An Elegy for Easterly (15 page)

We went with
Sisi
Jenny to our mother's friend's niece's wedding in Canaan between Jerusalem and Engineering in Highfields and she wore a yellow dress with white stars that was too small for my mother. When the master of ceremonies pointed to the lorry that would drive people to the rural home
of the bride, SisiJenny hurtled off in that direction and the last we saw of her was a distant figure in a yellow dress clambering into the packed lorry, her red shoe almost falling from her right foot.

Sisi
Jenny was succeeded by
Sisi
Lucia, who was not pretty, and did not eat too much, and did not enjoy herself at all. She did not smile once in the two months that she was with us; she watched me all the time, and made me feel guilty for no reason. My mother thought she had found the perfect housemaid until
Sisi
Lucia locked Munya and me up in my bedroom and vanished with my mother's new electric kettle and toaster from Barbour's, her favourite pair of shoes and three pairs of my father's trousers.

My mother then tried out poor relations as maids. They came from the rural areas with the musty smell of old smoke on their clothes and the sweet smell of peanut oil on their skin. They delighted in the television and stood mesmerised before its images.
Vatete
Susan sat and watched as the Capwells in
Santa
Barbara
failed to see that Dominic who whispered his words and appeared only in the shadows was really their supposedly dead mother Sophia, as evil Angela Channing tightened her grip on the Gioberti wine estate on
Falcon Crest
, and all the while my mother muttered under her breath and the fat congealed on the dishes piled up in the kitchen sink.

The Capwells did find out about Dominic/Sophia and Angela Channing lost to Chase Gioberti, but
Vatete
Susan was not there: she had been replaced by
Mbuya
Stella who liked to stretch out her legs on the floor as she talked through the smoke rings and regaled my bemused father with the latest stories of the antics of the black sheep of their family. Through the convoluted logic of Karanga relationships, at seventeen, she was his mother, and therefore my mother's mother-in-law, to be treated with some respect.

Then my mother decided that it was youth and not the lack of a blood connection that was the problem; the girls were too young, too inexperienced. She found instead a woman much older than her whom we called Auntie in the English way because she was not our relative but was too old to be called by her first name even if it was prefaced by
Sisi
, and whom my grandmother being hard of hearing called Kauntie. Kauntie fell asleep in the middle of the day and forgot to fetch Munya from school and he went hunting for tadpoles in the Chisipite stream, fell and banged his mouth and that was the end of his upper incisor tooth and of Kauntie. And that is how we ended up with
Sisi
Blandina, who spoke Karanga as deep as my grandmother's, and after two years it was almost like she had always been there.

When
Sisi
Blandina told us stories that her grandmother had told her, she began the tales in the traditional manner and said
ngano ngano ngano
, lilting the different syllables, and we replied
ngano
, and she repeated it twice to make sure we were really ready; we chanted back to her in anticipation because we knew that she would lead us to an enchanted realm where boys who turned into lions won the maidens of their hearts' desire, the hare was more cunning than his uncle the baboon, the girl who scorned to squeeze an ugly old woman's sores ended up living in enchantment beneath the water, and the king of a land far away set a trap to find which of his perfidious wives and children had cooked and eaten his royal tortoise.

My mother liked
Sisi
Blandina for different reasons. She did things without being told like arranging the clothes in all our cupboards according to colour and polishing the floors with Cobra polish with such vigour that my father complained that they were too slippery and my mother said he should buy the fitted carpets that she had set her heart on. Instead, my father said, ‘Well, well, we may as well invite the Prime Minister to hold his next rally here and not to bother with Rufaro or Gwanzura,' because
Sisi
Blandina sang songs from the war as she bathed and scrubbed her skin with a pumice stone.

Munya and I knew that there had been a war, but it was only through
Sisi
Blandina that it came to life in our house. She told us stories of the war, the guerrillas marching to her village in Lalapanzi and demanding food, the soldiers following the guerrillas and threatening to shoot the villagers who gave the guerrillas food, and then more guerrillas coming and threatening to shoot all
vatengesi
, traitors who sold them out to the soldiers or refused to give them food. They shot into the air to frighten people, and when her grandmother's dog Pfungwadzebenzi barked, a guerrilla shot him in the stomach and he limped off to the forest to die. Munya put his hand on
Sisi
Blandina's knee and said, ‘When Chenai grows up and buys me a dog, I won't call him Spider, but Pfungwadzebenzi.'

She told us that the villagers stayed up all night in a
pungwe
, a night rally at which guerrilla commanders with bushy beards denounced the Smith regime, told them about
gutsaruzhinji
, the socialism they would bring upon ending the days of Smith. Their voices were hoarse as the villagers chanted the new slogans and sang the new revolutionary songs, while young men with rifles danced to those same songs that
Sisi
Blandina taught us.

I remembered that for the first five years of my life, I lived in a country called Rhodesia with Ian Smith as Prime Minister, and then in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia with a Prime Minister called Abel Muzorewa, and now the country was called Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe was Prime Minister. As for Munya, born on the cusp of independence, just one year away from being among the special born-frees, the songs meant nothing at all.

And so we held our own
pungwes
in my bedroom with Munya and me taking on the role of the villagers and
Sisi
Blandina as our commander; we played out the stories that we thought had happened only in Lalapanzi.

‘I learned even more songs at the camp in Mozambique,'
Sisi
Blandina said. ‘The guerrillas came back and asked for young boys and girls to go with them to be trained and we went all the way through to Chimoio and Nyadzonia in Mozambique.'

We sang those training camp songs as
Sisi
Blandina walked Munya and me to school, swinging our arms
in hers while we swung our book cases on the other arms; we marched to their rhythm and chanted
hau
as she led us in our favourite song, the one we asked for over and over again.

‘Everyone took a new name, a war name, a strong name,'
Sisi
Blandina said. ‘I wanted to call myself Freedom, but there were already seven with that name, and even one called Freedom-now, and four other people called Liberty. Then one of the commanders told us that we were fighting for autonomy and for self-rule and for self-determination, and so that became my name.'

‘That is a long name,' I said in wonder.

Sisi
Blandina laughed and said, ‘No, just Autonomy. I am Blandina Autonomy Mubaiwa. Some of us girls were trained to fight, but the younger ones like me,
and some who could not do the exercises, cooked for the guerrillas and washed their clothes and we sang and we kept them company at night. But the first night, they said I was in Geneva, and they sent me back to the other girls who were also in Geneva.'

‘Is Geneva in Mozambique?' my brother asked.

‘That is not for you to know,' she said. ‘Your sister will know soon enough. See, already her breasts are poking out.'

I stormed off without hearing more, furious that she had voiced my deepest shame. My breasts had started to sprout three months earlier, and I walked with a stoop to hide them. I thought no one had noticed, but
Sisi
Blandina noticed everything. When my period came,
Sisi
Blandina was there to say, ‘Well, you are in Geneva now, and you will be visiting regularly. Better make sure those boys you like to play with keep themselves to themselves.'

I was mortified because I knew what she was talking about. The women from Johnson & Johnson had come to the school, and separated us from the boys so that they could tell us secrets about our bodies. They said the ovum would be released from the ovary and travel down the Fallopian tube and, if it was not fertilised, it would be expelled every twenty-two to twenty-eight days in the act of menstruation. It was an unsanitary time, they said. Our most
effective weapon against this effluence was the arsenal of the sanitary products that Johnson & Johnson made with young ladies like us in mind, they said, because Johnson cared.

I came to know many things about
Sisi
Blandina. I spied on her and read her letters; I read the ones she wrote before she posted them, letters written in her small rounded handwriting, letters with long elaborate beginnings and little news. ‘Chenai is growing breasts,' she said in one, and I was angry that she would tell my secrets to people in Lalapanzi. I tore up the letter, and dropped it to the floor. Sometimes, she cried, for no reason at all, and I heard her when I woke up late at night in our bedroom.