Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

Now, when he wants sex, he does not always go to his wife. He had had a girlfriend once, but his wife had found out; that was a time in his life that he did not think about, could not afford to think about. Even as he thought this, another thought came; the child is probably eleven. There is an eleven-year-old child with my blood in him or her. There is a child that is part of me out there. He pushed the thought from his mind.

Some of his friends had what they called small houses. He had never tried such an arrangement; small-house women expected as much money and attention as the real wives. The thought of not one, but two women each expecting everything from him, each treating him with that special brand of passive aggression that was fed into women with their mother’s milk, was enough to make him give up sex altogether.

He had decided to avoid such permanent arrangements, settling instead for occasional encounters. At the Law Society Summer School, with a willing colleague, preferably one who was married herself, and could console herself with the knowledge that she was doing only what her husband was doing.

Thulani lit another cigarette and smiled as he thought that the crisis in the country had become a boon industry for lawyers. They held conferences at Troutbeck Inn and Leopard Rock, holiday resorts where no tourists came, but only the NGO officials, constitutional law experts and human rights lawyers who pontificated on what they called the appalling and unacceptable and ever-deteriorating human rights situation in the country. Before the elections, they held seminars on creating the right space for democratic transition, and after the elections, they hosted conferences at which they gave postmortems. And the donor money rolled in, real money, dollars and pounds and euros.

After they had analysed the lack of democratic space and inveighed against the partisan actions of the police, they had sex. Thulani had been with Estella Mhango at the last conference; she had been three years behind him in school. She had failed constitutional law twice but was now styling herself a constitutional law expert and human rights activist.

The evening with Estella had been unsatisfactory enough not to be repeated. Funny, he thought, what was it with really beautiful women? There was something wooden about them, like they had been told so often that they were beautiful that they did not seem to feel the need to make an effort. Not Vheneka, though. She had never been like that. At least, not at first.

He did not trouble to find excuses for cheating on Vheneka. There seemed to be something obscene about sex with her, as though he was doing it with a relative. What added to the frisson was that he still felt the occasional flicker of desire. If he was to be honest with himself, it was not her that he desired, but the sex itself. In the dark, she could have been any woman. And this is what Themba wanted, this padlocked life. Thulani was suddenly tired. He stretched and yawned.

He slept and dreamed of Oliver.

When Vheneka woke the next morning, she made straight for the living room. Thulani was still asleep. She left him, showered, and with their maid, dressed and fed the children. She returned to the living room. Thulani slept on. He had drool coming out of the corner of his mouth. She shook him awake, and without waiting for him to rouse himself fully, she said, ‘How could you come home so late? I tried to call you, but your phone was switched off.’

He mumbled, and she repeated herself.

‘The battery was low,’ he said.

He yawned. She could see the dark filling of a molar at the back of his mouth. He closed his eyes again. She was suddenly angry, and fought to control herself as she said, ‘How can you keep coming home at this time? What would happen if I also start coming home late every night? Who would help the children with their homework?’

She could feel her voice rising into harsh ugliness but she could not prevent it. ‘And that tap in the yard has been broken for a long time now, it is still leaking and I keep asking you to get someone to fix it but you never do.’

‘Well, why don’t you sort it out then?’

‘Why should I do everything around here?’

‘I said I would fix it.’

‘Promises. That’s all you are good for.’

He got up to walk to the bathroom. As he closed the door she said, ‘That’s right, walk away, like you always do.’

Later, as she drove the children to school, she thought how worn the grooves were along which they moved their quarrels. She could feel herself saying all the clichéd phrases of a thousand injured women before her, but she could never stop herself. She wanted to make it specific to her and him, to them, Vheneka and Thulani, but it all came down to the same thing, promises not kept and not made. Words not said, embraces not given. Their quarrels were never resolved. They were simply postponed to another day. And they were never about what was wrong.

As she drove away from the children’s school, she found herself thinking, as she had so often before, that even her name was not her own. Vheneka Dhlamini, Mrs Dhlamini to her colleagues. Her new name, her Ndebele name and her fluency in her husband’s language were not enough to deceive native Ndebele speakers, but it was enough for some of her Shona colleagues to treat her differently. Just last week, she had heard the history teacher ask the biology teacher why it was that the Ministry was giving these Ndebele teachers jobs in Harare when there were schools in Bulawayo.

As she turned into Prince Edward, Vheneka shook off these thoughts and focused instead on the memory of the Vheneka Chogugudza who had played centre at netball and had grown into a woman aware of the power of her own beauty, the way it unsettled the men around her. There had not been many men, just Patrick, before he went to Poland to study, and then Thulani.

She smiled as she remembered those early days, when they had sometimes spent whole mornings and afternoons in bed, tasting each other. There had been dreams. Little things to hope for, aspire towards. Education for their children, professional success, two family cars. Travel to South Africa, maybe even to England. Small, small things burned in the flames of inflation.

After the pregnancy with Nobuhle, there was only one thing to be done. She knew that what she felt for him was not what he felt for her. She wanted only him. He had not been the first, but he was the last. She had not been his first, and she certainly knew she was not the last.

Nobuhle had died at five years, of meningitis said the doctors, witchcraft said hers and Thulani’s mothers. That was the beginning, she thinks. She tottered, but did not fall. Then the blow that had felled her: Thulani had made another woman pregnant. The woman had come to her school, she loved Thulani, she had said, and he loved her. There was nothing that could be done, she was going to have his child. She was four months pregnant she had said. Due at Christmas. And Nobuhle was dead.

Thulani stayed. She had not asked him, but he did. He had said nothing about the other child. She had asked no questions. Part of her knew that he remained for reasons more complicated than love. She had Busisiwe and Nkosana after that, but like a missing tooth that is present even in its absence, Nobuhle remained.

She knew, throughout the years, that Thulani had other women; she had seen the evidence. After his last Law Society conference, she had found a packet of condoms in his jacket. It had been opened. Two were missing. There was ice around her stomach, but her only coherent thought was to wonder whether both condoms had been used on the same occasion.

And after that, her revenge — Peter Kapuya, the trainee teacher straight from Belvedere Teachers’ College. She seduced him in her car as she drove him home after a late staff meeting to discuss a strike. She had resented him, this stranger, with his unfamiliar intrusion, but the memory of the missing condoms spurred her on. That night, for the first time in months she had made the first move towards Thulani.