Rotten Row Read online

  Caught between the bottom and top ends of the school, the Middle boys were disliked by both Juniors and Seniors. The Juniors hated us because, not to put too fine a point on it, we bullied them. We hated the Seniors because when we had been in Junior House, and they in Middle House, they had bullied us. We hated them, they hated us right back, and so rolled the endless cycle of age-based enmity that was as old as St Ignatius.

  We had other reasons for despising the Seniors. With their crisp white shirts and knives and forks in the proper hands, they were too superior for anything. It was not uncommon for a Middle House boy to declare, with blithe insouciance, that as he had swum three or four days before, there was no need to take a shower at all that week. So we found their fastidiousness about hygiene irritating. They did utterly pretentious things like splash eau du cologne on letters to girls. The school letter bag reeked of Drakkar Noir and Insignia and Old Spice.

  And we envied their easy access to the Merrywards. In the year that Zaka was head prefect, relations were particularly strained. A top Razor called Innocent Zvarevashe, whom we called Zed, had made history by becoming the first boy ever from Middle House to be the boyfriend of a Merryward. The Merryward in question was called Hester and she was just brilliant. Not only was she the first girl to join the Maths Olympiad, she also beat all the boys that year, and took her A levels a year early. She was far from being the best of them, but she was a Merryward all the same, even though she had stick-thin legs, large round glasses and hair worn permanently in what were then called standing buns, pointy antennae that made her look like she was on permanent stand-by to receive alien signals. Because of her hair, the Juniors called her Ripley, after the main character in the film Alien.

  On the bus to and from that year’s Maths Olympiad, Zed and Ripley had bonded over a shared passion for polynomial equations and the Fantastic X-Men. Before long, Zed found himself the only khaki-clad boy in the sea of white shirts at See Me time. He began to develop annoying Senior habits like washing daily. We had to stage an intervention when we caught him about to wear his Sunday best to attend Benediction on Thursday.

  For the most part, we encouraged him in his conquest because it made the Seniors feel aggrieved. They saw the Merrywards as their rightful property and resented this Middle House usurpation. Under these circumstances, a Middle and Senior boy were as likely to embrace in friendship as Dingane’s regiments and the Boers were to have a dinner party on the banks of Blood River. We may not have screamed ‘bulalani bathakati’ every time we passed a Senior, but it was a sentiment close to our hearts.

  The friendship between Zaka and Nicodemus started on Division Night. Perhaps the friendship had begun before, but that night was the first that we had any inkling of it. To try and overcome the age allegiances that the Houses created, Loyola was divided into four Divisions of a hundred boys and ten Marys in each. In these Divisions, we competed for the Division Cup. The Divisions were named after four of the Ugandan martyrs: Kaggwa, Kizito, Lwanga and M’kasa. Only the Juniors, Seniors and Marys really ever took this competition seriously: in Middle House, all the Divisions earned so many demerits that any points we earned practically cancelled each other out.

  Zaka’s Division, M’kasa, had won the Division Cup and thus the right to the best food. In addition to sadza and beans and rice and chicken, there were pork pies and corned beef, cake, jelly and custard. It was every schoolboy’s idea of a feast. Zaka ate none of it. Instead, he piled up all of his food on two plates, scraped back his chair and marched to Nicodemus who sat with the Kaggwa table.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and held out the food.

  Nicodemus took the overflowing plates, grinned and said, ‘Thanks, Zaka.’

  There was a collective gasp.

  Zaka knew that all the Junior and Middle boys called him by this name, but we never used it to his face. It was not uncommon, when he passed whole groups of us in the corridor, for us to mutter a sibilant chorus of ‘ZakaZuluZakaZuluZakaZakaZakaZakaZulu’ that died down the minute he whipped around to find us wearing innocent faces. In the ordinary case of a boy who had been as disrespectful as Nicodemus had been, any Senior boy, even one who was not head prefect like Zaka, would have been well within his rights to issue a demerit on the spot or order some other punishment.

  The boys at Kagwa, and across at Lwanga and Kizito looked to see what Zaka would do. He looked down at Nicodemus as though to say something. Then he nodded, turned his back on the Kaggwa table and walked back to M’kasa. He blew the whistle for the prayer, the chatter died down and he remained seated at the table after we had all left.

  Later that night, some boys who had snuck out to smoke behind the library said they heard him sobbing from inside the Prefects’ Room. No one could quite believe it because, whichever way you looked at it, sobbing and Zaka the Zulu did not belong in the same thought. In any event, that moment on Division Night, when Nicodemus called Zaka by his nickname, was the beginning of their friendship. After that, when they were not in their lessons or at sport, they were almost always seen together.

  *

  They were an unlikely pair. Nicodemus was not the kind of fellow who inspired intimacy. Without quite knowing why, we kept him at arm’s length. He was one of the few boys that we called by his Christian name. We had a chap we admiringly called The Tsar Liberator, because, not only was he the most well-endowed of the boys in Middle House, he could also ejaculate the furthest in any ejaculation competition. Nicodemus claimed that he was just as endowed and wanted to be called Mamba.

  Every school has its protocol when it comes to nicknames. Ours was that you did not choose your own: you waited to be given one. Nicodemus put our backs up by suggesting his own. Nor did we ever josh him about by his surname like we did each other. He was just Nicodemus.

  He had had a brief notoriety earlier that year because the only other boy he had been close to, a volleyball setter called Takunda Gumbo, and who had also been in Middle House, had killed himself. Gumbo had been at the school for only half a term before he was withdrawn. The suicide had happened away from the school. We had subjected Nicodemus to some questioning and curiosity at the time, but we soon discovered that the reason for it was entirely unconnected to the school. Gumbo had tried to forge his stepmother’s signature on a cheque. When she threatened the police, he had killed himself.

  Nicodemus was one of the Razors in the middle school, always near the top of his form. He was at Loyola on a scholarship. He came from a family with many other children but only one income. On Visiting Sundays, Zaka’s family brought groceries for Nico demus too. Without Zaka’s Visiting Sunday food, Nicodemus would have had only the food that the school provided and Loyola was given to what you might call Spartan conditions. We muttered to ourselves that he was taking things a bit far when he joined Zaka’s mother and sisters as they leapt, ululated and danced around Zaka when he won the Maths Award and the St Loyola Award for Services to St Ignatius.

  What surprised us the most about this friendship was that only Nicodemus seemed happy in it. Zaka seemed to shrink into himself whenever they were together. As the boys got closer, the other Middle House boys began to grumble that Zaka gave Nicodemus privileges that were denied them. On at least three occasions, Nicodemus was seen watching the Merrywards swimming from the Prefects’ Room. He was even seen smoking in there. When another prefect reported the matter to Zaka, the head did nothing about it. Every time that Zaka had to clean up the San, Nicodemus was there with him.

  We began to see that his friendship with Zaka gave Nicodemus a talismanic sort of power. We began to include him in our planning for that year’s big mission, Operation Cashel Valley, a raid on the orchard kept by the Loreto sisters. The previous year had seen the successful completion of Operation Zinjanthropus, in which we had lifted Bibiana, the school’s pet chimpanzee, out of her cage and left her to spend an afternoon making merry hell in the Prefects’ Room.

  On the night of Operation Cashel Valley, we snuck in through the wil
d area the Marys called kumapori. It was bad luck that Sister Hedwig came out early, shouted that she could see us, and when we tried to scramble over the fence, the more clumsy of us got stuck on the barbed wire.

  When we refused to say who had been part of the Operation, Father Rector ordered that Zaka do a search of Middle House. We had taken the precaution of hiding the fruit in Nicodemus’s locker, and, sure enough when he reached it, Zaka simply moved to the next without even opening it. That Sunday, he was in the confessional longer than usual.

  *

  By the time that Zaka had left and gone up to university, we had ourselves gone up from Middle to Senior House. We were now the white-shirted. We had our very own Marys, and found ourselves as protective of them as the Seniors before us had been of theirs. We sent them letters drenched in cologne.

  Nicodemus did not go up with us. We heard in the first week of the new year that he had transferred to a government day school in Mount Pleasant. As the university was also in Mount Pleasant, someone joked about him following Zaka who was now doing Engines, but we thought nothing of it then. In any event, even if they did chance to meet in Mount Pleasant, they would not have seen each other for long. Before the end of the year came the news that Zaka had been asked to retake all his subjects. It surprised us that university gave this sort of second chance. It surprised us even more that Zaka would need it.

  The next thing we heard, he was teaching maths in the valley, at St Peter Claver. We saw him during exam week, when we took a break from the stress of it all with a beer or two at Donhodzo.

  Zaka was with a group of village men who were drinking from a shared calabash of beer as they played draughts. When he saw us, Zaka shot up. It seemed to us that he looked pleased and mortified at the same time.

  He was in his old uniform. There is only one word to describe its state, well, maybe three: kutindivara, kusauka, faded. The white shirt looked as though it had been washed many times over in dirty water and had been dried in the dust. The black trousers were shiny from over-ironing. His shrivelled tie hung from his neck like a curse. He licked his lips and not meeting our eyes, said, ‘Yes, yes, I am here now. How is everything at the school?’

  Our eyes followed his to the neighbouring hill, to the rooftops of St Ignatius, red against the November sky. After we answered him, someone asked after Nicodemus.

  Zaka said, ‘Oh, Nicodemus. Fine, fine. Yes, yes.’

  An awkward silence followed.

  Then Zaka burst into speech.

  How was Father Rector? Was he still studying the organisms that lived inside figs? Had he managed to beat Kasparov yet? How was Bibiana? Who had won the Ignatius Award? Had we defended the school’s National High School Quiz title? How had we done at the Maths Olympiad? Who was head prefect?

  We told him what we could: that the Entomological Society of Southern Africa had named some new organisms in Father Rector’s honour, that Bibiana had escaped and been found outside Blessed Mary House, and that we had won the Olympiad but lost the Quiz. When we told him who the head prefect was, he made a moue of disapproval.

  The conversation trailed off.

  He sat back down with his companions. We moved away. It was strange to be drinking a few metres from him, and to recognise in this diminished Zaka our old head prefect. Though he kept glancing our way, he did not join us again.

  The whole school saw him again a few weeks after that. We were at Mass when he walked in during the Profession of Faith. He left before the Recessional. We saw him as we emptied out of the chapel, a small figure in his faded uniform, walking down the hill to the valley below, his shadow long behind him. That was the last time that any of us saw him. He remained at Peter Claver for only one more year. After that he vanished. Then he appeared in the newspapers, accused of murder and looking as guilty as anyone would do in a mug-shot.

  *

  Over the years, Zaka’s many irritations softened as they acquired the out-of-focus fondness of remembrance. First on the Alumni Forum of the school website, then, as technology advanced, on the Loyola page on first Myspace, then on Facebook, shared recollections of the time that Zaka had banned one thing or the other would be followed by a flood of more ‘remember when’s.

  We were everywhere, home and abroad, displaced by ambition, and by the shrinking hopes of our own nation, but on the Internet, we gathered to live again the dappled, sunlit days of our boyhoods. Zaka himself never popped up in these discussions. There were occasional Zaka sightings both at home and out in the diaspora where Old Ignatians had spread out. An old boy based in London said he saw someone who looked like Zaka ducking into a train at Paddington station. There was a Zaka sighting in Dallas, and another in Auckland.

  The most likely seemed to be one closer to home, in Zaka’s original village. An old boy who was a doctor at Gutu District Hospital said he saw a Zaka-like figure waiting to receive treatment. When the old boy approached to confirm his name, the Zaka figure walked away. The old boy could not be sure that it had really been him.

  By the time that we all met again for the College Diamond Jubilee, Nicodemus was dead and Zaka was awaiting death by hanging in prison. He escaped only because there was no hangman. Under the marquee that had been set up in the second sports field, old boy after old boy came forward to shake hands with Father Rector and slap each others’ backs in fat-handed congratulation. We had reason to be pleased with ourselves. Our families had given us to the Jesuits as boys, and now, as men in the world, we had achieved what the motto of our Founding Saint had commanded. We had set the world on fire. We had not done it in the sense that he had meant, that soldier philosopher, we were not soldiers of God beneath the banner of Christ, but we had, all the same, placed our school at the heart of national life.

  Among us were six members of parliament, ten judges, including the Chief Justice, enough lawyers to start a hundred class actions, enough doctors to staff ten district hospitals and enough engineers, architects and quantity surveyors to transform one of our many growth points into a small city. Almost every boy had slotted perfectly into his predestined hole.

  Not Zaka and Nicodemus. We talked about them as the afternoon crept over Loyola. We asked the same question that had been asked in court: why did Zaka do it? An old boy who was a judge told us that he had followed the trial when it came before his colleague, an old Merryward called Justice Dendere. She had had no option but to find him guilty, the old boy said.

  Zaka had refused to speak or offer any justification or defence. He had said nothing, and it was that silence that finally condemned him. There were no extenuating circumstances. It was a killing without a purpose, the judge said, without mercy or remorse. There was only one sentence possible: death by hanging.

  We finally got the truth, or a glimpse of it, from Kasparov. The timid little chap who had shadowed Zaka was now the expansive and voluble owner of an employment agency that recruited careworkers for hospitals in Luton. In the heat of that August day, he had us hanging from his every word.

  Just before the Division Night on which Zaka and Nicodemus had become friends, Kasparov had gone to play a game with Zaka in the Prefects’ Room. As he hunched over the chessboard, Zaka had not appeared himself. He had lost three games in a row, but still insisted that Kasparov stay long past the Junior House bedtime.

  Then he had burst into garbled speech about being caught by Nicodemus as he lay in the empty sanatorium with Gumbo, the boy who had died after forging his stepmother’s signature. From that moment, Nicodemus had begun to bleed both boys of money. Gumbo tried to pay him by getting a big sum all at once. When he was caught, he killed himself. Nicodemus changed his tactics. It was attention he wanted now, attention and friendship. Zaka’s friendship.

  As Zaka spoke, Kasparov received the tale with mingled horror and panic. He did not want to be the recipient of these dreadful confidences. Foremost in his mind was the thought of the demerit he would get if Brother Peter caught him out of bed. When Zaka released him, with a forceful dec
laration that he would get it if he told anyone, Kasparov crept away. He was relieved to find that he had not been missed.

  The next day, Zaka acted as though nothing of import had happened between them. By the time half-term came, Kasparov had almost forgotten about it. He did not tell anyone. He and Zaka were bound by the old College code of honour: come what may, you did not tell on another boy.

  They never played chess again.

  We heard all this with shock and horror. And though we exclaimed over the waste and pity, we could not blame him for doing nothing. When we looked at the faces of the boys around us, shining with hope in their uniforms, some of them our own children, it came to us just how young we had all been then. Kasparov had been only twelve years of age, turning thirteen that year. We had all of us been boys, even the oldest of us had been no more than seventeen. How could any of us have imagined, in the innocence of those days, of watching the Merrywards and smoking behind the library, in the laughter and japes of our annual raids and operations, that there had been this occluding darkness that cast such a long and pitiless shadow? That had led to two boys’ deaths and would now, all these years later, lead to Zaka’s own?

  We did not linger long on Zaka. We immersed our unease in other, happier, memories. We hid our discomfort in talk of the economy and politics. During the special Celebration Mass, the choral voices soared as they sang the same hymns we had sung all those years ago. The drummers thudded out the fata murungu fata murungu fata murungumurungumurungu drumbeat that had been the soundtrack to our every Sunday. At the close of the service, we said goodbye to Father Rector and to our old teachers. The sun came down as we prepared to leave. As our long line of cars snaked down into the valley, the sun came down behind the red roofs of St Ignatius. In the distance we heard the high shrill of the siren that had punctuated our days, sounding now to signal to the children we left behind that the day had ended and it was time to rest.