Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Fortune knows now he is making fun of her, and he hears her laugh and admonish him all at once. ‘ Aya, Baba! ’ she says, slapping him extra hard with the cloth again and rubbing it vigorously up and down his legs. When he has stopped laughing, he says to her, more quietly, ‘ Ndiripo kana, wakadiniwo?’, ‘I am fine, how are you?’ A splash of hand in water, a cold explosion on his shoulder, her fingers, massaging his skin, and her voice, matter of fact, full of song, ‘ Ndiripo kana, Baba ’

♦

Fortune has lived at Maronda Mashanu ever since Arthur pulled her from her grave thirty years ago. Her parents had asked him to perform the last rites for a pair of premature twins who had not survived their early birth. When he arrived at the kraal a few miles outside Enkel-doorn she was already lying next to her twin sister, both of them wrapped in the one blanket, in the one grave. The family was poor, so there would be no coffin. And there were no other mourners either. Twins are not seen as good fortune among the Mashona, whether they are Christian or not.

The babies’ father was throwing the first handfuls of soil over his dead daughters when Arthur saw Fortune move. No more than a tremor in her fingers, but enough for him to reach into the grave and lift her out. He brought her to his ear and listened at her tiny chest. A heartbeat as fragile and faint as a butterfly’s wings fluttered irregularly under her skin. He didn’t wait any longer, and carrying her as she was, wrapped in his vestments, he ran back to Enkeldoorn and the hospital.

When she was ready to leave the hospital Fortune’s parents did not want her back. They said a child brought back from death is not a good omen. She had been to the spirit world of her ancestors, and some of those spirits may still be with her, from when the white mufundsi pulled her from her grave. So Fortune came to live at Maronda Mashanu, where Arthur put her into the care of another family who lived on the mission. He christened her Cecilia in the river that flowed below the church but she rarely answered to that name and everyone called her Fortune instead: because she had been so lucky to be born twice, once from her mother, and once from the earth.

Now, thirty years after Arthur wiped the dust from her face and the dirt from her ears and ran with her at his breast to the hospital, their roles are reversed, and Fortune carries him instead. Not miles to a hospital but a few feet from his stool to his bed in the cool of his ron-davel. She lays him on the mattress and pulls a blanket up to his chin, stroking it smooth across his body. As her hand passes over his chest she feels his heart there, its beat as soft and irregular as a butterfly, flitting about the cage of his ribs, brushing its wings against the paper of his skin.

♦

He is sure it is Thursday, but he wants to check, so he asks Fortune, ‘ Nhasi Chingani?

He feels her hands on him again, soothing and fresh over his body, and her voice, with a laugh in it. ‘ Nhasi China , ’ she says, ‘It is Thursday today’, then she adds, in English, ‘VaBrettell, he comes today.’

Arthur lies on his back and listens to her pick up the calabash bowl from outside and walk away, singing quietly to herself. Fortune was always singing. When Arthur once asked her why she sang she had explained to him that she was singing with her sister, who went everywhere with her. They liked to sing together because their voices were the same and the songs sounded like they were sung with one voice twice; like when the Mbira player plucks two frets with his thumb at the same time and they make one note.

A light suddenly turns on in the darkness of his right eye. The sun has edged higher in the sky and slipped its beams inside the frame of his door. He lies there, enjoying the heat on his face and he drifts again, into his memories and his dreams.

All morning the fifty years of his life in Africa have come flooding back to him: forgotten faces and names, moments in time as clear as photographs in his mind, all carried on a tide of recollection. Loosened by his sickness, his mind has unlocked the floodgates of his past, left itself vulnerable to memory, filling with the years he has lived, the people he has met and the things he has seen. Through all his memories, though, one act and the shadow it throws wells up like a dark lava threatening to break the surface of his consciousness. But he will not mine it, and so he tries to bury it instead with other memories, other events, although he knows in his heart it will not go away. Because it is the one act of his life that both made and broke him, that has both denied and given him liberty, and as he rises and falls through his half-dreaming state he knows that the memory of it is circling above him: a vulture, waiting until he is weak enough for it to land and begin its undoing of him.

♦

The sound of a bicycle’s wheels whirring with grass in the spokes brings him back to the day around him. He must have drifted again, his consciousness, loose from its moorings. Time has become fluid. Was it the afternoon already? Had Brettell arrived?

‘ Mangwanani Baba .’

But the voice is not Brettells. Arthur smiles. ‘ Mangwanani Leonard, titambire .’ The words crack in his throat.

‘I have brought you some letters, Baba,’ Leonard says, preferring to practise his English rather than speak in Shona.

‘Thank you,’ Arthur replies. ‘I wasn’t expecting letters for another week at least.’

‘The post is very quick now Baba,’ Leonard explains. ‘One of these letters came on an aeroplane.’

‘Really?’ Arthur thinks of the planes he had sometimes seen or heard above the veld, catching the sun with their silver bodies, like lonely angels in the empty blue sky. ‘Will you read them to me, Leonard?’

He hears the scraping of a stool across the bare floor and the faint tearing of paper as Leonard opens the first letter.

Leonard Mamvura is the teacher at Arthur’s school in Maronda Mashanu, and has been there ever since Arthur extradited him from a police training camp in Salisbury fifteen years ago. Leonard’s mother had come to Arthur complaining that her son had been forced to join the police, that he did drill all day in a hot parade ground surrounded by wire when all he wanted was to train to be a teacher. Arthur wrote a letter to the police chief in Salisbury, requesting Leonard for the post of teacher in his school. He got no reply, so he sent another letter, and then one each day for a month until eventually he got a response, not in the form of a letter or a telegram, but in the form of Leonard himself who arrived at the door of his rondavel with a suitcase in one hand and a bundle of his letters in the other.

‘The chief said to bring these back to you, and to take myself while I am about it,’ Leonard had explained.

Over the last ten years Leonard has added the job of secretary to his post as teacher in the school, writing the letters that Arthur dictates and reading the replies that still come in from societies, family, friends and publishers. Arthur insists on signing his letters himself and he makes Leonard read them back to him several times before he lets him seal them in an envelope and address them. When the letters are to Arthur’s family though, Leonard secretly writes his own postscript, telling them how Arthur really is and sometimes asking for money to feed him. The letters are fewer now than they used to be, so many of his friends have passed away, but Leonard is still the bringer of news for Arthur, releasing him from his confinement with each letter he reads just as Arthur released him from the police camp with each letter he wrote.

He lies back on his mattress and listens to Leonard’s clear voice. His well-defined words placed one after the other, carefully, building the sentences like a bricklayer laying his bricks tenderly in the wet cement to build himself a wall.