by Andrea Eames
I did not know what shenanigans were, but I could guess. ‘Sir?’
‘You have not seen anything?’
I kept my eyes very wide and my face very stupid. The white man stared at me.
‘You have heard nothing?’ he said.
‘Sir.’ Neither yes nor no.
‘Bloody primitive business.’
‘Sir.’
He let me go. ‘The boy’s an idiot,’ he said, and ‘Run along home.’
I kept walking, looking down at my shoes. The empty Coke bottle winked in the sun. When I kicked it, it made a hollow clonk, then rolled away in an arc. There was still enough of the black liquid in the bottle to leave a little trail of drops that evaporated almost as soon as they hit the dust. I wanted to get away from them. The heat was oppressive now, pressing down on me. The witch doctor, the drought, the laughter of the white men – these things clustered around me and darkened my vision. I could feel bad fortune building like the storm clouds we so desperately wanted. I swerved off my usual path and into the bush, where I would be hidden. I pressed in deeper, wanting to get as far away as possible.
Soon I could no longer hear the white men’s voices, but I heard something else: a crisp rasp, like a snake moving through grass. I turned around slowly, hoping not to startle it – or hoping that it was something that I could run from. Instead, I saw a pair of human eyes looking at me. A man, fewer than six feet away from me, leaning up against a tree trunk. A mukomana. Chenjerai, was my first thought, but it was not Chenjerai. He was still and silent, and his skin blended into the grey bark behind him.
‘Maiwe!’ I jumped back.
The man slumped. There was a rifle on his lap, and he tried to close boneless, grasping hands on it. A mukomana. Who else would be out here in the bush with nothing but a gun?
‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ My voice sounded too loud. I heard that rasping sound again, and saw the muscles in the man’s throat convulse. His tongue was indecently red inside his slack mouth.
‘Who are you?’ Was he pretending? Would he pick up his rifle and blow my brains out, here in the hot, cicada-humming bush?
We stared at each other. I felt my muscles relax. A fly landed on the man’s lip, and he did not twitch or brush it away. I moved forward, curious now.
‘What is wrong?’
The rasping sound I had heard was his breath. He looked like one of the drunks outside the shebeen, but he also looked sick. If I had to picture a ghost I would have pictured this grey, sagging man with his dead eyes and foam around his mouth.
‘What can I do?’ I said.
The man’s hand twitched.
‘I will get help,’ I said.
The fly that had been buzzing around his lip landed on his eyeball. He did not blink. I could hear a buzzing in my ears as I backed away. Special Branch Poison. We had all heard about it. The stories said that white men poisoned objects that the vakomana used – radios, blue jeans – and it killed whatever it touched. I had half-thought the stories were not true; just made up to frighten children like me. But here was a dying man in the quiet of the bush.
We have very specific beliefs about the dead: their bodies and their bones. I have already told you what happens to us after we die, how the mweya and the nyama go their separate ways. But what happens to the meat left behind? We like to be buried in a particular way, so that we can begin our afterlife in the traditional way, undisturbed; not poisoned and propped up against trees, left to die in the bush, or to be eaten by animals.
I ran. I left him. I left him there. I ran until I had a stitch in my side and my vision shone white and speckled. I did not notice that I was falling until my chin hit the ground. I vomited a sweet, sticky mass into the dust and stood hunched, my hands on my knees, watching the ants swarm over my vomit. It was nearly all gone when I straightened up.
Hazvinei. I had forgotten Hazvinei. I had forgotten the N’anga and the spirits and the drought. My stomach heaved again, but there was nothing to come up. I ran until the saliva in my mouth was sticky and I had to clasp a hand to my side to hold in my breath.
‘Hazvinei!’
No one was home. The house was cool, quiet, filled with the tiny thoughts of spiders. No Hazvinei. I ran again, slipping on the polished stoep. I felt my shirt soak and cling to my armpits.
I knew where she would be. I followed the sound of the crowd, and arrived to see the circle of waiting people. I stood on tiptoe, trying to see. I caught a glimpse of a pink gingham dress, the rebellious curve of a cheek.
‘Iwe!’
‘Pamusoroi, pamusoroi,’ I apologised as I pushed my way through. When I finally reached the front, my ear was even more bruised from all the clips and slaps from angry adults.
‘Tinashe?’ Hazvinei turned, as if she had been expecting me.
‘Hazvinei, what are you doing?’
‘I am watching the N’anga.’
‘You know Baba said …’
‘Baba said, Baba said.’ She shrugged one shoulder.
‘Hazvinei, I will get into trouble. Baba told me …’
‘He will never know. We’ll leave before it’s over. It will be fine.’
‘The N’anga will know that we went to his hut. The spirits will tell him.’
Hazvinei looked at me with contempt. ‘Don’t be stupid, Tinashe.’
Was my panic for nothing? I swallowed my frantic breath and stood still. ‘Has it started yet?’
‘No.’
The N’anga stood in the clearing, licking his lips and sucking his teeth as old men do. The witch-smellers came out now, holding pots full of sweet, thick beer. I had seen the old women brewing this stuff before, stirring and stirring it in great shambakonzi pots outside their huts. If a fly was seduced by the sweetness and fell in, so much the better. The brew helped you to communicate with the spirits – or just made everyone drunk, according to Abel.
The N’anga drank first, then the musicians. When they had smacked their lips free of the sticky stuff, the old women let the crowd take it in their hundred hands. Hazvinei managed to grab the pot as it was going past.
‘Quick.’ She took a swig and passed it to me. I lifted it to my lips, not wanting to look like a coward. I only intended to wet my closed mouth with it, but Hazvinei slid her hand under the base of the pot and tipped it up, so that my mouth filled and I swallowed involuntarily. It was sickly; thick as honey.
‘Hazvinei!’ But it was I who received a sharp clip on the ear from the adult standing next to me, who pulled the pot out of my hands. Hazvinei grinned.
The men who played the drums and mbiras sat in the dust with their instruments, settling them between their knees. The drummers brushed the dust off the tightly drawn goatskins and touched them softly, as if stroking a cheek, and they began.
It was not music. It was a heartbeat – a dark red pattern. The shuffling and whispers of the crowd died down, and people started to sway and hum. I saw others in the crowd begin to dance with strange, jerky movements, their heads thrown back and their throats exposed, and when I looked down at my feet for a second time, I saw that they were dancing too.
The witch doctor entered the trance state. His eyes rolled back in his head; he spasmed and shook. His teeth rattled in his skull.
‘The spirits are possessing him,’ said someone in a whisper.
His spasms stopped, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, I drew in a breath. They were completely white, with no sign of a pupil.
Hazvinei pinched me.
‘Stop that!’
‘Then stop looking like a frog waiting for a fly.’
‘His eyes are gone!’
‘He’s just moved them back. Like this.’ Hazvinei rolled her eyeballs back in her head, and poked out her tongue.
The dance became a painting and my feet became paintbrushes, stamping and stirring up the red earth, the yellow bush, the blue sky. My own eyes rolled in my head. Something hot and sweet spread from my feet up my legs to my stomach and hear
t and finally my head, filling me with a kind of terrible joy. I felt as if I could shout and sing, or stab someone to see the spurt of blood, or kiss someone right there in front of my sister and be proud of the singing life in my mboro and in my veins. I stopped being Tinashe and became everyone. I only returned to myself when the witch doctor started to speak. I craned my neck to hear what he was saying, but then noticed that Hazvinei still had the whites of her eyes showing.
I nudged her. ‘Hazvinei. It is not funny.’
She did not move. Her mouth hung slack and open. I was in no mood for her games.
‘Hazvinei.’ This time I pinched her, hard, and she fell over. The N’anga stopped talking. The people near us moved back, and I felt the attention of a hundred pairs of eyes.
‘Mai! Baba!’
I called for them, but I heard no response. Hazvinei arched her back and took a great, rasping breath. Her throat became long and taut, and the air she drew in through her mouth seemed to whistle as it passed down the narrow passage to her lungs. She looked like she was sucking in something more than air. The veins in her neck stood out, angry and purple.
No one was paying any attention to the N’anga now, and he shrugged off his spirit possession as easily as he shrugged off his feather cloak.
‘Iwe!’ he walked to Hazvinei, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown. ‘Stop that, musikana.’
He moved to touch her, but jerked his hand back and shook it as if she had burned him. ‘Maiwe!’
Hazvinei fell to the ground and started convulsing. Each convulsion drew her higher, arching her back until she was bent like an angry snake.
Someone screamed. Then the excited babbling started, as everyone pointed and stared.
Hazvinei’s convulsions stopped. Silence from the crowd. She sat up.
‘She is fine,’ I said. ‘She fell.’
Hazvinei and I were on our own now, in the centre of a circle of open mouths. I tried to touch her, but her skin burned like metal in the sun.
‘Hazvinei. Hazvinei, get up.’
She looked at me with empty eyes, and a string of meaningless sounds came from her mouth. Her teeth were white and pointed, inhuman.
Amai was pushing her way through the crowd behind me. I could hear her voice. ‘Pamusoroi, pamusoroi.’ The crowd was so tightly knit and intent that she had to elbow her way through.
Hazvinei’s voice – or rather, the voice coming out of Hazvinei – spoke louder and more urgently now, stringing nonsense syllables together into a long, liquid babble. She turned her head this way and that, staring at the crowd with blank eyes. Whenever her gaze fell on someone, that person backed away.
‘Mai! Come quickly!’
Hazvinei’s legs tucked themselves under her body and raised her. She looked like the wooden toys they sold in the market.
‘Muroyi,’ the whispers ran.
I ran to the crowd and wrestled the pot of sweet beer from the man holding it. I swung it towards Hazvinei. The beer splashed in Hazvinei’s face and she fell, clasping her hands to her eyes. As she fell I saw a shadow leave her, something white and malignant that paled her face and darkened her eyes as it departed. She hit the ground. Her knee started to bleed. And then she looked up.
She stared around at all of us, her head dripping with beer. A baby started to cry.
Amai made her way through the crowd at last, and dropped to Hazvinei’s side, cradling her in her arms as if she were still a baby. Baba followed, pushing past me, and stood over them both.
‘Baba,’ I said, but he did not look at me. He picked up Hazvinei’s body and held her as he had held her when she was born, letting her long legs dangle. He carried her through the crowd, while Amai and I trotted behind him, avoiding the eyes of our friends and neighbours. I did not look behind me, but in the redness behind my closed eyes I saw the shape of the N’anga, and I knew that he was watching us go.
That night, the rain came. It was angry, drumming its fingers on our tin roof and shouting through the cracks in our doors and windows. I heard it calling to us, tempting us to come outside. When we did not answer, it threw itself against the walls in anger.
Hazvinei slept like a dead person that night, and heard not a thing. In the morning we saw that the rain had turned the ground to red, bloody sludge, and it had flattened our mielie plants.
Chapter Eleven
WHEN HAZVINEI WOKE, she was pale and dazed. Amai and Baba did not speak. They helped her to dress as if she were a baby again.
‘We are taking her to the N’anga,’ said Baba. ‘He will tell us what to do.’
‘But, Baba …’
‘You be quiet, Tinashe,’ he said. ‘If you had looked after your sister as I had told you to, this would not have happened.’
I felt the shameful heat of tears.
We walked to the N’anga’s hut. Hazvinei did not speak; instead, she walked with her head down and her mouth closed. I wanted to talk to her, but Baba did not let us have a moment alone.
‘Hazvinei!’ I whispered. She did not turn her head.
‘Hazvinei, do not tell the N’anga …’
‘What are you saying, Tinashe?’ Baba looked at me.
‘Nothing, Baba.’
We passed many people on the way to the N’anga’s hut, and, as each person was one that we knew, we had to stop and exchange a few words with them for fear of offending.
‘Mai!’
‘Be patient, Tinashe.’
We reached the outskirts of the village. All the other houses had a tidy, swept yard in front, and the floors gleamed with red polish, but the N’anga’s yard was choked with weeds and thorns, and his shack was filthy. There was no reason for him to have an untidy yard; many women in the kopje would be happy to sweep it for him. He just preferred it that way. The same black cockerel was pecking at the edges of a rain puddle, and swivelled one yellow eye to look at me. I avoided his gaze, afraid that he would give me away. I would not have been surprised if the cockerel had opened its beak and spoken like a man.
‘Baba.’
‘It is all right, Tinashe,’ he said.
‘Go-go-goi!’ Amai knocked on the door-frame.
A muffled voice from inside.
‘He is coming,’ said Amai.
I needed the toilet badly.
The witch doctor came out to greet us, standing so close that I could smell his sweaty, raw-onion smell and hear the dull rattle and clink of the bones in his necklace. He was skinny, hung with grass and gourds and necklaces and bracelets. A greenish film covered one eye, and a dark clot floated in the middle of the other. He leaned his old face down to mine and grinned at me. I did not look at him. I felt that he could pluck my knowledge directly from my eyes, like a bird cracking open a snail shell to get at the meat inside.
‘That girl. Pfoo.’ A disapproving outward breath, half a whistle.
‘Yes, N’anga.’
‘And you want me to look at her?’ He spread his wrinkled palms. ‘Why?’
‘Please, N’anga.’
‘Why would I help this one after what she has done? You saw what happened yesterday. You are lucky that the spirits listened to me and brought the rains despite your daughter’s behaviour.’
‘She has not been well,’ said Baba. ‘She is not speaking. Like Little Tendai.’
‘That one.’ The witch doctor clicked his tongue.
‘Is he better?’ said Amai.
‘I have given him muti. He will be better.’
‘And you will do the same for Hazvinei?’
He shrugged.
‘We also want to know her future,’ said Baba. ‘We are worried about her, after all of this. We want to make sure that she will be safe.’
‘It is a girl. What is the use of knowing her future?’
‘We have money.’ Amai brought out her handkerchief. It made a clinking noise.
‘It will need to be more if I am to ask the spirits about a girl,’ said the N’anga. ‘They will not like it.’
Amai fi
shed in her pocket. Another clink. The N’anga closed his palm.
‘Bring her in.’
‘Wait outside, Tinashe,’ said Baba and followed the N’anga inside. Amai stopped to touch my cheek, then took Hazvinei in too. I stayed in the mud, watching the water-patterns the heat made above the road, and shooing away the flies that landed on my leg.
Amai and Baba stayed in there for a long time. I could hear voices, but they were too muffled for me to understand. Once I heard Hazvinei wail, a high, pure sound, like the cry of a bird.
An auntie passed me. ‘What are you doing by the N’anga’s hut, Tinashe?’ I could see the greed in her smile as she scented gossip. ‘I am sure your Amai would not like you to be there.’
‘Amai is inside.’
‘Eh-eh?’ A considering glance at the shack, and at me. ‘With Hazvinei?’
‘Yes, Auntie.’
‘It is terrible, what happened yesterday. Is she sick?’
I stayed silent.
She stared at me for a few minutes, then turned away. ‘I hope for good fortune.’
‘Thank you, Auntie.’
I watched her big, round bottom waddle down the road.
The shadows changed shape. The round patch of sun on my head moved from one side to the other. My tongue dried out and I wanted water. There was a tap outside the witch doctor’s shack, but I did not dare drink from it in case Amai came out.
But would she see me? Surely there would be time for me to have a drink and come back to my spot on the ground. Surely Amai would not be angry. In fact, she would probably be angrier if she came out and saw me dried to a crisp, like an earthworm toasted on the tarmac. ‘Why didn’t you get yourself a drink, Tinashe?’ she would say. ‘Why didn’t you use your brain?’
I got to my feet with difficulty, feeling the blood itch and tingle as it returned to my legs. The tap was right next to the N’anga’s hut, by a window. I would have to stay down and not let my head pop up when I drank, in case Baba saw me. I watched one of my hands climb the tap like a little brown spider. Up, up, and it was there. The metal burned my palm, leaving a thin, transparent layer of skin on the handle. A screech as the tap turned, and then the cool, blessed ribbon of brown water, straight onto my parched teeth and tongue. I drank, and felt my stomach balloon up and out, and my skin go from wrinkly-dry-old-man skin to soft Tinashe skin again. I lay on my back in the sun, feeling fat and satisfied.