Harare, Zimbabwe, 2002
As the new millennium arrived, Tarisai was shopping in the global mall of Internet matchups. She found her fate tied to one Calvin Winter, a homely-faced man with a huge scar on his upper lip. When she first saw his photo, Tarisai thought maybe he’d been sliced with a knife. When she looked closer she remembered a condition she’d read about in university: cleft lip. Mr. Winter’s was not as serious as some she’d seen in her textbooks or even among the rural people in Zimbabwe. She found it difficult to think of kissing those deformed lips.
But then she wasn’t doing this for romance. He’d pay her $5,000 and all her travel expenses to Oakland, California. More importantly, marriage to Mr. Winter would get her that precious green card which would allow her to work in the United States. Maybe one day she could become a citizen. People told her that after a year or two she could leave this ugly man and launch out on her own. She hoped she’d only have to stay with him for a few weeks.
A friend of hers had a sister who lived in Colorado.
“It’s a lonely life there,” she told Tarisai, “but there’s money. Zimbabweans are hard-working. With our good education we always succeed.”
Her words filled Tarisai with confidence. She still dreamed of returning to university, of leaving behind a life of chasing men. Once she’d gotten rid of Mr. Winter, she’d send for her daughter, Netsai. Her child had to grow up somewhere with opportunities for all people. Zimbabwe was like that in the 1980s, just after independence. That was before President Mugabe went off the rails. In those days the government built schools and clinics to serve rural families like the Mukombachotos. Children like Tarisai had a chance to reach university. Now it was only for Mugabe and his cronies. He’d declared war on the poor. In her community people went in the middle of the night and stole the doors and window frames off the school buildings to sell them for food.
On the appointed day Tarisai took Netsai to her rural home and explained to her relatives what was going to happen. She’d never told them what really occurred at the university. They believed she graduated. She even had a friend print a diploma with a gold seal to show off to her parents. As long as it had the gold seal, they wouldn’t know the difference.
Tarisai’s mother and father embraced Netsai wholeheartedly. They would look after her until their daughter found a place to settle in America. Besides, they saw it as a chance to teach the young girl some proper African values. Children who grew up in the city didn’t know how to respect their elders and often preferred speaking English to Shona. They’d put Netsai on the right path.
“I’ve been offered a job as an architect in California,” Tarisai told everyone. She didn’t have to explain that an architect in America made more money in a year than anyone in her village would ever see in a lifetime.
Her parents were as pleased and proud as the day she graduated from Mutare Girls’ High School. To top it off, their daughter had brought them dozens of presents from Calvin Winter’s advance payment. Everyone in the family sparkled in new clothes, shiny leather shoes, and fancy hats. The family slaughtered a cow and Tarisai bought twenty crates of beer from the local bottle store. The day of her departure would become a major event in village legend, the day “we ate until our stomachs burst,” her mother called it, “like we used to do when independence first came.”
Tarisai was elated to bring a little happiness to her family in these hard times, even if it was based on a lie. Ever since the drought a few years earlier her parents had spent most of the year working on Mr. McGuinn’s farm. They couldn’t squeeze a living out of their meager plot any longer. The soil was exhausted. Their survival depended on the few dollars a month the white man paid them for planting, weeding, and harvesting his maize. Her mother and father were old, too old to still be laboring as farm hands, but nowadays things seemed to get harder each year for the people in their area. Worst of all, both of Tarisai’s sisters were ill. Sores covered their arms. Their eyes had sunk deep into their sockets. Her youngest sister, Chiedza, had a huge lump behind her right ear. Tarisai was once a prize science student but it didn’t take a scientist to see that AIDS was taking her sisters. Each had small children who the fathers had abandoned once they learned of the mother’s sickness. All the more reason for Tarisai to go to America. There would soon be more young Mukombachoto children with no parents to support them.
With the image of Netsai and her hollow-eyed sisters in her head, Tarisai boarded the blue and yellow bus back to Harare. Tears trickled down her cheeks the entire journey. Life was unfair. She’d made one mistake and she had to keep on paying and paying. This was nothing like the future she dreamed about back when her grade seven headmaster told her that one day she would go overseas.
Two days later Tarisai was sipping Johnny Walker Red Label on the Air Zimbabwe flight to London. Once she landed in Britain, she’d spend two days in the South End where some connection of Calvin Winter’s had arranged a British passport for her in the name of Deirdre Lewis. From then on, Tarisai would be a Briton. Everyone said it would be easier that way. She was thankful that her teachers at Mutare Girls’ High had taught her what they called a “Cornwall accent.”
New passport in hand, she’d take a Northwest flight to Oakland, California. In thirteen hours she’d arrive at the house of her husband to be. She hoped she could avoid consummating this marriage. With a daughter living thousands of miles away, a host of financial responsibilities, two sisters dying of AIDS, and the complex network of lies she’d knitted for herself, Tarisai Mukombachoto a.k.a. Deirdre Lewis a.k.a. Prudence already felt like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. The last thing she needed was to worry about the sexual urges of an ugly American husband.