Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  Nothing had changed. Rungo still appeared to have some mysterious problem with us and while our licences continued to lie unsigned, the worst finally happened and our money ran out.

  Without money, we weren’t able to pay the wages. And without their wages, our workers weren’t able to buy any food. Our food supplies also began to run out and when one day, I used the same teabag over and over again for cups of tea that grew progressively paler and paler, I knew we had sunk to a new low. Panic began to rise up in me. We had been through hard times before but never like this. We were going to starve!

  Then, our fuel ran out.

  Without fuel, we weren’t able to use the diesel generator. And without the generator, we weren’t able to pump water up from the borehole. A few days later, the water tank ran dry.

  WE WERE NOW WITHOUT WATER! WITHOUT WATER TO BATH … WITHOUT WATER FOR COOKING … WITHOUT WATER TO DRINK!

  Who could we go to for help? Family and friends in Zimbabwe who might have been able to give us some support had all fled the country or were in situations as bad as ours. We were caught tight in the vice-like grip of Mozambican corruption and there was no one to turn to for rescue.

  The terrible stress we’d been living under for so long now started to affect us in different ways.

  During the day, O’D kept his mind and hands occupied by repairing our equipment. In the evenings after work, he read books and I could only imagine how he must have been feeling because he never spoke to me. And so, I lived in a silent world with only my own thoughts for company. I didn’t even have Biasse to talk to anymore and I had stopped talking to God after Caetano had died.

  Caetano’s death preyed on my mind. Some weeks after the funeral, O’D had bumped into a nurse he knew and for a while they had spoken about Caetano and how he had died. “It’s the opinion of the Chimoio medical profession” the nurse had told O’D “that Caetano was over-medicated.”

  Although the nurse’s words confirmed what most of us suspected, that Caetano had been killed by the incompetence of a doctor (a not uncommon occurrence in Africa) dying in the middle of the trial seemed too much of a coincidence to me, especially when I took into account how Westh had benefitted from our tragedy.

  The timing of Caetano’s death also worked on my mind. If he had died before the trial had begun or after the trial had ended and the Sentence had been passed, I would have let it go. But Caetano had been alive on the day the Sentence was supposed to have been passed, only to find that it had been delayed, put off because Judge Magaia had suddenly become ill …

  How neatly everything had fallen into place, just as neatly as it had done when Samsone Joao had come to murder me.

  “Do you think Caetano died because of witchcraft, Jinho?” I asked him one day.

  He thought for a moment. “It’s possible, Vaal.”

  “He was afraid of Westh’s workers. He thought they had gone to a feiticeiro about him.”

  Jinho looked dubious.

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been Westh, would it? He’s from Europe.”

  “But living with a Mozambican woman now. Haven’t you heard? His wife left him and went back to Denmark.”

  “Oh, did she now? I wonder why she left him?” I mused.

  “It’s something we will never know,” Jinho told me.

  In the night, the forest drums took over my sleep and began to torment me. Invading the bedroom with their loud booming sound, they pounded in my head, making me dream strange dreams.

  I dreamed of a worker arriving back from Gondola where Caetano had last worked felling panga panga, and telling me that he had found a letter from Caetano on the front seat of the blue Gaz. “Give it to me,” I demanded, but the worker had fallen into a trance and a spirit had taken him over, babbling away in a woman’s high tinkling voice and talking Chitewa, a language I didn’t understand. “Who killed Caetano?” I asked the spirit, “Who?” but she just went on babbling away. Ignored, I started shouting at her, “Who killed Caetano? Who killed Caetano?” until the eerie sound of someone blowing an animal horn sounded in my ear and startled me awake.

  One morning, I woke up with fingers that were completely numb and thumbs that I couldn’t bend.

  Then, another morning, I woke up to find myself covered in a red rash.

  Spiralling down into a pit of the deepest and blackest depression I had ever known, I was overwhelmed by a sense of complete and utter hopelessness.

  O’D had liked Mozambique so much, had put our money and the years of our lives into the country and Mozambique had returned the compliment by taking everything … everything … from us.

  One afternoon in the spare bedroom, the room I used as a study, I sat in frozen despair in front of my old manual Facit typewriter and tried to make sense of what was happening to us.

  It all seemed to have started when Westh had stolen our pine and Caetano had decided to take him to court. Caetano had been so afraid of witchcraft that he had run from one witch doctor to another to protect himself. Had O’D and I, too, become entangled in the witchcraft that bedevilled Mozambique? Or … had we somehow already become entangled perhaps, before we had even arrived in the country?

  Thinking back over the years, I remembered the plank that had flown off the roof at Arrojela, flown straight at O’D, to hit him a glancing blow on his wrist. This hint of the supernatural had become overt in Mossel Bay, when my mother and I had had that chilling ghostly experience after my father’s death. And then, of course, it had finally manifested itself openly and brazenly in Nora Swete, laughing at us … mocking with its blank white eyes … because it knew what lay in store for us while we were completely oblivious of our future.

  We had come, O’D and I, into enemy territory - witchcraft country - two lapsed Christians, and it … whatever it was … hated us.

  Kirby Jennings had warned me to be careful but I hadn’t really taken him seriously. Words from the Gospel of John came into my mind. “The thief comes to steal, to kill and to destroy,” Jesus had said. Yes, that was exactly what had happened to us. Westh had stolen from us, Caetano had been killed and now the Mozambican government officials were doing their best to destroy us. Who was this ‘thief’? I wondered.

  All of a sudden, I had a tremendous sense of evil swirling all around me, evil so strong that it almost took my breath away and made me feel weak and faint. Help … we needed help … special help … and if we didn’t get it soon, something really, REALLY bad might well be going to happen to us.

  I raised my useless hands and placing my numb fingers on the keyboard of my typewriter, I began to write a letter. A letter to Achim, the German Missionary, asking for help.

  Achim wasn’t at home when O’D drove up to Moyo Mukuru’s gates and so he handed my letter to Achim’s guard to give to him.

  I waited for Achim’s answer expectantly but when three weeks went by without a response from him, I knew I had once again been let down. I had made a desperate plea for help and Achim had ignored it! Was this the way a Pastor, one of God’s very own special people, should behave? Full of wishy-washy talk about ‘love conquering evil’ and no concrete help?

  While I harboured bitter thoughts about Achim, unbeknown to me, Achim was going through some trials and tribulations of his own.

  Living in a country where everyone was always kandonga-ing across the border, Achim had been unable to resist temptation and had attempted some kandongas of his own. Unfortunately, as Pastors are supposed to keep to the straight and narrow, God was not with Achim on the morning he set off to smuggle purchases for his Mission out of Zimbabwe and into Mozambique. Caught by the Zimbabweans, he experienced the unthinkable and found himself under arrest!

  Left in the dark about Achim’s problems, my depression deepened.

  O’D solved our financial problems temporarily by selling our Nissan 20 ton lorry and then, when a Danish Aid Agency put in an order for planks and beams, O’D didn’t say no. He loaded the planks into the open back of the red Toyota and drov
e off very early in the morning for Chimoio. Government officials were notoriously late risers and he was certain there would be no one up and about at five in the morning to catch him selling his wood without a licence from Rungo.

  Then, one afternoon, O’D discovered that a woman had moved onto sawmill land down by the Nhamacoa River and had started to clear it in order to open a machamba. She moved off after he spoke to her, only to reappear some weeks later and this time started clearing land just on the other side of some trees very close to the back of our house! When O’D again went to speak to her, accompanied by the local Frelimo Secretary of the area, she refused to budge, now claiming, untruthfully, that the land had been sold to her by an employee of the old Magalhaes sawmill.

  A few days later, when Lloyd returned from a visit to the ramshackle banca (bar) just down the track from us, he arrived back in a state of agitation and with a warning.

  “Maam, I met that woman who has moved onto your land and we have to be very careful of her,” he told me fearfully.

  “Why, Lloyd?” I asked.

  “Because she is a … witch woman! She was there, at the banca, telling everyone she was a witch!”

  “Oh, she was probably just telling you that to scare you, Lloyd,” I told him.

  “No, Maam!” Lloyd’s eyes filled with the fear of witchcraft that held all Africans captive. “I am certain that she is a witch!”

  Oh, how charming, oh how delightful, to hear that on top of everything else that was happening to us we now had a witch as a close neighbour as well! Was evil closing in on us? After all, there was still quite a lot of empty land in the Nhamacoa that the woman could have occupied, so why had she deliberately chosen to move onto sawmill land? And so near to our house?

  It was difficult to ignore the presence of the witch woman, if, indeed, that was what she was. Separated from us only by a footpath and a thin band of trees, she and her son’s two wives began to clear the land, chopping down every tree which her son then began to turn into charcoal for sale in Chimoio. Soon, several huts of poles and grass went up and goats blared their blaring sound, while babies played in the dust with the chickens.

  An enemy had arrived right on our doorstep.

  Then, one morning, we discovered that Mogsie had disappeared during the night!

  Sure that she couldn’t have gone far, we began to search for her. Since Dr. Mafara’s departure for New York, poor little Mogsie had come down with an infection and had lost her hearing. Her deafness had also made her lose her sense of direction and when she wanted to walk anywhere, she went around and around in an endless tight little circle. It was a pitiful sight but without a Vet to consult and examine her, we had no idea how we could help her.

  Although we looked all over the place for Mogsie, we never found her, or even a trace of her. Lloyd told us he had seen a giant owl in the big old mango tree next to the spare bedroom on the night she disappeared and so we could only come to the conclusion that she had somehow managed to wander outside and had been taken by the owl.

  “I want my cat!” O’D said. He was terribly upset. He and Mogsie had had a special kind of relationship.

  I didn’t know what to say. Death was stalking us. Something was picking us off, one by one. We needed help, but where to get it?

  And then I remembered something.

  Once, when O’D had driven across the border without me, he had given a lift to two people. They had told him that they were South African Missionaries based in Chimoio and had given him a small yellow card with their names, their address and their telephone number. Colin and Betsie were their names and they were Afrikaaners from the Rhema Church in Alberton, near Johannesburg.

  “Call them. Please,” I told O’D.

  Although Colin and Betsie didn’t know us, they made the journey down to the Nhamacoa almost immediately. They knew all about witchcraft, it seemed, having had some rather bad experiences with it themselves when they had first arrived in Mozambique.

  “Is your house clean?” Colin asked me, when he sat down in the sitting room. He was a stocky middle-aged man, deeply tanned, and with a head of curly black hair.

  “Uh …” I said, taken aback by the question. I looked at the great spiderweb the golden orb had woven across the ceiling and the mud nests the wasps had made in the grass above our heads and in the folds of the curtains. “It’s as clean as I can get a house, in a place like this.”

  Colin shook his head at my lack of understanding. “No, that’s not what I meant. Have you searched your house to make sure somebody hasn’t left something from a witch doctor in one of your rooms?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything like that here,” I said slowly, remembering the witchy object Seven had found in his hut.

  “You must make sure,” Betsie told me. Small and slim, she had great big blue eyes and long silky brown hair.

  “I will,” I assured her, and began to tell them about the things that were happening to us.

  “Do you have a Bible?” Colin asked, when at last I stopped talking.

  “Yes,” I said, and went to get it from the bedroom.

  When I handed it to Colin, he examined it and then looked at me with disapproval. “It’s never been opened,” he said accusingly.

  “I do … er … look inside it,” I told him, embarrassed.

  “The pages are still all stuck together,” he went on, “as if it’s brand new … ”

  Unable to defend myself, I kept silent. As well as never reading the Bible I had bought to replace the one I had given to Steven, I had also given up my short forays into my father’s little Bible when Caetano had died.

  Colin gave my Bible back to me. “Turn to Psalm 91,” he told me, “and read it out aloud. It’s a psalm of protection.”

  I read out the psalm and then Colin and Betsie held out their hands to us. We took their hands and joined together, stood in a small circle in the middle of the sitting room. Colin began to pray for us and while he spoke, sudden tears welled up out of my eyes and embarrassingly began to pour down my face and fall in great big drops onto the carpet like a rainstorm. The more I tried to stop them, the more they fell. They were the tears of the terrible despairing grief and fear that had been wrenching at my heart for so long, mixed with an enormous sense of relief. We were safe now, I knew. I had felt the power of Colin’s words. When he stopped praying and we all said ‘Amen’, I hurried from the room to mop myself up.

  When I came back, O’D was making tea and coffee.

  “Four sugars please,” Betsie told O’D, unashamed of her excessive sugar intake.

  Colin took a sip of his coffee. “Foreigners never think they’re being affected by witchcraft,” he told us. “They all just think they’re having a run of terrible luck. They can’t understand it. Betsie and I were just the same when we first came here. Awful things happened to us and it was only when it occurred to us that it might be witchcraft and we started praying for protection, that things got better.”

  Before they left for the drive back to Chimoio, Colin promised to give me some Rhema cassettes. They would help us a lot, he told me, in turning our circumstances around.

  Colin and Betsie’s prayers had an almost immediate affect on our lives. For some reason known only to himself and to God, Rungo suddenly signed our licences and on the 6th November, almost a year from the time we had applied for them, we were at last allowed to start operating again.

  We did notice something peculiar, though, with the licence for the logs in Gondola. In all the years we’d been dealing with the Forestry Department, the licences had always expired on the 31st December of every year. This licence, however, expired on the 30th December, 2003. One day less than usual.

  “I wonder why he did this?” O’D mused, suspecting foul play.

  We were soon to find out.

  The fifty three days Rungo had given us weren’t nearly long enough to pull our panga panga logs and transport them down to the sawmill even with the help of one of Pedro of Lofor
’s lorries but O’D did his best. Knowing that the Forestry Department was going to claim our logs as ‘abandoned timber’ if we didn’t manage to bring them all to the sawmill by the 30th, he galvanised our workers into working overtime. Then, when the deadline ran out and he only had one more lorryload left at Gondola, he decided to take the risk and bring them down to us.

  Achim and his wife, Patricia, had invited us over to their house at midnight to see in the New Year and by ten o’clock, I was dressed up and waiting for O’D to come back from Gondola. When the minutes ticked by and the Old Year turned into the New Year without any sign of him, I took off my party clothes and got into bed. By now I knew the signs of trouble. A non-appearance on O’D’s part always meant disaster!

  O’D finally arrived home, tired and dirty. Rungo had, as we had suspected, cunningly set a trap for O’D and O’D had obliged by falling right into it.

  “They were waiting for me in Gondola,” O’D told me, wearily sinking down onto the edge of the bed. “They waited until I had loaded the last of our logs onto Pedro of Lofor’s lorry and then they arrested the lorry. They confiscated our wood, they confiscated Pedro’s lorry and then they fined us two thousand U.S. dollars.”

  I sat up slowly. The terrible feeling of despair that had been overwhelming me for almost a year began to dissipate …

  “A smirking Forestry Fiscal gave me something of an explanation,” O’D went on. “Rungo hates you,” he told me. “He hates you because you don’t pay bribes.”

  … and another emotion, a stronger emotion began to take me over …

  I shot out of bed, filled with fury and a really bad, bad feeling that I had never in my life felt before. The same emotion the Mozambican government officials had been showering on us ever since Caetano had died. A terrible feeling of hatred. A blazing, all consuming hatred. I gave a scream. “That comes to over FOUR AND A HALF THOUSAND U.S. DOLLARS!”

  “Don’t shout at me,” O’D said.

  “I’m not shouting at YOU”, I yelled, falling back into bed. “I’m shouting at RUNGO … RUNGO, that … that … oh, that unutterable … SWINE!”