by C. B. George
He sat on the curb at the far corner of the property, away from the gate. He took out his phone. He had no airtime, so he sent Bessie a free “call me back,” so that she’d know he’d arrived. But she didn’t finish work until one p.m., so he’d just have to wait. He idled back to the airtime seller on the corner where two gardeners were playing checkers. He watched for a while and made vain attempts to engage them in conversation, but they were unfriendly and engrossed in what was clearly a regular challenge match. He tried talking to the airtime seller, but the kid was every bit as sullen. Gilbert had the sense that the workers in this rich neighborhood banded together against any outsiders who might compete for jobs or customers.
By the time he returned to number forty-five it was five past one and, from a distance, he saw Bessie standing at the gate. He quickened his pace and, when she turned to look in his direction, instinctively raised his arm in a broad, excited arc of greeting. Her response was a brief, low-key twitch of her right hand and he felt suddenly embarrassed. The specific nuances of this small exchange signified, for Gilbert, everything that was wrong with their current situation. His love for his wife burned consistently hot but, in his absence, she had begun to resort to a kind of pragmatic frigidity that would take time to thaw even in the full glare of his passion. He sometimes worried that, one day, he would no longer be able to warm her up and she would cool him down instead.
He had told her this the last time she visited Mubayira and she appeared immediately crestfallen. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But when I am not here, do you believe I must think about my husband and daughter all the time? I can’t do that. If I do that I will become depressed.”
Gilbert promptly regretted his comment and suffered one of those sudden reversals of sentiment common to the love-struck. “No!” he gushed. “I am sorry. I will always have enough love for us both.”
She then looked at him—somewhat sadly, he thought—and said, “You cannot have enough love for two people. That is not how it works.” At which his heart turned over once again and he wished he’d said nothing at all.
Bessie was still wearing her maid’s uniform and in it she seemed all the more unfamiliar: the shapeless dress, gathered at the waist, robbed her small frame of its natural undulations, while the headscarf low on her brow made her look unusually stern. She greeted him formally, tentatively, and he, suddenly racked with uncertainty, did likewise. But, he couldn’t help taking her hand in his and she smiled up at him with a brief, familiar flash of personality that made his stomach tighten.
“You have been in Harare…” she began.
“Almost two weeks,” he said.
“How is our pumpkin?”
“She is fine. She is speaking, you know.”
“No! What does she say?”
“Gogo. To my mum. Well. Almost.”
Bessie nodded slowly. Gilbert felt his clumsiness and insensitivity. He watched his wife swallow her sacrifice as she surely did every day. She waited for it to settle. She asked, “And how is everyone at Sunningdale?”
“They are fine. Everybody is fine.” He let go of her hand so that he could adjust his small knapsack. “Shall we go inside? I bought some chicken.”
She smiled. “I also bought chicken,” she said. She looked back at the gate. “Madam is having a party. There are some guests. Later I may have to help with the dishes.”
“I thought you were off this afternoon?”
“I am,” Bessie said, and shrugged. She turned, took out her keys and opened the small door in the heavy iron gate.
17
Gilbert looked around the plot. It was large: perhaps half an acre in front of the house, a driveway running up the right-hand side to a twin garage, and then at least double the space behind. The house, though, was surprisingly old and modest, perhaps eight rooms in all, and Gilbert considered that, if these people were so rich, which they must be, it was strange that they hadn’t rebuilt. He said as much to Bessie, who replied, “It is not their house; they are renting. They’re from UK. I told you.”
As they skirted the garage, Gilbert heard the sounds of chatter and soft, unfamiliar music. The back of the house opened onto a large covered veranda, raised a meter or so above the lawn and overlooking a swimming pool. Half a dozen kids of various ages were splashing in the water, the youngest bobbing reluctantly in the arms of a white woman. A braai was in full swing on the far side of the veranda, burning too fiercely to be cooking the meat nicely. Around twenty people were gathered in clusters here and there, talking somewhat seriously. It was hardly what Gilbert would have described as a party.
Bessie told him to wait and approached the nearest group, all men, who were seated on cane chairs around a low table. She stood at a couple of meters distance until she caught the attention of a burly man in T-shirt and shorts. He stood up, even looking slightly relieved by her intervention, and joined Bessie on the grass. She led him over to perform the necessary introductions.
Bessie’s boss was tall, as tall as Gilbert and twice as wide. He had short dark hair, a broad, open face and a poorly trimmed beard that cracked easily into a smile. He transferred his beer bottle from right to left so that he could shake Gilbert’s hand.
“This is Mr. Jerry Jones,” Bessie said, in English. “Sir, this is my husband, Gilbert Chiweshe.”
Gilbert took his hand. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Boss,” he said.
The man said something incomprehensible and Gilbert was thrown until his wife prompted, again in English, “He is greeting you!” and he grasped that the murungu was speaking broken Shona.
“Ndaswera. Maswera sei?” Gilbert said.
“Fine, fine. It’s good to meet you.” The man reverted to his own tongue, swigged from his beer, then adopted a grave expression. “I’m sorry that we keep Bessie away from you. Though I don’t know what we’d do without her. She’s been a godsend.”
Gilbert didn’t know how to reply to this. He glanced at Bessie for help, but she was looking at her feet. “Thank you, sir,” he tried, and it seemed an acceptable response.
There was no need for further conversation, but Mr. Jones appeared determined to continue and he asked after Gilbert’s family and the journey from the “rural area.” Gilbert said that the journey had been fine, that his family was fine. Mr. Jones shifted from foot to foot as if uncomfortable. He drank from his beer again. “And what are you doing in the city?” Mr. Jones asked.
“I am looking for an opportunity. But at the moment I am driving a taxi with my brother-in-law.” Gilbert took out his wallet and found one of his new business cards. It had his phone number and Patson’s. It read, “Gapu Taxis. Your journey is our business. We go in peace.” It had been Gilbert’s idea to print the cards and it felt good to hand one over.
A hint of a smile twitched around Mr. Jones’s eyes. “You go in peace?” he said. “Is that a promise?”
Gilbert felt foolish. It had been Patson who’d insisted on the motto. “It is a promise,” he said. “Not a contractual obligation.”
Mr. Jones raised his eyebrows. “That’s good to know,” he said. Then, “Well, we’re a one-car family, so I often need a taxi. I’ll call you. At least now you can find the house.”
“No problem, Boss.”
Gilbert’s attention was taken by what was happening over Mr. Jones’s left shoulder. The white woman he’d noted before was hurriedly getting out of the pool and, in the absence of any other takers, handed her child to a tall, light-skinned black guy, wearing a loose, short-sleeved shirt and light trousers—he looked, Gilbert thought, like an American singer. The woman then wrapped a towel around her waist and hurried over, busily arranging her curly hair into something like order. She was too pale to be revealing so much skin to the afternoon sun and her shoulders and upper arms were marked with countless small freckles as if by way of protest. As she approached, she jabbed out her hand like a spear and Gilbert took it to avoid being run through.
“Hello,” she said.
&n
bsp; “Madam,” Bessie said quickly. “This is my husband.”
“Gilbert,” Mr. Jones said blithely. “He is visiting.”
“Visiting?” Mrs. Jones said, at a pitch that made her own husband’s eyes dart towards her, the last to cotton on to her obvious displeasure.
“Yeah,” he said, making no attempt to conceal his own irritation. “Visiting. Bessie. His wife.”
“Tomorrow we will go to church,” Bessie said.
There was a heavy moment of silence. Then Mrs. Jones said, “Well, this is a nice surprise. Good to meet you, Gilbert.” Then, “Bessie? Can you come back around six to clear up?”
She turned on her heels and strutted back to the party. Mr. Jones sniffed and gave Gilbert a conspiratorial look, which the latter didn’t entirely understand, then turned and said over his shoulder, “Nice to meet you. Have a good weekend.”
“Thank you, Boss.”
At the domestic housing, Gilbert stood in the doorway of the small kitchen while Bessie prepared the chicken. He sipped a Coke. They didn’t talk much, but that was OK. He enjoyed watching her busy herself and, besides, he knew that, though there were no words or gestures of affection, the diligence with which she cleaned and cut the meat was its own kind of intimacy.
They ate in Bessie’s room. He sat at the small table on the single chair. She sat on the floor. He told her his plans. He wasn’t sure how she would react, but he tried to speak as if it were all decided and brooked no argument. He told her that there was nothing for him in Mubayira. There were no jobs and he was no kind of farmer. He was proud that she had taken the initiative to come to Harare, but what kind of husband would he be if he just sat at home and let this situation drift indefinitely? He told her that Patson and Fadzai had agreed that he could stay in Sunningdale until he found his feet. He showed her the business cards. He would share responsibility for the taxi until he found work of his own. It might take some time, but eventually they would bring Stella and have a house and build a life as a family. He said, “What do you think?”
Bessie fetched the second Coke and divided it equally into two glasses. She smiled at him. She said, “I think it’s a good plan.”
18
Later that evening, around half past seven, when everyone had gone home, having expressed sufficient horror about the day’s central dramatic event, and when he’d finally finished the dishes and been able to dismiss Bessie for what was left of her weekend, Jerry found April cradling Theo on her lap on the couch. Theo was in his pajamas and half asleep, but April was still wearing her swimming costume and the same loose shirt and trousers she’d thrown over it hours earlier. Her hair was similarly unkempt, her eyes still wide with maternal terror.
Jerry said, “Everything OK?”
She took a moment to look at him, and when she did, she shook her head, not so much to answer his question as to signify, as if there could be any doubt, the full extent of her distress. She said, “That’s the kind of thing he’ll never forget, Jerry, never fucking forget. That’s the kind of thing that will stay with him forever.”
Hearing his mother’s tone of voice, Theo looked up at her from beneath her chin and sneezed. Jerry made some wordless noise of agreement, but couldn’t help thinking that the likelihood of his son remembering this forever was more down to April’s reaction than the incident itself. He said, “Good job that guy was watching—the father. What’s his name? Shawn?”
Jerry had intended this to be an uncontroversial and incontrovertible observation but, as was generally the case when April was wound like a corkscrew, such observations were hard to come by.
“Fuck, Jerry, fuck,” April breathed. Then, “We’ve got to be sure we know where Theo is at all times. You do know that, right? You do know that?”
Jerry bit his tongue. He did know that; of course he knew it. But he also knew that if he rose to the accusation he was sure was present in the question (and how could it not be? Her brief dalliance with the word “we” was clumsily disingenuous) it would only lead to a fight. And he was either too tired to fight or simply tired of fighting.
Instead, therefore, he made another vague, indecipherable noise and retreated back to the kitchen where he stood, propped against the counter, draining an open bottle of warm, flat beer and reflecting on the day. It had been, he decided, an unequivocal disaster—a party he hadn’t wanted to throw, attended by people he didn’t much like, pivoting around a public row with his wife and culminating in Theo’s near death. As he phrased it like that in his head, he issued a brief, amused snort for the benefit of an imaginary audience.
Jerry’s perspective was undoubtedly colored by how things had turned out. Because, though he wouldn’t now admit it, he’d enjoyed himself for at least the early part of the afternoon. It was colored, too, by living in a relationship under constant strain, which chafed, frayed and squealed, no matter how much he tried to anaesthetize, bind or lubricate its moving parts. And by the end of every day, a dull, chronic pain had always returned to ensure he felt short-tempered, hard-done-by and misunderstood.
Of course the braai had been April’s idea. Perhaps because she spent so much time dealing with personnel issues at the embassy, she now seemed to regard herself as some kind of de facto social secretary for the expatriates of Harare; initially just the Brits, but, latterly, all-comers. But if April considered a hosting role part of her professional remit, it was really Jerry who had the social skills to pull it off. Whatever Jerry thought about the motivations, perhaps even the morals, of Harare’s expat/diplomatic/NGO population, he also had a kind of impulsive and irrepressible gregariousness that, at least temporarily, swamped his cynicism. Consequently, though he had dreaded the braai in advance, he was soon hanging coats, cracking bottles and small-talking vacantly with the woman from US AID and her husband, who looked about eighteen but was some kind of hotshot in governance. After a couple of beers, he even found himself regaling the wide-eyed cultural director of the Alliance Française with the story of his first patient at the Epworth clinic. As she variously winced and exclaimed at every gruesome detail, thereby drawing walk-ups to their conversation, so Jerry began to relish the gruesomeness himself and even to elaborate unnecessarily (and not entirely truthfully) for effect.
Later, in the kitchen, by now feeling short-tempered, hard-done-by and misunderstood, he reflected with shame on his behavior. He considered bitterly that he’d somehow been infected by these people and the peculiar, incongruous, outdated lifestyle that saw two dozen white foreigners gather in a luxury that couldn’t have been familiar to them in London, Paris, Rome or wherever they hailed from, but to which they now appeared to feel instinctively entitled. There was even, he decided, something in the way these people behaved that acknowledged the absurd inequity of their situation: their superficial piety a kind of justifying token, and the politesse of their conversations reflecting an understanding that, for reasons of taste and, possibly, security, they should not be overheard by the rest of the city, however strong their desire to drive around with windows wide, screaming, “Look at me in my big fucking car.” And, of course, there were very few black people present; just Bessie making potato salad, Tapiwa from the embassy, Tom Givens’s trophy girlfriend (Esther? Young, bored, popping bubble-gum like a teenager), and Shawn, the New Yorker April had met at yoga, his silent Zimbabwean wife, Kuda, and their eight-year-old daughter, Rosie, who’d ended up at the center of the dreadful incident.
The afternoon had begun to go wrong with the arrival of Gilbert. Jerry had quite forgotten he’d OKed the visit, not least because he hadn’t considered himself in a position to OK it or otherwise. However, while he was being, he thought, no more than appropriately friendly, April had stalked over, dripping from the swimming pool, and he could tell from the jut of her jaw that something was amiss. Ten minutes later, when he had been en route to the braai to poke sausages and turn steaks, April, who’d appeared deep in conversation with three or four women, had caught his arm. She’d bombarded him with a loo
sely strung invective: what did he think he was doing saying it was fine for Bessie’s husband to visit when they’d never met him and didn’t know anything about him, and, besides, this was Bessie’s place of work, and was he really comfortable having a total stranger on the property with their two-year-old son?
Jerry looked from his wife to the other women and saw at once that this was what they’d been talking about and now, if not before, April was utterly confident in her indignation. He found himself staring at her, frozen in something like astonishment. Over recent months, he’d frequently found April’s anger, attitude or opinions shocking; so frequently, in fact, that he now wondered whether his shock could really still be blamed on changes in her behavior rather than his own obstinate refusal to acknowledge them.
Jerry attempted a mild remark about how he hadn’t known it was his decision as to whom Bessie could or couldn’t see in her spare time. He kept his voice calm, slightly jovial, cautiously stripped of any note of irritation. His comment didn’t have the placatory effect he’d hoped.
This was partly because April had lately learned to read the absence of irritation in Jerry’s voice for precisely the irritation it was intended to mask, and consequently reflected it right back. And it was partly, and more surprisingly, because his comment had provoked forthright opinions from the other women, which, in turn, attracted the attention of most of the rest of the Joneses’ guests. In fact, Jerry soon understood that he was more or less alone in thinking that Bessie’s husband visiting for the weekend was no big deal. What was more, everyone else seemed to have the personal experience, professional knowledge, cultural legitimacy or plain brass neck to lend weight (if not reason) to their opinions.