Gods and Soldiers (43 page)

Today Gogo has a green clothes peg pinned to her red jacket. She tries to get up when I arrive but fails. She staggers back to the floor, beside the blue door where she has been sitting. I rush through the gate, past the lemons, the pawpaw trees, the guava tree. The guava tree which has never given birth to anything but green leaves. I rush through the tears which are always welling at the bottom of Gogo's eyes. Gogo calls me a small wind which you can only feel on the tip of your ear. She says I started walking before I could crawl.

“A woman who cannot forgive her husband's infidelity can climb the highest tree in her village and drop her infant to the ground,” I hear Gogo say in her old red coat which used to belong to my mother. When it starts raining Gogo removes the coat quickly and hides it in a large black trunk. She pushes the trunk under her bed. “Red must be placed in darkness when it rains. Otherwise the lightning will burn all of us.” So when I see her sitting at her doorway, leaning forward, listening to her past, I know that there is no lightning and her heart is free.

“How is your mother?” Gogo says. “Now that I have finished wiping all the mucus from your nose your mother says you are her child? Is that so?” I do not answer this invitation for a quarrel with my mother, who is not even here with me. Gogo prefers to quarrel with someone who is absent. When Gogo and my mother are together, they agree on everything. They offer each other innumerable embraces. “Your mother left you with me when you were a week old, then she went to train to be a school teacher. Now you are a woman who wears high heels and she says you belong to her.” My foot hits the cracked cement block that is her stoep. I collapse beside her like a wave.

The door is wide open. I can see the darkness inside. Gogo has photographs all over her walls. Directly ahead there is a certificate given to my grandfather after he had spent twenty-five years at Lever Brothers, where he worked as a clerk. On it are all my grandfather's names—Enos Mtambeni Mugadzaweta. He was also given a silver watch. It represents time. Grandfather died in 1986. This was the first certificate ever to be received in my family.

I like the picture of Gogo and me in front of the Victoria Falls in 1995. We have our back to a large cataract with cascading waters. When we arrived at the Victoria Falls after a bus ride which lasted half a day, Gogo said this was not land she could inhabit. She turned away from the falling river. There was too much flowing water. Where would one build a shelter, she asked accusingly. I tried to explain that she was on “holiday.” I had tried to remove her from the sight of a bed-ridden son whom she had watched dying slowly for over a year. Her voice struggles against the sound of crushing water. There was no place to grow a crop on this river. We turned away from the falls, and, as per our family tradition, left quickly the thing which could hurt us. It is the shortest time I have ever spent at the Victoria Falls.

On the left, just near the light switch which I could not reach till I was seven, there is a happy picture of us hugging tightly. Behind us are two small wooden elephants. Gogo is laughing and spreading luck to everybody, especially Zanele. On that day, my sister Zanele got married. We were all very happy except Zanele. Her mother-in-law had spent the morning pushing an egg between her thighs to see if she had already slept with a man. Zanele emerged looking furious, her new mother triumphant. Throughout the wedding Gogo is busy trying to give Zanele luck.

My mother is hugging Zanele, calling her Furuwa and spreading rose petals in her hair. When the official pictures are being taken outside in the small garden with only a single struggling Petrea bush in it Zanele hisses to me that she will never eat an egg again in her life. Her husband Zenzo asks me what Zanele is saying and I say that she says I should move to the end of the row. So I move away even though I would have liked to remain with Zanele. Her new mother stands next to her and holds her by the elbow. Mother apologizes, saying that her garden is drought-stricken. She holds an umbrella over Zanele's head. The soil beneath us is cracking.

One girl is enough, my father said, and walked out of the door. I was the first girl and was named the most beautiful one—Ntombehhle. Then Zanele was born and my father cursed again and said two girls are enough. He left and never returned. Since our mother now had no husband it was best to spend time with Gogo, who had a grandfather. By independence my mother had enough money to buy a house in an area where black people had not been allowed to live before. Our country was renamed Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. All of us were Zimbabwe-Rhodesians. She immediately planted a petrea bush which refused to release its petals. She kept saying that the flowers on it could turn out to be purple or white. Now we are Zimbabweans. The petrea bush is still bare.

“I have come to collect you, Gogo,” I say softly over her shoulder. Gogo never wants to leave her stoep unless there is a death in the family, or a wedding. “You know that Zanele had the twins last week.” Gogo shifts her weight to one arm. “Of course I know Zanele had twins last week. Where did she get the twins? There are no twins from our side of the family,” she says thoughtfully. She is searching through the past she knows so well. “The children are beautiful, Gogo, but Zanele does not want them. She is refusing to look at them. She has not fed them since they were born and the clinic has had to ask other nursing mothers to feed them.”

Silence. I wonder if she had heard me. She rises, without hesitation or staggering. She walks firmly into the house. She has heard me. I feel two years old to see her walking solidly like that. The past thirty years of my life vanish. I wait outside where she has left me. She closes the blue door. Another door opens and closes. Another closes. Then a silence in which I can see foam mounting where land meets water. I hear a sound more quiet than waves. I know that Gogo has turned away from the thing which will hurt her, the thing which I have brought to her carried in my mouth.

Zanele has said she will not touch or see the children. Her husband says that if she continues in this manner he will take his children from her and place Zanele on 23rd Avenue. He says he will leave her “on 23rd” as though he will dump her in the middle of the road. The hospital for mental patients is on 23rd Avenue. It is as old as the country. Africans were sent there in Rhodesia for inciting revolutionary behavior.

Zanele's new mother calls her a lunatic who will murder her children like a crocodile which can even chew its young and swallow them. She likens Zanele to a confused hen which can be seen dripping with the yellow yolk from its own eggs as though it has been offered a feast. The mention of eggs makes Zanele resent the children even more. Zanele's nipples crack with wounds. The milk is trying to escape from her body.

A door opens. Gogo returns. She has tied a blue scarf over her head, the one I bought for her when I finished my journalism course in Harare and she had asked me what kind of work I was going to do. When I said I was going to write important things down she said, “The things which are not written down are also true.” Gogo walks with me through the gate, past the lemons, the dangling pawpaws, towards the place where land meets water. We walk. We walk on the crest of a wave. We see the beauty of the sea.

Gogo is going to talk to Zanele at the clinic, she says. I must take her there quickly.

While her husband Zenzo is leaning over the two cots with the two identical faces in them, Zanele bends towards me and forgets about the plate of porridge in her arms now tipping, now spilling over the metal bed-frame, now she whispers to me that she, Gogo, she our very own Gogo, drowned her day-old infant in a bucket of water. Gogo, our very own Gogo. The memory weighs like a mountain.

“You are too young to carry a mountain on your head,” Gogo says to Zanele.

 

 

 

THE SWEET KWAITO music blaring from a white CITI Golf passing along De Korte Street helped to bring me back from my reminiscence. I looked at the time. It was ten minutes to six in the evening. The gliding amber of the sun was sloping down to usher in the evening.

I searched the pockets of my jeans and took out the packet of Peter Stuyvesant that I had just bought at the supermarket and unsealed it. I lit a cigarette and inhaled the stress-relieving smoke.

When I had finished I threw the butt into the road and took out my Walkman. I pressed the play button and began to listen to Bayete. The name of the song was
Mbombela.
I lifted my bottle of beer; it was almost half-empty.

When I raised my eyes from the beer bottle, the police car had already stopped in front of me. I hadn't heard them arrive because of the fat beats coming from my Walkman. I pulled the earphones off and let them dangle around my neck.

At first I thought that they wanted some smokes, but then I realised that the police officers had caught me with an open beer. In two ticks both front car doors were flung open and I shrank like a child caught masturbating by its single mother as they moved hastily to accost me.

“Evening, sir.”

“Evening.”

“How are you, sir?”

“I'm alright.”

“Enjoying yourself, hey?”

“Yep.”

“Do you realise that what you're doing is against the law?”

“Excuse me? You mean relaxing under this tree?”

“No. I'm talking about public drinking.”

“I'm not drinking anything.”

“The evidence is in your hand.”

I looked at the bottle that I was still holding. I never expected policemen to be patrolling that quiet street. I thought that they would be attending to more serious crimes elsewhere. But there they were, spoiling the party that I was beginning to enjoy with my other self.
Why can't these people just leave a person to do his own thing?
I asked myself. I moved my eyes away from the bottle and looked at the pimple-faced Indian police officer.

“I'm just holding an open beer bottle that I was drinking when I was in the bar, sir. But I'm not drinking it now. And if that's a crime I didn't know.”

“We stopped the car because we saw you drinking, my friend. Do you think we're stupid?”

Silence fell while I looked at his tall, white, moustached colleague, who was mercilessly chewing some gum. He staggered forward and I could tell from his bulging bloodshot eyes that he was already drunk. His face was also bright red, as if he had lain in the sun for too long, and the golden hair on his skull stood up like a scrubbing-brush.

“Are you denying that we saw you drinking?” asked the red-faced officer.

“It is just a misunderstanding, sir; I wasn't drinking this beer.”

“Ohh! You think you're clever, né?” the red-faced officer asked contemptuously. He leaned forward and shook his large head slowly as if he was feeling sorry for me.

“What is your name?”

“Dingz.”

“Are you a student?”

“Yep.”

“Where?”

“Wits.”

He studied my face for a while. When he started to talk again, his words were accompanied by the heavy smell of liquor and cigarettes.

“OK. Listen, Dingz. We have been asked to patrol this area because lately there have been complaints about students who abuse alcohol. They drink and throw the empty bottles into the street and that's not good for the environment. Look there!” he said pointing at some empty Coca-Cola cans on the other side of the road. “Is that not disgusting?”

“So what does that have to do with me?”

“You say you're a student?”

I nodded.

“And you're holding a beer?”

“But I'm not one of those students you are looking for. If you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I have to go.”

I thought I had succeeded in talking myself out of trouble, but before I could even raise myself from the ground the red-faced officer asked me yet another question.

“What are you doing at Wits?” he asked, sprinkling my face with saliva.

“Law,” I lied. “Why?”

I thought that maybe then they would leave me alone, but the white officer continued looking at me; he was sizing me up. Then the Indian officer started to lecture me in a patronising tone of voice.

“I wonder if you're aware that a student was arrested last week on a charge like this one. Fortunately he was not doing law.” He paused and gave me a sympathetic look. “I understand you guys studying law are not allowed to take a legal job if you have been convicted of a criminal offence. It would be bad for you if we take you in now.”

I was realising the seriousness of my situation. I started to reflect on my future; all my efforts to get a place at varsity would prove futile if I was arrested now.
Oh shit! Me and my drinking!

The white officer was nodding along to everything his friend was saying. I remained silent, but they could see that they had managed to scare me. The white officer leaned closer to me.

“Listen! Here is a deal, pal.” He lowered his tone to a confidential whisper. “Either you come with us now to spend three months in a prison cell, or face a one thousand rand fine . . .” He paused and looked at my reaction. I kept my cool. “Or we can sort this thing out right now, out of court, by reaching a gentlemen's agreement.” A pause again. “Which means you can stop our mouths with only seventy rand, my friend.”

The Indian officer was nodding to support what his colleague was saying as I debated with my other self about the best step to take. I had never been in jail before. I had only heard scanty rumours about the Big Fives, the Twenty-Sixes, Apollos and other prison gangs that sodomise and kill other inmates. But at that moment I was more worried about my family at home.
What will they say if they learn that I was arrested for public drinking?