An Elegy for Easterly (2 page)

In the end, my words to Edna and my husband's family were no more than empty threats. I was persuaded to stay, although I can no longer remember what empty promises I believed. I came to know the subtlety of the intonations of their language, that
chimbuzi
with the voice lowering over the middle and last syllable was a toilet, while
chimbudzi
with the extra
d
and the voice rising on the middle and the
last syllable was a young goat. I learned to pronounce his children's names, and in the end did not need him, as he had done at first, to explain words to me.

‘I named the first child Rwauya, meaning “death has come”, and the second Muchagura to mean “you shall repent”, and the last Muchakundwa, “you shall be defeated”. They are messages for the white oppressors, warning signs to the white man.'

Thus had he stamped his patriotism on his children before leaving them with names that could mean nothing to the intended recipient of the messages, to the white man who chose to live in ignorance of native tongues. The white man has been conquered now, twice over, first in the matter of government, and now in the matter of the land that has been repossessed, but the children remain with their ominous names. I got to know them well because I replaced their mother after their father divorced her.

‘There is no need for anything official,' my husband said. ‘We are married under customary law, with no official papers. I will give her
gupuro
and she can take that to her family.' He picked out a pot with a red and yellow flower on it and gave it to her as a sign that he had divorced her. She died three years after that, but still, with her flowered pot and her early death, she got the better end of the bargain.

Like the worthless dogs that are his countrymen,
my husband believed that his penis was wasted if he was faithful to just one woman. He plunged himself into every bitch on heat, even that slut of a newsreader, the ruling party's First Whore, who lends the services of her vacuous beauty to their nightly distortions. She has been bounced from man to man, first as the mistress of a businessman who died with the red lips that spoke of his illness and then as the mistress of the Governor of the Central Bank, and after that, as the mistress of a minister without portfolio. Just like my husband, to salivate over other men's leavings.

Muchakundwa and Muchagura are solemn in their dark suits. They live in California now, where they study on government scholarships. They have chosen to seek their fortunes far from this sovereign land that will never, a trillion trillion times never, be a colony again.

They left and Rwauya remained.

He would have been considered a failure, Rwauya, with his two O levels, but he is just the sort of person who thrives in this new dispensation, where to keep ahead is to go to every rally and chant every slogan. Even with all the patronage that is meant to oil his path to success, he has run down two butcheries and
a bottle store, and, of six passenger buses, only one remains. He is full of schemes and ideas that never come to anything.

‘
Ndafunga magonyeti
,' he said to his father and me, from which we understood that he was thinking of investing in haulage trucks. ‘If I buy just two
magonyeti
, I will be okay.'

When the
magonyeti
scheme went down the primrose path along which went all others, he went from importing fuel and sugar to flying to Congo DRC and looting that country of cultural artefacts. And when Congo had been emptied of masks with cut-out eyes and old wooden bowls and long-phallused fertility figures, he turned his thoughts to local stone sculpture.

‘
Ndafunga zvematombo
,' he said, and began to export substandard chiselled bits of soapstone that were called Eagle or Spirit or Medium or Emptiness. ‘If I make just two shipments, I will be okay.'

Now he wants his hands on the farm that my husband left. He arrived at the house four nights ago, looking like the death of his name, his eyes red from crapulence, with the mangy dreadlocks that are now a declaration of African authenticity if you believe that the authentic Africa is a place without combs or water to wash the hair. He gave me an embrace that lasted a fraction longer than it should have, his hand
brushing my bottom far from the shoulder where it should have been.

‘You are looking very good,
Mainini
.'

I have learned to dispense with the niceties of social discourse with Rwauya and go straight to the heart of the matter. To my ‘What is it you want?' he launched into a half-coherent account involving one of the six ministers without portfolio, the Minister's three nephews, one of whom was married to the daughter of the Chief of Police in Mazowe District who was in turn married to a niece of the Lands Minister.

‘They have hired thugs to camp on the farm. Imagine, just two years after Father took it over from that Kennington,' he said. ‘You have to do something to protect the farm. This is an invasion. They have no right to take it. My father died for this country. That farm is my birthright.'

‘What is it that I can do?'

‘
Izvi zvotoda
President. Ask to see the President.
Mainini
, you have access, just ask to see the President.'

I could have talked to the President once, when he was still called the Prime Minister, before the Presidential Powers Amendment Act, before he
ditched the Marxist austerity of his safari suits for pinstripes and gold cufflinks, before he married his second wife, Her Amazing Gracefulness, Our First Lady of the Hats. I was close to the inner circle then, close to his first wife, and we talked about women and education into the night.

‘You are a coward,' she said to him. ‘Isn't he a coward? I keep saying he should ban this demeaning polygamy.' His eyes laughed behind their glasses and he asked us how he could do this when the peasants were wedded to these arcane notions of life. The Minister of Justice talked about the difficulty of applying Marxist–Leninist principles in the context of African culture. ‘The changes wrought by the Age of Majority Act show that, in the short term, law can be an instrument of social change, but ultimately, it is not the consciousness of man that determines his material being, but his material being that determines his consciousness. Law is a superstructure which must also wither when the state withers away.'

And we drank some more wine and argued about what would remain when the state withered away.

His wife gathered us to her in a small band of foreign women that their men had married in their exiles, some from as far away as Jamaica, England, Sweden, some from Ghana, Swaziland, South Africa.
We spoke English without feeling the need to apologise and drank wine and watched films at State House. We were well educated, all of us: Bachelors of Arts and Masters of Education, with three or four Doctors of Medicine. Yet we seemed to accept that the world of salaried work was closed to us as we raised children and hosted parties at which the talk was dialectical materialism and nation-building. When the World Bank's focus moved to empowering civil society, the donor money poured in and we undertook projects, children's foundations, disability programmes, women's empowerment, adult literacy campaigns.

‘To help the nation-building process,' we said, but, in reality, to keep ourselves busy and to close the chasm of boredom that threatened to engulf us in its emptiness.

Then the First Lady died but before that there was the Willowgate car scandal. ‘Top Ministers Involved in Illegal Sales of Government Cars', the newspaper headlines screamed, ‘State House implicated in Willowgate'.

In the inner circle, we held our breaths and thought heads would roll and the peasants and workers would revolt, and demand an accounting. The only thing that happened was the death of a minister in a supremely self-indulgent act of suicide. His grave lies over there behind the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In our band of foreign wives, we were shocked as our friend and patron the First Lady was sucked to the
centre of the scandal. We became less shocked as she remained standing. The donor money poured in still, and we learned the benefits of creative accounting. We assured ourselves that the creative accounting did not matter because the peasants and the workers still got the benefit of the money.

She died, the First Lady, but even as his wife lay dying, the President kept an unofficial wife in a small house and our husbands also set up small houses and scattered their seed in every province. My husband and I were sent to a banana republic as the country's representatives while the nation forgot about his third scandal concerning government tenders.

We returned to an amnesiac nation, but our visits to State House were not as frequent. The unofficial wife in the small house had become the Second First Lady at State House. She wore hats of flying-saucer dimensions while cows sacrificed their lives so that she could wear pair upon pair of Ferragamo shoes.

‘If only I could,' she said to the nation's orphans, ‘I would really, really adopt you all.'

A soldier steps out of the row of pallbearers with the flag folded in a neat triangular parcel. He salutes me before handing it to me. I let it sit in my lap with the stripes showing. I see the yellow and the green and
the red and a bit of the black. The President looks into the distance.