The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  *

  He is very successful now, Zenzo. If you know any of our artists, you will know him, because he is the most famous of them all. Perhaps you know him by that other, longer name, the new name that he gave himself to show the world that he is authentically authentic, genuinely genuine in the genuine fullness of his authentic Africanness.

  He has had exhibitions round the world. Once, in a small gallery in Melbourne, I walked in and found myself face to face with his work. Another time, in London, I picked up the Review, the magazine that came with the Observer, and found him smouldering at me from the cover. ‘His single-mindedness is impressive,’ said his interviewer. Indeed it is.

  When I think of him, I sometimes think of his girlfriend. Poor Sigrid. He mocked her often, imitating her accent, making sounds that he claimed she made when they were having sex. I did not see this as the cruelty that it was. I did not question at all that this was a violation of the worst kind. I thought she deserved it because she had what she had no right to: him. Sigrid was important to him, of course, because she was his ticket out of the country.

  Lloyd and I were mere conveniences, but Sigrid was a necessity. When I look back to how things were between us, I have to face the reality that the only reason he was ever with me was because I pretty much threw myself at him and said, here I am, take me. The only reason that he ever looked at me at all was because I presented myself to him. I made myself available to him.

  As I said, he is a famous artist now. He has been commissioned to paint huge, expensive murals in cities like Berlin and Tokyo and Geneva. People who know these things, the in-people, know that distinctive slashed-Z signature.

  ‘I fled with nothing but the paint-splattered clothes that I had on,’ he said in one interview.

  His career has risen with our country’s collapse. His paintings are different from the realist paintings that he said he wanted to paint. It is all tortured faces and screaming mouths now, slashed genitals and dismembered breasts. ‘Evocative images of his tortured homeland,’ as the reviewers will have you believe.

  His painting speaks truths that the government wants to hide, it is said. He is the artist exiled from his homeland because his work shows a reality before which the government flinches.

  None of it is true, but who cares for truth when there is a troubled homeland and tortured artists to flee from it? The more prosaic truth is that he did not flee, but rather left on the arm of his German girlfriend, on a ticket bought with her Deutschmarks, and that, having gone to Germany, he got himself a nice new passport before he traded her in for someone richer. I can’t even say that he fled from my malevolence, because that was only ever directed at Lloyd.

  This new Zenzo came into being much later, many years after Lloyd and I first met him. I had not thought that I would ever see him again, but I did. It was not my doing but Simon’s. He thought it would be a treat for me to see someone from my own country. Nothing delighted Simon more than thrusting some countryman or other upon me. I sometimes think that I disappointed him because I was not African enough. I had no national dress, no foods of tantalising exoticism.

  When Simon heard about Zenzo’s panel at the Fitzwilliam, he insisted that we had to go. It was then that I learned that Zenzo now lived in Berlin.

  Zenzo had lost the dreadlocks. He was still very good-looking – better-looking, in fact, than he had ever been. Money and success became him. I had already learned from the Observer interview that he had reinvented his past when he renamed himself.

  He had wiped out Sigrid from his biography. He had not fucked his way to Europe, no, not Zenzo – he had left because he was persecuted for his art. He would only go back when his country was free. And the distinctive scar on his right hand, the hand that had once stroked mine, the scar he had told me was the legacy of sneaking across the barbed wire to steal tobacco leaves from the farm next door: that had come from a knife fight during ethnic battles in the township where he grew up.

  At the reception afterwards, Simon wanted me to meet him. It seemed easier to go along, and besides, a part of me was curious to see if he would recognise me.

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘Memory.’

  He gave me a hug that I did not return. I found myself wrapped in his scent. This was certainly a new Zenzo, a more expensive one. His eyes darted about, looking at everyone but the person who was actually before him at the time.

  As I watched him work the room, I wondered for the first time what it was that Lloyd had felt for Zenzo. And I hoped – I longed to know – that it had not been love.

  *

  Poppy died in the September just after I turned seventeen. By then, I had been living with Lloyd for almost eight years. My life in Mufakose seemed like a parallel episode in someone else’s life.

  I could, at times, persuade myself that this life, the life that took in the Convent and Summer Madness, my horse, my books and the dogs, had always been my life.

  My dreams no longer troubled me as much as they had when I first arrived. In those moments when I forgot how I came to live with Lloyd, I found myself warming to him.

  Unlike Ian, who would later spend the last pain-wracked months of his life at Island Hospice, Poppy spent her last days in her own bed. Namatai came to the house the morning after the evening of her death to tell us that she had gone. I went with Lloyd to see her. She looked fragile in death. Lloyd kissed the papery skin of her forehead.

  She had wanted to have her ashes scattered at the same place her husband’s ashes had been, in Matopos National Park. It had been her favourite place when the Commissioner was alive. They had spent every anniversary of their marriage there.

  We drove in a convoy of three cars to the Matopos hills. It was a family tradition. ‘We don’t do it for Rhodes,’ said Lloyd. ‘We do it for the Matopos. You will see what I mean, Memory. I hope you remember that when I go, I want my ashes there too.’

  I am sure you have been to the Matopos by now; it is the ‘must-see’ place in every tourist guide. Rhodes’s grave is there, as is Allan Wilson’s of the Shangani Patrol, and Leander Starr Jameson too. But before they were buried there, it was a holy shrine, to Umgulumgulu, the god of the sky. The people who lived in the surrounding areas regarded it as a sacred place that was full of magic and power.

  I saw immediately why Poppy would want her final rest there. As I stood next to Lloyd, at the top of the world, the graves of Rhodes and Jameson and Allan Wilson before us, I could not help but be affected by the splendour of the stillness.

  The air seemed alive with the spirits of the nameless dead. I was struck by the hushed glory of this beautiful place, and I understood why the Ndebele had held it to be sacred, and why its eerie, peculiar beauty had so attracted Rhodes, and why the Commissioner and Poppy and Lloyd would want their ashes scattered here.

  As Lloyd scattered Poppy’s ashes up into the whispering trees, my mind went to the only other funeral that I had attended, Mobhi’s funeral, my mother almost jumping into the ground with her, and where the frenetic dancers raised dust around the grave as the drumbeat thundered.

  But there were no wailing voices in Matopos, no mother to jump into the grave. Only Lloyd and Ian, Liz and Sandy, Namatai and me.

  Lloyd made short speech about how much Poppy had loved this place. He wanted to come here when he too died, he said. Every time he came here he felt he was in a place where nature had begun, and it felt like the last place that would be here when it all ended. Alexandra read from a poem that she had chosen. ‘I am not there, I do not sleep,’ she said.

  A small gust of wind took up the ashes, danced with them a little before blowing them over us. ‘I am not there,’ muttered Sandy as he wiped his face, ‘but I am in your hair.’

  I was afraid to laugh because I feared that if I opened my mouth, bits of Poppy would find themselves down my throat. Poppy’s ashes fell on the flowers; the wind carried them into the trees and into the air around the top of the world and far into the distance.

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  Lloyd saw Zenzo before I did. We were at a garden party thrown by the Compton-Joneses. They threw a summer party in June, which, of course, is winter here, but they were not people to let an inconvenient thing like being in the wrong hemisphere get in the way of what they considered unassailable English traditions.

  Tim and Val Compton-Jones spoke in the kind of accents that made them sound like they had been taken from one of those Thames Television productions that were screened on ZBC all the time in the eighties. An hour in their house made you feel like you were an extra in a Bizarro version of To the Manor Born or some other drama about distressed gentlefolk in the English countryside.

  Tim Compton-Jones aimed to look like a jovial country squire, if, that is, a country squire wore khaki shorts and shirts and Farmer shoes all the time. His laugh was a loud braying sound, and he began his sentences with ‘I say’, and, in imitation, Lloyd and I took to beginning sentences like he did.

  ‘I say, old chap, it is raining rather hard, what?’

  ‘I say, old bean, the fire needs another log.’

  ‘I say, old chap, I need money for the school bus.’

  ‘I say, my foot,’ said Liz. ‘He grew up in Karoi. I know his family. None of them sound like that – his brother Dennis wouldn’t know a Pimm’s if you poured it down his arse.’

  Lloyd replied that Tim had got his accent when he married Val. She had one of those frozen faces with precisely matching eyebrows, like she was Botoxed to the eyeballs even before the invention of Botox. Her hair was sprayed into such stiffness that it seemed as though nothing could move it, not even the blistering high wind of an August day.

  Lloyd used to say that her voice was exactly like Sybil Fawlty’s. ‘She sounds,’ he said, ‘like a seal being machine-gunned.’ But I was reading Stephen King by the bucketful, and privately thought that she spoke like the wife in Pet Sematary after she had been brought back to life, or like her voice was being filtered through a cement mixer.

  Theirs was a highly stylised simulacrum of England. Their garden boys sweated as they trimmed their bushes into topiary animal shapes. Val Compton-Jones had yet to meet an indigenous tree that she did not want uprooted and replaced with a foreign import. Liz made sour observations about all the water that the trees absorbed, how their wretched gums and firs lowered the water table, how they had long roots, and took more water than they should.

  They held carols by candlelight at which children lisped about chestnuts and sang about the holly and ivy, and St George’s Day celebrations in which they chewed overdone roasts. At their parties, the children played croquet, and the adults tennis, the players in blinding white, as if they were just minutes away from stepping onto Centre Court. They would have fled in horror from the real England, with its Indians, Pakistanis and Jamaicans.

  Lloyd would not normally have gone to the Compton-Jones’s summer party, but he had been talking for some time about how I had no friends in the valley. Bridget Compton-Jones was at the Convent with me, but I had never seen her outside school. When I told him that I would rather stay at home, he said, ‘Just think of all the other children who will be there.’

  It seemed to have escaped him that I met any number of other children during the week. And that I never actually enjoyed the youth dances he drove me to at the Anglican Cathedral, where I stood drinking Fanta while people danced badly to Dire Straits and David Scobie. And I was seventeen, after all; in another year I would be at university. I knew about existentialism and solipsism. I had read Sartre and was reading Camus.

  The only attraction of the party was the drinks. I was much more interested in tasting the Pimm’s than anything else.

  I was working out how I could get a drink without Lloyd noticing. I headed for Liz. She had elbowed a waiter, delaying him so that she could finish the drink she held and take another before he moved on. ‘Tally-ho,’ she said in an exaggerated accent. ‘You are here, then, are you?’

  I offered to hold her drink for her. She picked two from the tray and handed them both to me. ‘In the language of the old country,’ she said, ‘chin-chin.’

  She knocked back her glass and handed it me, taking one of the two full glasses that I held. I could not resist drinking from the remaining glass. It was just as delicious as it looked. I drank it in quick gulps. A heady feeling began to sweep over me. Everything was lovely and green; the hedge animals looked as though they were about to stretch and prance across the lawn. The laughter seemed louder than any laughter I had ever heard. The grass was dazzling green. The powder blue of Val Compton-Jones’s eyeshadow was as one with the sky. She dazzled, they all dazzled, I dazzled.

  It was in this state that I saw Zenzo. He was the only other guest there who was not white. The only other black people there were the staff: the maids in colourful uniforms, the men in white shirts and black trousers, carrying glasses and food.

  He stood in jeans and a black tee-shirt with Bob Marley on it. He wore his hair in dreadlocks. I stared at him as though my eyes were on stalks. He had white eyes and a smile as white as the tennis clothes around him. I could not take my eyes away from his hair.

  Dreadlocks are much more ubiquitous now than they were then, so you may not understand how shocking it was to see a man in dreadlocks at a party in Umwinsidale. Dreadlocks were what the Bob Marley on his shirt wore: they belonged to another world, of Rastafarianism, which nobody understood, but everyone frowned on.

  I had only ever seen two people with dreadlocks: the homeless man who slept at the Post Office in town and the son of one of MaiWhizi’s brothers, who had once visited her. That nephew had dreadlocks, and everyone had crowded around him because MaiWhizi had said he did not eat meat. No one in the township actually believed that there was a person alive who could refuse to eat meat; Nhau got Whizi and her sisters to watch him to see if he ate meat.

  And here before my eyes was this beautiful young man with dreadlocks. I believe that I would have noticed him even without the dreadlocks because he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. It seemed to me that he was standing a little apart, watching the party and taking it in. The people around him did not seem to know what to make of him.

  I looked around to see whom he could be linked to.

  When Val Compton-Jones introduced him to Lloyd, I made sure to get closer. I walked up to them and put my hand in Lloyd’s. I was not normally this demonstrative, and Lloyd looked at me. He squeezed my hand as he said, ‘Have you exhibited much?’

  ‘Have you exhibited much?’ I said.

  Lloyd shot me a probing look.

  Before the man could talk, a woman came up to him. She put her arm through his. Young as I was, I recognised it for what it was, an act of claiming. And she was so old, I thought, so old you could see wrinkles around her face.

  They introduced themselves as Sigrid and Zenzo. They had just moved into Hazlemere Cottage, the small house on the Compton-Jones’s estate. She was a German economist. She worked for a German foundation in town, she said.

  He was an artist from Bulawayo.

  I knew then, of course, about sex. Sister Gilberta in biology had told us all about it in clinical, dry-as-dust terms, the spermatozoa, and fallopian tubes, complete with line drawings. Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann had filled in the rest. That this beautiful young man, Zenzo, should be with old Sigrid, that he should be making her melt and tremble while thrusting his manhood at her and filling her uterus with spermatozoa, which was expelled if there was no conception to form a zygote, seemed unutterably grotesque. He was young, as I would find out, only twenty-four, and she was thirty-seven.

  He was beautiful; she was not.

  They moved on to join another group and my eyes followed them, or at least him. While Lloyd was distracted, I downed his Pimm’s, too.

  The next thing I remember is waking up in my room. Lloyd had carried me to the car, as I had passed out.

  *

  I saw him again when I was riding. I had been ri
ding for more than three years now, and Liz trusted me out on my own. He was walking down Umwinsidale Drive. I recognised him at once. As I nudged Pugsley into Hazlemere, preparing to go home, I saw him.

  ‘The light here is good,’ he said. ‘This is how it must have been for Vermeer in Delft.’

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I memorised the names. I went to Lloyd’s Encyclopaedia Britannica. The next time that I saw him, I said, very quickly, ‘Vermeer was born in Delft.’

  I need not have bothered with Vermeer. He had been looking for me, he said, he had walked this way hoping that I would ride past. ‘I want to paint you,’ he said.

  ‘Will I have to take my clothes off?’ I said.

  He laughed and said, ‘It is not necessary.’

  I saw at once that this was the only way I would ever see him on my own. Surprised by my own boldness, I said, ‘Do you want to start now?’

  At his laugh, my heart plummeted down into my stomach, where it turned to water. He was busy at that moment, he said. We agreed to meet the following day. It was the holidays, so I had the whole day free.

  The next day, I walked down the valley and up to Hazlemere Manor. He was waiting in the cottage. He smoked. Then he said, come here, and he held and then kissed me playfully, and then not so playfully. I was caught up in the smell of him, a mixture of cigarette smoke and sweat, and something else, a smell that seized all my senses.

  I found out all about him. Like me, he was the third child in his family, but they were seven. He had gone to schools in Bulawayo and had transferred to Harare to attend the Birch School of Art. He talked to me as he worked, about the work he wanted to do and the work he had to do. No one, he said, was interested in visual art from here – it was all sculpture in serpentine and soapstone.

  He wanted to be a Vermeer, a Brueghel, a Lucian Freud. He did not care for abstract art at all; he wanted to be a realist painter in the old school, he said. Until he could get to be what he wanted, he had to be what the world wanted him to be: a sculptor of headless women with jutting breasts and bulging bottoms.