An Elegy for Easterly Read Online Free Page A

inserted one SIM card after the other to see which would get the best reception. Her phone was convenient, but there was this: from Mai James came most of the gossip at Easterly.

    In her home, Martha slept.
    Her name and memory, past and dreams, were lost in the foggy corners of her mind. She lived in the house and slept on the mattress on which a man called Titus Zunguza had killed first his woman, and then himself. The cries of Titus Zunguza’s woman were loud in the night. Help would have come, for the people of Easterly lived to avoid the police. But by the time Godwills Mabhena who lived next to Mai James had crossed the distance to Titus Zunguza’s house, by the time he had roused a sufficient number of neighbours to enter, help had come too late. And when the police did come, they were satisfied that it was no more than what it was.
    Six months after the deaths, when blood stillshowed on the mattress, Martha claimed the house simply by moving in. As the lone place of horror on Easterly, the house was left untouched; even the children acted out the terror of the murderous night from a distance.
    They called her Martha because Mai James said that was exactly how her husband’s niece Martha had looked in the last days when her illness had spread to her brain. ‘That is how she looked,’ Mai James said. ‘Just like that, nothing in the face, just a smile, and nothing more.’
    It was the children who called her Mupengo, Mudunyaz, and other variations on lunacy. The name Martha Mupengo stuck more than the others, becoming as much a part of her as the dresses of flamboyantly coloured material, bright with exotic flowers, poppies and roses and bluebells, dresses that had belonged to Titus Zunguza’s woman and that hung on Martha’s thin frame.
    She was not one of the early arrivals to Easterly.
    She did not come with those who arrived after the government cleaned the townships to make Harare pristine for the three-day visit of the Queen of England. All the women who walk alone at night are prostitutes, the government said – lock them up, the Queen is coming. There are illegal structures in the townships they said – clean them up. The townshipsare too full of people, they said, gather them up and put them in the places the Queen will not see, in Porta Farm, in Hatcliffe, in Dzivaresekwa Extension, in Easterly. Allow them temporary structures, and promise them real walls and doors, windows and toilets.
    And so the government hid away the poverty, the people put on plastic smiles and the City Council planted new flowers in the streets.
    Long after the memories of the Queen’s visit had faded, and the broken arms of the arrested women were healed, Easterly Farm took root. The first wave was followed by a second, and by another, and yet another. Martha did not come with the first wave, nor with the next, nor with the one after that. She just appeared, as though from nowhere.
    She did not speak beyond her request for twenty cents.
    Tobias, Tawanda and the children thought this just another sign of madness, she was asking for something that you could not give. Senses, they thought, we have five senses and not twenty, until Tobias’s father, Ba Toby, the only adult who took the trouble to explain anything, told them that cents were an old type of money, coins of different colours. In the days before a loaf of bread cost half a million dollars, he said, one hundred cents made one dollar. He tookdown an old tin and said as he opened it, ‘We used the coins as recently as 2000.’
    â€˜Eight years years ago, I remember,’ said an older child. ‘The five cent coin had a rabbit, the ten cents a baobab tree. The twenty had … had … umm, I know … Beit Bridge.’
    â€˜Birchenough Bridge,’ said Ba Toby. ‘Beitbridge is one word, and it is a town.’
    â€˜The fifty had the setting sun …’
    â€˜Rising sun,’ said Ba