When you produce a gentle, silent smile, so as not to chance an inopportune answer, the widow heaves herself out of her sofa, past bronze, brass, and copper figures that stand on her little tables.
The cabinet’s glass doors shake in protest, but after some rattling obey the widow. She removes two thick china cups and their saucers, part of a set that occupies the upper shelf along with a silver tea service turned copper with tarnish. Below the squat teapot, in a green-flecked frame of old Kamativi tin, stands the photograph the widow commands you to recognize.
He is clean shaven, light skinned, of medium height, and his immaculate dress includes a buttonhole as well as a handkerchief in his breast pocket. He holds a briefcase higher than normal for a standing man. His grip is two handed as though he had first sat, then was requested to stand, but decided to keep the bag at its previous elevation. His grasp is tight enough to bring out tendons on the back of his hand.
She, however, dimples coquettishly at the lens. A plump hand lingers on the arm that holds the briefcase. The other rests lightly on the back of a wooden chair on which a well-polished mock-python handbag gleams. She is wearing platform shoes and a shift dress, whose colour is uncertain in the black-and-white snapshot. Keeping the picture company on either flank, and on the shelves below, crowd various other ornaments: a cat of pink quartz that has lost an ear, a lone thick mug from a place called the Kings Arms. There are copper plaques depicting proteas, springboks, and blazing flame lilies, the blossom of Rhodesia, as well as shields proclaiming the year, location, and purpose of the many conferences Mr. Manyanga attended.
The widow walks past a grandfather clock whose pendulum swings heavily but does not keep time. Placing her cups on a large mahogany dining table, she announces she will make you tea. She likes you. In spite of your searing need to be favoured, your heart sinks. The snakes in your belly yawn. You feel as though your womb twitches. You are growing suspicious at being liked by this woman, knowing there is nothing about yourself that counts as amiable. Contempt for everything floods you. It lurks just under your expression as you regard this woman who likes you. At the same time, your fascination with her and the life she had fashioned for herself increases, so that you smile away your befuddlement.
“Those men of mine didn’t get round to breaking them,” the widow says when she returns to set on the table a fraying raffia tray loaded with an enamel teapot, sugar bowl, and milk jug. She pours your refreshment and nods at the lowest shelf, which displays six matching, painted drinking glasses that sparkle with regular dusting.
“They are all there. Not a single one of them was broken,” she says with pride. “Even though we used them on all of our big family celebrations. These days I only use them when my sons come. But do they come here often enough? No! Just like sons. That’s what boys do these days. They don’t ever come to see their mother!”
You heap half a dozen teaspoons of sugar into the cup the widow hands you. Energy pours into your body and you know you will manage the journey back to the hostel.
You want another cup of the hot, sweet tea. As soon as you set your cup down, however, the widow begins a tour of the house. She pulls open thick drapes of imported purple satin to present the disused gorge of a swimming pool, its tiles black with mould.
“Now the boys are gone, it is no longer used,” she says. “Of course, we taught our boys to swim in it.”
The kitchen must have been, fairly recently, beautiful. You learn it had been initially renovated under Mr. Manyanga’s supervision. He could abide tiles from one location only: Italy, in one colour only: golden ochre. But since his passing, squares have fallen off. The grout followed. Colonies of cockroaches reside in the grungy cracks. A gecko scampers across a crust of blackened cooking oil. You itch to attack everything violently with detergents.
“This one,” the widow informs you as you stare into a room mustier and more airless than the one you have left, “was going to be the first room that I rented out to the university students. I agreed with my husband when he said that to do the business properly we must do a pilot first. I did not want to disagree with him and his revelation. I said, I do not know about a pilot, but God knows. I just told my mother’s heart to be still. You know that heart inside a woman? It just wanted to do much more for all those students.”
The widow walks briskly about the tiny compartment, pointing out the window, a corner of which gives a view of the yard, although most of it opens onto the garage. She admires an old coffee table whose back edge is propped up on piles of Parade magazine, and points out a clothes rail hidden by yellowing curtains of pink satin, behind which drift clouds of cobwebs.
The widow apologizes for having made you wait at the bottom of the garden.
“Doing that,” she says, indignant on your behalf. “Even when I employ a gardener. And I pay him every time. On time! There isn’t a single month when I don’t. I knew it anyway as I was interviewing him,” she confides. “But what could I do with this heart, the one of a woman? Every woman is a mother at heart, Miss Sigauke. And every mother is also a woman. That’s why I said, come, I will pay you, when he was nothing but a vagrant.”
You remain silent, renewing your bargain with God and also invoking your ancestors.
“I told him this morning, go when she comes, I’m expecting a someone. But he leaves me to walk all that way down to open the gate and goes away early because it’s Saturday. I said wait for Miss Sigauke. I should have told him there were also some men coming for this interview.”
You smile more widely, relieved to know there are not any. Mai Manyanga, however, sounds regretful.
“That’s why I always say please, please, someone from the rural areas. A person from those barren places without any rain. Those people know when God has given them something good. Because those people really know suffering.”
The widow has gauged you well. She is aware of it. You accept her terms immediately, as there is no question of your returning to the family homestead in your father’s village.
She offers to have one of the telephones from the verandah connected, and is pleased that finally God will bring to fulfilment VaManyanga’s revelation. The rent is already too high, having been calculated against a young professional man’s salary. You decline the connection, even though the widow points out communication at that rate is a bargain. You assure yourself, as you trudge back to the main road, that one day, somehow, anyhow, you will enjoy the luxury of a telephone by your bedside. By the time you flag a combi down, you have promised yourself three telephones, in the kitchen, living room, and bedroom of your future home. Sitting in the minibus, you mull over a fourth for the bathroom.
CHAPTER 4
Moving to the widow’s is a great mistake. When you arrive, your room smells worse than before.
Mrs. Manyanga hovers around. She says to your wrinkled nose, “Yes, Miss Sigauke, your God favours you. You are home now. Only, isn’t it the greater favour for me, a poor widow, to bless someone like this?”
A leak in the roof has dripped onto the mattress, causing fungus to fuzz the cloth and ceiling. Has your landlady not seen it?
“Everything is nice and fresh now,” she says. Stretching an arm behind the clothes rail, the widow pulls down a few filaments of spiderweb.
“There was just a little hole, one like that up there in the roof. Just tiles that had moved like that because of the wind but as soon as I decided and I knew someone was coming to sleep in this room, you can see I fixed it,” she says, dusting her palms.
“You know, Miss Sigauke,” she goes on, “I am still looking for a girl. A decent one to ask to do this and that for me in my cottage. But that’s over in my cottage. That’s the only place I want someone to assist. Here I aired this room. All the windows were opened every day since you stood in that doorway. And I came in to close them myself each night, because you know when you have something that is good, all the time people are thinking of stealing it.”
Your landlady proudly
informs you how she removed the satin curtains and washed them with her own hands.
“You see, God is good. I am a widow and my sons have left too. But I receive so much power. Not for myself but for someone else. God still pours down His strength!”
You cannot decide whether you are happy or not to be left alone when she departs.
“Makanaka, Mambo Jesu,” you hear her singing as she crosses the yard to her cottage.
Packing your things in grimy drawers, you swear that when the time comes to move away, you will not go down the widow’s drive the way you walked up it—with nothing.
You spend most of your time sitting on your bed, brooding over your new misjudgement, contemplating how much you detest the place already. At other times, you wonder how you can suppress your growing feelings of doom. You endeavour to put together a plausible excuse for not going out to the job you said you had, in case the widow asks.
Your three housemates do not raise your morale. They all have jobs. It is better not to get to know them. By which you mean they should not become overly acquainted with you. You devise ways of avoiding contact, especially with the man in the bedroom next to yours who changes girlfriends more frequently than he does his trousers. The quiet woman gets up first, usually before the cocks crow, to make sure she has hot water. She takes a long time bathing. The big woman follows her. The man in the main bedroom gets up last because he has his own en suite bathroom. Their preparations wake you; when they go off to catch their combis you cannot fall asleep again for thinking of their offices, their contracts and monthly salaries.
You venture out infrequently for air in the garden or to sit on the humped roots of the jacaranda by the gate. When you are at the gate, you make an effort. For once, your village upbringing is an asset.
“Hello, how has your day been? How is everything, is all well where you are from?” you greet passersby.
Speaking so seldom, you are startled by the sound of your voice so that you don’t smile. Neither do the people. Sometimes they do not answer.
Once a week you go shopping at a tiny supermarket as depressed in its appearance as you are. Leaving the yard, you force a spring into your step in order to walk like a woman with lots of dollar bills lying in the bottom of her bag. Inside the shop, pretence suffocates you, as though you are wearing a too-tight corset. Completing your purchases, you do not want to go out again, because your bag bulges with budget-pack plastic bottles, smallest-size sachets, and minute boxes. Cooking oil, glycerine for your skin, candles for power outages, matches—everything broadcasts your poverty.
You keep your supplies in a corner of the kitchen cupboard, away from the other residents’ belongings. Hoarding your food the way you hoard your savings from the advertising agency in your building-society account, your principle is “less is more”: less eating is less spending, leaving more cash in your balance. More money on your monthly statements is more time to sort out life. Breakfast is a slush of mealie meal porridge you can hardly eat as the widow’s stove neither simmers nor boils anything properly. In the afternoon you stir the same mealie meal thicker for your sadza. You begin taking vegetables for relish, a few leaves a day, from the widow’s garden.
The rest of the time you sit by your window, staring past the once baby pink, now yellowing material onto your landlady’s patchy lawn. When this grows unbearably tedious, you shift a bit to face the slab Mr. and Mrs. Manyanga put down for the student housing. Sometimes, beyond the concrete, you see the widow’s shadowy form waft to and fro in her living room.
You are concerned you will start thinking of ending it all, having nothing to carry on for: no home, no job, no sustaining family bonds. Thinking this induces a morass of guilt. You have failed to make anything at all of yourself, yet your mother endures even more bitter circumstances than yours, entombed in your destitute village. How, with all your education, do you come to be more needy than your mother? End up less than a woman so dashed down by life that she tried to lean on her second daughter—a daughter who requires support herself, after losing a leg in the war, and now fends for two liberation struggle babies, your nieces, seen only once when they were toddlers. Your uncle, who intervened to keep you from your mother’s fate by sending you to school, is in a wheelchair, made a casualty of Independence by a stray bullet from a twenty-one-gun salute that burrowed into the delicate membranes beside his spinal cord during the first celebrations. You force yourself not to spare a thought for your father, the very idea of whom fills you with despair. The only person who might help with your and your family’s predicament is your cousin Nyasha. But she has emigrated overseas. You last heard of her when she sent the shoes, propitiously at a time when the post office was still forwarding packages rather than pilfering them. You cannot remember whose turn it is to contact whom, or even if you sent a letter to thank her.
You have shed friends in the years since university because you could not keep up with their lifestyle and didn’t want to be laughed at. Years later, after your abrupt departure, you drifted apart from your colleagues at the advertising agency. You torture yourself, in the early days of your stay at Mai Manyanga’s, with the idea that you have no one but yourself to blame for leaving your copywriting position. You should have endured the white men who put their names to your taglines and rhyming couplets. You spend much time regretting digging your own grave over a matter of mere principle. Your age prevents you from obtaining another job in the field, for the creative departments are now occupied by young people with Mohawk haircuts and rings in eyebrows, tongues, and navels.
Distraction from your dismal preoccupation arises on a Sunday, some weeks after your arrival, when a battered blue Toyota crunches over the widow’s gravel.
In a cloud of exhaust, the vehicle stops in front of the multiple carport, in precisely the spot to prevent any other from entering.
You look up from the magazine you brought with you from the advertising agency, which you are reading for the hundredth time, to see a sinewy leg slide out of the driver’s door. A long muscular arm snakes out and fumbles at the rear handle until it opens.
Half a dozen children leap out.
“Mbuya!” they holler.
They do their best not to destroy the widow’s vegetable garden. But ridges crumble as they jump. Vines snap.
“Hey, you watch it! Wait until somebody sees what you’ve done,” their father yells, quickly emerging from the car. “You’ll get the thrashing of your life. If your grandmother doesn’t want to, you can be sure I shall do it.”
The children giggle and shriek and charge off faster to hammer fists on the widow’s door. “Mbuya!” they shout again when the door opens and the widow invites them inside.
This arrival is a gift, bringing you a man to consider. It is a stepping stone to another life you crave, away from this nowhere and the days that gape empty behind you. You do not think of love, being obsessed only with what the gentleman can do for you, how the widow’s son will be insurance against your absolute downfall.
You suck the saliva out of your mouth, like a person biting into a lemon, when a woman descends from the passenger seat. “I am not staying in this car,” the woman says. “I’m telling you, I won’t do it.”
The man’s limbs are too long. They roll like a conveyor belt, as if his cartilage and ligaments are several sizes too large for his bones. He plants enormous feet on the gravel as he takes a few paces, before rubbing his palms on his wrinkled shirt. He leans against the car, sulkily lighting a cigarette.
“Today I am going to meet her,” the woman insists. “Whatever you say, today, I am going to do it.”
You scoop from your depths the scorn that had punished you in the weeks since you came to the widow’s. The man’s derision becomes poignant and satisfying as yours drains out of you and mingles with his, and the whole of it pours onto the woman.
A moment later, there is a shout down at the gate. Bolts clank and a long, low Volkswagen Passat shudders toward the house.
The man and woman are shaken out of their dissatisfactions. Smiles gash their faces as they turn to the approaching vehicle.
“Larky!” the man with the too-long limbs calls out to the new arrival. He steps forward and flicks his cigarette away.
The woman folds her arms moodily and leans her denim-bound buttocks against the Toyota.
Larky rolls down his window and shows all his teeth in greeting.
“Yah, Praise!” he grins, nodding at the blue Cressida. “So that’s it! That’s the winner you told me about?”
The other man grins also. But anxiety pulls his lips too far apart.
“A new one,” Larky says, stepping out of his car, his smile still wide. “Garbage, brother! Why waste your money importing this Japanese scrap metal?”
The woman’s shoulders droop. Larky holds out a hand. The two brothers bump shoulders.
“Me, I’m fine, bro,” says Larky, turning to make sure his voice carries. “You know, I bought another one, number three. For a spare when the others break down. Mother of the children drives the Mercedes. I’m using the BMW. But not at weekends. No more Japanese,” he brags. “Just the real ones. German.”
“Japan’s just as good,” says Praise. “Even better. They understand the way we do things.”
“How are you, Babamunini?” throws in the woman.
“But you’re going in the right direction,” Praise acknowledges more loudly, to drown her out. “I hope I’ll see that number three of yours, if it’s as good as you say it is.”
“Come! Come and see it,” Larky laughs. “Don’t stay away too long. We’ll roast some meat. You must bring the children.”
The men make a double fist. They wave the club of it back and forth, laughing.
“Sharp, mupfanha,” says Praise. Showing all his teeth again, he turns toward the woman.
“Babamunini! Babamunini, I have to tell you something,” she begins.
The fingers of each hand scratch the opposite bicep. She hunches her shoulders because she is a hopeless woman, the kind who reports her man to his younger brother.