But at that time the farm was still his, and he felt safe burying his Ennis there, on the land of his forebears. The farming community came out to show its support, everyone, including Mrs Willoughby who, after several glasses of Gordon’s, put on her patois accent, garnered from a decade or so in Kingston with her first husband, the then British Commissioner, and began to throw stones at the black workers who had come to say goodbye to their madam, yelling, ‘Bomboclats! Ye rassholes done stick punani madam when masser ’way! Ye gon burn in hell! Pussyclaats! Ye shall burn at the stake! What fuckery dis be? Raas!’
‘Leave them be, Mrs Willoughby,’ said my surrogate grandpapa. ‘They’ve done nothing wrong. They are good boys. Honest, hardworking girls. They were not here when it happened.’
‘Wah di rass? So, what Bumborass done dis abomination?’
My surrogate grandpapa hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, finally. ‘I have no idea.’
O, but you must have suspected, surrogate grandpapa, deep down, you must have known!
‘It’s the dissidents!’ said old Richardson.
‘Yes! It’s the dissidents! They’ve been attacking the farms everywhere, all over Matabeleland!’
‘The munts are hiding them in their huts!’
‘Have you seen those President’s boys, what’s their name? The 5 Brigade. They’ve been teaching the munts a lesson!’
‘Serves them right! That’s what you get for harbouring terrs.’
‘Let them burn themselves to death. That’s all commies know how to do. And a black commie’s twice as dumb and ten times as worse.’
He would repeat a milder version of these sentiments to the reporter from The Chronicle who came down a few days later to research an article on the recent spates of dissident attacks on the white farms, which made the front page.
It was the dissidents who’d done unspeakable things to his Ennis and then killed her! No, no, he had no idea who it could be, how could he know? No, he hadn’t noticed any suspicious activity. No, no suspicious persons had visited the farm before the attack! Just those President’s boys causing quite a racket in the neighbourhood. They were much welcome in the community, the President’s boys! Doing a fine job of protecting the peace-loving citizens of Matabeleland and smoking out the dissidents! All the farmer wanted to do was to farm, to toil quietly on his land and provide food for the nation … No, no, he was happy with the new President, he was doing a fine job, especially with the dissidents, they, the farming community, were hundred per cent behind the government of the day, yes, yes, very good job.
The car ride from the cemetery three nights ago was a difficult one. We drove home in silence, this time with me in the front seat beside Abednego, though after what I had just heard, I really wouldn’t have minded climbing into the boot.
‘Zamani,’ he kept saying. ‘Zamani, I’m sorry.’
That was all he could say. I opened my mouth several times, but I, too, could find nothing to say. He could apologize to me as much as he wants, but forgiveness is not mine to give. Only Mrs Thornton can do that. Like it’s only within Bukhosi’s gift to forgive me; and it’s only within my gift to forgive Zacchaeus for letching after my Thandi. But are there some things that happen in life to make other things, which once seemed unforgivable, forgivable? Does my surrogate father’s grief and suffering make forgiveable what he did to Mrs Thornton? Has what happened to my Thandi – dammit – has what happened to my Thandi not made my Uncle Zacchaeus’s vices forgivable? Because I know how my Thandi’s death must have hurt him so! How he must have wept! How it drove him to near madness! Did he not, in the mid-’80s, right after her death, begin to scribble anti-establishment tracts that cut the government to the quick? Incisive, precise pieces that were so unlike his former, literary, wispy self.
Question marks everywhere: he was reported as having been seen on Bulawayo’s Herbert Chitepo Street, outside the High Court, on the day of the signing of the Unity Accord in 1987, that marriage covenant between His Most Excellent Excellency Robert Gabriel Mugabe who, nerding it out at the signing ceremony with his oversize glasses and a cheesy smile, had dissolved the Prime Ministership and assumed the all-encompassing role of President – Hail Bushollini! – and ol’ fatso boy Joshua Mqabuko kaNyongolo Nkomo who, once fat with joy and now fatter with sorrow, looked absolutely miserable, his chin flopping over his shirt collar, those small, laughing eyes that my Thandi used to love no longer laughing, although his smile was still measured and his chubby, handsome face contemplative. They sat side by side, the two Eminences, one lean, one fat, pomp and grief, and with a tacky signature here and a snazzy signature there, signed the past into oblivion as though it had never existed – ushering in forever-lasting peace between their two nationalist parties, ZANU (PF) and (PF) ZAPU.
Was he not consumed by anguish and also guilt, my Uncle Zacchaeus, as he stood on the front steps of the High Court building? To know that, as Thandi lay dying, he was busy entertaining unsaintly reveries of her, pumping his man pump in the shadows of the Sheldonian at Oxford, while pretending to admire the theatre building, to take in the neoclassical tower rising from the roof of its poly-sided rear, to study the ornate filigree of the Corinthian capitals playing artsy games with light and shadow.
I forgive you for lusting after my Thandi, Uncle Zacchaeus! I forgive you!
And can Abednego ever forgive Black Jesus? As Dumo used to say, one can’t just exist passively in the twenty-first century. One has to be, actively, an ethical citizen of our global village, seeing in others the mirror of what he sees in himself – humanity – and in himself what he presupposes to be in others – inhumanity. This was one of his sweetest sermons! The loftiest of his speeches, designed to elevate! And yet he, himself, despite admitting that our current oppressors, too, had been, also, once upon a time, victims of oppression under the fascist state of Rhodesia, from which they had learned well and whose lessons they were now applying full force in the jingoistic state of Zimbabwe, in spite of being able to realize all of this, he could not bring himself to recognize Black Jesus’s humanity.
‘There’s nothing human about that man!’ he exclaimed, tears streaming down his face.
And I don’t blame him! I don’t blame him for being unable to transcend this, and yet whenever I look in the mirror and see this face of mine which is as black as a velvet night, with my kissable lips and my finely sloping cheekbones, I can’t help but think what this, then, makes me.
And finally, I thought to myself as the car bumped along back home, Abednego crying and murmuring softly beside me, would Mama Agnes forgive me? I had sought to stir up the hornet’s nest just enough to send her running to my protective embrace and talking to my sympathetic ears, but as I looked over at my surrogate father, grinding his teeth as he stared out the windscreen, I worried that where I had hoped he might sting, he might actually be ready to kill.
It happened this morning. So soon! I woke up to the sound of shouting outside my pygmy room, voices clambering over one another, one angry, the other conciliatory. My surrogate father and Mama Agnes were arguing outside the house, Mama Agnes clutching a suitcase. She was leaving for South Africa to go and look for Bukhosi! My surrogate father was accusing her of trying to leave him. She kept asking, ‘Why would I do that, heh? Tell me, why would I leave you, after all these years?’ But it was no use; he kept yelling that she wasn’t going anywhere, the spit flying from his mouth into her face, making her grimace.
I turned away, not wanting to witness what I knew was coming. Just don’t kill her, I prayed. Don’t kill her. I put my fingers in my ears, clenched my eyes, and waited.
When I emerged from my room, ten minutes later, I found the suitcase broken open, clothes strewn across the yard. Abednego was nowhere to be seen. Mama Agnes was slumped against the wall, her mouth bleeding. But she was alive! Thank God. I gathered her in my arms and helped her into the house.
She remembers his first beating as though it were yesterday. It poured out of her in
sobs. I sat with her, rubbing her back, taking in the smell of her, cooing little encouragements as she told me about the first outing they went to, at the Sun Hotel, which had just been renovated to the Bulawayo Rainbow Hotel. She thought the lobby was gaudy, awash as it was in gold rills of light pouring from dangerous-looking contraptions that dangled from the ceiling, but Abednego insisted it looked ornate, a reflection of the patrons who frequented the place, he said, where you could perhaps spot a minister or two, if you were lucky, because it was that type of establishment, a place for real men with sta-tuuss qu-oo.
She was aggrieved by such unashamed displays of wealth, Mama Agnes, while her mama and her father and her one-armed brother Trymore and her sister Nto withered under a pitiless drought back in Kezi. It was no secret that this drought had been caused by the wandering ghosts of the dead from the terrible time right after our independence, ghosts which had risen from their mass graves in search of their true resting grounds.
The dress, too, aggrieved her; it was a pink, frivolous thing, which cinched her waist and ballooned out in useless layers of satin that made her legs itch. She would have enjoyed it, she really would have; but the thought of her family becoming pinched like sucked oranges back over there in Kezi made my surrogate father’s kindness feel like an affront.
Her precarious, pointy shoes made it impossible to walk, so she sort of slid across the slippery floors of the Rainbow Hotel lobby, like the teenagers she’d seen outside the town flats rolling on shoes with wheels. The real challenge, however, presented itself when it was time to eat. Seated in the hotel restaurant, and blinded by the country’s gold reserves spilling from the ceiling contraptions, she stared at the cutlery and found herself assaulted by a familiar panic.
She began to cry.
The flood burst through the dam of her lashes, surged down her cheeks, gathering the caked-on make-up and unacknowledged memories in its wake, and carried this flotsam to the bleached tablecloth.
Once the torrent began, it would not stop, and not even Abednego’s hisses, not even the pain of his hairy fingers pinching the skin of her arm, not even the concerned waiter’s polished enquiries delivered singsong in the Queen’s finest English, could curb it. But Abednego had already ordered, and proclaimed, rather too brightly, that the evening would go on, no doubt determined to enjoy the exorbitant outing he had used the greater part of a month’s salary on, although visibly shrinking in his seat, no doubt trying to hide from the real men with sta-tuuss qu-oo and the Ministers. He forced her to eat the steak – half done, peppered, with sour-sweet sauce and a sprinkle of parsley on top – even though she exclaimed through her tears, ‘But look, it’s not properly cooked!’, gagging at the sight of the semi-raw texture of the interior, the slough of blood. He slapped her hands when she picked up the piece of steak and tried to eat with her fingers.
‘Just do as I do, you’ve already embarrassed me enough, all this crying, always crying fornogoodreason … Now, pay attention, you start from the forks nearest to the plate like this, and you work your way out – no, now how would that blunt knife be able to cut the meat? You use that one there with the teeth, yes that’s right – no mani, you hold the knife with your left and the fork with your right – I don’t know why the knife was placed on the right and the fork on the left, the waiter must have made a mistake – right, now you hold the fork like this, see, and you stab, yes stab … You will swallow that damn meat or I will shove it down your throat I swear – eish, will you stop with the crying, mani, kanti what’s wrong with you?’
And swallow she did, retching, aghast at civilized society’s endorsement of such rawism. She was certain, as they drove back home, the radio turned to loud no doubt to drown out her whimpering, that she was in for a tongue lashing; and so she was surprised when my surrogate father slipped quietly into bed, and thought that perhaps her tears had frightened him. She’d try to explain, wouldn’t she, that it wasn’t her fault, that she didn’t know what was happening, that it just happened, anytime like so, like something refusing to be caged, snarling and threatening to devour her, and no matter what she did it just came out, just came out like so, and now she didn’t know what to do … But when she slid under the covers next to him, he descended upon her in a fury, his grip too firm, his fingers between her legs calculated to hurt, his plunge into her ripping apart yet more dams. The louder she cried, the harder he pounded; his teeth dug into her neck, the spanking of her buttocks turned into a wallop, and his moans were animalistic in her ears. She clamped a hand over her mouth, damming her snivels, the flesh between her legs raw.
The Box
I clutched my Mama A’s hand, trembling from the thrill of having her talking to me again. She looked so delicate then, my mama, her anguished face open, hiding nothing, and I wanted nothing more than to be there for her, to guide her through that Gehenna, if only so we could conquer it together! But I was afraid to ask about Bhalagwe, it felt too soon, and instead cooed: Was it after this outing at the Rainbow Hotel that she began to despise my surrogate father?
She had never questioned his love for her, nor hers for him, for, as everyone well knew, husbands loved their wives and wives had to find ingratiating ways of loving their husbands. She believed he loved her, in his own way. He was remorseful for these intermittent beatings, she was sure, though she never understood their source, such was their arbitrariness; had she known what triggered them she would have at least tried to abate them. And though he never acknowledged them or said out loud that he was sorry, he showed his remorse, and his love, by bringing her gifts, like the box he came lugging home one cold June day whose contents, once he had plugged it in and hit the switch, transformed her world into a Carrollian Wonderland.
He came home a few days later, from the Butnam Rubber Factory where he worked as floor manager, in one of his moods. At first, she mistook his twitching eyes for anger, but it was the alcohol, she soon realized. The alcohol accentuated the tiny red veins in the whites of his eyes, and made his eyeballs swell out of their sockets, so that even when he was laughing, he looked like a man perpetually aghast. Anger, on the other hand – good, clean, sober anger – narrowed his eyes into slits.
‘Why?’ he bellowed, slamming a paw against the bedroom wall. ‘Is the house not cleaned?’
She stared at his nose; the thing was busy quivering-quavering as though at any moment it would leap out of his face and lobby on his behalf.
‘I said. Why. Is this house dirty, when I have a wife who spends the whole day at home?’
‘The box,’ she mumbled, staring at the floor.
‘What?’ He cocked his ear and brought his face close to hers, so that she was forced to look at him.
She pointed vaguely in the direction of the living room. ‘That box you brought last week. It has people who talk and move all day long.’
That paw, with its open palm and its fingers wide apart, shuddered with the threat of a slap. She shut her eyes. Waited for it, waited for it … She could feel his body shaking. But there was no sting on her cheek. When she opened her eyes, his wide face was arched away from her, his shoulders shaking, his mouth wide open, though no sound ushered from his lips.
She smiled uncertainly. Was it funny that she hadn’t cleaned the house? He wouldn’t beat her? Wouldn’t return her home and disgrace her mother with accusations of having brought up a lazy daughter?
‘So, you mean to tell me that you have done nothing the whole day but watch TV? All day long?’
She chuckled, gaining her confidence. ‘The people in the box, they would not stop talking and moving.’
He shook his head. ‘You, my wife … Goodness. All right. You want me to treat you like a child? I’ll treat you like a child. I suppose I’ll have to lock up the TV every morning before I leave. You are a nincompoop.’
She smiled when he said ‘nincompoop’ in English. Nincompoop, she had never heard that word before, she liked the sound of it, it sounded so, so, so romantic, the way he said it softly, with t
ickles in his eyes, the same way he called her ‘sweetie-licious’ or ‘baby-luscious’ or ‘long-lasting-chapis’.
She practised that word carefully – ‘nin-kho-m-phoop’ – so that, the following evening, as he licked her neck and panted ‘My strawberry-yoghurt’ in her ear, she throatily whispered back, ‘My nin-kho-m-phoop,’ and locked herself in the toilet when he slapped her, cursing – ‘Disrespectful! How dare …?!’ – where she scrunched up into as small a ball as she could manage, just like she had seen the black woman from America in the box do, and cried tears she was sure would never cease.
She managed to convince him to keep the box in the living room – ‘I will clean, Baba, I promise’ – where she watched, animated, as the people went about their lives over-there-yonder in Massachusetts-America: Cheers, The Cosby Show, Growing Pains, Diff’rent Strokes, and a nunu called Alf. Though she always made sure to pretend not to know the goings-on of the box when Abednego was home, in case he accused her of liking it too much and threatened to lock it up again. He was a jealous man, this husband of hers, and anything she seemed to pay more attention to than him, he took away. But as soon as the Peugeot 504 reversed out of the yard every morning, she lunged for the remote control, only switching off her beloved box when she saw the car headlights turning into the yard in the evening.
‘How was your day?’
‘Oh, all right, Baba, I scrubbed the curtains, did some spring cleaning in the bedroom, and read the paper.’
‘You don’t seem interested in the TV these days, how come?’
House of Stone Page 21