Rotten Row

by Petina Gappah

  He had known Deliwe from childhood, together with her brother Dumisani and sister Velile. To Samson and the rest of the township, this family had been imbued with an exotic glamour because they were one of a handful of Ndebele families in the area. A gawky girl, with legs like a new-born giraffe, Deliwe had been known mainly for her high jump at school. Then she had disappeared and returned six years later from England, where she had lived with Velile, who had become a nurse. Trained as a beauty therapist, Deliwe was no longer the gawky teenager, but a leggy beauty who turned heads and dreamt of becoming a model.

  When they reconnected, they had initially bonded over their desire to be anywhere but where they were. Her return had not been a willing one: she had been deported for overstaying her visa in England and he had come from a similar disappointment. After his stint at the Poly studying for a ‘Diploma in Mass Communications’, a Soviet-inspired title which made what they were learning sound more like studies in propaganda than journalism, he had seized gratefully at the opportunity afforded him by a generous brother who had offered to pay for him to do another degree, this time in Singapore. But alas, the brother had married while Samson was in his second year, and his new sister-in-law had decreed that a Singapore degree was a waste, so Samson had come back with no option but to use his MassCom qualification.

  Then his brother had died in a car accident and his sister-in-law had told him that Samson was now responsible for his younger sister who was at boarding school. The fees increased monthly, and, in the meantime, it was all he could do to keep a roof over his own head.

  Deliwe, for her part, had the responsibility of looking after her brother Dumisani’s daughter. She had a job at the beauty salon in the ZB Life Towers complex. So the two had bonded over family problems when they saw each other for the first time after many years, in a kombi that dropped them both outside the Aquatic complex. They had met again. He found it surprisingly easy to talk to her, even about the embarrassing things concerning his finances and family that he kept from his other friends. They found so much to talk about when they met that, often, Samson found himself walking her back to her house, then she walked him back to his, and then Samson walked her back again to hers, until they eventually agreed to part at a point that was halfway between their homes.

  Samson could no longer remember how it was that they had drifted into sleeping with each other. She had a sweet honesty that made him smile. He liked her best in the morning, her make-up gone, she had a vulnerability that caught at him. It would never have been a relationship, she was simply not deep enough for him to consider being serious about. And she had, on her part, been characteristically candid about his chances as her long-term prospect. ‘I like you a lot, Samson,’ she said. ‘If you had a bit more money, I would like you even more.’

  He had laughed out loud at that but it had not bruised his ego.

  They had seen less and less of each other after Samson had moved out of Chitungwiza. She had become established on the pageant circuit, performing well enough in the lower ranked titles to become Miss Summer Splash Third Princess, Miss Aquatic Complex First Princess, as well as Miss Personality in the Miss Chitungwiza final. The last accomplishment won her a contract to advertise a soap. She called him up with the news that her face was on a large billboard near Newlands shopping centre. Unfortunately, the very next week, it was covered over by a large picture of the president, accompanied by a birthday message congratulating him for his thirty-six years of visionary leadership.

  Whenever he saw her about town, she seemed happy to see him. ‘I am with this guy now,’ she said one night at the Book Café. ‘He is very well up. In fact, he has friends who are the children of ministers. And he even has one or two white friends.’

  She was fated, Samson thought, to become a rich man’s bauble.

  They were no longer sleeping together but he had those pictures. If she won, they would be his meal ticket. Not only would a promotion come his way, his editor promised a thousand dollars for every picture of a naked celebrity that they could get. And their definition of celebrity was elastic enough to include beauty contestants. And she would never know that it was him. They could have been taken anywhere and if she could do this with him, she could probably do this with everyone.

  The thought came to him that this was unworthy, but he was desperate. He replaced that thought with another. Any of her new boyfriends could have taken it. Thus trying to ease his conscience, Samson drifted off to sleep.

  Saturday afternoon, 12:37

  When Samson woke up again, he found he badly needed to piss. His phone indicated it was just after twelve thirty. Then it died. He had put it on the charger when he got in the night before, but clearly, there had been no electricity for more than twelve hours. He listened and there seemed to be no one in the house, not even the other lodgers. From the house next door came the loud sound of Ijahman blasting, ‘Are We a Warrior’.

  The house belonged to Jah Teurai, also known as Jah T, a Rastafarian market trader in his late sixties whose grey hair fell in increasingly diminishing bunches from his balding pate. So loudly did Jah T play his music that the windowpanes rattled. If any neighbours dared to complain about the noise, Jah T simply said, ‘But that is not noise. It is reggae.’

  Jah T was a Mbare institution whose company Samson particularly enjoyed, particularly going through his records while they smoked a joint of Malawi Gold and Samson listened to Jah T’s reminiscences. The highlight of Jah T’s life had been his presence at Rufaro Stadium the night Bob Marley played the Independence Concert. It was also the night of his conversion: Jah T claimed that it was the combination of the tear gas fired by the police to dispel an excitable crowd and the music of the Wailers that had set him on the path away from the Methodist church and on the way to being a Rastafarian of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

  It appealed to Samson’s sense of the absurd that after Prince Charles had lowered the old flag and a new flag waved in its place, the first words said in independent Zimbabwe had been, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Marley and the Wailers.’

  Taking his soap and towel, he went to the outside bathroom. There was no sign of Jah T. He was probably in the house somewhere. As there was no electricity, Samson had no choice but to give himself a bucket shower in cold water. Halfway through the shower, the music switched to Misty in Roots. ‘Oh, I’m lost,’ he sang happily along. ‘Wandering! Wanderer!’

  As a boarding school survivor, it was no hardship for him to wash in cold water, and in fact, this was part of his theory of why the country was truly unredeemable. Take a group of men and women who grew up in the rural areas with no creature comforts then went to mission boarding schools run on Calvinist lines, where they ate beans with bits of stone and caterpillars in their boiled cabbage before spending a good chunk of the seventies living lives of deprivation in the Bush as they fought the independence war, then give them a country to run and see what happened. No wonder that hot water and sanitation and good roads and regular supplies of occasional electricity came to be seen as luxuries, and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to be perfectly normal.

  Getting back to his room as Jah T’s music changed to ‘Ride Natty Ride’, Samson wolfed down six slices of bread spread with Sun jam, washed it down with Mazoe and Marley and dressed to go out. Singing to himself, ‘And it’s the fire, fire,’ he waved down a kombi and was soon on his way. At the traffic lights on Remembrance Drive, he read the newspaper headlines. Ten MPs had been fingered in some plot or another. They were now the fourth group to be ‘fingered’ in different plots. Samson was convinced that news editors simply kept the same headlines, changing the name as the circumstances demanded.

  It was not the headlines but in the fine print that the full tragedy unfolded. It was in the stories that unfolded at Rotten Row that the fate of the nation was written large.

  A man at Chitubu had been knifed because he had taken more than his fair share from a container of opaque beer. A woman who lived with her stepchild
had cut long thin marks into the little girl’s arms because she laughed in her sleep. A kombi tout accused of stealing a phone had been beaten to death by a crowd at Copacabana. A man accused of having a pet snake that rested under his car had been beaten unconscious on Leopold Takawira. A hairdresser knifed by her boyfriend at Northfields Penthouses had died from her wounds. A victim of political violence had refused to stay dead and buried in Gokwe. A ‘small house’ had seduced a madman to harvest his semen. An unidentified corpse had been found at Golden Quarry. A fight had broken out in Mbare over the rumoured news of the president’s death.

  These were the stories Samson listened to and wrote up every day at Rotten Row, the same road down which he had first come from Masvingo to Harare as a boy, with his mother and older brother and his sister just a baby. He still remembered the journey on the Hungwe Dzapasi bus from Masvingo, the recess at Pfugari to buy boiled eggs and bananas, the peanut butter rice and groundnuts they ate as the countryside moved past them, the music of the Bhundu Boys filling the crowded bus, and the drivers hailing each other with blasts of the horn as they passed each other. Most of all he remembered his mounting excitement as he spied the buildings of the city approaching and on the right, large black puffs of smoke rising from the giant chimneys. The chimneys were still there, but no smoke issued from them.

  Rotten Row was now his daily stamping ground. He spent every working day at the court complex walking up and down the stairs of the circular building, moving from court to court to listen to tales of unravelling lives that he then reduced to copy of no longer than six hundred words, seven hundred if sub-editor Nixon Nhongo was generous.

  His favourite teachers, Mrs Samupindi and Mr Makwari mba, had both taught him that the beauty of the English language lay in the elegance of its simplicity. At the Poly, he had spent a memorable afternoon listening to Stanlake Samkange, a veteran journalist who had urged his group of trainee journalists to follow George Orwell’s rules of plain writing.

  But Nixon Nhongo had very different views from his favourite teachers, Mr Samkange and from Orwell on what constituted good writing. He disagreed with all four as strongly as it was possible to disagree with someone you have never met. By the time Samson saw his own copy, now in the paper under his by-line, he found that it had been turned into more florid language. His modest reference to ‘a male organ’ had become a ‘venomous one-eyed trouser snake’, the rape victim who spoke with a low voice appeared shaking, her voice reduced to ‘tremulous quaking’, the elderly woman who had been beaten by her inebriated son became the ‘grandmother clobbered and whacked by drunkard’ and the magistrate who cautioned that the accused was in danger of contempt of court positively ‘thundered’ by the time the story appeared, and any person imprisoned was ‘caged’.

  Nixon Nhongo was currently enrolled as a first-year law student at the University of Zimbabwe. Samson did not want to imagine what would happen, if in addition to his journalistic Zimnglish, Nixon also added legalistic Legalese to his linguistic arsenal. Mercifully, that day was at least four years away, and by then, Samson was sure, he would have moved on to bigger, and, he hoped, better things.

  Saturday afternoon, 14:44

  Samson was tempted to walk across Africa Unity Square to the calm tranquillity of the Meikles Hotel, one of his favourite places. It was not just a hotel for him, but a sentimental place that was tied up with the childhood that he had begun again when his mother moved him and his brother to Masvingo. He had had just one wish then, to sit astride one of the two lions that stood sentinel at the entrance. But of course, he had never done it. He had known the hotel from its backrooms and kitchens, because his mother had worked in the hotel in Housekeeping. She made and stripped beds, and occasionally brought home treats in white boxes that had that distinctive yellow-gold ‘M’ logo on the lids.

  He thought of his mother whenever he entered the Meikles. Its hushed grandeur no longer intimidated him, but he found himself as reassured as always by the sense of tranquil order within. He could not really afford it, but the Wi-Fi at the Meikles’ Business Centre more than made up for the three dollars he had to pay for tea. As he placed his phone on the charger, he remembered that he had left his pageant ticket at work. He groaned as he realised that he would have to go into the office. As his phone charged, and he drank his tea, he listened to the conversations around him. A man dressed in the pristinely new khaki clothing that screamed ‘New Farmer’ shouted into his phone: ‘I am here in Harare just this weekend, but I go back to Centenary on Monday. Monday. I said Monday. I go back to Centenary Monday.’

  As soon as his phone was charged to sixty per cent, Samson made his way to work. At Century House, he greeted the security guard and walked to the lift.

  ‘No lift today, Chef,’ the security guard said cheerfully. Samson walked up the five flights to his office. He found himself in a large open-plan office filled with desks and computers and three large television screens mounted on the walls. The screens were permanently turned to the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN. He passed the Showbiz desks where two men were huddled over a computer as they copied pictures of a half-naked Kim Kardashian from the UK Daily Mail.

  Samson found it fascinating that whenever his countrywomen and other African women were pictured in the nude, they looked much more naked than white women and black women like Beyoncé or Rihanna. This, he suspected, was why there was such a stampede whenever nude pictures of a local celebrity popped up, like Deliwe, if she did well enough in the competition to become a celebrity. Before he could go over to join the two guys, he was greeted loudly by Ndomutenda, the women’s columnist at the paper.

  They had brought her in to give the Gender Perspective on news stories. The only women’s issues she was interested in, however, were her own – she seemed to believe that she was contractually obliged to deliver to the Metropolitan a series of self-regarding, solipsistic reflections on her hair, her menstrual cycles and what she called her journey to ‘She Spirit of her Inner Goddess’. That was also the name of her column, ‘The Inner Goddess’.

  It was all deadly serious, there was no humour or hint that other people outside herself might also exist. On Twitter, she described herself as ‘Beautiful Non-Conformist, Sensitive Controversialist, Passionate Lover of Ideas’ but it was clear that she loved only her own ideas. Her Tweets consisted of a series of trite quotes about inner beauty supposedly written many centuries ago by a Sufimystic called Rumi interspersed with talk about her hair and intermittent scolding. The country, she had decided, and, indeed the world, needed to be scolded severely for its various flaws.

  Just as, on the surface, Deliwe was not the person for him because she was shallow and vain, Ndomutenda appeared, on the surface, to be the kind of woman he should have been attracted to. Not only was she educated and bright and not at all bad-looking, she liked to read and travel. And she was a Salad who had grown up in the suburbs, a life that Samson envied and that he wished he had had himself. At this stage in his career, it was something that he could get only by association.

  Having spent time with Ndomutenda, he found almost immediately that he had made a mistake. She proved to be far less than the sum of her parts. Within seconds of sitting down, she had begun a thirty-minute monologue about herself, most particularly, about her journey to her Inner Self, her Inner Beauty and her hair. Then she had looked at the next table and delivered a long sermon on women who wore hair weaves.

  To Samson, there was nothing particularly exceptional about a woman who wore her natural hair, it was the hairstyle of every schoolgirl in the country, and, having grown up among the poor, natural hair was never in short supply in the townships and the rural areas, but for a middle-class woman like her, it necessitated endless self-scrutiny. As she went on about how natural she was, he did not bother to point to the artifice of her heels, her makeup or the push-up bra that thrust her breasts before him like an offering. By the end of the evening, he had decided he found her pretentious and judgemental. He thought her i
nsincere and unoriginal. He had made his excuses, he had to take his kombi to Chitungwiza. He did not miss the dismissive look in her eye when he mentioned the kombi. He had walked her to her car, then went on to the Book Café where he joined Deliwe and her friends. Since that ill-fated date, Ndomutenda put on an ostentatious show of ignoring him, particularly when others were around.

  So when he saw her on his way to his desk, he did what he always did: he greeted her cheerfully, and was pointedly ignored. He walked to his desk, unlocked the top drawer, took out his pageant ticket and left.

  Saturday evening, 18:07

  From his office building, Samson walked down Josiah Tongogara Avenue, crossed Mazowe Street and walked on until he reached State House. He was in time for the changing of the guard, such as it was. Two camouflaged guards marched together in lockstep, until they reached their two comrades who were marching in simi lar fashion but in the opposite direction. On meeting, the four saluted each other, then turned smartly back to stand where they had been standing moments before they started the march. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the proceeding: Samson suspected they did this merely to relieve their boredom.