The Death of Rex Nhongo (27 page)

L
ondon never looks its best on a chilly rush-hour evening at the back end of winter. In theory, Jerry's heading against the tide, from the clinic in Tooting to the small Lambeth flat, but the Northern Line's packed full of people with creeping colds, pinched expressions and haunted eyes. He tries to lose himself in the music on his iPhone, a song of lost love on a lake in Louisiana, but to no avail. He thinks it might have been easier to reintegrate if he'd come back in, say, July or August. He could have sat outside a pub until ten o'clock and enjoyed the novelty of twilight and the strange, anarchic ambience of a British summer, if not a drink. He glances round the carriage. He considers, wryly, that if this scene were played out in the developing world, someone could easily spin it into a story of desperate and dehumanizing circumstance—
They don't speak. They can barely look at one another. It's just too awful.

The Tube spits Jerry out at Kennington. He shivers as he walks home. He needs a winter coat. He stops at a corner shop and buys a South African chenin blanc for £5.99. He's counting the pennies.

At least the flat is warm, albeit with a constant smell of damp towels. Jerry reminds himself that it isn't actually a “flat” but, in estate-agent parlance, a “maisonette”—the first two floors of a dilapidated Georgian house, two bedrooms and a bathroom over an open-plan kitchen and living area that looks out on a small patio garden. Rent is the best part of two thousand pounds per month. Imagine where he'd have been living had he and April actually split up.

He calls out to her from the front door, “Days!” She has recently told him that this was her nickname as a kid—Days or Daisy. “It's what my dad called me,” she said. “But I kind of miss it.” Jerry is doing his best to try it out, but it doesn't sit naturally and he doesn't think it suits her—or, rather, it doesn't seem to describe the person he knows.

He finds his wife standing over the stove, stirring a small saucepan. She's listening to one of his current favorite albums on the small dock on the windowsill. He knows she doesn't like the music—in fact, she doesn't much like music. But she's trying.

He kisses her on the cheek. He gestures to the saucepan. He says, “What is it?”

“Jus.”

“What are you making?”

“Sausages, mash and tenderstem broccoli.” She studies his face. She says, “What?” Then, “I know it's lame, but I didn't have time.”

“It's fine,” he says. He laughs. “We're the returning Brits. We want some good British food. Make it a feature not a flaw.”

“Did you buy wine?”

He shows her the bottle. Her expression asks, Is that it? He says, “They'll bring something. Definitely. And I'm not drinking. We're broke, remember?”

Theo is already in bed. Jerry looks at his watch. He was supposed to do bath and bedtime. April bounces off his unspoken reproach. She says, “He was exhausted. That nursery's a problem, Jerry. Some of the kids are feral. He's finding it hard.”

“He's only three.”

April misunderstands his meaning. She says, “Exactly!”

They are having a dinner party, entertaining two of her new colleagues at the Foreign Office—Tim and Sam or Ben and Tom or Dan and John or something, and their respective spouses (Isabelle, Annabelle, Arabella, fuck knows). The guests arrive as a foursome, brandishing bottles and bonhomie.

They sit down to eat and April serves the food. Jerry rubs his hands together and says, “Good British grub! That's what we've missed!”

It's not long before he's telling the story of the incident that propelled them home just six months into a three-year posting. He is doing so for the umpteenth time. He knows his story is the talk of the Foreign Office. He tells it in minute detail. He no longer knows if the minute details are true, but it doesn't matter. His audience punctuate his story with “Oh, God!” and “Christ!” and “Jesus Christ!” Blasphemy somehow seems the appropriate response in this godless world.

When he has finished, one of the women says, “So what happened next?”

Jerry says, “Nothing. I told them I was prepared to testify, but the people at the embassy said my statement would be enough. Then, of course, the police lost the gun.”

“Oh, God!”

“And they were holding Patson, the taxi driver, on remand,” Jerry says. “And then…When was it?” He looks to April. “A month ago? They were holding him in Chikurubi, a prison. I mean, that's a fucking horrible place. He was murdered by another inmate.”

“Christ!”

“I know,” Jerry says. “I've been trying to find out some details, but…” He shakes his head and drops his chin. He feels a pang of shame and the pinprick of a tear, but he blinks it away because he doesn't want to embarrass his guests. He has told himself a hundred times that it wasn't his fault, but he wouldn't have to tell himself a hundred times if he really believed it. Secretly, part of him wonders if shame is the very source of all English restraint. Because if you open the floodgates of responsibility, how will you ever host another dinner party?

“Jesus Christ!” This is Tim or Sam or Ben or whatever. He is an analyst on the Africa desk and he tells them about the inquest into the death of Rex Nhongo—you know, the army guy, the vice president's husband—which has just completed. He concludes by exclaiming, “Smoke inhalation! It's all a cover-up!” And the rest of them nod sagely because they don't really know who Rex Nhongo is or was, and Tim or Sam or Ben or whatever is an expert and he's in danger of boring them.

Jerry interrupts the heavy silence that follows to say, “I sent some money to the family. Patson's family, I mean.”

Tim or Sam or Ben nods sagely. “All you could do,” he says.

The conversation moves on. April talks about childcare in London. She talks about Theo's situation. One of the women, who has two kids, nods empathetically, but says she's lucky that her father, something big in City accounting, can afford to pay a nanny.

“A nanny? Exactly!” April exclaims, and she looks to Jerry, her newfound bulwark. “Maybe that's something we'll be able to sort out.”

Later, in bed, Jerry watches April sleep. Though he no longer drinks alcohol, she has told him he still snores, and waking her up provokes those sparks of anger that threaten their equilibrium. So he tends to sit up, killing time on the laptop, browsing his favorite websites, until she is in deep slumber.

His phone, muted, buzzes at the bedside. It's a text message from Dr. Tangwerai, now based in Brighton, suggesting they catch up. It's the third such message Jerry's received and he has yet to reply. He would like to see Tangwerai. He wants to be a welcoming host to an acquaintance a long way from home. But he can't imagine meeting in this context, or what they would catch up about. Jerry knows the doctor as a man of clear-sighted integrity who would see through his stories. Theoretically, they could talk about something else. Practically, Jerry has nothing else. He stares at the screen. He considers some kind of holding reply, but he is blunted by despair. He returns the phone to the table. It will have to wait.

Jerry rather misses sleeping separately. He finds sharing a bed with April, with no prospect of any intimacy, a consistently painful reminder of how far they have fallen. He cannot remember the last time they had sex. But it's not just sex, it's the profound if rather absurd sense of shared space where two people meld without reproach. Of course, now that he is back in the marital bed, to leave it again would be an act of grand and possibly fatal significance, on which the committee of his character can't yet sign off. Besides, in the flat, there's nowhere else for him to sleep.

Jerry and April's relationship is not reconciled. Active reconcili­ation requires an honesty of communication of which neither of them is currently capable. However, they have found some new bonds to stick them together: their practical terror of splitting up, for example, and, especially, the silent, separate acknowledgment that there are certain things about which they cannot talk.

They don't talk about their time in Zimbabwe at all, at least not in private. Instead, Zimbabwe has become a source of public anecdotes, told mostly by Jerry, warily at first, but now with increasing flourish and fiction, that position them both in some kind of semi-heroic role in personal and national tragedies that were never in their control. Of course, April has her stories too. But even those that are safe to tell—about a thieving office cleaner, say—risk running squarely into the one that isn't safe at all.

She doesn't miss Shawn. He died the same night Jerry confronted her about the affair, the night Jerry was attacked on Enterprise Road and saved by Patson's terrible quick thinking. But April didn't find out about Shawn's fatal accident until a couple of days later when she got a call from Terri Sedelski—“Jeez, April! Where've you been? I figured you must've heard already.” April's initial thought…no, her initial
feeling
…was one of relief. Her initial thought was to be appalled by her initial feeling. Then, when she heard how Shawn had died, she felt a wound of self-hatred so deep that she believes it can never heal.

She attended one of the first days of the funeral. She went to Kudakwashe's parents' house where the widow was receiving mourners. Jerry accompanied her—despite her infidelity, despite his own recent traumatic experience. She was grateful, and recognized in her husband a rare compassion she hadn't acknowledged in too long. Broken marriages, like broken clocks, are right twice a day, perhaps even more frequently. April has begun to think that the trick is to live in the moment. The difficulty is in choosing the correct moment.

After briefly expressing his condolences, Jerry was funneled outside with the other men, while April was left in the murky living room with the women wailing. She was extraordinarily uncomfortable, partly, of course, because of what she'd done, but partly, too, because the process of the funeral was just so alien. Kudakwashe was at its heart, sitting with dignified stillness, but around her dozens of women busied themselves with tears and cooking and chatting and sometimes even laughter. April hovered, awkward and English, and wondered when it might be appropriate to leave.

At one point, Rosie approached her and held her hand. She said, “You know my daddy gone, right?”

“I know.”

The little girl looked at her seriously. She said, “Iss all Sasa­bonsam an he gone too.”

April looked at the little girl who would one day have to understand exactly how her father had died and she started to cry. Rosie patted her hand and said, “Don worry.”

April found Jerry outside. She repeated what Rosie had told her. At first, Jerry didn't respond, but when they got into the car, he said, “I swear there's something funny about that poor girl. The thing at the pool, the imaginary friend, the way she told me about…” Jerry paused. He shook his head. He said, “And then climbing on the fucking roof? All that shit about evil spirits, it fucks with people's heads.”

April and Jerry didn't attend the funeral service. By then, they'd left the country. Shawn was buried in Zimbabwe.

Sitting up in bed, Jerry tires of the blog he's reading about “nu folk versus new folk.” His mind drifts to Rosie and, for no reason he can later articulate, he Googles the name of her imaginary friend, Sasabonsam. He finds himself reading about a mythical vampiric creature, half man and half bat, who is purported to live in the forests of Ghana and Togo. Jerry makes an involuntary noise, something like a laugh, and, briefly, he feels a chill in his spine. But then he says aloud, “Fuck me!” and the feeling is gone.

He considers waking April, but that wouldn't go down well. And, besides, with every passing second, his mind reorders the inexplicable into a Western equation of coincidence, autosuggestion and psychological trauma. It all makes sense, as everything makes sense if thought about in the right way. Maybe he will tell April in the morning. More likely he won't. Most likely, if this information resurfaces at all, it will be as another anecdote, spun out with practice into an eloquent and meaningful narrative, and told at future dinner parties alongside the one about Patson, the taxi driver, and, perhaps, the one told by Tom or Dan or John or whatever about the ruling-party bigwig who died on his appropriated farm. This latter story is not Jerry's own, but it can also be appropriated. It doesn't matter who owns what any more: small but elaborate lies are necessary to underpin the megalithic icebergs, which necessarily remain mostly below the surface.

Jerry closes his laptop and turns off the bedside light. He sleeps the sleep of the centrally heated. He snores, but April doesn't wake up.

F
adzai has learned a new English word from her younger brother, Gilbert, who is an educated smartarse and therefore typically the source of such titbits. The word is “stoicism,” and it is a quality that she possesses, he says. He has told her that it means “patient durability,” although it also suggests a degree of “admirable fortitude.” He uses the word gently when describing her conduct in the six months since Patson's death.

Stoicism: Fadzai is fascinated by this word. She can think of no direct equivalent in her own tongue. The closest sentiment she can come up with is expressed in
“Uyu ndiye mukadzi chaiye”
(“That one's a real woman”). The implications of this comparison seem significant to her, but she can't quite articulate why.

Fadzai knows that Shona has several expressions to describe an absence of stoicism, if someone behaves inappropriately, say, or without dignity. And this leads her to two conclusions: first, that the idea of stoicism must originate in a culture where it is not the norm and therefore worthy of comment—for Zimbab­weans, patient durability is standard; second, that Gilbert must see in her the desperate need to weep and scream and rage against the injustice of her loss, because otherwise he would not have said anything. While Fadzai has little experience of justice, she understands its meaning.

Fadzai knows that her mourning is now supposed to be quiet and interior and she has adopted the façade so successfully it has become second nature. However, as with all those shoehorned into an uncomfortable role, she pays for her admirable fortitude with a disquieting sense of alienation, both from those around her and her true self.

Fadzai is not so deluded as now to think that Patson was a perfect husband; far from it. She acknowledges that she frequently hated him, latterly for several years. But she believes that, even when she hated him, she was loving him too, in raising their children, in preparing his food, in washing his clothes, in giving herself to him even when he disgusted her. She has come to understand that, when you love someone like that, it doesn't define you; it isn't the boundaries of your person, but its very substance. And now that Patson is gone, there is nothing: nothing to do and nothing to be done. Fadzai is not absent, but absence itself.

Two weeks ago, she gave birth to a baby girl. Her father named her Chandagwinyira, but Gilbert called her Hope. She has yet to refer to the baby by name, but she thinks of her as Hope. She is sitting on a stool outside her father's house, nursing.

Of course the baby keeps her busy, but inevitably she feels like she's going through the motions. She has heard of a condition called post-natal depression where you resent your new child. Fadzai is not depressed and feels no resentment; she feels nothing for Hope at all. Her mother noticed this. She took her aside and said, “You need to concentrate on your baby. That is all you can do for now. You care for her. You love her. It's all you can do.”

The implicit judgment in this reduced Fadzai to tears, which only exacerbated her mother's evident irritation and unspoken belief that her daughter was overwhelmed by inappropriate and undignified self-pity. But Fadzai was not crying for herself. She was crying because she is doing her best. As with Patson, if she can nurture, show care and compassion in the absence of those feelings, isn't that the apotheosis of love?

It is late afternoon. She sees Gilbert and Bessie approaching with their daughter, Stella, each holding one of the little girl's hands; a bank of three silhouetted against the orange ball of the setting sun. It is a picture of such beauty that it momentarily makes Fadzai forget her troubles, even the exasperation she currently feels towards her brother.

The Englishman paid Bessie fifteen hundred dollars in severance and bonus and Gilbert spent it all on chicks, fertilizer and seed, but he bought unwisely. Gilbert is no farmer. He reads books and they make him overconfident. He took no notice of the roadrunners kept by his neighbors, or their planting patterns and crop choices. He bought Buff Brahmas and soya-bean seed. He planted little maize and almost no greens. His books told him to do otherwise and his books knew best. He said, “This is not a subsistence project, but a commercial business. This is a new beginning!” Now, his beans have failed and his chickens are plagued with coccidiosis and he cannot afford medicated feed. Such arrogance! The local farmers have read no books, but they are not foolish and they raise what thrives and plant what grows.
This is a new beginning!
Fadzai believes that Zimbabwe has become a country of many new beginnings and few happy outcomes.

The Englishman also sent a thousand dollars to Fadzai. It was brought to Sunningdale while she was packing up the house with Gilbert and the children. Gilbert was to drive them to Mubayira in the Raum before returning it to Dr. Gapu.

The money arrived with a Mr. Givens from the British Embassy. Gilbert remembered him from his first visit to the Englishman's house. Givens was the
murungu
he'd seen with a Shona girlfriend, but he had clearly never been into a Shona household before. He was uncomfortable and he couldn't leave quickly enough.

A typewritten note from the Englishman accompanied the money. It included the sentence, “I cannot help but feel partially responsible for your tragic loss.” Fadzai pored over that line. In what way was he responsible and how had he calculated the price of this responsibility?

Fadzai showed Gilbert the ten hundred-dollar bills, clean and crisp. He shook his head and made a noise of contempt, which she didn't fully understand. He said, “You must keep that to yourself. You know how it is when you have money. There is always someone in need. That money is for you.”

Indeed, she knows how it is and she was grateful for the advice. But now Gilbert has needs of his own and the previous evening, when he was bemoaning his situation to their father, she had felt the burden of his every complaint weigh upon her shoulders. He has not asked her directly. He doesn't have to.

Fadzai doesn't know what she will use the money for. There is the baby, of course, school fees for Chabarwa and Anashe, even music lessons (for hadn't Patson delighted in his son playing the cornet?)…There are countless incalculable expenses stretching over the horizon of an uncertain future, and a thousand dollars will ultimately be nothing more than a coin tossed down a well. Perhaps to allocate the money to chicken feed for a novice farmer is no less productive a way to spend it than any other. However, Fadzai remembers Patson's advice that poverty makes you panic, which causes problems of its own. She is determined not to panic.

Today, fortunately, Gilbert seems to have put his worries to one side in that unique, admirable, infuriating way of his; when Hope finishes feeding, he sweeps her up and holds her in front of his face, cooing delightedly. “Little one! Little one!” He sits on the ground with Stella and puts the baby on his daughter's knee. He looks up at Bessie and says, “It is our turn next! A son is overdue.”

Fadzai considers her brother's joyful expression and wonders yet again at his optimism, even if its ecstatic quality has gone and the restlessness returned. She turns to her sister-in-law. Bessie is watching her husband and the two small children with unconcealed pleasure. But behind it Fadzai can see the worry, and she has a sudden, disquieting terror of the future: surely, Bessie will leave her brother; surely she will leave him and nobody will blame her, because the sum of books, ideas and hope has never fed a family.

Bessie is indeed worried. However, the source of this worry is not as Fadzai assumes. Rather, Bessie has a secret that she has so far kept to herself—a letter she received from Mr. and Mrs. Jones a month ago; a letter that's been followed by two calls in the past fortnight. The English couple have offered her a job as Theo's nanny. They believe they can secure an appropriate visa and they will fly her to London. They say that they live in a small flat and she will have to share a room with the child in the first instance, but they hope to move somewhere more spacious. On the phone, Mrs. Jones explained that she won't have a work permit, but she can stay for two years. They will pay her in cash to save her owing any tax. Bessie doesn't understand the details as the woman explained them, partly because her brain stalled on the mention of the proposed salary: more than twice the two hundred dollars she earned as their maid and all her meals included. “Think about it,” Mrs. Jones said.

Bessie has thought about nothing else. She is a person without material ambition, but such characterization is meaningless in a monetized, globalized world. If she goes, she thinks, she will save enough to secure her family's future. She could support Gilbert's efforts; or buy a plot of land, build a house, make efforts of her own; or both.

Bessie believes she should accept the job. However, she believes this in much the same way Fadzai believes she should save her small nest egg. And both women, for all their apparent practicality, are ruled by their generous hearts—often stoicism's secret ingredient. Bessie will never leave Gilbert because, as much as love is action, it's also an article of faith and, even when she can't believe in him, she believes in God enough for them both.

Gilbert will use Fadzai's thousand dollars to vaccinate his chickens and buy more seed. He will promise to repay his sister five-fold for her generosity and Bessie will work tirelessly to ensure he keeps his word. Gilbert will watch his wife in the field, bent double, pulling weeds and picking stones, and he will know that he is blessed—
uyu ndiye mukadzi chaiye
. This isn't a happy ending, but it is a new beginning and the outcome is as yet uncertain.