Rotten Row

by Petina Gappah

  There had been other small houses in her man’s life, she had replaced one herself and, she feared, was on the verge of being replaced. The one thing she knew about other women was that they were the enemy, every single one of them. They would stop at nothing in the pursuit of her man.

  Thus, she had moved around the townships, going from herbalist to herbalist as she sought the one substance, the one mupfuhwira that would cleave her man to her. A herbalist in Glen View had sold her chipotanemadziro, a potion that would make a straying husband stay at home. The herbalist claimed it was made using the dried and pounded tail of a lizard so that her man, like the lizard, would circulate only the walls of her home.

  From a woman at the Robert Mugabe end of First Street, she had bought Weti yeGudo, a powder that was supposed to make her man behave like a baboon that wanted to urinate in only one place. From a woman in Mbare called Sekuru Muchabaya, she had brought home a needle dipped in a secret substance, and that she was supposed to encase in a yellow duster when her man was far from her. In desperation, on the advice of a woman in Mufakose, she had even cooked him chicken to which she had added her own menstrual blood.

  None of this had worked, and so it was that she had eventually found herself in a hut in Seke, and there been told that as all other remedies had failed, there were just two left. The remedies had both terrified her, but the healer assured her that the fact that they were so terrifying was surely a sign of their power.

  The first remedy was to prepare a bath for him to which she was to add water in which a dead body had been recently washed. This way, her man would become as malleable as a corpse. The second was this one, the one she had opted for. She was to find the essence of a mad man, and prepare her husband food in which she added that essence. That way, he would become as docile as the man from whom she had taken the essence.

  She was perhaps too desperate to ask, why did this woman who promised so much, live in this township, where a burst sewer announced itself to all within it? Where, she could have asked, were these riches that she promised others, why did she grab, did they all grab, with such eagerness at the dirty dollar bills that they demanded? Why, if these treatments were so powerful, had no one thought to patent them, to sell them in bulk, to make them part of the balance of imports and exports and bring them firmly into the heart of globalisation? For markets were surely plentiful for powerful medicines against heartache and loss. Patents could be filed for curatives to infidelity and loneliness and rejection.

  Why, she could have asked, was so much of this medicine based on imitation and the manipulation of nature? Why was it that a heart-shaped leaf was supposed to cure the heart simply because of its shape, why was it if you slapped a child with the lung of a sheep that child would be as tranquil as a sheep in the face of provocation? Why was it that if a man ate lizard tail, he behaved like a lizard; if a man was treated with baboon’s piss, he behaved like a baboon; a man bathed in the water that had washed a corpse would become as malleable as that body; and a man fed the essence of a mad man would become biddable, unable to follow his own thoughts? She asked none of this, because she did not know the questions to ask. She had, and she saw, only her need.

  She finally saw the one she needed outside the Chicken Inn on Inez Terrace, rummaging in the bins. She shuddered as she imagined what she had to do, imagined his hands, those hands in the bin, on her body, that black grease on his skin on hers. In the end, getting him into the car was easier than she had imagined. He came to the side of her car. He looked exactly how she imagined a mad person would look. He stared straight at her, and then suddenly he smiled.

  ‘Let me take you home,’ she said.

  ’I want to shoot some birds,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right, let’s go to shoot some birds.’

  She opened the car for him. He got in. She clicked on the child lock. No one gave them a second look. It was a time of night at which the only motorists were men looking to buy lukewarm sex with cold cash. It was all darkness, the only light came from other cars. As she turned into Carreigh Cleagh, the driver of an oncoming vehicle neglected to dim his lights. The powerful beams shone so brightly that it was as though the momentary glare had exposed every dark thought in her mind.

  By the time she got to the gates of the estate, he was asleep. The guard stood at attention when he recognised her car. ‘My husband has gone on a trip, and I will be working at home for a week. Make sure no one disturbs me, please.’

  ‘Yes, Madam.’

  He saluted her as she drove on. It was an extra precaution, but one she was sure she did not need. This was the Brooke, after all, the fortress to which only the invited came through. No vendors, hawkers or jobseekers were allowed. No uninvited relatives dropped in, there were no unexpected callers. She had told the people at work that she had taken the whole week off to be in the Eastern Highlands with the man they thought of as her husband. And he was safely in Nairobi, and, she knew, would not even call her.

  When she got into the house, she looked about, and tried to see the house with his eyes, if his eyes saw what she saw. The house had been paid for by her man, but she had furnished it herself on the many trips that she took outside the country. The view over the golf course. The sunken lounge with its lounge suite from Dubai. The plasma screen television, framed by the totem animals, a nice touch, she thought, and one much admired (and to her irritation, imitated by her friends), his the lion, menacing fierce, hers the monkey, defiant, cunning. She would need all her cunning now.

  She gave him the only alcoholic drink that she could stomach: rum and Coca-Cola. It would make him more pliable, she thought, easier to manage. It proved more effective than she thought. It was easy to lift him, all those years of helping her mother bring home her drunken father from the township beer halls had trained her in the art of leading a drunken man from one place to another without letting him fall and drag her down with him.

  She took off his clothes. His hands and feet were callused with dirt wedged in the cracks. The rest of him, while caked with dirt, could be managed. He fell asleep in the bath. The grease defeated her, but at least the smell was gone. After the second unyielding bath, she had the wild notion to use something tougher, Vim perhaps, or caustic soda, but that would sear the skin. It had happened to her last maid but one, who had needed a hospital visit. No, she had all the time in the world to get him clean. She went through two bottles of Dettol and a tub of camphor cream.

  Every time he protested, she said, but you are home. The alcohol kept him peaceable and in between, he ate and watched television. It did not matter what she put on, sport on Supersport, Big Brother Africa, decoration programmes, he watched it all, lying on the bed in the guest bedroom, looking at the screen almost without blinking.

  On the third night, after she had given him seven baths in two days, she decided the time had come. She gave him more rum and Coke. Her courage almost failed her. She had some herself. She could not bring herself to take him into the bedroom she shared with her man, so she led him into the room she had given him. She lay him back on the bed.

  She had noticed when she bathed him that he had no problem getting hard. During the first bath, he had convulsed right there in the bath, and she had looked with dismay at the wasted essence that was washed down the drain with his grease and dirt. But at least she knew that he was capable.

  Afterwards, she unpeeled the condom, careful not to spill any of its contents. Who would have thought he would have so much in him? She emptied the condom into the old can that the woman had given her for this purpose. From its label, it had once contained condensed milk.

  ‘Ane madzihwa ane kondenzi,’ she sang.

  She burst into hysterical laughter, which became a sob, then laughter again. She was to take it back after a week. She did not know how much she needed. Divination, healing, is about intuition not about precision – it is in fact the opposite of scientific. Her intuition, responding to her need, told her to take as much as she could. She
was careful to refrigerate the can each time she added to it, clearing a shelf where it sat on its own, away from the carefully chosen cheeses and cold meats that her man liked to snack on.

  Once established, the pattern continued for six days: baths followed by food followed by drinking followed by what she insisted in thinking of as the necessary first step in the treatment that would restore her man to her. She drank more and more. Having finished the rum, they moved on to Blue Label whisky. She mixed it with Fanta.

  She became expansive, confiding. When the electricity went out on the third night, she did not trouble to fire up the generator, but lay in the darkness with him.

  ‘I got my man’, she said, ‘through a love potion.’ Just saying it seemed like a form of release. She told him of the mother who had left her drunken father. The man her mother married, who had gradually ignored his wife and directed his attentions towards her fifteen-year-old daughter until, at seventeen, her mother had asked her to leave home, the thrill of getting a university place so that she never had to go home again, her first job. Meeting her man, falling for his sleek car, his deep laugh. The herbalists she had visited to secure him. Her fear that she was not enough to hold him, that the charms no longer worked, that she would be replaced. The measures she had taken to prevent that happening. The love potions, the supplications, the prayers, the intercessions. And now, this desperate stratagem.

  On the fourth night she became maudlin, confessional.

  ‘I am not a bad person,’ she said. ‘Am I bad person?’

  ‘I want to shoot some birds,’ he said.

  His eyes were on Top Gear.

  ‘Look what I have done for you,’ she said. ‘You have this nice bed, you have good food, really, and if I wasn’t sure you would not know what to do with it, would not throw it away, I would give you money, lots of money, I would give you even a hundred dollars.’

  He did not answer, but watched as one Richard tried to outdo the other Richard in escalating excitement over the latest Maserati.

  On the fifth night, she inquired about his life. ‘Do you have a home?’ she asked him, then catching herself, ‘Did you have a home?’

  ‘I am going to shoot some birds now.’

  ‘Did you have a woman of your own, were you married?’

  ‘I want to shoot some birds.’

  On the sixth night, she danced to a Don Williams song. ‘Oh,’ she wept, ‘I love you desperately.’ He kept his eyes on the television.

  On the seventh night, she brought out her photo album, and showed him the pictures. The trouble began on the eighth night. This was the night she had decided she would take him back, as her man was to arrive three days later. She would take him back, then drive with the can to Seke to get the final medicine made up. She began to plan what to cook on the night her man came to her. She wondered whether she would have to serve him the medicine, or bath him in it. The thought turned her stomach a little.

  When the time came, he would not get into the car.

  ‘Please, you have to go.’

  She was panicking now, unable to breathe.

  ‘I want to shoot some birds.’ He said it with a flat insistence.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to shoot some birds.’

  The next night came and she still had not thought up the most effective way to get him out. She considered going to the gate, and asking the guards to take him out. If all else failed, that is what she would do. Her man would be home in two days, there was enough time. That night, he came to her room, something he had never done.

  She was woken by a sharp pain and the taste of a metallic liquid in her mouth. She had dreamt that her man was standing over them, but saw that no, it was not a dream, and he was not standing over them but was being held back by his brother, and it was morning and in the bed next to her, the mad man had a gash across the forehead where a broken bottle of Blue Label whisky had cut him. She screamed and as she did so, the blood, his blood came rushing out of her mouth and on to the sheet they lay on, his essence mixed with hers.

  The trial that followed was a short formality in which she confirmed her name, her address and her guilt. Her man was charged with attempted murder, then, the full details out, it was downgraded to assault, not even aggravated assault, said the Public Prosecutor because no man would have done less.

  At Rotten Row, she pleaded guilty to sexual assault. An eager court reporter splashed the details all over the Metropolitan tabloid. Here was sex, illicit sex, here was magic of the darkest kind. ‘SMALL HOUSE RAVAGES MADMAN,’ said the headline, ‘FOR CENTRAL LOCKING’ continued the by-line. She was only knocked off the front page by a man who died in Gokwe but refused to stay dead.

  Two months after leaving Chikurubi prison, she saw him, or she thought she saw someone very like him. He was outside the food court in Msasa. His hair was long and matted. His skin was so dirty it may never have once made contact with soapy Dettol water. But on his cheek was a scar that looked like it might be the faded result of an encounter with the jagged edge of a bottle. He looked straight at her and smiled. For a moment, she thought he winked at her blind eye before going back to rummaging through the bins in front of him.

  In Sad Cypress

  And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day.

  – The Book of the Prophet Amos –

  Ndicashandura mitambo yenyu kuve kucema, nenziyo dzenyu dzose kuve kurirakwokucema; ndicafukidza zivuno zose masaga, nokuita misoro yose mhazha; ndicaziita sepanochemna mnanakomana wakazarwa ari mumne cete, nekuguma kwazo sezuva rakaipa kwazo.

  – Buku yaMuprofita Amosi –

  PARIRENYATWA GROUP OF HOSPITALS POST-MORTEM REPORT

  Being an Affidavit in Terms of Section 278 of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act

  [CAP 9.07]

  I, NGONIDZASHE LORDMORE GWATA, MBChB (UZ), FRCPath (UK), being a duly Registered Medical Practitioner and a Consultant Forensic Pathologist, do hereby make oath and swear that:

  On 11 June 2016, and at the request of the Zimbabwe Republic Police, I examined the remains of PETER CHABURUKA MUPONDA, which were conveyed to me under the authority of SERGEANT PHINIEL ZUZE of Matapi Police Station, Mbare. The examination took place over one and a half hours at Parirenyatwa Hospital. The results of that examination are contained in the memorandum below.

  Memorandum of a Post-mortem Examination

  by Dr N. L. Gwata

  Name of Deceased Peter Chaburuka Muponda

  Sex Male

  Race African

  Age 65

  National Reg. No. Not available

  Occupation Court Interpreter

  Address 27 72nd Avenue, Haig Park, Harare

  Hospital number Not applicable

  Place of death Rotten Row Magistrates Court, Rotten Row, Harare

  Date of death 9 June 2016

  EXTERNAL EXAMINATION

  Deceased was a male of 1.68m in height. Appeared poorly nourished and skeletal. Clothes intact but in poor condition. Circumferential ligature mark around neck. Inverted ‘V’ indentation of skin apparent on right side of neck to match circumferential ligature mark and its mild vital reaction. Head flexed to the left.

  Marked venous vascular congestion and central cyanosis above the ligature. Petechial haemorrhages on both eyeballs. No signs of recent of injury. No distinctive marks. No decomposition. Natural features. Skin intact. Position of limbs anatomical.

  INTERNAL EXAMINATION

  Not performed due to lack of resources.

  OTHER SIGNIFICANT CONDITIONS

  None detected.

  SUMMARY OF AUTOPSY FINDINGS /OPINION

  Ligature in-situ, inverted ‘V’ indentation on neck, perilaryngeal bruising.

  As a result of this examination, I formed the opinion that the cause of death was:

  a. Asphyxiar />
  b. Hanging

  Note found on body suggests self-strangulation.

  Sworn before me ANTONIA D DENDERE, COMMISSIONER OF OATHS at HARARE this 15th DAY OF JUNE 2016.

  ADDENDUM TO POST-MORTEM REPORT, DATED 20 JUNE 2016

  (From previous page)

  On 10 June 2016, I was asked to conduct a post-mortem on a deceased male, Peter Chaburuka Muponda of Haig Park in the surburb of Mabelreign, whose body was conveyed to Parirenyatwa Hospital in the charge of Inspector Phiniel Zuze, Officer Commanding Matapi Police station, Mbare.

  On the same day, I sought to recuse myself from conducting the post-mortem on the grounds that I was aquainted with Deceased.

  Deceased and I were born on exactly the same day, the 11th of November in the year 1950. We grew up as boys together in a village on the banks of the Devure in Masvingo Province. We herded our fathers’ cows and goats together, played together and went to school together until Deceased failed to pass his Standard Six.

  On the same day, having realised that I was acquainted with Deceased, I sent a memorandum to head office asking to recuse myself and transfer the responsibility for the post-mortem to Midlands Province. That afternoon, I received a directive by telephone from the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health who stated that I could not to recuse myself as I am, at present, the only government pathologist in service.