Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Betty Finn’s house is on Bradfield Road in the north-east of the city, number 33, a modest bungalow with an open garage on the side with wisteria trailing over its roof. The bartered blue Rixi taxi drops me in front of a large black iron gate. I buzz the intercom and speak into it and soon there is the dog, as there is in every house in Harare, barking and baring its teeth at me through the bars beneath the armed response sign tied to them. The dog is joined and subdued by an older African man called Gregory who opens the gate with one hand while bending down and holding the dog by its collar with the other. The front door of the bungalow opens and Betty Finn welcomes me, apologising for the dog, the gate, the buzzer—‘But,’ she explains, ‘crime has got so bad now I have to be careful.’

I spend that afternoon with Betty, who has written academic articles about you, your poetry and your legacy. She is old now, in her seventies, but her interest in you has been a long-standing one. She shows me the unpublished manuscript of a book she wrote about your life; another person trying to pin you down with words. She says it doesn’t work, though, that you slip from under them, reclusive, ungiving, unwordable. We have tea and she tells me what she knows and thinks about you. How she thinks you were an impractical man who couldn’t even ride a bike, forced to live a practical life, your buildings and your body collapsing around the iron foundation of your faith. She says that in the last years people in Enkeldoorn said you were dirty, that you smelt, but that you always wore a clean white cravat. Above all else, she says she thinks you were lonely, unbearably lonely, despite your African friends and followers. The way she talks about your life in the bush, she makes it sound like a voluntary exile, rather than the finding of a home. I ask her about your child, if she knows the child’s name or where they lived, but she dismisses the idea, convinced that there can be no child. There was no wife, not even an African one, which, she says, was common among missionaries out in the bush. No, there was no love affair, and no daughter.

As the afternoon fades Betty’s subject of your loneliness spins on its axis until Betty is talking about her own isolation, and I wonder if there isn’t something of the mirror-man in you. That people can’t help seeing the ruling qualities of their life reflected in you. But then perhaps this is not a quality of yours exclusively, just the nature of relationships across history, between the writer and the written. The pursuer looking for something in their subject that they recognise in themselves. For Betty this seems to be loneliness, abandonment. She came to Rhodesia to be with the man she loved, Hugh Finn, a scientist and a poet, and married him here. She had always wanted to marry a poet ever since her childhood friend had announced dramatically while they were picking strawberries that she had discovered a great poet and that she would marry him. The friend was only twelve years old then, but years later she did marry the poet. His name was Tom Eliot, and hers was Valeric.

Hugh has been dead for some years now, and Betty is marooned in Zimbabwe, the country to which her love brought her and in which it has now left her, washed up on her own grief, which is deep and solid, echoing as it does the dimensions of her love. She explains to me, simply and determinedly as if explaining a complicated equation to a child, that love does not go away with death, does not diminish, and anyone who says it does has not been in love. Instead, she says, it grows daily, fed by memory and its own nourishment, increasing in depth and volume and casting an equal shadow of grief as it does so. Gregory serves us an English Sunday roast. The sun is hot through the barred window behind the table, a bird caws extravagantly from a tree in the garden and Betty cries for a while, holding her fork in one hand and her head in the other.

♦

The Blue Arrow coach is still reeling in the long road across the bush. Out of the side window I follow the fluid dip and rise of the slack telephone wires hung between their wooden poles, a long black rhythmical wave against the dull grey sky. I have been in Zimbabwe for twelve days, and I have tried to call Leonard every day, to tell him I am coming, but I have never got through. Looking at these wires now I understand why. Many of them have been brought down, cut open and stripped of their valuable copper, and this is probably why my voice never reached this far out of the city, and this is why I am having to come unannounced. In my shirt pocket I have the last letter from Leonard, dated over a month ago, and I only hope the words of welcome written there are still valid.

A rash of half-built breeze-block bungalows signifies the edge of a town. It has started raining, hard, soaking rain. I look out the front window of the coach to see Chivhu appear in its frame through the clear arc of the one long wiper sweeping waves of water off the windscreen with each swing of its arm. The coach slows, crunches down a couple of gears and pulls into a small square with buildings on three sides. The driver calls ‘Chivhu’. I am the only person to leave the coach. Outside, the rain is cutting up the dusty ground, unlocking the smell of the earth. I collect my rucksack from the hold then run to the shelter of the nearest building, a cream wooden hotel with green window frames and guttering and a swinging sign that says ‘Vic’s Tavern’. Along with a couple of men standing on the covered veranda I watch the Blue Arrow coach leave, then take my bag to a table, sit down, and order a toasted egg sandwich and a cup of tea. A waistcoated waiter brings my order out from the empty hotel and I watch the rain sheet off the sloping roof, spilling from the guttering, waterfalling to the ground, distorting the world beyond.

When the sound of the rain on the roof begins to ease I ask one of the men if he knows the way to where Reverend Mamvura lives, Farm 16 in Maronda Mashanu. He raises his eyebrows, smiles and says in a deep voice, ‘Yes, I know where Reverend Mamvura lives,’ he indicates with a flat hand. ‘Up here, then left and then right.’ He pronounces his English carefully, each syllable given its due weight in the Zimbab-wean manner. ‘It is about nine or ten kilometres,’ he adds; then, tilting his head to one side, he asks, ‘But how will you get there?’

‘I’ll walk,’ I tell him. Because that is how you would have got there from this town, on your feet, and I don’t want to follow you any other way.

The rain is light now, so I shoulder my rucksack, which feels too new in this town, and start to walk the way the man had described. I pass the post office on my left then continue up a long wide dirt street of shops, their entrances shaded by a wooden awning over an open walkway. The walkway and the shops’ faded, once colourful signs remind me of an American Western set, lending the street a pioneer feel beneath the African trappings of the town. Zvichanka Chete, Diki-ta Eating House, Fish and Chips, Chivhu Music Centre, Prop. D.J. Sit-hole, Zvoushe G. Dealer, Budget Boutique . A broken neon sign writes Enkeldoorn Garage in dull letters against the grey sky, reminding me of the town’s original name, and looking around now I find it hard to believe that it looks much different to when you were alive. Except, of course, today the people in the shops, walking on the walkway, driving in the beat-up trucks are all black and when you were here nearly everyone was white.

I turn left up a smaller street. A series of corrugated lean-tos line the left side and a squat, hexagonal rusted corrugate church stands on the right. The sun has come out now and a barber is outside his lean-to, shaving a path through the thick black hair of a customer who sits on a couple of upturned Pepsi crates. The long flex of his clippers leads back into the dark of the shed, where a small boy stares at me, his stomach distended and one finger in the corner of his mouth. I wave and he ducks back, further into the dark. The barber laughs and waves instead.