Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly

As Vheneka checked her mirror before driving into the school, she caught her reflection. ‘To look so antique and me only thirty-five,’ she said. She was suddenly frightened as she imagined another fifteen years of this.

Thulani had once asked for a divorce.

She had felt then a wave of rage so sharp it threatened to cut her sanity, but she had forced herself to speak slowly, calmly. In his language she had told him, ‘First you undo me this scar, then you unlearn me this language. After that, you can come back and we can talk about divorce.’

He had said nothing more after that. Sometimes she thought that she should leave him , but the fear of being alone hits her. She has nothing beyond him, beyond her family; the job she loved has deserted her. She can no longer escape to her great love, can no longer explore plot and plot devices in The Mayor of Casterbridge , find pleasure in explaining iambic pentameter. The girls she teaches are not interested. And who can blame them? How will Eliot and Pinter and Golding get them a fast buck? What guarantees do Achebe and Marechera and Dangarembga offer? They want the new subjects, computer science, accounts, economics, management of business. They want to find a way to London now, to act on Studio 263, to enter beauty pageants.

As she walked away from her car, she heard someone calling out to her. She turned. It was Thulani. She looked from him to his car, which he had parked outside the school gate.

‘You followed me,’ she said. The words sounded like an accusation.

‘I don’t have time for this,’ she said.

‘This is not about us,’ he said. There was something in his voice, but before she could speak, her mobile phone rang from her handbag.

‘Let it ring,’ he said.

She looked from him to the bag, and knew from his face that nothing was right.

‘I followed you, your brother called just after you left, but I wanted to tell you myself.’

The children, she thought, the children. But they were safe, they were in school, she had taken them there herself.

‘It is your mother,’ he said. ‘There was nothing anyone could do. Your brother said she just collapsed, and that was it.’

The phone rang again.

‘Leave it,’ he said again.

‘But the people, all the relatives, friends, they will want to say … to know the arrangements,’ she said.

‘And the school,’ she added, ‘I can’t go to class now. I have to tell Mrs Muza.’

He walked with her to the headmistress’s office where the message was given and understood. As they walked back across the school quadrangle, the bell rang for morning lessons. They were caught in a sea of laughing girls in green and white uniforms running to their classrooms. Their voices faded as Thulani and Vheneka walked to the car park.

The phone rang again as they neared the car. She reached inside her bag for it, and he caught her hand. ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he said, in the most formal expression of condolence that Shona allowed.

Why doesn’t he hold me, she thought, why does he say the words of a stranger, why, but even before she had completed the thought, he had taken her other hand. She was afraid to cry because she knew, when it came, she would not stop. Then she was in his arms and he was holding her and he held on to her as they walked to the gate. They left her car behind and drove back home in his. On the way, they talked about calling the funeral home and about all the other things, large and small, that needed to be done.

It is hard to remember that there was ever a time when you could buy a half-dozen eggs, a packet of Colcolm sausages, two loaves of bread, a packet of Tanganda tea and still have change from a ten dollar note for two Castle lagers and a packet of Everest. I was thinking of those days as I walked from Mbare to Tynwald today. I had gone to Mbare to collect my car, but my mechanic Lovemore had not finished with it.

A couple more days, m’dhara , he said.

I had to contend with that. Shaky called while I was in Mbare and said that he knew someone who knew someone who could get me a good deal on fifty litres of petrol. It is a super deal, m’dhara , he said, it is only valid today, take it or leave it.

I could not leave it; this was the only thing in my pipeline. Just ten days ago, I had had to suspend another deal — some moron thought he was doing me the world’s greatest favour by offering me nine hundred billion for a four-stroke diesel generator. He actually expected that I would smile and say Jesu wangu , but I said, forget it, there can be no deal for such a low price, and he said, you will not be able sell it for more, and I said, I would rather hang on to it in that case, simbi haiore, m’dhara, uye haidyi sadza .

These were thin times in the Gumbo household with the wife pulling faces, and in the small house the girlfriend was suddenly too busy to see me. So when Shaky’s super take-it-or-leave-it fuel deal came up, I set off at once. There was no transport to be found, and I had to walk all the way from Mbare to Tynwald.

My immediate thought when I saw the fellow I was supposed to meet was that he was high on something. I am Clever by name and Clever by nature, ha, ha, ha, he said, and ha, ha, ha, I said, now how much do you want for it? He pushed back dreadlocks from his forehead and said he wanted half a billion. You are dreaming, I thought to myself, and pulled out one of the drinking straws that I carried in my battered Old Mutual briefcase. I put the straw into the barrel, sucked at it to draw some of the fluid into my mouth, which was just as well because there was definitely something else mixed in with the petrol. I spat it out, hoping that it was only water and not urine — urine is preferred by the more unscrupulous because it is the same colour as petrol.

I know nothing about it, m’dhara , I am just the middleman, said Clever by name and Clever by nature. I was too tired to argue, it did not matter who was to blame, because the long and short of it was that I had nothing for my trouble, and to add to this, I now had to walk all the way back to town.

I tried to call Shaky. The number you have dialled is not available at the moment, said the electronic Econet voice, please try again later. I called his Telecel and NetOne numbers, same message different voices. My mood soured even further as I trudged past an ostentatious private school in Tynwald that everyone said was run by a retired army general.

As I walked, I thought about following up on another fuel lead that another contact had told me about. Here is how it works: there are these new farmers who get fuel at give-away bottom dollar everything-must-go preferential government prices. The government will throw anything at the new farmers to make them produce: cheap fuel, free tractors, free seed, free fertiliser — even free labourers; they were using prisoners on farms at one time. Pity they can’t throw in a bit of free motivation because the thing about the new farmers is that they don’t use the cheap fuel for their free tractors; instead, they sell both tractors and fuel to people like me, and people like me sell them on to the vast majority of the unconnected non-preferential-rate-getting masses that can only get fuel on the black market.

It’s against the law, of course, this black market thing, but they may as well arrest every living person between the Limpopo and the Zambezi and have done with it. This is the new Zimbabwe, where everyone is a criminal. One of my best customers, His Worship, Mr Mafa, is a regional magistrate for Harare, and another, the Right Reverend Malema, is a stalwart of the Anointed Church of the Sacred Lamb. The last time I sold diesel to His Worship, he paid off a little of what he owed me in tomatoes — his office at Rotten Row is crammed with the vegetables he grows on a small plot of land along the Bulawayo Road at the edge of which the City of Harare has placed large rusting signs that say NO CULTIVATION: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.