Josephat found Martha lying on the floor on her back. He raised her left arm, it fell back. He covered her body with a blanket, and left the house. Snatches of conversation reached his ears from the group gathered around BaToby. For the first time he realised that Easterly was still awake, unusually so; it was well after midnight and yet here were people gathered around in knots in the moonlight. He moved close, he had to know.
‘They were at Union Avenue today, they took all the wares.’
‘They just threw everything in the back of the lorries.’
‘Didn’t care what they broke. Just threw everything.’
‘In Mufakose it was the same, they destroyed everything.’
‘Siyaso is gone, Mupedzanhamo too.’
‘Union Avenue flea market.’
‘Kwese nekuAfrica Unity, it is all cleared.’
‘Even kumasurburbs, they attacked Chisipite market.’
‘My cousin-brother said they will come for the houses next.’
‘They would not dare.’
‘Hanzi there are bulldozers at Porta Farm as we speak.’
‘If they can destroy Siyaso …’
‘But they can’t destroy Siyaso.’
‘That is not possible,’ said BaToby. ‘I will not believe it.’
‘I was there,’ Godwills Mabhena said. ‘I was there.’
‘You men, the only thing you know is to talk and talk,’ MaiJames said. ‘Where are you when action is required? Where were you when they took down Siyaso? Nyararazvako.’ The last word of comfort was directed to the crying child on her hip. His mother was one of three women arrested in Mufakose, two for attempting to take their clothes off in protest, the third, the child’s mother, for clinging to her box of produce even as a truncheon came down, again, again, on her bleeding knuckles. The child sniffled into MaiJames’s bosom.
‘I will not believe it,’ BaToby said again.
In his house Josephat took down a navy-blue suitcase and threw clothes into it. His wife held the baby in a tender lock and crooned a lullaby that Josephat’s own mother had sung to him.
‘Your child will not be consoled, sister.’
‘We are leaving,’ he said.
‘She cries for her mother, gone away.’
‘We have to pack and leave.’
‘Gone away, to Chidyamupunga.’
‘The bulldozers are coming.’
‘Chidyamupunga, cucumbers are rotting.’
‘We have to leave now.’
‘Cucumbers are rotting beyond Mungezi.’
‘Ellen, please.’
She looked up at him. He swallowed. Her smile in the half-light put him in mind of Martha. ‘We have to leave,’ he said. He picked up an armful of baby clothes. He held them in his hands for a moment, then stuffed them into the suitcase and closed it.
‘It is time to go,’ he said. As they walked, to Josephat’s mind came the words of his mother’s lullaby.
Cucumbers are rotting beyond Mungezi.
Beyond Mungezi there is a big white knife,
A big white knife to cut good meat,
To cut good meat dried on a dry bare rock …
They stole out of Easterly Farm and into the dawn.
When the morning rose over Easterly, not even the children noticed Martha’s absence. They were running away from the bulldozers. It was only when Josephat and his wife had almost reached Chegutu that the bulldozers, having razed the entire line of houses from MaiJames to BaToby, having crushed beneath them the house from which Josephat and his wife had fled, and having razed that of the new couple that no one really knew, finally lumbered towards Martha’s house in the corner and exposed her body, stiff in death, her child’s afterbirth wedged between her legs.
The Annexe Shuffle
Emily sees Ezekiel shake his arms and hands around his head. Ezekiel is haunted by the buzzing of a thousand phantom mosquitoes. They fly close to his ear; it is always the same ear, the right ear. He swipes at them but this only increases their agitation. He longs to hit one, just one, and see the satisfying streak of blood across the wall. Sometimes he slaps a hand against one, again, again, but he hits nothing but the wall and, more often, himself.
He has to be bandaged often.
In between the buzzing mosquitoes, he says that he hears other sounds: shouting men dressed as soldiers, the dry crackle of the straw on burning huts, screaming children, crying women. More frequent and disturbing than that is this, the high intermittent buzz of the thousand mosquitoes. To keep their noise out of his head, Ezekiel sings a song that Emily remembers from Sunday school:
‘Father Abraham, please send Lazarus
To rescue me, I am burning in this fire.
Yuwi maiwe yuwi,
Yuwi maiwe yuwi.
Please send Lazarus, to rescue me
I am dying in this heat.’
And when he screams ‘Abraham, Abraham’ at least twenty times, the mosquitoes are still.
His shouting puts him in conflict with Sister Hedwig. She raps him sharply on the head with her knuckles. He stops screaming, and whispers ‘Abraham, Abraham’ from near the window, close to where Emily stands. She sees him trembling and instinctively puts a hand on his shoulder. They stand in silence looking out at Second Street Extension, at the embassy houses of Belgravia and the golf course across the road. Through the metal grille and the mesh wire, through the reinforced windows that separate them from the outside, they can see small figures on the eighteenth green.
Only outside this window is there change, yet even there a repetitive pattern asserts itself. On Second Street Extension, the cars, buses, emergency taxis are filled with people going about the business of living, the occupants within unaware of the gazes without. One time, two times, five times a day she sees the vans and cars from her suspended life. Up and down goes the little green bus, moving between the city centre and the university. ‘University of Zimbabwe’, a white station wagon says in blue lettering, ‘Faculty of Law’. The car is so close that she can make out the faculty motto below the university crest: fiat justitia ruat coelum. The motto is more than just the words of Caesoninus on a crest, it is a song in her soul, the reason she is a law student, the meaning she wants to give to her life. ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall,’ she says aloud. Outside, the traffic, golf course, the houses. Inside, the Annexe shuffle.
They bring Emily to Dr Chikara, the Dean of Students on one side, the warden of Swinton Hostel on the other. Dr Chikara is not who she expected. His office is an empty space with nothing on the walls. There are no books by Freud and Jung. There is no couch in sight. He does not talk about the id or the ego. Instead, from behind his government-issue desk, he directs her to a government-issue chair.
He smokes Kingsgate cigarettes, one after the other.
He writes down everything she says.
‘Canst thou minister to a mind diseased?’ she asks him. ‘Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?’
He writes this down.
‘May I have a cigarette,’ she says, without a question mark.
‘Do you smoke?’ he asks, with a question mark.
‘I do now,’ she says as she lights one of his cigarettes. She coughs out smoke through teary eyes.
He writes that down too.
‘I am sending you to the Annexe,’ he says, ‘the mental wing at Parirenyatwa Hospital.’
The words mental and hospital combine to produce a loud clanging in her mind.
‘I am not mad,’ she says.
‘No, of course you are not mad,’ he says. ‘Madness has nothing to do with it. You only need rest, all you need is rest.’
Emily is pliant, obedient, she needs rest. The warden calls her a taxi, to be paid for by the university. ‘I am visiting a friend,’ she tells the driver, even though he has not asked. Inside the Annexe, the door shuts behind her. A man in a striped robe walks the slow walk that puts her in mind of the undead of film and television. In his face is vacant possession.
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br /> ‘Do you have Parade, sister?’ he slurs.
She turns towards the door but there is no handle on the inside.
‘I am not supposed to be here,’ she says, ‘let me out, let me out.’
‘Sister, may I have Parade?’ the man says, and touches her face. The man attracts others, and two women shuffle towards her, with faces as empty as his. Like a persistent interloper, the rhyme from Stephen King’s Tommyknockers reverberates in her mind. Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door. The door won’t open, and she bangs on it to escape the shuffling figures in their striped robes. A nurse comes to her, face clouded with concern.
‘Is it not that you are the girl from the university?’ the nurse asks in Shona. ‘Is it not that Dr Chikara sent you here?’
‘No, no,’ Emily says in English, ‘let me out.’
I want to go out, don’t know if I can.
‘Are you not the one we are expecting?’ the nurse asks again.
‘I am lost,’ Emily says, ‘so sorry, so lost, I should not be here.’
I am so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.
The door opens and she stumbles out.
In her room on P corridor at Swinton, she announces to no one in particular: ‘I am going to keep a journal. I am going to write down everything that happens to me. Today I ate my banana,’ she says, ‘so I will write that down.’
‘I ate my banana,’ she writes.
Only it comes out ‘I hate my banana’, and, seeing this, she laughs. Then she sees that this is not so funny, this is, in fact, a sign that everything is against her, she can’t even trust her own pen, her own hand, her own thoughts, her very actions betray her, everything is against her, everything is wrong, so wrong, nothing will ever be right again.
It is as she cries that the Dean of Students and the warden enter her room to take her back to the Annexe. ‘I know my rights,’ she says through her tears. ‘I am a law student.’
They brush away her law studies like an inconvenient fly.
‘Your father said we can section you,’ they say.
The force of her father’s will moves across the country from Bulawayo to Harare. It takes the route that Emily herself takes to get to university each term, past Gweru, Kadoma, Chegutu. The force travels along the Bulawayo Road and propels her from her bed to pack a small bag. Pens and notebook, her new diary. Three changes of underwear, three T-shirts, two pairs of jeans. One book: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Her clothes are not wanted here, they remain in her bag. She wears a striped gown with the many-wash-faded letters ANNEXE ANNEXE ANNEXE all over it. She is branded across her breast, on her right arm, above her knees, across her back. She is small, Emily. The gowns are supposed to be one-size-fits-all but hers is so big that she feels like she is in a tent. In the window, she catches her reflection. She cannot see herself. MockingNurseMatilda takes down her particulars. Name, age, race, religion, height, weight. She asks Emily what tribe she belongs to.
‘This is what slows progress in this country,’ Emily screams. ‘The notion of tribe is a patronising Western construction,’ she adds when they have restrained her. ‘The Goths, Vandals and Visigoths, those were tribes, they talk about Serbian nationalism, but African tribalism. I do not have a tribe, I belong to the nation.’
They force her onto the bed.
‘I am a student,’ she weeps. ‘A university student.’
‘Hedwig is a Catholic Sister, Ezekiel is an army sergeant, Sonia there manages a hotel,’ MockingNurseMatilda says. ‘Welcome to the Annexe, my dear, we welcome students too.’
Emily reads aloud from the Origin of the Family. A wave of gratitude washes over her. These men, Marx and Engels, Karl and Friedrich, dead and white, they get it, they really, really get it. ‘In the first place, sexual love assumes that the person loved returns the love; to this extent the woman is on an equal footing with the man. Secondly, our sexual love has a degree of intensity and duration which makes both lovers feel that non-possession and separation are a great, if not the greatest, calamity; to possess one another, they risk high stakes, even life itself.’
She cries herself to sleep. She wakes to find a Coloured girl staring at her and smiling as she plays with the beads at the ends of the braids on Emily’s hair. ‘Feel my baby,’ the Coloured girl says.
Her name is Estelle, and she is a star rising high above the reaches of all that is ordinary and elemental. Nothing can touch her, and nothing does.
‘Feel my baby,’ she says again, eyes closed. She places Emily’s hand on her stomach, chopping-board flat. ‘He will be born tomorrow.’
‘Ralph.’ Estelle says the name like she is tasting its sound.
‘Ralph,’ she repeats.
‘That is what I’ll call him, Ralph, like the Karate Kid.’
Together Emily and Estelle look out onto Second Street Extension where up and down goes the little green bus.
In the Annexe, she finds that she is not the only one who is not mad.
‘I am not mad,’ says Ezekiel.
‘And I am not mad,’ says Estelle.
‘Why do you look at me as though I am mad?’ asks Hedwig and hits Ezekiel on the head. No one is mad except the nurses with their faces out of focus, they are gone and there they are again, with their large ears and large hands that grab and say she needs rest. They give her three small pills, one orange, one square and white, one round and white. She is happy that it is NiceNurseLindiwe and not MockingNurseMatilda who helps her to a bed. There is something Emily has to tell her, something important, terribly, desperately important. It is the most important thing she has ever said to anyone. She clutches NiceNurseLindiwe’s arm and looks into her eyes. ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son,’ she says. ‘The jaws that bite, the claws that catch. Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.’
Ezekiel sits in the corner away from the windows. Concentrated, he won’t show anyone what he is doing. He reveals his work eventually, shyly, a pencil drawing of the Taj Mahal. The domes and columns are delicately fragile in black and white. ‘That’s a building in India,’ he says. ‘I saw it in a book.’ The next time that Ezekiel screams ‘Abraham, Abraham’, Sister Hedwig tears the drawing and the Taj Mahal flutters in seven torn pieces to the floor. Ezekiel does nothing but sit and draw another. He gives it to Emily. If possible, it is even more beautiful than the first one. ‘It is the most beautiful thing that I have seen,’ she says, and means it. She cries, for no reason. Ezekiel puts his hand on her shoulder and smiles. Together, they look outside the window. She persuades him to sing a new song. She chooses a Sunday school song that also features Abraham.
‘Father Abraham has many sons
Has many sons, has Father Abraham
I am one of them and so are you.
So let us praise the Lord.’
Up and down Second Street Extension goes the little green bus.
Hedwig, Emily, Estelle, Ezekiel. And Sonia, the resident white. Her hospital towel is twisted in a turban about her head. She smokes blue Madison, regally, she holds the cigarette away from her as she says to Emily, ‘You speak English well. Very well, for an African.’ She gives Emily her cigarettes. The blue Madison is not harsh on the throat like Dr Chikara’s Kingsgate. Emily smokes one, five, this is the beginning of addiction, here in the Annexe.
And there is MaBheki in her corner.
Emily has learned to stay away from MaBheki. Her madness is of a malevolent bent, an ungentle madness that requires restraints, and not just the pills, orange and white, square and round.
‘I want my meat,’ MaBheki screams.
She has devoured all of her babies, she says, she is particularly fond of the flesh of her boy children. A peculiar hunger comes over her when she sees a male child, she says, she feels a compulsion to feed. She looks at Ezekiel as she talks, and Emily sings him the new Abraham song until he is calm. MaBheki is not long at the Annexe, her madness calls
for rigour of the kind that the Annexe cannot deliver. They strap her to take her out of the Annexe, out of Harare and out of Mashonaland to Ingutsheni, the oldest, the biggest mental hospital in the country, Ingutsheni, the constant rebuke in the ears of the young: don’t talk like you are at Ingutsheni. Before Ingutsheni was a mental hospital, it was a lunatic asylum, and there MaBheki’s voice will join those of the dangerously mad, the criminally insane.
MaBheki bares her teeth and her eyes meet Emily’s.
‘I want my meat,’ she says, and the door closes behind her.
In the moment that the door closes on MaBheki, Emily sees the trajectory of her own life: from the casual, almost conversational question, how many Disprin would you take to kill yourself, overheard by Anna the sub-warden, who puts the university machinery into operation by relaying the question to the warden who relays it to the Dean of Students who relays the question to Dr Chikara, who relays it to her parents who insist that she be sectioned in the Annexe. She grasps this much: she is here, not because she asked the question but because someone overheard her ask the question. Depending on whether she asks that question again, or, more precisely, depending on how loudly she asks it, her life could go either way, to the little green bus up Second Street Extension towards Bond Street, Pendennis and the university, or the other way, turning where Second Street meets Julius Nyerere Way to go past the National Gallery and the Monomotapa Crowne Plaza, past Town House and all the way to the railway station to take the night train to Ingutsheni.
Emily forces herself to be normal.
She stops speaking in poetry and quotations. She puts aside Marx and Engels. Inside herself, she recites ‘Jabberwocky’ and ‘Macavity’. Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe. His brow is deeply lined in thought, his head is highly domed. You would know him if you saw him for his eyes are sunken in.
An Elegy for Easterly Page 4