~This story
first appeared in Thyini as “Inevitable.” (2015).
~Selected by Kenneth A. Fleming, assistant editor for fiction
You know it is over when your grandmother comes from the
general dealer and confronts you about it. You deny it all because perhaps you
weren't just ready to deal with it yet. Your grandmother takes you on the next
bus to town anyway and just when you've thanked God that the General Hospital
is already closed, a young pharmacist tells your grandma that pregnancy tests
can now be bought over the counter.
She buys five to make sure before dragging you to your
uncle's house in the township where dust floods the streets and kids ran around
with snot on their faces and no trousers on. Unconcerned men laze around on
rundown cars with their shirts off because it is summer, just like Mutare, just
like the neighborhood you were uprooted from, while guavas fell from the trees
and Rutendo played marakaraka with you until sundown.
Your uncle’s wife is surprised to see you, but when she sees
the look on your grandmother’s face she acts like a good daughter in law and
silently makes tea. Your grandmother refuses to drink it. Sweat beads down her
temples, running from somewhere beneath her doek to the bottom of her neck and
there is an eerie silence, like the time you snuck out at night to go dancing
and locked your her in the house.
Taking the tests is hard enough with
your grandmother and your aunt watching as you intently pee into the cup. Like
the old ladies they are, there is a great fuss about following all the
instructions to a T. The results don't surprise you – you’ve skipped two
periods already. You have to wait for your uncle anyway, so your aunt makes
another pot of tea – hot water in a yellow metal kettle with the milk and sugar
thrown in it already and chunks of bread with only one slice margerined, just
the way you've had it every day for the past two years since coming to live
with your grandmother.
When your uncle arrives, the tribunal
has to be held via loudspeaker on your grandmother’s solar phone, although not
everyone’s opinion is heard because they are all headstrong and all loud and
all right. Your grandmother is broken, she looks angry but she's crying. You've
never seen her tears.
Every family member has something to
say about it all but as always your own mother is silent. Your mother was
silent too when you'd been caught talking to your Math teacher after twilight,
and when you had failed all your subjects that school year and when you were
caught changing the marks on her report card. They decide that your uncle and
aunt should escort you to your new home.
The journey back to your grandmother’s is tense. From Rusape
town all the way to Gunda turn-off no one speaks to anyone else, all you can do
is listen to the vague radio somewhere behind the gossiping mothers and watch
as the brown grass flies past you, just like the journey from Mutare, the one
you thought had a return date on it but didn’t.
When you arrive
they pack everything you had with you when you came – it all fits into one
satchel, and even the satchel was a donation but this isn't the time for
details. That is why you went to the grass in the first place; it helped you
forget about the rural school you now had to attend. It was light years away
from feeding the chickens with their pecking, and the pigs with all their
hovelly sounds...
Most of all it helped you to forget gratitude. They always
forced you to remember that when you arrived you had nothing but the clothes
you wore, that your Aunt Rumbidzai had paid your school fees and that it was
Aunt Namato who brought you food every month. You were tired of justifying your
existence. You hadn’t planned to stay that long with you grandmother. No one
had planned it – except your mother.
And so it is with your uncle and aunt that you walk the 2 km
journey from your grandmother’s home to your new husband’s home. You will go
without a price because you sold yourself cheap. You walk past fields that
smell of fresh long grass and cow dung, fields in which you had lain as he had
loved you. It was in these fields and fields further on that you had sat with
him and learnt to forget, the world stopped still when you were here, but now
it's catching up with you.
As you hear the njiva sing above you,
you think of all the days you had played truant with him – he had quit school
long ago so his presence came with intoxicating freedom. Out of the trees
hanging low, he would pick hute for you as you sat there in the grass, hiding
from busybodies.
The welcoming party is meager, one
skinny sister in law suckling her baby, and your lover. Their homestead is
peculiar in its lack of livestock. Your uncle and aunt leave after saying the
necessary and for the first night you will be joining in his hunger, the hunger
that that drove you to steal from your grandmother to feed him, isn’t that what
love does? That is why Grandmother had insisted you leave with nothing, so you
can see for yourself that he doesn't really love you.
But he does love you. Of course he has
not been you first lover; your first lover had been the neighbour. But that was
before he wanted to play the game with your baby sister too and that got you
into trouble. Love stops where marriage begins. That's what they say. It is
that way when finally you live with your man. You struggle for money and give
birth to your first child on the side of the road and he dies before you get to
hospital. You get pregnant again. You fight over something as crazy as five
dollars and you make up, but not before he kicks you in the stomach and you
lose that baby. Six months later you're pregnant again.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
“Remember the Grass” was inspired by a course in synchronous
narrative. One of the readings for the class was “Rooster Pollard Cricket
Goose” by Noy Holland which reminded me of rural Zimbabwe and also made me
think about narrating a story from the perspective of a character who has been
robbed of agency.
*****
ABOUT TARIRO NDORO
Tariro Ndoro is a Zimbabwean writer and an alumnus
of the Rhodes University Master of Arts in Creative Writing progamme. Her work
has appeared or is forthcoming in New
Contrast, Oxford Poetry, AFREADA and Fireside Fiction.
