Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

Ezekiel sits in the corner away from the windows. Concentrated, he won’t show anyone what he is doing. He reveals his work eventually, shyly, a pencil drawing of the Taj Mahal. The domes and columns are delicately fragile in black and white. ‘That’s a building in India,’ he says. ‘I saw it in a book.’ The next time that Ezekiel screams ‘Abraham, Abraham’, Sister Hedwig tears the drawing and the Taj Mahal flutters in seven torn pieces to the floor. Ezekiel does nothing but sit and draw another. He gives it to Emily. If possible, it is even more beautiful than the first one. ‘It is the most beautiful thing that I have seen,’ she says, and means it. She cries, for no reason. Ezekiel puts his hand on her shoulder and smiles. Together, they look outside the window. She persuades him to sing a new song. She chooses a Sunday school song that also features Abraham.

‘ Father Abraham has many sons

Has many sons, has Father Abraham

I am one of them and so are you .

So let us praise the Lord .’

Up and down Second Street Extension goes the little green bus.

Hedwig, Emily, Estelle, Ezekiel. And Sonia, the resident white. Her hospital towel is twisted in a turban about her head. She smokes blue Madison, regally, she holds the cigarette away from her as she says to Emily, ‘You speak English well. Very well, for an African.’ She gives Emily her cigarettes. The blue Madison is not harsh on the throat like Dr Chikara’s Kingsgate. Emily smokes one, five, this is the beginning of addiction, here in the Annexe.

And there is Ma Bheki in her corner.

Emily has learned to stay away from Ma Bheki. Her madness is of a malevolent bent, an ungentle madness that requires restraints, and not just the pills, orange and white, square and round.

‘I want my meat,’ Ma Bheki screams.

She has devoured all of her babies, she says, she is particularly fond of the flesh of her boy children. A peculiar hunger comes over her when she sees a male child, she says, she feels a compulsion to feed. She looks at Ezekiel as she talks, and Emily sings him the new Abraham song until he is calm. Ma Bheki is not long at the Annexe, her madness calls for rigour of the kind that the Annexe cannot deliver. They strap her to take her out of the Annexe, out of Harare and out of Mashonaland to Ingutsheni, the oldest, the biggest mental hospital in the country, Ingutsheni, the constant rebuke in the ears of the young: don’t talk like you are at Ingutsheni. Before Ingutsheni was a mental hospital, it was a lunatic asylum, and there Ma Bheki’s voice will join those of the dangerously mad, the criminally insane.

Ma Bheki bares her teeth and her eyes meet Emily’s.

‘I want my meat,’ she says, and the door closes behind her.

In the moment that the door closes on Ma Bheki, Emily sees the trajectory of her own life: from the casual, almost conversational question, how many Disprin would you take to kill yourself, overheard by Anna the sub-warden, who puts the university machinery into operation by relaying the question to the warden who relays it to the Dean of Students who relays the question to Dr Chikara, who relays it to her parents who insist that she be sectioned in the Annexe. She grasps this much: she is here, not because she asked the question but because someone overheard her ask the question. Depending on whether she asks that question again, or, more precisely, depending on how loudly she asks it, her life could go either way, to the little green bus up Second Street Extension towards Bond Street, Pendennis and the university, or the other way, turning where Second Street meets Julius Nyerere Way to go past the National Gallery and the Monomotapa Crowne Plaza, past Town House and all the way to the railway station to take the night train to Ingutsheni.

Emily forces herself to be normal.

She stops speaking in poetry and quotations. She puts aside Marx and Engels. Inside herself, she recites ‘Jabberwocky’ and ‘Macavity’. Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe. His brow is deeply lined in thought, his head is highly domed. You would know him if you saw him for his eyes are sunken in .

How many Disprin does it take to kill yourself, she asks. She calculates just how many would be required, four boxes, five boxes, maybe even ten boxes. She will drink them with vodka, drink them with Mazoe mixed with club soda. She does a comparative evaluation, Norolon versus Disprin. On a balance of probabilities, on the evidence of the gory newspaper tales of Norolon-induced abortions that end up killing both foetus and mother, Norolon would be more effective.

Outside herself, she helps to distribute the toast and tea in the mornings. Outside herself, she stares outside the window in the afternoon, careful not to sit there for too long. In her journal, she writes bright entries, with exclamation marks, about her future outside the Annexe. ‘I am going to Oxford!’ she writes, ‘I am going be a Rhodes Scholar!’

The evening pills empty her thoughts.

In the evening, she does the Annexe shuffle.

And then, just like that, Dr Chikara says she can go back to her life. She and Ezekiel sing ‘Father Abraham’ one more time, three more times, seven more times. Estelle joins in. Hedwig conducts them, insisting that they stand in a choir formation. Sonia applauds. MockingNurseMatilda shakes her head when she sees them. ‘The choir of the mad,’ she says to the orderlies, but there is no malice in her voice.

Emily walks out of the door that has no handle on the inside. The last thing she sees is Ezekiel saying ‘Abraham, Abraham’ while Hedwig hits him on the head. She stands on Second Street Extension, and waits for the little green bus. She re-enters academe to nudges and whispered comments. She is the subject of clever jokes, lawyer jokes.

‘She is not a fit and proper person,’ says one.

‘She is not a competent witness,’ says another.

‘She qualifies under the Mental Health Act,’ says a third.

She is so concentrated on being normal that thoughts of Disprin versus Norolon recede to that part of her mind that is most active in fantasy. Her exam results are stellar; she achieves seven firsts in one year. She receives the University Book Prize three years in a row. Her essay on the presidential pardon and the rule of law is published in the Legal Forum . But for the rest of her three years at the university, she is known as Emily from Law who tried to kill herself when her boyfriend, Gwinyai from Engines, dumped her for Lydia, the tall, skinny girl from Sociology. Even first years that were not there pass on the story, which grows with each telling and retelling.

‘She climbed a tree, that tree opposite the Students’ Union.’

‘She swallowed forty tablets.’

‘She was found unconscious on the floor.’

‘Naked.’

‘She threw herself in front of her boyfriend’s car.’

‘Not her boyfriend’s car, it was the Dean of Students’ car.’

‘He took her to hospital.’

‘Hospital, chii , they put her in a car, on a bus, on a train, on a plane, to Ingutsheni.’

The pinnacle of absurdity is reached in Emily’s third year when a first-year girl, seeing Emily, and not knowing who she is, asks her, ‘Is it true that that Emma girl from Law tried to kill herself in my room?’