The gleam of it attracts a timid little junior who offers to carry your bag as you return from the staff room.
When you unlock your office, the child carries it to your desk, taking three skipping steps to each of yours. Reaching her destination, the girl sets your bag soundlessly on the floor.
“What class are you in?” you ask, impressed by this deference.
“One Muuyu,” is the answer. “I mean One Muuyu, ma’am,” she corrects herself, twisting her fingers together at her mistake.
“All right,” you dismiss her. “Make sure you stay like that and do what your teachers tell you. If you do, we’ll meet in form three.”
She scampers off in delight, and you take out your register to draft remarks for your class reports.
“Chinembiri, Elizabeth,” the name soon confronts you. Gracious with new power, you draft several flattering comments.
As you are so engaged, a knock sounds at the door.
“Enter,” you call out.
The door opens and First Form Shona Attachment stands doubtfully in the entrance.
“Miss Sigauke, the head teacher wants you to join her. In her office,” she says.
You do not like to be disturbed at your pleasurable task, but must oblige.
Three people are seated in the head teacher’s small room. When you become the fourth, the room is much too full.
You take the single vacant chair beside the coffee table. Mrs. Samaita nods at a couple seated on the sofa pressed up against the far wall.
The woman covers her eyes when she sees you. She gulps several times but is unable to swallow down what she must. She gasps and then sobs gently. The man beside her touches her elbow and tells her to hush. His voice carries only half a heart, as though he is glad his companion’s wretchedness pushes at everything anyone can see and breathe and touch.
“Mr. and Mrs. Chinembiri. Elizabeth’s parents,” your headmistress says.
The woman uncovers her eyes. She points a finger in your direction. You are astonished when the quivering digit lets out a thin, high scream. There is no respite when it falls silent again: it elongates dangerously in your direction.
“Hi-i-i, hi-i-i,” the woman grieves, her voice dry and fragile as a drought-stricken leaf.
“Surely, who would have thought anybody would live to see such days?” the man says. Tears fill his eyes as he regards his wife. “These days we see now cut a mother up into pieces.”
Your headmistress picks up a ballpoint pen. Grasping it between her finger and thumb, round and round she twists it.
“Hasn’t everybody suffered? Suffered enough to satisfy anyone?” your pupil’s mother demands. “Who? Who wants people to suffer more? It’s you, teacher. You are saying suffer more. You want to show my daughter and me the meaning of agony by killing the child. Nhai, tell me, my daughter’s teacher, are you like maize in a field of manure? Is that how it is here, where we send our children every day, that you grow on the dung of the way we are hurt?”
“Mrs. Chinembiri,” says Mrs. Samaita in order to prevent the woman speaking further and so growing still more tormented, “is Elizabeth’s mother, Miss Sigauke. And Mr. Chinembiri here is the father. I had asked them to come and discuss other things,” your headmistress continues. “Before … before this … this later matter happened.”
“Yes,” Mr. Chinembiri says in a low voice. “We know we have not yet paid school fees. It’s because we are struggling with the rent.”
“And then this new thing happened,” Mrs. Samaita concludes. “When they were coming anyway.”
Your headmistress puts down the pen and informs the couple, “Amai and Baba Chinembiri, this is the teacher, Miss Sigauke.”
“We just wanted to see her,” your pupil’s father says. “Maybe Elizabeth did something bad, but her injuries are so big we wanted to see the teacher. I am the driver. This one beside me is the cook. We must get back quickly to our Europeans over there in Kamfinsa.”
Mai Chinembiri pitches over but comes to immediately and places the sign of the cross between herself and you. Softly she begins to keen again. The sound oppresses you. You clamp your hand over her mouth. Your pupil’s father does not dare touch you. Mrs. Samaita reaches for the phone, scattering copper trophies over her desk. Some girls in the corridor who are changing classes let out peals of laughter bright as the sun. You listen to the girls. Then you laugh with them. You hear her but you cannot see this laughing woman. You keep listening to her gurgling like a hyena high at the back of her throat.
CHAPTER 9
Now you understand. You arrived on the back of a hyena. The treacherous creature dropped you from far above onto a desert floor. There is nothing here except, at the floor’s limits, infinite walls.
You are an ill-made person. You are being unmade. The hyena laugh-howls at your destruction. It screams like a demented spirit and the floor dissolves beneath you.
“Good evening,” the hyena says.
You are petrified: will the floor disappear altogether? You make an effort to keep every muscle frozen.
“Good evening,” the hyena says again.
You are silent. You do not trust.
At once you realize you should have made another response. For halfway through your silence the softness opens its jaws and swallows you.
You curl your arms around your head. Your knees touch your chin. Even like this you are not big enough. The softness is bigger. You allow yourself to be swallowed.
“How are you feeling, Tambudzai?” the hyena goes on.
You are not there. You are not anywhere.
“Tambudzai,” the voice says. “You should be feeling better now. After so much sleep, you should be able to talk. Come on, Tambudzai, you must be much better.”
You try not to return. The voice keeps talking.
“You even slept when we moved you. But now it’s evening. The others are already on their way. Aren’t you hungry after such long sleeping?”
You rock your head to and fro. You do not know what to do now. Perhaps you should be grateful to the hyena for its words? You try to open your eyes but succeed only in rolling your eyeballs. You try to smile. Your tongue lolls, your mouth dribbles. Saliva trickles toward your ear.
“What’s your name?” the voice asks.
You breathe in slowly, concentrating.
“Name,” you exhale.
“Yours. You don’t have to repeat. This is not grade one. I want your name.” The hyena voice cracks. It conceals the crevice.
“Answer,” it says more gently.
“Answer,” you echo. You are proud of yourself. Once more you have brought out your voice. Yours.
“Not that.”
The voice breaks more impatiently, too much to hide.
“What are you called? What do people say when they call you?”
What does your mother call you? And your father? Your mother said something when you were on her knees. She called you Trouble. “Tambudzai,” you say softly, pleased you have come to this knowledge.
“OK,” the speaker says. Her voice does not listen. “Now tell me your surname. And today’s date.”
“March … March …” you begin with an effort.
“Confusion. Of surname with date,” the speaker says slowly, scratching with a cylinder at a pale rectangle suspended in the air.
“Oh!” you say, unhappy to have failed again after such effort.
The woman breathes in sharply and gives your knee a shove. “OK. About the name. That’s enough,” she says without interest.
Your eyes fasten on a fuzz of shades and colours. You struggle with swirls and dabs that move, giving the impression of an attempt at something that will never be completed.
In the middle is a long dark oval. There is dark and light.
“You do not know it?” the oval asks. “That is not right. That date is wrong.”
“Wrong?” you repeat.
“Tss!” The speaking oval is exasperated. “Yes. The date.”
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“What date?” you inquire.
“If this goes on I will bring you a calendar,” she says. “That could help. But better for you to manage without it.”
“Calendar?”
The oval snorts and stands and turns into a woman.
Far away in the new space, pale green undulates like a serpent, like the veil your mother ties to her head. It shrinks and yawns between two walls. It is a curtain.
“What about washing?” says the woman. “The bathroom, it’s over there.” She thrusts a hanging chin over a shoulder attached to nothing. “That way.”
“No,” you say. You do not want to go away.
“Do you know where you are?” she asks, watching you curl up once more.
You put your arms over your head for answer.
“Eh-eh, don’t go sleeping again, like you’re a woman in labour,” she says, trying to hide her hiss in a whisper.
She moves away to sit on a mattress that floats high in the air.
“Hospital!” you exclaim, both question and answer.
“Already one day,” she says. “It was yesterday when you came.”
She is eager about what she is saying. Her words blunder forth quickly.
“You’re lucky you’re out already. When you came they put you in restraining. Now that you are quiet it seems impossible that you were shouting like that, as if someone was murdering you.”
She returns and bends over you, murmuring. “You have been sedated. Your doctor’s orders. Are you comfortable? Or should we give you some more medication?”
“Doctor?”
You connect the word with hospital. You smile.
“M-hm,” she smiles back. “You have already been seen.”
“Seen? Why do they want to see me?”
The woman bursts out laughing. She glances around. Her eyes flash like sharpened kitchen knives.
“You don’t really know where you are, I can see that,” she breathes. “What time is it? Can you tell me?”
Your eyes close to get away from her. She presses closer.
“It is OK,” she says. “I am a nurse. I want to ask you some questions, please.”
She moves closer still. You start screaming.
You do not know it, but it is later.
“She doesn’t look as though she’s going to do anything. Let’s bring her back like that,” someone says.
“You think that is best?” someone else responds. “Mm, maybe not. From what they said, she might start more trouble.”
A hand grips your arm. You struggle with limbs of cotton wool and the hyena is at the bottom of the purple pond of your fear, laughing.
Your pants are pulled down and a needle burns into your buttocks.
You fight to pull your fingers out of the pool whose cracks are hardening like the lava from a volcano.
Feet pad forward. Knees creak as their owner squats before you.
It is the Voice.
“Hello. What’s your name?” the Voice begins again.
You like this. You are good at this.
“Name!” you agree, at ease in a gentle current of repetition.
You are lifted. Metal scrapes. Rubber whines.
Eyelids crawl apart. You cannot focus.
The woman draws pale green curtains against the afternoon glare.
Her nurse’s cap is a jagged dark outline against the sunlight.
“I am a student,” she says, twisting her fingers. Anxiety shreds her speech.
“Student,” you say. A shrill note of horror swells in your head. It pierces too far to endure. The purple hyena opens its jaws and all sensation vanishes.
The student nurse does not see the scavenger. She does not believe that you have vanished.
“I have to go,” she says. “I will see you another time. Then we can talk.”
“Take your blerry hands awf’a me!” a voice blares around you.
A pink oval is leading you through a room. There is light on one side. The light is windows. A world stares in on the other side. The world is a wall. In between drift shadows that believe they are people.
“Didn’t you hear me?” this new person screams.
You are afraid. You stop. You touch your mouth. It is closed.
“Just move,” the aide says, and brushes your shoulder.
You move on, feeling better.
“I said take your blerry hands awf’a me!” the new creature rages.
You walk down a corridor beyond which, you later learn, is the geriatric ward whose inmates share a day and dining room with your wing. Fingers of light leak round burglar bars that throttle high narrow windows. Dust dances in the columns of watery light. Iron doors gape like condemned eyes in the whitewashed walls.
“Isolation rooms,” the oval says cheerfully. “That’s where you were. Aren’t you glad they let you out?”
You come to a door.
“Dr. Winton,” your guide announces, having knocked on it. “Your patient.” She touches your shoulder again to guide you forward.
You take a seat. The chair is hardboard on a metal frame, like the one in the classroom. You do not want to sit on it. Dr. Winton looks at you refusing. Something tells you you cannot keep refusing while the white woman looks at you, so you sit.
The doctor leans over her plywood desk and peels off a strip of varnish. She rolls it between finger and thumb, drops the fragment on the desk, and puts out a hand.
You do not take it.
She sits down again and asks you questions. Where were you born?
Umtali, you tell her.
“Umtali?” she says.
Mutare, you correct yourself, after a pause. You are confused. What is the difference between Mutare and Umtali? You know there is a difference between them, but you do not know what it is or what it means.
Where did you go to school?
Your mind slides around, sluggishly working out what to say because you are too tired and drugged to prevent yourself hearing the words you say and so telling her means confessing to yourself, a thing you do not want to do.
Birth into a poor family, you say. Struggle to achieve your education, planting a field of green mealies and selling them to keep yourself in school when your mother refuses to vend at the market for you as she had done for your brother. This you do not say, because who can speak ill of a mother? To do so will increase the crime of being born who you are and where it happened, justifying all the calamity that befalls you. It is better to concentrate on the positive things that happened. Your uncle, Babamukuru, your father’s elder brother and the head of the clan, returned from England to take up a position as headmaster not far from your home. After your brother dies he brings you to his mission for a superior education.
“Aha,” says the doctor who knows nothing. “Guilt. Following an event seen as a sacrifice. You feel guilty about the death of your brother.”
You divert her probing by launching into the story of your cousin Nyasha, your uncle’s daughter.
“A companion, a sister,” the doctor says.
“Someone I could look up to,” you say. “Who could explain things to me. Until she got sick. Then I knew she didn’t know anything. I didn’t need a sister. I had lots of them.”
“How did she recover?” the doctor asks after you tell her of your cousin’s attempt at suicide from an eating disorder.
You shrug. You don’t know how your cousin recovered as the odds were so completely against her. In any case you feel the doctor is going off track. Her concern should be with your recovery, not your cousin’s.
“Nyasha always manages,” you tell her. “She always wins and gets the best of everything. Even her birth.”
“You think so?” the doctor says, raising an eyebrow. “Even after she engaged with the outcomes of her own birth in a difficult manner?”
You cause another distraction by telling Dr. Winton that in any case you did not see much of your cousin’s illness as you moved from your uncle’s mission after winning a
scholarship to a prestigious multiracial college in Umtali, the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart.
Dr. Winton cannot conceal a frown as you continue to narrate how well you did there, to the extent of achieving the best O-level results in the school.
“What happened?” she asks quietly when you fall silent again.
You cannot tell her that things keep repeating, that this time too it was as with your mother, and that you were not recognized because it was necessary to prefer another, your white classmate. You talk about the war instead, how it ruined everyone’s nerves and many bodies, about how twins at your school lost their parents, your sister her leg, and Babamukuru his walking. You tell yourself you will not cry and you do not.
The doctor insists, carefully, that she wants to know what you have done in the meanwhile that might have led to you sitting in her office. You relate episodes from Steers et al. where you worked. You want to explain what it really did to you. The words crawl slowly into your throat, for the hurts of adulthood have not assailed you as violently as those of childhood. Nevertheless this lesser assault is too much and again you cannot speak of Tracey Stevenson, the eternal favourite at school, who, you discovered with dull resignation, was your boss at the advertising agency.
“I saw a woman at a disco who looked like Tracey. You know, Tracey that girl at school,” you say, in the end, judging you have offered just enough to throw dust in the doctor’s eyes. You go on evenly to see what the doctor will do, “I wanted to beat her up.”
“It seems to me that you don’t like white people,” the doctor says.
“Of course I do,” you respond. “Anyway, it’s neither here nor there,” you continue with one of your shrugs. “They never see me. It doesn’t make any difference who they are. Nobody sees me.”
You stand up. When you are at the door you think of the corridor outside.
Dr. Winton watches you carefully.
“I wonder what would happen,” she says, “if you stopped hiding behind the door to the world that you have closed. If you stepped out. For some reality testing?”
“I’m not,” you say.