The Death of Rex Nhongo (5 page)

A
pril hurried out of the embassy into the car park. She was running late. She'd forgotten that Jerry had taken their car to the clinic again, so she hadn't thought to book a driver, and she cursed her husband under her breath (since she wasn't in front of the mirror). She sympathized with Jerry's need to work, of course she did, and she was privately impressed with the get-up-and-go that had made him take on something so challenging for no recompense. Nonetheless, the fact was that she was the one with the salary and, therefore, surely the needs of her job had to come first. Had Jerry even considered the amount of petrol required to drive their three-liter Land Cruiser to Epworth every day? Did he see that his desire to work was actually costing them money?

April approached Benedict, the senior driver, in the prefab booth in the car park and requested an embassy vehicle. He asked her if she'd booked one, and when she said she hadn't, he made a great show of looking at his clipboard before telling her, “I have nobody.”

“What about you?”

“Then who will tell the people needing a driver that there is nobody available?”

“I'm sure they'll figure it out.” April was struggling to control her irritation. “Look, I'm running late. Just take me to Avondale and drop me there. You can come straight back and when I'm done I'll get a taxi, OK?”

Benedict looked at her, unimpressed. She might as well have asked him to saddle up and carry her on his own back. “Next time, you remember to book,” he said, but he reached down a set of keys from the wall.

April had arranged to meet Peter Nyengedza at Sopranos, a café near Avondale shops. Nyengedza was the local lawyer representing Henrietta Gumbo, the cleaner who'd been fired by April's predecessor, Jeff Shaw. In her experience, it was best to schedule meetings with those outside governmental and NGO sectors off-site. The British Embassy was a grandiose structure in Mount Pleasant—a high-tech monolith of electric gates, sliding doors, epic solar panels, back-up generators, bullet-proof glass and secret bunkers. Its whole construction spoke of keeping some people out and other people in (with never the twain to meet); con­sequently, those with little experience of extravagant bureaucratic folly tended to find it a threatening place to visit.

April spotted Nyengedza at once, sitting at an end table on the veranda. He was in his sixties, wearing a navy three-piece suit with a handkerchief poking from the breast pocket. On the table in front of him was a battered briefcase and a full glass of water. He was sitting bolt upright, as if to attention, waiting.

April found something unnerving about the way this generation of Zimbabweans could wait. Younger locals or any expat of any age would have been talking on their mobile or tapping at its keypad; they'd have had their laptop out, or some papers or a newspaper or, at the very least, they'd have ordered a coffee and be sitting back repeatedly checking a watch—their whole demeanor signifying pressing time, distracted attention, extreme busyness. But the older generation just seemed able to wait with a kind of impassive, centered stillness that suggested authority over time or resignation to its vagaries, unless those two were the same thing.

As April approached, she regretted her choice of venue. If Nyengedza might have been put on the defensive by the embassy, Sopranos was, in its own way, just as bad, with its three-buck lattes and obese mothers indulging obese children in bucket-deep milkshakes. As she approached the lawyer, though, and he looked up at her a little rheumily before standing, taking her hand and pulling out a chair for her, she relaxed: Nyengedza looked less defensive than somewhat cowed by the surroundings and that suited her just fine.

April ordered an Americano and asked the lawyer if he wanted anything else. He declined and sipped his water.

He asked her how long she had been in Zimbabwe. He asked her whether she was enjoying the country. She expressed the usual vague but warm platitudes she'd perfected over the last three months. Her coffee arrived. He thanked her for agreeing to meet him, opened his briefcase and produced a sheaf of papers. “My client, Mrs. Henrietta Gumbo,” he said. “Have you had a chance to review her situation?”

She sighed. Then she smiled at him and leaned forward conspiratorially. She said she'd had a long conversation with her predecessor, Jeff, and, though she hadn't been at the embassy herself at the time, she was confident that all correct procedures had been followed. She said that, while Mrs. Gumbo's retrenchment was regrettable, the embassy had paid her the full three-month notice period specified in her contract, which had in any case been due to expire. She said that if Mr. Nyengedza had any further questions he was absolutely welcome to contact the embassy's legal team. She produced Tom Givens's business card from her purse and handed it over the table.

Nyengedza examined it. His brow furrowed. He looked puzzled. He asked her why she'd agreed to meet him if she was just going to pass him over to a lawyer—couldn't she have told him on the phone? She sighed again. She smiled again. She said that, if he recalled, she had in fact tried to tell him this on the phone and it was he who had insisted on the meeting. “This is really just a courtesy, Mr. Nyengedza,” she said.

He shook his head, seemingly more puzzled than ever. He began to say something but stumbled over his words. He sipped his water. She held her smile in place. She noticed a fleck of spittle in his graying beard, the frayed cuffs of his white shirt protruding from his suit jacket. She started to feel sorry for him. Nyengedza was, she decided, both past his prime and out of his depth.

The lawyer gathered his thoughts. He asked why Mrs. Gumbo had been retrenched. April told him that the embassy's need for cleaning staff shifted on a monthly, even weekly, basis, which was why employees were only ever given short-term contracts. She said that Mrs. Gumbo's services had no longer been required. He nodded. He said, “I see.”

Then he said that Mrs. Gumbo had told him that some station­ery had gone missing the day before her dismissal. He said this with a peculiarly hyperbolic intonation, as if he were transmitting quite the most shocking news in the world. April had no idea what this signified, so she didn't respond.

He looked in his file. He said, “A Mr. Shaw…”

“Jeff.” April nodded. “My predecessor.”

“A Mr. Shaw called together all the staff on the floor and said that two staplers had gone missing and that this petty theft had to stop.” Nyengedza paused, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He excused himself. He said that Mrs. Gumbo believed she had been retrenched for the theft of these staplers, although no official accusation had been made. Needless to say, Nyengedza added, the lady denied having taken the staplers. He looked at April through watery eyes. He said, “Did Mr. Shaw tell you about these missing staplers?”

“He didn't mention them,” April said, which was more or less true. Jeff hadn't made specific reference to the staplers, but, towards the end of their conversation, he had declaimed in frustration, “Fuck, April. Why all the questions? The woman was just another fucking thief.”

April drained her coffee. She put down the cup with a de­cisive clink. This conversation was going nowhere. “Look,” she said firmly. “Mr. Nyengedza. I agreed to meet you because you insisted upon it and, as I said, as a courtesy. But I'm not sure what you're expecting me to do. If Mrs. Gumbo were fired for stealing, there would have been an investigation. But that is not why she was released from her employment so there was no investigation. She was paid to the limit of her contract, so effectively her contract was simply not renewed. Do you think we have behaved illegally? If that is your determination, then you must do as you see fit. Otherwise, as I say, I really can't see what you're expecting me to do.”

Nyengedza stared at her. He appeared more than a little taken aback. April was pleased with herself. She could play tough when the situation required. Now he looked down and put his hands flat on the table to either side of his glass of water. It was a curious action, almost one of self-control, as though he were angry and only able to restrain his temper with an act of will. Either that or he believed the table might be about to take off. But Nyengedza didn't otherwise appear angry—in fact, every muscle in his face appeared entirely relaxed—and the table certainly showed no sign of levitation.

He started speaking and it took April a moment to follow. She wasn't sure if this was because he'd dropped his volume or his accent had somehow thickened. He was saying that it wasn't a legal matter—no, no, no—it was a question of human decency. He said that Mrs. Gumbo had worked at the embassy for eight years, was April aware of that? He said that she was a widow with two teenage children and school fees to pay. He said he knew Mrs. Gumbo was not a thief. He said, “I am appealing to you, Mrs. Jones, as a human being.” And then again, “As a human being.”

Later, April reflected that she was entirely right to promise Nyengedza that she would do what she could. She did not know how he was connected to Mrs. Gumbo, but she suspected they must have been related and he'd come to see her less as lawyer than concerned uncle or, perhaps, elder brother. He had appealed to her as a human being and she humbly hoped she'd responded as such. She considered how difficult it was to do the right thing in a situation like this, a place like this. She expressed as much to Jerry: “I just have too much power,” she said. “I mean, for that woman, it's not just a job, is it? In a situation like this, in a place like this, it's someone's whole life. The line between relative secur­ity and disaster is such a fine one.”

Jerry nodded in agreement, but April was somewhat put out that he didn't seem as stirred by the perspicacity of her observation as she was herself, so she asked him if he thought she'd done the right thing, just to check they were indeed on the same page. Jerry shrugged, sure. After all, he said, she'd only promised to do what she could, and if that turned out to be nothing, so be it.

April said, “Jesus, Jerry! I wasn't bullshitting him. I'll do what I can.”

“That's what I said.”

She shook her head. She was sure her husband didn't understand. “You don't understand,” she said. “He was this old guy. I swear he didn't have a clue how it works. I'm just trying to do the right thing.”

“The right thing for who?”

“For him. For her. For me. The right thing is just the right thing.”

“Right,” Jerry said. “Great.”

P
atson was late getting home, as was usual for the weekend. Fadzai woke automatically at the sound of the door and checked the time on her phone. It was after one. Still fully dressed, she dragged herself off the bed to prepare her husband's plate. As she laid it in front of him, she sniffed around him, like a dog. This was what she'd been reduced to. She smelt nothing but cigarettes and the particular cloying body odor of a man who'd sat in a car for fifteen hours straight.

She sat opposite him while he ate. They hardly spoke: partly because Chabarwa and Gilbert were sleeping top to toe in the corner, but mostly because, these days, they hardly spoke.

Patson said, “No meat?” She shook her head.

She watched him in the flickering candlelight, the peculiar, precise way he handled his
sadza,
rolling it carefully in his fingers until it made an almost perfect sphere, then scooping it through the gravy into his mouth with a deliberate, but somehow ex­travagant, relish. He had always eaten like this—slowly. When they had first met, she'd considered it a marker of gravitas; that he was a man to be taken seriously. Later, it had begun to irritate her and she'd decided instead that it described a basic, plodding aspect to her husband's character. Perhaps this was the nature of a bad marriage, she thought. In a good marriage you would learn to appreciate qualities you once loathed, in a bad one vice versa. But tonight, for the first time in a long time and for no reason she could identify, she found something reassuring in the way her husband ate.

When they had first met, Patson had been considered quite the catch and she was surprised when he'd shown interest in her. After all, as a teenager she'd had none of the skills of attraction that other girls seemed to develop naturally, while Patson had that corresponding nonchalance about him that seemed to take female attention for granted. He wasn't exactly good-looking, not tall, and darker than was generally considered handsome, but he moved with the well-ordered balance of someone who's properly assembled, he had that thoughtful smile, and his blue-black complexion was a glorious consistent monotone that could swallow sunlight.

Now she thought how shrunken he looked, his shoulders hunched, his head thrust forward, like a single knuckle. His skin hadn't changed, but it was as if there was now too much of it, creating not wrinkles but one great fold across the middle of his forehead, another on each cheek. She wondered what had made him like this. Was it just time, age, life? She considered what responsibility she might bear for the depth of those folds, the hunch of those shoulders.

She knew that Patson had been unfaithful to her throughout the first fifteen years of their marriage, but she had chosen to look the other way and had consequently never known the full extent of his betrayal. Something had snapped after Chabarwa's birth, however, and she had confronted him in a blistering attack from which neither of them had ever quite recovered. He had said that he would stop. She had said that she would take him at his word. But the decade or more since had seen her driven almost mad with suspicion and, therefore, bitterness, and her husband engaged in an inexorable process of retreat. She had hoped for more honest communication, but had been left with little communication at all.

Of course she could remember the pain she'd felt as she let his lies go unquestioned, the fear that other women in the neighborhood were talking behind her back; and she didn't regret taking a stand. But she was also forced to admit that it had brought no resolution and no happiness.

As she watched him now, she finally believed that there weren't other women any more, not because he'd promised as much but because he no longer had it in him. It was what she'd wanted and she'd made it happen. So why did she feel almost guilty?

She remembered a weekend when Anashe was three or four and they had driven down to see her family in Mubayira. They were outside at sunset while Anashe played with the local children, and Patson had stood behind her and briefly lowered his lips to her neck in that embarrassing way of his. She had shaken him off and, in a moment of confidence, asked if he could spend more time at home.

He had looked at her without recrimination (because this was long before the recriminations began) and he said, “You know I have to work, Fadzai. I am a man. But when I am home, I am
home
.”

At the time, she'd been disappointed and she hadn't known what he meant. But now she knew because now, even when he was in the house, he was always somewhere else, his eyes fixed blankly in front of him, his mind out on the Harare streets or, perhaps, locked in some internal maze of fundamental dissatisfaction. Sometimes she nagged at him just to get his attention, but when he gave her his standard riposte—“Why are you always talking?”—she could hardly say that she was just checking to see if he was still there, that some hollow apparition hadn't taken his seat or made itself comfortable in their bed.

Patson finished eating. He asked for tea, but they didn't have any. She said perhaps it was no bad thing since it was so late and tea always kept him awake. He asked for water. She fetched him a cup.

She said, “How was your day?”

For the first time he looked directly at her—what do you mean?

What
did
she mean? She meant nothing, but such was the state of their relationship that even the white noise of small-talk seemed to congest, choke and backfire. “How much did you make?” she said, by way of illumination, because, though money was a dangerous topic, it was something about which they had no choice but to talk.

“Eighty,” Patson said.

“That's good.”

“Two hundred for the week. I see Gapu in the morning. It's all his.”

Patson paid two hundred dollars a week rental to Dr. Gapu, the car's owner. He was at least a month behind. He began to excavate his back teeth with his thumbnail.

“So tomorrow is yours,” Fadzai said gently.

“A Sunday.” He sniffed. Then, “I'll be out early and back late.”

He looked at her again. He stretched his mouth and, for a split second, she thought he was smiling, but he was just trying to dislodge whatever was wedged in his molars. “Toothpick?” he said.