Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

His painting speaks truths that the government wants to hide, it is said. He is the artist exiled from his homeland because his work shows a reality before which the government flinches.

None of it is true, but who cares for truth when there is a troubled homeland and tortured artists to flee from it? The more prosaic truth is that he did not flee, but rather left on the arm of his German girlfriend, on a ticket bought with her Deutschmarks, and that, having gone to Germany, he got himself a nice new passport before he traded her in for someone richer. I can’t even say that he fled from my malevolence, because that was only ever directed at Lloyd.

This new Zenzo came into being much later, many years after Lloyd and I first met him. I had not thought that I would ever see him again, but I did. It was not my doing but Simon’s. He thought it would be a treat for me to see someone from my own country. Nothing delighted Simon more than thrusting some countryman or other upon me. I sometimes think that I disappointed him because I was not African enough. I had no national dress, no foods of tantalising exoticism.

When Simon heard about Zenzo’s panel at the Fitzwilliam, he insisted that we had to go. It was then that I learned that Zenzo now lived in Berlin.

Zenzo had lost the dreadlocks. He was still very good-looking — better-looking, in fact, than he had ever been. Money and success became him. I had already learned from the Observer interview that he had reinvented his past when he renamed himself.

He had wiped out Sigrid from his biography. He had not fucked his way to Europe, no, not Zenzo — he had left because he was persecuted for his art. He would only go back when his country was free. And the distinctive scar on his right hand, the hand that had once stroked mine, the scar he had told me was the legacy of sneaking across the barbed wire to steal tobacco leaves from the farm next door: that had come from a knife fight during ethnic battles in the township where he grew up.

At the reception afterwards, Simon wanted me to meet him. It seemed easier to go along, and besides, a part of me was curious to see if he would recognise me.

‘I know you,’ he said. ‘Memory.’

He gave me a hug that I did not return. I found myself wrapped in his scent. This was certainly a new Zenzo, a more expensive one. His eyes darted about, looking at everyone but the person who was actually before him at the time.

As I watched him work the room, I wondered for the first time what it was that Lloyd had felt for Zenzo. And I hoped — I longed to know — that it had not been love.

*

Poppy died in the September just after I turned seventeen. By then, I had been living with Lloyd for almost eight years. My life in Mufakose seemed like a parallel episode in someone else’s life.

I could, at times, persuade myself that this life, the life that took in the Convent and Summer Madness, my horse, my books and the dogs, had always been my life.

My dreams no longer troubled me as much as they had when I first arrived. In those moments when I forgot how I came to live with Lloyd, I found myself warming to him.

Unlike Ian, who would later spend the last pain-wracked months of his life at Island Hospice, Poppy spent her last days in her own bed. Namatai came to the house the morning after the evening of her death to tell us that she had gone. I went with Lloyd to see her. She looked fragile in death. Lloyd kissed the papery skin of her forehead.

She had wanted to have her ashes scattered at the same place her husband’s ashes had been, in Matopos National Park. It had been her favourite place when the Commissioner was alive. They had spent every anniversary of their marriage there.

We drove in a convoy of three cars to the Matopos hills. It was a family tradition. ‘We don’t do it for Rhodes,’ said Lloyd. ‘We do it for the Matopos. You will see what I mean, Memory. I hope you remember that when I go, I want my ashes there too.’

I am sure you have been to the Matopos by now; it is the ‘must-see’ place in every tourist guide. Rhodes’s grave is there, as is Allan Wilson’s of the Shangani Patrol, and Leander Starr Jameson too. But before they were buried there, it was a holy shrine, to Umgulumgulu, the god of the sky. The people who lived in the surrounding areas regarded it as a sacred place that was full of magic and power.

I saw immediately why Poppy would want her final rest there. As I stood next to Lloyd, at the top of the world, the graves of Rhodes and Jameson and Allan Wilson before us, I could not help but be affected by the splendour of the stillness.

The air seemed alive with the spirits of the nameless dead. I was struck by the hushed glory of this beautiful place, and I understood why the Ndebele had held it to be sacred, and why its eerie, peculiar beauty had so attracted Rhodes, and why the Commissioner and Poppy and Lloyd would want their ashes scattered here.

As Lloyd scattered Poppy’s ashes up into the whispering trees, my mind went to the only other funeral that I had attended, Mobhi’s funeral, my mother almost jumping into the ground with her, and where the frenetic dancers raised dust around the grave as the drumbeat thundered.

But there were no wailing voices in Matopos, no mother to jump into the grave. Only Lloyd and Ian, Liz and Sandy, Namatai and me.

Lloyd made short speech about how much Poppy had loved this place. He wanted to come here when he too died, he said. Every time he came here he felt he was in a place where nature had begun, and it felt like the last place that would be here when it all ended. Alexandra read from a poem that she had chosen. ‘I am not there, I do not sleep,’ she said.

A small gust of wind took up the ashes, danced with them a little before blowing them over us. ‘I am not there,’ muttered Sandy as he wiped his face, ‘but I am in your hair.’

I was afraid to laugh because I feared that if I opened my mouth, bits of Poppy would find themselves down my throat. Poppy’s ashes fell on the flowers; the wind carried them into the trees and into the air around the top of the world and far into the distance.

Lloyd saw Zenzo before I did. We were at a garden party thrown by the Compton-Joneses. They threw a summer party in June, which, of course, is winter here, but they were not people to let an inconvenient thing like being in the wrong hemisphere get in the way of what they considered unassailable English traditions.

Tim and Val Compton-Jones spoke in the kind of accents that made them sound like they had been taken from one of those Thames Television productions that were screened on ZBC all the time in the eighties. An hour in their house made you feel like you were an extra in a Bizarro version of To the Manor Born or some other drama about distressed gentlefolk in the English countryside.

Tim Compton-Jones aimed to look like a jovial country squire, if, that is, a country squire wore khaki shorts and shirts and Farmer shoes all the time. His laugh was a loud braying sound, and he began his sentences with ‘I say’, and, in imitation, Lloyd and I took to beginning sentences like he did.

‘I say, old chap, it is raining rather hard, what?’

‘I say, old bean, the fire needs another log.’

‘I say, old chap, I need money for the school bus.’

‘I say, my foot,’ said Liz. ‘He grew up in Karoi. I know his family. None of them sound like that — his brother Dennis wouldn’t know a Pimm’s if you poured it down his arse.’

Lloyd replied that Tim had got his accent when he married Val. She had one of those frozen faces with precisely matching eyebrows, like she was Botoxed to the eyeballs even before the invention of Botox. Her hair was sprayed into such stiffness that it seemed as though nothing could move it, not even the blistering high wind of an August day.