An Elegy for Easterly (22 page)

‘Hey, Matilda,' she cried, and tried to reach out across the space between the escalators. I reached out too and we clung to the edges of the moving stairs, our hands passing without meeting.

We laughed at our failure.

‘I'll wait for you at the top,' I said to her.

‘I'm running late and I have to catch my train, yeah,' she shouted, ‘but make sure you call me, all right? Call me, yeah? Tonight, yeah?'

On that escalator at Liverpool Street station, under the gimlet stares of the suited ones, all I could say was a faint
okay
that I am not sure reached her.
Only as I watched her glide down past the framed adverts for
Queen
the musical and the latest Harry Potter did it occur to me that I did not have her phone number. By this time, she had disappeared from my view and I imagined her, a chameleon in pink, pushing her way among the dark shapes on the platform, fighting to get onto the train in the rush hour.

The Negotiated Settlement

T
hulani did not immediately notice the darkness. Only when he was in the house and reached for the wall switch in the entrance corridor to produce an empty click did he realise that there was no electricity. Load shedding. He walked to the kitchen, singing snatches of Oliver Mtukudzi, ‘
Zvimwe
hazvibvunzwi, zvimwe hazvibvunzweiwe
.'

After all these years in Harare, his Ndebele tongue still couldn't get around the Shona
zv
and
nzw
sounds. It probably never would. He abandoned singing, and hummed as he groped for a candle where they kept them above the fridge. He lit one and opened the microwave oven.
Isitshwala
and stewed meat and leaf vegetables again. He had to unpeel the skin from the
isitshwala
to eat it. It had the smoky taste of food cooked over an open fire. The meat was cold and the vegetables clammy in his mouth. He washed his meal down with the remaining half-pint
of Pilsener that he had smuggled out of the Mannenberg. It was warm from being cradled between his legs on the drive home.

‘Dinner by candlelight,' he said.

He found this funnier than it was, and chuckled. He hummed more Oliver as he ate. Eleven mouthfuls later, the candle in his hand cast his shadow against the wall as he walked into the bedroom. The candlelight flickered over the outlined shape of his sleeping wife. He removed his shirt and trousers, leaving them in a heap on the floor and got into bed. His wife shifted in her sleep towards his side of the bed. Thulani felt a stir of desire, but it was a flash only, it died as quickly as it rose. He lay back and tried to recapture his earlier ebullience. What was that joke Themba had told again? He should have been more serious with Themba, it looked like he was really going to marry that woman.

‘You do not need to do this,' he had said to him, but Themba had only laughed and said vague things about settling down. He should have been firmer, he should have told him that settling down was simply settling, that he was giving permission to fate to stifle him and kill all his freedom.

‘There's the padlock, see.'

He struggled to remember where those words came from. He gave up the effort, and it came back
to him. Arabella, showing off her wedding ring after the remarriage to that poor bastard, Jude Fawley. He hadn't thought about
Jude the Obscure
since the last time he read it, almost nineteen years ago, when he had had to cram it for a literature exam. Another passage came to him now as he tried to find sleep: ‘Take her all together, limb by limb, she's not such a bad-looking piece – particular by candlelight.'

He got up. His wife slept on. Picking up his discarded clothes, he moved into the lounge and dressed himself again. In the darkness, he stretched out on the three-seat sofa. Just after they had bought it six years ago, he had tried to make love to Vheneka on this sofa, anything to kill the monotony, but she had said, no, no, the kids, and he had not tried again.

He went over to the bookshelf, and got down his secret stash of cigarettes. He lit one and lay back on the sofa. His thoughts drifted as he smoked. He saw in his mind's eye his wife's naked body, the breasts, the protruding stomach, the scar of Nkosana's Caesarean.

‘First you undo me this scar, then we can talk about divorce,' she had said, when three years ago, in a moment of unbearable suffocation he had asked for his freedom. He had not talked about it again.

Had he really wanted to leave? There seemed nothing active about his life now. He no longer
desired her, no longer thought about returning home, surprising her, no longer sought her first thing in the morning. He remembered how beautiful she had been to him once, and even now, she could surprise him sometimes, when unexpected, the scent of her came to disturb him, and she turned, and laughed, and he saw, beneath the puffed cheeks and strange hairstyle of the moment, the girl he had seen at the Students' Union.

He had wooed her on walks to Avondale, with Chinese food and combo-packs from Chicken Inn. Flowers from Interflora and movies at Kine 600. He had endured the endless ragging of his Bulawayo friends who mocked him for falling for a Shona chick, but even they had to admit that she was so beautiful she could have been Ndebele. On the night of her twentieth birthday, he had taken her to Gabrielle's, but she wanted to go to the Manchurian. The forty dollars he had saved for this night felt suddenly light in his pocket and when the bill came, his insides turned to water.

He would leave his ID card, he had resolved, and was just about to go over to talk to the waiter when she put her hand on his.

‘We can share the cost,' she said. He had protested of course, but not too much, and eventually had given in. They had held hands all the way back to the university,
and later, in Manfred Hodson Hall, in the room he shared on P corridor with Xholisa Bhebhe, on a narrow bed sagging from the sex of all the students that had come before them, they conceived their first child.

He had not meant to marry at twenty-one, but that first pregnancy had left him with no other honourable option. The consolation had been the sex. He had enjoyed feeling superior when he heard his fellow-students' desperate searches for sex. Not for him the prowls through the townships, looking for easy lays that opened their legs at the flash of a university student identity card; or the hours drinking at the Terraskane Hotel to summon the courage needed to approach a woman and take her to the Welcome Lodge opposite, where ‘resting for thirty minutes' was sixty dollars and ‘resting for an hour' was a hundred. Thulani had been spared this search. He had a woman with whom he could have endless legal sex.

Now, when he wants sex, he does not always go to his wife. He had had a girlfriend once, but his wife had found out; that was a time in his life that he did not think about, could not afford to think about. Even as he thought this, another thought came; the child is probably eleven. There is an eleven-year-old child with my blood in him or her. There is a child that is part of me out there. He pushed the thought from his mind.

Some of his friends had what they called small
houses. He had never tried such an arrangement; small-house women expected as much money and attention as the real wives. The thought of not one, but two women each expecting everything from him, each treating him with that special brand of passive aggression that was fed into women with their mother's milk, was enough to make him give up sex altogether.

He had decided to avoid such permanent arrangements, settling instead for occasional encounters. At the Law Society Summer School, with a willing colleague, preferably one who was married herself, and could console herself with the knowledge that she was doing only what her husband was doing.

Thulani lit another cigarette and smiled as he thought that the crisis in the country had become a boon industry for lawyers. They held conferences at Troutbeck Inn and Leopard Rock, holiday resorts where no tourists came, but only the NGO officials, constitutional law experts and human rights lawyers who pontificated on what they called the appalling and unacceptable and ever-deteriorating human rights situation in the country. Before the elections, they held seminars on creating the right space for democratic transition, and after the elections, they hosted conferences at which they gave postmortems. And the donor money rolled in, real money, dollars and pounds and euros.

After they had analysed the lack of democratic space and inveighed against the partisan actions of the police, they had sex. Thulani had been with Estella Mhango at the last conference; she had been three years behind him in school. She had failed constitutional law twice but was now styling herself a constitutional law expert and human rights activist.

The evening with Estella had been unsatisfactory enough not to be repeated. Funny, he thought, what was it with really beautiful women? There was something wooden about them, like they had been told so often that they were beautiful that they did not seem to feel the need to make an effort. Not Vheneka, though. She had never been like that. At least, not at first.

He did not trouble to find excuses for cheating on Vheneka. There seemed to be something obscene about sex with her, as though he was doing it with a relative. What added to the frisson was that he still felt the occasional flicker of desire. If he was to be honest with himself, it was not her that he desired, but the sex itself. In the dark, she could have been any woman. And this is what Themba wanted, this padlocked life. Thulani was suddenly tired. He stretched and yawned.

He slept and dreamed of Oliver.

When Vheneka woke the next morning, she made straight for the living room. Thulani was still asleep. She left him, showered, and with their maid, dressed and fed the children. She returned to the living room. Thulani slept on. He had drool coming out of the corner of his mouth. She shook him awake, and without waiting for him to rouse himself fully, she said, ‘How could you come home so late? I tried to call you, but your phone was switched off.'

He mumbled, and she repeated herself.

‘The battery was low,' he said.

He yawned. She could see the dark filling of a molar at the back of his mouth. He closed his eyes again. She was suddenly angry, and fought to control herself as she said, ‘How can you keep coming home at this time? What would happen if I also start coming home late every night? Who would help the children with their homework?'

She could feel her voice rising into harsh ugliness but she could not prevent it. ‘And that tap in the yard has been broken for a long time now, it is still leaking and I keep asking you to get someone to fix it but you never do.'

‘Well, why don't you sort it out then?'

‘Why should I do everything around here?'

‘I said I would fix it.'

‘Promises. That's all you are good for.'

He got up to walk to the bathroom. As he closed the door she said, ‘That's right, walk away, like you always do.'

Later, as she drove the children to school, she thought how worn the grooves were along which they moved their quarrels. She could feel herself saying all the clichéd phrases of a thousand injured women before her, but she could never stop herself. She wanted to make it specific to her and him, to them, Vheneka and Thulani, but it all came down to the same thing, promises not kept and not made. Words not said, embraces not given. Their quarrels were never resolved. They were simply postponed to another day. And they were never about what was wrong.

As she drove away from the children's school, she found herself thinking, as she had so often before, that even her name was not her own. Vheneka Dhlamini, Mrs Dhlamini to her colleagues. Her new name, her Ndebele name and her fluency in her husband's language were not enough to deceive native Ndebele speakers, but it was enough for some of her Shona colleagues to treat her differently. Just last week, she had heard the history teacher ask the biology teacher why it was that the Ministry was giving these Ndebele teachers jobs in Harare when there were schools in Bulawayo.