An Elegy for Easterly Read Online Free Page B

Toby.
    â€˜And the dollar coin had the Zimbabwe Ruins,’ the child continued.
    â€˜Well done, good effort,’ said Ba Toby. He spoke in the hearty tones of Mr Barwa, his history teacher from Form Three. He, too, would have liked to teach the wonders of Uthman dan Fodio’s Caliphate of Sokoto and Tshaka’s horseshoe battle formation, but providence in the shape of the premature arrival of Tobias had deposited him, grease under his nails, at the corner of Kaguvi Street and High Road, where he repaired broken-down cars for a living.
    As he showed them the coins, he remembered a joke he had heard that day. He repeated it to the children. ‘Before the President was elected, the Zimbabwe ruins were a prehistoric monument in Masvingo province. Now, the Zimbabwe ruins extend to the whole country.’ The children looked athim blankly, before running off to play, leaving him to laugh with his whole body shaking.
    The children understood that Martha’s memory was frozen in the time before they could remember, the time of once upon a time, of good times that their parents had known, of days when it was normal to have more than leftovers for breakfast. ‘We danced to records at Christmas,’ Ba Toby was heard to say. ‘We had reason to dance then, we had our Christmas bonuses.’
    Like Martha’s madness, the Christmas records and bonuses were added to the games of Easterly Farm, and for the children it was Christmas at least once a week.

    In the mornings, the men and women of Easterly washed off their sleep smells in buckets of water that had to be heated in the winter. They dressed in shirts and skirts ironed straight with coal irons. In their smart clothes, thumbing lifts at the side of the road, they looked like anyone else, from anywhere else.
    The formal workers of Easterly Farm were a small number: the country had become a nation of informal traders. They were blessed to have four countries bordering them: to the north, Zambia, formerly one-Zambia-one-nation-one-robot-one-petrol-station,Zambia of the joke currency had become the stop of choice for scarce commodities; to the east, Mozambique, their almost colony, kudanana kwevanhu veMozambiki neZimbabwe , reliant on their solidarity pacts and friendship treaties, on their soldiers guarding the Beira Corridor; this Mozambique was now the place to withdraw the foreign money not available in their own country; to the west, Botswana, how they had laughed at Botswana with no building taller than thirteen storeys, the same Botswana that now said it was so full of them that it was erecting a fence along the border to electrify their dreams of three meals a day; and, to the south, cupping Africa in her hands of plenty, Ndazo, ku South, Joni, Jubheki, Wenera, South Africa.
    They had become a nation of traders.
    So it was that in the mornings, the women of the markets rose early and caught the mouth of the rooster. In Mbare Musika they loaded boxes of leaf vegetables, tomatoes and onions, sacks of potatoes, yellow bursts of spotted bananas. They took omnibuses to Mufakose, to Kuwadzana and Glen Norah to stand in stalls and coax customers.
    â€˜One million for two, five million for six, only half a million.’
    â€˜Nice bananas, nice tomatoes, buy some nice bananas.’
    They sang out their wares as they walked the streets.
    â€˜ Mbambaira, muriwo, ma tomato, onion, ma banana, ma orange.’
    The men and boys went to Siyaso, the smoke-laced second-hand market where the expectation of profit defied the experience of breaking even. In this section, hubcaps, bolts, nuts, adaptors, spanners. Over there, an entire floor given over to the mysterious bits, spiked and heavy, rusted and box-shaped, that give life to appliances. In the next, sink separators, plugs, cellphone chargers. Under the bridge, cobblers making manyatera sandals out of disused tyres. The shoes were made to measure, ‘Just put your foot here, blaz ,’ the sole of