The second coming of Bhekumuzi

August 6, 2011

Abel Phiri

The shirtless unshod little boy with a stomach bulging with disease, picked up a five-billion-Zimdollar note from a heap of rubbish dumped on a bush growing on a lane. The city council had long since stopped collecting refuse and cutting grass — so many things looked alien to Bhekumuzi’s eyes .

The boy rushed to the vendor pushing a cart filled with empty whiskey bottles, the type you do not get deposits back for.

“I want some biscuits,” he cried, waving his money.  The vendor wiped sweat from his brow, lubricating a forceful slap.  The boy cried as it landed on his left cheek. He bit his lower lip and tongue, spat blood and resumed crying. “I just want empty bottles or money,” he sobbed.
The vendor snarled as the boy waved his note in his left hand, holding his swollen cheek.
The use of foreign currency had just been introduced in Zimbabwe.

A slight breeze blew while a security guard standing at a school gate watched the poor boy’s teeth chatter from the chill. He had abandoned teaching to man the gate. At least he was getting paid almost twice more than on his previous job. Feeling no pity for the boy and attributing his callousness to the violence he had recently been exposed to, he walked back into the school yard to call it a day.

Pupils poured out of the classrooms in response to the siren.  They all possessed an uncanny resemblance. Was it the uniforms or their weary faces?

Things were getting better  —  even some Zimbabweans, including Bhekumuzi who had left for South Africa, were coming back thanks to dollarisation.  The economy was stabilising.

He stood before the street he had grown up on, playing and chasing his friends up and down mindful of nothing, not even hunger.  It was the very same street and he conscious of his pain, every degree of it. It ran  potholed and old, stretching deep into the heart of the  township laden with  burdens of the pedestrians who walked over it pondering  their fate. Laden with their poverty, curses and obscenities, it had endured for years. The street had learnt to listen to their ridiculous, piteous logic or prayers seeking redemption from poverty .

At last he had finally returned home, though his journey had been contrary to his dreams and fantasies. 

His home still stood reproachful among others, he had always wished that one day he would raise the fallen fence  and repaint the faded, cracked walls. He had once  hoped that he would restore the love and warmth that used to permeate  its confines and bring it back to its pristine state.  

 He had hoped that one day he would buy flowers to give his wife, rather than steal them from his employer’s garden or buy clothes for his children in place of having his wife home sew them. He had always wished to be a successful man, but that was before he had gone to Johannesburg. 

He had worked very hard, scrubbing floors, washing dishes or selling sweets, but nothing had come out. It was after he was about  to receive his first official wage  that he heard that his mother was very sick back in Zimbabwe. Some said life had become better so he approached his employer and asked for his  salary to use for bus fare and returned.

 As he saw his kids leave the school, tears coursed down his cheeks. For years he had sought to build a life for them. For years he had struggled to be a worthy father — alas,  he was empty-handed .

He crossed the street and walked over to them as they joined other kids walking and playing about the road .

 “Sipho! Thando!” he called to them.

They paid him no attention. “Thando.”  He knelt before them, his face solemn like a parishioner genuflected before an altar. “My children, you have forgotten me,” he said. Still, they afforded him no attention.

He lifted his gaze to his house a few metres away from the school. A stranger appeared at the door calling the children, who briskly ran to the house totally ignoring their father like he was a total stranger.

Bhekumuzi watched as women clad in sarongs and doeks flocked into his home.  They took down the curtains and tied a red flag at the gate. 

“Who could be dead? My mother can’t be dead,” he thought. His faith was close to extinct, he was robbed of his being, he felt a part of him, the best part of him, fade along with the unfolding events. He longed to make up for all the years lived in vain.
He quickly trudged into the house, encumbered by people, friends, neighbours, relatives and enemies, all cuddled in mourning.

A slim lady sat on the floor covered by a blanket, she cried more piteously and louder than everyone. He crouched before her and clutched her hand. “My dear wife,” he said. His voice was more poignant than the  funeral environment. “Maybe I should have never left. Here I am without even the strength to bury my own mother or a lily to put on her grave,” he narrated between sobs.

The lady hurled away the blanket covering her. He was petrified and not even grief could prevail against his shock, neither could he defer it. Preliterate tremors raced down his spine as a chill spread through his whole body. “Bhekumuzi my son, your father wanted you to look after the family. He wanted you to mind the house. Maybe if you hadn’t disobeyed the ancestors your wife could still be here with us,” the unveiled woman cried.

Her mother’s tears streamed before his very eyes acknowledging agony beyond words. “Not my love, mama. No!”  “She can’t hear you,” a voice soared from behind him. “What! Is she deaf?” his voice was drowning in sobs.

He turned and saw his wife standing behind him. He was perplexed. She looked more beautiful and younger and her eyes promised a better tomorrow. She was indeed a burning lamp at the end of a tunnel, a beauty. 

She let a loose smile that unveiled her teeth that had always robbed him of his breath. Her lips, forged by a deity, glistened with temptation like grapes and her eyes still solicited him to explain his urgent desire to leave.

He looked around. Everyone had disappeared. “They said you are dead,” he warned her.  “Yes, I am,” she concurred.  “Then what is this place?” His voice was barely above a whisper.

 “Some say it’s heaven.” Her voice was tender.  “Some say it’s where we wait for  Judgment Day. A certain woman believes we are her aborted children reincarnated to haunt her. There is a man who thinks we  are stuck in our subconscious.”

Bhekumuzi looked around. Different people walked about, minding nothing but their fvarious occupations. 

A spectacular view of a gorge flanked by greenness greeted his gaze. Walking on the flower-carpeted ground felt like ascending to the sky. Dew glistened gold as dawn touched it. She closed her eyes, but the image was forever etched into her blindness; it felt like a home humanity had long been deprived of.