IV (Note: other sections will be viewable to me only for now).
I started school the year brother managed to sneak out of the country and went back to South Africa. Two nights before he left, he had come to the hut I slept in to give me my new school books. Those books smelled sweet and looked delicous. He must have seen the expression on my face because he said, "These are not sweets, but love them the same way you love sweets."
He then sat down and said he was going to show me how to read them. He had bought me three different books, my very first books. One book, he said, was for English, a language brother said I was going to learn properly at school, the other, for ChiShona, which, he told me, was the official name for the language we spoke, and the third one was for what he expained as the numbers subject, Mathematics. I knew what English was because I had heard brother speak it with his friends, then once in a while when Mai said things like "Fokof! Fokof!" I knew that was English. Alice used some English too, once telling me I was "stupet", but turning around to tell me not to tell brother that she had told me that's what I was, although that word sounded nice. I liked Alice.
Brother opened the English book first, reading so nicely that I just sat there listening to the sound of his voice, hoping that one day, soon, I would be as good as he was, the way his voice collapsed and sounded as if it came through his nose, his lips curling like very words he was reading were disgusting him, but still managing to read like his voice was pure magic. Then he explained in our language, retreating to his normal voice, that he had just read a story of an egg-like boy who fell and cracked his egg head. Brother had a hard time stopping me from laughing at the boy, and I could not wait to tell Chari about this strange little man, as brother called him.
Then when brother read the ChiShona book, which also had pictures of houses and animals and people, whole families with grandmothers, aunts, mothers, fathers, dogs, and cats, I knew I would have fun at school. I did not laugh as much when he read the ShiShona one, and I did not laugh even once when he was reading the last book which he said was for Mathematics. Brother said soon I would know how to count and spend my own money. "I don't have money," I said. "I will leave you some money, some pocket money, your own that you shouldn't tell your Maiguru about. It's our secret."
I had some money on my first day of school, money that Maiguru, for that's what I called Alice once she started living with us, did not know about. Even Mai did not know about that money, several silver coins which I kept for a long time as brother had instructed me (secretly) on the day we escorted him to Chivi to board a bus. At the bus stop, in the dark, he insisted that we tell no one that he had boarded a bus to somewhere, that if the comrades asked about him, to tell them that he had "crossed", which I never tried to understand at the time, swimming in my flood of joy about school and pocket money that I kept in my pockets for many years, taking it out to hide it when Maiguru was washing the clothes, then putting it back when the clothes were clean. Little did I know that those coins would get me in trouble with the soldiers, when months later, they thought a comrade had given me that money.
II.
We were lodgers. That's all we were, lodgers this year, lodgers the next year, lodgers the years after next. It seemed to never end and I was tired of lying to my friends at school in High Field about this house that we owned, this big house in Glen View 7, the place that had houses that looked like the ones in Waterfalls. I was tired of avoiding taking my friends home although most insisted on wanting to see this big Glen View house that looked like ones in Waterfalls.
When I asked my brother once about how far advanced our plans to buy a house in Glen View 7 were, he said, "Young man, remember what I told you about focusing on school?" That shut me up immediately because further inquiry on the issue would have meant a slap on the face, followed by a staccato of fists fixing my head. I always wondered how he managed to release blows with such rapidity, and I often watched, amazed, as the fists descended; I had learned in childhood not even bother crying or running away.
"You said we are focusing on paying my school fees first then everything will follow, that more money will be available once I finish school."
"Good," he said, taking the last swig from a beer bottle. This was what he called one for the road, because immediately after that he took his wallet and left for Kubatana Bar.
My brother. The man was great. He was twenty years my senior, an age difference that made him take the responsibility of being my father. I had just woke up one day and found I was this boy in Mazvihwa with no father and mother, but was in a family of many people, tons of brothers who had wives with tons of children. Then one among these brothers had stood out, the dark tall man who came to the rural areas once every three months, straightened everyone and then left. Straigtening was a position the family had naturally accorded him, as he did not hesitate to beat you up if you had or had not done something. That was the brother who claimed me as his son, which he said was the only thing that was made sense to do. But how?
Of the tons of brothers in the extended family, he was the only one with whom I shared a father. The others were his half brothers. I was his half brother too since I had a different mother, but there was a great exception, which I understood even as a small boy:
" Look at it this way young fellow. Since we have the same father we have one blood. Look around. Do you see anyone who looks like us in this room?"
I look around and all the other brothers, who were in the house at the time, drunk like lunatics, looked different from the dark brother and I, a dark one too.
"So you see, that's one clue. But the most important clue-- listen, are you listening? I might have to introduce the fist now. I have let you get away with much because I didn't think you could take the fist like a man." His eyes raced around the big room, and all the other people in the house seemed to be saying something to him, which I didn't hear because I was thinking about the fist, which I had seen at work earlier that day on one of the brothers.
"Good. You are now listening. Good. You and I, we are only two." At this point he raised two fingers, a big one and small one. So the small represented me. I think I nodded my head because he followed up with a nod, accepted a mug of beer from a completely drunk brother, stuck it to him mouth for long, then passed it on to a man I did know that much, who winced at me, and I looked straight at my real brother.
"You are the future of this family. I will take care of you like my own son; in turn you will take care of the growing family. But for now, just know, for what it's worth, that we are only two. How many?"
Judging by my age at the time, I could have responded, "Tu!" to which he nodded approvingly and sent me out to play with others. And so I had grown up under the care of my brother, most of the time living in the rural areas under the care of his wife.
"And that wife-- was that my mother?" Linda interrupted, and at the same time there was a beep on the phone, then a voice, "You have ten minutes." Ten minutes? That was a new one. These cards usually gave you a warning when you were left with only one minute.
"No Linda, that was not your mother, " I said. Linda's silence told me she had remembered that she was supposed to make this one easier for me, allow me to develop the details as was comfortable to me, details that would allow me to - eventually -- answer her question.
"Go ahead, Babamunini," she said. This girl had the audacity to tell me when I could go ahead.
Talking like that would not have stood a chance in front of my brother, not even the slightest hint of a chance. Like on the afternoon I asked him about the Glen View house, I was no longer at ease after the question, and especially after he left because I knew he would come back drunk, and chances of him raising the issue were very high. But I focused my mind on something else-- books. I was reading Dambudzo Marechera's House of Hunger for pleasure at the time, enjoying the references to sex and prostitutes. Then when Peter beat he girl he had impregnated, I put the book down, stood up and walked to the section of the room that had our tall brown wardrobe. On there was a full-length mirror, which for a moment looked like a window into the past, as the dark teenager in it walked to meet me.
I hadn't even started school when brother was made to marry his first wife. Well, second, if we count his one-month interaction with Mai Bee as marriage. I had not been born when he married Mai Bee, the much-talked about woman who had run away with the couple's baby, first to Chipinge, then across the boarder to Mozambique. So I have always regarded Alice as brother's first wife because I saw the marriage being made to happen one morning in January, 1977.
I.
This time I did not use a calling card; instead, I just picked up the cell phone and dialed my niece's number. I preferred calling Zimbabwe this way because I did not have to dial a million numbers before I got to talk to someone.
She answered immediately. As usual, what sounded like a rude voice came on the line, asking who I was. Then once she recognized my voice, after a few instances of perhaps pretending not to hear me, she said, "Babamunini, I have thought of asking you this question a long time."
"Go ahead," I said, hoping she would hurry up. People back home sometimes acted like they thought I had a whole orchard of money trees, especially my neice, asking me if I could buy her this or that, and always waking up to the reality that I was not really going to buy the goods since mailing them was more expensive than just sending the money.
After a pause, my niece cleared her throat. Then she said, "Babamunini, do I even have a mother?"
What? For a moment I did not know what say; then I thought of telling her I had not heard what she had said, but something in her voice told me she knew that I had heard the question, and that I should answer it. Unlike all the other times I talked with her over the phone, this time she sounded serious, in a no-nonsense way, never mind the thousands of mile that separated us.
"Why do you ask such a silly question?" I said, putting on my fatherly, authorirative voice which I had used for the past ten years from when she was about seven or so years, when I took over the responsibility of taking care of her, from a distance, after my brother died.
"I'm serious, Babamunini. I know my father, I even visited him in the hospital just before he died. But my mother, no one ever mentioned her to me. Mbuya doesn't talk about my mother. And when I asked her yesterday to tell me all I need to know, she said, 'Call your babamunini. Ask him to tell you what you need to know, then ask him why he hasn't come back home since he left many moons ago'."
"Wait a minute now. I can't quite hear you, something in our connection, Linda," I said, already feeling a deep pain about mother's second request about why I had not returned home in over ten years. But Linda could not buy into the weak-connection story. She continued, "I don't care about all the other things, babamunini, I mean about what mbuya said about you not coming home.That I know, and I always tell Mbuya let Babamunini stay in America for as long as he wants, and I tell her, you have to be proud you have your own son there." She paused and for a moment I thought I had lost her. This time I was just going to let her talk, let her just ask what she wanted. Who cares about the $1.40 per minute on my cell phone. Let her ask about her mother; let her. I mean, does the girl even know her own birth date?
And she spoke some more, "Babamunini, I said do I have a mother?"There was a moment of silence. Then something happened in me, a flash of memory, a howling woman, mauling the face of another, and I told myself it was time to do, as the only remaining father figure to my niece, what I was supposed to do: tell her what I knew, to the best of my remembrance. So I decided at that moment to be a man and take her question seriously.
"Linda, let me go buy some calling cards. What time is it there?"
"It's only after ten usiku. Please, babamunini, make sure you call me, please. I don't mean to spend all your money. I know you said you work too hard for it, and that I should not--."
"It's okay. I'm going to buy several calling cards. Understand that sometimes the calls don't always go through, but I will call you later tonight."
"I'll be awake, Babamunini, waiting." Pause. " And I'm sorry for asking."
"I'll call. Hang up now," I said, the fatherly voice possessing me again. Suddenly there was a beep. Silence. I sighed.
