This Mournable Body
VaManyanga, though, you find out to your satisfaction, did not let rumours derail his upward mobility. He soon purchased more properties and moved out of his second home to enjoy a grander lifestyle. Visits to the village where their niece lived became less frequent. Christine tells you she was comfortable with that, as she had ceased to either like or respect her relatives.
Understanding with some impatience that Christine is speaking not only about the Manyangas, but about all people who harbour the same intense cravings for advancement, “This came with the war,” you say. “All of it. Nobody ever did things like that before you people went to Mozambique and went about doing what you know you did.”
“There is nothing any freedom fighter did,” your companion says, “that people didn’t do in the villages. You know they started doing those things themselves very easily. And all of them are carrying on. Me, when the war ended, I swore I would find something to do with my own hands. I pledged I won’t do that kind of thing anymore. No matter what happens.”
With this Christine walks ahead briskly, bringing you soon to the disco, whose vibrations curtail further talking. She talks her way past the outsize bouncers at the club door, who look you over, objecting with pointed questions to two women entering the club unaccompanied. Down in the basement with the strobe going too fast and the music pumping a hallucinogenic rhythm, your companion surveys the room, weaves through dancers and tables to prop her elbows on the bar. She gives the solitary man beside her a sidelong glance, demonstrating how to extract all the booze you want from men without having any parts of your body grabbed. You discover you are good at it. It is marvellous to be good at something. You haven’t been good at much in a long time. Even the things you were good at, your education, your copywriting at the advertising agency—in fact one and the same thing—have in the end conspired against you, handing out a sentence of isolation.
Soon you are too drunk to think of anything but downing more.
While you drain glass after glass of vodka, Christine starts taking liquor with every second or third glass of Mazoe.
You lurch into a woman on your way back from the toilet. The woman has spiky hair. Her skin is white.
“Mind!” she says, setting her drink on a table, wiping dripping fingers on the back of her jeans.
You stare at her, your eyes attempting to focus. When the image is as clear as it is going to get: “Tracey!” you bellow.
“Excuse me?” says the white woman, giving you a tolerant smile.
“I know you,” you tell her. “I used to work for you. And we went to school together. “Are you going to pretend?” you crescendo. “You know you know me.”
Even as you speak, you are aware this person is not that particular white woman, the executive from the advertising agency who schemed with her fellow white people to steal the ideas you sweated over and produced for copy. With this knowledge, the hole in the universe yawns wide in front of you again and the woman who knows better than the one you hear roaring disappears into its depths. Making yourself as large as you can, you scream, “Don’t pretend with me, Tracey!”
“Katrin,” the woman responds, backing away. “Katrin.”
“Both,” you insist. “I mean, you’re my boss. From the advertising.”
The woman takes a deep breath. “Not me,” she says, exhaling sharply.
“Liar!”
She moves away onto the dance floor, joining a multiracial pocket of people, complexions ranging from ebony to pale marble. You follow her. She ignores you. You hear someone talking loudly, telling you she is not the woman who employed you at the advertising agency. You know this sensible voice is located in your brain. You don’t listen to it. “You are lying. That’s what you are doing,” you keep shouting. As you shout you lunge. The white woman sees you coming. She dodges round you and you fall into a trio of dancers. Bracing themselves on their platform shoes, tossing their weaves, “Get away,” they shout, shoving you from one to the other.
The men from the door surge onto the dance floor. They clamp the flesh of your upper arm in their fingers, asking which you prefer, calming down and being reasonable or being prohibited. They have, however, reckoned without Christine. Your companion plants her fists on her hips and informs the bouncers she is an Independence struggle ex-combatant, Moscow trained, and she can see half a dozen others still in fighting form around the bar; nor does it matter if some are not actually Soviet alumni but were trained in China, they are all comrades and fighters.
In spite of Christine’s intervention, the bouncers keep holding on to your arm, saying they are hired to end things; that when out-of-control women start beginning their messes with peaceful dancers, that is what they are ending. So Christine tells them you are under control and heaves you up the stairs and out onto the street. You refuse to walk. Christine drags you away from the club. You shout more and more loudly for her to release you. When she doesn’t, you scream that you will be damned if you ever go anywhere with her again. While you fling abuse at her, Christine manoeuvres you to the nearest bus stop. She props you up on the termite-eaten bench, pushes a dollar note into your jeans pocket, and tells you to take the first combi travelling toward Mai Manyanga’s.
CHAPTER 8
“What happened?”
Your eyelids slither apart. The earth spins. You slit your eyes against a brilliant dawn. You are lying on the pavement at the bus stop.
Looking down at you are two elderly men. They wear khaki suits and little caps: cooks, on their way to work in the northern suburbs.
“Who knows with these ones? It could be anything,” says one, after a moment’s reflection.
“Now what? What can be done?” the other asks.
“With women,” says the first. “When it’s like this, you know what it is. It’s their ancestors tying them up.” He straightens and his shadow lifts from over you.
“Love potion experts, these are the ones. Busy rotting their husbands’ guts and killing them one after the other. Don’t touch her. Otherwise you’ll be in for something. Absolute witches.”
Sweat, paraffin, and a long lack of washing. The smell rolls over you.
“I said don’t touch her. She’ll take what should be yours and it won’t come back to you.”
The odour recedes.
“Do you see anyone touching anything?” says the man who was warned to leave you alone.
There is rustling.
“Ah, what’s this? Wasting money,” says the first speaker.
“Since she is here, not yet dead,” says the other. “I’ll say it’s not wasting.”
A fifty-cent coin is pressed into your palm. You drift away as footsteps recede.
Later, you open your eyes again and lean over to vomit. The mess fills the cracks in the pavement. Ants and tiny spiders scurry around in indignation. You heave yourself up, clutching the fifty-cent piece, the evening’s booty. Ants and spiders trek over your body.
Regiments of them defy the city’s low pressure in the widow’s shower. You are thinking, as you attack both them and your skin with your washcloth, “I am the kind of person two cooks give a coin to. No, I am not that person. I am. I am not. Would I know it if I am that person?”
When you were young and in fighting spirit, growing mealie cobs in the family field and selling them to raise money for your school fees, you were not this person that you have become. When and how did it happen? When you were amongst the brightest, in spite of running kilometres to school and studying beside a sooty candle? No, it couldn’t have been then either. Nor was it in the days that followed at middle school at your uncle’s mission, where you remained focused on a better life and so continued to excel. This leaves only your secondary school, the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart. It must have been there that your metamorphosis took place. Yet how awful it is to admit that closeness to white people at the convent had ruined your heart, had caused your womb, from which you reproduced yourself before you gave birth to anything else,
to shrink between your hip bones.
You give up the struggle against your knowledge and concede at last a fiendish truth that you first encountered at the university. In an interview, a Ghanaian writer called Ama Ata Aidoo declared at first she had not known she was the colour she eventually learned she was, that the term black held no meaning for her until she found herself amongst white people. You laughed then as you read it, thinking, Oh, as though they dip you in paint. Now, the ants crawling over you as frenzied as ever in the drizzle of tepid water from the clogged-up shower-head, you know much better. The Ghanaian woman’s story calls to mind that aspect of your cousin Nyasha that you had disliked but were obliged to endure when you shared a room with her at the mission. There was frequently something dismissive, close to sneering, yet at the same time hinting at hurt in her words when she spoke about white people. It frightened you, in those days, to hear how hostile your cousin was toward the Europeans. Now, labouring to define the onset of your fading, the notion of one group of people disparaging another so malignantly once more dismays you.
Christine has taken to whistling. This morning she is caught up in the tune that everyone sang when it was said the war was over and everything that needed to be conquered had been. “Big Brother has come with high morale. Big Brother has come with happiness.” She allows a sad lilt to permeate her breath under the pulse of celebration. You decide you will go into the garden to do whatever she is doing beside her, whether it is weeding, or hoeing, or watering. And you will sing, putting the words to the tune.
A few minutes later, while you dry your arms and legs, you discard the urge to join your companion from the night before, since to do so would be a foolish step away from steering your circumstances back onto a proper course. Christine has shown she cannot contribute to any progress in your life. You leave the bathroom, resolving now to keep your distance from the ex-combatant as your next step toward advancement. Your feet make wet marks on the parquet flooring. You forgot your flip-flops and dirty your feet with walking.
The ants file with you, past you, and into you as you open your door. You panic at this symptom that persists into relative sobriety. You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice.
In dread you traverse your room. Even as you lower yourself onto your bed, you know it is not your intention to engage with the things that must be faced. The insects advance up the bed’s legs and into the covers the moment you thud onto the mattress. You close your eyes while your mind whirls on the problem of how to escape from your predicament. Piece by piece you devise a plan. You will go somewhere where there are no people like the landlady’s niece, who constantly hark back to the days of war and injustice. At the same time, you must insulate yourself from the shocks that result from engaging too much with white people. Exhaustion propels you over the border of wakefulness into a sleep from which you half hope you will not wake.
An orange sun flames angrily in the west when you next open your eyes. The ants troop up the walls. They have grown as big as wasps. The widow sings a strange hymn in her cottage. Treble shines ivory and the bass gleams like ebony. Note by note, the melody trembles to the ceiling. You blink the music and the insects away, afraid to think of anything while equally frightened of emptying your mind in case the space is occupied by something more horrible.
The only objects you possess that point to the human being you were meant to be are your academic certificates. Getting up, you drag them out of the plastic bag in which you wrapped them against dampness and silverfish, sneezing as the must tickles the hairs in your nostrils.
In the ensuing days you steal out, when no one is about, to buy the newspaper at the corner. You spread it out on the bed on your return and run a finger down the tiny print, embarking once again on the old routine of searching the smalls. Every time you send off an application you command yourself neither to wait for nor to expect a response. Of course you do precisely this, spending many hours looking through the window for the postman.
You are overjoyed the first few times you are invited to an interview, dressing carefully on each occasion in your Lady Dis and suit that now hangs encouragingly loose. The young men interviewing you invariably grin absentmindedly, twiddle pens between their fingers, and call you Auntie. Once it is a young woman. You want to strike twenty years off your age, to shout, “Here I am, I’m new, remade; look at me, I’m just beginning!” For in many ways you feel you are starting everything afresh after resolving to make things work. Telling yourself you must be thick skinned and persevere, you nevertheless pore with growing alarm over reports appearing in the media more and more frequently of people with degrees like yours, obtained more recently, leaving the country for work in South Africa, Namibia, and even Mozambique and Zambia. You have never been attracted to teaching as more than a temporary interlude, but, lowering your expectations several notches, you stumble one morning up thirteen flights of stairs at the Ministry of Education. Searching through narrow dark corridors, nose wrinkled against fumes seeping out of the lavatories, you eventually locate the door you require.
The official at the broken desk is overjoyed to see you. You are the first, you learn, in all his years as a public servant, to return willingly to teaching.
Giving you this information, the gaunt little man pokes a finger out from a frayed cuff and runs it over pages in a rumpled ledger. After a few minutes’ examination he offers you a post as a biology teacher.
“I am not qualified,” you object. “Have you looked at the certificates carefully? My degree is in sociology.”
The official pushes his cuffs up his arms. He rocks his chair’s legs back and forth, smiling like a senior pupil coaching a backward junior.
“These are your transcripts,” he says, patting the sheets on the desk.
You nod.
“We recognize this degree, of course. It is from our own university.”
Having settled every objection with this observation, the officer dials a number. He argues over the phone with the receptionist at the school he has in mind. Finely phrased insults slither back and forth, until he hints he can have the girl removed whenever he wishes. After some minutes of this, he places the receiver gently in its cradle, but once it is there he presses down on it until tendons ridge from his wrist to his fingers.
“She won’t see you now,” he says, distressed. “What I wanted was this morning. Now. For the headmistress to meet you. Or this afternoon. At any rate today. To make sure the thing with this position is finished. Her name is Mrs. Samaita. She is a very good woman.”
He scribbles a number on a scrap of newsprint and pushes it across the desk, instructing, “In two days. She says she has time for you the day after tomorrow.”
Mrs. Samaita, the headmistress, turns out to be a tough, large soul who uses her charisma to run her school efficiently according to her own standards of correctness.
“You have a degree. That is good,” she says when you meet, smoothing out your certificates and transcripts.
Her desk is small and lopsided. The rest of the room is as devoid of elegance, reminding you of your seedy quarters at Widow Manyanga’s. However, you ignore these indications that you are but buying time, have still far to go on your way up in the world. Instead you bask in the warmth of the headmistress’s approbation, promising yourself that with this foothold, you will work your way forward, avoiding the mistakes that have so far interrupted your progress.
“With this solid second-class degree of yours,” the headmistress continues, “it is good you are still here and not in South Africa or Europe. Or even Botswana. Imagine,” she says, “now Zimbabweans are going to that little place and other little places like Zambia. Some are even opting for Mozambique and Malawi. All of it is happening within living memory, a couple of decades after our independence. I am one, Miss Sigauke, who is
not afraid to say we did not set the right goals when we should have done so. I insist on setting them here at Northlea High School. You are welcome to the team if you will help me.”
Not sure what particular misgivings the headmistress has about independence, nor what she means by the right goals, you smile blandly. When you do not respond, she looks you over carefully and muses, “Are we to commend your patriotism or deplore a certain lack of initiative?”
Your smile spreads over your face more affably.
“Still,” the headmistress continues, pressing her thumbs against her lips as she makes her decision. “I am not going to chase you away with pessimism. Under the school’s circumstances, I am looking at the degree, not the subject. Although it would have been much better if you had managed biology at A level.”
Next, in spite of her brave words, the headmistress sighs. Her plywood desk wobbles against her midriff, almost upsetting a display cabinet next to it that is crammed with an assortment of trophies.
“But we have a good library with all the textbooks,” she nods. “I will show you where it is. The librarian will explain how the system works.”
She concludes with the hope that you have enrolled for the National Certificate in Education as you do not have a professional qualification and she has a strict policy on teachers’ credentials at her establishment.
The headmistress does you the courtesy of guiding you to the library herself instead of calling a junior. From the librarian in her cramped cubbyhole you fetch syllabuses and past examination papers. Several texts are missing and the librarian tells you with resignation that the students throw them out of the windows at examination time in order to retrieve them from the grounds outside. You take all this as a welcome challenge after so long without any responsibilities, determining not only to teach your students biology, but also to relay to them the standards you had learnt first at your uncle’s Methodist mission and subsequently at the Catholic convent. Setting your priorities high, you visit your alma mater, the University of Zimbabwe, for supplementary material. You spend hours in the old familiar library devising lessons you yourself find fascinating.