As he showed them the coins, he remembered a joke he had heard that day. He repeated it to the children. ‘Before the President was elected, the Zimbabwe ruins were a prehistoric monument in Masvingo province. Now, the Zimbabwe ruins extend to the whole country.’ The children looked at him blankly, before running off to play, leaving him to laugh with his whole body shaking.
The children understood that Martha’s memory was frozen in the time before they could remember, the time of once upon a time, of good times that their parents had known, of days when it was normal to have more than leftovers for breakfast. ‘We danced to records at Christmas,’ BaToby was heard to say. ‘We had reason to dance then, we had our Christmas bonuses.’
Like Martha’s madness, the Christmas records and bonuses were added to the games of Easterly Farm, and for the children it was Christmas at least once a week.
In the mornings, the men and women of Easterly washed off their sleep smells in buckets of water that had to be heated in the winter. They dressed in shirts and skirts ironed straight with coal irons. In their smart clothes, thumbing lifts at the side of the road, they looked like anyone else, from anywhere else.
The formal workers of Easterly Farm were a small number: the country had become a nation of informal traders. They were blessed to have four countries bordering them: to the north, Zambia, formerly one-Zambia-one-nation-one-robot-one-petrol-station, Zambia of the joke currency had become the stop of choice for scarce commodities; to the east, Mozambique, their almost colony, kudanana kwevanhu veMozambiki neZimbabwe, reliant on their solidarity pacts and friendship treaties, on their soldiers guarding the Beira Corridor; this Mozambique was now the place to withdraw the foreign money not available in their own country; to the west, Botswana, how they had laughed at Botswana with no building taller than thirteen storeys, the same Botswana that now said it was so full of them that it was erecting a fence along the border to electrify their dreams of three meals a day; and, to the south, cupping Africa in her hands of plenty, Ndazo, kuSouth, Joni, Jubheki, Wenera, South Africa.
They had become a nation of traders.
So it was that in the mornings, the women of the markets rose early and caught the mouth of the rooster. In Mbare Musika they loaded boxes of leaf vegetables, tomatoes and onions, sacks of potatoes, yellow bursts of spotted bananas. They took omnibuses to Mufakose, to Kuwadzana and Glen Norah to stand in stalls and coax customers.
‘One million for two, five million for six, only half a million.’
‘Nice bananas, nice tomatoes, buy some nice bananas.’
They sang out their wares as they walked the streets.
‘Mbambaira, muriwo, matomato, onion, mabanana, maorange.’
The men and boys went to Siyaso, the smoke-laced second-hand market where the expectation of profit defied the experience of breaking even. In this section, hubcaps, bolts, nuts, adaptors, spanners. Over there, an entire floor given over to the mysterious bits, spiked and heavy, rusted and box-shaped, that give life to appliances. In the next, sink separators, plugs, cellphone chargers. Under the bridge, cobblers making manyatera sandals out of disused tyres. The shoes were made to measure, ‘Just put your foot here, blaz,’ the sole of the shoe sketched out and cut out around the foot, a hammering of strips of old tyre onto the sole, and lo, fifteen-minute footwear. In Siyaso, it was not unknown for a man whose car had been relieved of its radio or hubcaps to buy them back from the man into whose hands they had fallen. At a discount.
On the other side of Mbare, among the zhing-zhong products from China, the shiny clothes spelling out cheerful poverty, the glittery tank tops and body tops imported in striped carrier bags from Dubai, among the Gucchii bags and Prader shoes, among the Louise Vilton bags, the boys of Mupedzanhamo competed to get the best customers.
‘Sister, you look so smart. With this on you, you will be smarter still.’
‘Leave my sister be, she was looking this way, this way, sister.’
‘Sister, sister, this way.’
‘This way, sister.’
‘This way.’
‘Sister.’
‘My si.’
They spent the day away from Easterly Farm, in the city, in the markets, in Siyaso. They stood at street corners selling belts with steel buckles, brightly coloured Afro combs studded with mirrors, individual cigarettes smoked over a newspaper read at a street corner, boiled eggs with pinches of salt in brown paper. They passed on whispered rumours about the President’s health.
‘He tumbled off the stairs of a plane in Malaysia.’
‘Yah, that is what happens to people who suffer from foot and mouth, people who talk too much and travel too much.’
At the end of the day, smelling of heat and dust, they packed up their wares and they returned to Easterly Farm, to be greeted again by Martha Mupengo.
‘May I have twenty cents,’ she said, and lifted up her dress.
Josephat’s wife was the first of the adults to recognise Martha’s condition. She and Josephat, when he was home from the mine, lived in the house that had belonged to her aunt. It was five years since Josephat’s wife had married Josephat. She had tasted the sound of her new identity on her tongue and liked it so much that she called herself nothing else. ‘This is Josephat’s wife,’ she said when she spoke into the telephone on the hillock above the Farm. ‘Hello, hello. It’s Josephat’s wife. Josephat’s wife.’
‘It is like she is the first woman in the entire world to be married,’ MaiJames said to MaiToby.
‘Vatsva vetsambo,’ said MaiToby. ‘Give her another couple of years of marriage and she will be smiling on the other side of her face.’
On that day, Josephat’s wife was walking slowly back into Easterly, careful not to dislodge the thick wad of cotton the nurses had placed between her legs. Like air seeping out of the wheels of a bus on the rocky road to Magunje, the joy was seeping out of the marriage. Kusvodza, they called it at the hospital, which put her in mind of kusvedza, slipping, sliding, and that is what was happening, the babies slipped and slid out in a mess of blood and flesh. She had moved to Easterly Farm to protect the unborn, fleeing from Mutoko where Josephat had brought her as a bride. After three miscarriages, she believed the tales of witchcraft that were whispered about Josephat’s aunts on his father’s side.
‘They are eating my children,’ she declared, when Josephat found her at his two-roomed house at Hartley Mine near Chegutu. She stayed only six months. After another miscarriage, she remembered the whispers about the foreman’s wife, and her friend Rebecca who kept the bottle store.
‘They are eating my children,’ she said and moved to her aunt’s house in Mbare. There she remained until the family was evicted and set up home in Easterly Farm. After another miscarriage, she said to her aunt, ‘You are eating my children.’
Her aunt did not take this well. She had, after all, sympathised with Josephat’s wife, even telling her of other people who might be eating her children. In the fight that followed, Josephat’s wife lost a tooth and all the buttons of her dress. Then the younger brother of the aunt’s husband had died. By throwing the dead brother’s widow and her young family out of their house in Chitungwiza, the aunt and her husband acquired a new house, and Josephat’s wife was left in Easterly.
In the evenings, she read from her Bible, her lips moving as she read the promises for the faithful. ‘Is there any among you that is sick? Let him call for the elders of the Church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick.’
From church to church she flitted, worshipping in township backrooms while drunken revellers roared outside, mosquitoes gorging on her blood in the open fields as she prayed among the white-clad, visiting prophets with shaven heads and hooked staffs who put their hands on her head and on her breasts. At the Sacred Church of the Anointed Lamb, at the Temple of God’s Deliverance, at the Church of Our Saviour of Glad Tidings, she cried out her need in the language of tongues. She chased a child as
her fellow penitents chased salvation, chased a path out of penury, chased away the unbearable heaviness of loneliness, sought some kind of redemption. And if the Lord remained deaf, that was because she had not asked hard enough, prayed hard enough, she thought.
She was walking past MaiToby’s house on the way to her own, when she remembered that MaiToby had told her about a new church whose congregation prayed in the field near Sherwood Golf Course in Sentosa. ‘You can’t miss them,’ MaiToby had said. ‘You go along Quendon, until you reach the Tokwe flats. They worship under a tree on which hangs a big square flag; it has a white cross on a red background.’
It means taking three commuter omnibuses, Josephat’s wife thought. First, the omnibus to Mabvuku, then one to town. She would have to walk for fifteen or so minutes from Fourth Street to Leopold Takawira, take an omnibus to Avondale and walk for another forty-five minutes to Sentosa.
I will rise at five, she thought, and catch the mouth of the rooster.
She remembered that she had not been able to reach her husband at the mine to tell him of yet another miscarriage. That thought directed her feet towards MaiJames’s house. It was then that she saw Martha. The woman did not need to lift her dress to reveal the full contours of pregnancy. The sight reached that part of Josephat’s wife’s spirit that still remained to be crushed. She ran past Martha, they brushed shoulders, Martha staggered a little, but Josephat’s wife moved on.
‘May I have twenty cents,’ Martha called out after her.
In her dreams, Josephat’s wife turned to follow the sound of a crying child. At Hartley Mine, her husband Josephat eased himself out of the foreman’s wife’s friend Rebecca who kept the bottle store. He turned his mind to the increasing joylessness of his marriage bed. Before, his wife had opened all of herself to him, had taken all of him in, rising, rising, rising to meet him, before falling, falling down with him.
Now it was only after prayers for a child that she lay back, her eye only on the outcome. It is a matter of course that we will have children, Josephat had thought when they married. Boys, naturally. Two boys, and maybe a girl.
He no longer cared what came. All he wanted was to stop the pain. He eased himself out of Rebecca, lay back, and thought of his wife in Easterly.
The winter of the birth of Martha’s child was a winter of broken promises. The government promised that prices would go down and salaries up. Instead, the opposite happened. The opposition promised that there would be protests. Instead they bickered over who should hold three of the top six positions of leadership. From the skies fell chimvuramabwe, hailstones of frozen heat that melted on the laughing tongues of Easterly’s children. The children jabbed fingers at the corpses of the frogs petrified in the stream near the Farm. The water tap burst.
MaiJames and BaToby argued over whether this winter was colder than the one in the last year but one of the war. MaiJames spoke for the winter of the war, BaToby for the present winter. ‘You were no higher than Toby uyu,’ MaiJames said with no rancour. ‘What can you possibly remember about that last winter but one?’
It was the government that settled the matter.
‘Our satellite images indicate that a warm front is expected from the Eastern Highlands. The warm weather is expected to hold, so pack away those heaters and jerseys. And a very good night to you from your friendly meteorologist, Stan Mukasa. You are listening to nhepfenyuro yenyu, Radio Zimbabwe. Over to Nathaniel Moyo now, with You and Your Farm.’
This meant that BaToby was right. If the government said inflation would go down, it was sure to rise. If they said there was a bumper harvest, starvation would follow. ‘If the government says the sky is blue, we should all look up to check,’ said BaToby.
That winter brought the threat of more evictions. There had been talk of evictions before, there was nothing new there. They brushed it aside and put more illegal firewood on their fires. Godwills Mabhena who lived next to MaiJames burnt his best trousers.
By the middle of that winter, all of Easterly knew that Martha was expecting a child. The men made ribald comments about where she could have found a man to do the deed. The women worked to convince themselves that it was a matter external to Easterly, to themselves, to their men. ‘You know how she disappears for days on end sometimes,’ said MaiToby. ‘And you know how wild some of those street kids are.’
‘Street kids? Some of them are men.’
‘My point exactly.’
‘Should someone not do something, I don’t know, call someone, maybe the police?’ asked the female half of the couple whom nobody really knew.
‘Yes, you are very right,’ said MaiJames. ‘Someone should do something.’
‘That woman acts like we are in the suburbs,’ MaiJames later said to MaiToby. ‘Police? Easterly? Ho-do!’ They clapped hands together as they laughed.
‘Haiwa, even if you call them, would they come? It took what, two days for them to come that time when Titus Zunguza…’
‘Ndizvo, they will not come if we have a problem, what about for Martha?’
‘And even if they did, what then?’
The female half of the couple that no one really knew remembered that her brother’s wife attended the same church as a woman who worked in social welfare. ‘You mean Maggie,’ her brother’s wife said. ‘Maggie moved kuSouth with her husband long back. I am sure by now her husband drives a really good car, mbishi chaiyo.’
She got the number of the social department from the directory. But the number she dialled was out of service, and after three more attempts, she gave it up. There is time enough to do something, she thought.
And when the children ran around Martha and laughed, ‘Go and play somewhere else,’ MaiToby scolded them. ‘Did your mothers not teach you to respect your elders? And as for you, wemazinzeve,’ she turned to Tobias. ‘Come and wash yourself.’
The winter of Martha’s baby was the winter of Josephat’s leave from the mine. It was Easterly’s last winter.
On the night that Martha gave birth, Josephat’s wife walked to Easterly from a praying field near Mabvuku. She did not notice the residents gathered in clusters around their homes. Only when she walked past Martha’s house did the sounds of Easterly reach her. Was that a moan, she wondered. Yes, that sounded like a cry of pain. Without thinking, she walked-ran into Martha’s house. By the light of the moon falling through the plastic sheeting, she saw Martha, naked on her mattress, the head of her baby between her legs.
‘I’ll get help,’ Josephat’s wife said. ‘I’ll get help.’
She made for the door. Another moan stopped her and she turned back. She knelt by the mattress and looked between Martha’s legs. ‘Twenty cents,’ Martha said and fainted.
Josephat’s wife dug into the still woman and grabbed a shoulder. Her hand slipped. She cried tears of frustration. Again, she dug, she pulled, she eased the baby out. Martha’s blood flowed onto the mattress. ‘Tie the cord,’ Josephat’s wife said out loud and tied it.
She looked around for something with which cut the cord. There was nothing, and the baby almost slipped from her hands. Through a film of tears she chewed on Martha’s flesh, closing her mind to the taste of blood, she chewed and tugged on the cord until the baby was free. She wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. The baby cried, she held it to her chest, and felt an answering rise in her breasts. She sobbed out laughter. Her heart loud in her chest, she took up the first thing she saw, a poppy-covered dress, and wrapped the baby in it.
In her house she heated water and wiped the baby clean. She dressed it in the clothes of the children who had slipped from her. She put the baby to breast and he sucked on air until both fell asleep. This was the vision that met Josephat when he returned after midnight. ‘Whose child is that?’
‘God has given me this child,’ she said.
In the half-light Josephat saw his wife’s face and his stomach turned to water. ‘I will go to the police,’ he said. ‘You cannot snatch a child and expect me to d
o nothing.’
His wife clutched the baby closer. ‘This is God’s will. We cannot let Martha look after it. How can we let her look after a child?’
‘What are you talking about, who is Martha?’
‘Martha Martha, I left her in her house, she gave birth to it. She can’t look after it, this is God’s will.’
Josephat blundered out of the room. He knew with certainty that it was just as he thought. Ten months before he had arrived home, and found his wife not there. ‘She has gone to an all-night prayer session,’ a neighbour said. A wave of anger and repulsion washed over him. He had only this and the next night before he was to go back to the mine.
A wasted journey, he thought.
He had gone to the beer garden in Mabvuku. The smell of his wife was in the blankets when he returned, but she wasn’t home. The hunger for a woman came over him. He left his house to urinate and relieved himself against the wall through the pain of his erection. A movement to the right caught his eye. He saw the shape of a woman. His mind turned immediately to thoughts of sorcery. He lit a cigarette and in the flare of the match saw the mad woman. ‘May I have twenty cents,’ she said, and lifted her up dress.
He had followed the woman to her house in the corner, grappled her to the ground, forced himself on her, let himself go, and in that moment came to himself. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘forgive me.’
He did not look at her until she said, ‘May I have twenty cents.’ He looked at her smiling face with horror; he fell over his trousers and backwards into the door. He pulled up his trousers as he ran and did not stop running until he reached his house. ‘It is not me,’ he had said again and again. ‘This is not me.’
He lit a cigarette. There was a smell of burning filter. He had lit the wrong end. He bargained with God, he bargained with the spirits on both his mother’s and his father’s sides. He bargained with himself. He would touch no woman other than his wife. He would not leave her, even if she never bore him a child. And even as he later gave in to Rebecca, to Juliet, and the others, he told himself that these others meant nothing at all.
An Elegy for Easterly Page 3