The service was already in full swing when we arrived; Formica chairs faced the makeshift stage, and a banner that read ‘PRAIZE JESUS HAMENI HALLELUJAH’ was draped across the exposed beams of the ceiling above the altar.
Mama Agnes made us waddle all the way to the third row, which would afford her a privileged view of the Reverend Pastor.
‘Glory glory!’ she screeched, in tandem with the choir, clinging to the faces of Bukhosi. Glory glory we sang, and the House of the Lord tromboned, the angels came down and gave us a Hallelujah, we gave them an Amen, but they weren’t satisfied and trilled Haaaalleeeeluuuujah, and we were electrified and cheeped Haaaaaaameni bo God is Goooooood, and that was good, and we were good, and all was good, and the good Reverend Pastor galloped down the centre aisle and gambolled onto the makeshift stage. We clapped Hallelujah and he bowed Amen.
He tinkered with his laptop, balanced on the podium, and cleared his throat:
‘Boom boom, is that the sound of a soul tripping?’ He cupped his ear. ‘A piece of heart sticking onto a piece of paper? A bit of thought left over to dry on a page? You wander the corridors of your mind like a vagabond on Robert Mugabe Way, two cheeks smacking the truth from your buttocks, that truth running like the lies from your mouth, your heart implodes and thought explodes—’
‘Bukhosi!’ yelled Mama Agnes.
‘Boom boom!’
‘Boom boom your back sags because your heart has so much to carry, tuck in a loaf a half pint and a bag of sugar, add some flimsy bearer’s cheques to that mess why don’t you, all borrowed from that old woman from next door, who wipes from her brow the sweat of her children yes them, them nurses them nannies them bum-wipers yes them, them pounding the pounds in the UK yes them, there is so much to carry there is too much to carry, so much so that you forget what you are carrying, so much so that you forget what you shouldn’t be carrying, and now you carry everything and forget where you are going.’
‘Bukhosi—’
‘Boom boom!’
‘Boom boom you stand in queues all day waiting for something to happen, in the end you forget what it is you are waiting for, listen as you say, Oh oh oh look at what Mugabe has done, and then you are laughing like Mugabe is the funniest man, listen as you say:
‘Yo hayi ah shuwa look at the price of everything going up all the time how are we gonna survive how are we gonna survive hayi ah shuwa sesidiniwe we are tired
‘At least the opposition can do us better
‘The opposition is a puppet of the West you woman you don’t be stupid Zimbabwe shall never be a colony again
‘Well we suffered then we are suffering now
‘Not to worry we have our angel Robert Gabriel
‘“Blair keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe.”.’
‘BUKHOSI—’
‘Boom boom!’
‘Boom boom you laugh at yourself at the irony of your suffering, garbled sounds escaping from mangled throats, thus the chaos from without has been taken, ripped apart and sewn back together, uglier now than it was before, tattering already at the seams. But the chaos within ferments and if someone were to ask you would not be able to explain why, all you know is that something rots from within. Something rots within because the things of this world rot within, I say something rots within because the things of this world rot within, I say the things of this world rot, I say give me a Ha-le-llluuuu-jaaaaah-Amen!’
‘Hallelujah-Amen!’
‘I can’t hear you!’
‘Hallelujah-Amen!’
‘Jesus can’t hear you!’
‘Hallelujah-AMEN!’
‘Yessus!!! Jesu-Christu-amen.’
‘BUKHOSI!’
The Reverend Pastor’s sermon was interrupted by a truck that had pulled up outside Buscod Supermarket next door, its back laden with mealie-meal and sugar and cooking oil. I joined those who were watching the commotion below from the windows; a manic crowd was descending upon the truck. I shilly-shallied, but only for a moment, casting Mama Agnes a sheepish smile as I gathered my belongings and followed the sinners who were already shuffling out.
For all my shoving and elbowing in that crowd, I didn’t manage to get any blooma bread or mealie-meal or sugar or cooking oil, although I did earn myself plenty of bruises. When I went back into the church, Mama Agnes had already disappeared with the Reverend Pastor, probably off to the Mguza River to collect holy water. Collecting holy water by the river … By the river they first lay. (She, recounting their tryst all those years ago by the Mpopoma River with such amorousness, eyes aglitter, bosom aflutter, forgetting conveniently how the man had taken advantage of her, how instead of renouncing his priesthood and marrying her, he had left her crying a river.) Would my Mama Agnes dare to …? She would never … Would she?
I admit I was a little angry with Mama Agnes, angry at myself but angry at her too, for falling for the Reverend Pastor’s charms, for being someone he could so easily turn against me, even after the work we had both done to build the foundations of our budding relationship. The idea of her having such a weakness thrilled me, for it would be something I could hold over her, she who was holier than thou. But more than delighted, it would make me sad, because then our relationship would not be built on love, as I had been trying so hard to do, to win her over and gain her affection; it would be predicated on fear. How far could that take me?
Anyway, all of this was speculation at this point, and I really was grasping at straws, but one thing was evident, from what Mama Agnes had told me about the Reverend Pastor and from the reasons he had been excommunicated from the Catholic order: the man had a weakness for the skirt. Such a defect, starting all the way back from his youth, surpassing even his love for God during his days as a priest, was surely chronic.
I hoped.
The pattern was there, wasn’t it?
It was so easy that I was almost disappointed in him. A nemesis is only valued as a nemesis if they are our equal; and it was hard to consider the Reverend Pastor an equal when, after only seven days, I wandered into his office at Blessed Anointings to find him between Sister Gertrude’s legs, Sister Gertrude who was spreadeagled across his desk like a chicken offering itself for the plucking. (Ha! The man’s affliction is more serious than I thought. He needs a dose of the marathon prayers he is always performing for his congregants. He he he!) At first, they didn’t see me, so engrossed were they in their ardour. I retrieved my Nokia from my pocket, angled it at them and began to take photos. By this point, Sister Gertrude must have clocked me, because she began to moan theatrically, like a brothel-queen, quite unbecoming for a Sister, but very good for the camera. The Reverend Pastor, taking her moans for encouragement, thrust between her legs with renewed vigour.
I couldn’t help it; I started laughing.
His head snapped up. Yes, I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to see that I had seen him. He leapt off Sister Gertrude, bumping into the chair behind him, his hands covering his rod of iron. Sister Gertrude groped to pull him back to her. ‘Deliver me, Pastor … Deliver me!’ She was earning her money.
I smiled. ‘Say “cheese.”’
I snapped another shot of them both, his hands raised, like someone had shouted, ‘Freeze!’, Sister Gertrude squashing her breasts to her bosom. I winked at him. And then I spun on my heel and walked out the door, leaving it ajar. I could hear him calling after me.
‘Zamani! Wai – Zamani!’
It felt so good to hear someone call my name with such yearning.
*
I found it quite ironic when I walked into town six days ago that it was I who was now seeking out a brothel, an indictment for which I had only been too willing to crucify my surrogate father some weeks before when I had suspected him of such slutty business. The place was as dingy as a brothel can get, squashed between a night club and a bar, on Fourteenth Avenue. It was narrow, and surprisingly packed for a Wednesday night, with a bar to the right, and a string of chairs without tables to the left, and a na
rrow walkway in between. The lighting was poor. The air was rancid, thick with all sorts of odours; the creamy smells of pudenda, of coitus, of used rubber.
The moment I entered, I was accosted by several women, each murmuring what they could do for me, demanding that I do things to them, throwing out prices like market dealers. I tried to extricate myself, murmuring that I was unavailable, to which they protested. I squinted at them to see if any one of them was what I was looking for. I felt a hand grab my property, then, quite possessively, at that, and, upon finding me limp and unexcited, it began to rub me, slowly at first and then, finding me not only unexcited but unexcitable, with vigorous professionalism. Oh, the poor strumpet! If only she knew that nothing short of a handsome maturity would do it for me, nothing but the umber face and lilting voice of my inamorata-turned-succubus as I had imagined her during my surrogate father’s telling! Nothing else could excite me, not her pair of voluptuous breasts, the nipples hard against her see-through blouse; not the supple curve of her youthful hips; her alluring eyes flutter-fluttering, her ruby lips parted, the tip of her tongue visible. Not for me, not for me, no one but my Thandi would do for me!
It was in this way that I met Sister Gertrude, or Getty, as she introduced herself to me, rubbing my property and then, when it became evident that I was immune to her charms, quite aggressively, with impressive determination. It was this that made me pick her. Lifting her hand from my groin, I pulled her away from her brothel-sisters, and asked her where we could go to be alone. This seemed to please her, and she led me away triumphantly, pulling me by my belt, swinging her hips in exaggerated movements, no doubt a victory walk for her sisters, but also for my benefit; a worthy show, I admit, but totally wasted on me.
She took us to one of the brothel’s back rooms, which had just enough space for a single bed and a chair. I asked her to switch on the light, to which she obliged, murmuring, ‘Oh, you are one of those who likes to see, heh.’
Under the bulb light, I could see that she was older than she had first seemed in the dim lighting up front, probably closer to thirty than twenty. Good; I would need experience on my side, I thought, that and charm, and determination, and prowess. She had so far exhibited the first three. She began to slip out of her see-through blouse and belt-skirt, her smile coquettish, her eyes no longer alluring now but quite calculating as she took me in, sitting not on the bed, but the chair.
‘What would you want?’ she asked, dropping the coquettish voice.
‘I’d like to get down to some real business,’ I replied, pulling out a thick wad of notes.
He had to be stopped, you see. First, Mama Agnes told my surrogate father about my altercation with the Reverend Pastor. The man stormed into my pygmy room on Wednesday morning, yelling at me to get up and get out. He had been watching me, he said, he had known all along something was up, and now he knew what it was. I didn’t want the family to know where Bukhosi was because I was helping him with this girl of his he had run off to. Was she pregnant, was that it? I had to stop listening to the boy, stop protecting him and listen to him, Abednego! He was the parent, he had a right to know where his son was. I wanted to deprive him of the chance to make things right with the boy, didn’t I?
I knew Mama Agnes could hear him from inside the house, and I hoped she would come out and defend me. But she didn’t, and that was when I knew the Reverend Pastor was finally getting to her.
My first instinct was to give my surrogate father some ubuvimbo. I hissed at him to lower his voice, ready to retrieve the root powder, but this only made him yell louder, and I was afraid to give it to him right there, what with him acting out and Mama Agnes in the house. I yelled, for Mama Agnes’s benefit, that I was hurt (which I was, his acrimony hurt me very much, especially the way he was kicking me out like I was a dog. Did I mean absolutely nothing to him? We’d been through so much together. He was only speaking out of anger, I know that, he was angry, and he was hurt, but so was I!). I was hurt by his words, I shouted, especially after all I had done to convince the boy to come back. It had been his fault that the boy had left in the first place, and now he was taking out his failings on me.
This didn’t deter him, but only made him angrier. He began to fling my clothes out of the pygmy room, shouting that I was a menace and I would leave his house if he had to drag me out himself.
‘All right, I’ll leave,’ I hissed, so Mama A wouldn’t hear us. ‘But not before I tell Ma what you did to Mrs Thornton. Yes, I’m going to tell Ma, and I’m going to tell Farmer Thornton, and I’m going to tell everybody. I’m going to tell Bukhosi, too. Yes, I’ll write to him and tell him.’
The man froze. I could see him practically shrinking. I hated it, having to do that to him. I was surprised to feel these things! Yes, I had grown to care for him, in spite of myself, in spite of everything he was and had done, and I didn’t want to see him hurt. These were frightening emotions, threatening to overwhelm me, I didn’t know what to do with them, but I could sense their minatory power, how they could derail my carefully calibrated plans.
He dropped the boy’s Nike shirt, which he was holding, ready to fling out with the rest of my things, and shambled out of my pygmy room, suddenly an old, crumpled man. I watched him go, watched him trudge into the house and disappear in there, not even bothering to shut the door. I stood there for a while, my chest heaving. Finally, I gathered my things, which were flapping about in the backyard where he had flung them, and put them back in my pygmy room.
I went to see the Reverend Pastor later that afternoon, after his lunchtime service, to find out how far he was with his machinations, and was happy to learn that his IT guys had had a glitch while trying to retrieve the FB messages; they couldn’t seem to find them, he said, eyeing me with suspicion, at least that’s what I thought it was. I was sick with worry, feeling at any moment as though I would throw up. I began to shout, my voice cracking, asking him what kind of amateurs these IT guys of his were, it had already been a day and still I hadn’t got my laptop back, and I wanted it, it was mine. None of my shouting helped; the fly simply would not give the laptop back, declaring that he would discover the boy’s location. The more I shouted, the more obstinate he became, and I realized that he, like my surrogate father and perhaps now my Mama Agnes, believed I knew where the boy was but didn’t want to give up his location.
With each passing day, I felt the Reverend Pastor and his IT guys closing in on me on one end, and the acrimony of my surrogate family pushing me away on the other. I couldn’t sleep, feeling quite ill, and couldn’t bring myself to face my surrogate father but especially Mama Agnes. And so, I badgered poor Sister Gertrude, resorting to pleas and threats, anything I thought could make her work faster.
It was three days ago, on Saturday evening, that I received a text from her telling me that she had finally had a meeting with the Reverend Pastor, and she had ‘made progress’; she would be seeing him again at his offices on Monday after the evening service.
It was the perfect honey trap for a man with a weakness for sweetness. I was right to trust the man’s hi-story with women. Did that Reverend Nobody really think he could take me on? Did he really think he could come out as the hero in all of this, mooching off my hard work, destroying my relations with my surrogate family?
BOOK THREE
Uncle Fani’s House
I feel myself changing, undergoing hydrolysis – for the body is but a land mass steeped in seventy per cent water – darkening as I come into contact with hi-story’s iron particles, cleaving my being from the present to form new bonds with the past. Perhaps I shall succeed in saying of the past, ‘Thus I willed it.’ Perhaps it is yet to do a number on me, denying me the pleasure of becoming a self-made man, one who has transcended hi-story and got hold of the present, and is thus able to rule the future.
I’ve been trying to understand why I find myself here today, as the man that I am, a man wrestling with that fiction of many versions, hi-story. It is through hi-story’s shadow
that we conquer the past, this past in which nothing can live but from which everything springs.
When I returned from my travels abroad earlier this year, in February, I found the country living in hi-story. Everywhere, odes to the past were being composed, sung, recited; here, the past lived more vividly than the present, for there was no future that could be seen, no future to be imagined. Each time somebody important, like Uncle Zacchaeus, tried to talk about the future, they quickly became part of the past, in this way encouraging us to always look back.
I, too, feeling this strong pull of the past when I returned home, went in search of mine; first to Tshipisane, the village where my mama and my family come from, with the hope, quite an illogical hope, now that I look back – like Trymore – of finding their remains so as to give them a proper burial. I was refused access to enter Antelope Mine by a pudgy, self-important guard, where I had hoped to uncover what had once been Bhalagwe. The landscape was dry and unyielding, scattered with several markings of mass graves, in the form of rushes placed over an area or branches boxing in a piece of the ground. None of the graves were labelled, and it was only thanks to the locals that I was able to identify them for what they were. Whenever I mentioned that word, Gukurahundi, though, I was met with shakes and fears, trembling, blubbering, and advised to leave the area immediately.
This one word, Gukurahundi, you only have to say it slowly, in order to understand its weight:
Gu – that’s a hard g, like go – and I can imagine her, my mama, as she went, bundled into the back of a truck as a teenage girl with those, like Mama Agnes, from neighbouring villages, my Uncle Fani by her side, my Cousin Khohlwa with them, bundled by the Men in the Red Berets, with Black Jesus leading the charge.
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