‘We can share the cost,’ she said. He had protested of course, but not too much, and eventually had given in. They had held hands all the way back to the university, and later, in Manfred Hodson Hall, in the room he shared on P corridor with Xholisa Bhebhe, on a narrow bed sagging from the sex of all the students that had come before them, they conceived their first child.
He had not meant to marry at twenty-one, but that first pregnancy had left him with no other honourable option. The consolation had been the sex. He had enjoyed feeling superior when he heard his fellow-students’ desperate searches for sex. Not for him the prowls through the townships, looking for easy lays that opened their legs at the flash of a university student identity card; or the hours drinking at the Terraskane Hotel to summon the courage needed to approach a woman and take her to the Welcome Lodge opposite, where ‘resting for thirty minutes’ was sixty dollars and ‘resting for an hour’ was a hundred. Thulani had been spared this search. He had a woman with whom he could have endless legal sex.
Now, when he wants sex, he does not always go to his wife. He had had a girlfriend once, but his wife had found out; that was a time in his life that he did not think about, could not afford to think about. Even as he thought this, another thought came; the child is probably eleven. There is an eleven-year-old child with my blood in him or her. There is a child that is part of me out there. He pushed the thought from his mind.
Some of his friends had what they called small houses. He had never tried such an arrangement; small-house women expected as much money and attention as the real wives. The thought of not one, but two women each expecting everything from him, each treating him with that special brand of passive aggression that was fed into women with their mother’s milk, was enough to make him give up sex altogether.
He had decided to avoid such permanent arrangements, settling instead for occasional encounters. At the Law Society Summer School, with a willing colleague, preferably one who was married herself, and could console herself with the knowledge that she was doing only what her husband was doing.
Thulani lit another cigarette and smiled as he thought that the crisis in the country had become a boon industry for lawyers. They held conferences at Troutbeck Inn and Leopard Rock, holiday resorts where no tourists came, but only the NGO officials, constitutional law experts and human rights lawyers who pontificated on what they called the appalling and unacceptable and ever-deteriorating human rights situation in the country. Before the elections, they held seminars on creating the right space for democratic transition, and after the elections, they hosted conferences at which they gave postmortems. And the donor money rolled in, real money, dollars and pounds and euros.
After they had analysed the lack of democratic space and inveighed against the partisan actions of the police, they had sex. Thulani had been with Estella Mhango at the last conference; she had been three years behind him in school. She had failed constitutional law twice but was now styling herself a constitutional law expert and human rights activist.
The evening with Estella had been unsatisfactory enough not to be repeated. Funny, he thought, what was it with really beautiful women? There was something wooden about them, like they had been told so often that they were beautiful that they did not seem to feel the need to make an effort. Not Vheneka, though. She had never been like that. At least, not at first.
He did not trouble to find excuses for cheating on Vheneka. There seemed to be something obscene about sex with her, as though he was doing it with a relative. What added to the frisson was that he still felt the occasional flicker of desire. If he was to be honest with himself, it was not her that he desired, but the sex itself. In the dark, she could have been any woman. And this is what Themba wanted, this padlocked life. Thulani was suddenly tired. He stretched and yawned.
He slept and dreamed of Oliver.
When Vheneka woke the next morning, she made straight for the living room. Thulani was still asleep. She left him, showered, and with their maid, dressed and fed the children. She returned to the living room. Thulani slept on. He had drool coming out of the corner of his mouth. She shook him awake, and without waiting for him to rouse himself fully, she said, ‘How could you come home so late? I tried to call you, but your phone was switched off.’
He mumbled, and she repeated herself.
‘The battery was low,’ he said.
He yawned. She could see the dark filling of a molar at the back of his mouth. He closed his eyes again. She was suddenly angry, and fought to control herself as she said, ‘How can you keep coming home at this time? What would happen if I also start coming home late every night? Who would help the children with their homework?’
She could feel her voice rising into harsh ugliness but she could not prevent it. ‘And that tap in the yard has been broken for a long time now, it is still leaking and I keep asking you to get someone to fix it but you never do.’
‘Well, why don’t you sort it out then?’
‘Why should I do everything around here?’
‘I said I would fix it.’
‘Promises. That’s all you are good for.’
He got up to walk to the bathroom. As he closed the door she said, ‘That’s right, walk away, like you always do.’
Later, as she drove the children to school, she thought how worn the grooves were along which they moved their quarrels. She could feel herself saying all the clichéd phrases of a thousand injured women before her, but she could never stop herself. She wanted to make it specific to her and him, to them, Vheneka and Thulani, but it all came down to the same thing, promises not kept and not made. Words not said, embraces not given. Their quarrels were never resolved. They were simply postponed to another day. And they were never about what was wrong.
As she drove away from the children’s school, she found herself thinking, as she had so often before, that even her name was not her own. Vheneka Dhlamini, Mrs Dhlamini to her colleagues. Her new name, her Ndebele name and her fluency in her husband’s language were not enough to deceive native Ndebele speakers, but it was enough for some of her Shona colleagues to treat her differently. Just last week, she had heard the history teacher ask the biology teacher why it was that the Ministry was giving these Ndebele teachers jobs in Harare when there were schools in Bulawayo.
As she turned into Prince Edward, Vheneka shook off these thoughts and focused instead on the memory of the Vheneka Chogugudza who had played centre at netball and had grown into a woman aware of the power of her own beauty, the way it unsettled the men around her. There had not been many men, just Patrick, before he went to Poland to study, and then Thulani.
She smiled as she remembered those early days, when they had sometimes spent whole mornings and afternoons in bed, tasting each other. There had been dreams. Little things to hope for, aspire towards. Education for their children, professional success, two family cars. Travel to South Africa, maybe even to England. Small, small things burned in the flames of inflation.
After the pregnancy with Nobuhle, there was only one thing to be done. She knew that what she felt for him was not what he felt for her. She wanted only him. He had not been the first, but he was the last. She had not been his first, and she certainly knew she was not the last.
Nobuhle had died at five years, of meningitis said the doctors, witchcraft said hers and Thulani’s mothers. That was the beginning, she thinks. She tottered, but did not fall. Then the blow that had felled her: Thulani had made another woman pregnant. The woman had come to her school, she loved Thulani, she had said, and he loved her. There was nothing that could be done, she was going to have his child. She was four months pregnant she had said. Due at Christmas. And Nobuhle was dead.
Thulani stayed. She had not asked him, but he did. He had said nothing about the other child. She had asked no questions. Part of her knew that he remained for reasons more complicated than love. She had Busisiwe and Nkosana after that, but like a missing tooth that is present even in its absence, Nob
uhle remained.
She knew, throughout the years, that Thulani had other women; she had seen the evidence. After his last Law Society conference, she had found a packet of condoms in his jacket. It had been opened. Two were missing. There was ice around her stomach, but her only coherent thought was to wonder whether both condoms had been used on the same occasion.
And after that, her revenge – Peter Kapuya, the trainee teacher straight from Belvedere Teachers’ College. She seduced him in her car as she drove him home after a late staff meeting to discuss a strike. She had resented him, this stranger, with his unfamiliar intrusion, but the memory of the missing condoms spurred her on. That night, for the first time in months she had made the first move towards Thulani.
As Vheneka checked her mirror before driving into the school, she caught her reflection. ‘To look so antique and me only thirty-five,’ she said. She was suddenly frightened as she imagined another fifteen years of this.
Thulani had once asked for a divorce.
She had felt then a wave of rage so sharp it threatened to cut her sanity, but she had forced herself to speak slowly, calmly. In his language she had told him, ‘First you undo me this scar, then you unlearn me this language. After that, you can come back and we can talk about divorce.’
He had said nothing more after that. Sometimes she thought that she should leave him, but the fear of being alone hits her. She has nothing beyond him, beyond her family; the job she loved has deserted her. She can no longer escape to her great love, can no longer explore plot and plot devices in The Mayor of Casterbridge, find pleasure in explaining iambic pentameter. The girls she teaches are not interested. And who can blame them? How will Eliot and Pinter and Golding get them a fast buck? What guarantees do Achebe and Marechera and Dangarembga offer? They want the new subjects, computer science, accounts, economics, management of business. They want to find a way to London now, to act on Studio 263, to enter beauty pageants.
As she walked away from her car, she heard someone calling out to her. She turned. It was Thulani. She looked from him to his car, which he had parked outside the school gate.
‘You followed me,’ she said. The words sounded like an accusation.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ she said.
‘This is not about us,’ he said. There was something in his voice, but before she could speak, her mobile phone rang from her handbag.
‘Let it ring,’ he said.
She looked from him to the bag, and knew from his face that nothing was right.
‘I followed you, your brother called just after you left, but I wanted to tell you myself.’
The children, she thought, the children. But they were safe, they were in school, she had taken them there herself.
‘It is your mother,’ he said. ‘There was nothing anyone could do. Your brother said she just collapsed, and that was it.’
The phone rang again.
‘Leave it,’ he said again.
‘But the people, all the relatives, friends, they will want to say … to know the arrangements,’ she said.
‘And the school,’ she added, ‘I can’t go to class now. I have to tell Mrs Muza.’
He walked with her to the headmistress’s office where the message was given and understood. As they walked back across the school quadrangle, the bell rang for morning lessons. They were caught in a sea of laughing girls in green and white uniforms running to their classrooms. Their voices faded as Thulani and Vheneka walked to the car park.
The phone rang again as they neared the car. She reached inside her bag for it, and he caught her hand. ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he said, in the most formal expression of condolence that Shona allowed.
Why doesn’t he hold me, she thought, why does he say the words of a stranger, why, but even before she had completed the thought, he had taken her other hand. She was afraid to cry because she knew, when it came, she would not stop. Then she was in his arms and he was holding her and he held on to her as they walked to the gate. They left her car behind and drove back home in his. On the way, they talked about calling the funeral home and about all the other things, large and small, that needed to be done.
Midnight at the Hotel California
It is hard to remember that there was ever a time when you could buy a half-dozen eggs, a packet of Colcolm sausages, two loaves of bread, a packet of Tanganda tea and still have change from a ten dollar note for two Castle lagers and a packet of Everest. I was thinking of those days as I walked from Mbare to Tynwald today. I had gone to Mbare to collect my car, but my mechanic Lovemore had not finished with it.
A couple more days, m’dhara, he said.
I had to contend with that. Shaky called while I was in Mbare and said that he knew someone who knew someone who could get me a good deal on fifty litres of petrol. It is a super deal, m’dhara, he said, it is only valid today, take it or leave it.
I could not leave it; this was the only thing in my pipeline. Just ten days ago, I had had to suspend another deal – some moron thought he was doing me the world’s greatest favour by offering me nine hundred billion for a four-stroke diesel generator. He actually expected that I would smile and say Jesu wangu, but I said, forget it, there can be no deal for such a low price, and he said, you will not be able sell it for more, and I said, I would rather hang on to it in that case, simbi haiore, m’dhara, uye haidyi sadza.
These were thin times in the Gumbo household with the wife pulling faces, and in the small house the girlfriend was suddenly too busy to see me. So when Shaky’s super take-it-or-leave-it fuel deal came up, I set off at once. There was no transport to be found, and I had to walk all the way from Mbare to Tynwald.
My immediate thought when I saw the fellow I was supposed to meet was that he was high on something. I am Clever by name and Clever by nature, ha, ha, ha, he said, and ha, ha, ha, I said, now how much do you want for it? He pushed back dreadlocks from his forehead and said he wanted half a billion. You are dreaming, I thought to myself, and pulled out one of the drinking straws that I carried in my battered Old Mutual briefcase. I put the straw into the barrel, sucked at it to draw some of the fluid into my mouth, which was just as well because there was definitely something else mixed in with the petrol. I spat it out, hoping that it was only water and not urine – urine is preferred by the more unscrupulous because it is the same colour as petrol.
I know nothing about it, m’dhara, I am just the middleman, said Clever by name and Clever by nature. I was too tired to argue, it did not matter who was to blame, because the long and short of it was that I had nothing for my trouble, and to add to this, I now had to walk all the way back to town.
I tried to call Shaky. The number you have dialled is not available at the moment, said the electronic Econet voice, please try again later. I called his Telecel and NetOne numbers, same message different voices. My mood soured even further as I trudged past an ostentatious private school in Tynwald that everyone said was run by a retired army general.
As I walked, I thought about following up on another fuel lead that another contact had told me about. Here is how it works: there are these new farmers who get fuel at give-away bottom dollar everything-must-go preferential government prices. The government will throw anything at the new farmers to make them produce: cheap fuel, free tractors, free seed, free fertiliser – even free labourers; they were using prisoners on farms at one time. Pity they can’t throw in a bit of free motivation because the thing about the new farmers is that they don’t use the cheap fuel for their free tractors; instead, they sell both tractors and fuel to people like me, and people like me sell them on to the vast majority of the unconnected non-preferential-rate-getting masses that can only get fuel on the black market.
It’s against the law, of course, this black market thing, but they may as well arrest every living person between the Limpopo and the Zambezi and have done with it. This is the new Zimbabwe, where everyone is a criminal. One of my best customers, His Worship, Mr Mafa,
is a regional magistrate for Harare, and another, the Right Reverend Malema, is a stalwart of the Anointed Church of the Sacred Lamb. The last time I sold diesel to His Worship, he paid off a little of what he owed me in tomatoes – his office at Rotten Row is crammed with the vegetables he grows on a small plot of land along the Bulawayo Road at the edge of which the City of Harare has placed large rusting signs that say NO CULTIVATION: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Unlike those poor sods who have found that their cherished degrees are useless in this new economy, I at least have not fallen too far off my track. I am using the skills I honed as an insurance man in the eighties and nineties. My ex-brother-in-law used to say I could sell dental floss to his mother-in-law – the woman had fewer teeth than a hen.
It is not just fuel either. I am what you might call an all-commodity broker: if it can be bought, it can be sold, and if it can be sold, I am your man. I have bought and resold computers that the President donated to rural schoolchildren in Chipinge during the last election campaign – they don’t need them after all, their schools have no electricity. I have sold reconditioned cars from Japan and Singapore, flat-screen televisions from Dubai, sugar and salt and children’s toys from South Africa. I have even sold water-purifying chemicals from Malaysia to the City Council of Kwekwe. All goods processed, no questions asked. No guarantees, no returns, no refunds. No wire transfers, no credit cards – as the sign at the Why Not Hotel, Esigodini says, Mr Credit Was Killed By Mr Cash.
Last year, I sold my biggest item yet: a John Deere combine harvester which came down to me from some poor white bastard who had been compelled to donate his land for redistribution by the magnanimous Comrades. When the Comrades redistribute the land, they also make sure to redistribute any crops on the land, all machinery, any furniture, plates, knives and forks, and any whisky that might be in the house.
So that’s how a lucky Comrade got a free combine harvester and having no need for it in urban Warren Park, he sold it to me for only one and a half trillion. I sold it for at least a hundred times that amount, got US dollars too, which I sold on at a healthy profit, and that is how I was able to buy a third-hand RAV4 for the wife, pay three lots of school fees in one go and get the girlfriend a four-day weekend at Vic Falls and all the one hundred per cent human hair (made in Taiwan) that she could buy.
An Elegy for Easterly Page 15