Moscow but Dreaming (20 page)

He came across a grass hut nestled between two strangler figs. The light he saw came from a small lantern perched atop the flat roof.

The monkey gave him a quick, vicious smack on the back of his head, and Munashe bent low, and hurried through the blanket-covered doorway.

“I brought him as you asked,” the monkey said, and leapt off his shoulders, to take place next to a military-style woodstove that filled the hut with unbearable heat.

In the glow of the embers, he saw a low cot, and an old, fat woman that reclined upon it. Her bare breasts glistened, framing her swollen abdomen, from which a belly button protruded like an upturned thumb. Her bright eyes held Munashe’s for a moment. “Well, well,” she said. “Looks like Tendai did a good job.” She gave the monkey a fond glance, and it hopped and chittered.

“Who are you, lady?” Munashe’s cracked and swollen lips moved painfully.

“I am Tapiwa,” she said. “You will serve me until your debt is paid.”

Munashe was about to protest, to say that it wasn’t his fault, but only sighed. Salt of his sweat burned like fire on his cracked lips. He felt certain that no matter what he said, he was already judged and found responsible for his mother’s demise. His only hope of returning home was to listen and to obey; perhaps then they would let him go. “How may I serve you?” His gaze wandered involuntarily to her elephantine thighs circled by rims of fat, and to the dark, curly vegetation of her pubic hair.

Tapiwa noticed the direction of his glance, and shook with a booming laugh. “Ah, not that way, boy. I have bad bedsores, and I need someone to take care of them. Tendai and Vimbai are not strong enough.”

“I’ll do whatever you need me to, lady. But can I have a drink of water?”

Tapiwa nodded. “You may drink and you may rest. Tomorrow morning, you start.”

The morning brought feeble light and the smell of dead embers and sweat, as Munashe started on his task. It took him a few tries to roll Tapiwa’s bulk to her side. Waves traveled under her skin with every move, and his fingers slipped on her smooth, damp skin. Two monkeys—Tendai and his brother Vimbai—watched from the perch atop the woodstove.

Munashe puffed, but finally Tapiwa was stable on her left side, her left breast flopping to the floor. Munashe looked at her back and gagged—where her skin should have been, there was nothing but an open sore, running from her shoulders to her backside. A white mass shimmered and moved inside the wound, filling it, spilling to the pallet with every breath Tapiwa took. Maggots.

“What are you waiting for, boy?” Tapiwa said. “Clean them up.”

Munashe extended his shaking hand to the living carpet of vermin, and a few maggots popped under his touch. Still, he gathered a handful, looking for a place to throw them.

“On the floor, on the floor,” Tapiwa said, impatient.

He obeyed.

Tendai and Vimbai left their roost, and gathered the maggots with their long fingers, stuffing them in their mouths.

“You want to help me?” Munashe said.

The monkeys chattered and laughed, and shook their heads, their jaws moving energetically.

And so it went—Munashe scooped out the maggots by the handful, and the monkeys ate them, showing no signs of getting sated. Munashe kept his eyes half-closed, and breathed through his mouth; his mind wandered far away, back to his home village, to the fields worked by women and children, to the smells of manure and upturned soil, to the proud cassava mounds, surrounded by yam and cowpeas.

Munashe missed home every day of his joyless labor. While Tapiwa was not unkind, her wounds grew re-infested every day, and Munashe was starting to suspect that his labor would never be over. And he gave Tapiwa the care he did not give his mother, care he could not give to all the people in his village—hollowcheeked men that came home from the city one last time, to their patient wives, thin and hard and strong like strips of leather. Tapiwa, the fat spirit—for he was sure that he was in the spirit forest—was all the sick, all those destroyed by the new way of life that he could not heal. Her sores wept for all.

At night, when the woodstove blazed, burning the already hot air of the hut, Munashe crept outside, under the sultry starless canopy of the forest, and prayed to the ancestral spirits to free him. He cried until his eyes ran dry, and rested in a crouch, listening to the night-sounds; there was chittering and chirping, sighing and moaning, wailing and weeping. And grumbling. His muscles tensed as he listened to the approaching roar—could that be a leopard? Twin lights shone through the treetops, and moved closer, like falling stars. Munashe’s mouth opened in awe as he realized that the sound and the light issued from a very old, very large Cadillac, painted bubble-gum pink. The Cadillac descended, leaping from branch to branch like a most agile monkey.

The Cadillac gripped a low horizontal branch with its front wheels playfully, swung, and somersaulted, landing in front of Munashe with a flourish.

“Hello, Mr. Cadillac,” Munashe said, shaken, but present enough to remember his manners.

“Hoo! What a dim boy!” the voice came from behind the tinted window. The window rolled down, and a smiling skull with red eyes blazing from under an old khaki baseball hat stared at Munashe. “Why would you think that the car was alive, hm?” “I . . . I don’t know, sir.”

“It’s a spirit car.” The car door swung open, letting out a tall skeleton dressed in a tattered tuxedo, with the sleeves and trousers that were too short. The skeletal remains of his neck were wrapped in a dirty red tie. “Now tell me what you need. You didn’t call me here for nothing, did you?”

Munashe told the skeleton his story, all the while marveling at the ease of spirit summoning in the spirit forest.

The skeleton listened with an inscrutable expression. “So, you want me to rescue you from your servitude?” he said once Munashe had finished.

Munashe nodded. “Please.”

“Maybe. But first, tell me—what did you learn from all this?”

Munashe stumbled for words. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe that everyone needs to be taken care of?”

The spirit skeleton nodded. “I suppose they do. What will you trade me for my help?”

“I don’t have anything,” Munashe said.

The skeleton’s eyes flashed. “You have flesh, boy. How much flesh will you give me for my help?”

Munashe closed his eyes, and thought about his mother. How emaciated she was. And still she lingered, grasping onto life with her stick hands. “Take as much as my mother had lost,” he offered.

The skeleton’s grinning mouth moved close to Munashe’s face, breathing out the smell of liquor and stale meat. It drew a great breath, and Munashe felt millions of tiny teeth gnawing on him, moving under his skin, shaving off his flesh pound by pound, yet never spilling any blood or damaging his skin.

When he opened his eyes, the skeleton seemed bigger and fatter—as much as a skeleton can be fat. He nodded to Munashe and got into his car. “Tomorrow night wait here for my uncle. He’ll help you.”

“Wait!” Munashe waved his arms after the Cadillac as it started its graceful ascent. “What’s your name?”

“Fungai,” the skeleton answered, and he and the Cadillac were gone, swallowed by the weakly glowing branches.

The next day, Munashe felt weak but almost cheerful as he went about his task. Tendai and Vimbai, the monkey brothers, noticed, and each gave him a vicious smack and an ear-boxing. Even that could not dispel Munashe’s good mood, and he grinned through the tears.

“Ah, you’re learning,” Tapiwa said. The living shroud of maggots that simmered on her back did not seem to inconvenience her in the least.

Munashe looked up. “Learning what?”

She shrugged, sending the maggots spilling over the pallet and the floor, where Tendai and Vimbai made quick work of them. “That there is a point in every pointless task,” Tapiwa said.

Munashe was not sure if he agreed. A pang of guilt coursed through his body—taking care of his mother was a pointless task; she would have died anyway. So instead he chose a task he thought he could accomplish—taming the lion back into the human form.

When the night fell, he snuck outside and waited by the giant strangler fig. He wondered if Fungai’s uncle also drove a Caddy.

Something tugged on the shreds of his trouser leg, and he looked down. He almost cried out at the sight of a small baby next to him that stood on all fours, its tiny, long-fingered hand clutching the fabric of Munashe’s trousers. Worst of all, the baby’s face was projected on a large TV screen; instead of a head, the TV perched atop baby’s shoulders dwarfing his small, withered body.

Munashe swallowed hard a few times. “Are you Fungai’s uncle?”

“Yes,” flashed the letters on the TV screen. Then, they were supplanted by a large red question mark that took up the entire screen.

“How can I heal Tapiwa’s wound?” Munashe said. “How can I go home?”

“One or the other,” the screen said.

“Both, please. I can’t leave until she’s better.”

The baby’s face reappeared, smiling. “You could. I could help you leave right now,” it said. Apparently, the TV had sound too.

Munashe bated his breath. This was better than he dared to hope. Still, he resented abandoning his hopeless task, no matter how pointless. “Help her first, and then help me leave.”

“One or the other,” the screen said.

“Then help her. I know I can leave after she’s better.”

A question mark again.

Munashe sighed. “I don’t know for sure, but I think this is how it works.”

Fungai’s uncle shrugged his tiny baby shoulders, and showed his face again for a moment, before displaying a chart. “Find the kobo tree -> Find the Lady-Who-Lives-Inside -> Ask for a wishing thread -> Ask for her price.”

“What’s a kobo tree?” Munashe asked, but Fungai’s uncle was already crawling away, the mahogany casing of his television head striking tree trunks that stood too close to his path.

The next night, Munashe set out looking for a kobo tree. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to be looking for, but reasoned that it would be easy enough to recognize. His expectations were fulfilled once he saw a majestic blood-red trunk, crowned with blue foliage and peppered with small yellow flowers.

“Lady?” he called. “Lady-Who-Lives-Inside?”

The Lady-Who-Lives-Inside stood before him as soon as he uttered her name. She was a tall young woman, the most humanlooking creature he had encountered so far. Munashe thought that she was just like any woman in his village, until he noticed her stomach—or rather, that she did not have one. There was a large round hole in her midsection, where her belly should’ve been, framed by the arches of her ribs and pelvis, and festooned with red fragments of gore that fringed the empty space, as if her organs were ripped out of her.

“I need a wishing thread,” Munashe said. “What is your price?”

The spirit reached inside of the hole and pulled out a thin string of sinew, red and blue and yellow. “For this,” she said in a high nasal voice, “I want the same from you.”

Munashe nodded and clenched his teeth as the spirit’s clawed fingers—ten on each hand—pried apart his skin and muscle, sinew and bone, until a tiny piece of Munashe dangled, dizzying, in front of his face.

“There,” the Lady-Who-Lives-Inside said, and gave him her thread. “Touch it to whatever wound you wish to heal, and it will be done.”

When Munashe returned to his village, he was barely able to recognize it. A silence hung over the normally noisy settlement, and the tidy houses bore an indistinct yet unmistakable air of neglect. The cassava fields were overgrown by the weeds, and no rows of women with hoes were fighting to reclaim the fields.

He went from home to home, calling the names of his uncles and friends. No one answered, and Munashe wondered if he was gone longer than he thought. He looked inside the empty houses, and found only desolation and dust. And bones.

It took him a while to discover the living inhabitants of the previously small but vibrant village. Several scrawny, mangy dogs emerged from the fields, as if disbelieving that there was a human there. Two children with bloated stomachs and protruding ribs soon followed.

“What happened?” Munashe said. “Where did everyone go?”

“Dead,” the older of two children replied. “AIDS, and something else.”

“Is anyone else alive?”

The children shook their heads, and looked at him with shiny hungry eyes. “Do you have any food?”

“No,” Munashe said. “But I’m sure we can find some.”

In one of the abandoned houses he found a hoe. He looked over the fields where the weeds reigned, strangling the cassava plants. With a sigh, he heaved the hoe and brought it down upon the arrogant weeds, mashing them into the ground, working them into the dry yellow soil. Munashe was starting on another hopeless task.

My neighbor, businessman Ipatov, was killed a few years ago, back when they still sold beer by the liter. I remember him because he was my first.

I’d just returned from the corner kiosk, my shirt drenched with cold condensation from the flank of a five-liter beer-filled jug I held against my chest. Outside of my apartment building I heard sirens and saw the yellow police cruisers and a white ambulance van with a red cross on its pockmarked side. My neighbor Petro, a middle-aged Ukrainian with heavy brows and a heavier accent, watched the commotion of people and vehicles and dogs from his second-story balcony.

“Petro,” I called. “What happened?”

Petro looked down at me. His wifebeater bore a fresh oil stain that made the fabric transparent; his fleshy nipple and the surrounding swirl of black chest hair stood out in naked relief against the oil spot. “Huh,” he said. “What happened? Guess three times.”

I stopped for a smoke and a rubbernecking as the cops went inside, and the paramedics brought out the gurney with the lifeless body under a white sheet. The wind snagged the edge of the sheet and it fluttered, exposing the bluing face of businessman Ipatov and his naked shoulder, branded with the cruel marks of the electric iron.

“Racketeers,” I informed Petro.

He scoffed. “You don’t say.”