This Mournable Body

  There is a blade-toothed rodent gnawing in your stomach. It is the hunger you used to suffer when you ate ice cream cones from the vendor at the park gate across from the hostel. It digs on and on, making a hole that, like the animal’s teeth, grows bigger and bigger. Because of it, suddenly you are ravenously hungry again.

  “Whatever they are telling you now, capital is never human, it’s only numbers. Capital’s just like your politicians. It knows those women out there are nothing but quantities! Think about your aunt at the homestead, Nyasha! She’s a bit in a calculation. A vote here, a price there for a dose of something. The people out here are just translated into ballots and markets for GMOs, Depo-Provera, and fertilizer.”

  You blob chilli sauce onto your eggs, wondering why everything, especially when white people say it, must come back to the village and your mother. You add two more spoons of sugar to your coffee and find a clean spoon to scoop the cream off the milk in its carton.

  “That is what I want to hear. Absolutely right now,” Nyasha says to Leon.

  “If you wanted to make it alone,” Leon continues, “then maybe you’d have a chance. Maybe someone would listen to you, without feeling threatened. But you want to do it with others. Can you think what it does to them, thinking of dozens and dozens of little Nyashas? All acting together.”

  Nyasha wipes her eyes, although no tears have fallen.

  “As I said, it is the question of proportion,” says Leon, reverting to impersonal phrases. “In your case the proportion is … it is …”

  “Small?” suggests Nyasha. She stands up to clear the table. “Insignificant? Irrelevant?”

  Leon jumps up to help because he always helps his wife with the housework. He spills milk and rattles dishes as he lifts them.

  There is a cold piece of toast in the wicker basket on the table. You take it and pile on Cousin-Brother-in-Law’s homemade peach jam made of fruit harvested from your cousin’s trees.

  “Go-go-go,” a voice calls as you stir the last of the sugar in the bottom of your teacup.

  “Hello, hello!” Nyasha and Leon welcome the visitors as one voice.

  “Child! Yes, child of mine, carry on like that. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” Mainini Lucia calls as she enters. “That’s what a child of mine does. She keeps on going, isn’t it?”

  Nyasha twines her arms around Mainini’s neck, as though she will never let go. Mainini stands rather stiffly, as all war veterans do when faced with close physical contact. Nyasha uncoils her arms from her aunt to put a hand on Christine’s shoulder. Leon advances with a brilliant smile and kisses both ex-combatants on both cheeks. They stand and take it. You hurry to embrace your mother’s sister and Christine, who has become an aunt by association. Having finished the greetings, Aunt Lucia bustles forward with Christine behind her. The scale of everything increases.

  “Kiri, oh, this is wonderful. I am so glad you came,” Nyasha cries. She grips Mainini’s arm with both hands.

  “Did you ever call us and not get an answer when it was possible for us to give one, Nyasha?” Mainini grins.

  “We are one less today,” says Nyasha, folding her arms and leaning against the sink in dejection. “Mai Taka isn’t well.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” says Mainini Lucia. “When you have two women who know what has to be done like Kiri and me, it is like you have ten. Didn’t we say we will always support you? And it’s better to support a woman who is supporting other women, isn’t it? Let us start now, so we finish quickly. And,” Mainini goes on with a laugh that sounds like Student Nurse’s, “here is Tambudzai. We are not three. We are already four!”

  Christine hands Leon the cardboard box she is holding. Cousin-Brother-in-Law balances it on some plates stacked beside the sink. He disappears into the pantry and Nyasha takes the box from the draining board. Leon returns carrying bags of tomatoes and onions, ginger and garlic, while Nyasha clears a space on the table in which she deposits the container.

  “That box,” Cousin-Brother-in-Law begins, holding the vegetables and looking at the sink. “Where is it?”

  “Here, Babamunini,” you say, coming to his assistance.

  Your cousin disappears into the scullery before any more conversation can develop to delay her work further. You take the vegetables from Cousin-Brother-in-Law and find somewhere to put them.

  “Tell us about this new workshop, Nyasha,” Mainini says when Nyasha returns, three maid’s smocks draped over her arm. Mainini accepts a garment and lays it over the back of a chair.

  “One day I will send someone from my company to these courses that you do, daughter,” she muses as she unbuckles the belt of the grey uniform she wears. “Are you going to show them how to make a film this time?”

  “I wish,” sighs Nyasha sadly. “I’m glad anything’s happening at all. You know me, Mainini. I had these huge hopes and ambitions. For all sorts of things. I wanted to start us telling different stories. Stuff that’s uplifting. Not just the nonsense on television. Not all that tragedy, either, as though that’s the only story there is. I’ve been dreaming of stories of things and people we can admire that in the long run make us better than we’ve managed to be so far.”

  “Let your participants sit in front of the camera,” says Leon. “Let them tell their own stories. That’s something they’d like and admire. I mean, Nyasha, why think of other things, big things, when you can think of your little self?”

  “Maybe it would be better if you taught them something useful,” Mainini suggests. “Like how to make advertisements. Then Tambudzai can help. I hope she hasn’t forgotten everything she learned at that advertising agency.”

  “You’re right, both of you,” Nyasha says in a conciliatory tone. “I just thought they could find value in telling someone else’s story too, looking outside of themselves,” she continues, pulling her smock over her head and closing the buttons.

  “You hope,” says Cousin-Brother-in-Law. His eyebrows twitch with the effort of maintaining a straight face. “How about going for the Oscars? With a comedy. Or a drama. Or a tragicomedy. Let us make a new hybrid, for example, The Great African Dictatress.

  Nyasha ignores him.

  Cousin-Brother-in-Law hums the Nigerian song about women and big pieces of meat as he leaves the kitchen.

  “Men,” says Nyasha. “They don’t want the biggest piece, right? They just want a piece of meat, that’s all.”

  “Du-du-du,” Kiri hums the infectious melody under her breath.

  “Sometimes you can listen to Babamunini, even though he is a white person,” recommends Aunt Lucia. “Sometimes there is nothing you can do to change anything. Remember Kiri and I went to war. If you see us who went to fight not trying to do anything about this country of ours, you should understand there is a reason.”

  “He says he wants to go back to Germany,” Nyasha confides. “As soon as he’s finished his doctorate,” she goes on, as though both completion of his research and departure are imminent. You realize she does not know Cousin-Brother-in-Law is mulling another thesis because he is no longer interested in his subject. You are surprised your in-law is behaving in the way you expect your own black men to do, first of all by being so indecisive and then by not telling his wife. You begin to suspect that Cousin-Brother-in-Law and Nyasha are not being honest, that they found each other because neither possesses the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect.

  “The task I gave the girls was to research a great African woman. It was their workshop preparation,” says Nyasha. “Only three understood what it was about. And what did all the others do? Can you believe it, seventeen of my participants wrote only about themselves.”

  Christine laughs and says, “Zimbabwe! So, Nyasha, Mukwasha Leon has already seen something of us.”

  “I’ll get to them,” promises Nyasha. “It’s just that no one has taken the trouble. Not seriously. They see what they see, right? And no one has taught those poor young p
eople anything different.”

  You grow increasingly galled by your cousin and her assumption that everyone has the luxury she has of surviving without being obsessed with one’s own person. All three of them think that now she has taken you out of the institution into her care, everything is wonderful for you. They do not know what it is to struggle with the prospect that the hyena is you, nor how this combat marshals in the task of finishing the brutish animal off, while ensuring you remain alive yourself. You squash an ant scuttling over the table and raise your finger to inspect its crushed black body, but your finger is clean.

  “You help too, Tambudzai,” Mainini says.

  Increasingly uneasy in this sphere where the three women have found their place, you contemplate following Cousin-Brother-in-Law. Added to everything else, you have no intention of cooking for a gang of young women whom only Nyasha truly thinks are worth the effort. After all, you came to your cousin’s not to be a chef but to continue your recovery.

  “Begin by washing those breakfast dishes, Tambu!” commands Mainini Lucia. “When you have finished, tell your cousin, and she will find you something else to take things forward.”

  Nyasha turns her head to hide a smile.

  “Look at this,” Mainini Lucia orders, putting her hand to her breast pocket. “Tambudzai, read what is written on it.”

  Your aunt does not give you the chance to comply. “AK Security,” she pronounces.

  She pulls the maid’s smock over her head and smooths it down. The grey uniform she is removing falls around her ankles.

  “Mine,” Mainini boasts as her head erupts through the neck hole. “I designed it myself. Logo, uniform, everything. For my own company.”

  Mainini steps out of the circle the charcoal-coloured uniform makes around her feet and holds the dress out to you. You examine it closely, finding the red and white A and K intertwined on the logo’s dark grey background impressive.

  “What people want. Already. That is what they’ll let you do,” says Nyasha. “Service. What they won’t let you do is allow you to create something yourself that they might end up wanting.”

  “AK Security,” nods Christine. “That is where I work now. Didn’t I tell you, Tambudzai, that when it is time, I will move from my aunt Manyanga’s.”

  “Congratulations, Mainini,” you say. Your respect for your aunt Lucia swells tremendously. You are glad that you have listened to her and honoured her as your mother. “And you, also Kiri, congratulations,” you smile. “Even though you came back from war it is like you didn’t go. Now you are just like everybody else who is advancing.”

  Christine turns away from you as she does up her smock buttons. You start washing up with a new energy, hope spreading throughout your person. Mainini Lucia was always a woman able to do what others of her sex couldn’t. Christine, though, has shaken off the habit of failure that made her scorn VaManyanga’s journey to prosperity, and has taken a step toward her own profit. These examples give you confidence, reassuring you that when the time comes, you will accomplish fine things too.

  “Even going to war has its uses. Only you don’t always know what will be useful and how it will be when it’s happening,” Mainini says with conviction, as though she had once been ashamed of being a woman who had seen too much blood. “Yes, sometimes we wondered why we went to war when we came back and everyone was shocked and began to hate us. And the war had swallowed up too much, even the things that came out of the womb that strengthened the heart.” Mainini pauses, remembering her little son whom she had left to fight in the conviction that her risk was the down payment on a better life for both of them. You heard the story once in the early days after the war, how, when the Rhodesian soldiers came, the young boy ran back to the kraal at the homestead to let out the cattle as he had been told he must in order to prevent the Rhodesians butchering the entire herd. Instead, the soldiers drove bullets through the boy’s back as he lifted the logs that closed the cattle pen. The force of the bullets leaving his body ripped his stomach open and spread his intestines on the sand that was mixed with cow dung. Your mother scooped her sister’s child’s intestines back into his little body. It was in the days before Babamukuru was paralysed. Your uncle drove the boy to the General Hospital in Umtali, where he died.

  “It was so difficult when everybody was afraid and started saying that we who fought were going naked at night, drinking blood and flying with evil spirits,” Mainini Lucia says in that voice of the former freedom fighter that cuts dangerously even when quiet. “Ignoring them all, I said to myself, look, I can face any tsotsi in any corner, even if that robber is holding a gun. He won’t know what hit him when I get him. China trained. We are fighters with Kiri here, even if she was trained in Moscow! I said that is something that you were given: yourself and other women like you—you can begin with that.”

  “She has made a place for us veterans!” exclaims Christine.

  “My child, Tambu” says Mainini. “War just shrinks in peacetime, isn’t it? That’s what I saw. I just went into that little space that is still there. So how can Kiri and I be useless?”

  Nyasha picks up a knife. You do not have a smock, but when you have finished the dishes, you start peeling and dicing vegetables, while Nyasha apologizes again that the crew is one short because of Mai Taka’s injury. She shakes her head, admitting that each encounter with such abuse depresses her.

  “I still think, though, every time I do a workshop with the young women, it makes a difference,” she says fiercely. “It changes something. I make myself think it. I have to. But really, it’s only my hope.”

  You smile along with Mainini and Christine, although you allow more irony into your expression than they do.

  By midday curries and stews to be frozen for the next workshop are simmering on the stove. You all turn to baking cakes, scones, and biscuits for the workshop participants’ teas.

  Leon brings the children back from school in Gloria. Your niece and nephew demand to scrape the bowls after the batter is poured into moulds. You can see your cousin’s hairs standing up on her arms. You offer to help by taking the children to buy ice cream, and you look forward to the treat yourself.

  Your offer does not turn out well, for Nyasha throws you a savage look as she strides off to fetch her purse. Carefully she counts out cents, looking at every coin twice to make sure she has the correct value. You wish, as you accept the fistful of change, that Mainini had moved from Kuwadzana to a reasonable area like the northern suburbs. Then you would find a way to make her invite you to live with her, and offer you a job, as she has offered Christine.

  “Be good,” your cousin orders her children. “If you are, we’ll have a treat,” she promises with a show of her old recklessness. “We’ll all go out to the cinema at the weekend.”

  “Ten days, twice a day, that’s twenty teas for fifteen people,” your cousin goes on, not waiting for her brain to switch from one task to the other, letting everything stream in parallel.

  “Stop at Mai Taka’s on your way,” she calls as you walk out. “And find out how she’s doing.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Mai Taka’s leg is better. Her weekend begins with Saturday afternoon off. Nevertheless, she assures Nyasha she will work all day as she was absent the previous day of the great workshop cooking. As the family has planned an outing, by two o’clock she is dressed up in a turquoise tight-topped, loose-skirted dress. Excited about the trip to the cinema, her eyes shine with the prospect of folding the story away in her mind and undoing the bundle of it when she returns, to reproduce the wonder for her own little Taka, for his father has forbidden the boy to tag along when his mother is busy working for their common employers. You deck yourself out in the bottle-green trouser suit you bought with your teacher’s salary. On your feet are the Lady Dis. You remind yourself finally to thank your cousin, but immediately you forget.

  Cousin-Brother-in-Law unlocks the vehicle. Your niece and nephew shout and jump up and down, reciting a catechism
of ice creams.

  “Chocolate!”

  “Cherry … cherry … ripple!”

  “Vanilla!”

  “The yellow one. It tastes like cream!”

  “Oh, you mean Devonshire.”

  Panashe nods at his elder sister.

  “Then say what you mean,” Anesu returns tersely, sounding much like her mother.

  “Def … Defsha,” repeats Panashe triumphantly.

  “Devonshire, OK. Listen! De … von … shire,” corrects the sister.

  “Dev’shire,” your nephew finally manages. Your niece nods approval.

  The little boy grows more confident.

  “But rum and raisins,” he admits, happily shaking his head. “M-m, I hate rum and raisins.”

  “Rum and raisin,” Anesu corrects her brother once again. “Children aren’t meant to like it because it’s got alcohol in it. Pana, you know what alcohol is, don’t you?”

  Panashe nods. “It’s the wine Mama likes.”

  “Jah, that’s one kind,” Anesu sniffs, unimpressed by her brother’s powers of observation. “That’s it. That’s why children don’t like it,” she goes on primly.

  Chuckling happily, Panashe scrambles into Gloria. Mai Taka scoops your nephew onto her lap. Cousin-Brother-in-Law pats the boy’s head and says, “You can have rum and raisin today if you want to. The rum taste is only flavouring.”

  “But he said he doesn’t like it,” points out Anesu. Panashe nods agreement.

  In the ensuing silence, you all realize that you have finished organizing the children, that you are suspended in a state of waiting for Nyasha.