Mubanga Kalimamukwento

Tapafwa noko, apesa umbi.                                                                                       

Another mother does not come when yours dies.

Bemba proverb.

      I.        

I learn how to pray on my mother’s lap. We are at Bible study, as we are every Friday evening in the pastor’s house, surrounded by people I see on Fridays and then again on Sundays during the main service. My mother always starts these evenings quiet, only Shani-ing and Bwino, shani-ing between handshakes with the other adults in a whisper. Then she pulls her concentration face––lips pursed––and nods at everything the pastor says even though he tells zigzagging stories about lips-shut lions, talking shrubs, and direct conversations with God.

The smell of eat-sum-more biscuits and milked tea wafts up from the glass coffee table in the middle of the sitting room. I’m sure everyone’s stomach is grumbling, not just mine. But the routine is, no one moves to pick either biscuit or teacup until Amai Busa, the pastor’s wife, offers the tray just before we leave when the tea is too cold and the biscuits are hardened around the edges.

The first time we came here, I raised my hand to ask a question. My mother chuckled, pulling it down, telling me afterwards That’s not how things are done, even though I’d heard her tell the pupils she tutored that questions were how we learnt.

I want to ask if the lion’s mouth was closed with a zipper or a lock, why no one thought to pour water on that poor shrub, and what number was God’s because I like memorising phone numbers. But I remain quiet, remembering how my mother says, Once is for the instruction, the second will be a slap, and rub my cheek as if it is already stinging.

My mother has no questions and only breaks her reverie by mouthing her Amen. The pastor is talking about a marriage between repentance and forgiveness at this point, explaining that the children of that marriage are blessings like he and his wife enjoy now. He points to the chandelier with its knife-sharp prisms, at their daughter Hosanna who is reading a children’s Bible next to her mother, and then at his car keys laid next to the biscuits and cooling tea. I watch his fat pointer finger float from blessing to blessing and conjure God as a fairy, blessing and blessing and blessing.

Amen, goes my mother’s mouth. Her breath, still pepperminty because she insists on us brushing our teeth before we leave the house, kisses me lightly on my head.

This sermon––like the ones before––ends with the same series of promises of restoration, that God will rebuild whatever area of our lives had been eaten by termites, the way he did for Joseph and for Hannah and for Jacob and Sarah.

Hallelujah! Preach it! Glory! and Amen jump out from the adults’ mouths like fireflies. This is where my mother’s voice steps in, warm as freshly fried vitumbuwa, round as the hug she has me enveloped in. She joins in the incantations, the first of the adults to flee English and dip into a language of her own fabrication, but no one minds. They start down parallel paths of gibberish, which my mother told me is called speaking in tongues. Habit demands I close my eyes. The way their tongues crash into each other reminds me too much of the rainy season’s first thunder, how, even though November petrichor had warned of its coming, my heart never failed to jolt at the sound. I always ran to hide under the blankets as if they could shield me from the rapid, incessant booming.

The vibrations of my mother’s voice through her chest drum against my ears, climbing louder and louder until, just when I think whatever holds sounds in it will split at the seams, she stops with a tear-stained Amen. I can speak six languages: English, because my teacher whips anyone who doesn’t speak it; Bemba for my nanny, who has been with us since before my memory crystalised; French, which my mother teaches at the Girls Secondary School near the town fence; and enough Tonga, Nyanja, and Luvale for all the grown-ups who hear me to fawn and say Wow, such a clever girl. But what language does God speak, one of my six or one of these tongues? I wonder if mouthing along with my mother would count as my seventh, even though I can’t quite untangle the meaning from the sounds.

Whatever language God speaks, it is not one of these because my mother will come to this Bible study waiting for the restoration promise until I’ve outgrown her lap.

    II.        

I learn how to pray the last week of school. That morning, when the school security guard unlocks the building and sunlight floods the narrow corridor, we are greeted by rolls of pink and green tissue stuck to the ceiling with sellotape. Between the headmistress’ office and the girls’ toilet, a wooden chair has been placed on a podium and the tissue paper there has been fashioned into the shape of open flowers, like the ones we draw when the assignment is to make Mother’s Day cards.

Father Christmas aleisa, Mwape, the class bully, squeals. Teacher Harriet knocks him on the head for propping one Bemba word against the two English ones, and for the rest of the day he takes it upon himself to do the same to any other transgressor he hears. Usually, I know what my classmates are talking about and pride myself in explaining it to them. Important things like The Lady in the TV advert isn’t really called Miss Zambia, she is just the prettiest so they let her use the whole country’s name, and Yes, you can make Coca-Cola with tea leaves, you just have to be careful to strain out the gunk, cool it and put ice in it before drinking, and Buttercup and Margarine are sometimes the same thing, but only if your mum knows to buy it from Mwaiseni and not the nearest Kanthemba, which doesn’t even have a fridge. Everyone usually believes me on account of me being the only one who hadn’t gone mute on the first day when Teacher Harriet said, Don’t speak Bemba, speak English, as she stalked the spaces between our desks while brandishing her long wooden ruler. But this, Father Christmas, is as brand new as leather school shoes from Bata. So, though I nod with the rest of my classmates at Mwape’s pronouncement, pretending to be just as jittery with glee, I hope no one asks me before I can come up with a believable definition.

Fortunately, they are all soon too busy playing What Will Father Christmas Bring Me? to bombard me with any stupid questions. Besides, I mostly scowl at their guesses while thinking my hardest about what this father will bring that the other one hadn’t. There is talk of Shera-shaped dolls and those poofy organza dresses that the lucky girls who play flower girl get to wear. I kiss my teeth at the person who asks if I am hoping for a football and if I want an ice cream machine because that is my favourite dessert, and I talk about it as if I eat it every day instead of once a month.

On our last phone call, in the secretary’s office at the school where my mother teaches, I asked my father for the entire Samantha Series. The one I had, Samantha Learns a Lesson, had taken me a whole month to finish. I figured by the time I finished the last one, I would have already forgotten the first and would still need to linger on the pages and ask my mother to sound out a long word for me.

Of course, baby, my father said, his silky voice crackling through the line like the TV when we turned it on during a storm. The call had come during guava season, and I had spent it using my tongue as a toothpick for the seeds stuck in the crevices of my teeth. It is deep into mango season now; none of us bother to steal some from the roadside stalls when the marketeers aren’t looking. They are yellow and falling from our backyard trees, rotting with the leaves. My mother packs one for me every day, calls it Sweet Course because she cuts it into cubes first instead of letting me suck it off the seed and make a mess of my uniform. Now, I try to squeeze the image of my father, already dimming into this Father Christmas who apparently grants secret wishes like Cinderella’s fairy godmother or my mother’s God. I wonder if Father Christmas’ voice breaks between words, even though he will be right in front of me on the wooden chair covered with tissues and not in a dorm room at a University in England studying for the first Masters Degree in our family. I decide that if it doesn’t, if, when he talks, the sentences form straight lines from his mouth to my ears, then he can be trusted to deliver before the next guava season arrives. It’s just a few thoughts, a few Focus, taps from Teacher Harriet throughout the day, but they hold me over somehow, dragging me from morning till the last bell.

Single file, order, single file! Teacher Harriet struggles over the din of excitement that has gripped us. Bemba words are scampering from so many mouths at once, nobody caring now about the Speak English rule. The holidays are four weeks along, and day one started as soon as the bell sounded. Her rules didn’t matter there. Eventually, she shrugs and frees us. We shuffle out into the corridor to join the other classes of pupils waiting to meet Father Christmas.

We are last in line, so Father Christmas’ face is shielded by all the teachers standing with their classes upfront. Slowly though, the corridor empties of bodies and that after-school oniony smell. Excited giggles filter in from outside as pupils unwrap presents. I find a tall window to peek through. I eye a boy hugging a stuffed animal shaped like a rabbit, and his friend talking to a skinny blonde doll wearing a pink sequin dress. Another boy is belching next to his blue car with blinking eyes where the headlights should be, and another is stuffing a short wooden train into his backpack. Someone received a plastic telephone and is inserting her index into the finger hole, rotating the dial clockwise. Hello, hello, she is saying. Hello, may I help you? before guffawing and startling a bird that had been pecking on a flower in the flame tree, which sits at the mouth of the schoolyard. Sometime between the bird flying off and the girl with the telephone disappearing into the street beyond the gate, Hello, becomes Ho, and then Ho, ho, ho.

Your turn, Teacher Harriet says with a hand on my shoulder, the plump fingers strong and the purple nails digging slightly into the fabric of my blouse.

Oh, I scream-say, the excitement squirrelling out through my mouth like a surprise burp.

I step forward to see a man as pale as baobab seeds before you suck the sweet off. He has on a red suit, and a stiff white wig hangs crookedly around his mouth.

Ho, ho, ho, he says again. Come on. Father Christmas sounds a little like the shows my mother watches on TV at night. The ones I am not supposed to be watching but have found a hole at the bottom of my bedroom door that lets me watch every single one. His skin is exactly like theirs, and his eyes are the same colour as my grandma’s cats. I was going to tell him that I wanted a bicycle, that’s what I decided while waiting to meet him, but I break out in hives, blinking at the cat eyes and the white wig and the mwabi-pale skin and cry like I did on the first day of school, running out of the building without collecting my bookbag. I was going to ask for a red one with a basket at the front for me to put my bookbag in on the ride to school. I was going to ride it home and sound the horn at everyone on my path. Now––

I tell my mother half the story between sobs, about a scary man and Ho, ho, ho and the bike I wanted for Christmas.

Christmas? She says, making a face like she smells liver cooking.

Christmas? I say, doubting myself.

Well, we don’t do Christmas around here, okay? That’s not even Jesus’ birthday.

When is Jesus’ birthday? I ask, welling up again, thinking about my almost bike.

Aw, she says, pulling me to her, where her voice thrumming in her chest can soothe me. She smells a little like the carbolic soap sitting on a plastic tray in the bathroom, a little like the vegetable oil she uses on her skin when lotion runs out before the month end, a little like me.

I was going to ask him for a bicycle, I muffle into her blouse, saliva and mucus wetting it and sticking to her skin.

She stiffens slightly, but says, Well, if you want a bicycle, baby, you can pray for one. Our Father in Heaven will provide.

I can’t explain it, but that makes me sob even harder, like the time she picked Sprite instead of Fanta at the restaurant, and I hated that she would have to experience the fizz shooting through her nose after every swallow like I had the one time I had tried the horrid drink.

Trust me, baby, she says, raking my hair. Our Father in Heaven always answers. My mother’s mantra: when the school sent me away for one term because she couldn’t pay the fees; when her salary was delayed three weeks and we ran out of food, even mealie meal to make porridge in the morning; even when we slept through thieves breaking into our house and taking everything but the bed and mosquito net we shared. How would our Father in Heaven answer when I didn’t even speak his language? The crying has me depleted, and I choose instead to trust the memory of every truth my mother had ever shared. So that night I pray the way my mother does, quiet and soft, Amen-ing and Amen-ing and then right before we were due to finish, I convulse into a litany of senseless drivel, again and again and again. My mother was staring at me when I opened my eyes but if she was surprised, she said nothing.

  III.          

Prayer returns to my mouth two years after my father comes back and we play house again even though at night they fight, and my mother escapes to my room when she thinks I am sleeping.

I am ten and now speak four and a half languages: English, which my father calls the queen’s language when he’s drunk and only wants to watch the BBC; Nyanja, because that’s what all my friends at home speak and they won’t play with a chongololo who thinks she is up there with her English manners; Bemba, which my father insists on when he is sober and quiet, Our language is our identity, he says; Tonga, because despite his belligerence when someone is disparaging the language in public, he is afraid of my mother’s mother, and doesn’t want to explain why I lost that part of my tongue after living with him only two years. The half  is the fragments of French I’ve retained in my mother’s favourite instructions, like Arrêt and Ferme la porte and Silence, which her friends still fawn over because I have the accent just right from hearing her since I was little. In church on Sunday, when the pastor commands the congregation to Speak to the Lord your God from the heart, my mother still breaks into tongues with the rest of them, and I can watch because their eyes are squeezed shut. I watch her each time like it is the first, trying to make meaning of her tear-stained plea, the one she is still waiting on God to answer.

.

One day my mother says, Pray for me; I have a cold which isn’t true, even though she is staying home from work and hasn’t opened the curtains or windows in her bedroom. Sunlight still creeps in through tiny gaps the curtains fail to conceal, revealing the inky stain on her cheek and cut across her lip from my father’s kicking last night. But I pray.

A few days later, when she returns from a checkup at the hospital, my mother coughs and says, Pray for me, baby, the doctors say ni TB.

Later that week my prayer is needed so that the medicine will work.

And then a month later? Maybe several, Pray trails off in her mouth. Her voice seems to fight her, and she coughs with the same might as my father after half a pack of Peter Styuvesants. The single word contorts her face while the rest of her body lies flat on a tall, white hospital bed. It is not new, this praying away of sickness. It’s the one thing I know God knows how to do. The first time my mother had TB, it took many injections and as many prayers for her to stop lying on her chest because her bottom was sore, and start going to work again. The second time was shorter, but the coughing was worse. At the tail end of every other illness, every other prayer, she had convalesced, and I had returned to fighting her instructions, refusing to wash the plates after lunch, staying out too late on the road with my friends, playing waida.

This third time wasn’t bending to the Our Father, I could now recite. Every time she seems to get better, her body shifts shape, dips for the worse. I am afraid of the hacking in her voice; I hope it won’t disappear completely, like the fat around her face and most of her hair, so I pray. I pray the way she does, on my knees, begging in a language I still don’t understand. I don’t mind that the aunties are staring, that the sound of beeping is probably drawing my voice out in God’s ear, or even that my mother is rubbing my back gently, sobbing.

God is quiet, watching me unspool from the centre out.

The pastor prays over her grave, promises restoration on resurrection day and everyone but me says, Amen.

  IV.        

I had a friend who told me one day, mid-Waida, that her mother died when she was two. She talked about it the same way she said, I’m in grade five, and I’m going to the salon on Saturday. Like it didn’t leave an indelible scar on her. Even then, when my own mother was still a sure-as-Sun thing, I knew what she had borne was not something I could.

At home that afternoon, I asked my mother how exactly you knew when a person was dead. She was washing our clothes, concentrating on rubbing out a stain I’d let bleed into my shirt. She hadn’t looked up to answer me; that was just one of the many questions I could ask in a day. If she engaged, who knew what I would ask next? I don’t know, she shrugged, squeezing her face at the stain. When you see one, you will know.

One Wednesday in April I come home to an army green tent perched on my father’s beloved lawn. The sitting room chairs are arranged in a semi-circle to honour a hissing fire. My grandmother arrives right after me, screaming my mother’s name with a face distorted in agony. Yet the morning after I still wake up expecting her to come into my room and tell me to get ready for school.

After four days of wail-drenched air, I take the silent car ride to the cemetery. Through the window, I watch Lusaka peel by. The sun is in the sky’s belly button, reducing the buzzing city to a silhouette, from the peeled-paint highrise flats in Kabwata to the rolling mansions lining Leopards Hill road.

In the Mourner’s Shelter, I stand in a line next to my father, watching person after person approach a gleaming white coffin and disintegrate at the head. My turn comes too soon, before I can decide whether I am ready. My feet stiffen at the fishtail, the world spinning out of shape. My father, who has been sobbing non-stop, wipes snot with the sleeve of his plaid jacket, and offers his hand so that we can walk to the front together. It is so tender, my father’s hand––bordering on fragile. Even without touching it now, I know it to be as supple as just-fried tilapia, like it couldn’t bruise a fly, let alone a mother, let alone mine. After their brawls, these hands would soothe my mother. A moth on her forehead and cheeks, as soft as him calling her my love asking how are you feeling today?

Come, baby, he says to me, voice crinkled from weeping, breath laced with cigarette smoke.

The stiffness in my legs zips right to my mouth, and grits my teeth until the rhythm of my heart threatens to rip them from my gums. I proceed anyway. After all, nobody has said, Banoko naba fwa, so there is hope. Yes, I am scaling the edge of the white casket, taking my time to get to the glass window where everyone before me has been stopping, some reaching their hands in to caress. Yes, my stupid heart starts to rage, my ears churning out a whine. Yes, I know the mourners are shouting her name, hands cradling heads and pitying me with their eyes, but still––

As I reach the little window, I suddenly remember that I don’t know where I put my photo album, the one with all the pictures my mother and I took at Phoenix Photo Studio. A panic courses through me, hot and crippling. I hold the edge of the white box and photograph her with my eyes. One of the wailers screams my name and scolds my mother for dying.

Mum has on a lilac suit with flappy peach collars, silver studs, red lipstick, and a small loose fringe made with the curls from her last relaxer. She is wearing that concentration face of hers that cuts the width of her lips in half. Her face is sunken, lustre sucked from it like air from a popped balloon.

Mummy, I whisper like I do when she is napping and I want to ask for something.

Mummy, please! A scream.

In slumber, my mother’s eyelids flutter, the whites of her eyes partially visible. Now they are stubbornly shut. In the end it’s the way she doesn’t start smiling. The way her arms don’t reach for me, or her voice still sleepy saying Why are you watching me sleeping? That’s how I know. That is how I know my mother is dead.

*

The next day, I move to my mother’s sister’s house––step one of my father melting into the fringes before Death devours him too, fifteen months later.

My mother’s sister’s house is twice the size of ours, nestled in a plush neighbourhood lined by bushwillow trees, fresh brick fences, and tall, burnished gates. The inside smells like a mix of garlic sizzling in oil and a perfume I cannot name. My first meal is char-grilled pork chops on a bed of white rice and red sauce. At my mother’s house, rice was for birthdays and Christmas. I eat the rice and sweep the pork from one side of the plate to the other until my wrist grows numb. Afterwards, her sister––who has my mother’s eyes, has the same even dark skin and sprinkling of skin tags across her cheeks––asks me why I didn’t touch my ndiyo. I am not a quiet child. Any other day I would have simply said, I don’t like it. I would have wrinkled my nose and shivered at the mere idea of the fat cooling from the pork and beading on my tongue. But I haven’t stopped thinking of my sleeping mother, of her skewed rouge, and that delicate suit. I don’t want to say anything new, don’t want new memories to take up space in my mind lest I forget so instead, I start to cry.

My mother’s sister cocks her head to the side, the way my mother does, did. Only it’s the left side, not the right. She tells me to wash my plate and all the dirty dishes and that she doesn’t like lazy girls. I nod, even as the tears continue into the kitchen, over the sink, and then the bedroom afterward until sleep comes.

I dream of my mother laughing. It is the shade of a Bhutan Glory butterfly, and I will never see it again.

    V.        

When I am 33, I will visit a therapist because mothering has me in shambles every night, assessing myself and deeming myself a failure. The first day I visit her will be the morning after my eldest slams a door in my face and yells, I hate you through the wood. I remember saying this to my mother, after watching a girl in a Hallmark movie do it and get her way. I hadn’t meant it, or meant to make her eyes well up as she asked me why I would say that. But the memory doesn’t help my self-appraisal.

The therapist will tell me, No, I was not just an unloveable teenager who still has to earn love by overachieving.

I will nod into my folded palms, bite back the sting of tears, and say, Sorry, when they don’t comply and fall anyway. I will tell her that I want to mother my two children better, and explain all the ways I fall short, confident that the road leads back to  my mother, who still sits pretty on the pedestal I left her on when I was ten.

The therapist will ask, why? nod at my explanations, and then she will ask, What if, maybe the woman who mothered me after mine couldn’t was actually the person I was avoiding becoming, every time I saw myself as a bad mother?

This question will suck the air from my throat, because I can’t say her name still––my mother’s sibling who became my pseudo-mother because her sister had been stupid enough to die and leave an antagonistic pre-teen in her custody.

Maybe, I will say to my therapist. And then, I will cry for an hour in my car.

But that is for later, after my body finally grows itself and my brain settles down. After the odds bend for me and I get a degree. After I name being touched, love, and promise to love, and to honour, and to obey. After the two children, the divorce, a career change and a move to a new country, I once saw through a peephole in my mother’s house. After love meets me there and peels me open, until I am soft as pulp again.

Right now, 11 through 15 are a gummed-up mess because memorising my mother’s face in her casket, the delicate fall of her lilac suit, and wondering why she was frowning has left my nerves thread-thin, a dishevelled echo of the child I once was.

Right now, I am 11, lying to my pseudo-mom about my grades even though she will see them and call me stupid.

Right now, I am 12, snacking on a slice of bread when she calls me a glutton and warns everyone in the house to watch the bread bin when I am around.

I am 13, and my best friend’s 25-year-old brother lets me take a shot of his whiskey. I throw up in the bathroom and have to be rushed to the clinic, where the doctor says not to worry, that I am just hungover. Right now, my pseudo-mom is smirking, saying she knew it, and what else was I good for?

Right now, I am 14, sneaking out at night to kiss a boy between the shrubs that frame a shortcut between school and home. I hold the feeling of ceaseless flailing of wings in my gut, and revisit it when my pseudo-mom tells me I will grow up to be a whore.

I am 15, creeping into a nightclub and letting the dizzying music dull the thudding in my head and doing dismally on my final exams, the final nail.

Mistake after mistake means that I am supposed to dim into the statistics. To become one of the 29 to 48 percent who become adolescent mothers, the 11.03 percent of unemployed youth, or the 94 percent without a University education. But then, a miracle––my father’s sister honours a promise she made to her little brother to educate me, no matter what. So, just when my future is as bleak as the desert, she recasts my story and gives me a chance without the foreboding hanging over my head like a noose this time. Or, in my mother’s words, But God.

  VI.        

Five years. That’s how long I lived under my psuedo-mother. That’s only 11 percent of my life so far. Her home, with its velvety seats and chequered yellow kitchen curtains, should be a feeble recollection, like the smell of cocoa butter on my mother’s freshly bathed skin. Right?

Five years, like paper held down by a thumb tuck. Only five years. So why do her words still spread like hives across the landscape of my memories?

Why did the language I learnt in her care become my mother tongue—a revolving door of dagger-shaped sentences to pry out and stab myself with in future whenever I make another stupid mistake, like marrying the wrong guy at 25, leaving him at 27 with a barely two-year-old and eight-month-old, quitting my first government job, and then trusting that the people I worked for at my next one were friends, not acquaintances?

Why, when I mistabulate at the self-checkout counter, is her breathy, Little thief, so crisp in my ear?

On the mornings my husband insists that I sleep in while he gets the kids ready, why can’t I? Why do, I pity the man who will marry you, and You are so lazy, play on a loop?

Failure.

Why do you smell so bad?

I will give you something to cry about, ehn.

More trouble than you are worth.

Sometimes, people ask when I will let it go. Beats me. I want to be free of her haunting, not to palpitate when her name flashes on my phone, ten again, words clogged in my throat.

My therapist frames it kinder, the way she does everything she says. She wants to know, in wading through all these memories, what gives me peace.

My children are almost 11 and 9 now, and when we butt heads and they stand firm in their opinions, my temper is cut into half. Sometimes I shout, and when they say, You don’t have to yell, Mom, I am as small as a worm because they are right. I’m sorry, I always say, because I am. I offer a hug if they want it, grateful every time they take it, and hope the sound of my soothing vibrates in their ears, a thrumming, unexplainable comfort.

In those moments, I think not of my mother but of her sister, in whose eyes I am a pest. I wonder about her screaming, her kissed teeth and slicing words. I wonder if butting heads with a child whom she didn’t push out exhausted her so much that everything she said to me was inevitable. Just a thing people said to children who weren’t theirs.

What about running? my therapist suggests, you said you liked that, right?

I nod but don’t make eye contact, the way you’re supposed to on this side of the Atlantic, so she continues.

Reading? She tries again, the perfect companion to my writing.

I nod.

What about a spiritual practice? Prayer?

I look at her then, doe-like, brown eyes, and smile, hoping she finds it convincing. I think of all the Thank God’s, I’ve muttered when things should have not gone my way, but the world rearranged itself somehow in my favour. If there is a God, I am the proof, right? I was not supposed to be here, penning this, right? I was supposed to crumble under the weight of being ripped from my source and then being admonished for not grieving properly. But I am here, right? That’s a good thing. Even if peace cannot be resurrected. Even if thinking of God feels like watching something through a peephole, an unreachable thing.

To her, I mumble a, Yes, prayer.

Listen, she says softly. Motherhood isn’t something you can quantify. You only have to get it right 75 percent of the time. The words sound right, are just right––something my mother would secretly say to me about a grade on a test while my father was raging about me not being first in my class. But the fissure in my core is moulded around my mother’s voice, not an apparition of it.

This is our tenth session, my therapist and I, and my husband assures me that I am doing better, that the depression is receding.

I smile at her. Thank you. And then I walk back to my car, where habit once again demands that I cry for an hour.

Mummy, please––