Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

The feeling of dread that began at the pit of my stomach spread up and up my body until I was vomiting my lunch all over the floor of my cell. As Loveness exclaimed over me, I tried and failed to ignore the pungent smell that came from the open tub. Again I heaved, but there was nothing left to expel. She soon connected my reaction with her gift. From the time I was a child, I could not bear the smell of camphor, but I had never had a reaction as violent as throwing up. Wonder of wonders, she not only brought me a cup of water and a bucket for me to clean up the vomit, but she also came to my cell with a large bottle of unscented aqueous cream the next day.

Her apparent friendliness to me is all the more remarkable as she vacillates between indifference and callousness towards the others.

*

Have you ever heard of the Little Ease, Melinda? It was a cell designed in the Dark Ages so that the inhabitant could not sit nor stand nor lie in it. The last man to be imprisoned in the Little Ease lived a long time in it, and an even longer time out of it. Chikurubi is like that. You learn to live with it. Some days are obviously harder than others, but you learn to live with it.

As you read this, I do not want you to get an overly romanticised or sentimental understanding of how things are. I worry that I may be giving you a wrong impression of Chikurubi. Take my friendship, such as it is, with Jimmy and with Verity Gutu. It didn’t emerge from heroic exploits, as it would have done were my life a film. I did not save either from bullying or beatings, nor did they save me. It all began about six months ago — or, at least, I can trace it to the day that Synodia targeted Sinfree. Until that day, every woman at the prison had kept her distance from me.

The chameleon incident meant that the others left me alone, but it also meant that, until the day of the incident between Sinfree and Synodia, no one talked to me if they could help it.

Like all bullies, Synodia goes for the weakest person in any situation. No one radiated weakness more than Sinfree, the new girl who arrived six months ago. She was a fragile, thin thing, flung into a world that expected obeisance to rules that she did not know. There is no induction or orientation of any kind. Synodia, Loveness and company prefer you to learn by what you might call the Montessori Method of Prison Instruction: you learn by doing, picking things up as you go along. The more mistakes you make, the more they hit you and the faster you learn.

So you soon learn that a prisoner is allowed to talk to the guards only when she kneels before them. A prisoner may not look directly at a guard. A prisoner’s hands, those dangerous implements, are to be in front of her at all times that she appears before a guard. No prisoner is called by her real name.

Sinfree knew none of this when she arrived. Three days after she got here, she sat crying at breakfast. The women around her kept their eyes focused on their plates.

‘Arson!’ Synodia called.

Sinfree wept on.

‘ Iwe , Arson!’

Someone must have nudged her to indicate that her name had been called.

She came and stood before Synodia.

‘ Pfugama ,’ Synodia said.

Sinfree spoke in Ndebele and said, ‘I do not understand.’ She turned to Loveness and to Patience, the other guard there. ‘Please,’ she repeated, this time in English. ‘I do not understand what you say.’

‘Who said you can speak English?’ Synodia said. ‘Who said you can speak English in here? Do you hear anyone else speaking in English? You think you are special, don’t you, with your English? Pwinglish, pwinglish.’

By this time, my blood was boiling. I did the very thing that I have spent my life flinching from: I drew attention to myself. ‘Can’t you see that she does not understand you, that she does not speak Shona? Why shouldn’t she speak in English to you?’ I turned to the girl. ‘She says you should kneel — that is what pfugama means. She is asking you to kneel.’

In the silence that followed, Synodia walked slowly and deliberately to where I sat. She gave me a long look. Then she walked back to where Sinfree still stood. She raised her hand and slapped the girl.

Her hand left visible welts on Sinfree’s face.

Jimmy, Verity and I all made the same, almost involuntary movement. From our separate tables, we stood up as though propelled by the same force.

Synodia gave Sinfree another slap before pushing her to her knees. ‘Did you not hear what the murderer there said?’ she said to Sinfree, still speaking in Shona. ‘Hanzi pfugama. You want English, well — we will give you all the English you want. Here is some English. And some more English.’

Each ‘English’ was a slap that spun the girl’s head. After Sinfree collapsed, Synodia turned to the three of us.

We continued standing.

‘And so, you three are the new guards then, are you?’ she said. ‘Let me show you how we train new guards.’

She came up behind me, and held me by the neck of my dress. She pulled me out of my place. She pulled at my hair and gave me a slap, then another. She pushed me to my knees. ‘This is how we train new guards. This is how we do it. Like this. Like this. Like this.’

Her spittle landed on me as she spoke. The smell of her rage enveloped me. Perhaps it was just the smell of cheap hairspray, but I found it more suffocating than the slaps. She then went for Jimmy, and for Verity.

The next morning, Synodia made Sinfree stand at breakfast and watch us eat. I was in enough trouble and I figured: what could be worse than the Condemn? I got up to her and gave her my bread. Synodia’s voice shrieking my name was like a whip through the air but on I went. I pressed a slice of bread into her hands. In her shock, Sinfree stopped crying, though I don’t know whether the shock was from my defiance of Synodia or from being touched, probably for the first time in her life, by an albino. Then Jimmy got up, too, and gave Sinfree her bread.

The others began to shout and whoop and bang their metal plates on the tables. Mavis Munongwa slapped her hands on the table and laughed. Benhilda Makoni said, ‘Beat them, Mbuya Guard. Nyatsorovai .’

The siren sounded ten minutes later.

We were locked down for the rest of the day, with no meals.

Jimmy, Verity, Sinfree and I were sent to clean the Condemn, the filthiest part of the prison. In a prison film, Verity and Jimmy and I would form a little band of sisterhood and Synodia’s cruelty would crumble under the strength of our sorority to a soaring John Williams score. It did not happen like that. Until she decided that she had had enough — of Synodia, of Chikurubi, and of the world at large — Sinfree was more scared of me than ever and Synodia more triumphant. But this is what I mean, that I am making a bad job of it, that I am still stuck here in the prison, when I should be telling you about how it all began; about my father and my mother, our house at 1468 on Mharapara, and how I left it one August day and never went back again.

I have said that my mother comes to me in a cloud of fear. Perhaps a better word for the feeling that my mother gave me is uncertainty. In that uncertainty lay fear. I never knew when she would laugh or cry or shout at us; I never knew when she would tell me to go outside and stop looking at her with ‘those eyes’.

When she put on her records, it was a sign for us to get out of the house as fast as we could. When that happened, we went to the back of the house, where, his wireless set drowned out by the music of the records, we watched our father at work, making beds and tables and chairs and wardrobes, cupboards and shelves.