Читать книгу The Book Keeper - Julia McKenzie Munemo - Страница 19

9

A WEEK INTO the trip I found myself disoriented and unsteady between two walls of a florist’s shop near the cemetery where Ngoni’s father was buried. There was the surprise of darkness, of cool air, and the scent of damp dirt under the thatched roof. There were three women working there, two with babies strapped to their backs with beach towels, each with what I saw as a sadness in her eyes. They were seated on three-legged stools, and behind them were wooden shelves tacked to the walls. On each shelf sat clumps of red carnations pulled together in small wooden baskets. Zimbabwe exported roses and asters and chrysanthemums, but in this shop there were only carnations. An ugly flower. But what did I know, maybe carnations are the traditional flower for cemeteries. I don’t live in a world where we visit the dead, where we bring them presents.

As Ngoni paid for his basket, I watched the women watch us. Wondered how they thought we fit. They’d probably seen our wedding rings, guessed that I was American, that Ngoni lived there with me. But did they guess at the warmth Gogo and Sekuru, lingering in the shadows by the door, showed me when we were at home? Could they tell I wanted to melt into the walls of this place, wanted to blend in and fit in and stop standing out? From where they were watching, could they see if I might become part of this family?

When we climbed back into the car with our basket, I looked out the window and saw that the cemetery stretched for miles. To my right there was no grass, just land pulled into long, dark mounds. At first I thought it was a garden with small labels describing the crops beneath. But then I realized the tin sheets lashed onto metal stakes marked graves. The land had been recently dug into; the mounds and rows would flatten in time. I couldn’t see where it ended. On the horizon, almost too far to see, there were gentle slopes of hills and a burning sunset and the sense that this planet was too big to hold us.

“When people started dying so fast, graveyards expanded informally like this,” Ngoni said. To my left was the formal cemetery, where the grass was tall and plentiful in spite of the drought. It wasn’t green, but a living brown color I didn’t recognize, maybe like what wheat looks like before it’s mown, vast and tall and windblown. But this wasn’t wheat, and it wasn’t standing on empty soil. Some graves—those that had been recently visited—were cleared of the long grasses. It was a patchwork quilt. “The Shona don’t cremate,” Ngoni said. “We have to put our dead in the ground.” I imagined the entire country sitting on top of graves some day in the future, the dead taking up all of the available land, houses come alive as in Poltergeist, possessions of everyone lucky enough to live past their people. I imagined the whole earth encompassed by ghosts. We pulled in and parked, and the hot air smashed into my face as I stood up in the dusty lot. Despite the heat it was suddenly winter 1980 and I was five years old.

* * *

I SIT AT the edge of the pew of the college church—the only one that would perform services for a suicide, I heard my mother say into the phone one hundred times this week. I can’t look forward, so I look back. Crane my neck around and see the room full of faces. Spot my kindergarten teacher and wonder, Who’s teaching school?

Later I stand in the cold next to my grandmother, at the foot of the open grave. Her whole body shakes as my grandfather shovels the first dirt onto the coffin. I can’t look forward, so I look back. Nan’s small face in the triangle of the backseat window of Mom’s friend’s station wagon. Peeking out. Driving away. Where is she going?

Can I come?

* * *

I SHOOK MY head to focus on the line we were walking in. Sekuru was in the lead and I was at the back, and we were following a narrow path cut into the grass. I could tell by their murmurings that they didn’t see the usual landmarks. Didn’t know where to look for their son. I watched Gogo’s face to see if she knew where Donal was and wasn’t telling, was letting Sekuru find the spot. But her face revealed no secrets, and we kept walking. At last Sekuru saw something familiar and signaled to the groundskeeper, who came with his scythe. I watched Sekuru watch the man and thought He looks old today. His eyes were bloodshot, his belly hung over his belt. As if he knew I was watching, he stood up taller, shifted his weight. I wondered if it was shame he was shouldering. If visiting that place that preserved his son’s memory also preserved his sadness, his illness, and his defeat. I wondered if it looked the same on me. If the reason we never visited Dad’s grave was the fear that people driving by the cemetery would see by the set of our shoulders that he was a suicide. I wondered how Sekuru handled it, his family broken. I wondered how I did.

It would take some time for the groundskeeper to clear the grave, even though he was being careful to clear only Donal’s spot. As he settled into the task, Ngoni and his grandparents went in one direction, to visit the grave of a more distant relative, and I went in the other. I walked along the red clay pathways peering at the ground. Separated stalks of grass in search of a rock. It was a Jewish tradition I wasn’t raised with, didn’t understand, had never done before. But it was a tradition I seemed to need to do then. Find a rock to place on the grave. I would just need one, but soon realized the entire cemetery was built on clay, so I reached down and picked up what I hoped was a substantial enough clump of red earth and joined them at the foot of Donal’s grave.

I bowed my head when they did, but couldn’t close my eyes. It was a lie I was unwilling to tell in Gogo’s presence—pretending to pray. I wished I could answer her questions about Jesus. About if I believed. Instead, I squeezed my lump of earth to make it firm and focused on my unpainted toenails exposed in my sandaled feet and listened to Gogo speak to her God. She bowed her head, and her wire-rimmed glasses slipped down her delicate nose. Grief kept her voice quiet, and I wanted to reach over to soothe her, I wanted to steady her. But I stayed still as she prayed. Gogo clutched her small purse between fingers wrinkled and dark with age, her thin wedding band loose on her finger. But my eyes couldn’t focus, and it was Mom’s ring I saw through tears, a diamond and two sapphires tipping to the wrong side of her hand as she stirred the sugar into her cup of black coffee. I was ten.

* * *

I’VE ASKED MY mother one hundred times to bring me there, but each time the answer is the same. “He’s not at the cemetery, kiddo.”

I’m smart enough not to ask where he is, then. Because I would go anywhere. Instead I bide my time, and when my grandmother Rose visits, I climb on wobbly legs into her car. It’s a wide Oldsmobile with red pleather seats and it smells like an old person, and she makes me slide all the way across the front seat until I am right up next to her in that spot where the gearshift is in Mom’s car. She pats my knee in a rhythm that I think means she loves me, but I can’t tell because it makes me want to jump out of my skin and run. She pats my knee in a rhythm that I think means she’s trying not to cry—not yet, because she has to be able to see to drive us to her son. She is the only person who will take me to this place, and it’s my job to stay stoic and brave beside her or I’m scared she won’t let me come along, so I focus on the stripe across the top of the windscreen where the glass is tinted blue. No matter the weather, things look sunny up there. I’m scared of what will happen when we get there, when we won’t have the blue tinting to protect us from the rain.

Now we’re at the foot of the grave, and just like that day when we put him here, her body shakes with sobs and she pulls me tight and tighter against her. Her straight wool skirt scratches the backs of my bare knees. Her large plastic glasses dig into my shoulder where she grasps them. A Kleenex balled in her other fist is a knot at my neck. We stand at the foot and stare at the stone. I read the words and wait for him to appear. I read the words and try to call him forth. But this is no magic trick, and I can’t make him come and attest to why he left. His mother can’t make him come and demand from him an answer for his absence.

How long do we stand there waiting?

Does she place a rock on his grave?

* * *

I LISTENED TO Gogo pray for her lost son. Thought I am lost. Felt something shift and start to loosen. I didn’t know where I was, was not safe. I didn’t know this man at my feet and shouldn’t be mourning him. But was this mourning? Was it grief? My hands shook and tears fell and the lump of clay resisted the squeeze of my fingers. I tried to breathe. Gogo scrunched her nose and sniffled, pushed up her glasses and sighed. She’d said what she came here to say and she walked now to the car. I watched her go but my feet were cement. Sekuru followed her and I watched him go too. After a time, Ngoni turned and held out his hand to me. I couldn’t move. He let me be.

Some time later—minutes? hours?—I walked to the stone and placed the lump of red clay on the rounded granite top of it. Lost my balance and grabbed the headstone so I wouldn’t fall. Hot air filled my lungs, my vision blurred.

* * *

I’M TINY. I climb up onto Dad’s monstrous lap, an ocean of legs for a little girl. “Can I sit in your square?” He bends his leg, places his right ankle on his left knee. Puts me there.

“You can always sit in my square.”