The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician. Tendai Huchu
the game’s still on,” Alfonso said. “Tell the girl to do it.”
“I go to school. Mum goes to work. Dad disnae do anything. That’s why he has to do the housework.” Chenai gave Alfonso a wicked stare.
Just as the Magistrate rose to leave, a goal was scored. Liverpool was down. He went to the kitchen without waiting for the replay. Alfonso’s voice followed him. “Did you see that, did you see that?”
It was strange that of all the things the Magistrate missed, his golfing buddies, his family, the sunshine, wide-open spaces, it was the maid he missed most of all. That quiet woman in her starched uniform, humming as she worked in the background, almost invisible to them. Mai Chenai had never been satisfied with her. The food was never cooked well enough. The house was never clean enough. The maid had a thankless job but she never grumbled. Looking back he’d never given it a moment’s thought. The house was a woman’s domain. Now he found himself questioning the conditions under which the maid had worked for him. The first time this had occurred was when he was bent over, brush in hand, cleaning the toilet bowl. In his entire life, he’d never imagined himself carrying out such a humiliating task. The maid, though, never complained. She did the laundry, walked Chenai to school, worked all day, and only got one day off in seven (a day off which could be revoked on a whim). Why did I never question this before – an injustice in my own house, yet there I was dispensing justice every day while I kept a virtual slave in my own house? How could this have seemed normal?
He sliced the greens. The can opener was broken so he had to use a knife to open the tinned tomatoes. He had bought hupfu from the Zimbabwean shop in Gorgie that sold exotic meats, Mazoe and little portions of heaven that reminded him of home. Thank goodness for hupfu. He put all these ingredients on the faux granite countertop and studied them as if they were the roots of some complex legal conundrum.
Cooking was a complicated business. Sometimes he watched the wrinkled chef on TV, shouting and swearing, all the while making the preparations look effortless. How could the simple maid have done this with such ease? Worse, the Magistrate somehow had to extract taste out of bland British ingredients. He prepared the sadza. Ravakukwata, the boiling mix, leapt out of the pot, stinging his arms. It looked like a white volcano, active and dangerous. Rising steam filled the room, painting itself a thin film on the window. He worked on the beef, which he mixed with veg in the wok, adding a light mix of spices, stirring, smelling the rich aroma as it wafted around the kitchen.
“Zviri kunhuwirira,” Alfonso called out from the living room.
He heard the sound of footsteps on laminated flooring upstairs. His wife was up. He imagined her reaching down and picking up her gown from the floor. After all these years, she still slept naked. The thought made him smile. He opened the sadza pot, added more hupfu, and stirred. The trick lay in squashing any lumps against the side of the pot. Heaven forbid he should end up with mbodza. He added more hupfu until it thickened and became sadza gobvu. Nhete was not for connoisseurs like him. He let the mixture simmer, listening to the hiss of escaping steam. One should never rush sadza. At this stage, the TV chef would call for a commercial break.
He could hear the faint splash of bath water upstairs. He arranged four plates and prepared to dish up his meal. The wrinkly chef was tough on presentation. Half the taste lies in the presentation, in how enticing the food looks. In the cartoon, something else he’d never have dreamt of watching back in the day, the rat wins the critic over by giving him ratatouille, a little taste of home. The Magistrate had become the anthropomorphic rat conjuring a minor miracle with each portion he put on the plate. The sadza lay on the top half of the plate, plain white and a sharp contrast to the red, green and brown of the stew and veg. Soup ran along the plate, meeting the base of the sadza.
“Goooaaal,” shouted Alfonso. “Two – nil! Your team’s as good as finished. It’s over, I’m telling you. The fat lady is singing.”
The Magistrate picked up two plates and returned to the living room. Alfonso clapped his hands. Chenai took hers with a quick, “Cheers, Dad.” He collected his own plate and joined them.
“You’re a fantastic cook, Magistrate,” said Alfonso.
“We should call you Jamie,” Chenai said.
“I think it’s all due to your profession. This is my theory, you were supposed to weigh facts, sieve out the kernels of truth through the rubble of falsehood. What better training is there for cooking? None. They call these ‘transferable skills’.” Alfonso smiled importantly. He loved postulating his little theories and, at the drop of a hat, would expound the improbable and claim it was biblical truth. The Magistrate felt torn between accepting the compliment and pointing out its ridiculousness. He reserved judgment.
The sound of stairs creaking and sighing as one foot followed the other preceded Mai Chenai, who walked into the room graceful, in spite of her blue tunic.
“Aika, Alfonso, you are here.” Her familiar tone bothered the Magistrate. Back home he would have been Babamudiki or VaPfukuto at the very least. This western business of calling people by their first names riled him. He reasoned it was the consequence of an individualistic culture, as though everyone had simply sprung up from nowhere. Some utopian ideal of equality – calling Her Majesty, Liz! The Shona way, the right way, stressed the nature of the relationship. The individual was the product of a community and had to be placed in relation to the next man. It was the glue that held them together, giving each value.
She sat next to her daughter, away from the two men. The Magistrate went to the kitchen and brought her supper – or was it breakfast? He watched as she took a small portion of sadza, rolled it gently in the palm of her hand and dipped it in the stew. Her lips parted. He watched her chew, admiring the soft line of her jaw, the tenderness of her face. He observed the fleeting bulge on her long neck as she swallowed, then she turned to him with a smile.
“Baba Chenai, murume mukuru anobika mbodza so. I’ll have to get a takeaway to eat at work.” She rose, kissed Chenai on the forehead, and left the room. The Magistrate realised that those were the only words she’d said to him all week.
The bedroom was a misty blue from the morning light. The Magistrate yawned as he stretched his back. He checked the time on the radio clock. He was only vaguely aware that it was a weekday. Days rolled by in purposeless succession. He rose, felt the cool floor under his feet and shuffled to the toilet. His face was wrinkled from too much sleep, eyes puffy and red. He washed his face, shaved and combed his moustache. A face he seemed only vaguely to remember stared back at him from the mirror. He took his medication with water straight from the tap.
“Dad, hurry.” Chenai pounded on the door. “I cannae hold it in, Dad.”
“Good morning to you too,” he said. She pushed past him. “I feel so loved.”
“I love you, Dad,” she replied mechanically from behind the closed door.
The Magistrate returned to the bedroom and began making the bed. First, he smoothed the bottom sheet. Mai Chenai loved to complain if it wasn’t straight when she came in. This was their routine. He would make the bed for her in the morning and in the evening he would find it perfectly made as if it hadn’t been slept in, as if they were trying to erase each other’s presence. They were becoming strangers who, except for the subtle scent of sleep that clung to the sheets and hid in the pillows, never shared a bed. On Mai Chenai’s days off the Magistrate watched television until the early hours and slept on the couch downstairs. If he used the small, third bedroom, Chenai would know something was wrong, though he wondered if she hadn’t already noticed.
“Dad, we’ve run out of sugar, again,” Chenai called from downstairs.
“Tell your mum later.”
What could he say? That he’d get it? He hardly had a penny to his name. When the gas beeped, or, God forbid, the electric ran out, he had to wait for Mai Chenai to sort it out. It was not meant to be like this. The shame sat somewhere in his gut, looping round his intestines, a dull ache that was with him every minute of every day. In the time of his father, whom he’d never known, a man’s role was clearly defined. He was the provider.