Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

I do not even know if there was a funeral. But who was there to bury them, when they had died together? How long had it been before they were found? Did our house on Mharapara find new tenants? Or did it become another place of horror, like the haunted house that we were afraid of when we were children? MaiWhizi, how did she take it? Did she go from house to house, spreading the news to those who had not heard about this bioscope in which her neighbours died?

All these questions, but they are all really one. How do you begin again? How do I begin again?

Mavis Munongwa died last night.

From my cell I heard her crying out, but I was too filled with my own pain to think that the sounds meant she was in any particular distress. When the siren went in the morning and Synodia unlocked the cells, she did not come out to wash in the ablution block with all of us.

No one noticed her absence until breakfast.

When Synodia came back, she held a whispered consultation with the others. They all left together, and it was then that we knew that something must be wrong.

After a few minutes, Synodia said, ‘Let us now say prayers for our sister Mavis, who has gone to sleep with the Lord. She has gone home, to a better world.’

Loveness ordered Jimmy, Evernice, Benhilda, one of the baby dumpers and me to fetch Mavis’s body and put it in the sanatorium. She weighed so little, her eyes had been closed, and she was light to carry. We carried her out feet first and laid her on the bed nearest the door.

Loveness said Mavis had no family, and she would be buried in the grounds of the prison. We buried her the next day. The December heat meant that she could not be kept in the clinic for long. From the window of the Condemn later that morning, I saw in the far distance some khaki-clad figures from the men’s prison digging a grave for Mavis, in the shared cemetery at the corner where the men’s and women’s prisons touch. Separated in life, together in death.

Only the old graves have gravestones. The new mounds of earth have no gravestones above them. It was to a new grave that we carried her the next day, wrapped in a prison blanket, and threw her body into the ground. She landed with a soft thud. Jimmy must have seen something in my face, because she squeezed my hand and whispered, ‘ Iza , Memory, iza .’

Synodia led us in singing. The women’s voices were beautiful in the hot afternoon. They induced in me a terror, not just for Mavis, but also for myself. This could be me one day. Even if I escape the hangman, I might still end my life here, in a prison blanket, buried by Synodia. Maybe I would even watch the men from the prison digging my grave.

After the funeral, I went back to my cell. I was unwell, I said; could I lie down. Loveness let me go. I had been looking forward to reading the old edition of I, Claudius she had given me before the meeting with my sister; I tried to read it now, but the words of Robert Graves blurred and mixed with the horror of what my sister had told me.

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, am now about to tell you that your entire life has been a lie. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, am now about to write this strange history of how your mother killed her children.

When my sister was eighteen years old, and I was seventeen and falling in love with Zenzo, a policeman called Constable Mapfumo came to her school in Chishawasha to tell her that our parents were dead. They had both drowned in the Mukuvisi River. Perhaps it was a murder-suicide, or a mutual suicide pact, who knows.

What matters only is that they both died.

Joy says that when people rage against the police and talk of corruption and inefficiency, she remembers that man, Takawira Mapfumo, who drove his own car to see her because he wanted himself to put in her hand the letter that my father had written. He sat beside her in the headmaster’s office as she read it, and afterwards held her hand while she cried.

This is what our father told her.

My father was not my mother’s first husband. He was not even her husband, because she was not his wife but rather belonged to another man. She had been just thirteen years old when she was married, or, I should say, when her parents married her off to a man four times her age.

She was married off to this man because a very long time ago, before 13 September 1890, before Lloyd’s Pioneer Column ancestor dreamt of Zambesia, of England’s El Dorado in Africa, long before there was a war of liberation, before the Internet and electricity, an ancestor of my mother had killed an ancestor of her first husband.

The story of this murder was passed by one generation down to the next. The spirit of the dead man came back as an angry ngozi spirit and wreaked havoc on my mother’s family. Fields failed to prosper, children rotted in their mothers’ wombs. My mother’s father was told that something had to be done, the debt repaid. A life for a life.

That life was to be my mother’s.

Her family decreed that that long-ago death had to be honoured through the gift of a girl to the family of the murdered. My mother was to be the currency that paid the debt.

Pledging girls is illegal now, of course. As Vernah will tell you, the government outlawed it almost at independence, but this was in the late 1960s, deep in rural Rhodesia, where the chiefs decided what was law and appeasing the sins of the past mattered more than securing one girl’s future.

So there was no one to protest, no one to dispute the authority under which a girl, a child, my mother, should be given over in marriage to a man to appease a murder committed long before she was even thought of. There was no one to stand up for my mother.

At the age of thirteen, my mother found herself married into a family that was poor, polygamous and plentiful. She became the third wife. The other wives lived in acrimony and conflict, and their children carried on their mothers’ quarrels. Into all this violence and ugliness came my mother. She could not escape because continuing in this marriage was necessary to appease an angry spirit.

She was unhappy and she was lonely. She ran away and escaped to her father’s house. Her father beat her and brought her back to her husband, who also beat her for her insubordination. With little education, and a family that had approved this enforced slavery and desired her marriage in the first place, where could she go? She tried to hang herself but was caught and tied down for three days. She was locked in her hut to prevent it. They would not let her go but they feared that, if she killed herself, her own ngozi spirit would come back and haunt them, and begin another cycle of endless death and despair.

In the end, my father was her escape route.

She met him four years after her forced marriage, when she took one of her stepchildren to the clinic near the new school in her village. He had a job there as a carpenter, making shelves and cupboards. He saw her when she came to the school and fell in love with her at once. That she was married did not deter him. But by this time she had a young child, a boy of three years. She was afraid that her husband would hunt her down if she took him. So she left him behind, that little boy whose name I will now never know. She left him to be raised in that family, and with my father she began a new life.