A Murder of Crows
As his face splits like a ripe fruit under my axe, I remember the drifts of rotten paw-paws that fell from the tree in our garden. They would hit the ground and burst softly and wetly, littering red seeds on the grass. The ants would climb into the sticky centre, some to die in the juices with their bodies glazed and smelling of sugar, some to carry it back to the anthill.
His head snaps to one side and a wound opens a red mouth in his forehead that grins slackly up at me. As he gives at the knees and sags to the ground, the red dust flies up into his face. I know he is dead when a fine dusty film covers his eyeball and he does not blink. I keep hitting anyway, just in case.
Blink.
My head is unbalanced and strange. With every blink of my eyes I see something else through the red veil; things that happened long ago. I remember the killing of a crow, when I was still living with my father in the quarters behind the big house. The boss had big nut trees in the garden, three of them, and when the nuts were ready the crows would gather, wings clattering, to stab at the sweet kernel. Their strong beaks snapped open the brown husks, and white meat spilled out like brains from skulls. It was a cruel joke. When the nuts dropped to the ground they would look perfect and complete, but nudge them with a shoe and you exposed the wounds. My father hauled a rifle onto his shoulders, took careful aim and shot one of the crows. It folded in on itself and collapsed softly on the grass, in a mass of oily feathers. My father whistled between his teeth as he hung it up by one foot from a branch of the nut tree. It swivelled there for days in a buzzing halo of flies, and the crows did not attack the tree again.
“Only one way to deal with crows,” said my father. He looked up into the branches. “Shoot one, and the rest will stay away.”
Blink.
I remember the cat from the big house dying when I returned from boarding school one holidays. It was a tortoiseshell. They had two cats; this one and a big sleek, black animal that hunted at night. This one was small, gentle and trusting. When my father took a break from gardening he would sit under a tree with his enamel mug of tea and peanut butter sandwich, and the cat would sit on his knee and eat the crumbs. She wandered out of the property, following the bigger cat, and a gang of boys found her. They broke her back with a stone. She lay in the hedge for almost two days before a gardener from a neighbouring house found her, and told the boss, who rushed her to the vet. He returned with a corpse. Her nose was still pink and smooth, and her fur was almost entirely clean. As the gardener, it was my father’s job to bury her in the garden, and I helped. I watched the grains of dirt pool and spill over her as we shovelled them in, filling up her nostrils, dirtying her white fur, settling in the corners of her eyes and between each splayed toe of her paw. My father did not have the white man’s sentimental way with animals, but he cried.
Blink.
I remember the night my mother died, shortly before I finished my O’levels. She worked as a maid in the big house. She was happy there, I think. Her name was Sarudzai, but the boss and his family called her Sally. It was easier to pronounce. The boss spoke some Shona, but ‘Sally’ was easier to call out than ‘Sarudzai.’ They say that you should always gives cats and dogs names that end in ‘y’ for the same reason; the sound travels further. I called her Amai, mother.
On the day she died, my mother scrubbed me until I shone. She pulled a comb through my pelt of hair, ignoring my screams and holding me firmly under her arm until they subsided. My mother often held me in that death-grip; usually when I had done something wrong and was in for a clout. I was used to Amai’s meaty arm, smelling of salt and the Vaseline Intensive Care she used to moisturise, but I was not used to having a bar of soap scouring every visible inch of skin. She knew she was dying, and she wanted to leave everything clean. She had swept the red dust in the yard, leaning on the broom after every few steps, and polished the tiles on the floor until they gave back a looking-glass world, an upside-down house. Now it was my turn. She had not scrubbed me clean like this since I was a little boy, but even now that I was taller than her by a head, she could pin me under her arm and go to work on me. She made me put on the suit I wore for church on Sundays. My father and I sat in our uncomfortable suits in the stifling heat; sat by her bed as she struggled for breath. We had a small electric fan that moved the heavy air sluggishly, but it was still as thick, meaty and damp as a lick from a dog’s tongue. I felt my own breath move in time with hers.
It was a strange night, spent sitting in funeral clothes while the spirits prowled around our house. I was a sceptic, no believer in the old tales of witchdoctors and tokoloshe or even in the Christianity that my parents practised, but even I could hear the difference in the night sounds. There was the usual distant barking of dogs, cries of night birds and the creaks and snaps of small animals in the bushes, but there were heavier footsteps and great slow breaths that circled us in our tiny square of electric light, waiting for my mother to join them. At about three in the morning, she succumbed to the disease in her lungs with a mad rattle of breath and a great sighing that spread like ripples in water out over the garden, maybe over to the big house itself. When she had gone, the world was rinsed clean, and the night air felt cold and pin-sharp when I stepped outside to try to find the spirits.
An orange tamarind moon rose, pockmarked and swollen. The darkness was thick and velvety, filled with the dust of moths’ wings and a vast skyful of tiny winking eyes. No spirits here, and no mother either.
Blink.
He stopped moving long ago, but I have caved in his chest and done other things that I cannot articulate, even in my mind. I stop my hacking with the axe and lean against the wall, panting. I have a mad urge to keep going until nothing is left, to cut into tinier and tinier pieces. I am no good at this killing. I thought it would take one blow, just one, cleanly, but I did not plan for his struggling, crawling about, and trying to talk to me through the bubbling blood in his mouth.
‘Tendai,’ he said, his mouth shapeless like a child’s before it begins to cry.
Tendai. My name.
I did not plan for his recognising me. I did not plan for his knowing my name.
He is no longer a person, but a mess of dog food on the cleanly swept dust outside the khaya, the servant’s quarters. His insides tendril out like the splayed curls of ivy that creep along the wall. My vision is intense, humming and white, too bright for me to see clearly. Perhaps it is the sun reflecting off the white walls and the red earth. The red earth. Sodden and trampled now. I cannot hear, and I can hardly stand. My thoughts are moving in the same strange, disjointed way, click-clack like an old projector, flickering in my head. He cannot blink now, with that dust drying on his dead eye. The crow swings gently from the tree in a breeze I cannot feel.
Blink
The boss was there on my first day of school. A pair of tanned legs rose unimaginably high from battered veltskoens, shoes made of hide. He bent down with a sound like the air crumpling, and the sun caught every one of the tiny golden hairs on his face. I had never seen such patchwork skin, made of red and brown and white and orange, and his eyelashes were so pale that they made his eyes look naked. He was huge and rough-voiced and laughed loudly and had a beard like the pictures of God. I was terrified. He owned our house, he paid my school fees; my father would stand with head slightly bent, nodding, as he issued orders. He was exactly like God, and not just because of the beard. Imagine having the shining presence of the Almighty, not comfortably ferreted away in the rafters of your church, but actually living within fifty metres of your house, booming and laughing and shining the light of His presence at all times of the day. God walked among us, issuing orders and dispensing justice.
He was a good man. There were far worse bosses; I know, I have heard the stories. He was just, and generous, and he spoke to my father as if he were a person as well as a gardener. He loved his dogs and cats and children. If in a particularly good mood, he would lift me onto his shoulders, as he did with his own son, and I would look down at his bristling blonde head and naked pink ears, and feel like Jesus.
Blink
There was so much death, in the years after I left school. Mugabe had come to power in the year of my birth, and the stink of death and sickness was strong in my nostrils by the time I was twenty. As well as the bodies buried in the liberation struggle, there were the new corpses; dead from the nameless illness that we never mentioned, dead from starvation, killed by the government, killed by criminals. The road to the airport was lined with dead and dying animals. They were pets, that fleeing families had thrown out of the car because they could not find homes for them at such short notice. My tiny stock of deaths caused and witnessed was insignificant in comparison. From the ants I had crushed to the death of my mother, none was big enough to appease the blood that the spirits demanded. It seemed that the country was hungry for it.
The priests prayed every week for God’s intervention, as I sat there in my father’s old suit. We all knew it was useless, because there was something older than God here. Mugabe was no longer the cause. Something else had taken hold of him and was grinding the country into a mess of broken bone and blood. This Christianity, merely two thousand years old, could not compete; whatever was hunting us was ancient and powerful. I could feel it snarling inside my own head. It watched me with the dusty eyes of the dead crow, revolving slowly, but in my imagination there was a gleam of intelligence behind that dead eye. Kill one and the others will keep away. Kill one and the others will go. Kill one. It was seductive, especially to a twenty-year-old boy at a loss for something to do with his muscle and hot blood. Perhaps I could have avoided it all if I had just found myself a nice girlfriend, or a proper job.
I joined the “war veterans”, who had never fought in any war but took the title of their ancestors. I joined up as formally as if I was joining a real army.
‘Maiwe,’ said the red-black man leaning against the doorway. ‘They are sending us the skinny ones, yes?’
‘I want to join you.’ I was conscious of my shirt, wet under the armpits and greying at the hem, too loose on my toast rack frame.
‘We get the ones from the villages who want money and land, and the ones from town who want parties and beer. Do you drink?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Then welcome.’ He let me pass. Inside was a table piled with rifles of all sizes and descriptions. Some were gleaming metal, some rusted or crusted with dirt. I could choose whichever one I wanted. I had never fired a gun before. I weighed one against my shoulder, lips pursed, trying to seem cool and knowledgeable. It was cumbersome and uncomfortable, a dead weight.
Blink
Kill one and the others will go.
My mother was dead, and my father living grey-haired in his old village. The khaya was deserted.
I had come back to see it one more time.
I had a gun now, and a swagger. I was bigger, and had a scratchy beard that grew inwards and caused me agony; but it was a beard, like God had, and I would never shave it off. I had been away for five years.
The boss came up behind me. Older, grey, carrying a watering can. No gardener now. He had shaved off his beard and left only a moustache, and his chin looked weak and soft. His eyes were watery and red-rimmed, his invisible lashes blinking in the bright light. I smelt a stink of fear cloud out from him when he saw me. His chin trembled, weakly, like a dribbling old man. I am tall and oiled and reek of black sweat. I am a man with a beard and a gun, and he is old.
‘Tendai,’ he says suddenly.
It is my turn, in my gun-carrying, black-man glory, to tremble. He recognises me. How can he recognise me?
‘Tendai,’ and now he is relieved. He puts down the watering can and holds out his hand. ‘How are you doing, boy? I haven’t seen you in years.’
His accent is thick and guttural, that old Rhodesian accent that we hate. I can’t say anything. How can he remember me as I was?
How does he remember my name?
The old axe for chopping wood was propped against the wall.
Blink
The blood soaks into the earth, which is already stained by the juice from rotten pawpaws that fell from the tree. There is a stink of ripeness and decay. The colours are more vivid, the air is lush with heat and that sweet stink, the buzzing of the insects is louder. The world seems obscenely full of life. Ants are already crawling onto his body, filling his nostrils. I can see them eating away at him, and I imagine the insects that will slowly crumble him to dust, the maggots that will clean up all the juices and leave him dry. And finally, the sharp beaks of the crows.
Okay, actually getting back to work now.
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