This Mournable Body
On one side miserable wraiths, which are in fact maize plants, poke up from the earth. In front and behind you the soil glitters like pop stars’ bling with mica, silicon, and crystals. The nearby mountains have, in the years since you last visited, grown as bald as underfed grandfathers. Further away the grey granite of the Nyanga range lowers like a ridge of frowning eyebrows. You catch your breath as you greet these sentinels to your past, suppressing every twinge of regret at the events that brought you here or at the deed you are doing. You twist the steering wheel to avoid a ditch and compel yourself to focus. Provisions packed in the back of the SUV slide up and down. Enjoying beforehand the impact you will make with these gifts, you compose yourself for the meeting ahead.
There are more homesteads in the village than you remember. Gob-nosed children scramble from patches of groundnuts and scrawny pumpkins as you drive by. They cheer, kicking up calloused soles as they chase in your wake.
“Mauya, Mauya! Mauya ne-Ma-zi-da!” they chorus. “You have come! Welcome, you have come in a Mazda.”
The sun beats down on the short tufts of their hair. The youngsters dance, legs turning grey in the dust that washes from your vehicle’s wheels. It floats with a shimmer above the soil and around the children’s feet. Their fingers flutter. Their hands twirl. Their small feet pound after you.
Closer to the homestead, at a communal tap beside a family’s well, other youngsters bash at each other with cooking oil tins and pesticide pails and grind their elbows into each other’s soft tissue. Past this fray your Mazda rumbles.
“Who is that one?” a girl shouts, distracted from her battle.
“That’s a murungu,” answers another.
“No it’s not. That’s a person,” the girl says, turning to keep the car in sight. “And, hey, can you see, it’s also a woman.”
“That doesn’t matter. Money, money, give us money!” a skinny boy screams, throwing his water pail down and dashing into the road. His gangmates join him, swelling your retinue of children.
Often you dreamt of this moment. You are prepared. A megapack of mixed sweets lies on the passenger seat beside you. You have eaten one or two to keep yourself going on the drive. Now you grab a handful. Toffees, chocolate eclairs, and fruit drops fly through the window, and the fight breaks out again behind your vehicle.
A couple of dogs are asleep inside your family’s homestead. Their bloated tongues spill onto the earth. They pant with shallow breaths, ribs expanding like the hoods of cobras, which gentle motion nevertheless does not disturb the flies that buzz about the animals’ sores. Neither animal barks at the Mazda’s wheels, nor bays to alert a family member. Your vehicle stops under the old mango tree, gnarled and drooping now, that had stood guard over the family members’ arrivals and departures for decades.
One animal opens an eye briefly as the car door thuds. It quivers an ear, thumps its tail in the sand once or twice, and lapses back into languor. When no one appears, you open the door again and press the horn. At this the dogs lope up and sniff at the Mazda’s wheels.
At last a woman cranes her neck around the granary.
“Ewo! Svikai!” she invites without a sign of recognition.
You blink hard.
“Mai,” you say in such shock that you forget to move toward her.
She is several times smaller than you remember, and her skin seems to have shrunk with her, while somehow retaining its overall mass so that where it does not hang, it has thickened like that of a pachyderm.
“Mai,” you repeat.
You sense criticism in her lack of recognition. You move forward swiftly to forestall any disapproval about anything.
“Mai, I am back. I have come.”
So saying, you drop to your knees beside her.
She is rubbing maize kernels off the cob in preparation for milling. Only one or two cobs are clean of seeds. The one in her hand is full, except for a few bare rows. The plastic sheeting beside her is heaped with untouched cobs. The wicker tray on her lap is all but empty. She is thinking of other things, not of what she is doing. You help her set the tray on the ground. Your gesture is unnecessary but she allows you to assist her and lays her head heavily against your neck for a moment. When she straightens up she once again is the woman who raised you.
“Ewo, Tambu,” she greets you. “You of the years. Isn’t that right, so many years? If this womb agreed, this mouth would say you are one from afar, nothing but a foreigner visiting. Only the womb knows better.”
You swallow frustration, smile, and embrace her again. Patience is both weapon and victory. How much of it have you deployed in your life? Come what may, and soon at that, whether the people here know it or not, you will be queen of the village.
“Let us go in, my child,” your mother softens, sensing the sharpness in her words. She turns gingerly onto her knees, balancing on her palms. Her fingers scrape the earth like claws. The joints are thick as bulbs ready for planting. Your mother winces as she rests her hands on a granary plank and heaves herself upward.
“There is no one to help you, Mai?” you inquire, holding her by the shoulder.
“Help? Aren’t you someone?” she snaps.
You slide your hand beneath her armpit. Her weight descends.
“Anyway, cooking sadza, it can be done,” Mai relents when the worst pain is out of her joints. “It’s these things like the maize and the milking that are painful. And the garden. So I thank God your sister Netsai gave me her two girls. They cook and keep the place clean. They fetch water from the pump down the road, and they do the washing in the river.”
“Concept, Freedom,” she raises her voice as two girls come into the yard, large, awkward bundles of twigs balanced on their heads.
The girls throw their bundles down on the rack by the kitchen. Looking you over while pretending not to, they approach, linking their little fingers together and bumping against each other.
“What does walking like that mean?” scolds Mai. “You should be running. This is your mother. The one with two legs, that kept her in Harare so long we thought something destroyed her. This is your maiguru, Tambudzai, the one who comes before your mother.”
The girls giggle and accelerate. You embrace. When you step back to look at them, the family likeness jolts you, so that you want to hold them against your body and promise them many things, that their lives will never be like yours, nor will there be any need to go to war like their mother did. You do not move, knowing that only by remaining resolute in your own progress will you have any chance of turning your desires into pledges that you can fulfil. The girls smile at you shyly.
“The Mozambiquans,” quips Mai disparagingly.
Your nieces hang their heads.
“We learnt that during the war,” your mother goes on indifferently, “while some were fighting, some were having children. Isn’t that so, you Mozambiquans?”
The girls shuffle closer together.
“Weren’t you born by your mother across the border?” Mai rasps on. “At the time she was meant to be fighting? But then, fighting with one leg. What kind of fighting was she meant to do? No wonder we are still living like this since people were still doing the same old things over there in spite of what they told us.”
“So we were born in Mozambique,” Concept, the older girl, nods. She speaks lightly as children who have recently become teenagers do when an offensive ritual is repeated. “Speaking of it is a waste of time. People born in Mozambique are back now, like everyone else.”
“If I had known,” your mother threatens your country’s history with vigour. “If I had known that’s what was happening in Mozambique, my daughter would not have lost a leg. For what? For this? For nothing!”
“You called, Mbuya?” her granddaughter continues, softly changing the subject.
“I didn’t call anyone. It’s nothing,” Mai shrugs and turns to the kitchen. “I’m going in. Girls, show your aunt where to go.”
Her voice thins. An anxiety she ca
nnot conceal throbs in the words.
“If there’s anything to carry that’s been brought, your aunt will tell you and you can take it.”
So saying, your mother turns toward the kitchen.
You lead your nieces back to the twin cab and pull the tarpaulin off the back. Dust ricochets. You let it settle in your lungs. Joy has gone out of everything. The girls hoist provisions to the main house looking glum and deflated.
“So the provisions are put away?” Mai asks when you join her in the kitchen.
“Yes, Mbuya,” the elder girl, Concept, nods warily, settling down on the reed mat to the left of the entrance where you, as women, cluster.
“Where is Baba? How is he?” you ask.
“He’s well. The cooking oil?” says Mai.
“The cooking oil!” her grandchildren echo.
“Candles?”
“Those too,” the girls confirm.
“And you carried the margarine nicely?”
When she cannot think of anything else that is necessary but may not have been provided, her eyes flare for a moment, but the light is immediately extinguished.
“Finally, Tambudzai,” she sniffs softly. “Now you have stopped eating everything you get alone. You’ve remembered you have a family. We nearly died of hunger while we waited for that to happen.”
“And Dambudzo?” you ask.
Your anger at your mother over her comment is so quiet, you yourself do not hear it and keep on smiling.
“Have you heard from your last child? Is your son sending anything home from America?”
“Ireland, he is now in Ireland,” your mother says, as though that explains everything, makes it clear your brother cannot be expected to provide as the Irish are not as abundantly blessed as the Americans.
“So it is time to thank my boss,” you continue, in this way opening the mouth of the subject that brought you home. “She is a good boss, the one I work for,” you continue.
Mai seems not to hear.
“Concept, Freedom,” she scolds. “Why are you sitting there? Isn’t it time to be cooking something for the traveller? Are you thinking of eating everything all by yourselves? Go to the house and bring down something to prepare for your aunt here.”
The girls scramble out to fetch rice and vegetables for a stew that is the new high-carbohydrate treat in trendy women’s homesteads.
“Ms. Stevenson,” you proceed quickly when your nieces have gone. “That is her name. She’s the one who has put me where I am at last. After so long, Mai, I am empowered. That is why I can come now, when so much time has gone. It was not a question of not knowing the womb, but one of not knowing how to come back to it.”
“So it’s not true,” Mai sniffs disdainfully.
“What is not true, Mai?”
“What we heard all the time is that you were not working. That’s what was said, that that degree of yours was just a piece of paper sitting, silently rotting. And I just kept on thinking, that’s the paper. What about that daughter of mine? Tambudzai, even when Lucia sent me worse messages about you, I just kept it in my mind, surely my daughter is not sitting there like paper that has been written on and finished. I said my daughter can’t be sitting there just like that, rotting.”
Concept and Freedom crouch in through the low door, holding small wicker baskets in the crooks of their arms.
“Who is that friend of your mother’s?” Mai turns to the girls as they settle down to their tasks. “That woman your mother fought that war with? The one who said she was going to help your mother to find a leg? The one that then disappeared to Harare to stay with a relative who was a businessman or something? Tell me,” Mai demands. “She is from some other village, otherwise I would remember. She fought that war, Concept and Freedom, with your mother and my sister Lucia.”
“Oh, yes! Maiguru Kiri,” Concept smiles as she pulls the skin off an onion.
Freedom moves an enamel dish of tomatoes out of the way. She slits a packet of rice open with a broken knife and pours the grain into a winnowing tray.
“Yes, Auntie Kiri,” she agrees, glancing from Mai to the rice she is picking over. “Maiguru Kiri comes from Jenya, you know, just under the holy mountain. She used to come here when we were little. But not so much anymore.”
“That one,” says Mai. “I sent her with some mealie meal for you. But when I heard what was going on, I said, ah, now Tambu will never eat it. It’s better if that Christine just goes ahead and cooks it.”
You smell the wood smoke from the kitchen fire more intensely in the silence that follows. Forgotten odours that cling to the years mix with the smoke—the light must of dung from the floor, people once known, their sweat, odd bits of waste, moist onion and tomato skins charring slowly.
“Hurry up now, girls,” says Mai. She ends with a wince as she pushes herself up.
“Tambudzai, you come with me. Though he never comes here anymore,” she grumbles on, her face pinching once more. “Even though your uncle never comes away from that mission since his accident, he only gives us one room in the new house he built here in this home. So you will have to sleep in the old house. With your nieces.”
“That’s all right. By the time we are finished we will have built our own houses,” you promise as you follow Mai out of the kitchen. For the first time, you believe your words.
“Are you a man?” Your mother dismisses any chance of such a thing. “Isn’t it your father who should be doing that, building those houses? If he can’t manage why do you think you are more than he is? Anyway,” she continues in the same flat tone and without taking a breath, “let’s see if there is still a mattress in the back room in that old broken-down place. You have put the provisions in the front, have you not? Who goes into that back room these days, since you left your things there? The girls sleep in the side room, so if anything happens they can call your father and me easily. Let’s see if the rats have left anything.”
Your mother moves slowly, which gives her more time to speak. “Who is this Stevenson?” she inquires, enjoying the shock she causes you with her alertness. “Do we know that family? Are they one of our white people who farm in our parts of the country?”
You hesitate.
Mai stands still.
“White people are a problem,” she remarks. “You can only work with them if you know them. That’s why we prefer to do things with our own ones. You have to know this Stevenson properly to work with her, my daughter. Play cunningly. If her family is not from these parts, how can you know her? And her, what does she want with you if she doesn’t know you?”
“Mai, I wouldn’t say that,” you object, as your mother hauls herself up the stairs that lead to the old house. “It’s not like that with all of them.”
“I see,” she snorts. “Out with it, get it over and done with.”
“I knew her for six years,” you say, judging it best to be miserly with the truth.
“Oh, she was one of those white ones at your uncle’s mission,” says Mai. “One of those missionaries.”
“Not really,” you explain. “I know her from the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart. We were in a class together.”
“Oh-ho,” breathes Mai. “I now remember when and where I heard that name,” she goes on. “So now it is as I thought. You have come down here to start your madness about white people again, Tambudzai. Isn’t that why you have been nothing all this time, because of too much of those people? Leave them alone. Go and find your own thing. That is what I can tell you.”
Mai picks her way through the provisions in the front room of the old house. She moves slowly, surveying the parcels with satisfaction.
The mattress in the back room is in a bearable condition, with sign of neither fleas nor maggots. When Mai is satisfied the room is habitable, she leaves, promising to send Freedom up to sweep dust from surfaces and rodent droppings from under the bedstand. She goes into the side room the girls share and returns after a moment with a blanket.
Left alone, you sit on the steel bed, gingerly at first, letting your weight down slowly. The light turns from light to dark grey. You light a flickering flame from one of the candles. A chemical in the wax is pungent and irritating, although the packet claims the candles are smokeless. In the spluttering light, the burgundy of a frayed rug that covers a pile of junk in a corner curdles and thickens in the way of an arriving spirit. Its rancid smell trickles up your nostrils relentlessly, like an unwanted memory.
The fabric feels oily between thumb and finger. Rankness, of age rather than barely washed bodies, rises from remnants the rats have spared. You are about to drop the decaying mass when a dull gleam catches your attention. The thread picks out a worn pattern in what was once bright blue embroidery. Lifting it higher, you recognize the crest on its breast pocket and a moment later your Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart blazer.
The garment lies over a pair of broken Sandak sandals. They are your mother’s size. Almost incredulous, you remember these too: a gift sent home through a relative when you began at the advertising agency.
The hardened, splitting plastic shoes lie on your old school trunk. White paint flakes, like broken snakeskin, on battered black enamel. Bending closer, you read the words TAMBUDZAI SIGAUKE. Beneath this stands an address: Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart, P Bag 7765, Umtali.
Your body freezes and your mind leaps out of it. You want to run across the yard and jump into your SUV. But you have committed to going forward. It seems to you the trunk vibrates with the gravity of a black hole that pulls everything into its origin. The force of it creeps across the floor, trickles through the air and up the walls and inward so that after a moment you cannot tell whether you are the box or the box is you. It is calling you to surrender something you are sure you do not have.
The old locks come apart with little force. Inside the old trunk, a stringless tennis racket lies on another burgundy blazer that is in better condition than the first, and larger. Underneath this, the tongues of discoloured tennis shoes loll forward as though from a throat. Right at the bottom, neatly laid together, protected by several skirts and blouses, carefully wrapped in torn but clean old plastic bags, are a dozen or more exercise books.