Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

The loss of the child caused her great unhappiness. After a year together, she and my father could not bear it. They were expecting a child. They returned to her home to make an offer: my father would repay the family of her husband; they would take her son and my father would marry my mother.

My mother then learned the horrible truth: her little boy had been drowned in the river while bathing. She and my father saw it as the ngozi striking back in terrible vengeance. I can see her weeping at the news, weeping like she did at Mobhi’s funeral, tears running into her mouth, hands clasped together behind her head, body moving from side to side.

My mother’s father refused to accept the money that my father offered as a penance. ‘You cannot marry another man’s wife,’ he said. And in addition to the original ngozi of her family, which remained unpaid since my mother had run away, there was now the ngozi of her dead child. There was only one thing to be done: my mother had to return to her husband. My father would pay compensation for having run away with her. But my mother could not bear that thought.

They went to my father’s village. Gift was born there, and soon after, Joy. A cow drowned in the river and the family blamed my father. ‘She will bring nothing but tears to you. You shall suffer every day of your life.’

They left to live in another village. And then I was born, with no darkness in my skin, with no pigment, an albino, murungudunhu , with my ghastly whiteness. My mother believed that I had been cursed inside her womb. Joyi says my father told her that my mother was unable to feed me, and that I spent my first year at a mission hospital.

They were asked to leave their new village as soon as the headman heard about my condition. My parents moved to town. Unmarried, they remained together, my mother sinking deeper and deeper into despair.

My mother killed Gift when he was three, Joyi was eighteen months and I was just a baby. She drowned him in his bath and told my father that her dead son had appeared before her and commanded it. ‘It was the only thing that could save them,’ he said she said.

They were not detected. He said the child had been playing. This was in the townships, before independence. The war was on; there was a state of emergency. There were so many African children — what did it matter if one died? It was just one less person to demand inconvenient things like majority rule and electricity and education and jobs. If I sound bitter, it is because I am. There was only the most cursory of investigations.

Then came Moreblessings.

My father could not unmake us, or wish us gone. He might also, though Joy did not say this, have believed that this was the curse that was playing out, that he could not prevent it but could delay its dreadful effect.

After I was born, they had seen a traditional healer who had told them that the only thing to do was to make sure my mother returned to her husband. My father was fatalist in his belief that they could not escape.

I now understand my mother’s persistence in seeking out a cure for me. She believed that there was someone out in the world, in Manicaland, perhaps, and maybe even Mozambique, who had a different answer, the right answer. She and my father travelled up and down the country.

Only the war on the eastern border, flowing in from Mozambique, stopped my mother, and defeated they turned to Harare, where they could get lost. My mother remained convinced that there was an answer out there, if only she could find the right diviner to give it to her.

They had spent more than half of their earnings consulting diviners. My father saw, I think, that they might eventually give all they had to finding this mysterious answer. He refused to allow any further trips. When my mother insisted, he fought her like he did the day she took me to the healer. He could not stop fate but he could be vigilant and make sure that it did not act through his wife. He could not send us to our mother’s relatives because they would not have accepted us.

His own mother had taken us in for a few months, when my father had to go to Salisbury for work and could not bring his family. But when the accident occurred that produced Joyi’s scar, the local chief said my parents had to leave.

But something more serious had happened that the chief was never told about: it was at my grandmother’s that my mother tried to kill me for the first time. She tried to drown me in a zinc bucket, and only my grandmother’s sudden arrival stopped her.

My father decided that he would work from home; he decided that he would spend every waking moment protecting us from our mother.

Then she killed Mobhi.

Her son had made her do it, my mother said. My father saw that we could never be safe as long as we were in that house. He did not let us out of his sight. But he did not blame her. He continued to believe that it was not she who did it, but a force external to her, a supernatural force that possessed her and drove her to kill. The best protection he could think of was constant vigilance.

At night, he tied her to the bed. But she broke free. The final straw came two weeks after Mobhi had died, when he found her standing by our bed in the middle of the night, trying to lift my sleeping form from the bed. ‘She needs a bath,’ she said. ‘She is dirty.’

The following day, after he took us to school, he walked along Crowborough without knowing or caring about the direction that his feet took him. He found himself in town and walked to the Harare Gardens. He and my mother had sometimes come here when they first came to Salisbury. He had brought us to those gardens often, passing through on our way to the Show Grounds every August for the Agricultural Show.

He had thought then of his grandfather, whom he had never known because he had died in the forests of Burma in the Second World War. That thought took him to the monument in the park commemorating the fallen from the two world wars. As he looked at the words on the plaque, ‘We fought and died for our King’, the intensity of his emotion moved him from his bench. Perhaps it was the simple beauty of those words, but something in him broke. He put his hands in his arms and wept long and hard. He was not aware of the passing people, or of the man who came to sit beside him. It was Lloyd.

I was supposed to be in court yesterday. This is the second appointment that I have missed this month. From what Loveness told me when she came to give me the message from Vernah Sithole that I would not be leaving, it may be another month before anything happens.

From what Vernah Sithole said the last time, the new Minister of Justice has appointed a commission to re-examine all sentences before they announce an amnesty. It is primarily meant for the new government’s supporters who were locked up on spurious charges, but the review will extend to all prisoners serving sentences of more than two years. They have delayed the opening of the judicial year to allow the new Commission on Sentencing to complete its work.

The Minister is also appointing new court officers, magistrates and prosecutors, and the Judiciary Services Commission is reviewing the appointments of all judges. In cases not covered by amnesty, Vernah explained, they may even order new trials.

A flicker of hope leapt up in me when she said this. I found myself making plans, tempting fate. But it soon died. Mine is not a political case, and perhaps I will never leave. That is what Loveness would want. ‘With all my heart,’ she said, ‘I hope it goes well for you. I want them to give you life, or at the very least eight years, so that Yeukai is finished by the time you leave.’