She spoke of the standards that the United Nations has set for the treatment of prisoners. Prisons should be places of human rights and human dignity, we were all on the same page, everyone in this room was on the very same page. We all wanted the same things, and those same things were, primarily, human rights and human dignity.
She spoke as though these were tangible gifts that we had only to reach out and take. Indeed, if we had had a piece of meat for every time she said those words, we would have gone to bed fuller than we had been in all of the time we had been in prison.
I cannot say I have seen any human rights since her visit — or much human dignity, for that matter — but Synodia’s voice is certainly less loud. Her blood-and-thunder seems straggly and ineffectual.
Loveness is even more subdued. No doubt she fears that the Stygian effects of the new Minister’s reforming zeal will flow all the way to Chikurubi. In this, she and I are of the same mind. If I am to stay here any longer, I would rather that my pact with Loveness continues. I can only cling to what I know, which is that my life since I started to teach Yeukai has some even tenor. If I am to be honest, I do not want to think of changes here.
6
Somewhere in the Archives, where I once worked, is a newspaper that has the report of my parents’ death. It will not be very long; maybe just ten lines headed ‘Man, Woman Drown in Mukuvisi’. This is the only time that my parents’ lives will be recorded. Had they not ended their lives, there would have been no reason at all for even this, but a double suicide will have been news.
How did they keep it from the township, their terrible secret? But the township encourages familiarity, not intimacy.
Joy says that Lloyd talked to my father for a long time. He asked to see him again in town the next day. He said to him that my mother was not cursed, that she was ill, dangerously ill, and that their children were in great danger. Could he not send us all to school? Lloyd asked. Then he could help my mother to get treatment.
When my father said he didn’t have enough money, Lloyd offered to pay the school fees for Joy and me. But my father said Joy could go to a school, but what about Memory, his daughter who was always unwell?
‘Could she not go to a special school?’ Lloyd had asked.
When my father had explained my condition, Lloyd had said that he would take me in, that he would look after me until my mother was well. When we met that first day at Barbours, it had been so that he could look at me, so that he could see if my mother agreed. He had told my father that my mother needed help — a doctor’s help, he had said. He had even made arrangements for them to see a friend of his who taught at the medical school at the university. And once they had seen this friend, he would make sure that he would support my father to look after me.
Lloyd had thought that my mother would be locked away for treatment. Perhaps my father thought so, too, because they did not go to see Lloyd’s friend, and they did not go back to see Lloyd.
So I was never meant to live with Lloyd. They had been right, after all, when they told me that I was to go there for a short time.
But then they died.
It was a simple act of kindness.
Our father finally allowed my mother to go to the Annexe. He had woken up to find her standing over him with a knife. He had tied her hands behind her back that night, and the next morning he had dressed her and taken her to Parirenyatwa, to the Annexe, where she remained for six months.
When I told Joyi everything that had happened to me, she wept with her veil over her face. She had been teaching at a school in India when Lloyd died and had not known about the trial until she came back. Through the Goodwill Fellowship, she heard about the albino woman called Memory, a woman who was in prison for killing a white man.
7
It has been two months since Joyi told me the truth about my family. My dreams have gone. The Chimera no longer pulls me down to the water; it speaks no more with my mother’s voice. I understand now that the dreams were not dreams, but faint imprints of buried trauma fighting memories of my mother.
In the first days after Joyi told me the truth, it was hard for us to talk without breaking down. But now, together, we have been sharing the many moments of snatched joy: my father’s music, my mother’s records, and the birthday cakes that were really just rock-hard candy cakes with a candle on them.
The ablution and the Condemn and the corridors are silent without the others. The Commission on Sentencing gave up — there were too many prisoners needing review. So they went for a straightforward amnesty. They released all the A and B and C prisoners. In D, they let go everyone who had served more than half their sentences. The only prisoners excluded from the amnesty were those convicted of murder and aggravated rape.
Vernah is still campaigning hard to have my sentence commuted to life, but that has not happened yet. Mavis Munongwa has found her own amnesty, which means that I am the only person left in the whole prison.
The prison is open to me now; I go where I please, when I please. There is no lock-up. I eat at Loveness’s house, and spend most of my time there. Synodia and Mathilda have asked me to teach their children, too, and that is how I spend most of my time. Teaching the children, thinking about my parents and all the things that I will do if they ever let me leave. I spend most of the time in a small room that used to be the library, and which I have persuaded Loveness to let me rebuild as one.
I am also rereading these notebooks that you sent back before you left for New York. I did not thank you enough for what you have done for me. Even if nothing comes of the magazine feature you were planning to write, I am grateful to you for setting me on the path to the truth.
I asked you to bring them all back because I wanted to go back, to see where it was I made that fatal mistake. My mind keeps going back to that memory of seeing Lloyd hand over the bills, a false memory on which I have built the foundation of my life, or, to put it more accurately, a true memory from which I have made false assumptions. My utter conviction that my parents sold me rested only on that exchange of money.
I understand now why Lloyd adopted me. He was as different as I was and knew what it was to be different. I did not see that he lived in pain and fear. He had paid my father for Joy’s schooling, as promised, and the money took her right up to her O levels. She lived at school during the holidays. When she decided that she wanted to take the veil, the nuns took over her education, and only when our parents died and my father wrote her that letter did she understand how she had come to be there.
There are things that I understand, or that I have grasped. My parents thought that it was a fate from ancient days that controlled their lives, but it was actually random chance. It was chance that led Lloyd to that park bench. He had left his car to be fixed up near Herbert Chitepo. It was not ready when they said it would be, and he had decided on impulse that he would walk to the park and look at the memorial. It was chance that brought Lloyd to that bench; it was chance, too, that my father found himself in the company of one of the few white men in Zimbabwe who understood what a black person meant when he talked about ngozi.
There are still many things that I do not understand. Some I can guess at, but I have no certainty. Above all, I am wondering if Lloyd knew where Joyi was, and if so why he kept us apart. Chishawasha and Umwinsidale are in opposite valleys. I am seeing the times we drove past Chishawasha, the time we drove to St Ignatius to see an old priest who had taught him at his old school at St George’s. In all that time Joyi was in the valley below. Did he never try to find out what had happened to my parents? And if he did, why did he not tell me about Joyi, why did he keep me with him still, without once telling me that my sister was at school in the neighbouring valley?