With all the documents approved and stamped, O’D phoned Fortescue and he sent his driver Mescheck to pick up the timber.
In the blue Gaz, O’D followed the lorry to the border, seeing it through Machipanda without any complications and waving Mescheck goodbye when he drove across the Munene River towards Forbes Border Post.
An hour or so later, O’D was back in Chimoio and sitting with Caetano at the Sports Clube when the hammer blows began to rain down on them. Bad news came thick and fast, just like the messengers who had come to tell Job of his losses.
The first messenger to arrive was Momahd. Returning from Machaze on a chappa, he had terrible, heart-stopping news about Alfixa, our chainsaw operator.
Alfixa had cut down a tree, Momahd told O’D and Caetano, and when he had leapt out of its way while it was falling, he had caught his foot in some undergrowth and had, himself, fallen ... right in its path! The tree had crashed down on top of one of his legs, crushing and smashing it.
“We carried him to the only clinic in the area,” Momahd went on, “but the people there couldn’t do anything to help. So we hired a driver and his pickup and we took Alfixa across the Zimbabwean border to Chipinge, the nearest place to Machaze where there is a hospital.”
The journey to Chipinge had taken two long and agonising days in the dilapidated old car and by the time the doctor at the hospital had examined Alfixa’s leg, it was rotten and full of maggots.
“The doctor cut off Alfixas’ leg,” Momahd said. “He cut it off above the knee.”
While they were listening, appalled, to the awful accident that had happened to Alfixa, another messenger arrived at the Sports Clube with bad news from Faruk, O’D’s Indian shopkeeper friend.
There had been several phone calls for O’D on Faruk’s shop phone, Faruk’s messenger told O’D and Caetano, as well as some faxes on Faruk’s shop fax machine. The calls and the faxes had all been from someone called Fortescue who had had a very loud shouting voice over the phone and although Faruk couldn’t understand a word of English, it hadn’t been difficult to get the idea that this Fortescue had been very angry about something.
Still benumbed by the news about Alfixa, O’D and Caetano hurried off to Faruk’s shop. What had gone wrong now? Inside, Faruk handed over some long white pieces of paper.
Scrawled in extremely large and menacing black handwriting, the faxes read:
MESCHECK IS STUCK WITH THE LORRY AT THE BORDER!
ERRORS IN EXPORT PAPERS!
MY LORRY IS NEEDED IN SOUTH AFRICA URGENTLY!
YOU BETTER DO SOMETHING TO UNSTICK THE LORRY - OR ELSE!!!!
It seemed we had been sabotaged! The paper Caetano had handed to the Customs official in Beira and which the man had handed back to him, telling him it was no longer needed, was apparently vital to the export. Without it, Fortescue would have to pay extremely high import duties on the wood he had bought from us!
Dazed by these events and trying to gather his wits together, O’D phoned Fortescue.
“I’m going to send another driver to the border with a car,” Fortescue told O’D, knowing our situation with regard to vehicles. “Mescheck can meet you in Chimoio with this car and take you to Beira to get the missing paper stamped.”
By the time the Beira Chamber of Commerce had dealt with the missing paper, Fortescue’s lorry had been stuck at the border for three days and our popularity rating with Fortescue had sunk to an all-time low. In fact, he never again gave us another order and his was the first and last export of timber we ever did.
Alfixa received excellent treatment at Chipinge hospital. Taking the loss of his leg philosophically, he told us that it had happened because ‘it was his time’. At first, he learned to walk with crutches and then later, when he was ready for it, we took him to a clinic in Beira where he was measured and fitted with a brown plastic leg. It was a very cheap leg, but it was all that was available, and every now and then he complained that the screws were coming lose and O’D would make him take it off and fix it for him.
By now our stress levels had risen to a new high and the news that Uwe was still at Arrojela and in our house didn’t help. The power of Mozambican witch doctors, it appeared, could not extend across continents and had no effect on big belligerent Germans. It was time we started issuing threats of our own.
Writing one last fax to our unwelcome tenant, we told him how much money we were going to lose because of his actions and that if he didn’t get out of our house right away, we were going to take him to court no matter how long it would take and sue him for damages for the loss of our house and the losses he had caused to our company.
This fax brought a reaction from Uwe. Contacting Willy, he told him that he would agree to leave our house but only on one condition. That he could continue to live there for another two months … RENT FREE!
“I wish we could afford to hire a hit man,” I told O’D.
There was nothing for it but to agree to Uwe’s outrageous demands.
Later on, we discovered why Uwe had been so reluctant to move out of Arrojela. He had bought a plot of land and had been busy building a house. As his house wasn’t quite ready for habitation, he had decided to remain nicely ensconced in ours.
Although the success of his blackmail sweetened Uwe’s mood and he graciously allowed Willy to bring people to look Arrojela over, the damage his recalcitrance had done couldn’t be repaired. We had run out of time and the best buyers had been driven away. In a hurry now, we were forced to accept the only offer Willy received, an offer that was thirty thousand pounds well below Arrojela’s value.
The day I lost Arrojela I put on a black T-shirt and black jeans to match my black mood. Sitting in a chair in the sitting room, I brooded on the terrible loss of my lovely house and of my security. Everyone had assured me that Arrojela would be safe, would never slip out of my hands … and now it belonged to someone else! I would never again cook in the pretty kitchen with the hand-painted tiles of purple grapes and ochre pears from Lisbon, never again amble through the hills, along paths so heavily scented with the fragrance of wild herbs, never again escape from the sun by sitting on the shady banks of the stream and cooling my feet in the running water …
This was all Chuck’s fault! And Carmen’s!
If Chuck hadn’t interfered and messed up our plans for Matsinho, we would never have come to the Nhamacoa, never have had to take a loan out on Arrojela. And as for Carmen’s contribution to my loss, if she hadn’t been so incompetent and taken so long to get the paperwork in order, we wouldn’t have had this trouble in paying John Phillips back.
O’D came into the sitting room for a drink of water. “Why are you looking like a Hell’s Angel?” he asked me.
“Because I feel like one,” I said. “This is how losing my house makes me feel. It makes me wish I had a motorcycle and could drive it backwards and forwards over Chuck and Carmen.”
“It was my house, too,” O’D said, and turned to hurry outside to avoid what he knew was coming.
“It’s not the same for a man,” I said, talking to his rapidly retreating back and beginning to lose it. “A woman’s house is A WOMAN’S HOUSE! And look at what I’ve got IN ITS PLACE! A broken-down, window-less, grass-roofed shack in the middle of nowhere that ISN’T EVEN MIIIIIIINE!”
Frustratedly left to myself, I mulled over my loss, wondering in amazement and some disbelief at how people we barely knew could have had such a damaging effect on our lives. And how none of them had even cared about what they had done, even getting angry with us! Chuck rushing off like that, making out that we were too difficult, Carmen angrily demanding an apology from O’D … and as for Uwe … UWE! causing us to lose thirty thousand pounds on Arrojela …
How untrustworthy and dishonest everyone was!
A tear trickled down my cheek and plopped onto my black T- shirt. I had planned to grow old at Arrojela but now I knew I would never see it again.
At the end of the year, Steven, our night guard, fe
ll ill with malaria and although O’D took him to Chimoio Hospital where they dosed him with a course of chloroquine he never seemed able to shake off the illness. He lost weight and his once powerful physique shrank until his clothes hung on him and he was just a shadow of the man he’d been when he’d first come to work for us.
O’D and I wondered if Steven’s loss of weight meant that he had AIDS but our workers told us that he was smoking a lot of mbanje and even sprinkling large quantities of the drug onto his sadza at mealtimes as if it was a condiment!
Then one Sunday morning at about 10 o’clock, Steven stumbled down the track towards our house and collapsed down onto the dry brittle yellow grass just outside our front door. He lay on his back on the ground with his eyes closed and in a weak voice told us he was dying.
He certainly looked in a bad way. His chest was heaving up and down erratically and his whole body was trembling.
Alarmed, I looked up from Steven and at O’D. “You’d better take him to hospital right away!”
Steven’s eyes flickered open. “No,” he gasped, “I don’t want to go to Chimoio. I want to go home to Masvingo. I want to die in my own country, Zimbabwe.”
“Well,” O’D said doubtfully, “I can give you the wages we owe you, Steven, but you don’t look as if you’re in any condition to travel.”
Steven closed his eyes again. Sweat streamed down his face and trickled off his neck, onto the ground. “I want to go back home to Masvingo,” he insisted, “I want to go back to Zimbabwe.”
“Alright,” O’D gave in. He went into the house and came back with Steven’s wages, as well as a bonus of some Zimbabwe dollars we still had from the days when we used to cross the border to buy things and to visit friends. He put the money into Steven’s right hand and Steven clutched the notes to his chest.
“I will rest here for a while,” he told us.
We stood over Steven while he lay on the ground. I shook my head at O’D. We were looking down on a man who was not going to get his wish to die at home in Masvingo. Steven probably wouldn’t even make it back to his hut in the Nhamacoa. How sad, how terribly terribly sad.
Steven’s lips moved and he mumbled something from the battered Bible he had always carried around with him until it had fallen to pieces and the pages had blown away in the wind. This gave me an idea. I went into the house and came out with my own Bible. Compared to Steven’s Bible, mine looked almost new although I’d had it for years. I took it with me wherever I went, like some talisman or good luck charm but shamefully, unlike Steven, I never read or opened it unless I wanted to find the answer to a Biblical clue in a crossword puzzle.
“Here, Steven.” I bent down and carefully placed my Bible onto his chest. “Here’s a new Bible for you.”
Books were expensive, precious luxuries for Africans and he would, I knew, never be able to buy another Bible for himself. If he lived, of course.
Steven’s left hand eagerly clutched the Bible to his chest. Unlike the money in his right hand, the Bible seemed to calm him … even to strengthen him a little. After lying on the ground for another half an hour or so, he managed to raise himself up and swaying a little, walked weakly off down the forest track, beginning his journey back to Masvingo.
“I wonder if he’ll get there,” I murmured.
“Who knows,” O’D replied.
Just before Christmas, I decided to have a springclean. Chuck had never come back for the stuff he and Eileen had left behind and as a whole year had gone by with no sign of him, I decided to give everything to our workers.
In the room underneath the house, I opened the cardboard boxes into which I had packed all their things, and got something of a surprise. Where were all Chuck and Eileen’s blankets and pillows, their pots and pans, their plates, their soup bowls, their cups, their glasses, their knives and forks? Box after box was empty!
Kneeling in front of the last box, I opened it up and peered inside. Oh, this one actually still seemed to have something in it … there, in the corner … Putting my hand down inside the box, I pulled the object out. It was an old pink knitted teacosy with a moth hole in it.
Holding the old teacosy in my hands, I sat back on my heels. Well, well, well. It seemed that the workers had already known what my thoughts were going to be long before I had even known them and that throughout the year, they had helped themselves to all the contents of the boxes during the long, dark nights.
I was beginning to get the idea that the human race was a stuff up. Was there anyone out there who could still be trusted?
I dropped Eileen’s old teacosy back into the cardboard box and stood up. “Happy Christmas, everyone,” I said, “and goodwill to all men.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE RETURN OF NORA SWETE
1997
After Steven left, we turned some of our workers into night guards and they armed themselves with pangas and large sticks and reluctantly and nervously patrolled around the house and the woodsheds. They weren’t at all happy about this because there was a ghost roaming around the sawmill after dark and several local people had seen it, down by the river and at other times near the house and the saw.
This was the first time O’D and I had heard about the sawmill ghost but our new guards assured us that it did exist and that it terrified all who saw it by moving towards them threateningly with flashing red and green lights.
“Red and green flashing lights …” O’D said, musingly. “Sounds like traffic lights …”
“You know what I think?” I asked O’D, as I often did.
He gave me a look. “No, I have no idea what you’re thinking,” he replied, as he often did.
“I think this ‘ghost’ they’re talking about was Steven’s lantern.” After Nunes’ prostitutes had kicked Steven’s lantern, it had developed a fault and had irritatingly flashed on and off all the time. “The locals were probably frightened when he wandered around at night and all they could see was this flashing light.”
“Mmm,” O’D said thoughtfully. “You could be right … and there could be some benefits in this for us.”
Hopefully, these stories of the flashing phantom would spread all over the area and prove to be a better deterrent than our reluctant guards at keeping the thieves away.
Early one morning, about two weeks after Steven had left for Masvingo, I wandered into the sitting room. Biasse and Seven were standing in the room and I noticed that both of them wore worried expressions on their faces. I opened my mouth to say good morning but before I could utter a word, Biasse got in first.
“I dunno about your radio, Madam,” he said.
I looked at him blankly for a moment. ‘I dunno about your radio’ was a decidedly strange way to greet me at the start of a new day.
“What about my radio, Biasse?”
“It is gone, Madam.”
Gone? I turned towards the bookcase and was shocked to see that Biasse was right. The spot where my radio had stood for the last two years was … empty! Despair gripped my heart. The chance of finding another shortwave radio was practically zero, especially in Mozambique. Oh, what a disaster!
I ran out of the sitting room, out of the front door. Outside, I gave a loud scream of anguish.
My scream was so loud that everyone heard it, even over the sound of the generator and the whine of the saw. Everything ground to a sudden halt. Startled, our workers turned to stare in my direction. O’D come running up to me, alarm all over his face.
“My radio’s gone!” I screamed, close to tears at the loss of the only companion, the only friend, I had in this solitary life I was leading. “GONE! Someone stole it in the night! I can’t live here without my radio! I can’t! I just CAN’T!”
O’D put a comforting arm around me. “We’ll get it back,” he assured me. “We did the last time it was stolen. Remember? That time when we went off to Harare for a long weekend and the Tabex guard stole it from under Biasse’s nose?”
I shook my head, hopelessly. Findin
g a radio thief in the forest wouldn’t be as easy as finding the thief on the Tabex farm. “No, we won’t get it back this time. I know we won’t.”
Biasse thoughtfully brought up the kettle from the cook hut for coffee and I calmed down a little. Desperate for the return of my radio, I came up with an idea.
“What about offering a reward for it?” I suggested. “If it hasn’t gone too far, someone will know who has it.”
The word went out through our workers. A reward was offered and a promise that secrecy would shroud the identity of any informer.
Three days went by, days that were incredibly long and incredibly silent.
Then one morning, Cinco Metro sidled up to the open sitting room window and, dramatically looking around to make sure that no one was watching, put a hand over his mouth and, from behind his palm, whispered “There is a man here with a secret”.
“Oh, and what is this secret, Cinco Metro?” I asked.
“Sshh!” He hissed and looked around dramatically again, thoroughly enjoying himself. “He has come about the reward. He wants to speak to the boss about it.”
My heart gave a thump of hope. This had to be news about my radio!
“Well then,” I whispered back at Cinco Metro, “go and call the boss … but do it secretly, for Heavens sakes!”
Delighted with my instructions, Cinco Metro rushed off to get O’D.
When O’D walked up from the sawmill, a young man with twisted legs and a pole for a crutch moved laboriously over to speak to him. After a few minutes of more whispered conversation with O’D, he left.
“What’s up?” I asked O’D. “Is this anything to do with my radio?”
O’D nodded his head. “Might be. Apparently, his uncle recently bought a radio with two aerials like ours … from Steven ...”
My mouth fell open. “Steven!”
“… and paid him for it with thirty two chickens.”
Monkeys in My Garden Page 26