“Ian, I didn’t mean… Ian, I’m sorry; I’m scared, that’s all. Ian, please, let’s talk.”
I watch him standing there.
“Ian, please…”
“Leave it, Lindiwe, not now.”
He turns from me.
“My father’s dead, Ian. He’s dead. Mummy told me yesterday. She’s already buried him. I, we…”
He is standing so far away from me, looking at me, through me, the color drained from his face, his hands holding David’s
pictures.
“You’re right, Ian. I’ll take Danielle back to Bulawayo. You go with David across the border. I’ll… I’ll join you later. You
fly out.”
“No, we’ll all go together, I’m not leaving you.”
“Ian, it will look less suspicious if it’s just you two. A little holiday with your son. Just staying for a couple of weeks.”
“
You
should go with him, Lindiwe.”
“Ian, you’ve got all the contacts for the pictures. I… I need to go to Bulawayo. I have to, my father, I…”
“Shush, Lindiwe, it’s okay. Don’t, we’ll work it out, shush.”
I drive them
to the airport, watch them at the ticket desk and then a last glimpse as they walk through the narrow passageway to immigration.
Danielle and I could go upstairs and see them board the plane from the balcony there, but I can’t do it. I should wait to
see that they do actually board the plane, that they are actually on the plane when it takes off, that they are not hurled
off by bulky men in overcoats, but I can’t stay. I can’t watch them leave.
From the airport I drive straight to Bulawayo.
I park the car outside the gate. I look up at the house.
“Let’s go,” I say at last to Danielle.
I swing the door shut and I wait for Danielle.
I turn and there is Maphosa.
“Oh,” I gasp.
“You have come,” he says.
In this moment, a sense of this man as a form of spirit flitting from one life to the next seizes me.
“Yes, I have come,” I say.
I try to find the Maphosa I know, knew. My childhood Maphosa.
Sunglasses are clasped to his eyes.
Maphosa’s lips move and twist. It is hard to tell what they mean to convey. A smile? Scorn? Irritation?
“We are doing serious business here.”
Whiffs of dagga. Petrol. Diesel.
I look down at his hand to the jerry can there and think of the farmer he must have got that from, the terrors that must have
been inflicted on him and his family.
“Yes,” I say.
And now I see the two looted Land Rovers over at the McKenzies stacked high with their scavenged bounty.
He turns his face to Danielle who has been standing rigid against the car door, her hand clasping the door handle.
The jerry can knocks against his leg, and petrol spills out on his trousers onto the gravel. There was a piece in
The Financial Gazette
about disgruntled war vets running amok at petrol stations, creating home depots in the townships where they sell fuel in
the black market.
“Is this one Rosanna’s?”
“Yes.”
Danielle keeps her eyes clamped to her feet.
“That one is no good.”
I try to think, here is a man, a killer, but I also think, here is Maphosa, a relative. A
distant
relative, I hear Mummy.
He peers into the car. “Where is the boy?”
It takes a moment to know who he means.
“He is in Harare. At school.”
I watch Maphosa push a finger under his glasses, scratch. It is his bad eye.
“We are cleaning the area.”
We stand silently, facing each other.
Is this a warning then?
Don’t bring your white man here. He is not welcome. We will deal with him.
And then he turns and walks slowly up to Number 18, the jerry can knocking against his leg, spilling petrol, and the sound
of the latch of the gate clanging down fills my ears. Like a spirit, Maphosa disappears.
There are two suitcases lined up against the wall in the passageway.
I find Mummy sitting in the lounge, waiting.
She gets up from the couch.
“Good,” she says.
I watch her smooth down her black skirt and then pat the black doek on her head.
“I’m waiting for the taxi. Here are the keys. When you have finished, give them to the estate agents. I have written down
all the details by the telephone.”
I hear a hoot.
“That’s the taxi. I’m going now.”
I will never see her again. I will never see this woman who is my mother, whom I call Mummy. This is it.
“Mummy,” I say. The word is there out loud between us.
If she could only say, “Daughter, my child.” Something.
She stands still. And I am sure she will give me something. Some thing.
She looks up, sees Danielle pressed against the doorway.
“Just like him,” she says. “A face of a man.”
I look up at Danielle, and for the first time, I see Daddy’s nose, his squashed chin. Daddy who is gone.
Danielle steps back from the door. Mummy walks past, and I watch her dragging the suitcases to the gate.
And then she, too, is gone.
I’m afraid to be in the house, to go into Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom, so we drive to Eskimo Hut to find Rosanna.
She is not there. There are no vendors.
We ask one of the ice-cream attendants, and he says that the army came and cleared up the area. We should try at Cement Side.
There are some camps deep in the bush there.
I buy Danielle a chocolate cone. While I’m paying, the attendant leans over the counter, whispers to me. “You must be careful
with the girl. The soldiers give too many beatings and even shootings. They are mad from the DRC. You must not leave her alone.”
We sit down on one of the benches, and there is nothing but the sound of Danielle slowly licking her ice cream, the Walkman
tucked in her hand. The sound is on too high, snatches of Billie Holiday’s “My Man” filter out. I think of how David left
it on the kitchen table, and when I told him not to forget it, he shrugged and said, “Danielle can have it.”
I look towards the Trade Fair Grounds. The queues used to be so long during the fair that sometimes it took three hours to
get into the grounds. Daddy would always say I was two years younger than I was so that I would get in for free. Mummy would
pinch me to make me smile at the ticket lady.
“Come, Danielle,” I say, getting up. “Let’s go to town.”
I know I can’t keep delaying. Soon I’ll have to face the house. I’ll have to face my father. But for now we can drive into
town. We can be tourists, visitors.
Bulawayo has always been slow, but looking at Main Street now, it is no longer the quaint slowness of country people where
everything is next time or tomorrow, but a brutal nothingness as though time itself has been vandalized, savaged. There is
nothing to see.
The streets are deserted, emptied. Down past Haddon and Sly, Woolworths, up to OK Bazaars, right past Truworths, Edgars, Meikles.
Nothing. Bulawayo’s soul has been ripped out and here lies the dead body.
It has only been six months since I was last here with David. What is happening? What is happening?
I park the car opposite what once was Kine 600 and has now become the Apostolics of God’s Freedom Hall. Old kung fu posters
are still pasted on the walls.
I get out of the car. I have eyes. I must see what cannot be seen. What once was.
No vendors. None at all. No street peddlers with their scotch carts laden with tin pots, vegetables, old shoes, clothes. No
street children shuffling between shoppers. No beggars on the pavement. No street entertainers. No old men sitting, playing
the blues or country on Olivine Oil tin guitars. Nobody at the bus depot opposite the City Hall selling flowers and curios.
No young men loitering in corners, whistling and calling, “Sisi, Sisi, you are too nice.” No sounds of high-pitched laughter,
exclamations.
“Let’s go to Lobengula Street,” I say to Danielle.
There is always something happening by the Indians’ shops.
We get in the car and I drive downtown. Surely we will find the old Bulawayo there. Something to stand and stare at.
But today, nothing.
No crackle and blare of music from dimly lit, musty interiors. No hot, tangy smell of curries and samosas. No Indians standing
outside calling out, “Come, madam, just to take a look.” No zigzagging along the cracked pavement, trying not to trip and
fall on all the enterprising individuals squeezed on the ground: card sellers, shoe shiners, button sellers, scrap of material
sellers, certificate sellers….
And if I close my eyes, there is Lindiwe walking down these streets with her friend Bridgette who needs help.
All is quiet. Still. The shop fronts closed.
I open my eyes. What
is
there to see? Look! Look!
VOTE ZANU-PF OR DIE
scrawled in blood red all along walls.
MAKULAS OUT
spray painted on a window.
BACK TO INDIA
scratched on a dustbin.
The blackened, charred wooden storefronts.
The Bulawayo of Ian McKenzie and me.
Driving through the dusk, it hits me that this is it. The country’s been shattered. For the first time I take in how serious
things are, how far gone, how much is lost. How this country, my country of eternal optimists—live and let live; next time,
things will work out; tomorrow—has come to this.
And so I drive on, on to the house of my childhood, the fading Spanish Colonial, to the place that grew me. To the house I
must say good-bye to, to the father I must leave behind. For I don’t belong here. I have a home and it is not here.
I turn into Marula Drive and for a fleeting moment I see the schoolgirl in her netball uniform standing against the bus stop,
waiting…. She is grown. I am grown. I know this now.
There is a pack of frozen boerewors in the fridge, some bread, a couple of tomatoes. I put the boerewors in a pot of hot water
for a quick defrost.
We eat the boerewors sandwiches in front of the TV. We watch
Mvengemvenge,
which used to be a showcase for local music and was very lively but is now full of government-sponsored groups extolling
the virtues of all things Bob, and the Women’s League choir. I try to switch to ZBC2, but there is no reception from Harare.
The satellite has long been disconnected, so no SABC or MNet. Danielle seems fascinated by the program though, chewing her
bread slowly, her eyes glued to the screen.
Danielle goes to sleep in David’s room.
* * *
For an hour I fiddle with tidying things around the lounge and the kitchen until there is nothing else but to go to my parents’
room.
The mess of it shocks me.
The bed unmade. The cupboard doors flung open. Papers and clothes littering the floor.
I breathe in the smell, hoping…
I pick up the pale blue jersey.
I stand in the room.
I sit down on the bed, just at the edge where I would have sat if he was lying…
I look up to where he would be resting his head.
I turn quickly away and look up to the opened cupboard.
He had all his papers in the black briefcase.
Birth certificates. Marriage certificate. Diplomas. Burial payments.
His will.
Mummy must have taken it.
I look at the chair in front of the cupboard that she must have climbed on to look, check that she had everything she needed.
I get up from the bed. I get on the chair. I stretch my body, arm, so that it reaches far into the last shelf. I’m taller
than Mummy, I can reach further. I swipe my hand this way and the other. Nothing. I stretch until I’m almost falling off the
chair. Some thing. I drag it carefully towards me. A photograph covered in dust.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
I hold the picture in my hands.
I pick up the sleeve of his blue jersey and wipe the dust and grime away.
There is Daddy. In the bush. In his army uniform.
Standing beside him, Mr. McKenzie and Maphosa. They are wearing Selous Scout uniforms.
Daddy is holding a gun. The bayonet out.
I look at him. I look at Mr. McKenzie. I look at Maphosa.
I look at Maphosa.
I bring the picture closer, closer, until I see.
Maphosa’s eyes.
Both of them looking straight at Daddy who is holding the bayonet.
Both eyes wide-open, clear, seeing.
I turn to Mr. McKenzie.
Help me!
But he’s not interested in Daddy or Maphosa.
He’s looking down at the dead terr.
Except the dead terr is a woman with a baby strapped on her back.
I sit down on the bed.
I turn the picture in my hands.
Rhodesia. War.
And I know Daddy is asking me to understand.
How that war, the bush, twisted everything, what you believed was right or wrong, and made every man who fought in it its
victim.
I start awake. The wail of a gate, which gets louder, louder, until it becomes bloodcurdling screams. Instinctively, I draw
the curtain aside.
The house next door is alight.
I wait on the bed to awaken from this dream.
Like I have done so many times before.
I wait and wait.
I look outside in the dark.
The house next door is alight.
I get out of bed. I walk in the dark passageway. I stop. I go back. I slowly open the door to David’s room.
“I am awake,” I hear Danielle.
“Stay here,” I say. “Don’t leave the room.”
I close the door.
I stand outside and watch the house next door burn.
The smell of petrol thick in the plumes of smoke.
The house will crumble into ash.
The fire brigade that has no fuel, no water, no trucks, will not save it.
It will take with it its secrets.
The story of that night, so long ago now.
Here we are.
In this city with its pristine storybook lake and snow-covered mountains, its international bureaucrats and bankers.
We will call this place home, until the time comes for Return.