The High Court stood on top of a small hill in flat Bulawayo. It was an impressive building, looking rather like a fort with a big green copper dome. From its upper windows you could see the town spreading out flat to the east, the hot wide black streets of midtown, wide enough to turn a wagon drawn by sixteen oxen. To the west, far away to the west you saw the miles and miles of hot white square houses of the African townships laid out clinically in hot straight rows. And beyond the suburbs to the east and the township to the west were the hot brown shimmering horizons of flat bush, stretching away to infinity.
The Criminal Court was full. High up on the bench sat the judge in his hot red robes. At the foot of his bench, in a wig and with a black gown over his suit, sat the registrar. He was Joseph Mahoney. He had pushed his wig forward over his forehead, almost down to his eyebrows. He leant forward slightly in his chair, his elbow on the arm rest, his forehead resting on one hand. On the table in front of him stood the documents of the trial, the exhibits, the bloodstained shovel and in a sack at his feet was the skeleton of the deceased with chips hewn off the neck vertebrae, which showed that she had her head chopped off. In front of his table, a few paces away stood the bar where the two advocates sat in their wigs and gowns and butterfly collars. Behind them in a big wooden box stood a policeman and next to him stood the accused, a little wizened black man with frowning eyes and short hair turning white. He wore prison clothes and he was on trial for his life. And behind the dock were rows of public benches, crowded now with black sweaty faces, listening to the words of the red-robed judge sitting high up on the bench behind Mahoney.
From where the judge sat it looked as if Mahoney was resting his head on his hand listening to the judgment. Mahoney was not listening. He had listened to the trial and he knew what the judgment was going to be. He was asleep and he had been asleep since the judge had begun to speak. Mahoney had been the judge’s registrar for nine months and he had perforce learned the art of sleeping sitting up. Mahoney slept in Court whenever he could safely do so, because he studied late into the night for the Bachelor of Laws degree.
His face was no longer lean and brown. It was fatter and it was white and he had shadows under his eyes. His hand frequently trembled and his fingers were stained with nicotine and every morning his tongue smarted and he coughed a great deal over his first cigarette.
The judge paused after each sentence so that it could be interpreted to the little black man in the dock.
‘To sum up, then. I find as facts proven that you suspected your second wife of committing adultery. You suspected this for a long time, you spoke to a number of your tribesmen about it, asking them for advice and for confirmation of your suspicions. I find that you did go to consult Siamanga the witch-doctor to learn if your suspicions were well founded and that he threw the bones and purported to divine the answer and that he in fact did purport to confirm your suspicions. You decided to kill her and you thereafter in accordance with a preconceived plan lay in wait for her in the bush with the shovel, exhibit two. I find that as she came past you leapt out at her and belayed her with the shovel, and eventually chopped her head off with it. In short, I find that all the elements of the crime of murder are present in this case. Your counsel has argued on your behalf that extenuating circumstances exist in this case which would entitle me to pass a sentence other than death. He has urged on your behalf that you are a simple man, outraged by the adultery of your second wife and spurred on by your belief in the witch-doctor. I regret I cannot agree. You planned this murder, you were not consumed by a sudden passion. Nor do I consider your belief in witchcraft a mitigating factor. People in this colony must realise that crimes committed in the name of black magic are the more heinous because of it, not less so. We cannot have people being accused and punished on the mere words of witch-doctors. I find your reliance on the word of this so-called witch-doctor an aggravating feature. You had no other evidence of the deceased’s adultery. I conclude that there are no extenuating circumstances in your case. Accordingly, in law, I have no option as to the sentence I must pass.’
The judge glanced down at Mahoney and waited for him to stand up and perform his duty. Mahoney did not move. The judge cleared his throat, but Mahoney did not move. The counsel began to cough at him.
‘Mister Registrar,’ the judge whispered down at him.
No response from Mr. Registrar.
‘Mister Registrar!’ The counsel coughed louder.
‘Mister Registrar!’ and the Court shorthand writer leant over and nudged Mahoney.
Mahoney was on his feet in a flurry. He blinked around guiltily and took a deep breath.
‘Silence in Court!’ he shouted.
He darted from his chair. He scrambled up the steps on to the judge’s platform and darted for the judge’s door. He flung it open and stood back quickly and blinked expectantly at his master.
The judge stared at him and sighed. He lifted his arm petulantly and motioned Mahoney over to him. ‘The death sentence,’ the judge hissed, ‘I’m terribly sorry, milord.’
Mahoney turned from the throne and climbed quickly down to his seat at the foot of the bench. He stood up straight and cleared his throat and straightened his wig.
‘Mister Interpreter,’ he intoned. ‘Tell the accused that he has been duly convicted of the crime of murder. Ask him if there is anything he has to say, or if he knows of any reason why the Sentence of Death should not be passed upon him according to Law.’
Mahoney sat down with relief.
The black man listened attentively, frowning very much. He thought hard, then he shook his head at the interpreter.
‘I have nothing to say milord,’ the interpreter said. The judge leant forward.
‘Mister Interpreter, explain to the accused that this is a very important moment. If there is anything at all he would like to say, now is his chance to say it.’
Mr. Interpreter said ‘As your Lordship pleases’ and he relayed the question to the little black man. The black man frowned and thought again. Then his frown lifted. He spoke earnestly to the interpreter. The interpreter listened solemnly and then translated literally:
‘I wish to thank the Mambo for putting on his red clothes and going to all this trouble just to hear my case. I am very sorry for the trouble I have caused the Mambo.’
Mahoney closed his eyes and shook his head. Jesus. The judge nodded. ‘Anything else?’
The black man nodded his head politely. ‘Yes, I have something to say.’
‘Yes?’
‘I wish to ask the Mambo to hurry up and hang me because then I can hurry up to my wife. I think she is still doing the same thing in heaven.’
The judge looked at the little man. ‘Anything else?’
The little man shook his head and the interpreter said: ‘No thank you, milord.’
The judge looked down at Mahoney and Mahoney turned in his chair and looked up at the judge. The judge nodded. Mahoney stood up and addressed the Court.
‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, all persons are charged to stand and keep strict silence while the Sentence of Death is passed upon the prisoner at the bar.’
The interpreter sang out the translation. All the people in the courtroom stood, his Lordship, the registrar, the counsel and the public. The judge opened a volume of statutes on his bench and he read slowly.
‘The sentence of the Court is that you be returned to custody and that the Sentence of Death be executed upon you according to Law. And may God have mercy upon your soul.’
The little black man stood looking at the judge while the interpreter translated the sentence to him. Then he lifted up his bony black arm and saluted in respect. The judge blinked and he sat down. The prisoner was led from the dock down the stairs into the holding cells below the courtroom.
The judge sighed.
‘Court will adjourn until ten a.m. on Monday,’ he said tiredly.
‘Silence in Court!’ Mahoney shouted and he moved out from behind his table. He mo
unted the platform and opened the judge’s door for him. He closed the door and returned to his table. He selected a warrant from a drawer and began to fill in the details of the prisoner. The warrant had a black border round it and it is called a Death Warrant. He signed it.
Mahoney went upstairs to check in his judge’s chambers and he found, not to his disappointment, that the old man had gone home. He took off his jacket and collar and he descended the stairs from the judge’s chambers down to the big oak-panelled library below. It was a handsome library with shelves and shelves of books and there were red velvet curtains draped over the windows and on the walls there were portraits of old judges.
The library was hot. It faced west and the hot afternoon sun beat on the stone walls and windows. It made Mahoney’s nerves prickle as he walked into it, his footsteps ringing lonely and hollow over the warm parquet flooring. The library was a hot dry tongue-smarting hungry place for Mahoney. It saved him a little bit of money but he hated the place. He always felt hungry and feverish when he entered it. He was hungry because he did not eat properly. Samson made his breakfast in the morning but Mahoney felt too rough to eat at seven. His head usually ached and he was still half asleep and his tongue smarted from too much smoking whilst he sat and burned the midnight oil of the night before. Breakfast at 7 a.m. nauseated Mahoney and in the end Samson simply put a fried egg between two slices of bread, put it in Mahoney’s briefcase and he ate it later at the office. By noon Mahoney was famished and his tongue ached from his injudicious smoking. At lunch time he went out and bought two meat pies which filled him up and which he ate while he studied in his office for the hour. He did not go to a restaurant because he could not spare the time and because the restaurants he could afford did not give him enough to eat for his money. And he hated the hot walk to these cafés and the crowds that were always in them, he hated the Coca-Cola signs with their luscious rosy-cheeked girls the likes of which he had never seen in the flesh, the monstrous chromium Aggi Coffee machines spewing steam, the gay, badly painted murals of coconut palms and blue lagoons when he knew there wasn’t a blue lagoon for a thousand miles; he hated the juke box that constantly proclaimed that life was a lot of fun, that we should rock rock rock around the clock to-ni-i-i-i-ght. He hated the sun burning down on his suited back as he walked back to the office still hungry, he hated the burn of the cigarette on his tongue after a quarter of a meal. So he ate two meat pies in his office, which filled him up, and he did some swotting. Sometimes he went to a bar and bloated himself on four shillings’ worth of curried chicken giblets and rice, lots of rice, which made him feel full, good and full. But he still felt feverish when he entered the High Court library at the end of the day. His tongue still smarted and the palms of his hands were peeling and they were itchy and sweaty.
He saw his table in the far corner of the library littered with his books and his notes. And Mahoney wanted to cry out and charge the table, kick it and throw books at it and tear up his notes and scream. And he wanted to run out of the library down to the nearest bar and order himself a row of cold beers and flush his system with them, fray and soften up the hot dry-scabs on his soul and his smarting tongue, fill his belly with the balm of beer. Like every other sane person was doing at this moment in this desert.
Mahoney leant against the bookshelf and held his head.
‘Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’
He sat down and he undid the buttons on his shirt and he kicked off his shoes, and he took out his pen and opened his notes. Automatically his hand reached out for his packet of cigarettes and he lit one. It burned his tongue. He put his hand inside his shirt and scratched the hot red nervous heat rash and then his hand went down to the back of his knee and he scratched the heat rash there through the dank material of his suit. He glanced up at the clock on the wall. Five o’clock. Three hours to supper, and another five hours’ work thereafter and he would finish his night’s quota.
Chapter Eighteen
Bulawayo is a pretty bloody name for a town to have, but then Bulawayo is a pretty bloody town. Bulawayo means Place of Slaughter, and Mahoney was wont to say: Man, it slays me. From the living-room window of his flat in Fort Street he looked across the dirt-red corrugated-iron roof-tops of the red brick houses in the brown dirt yards where fat unlovely housewives in slippers and curlers bawled out tattered native servants, where snotty-nosed children played with broken toys and swung on swings made of motorcar tyres: he looked down on to sanitary lanes where the dustbins stood and where servants gathered to squat on their haunches and chatter and pick their noses and gamble and play their portable radios, he looked on to the back doors of the servants’ quarters where the windows were dirty and broken and the panes patched with cardboard: at nights there were candles burning behind the windows and from within there came the jumbled cadent monotonous rise and fall of cracked records played on old gramophones, the murmured jumble of singing broken by the coarse and uninhibited laughter of men and the shrill flabby laugh of their black women: he looked down on to the narrow strip of uneven tarred road flanked by dirty brown gravel where stunted jacaranda trees had grown and then given up, where the old cars of the people who lived in the red-roofed houses were parked. On the ground floor of the block of flats was an Indian merchant who sold everything from hairpins to guitars and bicycles and on the concrete pavement there were stains, and Africans gaped in the windows at the trinkets, and fat Indian children played in the gravel gutter. Beyond the red corrugated-iron roof-tops was downtown Bulawayo where the shops and new office blocks towered up and beyond them lay the nicer blocks of flats, then the spreading lawns and hedges of surburbia and the Clubs. And beyond these, and on all sides of the town lay the vast flat bush horizons stretching to the end of the world.
On Sundays the unlovely Fort Street was still and listless under the hot sun and the chatter of the natives in the sanitary lanes was desultory and it seemed that there was nothing to do in the whole world but sit on the verandahs of Fort Street and drink beer until it was lunch time, then lie down on the slattern beds and copulate, waiting for Monday to bring something to do. If you lived on the other side of town in the nicer flats and in the lawns and between the hedges of the nicer suburbs, there was still nothing to be done with Sunday but sit on the lawns at the edge of the swimming pool and drink beer and gin-slings and play golf at the Club and then stand and sit around and drink beer and gin-slings and guffaw and then go home to sleep it off and copulate, and wait for Monday to bring something to do again. Sunday is a bad day in Bulawayo. During the week there are always the air-conditioned cocktail bars in all their different colours and subdued lighting and upholstery and get-ups where you can kid yourself it’s a great life. But on Sunday even the cocktail bars are closed.
But that summer Mahoney did not care about Fort Street and the scores of arid streets like Fort Street, about the sun shimmering on the corrugated-iron roofs and the snotty-nosed children and the dogs’ urine patches, the easy aimlessness of the pleasant lawns and hedges of surburbia, the vast shimmering horizons, for Mahoney was not only too busy, he was also in love.
At nine-thirty there was a short toot outside the back of the dark High Court library. Mahoney shoved his chair back quickly and ran his peeling hands through his hair and hurried through the empty bookbound hall to the back door and stepped out into the darkness. There she was, there was her car parked in the shadows. She flicked her lights once. Mahoney hurried over to the passenger side and climbed in.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hello, my love.’
She kissed him and then she pulled the lid off a cake tin. There were sandwiches and a Thermos of coffee. She watched him eat.
‘You look starved. What did you have for supper?’
‘Bully beef.’
‘And?’
‘Potatoes.’
‘You can’t live off that. In future I’m going to go around to your flat and supervise that boy of yours into lashing you up a decent meal.’
&n
bsp; She watched him drink the coffee.
‘How’s it going?’ she said.
‘Bloody awful, thanks.’
‘You’ll pass,’ she said.
‘I’m not so cocksure.’
‘You’ll pass with flying colours.’
‘I shouldn’t have put so much time into that useless book. I should’ve started swotting earlier.’
‘It’s not a useless book. It’s going to be a best-seller.’
‘How do you know if you haven’t read it?’
‘Anything you do will be good. You’ll pass with flying colours and the book’s going to be a best-seller.’
‘Suzie?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘Thanks for staying in and coming round here bringing me skoff every night.’
‘It’s the Florence Nightingale in me. I’d do it for anybody.’
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