No one paid attention to me when I told them that I was responsible for what happened to Tata and Salomé. When I explained how I had caused everything, by snapping a string of beads, they hushed me and said I would soon get over the shock of losing Tata.
After the funeral I sit Tembo down. He looks into my eyes and tells me he wasn’t seeing Salomé. He’s less forthcoming when I ask him what he knows about Tata and Salomé. Reluctantly he admits to having seen her twice at Tata’s office in the week before the election. I press for details. Salomé was at Tata’s office two days after I dropped her there. She arrived in a taxi wearing a red blouse. A few days later he found her sitting in the reception. The second time he claims he can’t remember what she was wearing. He had no idea what she was doing there. No, he didn’t see her talking to Tata. Yes, he greeted her. ‘Let it go, baby. Grieve for him and let it go,’ Tembo says.
Driver is less prepared to reveal what he knows. When I corner him two weeks after the funeral he bursts out crying and blabbers on about how his life will never be the same without Tata. How he never knew the day would come when he would envy the dead: ‘The dead are with JS, I am here without him.’ Then he blows his nose loudly and claims that the first and last time he ever saw Salomé was the day I dropped her at the office.
‘What’s your business?’ Grandma Ponga asks me when I tell her that I suspect Tembo and Driver know more about Tata and Salomé than they are telling me. ‘Mama T should be the one interested in the relationship between JS and the girl. But she isn’t because she knew the man. God knows what possessed you to take her to him. Did I not warn you about that girl when we saw her at the chemist?’ Then she looks at my face, sighs and says, ‘Pumpkin, none of this is your fault.’
We bury Tata and everyone goes back to their lives. Ma and Grandma Ponga make up without my help. Grandma Ponga tells me that the most painful part of losing someone is accepting the fact that the world doesn’t stop when they’re gone. ‘Life carries on. People still sleep, wake, eat, bath and laugh. But it’s these simple everyday things that gnaw at you. The lady walking down the road humming to herself, children laughing in a group; it’s as if they are mocking your pain. But they aren’t,’ she says. ‘It’s just your time not theirs. Everybody has their time of grief, because no one who comes onto this earth stays.’
The sun rises and sets. The full moon comes and goes. The icy winds and smoky skies give way to hot, stagnant air and clear blue skies. Heat haze rises off the tarmac. Junior breaks out in heat rash. Inswa announce the coming of the rains. They flap around the light bulbs in a frenzy before they lose their dainty wings. Eventually they end up scattered all over the ground, still and lifeless, for us to salt, fry and eat. Then, heavy rains from late October through Christmas to February. Mangoes weigh down trees, maize cobs are sold by the roadside - fresh, roasted over charcoal or boiled in their skins. Pumpkin leaves and wild mushrooms sprout from the earth.
Mufuka abandons her Winnie-the-Pooh bottle and starts to talk. Grandma Ponga finally sells the tavern but refuses to move out of the house. One Saturday afternoon Ma sits Grandma Ponga and me down in her living room and confirms our worst suspicions. She tells us she’s HIV-positive, so is Uncle Oscar, and both of them have been prescribed antiretroviral drugs. She says if she can accept her HIV status then so should we. With a blissful smile she tells us that being HIV-positive has brought her and Uncle Oscar closer than they have ever been. ‘Faith will see us through,’ she says. Soon she piles on weight and converts Uncle Oscar to Seventh-day Adventism.
Through it all, I try to heal. I go in search of answers to questions I myself don’t understand. Did the beads I scattered all over my front yard cause Salomé’s death? Was Tata’s death my punishment for my getting rid of Salomé? Tata and Salomé? How? Why? I spend hours in consultation with preachers, inyangas and clairvoyants, anyone to vindicate me, to convince me that Tata’s death was not my fault.
My search ends one Sunday morning ten months after Tata’s passing, when I receive a long-distance call from Bee. I talk and cry at the same time for two hours. I confess to Bee that grieving for Tata was not as hard as dealing with Salomé’s death. Grieving for someone I disliked was more emotionally draining than grieving for a person I loved. With Salomé I had to deal with my guilt and a feeling of being submerged in a bottomless pit of defeat. By dying with Tata, I felt, Salomé had somehow won something, though I wasn’t sure what.
To top it all no family or friends came forward to claim Salomé’s body. Her madam at the salon had no idea where Salomé was from originally. Apparently she had walked into the salon a year earlier and charmed her way into a job. Whenever the madam reminded Salomé to bring her registration card and references from her previous employer, she claimed they were with her grandmother in Mumbwa for safekeeping and promised to pick them up when she next travelled home. The madam confessed that she didn’t push because Salomé was an extremely reliable worker and had increased the number of clients at the salon.
Eventually, when Salomé had been unclaimed for over a month, a barber who worked in the salon agreed to travel to Mumbwa. The barber came back with an elderly uncle, who took one look at the blue corpse and said it wasn’t the body of the niece he was looking for. So, with no other option, Salomé’s madam, Tembo and I put money together for a coffin. We hired a preacher to pray for Salomé’s soul, then we left her lying under a heap of sand and fresh flowers with the heads cut off their stems.
‘Pumpkin, don’t burden yourself with Tata’s mistakes,’ Bee says after listening to me. ‘I think you need to unpack. See a therapist. Let go of everything. You shouldn’t be feeling guilt over Salomé’s death. Or your tata’s.’
‘It’s not just guilt. I’m angry.’
‘At who?’
‘Myself. I should have asked Tata all my questions when I had the chance. Why he left me by the roadside when I was nine? Why he decided to take me into his home? Why all the young girls? What was it between him and Grandma Ponga?
Bee sighs. ‘If you really want to know, why not ask Grandma Ponga?’
I’m quiet.
She asks me to hold on and I hear her closing a door.
‘Pumpkin, if you had asked Tata why he left you by the roadside, he would have said he didn’t see you. And if you had asked him why he took you to live with him, he would have said it was because you’re his daughter. As for the story about him and Grandma Ponga, he would have denied it, flat out, and so will she if you ask her. Where does that leave you?’
I digest her words, but I still don’t say anything.
‘We all make irreversible mistakes. Do things we wish we hadn’t. What purpose does going back to address them serve? If you find out the answers to your questions, then what? I had my first son at fourteen. That was a big mistake, but the mistake is a healthy twenty-year-old now. I’ll tell you something, if I hadn’t gotten pregnant with him I would never have admitted to sleeping with Mwanza. But it happened, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Unpack it all and move on.’
‘Her death was my fault. I broke the string of beads your mother gave –’
‘Oh, Pumpkin, for God’s sake! Since when did breaking a string of beads kill someone? My mother is a herbalist and, yes, she has a strong sense of intuition, but she also sees a lot of things the rest of us don’t. If I took note of all the so-called evil spirits my mother sees around me I would spend my days carrying out endless rituals to get rid of them.’
‘But she knew about Salomé. I didn’t tell her.’
‘She could see you were troubled. She guessed it had to do with another woman – she got it right. There are a lot of mind games involved in what my mother does. Half the things she knows about her clients they tell her, perhaps not verbally, but through their body language. And she helps by making you believe you are protected by performing a ritual. Yours was snapping a string of beads.’
Slowly the hard, cold feeling that I’ve carried inside me since Tata’s passing starts to thaw. The weight I’ve carried starts to lift.
There’s a silence between us.
Bee is first to speak. ‘I always wished I were you.’
‘Why would you want to be me?’
‘To have a wealthy father that everybody knew. Parents that owned a car. A pretty mother who looked a fashion model,’ Bee says and sighs. ‘They say a man admires the roof of another man’s house because the roof is all he sees.’ Then she asks me to count my blessings. After all, my mother and grandmother are still alive. My husband and children are in good health. And although Tata is dead, and he made mistakes, he loved me.
Before she hangs up she says, ‘Pumpkin, your Tata might have let you down. He didn’t do so intentionally, he loved you. It’s always the ones who love you that cause the most hurt. All he was doing was living his life. It’s time that you lived yours.’
The cold season comes around again and we hold a memorial service for Tata. In his sermon the priest asks that we stop mourning Tata. He declares that the day of the memorial is the last day for shedding tears for Tata. ‘To those of you who have not yet mourned Joseph Sakavungo, do so today,’ the priest says. ‘Shed your last tears, as from today we will remember him with happiness and joy.’
After the prayers, Mama T unveils a tombstone the size of a king-size bed. She cries as if Tata has just dropped dead, then she wipes her face and at the end of programme, when I say goodbye to her, squeezing my hands in hers, she says, ‘That’s it. I’ll leave him to rest. Do the same. And don’t forget about me. Keep coming to the farm. It’s your home. You’re my daughter.’
In the cemetery car park Grandma Ponga asks Ma to sit in front and she gets into the back seat. My mind starts ticking, but I stop it. I’m not going there. I loved Tata and I’ll miss him, but I can’t patch up his mistakes. It was his life and his messed- up patchwork.
As I pull out of the cemetery, I turn up the car radio because I know Grandma Ponga doesn’t want us to hear her weeping for Tata.
Sissy was right: love and hate, same-same.