The Boy Next Door

by Irene Sabatini

  Maphosa called any white person who personally outraged him a Boer, Bhunu. Daddy said that this was probably because he had worked for a while in the mines in Johannesburg and had been thoroughly mistreated by the Afrikaners. I wondered if that’s where he had lost his eye. But, would he have been accepted as a fighter in the bush without an eye?

  Maphosa came to our house six months ago. He came with a small suitcase and a knobkerrie. He had been demobilized. He came from Entumbane where there was heavy fighting between the two Liberation Armies housed there. School was closed for two whole weeks, and from home we could hear loud bangs and blasts coming from that direction. Maphosa said that the Shonas were trying to wipe out the Ndebele Fighters. But the Ndebeles had the blood of the great Ndebele warriors, kings: Mzilikazi and Lobengula, flowing in them and could not be bothered by such little insects as Shonas.

  Mummy had made him wait outside for Daddy from half past eleven to five o’clock. She only gave him a glass of water to drink in all that time. When Daddy came home and saw Maphosa waiting like that he raised his voice at Mummy. I didn’t know if he was upset with Mummy or Maphosa or with them both. Daddy said that Maphosa was a relative, and he should be accorded due respect. Mummy mumbled how was she to know and keep count of every single member of Daddy’s family.

  Daddy has many stepbrothers and sisters.

  The new Zimbabwean Army did not want Maphosa and his like among its ranks; it only had room for Shonas. He had to live life in Zimbabwe just like everybody else.

  Early on Daddy tried to get Maphosa an apprenticeship with the post office. At the job interview, Maphosa said that he was not willing under any circumstances to work for a white man.

  Maphosa puts Ingram’s Camphor cream on his bald head, and you always smell him before he arrives. Sometimes he doesn’t rub it in very well and his scalp is covered with patches of white. I heard Mummy remark to Daddy: “Does he think that the cream is medicine that will grow back his hair?”

  To make up for the lack of hair on his head, he has a tuft of beard which he pulls at when he is upset as if he is trying to snatch off a disguise. Some days he ties a black cloth over his bad eye and he looks like a pirate.

  He is the chapter president of the Baysview War Veteran’s Association, which has five active members. They meet at Maphosa’s room when Mummy and Daddy are not around. Maphosa cooks a pot of sadza on a fire outside his room, and they sit around and discuss the war and the failure of Independence to deliver the land. When the sadza is cooked, they eat it with some meat that Jacob has brought with him. They nyosa the meat on the fire. Jacob is a butcher boy at the Baysview butchery. He doesn’t hear very well and he doesn’t talk. Sometimes the association is still meeting when Mummy comes home, and the members have to sneak out at night.

  The twenty-fifth of each month Maphosa goes to town to collect his war veteran allowance and his disability benefit. When he comes back, he is in a bad mood. He says that he is not at all interested in pieces of paper. This is how our people were tricked in the first place. He wants the land. That is what they fought for.

  One thing that he cannot tolerate is cruelty to birds. When he sees any boys tormenting birds and nests with their catapults, he shouts and chases after them; sometimes he even throws stones at them. Then he will go and check that the birds are all right, and once I saw him climb a tree in the bush opposite Baysview Superette and look inside a nest to see if the boys had broken any eggs. He says that birds saved his life in the bush more than once. When I asked him how, he said that there were some birds that would become very quiet when the enemy was close. Other birds would start singing in a certain way. Then you knew. Once a bird had flown right onto his left shoulder and started tapping on it with its beak. He understood the bird’s message: They must prepare. The enemy wanted to ambush them. When Maphosa tried to tell his commander the bird’s message, the commander told him to shut up. If only the commander had listened. As the bird had warned, the enemy ambushed and the commander and five other guerrillas lost their lives.

  He was at Rufaro Stadium when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980.

  Actually, we were Zimbabwe-Rhodesia for less than a year from June 1979 when Bishop Abel Muzorewa formed a Government of National Unity with Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front. Everybody said that Muzorewa was a puppet and that he was put there to try and get international sanctions lifted and to isolate the Nationalists. Daddy said that Bishop Abel Muzorewa was not very able at all and that he was a laughing stock. And, “Where have you ever heard of a country with a surname?”

  Bob Marley came to sing; he wrote a special song: “Zimbabwe.”

  Maphosa says that he was right out in front, and as soon as “Zimbabwe” started, the crowd went wild and began misbehaving. They were pushing and trying to climb over the barriers onto the stage to sing with Mr. Marley. He says the little man, which is what he calls Mr. Mugabe, did not look amused at all. Everyone knows he wanted Cliff Richard, not Bob Marley, to be there.

  The next day, after the news, the new prime minister gave his first Address to the Nation. Rosanna, as usual, was sitting too close to the TV, but Daddy didn’t scold her this time; he was concentrating too hard.

  “Well, he sounds quite reasonable and sincere,” Daddy said afterwards.

  “Reconciliation is the best and only policy.”

  Daddy sounded as though he was trying to convince himself with good arguments. “He’s a very educated man. Did you hear his Engl—?”

  “He’s a Shona,” Mummy interrupted him.

  Ever since the elections when Mugabe and ZANU-PF had shocked them by winning fifty-seven of the eighty seats while Nkomo and ZAPU had only won twenty, Mummy had been making daily predictions about what life under Shona Management would bring.

  “This is their chance now. Everyone will be forced to speak Shona. Watch, he will even make his Address to the Nation in Shona.

  “They will flood this place. Those jongwes of theirs will be crowing all over Matabeleland.”

  Mummy was very scornful about the ZANU-PF symbol of a cockerel.

  Rosanna shook her head. “There is just something about him,” she said. “He is too serious.”

  It felt as though, sitting so close, she had seen much more of Mr. Mugabe than the rest of us.

  I didn’t say anything. I was wondering whether, sitting in front of the cameras, Mr. Robert Mugabe had felt all those millions of Zimbabwean eyes looking at him, whether he knew how much power he must have to have everyone waiting to hear what he had to say.

  4.

  When I went to see Dr. Esat at Galen House, the ladies at the reception were talking about the trial which was on the front page of The Chronicle. They were saying what a shame it was, such a good-looking boy.

  There was a big picture of him; he was looking down at his feet. The headline was “Murder!”

  One of the older ladies said her son had gone to school with him and there had been something going on in that house for sure; he would come to school with welts all over his legs, even the Welfare Department had been called in, and now that he had come for his father’s funeral who knows what that woman had schemed and let loose.

  She was interrupted by some patients who had to fill in the Medical Aid forms. I had the Femina magazine open on my lap, and I was praying that Dr. Esat would be running late as usual.

  And she had been talking to John, her son, she started again, how sometime near the end of Form One, close to four years now, the boy had disappeared; word was that he’d taken off to South Africa to find his mother. And that was another story, how that woman had abandoned the poor bugger, gone chasing after some sweet-talking salesman in Jo’burg, left the little mite to the house girl not even a month old. He’d been back a couple of times, never stayed too long, though. You could tell just by looking at the poor lad he’d been driven to it. And why had they put him in prison khakis; he hadn’t even been convicted; yet another strategy to humiliate us whites….

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sp; One of the ladies nudged her and hissed, “Shush, June.”

  June looked at me, and I pretended to be reading the poster on “Good Hygiene Habits” on the wall.

  They started to talk about other things.

  When Daddy finished reading The Chronicle that evening, I took it out from the basket where Mummy puts all the old newspapers so that she has an ever-ready supply of papers to line the kitchen drawers and cupboards. Mummy is convinced that the newspaper contains something that repels cockroaches. I took the front page out. My heart was beating very fast as if I was stealing. I folded the paper over and over again, and when I was in my room, I put the paper in the pink handbag Aunty Gertrude gave me for Christmas last year.

  I kept thinking that if only we had moved from Thorngrove to Baysview in 1978 instead of 1979 I might have seen him. I tried to imagine how he might have looked like around about my age, what kind of boy he would have been.

  Daddy said that even though Mrs. McKenzie was a racist, she was not such a bad person. No one deserved to die in that manner.

  In the past year, added Mummy, Mrs. McKenzie had changed. She had even told Mphiri to give us any spare vegetables from their patch, and she had stopped complaining about the chickens. Anyway, when the municipal police had come round, they had turned a blind eye because Daddy kept them well supplied with eggs. Mrs. McKenzie had not even made a fuss about the workshop. She was not the same person who had called us kaffirs when we had first moved in and who had kept calling the municipal police and the RSPCA over.

  The superintendent of the RSPCA, Mrs. Van der Klerk came on a Saturday morning, with two black inspectors. She was very tall and looked down on everyone she was speaking to, even Daddy.

  “I have come to inspect the dogs,” she barked. “We have received numerous complaints about mistreatment at this address. We are entitled by law to carry out a spot check on any animal’s welfare in any premises within the territory of Rho… Zimbabwe.”

  She said all this very fast as if she were firing bullets, and Daddy and Mummy just stood there looking up at her. Even Maphosa who always had something to say about white people was quiet.

  “Where are the dogs?” asked the RSPCA superintendent.

  Daddy pointed to Roxy and Tiger who were rolling about at her feet. The superintendent looked down, down at them. She looked very hard.

  I knew what she was thinking. Black people don’t keep dogs like Jack Russells. They keep skinny crossbreeds, big dogs who are kept hungry so that they are vicious, for guarding property. But Daddy had bought the dogs from a white couple in Montrose after he had read an article in The Reader’s Digest that said Jack Russells, in spite of their size, made excellent guard dogs and required very little upkeep.

  “The other dogs,” she said at last. “The ones being mistreated.”

  Daddy and Mummy looked at each other.

  “These are the only dogs we have,” said Daddy.

  The superintendent didn’t believe Daddy because she walked right past him, round to the back of the house to check. The inspectors followed, then Mummy and Daddy, then Maphosa and me. The superintendent looked and looked. She knelt down and looked deep into the dogs’ kennel. She even went to Rosanna’s place and then to Maphosa’s. Daddy’s workshop, too. Finally she gave Roxy some pats on the head and said, “You have very happy dogs,” and then she left.

  But still, Mrs. McKenzie was always shouting and screaming at Mphiri, calling him a no good so-and-so, and since Mr. McKenzie Senior had died, Mphiri would disappear for days on end in his room. Rosanna said that Mphiri complained of headaches and sometimes his face was a strange color with bumps and swellings. Rosanna said that he was very obviously getting attacked by the spirit of Mr. McKenzie Senior who was quite angry to be dead and gone and to have his house taken over by the witch. “Idiot,” said Maphosa quite angry. “Mphiri is an old man. Can you not see that with your two ever-busy eyes? He must be falling and knocking into things. He should be back home where there is not so much concrete and walling and other unfortunate objects.”

  5.

  For a long time, Daddy told the story of the RSPCA lady and her inspectors to anyone who came to visit. He would always conclude by telling the visitor, if only that fearsome lady had gone over to Thorngrove; she would have had her work cut out for her with Mr. Rosset and his yard full of underfed crossbreeds.

  In Thorngrove (the raw coloreds called it Groove Town), I had a black dog called Rex who would disappear and come back limping and bloody; he had been attacked, once again, by Old Man Rosset’s pack of dogs down by the end of the road where the stream began. Sometimes at night the dogs barked so much you would think that all the thieves in the country had descended on that one house. Some people, like Mrs. Bernie, said that Old Man Rosset had the evil eye, which could strike you dead. But other people, like Mrs. Green, argued that didn’t make any sense: if Old Man Rosset had such a powerful weapon, why would he need a pack of dogs? The other people would answer back, they were there for when he was sleeping, but then evil eyes were not supposed to go to sleep…. One day Rex did not come back. Not the next day, not the day after that, either. I thought that Old Man Rosset had kidnapped him and added him to his pack.

  It was Rosanna who let out the secret: Daddy gave Rex to someone at work because he was afraid of him catching rabies. Even though Rex was vaccinated, Daddy still didn’t trust that to work against all those dogs and their bites, especially after the city council issued a health warning about a rabies outbreak.

  When Daddy was a boy, a relative in Nyamandhlovu was bitten by a dog and the relative had to be tied to a tree to keep him from attacking people.

  Thorngrove was a colored suburb, and we had lived in a two-bedroom municipal brick house. The Soutter children who lived opposite us used to torment me. They were always lying in wait for me when I came home from primary school with Rosanna.

  “Your mother is a kaffir, kaffir, kaffir!” they would shout and throw stones.

  Once, Rosanna chased them right into their house and smacked one. They said all these things about Mummy even though their own grandmother, who sometimes just turned up at their doorstep and who they made sleep in the boy’s kaya, was coal black and couldn’t speak any English; they tried to tell people that she was the mother of their housegirl. Also, Mrs. Soutter was always coming round to ask for “some slices of bread,” “a bit of sugar, my dear, if it’s not too much trouble,” “a pinch of salt,” “a tomato or two” because Mr. Soutter, who was a train driver, was also a world-class drunkard. Mrs. Soutter would say things like Mummy was so lucky with skin like hers, whereas she suffered so much what with the sun burning her and all; it was her Scottish ancestry that was the culprit. Everyone knew that the Soutter girls straightened their hair; once Charmaine got caught in the rain and her hair caught such a dwinch that it looked like the hair of the golliwog I had received from the Christmas hamper at church. And the Soutter boys never grew their hair; it was always well cropped, very close to the scalp so that you couldn’t see how coarse it was.

  The best thing about Thorngrove was Mummy’s cookery classes. Every Thursday evening, Daddy dropped Mummy and Granny Joseph at the Guild Hall opposite the fire station. Granny Joseph was very big, and she occupied the whole backseat of the car by herself. After every Thursday, Daddy complained bitterly about his springs and the alignment of his car.

  Mummy spent two hours cooking, and when she came back home, she had parcels of food that she would carefully lay out on the dining-room table. Scotch eggs were the best; I would eat the baked sausage meat, rolled in breadcrumbs, and leave the hard-boiled egg for Daddy.

  Mummy put on weight, and Daddy would tease her and call her isidudla, fatty, but then she went to the doctor and they discovered the cysts.

  Mummy had three big files with all her recipes, and there were also pages with drawings and diagrams of very complicated table settings. There were forks, which were 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d… then the spoons… then the plates…. She w
ould save some of her personal allowance from Daddy to buy dessert spoons, forks, dessert plates, soup plates, serving dishes, and she would put them in the display cabinet in the lounge and lock them inside.

  The European food Mummy cooked at her classes required special ingredients, and if Mummy wanted to cook them at home, she would add them to the monthly grocery list. Sometimes the list would be very long, and Daddy would grumble about unnecessary expenditures as he pushed the trolley up and down OK Bazaars on the End of the Month Saturday. Sometimes he would leave Mummy and me stranded with the trolley in one of the aisles while he ran across the road to check and compare the price of one item at OK Bazaars with that at Woolworths. Even if there was only a difference of two or three cents, he would get the cheaper one. Sometimes he made two or three dashes across the road.

  Mummy stopped going to the cooking classes because she said she was tired of Daddy always complaining and not appreciating anything she tried to do to better herself. Her recipes and complicated table settings found their way to Daddy’s workshop where he used the blank sides to draw his technical diagrams of the insides of TVs and radios.

  Mummy said Thorngrove was only a little bit better than Magwegwe Township.

  I don’t remember Magwegwe at all because I was very small, but she says that we were living in nothing more than a glorified shack and we were paying an exorbitant rent to a businessman who owned various bottle stores in the townships. The three of us lived in one room and used a paraffin stove for cooking so the room always smelt of oil. The toilet and shower were outside, and we shared them with three other families. Some people in the township didn’t like having Daddy there because he was a colored.