Leaving the office on weekdays, you turn not toward the Fourth Street bus terminus but walk down to the cinema complex on Robert Mugabe Avenue. There, after haggling with the attendant who wishes you to sit through one screening and then return to the foyer to purchase another ticket, you savour victory when you are permitted to pay up front for both the evening sessions. You sit until the very last note of music has vibrated away over the end credits, not once weeping, never brightened by gladness. After the cinema, you take a solitary dinner in a nearby restaurant, this being preferable to a lonely repast at home that relaxes too much, enabling the unease that wafts beneath your polished exterior to leak through your depleted defences. Once the waiter has brought your order, feeling neither hunger nor satiation nor enjoyment, you clear your plate. After that you trek through a number of nightclubs, picking up cacophonous company on the way, yet always avoiding the Island in case you bump into Christine.
At weekends, you sit in Harare Gardens. You watch couples cuddling on the lawn and taking wedding photos with their arms around each other. At these times, regret over not moving in on the Manyanga brothers ripples through the hollowness in your chest. You hold an image of Larkey in your mind for some seconds, then you breathe in deeply, clench your jaw, and force the vain pining from your mind.
You decide to inquire about an experienced nganga. This solution turns out to be impossible, like all else you have tried. You cannot ask Baba and Ma’Tabitha. Seeking solace and such personal advice from your domestics is unthinkable. Tracey has no idea of those things and Pedzi is a high-swag city girl who would enjoy a laugh at your predicament. Auntie Marsha does the horoscope in the Clarion. She is too foolish to attend to. Instead you visit the Queen Victoria Library on Saturday mornings before you take up position in the park, looking for information on occult and spiritual divining.
At work you revert to the old pattern from the advertising agency, in which you deliver admirably to order, but cannot begin anything without instruction. All the same, you are a model of decorum, showing impeccable deference to everybody you meet in your building’s community. You take to greeting Sister Mai Gamu as affably as you wave at the queen of Africa. You nod cordially to the politician’s wife’s typists and, on the few mornings that you feel exceptionally courteous, you extend the pleasantries to asking how supplies of paper and ink cartridges are, under the prevailing difficult circumstances in the country. You buy a couple of quarter-litre bottles of brandy, which you tuck away in your handbag, against the Gossip Club accosting you on the stairs or in the lift, but although you see them through the windows in the office doors, they no longer summon you to enter.
In the office, you take care to solicit, every day, lunch requests from Pedzi and Tracey. This you do in order to preempt them with volition before they order your service, thereby reminding you again of your position relative to theirs, your built-in inadequacy that prevents you engaging with their exuberant sorority. Later, you knock, then carefully set down their orders, which they now thank you for, as they are no longer in the first throes of creating their new product. You smile and express your willingness to see to it immediately, if they require any further attention. All the while you simmer internally with resentment.
The one upward current in your situation is that after six months of failing, you finally obtain your driver’s licence. This accomplishment coincides with the inauguration of Pedzi’s project. You realize you have taken too many attempts to succeed at the road test when Tracey looks at your certification with a quiet nod of her head and instructs Pedzi to buy a Highway Code booklet and make an appointment for her provisional licence. Comparing yourself to Pedzi, as always, considering that Pedzi will probably obtain her road licence the first time she attempts it, dulls your pleasure in your achievement. Your dissatisfaction increases whenever you enter your car and head for the office or home. Then the purple Mazda SUV that Green Jacaranda purchased for you swerves perilously through amber traffic lights and in and out of queues of cars. Furious, you honk twice as loudly back at anyone who sounds a hooter in displeasure.
At the premises, while Tracey works on new signings, sponsors, and programmes, and attends to the eco-spin-offs that include the granite miners, you dream of being out in the savannah or climbing mountains as you busy yourself with the overseas agents and their holidaymaker clients, as well as with your principal responsibilities of bookings and statistical analysis. Your boss has built up her ecotourism enterprise in the northwest of the county on her brother’s, Nils Stevenson’s, farm. This you learn several weeks after your final road test, being then called into Tracey’s office and offered a seat, as at your first day. As discreetly as possible, while still allowing you to feel like a valued member of the organization, Tracey reveals how she settled for the arrangement with her brother when old Mrs. Stevenson died first, followed in one year to the week by the departure of her husband. As stubbornly as the family had resisted putting an e into Nils’s name in order to celebrate their Viking origins, Nils resisted his sister’s claim to any part of the family property. On leaving Steers, D’Arcy and MacPedius Advertising Agency, your boss threatened her brother with the law. The outcome was an out-of-court settlement sanctioned by the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority that allowed her to build a village on several acres of the ranch. The agreement stated the land was to be sectioned within five years of the date of signature. However, as Tracey became much too busy with the success of her venture, greatly due to the location of her project next to a water hole, the subdivision did not take place.
After accepting formal congratulations for acquiring your driving licence, you receive the news you have been longing to hear. In addition to the statistical analysis and bookings, now, finally, you will accompany the company’s clients as tour supervisor. According to this plan, you are to bring a much-needed capacity into the organization that has so far been outsourced at unjustifiable expense in the opinion of Green Jacaranda and its donors, as Green Jacaranda already employs three full-time staff. Tracey’s eyes are bright but noncommittal as she relays this. Your success at your rationalizing task will upgrade your position from project manager to that of tour manager in due course, if all goes well. Tracey wishes you good luck and lets you know you are under a three-month probation period.
You surrender to this new task, as though your job is the God whom you met for the first time decades before when you arrived at your uncle’s Methodist mission. You enjoyed many trips around all parts of the country when you lived with your relatives, for your uncle put into practice during the holidays his belief that seeing was part of education. He always included a lecture during the family outings: Mr. Smith’s Kariba hydroelectricity plant and the sunken Tonga village whose outraged spirits stirred the river snake god to eat up several Italian engineers, to say nothing of their workers. Then Rhodes’s grave up in the Matopo Hills overlooking Bulawayo, which had once been the most potent shrine of Mwari, the God of all people from Zambia through your own country and into South Africa, where freedom fighters under cover of night held sacred cleansing rituals during the war, and which, you had discovered as you researched for advertising campaigns, young male Zimbabweans now marked their property with urine. The magic of these sites was strong and real to your teenage person. It hovered over the crumbling location that you visited as Zimbabwe Ruins, that you encountered again at Steers, D’Arcy and MacPedius Advertising Agency, rehabilitated and renamed Great Zimbabwe. Your promotion is like an opening up of time that allows you to recharge your middle-aged soul with your determined young self. There was generosity in that earlier person, flowing from delight at those years’ exuberance, when the journeys undertaken with Babamukuru and his family induced a conviction that you were a person amongst people, like all others, part of a marvellous world. You welcome the rebirth of your youthful exhilaration and are eager to pass on your excitement to your clients during visits to the sites you have not visited for decades.
The watering hole Tracey c
hose as the site of Green Jacaranda Safaris does not shrink at the same pace as other well-frequented water sources in the parched, sandy plains of the northwest. By the time you arrive with your contingent of tourists, it has withdrawn a mere half metre or so from where its bank emerged when the Stevensons acquired it; but the elephants still wade to the middle to siphon water up into their trunks and out onto their backs. Buffalo still wallow in muddy satisfaction at the pool’s edges. You are soon accustomed to seeing a full five Xs against the items on big game viewing each time you gather the client satisfaction questionnaires.
It is immensely beautiful up on the Stevensons’ property. Every morning, recalling at this serene moment during the tour your upbringing first at the mission and then at the convent, you murmur a short prayer, giving thanks for being surprised by such happiness when you believed you had lost all capacity for revival or betterment. There is exquisite delight in the ripple of pale gold grass over the plain. Immeasurable peace abides in a giraffe’s neck curving brown and deep gold against the sky that shines too blue to look at, as in the animal’s velvet plucking of foliage. The rumble of a lion’s purr, the arc of the tusk of an elephant bull, the calculated flick of a predator bird’s wing rekindle awe at the fact that you are part of such existence. In the evenings, long drinks anticipate freshly caught fish grilled on an open fire by the chef with a marinade of mazhanje juice or marula liqueur. There are madora and matemba, and sorghum beer for those who dare later in the night, when dancers entertain the guests in the establishment’s central clearing. In the cold season, when even the sun is white, grass stalks sway gently in the breeze and your visitors catch their breath. The smell of smoke from the estate hands’ cooking lingers over the safari lands, and, on some evenings, a rim of red glows in the distance like a full moon rising, over in the villages where people reside, their untended fires crackling and smoking with destruction. On those nights, the sky smells like home. Your brochure reads, and you advise your group, that the settlers, in awe, named the sprawling veld God’s Own Country. The clients exclaim and question each other over every animal track encountered, dung beetle chuckled over, and pool that looked refreshing but might harbour bilharzia. Following discussion amongst themselves, they are interested in your opinion.
Thus the patina of what your mother, with stinging distaste, labelled “the Englishness,” which you acquired at the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart, at last turns into a grand advantage. How restoring it is, even as you plod toward middle age, to reap a positive outcome from the convent that, while it educated you, rendered you “them,” “they,” “the Africans.” As tour supervisor at Green Jacaranda, you are still Zimbabwean enough, which is to say African enough, to be interesting to the tourists, but not so strange as to be threatening. They communicate comfortably with your anglicized accent, and you reproduce it assiduously, although you still mutilate some of the diphthongs. The person you have become at the end of a long, twisting route is fascinatingly enigmatic, yet at the same time endearingly familiar to the clients. Not in a place that you can call home, but itinerant, away from the homestead and from the office on Jason Moyo, you become a star.
You spend time with the older women in the groups. They bring small gifts with which to appreciate various people they encounter. You are presented with chocolates, long, narrow chiffon scarves, and perfume samples. Frau Bachmann, who travels regularly with her husband, is particularly generous bringing in addition little German Christmas cakes, which she urges you to keep to share with your family. “Charming!” is their enthusiastic comment—“Entzückend!” from Frau Bachmann—as you explain how in earlier times possessing a sacred totem animal that was cared for and not eaten ensured conservation. If the totem animal was eaten, one’s teeth invariably fell out, you continue, laughing. These days, however, people find herbalists who give them medicine so they can eat whatever they like. You explain the phrase for incest translates literally to “eating totem.” “Amazing!” your clients nod as you conclude. For your part, you file away German words in order to test them on Cousin-Brother-in-Law.
In season, the tourists take out their cameras and run reels of film when you show them the tree the eco-safaris are named for. Here is your boss in so many photographs, the kindly yet wily Zimbabwean of Scandinavian extraction. You too are in many frames on the opposite shores of seas and oceans. You stand smiling somewhat stiffly, under the purple canopy of the jacaranda tree, or beneath the shade of an acacia in the vastness of the savannah. So will you be remembered.
Returning to the office from your seventh, particularly satisfying, safari, when you are expecting your promotion to the position of tour manager, you notice a change has come over Tracey. She leaves the premises to meet government officials in their offices more frequently. Taciturn after such appointments, she utters short and abrupt sentences. She rarely speaks of principles. You persuade yourself at first that the change in your boss’s demeanour is due to strain between her and her newly appointed project manager, exacerbated by your absence. Hoping this is the case, you keep a sharp if covert eye open for signs of this dissent. As it turns out, after a few days in which you pore over statistics from the questionnaires and write extensive reports on each aspect of the excursion—this last an additional task that you have now been distinguished with—you are obliged to concede that your success is not the cause of the new tension in the office. Your boss and the former receptionist continue to be an admirable team. To make matters worse, the results of a pre-survey indicate Pedzi’s ghetto arrivals and satisfaction scores will be at least as high as yours.
Its official name being unspeakable, Pedzi’s project is branded the Green Jacaranda Ghetto Getaway on all publicity material. Having developed into a practically no-cost option for clients to incorporate into the usual Green Jacaranda safari a modified high-density community experience, it consists of a tour, one night in a home, breakfast the following day, and a choice of activities before resuming the standard programme.
Pedzi is aware of the dangers of too much success and acts diligently to circumvent them. She does not, in the beginning, raise a single hair of her plucked eyebrows at you when you return with many tales of satisfied clients. She navigates the rivalry between the office building’s occupants by keeping the glass foyer doors open when she is working at reception, even though this is against the boss’s advice and company policy, in order to disarm each woman who passes with a smile, even those whom she now, in her new role as businesswoman, finds frustrating. She even grins at the youths who congregate for pickings around the city council’s overflowing rubbish bins. So intent on her advancement is she that Pedzi dashes them a couple of local dollars to remove the refuse outside of Tracey’s schedule.
Little by little, however, Pedzi is eventually overcome by the brightness of her prospects. She promises the seamstresses several times a week that she will soon have an outfit made. When she does not turn up for measurements and they inquire she tells them she has changed her mind, that the outfit will be made for her sister. Eventually she is promising everybody on all the floors everything and delivering nothing. Nevertheless, Pedzi is proof that a girl from the high-density areas can become a successful businesswoman. She remains immensely popular. Tracey frets about the donors appearing at short notice to find women from the lower levels drinking instant coffee and eating samoosas at the donors’ expense. For their part, the co-tenants begin to ask when they go out for lunch whether they may bring first Pedzi, and gradually all three of you, coleslaw and samoosas or sadza and stew when they return.
“Hey, anyone? Hamburgers? Salad? Samoosas?” Pedzi calls calmly through the office at the request of her newfound sisters who either come up to take the order or use the telephone.
As the launch of the Ghetto Getaway approaches, Pedzi relays information throughout the Green Jacaranda building concerning her soon-to-be improved finances, and reminds everybody that they all stand to benefit as, in principle, they had all been party to
her breakthrough as part of her work community.
This is when Sister Mai Gamu makes it known that she is a baker of eight-tier wedding cakes, and reveals she also possesses a bridal boutique in a more affluent section of Harare’s avenues. Her grey eye staring dully, she entreats Pedzi to advertise the ghetto as an original wedding venue for Green Jacaranda clients and other Europeans. She confides her secret yearning that a wedding party will include a best man and she will become a German citizen, thus getting her own back on her spouse. Pedzi accepts a business card without commitment, promising vaguely to pass on the information; but when she discusses matters with the younger seamstresses, she vows she will never take Mai Gamu’s card, a politician’s inferior common-law wife, out of her pocket when her clients land at Harare Airport.
As the Ghetto Getaway momentum grows, half a dozen businesswomen on the floors above and below express their willingness to take in as many as three Ghetto Getaway clients a night. Pedzi’s sister, in preparation, evicts half a dozen lodgers from her backyard shacks.