I knew we’d arrived at the house on Marlborough Drive when we turned off a quiet, winding road and idled before a large black metal gate. Ngoni’s aunt tooted the horn and I looked at my husband’s face for signs that he was home, that I would finally see him in his place. But he wasn’t smiling. He was waiting.
Soon there was a loud rumble and clatter and the metal wall in front of us began to move, though I couldn’t see by whose hands. As the gate yawned open, it revealed the wide lawn I recognized from the pictures, the banana tree and the flowers, and a metal cage exactly the size of a sedan in the middle of the driveway. It looked like a birdcage, and it took me a moment to realize that the need to protect a car from the elements is a luxury, but protecting it from thieves, a necessity.
As I climbed out of the backseat of the car, I thought that the house seemed smaller than it had in the photos. The swimming pool was empty and cracked and filled with dust from disuse. I tried not to look at it for too long, tried not to reveal my disappointment or ask if we could get it fixed before we left. It was so hot here, and a pool would give me a place to be if I started to feel unsteady. Water has always connected me back to myself. Instead I turned back to the gate to see who’d let us in, and there was a tall man, skinny in his jeans and sweatshirt. Ngoni’s uncle Dakarai.
I wanted to introduce myself, thank him for letting us in, but he was making himself busy relocking the gate. He stayed apart from the group and looked down at the plants that lined the driveway as though the red and green leaves might hold a message. His hand reached up to his mouth and I thought I saw his lips moving behind it.
When I turned back toward the house, there was Gogo walking with her arms outstretched. She sang to herself, unable to contain her excitement. She was bold and glittering in a pink-and-gold-patterned dress and matching headscarf, bracelets tinkling on her arms, skin shining, lips pursed in ululation. She walked past her grandson as though he wasn’t standing there and grabbed me up into herself. Rocked me back and forth, back and forth, in the same welcoming dance she’d led me in at JFK the day we met. She said into my ear in her deep soothing voice, “Julia! Julia! You are finally here,” and this was a welcome so big and bright I didn’t know how to respond. I surrendered to her laughter, joined in, stopped trying to figure everything out and just let myself be in this new place. Over her shoulder, I saw Ngoni smile. Sekuru stood next to his grandson, smiling too, and soon made his way over to me. I remembered just in time that in Shona culture, women don’t hug men they’re not married to, and so, despite the connection we formed when they visited us a couple of years ago, I could only shake Sekuru’s hand now. He wore black pants and dress shoes, a button-front shirt and a tie. The circle of dyed-black hair that wound around his head like a crown was slightly narrower than it had been when we first met, and as I looked into his face I remembered how much it reminded me of Ngoni’s. Although Sekuru’s face was round and Ngoni’s narrow, although his cheeks formed apples under his eyes when he smiled and Ngoni’s stayed flat, although he was shades darker than his grandson and didn’t wear glasses, there was something in the way they each extended their bottom lips when they were finished making their point, and in the unison of their voices and their hands when they spoke. How when they looked at your face it felt as if their eyes went all the way through.
Soon we were ushered into the house, and I followed Ngoni through a dining room with an oval table and mismatched chairs, paint peeling from the walls by the ceiling but otherwise a pretty Easter-egg green. Then into the living room, which was large and dark. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I saw Dakarai sitting with the woman from the car, Ngoni’s aunt. They were arranged on the dark green couch like teenagers, and soon Gogo and Sekuru joined them. Ngoni led me from one to the next for my formal introductions. I started with Sekuru and Gogo, whom I knew but whom I still needed to greet. I stood in front of them for a moment, took their hands in mine, thanked them for inviting me here. Then I turned to Dakarai, who shook my hand and said it was nice to finally meet me. When I came at last to Tendai, she shook my hand too, but didn’t say anything much. It was in her eyes, the message that we were in this together. We already know each other, she seemed to be saying with her bright smile and wink. We go way back.
Gogo told me to sit down, and I watched as everyone in the family bowed their heads together and prayed a prayer of thanks for our safe arrival. When they looked up, Gogo kept her hands together but clapped them slightly, pointing them first to Ngoni and then to me, thanking us for coming. This was our formal welcome—a scene that would repeat in living rooms in Zimbabwe and the U.S. in the years to come. A scene that always seemed, to my American eyes, to come a beat too late. I was so used to welcoming people in kitchens or across the passenger seats of cars, wild hugs and hoots of laughter at the reunion, at the return. The Shona people, I was coming to see, had a formality I’d previously only attributed to Ngoni’s personality.
9
A WEEK INTO the trip I found myself disoriented and unsteady between two walls of a florist’s shop near the cemetery where Ngoni’s father was buried. There was the surprise of darkness, of cool air, and the scent of damp dirt under the thatched roof. There were three women working there, two with babies strapped to their backs with beach towels, each with what I saw as a sadness in her eyes. They were seated on three-legged stools, and behind them were wooden shelves tacked to the walls. On each shelf sat clumps of red carnations pulled together in small wooden baskets. Zimbabwe exported roses and asters and chrysanthemums, but in this shop there were only carnations. An ugly flower. But what did I know, maybe carnations are the traditional flower for cemeteries. I don’t live in a world where we visit the dead, where we bring them presents.
As Ngoni paid for his basket, I watched the women watch us. Wondered how they thought we fit. They’d probably seen our wedding rings, guessed that I was American, that Ngoni lived there with me. But did they guess at the warmth Gogo and Sekuru, lingering in the shadows by the door, showed me when we were at home? Could they tell I wanted to melt into the walls of this place, wanted to blend in and fit in and stop standing out? From where they were watching, could they see if I might become part of this family?
When we climbed back into the car with our basket, I looked out the window and saw that the cemetery stretched for miles. To my right there was no grass, just land pulled into long, dark mounds. At first I thought it was a garden with small labels describing the crops beneath. But then I realized the tin sheets lashed onto metal stakes marked graves. The land had been recently dug into; the mounds and rows would flatten in time. I couldn’t see where it ended. On the horizon, almost too far to see, there were gentle slopes of hills and a burning sunset and the sense that this planet was too big to hold us.
“When people started dying so fast, graveyards expanded informally like this,” Ngoni said. To my left was the formal cemetery, where the grass was tall and plentiful in spite of the drought. It wasn’t green, but a living brown color I didn’t recognize, maybe like what wheat looks like before it’s mown, vast and tall and windblown. But this wasn’t wheat, and it wasn’t standing on empty soil. Some graves—those that had been recently visited—were cleared of the long grasses. It was a patchwork quilt. “The Shona don’t cremate,” Ngoni said. “We have to put our dead in the ground.” I imagined the entire country sitting on top of graves some day in the future, the dead taking up all of the available land, houses come alive as in Poltergeist, possessions of everyone lucky enough to live past their people. I imagined the whole earth encompassed by ghosts. We pulled in and parked, and the hot air smashed into my face as I stood up in the dusty lot. Despite the heat it was suddenly winter 1980 and I was five years old.