The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  This was a vow that was better made than kept.

  In that first year, it seemed to me that I saw them everywhere I looked. My heart grew still when I saw any tall, straight man with a short, neat Afro. Six months after I left home, Lloyd dropped me off at the Queen Victoria Memorial Library on Rotten Row; I saw a man that I knew was my father. So certain was I that it was him that I ran after him across the street. The traffic lights changed before I noticed them and all around me car horns beeped, and I came to myself.

  An irate driver who had almost run me over got out of his car and blocked my path. More horns beeped around us as he made a grab for me, but I managed to slip away. I ran all the way back to the library without stopping, and I lost sight of my father, or the man that I had imagined to be my father.

  The phantom sightings continued over the years. One Sunday, two years after my sale, at the racecourse at Borrowdale with Lloyd and Liz Warrender, I heard a woman shout ‘Iwe, Moreblessings!’ Even as I knew that it could not be our Moreblessings because our Mobhi was dead, and even as I saw that this Moreblessings was not a girl but a woman in a bright pink shirt and a yellow banana clip in her hair, my hope still rose in my throat until it stung my eyes.

  That day, and on every day that I went to the racecourse, I imagined my father sitting at his wireless set in our house on Mharapara Street in Mufakose, listening to the invisible thunder of the horses that I saw before me.

  Throughout the years, I would catch what I thought were glimpses of one or another of my family, but as the years ran into each other, the memories faded.

  Years later, when I had begun to think of Lloyd and Poppy as my family and Summer Madness as my home, at St Dominic’s Secondary School in Chishawasha, the valley opposite Umwinsidale, I saw a schoolgirl, small, slight and caramel-skinned, who might have been my sister Joy.

  St Dominic’s was the rural version of our school. It was not so much a sister school; more like a cousin, a poor rural one for that matter, where the girls were not considered sophisticated enough for the blazers, boaters, French, swimming or tennis that was considered so necessary for us.

  We had gone there for a debate; something about colonialism bringing more harm than good. After the motion was carried, we got into our bus to leave. As our bus negotiated its way along the narrow path that led to the school gate, we stopped to make room for their school bus.

  As their bus passed us, I saw among the faces in the bus a girl who could have been my sister, a girl who could have been the child that my sister Joy had been when I last saw her. As though sensing that I was staring at her, she turned in my direction. Our eyes met. In that moment, our bus drove away, and I was left to persuade myself that I had imagined the resemblance.

  I never saw them again. Even after I was old enough to have my own money and I could navigate the city on my own, even after I turned sixteen and Lloyd gave me my beloved orange Beetle, I did not look for them. By this time, I had reasoned to myself once and for all that if they did not want me, I did not want them either. Most of all, I did not look for them because I was afraid that seeing them would only confirm my loss.

  I wondered often why Lloyd had taken me in. You see how insidious his influence is, how I am using his language. I believe he came close to explaining, after all the ugliness with Zenzo, but I did not open the letter he put under my door. I did not want to hear his self-justification.

  In the years that followed, my feelings for Lloyd went through a complex spectrum that took in fear, affection, anger and revulsion, gratitude and, ultimately, pity. If you had met Lloyd, you would have been struck that such a mild and gentle man could cause feelings of such depth and intensity.

  Lloyd’s unstinting generosity complicated matters, particularly after the business with Zenzo. There was no question that his house was very clearly, and openly, my home. He gave me an expensive and necessary education that was good enough to get me into an elite university. Under expert medical care my skin bloomed until both Simon and Zenzo could say, with some sincerity, that I was beautiful. I discovered books that became as necessary to my being as breathing.

  Living with him in that house, I fell in love with history. Through him, living in his world, I got a sense of a world that was bigger than myself. Could there have been love?

  If I had not seen that passing of notes between my parents, I would have believed … I don’t know what I would have believed. And if there had been no Zenzo. Maybe there could have been love between us, not the prurient love of funny things imagined by Officer Dimples, but love in its simple purity of one being opening up to another, with no expectation beyond the gift of that love.

  In the moments when I forgot how we came to live together, I believe that I came to love him. What had been a tentative flowering might have turned into a full blossoming. Then Zenzo entered our lives, and everything wilted.

  2

  I read in one of your columns that, on the night before their execution, death row prisoners in one of the Southern states, Texas or Georgia, I can’t recall, will usually request, for their last meal, the foods that recall their childhood. And because a disproportionate number of death row inmates are black prisoners from the rural South, these last suppers tend to be the food of the poor, fried chicken and collard greens, grits and sweet potato pie.

  I don’t think I would want any food on the night before that morning. I imagine that it would taste like ash. And how would I ever eat that last mouthful, the last morsel, knowing that it is the last that I will ever eat? I would want just wine, I think. No – vodka, perhaps: strong, cheap vodka, and lots of it, enough to knock me out the night before and make every step the next morning shine with light.

  When I asked Loveness on Sunday if we had the last supper tradition here, she clucked her tongue and said, ‘You know we do not talk about that here.’

  Any time that I approach the subject of my sentence, Loveness acts like a particularly judgemental hostess whose least important guest has been caught in a social faux pas. When I told her that, in America, people eat what they want on their last day, she said again that I should not think such things, and besides, I should hurry and leave my cell because I had a visitor.

  I was surprised. As I told you before, I have never had a visitor in the two years that I have been here, apart from the Goodwill Fellowship people. You and Vernah Sithole do not count as visitors because you come at the special dispensation of the Chief Superintendent. As you saw last week, you can come in and out as long as you announce your planned visit and you don’t visit more than twice in one week. So you are not visitors in the ordinary sense.

  I thought it might be one of the Goodwill Fellowship women, though I was sure it would not be the one that they sent last time. ‘Are you coping with prison conditions now?’ the woman who came to see me had asked. ‘Are you missing anything, anything at all?’

  Her face was a symphony of manufactured sympathy. Something about her perfect assurance made me savage. Am I missing anything, anything at all? I mean, really. Not anything at all. Just everything. Books, books, books, books. Soap. A warm bed with clean sheets that smell of fabric softener. A hot shower. Sunscreen. The plopping sound produced by a Chablis straight from the fridge. Mosquito spray. The smell of old archives. The curling loops on old manuscripts. The cream-and-green ordinariness of my Tilley hat. Toothpaste. A comb. A comb with all its teeth attached. The Internet.

  ‘You know what I really miss?’ I said, and put on my most wistful look. I may even have managed a shimmer of tears.

  She leaned forward, her face a rictus of concern, the Bic pen on her clipboard ready to note down desires she knew the Goodwill Fellowship could not possibly fulfil, her left hand on the verge of stretching out to clasp mine in solidarity.

  ‘What I really long for, more than anything, what I miss above all other things,’ I said, ‘is a good, hard fuck.’

  The outstretched hand was withdrawn. Her face collapsed into an O of shock. She fumbled for her cl
ipboard and moved to record the longings of the next prisoner. I felt terrible until my irritation took over. What did she know, this little peach-faced do-gooder? It takes more than good wishes; it takes a spectacular failure of the imagination to ask if there are things we miss. Better to say nothing, to bring Bibles and leave than to open wounds that you cannot possibly heal.

  But it was not the Goodwill Fellowship this time. Instead, my visitor was a student from one of the universities here. Synodia was not pleased to have another visit to supervise. Visiting days are on the first and third Sundays of every month. They are often deeply distressing, as so often the visitors bring bad news, and the guards have to threaten everyone and shout louder than usual to get everyone to settle. On those Sundays, the women who will have seen family during the day mostly spend the night in fits of weeping, which irritates the others and causes friction. That is when most of the fights in C cell happen.

  My visitor had two letters from her university, one asking whomever it concerned to co-operate with her research, the other from the Prison Commissioner, approving her to see me, on condition that it was to be in the presence of a guard. Synodia was not pleased to hear her ask for a special room. As the guards were all occupied, she marshalled us into the canteen with all the others. We sat at one end of the room while Synodia stood over us with a sour face.

  Synodia’s manner had clearly unsettled my visitor. Without looking directly at me, she stammered something about the sociopathology of the female murderer. She turned to open her laptop bag.

  ‘Eh, what are you handing her over there? I have to see what is in that bag,’ Synodia said.

  ‘But I have already been searched,’ the student responded.

  ‘And you will be searched again.’

  At Synodia’s command, the girl took out everything she had and put in on the table. As Synodia looked through her things, she kept a running commentary on how important it was for the student to know that there was nothing special about murderers like me, how it was important to make sure that murderers like me knew their place, and that the place for murderers like me was not in any fancy books written by students at a university, no matter how clever and educated they thought they were, but here in Chikurubi, where murderers like me belonged.

  The student put everything back into her bag but her notepad and pens. Synodia was clearly getting to her. When she dropped a pen, she jumped as though to escape her own skin. She licked her lips and looked at her notebook. I waited for questions that did not come.

  Eventually I said, ‘So, Clarice.’

  She looked at me blankly and said, ‘My name is not Clarice.’

  ‘Hannibal Lecter?’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t get you.’

  ‘“I’m having an old friend for dinner”?’

  ‘Sorry?’ she said again.

  ‘The Silence of the Lambs?’

  She looked about the room as though the silence that I spoke of was all around us.

  ‘Sorry?’

  The rhyme from the school playground in Mufakose came to my mind: ‘Es-oh-ara-another-ara-no-more-ara-and-then-wayi!’ She looked as if she might know that rhyme. She is one of those students Zimbabwe produces, like my old friend Mercy at the Convent; she probably studied by the light of candles, her English coming to her, as mine did in the first three years, from teachers who had learned it third-hand, the accent undiluted, the ambition strong. She would have gone to a mission school, very likely as a scholarship girl.

  And perhaps, like Mercy, she would meet some Pentecostal Christian man, if she hadn’t already, who would have no interest in the sociopathology of the female murderer.

  By the time she had recovered enough to stammer through a list of questions that assumed my conviction and guilt were one and the same thing, I had lost interest in Clarice. I gave short, bland answers to her questions, staying only so that I could spend more time looking around the room at all the visitors.

  As Clarice talked and I looked about me, I wondered, for the first time, what my life might have been like if I had never met Lloyd.

  3

  It was Lloyd who first took me to the National Archives in Borrowdale. In our history classes, the walls of the classroom disappeared and I found myself fully immersed in the lesson of the day. The past came alive vividly before me. Chuma and Susi carrying the body of Livingstone, Gonçalo da Silveira’s lonely death in the Mutapa Empire, Chiang Kai-shek crossing from the mainland, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks fighting the October Revolution, Queen Philippa pardoning the men of Calais.

  If you ever go to the Archives, you must make your way through the main doors and up the stairs past the main desk. You will find yourself in an atrium that leads to the Beit Gallery. In this space are the symbols of the extraordinary juxtapositions that birthed this country.

  There is a strikingly real facsimile copy of the Domesday Book, the result of William the Conqueror’s comprehensive act of administrative control after crossing the English Channel to conquer an England that would eventually sprawl into the empire on which the sun finally set with the independence of this country.

  There are large paintings by Thomas Baines, the artist who brought Africa to London as a lush rainforest inhabited by noble natives in neatly folded loincloths. There are two life-size bronzes of the rebels Charwe and Gumboreshumba, better known as the spirit mediums of Nehanda and Kaguvi, the spirits who gave the fight for black independence its moral force. And there are pictures of the ruins in Masvingo, the seat of the ancient empire that gave the country its name.

  It was only in the months that I worked at the Archives, after my return to Zimbabwe, that I came to realise this arrangement was purely random.

  If you go past this room and into the narrow corridor, you will find yourself in the treasure vault of the Beit Gallery. In here is the mace presented to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland by the British Parliament. In a glass cabinet, you will find the independence documents, a letter from the Queen of England handing over the country as one would hand over a gift to a friend. There are books and documents and portraits dating back to the seventeenth century, documents that quickened my blood as I studied the Mutapa Empire.

  Right at the end of the gallery, in a wooden cabinet with a glass lid, is a worn piece of blue, red and white cloth that was stitched in South Africa by hands that have been lifeless for more than a hundred years. This is the Pioneer flag, the Union Jack that Cecil John Rhodes and his Pioneer Column, Lloyd’s grandfather among them, raised at Fort Salisbury on 13 September 1890.

  Sometimes, when I found myself in the Archives, or when Lloyd talked about his family, I thought of my own, undocumented past. The parents that I left behind in Mufakose seemed, like Melchizedek the Priest-King who came leaping in dance to Abraham, to have had no father and mother. We seemed like the Spartoi, the earth-grown men that sprang up, fully formed, from the teeth sown by Cadmus, to be completely unconnected to anyone but ourselves, to have emerged complete into the present, without a history.

  There were no old letters, no mementos, no links to any kind of past. Even when we asked them, my parents answered no questions about their past, or any past. It was more than a lack of openness – it seemed an almost active secrecy. I had once asked my mother where my dead brother Gift was buried and she answered by shouting that I should not ask about things I did not understand. ‘Why,’ she continued, ‘are the plates in the sink still unwashed after I told you again and again to wash them?’

  She had, in fact, told me no such thing, but I hastily moved over to the kitchen to do as she said.

  We had always lived in town, as far as I knew, until my father explained about Joyi’s scar. I did not know that we had ever lived in a rural village until the day Joy looked at her small burned foot and said she wished it looked like the other one. ‘That is a symbol of great love,’ my father said. ‘You should not wish it away.’

  We pressed him to tell us what he meant and he laughed and said, ‘Sh
e got it because of too much love. It happened when we lived kumusha. You had a little doll.’

  ‘Did it open and shut its eyes like Promise’s doll?’ asked Joyi.

  ‘This was when we lived kumusha, at your grandmother’s village. It was not a real doll; it was a cornhusk that you had taken and made a doll of. When your grandmother burned it by mistake, you wailed and ran into the ash to rescue it. We got to you just in time.’

  He told us about the white plaster that Joyi had; they had to crack it open at the hospital when it came off.

  This was the only time that he had ever mentioned a rural home or a grandmother. Joyi was more interested in her plaster, but I pressed him on the grandmother. ‘Where is she? Where is this rural home?’

  Who was the grandmother, was she old, where was she now, was she dead, when would she come to see us, would she bring us peanuts and matohwe and watermelons, like Whizi’s grandmother that time, or just horrible stinky old mufushwa, like Princess’s granny?

  He only laughed, and said, ‘Why don’t we go for our walk?’

  In the excitement of anticipating sweets and treats, I stopped asking questions.

  As I have said, it was only when I heard the neighbours talking at the wake when Mobhi died that I thought at all about what it meant that we had no relatives. MaiWhizi asked what had happened to all our relatives, why we were burying Mobhi alone, like we were ‘born locations’, meaning people born in the townships, people without roots; it was only then that I began to wonder why no one ever came to see us.

  There was that scar, though, Joyi’s burn scar. It was a hard fact that I could hold on to. It connected us to another life, to a grandmother, to a rural home, at least. Joyi, rarely aggressive, lashed out at me when she heard me tell the plaster story to Lavinia at breaktime. Only, in my retelling, the plaster had been on me and not on Joyi. She came charging at me and I found myself flat on my back as she pummelled me. And though I hit back, I knew she was justified in punishing me because I had claimed as my own something that was hers.