An Elegy for Easterly (7 page)

Up and down she goes in the little green bus, always sitting on the right so that she looks out at the golf course and not at the Annexe opposite. In her drawer with her diary and fevered poems, she keeps Ezekiel's picture of the Taj Mahal. In her final year at university, she is three-quarters of the way from the Annexe and a quarter of the distance from Oxford. There is nothing to do but celebrate the end of exams, the approach of Christmas, going home, the unwritten future.

It is Friday evening, and she is with Fadz and Sihle
and Kenny and Lindy buying mushroom burgers at Chicken Inn. They will tumble into Fadz's battered Beetle and go on to a night of clubbing at Circus. They have been drinking vodka, and they laugh at the smallest thing. She comes out onto Inez Terrace, in mid-laugh, and there, holding a box of fried chicken is Ezekiel. His smile is wide as he moves towards her. He says something, a greeting, but all she hears is, ‘Abraham, Abraham,' as up and down goes the little green bus. She turns away. He sees her pretending and she sees him seeing. She pretends not to see the shadow that falls across his face.

Something Nice from London

T
he little boy in the orange shirt tells me that his grandmother says that his mummy is bringing him something nice from London. ‘Your mummy will bring you something nice from London too,' he asserts, with all the gravity of a child whose concerns coincide with those of the world. He runs off before I can reply, and I watch him tear up and down the observation platform that overlooks the arrival hall of our airport. The Chinese built this airport when the old one became too small for the tourists that poured into the country in their thousands. No tourists visit us now. Our almost total isolation means that we have no camera-toting, free-spending visitors to pour dollars and pounds, euros, yen and yuan into our empty coffers. We have an international airport in name only; the twice-weekly flight to and from London provides the only direct link we have to the world beyond our continent.

We wait for the Friday morning flight from London, as I stand with my mother, my brother Jonathan and his wife Mukai, and watch through the transparent glass of the observation platform. Our sombre faces are out of place, surrounded by those that smile in anticipation, with mouths that laugh and fingers that point out to children, there they are, there she is, he is here at last; they arrived on time. My mother stares unseeing at the passengers below us who crane their necks to look up at the platform, anxious to catch a glimpse of a familiar face, arms waving and jangling with bracelets, faces broad with smiles. They have made an effort for the flight, the women in manicured wigs and weaves, their England clothes fitting well, their skin lightened by years, and maybe even by just as little as six months of living out of the heat and stress of poverty. Those receiving them have also made an effort, or maybe it is not such an effort. They will have been happy to put aside their quiet desperation to wear the shining joy of welcome. For these passengers bring with them more than their loved selves, they bring something nice from London, the foreign money that will be traded on the black market and guarantee a few more months of survival.

We wait two hours before Jonathan confirms with the airline that Peter is not on the flight. The flight
from Johannesburg arrives next, and we resign ourselves to returning home. We exchange no words as we walk back to the car park; my mother between Jonathan and Mukai, and me two steps behind. The car radio bursts into life as soon as Jonathan starts the engine. A voice reminds us that the land is ours, it will not be taken from us again; the country will never be a colony again. The message is repeated three times in the twenty minutes that it takes Jonathan to drive us home. In between the repeated message there are songs of histrionic patriotism, including one that I have not heard before in which the singer extols the President as a direct descendant of Christ and implores the Almighty to grant long life to him, to his wife and to all his children.

As Jonathan winds into the open gate to the driveway of our garden, the women gathered in the front of the house see us and begin a persistent keening. They are echoed by more women who pour out of the house, jumping in little paroxysms of grief. They cry out, ‘Peter
woye, nhai
Peter, Peter
kani
, Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter.' They tear the air with a thousand Peters, each one a crescendo building onto the next. My paternal aunt
Mai
Lisa outdoes them all as she hops first on one leg, then the other, bends low from her
waist, raises herself and puts her hands on her head and wails with her face to the sky, tears streaming from her eyes as underarm sweat dampens the light-coloured fabric of her dress. She nearly fells my mother as she embraces her. She almost knocked me over yesterday, so when I see her propelling herself towards me, I head off and envelop myself in the keening of the collected family daughters-in-law. They are the official criers, and they begin the ritual chanting and invocation of Peter's name.

‘We will not see him again,
uhuu
.'

‘Why have you left us, oh my father,
yuwi
?'

‘You have left us alone, and bereft,
yuwi
.'

‘Regard your mother, she is bereft and inconsolable.'

‘You are too cruel, Peter, come back Peter,
kani
.'

‘Who shall care for us now that you have left,
uhuu
?'

The men of the family follow behind, maintaining a distance from this rigorous mourning, this business of women. The sound of grieving tears the air until the moment is over and they want to know what happened.

‘Peter's body did not arrive,' Jonathan explains.

This does not satisfy the relatives, and the questions remain.
Mai
Lisa is silent now that explanations are required. She had passed on the message from
her daughter Lisa in England, Peter is coming home, she said. Now that Peter is not here, and we want to know what happened, she discovers that she is needed in the kitchen and is now commanding the family daughters-in-law. Their non-agnatic status in the family means that not only are theirs the lungs that provide the loudest mourning, theirs are also the hands that cook and clean at family gatherings. We can get nothing from her beyond ‘I know only what I have told you. Lisa is there. Why estimate the length of a snake using the bark of a tree when the creature is right there for you to measure?'

Lisa calls that evening to explain that when she had told her mother that Peter would be on the morning flight, she had meant only that there was merely a
possibility
of him being on the flight. She did not actually tell her mother it was a
certainty
. The situation is
more complicated
than she thought, she says. In fact, Peter might not be home for
some days
. She has travelled up to Birmingham from London, she says, but she cannot stay. There will be a post-mortem, Lisa says. Peter died in an area with many
junkies
. It was a week after he died before he was identified. And it seemed there would be at least one week, possibly two, before he can come home. There
may well be two post-mortems, if they charge anyone with his death.

In the meantime, his remains congeal in the drawer of a mortuary in a foreign land. And while his body is there, the family has gathered here to bury their child. Outside, the men of the family sit around the fire keeping a vigil while they argue over whether Motor Action or Caps United deserves to top the national soccer league. There is no hope for Dynamos under its present management, they agree. Inside the house, the women sing of the transient nature of our earthly presence. ‘
Hatina musha panyika
,' they sing as they wait to see Peter in his coffin before they can undam the full outpouring of their grief. They cannot mourn him fully without seeing his body. He came from the dust and to dust he must return to be interred whole, intact. They are all here, my grandfather's brother, my father's nephews and nieces, the agnatic aunts and uncles as well as the aunts and uncles by marriage. They continue to arrive, preparing their faces to meet the faces that they will meet, composing their faces to masks of mourning as soon as they glimpse the gates to our house. They let go then, wailing at the top of their voices, falling into each other's arms as they stagger in little dances of grief. Then the moment of emotion over, they ask after one another's health and that
of their families, and their thoughts turn to food.

And in this matter of food lies our anguish.

We cannot feed them all if they continue to pour out like this, and if we must host them for an unknown number of days. We cannot be sure how long it will take to bring Peter home. The small pile of
chema
funeral donations in a bowl on the kitchen table, grubby notes laced with the sweat of many hands, is barely enough to pay for three days' supply of black market milk and bread and sugar. Already the relatives on the paternal side who have the authority to command the daughters-in-law march into the kitchen and demand to know when the feeding will begin. But how to tell people: please go away, we have not started officially to mourn? They have spent money to get here; the old aunts from Shurugwi have taken out their notes from the old pots in which they keep their money. And then to tell them, please, find more money, go away for now and come back later, wearing your most sorrowful faces.

We cannot issue an invitation to a funeral like it is a wedding.

And even as we cannot bury Peter without our relatives, the relatives bring complications beyond the pressing matter of food. They do not accept our
decision to bury Peter here in Harare. They will not listen to Jonathan as he explains how fortunate we are to have a burial site, how we had to bribe a council official and still pay double the market price. They insist that our customs dictate that Peter be buried with my father and other ancestors hundreds of kilometres away in Shurugwi. Great-uncle Matyaya who arrived last night has been the most insistent. He trembled with passion as he grasped the rounded end of his walking stick and thumped it on the floor in emphasis. ‘Is it not bad enough that Peter died
mhiri kwemakungwa
, over the oceans where the baleful influence of alien spirits could not be discounted? Never before', he said, ‘has a son of Chikwiro been buried away from the land of his ancestors.' Jonathan has reached his limits and has to restrain himself from saying to the fathers of the clan that if they want to bury him in Shurugwi, they have to pay for the bus to ferry the mourners there.