An Elegy for Easterly Read Online Free PDF Page A

the shoe sketched out and cut out around the foot, a hammering of strips of old tyre onto the sole, and lo, fifteen-minute footwear. In Siyaso, it was not unknown for a man whose car had been relieved of its radio or hubcaps to buy them back from the man into whose hands they had fallen. At a discount.
    On the other side of Mbare, among the zhing-zhong products from China, the shiny clothes spelling out cheerful poverty, the glittery tank tops and body tops imported in striped carrier bags from Dubai, among the Gucchii bags and Prader shoes, among the Louise Vilton bags, the boys of Mupedzanhamo competed to get the best customers.
    â€˜Sister, you look so smart. With this on you, you will be smarter still.’
    â€˜Leave my sister be, she was looking this way, this way, sister.’
    â€˜Sister, sister, this way.’
    â€˜This way, sister.’
    â€˜This way.’
    â€˜Sister.’
    â€˜My si .’
    They spent the day away from Easterly Farm, in the city, in the markets, in Siyaso. They stood at street corners selling belts with steel buckles, brightly coloured Afro combs studded with mirrors, individual cigarettes smoked over a newspaper read at a street corner, boiled eggs with pinches of salt in brown paper. They passed on whispered rumours about the President’s health.
    â€˜He tumbled off the stairs of a plane in Malaysia.’
    â€˜Yah, that is what happens to people who suffer from foot and mouth, people who talk too much and travel too much.’
    At the end of the day, smelling of heat and dust, they packed up their wares and they returned to Easterly Farm, to be greeted again by Martha Mupengo.
    â€˜May I have twenty cents,’ she said, and lifted up her dress.

    Josephat’s wife was the first of the adults to recognise Martha’s condition. She and Josephat, when he was home from the mine, lived in the house that had belonged to her aunt. It was five years since Josephat’s wife had married Josephat. She had tasted the sound of her new identity on her tongue and liked it so much that she called herself nothing else. ‘This is Josephat’s wife,’ she said when she spoke into the telephone on the hillock above the Farm. ‘Hello, hello. It’s Josephat’s wife. Josephat’s wife .’
    â€˜It is like she is the first woman in the entire world to be married,’ Mai James said to Mai Toby.
    â€˜ Vatsva vetsambo ,’ said Mai Toby. ‘Give her another couple of years of marriage and she will be smiling on the other side of her face.’
    On that day, Josephat’s wife was walking slowly back into Easterly, careful not to dislodge the thick wad of cotton the nurses had placed between her legs. Like air seeping out of the wheels of a bus on the rocky road to Magunje, the joy was seeping out of the marriage. Kusvodza , they called it at the hospital, which put her in mind of kusvedza , slipping, sliding, and that is what was happening, the babies slipped and slid out in a mess of blood and flesh. She had moved to Easterly Farm to protect the unborn, fleeing from Mutoko where Josephat had brought her as a bride. After three miscarriages, she believedthe tales of witchcraft that were whispered about Josephat’s aunts on his father’s side.
    â€˜They are eating my children,’ she declared, when Josephat found her at his two-roomed house at Hartley Mine near Chegutu. She stayed only six months. After another miscarriage, she remembered the whispers about the foreman’s wife, and her friend Rebecca who kept the bottle store.
    â€˜They are eating my children,’ she said and moved to her aunt’s house in Mbare. There she remained until the family was evicted and set up home in Easterly Farm. After another miscarriage, she said to her aunt, ‘You are eating my children.’
    Her aunt did not take this well. She had, after all, sympathised with Josephat’s wife, even telling her of other people who