An Elegy for Easterly (16 page)

She had admirers at the shops and all the gardeners in our road whistled if they were out in the road when she walked past. Even
Mukoma
Joseph who worked for Mr Shelby from number twenty-five and had married
Sisi
Maggie and sent her off to the rural areas said in his lisp, ‘
Ende
sister
makabatana
, you are so well put together.'

She ignored
Mukoma
Joseph and the others and talked only to
Mukoma
George who worked at the
Post Office and who made sure to watch for us as we walked past.

‘Ah, hello sister Chenai, hello
mfana
Munya,
masikati masikati
,' he said.

‘
Masikati Mukoma
George,' we greeted him back.

‘
Hesi kani
, Blandina,' he said.

‘
Ho nhai
, so I am the one that you greet last?' she said.

‘Last but not least, Blandina, you know that,' he said.

They lingered and talked while Munya and I moved ahead of them. One day,
Mukoma
George ran after me as I walked home alone from recorder practice.

He said, ‘Ah,
masikati
sister Chenai, please take this to Blandina,' and thrust a blue aerogramme and a packet of Treetop sherbet into my hands.

The sherbet was for me, he said, and I ate it on the way home.
Sisi
Blandina laughed when she read the aerogramme and said, ‘
Haiwa
, I have no time for such foolishness.' She would not let me read it, but I knew that she would keep it in a shoebox that she kept at the bottom of our cupboard with the other letters that she received from Lalapanzi, and that night I sneaked into her box and read it.

‘My sweetheart Blandina,'
Mukoma
George had written,

Time, fortune and opportunity have forced me to take
up my hand to pen this missive to ask how are you
pulling the wagons of existence and to tell you how
much I love you. My heart longs for you like tea longs
for sugar. I wish for you like meat wishes for salt, and I
miss you like a postman would miss his bicycle. Truly,
Blandina, you are my life, and I hope that you will be
my wife. I want to send a messenger to Lalapanzi with
any cows that your father asks as a bride price. I hope
one day to be your ever-loving husband
,

    
George Simbarashe Gweme from Munyikwa

After that letter,
Sisi
Blandina lingered more and more with
Mukoma
George as she walked us back home from school. She now took all her Sundays off, she went away early in the morning, and then one Sunday she did not come back and that was the only time my mother ever had to shout at her. She made herself three new dresses on her sewing machine.

She talked less and less about the war.

‘Is Princess a nicer name than Rosemary?' she said. ‘Do you like Precious or Prudence? What about George for a boy?'

When I said that she should ask
Mukoma
George if he liked it, she laughed and sang me another war song.

Then one day, just like that, she was gone.

She went for her Sunday off, and called my mother in the evening to say she would come for her clothes.
She was getting married she said, she was going to elope to
Mukoma
George's aunt's house in Engineering. She came back to pack up her things, her sewing machine, and box of letters, and her three pairs of shoes, her pleated skirt with the cloth belt, her two blouses and her two-piece costume that my mother had given her, and the three dresses that she had made on her sewing machine. The only thing she left behind was the uniform dress and matching hat on her bare shelf in the middle of my wardrobe.

Three weeks after she left us, there was a clanging sound from our gate, and the dogs from next door barked at the sound and there was
Sisi
Blandina. She cried as she told my mother that George asked why it had taken so long for her to go to him if she was sure the child was his and anyway, George said, he had a girl in Munyikwa who was promised to him.
Sisi
Blandina told my mother that she told him he had deceived her and then he said he could not marry someone who was not a maiden and she said but he knew all the time because she told him about the camp in Mozambique and how she kept the guerrillas company and my mother said Blandina, and
Sisi
Blandina said but it was not my fault that is what we were told to do and my mother said
ndine
urombo
Blandina, I feel pity, but you cannot stay here when things are like this, and
Sisi
Blandina wept and said, I have nowhere to go and my mother said you can go back to Lalapanzi and
Sisi
Blandina said oh God, my father, she said how will I face my father, and my mother said I can give you some money for the first few months but you cannot stay here and
Sisi
Blandina wept and stayed the night but left before I woke up the next morning and I never saw her again.

The police came to our house on the same day that my mother's sister, my aunt from Gwelo, came to visit and they said that a woman had been taken out of the Mukuvisi River and did my parents know her because she had an aerogramme in her bag with our address on it. My father went with them and identified
Sisi
Blandina and he came back and told my mother. She cried and my aunt said to her, well, this is what happens when you try to help these girls and she said something about whores who slept with men to whom they were not married. Then she said to my father, really, these maids are all the same.

Aunt Juliana's Indian

M
r Vaswani of Vaswani Brothers General Dealers was the first Indian that I saw closely enough to count the teeth in his mouth and the buttons on his shirt. I had seen Indians before; they were hard to miss, the women in fabrics of gossamer lightness, splashes of colour on Salisbury's pavements, and, like their men, as brown as we but with hair that slipped and slithered like white people's. Until I saw Mr Vaswani, I had never been close enough to them to see the colour of their irises.

Our school in Chitsa was closed because of the war so that my brother Danai and I were sent to Glen Norah Township in Salisbury to live with my mother's younger sister,
Mainin
'Juliana, who shared a house with their brother, our
Sekuru
Lazarus. We came to know all about
Mainin
'Juliana's Indian. She called him
Mu
India
wangu
, my Indian, shorthand for my Indian employer, to distinguish him from all
the other Indians that were not Mr Vaswani. She worked in a shop in town that sold everything an African could possibly need, she said.

‘I stand behind the counter and help the shoppers,' she told us. ‘And all he does is to stand there ordering me about. It is always Juliana you are wary, wary slow, and Juliana hurry up, hurry up because there are wary, wary many customers.'

Mainin
'Juliana argued with our neighbour's daughter Susan, who worked in a white family's house in the suburbs.

‘
Mu
India
wangu
is a difficult man,' said
Mainin
'Juliana.

‘My white madam is more difficult,' said Susan.

‘He waits until the last possible moment before paying our salaries.'

‘
Manje
madam
vangu
lies in bed all day and smokes while I clean.'

‘He shouts at me, all day in my ear.'

‘She won't let me eat any leftovers, imagine, her dog eats better than me.
Ufunge
, she even rides with her dog in front with her in the truck, and me in the back with all the sun and dust.'

‘He won't advance me money to do my Pitman's examinations. Just fifteen dollars, imagine.'

‘She won't allow her husband to put electricity in the boy's
kaya
, so I have to cook outside.'

‘He talks all day and sometimes won't let me have my lunch.'

‘Madam
vangu
is too lazy even to wash her own underwear; I have to do it by hand.'

‘One of these days,' vowed
Mainin
'Juliana, ‘I am going to punch those spectacles off his nose.'

Danai and I decided that when we grew up, we would work for
Mu
India rather than the white madam. We spoke of him in one breath as
Mu
India
waMainin
'Juliana, and talked of him as intimately as we did the members of our very large family, wondering at the peculiar singularity of his ways, his refusal to advance salaries even when there was illness in the family, his habit of picking his nose when he thought that no one was looking, the leftover Zambia cloth and bent out of shape Kango plates and cups with missing handles that he gave Juliana and his other assistant, Timothy, as Christmas bonuses, the yellow plastic comb that he tucked behind his ear and next to his hair, and his house in Belvedere, which we pronounced Bharabhadiya.

We became experts on Indians
Mainin
'Juliana was not the only one with an Indian connection; our long-dead
Sekuru
Simplicious, who was the sibling between our mother and
Sekuru
Lazarus, had worked
with Indians in Durban in South Africa before returning home to Rhodesia and dying in the war.

Indians did not wipe their bottoms with tissues: they washed them with water with their left hand. They worshipped cows. They did not eat meat. When they died, their bodies were burned and not buried. All their food contained curry. They all owned shops; and as shopkeepers, they were all just like
Mu
India who gave Juliana no Christmas bonus, but instead, gave her leftover pieces of Zambia cloths that no one wanted to buy. The pieces were rarely long enough to wrap around my eleven-year-old waist, and so Juliana gave them to our maternal grandmother who seemed to have a use for every piece of fabric she came across.

Out in Domboshava where my grandmother lived, the pieces of cloth increased my grandmother's consequence in the eyes of her neighbours. ‘
Akadii
zvake
Mu
India
wa
Juliana?' she would ask after his health. ‘And has Juliana given him the herbs that I brought the last time that I was there?'

Mu
India
waMainin
'Juliana's indigestion was of particular concern to her because it seemed never to end.

‘Why does he not eat
sadza rerukweza?
' she asked, referring to a mud-brown traditional dish that required a strong stomach to eat.

‘You and your
rukweza
,' said my uncle.

‘It is not meat, so he can eat it.' And she launched into her usual lecture about the benefits of
sadza
rerukweza
which opened up the intestines and allowed them to breathe.

‘As my brother Simplicious who died in 1974 always said,' said
Sekuru
Lazarus, ‘the problem with Indians is that they eat curry too much. Always they say
pili pili fakile
.'

At the same time that we admired our dead
Sekuru
Simplicious as a much-travelled man, Danai and I were surprised that the Indian language sounded so close to the little that we knew of Ndebele.

Mainin
'Juliana saw her job as no more than a bridging measure until she landed her dream job. ‘I want to be a top-flight secretary,' she said to anyone who would listen.

She bought used books with broken spines that proclaimed themselves as having belonged to Tracy Thompson and Debbie Moffat and Squiffy Stevens. In the evenings, she hammered out on a typewriter with a missing m, pressing down on the keys, but with no paper because she could afford neither it nor the typewriter ribbon. She listened to records from the Rapid Results College. There was a single called
‘Spoken English' that I played for Danai with the gramophone switch in the groove meant for LPs, so that the needle dragged across the record and the voices sounded deeply low and slow, even the woman's as she said, ‘I want to speak good English.'

‘She wants to speak good English,' said the man.

‘I speak bad English.'

‘She speaks bad English.'

‘It is very hot in Spain.'

‘She says that it is very hot in Spain.'

Her Rapid Results English proved unnecessary in her job; from what she told us, her real value was in translating
Mu
India's shouted orders to his customers to softer, more polite Shona.

Mainin
'Juliana's top-flight dream seemed close to her in the middle of 1978, the year of the changes. We learned on the news that the government would build more schools and bring electricity to the townships. Danai and I made games out of the cartoon strips in the
Herald
newspaper and
Parade
magazine and played being Sam and Ben, characters created by the government to exhort people to vote.

‘Sam,' Danai would say, ‘if I vote in the April 1979 one man, one vote elections, what will I get?'

In a voice dripping with sincerity, I asked, ‘What have you always wanted, Ben?'

‘Majority Rule!'

‘That is what you will get.'

‘I also want peace; the war to stop.'

‘That is what you will get.'

‘I want the schools to open again; education for my children.'

‘That is what you will get.'

‘I want hospitals and clinics, good care for my family when they are sick.'

‘That is what you will get.'

‘There must be good jobs so we can earn good money.'

‘When you vote that is what you will get.'

Then all together, we said, ‘We must use our vote so that we can get our Majority Rule. We will both vote in the April 1979 one man, one vote elections.'

Sekuru
Lazarus had much to say on these elections, as on every other subject. He spoke loudly and at length,
kupaumba
like my grandmother said, referring to the ceaseless sound that a drum makes in the hands of a particularly enthusiastic drummer, speaking always in a tone of argument even with those who agreed with him.

‘Where were all the schools and the electricity all this time? You tell me that. The suburbs where the whites live are bright and clean, and we have, what? Now that the blacks have said no to their nonsense and taken up arms, do they think they can buy us
with their electricity and their schools?

‘We have said no,
aiwa, bodo, hwi, nikisi, kwete,
haikona, tsvo
.

‘They want to cloak our faces with deception. These are bribes to make us forget our suffering so that we vote for their internal settlement.

‘I swear by my grandfather Musekiwa who died in 1959, I swear that even if all the townships in Rhodesia become white with light, I will never vote for Muzorewa.

‘And if this finger on my left had not been cut off in 1965, I would have taken up arms, me.

‘You would have seen me then.'