I slept next to Mobhi, who slept next to Joyi, and I often woke up with the smell of her urine on my nightdress. My mother, enraged, would beat us, and command me to wake her in the night. But the toilet was outside and the night held terrors for me.
In the night, our main door squeaked, dogs barked, insects flew and the witches who ate children mounted an invisible presence and saw through the eyes of the barking dogs. In the night walked Peggy, with her big bottom and big Afro. Then there was the small matter of the haunted house six houses down from MaiNever’s.
It was an empty house, with all the windows smashed in. It drew the gaze of everyone in the township. At least during the day it held its fascination. In the night, it was a place of terror. People had lived there once. But every time new lodgers moved into that house, they woke in the night to find themselves, and all that they owned, out in the street.
People said that there was an angry ngozi spirit in that house. Ngozi, if you did not already know, is the spirit of vengeance that follows a violent death. All the people on our side of Crowborough believed that someone had been killed there, and that, until that spirit was appeased, all those who lived in the house would live with the horror of that terrible slaying and wake to find themselves outside the house.
The haunted house was on the Dindingwe end of Mharapara, nowhere near where we lived, but it was close enough that I preferred not to go out at night. A million times better to hang up our urine-soaked blankets, a million times better to wash daily the old nightdress in which I slept. And when Mobhi drowned, her feet sticking up from out of the zinc bucket in our bathroom, I remember the relief of dry blankets.
In the township, we lived in forced intimacy. We knew which neighbours borrowed which things: shoes for a school trip, sugar, mealie meal, salt, eggs.
We revered Teacher Maenzanise, who had something that few others had — a car. When Constance fell from the avocado tree at Princess’s house, her mother MaiNever carried her broken body all the way down Mharapara, across Shuramurove and into Mhembwe Street, where Teacher Maenzanise lived. All that MaiNever needed to say was ‘Connie wabvirodonha’, and Teacher Maenzanise put down his Parade and his cigarette and drove them to Gomo Hospital.
There was no thought of an ambulance. For one thing, there was no phone to call it with. Teacher Maenzanise provided an unofficial ambulance service for everyone on our side of Crowborough Way. MaiPrincess’s daughter Promise had been born in that car, Ba’Nhau’s old Sekuru had died in it, and both had been on the way to the hospital.
In the year before I was sold, Teacher Maenzanise’s reputation was in danger of being dented because an angry woman came to school and took off her clothes in front of him. Drawn by the commotion, a crowd of children and teachers came to his classroom and heard her threaten to take off her clothes. This was meant to show that she had lost all her dignity; it was to show that the world might as well see her naked because of what he had done to her. ‘Ndokubvisira hembe, I will strip off my dress right here,’ she shouted.
I did not see this myself, but my sister Joyi did because she was in Teacher Maenzanise’s class. She and her classmates had seen the woman, but could not describe what she looked like naked because Teacher Maenzanise had taken his jacket and covered her up and fought her out of the door. She had held on to the doorjamb and Teacher Maenzanise had had to force her out. The last thing that Joyi and the class had seen were her naked legs kicking her light-blue plastic Sandak shoes to the ground.
The township gossips said it must have been her fault if she was pregnant, didn’t she know he was married, she was a slut who deserved everything she got.
‘Who would say no to being married to a teacher?’ said MaiWhizi.
‘Especially a teacher with a car,’ MaiNever said.
‘Imagine marrying a woman like that, ukaroora zvakadaro unenge wazviparira ngozi,’ was MaiWhizi’s conclusion.
MaiWhizi would come over and comment on the hairstyle my mother was working on. She was also obsessed with other women’s complexions.
‘Ende vasikana Rispah mazotsvuka,’ she would say. ‘Murikuzoreiko mazuvano, what lightening cream are you using?’ Like the bi-coloured rock python in the Just So Stories, her face was two different colours. The cheeks were black — from using Ambi lightening cream, everyone said — and the rest of her face was the colour that she should have been, the colour she kept changing.
But this was all in my mind. I longed to play on Mharapara with the others but I could not join in. I could not join in because, if I went out and stayed in the sun for any length of time, my skin cracked and blistered. I spent my days indoors with the sound of the township coming through my mother’s shining windows, or I sat and observed them from our Sunbeam-red veranda. And when I did venture out, it was to be greeted as murungudunhu, so that I thought that must be part of my name.
7
The nights that I spent at Highlands police station and those early nights at Chikurubi in the cell that I shared with Mavis Munongwa brought back the old dreams that had shuddered me awake, the dreams that had not disturbed my sleep since my first two years with Lloyd.
In my dreams, I see a njuzu that is shaped like the Chimera. It moves beneath a dress of poppies that are brighter than the blood gushing from its mouth. It speaks in a voice thick with blood and water. ‘You are dirty, you are unclean,’ it says.
It pulls me down, down into its throat. I jolt myself awake just at the point that its throat closes over me and my face is submerged and my lungs fill with water. Sometimes the njuzu’s voice sounds like my mother’s, other times like Lloyd’s. In the water with me is Lloyd’s swollen face, his eyes open, his neck constricted by the creature’s tail. As it pulls me into itself, I hear the clanging crashing of a thousand keys. A scream that begins as mine merges into Lloyd’s sister Alexandra’s before becoming the shriek of the Chimera.
I don’t know if you can smell in your dreams, Melinda, but in mine the creature comes wrapped in the suffocating smell of camphor, as though it has washed in it, as though its very marrow is made of it. And as it was then, I can never go back to sleep after my sudden waking. I lie listening to the sleep sounds of the prison, the stertorous breathing of Mavis Munongwa in the next cell, the high whine of a million mosquitoes, the creaks and sudden sounds of the prison talking to itself. I listen to the beating of my heart, until four thirty in the morning comes and with it the strident siren that heralds a new day.
*
Vernah told me before our second meeting that you are learning Shona. I didn’t know that you are planning to stay as long as that. Whatever you do, you should not allow yourself to be discouraged by the many people — white people, I mean — who you are certain to meet who will tell you how difficult the local languages are, how they twist the tongue and confuse the mind.
Lloyd and his friend Liz Warrender, who I will tell you about, were both fluent speakers. Liz had picked up hers at the farm in Melsetter where she grew up, while Lloyd’s was the result of years of assiduous and conscientious study. It was partly this facility and ease with the local language that got them labelled eccentrics. Lloyd could not only speak Shona fluently, which helped me in that difficult first year with him, but he could also write it better than most Shona speakers that I know.