‘Do you mean rigor motion?’ said Patience.
‘That’s right,’ Synodia said, ‘rigor motion.’
Synodia continued, ‘She was stiff as anything, I tell you. We could hardly move her, only when she came out of it did she finally move.’
I found out then that the excitement is about the woman called Rotina Mavhunga or Nomatter Taruza. Her story was one of the things that Lloyd and I laughed about, uniting our mirth in disbelief.
You must know about her. She is that woman from Chinhoyi who convinced the Cabinet that she could make diesel come out of a rock. In exchange for this miracle, she is supposed to have received a farm and seventy billion dollars. Chinhoyi is a mystical place, of course, with its deep caves that are said to contain all sorts of njuzu. I am sure that on that basis alone the government believed her. She was the medium of the spirit of Changamire Dombo, she said; she was the medium of the great emperor of the Rozvi people.
Almost half the Cabinet went to her. They took off their shoes and socks. They exclaimed and clapped when the fuel came out. The women ministers ululated. All the while, behind the rock, she and her boyfriend had a tanker of diesel from Zambia.
I saw her later that day at lunch, a small, light-skinned woman with eyes like she was recovering from a hangover. She sat apart from the others. Around her women ate their sadza and boiled cabbage.
She belched and said, ‘Mudzimu wangu unoti ndinoda nyama.’
Synodia said, ‘You can tell your spirit that it is in the wrong place. There is no meat for it here.’
She belched again and broke into song, ‘Black September, wairamba kubire Charter mukoma, wakatozobira watombodzungudza musoro mukoma.’
As suddenly as she had broken into song, she stopped and seemed to go into a trance. The women around her moved away.
She belched again and said again, ‘Mudzimu wangu unoti ndinoda nyama.’ She spent the rest of the lunch period belching and shaking her shoulders.
There was a commotion later when she began to sing very loudly, ‘Gandanga haridye derere mukoma. Chukucha mwana weropa! Chukucha rega kudaro!’
The guards rushed to keep her quiet. At supper that afternoon, she again insisted that her spirit demanded only meat. Again, she ate nothing. At lunch the next day I saw her wolfing down boiled cabbage like her spirit depended on it.
*
After he returned from the police cells, Lloyd and I spoke little to each other. When we spoke at all, we were stilted and formal. The air between us was heavy with what was not said. The previous Christmas, Lloyd had given me a battered Beetle. I no longer needed him to drive me to school, and took care to leave the house before he did. He left after I did, and arrived when I had long gone to bed. At weekends, he drove on his own to the cottage in Nyanga. He accepted every conference invitation that he received. I frequently found that I was alone in the house.
The tension became so unbearable that all I could think of was escape. But where could I have gone? I could not go back to Mufakose. I had no relatives who could have taken me in. And the only friends I trusted, Liz and Sandy, were more Lloyd’s friends than mine.
I was desperate to escape. I knew that my only escape was a scholarship to study abroad. I threw myself into my studies. Against Sister Mary Gabriel’s wishes, I opted to write my A level exams in the June of the next year, and not wait for November. And I applied to every university I could think of that was out of the country.
My efforts paid off. I did well enough to get the scholarship, and I was admitted to read history at Sidney Sussex in Cambridge.
In the first days I wrote to him long, discursive letters about my lectures and tutorials. Alexandra would say, as she said at the trial, that I wrote to him only to ask for money. She produced letters in which money was a constant complaint.
When I left, I did not come back. The only time that I returned home was for a month in the first year of my postgraduate degree. In that year, Lloyd had been on sabbatical leave in America.
I met Simon, I studied, I travelled, I was happy. I won’t tell you much about Simon; he mattered to me then but does not matter to this story. The distance blunted the painful memories. The distance also allowed me to give more space to the circumstances that had brought us together. I wanted to ask why he had bought me.
But I kept it to myself. Even when I met Simon I could not tell anyone. That, like all my attempts to connect, soon fizzled away, and I was free from all the explanation and analysis that talking would have required. I had eventually come to forget it; I did not care about forgiving because forgiving meant actively remembering. I did not want to forgive because I did not want to remember.
After university, I was barely in the same place for more than six months at a time. A few months before my studies ended, one of the fellows at my college had recommended that I continue on to doctoral work. He also recommended that I spent a year at an East Coast university in the United States. I had the idea to convert my thesis on the Mutapa into something bigger. I planned to go to Portugal. I would even register for language classes at the University of Lisbon.
And then I was seized with a lassitude that made the smallest task seem like endless labour. To get to the United States required me to apply for a visa. I collected the forms; I put everything together. Then I did nothing. The thought of taking the train to London, following up on papers, submitting my passport for a visa, exhausted me. I was tired, too tired to do anything; all of it seemed too difficult; everything seemed too difficult. And so I stayed where I was, taking any job that came my way until I decided that it was finally time to go home.
*
I came back to a country whose outlines I recognised, but which was different in the details. I had not been home in more than ten years. So I was not there to see for myself how quickly everything had gone wrong. All that had happened in my absence – the political paralysis, the economic collapse – had been nothing more to me than news headlines. Now it revealed itself everywhere. You arrived after everything had calmed, after the political settlement, but Vernah, who was here throughout everything that happened, can tell you all about it. It is different for Vernah and people like her, for people who were here all the time.
I had not prepared Lloyd for my arrival. I wanted to believe that he had forgiven me, but the possibility of another rejection kept me quiet.
I called him from the airport in Johannesburg, and told him simply that I would be on the flight that landed in three hours. He was waiting for me at the airport when I landed. As I saw him again after all that time, it was as though I was seeing him for the first time, really seeing him. Had he always looked so weathered? It seemed as though someone had taken out his spine and he was collapsing in on himself. And what had happened to his hair?
He waved down at me from the transparent platform overlooking the arrivals hall at the airport. I did not know what I would say to him, how I would tell him about the revolution in my ideas and feelings. Would I ever be able to talk about Zenzo? How would I overcome the constraint that had arisen between us, how would I cross the distance of all those years? I did not know how to begin to tell him all the things that I wanted to say; how to tell him that I was sorry for my betrayal.
My bags were searched and I was allowed through. I blinked in the bright light as I walked through the glass doors.
‘Mnemosyne,’ said Lloyd as he put his arms around me and lifted me off my feet.
And as I hugged him tightly, I realised that he knew already all that I wanted to say, and that it was unnecessary ever to say anything because he knew all that I wanted to say even without my saying it.
11
Since Loveness overheard Jimmy and Benhilda telling Monalisa that the Commissioner forced the guards to vote for the ruling party, or else they would lose their jobs, she has not brought me any more newspapers. She came to my cell during lock-up and yelled at me through the bars. I have been telling the others things they should not know, she shouted, and she ha
d trusted me, and look what I was doing, did I want things to go back to what they had been, before the papers and the favours?
There was no point in arguing, especially as she was right that the information came from me. Since the opposition women left, the election is the talk of the prison. From the snatches we overhear from the guards, from the information filtered through visiting Sundays, it is clear that something big is happening outside, perhaps something big enough to affect us here.
Verity came back from the hospital with more news. She collapsed at the prison farm three days ago. Patience and Mathilda half-dragged, half-carried her to the sanatorium, where she lay groaning on the bed until Synodia grudgingly signed release papers for her to be taken to hospital. It was appendicitis: she returned with her appendix removed and news of the victory, her dimples straining against her face.
It was hard to resist Verity’s infectious excitement as she described the spontaneous celebrations she glimpsed through the grille of the prison truck.
Things would change, she predicted. Now she would really get out. Her connections would pay off.
‘But I thought that your connections were all on the side that has lost. Isn’t this bad news for you?’ said Jimmy.
‘I have friends where it matters’ was Verity’s cryptic answer, and she went back to telling us all the things that she would buy in Dubai the minute she landed there. Next to her, Benhilda and Beulah spoke happily about the food that would come, and the blankets too. They only seemed uncertain about whether the new government’s magnanimity would extend to fizzy drinks.
We stopped talking when Synodia and Loveness came to inspect the shirts we had ironed. Synodia looked more sour than usual, and Loveness was shorter than usual in her commands. Jimmy could not resist and said, ‘Congratulations, Mbuya Guard, on the new government.’
Synodia sneered and said, ‘Pwongratulations, pwongratulations. Don’t talk as if it is your father’s government.’
Patience added that there was nothing to celebrate because the new president would be leading a government of people who barely spoke English. ‘They are all alphabets,’ she said. ‘Literate alphabets.’
Jimmy said, ‘Well, it is still better because the last president led a government of thieves.’
Patience gave her two weeks of sanitary duty.
The excitement is less to do with a new government than with the certainty of an amnesty. ‘There will be an amnesty international after the election,’ said Verity. ‘There is always one after an election.’
‘What Amnesty International now?’ said Monalisa. ‘What do you mean, Amnesty International?’
‘You know what I mean. Prisoners are allowed to go after an election,’ said Verity.
‘Then why are you calling it Amnesty International?’
‘That is what it is called.’
‘Amnesty International is an organisation,’ said Monalisa.
‘Yes, it is an organisation that makes sure prisoners get out of prisons after elections. What, you think you know everything just because you said yes baas, no baas to white people?’
‘What do white people have to do with anything? I already told you that Amnesty International is an organisation.’
‘Pwamnesty, pwamnesty,’ said Synodia. ‘Pwoganisation, pwoganisation.’ She had snuck up unnoticed. Monalisa and Jimmy were too busy arguing to see her appear, or to see our frantic attempts to warn them. ‘What do you know about amnesties? Will you stop talking and get on with your food? As for you,’ she said to Monalisa, ‘let’s see just how hard you worked for your white people. Pwite people, pwite people.’
Whatever revolution is raging outside has – in here, at least – clearly been postponed.
*
This time, coming to Summer Madness felt like returning home. Lloyd’s gentle kindness to me was just as it had ever been. We settled back into our old rhythms, as though I had never been away, as though those two weeks had never been, and as though I had never betrayed him.
We had long conversations about the elections that had been delayed yet again. He feared that the country was on a precipice. I watched the news, stunned at the mix of bare-faced lies and superstition presented as fact. A convicted murderer who had been pardoned was declared a national hero. A house was blown up by witchcraft in Chitungwiza. A goblin was stealing women’s underwear in Gokwe. The adverts were all in celebration of the ruling party: I gazed in amused disbelief at the most unlikely figures ever to grace a football field, three big-bottomed women from the city’s oldest and most chaotic township, dancing on a football field in ruling party ‘team colours’. They shook their thighs of thunder as they sang in praise of the ruling party. They danced to the beat of their own oppression.
In the first two weeks of my visit, I took to driving around and walking about town. Outside Bay’s department store, two little boys spoke threateningly to the naked breasts of the semi-clad statues of Artemis and Aphrodite. ‘We will drink all your milk. We will drink every last drop.’
I began rereading the books that I had read as a child, capturing the feelings of wonder I had known then. I had no definite plans; I did not know how long I wanted to stay. I had no job anywhere. There was really nothing for me to stay for, but there did not seem anything to go back to, either. I would find my way, I thought, I would find something.
Lloyd suggested that I consider teaching at the university. I chose to volunteer at the Archives instead, while I decided what to do. The place had its old pull on me still, and comfortable as I now was in my skin, I did not think I could bear to stand before the unblinking gaze of staring students.
I had few people to visit. I saw my old friend Mercy, who told me how infinitely she had been blessed, how the Lord had moved in her life and made everything that she touched prosper. Sandy had moved to Cape Town to live with a sister. And Liz Warrender was dead.
Lloyd had emailed me about Liz’s death the year before. I passed her old house many times, now bursting with Rebecca’s relatives and other squatters.
I even went back to the Convent to see Sister Mary Gabriel, but found that she had been moved to a school in Masvingo. It was then that I realised that, without Liz, and Sandy, I really had no one left.
In my wild moments of loneliness, I thought of driving to Mufakose. But that wound, though partially healed, still throbbed enough for me to want to leave it undisturbed. I stayed away.
Ian and Alexandra were no longer on their farm in Chipinge. It had been one of the first farms to be invaded. Ian was dying at Island Hospice. He did not know me at all when I saw him. He had had a stroke that left him paralysed on one side and oozing constant tears from one eye.
Alexandra seemed even older than Ian. She told me about the stand-off at the farm, what the leader of the invaders had said, what she had said to him, what he had said back to her, and how Lloyd had called ‘a connection of his’, one of the ministers he had been with in the camps at Chimoio, who had said, if they packed their clothes and things, he would make sure that they were not harmed.
She told me about what had happened to the farms of people I did not know, or who, if I had ever known them, I had completely forgotten, like Keith and Suzy Granger, who had left with nothing at all, just what they had on; not even proper shoes. ‘I promise you,’ she said, ‘They are now in Nigeeria.’
The Grahams had fled the farms, shots ringing in their wake; their dogs were killed as they tried to defend them. The Chisholms of Chimanimani had tried to defend themselves, but both father and son had been killed. It was their faces that had been splashed across the international news.
The invasions were the talk of Umwinsidale. My feelings were ambivalent. I had lived long enough among them to understand and feel pity for their losses, but I found it infuriating that they spoke as though there was no context to this, as though this is something that had just happened, with no history to it.
They spoke as if the Pioneer Column had never invaded a land that was not thei
rs, as if land had not been stolen, as if this had not been a crisis long in the making.
I don’t want you to think that I am in any way defending the chaos of the way the farms were parcelled out, or the greed with which the top people took farms for themselves. From what Lloyd told me, Alexandra and Ian’s farm had gone to the second wife of an army general, who had also taken a farm in addition to the one that went to his first wife and two children.
The whole thing had been reduced to the simple matter of blackness versus whiteness. White people stole the land. Black people took farms and ruined them. Black people took control and ran things down. White people stole.
Alexandra believed that it was not inexperience that made black people incapable of being farmers, but something intrinsic to their identity. For her, the ability to farm had nothing to do with access to loans and cheap labour, but had everything to do with the genetic accident of whether you were born white or black. ‘Africans can only farm communally, you see; they can’t do the big commercial farming. They are used to only little pieces of land. It is a miracle they grow anything at all.’
Lloyd said, ‘What about all those historical advantages that the commercial farms enjoyed? The tilted and unjust land-tenure system, the bank loans and the guaranteed markets?’
Alexandra changed tack and said, ‘It’s the wrong people at the top.’ She looked directly at me and said, ‘You always choose the wrong leaders.’
‘And Ian Smith,’ I said. ‘What was he, the white Mandela?’
Alexandra got up abruptly and left the room. Lloyd made a face at me, smiled, and when she came back, steered the conversation to other, safer waters.
There had been two robberies in the area, with the most serious being at the Collinses’ on Hazlemere. Alexandra was convinced that the squatters from the camp that had sprawled out on Liz Warrender’s property were behind it. In one of the robberies, the white couple that lived at the targeted house had been shot and their bodies thrown in the swimming pool. ‘Inside jobs,’ Alexandra said, nodding in the direction of the squatter camp. The police had taken some of the squatters away, had beaten them senseless, but no one had confessed, she said. ‘Mind you don’t pass that lot at night,’ she added. ‘And make sure you load the gun.’
The Book of Memory Page 18