The Book of Memory Read online

  PETINA GAPPAH

  The Book of Memory

  This book is dedicated, with all my love,

  to Lee Brackstone,

  who brought me home

  The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: 1468 Mharapara Street

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Part Two: Summer Madness

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Part Three: Chikurubi

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  1468 MHARAPARA STREET

  1

  The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man.

  I say my father and mother, but it was really my mother. I see them now as I saw them on the day we first met Lloyd. They are in the clothes that they wore to church on Sundays and when we went to town for window-shopping, because if you are going to hand your daughter over to a perfect stranger, you need to look your best.

  My mother wears a white dress with big red poppies all over it. Around her waist is a cloth belt in the same material, and on her head a red hat with a white plastic flower on it. Her shoes and bag are white. My father is in a safari suit whose colour I can no longer remember. Or perhaps it wasn’t a safari suit at all that he wore, and I have only put him in one because it is what all the men wore in those days. His hair shines with Brylcreem.

  It was a happy day for me. I wore my favourite dress, a white lacy dress with a purple sash, my Christmas dress from the year before. I was in town, far from the torments of my school-playground nemesis, Nhau, who tormented me as much at home as at school because he lived on our street. I was in town with my father, who held my hand as we walked. I was happiest about this, that I had him to myself, with one sister at school and the other recently dead.

  To crown my joy, a white woman in the chocolate section of the department store came up to us as we moved towards the lifts. She wore glasses with frames that elongated upwards into points on each side of her face, giving her eyes a distorted look, as though I were seeing them through the milk bottles, the gold-and silver-topped ones, that we bought at the shops. ‘She looks like an angel; isn’t she an angel?’ she said. She gave me a dollar coin. It felt large and unfamiliar in my hand.

  That brings with it another, earlier memory, of the twenty-five-cent coin that a nurse gave me when I cried hard after an injection at Gomo, the government hospital for the poor. I had bought sweets, which Nhau persuaded me to plant in the street outside his house. They would grow into a large sweet tree, he said.

  From the chocolate section on the ground floor, we walked to the lift. A man in a maroon uniform with a large scar running down his face announced each floor as we reached it. ‘Third floor: children’s toys, children’s clothes and tearoom,’ he said as we left the lift.

  My parents and I sat on one side of a booth. A bee hovered over my glass of Cherry Plum before toppling into the fizzy purple drink. It tried to fly out but its wings were wet and heavy and it floundered in the bubbles. And there was ice cream to go with the Cherry Plum, an elaborate sundae that Lloyd bought for me – Lloyd was on the other side of the booth – complete with a whole banana and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.

  I remember, too, the first words that Lloyd said to me. ‘Speak, Mnemosyne,’ he said.

  I had no way of knowing then that Lloyd was teasing me, or that Mnemosyne was another word for my name, Memory. But perhaps I am confusing this with the second day that I saw him, the day he walked me to his car and into my new life.

  I could also start by telling you all about Lloyd. I could start by telling you that I did not kill him. ‘Murder,’ said the prosecutor who laid out the case against me at the High Court, ‘is the unlawful and intentional killing of a human being who was alive at the time.’

  After the police came for me on the night he died, after they arrested me and took me to the police station at Highlands, after I had spent three days without food or drink, after I had wept myself hoarse and my marrow dry – for Lloyd, I told myself, but really it was the fear – and after the dreams started coming again, I told them what they wanted to hear.

  Their disbelief exploded in bursts of laughter. ‘Just tell us the real truth. You were his girlfriend and he was your boyfriend. He was your sugar daddy. Just tell us the truth, that you killed him for the money.’

  It is strange, the inconsequential thoughts that come at a time like that. As I looked at the constable who headed my interrogation, I noticed that his jutting-out eyes gave him the staring effect of a drunken gargoyle on a public building. ‘Or maybe he made you do funny things to him in bed? This is a serious case, this one, it is no laughing matter.’

  His laughter erupted thickly into the room. Two large dimples appeared in his cheeks, producing a startling transformation. The gargoyle had become a cherub.

  ‘And it was the money, isn’t it. They have too much, these whites,’ said his partner, a stocky woman in a faded uniform that seemed ready to burst with every movement she made. A button had already fallen from its place on her tunic.

  I could not stop looking at the pink plastic rollers in her hair. Even in my distress, the orphaned thought came to me that surely, no one made plastic rollers like those any more, the spiky ones that attach themselves to your hair together with sharp plastic pokers.

  ‘A nice-looking young woman like you,’ she said. ‘You are not so bad-looking but for the, well, you know. You certainly know how to take care of yourself; I must give you that. But honestly, why else would you live with a white man like that, alone, just the two of you alone in that big house?’

  She dug her right thumb into her left nostril as she spoke.

  I repeated what I had already told them. ‘I lived with Lloyd Hendricks because my parents sold me to him as a child.’

  Even as I said it, I knew that no one would believe me, and why should they, when I could hardly believe it myself, when I had struggled to understand it all my life. From the moment I saw my mother stuff the money that Lloyd had given her into her bra, from the moment after Lloyd shut the door of his car on me, I have wondered how my parents could have brought themselves to do it.

  ‘My parents sold me to him,’ I repeated.

  Officer Rollers looked at Officer Dimples and laughed.

  ‘What is she talking?’ she said. With her index finger, she flicked dried mucus from her thumb. ‘We do not sell children in this country,’ she said. ‘What are you talking?’

  There was a loud scrape as she pushed her chair back from the table to walk out of the room. Her voice came back to us from down the corridor. ‘Hu
yai mundinzwirewo zvirimuno.’

  At her invitation, the room swarmed with officers. As they crowded around me with their mocking laughter and loud voices, I knew that there would be no convincing them. And if they did not believe the truth of this basic fact, how could I convince them of how he had actually died? What imaginative powers did they possess, these men and women in their brown-and-grey uniforms, this woman in her strained seams and pink rollers, this man who leered as he imagined funny things with white sugar daddies, what could make them see the horror of the moments that followed after I found Lloyd dead?

  Lloyd rarely talked openly about how I came to live with him. When he spoke of it at all, it was always in euphemisms. He spoke of ‘taking me in’, of ‘giving me a home’, the good-hearted rich man taking in the poor black child, the cheerful Cheeryble giving room and board to an ungrateful Dickensian orphan. Except that it was really a case of the white man buying the black child, apart, of course, from the ‘well, you know’, as Officer Rollers called it, the condition that makes me black but not black, white but not white. That is how it was, and I will tell you all about it.

  2

  I should feel afraid. I should wake in the night, soaked in sweat from fearful dreams. I should have palpitations, no appetite and endless runs.

  I have felt afraid. In those early days, as I awaited the trial and bail was denied, I shared a cell with Mavis Munongwa, the only other woman who is here for murder. That was before I got my own cell.

  I covered my ears as Mavis screamed out the names of the children that she had killed. I was sometimes afraid to close my eyes and go to sleep. But even then, fear did not hold me completely to itself. I was insulated by my sense that none of this was real. That none of this was true. That it was too preposterous to be real.

  I still feel afraid now, sometimes, but it is mostly in my dreams that fear comes to me and I find myself drowning before I startle myself awake. Outside of those dreams, I sleep well, or as well as I can on a prison-issue bed in a cell whose dimensions fall short of those prescribed by international treaties on the sagacious and humane treatment of the prisoner. I eat well, or as well as one can eat when the food is as bad as it is here.

  Mostly, I just feel bored. You do something often enough, even something like waiting for your own death, and it too becomes routine.

  I am writing this in my cell because Loveness has allowed me to take the notebooks and pens back with me. It has been three weeks since you gave me the notebooks and I started writing. You were my first visitor from the outside. And you were certainly the first visitor that any of us have ever had from overseas. Even here in Chikurubi, as in the rest of Zimbabwe, we value above all else the things that come from outside ourselves. Well, maybe not Synodia, the head guard.

  They talked about you after I left, Loveness and Synodia. They were perplexed as to why a white journalism woman, as Loveness called you, would come all the way from America just to talk to a murderer like me. Synodia snatched from me the card that you left behind, and read your name and address as though they were lies that I had made up just to annoy her. ‘Linda Carter,’ she said as she read your card with her thumb over it. ‘Who is this Linda Carter?’

  ‘It’s Melinda Carter,’ I said. ‘She is a journalist who lives in Washington, in America.’

  Synodia twisted her face into a moue of disbelief. ‘Pwelinda, Pwelinda,’ she said, and flung the card back at me. ‘Pwashington, Pwashington. Can you eat America? I said, can you eat America? If you can, you shall eat America until you are full of America. Pwamerica, Pwamerica.’

  I call these statements Synodic Utterances. I am sure they make perfect sense in her mind as she is formulating them. They just somehow lose all meaning when they are uttered.

  You were the first visitor that I have had, outside my lawyer, Vernah Sithole. My first outside visitor in the two years, three months, seven days and thirteen hours that I have been here. Until Vernah became interested in my case, the only outsider I saw was the woman from the Goodwill Fellowship.

  It was Vernah’s idea that I should tell my story to you. Before she sent you to interview me, she told me that I should write down every detail that I could remember, that I should record everything that could make a sympathetic case. ‘It is important for the appeal,’ she said. ‘It is important because the death penalty is mandatory in cases of murder, and we have to find extenuating circumstances. It is the only way to commute the sentence.’

  The appeals here are not looped in the endless cycle that goes on in America. And there is no governor to grant clemency at the last dramatic minute. I have just one appeal, to the Supreme Court. Vernah has appealed both the sentence and the conviction. The judges can do any of three things: they can confirm the conviction and uphold the sentence; confirm the conviction but quash the sentence; and, best of all, they could quash both the conviction and the sentence.

  Look at me, with my legalese. I have become an expert in my own case. Perhaps I would not be here at all if Vernah had been my lawyer when I was arrested, or if she had represented me at my trial. I had no lawyer at all. When I confessed to killing Lloyd, I had not slept or eaten for days. That is another reason Vernah is convinced my appeal will succeed.

  As I have said, writing to you was another of Vernah’s suggestions. ‘Write it to Melinda Carter,’ she said. ‘Tell her everything, even the things you think she already knows.’

  You cannot imagine how strange it is to be addressing this to you. Like every person who has read the magazine you write for, I am familiar with your work. Every time I bought your magazine, I skipped the big celebrity interviews, the Iraq War and financial-scandal exposés, and made your column the first feature I read every month.

  So I know that you have made a career out of exposing miscarriages of justice. Vernah has told me that you are here for a year to research a series of essays on our benighted justice system.

  Verity Gutu, that veritable fount of endless and often irrelevant information, told me that I was in good hands with Vernah Sithole. She said, and these were her exact words, ‘You are in good hands with that Advocate Sithole woman.’

  Loveness told me about her defence of a woman in Gweru who had thrown her baby down a pit latrine. The baby had not survived; she had drowned in the faeces and urine and rank sweat. Loveness said Vernah got her off with a one-year suspended sentence. ‘A pity,’ the magistrate said, ‘that the lawyer showed more remorse than her client.’

  Until the reprieve that Vernah is fighting for comes, if it comes at all, I write this in the shadow of the gallows. If the Department of Public Prosecution and the Department of Prisons have their way, I will swing from a rope and hang until my neck lengthens to breaking point or it snaps and my bowels open and my life is extinct and I am given a pauper’s funeral and an unmarked grave.

  I was thinking today about the question you asked me on our second meeting: why none of the journalists here have been interested in my story. On my less cynical days, I would answer that other things matter more: who will win the election; who will govern next; which man has killed his wife with what instrument; who will win Big Brother Africa; football scores and cricket results; mysterious happenings involving sorcery and grave robberies, goblins and curses.

  In many ways I am glad that no one has chosen to tell my story. When the papers first reported Lloyd’s death, they focused on my condition, just as had always been done in the township where I lived before Lloyd bought me. There was a brutal honesty in how the children regarded anyone different. If they saw a person with no legs, they did not point out a person living with no legs, or a person living with no sight; they shouted, hona chirema, hona bofu, come and see the cripple, come and see the blind man, calling attention to each deficiency.

  Their attitude was implicitly rooted in the language itself. Bofu is in noun class five, denoting things, just like benzi, the word for a mad person. Chirema, like a chimumumu, is in noun class seven, also denoting things, objects, lifele
ss objects or incomplete, deficient persons. As murungudunhu or musope, I find myself with normal people in noun class one. But murungudunhu is heavy with meaning. As a murungudunhu, I am a black woman who is imbued not with the whiteness of murungu, of privilege, but of dunhu, of ridicule and fakery, a ghastly whiteness.

  I thought at first that writing all of this down for you would be difficult, but the memories are flooding my mind, faster than I can write them down. Mobhi’s feet, the soil of Mharapara Street on her soles, stick out from the bucket of her death. Copperplate thunders across the Umwinsidale downs. Lloyd and Zenzo’s laughter becomes the voice of the Baptist telling me to reject Satan. The waters of the Mukuvisi close over my head as I scream in terror.

  The memories have been coming since I have been here. Long before Vernah Sithole asked me to write it down for you, I have had yawning space in which to do nothing but think and reflect. There is nothing to do here in those twelve dead hours between four thirty in the afternoon, when we are locked up for the night, and four thirty in the morning, when the siren goes. Except for the Bible, there is nothing to read, and there is no one for me to talk to because I have my own cell.

  We are allowed to take our Bibles back to our cells, but Synodia does not often let me take mine back with me. My very existence irritates her. She hates that I speak English, she hates that I once lived with white people, she hates that I studied outside the country, she hates that I am here for murder.

  So I reflect on my life, to rework the events that brought me here, to rearrange and reimagine them in an endless cycle of what-ifs.

  Jimmy Blue Butter envies my old life with Lloyd. She envies Summer Madness, the house that her imagination has transmuted into a mansion of monstrous proportions. She does not understand how someone who once lived in such a mansion can so calmly sleep on a mattress on the floor of a prison cell or eat bread with green mould on it. She does not understand how I can stand with the others repairing the condemned goods in the dirty storage room we call the Condemn, or how I can stand hour after hour in the laundry, washing and ironing the clothes of the guards who insist that we call them by the affectionate term Mbuya Guard even as they exercise their petty tyrannies over us.