Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

I asked you to bring them all back because I wanted to go back, to see where it was I made that fatal mistake. My mind keeps going back to that memory of seeing Lloyd hand over the bills, a false memory on which I have built the foundation of my life, or, to put it more accurately, a true memory from which I have made false assumptions. My utter conviction that my parents sold me rested only on that exchange of money.

I understand now why Lloyd adopted me. He was as different as I was and knew what it was to be different. I did not see that he lived in pain and fear. He had paid my father for Joy’s schooling, as promised, and the money took her right up to her O levels. She lived at school during the holidays. When she decided that she wanted to take the veil, the nuns took over her education, and only when our parents died and my father wrote her that letter did she understand how she had come to be there.

There are things that I understand, or that I have grasped. My parents thought that it was a fate from ancient days that controlled their lives, but it was actually random chance. It was chance that led Lloyd to that park bench. He had left his car to be fixed up near Herbert Chitepo. It was not ready when they said it would be, and he had decided on impulse that he would walk to the park and look at the memorial. It was chance that brought Lloyd to that bench; it was chance, too, that my father found himself in the company of one of the few white men in Zimbabwe who understood what a black person meant when he talked about ngozi .

There are still many things that I do not understand. Some I can guess at, but I have no certainty. Above all, I am wondering if Lloyd knew where Joyi was, and if so why he kept us apart. Chishawasha and Umwinsidale are in opposite valleys. I am seeing the times we drove past Chishawasha, the time we drove to St Ignatius to see an old priest who had taught him at his old school at St George’s. In all that time Joyi was in the valley below. Did he never try to find out what had happened to my parents? And if he did, why did he not tell me about Joyi, why did he keep me with him still, without once telling me that my sister was at school in the neighbouring valley?

In one of her prayer meetings before the prison emptied, Synodia spoke about a baptism of fire. I feel as though I have walked through fields of fire to emerge into shining coolness. I tell myself to fight the hope that rises like a flare when I imagine that I might actually leave. I look forward to leaving because finally, my life makes sense. My discomfort has not just been feeling ill at ease in my skin, but a discomfort in myself.

One of the hardest things about prison is the lack of choice. There are choices, even here, and the most important one is the life within. I will not think about tomorrow. All I want to do is to live in the moment. It will not be possible for me to escape the past. But if I go back there, it will only be to find ways to make rich my present. To accept that there are no villains in my life, just broken people, trying to heal, stumbling in darkness and breaking each other, to find a way to forgive my father and mother, to forgive Lloyd, to find a path to my own forgiveness.

To stop living what has been, until now, this pale imitation of life.

I thought today about the peppered moth. Like that insect, I have had to change my shape and shade to blend into my surroundings. And like the peppered moth, I was fluttering, blindly, changing colour, struggling to adapt, to survive. Maybe that is enough — for me to resolve that I will survive. And to start my life all over again, whether in here or out there, but to start it over with the full truth before me. Maybe that is enough to begin with.

Verity, Jimmy and Beulah came to see me yesterday. As part of their amnesty conditions, they are not supposed to visit the prison. But there they were, in the canteen, with things for me: food, drink, toiletries, soap, a new toothbrush, a towel and sunscreen lotion.

As if they had set out to look as different as possible from how they were when they were here, Jimmy wore tight red trousers and a lurid yellow blouse while Beulah’s hair was covered in a long ginger weave that came down to her waist. The sweat shone through Verity’s thick foundation. Her red-and-blue heels were so high that her knees buckled. They had come in her new car, Verity said, as she jingled the keys casually, but not so casually that Synodia missed them.

‘Hesi kani, Mbuya Guard,’ Jimmy said, and slapped her hand against Synodia’s, like they were best friends reunited. ‘Nayo nayo tirongo.’

‘ Zvipi ,’ said Synodia. ‘You will be back here soon enough. With your temper, Beulah, and your permanently open legs, Jimmy, you will be back with us before you know it.’

Beulah and Jimmy shrieked with laughter and clapped each other’s hands so hard that it was like a small thunderclap had been unleashed in the room.

Joyi arrived just after they did. They sat side by side on the bench. Jimmy was soon talking to Joy like she had known her all her life, drinking Cream Soda and Cherry Plum, the things Beulah said she missed most when she was here. ‘There is something about this place that just makes me so hungry,’ Beulah said as she tore into a drumstick.

Verity told us about her new car, which seems intricately connected to her new boyfriend, while Jimmy told us about the work she is now doing. There is a project funded by the European Union that is persuading women to give up prostitution in exchange for working together on a co-operative farm. The thought came to me that they should call it the ‘Hoes for Whores’ programme.

I could not keep a straight face as Jimmy explained that she was only doing this as long as she has to report to the parole office. ‘As soon as they forget about me, I will stop. They are insane, those Europeans. Like I can’t get more money in thirty minutes on my back than a month on my feet,’ she said.

Monalisa has started her own business, consulting on aid projects. Evernice has reinvented herself as a victim of political repression.

Jimmy is going to move back to Manicaland, but not to her village. She plans to make her way to the diamond mines in Marange and on to Manica in Mozambique, where there are many white and Asian men with exotic tastes. ‘Just a little licking here, a little sucking there, and I will make more than I make in Harare.’

I listened as they laughed and talked about their plans until Synodia came to tell us that it was time. We all got up. ‘We will see you soon,’ Jimmy said.

I wondered for how long they would come. Will they still come in one year, in three years, in five? Will they come in ten? Will they care if I die here, if I am given a pauper’s funeral and buried in an unmarked grave, like Mavis Munongwa? They will forget this place. They should forget this place. They will forget me.

‘Memory, don’t cry,’ Verity said, and reached for my hand.

‘It is nothing,’ I said. ‘My eyes are hurting today.’

They all embraced me before they left, Jimmy so strongly that she lifted me off my feet, and as I walked back to my cell I carried with me the mingled smell of their perfumes.

I am reaching the end of this notebook. I will not write again. I will give this to you when I see you, together with the other notebooks that I asked you to give back to me so that I could read over them again. We will know next week whether or not I will get a new trial. There is enough in what I have told her to make my conviction unsafe, Vernah says. All the evidence pointing to my guilt is purely circumstantial.