Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

In the afternoon, his bank manager asks to see him.

‘We need to discuss an irregular transaction from your account,’ the bank manager says. ‘You deposited a fraudulent instrument into your account. We cleared it, but the American bank on which the cheque was drawn has now refused to honour it.

‘We would normally take the blame,’ the bank manager says, ‘but this does not apply to cheques drawn on American banks.’

Our man’s stomach turns to water. ‘Dr Rose and Mr George and Miss Manning,’ he says. ‘Dr Rose.’

The bank manager offers him a drink. He empties the glass in three swallows. Water dribbles from the glass onto his tie. He explains about the email that started it all, the trip to Amsterdam, the dirty money, the loan, the cheque. It takes eleven minutes. He contradicts himself three times.

He drinks a litre of water.

‘This is clearly a matter for the police,’ the manager says. ‘It is difficult to establish identity in such cases. For all we know, this could be the work of just one person. It often is.’

The full meaning of the manager’s words hits our man. ‘I can take you to Amsterdam,’ he says. ‘We can go there together. I’ll pay for our tickets. We can catch Mr George. Write to Dr Rose. I have their emails. Write to Dr Rose.’

‘That is not the bank’s immediate concern,’ the bank manager says. ‘I called you to give you this.’ Our man takes the proffered paper. It is a letter of demand. The amount of fifty-one thousand two hundred and thirty-four Swiss francs, equivalent to twenty-five thousand euros, is to be repaid within thirty days. He looks at the bank manager’s face, looking to find something that says the letter is not real. He does not find what he seeks. He swallows.

From a very far-off place comes a voice that sounds like the bank manager’s. The voice sounds like it has travelled a long way and echoes around the room. ‘I will call the police for you,’ the voice says.

Police, police , the word is loud in our man’s head. His mother’s voice speaks across time and space: ‘You take any more of that sugar, and I will call the police.’ That memory sparks another, and suddenly, there they all are; his mother and his uncle Benkias, his sister Shupikai holding his son at age two, all of them crowding his head. ‘I will call them now,’ the bank manager says. As the bank manager reaches for the telephone, our man reaches for water, but the glass is empty, the bottle too.

‘You should not play outside in the rain when you are wearing red,’ Sisi Blandina said to Munya and me.

‘Lightning likes things that are red and it will hunt you out and strike you down and burn you from inside out.

‘And you must not sit out on the road, otherwise you will grow festering boils on your bottoms.

‘You should never cut your hair out of doors, because if even the smallest fluff is left in the open, varoyi will find it, and put a spell on you, and you know how powerful their sorcery is.

‘And you must not peek at each other while you dress, because boys and girls who spy on each other’s nakedness get styes in their eyes.’

She told story upon story of the fates that awaited us if we did things we were not supposed to do, and she had the proof, for these things had happened to people she knew in Lalapanzi.

‘You must not walk over a person’s legs,’ Sisi Blandina said. ‘If you do so, you must walk back the other way to reverse the action, and if you don’t, the one who has been walked over won’t grow.’

I made Munya lie on his back. I jumped over his legs and out of the house to play. He ran to find Sisi Blandina and wailed, ‘Chenai jumped me. She always jumps me, and now I won’t grow.’

Sisi Blandina marched out of the house, with Munya sniffling beside her. Her nails dug into my flesh as she grabbed me above my right elbow and dragged me from my play.

‘You will not go outside until you walk back over him,’ she said.

I obeyed, jumping over him, but making sure that I crossed my fingers on both hands behind my back.

‘She had nings on,’ my brother cried. ‘It won’t work because Chenai crossed her fingers, she had nings on.’

‘Nings nings, chii chacho ,’ Sisi Blandina said. ‘Why must you always believe what those white children tell you? Did their parents not lose the war?’

That was incontrovertible, it was unanswerable.

We had won the war, we had conquered the conquerors. Our parents said it all the time. The television said it, the radio too. We had won the war.

Munya, who had been torn between the binding nature of nings and the authority of Sisi Blandina, now believed her when she said that he would grow as tall as my father.

‘Bigger,’ he said. ‘I want to be bigger than Sekuru Thomas.’

‘You will be bigger and stronger too,’ she said.

‘Will I be like Mr T, from The A-Team ?’

‘Exactly like Mr T,’ she said.

She petted him, and said she would take him to the shops to buy sweets with her own money. Now that the threat of dwarfism had been thwarted, Munya could afford to be generous. ‘I will bring you Treetop sherbet,’ he said.

I could still see the marks that Sisi Blandina had dug into my arm.

‘Keep your stupid sherbet,’ I fumed as I stormed off to pour water all over the shiny kitchen floor. When Sisi Blandina smacked me across my bottom I screamed, ‘You are not my mother; you are only the housemaid.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am only the housemaid, but your mother is not here.’

My mother was often not there because she had day shifts and night shifts as a nurse at Andrew Fleming, later called Parirenyatwa Hospital. I was not always happy when she was home because she pulled my hair when she plaited it, which made me wince in pain and sit with my face tight for two days before the plaits settled on my head. She spanked me hard when I made Munya cut my hair so that she could not plait and yank it any more.

My father was there and not there, and when he was, he sometimes looked at Munya and me like he wasn’t sure what we were doing in front of him. He smoked Kingsgate cigarettes and we liked to watch him blow smoke rings in the air. He taught mathematics at the university, and when Munya asked why we could not have a dog because everyone had a dog, Daddy drew him something that he said was a model that proved that it was rationally and statistically impossible for everyone in the world to have a dog.

So mostly, we had Sisi Blandina to look after us. She had my mother’s authority to command, and reward, to cajole, threaten and smack us in accordance with her judgement. She came from Lalapanzi, Sisi Blandina, smack in the middle of the country, a place so central that the province in which it rested was called the Midlands. In Lalapanzi, the lightning hunted out little girls and boys who played in the rain in red, it sought their red clothes and burned them from inside out. The rivers of Lalapanzi were home to njuzu , fearsome water creatures that sometimes took children and made them live under water. In Lalapanzi wandered a goritoto , a ghost giant that cast a shadow of bright light as it moved.

The government renamed the places that the whites had renamed, so that Umvukwes became Mvurwi again, Selukwe became Shurugwi, and Marandellas became Marondera. Queque became Kwekwe. The changes did not affect people like my grandmother for whom independence was a reality that did not alter their memories. She continued to speak of Fort Victoria and not Masvingo, of visiting us in Salisbury when she meant Harare, and of my aunt who was married in Gwelo instead of Gweru. Sisi Blandina was not as bad as my grandmother, but like most people then, she sometimes forgot to use the new names.