own natural hair. She makes us stand and sing every morning before breakfast. Then she gives a little sermon, and all the while flies are hovering over our bread and the tea grows cold. The sweat shines off her face as she makes authoritative pronouncements about the fate that awaits each of us. She taps the side of her head with an open palm and her fingers splayed upwards as she talks – I suspect that it is not the passion that moves her, but her scalp that itches under her weave. ‘You are whores and murderers; you are thieves and criminals. You have forfeited the Mercy of the Lord, and you will never know the grace of God.’

  We have l
earned the expected responses.

  ‘That’s right,’ we respond.

  ‘That’s right!’ screams Evernice, louder than anyone.

  ‘Are you listening to me? Are you with me? You will burn in hell, all of you.’

  ‘Amen,’ we agree.

  ‘Only through the blood of Jesus will you know salvation.’

  ‘Hallelujah.’

  ‘You must open your hearts to the Lord. You must fill your blood with his power, so that even the mosquitoes that bite feel that power. They will suck the power in your blood.’

  ‘Power in the blood!’ echoes Evernice.

  ‘Kamasatalaha, kamasatalaha, kamasatalaha.’ This is Benhilda Makoni’s contribution. She has begun to speak in what she calls tongues. She froths at the mouth and shakes her body.

  We then launch into one of Synodia’s favourite songs: ‘Every day with Jesus/ is sweeter than the day before./ Every day with Jesus/ I love him more and more.’ Synodia interrupts each of her sermons with a song. It surprises me that we manage to sing at all, let alone rouse any enthusiasm. And yet you find ululations and dances and thumping on makeshift drums.

  All through yesterday, ‘Every Day with Jesus’ followed my movements wherever I went. If it was not Benhilda singing it in the ablution block, it was the baby dumpers singing it in the garden or Jimmy and Verity humming it as they swept out the cell.

  *

  The song has also struck a chord of memory: I believe that was one of the songs that we sang when Reverend Bergen came to preach at the tambourine church that my mother made us go to after my father found out about the healer.

  My mother’s Christianity did not preclude atavistic beliefs in the ancestors whose job it was to guard and protect her against misfortune, against barrenness, illness, financial woes and misery. It is a curious thing, this straddling of the modern and the ancient world. One foot is in the Christian camp of the certainty of prayers answered, tambourines and organs, Latin chants and wafers that are actually human flesh. The other is in the traditional-religion camp, propelled by fears of witchcraft and tokoloshes and divisi. In this world, ancestors are a powerful force, for we have them on both sides, as did our fathers and mothers before us, and theirs before them, creating an ancestral web that cocoons us in its care and protection.