Читать книгу Mukiwa - Peter Godwin - Страница 10

Until oom Piet’s murder I lived an insular existence at home in Silverstream. My parents both disappeared early each morning, my mother on her rounds of African clinics and small rural hospitals, my father to oversee the factory or travel around the extensive estates, which were a hundred miles long from end to end. They were both fairly remote figures to me. My father was tall and barrel-chested and he had a great walrus moustache. Behind his back, the boys called him mandebvu, which means ‘beard’ in Shona. Sometimes they called me piccanini mandevu because I was his son. They seemed to like my father because he was fair and because he seldom shouted, unlike other bosses, who often did. He had tortoiseshell glasses and above them his dark hair was brushed straight back off his forehead. He tried secretly to flatten it with hair cream, which I found in the bathroom cabinet.

My father always wore a safari jacket with matching shorts, long socks and veldskoens. He had a farmer’s tan: a sunburnt face and a ruddy V down to the collar of his safari suit, brown forearms and brown legs from the bottom of his shorts to the tops of his socks. In between his skin was milky and it reminded me of the plants we kept in the dark at school as an experiment to show how they needed sunlight to grow.

My father was very particular about his safari jackets and they were specially made by a tailor in Umtali to a design that my father drew up on the back of his cigarette packet. The important things were the breast pockets, which had to be subdivided exactly to take a packet of Gold Leafs, a slide rule, a small diary-cum-notebook, two biros and a revolving pencil with 2HB lead in it. It always had to be 2HB lead. Sometimes, before he left for work in the morning I was allowed to load his pockets. I imagined I was arming a fighter plane with its complement of missiles.

My mother had long red hair, so long she could sit on it. Every night after her bath she sat at her dressing table and brushed it with vigorous strokes of her bristle brush until it crackled with static electricity. Then she rubbed cold cream into her pale face. In the morning, after tea, she hid her hair. She would coil it into a tight bun, pack it under a web of hairnet and stab a clutch of French hairpins into it. Then she would put on her ‘sensible’ shoes and her white coat and be gone.

My days were filled with dogs and servants. There was, of course, Knighty the cook boy, and my nanny, Violet, who became his second, junior, wife. And there was the garden boy, Albert, who came from Mozambique. I don’t know any of their surnames. In those days Africans didn’t have surnames to us. We knew them just by their Christian names, which were often fairly strange.

Older Africans, whose parents couldn’t speak English, tended to have an arbitrary English word as a name. They believed that having a name in the white man’s language would attract the white man’s power. So they were called by any English word their parents had chanced across: words like Tickie, or Sixpence, Cigarette or Matches were commonly used as names. The next generation of Africans, who were the target of Christian missionaries, tended to have Old Testament names; Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah and Zephaniah. Baby girls were often called after the emotion felt by the mother at birth – Joy, Happiness, Delight. But, as far as I know, there were no girls called Disappointment, Pain or Exhaustion. Finally Africans began taking ordinary names popular with European settlers. Usually they would retain an African name as well, which only they knew, but after the civil war, the new chimurenga, it became fashionable to revert to their African names.

Names were often corrupted by semi-literate District Assistants at the Department of Native Affairs, where births were supposed to be registered. My mother had a medical orderly called Cloud, who should have been Claude but for the slip of a clerk’s pen. And on Violet’s documents she was called ‘Vylit’.

My mother told me later that having Violet all to myself had the same effect as giving a teenager his own car: mobility. We roamed around the countryside at will, going to tea parties with her friends, helping with the harvest, wandering around the market. Violet wore a maid’s uniform – a floral dress with a small white apron over it and a little starched nurse-type hat pinned to her tightly plaited hair. As a baby I was strapped on to her wide back, in the pouch of a thin grey blanket, African-style. I can still remember the smell of her. It was a comforting musky smell, a mixture of wood smoke and Lifebuoy soap. She continued to carry me in this way, like a reverse marsupial, on longer journeys to the store or the compound, until I was four or five.

One day Violet became an Apostolic, which was what they called members of the Apostolic Church of Africa. Apostolics were prized as good workers because they didn’t drink alcohol. So were Malawians, mind you, because they were migrants who sent most of their money home and didn’t waste it on beer, gambling and women. You couldn’t really tell if women were Apostolics, there was no outward sign, so my parents didn’t know that Violet had joined their ranks. But you could usually tell if men were Apostolics. They shaved their heads and grew long beards, and strolled about with long wooden staves.

Of course, I knew as soon as Violet was converted. One Sunday morning she strapped me to her back and walked down the hill, past the factory and the store, turning off the main road and on to a path which skirted around the bottom of the African compound. We crossed the Silverstream river along a log laid from bank to bank. The river, despite its diminutive name, was a full-bodied watercourse and it roiled over rapids beneath us. We paused at the bank for Violet to take her shoes off and make a vigorous sign of the cross, and then she launched us along the log at a brisk teetering walk, her arms outstretched for balance, like a tightrope walker. The trick was not to look down and not to stop mid-stream. It also helped if I sat steady and didn’t suddenly crane over one side of the blanket sling to goggle at the river below. Once we were safely on the other side, Violet made another sign of the cross, put her shoes back on and there in a clearing ahead was the Apostolics’ meeting place.

We all sat round in a big circle, and in the middle stood a man with a bald head and a long beard. He had a stick with a cross on top of it and he read in Shona from a battered copy of the Old Testament. After each sentence he would pause, and we all shouted out ehe! and ndizvozvo!, which mean ‘yes’, and ‘it is so’. Then another elder began pounding a tom-tom and we all sang a hymn.

Finally, we all danced around in a circle to the pounding of the drum. I would be jogged up and down on Violet’s back, which was a real treat and was known as ‘duncing’. Then, sweaty from our exertions, we tackled the river crossing again, and trudged back up the hill, home in time for lunch. This became our regular Sunday outing.

Over the next few years, we Apostolics became more established and more numerous. We built a huge hut the traditional way. Working only on Sundays – we could break the Sabbath because this was Jehovah’s business – we nevertheless managed to complete the project in less than two months.

First we cleared a large circle, digging up the ground with badzas – traditional hoes. Then we dug a two-foot trench around it. In the trench we planted a circular wall of vertical wattle logs, off-cuts which had been donated by the factory. These we pounded into place, packing the spaces between them with mud. Next, and most tricky, we constructed a large conical frame out of thinner logs and latticed it with a web of saplings, bound together with bark. On one memorable Sunday we hoisted the roof frame on to the walls and lashed it into place.

Meanwhile we had been scything tall elephant grass on the hillside and laying it out to dry in the sun. Even I had been equipped with a small blunt sickle, and my sheaves, though rather puny, were received by the chief thatcher with appreciative formality. We tied the grass into bundles and the thatching began, the bundles being placed in layers from the bottom up. The hut was finally taking shape and it looked magnificent, quite the biggest hut anyone had ever seen.

When the thatching was complete, the congregation were required to bring grass panniers full of fresh cowpats for the floor. As we didn’t have a cow, we brought a basket of donkey pats instead and it went in with the rest. The pats were mixed with soil and water to produce a cement-like substance, which was smeared thickly on the ground. It dried to make a floor that was as hard as terracotta.

Now that we had a real church, it was decided that we ought to have proper uniforms. An elder, who in ordinary life was Isaac the chief herd boy on Erasmus estate, had been to Umtali recently and reported that the Apostolics there were wearing a distinctive uniform which they called gammonts. The garment consisted of a floor-length red robe with a short, square-necked white smock over it, rather like an altar boy’s uniform. The elder had one made up and everyone gathered round after the service to admire it, fingering the hems and pleats and generally examining its construction. Soon all the men had them. The women began to wear long loose red dresses with white collars, and red dhukus bound around their heads.

Violet acquired the regulation dress too, although she kept it rolled up in a plastic carrier bag until we got close to the church hut, and only changed into it behind a boulder near the river. After the service, she changed back into her maid’s uniform again. For some reason she had decided that my parents would disapprove of the Apostolics.

‘You must not tell the madam or baas where we go on Sunday mornings. You understand?’

I must have looked uncertain. She knelt down, held me by the arms and looked me in the eyes.

‘It will be our little secret. Between you and me. No one else.’

I loved secrets and readily agreed.

After several more weeks, however, I began to pine for my own gammont. I didn’t like being left out of the clandestine clothes change at the riverside each Sunday. When I asked Violet if I could have a uniform too, she looked appalled.

Only adults had gammonts, she pointed out, and anyway how would we hide it? Disappointed as I was, I reluctantly accepted her objections.

Two Sundays passed. Then the following Monday Violet marched me down to the store just as it should have been closing for the lunch hour.

The store was a cavern of delights. When you entered it from the brightness outside, you could see nothing at first until your eyes adjusted to its gloomy interior. Then, slowly, you could make out the bolts of bright cloth in racks along the wall, and below them rows of tins, cheap canvas shoes, enamel plates and bowls, bars of blue washing soap, bottles of cooking oil. From the ceiling hung bicycle wheels and inner tubes, agricultural implements and kettles and cooking pots. In the back room were big bags of mealie meal and flour, sugar and milk powder.

A paraffin fridge bulged with Penny Cools and Lyons Maid ice creams, bottles of Coca-Cola and cream soda. Stuck on the lid was a handwritten notice which said: Decide what you want FIRST and then open the fridge LATER. By Order. But no one paid any attention and we would spend hours scrabbling inside it for particular flavours.

On top of the wooden counter was a glass cabinet of sweets: multicoloured jujubes, jelly beans, bulbuls, gobstoppers, little men made of banana-flavoured nougat. Best of all were the sweetie cigarettes – solid white tubes of candy with fiery red tips which came in a mini cigarette packet. I was a four-a-day man.

Joseph the storekeeper let me take as long as I wanted to make up my mind. He went on serving, doing a steady trade in single Star cigarettes and half-loaves of bread. His customers would unknot their handkerchiefs and carefully count out the right coins, which Joseph would ring up on his enormous till, with a balletic flourish.

On the wall behind him was a huge poster of two beaming black women. The message beneath them read: Ambi skin-lightening cream – for a more beautiful complexion. The one for YOU. The women in the poster had light caramel faces and were surrounded by admiring African men in tuxedos.

Today Violet bustled me in just as the security doors were closed behind us by MaGlass the tailor, who was usually stationed in the far corner behind an ancient treadle sewing machine. He was known by all as MaGlass because he was one of the very few Africans who wore spectacles. When MaGlass the tailor climbed up his ladder and retrieved two bales of cloth, one white and one red, I guessed what was happening. He brought his tape measure and measured my neck and waist, arm and leg. Each time he moved one of my limbs to measure it, I kept it in place as still as a pipe cleaner. Then he measured out two lengths of cloth on the metal yardstick that was screwed down to the counter, and cut them off the bales.

MaGlass the tailor made some calculations on a piece of paper.

‘The cost is nine shillings and sixpence. Six shillings for material, three and six for labour,’ he announced.

It hadn’t occurred to me that it would cost money. I only had a shilling, which I brought out of my pocket and put tentatively on the counter, but Violet was already counting coins out of her handkerchief. I offered her my shilling.

‘No, it doesn’t matter. Better you spend on sweeties, I think,’ she said and handed it back.

‘You come back in two days for fitting,’ said MaGlass the tailor.

I could barely contain my excitement.

After one fitting it was ready, a particularly fine gammont which MaGlass had embellished with some irregular embroidery around the square neck of the white smock and my name – ‘Master Peter’ – sewn across the chest.

In time we all had gammonts except the growing parade of rookies, who would usually get kitted out within a few weeks of joining. Our success rate was pretty good with these new recruits – the religious cocktail we had concocted was almost irresistible. It was a combination of traditional African animism and selected morsels of Christianity, mostly from the Old Testament.

Isaac the dip boy, who had become the chief elder, was more of a master of ceremonies than a pastor, and he had a natural flair for showmanship. He kept the conventional Bible readings short, and we soon got on to the drumming and dancing.

The drummers positioned themselves around the edge of the great hut – we all had drums, traditional ones made of a hollowed-out log with cowhide stretched over the top and secured with wooden pegs. The biggest were enormous bass drums which were so tall they had to be beaten from a standing position. I had a little canto tom-tom that I beat while sitting cross-legged. Sometimes there were as many as a hundred drums going. It was said that you could hear the beat from the lookout tower on Spitzkop Mountain, which was a good five miles away.

As the rhythm slowly increased, the dancing would grow more frenetic. Exhausted dancers dropped out to be replaced by new ones, in an ongoing relay. It kept on going, faster and faster, until one of the dancers issued a piercing howl. The drums would stop, and the dancers pulled back to the edge. The one who had howled would usually fall to the floor, writhing and kicking and often frothing at the mouth. He was in the process of becoming possessed by a spirit.

Once possessed, he would quieten down into a trance, eyes unfocused, body limp. He would begin speaking in a voice that was not his own, a voice that really had changed completely. Sometimes he would speak in comprehensible Shona, sometimes in tongues, which only the elders could translate.

The talk would be either in the form of a narrative – usually an obscure Old Testament episode – or in the form of a sermon, urging the congregation to observe certain rules of living. Question and answer sessions occasionally took place, although I noticed that these were usually done during a speaking in tongues, with an elder as interlocutor.

The person in the trance had in effect become a spirit medium, a key player in ancient African animism. The medium was no longer himself, he was now a conduit, usually for a character from the Bible, a prophet, or an apostle – though never Christ himself. Or he became the spirit of a departed ancestor, dispensing wisdom and advice from beyond the great divide.

It was heady stuff.

Spirits could speak through anyone – men, women, even children. I once saw a young girl of eleven or twelve who normally spoke in a high piping voice become possessed and address us in a rich baritone. She held forth in the most detailed way about a smouldering land dispute between two local tribes, going back to its origins in the late eighteenth century. Her discourse was sprinkled with archaic chiNdau phrases long passed out of common usage.

One Sunday, when I was a bit older, a most disturbing thing happened. I had been drumming for half an hour and got up to have a dance. By then we used to dance around a central pole, kicking our feet high and pounding them down in unison on to the baked manure floor so the whole hut shook and the thatch quivered above us. In the middle, next to the pole, was a small fire as it was a bitterly cold winter’s morning, the valley outside still contoured in thick guti, a drizzly mist. The tempo had become frenetic, and despite the chill we were all lathered in sweat.

The last thing I remember was staring into the flames of the fire and feeling myself slowly being drawn into them.

When I came to, I was lying down by the wall, my head in Violet’s lap. She was wiping my forehead with her handkerchief. I felt exhausted, drugged with sleep. My gammont was completely sodden, as though I had fallen into the river. Violet was making little comforting noises as she dabbed at my head with her hanky. And she was crying too. Behind her, Isaac the chief elder and other prominent Apostolics were murmuring anxiously to one another.

No one would tell me what had happened. I thought I’d just fainted, but Violet eventually told me I’d been possessed, that I’d talked – in Shona – for about ten minutes. But she wouldn’t say who I had become or what I said. No matter how I pleaded and threatened and cajoled, she absolutely refused to elaborate. I had never seen her so stubborn.

I didn’t go back to the Apostolics’ hut after that. I suddenly felt scared. My gammont was left hanging in the back of my wardrobe until my mother discovered it one day, years later, and threw it out.

Whenever I met my old fellow Apostolics on the road or in the plantations, they treated me with a new formality, using the cupped-hand greeting and averting their eyes to avoid meeting mine.

In the years that followed my defection, the Apostolics grew to become one of the biggest churches in southern Africa. They began calling themselves the Zion Christian Church and took to wearing little green ribbons pinned to their chests. Later I saw these had been formalized into tin ZCC badges with a green backing. In the cities and towns at least, they have a more conventional, evangelical approach now. But in the more remote areas, where traditional culture is strongest, Isaac the dip boy or his spiritual successors are still practising their old rites, and remaining in close contact with the wise ones – the ancestors.

Violet’s conversion to the Apostolics was not shared by Knighty. He despised them because they didn’t drink beer.

Beer loomed large in Knighty’s life. Not the Castle or Lion lager in bottles that the whites drank. Nor Chibuku or Rufaro, the thin porridgy African beer made of millet and produced commercially in waxed cartons. Knighty preferred to brew up his own beer. He made it in a 44-gallon drum hidden in the bush at the back of the garden. First he emptied a bag of ground millet into the drum and added some water – rainwater was best. A packet of yeast was sprinkled in. Then, as the mixture slowly fermented, he added various other ingredients to pep it up. Herbs and flowers, cream of tartar seeds from the baobab trees.

Sometimes Knighty used other, less conventional, ingredients. An old car battery gave the beer a delightfully pungent edge, he said. Small rodents were good for body. And he would gratefully receive any snakes that we killed around the garden – boomslangs and green mambas were particularly prevalent.

Knighty had a reputation down in the compound as a master brewer of the old traditional school, and serious drinkers would send their wives up for supplies whenever word reached them that another drum of his special brew had reached maturity. Knighty would ladle the beer out of the vast grimy drum into their large black cooking pots. They would hand over a few coins, or some cobs of maize or heads of cabbage in exchange. Then he would help to hoist the full pots on to the coiled cloth skull pads on their heads, and they would stroll back down to the compound to their thirsty husbands.

Apparently Knighty’s brew was staggeringly potent, twice as strong as Chibuku they said. This more than made up for the fact that sometimes it made drinkers violently ill.

Knighty and Violet lived together in one half of the servants’ quarters. They called it their kaya, which means house. Their musha, their real home, was still in the reserve. The other half of the kaya was occupied by Albert the Mozambican.

Albert came from a kraal just across the border, about four days’ walk, and walking was the only way to get there. He was bald on his head but had a small untidy beard which grew in clumps on his chin and always had grass seeds in it. Albert wore long baggy shorts and his ragged khaki shirt always hung down on the outside. He had bandy legs and bare feet which were as wide as dinner plates and crispy with calluses. He usually chewed a piece of wood and he walked with long strides so I had to jog alongside to keep up with him.

Albert’s main job was to do the gardening, which took a lot of energy as the garden was about five acres, although part of that was a paddock for donkeys. It also included a big vegetable garden in which he grew all the vegetables we ate. When my father had a small cement swimming pool built, Albert’s responsibilities were extended to keeping that clean too, although this task completely defeated him and the pool eventually became one of the most fecund frog-breeding locations in the whole province. Long slimy strings of frog spawn trailed around your arms and legs whenever you swam in it.

Because Albert’s second language was in fact Portuguese, his English was worse than either Violet’s or Knighty’s, so I ended up learning most of my Shona from him. The language he actually spoke was called chiNdau, a dialect of Shona used by the Ndau people who lived in Gazaland, along the eastern border with Mozambique and inside Mozambique itself.

Not many Europeans could speak chiNdau, or any of the Shona dialects for that matter. Some priests could, and a few District Commissioners. The rest of the Europeans spoke to Africans in English, talking very loudly and slowly, usually in an African accent. Or they used a bastard language called kitchen kaffir, which was supposed to be called chiLapalapa.

Kitchen kaffir wasn’t really anyone’s own language; it was a hybrid, a mixture of English, Afrikaans and Zulu. My father told me it had been invented in the mines so that the white shift bosses could communicate with the various tribes who worked underground. He said that the verbs were Zulu and the nouns were English and the swearwords were Afrikaans.

Albert also taught me how to swear in chiNdau. He didn’t particularly want to, but I kept pestering him until he agreed. Not even priests or District Commissioners knew how to swear in chiNdau. Mboro meant cock, machende meant balls and meche was the word for a fanny. If I got into fights with kids down at the compound I could reel off a string of chiNdau swear words that had the adults whooping with astonishment.

One of Albert’s lasting memorials was the tree house. It was an ambitious construction at the back of the house, overlooking the red dirt road that led down to the Viljoen’s house and on to the Mozambique border. Albert did most of the building, with me as his constant helper.

Knighty the cook boy initially greeted the whole idea with great derision. But as it took shape his scorn was overcome and he became an enthusiastic supporter. He began chipping in with all sorts of ever more extravagant ideas. While Albert and I were up there actually lashing poles together and hammering six-inch nails, Knighty would sit cross-legged at the base of the trunk in his grubby white apron and long white shorts and bare feet, smoking roll-ups, and bossing us around.

Finally he became so enamoured of the project he had originally insisted would never stay up that he transferred various kitchen activities to his station below the tree. He sat mixing unspecified liquids and beating eggs and sprinkling liberal pinches of seasoning into his bowl, and at intervals shouted up completely unhelpful advice and unworkable ideas with great confidence.

‘You put double storey?’ he suggested. ‘How about we make fireplace?’

Albert and I would exchange a secret look, I would roll my eyes to the sky and Albert would shake his head and we would continue hammering and binding just as before. And Knighty would continue contentedly mixing his potions.

Knighty was, in most regards, an ineffably bad cook. He had only about eight dishes and all these he cooked dismally. Meat rissoles and macaroni cheese used to come around with relentless monotony several times a week. The macaroni was invariably glazed with a cinder crust. The rissoles were always burnt underneath and raw in the middle. But he did have a terrible old wood stove to work with, which had only one temperature and smoked so badly he had to make running forays to move the pans or stir the pots, and retreat coughing and gasping and cursing.

You could adjust the temperature of the stove by the size and type of logs. So from his great log store under the eaves, Knighty would select big or little, split or whole, dry or wet, depending on the recipe. He made a great show of this process but in truth it had little effect on the success of his cooking.

But Knighty did have a couple of real winners that had me growing up believing he was the cordon bleu chef of Africa. His home-baked bread was superb. Not content with anything so boring as conventional loaf shapes, Knighty turned first to the farmyard for inspiration. His speciality was ‘The Pig’. The central loaf was in the shape of a sow, and along its sides were suckling piglets which could be neatly broken off and eaten as rolls.

Later he went to the wild for his ideas; his final triumph, more of a dough sculpture than a mere loaf, was a crocodile whose scaly back could be dismantled as tiny bread bobbles.

If it was someone’s birthday or school holidays had just begun, Knighty would fashion a name on the back of the central animal loaf. As he couldn’t read or write, these heroic messages were crafted as ideograms under remote instruction from Violet, who only had standard four herself. They were often massively misspelt, not that anyone cared about that.

Knighty’s other culinary masterpiece was the potato bomb, one of the most exciting eating experiences of all time. From the outside it looked like a conventional mound of mashed potato (although inevitably it was littered with little hard bits) but inside was the gravy. I was always allowed to be first in, and the excitement was never knowing quite how far inside the gravy started. Because of the way that Knighty packed down the mashed potato mound, the gravy was stored under pressure and if you weren’t extremely careful it could literally burst, splashing hot gravy all over the place to everyone’s great amusement.

It became a game between Knighty and me; he would constantly change his construction of the bomb, with dummy compartments and off-centre gravy cores to confuse me.

When the tree house was finally completed, Knighty took to sleeping up there at night, to get relief from the summer heat, or when he had been having words with Violet or the baby’s crying got on his nerves. He was often joined by the dogs, who, curious to find out why he was spending so much time up there, eventually managed to climb up the tree. Soon it became a favourite haunt of theirs too, and their habitual sleeping place – a tree kennel. They continued to patronize it long after I’d lost interest and had turned instead to digging an underground bunker.