‘Hey!’ It was one of the bodyguards, a white, muscular fellow with a big, bald head. He was striding towards me, his hand on the holster by his hip. I tensed, ready to spring.
It was the sight of the boy that saved me. He was waddling between Black Jesus and His Most Excellent Excellency, dressed, obscenely, in a mini replica Air Marshal uniform. He looked no more than six or seven.
Skin the same shade, the colour of the rich black clay that can be found along the Gwayi River floodplain.
My eyes swayed wildly from father to son to father. The boy had his face turned away from me, his head angled up, trying to mirror the father’s movements, miming as though he, like Black Jesus, were speaking to His Most Excellent Excellency, shaking his head in tandem. His Most Excellent Excellency, laughing, pointed at him, and Black Jesus looked down at him. His flat-bellied heart lips broke into a smile. He pulled the boy towards him and hugged him. Bent and kissed the small, round head.
My coiled body loosened.
I raised my hand and touched my head.
‘Hey!’ The bodyguard had reached me now. He shoved me, right into a group of spectators behind me, who staggered and fell, I falling on top of them. ‘Step back! No touching the ropes!’
I didn’t even apologize as I got up, didn’t return the rough shoves of the spectators, didn’t take any notice of the bodyguard. My eyes were on Black Jesus and the boy. It was at that moment that I realized that I hadn’t ever wanted to kill Black Jesus. No. What I yearned for, so very badly, was for him to kiss me on my round head, too.
He came in tonight, my surrogate father, back earlier than usual, having come from one of his mysterious solo searches for the boy. It was the first time in a week and a half that he sought me out – and he did it by crashing into my room without knocking, flinging open the door while I was tapping away at my MacBook. He was staggering, and at first I thought he was drunk, but when I clocked his drooping features, as though at any moment they would drip-drip away, I realized he was drunk with grief. I can understand; the double blow of first having to deal with Bukhosi’s disappearance and then now having had to relive the deaths of my inamorata and his boy, would be enough to drive any man mad. His madness even zapped time, so that in his hi-story the fighting at Entumbane and Black Jesus happened together, and not two years apart, as in History. History does not know his pain. What is time, anyway? You can no more tell a man not to feel what happened eons ago if to him it’s as though it happened just yesterday. Dumo would say that this is a good thing! The greatest sin is to forget! The bitter gulp of hi-story is a necessary penicillin against the myopia of the present!
Abednego glared at me with open hostility, and I wondered if he blamed me for having dredged up our family hi-story. ‘Give me the thing,’ he said, holding out his hand, palm-up.
‘What?’
‘The thing! You’ve been giving me something. I want it. Give it to me.’
I looked up at him innocently. ‘What are you going on about?’
He blinked rapidly. ‘The thing I tasted on your finger that day when – I tasted it in the drink you gave me, also. Give it to me!’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘Give me the thing! Where are you hiding it? Give it to me!’
With that, he began ransacking my lodgings, upsetting my little put-me-up bed, shoving my Mac to one side, emptying my satchel, rifling through my clothes. I would have given him some ubuvimbo, had he not looked at me with such coldness; after everything I had done for him! So, I just sat there, my arms folded across my chest, watching him smugly. His hands were trembling.
‘Please,’ he said, finally. ‘Give it to me. What is it? Where did you get it? Please. I need just a little bit, I haven’t been well and I—’
He stopped and glared at me. I thought he was going to attack me, but instead, he turned and shambled out of my pygmy room, and I heard him go into the house. I sat there for a long time, surveying the mess he had made of my belongings, dismayed. I had never before been so humiliated by him. Was he unaware of the power he had over me, of the power a father has over his son?
He shuns me, my surrogate dada, now when I need him more than ever. I, too, am hurting. I keep staring at our selfie from the other day, me nesting in the crook of his arm, busy smiling for the camera, his other hand resting on my hip, eyes closed. It hurts me to think of what we’ve become now, looking at that photo. I find myself seeking solace in the Red Album, thinking of Thandi, thinking of my mama, remembering Uncle Fani, and fending off the dark cloud that threatens to engulf me. I feel so alone! I’ve been forsaken by Abednego, who goes off alone each night, God knows where; Mama Agnes spends all her days working or on her knees in front of the pastor. What about me? I have been unable to leave my lodgings. What is worse, I’m frightened even to go to sleep! I’m afraid to shut even one eye, for she comes to me in my dreams, my inamorata, she mounts me still, only now my wet dreams have lost their sweetness, and no matter how hard I try, in these dreams which have become nightmares, to push her off me, to plead with her to dismount me, she gallops and pants until she has had her fill.
It feels as though Thandi died only yesterday! My inamorata!
I was just dozing off, after my altercation with my surrogate father, having put back to order my humble lodgings and crawled onto my little bed, and tried unsuccessfully to fend off sleep, for I could already hear her howling in my dreams, my succubus, when I heard screaming coming from the main house. I leapt at once from my mattress and out of my room, slamming against the back door with the full force of my weight – though it’s never locked, it needs force to push open and squeaks horribly, for which I must utter a silent apology at night whenever I am pressed for the loo – and dashed into the house to find Mama Agnes cowering in the living room, between the bookcase and Bukhosi’s sofa, my surrogate father standing over her, his fist raised. I looked down, took in the swollen rearrangement of Mama Agnes’s face, looked back up at the man, grimaced, grabbed his arm and spun him around.
His eyes fell on me, wild. ‘You,’ he hissed. ‘What have you done to me? Give me the thing—’
I punched him. He staggered, blinking repeatedly. He looked about him, first turning that large head of his left, and then right, and then towards me, and then at Mama Agnes, his generous nostrils trembling, and then, without a word, he shoved past me and out of the house.
I gathered Mama Agnes in my arms and led her to her sofa. She was crying. I yearned to cup her face, to look into those eyes, to kiss her and hush her, but that otherwise beautiful scape had swelled to tender proportions, and it was all I could do not to cry. I offered her a cuppa, that’s the best I could manage, Tanganda, with a dash of lemon, just the way she likes it. Then I sat down and watched patiently as she sipped it. This seemed to calm her, for she stopped crying, her sobs receding to sniffles.
I reached out and took her hand, nursing it as if it were a baby bird. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him,’ I soothed. ‘It’s so unlike him!’
She looked at me witheringly. Things had always been like this, she said. They had been like this from the very beginning, and even though she believed he had changed, he was back to his old ways again, back to his drinking and his beatings, and it was because Bukhosi was missing, she knew, it was the stress of their missing boy, and if only he’d come back to them, she knew everything would be all right again!
‘I’m here, Mama Agnes, I can make everything all right!’ I hissed, but it was as though she couldn’t hear me.
I was glad that the electricity had gone as usual, glad for the darkness, for I know not what manner of guilt my face betrayed as I sat there trying to breathe lightly, not knowing where to burrow my shame. For, isn’t it because of me that my surrogate father has become, once again, a wife beater? Isn’t it I who encouraged him when he started drinking Bell’s, despite the fact that he’s a recovering alcoholic? Isn’t it I who has been plying him non-stop with Johnnie? And if only I’d
given him a bit of ubuvimbo earlier when he came begging … It’s my fault that Mama Agnes’s face is like puff pastry!
She leaned in to me, Mama Agnes, and placed her head on my chest. I tried to keep steady; the smell of her Ponds Lotion, the oily spray on her weave, were exhilarating. I imagined this is what my own mama would have smelled like. I imagine she would have found comfort in my arms, just like this. I carefully placed an arm around Mama Agnes’s shoulders. She didn’t shrug me off, like my surrogate father would have done. Instead, she snuggled up against me.
‘I’m here for you, Mama Agnes,’ I cooed gently. ‘Everything is going to be OK. You deserve better than this.’
‘I do, but it’s what I’ve got, Zamani,’ she replied. ‘I have to play the cards that I’ve been dealt.’
And she’s right, Mama Agnes. We’ve got to play the cards we’ve been dealt. I thought of my surrogate father, God knows where in the night. I thought of the cursor blinking on the screen of my MacBook, of my grand project. I thought of me and Mama Agnes, unwittingly brought together by Abednego’s violence. I thought of being a true part of this family, of being a rooted man, a new creation who has broken free of the vicissitudes of the past and who can thus say of it, ‘I am the one who willed the past’ and not, ‘It is the past, that tempestuous bastard, that has willed me.’ We have to play the cards we have been dealt. And so, I turned to Mama Agnes and smiled encouragingly.
‘How did it all begin?’ I coaxed. ‘Tell me all about it.’
BOOK TWO
An Arranged Marriage
What kind of family hi-story would it be, anyway, that chronicles the surrogate father without also ushering forth the voice of the surrogate mother? Though we can only suppose at fathers, deny our fathers, hate our fathers, renounce and denounce our fathers, even kill our fathers, we can only love our mothers and cling, with a force bordering on the primal, to the mother–child bond, in particular the mother–son bond, which is of the sacred kind and on which whole nations are to be built. Just look at that Helen of Troy! Look at that Mbuya Nehanda! Look at our Queen Lozikeyi! Look at the Queen of Sheba, whose mothering was so strong and whose bosom so bounteous that the Egyptians, the Jews, the Arabs and the Ethiopians fight over ownership of her legacy to this very day. Even the Brits are wise enough to realize the nurturing power of a mother, that’s why they plead over and over with God to Save the Queen!
I wish Mama Agnes had known Abednego before Black Jesus turned him into the man she met. It was her father, of course, who made the choice, back in ’87, of whom she was to marry, when she was but a lassie, barely sixteen, with only hillocks for breasts; he who negotiated the lobola with my surrogate father prior to the arranged meeting. She ought not to have been surprised by her father’s instincts to marry her off, though. Hadn’t he, after all, saved his homestead from annihilation during the past four years by steadfastly applying the formula of profit? When the Men in the Red Berets first came in ’84 to Mama Agnes’s village, Kezi, in Matabeleland South, having been armed and trained in Nyanga at the banks of the Nyangombe River for His Most Excellent Excellency Prime Minister Robert Mugabe by North Korea’s great Kim Il-Sung – a case of the master teaching his prodigy – raping, looting, chopping willy-nilly, screaming Are you a dissident? Are you a dissident?, no answer good enough, hadn’t he, her father, sworn allegiance to leader-and-country, and offered himself up as a spy? Had they not been spared the worst of the horror as a result, while those less practical of their neighbours faced massacres of whole clans? And hadn’t her father done the same thing some six years before that, during the liberation war, when that colonizer Prime Minister Smith’s Rhodesian army had come rat-a-tatting on village doors?
She hadn’t wanted to marry my surrogate father, Mama Agnes. She’d been in love with another, a visiting apprentice priest from the Mashonaland North District named Father Reuben. He was slim, with skin the colour of matured baobab bark and an uncivilized afro, which he said regretfully he would have to trim, thanks to his civilizing vocation. And eyes that were too beautiful for a man, the burning colour of the winter bushveld. Everywhere he went, he wore a rosary and clutched a King James bible to his chest. Mama Agnes likened him to Jesus himself, a man of parables who left gemstones of (en)light(enment) wherever he walked. Now, here was a man who had the power to fill the craters gaping inside her with something more meaningful than the things her mama had said to bury and which she had so desperately tried to forget.
‘Forget about Bhalagwe,’ her mama had said. ‘The leaders of the nation have ordered us to forget. To the future we must attend!’
But who could ever forget a concentration camp? Who could forget the day they took her and her sister Nto, and her brothers Trymore and Mwangi and Promise, how her mama, left behind in the village, had blackouts every single day until they returned, just she and Nto and Trymore, with neither Promise nor Mwangi, Trymore who now had only a stump where his arm had been? Memory loomed everywhere, like an accusation, in Trymore’s eyes, in the eyes of the entire village, in the way they shuffled and the way they whispered and the way their bodies twitched like something was biting them and in the way the maize refused to grow. It ruffled the landscape and filled it with wraiths, so that even when there was nothing there, nothing tangible, Mama Agnes could not survey their compound, with its mud huts arranged like an L – the kitchen buttressing the corner, with her parents’ hut on one side, and the boys’ hut and girls’ hut and the silo on the other side – without some chilli smarting in her chest, like one of her mama’s big red Sahara Reapers. There would always be ghosts lingering there, wouldn’t there always be ghosts? Lurking over there by the kraals at the bottom of the homestead, opposite the boys’ hut, where the Men in the Red Berets had appeared, abracadabra just like that, floating in the evening mist like spectres. And her mama screaming Run you children mani run do you want to die do you want to die run mani!
But forget. That’s what her mama had said, even though I imagine she could feel the memories of that time straining against the confines of her mind, Mama Agnes.
Her infatuation took root the day Father Reuben compared sitting on the fence of religion with being pregnant.
‘You cannot be half pregnant,’ he said, his gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re either pregnant or you’re not.’
That he chose pregnancy as the medium for his life-lesson danced in her head for the weeks to come. It could only mean one thing. He wanted to get pregnant with her. She entertained thoughts of cattle herded all the way from Mashonaland North District scrambling into the Ndiweni kraal. Her mama’s warning about keeping her virginity sacred flew straight out of her head as she fantasized about the feel of Father Reuben inside her. She would not even play the shy, hesitant girl. She would say yes before he finished his proposal, and they would go to the stream…
She pulled away from me, Mama Agnes, and leaned forward, chuckling in the darkness. I could feel her blushing. I feared the spell my surrogate father had put us under was broken. I groped about desperately for something useful to say. Finally, I placed a tentative hand on her shoulder.
‘I know what you’re talking about,’ I said, lowering my voice into a conspiratorial whisper, but with a dash of mirth in it. ‘I, too, remember what it was like to be curious in my teens. Ach, I was so in love with my best friend’s sister!’
I had no best friend as a child, and certainly wasn’t in love with anyone’s sister, but this seemed to land with her just the right way; Mama Agnes chuckled again, and I felt her shoulder slump as she leaned back on her sofa.
‘I found every excuse possible to go to the Catholic church,’ she confessed, though she had turned away from me now and was facing my surrogate father’s empty sofa opposite us. ‘I even signed up to be an Usher, and followed Father Reuben wherever he went. “Father, what do you think of my flower arrangement?” I would ask. “Father, would you like to drink from my dish? The water is fresh from the stream. Father, Father, Father …”’
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If Father Reuben noticed her infatuation, he ignored it. He was always cordial, treating her with the same respect that he treated everybody else, which made Mama Agnes feel like just another insignificant sheep in the flock under his patronage. She fell into a depression, eating little and barely concentrating in class. When her teachers asked her why her grades were dropping, for she was an excellent pupil with first rate grades, she shrugged and said the ten kilometres she had been walking to and from school for the past four years was becoming too much for her.
‘You have a bright future ahead of you, Agnes,’ her science teacher said. ‘It’s through education that you will be able to get out of this rural coop, and see the better world. There’s a scholarship offer from the Catholic Church, for one to go and further their studies in a college in Massachusetts. We have put your name forward, but now it’s up to you, to make sure your grades are up to par. Don’t disappoint us. You can be absolutely anything you want, Agnes. Anything.’
Mama Agnes wanted to be Mrs Father Reuben. She didn’t care if Massachusetts was part of the better world. Her ambitions stopped at the altar of a Catholic church somewhere in the Mashonaland District.
‘Oh, I was so foolish then …?!’
‘No, no no, Mama A, don’t be so unkind to yourself. You were in love. I, too, know what it is like to be in love.’
(Softly, softly, Zamani!)
One afternoon, after the Sunday service, she found herself strolling side by side with Father Reuben, listening attentively to one of his parabolic life-lessons, and daring to challenge his theories here and there. They were stumbling across one of the village’s narrow, rutted paths flanked by maize fields that stood spare in November. The maize stalks were slowly browning, as though they were being turned over the embers of a fire.
House of Stone Page 16