An Elegy for Easterly (8 page)

‘The only good thing about Father's death', Peter had said in his careless way, ‘is that we will not have to put up with his tiresome relations.' We learned soon enough that this prediction was premature. Death does not sever the ties; it binds them ever tighter, for it is in death and its attendant processes that kinship
asserts its triumphant claims. He had been loaned to us as husband and father, but in death the clan reclaimed him. They buried him in Shurugwi, where we had to travel for hours on uncertain roads if we wanted to visit his grave. Kinship asserted itself through the funeral rites, in the ceremony to release his spirit, and in the accompanying ceremony of inheritance. His family had even attempted to speak on his behalf. They consulted a diviner who interceded between this world and the next: Father did not rest easy, was his uncompromising verdict. It appeared that the reasons for his discomfort were mainly financial.

‘He wants the money that he left behind to be divided between his children and the brothers and sisters of his blood,'
Mai
Lisa pronounced.

But my father's spirit, however restless, could not undo the will that he had written and signed in his own hand. And when the Master of the High Court pronounced this as the final word, the aunts and uncles could only curl their mouths into their noses.

They are here, now, the aunts and uncles. They are determined that we meet the costs of their expectations, but that we bear the burden alone just as we shared my father's inheritance without them.
Jonathan is particularly worried about the fuel. He drives at a moderate speed to conserve it. There are snaking queues at the garages, people sleep in their cars, unsure of the hour the fuel will arrive. The garage attendants are endlessly optimistic, the fuel will arrive if not just now, then some time this week. But the queues only grow longer as the attendants become more hopeful. Jonathan is afraid that we may not have enough to last the week. The garages give priority to funeral parties, but they have become wise to the tricks of conmen who pretend to be part of funeral processions and then sell on the fuel at inflated prices. One man even feigned death, almost suffocating in his coffin to get his precious fluid. The attendants insist on seeing the death certificates of the deceased. We have no death certificate, and we will have none unless Lisa comes through for us.

Lisa is the daughter of our father's sister, she calls me
mainini
, little mother, and she calls Jonathan and Peter her uncles. Her mother takes every opportunity to tell us of her latest success.

‘Lisa has bought herself a car.'

‘Lisa has moved into a bigger flat.'

‘Lisa is flying to America, to Canada, to Italy, to France.'

‘She has sent money just today, two hundred and fifty billion dollars she sent, it is only two hundred pounds, just imagine. She insists that I go on a holiday, but I told her, no, my child, not on four teachers' annual salary. I said a new stove is more important. Can you believe that she sent more money, five hundred billion dollars? Just imagine. I will buy a new fridge from Radio Limited.'

But of Lisa herself we see very little. She has only been home once in the four years since she went away. She was here two Christmases ago, resplendent in her plastic hair and tight-fitting clothes. She brought us a tray decorated with the names and faces of the kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth Windsor, and presented it as though it was the one thing needful in our unravelling lives. She chatted brightly about England in her new accent; she pronounces our city's first letter as
haitch
. The sun was too hot, she complained, and she had only been back for two weeks but goodness, wasn't she becoming dark. ‘Oh but everyone here is so dark,' she said.

My aunt and my mother have been locked in a lifelong war of attrition, the same war that is fought in households across the country between wives on one side, and the mothers and sisters of their husbands
on the other. Between my aunt and my mother, it expressed itself in the up-and-down looks from my aunt as she asked, ‘Is that a new dress?' and then, ‘I would have thought with
your issues
you would not have time for such finery.' It expressed itself in my mother's finger running across furniture to collect dust, in her fastidious eye that picked out the merest hint of a smear on the windows.

Above all, it expressed itself in the competition between their children. We have not achieved Lisa's material success, having sent no stoves and fridges from Radio Limited home to my mother. But even our modest successes, my soon-to-be-achieved medical degree and Jonathan's accountancy qualification, are cancelled out by Peter's failures.

I often think of my aunt as the opposite of that trio of horsemen galloping though the night to bring the good news from Ghent to Aix in my favourite poem as a child. She crosses the city from Mufakose to Greendale in her eagerness to bring us bad news before anyone else can do so. And for all the distance between London and Birmingham, Lisa seems to be remarkably well informed about Peter's failures. She passes one Peter story after another to her mother who endures the discomfort and oppressive heat of one commuter omnibus after another as she arrives to sweat out her bad news.

Then finally, she brings us the worst news of all.

But we were not to worry, she said.

Lisa would bring Peter home.

As she boasts of Lisa's accomplishments, my aunt chooses not to recall that it was my father who said to her, ‘Sister, your daughter has finished her nursing diploma. Instead of rotting in some rural outpost, why does she not try her fortune where others have gone?'

It was my father who gave Lisa the money for her air ticket. My mother did not speak a civil word to my father for a week after his decision to buy Lisa's ticket; their voices rose in the night, my mother insisting that his first duty was to his own children, Father saying that it was in their children's interests that others in the family succeeded so that we all shared the family burdens, and my mother saying that he was too weak for his own good, and did not our elders say that if you rear a dog on milk, it would only end up biting your hand?

Though he did not live to see Lisa's success, he continued to do good for us from beyond the grave. It was his life insurance money that sent Peter to
London. I try to avoid thinking it is not fair, it should have been me, and I would have honoured Father's memory. Even then, I could see the sense of the plan; I had my studies, Jonathan his training. And there was Peter, shiftless and idle. Harare was not the place for a nineteen-year-old boy who was bright and able, but too lazy to achieve the grades to get into the local universities, and who could not get a job but liked to drink.

So we sent him to London.

He had been more fortunate than those of our countrymen and women who have flooded England to wipe old people's bottoms for a living. No menial labour for Mother's last-born son. Father's money had paid his tuition. But Peter's ambitions were as broad as the range of courses available to him; he moved from architecture to business studies, from economics to statistics, from quantity surveying to computer science. ‘This time, I won't change my mind,' he said every time that he changed his mind.