Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende

Dream IV

I am in the cactus garden. The sky is dark. There is a storm brewing, and the air is static. In my hand I am holding the red rose. Its petals are droopy, the edges blackened and dry. The thorns have stuck into my skin, and I cannot pull them out because in the other arm is the baby. My fingers are bleeding, and the painful throbbing is unrelenting. The baby is screaming, and she has thrown off her blanket. She is crying so hard I see the blood vessels imprinted on her forehead. She is unhappy and hungry, but I cannot feed her. My hand hurts, and my arm muscles are strained from the weight of the baby. I look for the rock so I can at least sit, but it is not there. I am sweating and frustration is mounting. I wish the baby would stop crying so I can think of what to do. I try not to move my sore hand, but it’s impossible with the baby jerking about in my other arm. Just as I am about to despair, a woman appears. She is young, her face somber. She has a baby sling around her waist, and she reaches over and takes her from me. The baby immediately stops crying. She bends and places her on her back and secures her with the sling. She carefully unsticks the dying rose from me, taking out the thorns one by one. It hurts like hell even though she is gentle. Then we stand there looking at one another. She does not say anything and neither do I. I wake up.

 

By the time we started classes on Monday, the swelling on my face had gone down. To the curious gossips I simply stated that I had been so drunk after a party on Friday that I had fallen.

“Hmm, this girl! Are you sure your boyfriend did not panel-beat you?”

“Even if he did, do you think she’ll tell us?”

“Ha! You people do not know that a man who beats you loves you?”

“Lies! How can someone claim to love you then beat you?”

“Your parents beat you, and they love you, so it’s the same thing.”

“Ah, but your boyfriend is not your father, so he has no right to touch you.”

“Ya, but some women need to know their place.”

“Correct! Some ask for it. They talk too much.”

“Some are disrespectful. Men like respect.”

I was relieved that people assumed I had a boyfriend who might have beaten me. Busi and I both knew that our relationship was not the norm, and we were both aware that standing out as strange or “not normal” would not be a good thing for us.  This didn’t matter to me, but it seemed to matter in this place where every woman was on the hunt for a man to get hitched to before graduation. I knew what our relationship was and this is all that mattered to me. What I knew also was that we could not pull any crazy moves that would attract attention to what we were not. That would be disastrous. This lent a heaviness to what we were because though we were not secretive, we were not totally in the open either. Busi and I were lovers, and we could not celebrate this openly the way others did.

Innocence. It was the loss of innocence that I mourned that Friday night Busi hit me. Our relationship lost its light, playful essence. Two girls sharing a bed in boarding school was a common thing. Girls got homesick and offered each other comfort. They spooked one another out with stories of witches and goblins and shared beds to keep fear at bay. Two women sharing a room at university was the way things were, but the women were pairing off with men. Men hit on me often enough, and the weight of lying that I was in a relationship with another man to keep them away was taking its toll. I detested myself for lying, for feeling like the only way to keep men away from me was to claim myself the territory of another man. I told them I was married and that my husband and child were in the village. I even changed my dressing to match my lie: Frumpy skirts and a dhuku on my head to classes. I did not like who I was becoming.

One Sunday afternoon, just before end of semester exams, Tsitsi, one of the girls with a room next to ours knocked on our door. Busi and I were both studying. I was at one of the desks, battling e-commerce terminology and wishing that there would be a freak earthquake that would destroy the College of Business on the day of our exam. Busi was lying on the bed, frowning over a Chemistry text.

“Come in!”

She was irritable.

“Hi ladies, kanjani?”

“Hey Miss Tsitsi, what’s up?”

“Hi Ludo, can I sit with you for just an hour or so? Kawa is entertaining.”

She giggled and winked at me.

“Of course, have a seat.”

I pointed to the other chair and Tsitsi sat. She was pretty, with cat-like eyes and a mischievous grin. Her brown weave framed her face perfectly. Busi scowled at me. I ignored her.

“So who’s the lucky guy?” I asked Tsitsi playfully.

“Kanti Tsitsi you are not studying?”

Busi’s tone was saccharine, disguising venom as she rudely butted in.

“Ha ha! Study? That is so old school. I will pass, don’t worry about me.”

Tsitsi was smug as a crocodile with an impala clamped between its jaws.

“Wow! So you are one of those prodigy types that doesn’t go to lectures or study for exams but gets distinctions every time!”

I glanced at Busi, silently pleading with her to be polite. She ignored me.

“Or are you one of those sex-for-grades babes who uses what she has to get what she wants?”

Tsitsi stood up. The chair fell back and she glared at Busi, her eyes now slit in her face.

“Busi what is your problem? You should have just told me to go away if you did not want me here. I won’t put up with your insults. I am out of here!”

She marched out of the room. I looked at Busi incredulous. Her head was already buried in the text book.

I ran after Tsitsi and caught up with her outside the hall of residence. She was talking to a couple of girls and from her gesticulations and head movements I was sure she was recounting what had just happened to her.

I interrupted them.

“Tsitsi I am so sorry about what happened back there. I think it’s just exam stress, you know.”

Tsitsi looked at me, anger steaming out of her flaring nostrils. She looked at the two girls, both clutching their books to their chests. They were in no hurry to go anywhere.

“Ludo, why are you the one apologizing for your roommate’s bad manners?”

I was stumped.

“Anyway, that girl is very rude. She has issues. You need to warn her because one day someone less tolerant of bullshit will fuck her up big time. Just warn her.”

Tsitsi raised her finger in warning.

“Last week one of the guys, Clifford from Engineering, greeted her nicely by those vendors near Cecil Avenue. She looked at him like he was a walking piece of shit and sucked her teeth as though he had insulted her. Disgusting!”

“What did Clifford do?”

“He just let it go. But I tell you if it were one of those stoners, like Simba or Ringo, it would have been another story. She would have been on her knees begging for mercy.”

“She acts like she is better than everyone else. They are rich I hear.”

“I doubt that. If they are rich why is she not in the UK or the US or something?”

I started to walk away. I was too upset to go back to the room, so I made my way to the ice cream vendors. I walked past lovers kissing under trees, sharing Fanta out of the same bottle, lounging in the late afternoon sunshine. I realized I did not have any money on me, so I walked past the red-and-blue ice cream trolleys towards the soccer field. It was parched and dusty with tufts of brown grass here and there. The glaring sunlight made me squint. I was unhappy. I walked round the track unpacking my misery, turning it over and over, trying to see if it could become something else. I was claustrophobic in that room, in that bed with Busi. It was hard to admit this to myself because I felt like a fraud. I was betraying Busi by thinking such thoughts, but I knew that if I did not acknowledge them I would suffocate under the blanket of her possessiveness. I was exhausted from trying to cover up my true feelings about her and me. I was sick of pretending we were just friends. I yearned for authentic interactions with other students, but our secret relationship left me feeling isolated, like a Sangoma alone with the secrets and burdens stored in her bag of bones. I was tired of the ball and chain on my ankle that the relationship had become. I wanted out. I needed to get out. I would wait until exams were over to tell Busi.

It was dark when I got back to the room. The power was out, and the whole campus was enveloped in the monotonous drone of generators. Students had their doors ajar so they could study by the light from the tall towers used at night to flood the campus with light. The generators only powered essentials, like the cold storage rooms where meat and chemicals for high-level science experiments were kept. The lecturers’ quarters and the tower lights were also essentials.

Some of the girls lit candles to augment the light, and since Sunday was find-your-own-meals day, many were eating bread.

Not surprisingly, our door was closed. I opened it and walked in to find Busi hunched at her desk, scribbling furiously in a notebook. A candle was lit, and light filtered through the window from outside. I sensed that she was upset.

“Hi.”

She did not respond to my greeting. I went to the bathroom to wash my hands and face. She startled me. My heart quickened.

“So where did you go?”

“Ah ah, you scared me. Creeping up on someone like that.”

I sighed.

“I went for a walk. I needed some air.”

“LIER! You went with that bitch Tsitsi. Didn’t you?”

I turned around, anger making me bold.

“Are you nuts? I ran after Tsitsi to apologize for your nasty attitude, and then I went for a walk, OK?”

As I turned back to the sink, Busi yanked me by the hand. I stumbled into her and she shoved me back.

“Who do you think you are talking to like that, who?”

I pulled my hand back and stepped away. I backed into the sink.

“I am talking to you Busi, you! Do you know what people out there are saying about you? Do you know what people think of you?”

“Fuck what anyone thinks. They can go to hell. They don’t know me.”

“Well I care what people say because I am linked to you. I care because it is me who gets to hear all the comments and talk about your rude behavior. I am the one making excuses for your crap, and I am sick of it. I am sick of it all.”

Busi was still, every cell in her body on high alert, her razor-sharp eyes on my face, reading every clue she could pick up.

“So what are you saying Ludo?”

I looked away.

“It’s that Tsitsi. I know it. You want her right? You are attracted to her.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake! Quit it. This has nothing to do with Tsitsi or anyone else. This is about you and me, and this relationship Busi. I am tired. I am tired of being the only thing you need Busi. It’s too much for me, this being all things. I can’t be your mother, lover…”

“What did you say about my mother?”

There was a glazed look in her eyes, and I had the sick feeling that she had vacated her body or that she was looking at me but seeing someone or something else.

Before I could draw a breath Busi’s closed fist landed on my face. I heard a crack. Something was broken. I did not feel any pain, but I felt heat as my face puffed up and blood oozed out of broken vessels to form a black pool under my skin. I felt a warm trickle from my nose and tasted blood as it seeped into my mouth through closed lips.

I looked at Busi. In her eyes I saw a wasteland of broken things: dreams, bodies, babies, stories and more stories, and someone. It was like the graveyard in our village, with mounds of red soil decorated by the deceased person’s favorite dishes, pots, pans, and trinkets. But this graveyard in her eyes was so old the soil was eroded, and the trinkets had lost their shine and were strewn all over the place like abandoned toys.

“Ludo I am sorry.”

Tears sprang up in her eyes, and I willed them to fall so that her vision would not be blurred. I wanted her to see what she had done to my face. I wanted her to see what she had done to her hand, which was swelling. I started to feel faint and my knees buckled. I could not breathe. My eyes refused to stay open, and I willed them to focus on Busi’s blackening hand, blackening and swelling and hideous. Then I saw her, the person Busi had been looking at as she beat me. The person she was beating was not me. She was not angry with me. It was not about me. It had never been about me. Everything went dark.

Dream V

I am walking along a path in the acacia garden. I am with two of my cousins, and we are on our way from the stream. We have been fetching water and all three of us are carrying buckets of water on our heads and chatting and laughing. It is a beautiful day, and my cousins start to sing a song that I do not know. They dance, swaying their hips to balance the buckets on their heads. They do not need to hold onto them so their hands are on their wastes. I am so engrossed in their dance that I do not look in front of me as I am walking. I step on something and immediately it puffs up against my foot, all sponge-like. I look down into the face of an angry chameleon. It has turned black, and it opens its mouth to reveal a pink cavity and hisses at me. Its eyes are red and they are rolling in their sockets. It hisses again. Run! Ludo run. My cousins are already far off. They have dropped their water buckets, and they are running and calling to me. I am frozen. I want to run but cannot move. I am terrified, but I am unable to run. The chameleon is getting angrier and bigger, and its hissing is louder. My cousins’ voices are mere whispers now, and I can no longer see them. The chameleon grows and my heart pounds faster, but I am stuck to the spot. The woman with the baby appears and she looks fearful. She says, in a force so powerful it almost knocks me over: ‘Ludo run! Run now!’ I hesitate for a split second, and just as the chameleon is puffing up into a gigantic monster, I drop my water bucket and run. I do not see a path nor do I wait for one to appear. I just run. I am drenched and my clothes are sticking to me, but I run and run and run. I do not look back.

 

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