In one of her prayer meetings before the prison emptied, Synodia spoke about a baptism of fire. I feel as though I have walked through fields of fire to emerge into shining coolness. I tell myself to fight the hope that rises like a flare when I imagine that I might actually leave. I look forward to leaving because finally, my life makes sense. My discomfort has not just been feeling ill at ease in my skin, but a discomfort in myself.
One of the hardest things about prison is the lack of choice. There are choices, even here, and the most important one is the life within. I will not think about tomorrow. All I want to do is to live in the moment. It will not be possible for me to escape the past. But if I go back there, it will only be to find ways to make rich my present. To accept that there are no villains in my life, just broken people, trying to heal, stumbling in darkness and breaking each other, to find a way to forgive my father and mother, to forgive Lloyd, to find a path to my own forgiveness.
To stop living what has been, until now, this pale imitation of life.
I thought today about the peppered moth. Like that insect, I have had to change my shape and shade to blend into my surroundings. And like the peppered moth, I was fluttering, blindly, changing colour, struggling to adapt, to survive. Maybe that is enough — for me to resolve that I will survive. And to start my life all over again, whether in here or out there, but to start it over with the full truth before me. Maybe that is enough to begin with.
8
Verity, Jimmy and Beulah came to see me yesterday. As part of their amnesty conditions, they are not supposed to visit the prison. But there they were, in the canteen, with things for me: food, drink, toiletries, soap, a new toothbrush, a towel and sunscreen lotion.
As if they had set out to look as different as possible from how they were when they were here, Jimmy wore tight red trousers and a lurid yellow blouse while Beulah’s hair was covered in a long ginger weave that came down to her waist. The sweat shone through Verity’s thick foundation. Her red-and-blue heels were so high that her knees buckled. They had come in her new car, Verity said, as she jingled the keys casually, but not so casually that Synodia missed them.
‘Hesi kani, Mbuya Guard,’ Jimmy said, and slapped her hand against Synodia’s, like they were best friends reunited. ‘Nayo nayo tirongo.’
‘Zvipi,’ said Synodia. ‘You will be back here soon enough. With your temper, Beulah, and your permanently open legs, Jimmy, you will be back with us before you know it.’
Beulah and Jimmy shrieked with laughter and clapped each other’s hands so hard that it was like a small thunderclap had been unleashed in the room.
Joyi arrived just after they did. They sat side by side on the bench. Jimmy was soon talking to Joy like she had known her all her life, drinking Cream Soda and Cherry Plum, the things Beulah said she missed most when she was here. ‘There is something about this place that just makes me so hungry,’ Beulah said as she tore into a drumstick.
Verity told us about her new car, which seems intricately connected to her new boyfriend, while Jimmy told us about the work she is now doing. There is a project funded by the European Union that is persuading women to give up prostitution in exchange for working together on a co-operative farm. The thought came to me that they should call it the ‘Hoes for Whores’ programme.
I could not keep a straight face as Jimmy explained that she was only doing this as long as she has to report to the parole office. ‘As soon as they forget about me, I will stop. They are insane, those Europeans. Like I can’t get more money in thirty minutes on my back than a month on my feet,’ she said.
Monalisa has started her own business, consulting on aid projects. Evernice has reinvented herself as a victim of political repression.
Jimmy is going to move back to Manicaland, but not to her village. She plans to make her way to the diamond mines in Marange and on to Manica in Mozambique, where there are many white and Asian men with exotic tastes. ‘Just a little licking here, a little sucking there, and I will make more than I make in Harare.’
I listened as they laughed and talked about their plans until Synodia came to tell us that it was time. We all got up. ‘We will see you soon,’ Jimmy said.
I wondered for how long they would come. Will they still come in one year, in three years, in five? Will they come in ten? Will they care if I die here, if I am given a pauper’s funeral and buried in an unmarked grave, like Mavis Munongwa? They will forget this place. They should forget this place. They will forget me.
‘Memory, don’t cry,’ Verity said, and reached for my hand.
‘It is nothing,’ I said. ‘My eyes are hurting today.’
They all embraced me before they left, Jimmy so strongly that she lifted me off my feet, and as I walked back to my cell I carried with me the mingled smell of their perfumes.
9
I am reaching the end of this notebook. I will not write again. I will give this to you when I see you, together with the other notebooks that I asked you to give back to me so that I could read over them again. We will know next week whether or not I will get a new trial. There is enough in what I have told her to make my conviction unsafe, Vernah says. All the evidence pointing to my guilt is purely circumstantial.
Joyi has read them all. With all the treachery of my imperfect recall, the notebooks have helped us to construct our collective memory. Joy marvels at what I remember. ‘What you have here is a book of memory,’ she said.
‘Isn’t that in Shakespeare?’ I said.
‘It’s in the Bible,’ she said, ‘The Book of Malachi. “Those who feared the Lord spoke to one another and he gave attention to them and a Book of Memory was written before Him.”’
Joy told me something that I had forgotten, or perhaps had never known. ‘Baba says she chose all our names. She never regretted us.’
‘Just look at what she named us,’ I smiled. ‘Gift and Joy.’
‘Memory and Moreblessings,’ said Joy.
We talk about the past, but when the pain is too much to bear we reach for other subjects. Joy has told me about what it means to be in her order. She is a female Jesuit. She has told me about Ignatius of Loyola, who says that to be spiritual means to listen to the deeper levels of our experiences, to the knowledge that there is something good and worthy to be found even in suffering. That God means for us to find meaning in things that happen to us, even the very worst.
She has chosen to respond to our past by choosing to see it as a mysterious way in which God operates. There is a neat and terrible logic to the idea that these were no random events at all, but a pattern drawn by an unseen hand. But no god can be that terrible, that vengeful. That God is not relentless or sardonic enough — but maybe something like the Moirae, the three Fates spinning for each man the thread of life, measuring it out and then snipping it with those abhorred shears at the appointed time.