This Mournable Body
Your clothes are packed in the new suitcase your relatives bought for you. You do not know what to make of this, whether they are so unsophisticated as to spend the little they have on you and thus have less themselves, or whether it is their way of hurrying you away. You decide not to be concerned. The outcome of their gift is that you will make a better impression on Tracey than arriving with clothes in crumpled plastic bags and threadbare backpacks, and this is good. You thank them for the lovely suitcase for the hundredth time as you all troop down the stairs. They urge you not to mention it.
You have stashed the bag of mealie meal Kiri brought up to Harare from your mother in a corner of the wardrobe you have cleared of your belongings. You wish you had actually removed it as you intended. But there is so much clutter everywhere in the house, you are positive it will not be discovered for months. By that time it will no longer be edible and nobody will associate you with it. Abandoning the gift is an act as significant as digging up your umbilical cord and carrying it away from where it was buried. You feel greatly relieved as you enter the garage.
All the family are present to send you off. Leon arranges your belongings in Gloria’s boot. Panashe holds a boxful of shoes out to his father and chatters on about a girl at school who habitually slew giants on Fridays.
“How does she slay them?” his mother asks.
“She ties them up with string,” Panashe explains as you set off. “Then she puts lots and lots of candy-floss in his mouth. Lots and lots of candy-floss.”
Anesu, who has grown quieter since her brother’s crisis, listens while your nephew carefully explains the giant’s torture. As the car shudders across the drive, a workshop participant races across the lawn.
“Slow down,” Nyasha says.
The car stops.
“I am not going to write about me,” the young woman says. She looks down at her stomach and says, “Can I write about my mother? She was shot. The person who shot her is free. Because of the pardon. The president’s.”
“Yes, write that,” Nyasha says.
“Maybe it is about me, anyway,” the girl says softly. “Since because of that man I am an orphan.” Shoulders drooping lower, she starts back to the group.
“She is one of the three. Who got it the first time,” Nyasha says.
Leon has his hands on the steering wheel, but has not remembered to drive.
“Let’s go,” Nyasha says.
Cousin-Brother-in-Law opens his mouth, then eases his foot off the brake without a word.
Down by the gate, down behind the bushes, the staff quarters’ door flies off its hinges. Mai Taka rolls down the stone steps in front of the dirty-walled building. She lands in a heap in the sandy clearing at the foot of the steps. A shadowy figure hovers behind her. It leaps down the steps in one jump, swinging a bicycle chain round, like a propeller.
Mai Taka wears her nightdress. The chain cuts through the cloth. She scrambles up.
Nyasha turns Panashe’s head away, then leaps out of the car, shouting at Leon to follow.
“Mai Taka! Mai Taka!” screams Anesu.
Mai Taka trips over bushes. A length of the cloth she holds to her chest catches in branches. Mai Taka rakes at the bush and shakes it. Silence stands outside the quarters. The chain dangles beside his feet in the sand.
“Come and help us, Silence, come and help us,” Leon calls, approaching the help.
“Leon!” Nyasha cautions.
Cousin-Brother-in-Law drags his gaze from Silence to Mai Taka. His face pales with understanding. Nyasha wedges an arm under Mai Taka’s shoulder, Cousin-Brother-in-Law pushes his under the other. They drag Mai Taka between them.
“You’ll have to get out,” Nyasha says when the three reach the car, because you are sitting there, watching.
She adds, “With the children.”
Mai Taka’s eyes swivel back in their orbits. The car smells like a rotten wound after you vacate it and the help climbs in.
Nyasha walks back to pick up out of the bush the cloth Mai Taka dropped. She stands motionless for many seconds before bending down. When she straightens up, she arranges the thing she has retrieved into a bundle.
“I didn’t know,” Nyasha whispers, returning to the car. “Mai Taka, I didn’t know. I should have followed that gut suspicion I had, when I asked.”
Mai Taka hugs the bundle and whimpers.
Mai Taka refuses to lie down on Anesu’s bed or to recline in the living room on the sofa. Nyasha pushes a chair for the woman between the wall and the kitchen table. Mai Taka slumps forward. Leon and Nyasha discuss what to do with the injured patient, who needs to be treated, and with the bundle that must be incinerated.
“He will kill her,” Nyasha says. “I’ve been doing my research. Doctors here don’t like to talk, but when they do, they say they sew patients together a few times. Then the next time they see them, they open them up for the postmortem.”
Mai Taka opens her eyes and asks, “Mai Anesu, where is my baby?”
“It is in the garage,” Nyasha says. “I have put your fetus in a bucket with the towels you wrapped it in.”
Mai Taka tries to stand up. Holding first on to the table and then on to the sink, she half crawls and half walks toward the garage.
“Leon, come,” says Nyasha. “We’ll take her to the hospital.”
You remain with the children, who are upset by what they have seen. Once the three of you are alone, however, Panashe crawls onto your lap. Anesu goes through the bookshelf in her room and then you sit in Panashe’s room, while your niece reads from Die kleine Raupe Nimmersatt. Trying to dismiss but not succeeding in pushing your delayed move from your cousin’s house to the back of your mind, you pay no attention to the unfamiliar language.
When Nyasha and Leon return with Mai Taka, both children are asleep. Meeting the three in the kitchen, the first thing you notice is that the bundle is gone. Mai Taka, unsteady on her feet, is led to her kitchen chair. Her eyes keep opening and closing, showing too much white. Once the woman is settled, Leon leaves once more for the chemist’s. They had tried several on the way but had not found one with a stock of the required medication.
“Something to eat now, Mai Taka?” Nyasha soothes the woman, holding her hand.
Mai Taka’s eyes are closed. She shivers.
“Tea. Something little,” Nyasha says. “Porridge. Sadza. There’s lots of gravy. You must eat something for the medicine, even if it’s little-little.”
They have returned from Parirenyatwa Hospital with a list of charitable mission hospitals within a hundred-kilometre radius that offer immediate, affordable, and tolerable services, for though your relatives are covered by Leon’s medical aid, the house help is not. Your cousin sits on the floor in the hall by the telephone and calls the first one on the list. The out-of-town lines are bad. Nyasha dials the same number again and again.
Leon returns three-quarters of an hour later with strong antibiotics and barbiturates.
“We have to go to St. Andrew’s now,” Nyasha says, coming back into the kitchen. “They’ll take her and do it today, if we get there before four o’clock.”
“That’s a trip,” says Leon. “I’ll walk over and talk to Matthew, next door. Maybe he can lend us some money for the petrol.”
You take Nyasha aside and negotiate to call Tracey to pick you up from your cousin’s house. Nyasha has coaxed Mai Taka to lie down in Anesu’s bed by the time you leave, having first told the little girl she would spend the night with her brother. Leon has not been able to borrow the money from the neighbour and is busy trying German colleagues.
CHAPTER 15
On the way to your new home, you remember how, in all the commotion surrounding Mai Taka and Silence, you have forgotten to thank your cousin suitably for the time you spent at her house. You had expected to do so in the car, once safely on your way, as premature gratitude could easily have eddied through the air to covetous spirits, giving them time to sabotage your happiness from envy. Resolvin
g to call her as soon as you have settled in, when she has had time to manage the matter with Mai Taka, you decide to use part of your first salary to purchase Nyasha a thank-you present. This settled, you respond more freely to Tracey’s small talk.
In Avondale West, not far from the Mediterranean Bakery, Tracey turns into a close. Each of half a dozen gateways arranged in a semicircle around the road leads to a quarter-acre plot. These pieces of land were dissected out of a sprawling farm decades ago as news of sunny Rhodesia—called “God’s own country”—was circulated to attract dissatisfied Europeans from the north of the world. The former farmhouse, situated at the centre of the U, its grounds spreading out on either side, is still the largest, most imposing building. Smaller lots run up the sides of the road.
You had hoped, the day Tracey brought you to view your new home two weeks ago, that the former farmhouse would be yours. It was not too difficult, though, to swallow disappointment when the Pajero stopped halfway down the close, in front of the smallest building. You comforted yourself by observing how the outside of the house was newly renovated and neat, the terms reassuringly good: a modest amount deducted from your salary with an option within five years to exchange the lease for an agreement of sale. Restless to leave Nyasha’s household, your savings from your period at the advertising agency, meagerly supplemented by your months of teaching, dangerously low, you quickly signed.
This afternoon, you are even more eager to recommence earning a living than you were a fortnight ago, when you first visited your new residence. The abject scene of Mai Taka and the impossibility of ferrying her to hospital, even though white Cousin-Brother-in-Law was involved, reminded you fearfully that the hardship of your village origins could pursue you in the city as well.
Tracey cuts the engine. The remote control does not work: there is no power at the moment. The gardener slides the gate open. The vehicle rolls toward a large bungalow behind which are staff quarters. The buildings are painted a dusky peach that glows warmly, like sunset, and there is a margin of brown along the bottom to prevent the walls being spoilt by splashes of dirt. You nod, giving a contented smile. You see yourself working hard from here until you make your way up as far as Borrowdale.
Behind a rainbow from a borehole-fed water sprinkler, the front garden and vegetable patch thrive like a Ministry of Agriculture model garden. There is only a hint of history, nothing unpleasant, in the ancient paving stones that lead to the house. When Tracey and you have grown used to each other, your boss tells you she employed an artist friend who did the props for the advertisements to age the new ones down. The gardener pushes the gate closed and stands to attention next to the Pajero.
“How are you, madam?” he salutes. His overalls are clean and tidy if old, his gumboots glossy at the top although the base is muddy. Mouth smiling, he raises his chin. His eyes gleam as he examines you.
“Remember, you’re perfectly safe, Tambu,” Tracey says as you climb out. She pronounces your name with a better accent, as though she has been practising since the weekend you met. “No one will get over that!” she exclaims with satisfaction, pointing at the redbrick back wall. “I asked them to put an extra metre on top above the standard, just to make sure,” she continues. “No point in leaving anything to chance when in principle you can do something about it. And there’s a boom at the top of the close that’s manned every night. All the householders chip in. No one’s going to mug you, or anything like that. So you don’t need your own night watchman. Alfred can enjoy his sleep except on the nights he mans the boom.”
The housekeeper, the gardener’s wife, emerges from under a trellis covered with grapevine. As they were both off the day you visited, they are meeting you for the first time. After scrutinizing you for a few seconds, the man cups his hand over his heart. The woman curtseys. She claps twice after you shake hands.
“Where are you from, Mai?” you enquire politely as the couple haul loads of your luggage into their arms. “You are mai who?”
“Ma’Tabitha. I am from the Save River. But I married. To a man from afar, Phiri, from Malawi.”
“VaPhiri, how are you?” you say to the gardener. You relax as he has done and raise your hands in a soundless clap. It is good to have someone around from closer to your home than Harare. You chat briefly about the river the woman mentioned, since you once spent several days’ holiday there with Babamukuru and his family a quarter of a century ago.
“They were with the property before I bought it,” says Tracey, “which makes everything much easier. It’s as if they own the place and you’re the odd one out. Very convenient for a working woman.”
Once more you refuse to harbour anything like resentment or jealousy concerning Tracey’s diverse advantages, such as the salary she had earned at the advertising agency that was many times yours by virtue of her being an advertising executive while you were a mere copywriter, although your qualifications were similar, and were obtained from the same institutions—first the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart, and then the university in Harare. You swallow the past of your common school days and remind yourself that Tracey had a year more work experience than you do, as you had repeated your A levels at which second chance you scored only average marks, whereas she had excelled at her first attempt. Your smile, like Ba’ and Ma’Tabitha’s, etches deeper into your face. Like them you cannot indulge yourself in any discontent. You must be happy with what you have and how much better it is than where you have been. The long trek from the hostel has ended. You possess the contract to a wonderful bungalow that after five years will become your property. You cannot allow anything else to matter.
Tracey has Ba’ and Ma’Tabitha go on ahead, stopping under the grapevine that leads to the back entrance to admire the glitterstone swimming pool on the northern side of the building.
“You don’t swim, do you?” she asks. “Unless you’ve learnt in between. They say glitterstone’s cold,” she cautions. “But your favourite place at school was behind the hall with your books and that blanket of yours. Not the swimming pool, really.”
You laugh and move on. When Nyasha comes, Panashe and Anesu will splash in that pool. So will Leon.
“I love these black granite surfaces,” says Tracey as you enter the kitchen. She runs a finger over the speckled countertops.
You imitate the gesture, enjoying the smoothness.
“I did tell you it’s all local, didn’t I?” she goes on. “Do you know, five of the ten best stone sculptors in the world are Zimbabwean?”
“Yes,” you tell her, grateful for your lesson from Cousin-Brother-in-Law. “I’d love to see their pieces.”
Your smile expanding on your face, you compare the stone colours to Mai Manyanga’s ochre. You are overwhelmed. Your good fortune all but brings you to tears as you stand next to your boss, digesting how you have earned your own kitchen without having to marry any of the Manyanga brothers.
“That history of ours in stone goes back centuries. To the dzimbahwe and the Zimbabwe birds,” your boss muses. “I’ve got to find a way to put that into the Green Jacaranda itinerary. I haven’t been able to so far as, well, the stone quarrying isn’t exactly green. Still,” she goes on, leading the way, “in principle, there’s got to be a solution! After all, we do try to make it sustainable.”
You follow your boss to the living room, a wide airy space that opens through French windows onto the front garden. You run your palm over a black granite coffee table framed in wood from a historical railway sleeper. Next you drop onto an ivory-coloured leather sofa.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Tracey nods with a grin that acknowledges your appreciation. “It’s so obvious, you’d think it would occur to more people to add value to our heritage,” she continues, making you think of your cousin Nyasha, whose mind, like your boss’s, does not leave a matter once it decides to settle. You smile again, at Tracey’s enthusiasm.
“Not very likely, though,” she proceeds with some disappointment. “Not with the gu
ys we have in government. We’ve got a good fair trade deal with the suppliers down in Mutoko. So we hope it’s just vicious rumours about the government nationalizing everything. This indigenization thing. What d’you think they’re doing, Tambu?”
Smile steady, you raise your shoulders and shake your head.
Tracey cocks hers to the side in scarcely disguised surprise. “You must have an opinion,” she says, settling on the sofa arm, which indents under her weight. “Everyone does. No one can’t. Especially not these days.”
“I don’t believe in politics,” you say, hoping the answer is acceptable, and wondering, if it is not, what answer would be preferable.
“Of course you do.” Tracey says. “Otherwise there’s no way you’d have moved out from that cushy job at the agency. And there was that note you wrote, with that rot about getting married. I thought, hmm, there’s more than meets the eye here. Quite the politician. Well, that makes two of us who realized we had to get out,” she goes on, crossing the room to an armchair. “In principle three,” she adds in afterthought as she leans back. “With Pedzi. Although that’s not quite the same as I headhunted her before she left on her own the way we did.”
You are startled to hear Tracey call a job that had been so grossly unfair that it had exhausted your long patience “cushy.” At the same time, you had never in your life been concerned with politics. You understand that people like you, who are clawing their way forward, do not have time for it. Most recently you have been so concerned with your personal predicament that you have not thought much about the subject at all, leaving such to Nyasha and Leon. Struck by Tracey’s assumption that you would have considered such matters, caught unaware by her probing, which forebodes unanticipated, sensitive angles to your job, you ignore the jolt you suffer on hearing of Pedzi.
“Shall we leave them here?” Ma’Tabitha calls from the hall. She indicates the pile of baggage she and Ba’Tabitha have brought in and stacked.