Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

Even then he was thinking of himself; he had no thought at all for Lloyd. I pushed myself from him violently, and tried to pass the door. Lloyd stepped into the kitchen. Immediately to my mind’s eye came the two of them, naked on Lloyd’s bed.

I managed to reach the door. As I left, I heard Lloyd say to him, ‘You have to go.’

‘She could tell someone — you have to stop her.’ Zenzo’s voice was a now whiney panic.

I moved out of earshot, but not before I had seen Lloyd stretch out his hand and pull Zenzo into an embrace.

That is what decided me.

I wrote to the police. ‘There is a man who is committing sodomy with other men. His name is Lloyd Hendricks and he teaches at University of Zimbabwe.’

I dropped the note in the police box at Highlands. I do not know what I wanted, what I expected to happen. Almost as soon as I dropped that note in the police box, I regretted it. But I could not unpost it, so I let it be. Things continued as they had before. Then Lloyd didn’t come home one night.

He didn’t come home the next day.

Alan Milhouse came over, worried and anxious. Ian and Alexandra drove down from Chipinge. Liz and Sandy came to ask every day. They held a conference, Alan and Alexandra and Ian. Alan said Lloyd had missed their usual lunch in the Senior Common Room. He had gone to Lloyd’s department and found his rooms empty. Someone in the department said the police had come for him, but that could not be true, could it?

Only Alan thought to ask me if I knew anything about where Lloyd might have gone. But it never occurred to him that I might have anything to do with it.

Alan then suggested calling all the hospitals, and the police stations. They drove to all the hospitals and inquired at every station. They finally found him at Highlands police station, two weeks after he had disappeared, and three times after they had been to ask. He had refused to sign an admission of guilt. They had no knowledge of the other party, as the police described Zenzo. All they had was an anonymous accusation. It was impossible for them to prosecute.

On the night that he came back, I stood behind the door in the next room and listened to their conversation.

‘I had hoped all that was over when you met Sue,’ Alexandra said.

She put her arms around him and he put his head on her shoulder. As I moved away from the door, our eyes met across Alexandra’s shoulder. I knew without needing to hear it from him that he knew that it was I. Later, as I lay in my room, reading in bed, I heard his footsteps at my door. I thought he might come in, but after a pause I heard him move back to his own room.

From the laundry room where Monalisa, Evernice and I were ironing yesterday, I heard running feet, muffled voices and then shouted voices. The sounds seemed to come from the admissions office at the end of the corridor. Evernice ran out into the corridor. Monalisa and I continued with the ironing.

She returned ten minutes later, her eyes shining.

‘That n’anga woman is here,’ she said.

Evernice ran back into the corridor without explaining what she meant. I continued alone. It was only when Synodia and Patience arrived to collect the ironed clothes that I understood what she had meant.

They were talking at the same time. I had never seen Synodia that animated outside one of her church services.

Evernice said, ‘Have you heard that the diesel n’anga is here? They finally caught her, she was about to cross into Mozambique …’

‘Pwozambique, Pwozambique,’ said Synodia. ‘Who said anything about Mozambique? It was Zambia, that’s where she went to buy the diesel in the first place.’ Then she became almost confiding. ‘In all my time here,’ she said, ‘I have never seen anyone so difficult. It took two whole hours just to process her. She collapsed to the floor and went into a trance. We tried to lift her, but we had to call two more guards. She was heavy, stiff, like a dead body. Like she had rigor — what is it called?’

‘Do you mean rigor motion?’ said Patience.

‘That’s right,’ Synodia said, ‘rigor motion.’

Synodia continued, ‘She was stiff as anything, I tell you. We could hardly move her, only when she came out of it did she finally move.’

I found out then that the excitement is about the woman called Rotina Mavhunga or Nomatter Taruza. Her story was one of the things that Lloyd and I laughed about, uniting our mirth in disbelief.

You must know about her. She is that woman from Chinhoyi who convinced the Cabinet that she could make diesel come out of a rock. In exchange for this miracle, she is supposed to have received a farm and seventy billion dollars. Chinhoyi is a mystical place, of course, with its deep caves that are said to contain all sorts of njuzu . I am sure that on that basis alone the government believed her. She was the medium of the spirit of Changamire Dombo, she said; she was the medium of the great emperor of the Rozvi people.

Almost half the Cabinet went to her. They took off their shoes and socks. They exclaimed and clapped when the fuel came out. The women ministers ululated. All the while, behind the rock, she and her boyfriend had a tanker of diesel from Zambia.

I saw her later that day at lunch, a small, light-skinned woman with eyes like she was recovering from a hangover. She sat apart from the others. Around her women ate their sadza and boiled cabbage.

She belched and said, ‘Mudzimu wangu unoti ndinoda nyama.’

Synodia said, ‘You can tell your spirit that it is in the wrong place. There is no meat for it here.’

She belched again and broke into song, ‘Black September, wairamba kubire Charter mukoma, wakatozobira watombodzungudza musoro mukoma.’

As suddenly as she had broken into song, she stopped and seemed to go into a trance. The women around her moved away.

She belched again and said again, ‘Mudzimu wangu unoti ndinoda nyama.’ She spent the rest of the lunch period belching and shaking her shoulders.

There was a commotion later when she began to sing very loudly, ‘Gandanga haridye derere mukoma. Chukucha mwana weropa! Chukucha rega kudaro!’

The guards rushed to keep her quiet. At supper that afternoon, she again insisted that her spirit demanded only meat. Again, she ate nothing. At lunch the next day I saw her wolfing down boiled cabbage like her spirit depended on it.

*

After he returned from the police cells, Lloyd and I spoke little to each other. When we spoke at all, we were stilted and formal. The air between us was heavy with what was not said. The previous Christmas, Lloyd had given me a battered Beetle. I no longer needed him to drive me to school, and took care to leave the house before he did. He left after I did, and arrived when I had long gone to bed. At weekends, he drove on his own to the cottage in Nyanga. He accepted every conference invitation that he received. I frequently found that I was alone in the house.

The tension became so unbearable that all I could think of was escape. But where could I have gone? I could not go back to Mufakose. I had no relatives who could have taken me in. And the only friends I trusted, Liz and Sandy, were more Lloyd’s friends than mine.

I was desperate to escape. I knew that my only escape was a scholarship to study abroad. I threw myself into my studies. Against Sister Mary Gabriel’s wishes, I opted to write my A level exams in the June of the next year, and not wait for November. And I applied to every university I could think of that was out of the country.