Christine jumps like an athlete preparing for a race before she continues, “If I have the same choice, I will never repeat it. I learnt you run away from blood. You don’t run to it, pretending it is water. That you can pour wherever and drink, a river flowing to quench your thirst, lying that it’s water.”
Her shadow is brutish as she leaps. You lean against the tree trunk. Your breath, which had begun to calm, rushes into your lungs uncomfortably shallow.
“Why aren’t you answering anything?” says Christine, a rough disappointment invading her voice.
You want her to run again, away, without you, so that you can stay in this in-between place not in the city and not at the widow’s. You did not find the words to speak of Mai Manyanga’s sling when you saw it, nor do you want to this evening.
“You are saying you did not see the blood in Mai Manyanga’s living room?” Christine persists. “That although you were in the house, you didn’t hear anything?”
Now that she has spoken of it, you want to move again, to dart away from the scene you witnessed many weeks ago, before Christine came, in Mai Manyanga’s living room. You want to leave Christine’s truth, that once you have seen blood you are covered by it, behind in the heart of this war-woman. Yet you are beginning to realize blood does not only speak, it follows. You saw the blood spurt from your sister’s leg during the war, just after you had graduated from your uncle’s mission, and you fled from then on. You kept on fleeing from the sight all through your years at the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart.
“No one heard anything,” you murmur in self-defence.
You want to sit down, but there is only a fence.
“Is anyone thinking anything about any of it?” asks Christine.
“O Mwariwe tiitire nyasha. Oh great God, have mercy on us.”
The anguish Widow Manyanga had not mustered for Shine’s woman slithers through her window into the night, a distant wretchedness.
“M-hm,” says Christine. “Once you have seen it, it is difficult forever after. The first time, if you are that kind of person whose heart is weak, blood can be like a trap. It fastens. Either you want it all the time, or you are afraid of it until the end of your days.”
Your breathing remains shallow and difficult. Pain heaves beneath your breath, gripping your throat so that you cannot speak. You know, although you have said little about that evening, that you have already said too much and you must not dare to deliver another sentence or else you will drown in a pit of disgrace.
“Don’t worry,” Christine says. “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t the fault of anyone in the house. Everyone told my auntie over there. But she just doesn’t listen to anyone.”
“Vanamai, uyai ticheme. Women, let us wail together,” the widow moans her chorus. “Kuna Mwari ati itire nyasha. To God, to beg His mercy.”
“The family sent people to tell her. But all she did was boast to them. Saying she was carrying out VaManyanga’s wishes so nobody could tell her anything. Since she was the last to see him and so she knows what her husband wanted.”
“O Mwari we, tiitire nyasha,” Mai Manyanga wails, her voice thinned by the distance.
“One day I will tell you about that,” Christine says. Her promise sounds like a threat.
The singing grows louder as Mai Manyanga returns down the drive.
“I’m the one she’s looking for,” you say. “I said I was going to pray with her.”
“Let’s go,” says Christine. “We can catch a ride to town.”
“I’ll get a dollar,” you say, changing your mind, even though you do not want to spend any money on the trip to town and back.
You wait until Mai Manyanga returns to the cottage before hurrying back down the road. Once in your room, you contemplate crawling into bed, but Mai Manyanga starts wailing again. You pull a dollar from its hiding place in a drawer and quickly change your top and shoes.
Outside once more, you walk beside Christine, staring at your moon shadow. It is bigger than you. It moves parts of its body that you do not. It runs when you are walking.
“My aunt is bleeding,” Christine says. “She is not well. Her sons are frightened.”
You want her to be quiet, but she goes on, “They are all pretending they don’t know who did it, but it was Larky that evening. Do those boys ever do anything quietly? So why are all of you in the house lying that you didn’t hear anything? Are you going to tell me something, Tambudzai? Why keep quiet? Are you a Manyanga? My aunt won’t live long but we in her family, we didn’t want to wait and see if her sons managed to kill her first. That’s why it was decided for me to come here and make sure those boys keep order.”
You sniff the air. Smoke. Spices. One of the residents on the road has been, or perhaps is still, braaing.
Your nose remembers that evening some months ago. The smell of marinating meat was thick in the main house.
You never do find out whether it’s the actual date or not. It is the day the widow and her sons choose to celebrate Ignore’s, the youngest one’s, birthday.
The widow begins preparing the day before. She departs twice in the Nissan that has just come back from the mechanic so that the garage finally holds a car. However, each time she pumps petrol into the carburetor, the exhaust pipe spits out dark fumes as though it has indigestion.
You go into the kitchen at midmorning that day, hoping everyone else has left. You want to simmer your porridge, but you abandon your task the minute you walk in. Bertha and Mako are ensconced in chairs. It is a month-end week-end and they have orange juice, margarine, and jam spread out on the little table. They have toast and scrambled eggs with slivers of bacon. You look at their food dully, your mouth not taking the trouble to water.
With a guffaw, Bertha proposes a wager: Will the widow’s double cab make it back from the outing, or will it break down so that Mai Manyanga has to call the mechanic again? Mako takes on the bet. Giving another great laugh, Bertha opts for the widow’s ruin. When Bertha finally quiets down, Mako insists that God, who is great and merciful, will favour the widow.
In the evening, the Manyanga sons arrive on time. They are equipped with cooler boxes and ice cubes and women who agree to congregate in Praise’s car with six packs of Castle and a bottle of Mukuyu wine. Envy blossoms in your heart, for at this point, in spite of your inaction, you still entertain a desire not for marriage itself but for the security the state of being married brings. You do not direct your grudge against the wives you have not seen, but against these vain, vacant-eyed, plastic-nailed creatures who are enjoying a life of security and ease, the kind of living you had envisioned for yourself and up until that calamitous day at the agency had worked for so diligently. Like the widow who takes no stand against her son’s entanglements, you forgive the Manyanga men their dalliances and fantasize desperately about encountering one of them in the hall.
The family living room is unlocked for the occasion. Once the men are settled with their drinks, your landlady sings, “Mwakanaka, Mambo Jesu.” The men join in, tunefully, if lacking the widow’s fervour. The hymn done, Mai Manyanga conducts a prayer. After this the sons return to their snacks. From time to time one of them carries a dish of roasted peanuts or chicken wings to the women in the car, who grow raucous whenever their refreshments need replenishing. Mai Manyanga enjoys her sons’ presence, and is not in the least put out by these arrangements. You suspect the Manyanga looseness will be a challenge once you have made your move, but you tell yourself you will cross that bridge when you have to.
The murmur of voices changes to the clink, at rich intervals, of glass and china as the Manyangas mould sadza into balls, dip them in gravy, and chew at fragrant meat. The family’s conversation dwindles to a distant hum.
You fall asleep lightly, unable to find a place of deep rest with the smell of food tantalizing your stomach. Not much time passes before the ripples of the family’s speech swell. Sentences reach you in waves of sound that grow until it seems they smash at
the bed, pound at the wall, and toss the floor hither and thither. The air itself seems to quiver and tremble. The darkness of the night shudders to the rhythm of an old, half-forgotten music that you last heard many years ago on the homestead and a swift copper note vibrates from one corner of the room to the other. Shine adds a dark bass line to this melody, while the voice of the woman he is with crescendos shrilly.
You open anxious eyes to the sound of distressed cries.
“Yowe! Yowe! Yowe!”
As you surface from your half dream, you realize the voice is Mako’s.
“Vasikana, Shine,” your housemate continues. “Vanhu kani, come and look. Come and see what happened.”
You do not move, only sliding out of bed after Bertha’s door opens.
Mako is hunched over in the middle of the hall between kitchen and living room. She props herself up against a wall as well as she can. She is shaking.
Swathes of scarlet thicken and congeal on the floor. The clots in the family room extend all the way back to the dining table. Drops crust and flake on the grandfather clock, the cabinet, carpet, and occasional tables. The beer mugs that toasted the family’s celebrations are strewn in jagged pieces across the floor. On the wooden shelves, shards from family photographs glint on taut stiff pools. Mrs. Manyanga and her husband are spattered but upright and stare out with the same pride as ever.
You want to remain suspended between one breath and another but after you exhale, you creep forward behind Bertha and Mako, to see your landlady seated at the dining room table. The remains of dinner lie caked on the plates scattered before her. The widow’s colourful doek is by her chair. Her ogbada of the same bright print is slit from shoulder to breast as though a drunken surgeon had attempted reconstructive surgery.
She smiles and says in a flat yet triumphant tone like a hostess resuming the conversation, “I saved him. I protected my Igi from both of them. Go, Bertha, Tambu, Mako. Go all of you and find him. And when you have found him, I want you to look after my Igi. Make sure that no harm comes to him.”
Mechanically, you kneel in the blood. The smell makes you gag. You take your landlady’s hand to knead forth a response, but Widow Manyanga repeats in the same voice, “Go, vasikana, to my Igi. I want you to look after him.”
Blood is on your knees. Standing, you reach for a paper napkin and wipe it off, feeling as though the snakes of your womb have opened their jaws and everything is plummeting out of you to the ground.
“This is what happens when you give birth,” the widow says.
Bertha, who alone can act, goes out. She returns a few minutes later carrying a cup of steaming tea.
“Is there anyone here with any Panadol?” she asks.
Everyone is quiet. No one has any medication.
“I know Larky wants to kill Igi,” your landlady resumes in a moan. “Because this house is Igi’s birthday present. Larky wants to kill him because my son Igi is the only one who is fighting for me. Yes, Larky and Praise. The two want to kill me.” She smiles dully before she continues, “If it were not for the last one that came out, I would be like a stray, an unloved dog kicked about by everyone because of those two who came first. Yes, this house is a present for Igi’s birthday. My Igi. When my Igi has my things I am keeping them and not throwing them somewhere to another woman.”
“Shame. Too bad,” says Bertha, speaking more quietly than she has ever done before. “You, are you sure there’s no one with a Panadol?”
Walking carefully down the hall, Shine’s woman, a new, unfamiliar face, stops at the living room door, observing. No one pays her any attention. Tense in her desire not to be noticed, she steals on tiptoe out through the verandah.
You and your housemates do not look at each other. You draw in a series of deep breaths and let them out in a shudder, feeling how you are the world and it is hollow and the three of you are falling through it.
“Then she started singing that song again,” you say to Christine. “The one she always sings about King Jesus.”
“You were and you are still lying,” Christine says softly. “When things like that happen there’s a lot of noise.”
You pass under a row of jacarandas. The moon is higher, the soft wind cooler. Christine pulls you off the gravel, where your feet are crunching, onto the grass. The streetlights on the main road to town glow up ahead.
“I know why you don’t want to say you knew something,” she resumes. “Because it’s too much. You say how can a woman be like that? You cannot answer, so you say no she isn’t.” She sighs loudly and continues with venom, “Ignore! His mother did the same, ignoring what he was doing. Even now, my aunt is also ignoring the sickness in her womb that is eating her away from the inside,” she remarks with annoyance.
Your own blood runs cold as you wonder where you will live if Mai Manyanga should die before you find alternative accommodation.
“Fear,” your companion continues. “It’s caught hold of them. Now Ignore has stolen the inheritance from the rest. So when he boasted about his birthday present, Larky went and punched him. And then my aunt jumped up. Saying to Larky, if you are going to kill anyone, kill me and not my son. That is when Larky’s door burst open and his memory of himself flew out of it. He grabbed the meat knife and jumped at Ignore. So Ignore ran behind his mother.”
You turn into Lomagundi Road, glad you will soon be in a combi where it is impossible to continue such conversations.
“We saw such things,” your companion says. “During the liberation struggle. Then it was in the bush, but now it is in the home. And still no one talks. They just say it happened, or they even say it didn’t happen, and then ignore it.
“Anyhow, that’s how I came here,” Christine proceeds quietly. “When I was back home, just being there, pretending it’s life, like everyone else, they called me and said, ‘Go and see what is happening with your aunt. Those young men know what kind of a woman you are.’” She splutters between a laugh and a cough. “That fighting was just like a madness. Maybe they thought because I’d seen so much of it, I was the best one to deal with what’s happening here in Harare.”
You come to a bus stop and sit on the bench. You start trembling. You stand up again because sitting is heavier than standing.
“I didn’t want to come,” says Christine, “because I don’t want to get mixed up in it. My aunt married her husband when she was a young woman. And this is what it has now come to. With us it looks like there’s always blood. I don’t know if it’s just my family.”
The first combis that pass by, long intervals between them so late in the night, are crammed with people. When you return to a place beside her on the bench, Christine relates in a scornful voice the matters you should not be mixed up in.
Your landlady’s husband moved up to Harare from Masvingo. Before the move, VaManyanga was employed as an attendant at a fuel station by a white man named Peacock. At Independence, this Peacock left the country for New Zealand, bequeathing to VaManyanga the fuel station and all its movable property. In a murky arrangement with the nation’s long-distance bus company involving fuel discounts, shares, and severance packages, a junior manager was fired. VaManyanga applied for the position and was successful, while running his business on the side. By similar means, within a few years, he obtained the position of CEO with the Zimbabwe People’s National Buses. Transferred to the parastatal’s head office in the capital, VaManyanga disposed of the service station and snapped up a property in the southern suburbs. Christine’s voice drips with disdain as she describes this violation of what she had fought for, while you are so excited by the knowledge that your very being emits a low hum of admiration for the man who promoted himself so astutely.
Christine flags down another combi. It stops, although it is already packed with more people than are allowed. Then, because you are late-night travellers who are at his mercy, the conductor charges double and you part with an entire dollar, leaving no fare for getting back at the end of your outing. The oth
er passengers rumble with discontent but pull out dirty wads of low-denomination notes, or handfuls of change. You feel you are dissolving through the seat onto the tarmac where wheels will churn you to invisibility.
You climb out after Christine when the combi stops at Copacabana. She steers you eastward over a cavernous pavement in silence for the first couple of hundred metres.
“He became quite rich,” she says in the end, as an afterthought. “It turns out he was good at what they called doing business. That’s what they called it after Independence. You know,” she observes, “it is better to call it April 18. What do we really know about independence? Maybe that it was just for people like my uncle.” Her voice is sad now, rather than scornful, as she divulges how VaManyanga soon purchased a new dwelling in an area further to the city’s north, from another white person who was also departing to New Zealand, where there was not, nor could ever be—since all the earlier nations had been eradicated—any talk of indigenizing anything. It turns out that, just like you, everyone had applauded VaManyanga’s achievements. No one queried anything. Relatives and colleagues alike praised the way the newly independent businessman had turned his inheritance into hard currency and deposited it safely in a bank on the Isle of Man.
“What did they want? Of course, to borrow my uncle’s money from him,” Christine snorts. You shake your head and suck your teeth, genuinely outraged on behalf of your companion’s uncle.
“He was too shrewd. I admit he was clever,” shrugs your companion. “So hardly anybody got anything. So what did they start saying? That all that money he made could never just come from hard work, but that he had some wicked, blood-drinking goblins. So some of them started trying to find out what muti my uncle was using. Some wanted to neutralize it with stronger medicine, others wanted to use it themselves. More than one mouth said his charms contained pieces of kidnapped children’s bodies.” As she mentions this, Christine confirms her uncle was the sort of man who might well have gone so far as taking the children’s parts to South Africa for sale or for imbuing with magical properties, or that he could very well have buried the organs in places where he wanted to establish further ZPNB depots.