‘She will never keep the Commissioner at this rate,’ said Benhilda as she waved a pair of underpants over her head. ‘She must know, surely, that the only way to keep a man is to make sure that you wash these yourself.’
Unlike the others, Patience prefers to speak to us in English. She is in training to be a court interpreter. ‘Irregardless of the absence of water,’ she says, ‘you should make sure the hoarse pipes are connected.’
‘You must make sure that your plates and bowels are clean.’
‘You have the wrongful number!’ she screamed into her phone the other day. ‘I said this is the wrongful number!’
‘Can you believe it,’ she confided to Loveness, ‘there are women, married women, whole married women, five, six children later, who have not had a single organism?’
‘You don’t say,’ said Loveness.
‘Not even one organism, just imagine,’ she said, and in the next breath she shouted at me for listening and told me to get on with my work. This is what surprises me most about Chikurubi, that we can laugh as much as we do. But there is a hysterical edge to my laughter, because every time I laugh I know that I am laughing into the darkness.
5
I did not see my family again after my parents sold me. I remember once sitting at my stool before the long wooden desk in the science lab at the Convent, melting potassium permanganate crystals in a test tube over a Bunsen burner, when the thought suddenly occurred to me that I could no longer picture Mobhi’s face in my mind’s eye. I closed my eyes to see her, and concentrated so tightly that I did not hear Sister Mary Gabriel shouting that my crystals were burning.
There are some things about her that I still remember. Her fat legs, her pudgy arms thrusting out to be picked up, her laugh against the sky. But over the years, her face has become a blur, like a jelly that has been out of the fridge for so long that it has lost its shape, and I cannot see her face. I remember her feet the most because they stuck out of the bucket in which she drowned.
I have no pictures that could have helped me remember. I took none with me. My mother’s photo album remained with all the other things that I left behind in Mufakose. And even then, even if I had wanted to take some, there were not many pictures in that album.
These things that I am telling you about, at least in these early years, all happened in the middle of the 1980s, before the digital revolution, long before the days where every person in the world had a camera. For people like us who lived in the townships, to be photographed was a commitment that required money and serious effort.
On the rare occasions that we were photographed, we dressed in our best clothes, in our Christmas clothes that doubled as our birthday clothes, my sisters and I in the same lacy dress but in different colours. My brother, Gift, in the few pictures that remained of him after he died, wore a suit and a velvet bow tie.
Getting our picture taken meant taking the bus to Highfield Township, where there was a photography studio. Joyi and I tried to walk without shuffling our feet; we were afraid to disturb the dust of the township street, which had a stubborn propensity to stick to freshly washed and Vaselined legs. Mobhi was up on my father’s shoulders.
Past Gwanzura Stadium we walked, past the Mushandirapamwe Hotel, past the Huyaimuone Superette and Butchery, past the Chirwirangwe Cash and Carry and the chemist’s, until we reached the studio.
The photographer was called Bester Kanyama. This was serious business: he did not like it when we smiled. He posed us with incongruous objects around or before us, an open umbrella in front of a velvet curtain in one case, or next to a radiogram or wireless set in another, or else holding a vase of artificial flowers fashioned from discarded thin wire and coloured women’s stockings.
When he photographed Joyi, Mobhi and me separately from our parents, he sat us next to a large doll with a porcelain face that had staring eyes and a blank smile. Our pictures thus had a frozen quality; our eyes were brighter than new dollar coins, as though a light had been shone directly into them.
I always looked pale, paler than everyone else, like a ghost against the others, as though I were a live and large version of the porcelain doll on my knee; the same doll that frightened me in my first week at Summer Madness, or a doll very like it.
The only time I can remember that we did not prepare to get photographs taken was a few weeks before Mobhi died. My mother was happy, which made us all nervous. This was around the time she had joined Reverend Bergen’s church and he had singled her out and made his great prophecy about her fate.
A photographer who walked from door to door taking pictures passed our house. He was not Bester Kanyama, but someone else, a man who lived in Kambuzuma Section 2 and whose studio was the street.
My mother called him into the yard. ‘How much for a picture?’ she asked.
The man replied, ‘One dollar for one card, and three dollars for four cards, but if you want more we can negotiate.’
After a long negotiation, my mother led him to the side of the house, from where my father worked. Joyi, Mobhi and I followed. As ‘Mirandu’ played on the radio, the photographer took our picture. He wore a small fedora hat with a red feather in it. When he creased his brow, the hat moved, and with it the feather. We laughed out loud, all of us, my father, my mother, my sisters and me; we burst into hard, sudden laughter. In that moment he took the picture.
We did not see the developed photograph until after Mobhi died.
The photographer had said that my mother should come and pick the photographs up from his house in Section 2 after two weeks, which was how long it would take him to move around the township to finish his roll of film and persuade people to have their pictures taken. In the tumult and turmoil that followed Mobhi’s death, the pictures that my mother had ordered lay unremembered with all the other photographs the photographer had taken.
After my mother failed to collect them from his house, as he had asked her to do, the photographer returned to our house. When he heard of Mobhi’s death, he took off his hat and tried to give the photograph to my mother. He did not ask for money. She did not take it; she was then in a catatonic state. He left it on the starched-lace doily on top of the display cabinet. In a brief moment in which she came to herself, she tore it up and scattered the pieces on the floor.
If I try hard enough, I see that image still. My father sits on a half-finished wardrobe with Mobhi in his arms, her face cracked in two by her smile. His head is thrown back. Joyi and I are grinning, arm in arm. My mother’s face is radiant with laughter. I am next to my mother, trying to ignore the unfamiliar lightness of her arm around my shoulders.
After everyone had gone to sleep that night, I looked for the pieces of the photograph and tried to stick everyone together with my saliva. It did not work. I contemplated stealing sticking tape from the desk of Mistress Nyathi, my class teacher. Until I could steal the tape, I kept the pieces in the stapled middle pages of the novel Muchadura, which I had just won for coming first out of all the four classes of grade threes.
I thought the picture would be safe in there. Not only was it a novel about a terrifying avenging spirit, but it also had a cover featuring a creepy unsmiling child, the torso of a ghostly woman and a disembodied eye. My father had made me cover it in brown paper. Our neighbour had the same book, and Mobhi used to burst into tears when she saw it and Joyi would not look directly at it. For all her fear of the book, Joyi took Muchadura with her to school one day without telling me and did not return it. Even when I beat her up until she had a nosebleed, she would not tell me what she had done with the book.