Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

She indicated that I should sit. I took the armchair nearest the television and turned towards it. It had a sleek, flat screen, with the store display labels saying ‘high-definition’, ‘40-inch LCD’ and ‘Phillips’ with two Ls stuck in the bottom corners.

‘Patience brought this from Dubai,’ she said as she switched it on. ‘Just three hundred she charged me, can you imagine, what a bargain, and she paid no duty, no nothing. That is the good thing about being connected.’

She surfed though the channels until she found a Nigerian film. ‘Oh, my daughter,’ said the television. ‘What have you done with my daughter? I want my daughter, wo-o .’

‘Your daughter will not come back. She has married a creature of the waters.’

‘She has married a marine husband!’ screamed a voice.

‘A marine husband,’ echoed the first.

Mesmerised by the television, I did not realise that Loveness was not only talking to me; she was also handing me a glass of Coke that she had poured out for me. As I drank greedily, I tried to focus my attention away from the television.

Loveness was uncharacteristically nervous — bashful, even. She talked in a circumlocutory way about how much she liked Nigerian films, the problems with teachers these days, the things that Patience brought back on each trip to Dubai and why it was good to have Patience on her side. It was obvious that all of this was a lead-up to something. But I could not think of anything that would warrant such hospitality. I concentrated on my drink and the television, until finally she came out with it.

Her daughter was having problems at school and she wanted me to help. I had gone to university, she said, so I knew all about it. She was writing Cambridge exams in two years. She had saved and saved for her daughter because she wanted her to write the very best exams.

‘You have been where, you have been to Cambridge, there where they set the papers,’ she said. ‘Can you help me?’

‘Ajana says the girl must remain under the sea.’

‘Will you help me?’ said Loveness again.

‘Yes,’ I said, and turned my attention from the television. ‘Yes, of course I will help.’

The door opened and in came a little girl with that robust thinness that only very young girls have. The sound of the television receded, and even Loveness seemed to be speaking from a long way off. She was a small girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, a small albino girl with freckles on her face and arms and thick glasses on her nose. In that moment, I understood everything that had baffled me about Loveness. The little girl blinked and scratched at the alabaster skin of her right arm. In that gesture, I saw myself again.

*

Every afternoon, after Yeukai returns from school, Loveness takes me to her house. Yeukai is not at the prison school, but at a government school in Highlands. Funnily enough, it is Alexandra’s old school. It was once a government school only for whites, but it now takes mainly the children of the domestic staff who work in the affluent areas surrounding it.

The uniform is still the same, the children are obliged to wear hats, but they are fifty children in each class. Yeukai is behind in every subject. For this term, I am teaching her history, geography, English language and literature. In February, we start on biology and chemistry. They are not my strongest subjects, and I have to stop at physics and maths, but Loveness said not to worry: they had been Synodia’s favourite subjects at school.

With the reawakened memories of the children at my first school in Mufakose in mind, I asked Yeukai if the other children gave her problems at school. She was not the only albino child in her school, she said; there were three others, so everyone was used to her. The school absences are Yeukai’s only problems. I have said that in her I saw myself again, but we differ in one respect. She wears glasses, but is otherwise healthy and well cared for. Loveness told me that there is now an Albino Society that gives out free sunscreen and advice.

I would rather that you not tell Vernah Sithole about this arrangement. I know that she will not approve of this — she has, after all, been appointed to the new Anti-Corruption Commission. She will get into a tizzy about corruption and get Loveness into trouble for abusing her position. It is corruption, but it is a form of corruption that happens to benefit me.

In Loveness’s house, I get to shower in hot water, the first hot water I have had in two years. I get lotion for my skin. I watch the television when there is electricity. It is limited fare: Loveness sticks resolutely to Nigerian and Korean melodramas and channels with Pentecostal preachers, but I have managed, on one or two occasions when she was not here, to catch reruns of sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends .

In the effusion of her happiness, Loveness even offered me some of her old clothes until she recalled that I could not wear them in prison. If Yeukai passes this term’s tests, I intend to ask Loveness to buy me a bottle of wine. I can almost taste it in my mouth.

Above all, I get books.

I suggested to Loveness that she should go to the flea market at Avondale and buy any books she could find. She brought back the I, Claudius books by Robert Graves, and some Frederick Forsyths and Jeffrey Archers. She apologised because the only books she manages to find are old. I have told her that this is what I prefer.

The world has changed, but the curriculum has not. I am teaching Yeukai all the things that I learned myself. I find myself looking forward to the lessons, planning them, impatient for the next one, and missing them when they are cancelled. I teach her about the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, I teach her about igneous rocks and sedimentary rocks, I try to smooth her way as she stumbles through the iambic pentameter.

We had started on the Russian Revolution when Loveness came to see me last week; it was on the day that I normally go to teach Yeukai. I was thinking already of ways to make the revolution come alive for her. Maybe I would tell her about Rasputin. I would teach her the standard story in the text, about the rightness of the revolution, but I would try to make her see the pain of the children shot one by one, the pitiful waste of it. My mind was on the little Tsarevich and I did not immediately understand what she said.

‘Your sister is here to see you,’ she said.

I thought I had misheard her as soon as I saw my visitor. Sitting in the visitor’s room was a small, light-skinned woman in a plain grey skirt, a white blouse, and a short veil covering her hair. I had misheard Loveness. There is a sister to see me, she meant, a Catholic sister, perhaps a volunteer from the Goodwill Fellowship. As I hardened myself to meet her platitudes, she looked up from the book she was reading and smiled.

Then my heart contracted because my mother faced me across the years. ‘Memory,’ she said, and burst into tears.

Immediately, I saw my mistake. My mother’s face had never been this gentle, or her voice ever this soft.

How do you begin your life again after you find out that everything you thought was true about yourself is wrong?

How do you begin to understand your life all over again? My mind is in the Mukuvisi with my parents, in the murderous waters of the river in which the Baptist almost drowned me until my father put his strong arms around me. Had those same arms pulled my mother to her death? Who had killed whom? Had they died at the same time, weighing each other down?