This Mournable Body

  “Mbuya, here, here! Me, me!” the children’s voices ring out. The cries grow louder as the widow’s door opens and they rush onto the stoep.

  “Mwakanaka! Mwakanaka! You are good, King Jesus!” The widow’s voice threads through the afternoon.

  “Mai, don’t let that herd trample you to pieces. We’re coming,” Larky says. He steps forward and dimples dramatically. You push the curtain tentatively aside.

  “Is that what you do?” the widow says. “What about coming to greet me now, you Praise and Larky? At least these children know how to do things properly, greeting their grandmother.”

  “We’re coming, Mai. Right now,” the men promise. “Aren’t we here? It means we want to see you.”

  “Now, children, guess what I’ve got?” the widow says.

  She holds something. It is small, a packet.

  “Sausages!” a child squeals.

  “Red ones!” shouts another.

  “Which of you wants a sausage?” the widow sings in a full voice as though she were at Praise and Worship.

  “Ini! Me, me,” the grandchildren answer.

  The noise dies away as the children concentrate on biting and chewing.

  “How’s everyone? How is Maiguru?” Larky pays his respects to his brother. In the near-quiet, he goes on, “What about that boy? Did you tell Ignore we want to see him?”

  “Fine and what about with your everybody?” Praise scratches his head. “Our young one? Yes, where is he? Didn’t you call him?”

  Larky hitches neon-hued Bermuda shorts up over his boxer’s belly.

  “Why me? It’s that youngster Ignore you should be asking why he isn’t here. Why are you questioning me as if you’re not the eldest, the one who should be organizing?” he says, an edge to his voice.

  Praise pulls another menthol cigarette out of his pack. Smoke drifts from his mouth as he looks about the disintegrating property.

  “Anyway, what’s Ignore doing that stopped him?” Larky says.

  Praise scratches the top of his head again before offering his brother a smoke. Larky accepts. Blue coils float up.

  “So now you’re behaving?” Praise yells at the children. “That’s what you’re doing now. Didn’t I tell you to?”

  The men draw together to wave and make fatherly faces at the group on the step.

  Inserting herself into the men’s distraction cleanly, like a knife, the woman in jeans slides away from Praise’s Toyota.

  “Just watch me, Praise,” she says when she has moved far enough for the widow to see her. “Today it is too much, I don’t care. Even if she’s ignoring me, I know it’s only because you’ve told her something. Just now she will know she has another muroora, another daughter-in-law. This afternoon, I’m meeting your mother.”

  Widow Manyanga turns her back, a resolute gesture, on the group by the garage.

  “I told you, not today.” Praise turns to the woman.

  “Liar!” the woman hisses.

  She raises a finger, lets it sway. Her body takes up the rhythm, balancing in stilettos.

  “You are lying to me and you know it, Praise Manyanga. Only I don’t know why you want to do it. Why were you lying like that to me, you Praise? When you said next time? But now in front of your brother and in front of your mother and in front of your children, also, you want to make me look stupid.

  “Next time, next time, next time, next time,” she repeats in a high-pitched crescendo. “Are you going to lie again and deny it? All the time, you told me lies. That’s why now your family ignores me!”

  “Mainini, I am glad to see you here. I was happy to see my biggas, that’s all,” says Larky.

  He spreads his arms for an embrace.

  “Come on, is this what you really want?” he says. “To be unhappy like that? When my elder has done well and gathered us all for this visit?”

  “To be like what?” the woman says, dipping her head like a bull about to charge, but then leashing herself up again.

  “What are you saying I shouldn’t be like? Am I the one who shouldn’t be like something?”

  She lengthens her lip, and when it will not descend any lower, she allows Larky to give her a hug. He manipulates her into his Passat and once they are in his vehicle she allows him to pat her back. The engine throbs. You smile faintly, judging that this woman will not be strong competition.

  “Who wants what I’ve got?” Mai Manyanga calls out to the children, another packet of Viennas clenched in one hand. A short knife is in the other.

  “And Praise, what about it? Didn’t you tell Ignore?” asks your landlady, turning from the children, in a church choir voice loud enough to be heard in the next yard.

  “Ask Larky,” Praise says.

  The widow stabs the knife into the new packet of sausages, ripping it open.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t tell that son of mine?” she begins anew when she has done feeding the grandchildren.

  “Don’t worry, Mbuya Manyanga! We want to eat all the good things you’ve prepared too,” Praise says, folding his arms. “As soon as that one you are talking about arrives.”

  You listen, daydreaming about how, when you have made your move, you will be a member of this family.

  In the end, Larky’s Volkswagen does not leave with the unhappy “small house” woman his brother keeps because a tawny-coloured car, flat like a frog, crawls toward the carport. You realize that this last is the best of the three vehicles, for the noise in the yard hardly changes when it stops, nudging the Passat’s bumper.

  “Hey mhani, Ignore, behave like a person,” Larky says, his head out of the window.

  “There’s no problem! Is there a problem, Larky? Praise?” the third man shrugs, stepping out of his vehicle and smiling. The other men look at the car with longing.

  Ignore nods at his mother’s cottage, but Praise links an arm with him and pulls him forward until their foreheads touch.

  The children wave their sausages, or try to take bites out of each other’s.

  “I will bring more,” Widow Manyanga says. As she disappears clutching the empty pack she shouts, “And are you still not coming to greet your mother, now that Ignore is here?”

  “I am coming,” Ignore calls.

  The children run into the cottage after the widow. Larky gets out of his car. The men huddle, nodding their heads.

  The woman is shunted from the Passat into the Porsche. Ignore climbs back in, to return a few minutes later—to your great satisfaction—without his passenger.

  “Big brother,” Ignore says as he steps out of his car for the second time, “tell me which dustbin you picked that woman of yours out of.”

  “Which big brother?” snaps Praise. “Why are you talking about dustbins?”

  “You have to examine it, where the fish are,” Ignore shrugs. “That way you can taste all the waters. But examining doesn’t mean eating. Biggas, what is it? Are you examining, or are you eating?”

  Praise scratches his head.

  “How is she?” asks Ignore, looking at the widow’s cottage.

  “Happy,” says Larky. “First she fed her grandchildren. Now you’re here.”

  From the back of his car Larky hauls out a cardboard box. Praise drags crates of Coke, Fanta, and Stoney Ginger Beer from his. The Manyanga sons sit on the slab looking over the widow’s vegetable garden. They lift bottles and drink and when the level of liquid in the bottles sinks, they top their drinks up with spirits.

  Larky asks Ignore about a lawyer.

  Ignore pours shots and says, “Kamuriwo.”

  They talk about the lawyer. Your mind drifts to the two-year-old magazine from the advertising agency that lies on your lap.

  “Estate agent?” Larky says. You weigh your current company, an oil-stained magazine, against these men who have already inherited once and are set to do so again in the future.

  Outside, Ignore shifts, but does not volunteer an answer.

  Larky stands up, drink in hand. He studies the
slab, the sinking fence, the progress to ruin.

  “That’s the trouble,” he says. “I told you when Baba died, didn’t I? I said we have to start managing this place so it doesn’t rot. So there’s something to get out of it.”

  There is sorrow in his demeanour as he talks about his mother’s house. His speech is punctuated by words like kitchen and wasted money. In a little while, Ignore starts laughing. Praise shakes his head, perplexed.

  “And that black granite they wanted in the swimming pool.” Larky goes on, his voice rising and shaking. “I told them, I said, Mai, Baba, start with lessons. For swimming. Not with a pool! That’s how to start. But these parents of ours, do they listen? How many times did I fix it? I’m sick of maintaining this place when she can’t do anything for herself!”

  “After the accident I did my bit with the car repairs,” says Praise. “Larky, it’s not right for you to say you are doing everything.”

  “The estate,” says Ignore, still amused. He talks about knowing people and expediting signing of papers.

  “If she doesn’t sign now, what’s next?” inquires Praise. He scratches the back of his head.

  “This son here,” Larky nods at Ignore. “Like he said, his connections will make it happen.”

  “Buyer?” Praise uncoils and stretches.

  “When we have the buyer,” says Ignore, “Praise, what are you going to do with her?”

  The children, who have assembled on the porch once more, finish their cold drinks. They throw the cans at a guava tree.

  “Maybe we can think again,” Praise says. “She’s rented out the little room. The woman there didn’t want the telephone option, but at least she put down three months’ deposit.”

  Your breath catches in your throat as you realize you are the woman spoken of. You are suspended between one thought and the unformed one that follows. The throb in your chest accelerates, with one beat for hope and the other for more disenchantment. You wish it was all the same, that none of it mattered.

  “Let’s get rid of the telephones,” Ignore is saying. “They’ll raise some money. I’ll find someone who’ll take them.”

  “She’s still talking about the pay-phone business,” Praise objects, with a frustrated click of his tongue. “She wants to bring a relative over to help her manage a business with them.”

  “Sell,” repeats Larky firmly. “Otherwise we’re all going to be in ruins.”

  You inhale and exhale slowly. You have decided it is of no consequence to you who buys the house. The jeans-clad woman is done with, leaving the Manyanga sons available and desirable for your newly hatched project of ending life’s downward spiral. Their wives are not in sight, which means either that the men do not value their women highly, or that the wives have little time for their husbands. It is going to be easy to challenge that sort of woman. Life has been kind to you at last. It has deposited you in the right family. You choose Larky as your first target because he is the most powerful.

  Oblivious to what you have in store for them, the men finish their discussion. The children shout greetings as their father and uncles leave the slab to go to their mother’s cottage.

  You slip into the bathroom, where there is a better view of the widow’s place. But the front door closes as you peer out, and after that there are only shadows passing in different gaits and rhythms behind the curtained windows.

  You wait, as days extend into weeks, for an opportunity to ensnare your landlady’s son. When this does not arise, lying on your bed with the sagging mattress in the pink frilly room, you reconsider your options and devise a wiser system to maximize your chances of success by working through each heir, starting with the eldest. You dream of the house you will live in then, in which there will be neither pink frills nor yellow kitchen. You train your heart and mind on the black granite swimming pool, to make sure it will be waiting for you. Finally you will make good the lie you told your colleagues when you left the advertising agency, saying someone had whispered “You!” and you were getting married.

  CHAPTER 5

  The energy that had animated your landlady seeps away after the visit. She emerges from her cottage less often in the weeks following her appointment with her sons. She avoids the sitting room that she displayed so grandly before. She speaks of her sons less frequently when she happens on you in the yard or hallway.

  When she does attempt to yell a hymn, her voice is weak. The tunes trickle out of her like the tired flow of a silted river. In the middle of the night she is an upright shadow in her front room, as though she cannot bear the pain of sitting, and when all her lights are turned off her attempts at song give way to silence or quiet groaning. After some weeks she carries a bandaged arm in a sling. You avert your eyes. No one in the house talks of it but when you see it, you shiver.

  In her new silence, the widow surprises you in the garden on several occasions. You explain why you are harvesting her vegetables. She hardly listens, her eyes trained on the slab where her sons sat, but when you have finished, she gathers a handful of yellowish leaves from a plant’s thick base. These she hands to you, encouraging you, as gently as she is able, to pick a bundle now and again before the gardener neglects everything completely and turns her yard to jungle.

  “Now and then” soon becomes every day. You continue to help yourself to your landlady’s crop with decreasing compunction until the day you hear two voices quarrelling in the cottage. By this time the widow has not inspected her property for more than a week, nor sat in the sun on her porch. The arguing rises and soars like a song, a happy one as though the quarrellers are elated at the opportunity to tear each other apart, to broadcast their rage in savage voices across the neighbourhood.

  “Those phones are out of date,” insists your landlady’s adversary.

  “So what? Are you here to tell me about my things? A phone is a phone. Where did you see an expiry date written?”

  “I’m not here because you asked me,” the visitor says. “And it’s not because I want to be. The people who sent me said go to look after her. They didn’t say go and make sure she loses everything her husband left her. Because of all the foolish things she is doing!”

  “Wouldn’t you love me to lose everything,” the widow says. “I’m not going to. Those are my things. I worked for them also.” The viciousness in her voice cracks through the air, insisting on submission. “When you are here, you do as I tell you. Otherwise go back to that village you came from.”

  Fear, your recurrent dread that you have not made enough progress toward security and a decent living, prickles like pins and needles at the mention of “village.” You have dodged this fear for too long—all your conscious life. Now even here at Mai Manyanga’s, you are trapped by it. You scold yourself for not having made a move toward Praise, putting into action your strategy to start with the eldest. Because of your inertia, the Manyanga sons might sell the house before you have positioned yourself properly, exposing you to eviction. You cheer yourself up by disparaging your prospective mother-in-law. You vow not to be overawed by a grandmother whose presence is dwindling away before your eyes. As evidence of this decline, you were easily able to filch her vegetables, to boil them on her own stove and consume them in her kitchen for a long while without her knowledge. For your plans to come to fruition, you must become wary of the newcomer instead. She could influence the widow in any number of ways, wreaking havoc with your project to become reputable.

  “I’m not going back. That topic’s finished,” the newcomer says, in a quieter tone. “Yes, at least coming here has brought me out of the village. I’ll see what I can find to do until the matters are sorted out. But don’t waste your time telling me to: I won’t touch any of those telephones.” You meet your landlady’s companion that afternoon.

  “Mwakanaka, Mambo Jesu!” You hear the widow approach while you are cooking the greens you collected in the morning.

  “Vasikana! Girls!” Mai Manyanga calls her tenants loudly, once she is in the hall.
“And Brother Shine too. Today I want to see all of you.”

  You do not hear the other tenants reply, and so you decide to remain silent also.

  The landlady appears energized by her bout with the woman.

  “I am sure all four of them are in,” she remarks to her companion. “That is why we agreed for you to come on Saturday. Bertha! Mako!” she calls again, her voice soaring in frustration at having to shout so many times when presenting a visitor.

  Their footsteps stop at a door in the hall. There is knocking that goes unanswered.

  Your landlady and her companion start back down the hall, allowing you to slip out of the kitchen.

  “Good afternoon, Mai Manyanga,” you call, voice sweetened in the way you used to speak to the matron at the hostel. “Is there something you wanted?”

  “Ah, Tambudzai,” Mai Manyanga replies. “You must have been making a racket in the kitchen with the pots since you did not hear me come in.”

  The landlady indicates the woman beside her. “I have brought my relative, to introduce her. I don’t want anyone getting frightened of anything and calling police. Saying there is a strange person here. Who is doing this and that. So everyone must come and say hello to her.”

  The lodger Bertha, the large woman who washes later than the other, timid housemate, opens her door halfway. She squeezes through the narrow opening to make sure Mai Manyanga does not enter.

  “This is Christine, my brother’s child,” your landlady announces, emphasizing the word brother with pride. “The one who was the first in our family. She is his daughter. Yes, daughter of the firstborn of my parents. Her father was killed when we thought God had been merciful, bringing him through the war when so many were dying, being killed either by the soldiers or by the comrades. She is called Kiri.”

  The landlady is still for a moment, like a woman who has departed to sit beside her sibling. Her words open up a void, out of which troop your own wounded and dead. You regard your memories from afar, and finally turn away from them.