An Elegy for Easterly (5 page)

By the middle of that winter, all of Easterly knew that Martha was expecting a child. The men made ribald comments about where she could have found a man
to do the deed. The women worked to convince themselves that it was a matter external to Easterly, to themselves, to their men. ‘You know how she disappears for days on end sometimes,' said
Mai
Toby. ‘And you know how wild some of those street kids are.'

‘Street kids? Some of them are men.'

‘My point exactly.'

‘Should someone not do something, I don't know, call someone, maybe the police?' asked the female half of the couple whom nobody really knew.

‘Yes, you are very right,' said
Mai
James. ‘Someone should do something.'

‘That woman acts like we are in the suburbs,'
Mai
James later said to
Mai
Toby. ‘Police? Easterly?
Ho
-
do!
' They clapped hands together as they laughed.

‘
Haiwa
, even if you call them, would they come? It took what, two days for them to come that time when Titus Zunguza…'

‘
Ndizvo
, they will not come if we have a problem, what about for Martha?'

‘And even if they did, what then?'

The female half of the couple that no one really knew remembered that her brother's wife attended the same church as a woman who worked in social welfare. ‘You mean Maggie,' her brother's wife said. ‘Maggie moved
ku
South with her husband long
back. I am sure by now her husband drives a really good car,
mbishi chaiyo
.'

She got the number of the social department from the directory. But the number she dialled was out of service, and after three more attempts, she gave it up.
There is time enough to do something
, she thought.

And when the children ran around Martha and laughed, ‘Go and play somewhere else,'
Mai
Toby scolded them. ‘Did your mothers not teach you to respect your elders? And as for you,
wemazinzeve
,' she turned to Tobias. ‘Come and wash yourself.'

The winter of Martha's baby was the winter of Josephat's leave from the mine. It was Easterly's last winter.

On the night that Martha gave birth, Josephat's wife walked to Easterly from a praying field near Mabvuku. She did not notice the residents gathered in clusters around their homes. Only when she walked past Martha's house did the sounds of Easterly reach her. Was that a moan, she wondered. Yes, that sounded like a cry of pain. Without thinking, she walked-ran into Martha's house. By the light of the moon falling through the plastic sheeting, she saw Martha, naked on her mattress, the head of her baby between her legs.

‘I'll get help,' Josephat's wife said. ‘I'll get help.'

She made for the door. Another moan stopped her and she turned back. She knelt by the mattress and looked between Martha's legs. ‘Twenty cents,' Martha said and fainted.

Josephat's wife dug into the still woman and grabbed a shoulder. Her hand slipped. She cried tears of frustration. Again, she dug, she pulled, she eased the baby out. Martha's blood flowed onto the mattress. ‘Tie the cord,' Josephat's wife said out loud and tied it.

She looked around for something with which cut the cord. There was nothing, and the baby almost slipped from her hands. Through a film of tears she chewed on Martha's flesh, closing her mind to the taste of blood, she chewed and tugged on the cord until the baby was free. She wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. The baby cried, she held it to her chest, and felt an answering rise in her breasts. She sobbed out laughter. Her heart loud in her chest, she took up the first thing she saw, a poppy-covered dress, and wrapped the baby in it.

In her house she heated water and wiped the baby clean. She dressed it in the clothes of the children who had slipped from her. She put the baby to breast and he sucked on air until both fell asleep. This was the vision that met Josephat when he returned after midnight. ‘Whose child is that?'

‘God has given me this child,' she said.

In the half-light Josephat saw his wife's face and his stomach turned to water. ‘I will go to the police,' he said. ‘You cannot snatch a child and expect me to do nothing.'

His wife clutched the baby closer. ‘This is God's will. We cannot let Martha look after it. How can we let her look after a child?'

‘What are you talking about, who is Martha?'

‘Martha Martha, I left her in her house, she gave birth to it. She can't look after it, this is God's will.'

Josephat blundered out of the room. He knew with certainty that it was just as he thought. Ten months before he had arrived home, and found his wife not there. ‘She has gone to an all-night prayer session,' a neighbour said. A wave of anger and repulsion washed over him. He had only this and the next night before he was to go back to the mine.

A wasted journey
, he thought.

He had gone to the beer garden in Mabvuku. The smell of his wife was in the blankets when he returned, but she wasn't home. The hunger for a woman came over him. He left his house to urinate and relieved himself against the wall through the pain of his erection. A movement to the right caught his eye. He saw the shape of a woman. His mind turned immediately to thoughts of sorcery. He lit a
cigarette and in the flare of the match saw the mad woman. ‘May I have twenty cents,' she said, and lifted her up dress.

He had followed the woman to her house in the corner, grappled her to the ground, forced himself on her, let himself go, and in that moment came to himself. ‘Forgive me,' he said, ‘forgive me.'

He did not look at her until she said, ‘May I have twenty cents.' He looked at her smiling face with horror; he fell over his trousers and backwards into the door. He pulled up his trousers as he ran and did not stop running until he reached his house. ‘It is not me,' he had said again and again. ‘This is not me.'

He lit a cigarette. There was a smell of burning filter. He had lit the wrong end. He bargained with God, he bargained with the spirits on both his mother's and his father's sides. He bargained with himself. He would touch no woman other than his wife. He would not leave her, even if she never bore him a child. And even as he later gave in to Rebecca, to Juliet, and the others, he told himself that these others meant nothing at all.

Josephat found Martha lying on the floor on her back. He raised her left arm, it fell back. He covered
her body with a blanket, and left the house. Snatches of conversation reached his ears from the group gathered around
Ba
Toby. For the first time he realised that Easterly was still awake, unusually so; it was well after midnight and yet here were people gathered around in knots in the moonlight. He moved close, he had to know.

‘They were at Union Avenue today, they took all the wares.'

‘They just threw everything in the back of the lorries.'

‘Didn't care what they broke. Just threw everything.'

‘In Mufakose it was the same, they destroyed everything.'

‘Siyaso is gone, Mupedzanhamo too.'

‘Union Avenue flea market.'

‘
Kwese neku
Africa Unity, it is all cleared.'

‘Even
kuma
surburbs, they attacked Chisipite market.'

‘My cousin-brother said they will come for the houses next.'

‘They would not dare.'

‘
Hanzi
there are bulldozers at Porta Farm as we speak.'

‘If they can destroy Siyaso …'

‘But they can't destroy Siyaso.'

‘That is not possible,' said
Ba
Toby. ‘I will not believe it.'

‘I was there,' Godwills Mabhena said. ‘I was there.'

‘You men, the only thing you know is to talk and talk,'
Mai
James said. ‘Where are you when action is required? Where were you when they took down Siyaso?
Nyararazvako
.' The last word of comfort was directed to the crying child on her hip. His mother was one of three women arrested in Mufakose, two for attempting to take their clothes off in protest, the third, the child's mother, for clinging to her box of produce even as a truncheon came down, again, again, on her bleeding knuckles. The child sniffled into
Mai
James's bosom.

‘I will not believe it,'
Ba
Toby said again.

In his house Josephat took down a navy-blue suitcase and threw clothes into it. His wife held the baby in a tender lock and crooned a lullaby that Josephat's own mother had sung to him.

‘
Your child will not be consoled, sister
.'

‘We are leaving,' he said.

‘
She cries for her mother, gone away
.'

‘We have to pack and leave.'

‘
Gone away, to Chidyamupunga
.'

‘The bulldozers are coming.'

‘
Chidyamupunga, cucumbers are rotting
.'

‘We have to leave now.'

‘
Cucumbers are rotting beyond Mungezi
.'

‘Ellen, please.'

She looked up at him. He swallowed. Her smile in the half-light put him in mind of Martha. ‘We have to leave,' he said. He picked up an armful of baby clothes. He held them in his hands for a moment, then stuffed them into the suitcase and closed it.

‘It is time to go,' he said. As they walked, to Josephat's mind came the words of his mother's lullaby.

They stole out of Easterly Farm and into the dawn.

When the morning rose over Easterly, not even the children noticed Martha's absence. They were running away from the bulldozers. It was only when Josephat and his wife had almost reached Chegutu that the bulldozers, having razed the entire line of houses from
Mai
James to
Ba
Toby, having crushed beneath them the house from which Josephat and his wife had fled, and having razed that of the new couple that no one really knew, finally lumbered towards
Martha's house in the corner and exposed her body, stiff in death, her child's afterbirth wedged between her legs.

The Annexe Shuffle

E
mily sees Ezekiel shake his arms and hands around his head. Ezekiel is haunted by the buzzing of a thousand phantom mosquitoes. They fly close to his ear; it is always the same ear, the right ear. He swipes at them but this only increases their agitation. He longs to hit one, just one, and see the satisfying streak of blood across the wall. Sometimes he slaps a hand against one, again, again, but he hits nothing but the wall and, more often, himself.

He has to be bandaged often.

In between the buzzing mosquitoes, he says that he hears other sounds: shouting men dressed as soldiers, the dry crackle of the straw on burning huts, screaming children, crying women. More frequent and disturbing than that is this, the high intermittent buzz of the thousand mosquitoes. To keep their noise out of his head, Ezekiel sings a song that Emily remembers from Sunday school:

And when he screams ‘Abraham, Abraham' at least twenty times, the mosquitoes are still.

His shouting puts him in conflict with Sister Hedwig. She raps him sharply on the head with her knuckles. He stops screaming, and whispers ‘Abraham, Abraham' from near the window, close to where Emily stands. She sees him trembling and instinctively puts a hand on his shoulder. They stand in silence looking out at Second Street Extension, at the embassy houses of Belgravia and the golf course across the road. Through the metal grille and the mesh wire, through the reinforced windows that separate them from the outside, they can see small figures on the eighteenth green.

Only outside this window is there change, yet even there a repetitive pattern asserts itself. On Second Street Extension, the cars, buses, emergency taxis are filled with people going about the business of living, the occupants within unaware of the gazes without. One time, two times, five times a day she sees the vans and cars from her suspended life. Up and down goes the little green bus, moving between the city
centre and the university. ‘University of Zimbabwe', a white station wagon says in blue lettering, ‘Faculty of Law'. The car is so close that she can make out the faculty motto below the university crest:
fiat justitia
ruat coelum
. The motto is more than just the words of Caesoninus on a crest, it is a song in her soul, the reason she is a law student, the meaning she wants to give to her life. ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall,' she says aloud. Outside, the traffic, golf course, the houses. Inside, the Annexe shuffle.

They bring Emily to Dr Chikara, the Dean of Students on one side, the warden of Swinton Hostel on the other. Dr Chikara is not who she expected. His office is an empty space with nothing on the walls. There are no books by Freud and Jung. There is no couch in sight. He does not talk about the id or the ego. Instead, from behind his government-issue desk, he directs her to a government-issue chair.

He smokes Kingsgate cigarettes, one after the other.

He writes down everything she says.

‘Canst thou minister to a mind diseased?' she asks him. ‘Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?'

He writes this down.

‘May I have a cigarette,' she says, without a question mark.

‘Do you smoke?' he asks, with a question mark.

‘I do now,' she says as she lights one of his cigarettes. She coughs out smoke through teary eyes.

He writes that down too.

‘I am sending you to the Annexe,' he says, ‘the mental wing at Parirenyatwa Hospital.'

The words
mental
and
hospital
combine to produce a loud clanging in her mind.

‘I am not mad,' she says.

‘No, of course you are not mad,' he says. ‘Madness has nothing to do with it. You only need rest, all you need is rest.'

Emily is pliant, obedient, she needs rest. The warden calls her a taxi, to be paid for by the university. ‘I am visiting a friend,' she tells the driver, even though he has not asked. Inside the Annexe, the door shuts behind her. A man in a striped robe walks the slow walk that puts her in mind of the undead of film and television. In his face is vacant possession.

‘Do you have
Parade
, sister?' he slurs.

She turns towards the door but there is no handle on the inside.

‘I am not supposed to be here,' she says, ‘let me out, let me out.'

‘Sister, may I have
Parade
?' the man says, and touches her face. The man attracts others, and two women shuffle towards her, with faces as empty as
his. Like a persistent interloper, the rhyme from Stephen King's
Tommyknockers
reverberates in her mind.
Late last night and the night before,
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the
door
. The door won't open, and she bangs on it to escape the shuffling figures in their striped robes. A nurse comes to her, face clouded with concern.

‘Is it not that you are the girl from the university?' the nurse asks in Shona. ‘Is it not that Dr Chikara sent you here?'

‘No, no,' Emily says in English, ‘let me out.'

I want to go out, don't know if I can
.

‘Are you not the one we are expecting?' the nurse asks again.

‘I am lost,' Emily says, ‘so sorry, so lost, I should not be here.'

I am so afraid of the Tommyknocker man
.

The door opens and she stumbles out.

In her room on P corridor at Swinton, she announces to no one in particular: ‘I am going to keep a journal. I am going to write down everything that happens to me. Today I ate my banana,' she says, ‘so I will write that down.'

‘I ate my banana,' she writes.

Only it comes out ‘I hate my banana', and, seeing
this, she laughs. Then she sees that this is not so funny, this is, in fact, a sign that everything is against her, she can't even trust her own pen, her own hand, her own thoughts, her very actions betray her, everything is against her, everything is wrong, so wrong, nothing will ever be right again.

It is as she cries that the Dean of Students and the warden enter her room to take her back to the Annexe. ‘I know my rights,' she says through her tears. ‘I am a law student.'

They brush away her law studies like an inconvenient fly.

‘Your father said we can section you,' they say.

The force of her father's will moves across the country from Bulawayo to Harare. It takes the route that Emily herself takes to get to university each term, past Gweru, Kadoma, Chegutu. The force travels along the Bulawayo Road and propels her from her bed to pack a small bag. Pens and notebook, her new diary. Three changes of underwear, three T-shirts, two pairs of jeans. One book:
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State
.

Her clothes are not wanted here, they remain in her bag. She wears a striped gown with the many-wash-faded 
letters ANNEXE ANNEXE ANNEXE all over it. She is branded across her breast, on her right arm, above her knees, across her back. She is small, Emily. The gowns are supposed to be one-size-fits-all but hers is so big that she feels like she is in a tent. In the window, she catches her reflection. She cannot see herself. MockingNurseMatilda takes down her particulars. Name, age, race, religion, height, weight. She asks Emily what tribe she belongs to.

‘This is what slows progress in this country,' Emily screams. ‘The notion of tribe is a patronising Western construction,' she adds when they have restrained her. ‘The Goths, Vandals and Visigoths, those were tribes, they talk about Serbian nationalism, but African tribalism. I do not have a tribe, I belong to the nation.'

They force her onto the bed.

‘I am a student,' she weeps. ‘A university student.'

‘Hedwig is a Catholic Sister, Ezekiel is an army sergeant, Sonia there manages a hotel,' MockingNurseMatilda says. ‘Welcome to the Annexe, my dear, we welcome students too.'

Emily reads aloud from the
Origin of the Family
. A wave of gratitude washes over her. These men, Marx and Engels, Karl and Friedrich, dead and white, they get it, they really, really get it. ‘In the first place, sexual love assumes that the person loved returns the
love; to this extent the woman is on an equal footing with the man. Secondly, our sexual love has a degree of intensity and duration which makes both lovers feel that non-possession and separation are a great, if not the greatest, calamity; to possess one another, they risk high stakes, even life itself.'

She cries herself to sleep. She wakes to find a Coloured girl staring at her and smiling as she plays with the beads at the ends of the braids on Emily's hair. ‘Feel my baby,' the Coloured girl says.

Her name is Estelle, and she is a star rising high above the reaches of all that is ordinary and elemental. Nothing can touch her, and nothing does.