An Elegy for Easterly (3 page)

‘How can one man rule forever?' was the question that obsessed my husband before he died. ‘Twenty-eight years, and still he wants to hang on?'

He joined in a plot to ensure that the next president would be from his province. There were secret meetings. They had come to the farm, the heavyweights as the press calls them, referring to their assumed political influence, but the phrase could as well refer to their stomachs that require heavy lifting for all the copulation they seem to do with contestants and winners of beauty pageants. They plotted and schemed and the President got to know of their plots and schemes as he gets to know of everything. But the President was merciful; my husband's grovelling must have been so irritating that the only way to put an end to it would have been to extend the magnanimous hand of presidential pardon. He did not enjoy that forgiveness long because then he succumbed to a long illness, to use one of many presidential terms for death from Aids. He died, leaving me relieved that it had been years since I was a wife to him in any but the social sense.

‘Forward, march.' The words are a strangled cry that seems to come from deep within the intestines of a soldier whose face is contorted from the effort of shouting them. This is followed by the rattle of a drum. The voice comes again and six soldiers march in formation and stand over the open grave.

There is a drum roll.

‘Company, fire.'

The soldiers shoot into the air.

‘Company, fire.'

More gunshots.

‘Company, fire.'

And so on until twenty-one rounds have been shot into the air and the coffin has been sent off in the pomp and pageantry of a full military funeral. Tomorrow, the official newspaper will be full of a four-page photograph spread. They will say that my husband lay in state at Stoddard Hall before his coffin was loaded on to a gun carriage and travelled in a fifty-car cortège to the national shrine at Warren Hills, where a service from the official state priest was followed by an oration from the President, which was followed by a twenty-one-gun salute. There will be a full text of the President's speech. And for at least a week, the funeral will make up the entirety of the nightly news.

These are the ceremonies that give life to the ruling party's dream of perpetual rule, the pompous
nothingness of the President's birthday celebrations, the state-sanctioned beauty pageants from which they choose new mistresses, the football matches with predetermined outcomes. The unity galas and musical ‘bashes', the days of national prayer, and, above all these, the state funerals.

I wonder what the masses would say if they were to be told that they have gathered here to bury a bit of wood covering a sack filled with earth while the man we mourn lies in an unmarked grave.

The newsreader who was my husband's mistress announced that my husband was to be made a national hero. The Politburo had declared him a hero to be buried at the national shrine. They did not tell me, his widow, of this decision and I had to hear it from his whore on the evening news. ‘The shrine is where they lay the gallant sons who fought in the liberation struggle,' she added, helpfully.

What she does not say is that my husband is fortunate to have been awarded the status at all. Only those who had not disagreed with the President at the time of their deaths become heroes. A committee weighs the gallantry. It is sometimes necessary to upgrade those that were not gallant enough but sang well enough and danced high enough in the praise of
the President to earn them a place there. My husband had been measured and the scales declared him worthy. He had never held a gun in his life. He knew nothing of the forests of Mozambique where the guerrillas trained. His main contribution to nation-building was to unite the nation in gossip over his five scandals. The scandals and his recent disloyalty have been discarded and all that matters is that he consolidated the gains of the liberation struggle by devotedly introducing the President by his full totem name.

In the end, they came to pay their respects and to talk about the funeral.

‘His body will lie in state at Stoddard Hall,' the presidential spokesman said. ‘He will proceed to Warren Hills for a full military burial.'

‘Those were not his wishes,' I said. ‘He wishes to be buried in his village.'

There was silence.

‘His bones would not rest easy, he said, if he did not lie in the land in which he was born, where his ancestors are buried, and where he wants the bones of his children, and his children's children and their children in turn to lie with his when their time comes.

‘It was his obsession in the end,' I continued. ‘He believed that only if he lay in his home village would he find peace.'

I was sure that the reference to a potentially restless spirit would appeal to the atavistic instincts of the Cabinet members. They believe in the supernatural, after all, haunting traditional healers for success-guaranteeing potions and agitating for a law to punish witchcraft.

‘We have no option but to go ahead with the funeral,' the spokesman insisted. ‘The announcement has been made by the President himself; to go back would …' His voice trailed off but he did not need to finish the sentence. The President is not a man who loses face.

In the end, it was perhaps not so much the fear of my husband's
ngozi
spirit that made them treat me with respect as it was the necessity of avoiding the embarrassment that would result if I carried out my threat to go to the private press. They sent one emissary after another to talk to me, until they sent three heavyweights from the Politburo. After allusions to the family honour and talk of a personal triumph for my husband, came this plea: ‘Think of how good it will be for his region.'

My husband was from the restive tribe in the south that sleeps and feeds and knows not the President. They carry a chip on their shoulder the size of their province. They do not have enough power, enough heroes at the national shrine. My husband's hero status
would, they believed, quell the restive tribe, and still the fires that burned in the party over who will succeed the President. And in that realisation, I saw my future. I have no home in my own country to go to; everything that I have invested is here. I could choose to be an official widow to be trotted out at every commemoration of the heroes.

Or I could choose my own path.

‘I want my husband's farm back,' I said, ‘and I want it registered in title deeds in my name. I also want an uncontested seat in the new Senate.'

So the bargain was sealed: for a seat in the new Senate, and a farm in my own name, I would close my mouth and let them bury wood and earth in his name. They jumped at this; how could they not, when my husband had died in early August, which meant that they could have a real funeral on the very day in the middle of August that they commemorate men of the ruling party who have died still in agreement with the President. And so the spokesperson arranged everything, the coffin, the service, the switch after the lying in state at Stoddard Hall. He measured out exactly the precise kilograms of earth to represent my husband's dead weight. ‘It must feel like the soldiers are carrying a real body,' he said.

They have sounded the last post and fired the twenty-one-gun salute. I count slab upon slab of polished marble covering the desiccated bones of the dead heroes. One of them will soon cover the earth that is standing in for the flesh and bones of my husband.

There are many such secrets here, what the French call
les secrets de Polichinelle
, secrets that everyone may know but which may not be spoken. It is known that one of the heroes we buried recently was not the fine upstanding family man of the presidential speech but a concupiscent septuagenarian who died from a Viagra-induced heart attack while inside an underage girl. And it is known that the Governor of the Central Bank who has vowed to end illegal sales of fuel is himself involved in sales of fuel on the black market. And that the President … well, that which is not spoken or written down is not real.

Only the official truth matters, only that truth will be handed down through the history books for the children to learn. This they will learn: my husband is a national hero who lies at the Warren Hills. Warren Hills is the national shrine in a land presided over by the wisest of rulers. The land is one of plenty with happy citizens. The injustices of the past have been redressed to consolidate the gains of the liberation struggle. And in that happy land, I will be a new farmer and senator.

An Elegy for Easterly

I
t was the children who first noticed that there was something different about the woman they called Martha Mupengo. They followed her, as they often did, past the houses in Easterly Farm, houses of pole and mud, of thick black plastic sheeting for walls and clear plastic for windows, houses that erupted without City permission, unnumbered houses identified only by reference to the names of their occupants. They followed her past
Mai
James's house,
Mai
Toby's house, past the house occupied by Josephat's wife, and her husband Josephat when he was on leave from the mine, past the house of the newly arrived couple that no one really knew, all the way past the people waiting with plastic buckets to take water from Easterly's only tap.

‘Where are you going, Martha Mupengo?' they sang.

She turned and showed them her teeth.

‘May I have twenty cents,' she said, and lifted up her dress.

Giddy with delight, the children pointed at her nakedness. ‘
Hee, haana bhurugwa
,' they screeched. ‘
Hee
, Martha has no panties on, she has no panties on.'

However many times Martha Mupengo lifted her dress, they did not tire of it. As the dress fell back, it occurred to the children that there was something a little different, a little slow about her. It took a few seconds for Tobias, the sharp-eyed leader of Easterly's Under-Eights, to notice that the something different was the protrusion of the stomach above the thatch of dark hair.

‘
Haa
, Martha Mupengo is swollen,' he shouted. ‘What have you eaten, Martha Mupengo?'

The children took up the chorus. ‘What have you eaten, Martha Mupengo?' They shouted as they followed her to her house in the far corner of Easterly. Superstition prevented them from entering. Tobias's chief rival Tawanda, a boy with four missing teeth and eyes as big as Tobias's ears were wide, threw a stick through the open doorway. Not to be outdone, Tobias picked up an empty baked beans can. He struck a metal rod against it, but even this clanging did not bring Martha out. After a few more failed stratagems, they moved on.

Their mouths and lungs took in the smoke-soaked smell of Easterly: smoke from outside cooking, smoke wafting in through the trees from the roadside where women roasted maize in the rainy season, smoke from burning grass three fields away, cigarette smoke. They kicked the empty can to each other until hunger and a sudden quarrel propelled Tobias to his family's house.

His mother
Mai
Toby sat at her sewing machine. Around her were the swirls of fabric, sky-blue, magnolia, buttermilk and bolts of white stuffing for the duvets that she made to sell. The small generator powering the sewing machine sent diesel fumes into the room. Tobias raised his voice above the machine.

‘I am hungry.'

‘I have not yet cooked, go and play.'

He sat in the doorway. He remembered Martha.

‘Martha's stomach is swollen,' he said.

‘Mmmm?'

‘Martha, she is ever so swollen.'

‘
Ho nhai?
'

He indicated with his arms and said again, ‘Her stomach is this big.'

‘
Hoo
,' his mother said without looking up. One half of her mind was on the work before her, and the other half was on another matter: should she put elaborate candlewick on this duvet, or should she
walk all the way to
Mai
James's to make a call to follow up on that ten million she was owed?
Mai
James operated a phone shop from her house. She walked her customers to a hillock at the end of the Farm and stood next to them as they telephoned. On the hillock,
Mai
James opened the two mobiles she had, and inserted one SIM card after the other to see which would get the best reception. Her phone was convenient, but there was this: from
Mai
James came most of the gossip at Easterly.

In her home, Martha slept.

Her name and memory, past and dreams, were lost in the foggy corners of her mind. She lived in the house and slept on the mattress on which a man called Titus Zunguza had killed first his woman, and then himself. The cries of Titus Zunguza's woman were loud in the night. Help would have come, for the people of Easterly lived to avoid the police. But by the time Godwills Mabhena who lived next to
Mai
James had crossed the distance to Titus Zunguza's house, by the time he had roused a sufficient number of neighbours to enter, help had come too late. And when the police did come, they were satisfied that it was no more than what it was.

Six months after the deaths, when blood still
showed on the mattress, Martha claimed the house simply by moving in. As the lone place of horror on Easterly, the house was left untouched; even the children acted out the terror of the murderous night from a distance.

They called her Martha because
Mai
James said that was exactly how her husband's niece Martha had looked in the last days when her illness had spread to her brain. ‘That is how she looked,'
Mai
James said. ‘Just like that, nothing in the face, just a smile, and nothing more.'

It was the children who called her Mupengo, Mudunyaz, and other variations on lunacy. The name Martha Mupengo stuck more than the others, becoming as much a part of her as the dresses of flamboyantly coloured material, bright with exotic flowers, poppies and roses and bluebells, dresses that had belonged to Titus Zunguza's woman and that hung on Martha's thin frame.

She was not one of the early arrivals to Easterly.

She did not come with those who arrived after the government cleaned the townships to make Harare pristine for the three-day visit of the Queen of England. All the women who walk alone at night are prostitutes, the government said – lock them up, the Queen is coming. There are illegal structures in the townships they said – clean them up. The townships
are too full of people, they said, gather them up and put them in the places the Queen will not see, in Porta Farm, in Hatcliffe, in Dzivaresekwa Extension, in Easterly. Allow them temporary structures, and promise them real walls and doors, windows and toilets.

And so the government hid away the poverty, the people put on plastic smiles and the City Council planted new flowers in the streets.

Long after the memories of the Queen's visit had faded, and the broken arms of the arrested women were healed, Easterly Farm took root. The first wave was followed by a second, and by another, and yet another. Martha did not come with the first wave, nor with the next, nor with the one after that. She just appeared, as though from nowhere.

She did not speak beyond her request for twenty cents.

Tobias, Tawanda and the children thought this just another sign of madness, she was asking for something that you could not give. Senses, they thought, we have five senses and not twenty, until Tobias's father,
Ba
Toby, the only adult who took the trouble to explain anything, told them that cents were an old type of money, coins of different colours. In the days before a loaf of bread cost half a million dollars, he said, one hundred cents made one dollar. He took
down an old tin and said as he opened it, ‘We used the coins as recently as 2000.'

‘Eight years years ago, I remember,' said an older child. ‘The five cent coin had a rabbit, the ten cents a baobab tree. The twenty had … had … umm,
I
know … Beit Bridge.'

‘Birchenough Bridge,' said
Ba
Toby. ‘Beitbridge is one word, and it is a town.'

‘The fifty had the setting sun …'

‘Rising sun,' said
Ba
Toby.

‘And the dollar coin had the Zimbabwe Ruins,' the child continued.

‘Well done, good effort,' said
Ba
Toby. He spoke in the hearty tones of Mr Barwa, his history teacher from Form Three. He, too, would have liked to teach the wonders of Uthman dan Fodio's Caliphate of Sokoto and Tshaka's horseshoe battle formation, but providence in the shape of the premature arrival of Tobias had deposited him, grease under his nails, at the corner of Kaguvi Street and High Road, where he repaired broken-down cars for a living.

As he showed them the coins, he remembered a joke he had heard that day. He repeated it to the children. ‘Before the President was elected, the Zimbabwe ruins were a prehistoric monument in Masvingo province. Now, the Zimbabwe ruins extend to the whole country.' The children looked at
him blankly, before running off to play, leaving him to laugh with his whole body shaking.

The children understood that Martha's memory was frozen in the time before they could remember, the time of once upon a time, of good times that their parents had known, of days when it was normal to have more than leftovers for breakfast. ‘We danced to records at Christmas,'
Ba
Toby was heard to say. ‘We had reason to dance then, we had our Christmas bonuses.'

Like Martha's madness, the Christmas records and bonuses were added to the games of Easterly Farm, and for the children it was Christmas at least once a week.

In the mornings, the men and women of Easterly washed off their sleep smells in buckets of water that had to be heated in the winter. They dressed in shirts and skirts ironed straight with coal irons. In their smart clothes, thumbing lifts at the side of the road, they looked like anyone else, from anywhere else.

The formal workers of Easterly Farm were a small number: the country had become a nation of informal traders. They were blessed to have four countries bordering them: to the north, Zambia, formerly one-Zambia-one-nation-one-robot-one-petrol-station,
Zambia of the joke currency had become the stop of choice for scarce commodities; to the east, Mozambique, their almost colony,
kudanana kwevanhu
veMozambiki neZimbabwe
, reliant on their solidarity pacts and friendship treaties, on their soldiers guarding the Beira Corridor; this Mozambique was now the place to withdraw the foreign money not available in their own country; to the west, Botswana, how they had laughed at Botswana with no building taller than thirteen storeys, the same Botswana that now said it was so full of them that it was erecting a fence along the border to electrify their dreams of three meals a day; and, to the south, cupping Africa in her hands of plenty, Ndazo,
ku
South, Joni, Jubheki, Wenera, South Africa.