LAKE OF MY HEART – CHAPTER 6

He parked his Nissan in front of his parents in law’s house. The house was common brick under black tiles in the shape of a rectangle. It had the normal facilities, three medium bedrooms with built in cupboards, a large bedroom with a tiny ensuite toilet and shower and built in wardrobe. There was a passage, a lounge and dining room and a carport made of wrought iron and deformed 16-mm bars. The house was painted with a ceiling and paved brick outside between the house and the road. There was a precast wall protecting the premises.

There was not enough room between the road and the fences for parking vehicles neither could a vehicle be parked between the fence and the house. The stands were almost roof to roof if extended. About seven children ran to hug him while he lifted the youngest three only.

Naomi’s mother was strict as strict as his own was on staying within the perimeter of the four bedroom house‘s pre-cast wall. His mother gave his children no room for experiments outside their perimeter fence without adult supervision. This was a mining community. She always defended. Even outside the mines could be found harm.

“Granny made us dumplings,” said the smallest.

“What are those?” he asked. “Are they made of wood?”

“They are like cakes,” said the middle one. “They are made of flour.”

“Whole wheat?” he asked.

“I don’t know whether it’s self-raising or plain flour”, was the answer.

“Not fritters?” he asked which were his favourite though he had been told countlessly to watch the oil. He liked potato fritters when made with raw onion and egg.

“My son the dumplings are finished, sekuru finished the last. We didn’t know you were coming”, his mother in law said.

“Can I have the recipe?” he had asked to which everyone had started laughing including his father in law. “It appears like everyone thinks I can’t cook.”

“The last best thing you ever did when I and you were alone was taking me to the shops to buy our lunch,” his father in law had said. “But lunch was wonderful I tell you. We had beef bones and sadza. I tell you that meal tasted good. You bring the beef bones here and the dog grows fat.”

“Baba!” his mother in law complained.

“Women,” his father in law wailed. “Did I say that aloud?”

“Dumplings were made with apples, potatoes enclosed in a sweet dough before being baked”, the eldest of his children said. “We helped granny cutting onions and making flour dough. Dad when I grow up I want to work in a big bakery baking casseroles, buns, bread and ________.”

“_____ and dumplings”, Trevor finished to laughter from the adults.

“Daddy?” his smallest child and last daughter was onto him. “Can I ask a question?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Do you really need ask me a question?”

“What do you do when you are driving and you see a robot?” she asked. “Let’s say you are coming from drinking a beer hall.”

“Drinking a beer hall?”

“Yes and you come to see a robot ______,” was the question going on?

“Robot?”

“A pink one?”

“A pink one?” Trevor thought long and hard. “I suppose I can stop the vehicle.”

“Dad the pink one means get ready to stop.”

“How many colours of robots do we have?” he asked.

“Five”, was the response.

“Name them”, he queried. “There is pink and others?”

“Red and blue. I will tell you the others when I hear of them,” the little child suggested.

“Thanks for the advice”, Trevor replied. “Was there anything else?”

“Yes what is there between a pork pie and a pop eye?” that was a question from an intelligent three year old almost.

“I don’t know.”

“The pop eye eats the pork pie daddy,” was the response. “So simple.”

“Yeah so simple it doesn’t need a decision tree,” he mused.

Trevor turned towards his father in law with a smug on his face. His father in law who was wiping tears of laughter. English play dough was good, soft and palatable. However, he still remembered less than two weeks ago when he had sat down comfortable on top of a cow. He had to remodel the cow. The three year old insisted he recreate it as had been before. Now, he had to deal with a pink robot! “At your age I hadn’t even seen a robot in Bindura let alone their meanings.”

“Is everything at home okay?” his father in law asked through a smile at the mention of robot colours. “It's only you and my a’mbuya?”

“Oh because I came alone?” he asked. “I was showing a client a rental property in Glen Norah C. I dropped him off at Glen View turn off. I came on a whim. The whole house is to be let by us to one client, no sub-letting. The previous client thought they were clever by sub-letting. They got chucked out. The rentals are lower than commercial so the losing tenant is at a loss.”

“For a moment I thought you had come to collect the three children,” the older man suggested.

“I wasn’t given those instructions. House maids are problematic. We hardly maintain any these days especially when the children are at school. If both of us are at work the maids become complacent and spend most time seeing television or visiting or entertaining their boyfriends. We incurred a huge telephone bill. The maid was ringing everyone with a phone.”

“That’s good,” his mother in law said. “What shall we prepare for you?”

“What traditional food do you have?” he asked. “Tripe?”

“Sour milk,” his mother in law said. “Really ripe and sour.”

“That could do with a plate of sadza,” he said. “You three I am not collecting you so off you go to play with your cousins and friends. I don’t even know where your mother is. If I have eaten well she can find her own lunch.”

“You children are crossing the Limpopo to South Africa, your two brothers in law are there now with their families, the other is in Botswana, we worry you will be next,” his father in law had said at length. “Just through with his carpentry apprenticeship and he is in Botswana working as a builder’s carpenter.”

“I have thought about it baba,” he had replied. “For me as a professional to go to a country where my qualifications won’t work is hard. There are no job openings. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a suitable country with a shortage of estate agents or valuers. You won’t get a work permit so you will end up doing menial work. All my brothers-in-law are tradespersons. They can find requisite jobs after some time.”

“I hope you soldier on being here. Just meeting and chatting is good for us,” he replied. “Now those three I only talk over the telephone with them. They only come here once a year and the little children now speak Sotho, Venda and even Tswana!”

“However, this economic nose dive if it continues, we will reach a day when we will be working for eight months without a salary”, he replied. “Either that or we will earn hefty salaries that won’t buy five items in a tuck-shop.”

“How do you see houses if the economy continues to bleed?” asked the elder person.

“Baba it is not all of us who are struggling to earn a living. Those in the informal sector dealing in illicit stuff like diamonds, emeralds, gold and others are cashing in every day. They can convert all their daily taking to foreign currency and buy properties in cash. All a seller does is write the value in Z$ when they have been given South African Rand. I remember one guy who paid for a bedsitter in cash not in three days same day, we counted it, locked it up and called the seller and we recounted and shook hands over an agreement.”

“I thought so,” the elder replied. “Don’t you risk arrest?”

“What of the shop managers who tell us sugar, cooking oil and other commodities have run out when the same commodities are sold to middle persons at twice the government gazetted rate and sold to the streets at three times the rate? We all face arrest but that is the economy baba there is nothing I can change.”

“I wouldn’t like to visit you behind bars.”

“Then pray very hard.”

He could not tell his in-laws about problems at home. But then African culture had been one for arranged marriages where a bride the age of Naomi when they met could have been married off to man with a child of the same age in order for the girl’s parents to get enough food to last them a year. What of successive droughts in future when all the girl children were married off? What of a cultural issue of killing twins, physically handicapped and albinos because they were strange? He perceived that survival of his marriage was more important than culture.

Later he said his farewells before driving away. He reflected on it.

“Daddy?”

“What?”

“Aren’t you leaving something?” asked his daughter.

“Maybe I will leave two empty bottles,” he said.

“Dad! For ice cream,” she chided.

Would it be how it felt to be paying his children a visit after a divorce? He knew very well that in African society, new and old bottles did not match. New wives and children from the previous marriage did not mix and match very well. You only had to visit a child friendly victim’s court to witness.

You only had to scan through any daily newspaper covering court cases. Marital mistakes were walking the talk in courts every day, either as the abused, abusers or notorious criminals.

__________________________________________

When he got home someone had pasted a note on the bedroom door. ‘Your weaknesses’ male chauvinist p--.

1. You drink too much alcohol – your conversations are too full of, beer and I, I and beer were walking. Even your sex life is controlled by beer. Whom do I neck with when you are out clubbing? You smell like a drain pipe that was used to flash out water mixed with alcohol at cleaning. When you return, from the fumes alone I could have a hangover. When you manage to get home in the dark, you are flat asleep before reaching the bed. In the morning curing your hangover is more important than your dutiful wife’s needs. I think you know more of beer, wine and spirit brands and their texture than the colour of my hair, my ring size or my birthday or our anniversaries.

2. If I didn’t control your alcohol intake you would have landed in the gutter. Better still you could have looked handsome with your bushy beard and kinky hair looking up at the stars in a wooden coffin/casket six feet under. I wonder how your liver withstands all the multitudes of abusive drinks that you throw at it. Given to a hungry lion, the feline beast would vomit the liver without swallowing! Failure which it, the lion would die of rabies it hadn’t had.

3. You are self-centred. Everything revolves in an arch around you. You see yourself as a little sun. You think you are a demi god or something. If we don’t fit into your solar system, you can plug us out. Where the heck do we fit into your milky way? God created both men and women not men alone in case you are behind the news. God created hops, grapes, marula fruit and sorghum. He didn’t create beer, wine, spirits and other alcoholic beverages. He also created plants that beautify the fields which you call marijuana, tobacco and turn some into cocaine.

4. Your siblings? When did you last visit any of them excluding the two that are not in the United Kingdom and the two in South Africa? When last did you visit Chivhu, Hwange and Norton? Check you diary, I was the last one there. When last did you go to Johannesburg? I visited and boarded at your siblings less than three weeks ago. Did you want me to leave my children in Johannesburg? Didn’t the children confuse eel with tiger fish? Where had they seen one of them if not in Norton with your sister?

5. Look up the word f—k and s—t in the English dictionary then look it up in our Shona dictionary and find out what it means. Try and shout it out in vernacular before a mass of married couples and grandmothers/ fathers. It is an abomination to use both words. Bloody isn’t that bad in translation but can you use it like a totem, revere it? Stop swearing and pointing beer bottles at me, you can use fingers to point. Judging by the volume of food I throw out when you are drunk, no wonder you are losing weight. No wonder you don’t understand why you collapsed at work some months ago. It should be food before beer and not the reverse, unless you like junk food, try those oily foods in town with used oil reused to beat the shortages.

6. Getting moody for me is usual because at one time someone gets upset or is just not in the right frame of mind. Don’t you ever wake up tired instead of relaxed? The world has seasons, windy, cloudy, raining and sunny. Each has its toll on us. We miss the other when we have the opposite. Moods are like the seasons too. [at least mine are]. Learn to understand me and do so for the better.

7. Family expenses comprise of the food bill. Of this how much do you contribute as a ratio with alcohol? I am not saying you don’t buy food, I know you do. When last did you remember the children’s nicknames let alone their sports event days at school or birthdays? Next thing, you will meet one of your daughters after she wedded while you were out with the boys’ binge drinking at Lake Manyame.

8. You make decisions without asking the family like going solo – getting out of employment with the reputable estate agency and starting on your own with your ‘friends’. Where did it get you besides you missed a jail term by a whisker then back you went putting your tail under your legs going back to the same national estate agency you had left? How in Heaven’s name you failed to be drawn into the fake residential stand racket that saw your comrades incarcerated and one of them plying his trade as a taxi driver in Johannesburg, I don’t know. It could have served the family well to have a Hwahwa Medium/ Maximum Prison history.

9. You don’t maintain consistence in paying accounts like Africa On Line (internet), telephone, mortgage, lights and rates. You only care about the full boutique of DSTv because you want to watch soccer.

10. When last did you get my hair, nails or feet done? When last did we have a dinner in town as a family? I know the Zimbabwe $ continues to plummet in value but even a take away like Chicken Inn, Nandos etc.? An ordinary 300-ml of coke and a pie for instance.

11. When was the last time you were ever romantic? When did you ever remember my or your own birthday or those of children? In Kenya the Maasai once believed to be a man, someone had to kill a lion. At that rate, lions would have become extinct in east Africa. Well, to be a man, do you have to drink yourself to a standstill to prove you are a man? We blow the candles while you are out having a pint. When was the brewery opened would be a better question for you to come.

12. You like watching blue movies so much I thought you were falling in love with the ‘bitches’ in there from whom you should draw sustenance. What’s so interesting about group sex beside the horrid nature of the ‘sin’? At times I wonder if you are not a gigolo. Don’t you get sick of seeing those things on those movies? At times you fall asleep watching ‘them’ and I have to shut off the DVD players. Imagine if the children had wondered into the lounge. Sex on the 29-inch screen is so interesting to you.

13. You are a chauvinist p--. You think I can’t swim in a sea of crocodiles? I just need to feed YOU to them while I swim away. I can make it in the world as the ex-wife of an estate agent broke or not. With or without your house mortgaged or not I can survive. As to one night stands, since when did I start those taking it from a fact that I was a virgin when we married and you were not? Did we ever have one night stands? Did we ever have sexual contact before marriage? Have you ever heard of secondary virginity which can be practised before the next marriage? I don’t think the question applies to you, it’s obvious to whom it can apply.

14. Find time to respect and give honour where it’s due. It’s worth more than love. A double portion of either respect or honour is worth more than diamonds.

15. I was a virgin when I married. I stay true to one man, is the reverse true?

Underneath was written, “no noise if you want to sleep in the bedroom. Don’t wake me up.”

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