The White Shadow Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Andrea Eames

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘Look after your sister, Tinashe.’

  Tinashe is a young Shona boy living in a small village in rural Rhodesia. The guerilla war of the late 1960s haunts the bushlands, but it only infrequently affects his quiet life; school, swimming in the river, playing with the other kids on the kopje.

  When his younger sister, Hazvinei, is born, Tinashe knows at once that there is something special about her. Their life in the village, once disturbed only by the occasional visits of his successful uncle and city cousin, Abel, now becomes entangled with the dual forces of the Shona spirit world and the political turmoil of the nation.

  As Tinashe, Hazvinei and Abel grow older, their destinies entangle in ways they never expected. Tinashe is prepared to follow his sister anywhere – but how far can he go to keep her safe when the forces threatening her are so much darker and more sinister than he suspected?

  Andrea Eames weaves together folklore and suspense in this compelling tale of a boy struggling to do the right thing in an unpredictable world.

  About the Author

  Andrea Eames was born in 1985. She was brought up in Zimbabwe, where she attended a Jewish school for six years, a Hindu school for one, a Catholic convent school for two and a half, and then the American International School in Harare for two years. Andrea’s family moved to New Zealand in 2002. Andrea has worked as a bookseller and editor and now lives in Austin, Texas with her husband. Her first novel, The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, was published in 2011.

  Also by Andrea Eames

  The Cry of the Go-Away Bird

  ANDREA EAMES

  The White Shadow

  Chapter One

  IT ENDS HERE, inside an elephant: in its cavernous ribcage, wet with sluggish blood, where a thin man sits folded, hugging rock-grazed knees. It ends here, and I am alone.

  I have to think of something, here, to keep from going mad, as I wait for morning. I need to know where this began – not to blame nor to mend, but simply to know.

  Dzepfunde, we say, when the storyteller pauses. Go on.

  It began when my father told me that every person has two shadows: a black one and a white. The white shadow, mweya, is the soul and the black shadow, nyama – a word which also means ‘meat’ – is the flesh.

  ‘The mweya climbs out of the body after you die, in the form of a worm.’

  ‘A worm?’

  My father smiles across the years. ‘That is why we make a hole from the grave to the outside with a hollow reed, leaving a tunnel. The worm will crawl out and into an animal, and that animal becomes an ancestral spirit.’

  I remember the strength of his heartbeat as I rested my ear against his chest; the strength of his hands.

  ‘The spirits of chiefs become clan spirits – mhondoro – powerful lions and protectors of our people.’

  ‘That is us,’ I say. ‘Our totem is shumba, the lion.’

  ‘That is true, but a totem animal is a different thing from a mhondoro,’ said Baba. ‘A totem animal protects just the family. The mhondoro works for everyone. And they come only from the spirits of chiefs and of their sisters.’

  That is how I learned from my father that sisterhood is a powerful thing; family more powerful still. Carrying on the family line is everything. If you do not have children you cannot become an ancestor yourself, watching over the family and accepting their offerings.

  I shift my weight and sit cross-legged now in the congealed blood. Cross-legged because I am a man, taught to be a man as my father was taught: if you have the misfortune to be a woman, you must hold your legs straight in front of you so that no menstrual blood can escape to redden the already red ground. I do not know why we think that the rich blood of women, which comes from preparing the womb for more children – future ancestors – will stain and pollute our earth; it is already polluted, with the blood of men and boys, women and girls, killed in battles and in other, less noble ways. Nevertheless, this is what we believe. It is difficult to be a woman, and I am only now realising quite how difficult it is.

  Women are dangerous, I was taught. Women have a natural tendency to become witches. Everyone knows this; and witches are the only thing that can break the unbreakable line of family, as live children become adults become animals become ghosts.

  Children become adults become animals become ghosts.

  I can feel that I am almost there. I am coming to some understanding. I clutch my knees tighter. I lower my head onto the cool, damp skin of my arm; and I wait.

  Chapter Two

  IT BEGAN WHEN the second child was born to our family, and my father fell in love.

  I can tell you that Baba was not a man who fell in love easily. He was not a man who did anything softly or easily, with his big voice and his big hands and his chest like a drum – a man known in the village for his kindness and generosity but also for his strength. He told me that he did not sleep at night as I did, and I believed him. He told me that, when Amai and I slept, he left our small house on the kopje to wrestle leopards that would otherwise eat us in the night.

  ‘Who do you think looks after you and your mother when you are being lazy in bed?’ he said. ‘That is why I am so strong. Because I have eaten the hearts of many leopards.’

  When I was very young, I tried every night to stay awake so that I could go hunting with my father. I held my eyelids open until the eyeballs felt dusty and sticky in their sockets, like sweets that had been sucked and then dropped in the dirt. I pinched my arm over and over until it went numb, and I kicked my legs against the mattress.

  My father watched me from his chair in the corner, smiling. ‘You are doing well, Tinashe. Maybe tonight you will hunt the leopard with me.’

  I saw the leopard in my mind: as big as a house, a creature of fur and claws and flames and oil, with sun-blackened eyes. I imagined killing it with a spear and watching its bright red blood bloom like a flower on its pelt. I imagined my father cracking open the ribs of the leopard like the shell of a pecan nut and pulling out the red heart, still beating and fluttering in his hands as it tried to break free. I would bite into the heart as I bit into the red skin of an apple. I would taste fire, and meat.

  When I woke in the morning, I could not believe I had fallen asleep. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ I asked Baba every time.

  ‘I was too busy fighting the leopards,’ he would always say.

  I felt safe knowing that my father was looking after us. When I was curled into a fat ball in bed – a little black tick clinging to my mother’s hide – my strong father was out in the darkness, keeping the bad things away. Baba was not one to show affection with kisses or embraces but, sometimes, when he had just eaten and he was feeling full and content, he w
ould let me rest my head on his chest and hear that his heartbeat was strong and full of blood, the way a man’s heartbeat should be.

  ‘What are you laughing at, hey?’ My father got his hand under my arm and groped for the ticklish spot. ‘What are you laughing at?’

  I burrowed my head deeper into his lap, smelling sweat and the hot-meal smell of body odour and, beneath that, the sweet and mysterious smell of his mboro. I was not afraid of it. I had seen it many times, when he was pissing in the yard. He made fun of my small one when Amai washed me in the tin tub. Mine would be like his one day, when I was a man.

  ‘It is good to be a man,’ Baba said. ‘We make children, and children are the greatest wealth.’

  These were the days when the kopje was a peaceful place, perched on its lion-brown hill and overlooking the dry sweep of the tribal lands. We had wealth, in this village: brick houses, good crops of maize, strong herds, a shop that never ran out of sugar and Coca-Cola, and a market for the people who passed through on their way to the town. The scrubbed-bare hillside gave way to trees – acacia, mopane, msasa – and then the tea-brown river. Policemen – a few black, but mostly white – looked after our village and the others in the area, but I did not see them very often. Trouble was rare, and when it occurred we could manage it ourselves, with the help of the witch doctor and the older men in the village. I played with the other kids in the red dirt and ate sour fruit from the bush and thought the kopje would stay that way for always – but a change was coming. Because children are the greatest wealth, we prayed in church every Sunday for Amai to give the family another boy.

  ‘A boy makes the family stronger,’ said Baba. ‘A girl is with the family only until she marries. She is a little stranger in the house.’

  I drew myself up to my full, male, three-year-old height. Baba and I were the men of the house, and we made the family strong.

  On Sundays, in preparation for our prayers, Amai washed me in the yard with Sunlight soap, and then rubbed me all over with Vaseline until my skin was soft. I wore my best suit to church and knelt on the little cushions with my mother and father, praying for a boy. Amai told me to sing as loudly as I could so that Mwari would know we were grateful to him for hearing our prayers.

  After church, the women pulled Amai aside and chattered to her. I held her hand and swung on it, impatient to get home and away from these fat women, but it was difficult to get Amai to come away. The women asked her questions in low voices, about milk and blood and what she was eating, and she answered almost in a whisper.

  ‘Mai! I want to go home.’

  ‘Nyarara, Tinashe.’

  There were mysterious recommendations – put this herb on your sadza, sleep with a pillow under your feet, make sure you do not wash yourself too soon after – but this one was hushed before I could hear it all.

  ‘Good luck!’ said the women as we moved away.

  Baba was working to make the baby too. His friends shouted at him as we passed: ‘Have you planted your seed yet?’

  Baba pretended to be angry, but I could tell that he was pleased.

  When Amai fell pregnant, we gave thanks. It was a miracle, Amai said. I was three years old. The fact that my mother was growing a person inside her stomach like a mielie seed growing into corn did not seem any more miraculous to me than the sun rising every morning, or water falling from the sky when it rained.

  ‘Now, Tinashe, you will be a good boy for your mother, yes?’ said Baba. He laid his palm on my head. ‘You are going to be an older brother.’

  I felt my chest swelling, my voice deepening. I was Baba’s second-in-command, and my little brother would have to listen to me. I imagined him following me as I ran with the kopje gang; watching me as I dived into the deepest part of the river and climbed the highest trees.

  Pregnant, Amai changed. She moved slowly and gracefully, as she did when carrying a basket on her head. She made strange noises – groans, little sighs. Her skin became taut and purple. When I tried to lift her belly in my two hands, it felt like the bucket Baba carried from the well; even if I braced myself and spread my legs as far apart as they would go, I could not lift it.

  Amai swelled up like a big hippo, Baba said. He only said this to me, though. To my mother, he said that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. ‘You are glowing,’ he said, or ‘You look like a queen.’

  She did look like a hippo, I thought. She yawned like a hippo. She fell asleep whenever she sat down. Her bottom was so big and round that she had only to bend her knees for it to touch the seat of her chair. When she lowered her weight to the seat, she puffed her cheeks up and blew – ‘Pfooo’– out of her lips. I found it hard not to laugh, watching her.

  ‘Tinashe,’ she shook her finger, ‘one day you will have a wife and a baby, and you will have to tell your wife big lies as well, and watch her getting fatter and fatter. So don’t you laugh at me.’

  I could tell that she was not really angry. I buried my head in the crook of her elbow, inhaled her warm-bread smell and took a sliver of her skin between my lips as if I were going to eat her. When I did this she pretended to be very afraid and said, ‘Don’t eat me, Tinashe, or who will cook dinner for you and your father tonight?’

  I laughed. When I rested my ear against her stomach I heard sloshing and splashing.

  ‘It is your brother swimming,’ Amai said.

  I pictured him paddling after a bit of sadza that Amai had swallowed and stuffing it into his mouth with webbed fingers. I loved to swim, and I was glad my brother loved to swim, too.

  As the months passed and the birth of my brother approached, Baba whistled and sang, and grabbed Amai’s bottom as she walked around the house. ‘You are my delicious eggplant,’ he said to her, and other silly things like, ‘You are a gourd, round and ready to burst.’

  We received a letter from Babamukuru, my uncle. He was Baba’s oldest brother – the head of the family, and the most successful man to come from the kopje. Not only had he finished high school, but he had also attended university on a scholarship and now worked at an important job at an office in town. He had a silver car and a big house, and everyone in the village knew that when Babamukuru spoke, he spoke wisely. In this letter, he told us it was good that the baby danced in the womb as it showed he would grow to be strong and active.

  ‘Remember how still Tinashe was,’ he wrote. ‘We were not even sure if he would come out alive.’

  Baba laughed at this, but I did not want Babamukuru to think that I was small and weak.

  My parents discussed suitable names for my brother that day. It was an important discussion that took a long time, as names are important and shape your destiny. Tinashe means ‘God is with us’.

  ‘We must call him Mambo,’ said my father, ‘the King.’

  ‘Shush.’ My mother did not like this. It would be tempting fate to give a child a name like that, particularly a second child. ‘We shall call him Simbarashe.’

  The power of God. It was a powerful name, like mine, fitting for a younger son and brother.

  When Amai was due to give birth, her mother and aunties and sisters came to stay with us. The house filled with women, smelling of perfumes and cooking fires. They shooed me off with flapping aprons and flapping hands.

  ‘Nyarara! Give your mother some peace!’

  ‘Go and do something useful.’

  I have never in my life done as many chores as I did that week. If I sat still for five seconds, the aunties thought I was being lazy.

  ‘Look at that one sitting there as if he is a king!’ they would say, and give me something to do.

  I fetched water in the small bucket, the only one I could lift, which meant I had to go back and forth from the well five or six times, with the metal hitting my shins and giving me bruises. I ground up the mielie meal and went with coins to get milk and bread from the store. I did nothing right. I left the mielie meal too lumpy for sadza. I bought the wrong bread and too little milk.

  ‘He is usel
ess, this one,’ said the aunties and clicked their tongues. It was not a good week for me. Baba was out at work during the day and then out with his friends in the evenings.

  ‘I need to get away from all these women,’ he whispered to me loudly. He knew the aunties could hear him.

  ‘Eh-eh!’ they said. ‘Typical man.’

  They loved my father. He was big and good-looking and they liked to fuss around him, getting his dinner and his beer. I wanted to go with him to the shebeen, but I was too young. Instead, I stayed outside in the evenings, pretending to chop firewood, listening to the screeching and giggling from indoors and peering in through the windows when I could.

  ‘Maiwe, these men do not know what they do to us,’ said one of the aunties, shaking her head. ‘They do not know the pain we go through.’

  ‘All from one little thing!’ said another auntie, and mimed something with her fingers, as if she were measuring the length of a tiny fish. The aunties laughed.

  ‘What little thing?’ I asked through the window, and this made them laugh even more.

  ‘You will find out one day,’ they said.

  On the night that my mother gave birth I heard her screaming terrible screams. With each scream a cry went up from the other women.

  ‘Aii!’

  ‘Maiwe!’

  And then a short silence before the next one. I wanted to go to Amai, but when I knocked on the door, one of the aunties shooed me away.

  ‘This is women’s business!’ they all said.

  There was a woman’s world and a man’s world. The woman’s world was cosy, full of chatter and talk and warmth and food. The man’s world was a lonely place, outside a closed door, in the noise-filled night.

  ‘Tinashe.’ My father was home. I wanted to ask what was happening – why Amai had to be in so much pain. Why it was so important. But you did not ask questions like these. If I sat down with Baba and tried to talk to him about how I felt and what I thought, he would have given me a smacked bottom or pinched my ear and told me to be quiet. A man is supposed to be able to sort out his own problems without all the jibber-jabber that women are allowed to make. ‘It has started, Baba,’ was all I said.