Lettah's Gift Read online

  Graham Lang was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. He is the author of Clouds Like Black Dogs and Place of Birth, which was longlisted for the Sunday Times Prize, South Africa’s premier literary award. An accomplished artist, he has exhibited widely and taught art in both Australia and South Africa. Graham has lived in Australia since 1990.

  www.grahamlang-author.com

  For Allen, Nabeel and Shaynne

  My world nothing but this. Wrapped in a blanket on her back, my head pressed against her soft breathing bulk. Her slow, rolling gait. Her soulful voice. Songs sweet and lilting. Strange clicks of her tongue as she sings of a tree called uxhakhuxhaku. The way she sings its name is the way it sounds to eat its fruit. Feeling her move, taking me with her. Nothing but this. Nothing but this and her voice to fill the world.

  I

  On the face of it, not much has changed. The same small mining town straddling the railway line halfway between Harare and Bulawayo. A scabrous cluster of shops and houses huddled together against the encroaching bush, red roofs baking under the sun, walls the colour of old bone. The reek of iron and melting bitumen. Thirsty jacaranda trees with white-painted trunks lining the roads. Everything covered with a fine layer of dust whipped up by passing traffic. People wander about the streets. Drifting like leaves, like chaff. Serenaded by the endless tenor of insects.

  Turning off the main road, I head towards a ridge of hills on Kwekwe’s northern outskirts, passing forgotten places, suddenly familiar: the post office with its squat clock tower, the Phoenix Hotel, rows of shabby storefronts with stepped gables and awnings. I’m surprised by the accuracy of my memory, that it guides me so well. I was a boy when my family left this place, the first of many moves. After all this time there’s a strange nostalgia in coming back to this small oasis of the past – an awakening of sorts, but no sense of belonging. I know that nothing is as it was. This is not the place of my boyhood. Everything has changed. Even Kwekwe’s name, derived from the sound of croaking frogs, is different. The town I knew was spelled Que Que. The country I knew – Rhodesia – is not this country. Rhodesia had a war and became Zimbabwe. Another place.

  Approaching a sports field on the left, I pull over and climb out of the car. The field is empty, sun-scorched; yellow grass and thorns survive in patches, stark against the bare ground. Dusty trees and a row of corrugated iron huts along the far periphery, shimmering in the heat. A cloudless sky. The air filled with the whirr of insects and the chatter of people teeming along the road.

  I lean on the roof of the car and aim my camera at the field. The light has a glittering, metallic quality; I’m facing into the sun and must shield the lens with my hand. I take just one photograph before a group of men passing by interrupts my view. Their loud talk ceases abruptly as they walk past. They glance at me with strange expressions. Angry, unintelligible mutterings in Shona. A man wearing the frayed remains of a peaked khaki cap peers into the camera lens. Brandishing a knobkerrie, eyes wide beneath the black plastic visor of his cap, he feints at me, grunting, ‘Heeyah!’ I lower the camera, smiling uneasily. The man walks on, mouthing indignant words, slapping the ball of the club against his palm. I’m puzzled, taken aback. Why are these men angry? What does the sight of a lone white man with a camera evoke? I carry with me media images of beaten people. Dazed stares from swollen faces. A man with his back pocked with cigarette burns.

  I climb back into the car and drive away.

  I should take more care. This is not the place to be giving wrong signals. There is no ulterior motive for my being here, other than to deliver a gift of money – a mission that compels me to seek out the places of my childhood.

  This talk of belonging. I’m an Australian of African origin – white colonial African, that is. But I’d be quite happy to declare myself Australian and be done with it. I don’t pine for the past, for a mother country. The umbilical cord that tied me to Africa was cut long ago. My recollection of my Rhodesian childhood is mostly vague and fragmentary, bits and pieces that somehow comprise a whole, of sorts. Of my time in Que Que, there is no clear sequence; memories emerge and retreat, arbitrarily, as though through a dense mist. Some, very few, have an almost luminous clarity. Like shooting stars they burst into my mind, burn brightly for a few seconds, then fade. Among the most persistent of these is being carried on Lettah’s back. Her slow, rolling gait – the texture of her neck, the mournful lilt of her singing. Her raw soap smell. I like to believe that what I remember is true, I take comfort in it, yet also suspect that such old memories often rely more on the workings of my imagination than fact.

  Lettah is the reason I’m here. She is the one to whom the money must be given, on behalf of my mother. A complex tale of postcolonial guilt. By finding her, by delivering the gift, I will mend the past and in the process rise from my rut of failure. Such was my mother’s reasoning. I pass ragged processions heading to and from town – women balancing absurdly heavy burdens on their heads; men sporting axes and knobkerries as Englishmen might sport brollies. Again I wonder what prompted the anger from those men at the sports field. My motive was entirely innocent. I stopped to photograph the sports field because of something I’d suddenly remembered.

  Every year the Boswell Wilkie Circus came to Que Que. It would appear miraculously on that same sports field for a few days, and then just as suddenly it would be gone. I remember the spectacle of the night-time shows: the laager of trailers and caravans pulsing with coloured lights, the huge glowing tent beneath the starry sky. Jammed with my brother between our parents on the packed stands. The smell of sawdust and canvas. Howls of laughter at the clowns’ antics. Tatty-looking lions jumping through flaming hoops. The crack of the lion tamer’s whip. Contortionists and acrobats in glittering costumes. Drum rolls before amazing feats. The human cannonball. He wore a silver helmet and an electric blue suit with a yellow lightning bolt across his chest. The cannon made a sharp bang and he shot out across the arena into a net. We heard later that he missed the net in Bulawayo and was killed. One year we saw the Strongest Man in the World lift a horse clean off the ground. He was a burly white man who sported a leopard skin costume and Brylcreemed hair with a cowlick, like Elvis Presley. He straddled two twenty-foot vertical ladders and climbed up, one rung at a time, with the horse hanging from a harness between his legs like a gigantic, whinnying scrotum. I’m convinced this started my older brother, Max, on his life-long quest for superhuman strength.

  We lived on an eleven-acre smallholding in an area called Hillendale, just outside Que Que. The road to Hillendale went past the sports field. When the circus was there we could see the animals out on the field during the day. There were elephants, palomino horses and Shetland ponies. Once there was a bear shackled to an iron stake in the hot sun. Lions and tigers paced back and forth in trailer cages that stank of their excrement. Max and I would pester our mother, Lydia, to stop when she was driving past, and one day she did. Max was sitting in the front of our green Opel station wagon with her. I was in the back. A loaf of bread, some carrots and a newspaper Lydia had just bought at the shops were on the front seat between her and Max.

  She parked the car near where the elephants were hobbled together in twos in the far corner of the field. It was hot and the car’s windows were wound down. Benny King’s ‘Spanish Harlem’ was playing on the radio. Lydia explained that they were Indian elephants because of their smaller ears. The elephants, a dozen or so, observed us curiously and then came sauntering up and surrounded the car. Lydia commenced to wax lyrical about what sweet, gentle animals they were, compared to their more savage African cousins who, she said, could never be tamed. At that point, a jumble of bristly trunks burst through the windows from all sides, grabbing at things. The bread, carro
ts and newspaper vanished before our eyes. The little Rhodesian flag I’d been waving out the window disappeared into a gaping mouth, dowel rod and all. Max and I thought it was all great fun. We liked the feel of the bristly trunks. But then Lydia, perhaps imagining her boys or even her large self disappearing into those gaping mouths, lost her nerve and began to shriek. Her fear was contagious; Max and I joined in with ear-splitting screams, although later on Max would deny any part in it.

  Spurred on by this commotion, the stupid beasts began to bump the car with their foreheads and rumps until it was almost rocking off its wheels. Our screams rose to a crescendo. At no time did Lydia do the sensible thing and just turn on the engine and drive away. She just put her head back and shrieked as the car rocked. Benny King sang away, unperturbed.

  Help finally arrived in the diminutive form of Ticky the clown. About my height at the time, give or take. He ran up, slashing at the air with the lion tamer’s whip, mouthing words Max and I had never heard before, and which my mother forbade us ever to repeat. He was wearing little rugby shorts and a grubby vest. He didn’t have any paint on his face and had a half-smoked cigarette clamped in one corner of his mouth. The elephants dispersed, trumpeting rudely.

  Ticky apologised profusely. Clasping her bosom, Lydia looked as though she was about to have a heart attack. Her pretty, brooding face was flushed, beads of sweat had formed above her upper lip. She tried to say something but her eyes closed and her jaw dropped – later we got used to these mild bouts of cataplexy. She started the car and stalled as she took off because her legs were shaking so much. Finally we got going. It took us a little while to regain our composure. I wondered why it was Ticky who came to save us. What was the Strongest Man in the World doing? Pretty poor show on his part, it seemed.

  I leave town down a long straight road through thickening bush, past ramshackle dwellings strewn about like meteor debris. A widow bird with long black tail feathers flies a bobbing course beside the car for a while, before veering off. It surprises me that some long-forgotten names of African birds and trees are suddenly poised for expression on my tongue. A lost language suddenly remembered. My father was a botanist and amateur ornithologist, driven to giving things their correct name. A smidgen of his knowledge must have rubbed off, I guess.

  I ascend the ridge of hills that guided me through Kwekwe to Hillendale. Just over the crest, on the left, is Sunnyside, my first home. The entrance is how I remember it: a stony road winding through tall stands of msasa and mukwa trees. Ahead stands the house built of red jasper stone, a corrugated iron garage, some sheds and a chicken run. Down a path through the bush is a compound consisting of a few rooms in a single block – the old servants’ quarters. Despite its original acreage it was never, by any stretch of the imagination, a grand property. The grounds still consist mostly of undeveloped bush. Even when my parents owned it, it had a slightly derelict air. Like so much about Rhodesia, it was imbued with a doomed potential. The grounds around the house were partially landscaped into a garden of stone-walled terraces and Christ-thorn hedges. There was a summerhouse, an obelisk-like fountain on the front lawn and a large aviary in which my mother used to keep canaries and budgies. A place sadly falling short of its English pretensions, constantly battling to keep the heathen bush at bay.

  The house is now completely dilapidated. The corrugated iron roof sags and is rusted through in places, broken windows are patched with cardboard, a door hangs askew. Detritus lies everywhere, mostly old car parts, within the perimeter of a high security fence. The backyard is strewn with old cars, hulks in various stages of disembowelment. Outside the fence, the stone terraces have been overwhelmed by bush. The summerhouse stands in ruin, just a few rotting wooden rafters left precariously on the stone pillars enmeshed in bougainvillea creepers. A small crop of withered maize now occupies what used to be the front lawn.

  A woman is sweeping the back porch outside the former kitchen with a straw broom. Some children appear in the doorway behind her, alerted by the sound of my car. There are two men working on a battered pick-up in the backyard. They peer out from under the bonnet as I pull up at the locked gate. One of them, a thin young man in ragged blue overalls comes over to the gate. I get out of the car to greet him. We shake hands through the gate. The man has a nervous air; when he is not speaking his jaws clench incessantly. I explain that the house was once my family’s home.

  The man looks at me blankly. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Frank Cole. I lived here long ago. In the sixties.’

  The man gives a short laugh and shakes his head. ‘I wasn’t even born then.’ He turns and calls across in Shona to his companion still working under the pick-up’s bonnet. The other man, older, with grey hair, straightens up. He looks at the sky pensively and shakes his head.

  ‘My father doesn’t remember any Coles,’ the man says.

  I shrug. ‘We were only here a few years.’

  I ask to take a few photographs of the property. To show my family in Australia, I explain. The man inspects me carefully. He glances at my hire car, a Nissan with Harare numberplates. He sniffs the air and clenches his jaws.

  ‘Your father was owner here?’

  ‘Yes, he owned this house.’

  ‘But now you are from Australia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The man nods slowly, eyeing the camera around my neck. The older man comes sauntering up to the gate. The kids who had been watching from the house run across the yard, a naked toddler bringing up the rear. They lean against the fence, poking their fingers through the wire, staring at me silently. Thin-legged, pot-bellied, a sheen of snot under their noses. The two men converse in Shona. Of Zimbabwe’s two native languages – Shona and IsiNdebele – I know only a smattering of the latter, courtesy of being half-mothered by Lettah.

  ‘You can pay for photographs?’ the older man asks.

  ‘How much?’

  The two men deliberate. A sum is decided. When I left Rhodesia you could buy ten thousand houses for what these men are asking for; now it’s barely enough for a loaf of bread. I go back to the car and rummage in the boot, returning with a few ‘bricks’ – the local term for the wads of banknotes necessary for simple transactions. The children watch, wide-eyed, as I count the money; the younger man unlocks the gate and lets me inside.

  I walk slowly around the house, taking photographs. I’d hoped to be left alone, to be able to quietly contemplate this moment where I tread again the soil that I once felt under small bare feet. But other small bare feet have dominion of this ground now. The children, who seem to have grown in number, follow me around like little fish behind a diver, scattering when I turn around. A few have found their voices; they ask, please, sir, give me money. I part with the loose change in my pocket – the few banknotes left over from paying the men. The begging becomes more persistent, almost hostile. I try to make light of it, to joke with them. I pull out my pockets. ‘Look – all gone,’ I say. The two men are watching me from the veranda at the front of the house. They are joined by three women. I feel uneasy with their eyes on me. I take a final shot of the old fountain poking surreally out from the miserable maize crop. Then I nod and wave at the men on the veranda.

  As I make my way back to the car, the kids clamour around me. I’m almost overwhelmed as I near the gate. Tiny arms grasp at me, cling to me, a shrill chorus of voices beseeches me. I panic and run the last few metres. There is a wild frenzy as the kids scramble after me. The naked toddler is bumped over; he starts bawling. Breathing heavily, I slam the gate closed behind me, filled with self-loathing at having created such a wretched scene.

  On my way back to town I turn into the overgrown driveway of another house. Brak Malan’s place. Once we were like brothers, inseparable. We roamed the bush around Que Que, acting out heroic fantasies spawned by the westerns and war movies we saw at the local bioscope. Masters of our domain. I walk around the Mal
ans’ house, also derelict. The roof is gone, just weathered brick walls remain, festooned with cacti and creepers. A dense grove of mukwa trees has encroached upon the house from the property’s rear boundary. Another victory for the unruly bush.

  Back in Kwekwe I stop for a Coke at a grocery store in the main street. Since I don’t have an empty bottle to exchange, I’m asked to drink it on the premises – Zimbabwe has a bottle shortage. I stand next to the counter while the shopkeeper, an old Indian with a white beard, cuts up some meat on a wooden block. On the wall above his head is a large framed photograph of Robert Mugabe. The same dour visage that, by law, presides in every public building or business premises in Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s face seems made up of squares. A square skull, square jaw, square glasses, even a square sliver of a moustache nestling in the philtrum under his nose. He gleams like a block of black granite hewn by a totalitarian sculptor. This analogy surprises me. He’s never impressed me before as someone to whom the word ‘solid’ might apply – I’ve always seen Mugabe as an absurd caricature, all head and no body, a dainty puppet. Laughable for his pompous voice and convoluted parodies of etiquette. But gazing into his blank eyes behind the big square glasses, I realise there must be precious little about him to laugh about for Zimbabweans. He is solid. Hard.

  The store is empty of people. Only a few items remain on the shelves. Some spices, a few tins of condensed milk, half a dozen bags of mielie meal. A single packet of Lobels biscuits. Some straw brooms, sisal rope, paraffin. I finish the drink and push the empty bottle across the counter.

  ‘How’s business these days?’ I ask the shopkeeper.

  It’s a question that needs no reply. The shopkeeper gestures at the sparse shelves with his knife, gives a small grunt, and continues cutting the meat.

  ‘In the old days this used to be a cycle shop,’ I say. ‘Phoenix Cycles.’