The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  He drew me on my horse, a delicate pencil sketch. I sometimes wish I had kept it – it would have been worth a lot of money now. Instead, I tore it up in the passion of my rage.

  So this was love. I felt like I was riding at breakneck speed, the exhilaration tempered only by the fear that my horse would stop suddenly and I would find myself hurtling over and onto the ground. I lurched between fear and longing, between triumphant certainty and aching insecurity.

  Everything was much more vivid. How lovely was the sky! And yet everything was so much more terrible. Why did time move so slowly? Why did Sister Hedwig talk so much? What mattered the French Revolution, what mattered the organic formula for lithium, what mattered the peppered moth, when there was something bigger than this classroom, than all classrooms?

  He liked Queen, he liked Black Umfolosi, he liked Lovemore Majaivana. I loved Queen. I worshipped Black Umfolosi. I adored Lovemore Majaivana. He peppered the language with his own. A simple word like wena came to mean more than just you. ‘You’ was ordinary, prosaic. Wena invited me in; it said I existed to him. On his lips, the word faka, simply meaning to put, was imbued with thrilling meanings.

  He laughed at my accent; until he mimicked me back to myself, I had not realised how my voice had taken on the voices of those around me. I had not realised how much of the Convent was in me, how much of Liz, of Lloyd and Sandy. I wanted to stamp out my voice. I liked the sound of his voice, the way he said bottley instead of bottle, cattley instead of cattle and wiggley when he meant wiggle. He did not take it well: we fought when he thought I was making fun of him. Imitation, in this case, was no flattery.

  I shut out thoughts of Sigrid.

  He was mine, not hers; rightfully mine. That is how I thought of him, in the possessive mode. There was a claim of ownership, a sense that we belonged. My claim, my stake in him, was nothing more than my love for him, but it was enough. It was everything. Sigrid’s existence simply fortified my love for him. To me, she did not exist in her own right: she existed only to test our love.

  I look back now at my time with Zenzo, and then I look at my brief life with Simon, and I wonder that I should have given myself so completely to someone who so obviously did not love me. Simon wanted me; he loved me; he wanted to heal me. He gave me the very best of himself, his devotion; he plied his troth to me. All I had to do was to take what he offered.

  I want to believe that I know a little more now about people than I did then. Then I thought that Zenzo was just moody. I thought that he was pouring his soul into his work. I see now that he used his art, and would always use his art, as a cover to get what he wanted, and as an excuse to be less than he knew he should be.

  As I lay in his arms in that cottage on Hazlemere, I fantasised about our life together. Europe was our focus: it was where we aimed the trajectory of our dreams. He would look at paintings, and I the buildings that contained them. It was a beautiful fantasy, a dream, which came crashing down the day I found him with Lloyd.

  9

  When Loveness brought me the newspaper today after lock-up, she was in a voluble mood. She talked about her daughter. Her daughter’s condition was better, her daughter’s teachers were still bad, her daughter’s uniforms needed taking in. I wanted to say that I knew about the damn uniforms because I ironed them every week, but I said nothing and instead tried to read the headlines from the newspaper she was waving in her hand. My mind was on the election, and it was only with effort that I heard her say that her daughter’s father left her when the child was a baby. ‘He could not cope with what, with her condition.’

  My mind wandered until she said, ‘Memory, did you hear me? You are eating matemba today.’

  The big smile on her face suggested that I should be giddy with excitement. The Goodwill Fellowship had donated sacks and sacks of the stuff, she explained, and we were to have some for our supper. I was clearly supposed to be excited about this, which I suppose I should be, as the Goodwill Fellowship usually just donates Bibles along with lashings of sympathy. My immediate thought was that the Goodwill Fellowship must have donated more matemba fish than the prison guards could steal.

  I am certain that Synodia, Loveness, Patience and the rest of the guards have not had to buy toilet rolls or sanitary pads in months. Or toothpaste. Or soap. Or washing powder. Or anything else that can be carried off to use at home. So when she said that we were to have matemba for about a month I could only imagine that they must have driven entire lorries of the stuff to the prison. We get only what the prison guards choose not to take.

  It is strange how associations can come just from a fractured image, a phrase, a word, a smell. It was while she was talking of how lucky we were to have this bounty that I remembered the only time that I met Simon’s mother and father, Domenica and Hugo. I could see as soon as I met them that Simon had only told his parents where I was from, but not what I looked like.

  I had developed by then the affectation of braiding my hair into long plaits that matched the colour of my skin to produce a somewhat otherworldly effect. Simon, in the first giddy moments when we could not stop touching each other, said I looked like something that lived in the water, like the Ondine.

  When we sat down to dinner, Domenica startled me by asking, ‘Are you Matemba?’

  ‘Am I what?’ I said.

  ‘Matemba. That’s it, isn’t it, darling, that thing I read you the other night? It was the Matemba, wasn’t it?’

  Without waiting for an answer from her husband, she continued, ‘Or was it Malemba? No, it was definitely Matemba. The Matemba people. They have a forgiveness ceremony, don’t they, darling?’ To the rest of us, she added, ‘In the middle of the night. The whole village comes out and sings. Then the person who did whatever it is stands in the middle and everyone sings, we forgive you, we forgive you.’

  ‘Matemba,’ I said, ‘are very small fish.’

  ‘Small fish?’

  ‘Yes, also called kapenta. From Zambia.’

  Her husband, who had turned to speak to Simon, now broke away to hear the tail end of the conversation. ‘The Matemba people are Zambians? I thought you said they were from Zimbabwe.’

  ‘Well, yes, but they are fish, apparently,’ said Domenica.

  She gave me a look that was almost accusatory. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘When were you last there?’

  ‘I have eaten the fish myself,’ I said. ‘But maybe these Matemba people have sprung to life since I left two years ago. Like the earth-grown men.’

  ‘Well, it must be some other Africans, then,’ she said.

  Domenica began to talk about something else. I focused on the wine. I had never lived in a village or even been to one, but I could not imagine any villagers, between the harvesting and the tilling, between the water-fetching and the shifting cultivation, having time to stand and murmur forgiveness chants in circles in the middle of the night. I know I did not convince Domenica because I heard her tell that story again at another, bigger dinner party.

  Since that night, this mysterious forgiveness ceremony has popped up many times in other places, always attributed to different tribes. It even appeared in your magazine, in an excerpt from the memoir of an American writer who always looks as though she is weighed down by both the thickness of her dreadlocks and the ponderousness of her prose.

  I can see, I suppose, the attractiveness of it.

  It speaks to the human need for validation, for acceptance, for belonging. It affirms the power of words. It says that words can be even more powerful than deeds; that dreadful acts can be wiped out by the simple sincerity of the right combination of words; it speaks to the power of contrition. If you say you are sorry enough, often enough, you can wipe out pain.

  ‘I stole maize that did not belong to me.’

  ‘We forgive you.’

  ‘My cow wandered into the wrong pasture.’

  ‘We forgive you.’

  Even as I pour scorn on this forbearing tribe, I wonder what would it be like t
o have my own little village of all the people I have known, standing and saying they forgive me. Mostly it is Lloyd. He died before I could tell him how sorry I was, before I asked him if he forgave me. I long for him to speak to me, to say to me, ‘I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.’

  *

  It was all because of a cancelled hockey game. Played in the winter months, when the sun burned less, hockey was one of the games that I could play and I made a competent right wing for the second team. On that afternoon, we were supposed to play Arundel School, but when we got there we found there had been a mix-up about the dates. The school allowed us to go home early. When I got home, I saw Lloyd’s car. I looked for him but he was not in any of the places that he usually was if he was home. The first thing that told me I was not alone was the murmur of voices.

  I followed the sounds to Lloyd’s room. The door was slightly open. The laugh came again, Lloyd’s laugh rich with happiness. And then the murmur became Zenzo’s voice. Without thinking, now only reacting, I pushed the door ajar. Zenzo was sitting up, smoking, laughing down at Lloyd, who lay looking up at him from his pillow. They did not see me at once. Lloyd looked up and Zenzo laughed. On Lloyd’s face I saw something that might have appeared in my own face. And in Zenzo’s face, I saw something that I recognised as reciprocity, acceptance.

  Lloyd turned and saw me. This was the tableau: Lloyd’s face of horror, Zenzo’s disappearing smile, the bed, the smoke wafting up to the ceiling, the men.

  My blood froze to form sharp pins of ice that stabbed me with their heat. I must have made a sound. Zenzo said something. With his left hand, Lloyd grabbed a shirt from the floor and ran towards me, his right arm outstretched.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ I said. ‘Don’t come near me.’

  He stopped, as though recoiling from my hatred.

  I turned to leave the room before I could cry.

  In the many years that followed that day, after I had moved away and could look back with a calmer mind, I finally began to think about Lloyd’s life, about Tracey Collins, the woman in the photograph with the Farrah Fawcett hair and thick glasses, the woman who served as a protection to blind the world to what he was. I thought about what it meant to live in a country where you could never share such an essential part of yourself.

  Many things made sense all at once: Alan Milhouse, the women he refused to be involved with, the strange voices that I heard at night. I did not think all of this at the time. I hated Lloyd. He repulsed me. I felt contaminated by him. I could not make the imaginative leap that would have made me see how trapped he was, that could have made me see the lie he was constantly forced to live.

  I judged him with all the prudish and priggish self-righteousness of a Catholic schoolgirl with narrow, dogma-driven certainties.

  In the years since the shock of that moment, I have come to understand Lloyd. Even as I write this, I see how presumptuous it is for me to say that. If I had been mature enough I could have seen how lonely he was, how terrifying it was to live in a country that did not accept you. Not even Lloyd’s whiteness could have saved him from the stigma of homosexuality because it is a stigma that cuts across race and tribe and religion and class and sex and political beliefs and all the artificial divisions this country has erected to keep people apart.

  If I had been mature enough or had sufficient imagination, or generosity of spirit, I might have seen that Lloyd was as different to those around him as I was, that the fact of our difference bound us. But I felt only repugnance.

  Would I have seen things differently if the object of his affection were not also the object of mine? Because I also hated him with all the passion of scorned love. But if I am honest I will admit my prejudice. I was as much a victim of my society as anyone else.

  But the sin, for such I considered it, was nothing compared to this ghastly situation in which he was now my rival for Zenzo.

  I saw him as someone who had taken away everyone that I had loved. I forgot the privations of my earlier life; I disregarded everything he had ever given me. I saw only the wrong that he had done me. He had taken the one person who made me happy.

  In the hot fever of my pain, I saw him as existing only to block my happiness. I remembered every disagreement, every small thing he had ever denied me. My family – he had bought me from my family and now he had taken Zenzo. It was grotesque to be love rivals with someone who stood in place of my father. I did not stop to consider that Zenzo might have had his own agency. It was all Lloyd. Alone in my room, I slapped my face hard enough to leave angry red welts.

  The next day, he tried to talk to me. I hurled at him my disgust and abhorrence. ‘Is this why you bought me? To make me see what you do? Is this why you brought me here?’

  His face went white as he said, ‘What on earth do you mean, I bought you?’

  ‘You know very well what I mean,’ I flung at him. ‘I saw it all, at Barbours, remember? I was there. I may have been a child but I know what I saw.’

  He walked away without talking and I was left to enjoy the savage satisfaction of my victory.

  The next day I saw that he had put a letter for me under my door. It would be full of justification, I thought, and burned it in the fireplace without reading it. For the rest of the week, I stayed away from him. I took myself to school, and shut myself in my room as soon as I heard him come into the house.

  Without knowing it, Zenzo gave me the idea for my revenge. The morning after I found him with Lloyd, he came to the house. I was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to eat toast and marmalade as I read.

  I looked up from my toast to find him staring at me. I stood up quickly and went to the door. ‘You can’t tell anyone what you saw,’ he said. ‘You can’t.’

  I tried to push past him but he held my hands. ‘Please,’ he said, intending a caress. ‘I get that you hate me right now.’

  He put his hand on my waist, as though to draw me to him. I was filled with anger and outrage. I fought myself free.

  ‘If anyone finds out, if for any reason the police get involved, I mean, do you really want me to be in trouble?’

  Even then he was thinking of himself; he had no thought at all for Lloyd. I pushed myself from him violently, and tried to pass the door. Lloyd stepped into the kitchen. Immediately to my mind’s eye came the two of them, naked on Lloyd’s bed.

  I managed to reach the door. As I left, I heard Lloyd say to him, ‘You have to go.’

  ‘She could tell someone – you have to stop her.’ Zenzo’s voice was a now whiney panic.

  I moved out of earshot, but not before I had seen Lloyd stretch out his hand and pull Zenzo into an embrace.

  That is what decided me.

  I wrote to the police. ‘There is a man who is committing sodomy with other men. His name is Lloyd Hendricks and he teaches at University of Zimbabwe.’

  I dropped the note in the police box at Highlands. I do not know what I wanted, what I expected to happen. Almost as soon as I dropped that note in the police box, I regretted it. But I could not unpost it, so I let it be. Things continued as they had before. Then Lloyd didn’t come home one night.

  He didn’t come home the next day.

  Alan Milhouse came over, worried and anxious. Ian and Alexandra drove down from Chipinge. Liz and Sandy came to ask every day. They held a conference, Alan and Alexandra and Ian. Alan said Lloyd had missed their usual lunch in the Senior Common Room. He had gone to Lloyd’s department and found his rooms empty. Someone in the department said the police had come for him, but that could not be true, could it?

  Only Alan thought to ask me if I knew anything about where Lloyd might have gone. But it never occurred to him that I might have anything to do with it.

  Alan then suggested calling all the hospitals, and the police stations. They drove to all the hospitals and inquired at every station. They finally found him at Highlands police station, two weeks after he had disappeared, and three times after they had been to ask. He had refused to sign a
n admission of guilt. They had no knowledge of the other party, as the police described Zenzo. All they had was an anonymous accusation. It was impossible for them to prosecute.

  On the night that he came back, I stood behind the door in the next room and listened to their conversation.

  ‘I had hoped all that was over when you met Sue,’ Alexandra said.

  She put her arms around him and he put his head on her shoulder. As I moved away from the door, our eyes met across Alexandra’s shoulder. I knew without needing to hear it from him that he knew that it was I. Later, as I lay in my room, reading in bed, I heard his footsteps at my door. I thought he might come in, but after a pause I heard him move back to his own room.

  10

  From the laundry room where Monalisa, Evernice and I were ironing yesterday, I heard running feet, muffled voices and then shouted voices. The sounds seemed to come from the admissions office at the end of the corridor. Evernice ran out into the corridor. Monalisa and I continued with the ironing.

  She returned ten minutes later, her eyes shining.

  ‘That n’anga woman is here,’ she said.

  Evernice ran back into the corridor without explaining what she meant. I continued alone. It was only when Synodia and Patience arrived to collect the ironed clothes that I understood what she had meant.

  They were talking at the same time. I had never seen Synodia that animated outside one of her church services.

  Evernice said, ‘Have you heard that the diesel n’anga is here? They finally caught her, she was about to cross into Mozambique …’

  ‘Pwozambique, Pwozambique,’ said Synodia. ‘Who said anything about Mozambique? It was Zambia, that’s where she went to buy the diesel in the first place.’ Then she became almost confiding. ‘In all my time here,’ she said, ‘I have never seen anyone so difficult. It took two whole hours just to process her. She collapsed to the floor and went into a trance. We tried to lift her, but we had to call two more guards. She was heavy, stiff, like a dead body. Like she had rigor – what is it called?’