An Elegy for Easterly (23 page)

As she turned into Prince Edward, Vheneka shook off these thoughts and focused instead on the memory of the Vheneka Chogugudza who had played centre at netball and had grown into a woman aware of the power of her own beauty, the way it unsettled the men around her. There had not been many men, just Patrick, before he went to Poland to study, and then Thulani.

She smiled as she remembered those early days, when they had sometimes spent whole mornings and afternoons in bed, tasting each other. There had been dreams. Little things to hope for, aspire towards. Education for their children, professional success, two family cars. Travel to South Africa, maybe even to England. Small, small things burned in the flames of inflation.

After the pregnancy with Nobuhle, there was only one thing to be done. She knew that what she felt for him was not what he felt for her. She wanted only him. He had not been the first, but he was the last. She had not been his first, and she certainly knew she was not the last.

Nobuhle had died at five years, of meningitis said the doctors, witchcraft said hers and Thulani's mothers. That was the beginning, she thinks. She tottered, but did not fall. Then the blow that had felled her: Thulani had made another woman pregnant. The
woman had come to her school, she loved Thulani, she had said, and he loved her. There was nothing that could be done, she was going to have his child. She was four months pregnant she had said. Due at Christmas. And Nobuhle was dead.

Thulani stayed. She had not asked him, but he did. He had said nothing about the other child. She had asked no questions. Part of her knew that he remained for reasons more complicated than love. She had Busisiwe and Nkosana after that, but like a missing tooth that is present even in its absence, Nobuhle remained.

She knew, throughout the years, that Thulani had other women; she had seen the evidence. After his last Law Society conference, she had found a packet of condoms in his jacket. It had been opened. Two were missing. There was ice around her stomach, but her only coherent thought was to wonder whether both condoms had been used on the same occasion.

And after that, her revenge – Peter Kapuya, the trainee teacher straight from Belvedere Teachers' College. She seduced him in her car as she drove him home after a late staff meeting to discuss a strike. She had resented him, this stranger, with his unfamiliar intrusion, but the memory of the missing condoms spurred her on. That night, for the first time in months she had made the first move towards Thulani.

As Vheneka checked her mirror before driving into the school, she caught her reflection. ‘To look so antique and me only thirty-five,' she said. She was suddenly frightened as she imagined another fifteen years of this.

Thulani had once asked for a divorce.

She had felt then a wave of rage so sharp it threatened to cut her sanity, but she had forced herself to speak slowly, calmly. In his language she had told him, ‘First you undo me this scar, then you unlearn me this language. After that, you can come back and we can talk about divorce.'

He had said nothing more after that. Sometimes she thought that
she
should leave
him
, but the fear of being alone hits her. She has nothing beyond him, beyond her family; the job she loved has deserted her. She can no longer escape to her great love, can no longer explore plot and plot devices in
The Mayor
of Casterbridge
, find pleasure in explaining iambic pentameter. The girls she teaches are not interested. And who can blame them? How will Eliot and Pinter and Golding get them a fast buck? What guarantees do Achebe and Marechera and Dangarembga offer? They want the new subjects, computer science, accounts, economics, management of business. They want to find a way to London now, to act on
Studio
263, to enter beauty pageants.

As she walked away from her car, she heard someone calling out to her. She turned. It was Thulani. She looked from him to his car, which he had parked outside the school gate.

‘You followed me,' she said. The words sounded like an accusation.

‘I don't have time for this,' she said.

‘This is not about us,' he said. There was something in his voice, but before she could speak, her mobile phone rang from her handbag.

‘Let it ring,' he said.

She looked from him to the bag, and knew from his face that nothing was right.

‘I followed you, your brother called just after you left, but I wanted to tell you myself.'

The children, she thought, the children. But they were safe, they were in school, she had taken them there herself.

‘It is your mother,' he said. ‘There was nothing anyone could do. Your brother said she just collapsed, and that was it.'

The phone rang again.

‘Leave it,' he said again.

‘But the people, all the relatives, friends, they will want to say … to know the arrangements,' she said.

‘And the school,' she added, ‘I can't go to class now. I have to tell Mrs Muza.'

He walked with her to the headmistress's office where the message was given and understood. As they walked back across the school quadrangle, the bell rang for morning lessons. They were caught in a sea of laughing girls in green and white uniforms running to their classrooms. Their voices faded as Thulani and Vheneka walked to the car park.

The phone rang again as they neared the car. She reached inside her bag for it, and he caught her hand. ‘I am sorry for your loss,' he said, in the most formal expression of condolence that Shona allowed.

Why doesn't he hold me, she thought, why does he say the words of a stranger, why, but even before she had completed the thought, he had taken her other hand. She was afraid to cry because she knew, when it came, she would not stop. Then she was in his arms and he was holding her and he held on to her as they walked to the gate. They left her car behind and drove back home in his. On the way, they talked about calling the funeral home and about all the other things, large and small, that needed to be done.

Midnight at the Hotel California

I
t is hard to remember that there was ever a time when you could buy a half-dozen eggs, a packet of Colcolm sausages, two loaves of bread, a packet of Tanganda tea and still have change from a ten dollar note for two Castle lagers and a packet of Everest. I was thinking of those days as I walked from Mbare to Tynwald today. I had gone to Mbare to collect my car, but my mechanic Lovemore had not finished with it. 

A couple more days,
m'dhara
, he said.

I had to contend with that. Shaky called while I was in Mbare and said that he knew someone who knew someone who could get me a good deal on fifty litres of petrol. It is a super deal,
m'dhara
, he said, it is only valid today, take it or leave it.

I could not leave it; this was the only thing in my pipeline. Just ten days ago, I had had to suspend another deal – some moron thought he was doing
me the world's greatest favour by offering me nine hundred billion for a four-stroke diesel generator. He actually expected that I would smile and say
Jesu
wangu
, but I said, forget it, there can be no deal for such a low price, and he said, you will not be able sell it for more, and I said, I would rather hang on to it in that case,
simbi haiore, m'dhara, uye haidyi sadza
.

These were thin times in the Gumbo household with the wife pulling faces, and in the small house the girlfriend was suddenly too busy to see me. So when Shaky's super take-it-or-leave-it fuel deal came up, I set off at once. There was no transport to be found, and I had to walk all the way from Mbare to Tynwald.

My immediate thought when I saw the fellow I was supposed to meet was that he was high on something. I am Clever by name and Clever by nature, ha, ha, ha, he said, and ha, ha, ha, I said, now how much do you want for it? He pushed back dreadlocks from his forehead and said he wanted half a billion. You are dreaming, I thought to myself, and pulled out one of the drinking straws that I carried in my battered Old Mutual briefcase. I put the straw into the barrel, sucked at it to draw some of the fluid into my mouth, which was just as well because there was definitely something else mixed in with the petrol. I spat it out, hoping that it was only water and not
urine – urine is preferred by the more unscrupulous because it is the same colour as petrol.

I know nothing about it,
m'dhara
, I am just the middleman, said Clever by name and Clever by nature. I was too tired to argue, it did not matter who was to blame, because the long and short of it was that I had nothing for my trouble, and to add to this, I now had to walk all the way back to town.

I tried to call Shaky. The number you have dialled is not available at the moment, said the electronic Econet voice, please try again later. I called his Telecel and NetOne numbers, same message different voices. My mood soured even further as I trudged past an ostentatious private school in Tynwald that everyone said was run by a retired army general.

As I walked, I thought about following up on another fuel lead that another contact had told me about. Here is how it works: there are these new farmers who get fuel at give-away bottom dollar everything-must-go preferential government prices. The government will throw anything at the new farmers to make them produce: cheap fuel, free tractors, free seed, free fertiliser – even free labourers; they were using prisoners on farms at one time. Pity they can't throw in a bit of free motivation because the thing about the new farmers is that they don't use the cheap fuel for their free tractors; instead, they sell
both tractors and fuel to people like me, and people like me sell them on to the vast majority of the unconnected non-preferential-rate-getting masses that can only get fuel on the black market.

It's against the law, of course, this black market thing, but they may as well arrest every living person between the Limpopo and the Zambezi and have done with it. This is the new Zimbabwe, where everyone is a criminal. One of my best customers, His Worship, Mr Mafa, is a regional magistrate for Harare, and another, the Right Reverend Malema, is a stalwart of the Anointed Church of the Sacred Lamb. The last time I sold diesel to His Worship, he paid off a little of what he owed me in tomatoes – his office at Rotten Row is crammed with the vegetables he grows on a small plot of land along the Bulawayo Road at the edge of which the City of Harare has placed large rusting signs that say NO CULTIVATION: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Unlike those poor sods who have found that their cherished degrees are useless in this new economy, I at least have not fallen too far off my track. I am using the skills I honed as an insurance man in the eighties and nineties. My ex-brother-in-law used to say I could sell dental floss to his mother-in-law – the woman had fewer teeth than a hen.

It is not just fuel either. I am what you might call
an all-commodity broker: if it can be bought, it can be sold, and if it can be sold, I am your man. I have bought and resold computers that the President donated to rural schoolchildren in Chipinge during the last election campaign – they don't need them after all, their schools have no electricity. I have sold reconditioned cars from Japan and Singapore, flat-screen televisions from Dubai, sugar and salt and children's toys from South Africa. I have even sold water-purifying chemicals from Malaysia to the City Council of Kwekwe. All goods processed, no questions asked. No guarantees, no returns, no refunds. No wire transfers, no credit cards – as the sign at the Why Not Hotel, Esigodini says, Mr Credit Was Killed By Mr Cash.

Last year, I sold my biggest item yet: a John Deere combine harvester which came down to me from some poor white bastard who had been compelled to donate his land for redistribution by the magnanimous Comrades. When the Comrades redistribute the land, they also make sure to redistribute any crops on the land, all machinery, any furniture, plates, knives and forks, and any whisky that might be in the house.

So that's how a lucky Comrade got a free combine harvester and having no need for it in urban Warren Park, he sold it to me for only one and a half trillion.
I sold it for at least a hundred times that amount, got US dollars too, which I sold on at a healthy profit, and that is how I was able to buy a third-hand RAV4 for the wife, pay three lots of school fees in one go and get the girlfriend a four-day weekend at Vic Falls and all the one hundred per cent human hair (made in Taiwan) that she could buy.

I was musing on all these deals as I crossed the field that divides Tynwald from Ashdown Park and walked to the corner of Eves and Ashdown Drive. I thought I might get a lift to town here. I bought an Everest from a vendor who had set up a stall at the corner. As I lit my cigarette, I was almost run over by a huge silver Prado that screeched to a halt beside me. The driver jumped out leaving his door open, and bought a couple of cigarettes from the vendor.

I was about to say something to him when I was distracted by the music coming from his car. I would know that riff even in the pits of hell. The Eagles. ‘Hotel California'. The music poured from his car and into Ashdown Drive. My rage went away in an instant. I laughed hard. The young man and the street vendor looked at me. They were joined in their curiosity by three men who had been waiting for transport to town. It is not every day a man goes mad at the corner of Eves and Ashdown Drive. Their baffled faces made me laugh harder, and buckled by
the strength of my laughter, I doubled over.

Ko ndeipi blaz?
the Prado driver asked.

You will not believe me if I tell you, I said.

Try me, he said.

Now here was an opportunity.

I will only tell you if you give me a lift to town, I said. I nodded towards the other three. Give all of us a lift and I will tell you the best story you have heard your whole life.

One
mita
each, he said.

I summoned the three who clambered into the car. I got into the passenger seat. We handed over a million dollars each to our driver and drove off in the final blasts of the Eagles. As we drove down Harare Drive, I told them about the time, back in the swinging nineties, when Zimbabwe was still Zimbabwe and I had spent a night at the Hotel California.

My hero as a child had been Paul Mkondo; that song from his money programme had been the theme song of my youth. He was everything I wanted to be, and so it was only natural that I associated the insurance business with money, and sought to make my fortune in that line. As an insurance salesman, I was successful because I had hit on the bright idea of sticking mainly to the small towns that most salesmen
avoided. Not for me Harare and Bulawayo, or Gweru and Kwekwe, Mutare and even extended villages disguised as towns like Marondera. There were any dozen insurance sellers here. I frequently turned my Datsun Bluebird towards the small mining areas and tiny towns, not quite going to the rural areas, but skirting them, Kamativi and Karoi, Esigodini and Hwange.

I made a surprisingly steady sale; you would be amazed at the number of miners and small-town teachers in those days that had money stashed under pillowcases, and whom I managed to persuade to give a little of it to insurance. I sold protection in a suitcase, with just a signature on the dotted line, I secured futures, one copy for you, and two for the file. There was another bonus, the many lonely housewives I encountered. And there was nothing like driving the long lonely stretches of road with nothing but myself for company and the Bhundu Boys on the stereo.

On one such occasion, at about seven in the evening, I came to Kamativi. I thought I would surprise Mabel, one of my women. I had not seen her since I last came to Kamativi four months before this when her husband had been at his mine job. A bed for the night, and, if I knew Mabel, a half night of pleasure awaited me, and I was filled with anticipation.
I scrounged around to see what I could bring her, and managed to find two warm bottles of lager in the boot of the Datsun. My condoms were in my briefcase as usual and I carried everything to the house, together with a couple of newspapers. That would have to do, and, parking my car, I made my way towards the house.

Even before I could knock, there was her husband, short in stature but large in suspicion. And behind him, Mabel, a tall woman, who seemed suddenly reduced, simpering and smiling and looking everywhere but at me. A woman with half a brain would have said I was an uncle, or a cousin, but she left me to my own devices.

I was left with nothing but my wits and ready tongue.

I am selling insurance, I said.

What kind of insurance is it that is sold in pitch darkness, he asked.

It is only that I know your wife, I said.

My wife, he said, how do you know my wife?

I mean to say, I met your wife, I corrected.

And where exactly did you meet my wife, he asked.

I was here earlier selling insurance, and she said she could not make such an important decision without you being here, and so I thought I would come later.

In the end, it was the newspapers that I carried under my arm that did it, it was
Kwayedza
, the local-language newspaper that always had an intoxicating mix of stories of witchcraft and adultery all delivered in the moralising tone that you associated with your oldest aunt. ‘
Kitsi Yakapfekedzwa Sekacheche
', said the headline of the day, ‘Little Kitten Found Dressed as a Baby', and I could see my woman's man flicking his eyes towards it. I had a couple of other papers in the car, and I offered him these now, and also mentioned the two warm beers. This was all the oil that was needed to grease my way in. I had noticed before as I travelled to these remote parts of the country that the best way to a man's confidence was to offer anything printed, a book, a newspaper, a Watchtower pamphlet. I had made many friends by simply allowing someone, sometimes as many as six people, to read a newspaper over my shoulder. His eyes positively glinted at the wealth I presented him, for in addition to
Kwayedza
, I had in my car the
Daily
Gazette, Parade
and
Horizon
.