Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

When she tried to track down her old friends and found them fat and fortyish at the age of twenty-seven, she considered this to be a plot against her happiness. ‘It is not fair,’ she said. ‘How can things change so quickly?’

Her Zimbabwe was frozen in 1997, the year she left. Hers had been a country of money to burn, fast guys from Saints and Falcon in fast cars, and party after party, a Zimbabwe without double-digit inflation, without talk of stolen elections. In the absence of the continuity of this life she talked again and again of the old days.

‘Do you remember when I first went to Dallas?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and we had the hardest time explaining to MaiguruMai Susan that Dallas was a real place but that you would not be meeting Bobby Ewing and Cliff Barnes.’

‘Oh, Dallas ! Remember when Bobby died?’

‘Yes, and Pam woke up to find that Bobby’s death had been a dream, that the whole season before that had been a dream.’

‘I am glad they brought him back,’ she said.

‘How can you be? They cheated so spectacularly. Why invest all that emotion mourning a person who then comes back from the dead?’

‘ Aiwaka , Matilda,’ she said. ‘Imagine Dallas without Bobby.’

‘You kept me up to date on what I missed, do you remember?’ I smiled.

She had been at school in town, while I was at boarding school.

‘The girls at Chisi thought I was writing to my boyfriend,’ she grinned.

‘At my school, they thought yours were from mine,’ I said.

We laughed.

Into the natural pause that followed our laughter she said, ‘I am not returning to Dallas.’

I looked up from my ironing.

‘There is no way that I can go back to the States,’ she blurted. ‘I was there illegally. They will not let me back in, I overstayed my visitor’s visa.’

‘But you were at the university …’

‘Community college,’ she said, and added, ‘for only three months.’

‘And the job with the insurance broker …’

‘I worked in a restaurant.’

And the mortgage and the poetry and the dance, I thought, but did not say. And the men; the men, all of them wealthy, all of whom wanted to marry her but there was something wrong with each one.

‘I can’t go back, but I can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘What would people say? They would say I can’t go back, that’s what they would say.’

‘I know Harare is not Dallas, but is it then so bad?’ I asked her gently.

She shook her head.

‘I can’t be myself here. I want a bigger world. I need to go back. But I cannot use my passport. I’ll show you, it has been endorsed.’ She showed me the passport and I saw the words May not be granted leave to enter stamped like angry welts on a face.

‘What will I do?’ she said as she wept into her hands. ‘It is hard, so hard. Everything is so hard.’

‘We have to help her,’ I said to Jimmy when he came home that evening.

‘Help her what?’ Jimmy said. ‘We should help her find a job.’

The next morning, he read aloud to her the few vacancies that appeared in the newspaper. ‘I want a bigger world,’ she said as she put marmalade on her toast. ‘Bigger world yekutengesa ma hamburger,’ Jimmy said, when she was out of hearing, and I hushed him for fear that she would hear.

‘ Kana ada zvekutsava , there is always Macheso,’ he said. ‘She can be one of his backup dancers if she wants to dance. Or if she wants to be Paul Mkondo, there are insurance companies here too.’

He picked up his keys to go to work and sang. ‘ Itai penny penny vakomana ndatambura. Vakomana urombo uroyi. Kana usina mari hauna shamwari .’ It was only after the door closed behind him that I realised that he was singing the song from the old Paul Mkondo insurance programme on Radio 2.

The burden of the truth off her shoulders, Rambanai sang along to Boyz II Men on her disc-man, clogged up the bathtub drain with the artificial hair from her weave, and told me her plans for our money. ‘America is a non-starter,’ she said cheerfully. ‘They will never give me a visa now. I will go to London. At least we don’t need visas for England, being in the Commonwealth. In England, I can get an office job. I will continue my dancing. Or maybe acting, I have always wanted to be an actress. I will get a proper job, go to school at night. I will do something.’

‘But your passport was endorsed …’

She waved away the endorsement as if it were of no consequence.

‘Exactly. I can’t go as me; they have records, you know. I need another passport in another name. That’s what lots of people do when they have been deported, they just get new passports.’

‘ Mainini , new passports don’t grow on trees,’ said Jimmy.

‘Exactly,’ beamed Rambanai, ‘and that is why you have to help me get another one.’

‘Oh, and I will need a new name,’ she added. ‘There is a record on me now. I can choose any name I like. Tamera, Chantal, Michelle. I know, I will choose a Ndex name. They have some really cool names. Nonhlanhla. Busisiwe. Sihle. Gugulethu. I know, Langelihle, that means beautiful day. You can just call me Langa for short. I can be Ndebele. Oh, I could even be a Ndebele princess.’

‘But you are not Ndebele,’ I said.

She went on as though I had not spoken, ‘It will be so cool to be Ndex, you know, with the whole Zulu connection. You know Oprah Winfrey is part Zulu, right?’

‘ Mainini , I don’t know what they are telling you in America, but from what I remember of my history, no Zulus were taken to America as slaves,’ said Jimmy.

‘You don’t even speak Ndebele,’ I said.

‘I’m sure there are lots of Ndebele people who don’t speak the language,’ she said. ‘I can be one of them! What would they know about it in England?’

‘But your certificates,’ I said in dismay, ‘how will you get a job without your O level and A level certificates? Those are in your own name.’

‘I will just focus on my dance,’ she said. ‘And maybe acting, I have always wanted to be an actress. You remember how I used to act at school.’

In my mind, together with Rambanai as a pregnant Mary in the nativity play in which she appeared when she was eleven, I also saw Ba’muniniBa ’Thomas spinning and spinning in his Paradise Peace Casket as he talked in his resonant voice about the value of education.

Jimmy would not give her money, but I brought him round in the end. A new, unendorsed passport in another name would not be cheap. We sold some shares that Jimmy’s father had left him. We postponed buying a new fridge and stove for our flat. These sacrifices caused some strain between Jimmy and me, and I had to make Rambanai promise to send us back our money as soon as she sorted herself out. ‘I will send it within a month of arriving,’ she said. ‘You can trust me, you’ll see.’

We spent interminable days waiting for a new birth certificate, before we waited for a new ID card, and then finally, a new passport. Our mission began in Makombe Building where Rambanai procured the first proof of her new existence in the form of a Republic of Zimbabwe birth certificate. We waited among infants crying at their mothers’ exposed breasts and we listened to the voices of the desperate.

‘I have travelled all this way, please just help me, mukuwasha .’

‘ Imi ambuya , there is nothing we can do if you do not produce the child. How do we know the child exists if we do not see it?’