The Dust Diaries (21 page)

As the afternoon fades Betty’s subject of your loneliness spins on its axis until Betty is talking about her own isolation, and I wonder if there isn’t something of the mirror-man in you. That people can’t help seeing the ruling qualities of their life reflected in you. But then perhaps this is not a quality of yours exclusively, just the nature of relationships across history, between the writer and the written. The pursuer looking for something in their subject that they recognise in themselves. For Betty this seems to be loneliness, abandonment. She came to Rhodesia to be with the man she loved, Hugh Finn, a scientist and a poet, and married him here. She had always wanted to marry a poet ever since her childhood friend had announced dramatically while they were picking strawberries that she had discovered a great poet and that she would marry him. The friend was only twelve years old then, but years later she did marry the poet. His name was Tom Eliot, and hers was Valeric.

Hugh has been dead for some years now, and Betty is marooned in Zimbabwe, the country to which her love brought her and in which it has now left her, washed up on her own grief, which is deep and solid, echoing as it does the dimensions of her love. She explains to me, simply and determinedly as if explaining a complicated equation to a child, that love does not go away with death, does not diminish, and anyone who says it does has not been in love. Instead, she says, it grows daily, fed by memory and its own nourishment, increasing in depth and volume and casting an equal shadow of grief as it does so. Gregory serves us an English Sunday roast. The sun is hot through the barred window behind the table, a bird caws extravagantly from a tree in the garden and Betty cries for a while, holding her fork in one hand and her head in the other.

The Blue Arrow coach is still reeling in the long road across the bush. Out of the side window I follow the fluid dip and rise of the slack telephone wires hung between their wooden poles, a long black rhythmical wave against the dull grey sky. I have been in Zimbabwe for twelve days, and I have tried to call Leonard every day, to tell him I am coming, but I have never got through. Looking at these wires now I understand why. Many of them have been brought down, cut open and stripped of their valuable copper, and this is probably why my voice never reached this far out of the city, and this is why I am having to come unannounced. In my shirt pocket I have the last letter from Leonard, dated over a month ago, and I only hope the words of welcome written there are still valid.

A rash of half-built breeze-block bungalows signifies the edge of a town. It has started raining, hard, soaking rain. I look out the front window of the coach to see Chivhu appear in its frame through the clear arc of the one long wiper sweeping waves of water off the windscreen with each swing of its arm. The coach slows, crunches down a couple of gears and pulls into a small square with buildings on three sides. The driver calls ‘Chivhu’. I am the only person to leave the coach. Outside, the rain is cutting up the dusty ground, unlocking the smell of the earth. I collect my rucksack from the hold then run to the shelter of the nearest building, a cream wooden hotel with green window frames and guttering and a swinging sign that says ‘Vic’s Tavern’. Along with a couple of men standing on the covered veranda I watch the Blue Arrow coach leave, then take my bag to a table, sit down, and order a toasted egg sandwich and a cup of tea. A waistcoated waiter brings my order out from the empty hotel and I watch the rain sheet off the sloping roof, spilling from the guttering, waterfalling to the ground, distorting the world beyond.

When the sound of the rain on the roof begins to ease I ask one of the men if he knows the way to where Reverend Mamvura lives, Farm 16 in Maronda Mashanu. He raises his eyebrows, smiles and says in a deep voice, ‘Yes, I know where Reverend Mamvura lives,’ he indicates with a flat hand. ‘Up here, then left and then right.’ He pronounces his English carefully, each syllable given its due weight in the Zimbab-wean manner. ‘It is about nine or ten kilometres,’ he adds; then, tilting his head to one side, he asks, ‘But how will you get there?’

‘I’ll walk,’ I tell him. Because that is how you would have got there from this town, on your feet, and I don’t want to follow you any other way.

The rain is light now, so I shoulder my rucksack, which feels too new in this town, and start to walk the way the man had described. I pass the post office on my left then continue up a long wide dirt street of shops, their entrances shaded by a wooden awning over an open walkway. The walkway and the shops’ faded, once colourful signs remind me of an American Western set, lending the street a pioneer feel beneath the African trappings of the town.
Zvichanka Chete, Diki-ta Eating House, Fish and Chips, Chivhu Music Centre, Prop. D.J. Sit-hole, Zvoushe G. Dealer, Budget Boutique
. A broken neon sign writes
Enkeldoorn Garage
in dull letters against the grey sky, reminding me of the town’s original name, and looking around now I find it hard to believe that it looks much different to when you were alive. Except, of course, today the people in the shops, walking on the walkway, driving in the beat-up trucks are all black and when you were here nearly everyone was white.

I turn left up a smaller street. A series of corrugated lean-tos line the left side and a squat, hexagonal rusted corrugate church stands on the right. The sun has come out now and a barber is outside his lean-to, shaving a path through the thick black hair of a customer who sits on a couple of upturned Pepsi crates. The long flex of his clippers leads back into the dark of the shed, where a small boy stares at me, his stomach distended and one finger in the corner of his mouth. I wave and he ducks back, further into the dark. The barber laughs and waves instead.

This street bears right, past the Chivhu hospital, a complex of low wooden buildings behind a wire-mesh fence with scrubland grass growing in between them. Some orderlies smoke under the shade of a large open thatched shelter that stands apart from the main buildings. At the corner of the hospital the road ahead of me peters out into veld grass, a narrow track and trees, so I turn left and start walking up the road I was told will lead me to Leonard’s farm at Maronda Mashanu. It stretches ahead of me, a long, straight, rust-red dirt road that narrows into the horizon like a textbook perspective diagram. Slightly cambered, its centre has been driven smooth by truck and bus tyres, scattering the larger pebbles into small banks and dips at it edges in which the rain water has collected in long thin puddles. A strip of grass flanking either side develops into thick bush away from the road: low green trees punctuated with rounded granite boulders. The wind has whittled some of these into standing stone sculptures, one stone on another, and many are rashed with orange lichen. Sometimes the words ‘Bus Stop’ are painted on them in black writing. A line of telegraph poles margin the road on the left, their single wire a dark pencil line against a sky that is still portentous with rain.

I pass the hospital, where a man is sitting outside the entrance with his young daughter. The left side of her face is swollen, shutting one eye and blowing out her cheek. Her father wears an old suit jacket over a jumper, flannel trousers and battered slip-on shoes. He raises a hand and asks ‘How are you?’ in the Zimbabwean way, with the emphasis on the ‘you’. As he does so his daughter turns away from me and hides her face behind her father’s jacket. I tell him I am fine and walk on, my rucksack pulling at my shoulders and my water bottle swilling at my side. Occasionally the alarm of an insect trill laces the quiet, but otherwise
the
road is silent, just the sound of my own breath and my feet on the stones. Just once a man on a bicycle appears at the road’s sharpened point on the horizon and cycles towards me, rising and falling over the undulations like a boat on a gentle sea. He gets nearer, until I can hear the whirr of his wheels, passes me, then is gone.

After about two miles I pass a battered farm sign on a pole, white paint on black, ‘Farm N°4, Cripps Road’. This is your road, then, the one you walked for forty years, made with your own feet, from Maronda Mashanu to Enkeldoorn and back, carrying your letters, your manuscripts, your grievances, your hopes and your memories. Many roads and streets in this country have changed their names since independence. Windsor Way is now Makombe Way, Stanley Avenue is Jason Moyo Avenue, but this is still your road, Cripps Road. Long, straight, unforgiving, it seems suitably yours, and now I am walking up it to find you in your grave, carrying my questions about your life and why you lived it the way you did.

Ray Brown is another person who has asked these questions before me. An English professor at the university in Harare, he has studied your poems and your stories for traces of you and like Betty Finn he is long familiar with your life. I sat in front of Ray in his house on The Chase, a wide Harare street with rows of jacaranda and musasa trees obscuring the houses that line it on either side, and listened to him talk about you. He is a professor to the bone. Embraced by his huge armchair, he clenches his teeth on a pipe and thinks in silence for a long time before speaking. A wayward fringe of white hair falls across his forehead, beneath which a pair of large square glasses dominate his narrow face. He is a man of literature, and it is your writing that fascinates him: an English nineteenth-century poetic sensibility brought to bear on an African landscape at the dawn of the twentieth. A Keats scholar himself, it is maybe the mirror-man at work again, but he stresses the juxtaposition of your love of Keats, the physical sensualist, against your life of spiritual ideal and physical privation; the romantic nature of your writing against what he calls your ‘muscular Christianity’.

When I ask him if he knows of a child, he is silent for longer than one of his usual pauses, then says, ‘No, I doubt it.’ He does tell me, however, of an occasion years ago when a girl stood up at a symposium held at the university and claimed to be your granddaughter, but he says that he and the other academics dismissed her as an impossibility. When I tell him that my great aunt also met a woman who said she was your granddaughter, and that I have an intuition that it was a specific event, something like a love affair that first sent you to Africa, he is quiet for a long time again. Eventually he stands, and goes to look for a book on his bookshelf. He brings back a selection of your poetry and prose, thumbs the pages, finds what he has been looking for, leans forward with his elbows on his knees and says, ‘See what you think of this, it’s from a poem called ‘To the Veld’.’ And then he reads:

Take my love and praise…

Most of all for thy weariness –

The homeless void, the endless track,

Noon thirst, and wintry night’s distress –

For all tense stretchings on the rack –

That gave me my lost manhood back.

He looks at the page for a moment, then looks up at me again, peering over his glasses that have slipped down his nose, and says, ‘That last line has always troubled me, ‘my lost manhood’. Why lost, do you think?’

After two hours’ walking, my water bottle is empty and I can sympathise with your vision of the ‘endless track’. The clouds are bulking out above, darkening with rain and I’m worried that this is somehow not your road after all. I decide to carry on until the next farm at least, and walk on down a dip and over a little bridge. The land on the banks of the river that flows under it is covered in a lush grass that rises up into meadows on either side. A jacaranda tree hangs over the road, heavy with its lilac, bluebell flowers, and in the distance I can see a man carrying a spear and walking with two hunting dogs. I stop and rest, realising why you could have thought Mashonaland an Arcadia. Its country is unoriginal for miles, but then every now and then it offers up a place like this, where the simple beauty is all the more striking for rising out of the monotony of the veld.

I am about to turn around and find some shelter before the rain, which I can see sweeping across the land over in the east, reaches me, when I see the sign for Leonard’s farm. It is a wide hoop of round metal painted white, with two dark-blue stripes like an old–fashioned life-guard ring. Leonard’s name, the farm number and the P.O. Box number are written on it, also in blue, the words invaded by patches of rust. It hangs on an old metal gate, which I push open and walk through, following a rough track that curves up to a homestead scattering of huts on slightly higher ground.

As I walk up the track I take stock of the place. On my right is a single brick rondavel with a neat thatched roof and a line of washing hanging quietly in the still air outside it. Past this, there is a cattle kraal, not made from regular planks or fencing wood but from whole branches planted in the ground with other branches woven in between them to form the horizontal rungs. It gives the impression of intricate planned disorder, part natural, part artificial. Inside, a couple of short-horned cows shift from foot to foot in the mud. Past this, still on my right, there is a squat concrete well with its metal bucket pulled up short to the winding axle and a thin short-haired dog lying at its base, pole-axed by the humid heat. Ahead of me is the homestead proper, a rough square of dusty ground flanked by a whitewashed iron-roofed bungalow on the right, and a couple of thatched rondav-els, raised on bricks, to its north and its south. Inside the centre square there is a wooden maize holder, constructed like the cattle kraal from undeveloped wood, an ancient green plough being reclaimed by the earth it once disturbed and a corrugated-iron drying stand on which a pile of red, green, blue and white pots and pans show up brightly against the background of yellow veld grass. A scattering of thin chickens, their red wattles trembling as they walk, strut the dusty ground, pecking for food. Just outside the square is a plain concrete block, its corrugated roof pinned down by stones, with an entrance at each end. White arrows painted on its walls point to each of them, and written above them in English and Shona are the words VARUME

GENTS and VAKADZI LADIES.