The Book of Memory

by Petina Gappah

  Joyi arrived just after they did. They sat side by side on the bench. Jimmy was soon talking to Joy like she had known her all her life, drinking Cream Soda and Cherry Plum, the things Beulah said she missed most when she was here. ‘There is something about this place that just makes me so hungry,’ Beulah said as she tore into a drumstick.

  Verity told us about her new car, which seems intricately connected to her new boyfriend, while Jimmy told us about the work she is now doing. There is a project funded by the European Union that is persuading women to give up prostitution in exchange for working together on a co-operative farm. The thought came to me that they should call it the ‘Hoes for Whores’ programme.

  I could not keep a straight face as Jimmy explained that she was only doing this as long as she has to report to the parole office. ‘As soon as they forget about me, I will stop. They are insane, those Europeans. Like I can’t get more money in thirty minutes on my back than a month on my feet,’ she said.

  Monalisa has started her own business, consulting on aid projects. Evernice has reinvented herself as a victim of political repression.

  Jimmy is going to move back to Manicaland, but not to her village. She plans to make her way to the diamond mines in Marange and on to Manica in Mozambique, where there are many white and Asian men with exotic tastes. ‘Just a little licking here, a little sucking there, and I will make more than I make in Harare.’

  I listened as they laughed and talked about their plans until Synodia came to tell us that it was time. We all got up. ‘We will see you soon,’ Jimmy said.

  I wondered for how long they would come. Will they still come in one year, in three years, in five? Will they come in ten? Will they care if I die here, if I am given a pauper’s funeral and buried in an unmarked grave, like Mavis Munongwa? They will forget this place. They should forget this place. They will forget me.

  ‘Memory, don’t cry,’ Verity said, and reached for my hand.

  ‘It is nothing,’ I said. ‘My eyes are hurting today.’

  They all embraced me before they left, Jimmy so strongly that she lifted me off my feet, and as I walked back to my cell I carried with me the mingled smell of their perfumes.

  9

  I am reaching the end of this notebook. I will not write again. I will give this to you when I see you, together with the other notebooks that I asked you to give back to me so that I could read over them again. We will know next week whether or not I will get a new trial. There is enough in what I have told her to make my conviction unsafe, Vernah says. All the evidence pointing to my guilt is purely circumstantial.

  Joyi has read them all. With all the treachery of my imperfect recall, the notebooks have helped us to construct our collective memory. Joy marvels at what I remember. ‘What you have here is a book of memory,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t that in Shakespeare?’ I said.

  ‘It’s in the Bible,’ she said, ‘The Book of Malachi. “Those who feared the Lord spoke to one another and he gave attention to them and a Book of Memory was written before Him.”’

  Joy told me something that I had forgotten, or perhaps had never known. ‘Baba says she chose all our names. She never regretted us.’

  ‘Just look at what she named us,’ I smiled. ‘Gift and Joy.’

  ‘Memory and Moreblessings,’ said Joy.

  We talk about the past, but when the pain is too much to bear we reach for other subjects. Joy has told me about what it means to be in her order. She is a female Jesuit. She has told me about Ignatius of Loyola, who says that to be spiritual means to listen to the deeper levels of our experiences, to the knowledge that there is something good and worthy to be found even in suffering. That God means for us to find meaning in things that happen to us, even the very worst.

  She has chosen to respond to our past by choosing to see it as a mysterious way in which God operates. There is a neat and terrible logic to the idea that these were no random events at all, but a pattern drawn by an unseen hand. But no god can be that terrible, that vengeful. That God is not relentless or sardonic enough – but maybe something like the Moirae, the three Fates spinning for each man the thread of life, measuring it out and then snipping it with those abhorred shears at the appointed time.

  It makes more sense to think that it is that ngozi reaching out from the past. Anything else is too horrible, the idea of a knowing hand directing all of this merely to put me in prison to learn a life-affirming lesson; that this all happened so that I could find a sense of purpose behind bars.

  I have not said any of this to Joy, and perhaps I never shall, for the simple reason that I love her. But it makes more sense for me for all of this to have been a random series of things that happened, with no celestial hand to direct any of it.

  I have been obsessing over the moments, small in themselves, that brought me here. I see in my mind’s eye my father, wandering into the Harare Gardens and pausing to look at the statue of the dead soldiers. I see Lloyd, also stopping and looking at that same statue, those two thoughts occurring to both men at the same moment and leading them to that fateful union. The cancelled hockey match, and coming home to find Lloyd with Zenzo.

  We also talk about Lloyd.

  When I think about Lloyd now, it is not those difficult first days that I see. It is not even the tumult of our life after Zenzo. Instead I think of our drives to Nyanga, I think of going to bookshops. I think of the day that we buried Poppy in Matopos. That period of equilibrium that came after my return home. Because what I had with Lloyd was love. There was love and warmth and generosity of spirit. I was smiling when I recalled our trips to the Archives.

  ‘You must have loved him very much,’ Joy said.

  In the bare simplicity of her words, I recognised a truth that I had long run from. I think that handing me to Lloyd was a leap of faith for my father. I don’t think that it was such an extraordinary leap. He had seen what everyone saw as soon as they met Lloyd. He had seen his warmth, his generosity, and his shining goodness.

  Was it Pericles who said that grief is felt not in the want of what we have never known, but rather in the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed? Lloyd would know. That is the way it is with me. I find I grieve for my parents as remembered persons. But it is for what I have been long accustomed to that I grieve the most. It is for Lloyd that I grieve the most. I think over the four phases of my relationship with Lloyd: the distance and uncertainty of the first years, then the gradual tranquillity, the turmoil of Zenzo and the bitter aftermath, and the new equilibrium after I returned. He gave me an understanding that took me outside of myself, that there was a life beyond things; there was an existence that went on long after the self had gone.

  A line from my mother’s favourite song came back when I was with Yeukai and the children today, about a summer’s day, and placing flowers on old family graves.

  If I ever leave, I will drive out to Matopos. Vernah managed to get Alexandra to tell her that Lloyd’s ashes were scattered just where I thought they would be, and where he said he wanted to be when he died, at World’s View in Matopos.

  That is where I will go first, to Matopos, to throw flowers over the place that he loved the most. Not funeral flowers, not lilies, or carnations, or roses. I will give him strelitzias, birds of paradise with long, strong stems and orange and purple plumes, the flowers that I bought on the day that he died. I can see them now, blazing with colour in the air, purple and orange against the blue sky, falling from every direction that I throw them, falling to the ground of his resting place. If I ever get out, I will throw birds of paradise from the top of the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  That I managed to reach this last page is due to the support of the ace professionals who nursed this book to life, and the love and support of my friends and family. I must acknowledge above all others the wonderful people at Faber, particularly my editors, Mary Morris and Silvia Crompton, who managed to combine their enthusiasm for this novel with forensic evi
sceration of it; Walter Donohue, who wrote a brutal but kind assessment that lifted me out of a very tricky place; and Hannah Griffiths, who poured sunshine into the gloom. I also acknowledge with gratitude Sophie Portas, drumbeater of First Chimurenga proportions; Donna Payne for the breathtaking cover; Stephen Page, my infinitely patient and abiding publisher; and Lee Brackstone, poor thing, who aged quite visibly with each draft that he read.

  I also wish to thank my former agents, Claire Conrad and Rebecca Folland at Janklow and Nesbit, and also Kirsty Gordon, for shepherding me into the world and linking me to Mitzi Angel in New York, Sylvie Audoly in Paris, Catherine Bakke-Bolle in Oslo, Luigi Brioschi in Milan, Martjin David in Amsterdam, Päivi Koivisto-Alanko in Helsinki and Charlotte Weber in Stockholm, wonderful visionaries who saw a novel even before one existed, and who kept faith with me even as I struggled to keep mine with them.

  I also thank my current agents, Cathryn Summerhayes and Raffaella de Angelis at WME, who truly make me feel like I am their only author. And if there is such a thing as a literary godfather, mine would be Eric Simonoff. Thank you, Eric, for being there at the crucial moments: for where you go, I will go and your people shall be my people.

  In Geneva, I wish to thank my old boss, Frieder Roessler, and my current bosses, Niall Meagher and Leo Palma, who made it possible for me to move back to Zimbabwe for three years to write while guaranteeing my security. Thank you, truly, for the best of both worlds.

  In Amsterdam, I want to thank Nederlands Letterenfonds, the Dutch Foundation for Literature, for the beautiful apartment on the Spui in which I wrote a crucial part of this book in the summer of 2011. In Den Haag, my profound thanks go to Ton van de Langkruis, director of Stichting Writers Unlimited, whose invitation to three memorable literary festivals in Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten finally convinced me that I may have written a novel that other people might actually want to read.

  In New York, I am grateful to the brilliant minds I met as an Open Society Fellow in 2012, particularly those belonging to Deprose Muchena, Tawanda Mutasah, Leonard Bernardo, Stephen Hubbell and Glen Mpani. That crucial year of travel and reflection on questions of spirituality and religion affirmed my commitment to writing the truth about my people in all their beauty and ugliness, in all their maddening complexity.

  I did not manage to visit Chikurubi Prison. I had one opportunity, but it would have required me to sign the Official Secrets Act. As the point of the visit would have been a little frustrated if I could not write about the prison, I declined the opportunity. The Chikurubi of this novel is thus from my imagination, and from archival research. I am particularly grateful to Simon Mann, who, in his memoir Cry Havoc (John Blake, 2011), brought humour to his vivid account of his time in Chikurubi; to Thelma Chikwanha, who, as the Community Affairs Editor of the Daily News, made a commitment to telling the stories of Zimbabwe’s prisoners; and to Irene Staunton and Chiedza Musengezi, whose lovely collection of short prison memoirs, A Tragedy of Lives: Women in Prison in Zimbabwe (Weaver Press, 2003), moved me deeply. I am also grateful to Julie Stewart and the Women’s Law Programme at the University of Zimbabwe, and to Tendai Biti, who not only made me big in Gokwe, but also, together with Farai Rwodzi, shared with me his own prison experiences.

  In Harare, I want to thank all my friends, particularly these comrades-in-arms who were directly connected to the struggle for this book: Penny Stone, Richard Beattie and Magnus Carlqvist, best beloveds and library titans; Patrick Mavros, who gave me more Umwinsidale stories than I knew what to do with; Tatenda Mawere and Munyaka Makuyana for their unparalleled support and kindness; Dominic Muntanga and Naomi Mapfumo for that whooping cheer over Sunday pancakes; Lisa Orrenius, a Zimbabwean writer in disguise, and whose eagle eye gave me Loveness; Firle Davies, Raphael Chikukwa, Andrew Chadwick, Nick Marq and Jill Coates, friends and fellow travellers; Alf Torrens and Deborah Bronnert for that spectacular send-off and Jeane Wessels for the gift of the tea estate in Chipinge at which it all fell into place.

  I also want to remember with love my beautiful friend Pilar Fuertes Ferragut, the Spanish envoy to Zimbabwe whom we lost in a tragic car accident in April 2012. She suffused everyone she met with her warmth, intelligence, elegance and radiance. Thanks to her relentless and generous encouragement, I accepted an invitation to read to the members of ZIMAS, the Zimbabwe Albino Association. Their kind reception, and the stories they shared with me, encouraged me to rescue this novel from the bin into which I had thrown it. I miss her very much.

  Then there is a group of people who have meant everything to me wherever I have been in the world because they are part of my interior world. I was excited to find one morning that I had found the perfect name for a character, only to find to my horror that my perfect name belonged to one of the many friends on Facebook that I have never met. I am grateful to my beloved Gang of Lunatics. I cannot name you all, partly because there are so many of you, but mainly because I suspect that some of your names may not actually be your own. You stretch my thinking, sharpen my arguments and force me to re-examine my assumptions and prejudices. You fill my heart with laughter. I cherish you all dearly.

  Finally, to my son, Kush Gappah, who could not read when I started writing this: I promise that the one after the next one is for you; to Silas Chekera, I thank you every day for helping me to this path; and to all the members of my family: the Gappah Gapas – Tererayi Mureri, Simbiso, Regina, Ratiel, Vimbayi, Vuchirai and Babamunin’Pheneas, the bookseller of Harare, who sold the last book like it was cooking oil on the black market: ndinotenda vana Mukanya, Makwiramiti, Bvudzijena, vaMbire nemi mhai, Musinake, Shinda, Zimbabwe. Kune zvese zvinoitika mumhuri medu, munogaroti dai Pet’na aivapo, zvokwadi ainyora mabhuku. Mukasafadzwa nerino, musavhunduka, nokuti ariko mamwe achatevera.

  Hokoyo nenhamo!

  About the Author

  Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her prize-winning debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, heralded the arrival of a major new voice in international fiction.

  By the Same Author

  AN ELEGY FOR EASTERLY

  Copyright

  First published in the UK in 2015 by

  Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2015

  All rights reserved

  © Petina Gappah, 2015

  Quotation from Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov is reproduced by kind permission of Random House LLC (USA)

  The lyrics to ‘Black September’ by Master Chivero are used with the permission of the Master Chivero Estate, with the kind assistance of the Zimbabwe Music Rights Association

  Cover design by Faber

  Cover image © Jiro Miyamura/amanaimages/Corbis

  The right of Petina Gappah to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–27177–1

 

 

 
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