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  Pepukai did not know which of this medley of questions to answer, so she only said. ‘My flight is tonight. I work in a field called transitional justice.’

  ‘Zvenyu!’ said Plaxedes, but without paying much attention. ‘My sister went there only seven months, she was in London but not London exactly, she was in Men Chester, do you know it, and she was almost as light as a Coloured when she returned. Akadhipotwa together with her husband, my Ba’mkuruTryson, they were both deported. Luck’enough, they did not yet have their son Kuku. Do you have a white man? But you don’t look like the ngoma kurira mbira dzenharira type, you are too polished, you are not the type they like. My sister MaiKuku says white men like black women who just look rough and who wear zvechiRasta Rastaso.’

  ‘Ngoma kurira chiikowo iwe,’ said Ma’Shero. ‘Stop going on about white men, Plaxedes, have you not heard about Kindness?’

  ‘Kindness?’

  ‘Kindness is late. She has passed away.’

  ‘Haa?’

  In her surprise, Plaxedes pulled at Pepukai’s hair.

  Pepukai winced, but the other woman did not notice.

  Plaxedes pointed to Kindness’s empty station. ‘Do you mean this Kindness, this one right here?’

  ‘That Kindness,’ MbuyaMaTwins called out from under the dryer.

  ‘Ichi chitekete ichi? Uyu Kindness wekuzvinzwa uyu, who walked like her feet did not touch the ground and talked like she was chewing water?’ said Plaxedes.

  ‘That very one,’ said Ma’Shero.

  ‘That Kindness?’

  ‘That Kindness.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She was shot by her boyfriend.’

  ‘She was shot by her boyfriend?’

  ‘She was shot by her boyfriend.’

  ‘But that one had so many boyfriends!’

  ‘That is just what we were saying,’ said Matilda. ‘She wanted to be upper class that one, and she thought the way to be upper class was to go out with an upper-class man, now look at her.’

  ‘Ii, I should let my sister know,’ said Plaxedes.

  For Pepukai’s benefit, she added, ‘That’s MaiKuku, the one who was deported from Men Chester, but she is quite well up now. They live in Mebryne, in Hedgepark and my Ba’mkuruTryson even has relatives in Ballantyne Park.’

  Into her phone, she said, ‘Hello. Hello, Kuku. Ipa mhamha phone. Ipa mhamha phone. Ipa mha … Hello, MaiKuku? … Ende futi! Iwe, you won’t believe it. Kindness is late … Kindness! … Kindness mhani iwe, wekunokuFiyo … The hairdresser … Don’t you remember Kindness? … You met her that time at the Food Court at Eastgate, remember? … We had gone with BabaKuku to watch that film, what was it called? Rabbit, Habit something, the one about those creatures who look like tokoloshis but walk and talk and act like normal people even though they are not actual people … Yes, Hobbit. That’s the one. We had gone to watch Hobbit. And she was walking in front of us and I said to you, MaiKuku, I said, I know that bottom … Yes … Yes … Very big … Chivhindikiti so … Yes … That’s the one. She wore a tight red trouser and a white blouse … Yes … Nekabhutsu kake keblueso … Ende aichena zvisingaiti mwana iyeye, asikuzvinwa. Hanzi she died … Shot … I said shot … Yes, shot … Yes … Shot with a gun…. Ufunge … Yes … Some boyfriend … I don’t know, mira ndivhunze.’

  She turned to Matilda, ‘Where did this happen?’

  ‘Northfields, in town,’ said Matilda.

  Plaxedes turned back to her phone. ‘Northfields … Northfields. In town. I said North … Ah, I have run out of airtime.’

  ‘Ii vasikana, inga ihorror,’ she said. ‘Manje I have to go. My break is over but I will be back in an hour to find out more. If you are not finished with the braids, I will even come and help.’

  Pepukai breathed at last.

  Plaxedes’s phone rang as she left, and they could hear her say, ‘Northfields … Northfields … Yes … She was shot at Northfields.’

  As soon as she was out of hearing, Ma’Shero said, ‘Is there a bigger gossip than that Plaxedes?’

  ‘You know, don’t you,’ said Zodwa, ‘that her husband’s sister and aunt actually beat her up once because of her gossiping?’

  ‘Serves her right,’ said MbuyaMaTwins. ‘She is not the type that you can tell anything.’

  As she talked, MbuyaMaTwins moved from under the dryer to a dressing station. Shylet stood behind her to unroll her hair from the curlers and style her hair. MbuyaMaTwins admired her reflection in the mirror. Pepukai thought the wash and set made her neck and head look like a very small mushroom on a particularly bulbous stalk. As Shylet sprayed liberal doses of a smelly moisturiser over the finished hair, Pepukai tried not to cough.

  ‘Ende machena zvekwaMaiChenai chaizvo,’ said Ma’Shero. ‘That looks so nice.’

  ‘Ndachenaka?’ said MbuyaMaTwins. She preened in the mirror as she turned her head, the tips of her spread-out fingers lightly tapping her new hairstyle. ‘I am going to the First Lady’s rally on Saturday. Then we have a function at Feathers Hotel in Mebhuraini. This time, bambo vekwangu will have to come, I won’t hear any more of his excuses. What sort of golf is it that is played at all hours?’

  The women nudged each other. MbuyaMaTwins, unseeing, continued to admire herself in the mirror. They all looked up as a voice came from the door. ‘T’ookumbirawo rubatsiro vanhu vaMwari. T’ookumbirawo rubatsiro vanhu vaJehovah.’

  It was a blind beggar who was led by a small boy of no more than seven or eight years of age. The man wore tattered blue overalls while the boy wore a shirt and shorts that belonged to two different school uniforms. They were both barefoot.

  Matilda said, ‘Does anyone have a dollar?’

  MbuyaMaTwins rummaged through her overstuffed bag. Pepukai opened her purse. Genia let go of Pepukai’s hair so that she could dig into her trouser pockets. Ma’Shero and Zodwa went to their stations to get their handbags. As the boy went from woman to woman collecting money, the old man dropped to his knees in thanksgiving, raised his voice in blessing and clapped his hands in gratitude.

  ‘Mwari wenyu vakukomborerei, vakukomborerei, vakukomborerei. Mugare kure kwemoto vakukomborerei, vakukomborerei, vakukomborerei.’

  They left the salon.

  MbuyaMaTwins took twenty-two dollars from her bag and handed it to Matilda. ‘I will give you an extra two dollars for a drink,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks, MbuyaMaTwins,’ said Matilda. ‘Shylet!’

  Shylet’s face brightened.

  ‘Go and give this to Plaxedes at TM, I owe her thirty for the relaxer. Tell her the rest is coming.’

  Shylet’s shoulders drooped as she walked out.

  ‘Right, girls,’ said MbuyaMaTwins, ‘bofu iri rabata mwoyo wangu mufunge. I have to go, but before I do we need to pray.’ Without further prompting, the women melted from Pepukai to gather around MbuyaMaTwins in the middle of the salon, their heads bowed. Unsure of what to do, Pepukai joined them.

  MbuyaMaTwins’ face became twisted with effort.

  ‘Bless, Lord, everyone in this salon, Lord, and especially this daughter who is taking a flight today. Send her journey mercies, dear Lord. Do not put evil thoughts in the mind of the pilot, Lord, bvisai utsinye mupfungwa mapilot, bvisai mweya wetsvina Baba mupfungwa dzapilot, itai kuti pilot amhare ndenge zvakanakisa, zvinokomborera imi, let the pilot land the plane with no incident, let him not crash it deliberately.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Genia.

  ‘We ask you to receive into your loving arms our sister Kindness, take her into your glory, Mwari Baba to you she has come to rest Lord. Ndimi Mwari Baba vemasimba, ndimi Mwari Baba munopa nekutora, munopa ndimi Mwari Baba, ndimi Mwari Baba munogona, Mwari Baba munogona, Mwari Baba munogona kani, Mwari Baba munogona!’

  ‘Amen,’ the women chorused.

  ‘We ask you to guide us today in everything we do, so that all that we do may be to honour your holy name, mutiponese panjodzi, muve nesu mumabasa, tingwarire zvatinotaura, tirumbidze zita renyu nguva dzese, tidadise pane zvese.’ />
  ‘Amen,’ said Genia.

  ‘We ask for your special blessings on the First Lady, Mwari Baba, as she travels around the country sharing her deep and educated wisdom with the nation, watch over her and over all the Members of the Women’s League, Jehovah, muvasvetutse panjodzi.’

  ‘Amen,’ moaned Matilda.

  ‘This we ask in Jesus’s name. Muzita raBaba, nereMwanakomana, nereMweya Musande. Amen.’

  ‘Amen.’

  MbuyaMaTwins crossed herself and kissed her rosary. She picked up her bag off the floor, stuffed her white headscarf into its capacious depths and with a radiant smile said to Pepukai, ‘Wofamba mushe dhali, travel well, my dear’, and to the others, ‘Ndiyoyo vasikana, see you next week.’

  ‘Inga vakatozvipengera zvavo mothers ava,’ said Genia as soon as the client was out of hearing. ‘So she is really serious about this Women’s League stuff? And isn’t she supposed to be a Roman Catholic?’

  ‘You know she is,’ said Matilda. ‘You saw what she is wearing, so why do you ask?’

  ‘Because she prays like a Pentecostal, that’s why, zvechurch yemweya chaiyo,’ said Genia.

  Shylet piped up from the sink. ‘She apparently wants to set up her own church. She is doing it with that other fat one, her best friend from Mbare, Makorinde. They are setting up a women‘s Ministry. That’s why she is working with the Women’s League, to get all the permits.’

  ‘That is a smart move,’ said Genia. ‘If she does not make money from the Women’s League politics stuff, there is plenty money to be made in these new churches.’

  ‘And she will need all the prayers she can get with that husband of hers,’ said Ma’Shero. ‘He is the busiest unemployed man in the city.’

  ‘And he is never alone either,’ laughed Genia.

  ‘Makwatuza,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Makwatikwati,’ echoed Zodwa.

  ‘Kuda zvinhu!’ said Ma’Shero.

  They laughed and clapped their hands to each other.

  It took a little more talk of Kindness and another hour before Pepukai was done. The braids fell beautifully and lightly from her head, in hundreds of long thin ropes that were perfectly even. The last thing was to soak the ends in hot water to seal them and make sure that they did not unravel. Genia held up a mirror to the one before her so that Pepukai could see the back of her head.

  The women beamed as they admired their handiwork.

  ‘You are so right,’ Matilda said, ‘this is very old-fashioned but it really suits your face.’

  ‘Perfection sipo yekukwizira chaiyo,’ said Ma’Shero.

  ‘Maworesa nhunzi yegreen,’ agreed Genia.

  Shylet approached, shaking the can of the stinky spray. Pepukai held up her hands as if to ward off evil. ‘It’s really okay, thank you, Shylet,’ she said. ‘I do not need the spray, I will do that later.’

  She paid the eighty dollars that Matilda had requested, and gave her an extra twenty. ‘This is my chema for Kindness,’ she said. ‘I hope it all goes well.’

  As she spoke, Matilda’s phone buzzed out a new message.

  ‘It’s from the cousin sister of Kindness. She has no airtime, but she says we have to come now,’ said Matilda. ‘The mourners are gathering at their house in Mebhoreen.’

  ‘Is it okay if I just wait here for my hair to dry a bit?’ Pepukai asked.

  It was fine, Matilda said, Shylet would stay to lock up. They said their goodbyes and bustled out. Pepukai continued to hear their voices until they turned the corner past the butcher’s. In thirty minutes, her hair was dry enough for her to leave. The last Pepukai saw of Snow White Hairdressing was Shylet sitting at Kindness’s station, plaiting the rest of her hair. That night, on her flight to Amsterdam, Pepukai chose the chicken over the fish. Nor did she eat any of the orange segments in her fruit salad, choosing to eat, instead, the grapes and cubed melon and the delicate slivers of apple.

  The Death of Wonder

  But let judgement run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

  – The Book of Amos –

  Asi kururamisa ngakuyerere semvura, vuye kururama sorwizi runongoramba rucidira.

  – Buku yaMuprofita Amosi –

  In the newspapers, they called him the murdered man who got his own justice. They said he fought his own battle. When I talk about his case, particularly in a drinking setting when the shadows of the night are lengthening and the beer and talk are flowing and we take a turning to the supernatural, I will often do a bit of grandstanding, you know, making light of it all and hamming it up for effect, but if I am to tell you the truth, Wonder’s case shook me up in a way that no other case had ever done. These days, I am no longer as secure in myself as I once was. I am no longer as certain in my beliefs.

  Three facts, at least, are beyond dispute. The pathologist who handled Wonder’s autopsy is indeed mad. If you ever have reason to go to the psychiatric hospital at Ingutsheni in Bulawayo, and I hope, for your sake, that you never do, you will find him there, but whether he is there because of his handling of the post-mortem, I cannot say.

  It is also true that the two cousin brothers who were the killer’s accomplices have departed this life. But did they die simply because it was their time, or was it, as all of Gokwe would have you believe, the wrath of Wonder reaching out from the grave to bring them to him? And it is true that in his cell at Whawha Prison, the man who killed him is now blind. That was Wonder, says Gokwe, using his own mother’s blindness to close forever the eyes of his murderer.

  Without ever actually using that word, I always thought that I was an atheist. As a policeman, you see enough raped children, battered women and murdered men to doubt that God exists. Or else you conclude that if this is what the world looks like with a supposedly All-seeing and All-knowing Being in charge of it, such a Being is not one in which you want to believe.

  I used to love that book by Stanley Nyamfukudza, do you know it, The Non-Believer’s Journey? It was one of my O level set books. I thought it a particularly apposite title for my own life. But it is an awkward position to be a non-believer when the companions on your life’s journey are all believers for whom even the slightest whiff of disbelief is enough to brand you the leader of one of those Satanic sects that always seem to be popping up in Mufakose. So I kept my disbelief to myself. I went to church every Sunday with my wife and children. I sang the hymns. I said the prayers.

  My disbelief went the other way too, in the direction of what my mother called Chivanhu. Until Wonder’s case, I did not believe at all in the world of traditional beliefs and all that goes with it, you know, the naked witches flying in the night, the talking snakes that spit out cash, the owls and omens. I do not recall when it was that it seemed preposterous to me that people could believe that women, and they only ever seemed to be women, could fly naked in the night on winnowing baskets, or sit astride hyenas as they travelled to eat the flesh of the dead.

  At the most basic of levels, it struck me as a stupid waste that witches would expend such marvellous abilities on such pointless activities as flying to cemeteries to eat rotting corpses, when they could have gone anywhere in the world that they chose to go without the trouble of applying for visas or purchasing air tickets. They could have transformed aviation as we know it. Those Wright brothers would have had nothing on them.

  My mother managed to believe in both ChiKristu, Christianity, and Chivanhu. When close family members died, she and the family elders would go to a gata, that supernatural autopsy in which a n’anga is asked to determine how the deceased met his death. My late father succumbed to a combination of lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver when I was twenty-five. My mother wanted us to attend a gata. As she put it, ‘Yes, it may very well be that the doctors are right that it was this lung liver disease that killed him, but we need to find out who it is that gave it to him in the first place, who it was that allowed this to happen.’

  Considering that my Old Man’s liver had finally given out on him after he spe
nt two days drinking non-stop in a township shebeen, a death preceded by a lifetime of smoking three twenty-packs of Kingsgate every day and drinking his wages away with every hooker between Zengeza 4 and Seke before coming home to use his fists on his wife and children, his death under those circumstances should have been a surprise to absolutely no one. And as you can probably tell, I have no fond memories of the man. We were like the family in that Oliver Mtukudzi song, what is it called, ‘Tozeza baba, baba chidhakwa’; we were a family ruled by fear and alcohol. It’s probably why I became a cop, come to think of it, to get over that sense of helplessness, that constant feeling of powerlessness.

  But back to the main point. After my passing out parade at Morris Depot and I was posted to police villages across the country, I took the lead from my superiors in how the law dealt with witchcraft. Incidentally, it was usually the same sort of person accused, an unpopular in-law, the usual family conflicts spilling out into accusations of witchcraft. It was striking that the young and the beautiful were never accused; shavi reuroyi, that pestilential spirit of witchcraft, it seems, chooses to possess only the old and unpopular, the lame and the halt.

  In such cases, we ignored all the mumbo jumbo and the superstitions. We concentrated on what the law could actually touch. We focused on the actual harm caused, and punished that, and on threats to do harm and punished those. The Witchcraft Suppression Act helped keep things in check. A colonial statute from about 1895 or thereabouts, it gave us powers to arrest anyone who accused any other person of witchcraft. In their reforming zeal, our colonial overlords took the view that the belief in witchcraft was a primitive superstition best suppressed by punishing any native who talked of it.

  But as with all things that are driven by punitive legislation and not genuine social change, the act did nothing to suppress witchcraft. It only served to drive underground the work of the many witch-hunting tsikamutanda around the country who never went away. When it was finally repealed a few years ago, I almost choked on my tea when I read the headline in the state paper that trumpeted: ‘GOVERNMENT LEGALISES WITCHCRAFT.’