Prudence Couldn't Swim (20 page)

“I'll set bail at $50,000,” he said, drawing his gavel down and looking through the papers for the next case.

Even though a parolee isn't supposed to have contact with inmates, Red Eye came to visit me after court. We spoke through a metal screen in the visiting area. He said he'd already talked to Jerry Carney, a former heavyweight boxer who ran a bail bond business. I knew some of Jerry's associates from my time in the Feds.

“Jerry says you'll be out by the end of the day,” Red Eye told me.

“And you'll get violated for coming here,” I told him.

“My PO's cool,” he replied. “Don't trip.”

It took an extra twenty-four hours but the following day I was shedding that jumpsuit for the Bermuda shorts and Walter Payton T-shirt Red Eye delivered.

My next task was to scrap that wet-behind-the-ears public defender and get a real lawyer. We call public defenders “dump trucks.” I didn't want to become a freshman lawyer's dumped load, especially since
I still didn't know exactly why I'd been charged, let alone what the evidence was. I did know one thing, though: I didn't have long to figure it all out before the whole house of cards crashed down on me and Red Eye.

Harare, Zimbabwe
September 1994

T
wo months before graduation the dean of students summoned Tarisai to his office. She didn't make too much of it. The head of the Biology Department, Professor Chawanda, had once called her in. When she got there, she found he wanted to ask her out for a drink. He was sixty-three years old. She had no trouble politely refusing. She still ended up with an A in his course.

Other professors had issued similar invitations. The girls in the hostel encouraged her to accept these invites but Tarisai always declined. Cephas would not tolerate her being in the company of other men. The girls in the hostel kept reaching the same old conclusion: Tarisai was a hopeless bookworm doomed to a life of biochemical experiments and celibacy.

Tarisai was fully prepared to offer a range of excuses when the dean popped the question. She was confident her diplomacy would ensure she wouldn't end up in an unseemly chase around his desk. Other girls had such problems, not Tarisai. She'd learned to act in a dignified manner.

The dean was a tall man who sat very erect behind his desk. Unlike most of his peers, he devoted an hour each morning to physical exercise. The grounds staff at the university were used to seeing him huffing and puffing along campus roads as they made their way to work early in the morning. He claimed to have run the London Marathon in 1979.

The dean had shed his jacket for the meeting with Tarisai, paring down to his crisply ironed yellow shirt and brown tie. His handsome, slightly aging face bore the sheen of imported lotions.

He greeted Tarisai in the traditional Shona way, clapping his hands quietly in front of his chest. He spent a few minutes asking about her
family and her progress with her studies. This was the African way, finding out about a person's welfare and their relatives before conducting any business. The dean didn't do it with everyone but in this instance he felt it was important.

Once the greetings were finished, he reached for a green piece of paper inside a manila file with Tarisai's university registration number written on the cover in black marking pen.

“Miss Mukombachoto,” he said, “you have compiled an impressive academic record during your time here. I have spoken with three of your professors. They all express the utmost confidence that you are on the road to becoming the first black woman in Zimbabwe to earn a PhD in biochemistry.

Tarisai thanked the dean. She was almost blushing. She'd never received such praise from someone this important. Despite such kind words, she couldn't quite relax. The belts around her middle were squeezing tight. She'd adjusted them in an extra notch for this meeting with the dean. She couldn't let him find out her secret. He was predicting a bright future for her.

“On the basis of this I have engaged in extensive discussions with the executive committee of the university. Unfortunately they have been made aware of your condition.”

The dean almost swallowed the word “condition” he said it so quietly. It struck like a bolt of lightning to Tarisai's heart. Suddenly her mind started to race through scenarios of disaster. How could she talk her way out of this?

“I have tried to convince our committee of the need to make an exception in your case. However, they have overruled each and every effort on my part. They have insisted that the rules be followed to the letter. Therefore, I have the unpleasant task of delivering this to you.”

He handed her the green piece of paper. It was a typewritten letter on the stationery of the Office of the Vice Chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe.

The dean continued. Tarisai was too frightened to even look at what the paper said.

“I regret to inform you,” he said, “that as of today, you are expelled from the university. You have twenty-four hours to collect your things
and move out of the hostel. I am sorry that we were not able to reach a more amenable and realistic solution. If there is anything I can do to assist you in your attempt to further your studies, do not hesitate to call on me.”

Tarisai sat in silence. Who had betrayed her, torn her heart from her chest, crushed the dreams of her parents? Who could do such a thing? Probably one of those rich girls in the hostel had found out. She hadn't told any of them. She'd even waited every night until her roommate went to sleep before she got undressed. Still someone must have noticed the belts, the change in her style of dress. They couldn't stand a poor rural girl who was more beautiful and more clever than they were. Then she had a more disturbing thought: it could have been Cephas himself, wanting her out of his life. She didn't want to think about that possibility.

Ever since high school she'd lived on one track: her studies would carry her to success and she'd carry her family with her. How many times had she envisioned a team of local builders at the family homestead as they began construction of her parents' three-bedroom brick house, complete with a generator, a tin roof and ceilings in every room? Now it had all fallen apart. She went into a brief daydream, seeing herself climbing aboard the blue and yellow Matambanadzo bus, riding home in shame, sharing a seat with a woman carrying a live chicken on her lap or putting up with a drunken old man spilling sorghum beer on her dress and trying to touch her bare knees.

“Miss Mukombachoto,” said the dean, “I'm so sorry. Is there nothing I can do? Do you need transport for your things?”

“I don't know,” she replied looking past him at an obscure vision of her future. “I don't know what I'll do. Thank you, professor, for trying on my behalf.”

She stood up and for some reason she curtseyed, like she used to do when she was a small girl waiting on the old men in the village. She went for a long walk around the campus, finally finding her way back to the hostel. Her roommate had gone to town to do some shopping. Tarisai locked the door and cried until her eyes were dry. It was almost dark by the time she staggered out of the room.

“I can't go home,” she thought. “Never. If I leave town I'll end up as
one of those thousands of rural girls who spend their life looking after children and maize fields. Men with a third-grade education will send me to collect firewood. I can't live like that.”

She caught a bus to town and knocked on the door of one of her few friends from university, Dorcas Ncube.

Dorcas had graduated the year before and taken a low level job in the accounts department at Lever Brothers, one of Zimbabwe's biggest companies. She had a one-bedroom apartment in the Avenues, a sea of high-rise blocks on the edge of Harare's city center. The Avenues had a reputation as the sugar daddies' playground. Entire blocks of flats were full of attractive single women who entertained the prosperous men of Zimbabwe, married and unmarried. For their services, these “avenue girls” received various rewards: trinkets, stipends, and whatever else they could bargain for. Some had their rent paid. Others bought new lounge and bedroom suites from the sugar daddy's purse. A few got “ladies' cars”—Renaults 5s, VW Golfs, Mazda 323s. Shopping baskets, they called them.

A handful of avenue girls sought substance in their relationships. They looked for love, family, and future. If this meant stealing the coveted prize from an aging wife, so be it. Wealth and romance were in short supply. Competition was often intense, sometimes ugly. One night a girl two doors down from Dorcas woke up to a gang of thugs sent by her sugar daddy's wife. The girl ended up in hospital for three days.

Dorcas avoided this drama. She walked to work, did her job faithfully, and returned home, always careful to be behind her locked door before sunset. She lived only with her young cousin, Caroline, who had just started high school. Dorcas spent most evenings either helping Caroline with her homework or watching the one local television station. The highlight of her week was Sunday evening when her favorite program,
Dallas,
came on. She loved to hate J.R. Ewing.

Dorcas had patience. She knew one day she would rise in the ranks of Lever Brothers or some other company. Black women with accounting degrees were rare. Within a few years she'd have a house of her own, a nice car. Love would come to her naturally, through meeting someone at work or being introduced by friends. She would never
become an avenue girl. She was attractive enough to compete, though not beautiful like Tarisai. Dorcas was slim and short, her complexion clear and dark. On special occasions she put on perfume and polished her nails. Otherwise, she didn't pay much attention to such things. Like Tarisai she had always relied on being clever, not glamorous.

Tarisai found Dorcas watching early TV news, eating a dinner of the green vegetable they called “rape” and the traditional maize porridge, sadza. She only had meat on the weekends.

Dorcas immediately noticed the panic in her friend. In the entire two years the young women shared a room in the hostel, Tarisai never carried this expression. She looked like her eyes would never close.

The two greeted each other in the carefully crafted way before Tarisai explained why she had come.

They talked long into the night, well after Dorcas's cousin had gone to sleep on the kitchen floor.

Tarisai told Dorcas the whole story, from her first meeting with Cephas to her expulsion from the university. They cried together at times, then planned how Tarisai could avoid that fateful, humiliating bus ride back to her rural home.

The next day Tarisai packed her two suitcases full of clothes, blankets, toiletries, photos, and her few pieces of costume jewelry. While everyone else was attending morning classes, a taxi came and took her away. She didn't have the courage to tell the other girls at the hostel what had happened. They'd figure it out themselves.

The taxi dropped her at Dorcas's. Tarisai arranged her things in one corner of the living room. She'd sleep on the sofa until she had enough money to buy a bed. Dorcas offered to share her double bed with Tarisai but she didn't want to trouble her hostess. The next day Tarisai would go to various companies and offer her services. She was sure she'd find something. After all, she'd gotten all A's in accounting in high school.

After two weeks she managed to secure a job at a small import-export company. She answered phones, filled out orders, and helped with the bookkeeping. They paid her $600 a month, a pitiful sum, but enough to help Dorcas with the food bills and rent.

At her job Tarisai didn't have to worry about tying belts around her
middle. Her employer wasn't concerned about pregnancy as long as it didn't interfere with work. He figured Tarisai would do what most women did, work up until the day she delivered, take a couple days off, then be back at her desk. Maternity leave was almost unheard of in Zimbabwe. People still boasted that African mothers were strong, not “dainty and fragile” like their European counterparts who stayed at home for six months after giving birth.

While Tarisai easily completed all her duties, the long walk to and from work proved exhausting. As she got into her eighth month, she found herself laying her head down on her desk in the office and taking brief naps. When she arrived at Dorcas's in the evening, she did nothing other than collapse on the sofa and fall asleep.

One day on her way home from work she saw three girls from the hostel walking toward her. They looked so lively and happy. In just a few weeks they'd be graduating.

Tarisai ducked into a hardware store and waited for them to pass. The paint fumes made her nauseous as she concealed herself behind a display of Dulux high gloss enamel. Finally she heard their raucous laughter in front of the store. They were talking about a party at some company director's house the previous weekend. Apparently the imported whiskey had flowed like water. Finally the girls passed.

Tarisai spent several more minutes in the hardware store before she went back onto the sidewalk. She knew her former friends were gone but seeing them drained her energy. They were all a year younger than her, yet their life was on course. They reminded her of all that she had lost.

A month later she delivered a baby girl at Parirenyatwa, Zimbabwe's biggest hospital. She named the girl “Netsai,” which means something like “troublesome.” Despite the name, Tarisai loved the little girl and doted on her when she came home from work in the evening. During the day, Netsai stayed with Mabel, a sister of one of the avenue girls in the building. Tarisai paid Mabel $30 a month plus some food.

Several weeks after Netsai's birth, Cephas appeared at Dorcas's door.

“I've come to see my child,” he said.

Tarisai suppressed her anger. If he knew where she was, why had he waited so long to come? She handed him the baby. A child had a right
to know her father, even if the man showed her no love. Cephas smiled and chucked Netsai under the chin.