Life After Death

  'What are your qualifications?'

  'Only a poor degree in Media Studies. Oxford.'

  'I'm impressed. And what paper are you working for?'

  'The Truth of Bulawayo.''

  'Yeah, and where exactly do Thomas and you meet?'

  'Damn Thomas. You know what I think? I think you smell good. And what's more, I think you look good.'

  Natasha felt her blood rushing to her face. She realized she had to be very careful today. She might end up in his bed. And she'll be very popular with Thomas. She said a lame ‘thank you’.

  'Time for supper now, my dear. You will blush later.'

  She felt him fumbling for her hand as they walked to the dining room.

  'That's very uncivilized, Mr Mohyi.' She jumped. 'You're taking advantage of a stranded woman. And that's not very fair.'

  'Sorry, you very faithful to Thomas, too, aren't you?'

  'Very.'

  'And I'll leave you alone only on one condition, that you promise me one thing: tell me how, when you met Thomas. I only want to confirm.'

  'I will do that.'

  As they talked at the table, her phone rang.

  'Natasha, where are you? It's Thomas.' She was told. 'I've been looking for you. How did you leave the airport?'

  'I'm at the Sheraton. Come straight to the waiting room.'

  'So what else do you have to say about the minister?'

  'Nothing much.'

  'And have you been in London with him?'

  'Not me.'

  'So who does he go with?'

  'I really don't know anything about the London you want to talk about, Mr Sipeyiye.'

  Sipeyiye has begun to pack. 'And where are you going?' Natasha asked, alarmed.

  'An Internet shop.'

  'I can't read you. Internet Shop?'

  He stretched his hands. 'We might meet again. You are a beautiful girl. Thanks.’

  And with that he walked off.

  Just then he saw Thomas walking in through the door. They brushed against each other with neither a glance nor a word as they passed the door. Natasha couldn’t understand it at all.

  Dr. Dumka was smartly dressed in the latest suit.

  'Who was sitting here?' he asked as he planted a kiss at her temple.

  'Sipeyiye.'

  He nearly spat. 'Sipeyiye who?'

  'Sipeyiye Mohyi.'

  'Damn, where’s the son of a bitch?'

  'He just went out.'

  The doctor practically ran out of the room.

  The first thing Natasha noticed in the morning were the headlines. They all said something about Dr. Dumka and the AIDS money. The Truth went further to explain how the minister had externalised the people’s money to put up a mansion in Cape Town. It explained how the minister had even opened an account with a Swiss bank. Natasha left Harare in a hurry before Thomas could put a hand on her.

  Chapter 10

  VaPfocho could hear every sound in the dark because of her pain and worry. You can never sleep when your body is on fire. Today, there was someone trudging in the homestead. She thought she heard the sound of heavy luggage been thrown to the ground.

  She heard, 'Mother.' She would recognize the voice even in another lifetime.

  'Natasha,' she croaked.

  Natasha opened the door. She groped her way to her.

  'Mother;’ she called again in the dark.

  She was only inches away from her now. She came nearer still now. Natasha's fingertips brushed her forehead. Natasha recoiled.

  'You are wet,' she accused.

  'I'm sweating.'

  'It's dark here,' she complained, again.

  Natasha sat beside her in the dark. She wore a peculiar smell in contrast to the natural smell in the hut. VaPfocho didn't like it. And for another instant, VaPfocho doubted her daughter’s capacity to handle the work that lay ahead of her.

  'Where’s the candle?' she asked again. Natasha was afraid of the dark, and the future that wasn’t promising to be alight either.

  ‘There is no light,' she said matter-of-factly.

  'There always has been no light.'

  'What's the problem?' Natasha asked.

  'Everything,' her mother responded.

  'Mother.'

  'That' s what it is. Everything is the problem.'

  Natasha groped for the fire. She knocked a few twigs together. Ambers flew in the air. She blew into the air, not easily. And she choked from the smoke. The fire came alive, illuminating the small hut. Her eyes stung.

  She looked around the hut distastefully.

  Her country roots and this is where they had taken her again. It all came down to this hard mat and the groans of pain from nearby. The smell of cow dung was in the air. Even Natasha herself doubted her capacity to change things. Where do you begin when things stand like this?

  But despite all this, she knew she had to be here.

  She wondered where her sisters were when their mother was suffering like this. And people at times we forget the greatest joy in life: to give. And if we can't gather that, God may just take away even the little that's left. She had no doubt in her mind that her sisters were doomed.

  That night, she made some resolutions. She would say goodbye to the carpenter. It is no good to impose your suffering on people who have nothing to do with it.

  She would put up a hut somewhere. She was now looking inside herself to find strength. She would take her mother to the hospital. She would go to Harare to try finding a job. And maybe she would take her mother there.

  She woke up very early on the day that followed. She asked for a bucket and a towel from the carpenter’s wife. She gave her, with a slightly crinkled face. Natasha explained, very politely and without even using the word AIDS that she would not contract any disease by sharing a bucket.

  Chapter 11

  Natasha tried all odds. On a certain morning, she gathered all the blankets and her mother's rags. She carried them to the Nyazvindete River. She had some tough time washing them. In the afternoon, she came back from the valley.

  The hut that her mother was sleeping in was dirty and smoky. She went around and gathered some cow dung. She smeared it on the walls. As she did this, she came across some papers in the hut. Dusty, ruffled papers thrown carelessly about the hut.

  She had expected this, but still when she looked at the papers, they shocked her. Written in an upright, quick handwriting, they proclaimed VaPfocho had visited the hospital five times. They announced in the end that she had tested positive for HIV and been discharged.

  She found herself breathing in rasps.

  ‘Mother, we’ll put up our own hut.’

  VaPfocho gazed at her daughter. She stared at the distant hills of Gona. She gulped lustily at her brew.

  ‘I’m talking to you, Mother.’

  VaPfocho yelled. ‘Where did you hear of women putting timber on their shoulders to put up a hut? You’re mad, Natasha. You have gone out of your mind. Do you hear me?’

  ‘We have to do this, Mother. It will be easier for me to take care of you if we have our own place. We’re grateful for what the carpenter has done for us. But we should move off. We don’t want to burden him by expecting too much from him.’

  ‘You have never wanted to stay with me here, have you? I smell. I’m rotten. That’s why you don’t want me here. I should have known. You should have stayed in Joni selling your body.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Natasha tilted her head, totally amazed.

  ‘And you’d pretend you don’t know what I mean, too? You have a very, very big hole between your legs.’

  ‘Would you stop it, please? Say something sane.’ She almost screamed.

  ‘What sanity do you know? What do you know, anyway? I’m far much older in the ways of Tuzuka than you can ever be.’

  Natasha’s face heated as the tears rushed to her eyes. This was not the first time her mother had raised her temper. Neither was it the last. Her Mother was impossible! She had come to the poi
nt of calling her that, too: impossible! VaPfocho would never appreciate all that Natasha had done. Really, if anything VaPfocho would make it all thorny. Natasha was losing her faith in the good things of life.

  Natasha bolted out of the house and stormed into the woods. She stamped violently upon the rough ground. The knotted grass and tore at her feet. She stumbled and fell. Not once. She always rose more determined. She began a frenzied small jog. Her body was hot. Despite this, she felt capable and almighty.

  She stopped abruptly. All around her was a thorny wall of greenery. Her breath came in audible rasps.

  She was on a nervous breakdown, she thought. She turned, clutched and hugged the trunk of a msasa tree. The bark tore at her chest, raw and dry.

  She was wasting herself. She was supposed to be somewhere else, growing spiritually. Here, she was caught in a common problem. She was tied down by her history. She was rotting to eternity while she still couldn’t move an inch.

  How she wished to be free! She had never volunteered. Natasha had never said she wanted to save the world from pestilences, incurable diseases. She simply wanted to be away and free. The very least they’d do is appreciate it if she would stay here another day.

  Damn it, why would she waste her time thinking of it, much less wishing it? She was trying to plant a love that would never grow. She should have known all this and acted accordingly. The problem with her: she was never growing up.

  She cried earnestly, the tears falling down her cheeks onto her neck and on to the grass. Tears, saliva and mucus mixed on her chin. They trickled down slowly. The thick fluid dripped unchecked to her breast.

  ‘If she could…if only…’

  She jerked from the impulse.

  No, it couldn’t be her thinking. She had never wished anyone dead before. Least of all, her mother! She cried the louder. She had been tested. She was giving in. ‘God, why do you let this happen to me?’ That was the single question she was asking herself a dozen times each day.

  She cried until her eyes were enamel white. She cried for the better part of the afternoon. Eventually, she hung limply to the tree, spent.

  She turned and looked in the direction of her mother. She disengaged herself from the tree. The bark was smeared with mucus and tears.

  She walked slowly back home. She feared again, more than anything else, her mother’s explosive anger.

  VaPfocho sat alone blocking the door to the hut. She was deadly quiet. When Natasha asked to go in, she rolled aside.

  ‘Where are you coming from?’ VaPfocho, asked softly. There was a stony calmness in her. It would not be too long before she exploded again.

  ‘I’ve just been walking around.’

  ‘You don’t lie to me,’ she glared. ‘Moving around and crying? Is that the same thing? Since when have you started telling lies? Tell me, when did you start lying? Who’s corrupting you?’ She pointed an accusing finger at her.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I have been doing, Mother. I am old enough to care for myself.’ She had her hands on her hips.

  ‘It doesn’t matter for sure.’ That quietness in her voice again magically calculated to disarm Natasha. Natasha was caught off-guard. And then like a maggot wriggling in flesh her mother waded into her with her next words, ‘When I spend the whole day without sadza. When I crawl on my knees to reach for the water, when I mew and bray under this pain. There you’re my child, to tell me it doesn’t matter.’

  Her mother’s words stung her to the bone.

  It was easier to be quiet, Natasha realized. She could argue and reason, but she would never win. Very soon the carpenter’s wife would be craning in, attracted by voices. She was not just about to explain it was a small squabble again.

  She stared at her mother. In that single instant, she summed her up, again. A face ridged, fashioned that way by daily tempers. She suffered from self-centeredness. She would never relax, get to look around and appreciate love and nature. She had a problem, and a big one at that. She had waged a war ever since her inception and she wanted the whole world to revolve around her. No ways, any ways, Natasha swore.

  VaPfocho looked into nothingness. She had been doing that in as long as Natasha could remember her. Her mouth twisted in a selfish grin, ugly as ever. Under her bony face were taut fibres, tight on a scaly skin. Natasha told herself she didn’t have a mother. All her efforts to have one have failed.

  They didn’t exchange another word on this day. Every word was bound to be opposed. She prepared her supper quietly. She cooked more than what was necessary. She made it a point to tell her mother that there was something in the clay pot. She left it there.

  Chapter 12

  Her body assumed a new function. She realized it when she knelt down to wash her mother's body. Her mother’s body had a reeking, human stink. And as she looked at her greying body worn down by continuous pain, she felt the tears warming her eyes. She knew why she had to come back from South Africa: her mother needed her.

  'I don't want a bath,' her mother protested.

  Natasha said something politely. She didn't want to say much. She knew she was weak and that would betray what she was feeling for the woman who lay in the bath.

  One sunny afternoon, and after selling the last of her belongings, Natasha left for Harare. She explained to VaPfocho that she, VaPfocho, would remain behind, and there was no other way to do it. She emphasized however that she wouldn't be long.

  When she set foot in Harare, she went straight to the Herald building. She asked for all the papers in the previous fortnight and jotted down the phone numbers that had anything to do with accountants. She visited a typist and prepared a CV. She posted them to the various addresses, without an idea on how she would get her response.

  She also visited a Government Office that claimed to have the responsibility to distribute AIDS funds. The building was dilapidated and squashed between other tall buildings.

  'There are no AIDS funds,' a secretary told her between mouthfuls. She was munching a pie at 8:30 in the morning.

  'What's that she wants?' a man asked as he passed the reception. 'Bring her in, please.'

  And so Natasha followed a well-dressed man along until she was ushered into another office.

  Natasha asked how she could get AIDS money for her mother. She did it in a low tone, noting the office was too close to the reception. The man she was talking to, in turn did not give a damn. It was clear that Natasha wouldn't be the first to seek the muscle of Dr Timothy.

  The man explained to her that a quarter of the Zimbabwean population needed AIDS levy rescue. He explained still that up to date, only two thousand people had received that fund. He went further to say that he had played a major role in half of them getting the fund.

  ‘I’d do you a favour,’ he said moving with great authority in his swing chair. ‘You’d get the AIDS levy, all right,’ he continued. ‘But not before I look at the insides of your knickers.’

  Natasha returned home in a hurry.

  Chapter 13

  She woke at first crow. It was still lemon grey when she walked along the edges of the carpenter’s fields. She left a trail of sagging grass along her wake. She was afraid of the night around her. Still, she dreaded to have to wait for the light that looked so distant away. She knew she had to continue.

  The night, the promise of the light, the fear, and the resolution: that summed her on the morning.

  Natasha was going to put up a hut.

  The night had softened her temper. She had woken up with a new spirit. Although afraid, she was resolved. Putting up huts was supposed to be the men’s job. She realized now, that she had spent the better part of her life with a wrong idea. She walked aimlessly in the morning shadow of the vegetation. She had not the slightest idea which trees to fell for the hut.

  Guess work did it. She spotted two straight, thorn trees. She began to cut them. As she worked, the sun warmed and heated her body. Her back burnt. Sweat plastered her back. She worke
d harder still.

  She sat on a rock then lay on her back. She wondered how indeed she was going to finish putting up a house at this rate. Her back ached, and dearly longed for water to drink. She fell asleep like that. She woke up, a quarter of an hour later.

  She picked her timber. When she put it on her shoulder, it prickled and tore her shoulder. She tried her head: women are stronger on the head. The two poles rolled and sat uncomfortably. She made a plan. She would the logs one at a time. As she approached the carpenter’s fields, she dropped it and went back for the other one. When she had finally managed to bring both of them home, it was already dusk.

  She dashed to the river. She bathed, trying in vain to leave all the blue ticks that had latched onto her at the Nyazvindete. She came home at sundown with the tin dangling on her head.

  Her mother had eaten the food she had left in the pot. She didn’t want her mother to eat cold food. On the day though, she had been left with no choice.

  VaPfocho was sleeping and snoring quietly. They had not talked to each other since morning, and Natasha dearly wished to talk to her. She was a different person altogether if she wasn’t talking. A lovable mother, dignified…

  There was no wood for the fire. She ducked off to the end of the fields. She made do with the carpenter’s hedge. She came back to her mother laughing and running.

  Her mother was awake. ‘What’s it?’ VaPfocho looked annoyed.

  She put the kettle on the fire. It boiled easily with the msasa wood.

  ‘I’m not bathing,’ VaPfocho protested when she heard water poured into zinc.

  ‘Who said you’re bathing, Mother?’

  ‘You think I don’t know you’re putting that kettle for me? Don’t baby talk me. I said I’m not bathing. That’s almost all there is to it.’

  ‘Come on, Mother. Don’t be a bother again. You know I have to prepare supper. Besides, you haven’t asked me where I have spent my day.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘In the bush cutting timber for the hut.’ She waited for the impact. At that time, she expected a physical clap from her.

  VaPfocho just stared at her.

  ‘You were telling the truth, Mother.’ She added. ‘It’s not easy to put up a hut. I went into the woods in the morning. I got only two straight poles. Then, I didn’t know whether to put the poles on the shoulder or head. And you know what I did?’