Читать книгу Chairman of Fools - Shimmer Chinodya - Страница 9
ОглавлениеAnd what is it, my dear husband, that’s eating you up? What is it that’s making you hate yourself, hate me? Can’t you see that this phoney, artsy life of yours is hurting you, harming me and dragging your children and everybody around you into the steep-sided pits of your despair? You are keeping bad company; your image badly needs sprucing up, you have to be schooled again in the simple ways of trust. The word SELFISH is branded on your forehead, like numbers scorched onto the flanks of mindless cattle. You brook no advice; you have mangled your sense of time and scratched the word ‘purpose’ out of the grammar of your habits. A year out there, after a decade of blame and abuse and you think I’ll take it forever. You think I’ll stay the same, that I won’t change to become ME, MYSELF, I, ME. Be warned, my dear man, that I’m definitely changing; that there are things in store for you…
When Farai arrives home he finds Veronica asleep. Her left arm hangs limply out of the sheets, her wedding ring gleaming faintly in the moonlight that is filtering into the bedroom through the high, curtainless windows. He wanders into the study to look for mail and messages, and then into the kitchen for a bite, but finding nothing prepared, brushes his teeth and climbs carefully into bed beside her. Something, perhaps a large rat, makes a strange, thumping movement in the ceiling but he is too tipsy to worry about it. For hours he cannot rest. Lately, alcohol has not brought him the deep sleep he so badly needs. He shudders at the thought of the binges that characterised the last few weeks before his return home.
In the morning she startles him awake with her hair drier.
‘Why don’t you try natural locks?’ he says, sleepily, longingly. She is wearing a new white cheese-cloth dress with buttons all the way up the front and black high heels. She sprays a subtle perfume under her arms and between her thighs. He feels envious of her and yet angry with her. A woman can change a lot in twenty short months.
He sits up and reaches for her.
‘No,’ she pushes his arms away. ‘If you had wanted that you would have come home earlier.’
‘You left me no supper.’
‘If you’d wanted food as well, you’d have been here earlier still.’
‘Some men come home to find supper waiting for them.’
‘Men who respect their wives and families.’
‘But I’ve only been back three days.’
‘So you’re already trying to catch up on what you missed. Back to your old ways. What about me, alone here, with the children?’
‘You make it sound as if I was over there having a picnic.’
‘Why didn’t you take us with you?’
‘We’ve been over this a hundred times. Why should I drag my family into all that snow and snobbery when I’ve built a nest for them here? Squandering a fortune? To prove what?’
‘It would’ve been a good experience for the children.’
‘Would you have left your job for two years of nonsense, and then come back to find new school places for the children and work for yourself? You’re too ambitious for that.’
‘One can always begin a new career. We’re not working to buy an aeroplane, you know. One day you’ll die and leave your estate to be devoured by wolves. We won’t see a cent of it. You should learn to spend your money while you are still alive.’
‘You take for granted all the little comforts I starve myself to create for you.’
‘Don’t exaggerate. You’re full of self-pity and you just worship money.’
‘No, you do. Secretly. You contradict yourself. On the one hand you preach thrift but on the other you are obsessed with the image of wealth and prosperity held up by your church. You’re envious of me. The real trouble is you think I was over there having fun.’ ‘How can I think otherwise when you start your disappearing act as soon as you set foot at home?’
‘What d’you expect me to do when you go to that church of yours three times a day?’
‘Maybe I’ve found comfort in it. Maybe it’s time I became my real self, and stopped you trying to change me into whoever you want me to be.’
‘We’ve gone through this a thousand times. I wish …’
‘There you go again. Talking, talking and listening to yourself and blaming me for everything. That’s what you have done all your life. I can’t stand it any more. Now take your hands off my dress. I’m late already.’
‘What about breakfast?’
‘You’ve been making that for yourself for ten months, or so you say. Remember, when you phoned home you promised us a surprise breakfast one day. Why don’t you try that today?’
Veronica picks up her bag, her bible and the car keys and swishes out of the bedroom. The children, Sharai, eight, and Ticha, six, are waiting for her in the passage, decked out in their new clothes. Their first daughter, Rumbi, is a high school boarder in the mountains four hours away.
He slips on his gown and follows them to the door. There is no time for good mornings, just the clinking of keys as at a jail-room door. He watches from the window as Veronica drives out through the electric gate in her blue Corolla, the exhaust of the car rattling.
Switching off the DSTV left on by the children, he enters the kitchen to find out if there is anything to eat. The fridge is full of meat, bread, vegetables, milk and the pantry shelves are well stocked with eggs, rice, spaghetti, sugar, maize meal, cooking oil and fruit juice, but he has no appetite, nor the strength or desire to cook. A hangover throbs at his temples. Maybe he should just have an ice cold beer but god no, this is a Christian house and drinking is taboo. Veronica would never allow it, let alone buy him a beer. When they first married there was always a beer or two in the fridge but nowadays, especially since she joined the new church, he is uncomfortable drinking at home. When he has visitors, and these are rare, he has to rush to the shops to buy drinks.
In the lounge he picks up the framed photograph of his late mother. She stares out at him. He is surprised to remember how young she was when she died – only fifty-three – ravaged by cancer and bedridden in this very house under his youthful, unknowing care. His photogenic father, struck dead by a sudden stroke at seventy, had left no photographs worth framing. Nor had Dzimai, his taciturn brother whose fate he hated to recall and for whom he hadn’t shed a tear.
Mooching into the study, Farai stares at the telephone. Damn it, Piri the dancer had said she had no phone, and he had not been sober or focussed for long enough to get a specific address, or to find out what she would be doing today. ‘It’s funny,’ he thinks, ‘how those precious names and numbers salted away in bulging purses or glove lockers have the knack of disappearing, just when they are most needed.’
He bathes, puts on a clean change of clothes, locks up the house, and like a dazed, deodorised assailant, drives out to assault the city. His old Mazda 323 is still a good runner – he plans to buy a new model once his overseas stint is finally over. One more year out there, alone, is a long time. Again he wonders why he accepted the job.
While he is filling up at the local garage who should pull up but Wilbert, the only man he can perhaps claim as a real friend, as their friendship goes back to their schooldays nearly three decades ago. They studied together in the hockey fields, picked mazhanje in the forest and raided neighbouring farmers’ maize fields for kanga on full moonlit nights. Wilbert is now the quintessential family man, marrying off brothers, chastising errant sisters’ husbands, burying clansmen and overseeing enormous weddings. Modest Wilbert, now a financial director, but still trundling up in his old pick-up truck with a little boy on the front seat. Within seconds Farai, laughing, bursts out of his car to give Wilbert a hug.
‘Man! Hey! When did you get back?’ The months slip away in a few jokes and Wilbert invites him to have ‘one one’ at a nearby bottle store. His friend volunteers little about his life besides bemoaning the rigours of work and domestication and the approaching mid-forties. Farai knows Wilbert envies him his freer career and ability to travel. He talks expansively about his experiences in America, his problems with Veronica, and with drink, but he says little about the women cluttering his life.
‘You ought to eat before you go drinking, Farai. And try going to church with the missus and the babies once in a while.’
Wilbert’s advice sounds mundane; the kind gleaned at smoky barbeques and crowded bottle stores. Most men don’t take advice easily, even from friends. But they like to drink together all the same. ‘One one’ becomes ‘two two’ and ‘two two’ becomes ‘three three’ and ‘three three’ often becomes ‘four four’. Wilbert typically refuses to allow Farai to pay. The baby is fidgeting on the seat and has had enough chips and Fantas and his wife Clara must be wondering where he is with the milk, tomatoes and potatoes. He has to go. He leaves with promises of a further meeting tomorrow afternoon, when he is free.
Left alone, Farai ponders his fate. He has money, and time to kill, but no one to spend it with. The beer so early in the day is exhilarating him but intensifies his loneliness. He thinks perhaps he should have a small house, but he has never had the patience to run one nor a woman to try it out with. Besides, he has never been a small house man. He fears attachment. He is a man waiting to be found; a confused being waiting to be rediscovered and restored to himself. He hops from pub to pub, jesting with women, arguing with old acquaintances and is somewhat amazed at how adept he is becoming at it. He frequents the pubs in search of familiarity and security but after five pints he feels no better.
At one of his roadside haunts a leggy woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a black dress and purple doek, plants herself on a free chair, opposite him across a cement table.
‘Fatima!’
‘I thought you’d forgotten me. When did you come back?’
‘Three days ago. How did you know I was away?’
‘It was in the papers. And you told me before you left. How was it?’
‘So-so.’
‘You said you would write to me. You probably tore up my address even before you boarded the plane. You have too many of us all over the place. When are you ever going to grow up and settle down?’
‘Cheers! To my ancestors! What are you doing here?’
‘Just having fun.’
‘Are you looking for men?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Are you married now?’
‘Heavens, no.’
‘How is your little boy?’
‘He’s going to school now, in Grade 1. And how’s your wife?’
‘She’s OK.’
‘She must be happy you’re back. You should spend more time with her and your children. Is she still going to that new church of hers?’
‘Zvekuti!’
‘Perhaps it’s good for you to have such a wife. You don’t realise it, but you need her. Make sure you don’t lose her.’
‘You’re gaining weight. Are you sure you aren’t pregnant?’
‘Who gets pregnant these days with funny diseases around and tonnes of condoms at every street corner?’
‘Or perhaps you’re eating lots of fish?’
‘Oh, fish. You love fish. Fish is good for you. Fish is innocent. Pork is bad. Never, ever, eat pork in people’s houses, especially at night. Remember that weird day soon after you buried your father and came crawling to my compound when all the bars closed, caked with dirt and shaking with hunger and I cooked you a big fresh bream from the dam and you put up in my room, and in the morning I soaped and scrubbed you up in my little grass bathroom and you wore my palazzo while I washed and ironed your clothes?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I wonder why your wife let you go out like that.’
‘She’s too educated.’
‘Who says educated women should treat their husbands that way?’
‘She never went to chinamwari like you did.’
‘In my country even women with university degrees take traditional courses in looking after their husbands.’
‘One day I’ll thank you for looking after me then.’
‘And yet you brought me nothing. Are you back for good?’
‘I’m going back for another year.’
‘Don’t bring us back a skinny little white woman who is too scared to kill a fowl.’
‘No, I won’t. I love black women. Hey, that big bream – was that the day we woke up and went to see zvigure, the masked dancers from Malawi?’
‘No, that was another day. New year, two years ago. You drank non-stop without sleeping for two days, and talked all night. A woman next door heard you and she said she knew a man who might be able to help you. A traditional healer.’
‘What makes you think I need help?’
‘I can tell. When did you last eat?’
‘Yesterday morning.’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not really.’
‘How many crates of beer have you taken?’
‘Maybe a half.’
‘Do you want to go and see zvigure now?’
‘Yeah, why not? Where?’
‘At a farm not far from here.’
‘OK.’
‘Can we pick up my friend Enesi on the way? She’s my home girl. I know you love going out with two women.’
‘Do I?’
‘Just don’t get too carried away like you did last time we went with Rakeri.’
At sunset Farai sits ensconced between Fatima and Enesi drinking and watching zvigure. Enesi is a lean dark girl with a good laugh. The place, an old tobacco barn, is full of cheering men, women and children. A dozen or so smart cars are parked outside and Farai waves at a well-dressed woman he thinks he was at university with, one who was in Veronica’s class. He is surprised to see her here. The dancers are all male with grass skirts, brightly coloured blouses, hideously painted masks and wild wigs of imitation Caucasian hair. They are mounted on incredibly tall stilts and take turns to twist, gyrate and incite the crowd with a blur of suggestive motions. The drums thump to a bewildering rhythm, the watchers clap and sing. The observers keep to the edge of the clearing, at a respectful distance. Every now and then a dancer charges into the crowd, and the audience scrambles back in fear. The braver ones stop to throw money at the mask’s feet before they flee. Farai sees the university woman rise to answer the challenge of one of the masks. She leaps at him so that the top of her head is level with his feet. She tears off the band holding together her dreadlocks and yanks up her skirt, digs her shoeless feet into the dust before him, throws her head back and shudders while he rocks at her, above her and showers himself all over her for just a minute before she ducks back to the safety of the crowd.
Applause.
The dancer pauses, then struts around searching for the next victim. His beady eyes meet Farai’s and he seems to scowl through the mask. Farai feels chosen, trapped and has a weird foreboding of things to come. And now the dancer charges straight at Farai and Fatima and Enesi!
‘Run!’ Enesi pants, and the two girls leap back over abandoned bottles. Farai’s quart tips over into the dusty, thirsty earth like an offering to unknown spirits and he freezes, cowering in the space between the two stilts. He sees the dancer sway above him and the mask staring angrily at him. The dancer leans down as if to grab him.
‘Get up and run!’ Fatima yells from the darkness behind. Too late, he feels the swash of the dancer’s fly whisk on his back. He plunges into the crowd, ploughing up a hurried exit with his arms. Outside in the gathering dusk silhouettes scatter and he scrambles for his car, leaps in and starts the engine.
Fatima and Enesi bang on the bonnet and the windows, ‘Don’t leave us here! Don’t leave us here.’
Deaf to their pleas, he swings across the grass towards the road.
‘You’re leaving us here,’ Fatima cries, ‘OK, go. You’ll see.’
He bumps across the veldt. He is not very sure of his way out of the maze of dirt tracks, but a haze of city lights beckons in the east. Tree branches snap at the car windows, a wheel groans over the stump of a dead tree, a stray cow crashes away from the headlights into the bushes. Miraculously, he finds the tarred road. A military truck roars past, horn blaring. Yellow lights flicker and vanish ahead of him.
God, he must go home and sleep.
God, he must get to warm safe home and say sorry to Veronica and find something to eat and hold her and kiss her and find some sleep.
The car radio switches itself on. Brenda Fassie screams:
You don’t come around
To see me in the week
I’m your weekend
Weekend special
He slaps the button shut. No time for music now. Empty bottles chatter and clink on the back seat. He reaches down under his seat and fishes out a warm, fat, quart. He snaps it open with his teeth and takes a swig. For a Saturday evening, the road is fairly empty. He skirts the city centre and runs into a police road-block. He quickly slows down, squeezes the bottle between the edge of the passenger’s seat and the car door and approaches the flashing lights. An officer with reflective arm-bands beckons him to stop and steps to the side door.
‘Licence please,’ she says through the open window.
‘I left it at home.’
‘Do you have your ID?’
He extricates the ID from his purse and holds it up to her.
‘Why are you driving drunk, Mr Chari?’
‘I’m not drunk, Officer.’
‘Now don’t argue. You don’t even have your seat belt on. How much have you taken?’
‘Just a few pints.’
‘Your car is reeking of alcohol from metres away. Do you want to kill yourself?’
Another officer, a man, armed with a gun, comes over, takes the ID from the woman officer and flashes a torch over it.
‘Do you have to get drunk to write your books, Mr Chari?’
‘Is it him?’ The woman officer asks. ‘I thought there was something familiar about his face.’
‘Haven’t you seen him in the papers and on TV, Sarge?’
‘Well, the law makes no exception of the famous. He could lose his licence for this.’
‘What are you writing now, Mr Chari?’
‘Well, about …’
‘I see, you won’t say. You think police officers don’t read, eh? For your information, I studied one of your books for my O-Levels. What have you got in your car?’
He flashes the torch inside the car. ‘Mhaiwe! What a lot of empties, Sarge. Now, Mr Chari, give us anything you’ve got open.’ Farai pulls out the concealed quart and hands it to the officer. She holds it gingerly as if it were an exhibit.
‘Why are you drinking so much?’ she asks, as if she genuinely wants to know.
‘Stress,’ he chances, ‘I’ve buried a mother and father and brother in four years and I’m having serious problems with my wife.’
‘Look, brother,’ intervenes her colleague, ‘I’m a man like you and even if I’d lost my whole family and my wife had divorced me, it doesn’t mean that I can drink and drive.’
‘Why don’t you go to a family counsellor?’
‘We’ve already tried that. I’m sorry, Officer.’
‘Sorry doesn’t protect all the people you might injure or kill. Sorry doesn’t protect you from yourself, or from car-jackers.’
‘Where are you going, Farai?’ asks the woman.
‘Home.’
‘You’re not going to drink any more?’
‘No.’
‘How far away is home?
‘About ten k’s. Look, officers. I’m drunk and I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.’
‘Don’t you think we should take him for a breath test, Sarge?’
‘He’ll fail without even opening his mouth. If he’s really sorry he’ll know what to do. This is Harare, man. He can’t just say sorry with nothing to show for it. Give him back his ID, officer. He knows what to do.’
Farai pockets his ID. There’s a pause, the three of them not knowing what to do next. Some alternatives are tricky. Then, to his disbelief, he hears himself start the car and ease off. Miraculously the officers step out of his headlights, and he’s off, slipping away from the scene. He lowers his head to the dashboard, expecting to hear a burst of gunfire from behind. Nobody fires. Nobody follows him. He accelerates.
As he approaches the local shopping centre he hits the kerb with a BANG and the car swings back and loses speed. He struggles to control the vehicle, changing gear, pumping the brakes and the car squeals to a halt. He puts on the handbrake and gets out to have a look. The tyres are OK but the wheels won’t turn. He gets back into the car and starts her up, but the great heap of metal won’t move. Two night guards patrolling the centre offer to push and he shakes his head in despair. The problem is not with the battery or the starter motor, but with the wheels and the suspension. He asks the guards what time they knock off and they say six in the morning. He offers them money to keep an eye on his vehicle all night and wait until he returns in the morning.
He locks the car and begins the long trudge home. The shopping centre is deserted. There are no more combis or taxis in the rank. From behind the gates and prefabricated walls dogs bark frantically as he walks past, and the ugly refrain follows on his heels. A full moon gloats over at him.
‘Damn it,’ he thinks, ‘if I only had a cell phone I could call the car break-down company or even haul Wilbert out of bed, but no, I mustn’t give him trouble, not at this time of the night, anyway.’ It’s not always good to trouble your friends.
The lights in the industrial sites swell and glow, shrink and vanish and then re-emerge. They look like the headlights of approaching cars, but there is no traffic in the road. Farai takes off his glasses, wipes them on his T-shirt and peers into the dark vlei ahead of him. A bat with a faulty radar loops out of the sky and skims over his head. He falls to his knees. He sees a person in a white gown approaching him.
‘Good evening.’
In the moonlight, the man’s head shines bald. He is barefooted and holds a staff in one hand and a Bible in the other.
Farai takes a deep gulp of air and grunts indistinctly.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes. Say, is everything all right where you are coming from?’
‘Why, yes.’
‘And you think I’ll get home all right?’
‘I don’t see why not. The road is safe and there’s a full moon. Besides, it’s not too late. Are you going far?’
‘I live straight down the road past the shopping mall, among the houses on the right. My car broke down.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’re a man of God, aren’t you? Will you pray for me to get home?’
‘Why, if you want. I started praying for you the moment I met you. I pray all the time.’
‘And can you pray for my wife and children, too?’
‘I’ll do that too. Is something bothering you?’
‘Problems at home.’
‘What makes you think things are going wrong for you? You probably have a wife and children, a good job, a nice house and a car. And you have good health and life. There are many people who would envy you.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Tell me, do you drink?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Maybe you should try cutting down. I used to drink myself.’
‘How did you stop?’
‘God called me. Do you go to church?’
‘I used to.’
‘What made you stop?’
‘I just stopped. I believe there is a God – maybe I just lost faith in churches.’
‘Some churches are different. Why don’t you try us? We welcome everybody. We have all night prayer meetings on Wednesday and Saturday nights behind the mall and you are free to join us. You’re a young man and you’ve a long life ahead of you.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Of course. But I must be on my way. I’ll pray for you. Go well, and good luck with your car.’
The man of God hurries past him without turning back. His words have soothed him and given him the energy to walk faster. But Farai shudders at the thought of himself in a white gown. He does not meet any cars or people on the way. When he arrives home it is after midnight. He clicks on the remote and the electric gate shudders open. The house is in darkness and the security lights are not switched on. He waits for the gate to close, pockets the remote and approaches what feels like his grim prison for the four-thousandth time. From the other side of the fence, his neighbours’ alsations give a couple of puzzled woofs. Their security lights swell, shrink, blink and turn bluish, he irritably squeezes his eyes shut against the sudden glare and then struggles with the padlocks and the lock-blocks. Inside the house all the lights are off and the alarm has not been switched on. He snaps on the lights and approaches the main bedroom. Veronica is not there. The bed is unmade, just as he had left it in the morning. He checks the children’s bedrooms – they are empty too – clothes, shoes and books are strewn all over the carpets. He takes a peek into the maid’s bedroom and switches on the light. She is not there. In the study he checks out the telephone. No dial tone. In the lounge the hi-fi switches itself on and off, and on and off again. He checks all the doors and windows. They are all secure.
There is no supper in the fridge and in the scullery yesterday’s dishes have not been washed.
He goes back to the bedroom and throws the wardrobes open. Half of Veronica’s dresses are missing.
He throws himself on the bed. Sleep, Oh sleep. He squeezes his eyelids together and messages his scalp with his fingers.
Out in the yard a car stops, engine running, and the electric gate rolls open. He hears children’s voices, keys rustling, foot steps in the lounge, muted voices. Laughter. He steps out expectantly to the lounge. The lights in the lounge blink on and off and on again. There is nobody – the keys are in the door where he had left them and the children’s bedrooms are empty. Her peeps through the curtains, out to the yard. The gate is closed and there is no car in the driveway.
He throws himself again on the bed and tries to sleep. He lies like that for hours, on top of the blankets. Each time he begins to fall asleep, something wakes him up.