An Elegy for Easterly

by Petina Gappah

  My father was there and not there, and when he was, he sometimes looked at Munya and me like he wasn’t sure what we were doing in front of him. He smoked Kingsgate cigarettes and we liked to watch him blow smoke rings in the air. He taught mathematics at the university, and when Munya asked why we could not have a dog because everyone had a dog, Daddy drew him something that he said was a model that proved that it was rationally and statistically impossible for everyone in the world to have a dog.

  So mostly, we had SisiBlandina to look after us. She had my mother’s authority to command, and reward, to cajole, threaten and smack us in accordance with her judgement. She came from Lalapanzi, SisiBlandina, smack in the middle of the country, a place so central that the province in which it rested was called the Midlands. In Lalapanzi, the lightning hunted out little girls and boys who played in the rain in red, it sought their red clothes and burned them from inside out. The rivers of Lalapanzi were home to njuzu, fearsome water creatures that sometimes took children and made them live under water. In Lalapanzi wandered a goritoto, a ghost giant that cast a shadow of bright light as it moved.

  The government renamed the places that the whites had renamed, so that Umvukwes became Mvurwi again, Selukwe became Shurugwi, and Marandellas became Marondera. Queque became Kwekwe. The changes did not affect people like my grandmother for whom independence was a reality that did not alter their memories. She continued to speak of Fort Victoria and not Masvingo, of visiting us in Salisbury when she meant Harare, and of my aunt who was married in Gwelo instead of Gweru. SisiBlandina was not as bad as my grandmother, but like most people then, she sometimes forgot to use the new names.

  ‘To get to Lalapanzi,’ SisiBlandina said, ‘you take the train here in Salisbury and get off at Gwelo. You then take a bus from Gwelo and drive through Wha Wha before you get to Lalapanzi.’

  I liked to work the rhythm of the names into my skipping games.

  ‘Right foot Salisbury, left foot Gwelo.

  Right foot Gwelo, left foot Wha Wha.

  Right foot Wha Wha, left foot Lalapanzi.

  Right foot Lalapanzi, left foot Lalapanzi.

  Both feet Lalapanzi, both feet Lalapanzi.’

  There had been many housemaids before SisiBlandina. They lived with us, they were a part of our family and yet were not of it, sharing my bedroom, and getting up at five in the morning to sweep the floors, make the breakfast for my parents and for Munya and me, wash the dishes, walk Munya and me to school, wash the clothes and the windows, make lunch for Munya and me, fetch us from school, do the lunchtime dishes, make and serve the supper, wash more dishes, and through it all, watch that Munya and I behaved and didn’t kill each other, before collapsing to wake again at five the next morning.

  The white children like my old best friend Jenny Russell and Laura Steele in Miss Blakistone’s class called the maids who worked at their houses by their first names, but we called them Sisi, sister, it being unthinkable that young children could address adults just by their first names. They came and went, dismissed for various flaws as my mother searched for the perfect housemaid, leaving behind the uniform dress and matching hat that they all wore which seemed to stretch and shrink to fit each one.

  My mother dismissed SisiMemory and SisiSekesai because they ate too much bread in the morning, spooning too much jam on their bread.

  ‘Housemaids should not eat too much,’ said my mother.

  SisiLoveness dimpled and glowed when she smiled, and every Saturday she undid her plaited hair, scratched out the dandruff with a red plastic comb, washed her hair and plaited it again in neat rows across her head. She used Ingram’s Camphor Cream and not normal Vaseline, and her clean smell lingered in every room that she left. My mother fired her because she said SisiLoveness cared too much for her appearance and not enough for the floors of the house. I see now that my mother fired SisiLoveness because she was all too aware of the stories of maids who stole husbands away from their employers.

  ‘Housemaids should not be too pretty,’ all the women agreed.

  SisiDudzai was fired because my mother came home unexpectedly and found her dancing to Bhutsu mutandarikwa, sweating and dancing, as my mother said, like one possessed, stomping on the living room floor, clapping herself on in encouragement, head thrown back in abandonment, whistling like she was out herding cows.

  ‘Housemaids should not enjoy themselves too much,’ my mother declared.

  Those who were not fired quit, like SisiMaggie who left to get married to MukomaJoseph, the gardener who worked for Mr Shelby from number twenty-five. The union did not bring Mr Shelby closer to us, and he still watched with an unfriendly face as Munya and I walked past his house, and grunted his response when we chirped, ‘Good morning, Mr Shelby,’ while Munya looked at Mr Shelby’s dog Buster with longing.

  SisiNomathemba quit because she could not make us obey her. Munya and I had an unerring eye for the weaknesses in the maids’ resolve. We found them in SisiNomathemba, and sometimes led her away from the normal route along the road, and got her lost among the greenways at the back of the houses and left her there. We tormented and laughed at her because she spoke Ndebele, we said ‘hai’ to everything she said because that was how she began her sentences, and we repeated what she said and mimicked her accent until, conquered, she wept and said lina abantwana liyahlupa sibili.

  We went with SisiJenny to our mother’s friend’s niece’s wedding in Canaan between Jerusalem and Engineering in Highfields and she wore a yellow dress with white stars that was too small for my mother. When the master of ceremonies pointed to the lorry that would drive people to the rural home of the bride, SisiJenny hurtled off in that direction and the last we saw of her was a distant figure in a yellow dress clambering into the packed lorry, her red shoe almost falling from her right foot.

  SisiJenny was succeeded by SisiLucia, who was not pretty, and did not eat too much, and did not enjoy herself at all. She did not smile once in the two months that she was with us; she watched me all the time, and made me feel guilty for no reason. My mother thought she had found the perfect housemaid until SisiLucia locked Munya and me up in my bedroom and vanished with my mother’s new electric kettle and toaster from Barbour’s, her favourite pair of shoes and three pairs of my father’s trousers.

  My mother then tried out poor relations as maids. They came from the rural areas with the musty smell of old smoke on their clothes and the sweet smell of peanut oil on their skin. They delighted in the television and stood mesmerised before its images. VateteSusan sat and watched as the Capwells in Santa Barbara failed to see that Dominic who whispered his words and appeared only in the shadows was really their supposedly dead mother Sophia, as evil Angela Channing tightened her grip on the Gioberti wine estate on Falcon Crest, and all the while my mother muttered under her breath and the fat congealed on the dishes piled up in the kitchen sink.

  The Capwells did find out about Dominic/Sophia and Angela Channing lost to Chase Gioberti, but VateteSusan was not there: she had been replaced by MbuyaStella who liked to stretch out her legs on the floor as she talked through the smoke rings and regaled my bemused father with the latest stories of the antics of the black sheep of their family. Through the convoluted logic of Karanga relationships, at seventeen, she was his mother, and therefore my mother’s mother-in-law, to be treated with some respect.

  Then my mother decided that it was youth and not the lack of a blood connection that was the problem; the girls were too young, too inexperienced. She found instead a woman much older than her whom we called Auntie in the English way because she was not our relative but was too old to be called by her first name even if it was prefaced by Sisi, and whom my grandmother being hard of hearing called Kauntie. Kauntie fell asleep in the middle of the day and forgot to fetch Munya from school and he went hunting for tadpoles in the Chisipite stream, fell and banged his mouth and that was the end of his upper incisor tooth and of Kauntie. And that is how we ended up with SisiBlandina, who spoke Karanga as
deep as my grandmother’s, and after two years it was almost like she had always been there.

  When SisiBlandina told us stories that her grandmother had told her, she began the tales in the traditional manner and said ngano ngano ngano, lilting the different syllables, and we replied ngano, and she repeated it twice to make sure we were really ready; we chanted back to her in anticipation because we knew that she would lead us to an enchanted realm where boys who turned into lions won the maidens of their hearts’ desire, the hare was more cunning than his uncle the baboon, the girl who scorned to squeeze an ugly old woman’s sores ended up living in enchantment beneath the water, and the king of a land far away set a trap to find which of his perfidious wives and children had cooked and eaten his royal tortoise.

  My mother liked SisiBlandina for different reasons. She did things without being told like arranging the clothes in all our cupboards according to colour and polishing the floors with Cobra polish with such vigour that my father complained that they were too slippery and my mother said he should buy the fitted carpets that she had set her heart on. Instead, my father said, ‘Well, well, we may as well invite the Prime Minister to hold his next rally here and not to bother with Rufaro or Gwanzura,’ because SisiBlandina sang songs from the war as she bathed and scrubbed her skin with a pumice stone.

  Munya and I knew that there had been a war, but it was only through SisiBlandina that it came to life in our house. She told us stories of the war, the guerrillas marching to her village in Lalapanzi and demanding food, the soldiers following the guerrillas and threatening to shoot the villagers who gave the guerrillas food, and then more guerrillas coming and threatening to shoot all vatengesi, traitors who sold them out to the soldiers or refused to give them food. They shot into the air to frighten people, and when her grandmother’s dog Pfungwadzebenzi barked, a guerrilla shot him in the stomach and he limped off to the forest to die. Munya put his hand on SisiBlandina’s knee and said, ‘When Chenai grows up and buys me a dog, I won’t call him Spider, but Pfungwadzebenzi.’

  She told us that the villagers stayed up all night in a pungwe, a night rally at which guerrilla commanders with bushy beards denounced the Smith regime, told them about gutsaruzhinji, the socialism they would bring upon ending the days of Smith. Their voices were hoarse as the villagers chanted the new slogans and sang the new revolutionary songs, while young men with rifles danced to those same songs that SisiBlandina taught us.

  ‘What to do with Smith?

  Hit him on the head until he comes to his senses!

  What to do with the ugly crow?

  Hit him on his head until he comes to his senses!

  What to do with Muzorewa?

  Hit him on the head until he comes to his senses!

  Until when?

  Until we rule this country of Zimbabwe!’

  I remembered that for the first five years of my life, I lived in a country called Rhodesia with Ian Smith as Prime Minister, and then in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia with a Prime Minister called Abel Muzorewa, and now the country was called Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe was Prime Minister. As for Munya, born on the cusp of independence, just one year away from being among the special born-frees, the songs meant nothing at all.

  And so we held our own pungwes in my bedroom with Munya and me taking on the role of the villagers and SisiBlandina as our commander; we played out the stories that we thought had happened only in Lalapanzi.

  ‘I learned even more songs at the camp in Mozambique,’ SisiBlandina said. ‘The guerrillas came back and asked for young boys and girls to go with them to be trained and we went all the way through to Chimoio and Nyadzonia in Mozambique.’

  We sang those training camp songs as SisiBlandina walked Munya and me to school, swinging our arms in hers while we swung our book cases on the other arms; we marched to their rhythm and chanted hau as she led us in our favourite song, the one we asked for over and over again.

  ‘We shall go from here (hau)

  And head for Moza (hau)

  Yugoslavia (hau)

  And China (hau)

  They shall give us (hau)

  An arsenal of weapons (hau)

  To take with us (hau)

  To Lancaster House (hau)

  Do you doubt us? (hau)

  Do you doubt us? (hau)’

  ‘Everyone took a new name, a war name, a strong name,’ SisiBlandina said. ‘I wanted to call myself Freedom, but there were already seven with that name, and even one called Freedom-now, and four other people called Liberty. Then one of the commanders told us that we were fighting for autonomy and for self-rule and for self-determination, and so that became my name.’

  ‘That is a long name,’ I said in wonder.

  SisiBlandina laughed and said, ‘No, just Autonomy. I am Blandina Autonomy Mubaiwa. Some of us girls were trained to fight, but the younger ones like me, and some who could not do the exercises, cooked for the guerrillas and washed their clothes and we sang and we kept them company at night. But the first night, they said I was in Geneva, and they sent me back to the other girls who were also in Geneva.’

  ‘Is Geneva in Mozambique?’ my brother asked.

  ‘That is not for you to know,’ she said. ‘Your sister will know soon enough. See, already her breasts are poking out.’

  I stormed off without hearing more, furious that she had voiced my deepest shame. My breasts had started to sprout three months earlier, and I walked with a stoop to hide them. I thought no one had noticed, but SisiBlandina noticed everything. When my period came, SisiBlandina was there to say, ‘Well, you are in Geneva now, and you will be visiting regularly. Better make sure those boys you like to play with keep themselves to themselves.’

  I was mortified because I knew what she was talking about. The women from Johnson & Johnson had come to the school, and separated us from the boys so that they could tell us secrets about our bodies. They said the ovum would be released from the ovary and travel down the Fallopian tube and, if it was not fertilised, it would be expelled every twenty-two to twenty-eight days in the act of menstruation. It was an unsanitary time, they said. Our most effective weapon against this effluence was the arsenal of the sanitary products that Johnson & Johnson made with young ladies like us in mind, they said, because Johnson cared.

  I came to know many things about SisiBlandina. I spied on her and read her letters; I read the ones she wrote before she posted them, letters written in her small rounded handwriting, letters with long elaborate beginnings and little news. ‘Chenai is growing breasts,’ she said in one, and I was angry that she would tell my secrets to people in Lalapanzi. I tore up the letter, and dropped it to the floor. Sometimes, she cried, for no reason at all, and I heard her when I woke up late at night in our bedroom.

  She had admirers at the shops and all the gardeners in our road whistled if they were out in the road when she walked past. Even MukomaJoseph who worked for Mr Shelby from number twenty-five and had married SisiMaggie and sent her off to the rural areas said in his lisp, ‘Ende sister makabatana, you are so well put together.’

  She ignored MukomaJoseph and the others and talked only to MukomaGeorge who worked at the Post Office and who made sure to watch for us as we walked past.

  ‘Ah, hello sister Chenai, hello mfanaMunya, masikati masikati,’ he said.

  ‘Masikati MukomaGeorge,’ we greeted him back.

  ‘Hesi kani, Blandina,’ he said.

  ‘Ho nhai, so I am the one that you greet last?’ she said.

  ‘Last but not least, Blandina, you know that,’ he said.

  They lingered and talked while Munya and I moved ahead of them. One day, MukomaGeorge ran after me as I walked home alone from recorder practice.

  He said, ‘Ah, masikati sister Chenai, please take this to Blandina,’ and thrust a blue aerogramme and a packet of Treetop sherbet into my hands.

  The sherbet was for me, he said, and I ate it on the way home. SisiBlandina laughed when she read the aerogramme and said, ‘Haiwa, I have no time for
such foolishness.’ She would not let me read it, but I knew that she would keep it in a shoebox that she kept at the bottom of our cupboard with the other letters that she received from Lalapanzi, and that night I sneaked into her box and read it.

  ‘My sweetheart Blandina,’ MukomaGeorge had written,

  Time, fortune and opportunity have forced me to take up my hand to pen this missive to ask how are you pulling the wagons of existence and to tell you how much I love you. My heart longs for you like tea longs for sugar. I wish for you like meat wishes for salt, and I miss you like a postman would miss his bicycle. Truly, Blandina, you are my life, and I hope that you will be my wife. I want to send a messenger to Lalapanzi with any cows that your father asks as a bride price. I hope one day to be your ever-loving husband,

  George Simbarashe Gweme from Munyikwa

  After that letter, SisiBlandina lingered more and more with MukomaGeorge as she walked us back home from school. She now took all her Sundays off, she went away early in the morning, and then one Sunday she did not come back and that was the only time my mother ever had to shout at her. She made herself three new dresses on her sewing machine.

  She talked less and less about the war.

  ‘Is Princess a nicer name than Rosemary?’ she said. ‘Do you like Precious or Prudence? What about George for a boy?’

  When I said that she should ask MukomaGeorge if he liked it, she laughed and sang me another war song.

  Then one day, just like that, she was gone.