Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

I had not realised before then how pink her gums are or how yellow the teeth that frame the missing ones on her upper jaw. I thought suddenly of Mr Todd in A Handful of Dust, trapping Tony into a nightmare of reading all of Dickens, over and over and over for the rest of his life, buoyed only by the thought that the Amazon jungle termites had disposed of one hated volume.

The new Minister of Justice arrived in person to inspect the prison. In the weeks before she came, detergents and mops appeared as if by magic, along with tubes of toothpaste, soap and sanitary pads and toothbrushes. When we stood before her in our clean uniforms and with our newly cleaned teeth and feet with shoes on them, singing a song that we had been practising while we worked, it was with stomachs full of porridge made with the right amounts of sugar and margarine.

And from the kitchen wafted the smell of fried beef.

The Minister walked among us. When she got to the Ds, she asked, in the cheeriest voice possible, how things were in prison. Just as I was thinking how best to answer such a question, how to address in one succinct sentence the bad food, the poor plumbing, Synodia, how the guards treated us, Evernice said, ‘Everything is very well, very nice.’

‘Everything is just wonderful,’ Beulah added.

‘Just wonderful,’ simpered Benhilda.

Behind the Minister, Synodia, Loveness and the guards smiled their approval. The Chief Superintendent stood next to them, the buttons on her epaulettes reflecting the glow of self-congratulation that came from Synodia and Loveness. After this hearty endorsement, the Minister seemed to lose her assurance and her speech fell a little flat.

She spoke of the standards that the United Nations has set for the treatment of prisoners. Prisons should be places of human rights and human dignity, we were all on the same page, everyone in this room was on the very same page. We all wanted the same things, and those same things were, primarily, human rights and human dignity.

She spoke as though these were tangible gifts that we had only to reach out and take. Indeed, if we had had a piece of meat for every time she said those words, we would have gone to bed fuller than we had been in all of the time we had been in prison.

I cannot say I have seen any human rights since her visit — or much human dignity, for that matter — but Synodia’s voice is certainly less loud. Her blood-and-thunder seems straggly and ineffectual.

Loveness is even more subdued. No doubt she fears that the Stygian effects of the new Minister’s reforming zeal will flow all the way to Chikurubi. In this, she and I are of the same mind. If I am to stay here any longer, I would rather that my pact with Loveness continues. I can only cling to what I know, which is that my life since I started to teach Yeukai has some even tenor. If I am to be honest, I do not want to think of changes here.

Somewhere in the Archives, where I once worked, is a newspaper that has the report of my parents’ death. It will not be very long; maybe just ten lines headed ‘Man, Woman Drown in Mukuvisi’. This is the only time that my parents’ lives will be recorded. Had they not ended their lives, there would have been no reason at all for even this, but a double suicide will have been news.

How did they keep it from the township, their terrible secret? But the township encourages familiarity, not intimacy.

Joy says that Lloyd talked to my father for a long time. He asked to see him again in town the next day. He said to him that my mother was not cursed, that she was ill, dangerously ill, and that their children were in great danger. Could he not send us all to school? Lloyd asked. Then he could help my mother to get treatment.

When my father said he didn’t have enough money, Lloyd offered to pay the school fees for Joy and me. But my father said Joy could go to a school, but what about Memory, his daughter who was always unwell?

‘Could she not go to a special school?’ Lloyd had asked.

When my father had explained my condition, Lloyd had said that he would take me in, that he would look after me until my mother was well. When we met that first day at Barbours, it had been so that he could look at me, so that he could see if my mother agreed. He had told my father that my mother needed help — a doctor’s help, he had said. He had even made arrangements for them to see a friend of his who taught at the medical school at the university. And once they had seen this friend, he would make sure that he would support my father to look after me.

Lloyd had thought that my mother would be locked away for treatment. Perhaps my father thought so, too, because they did not go to see Lloyd’s friend, and they did not go back to see Lloyd.

So I was never meant to live with Lloyd. They had been right, after all, when they told me that I was to go there for a short time.

But then they died.

It was a simple act of kindness.

Our father finally allowed my mother to go to the Annexe. He had woken up to find her standing over him with a knife. He had tied her hands behind her back that night, and the next morning he had dressed her and taken her to Parirenyatwa, to the Annexe, where she remained for six months.

When I told Joyi everything that had happened to me, she wept with her veil over her face. She had been teaching at a school in India when Lloyd died and had not known about the trial until she came back. Through the Goodwill Fellowship, she heard about the albino woman called Memory, a woman who was in prison for killing a white man.

It has been two months since Joyi told me the truth about my family. My dreams have gone. The Chimera no longer pulls me down to the water; it speaks no more with my mother’s voice. I understand now that the dreams were not dreams, but faint imprints of buried trauma fighting memories of my mother.

In the first days after Joyi told me the truth, it was hard for us to talk without breaking down. But now, together, we have been sharing the many moments of snatched joy: my father’s music, my mother’s records, and the birthday cakes that were really just rock-hard candy cakes with a candle on them.

The ablution and the Condemn and the corridors are silent without the others. The Commission on Sentencing gave up — there were too many prisoners needing review. So they went for a straightforward amnesty. They released all the A and B and C prisoners. In D, they let go everyone who had served more than half their sentences. The only prisoners excluded from the amnesty were those convicted of murder and aggravated rape.

Vernah is still campaigning hard to have my sentence commuted to life, but that has not happened yet. Mavis Munongwa has found her own amnesty, which means that I am the only person left in the whole prison.

The prison is open to me now; I go where I please, when I please. There is no lock-up. I eat at Loveness’s house, and spend most of my time there. Synodia and Mathilda have asked me to teach their children, too, and that is how I spend most of my time. Teaching the children, thinking about my parents and all the things that I will do if they ever let me leave. I spend most of the time in a small room that used to be the library, and which I have persuaded Loveness to let me rebuild as one.

I am also rereading these notebooks that you sent back before you left for New York. I did not thank you enough for what you have done for me. Even if nothing comes of the magazine feature you were planning to write, I am grateful to you for setting me on the path to the truth.