If It Wasn’t for the Nights
I have buried my father every night for the last fifty-seven days, every night since he died, and I couldn’t fly home for his funeral. When I fall asleep, I see myself standing with my mother by his open grave. Baba is lying in his white casket, in the grey suit he wore to my graduation, his navy-blue tie askew like it always was. They begin to lower the casket into the ground, but it’s still open. Mhamha, she is standing there in her Catholic Church uniform, a white dress, a white dhuku and the sky-blue cape of Chita chaMai Maria. She watches the casket descend, staring at Baba’s lifeless body. I reach out to take her hand, but she pulls away, looks at me and says, “Charity, why aren’t you here?”
Tonight’s dream begins the same. But this time, it’s Baba who speaks. He says, “I wish you could have been here.” And suddenly his casket is shut. And as they lower it into the ground, I just know that this is the last time I will see my father.
Blind panic jerks me out of the dream as my mind flees the image of Baba’s descending casket. I sit up and slowly, my room comes into focus, and I remember where I am. I am in Toronto, my fiancée, Tino, is lying next to me, gently snoring. And my father is dead.
I lie back down on the bed waiting for my heart to slow down. It’s been almost two months, but I still struggle to believe my Baba really died, snatched away after a massive heart attack. I still find myself asking the universe, “Are you sure that it’s my father who died? My Baba?” But there is no doubt. I watched his funeral via Facebook live. I watched them lower his casket. Baba really died. And my mother’s words are still ringing in my head: “Charity, why aren’t you here?” They’re words I wish she would say in real life. For in the real world, Mhamha hasn’t spoken to me since the day Baba died. She says, “the absolute shame” I brought upon the family finally killed him. And what is this shame? I am a lesbian, and I am going to marry another Zimbabwean girl.
I turn over on my side to look at Tino as she sleeps. Her silk wrap is slipping off her head and a few braids are spilling out. I think about waking her, so I don’t have to be alone. But I think better of it. Even in her sleep, she looks exhausted, this love of mine. So, I decide to get up and find something to do in the kitchen, anything to get that casket out of my head.
I knock before I open the door to let Tino’s mother know I’m coming out. It’s a silly thing to do, especially since it is 4 am and she is probably asleep. But I did it the first day she arrived three months ago, and I can’t stop now and let her know how nervous she made me. I spent the first few days of her visit petrified, knocking before I left my own bedroom, waiting for the storm to break, waiting for this conservative woman to finally say what she really thought about her daughter marrying another woman. The blow-up never came. But I’m still waiting.
I sit down at the kitchen table and dial my mother’s number. It rings and rings, but she doesn’t answer. I call again and this time, it cuts after the third ring. She doesn’t want to speak to me. I get up and turn on the electric kettle. The sound must startle Tino’s mother because I hear her shuffling behind the curtain that marks off the den. She has been sleeping in there for three months, ever since Zimbabwe abruptly closed its borders because of the pandemic and her flight home was cancelled. I remember the panic Tino and I felt when we realised that she couldn’t go home. The two of us sat at the kitchen table hunched over the laptop while Ma serenely knitted on the couch. We urgently whispered to each other as we searched every site we could find for a flight back to Harare, but they all told us the same story: no way home.
I am still staring at the curtain when Ma suddenly pushes it back.
“Are you making a cup of tea?” she says, adjusting the purple bonnet on her head as she pushes her large spectacles up her nose.
“Did I wake you, Ma?” I ask.
‘Ma’ is what she has grudgingly decided I will call her. It recognises that we will soon be family, but also that I have as much familiarity with her as any random person on the side of the road showing her a bit of respect.
“No. I’m usually up this early praying,” she replies.
My stomach clenches at the thought that she heard me all the late nights I’ve cried into a cushion on the couch.
Ma asks, “What kind of tea are you making?” She walks over and takes the chamomile tea bags out of my hand. “This isn’t real tea,” she says, shaking her head. And just like that, she takes over the ritual of making tea.
Ma places two bags of the precious Tanganda tea she brought with her into the porcelain teapot, then pours hot water over them. After adding a half-cup of milk, she places the teapot on the stove. She takes out two white mugs with sunflowers on them and flings them on to the table. I want to tell her to be gentle with them. My Baba gave them to me on his solitary trip to Toronto. But it feels ungrateful. For as she takes out some bread and begins to make peanut butter sandwiches, I realise that this is how I’ve always encountered her since the day my Baba died, standing in the kitchen making me food. I did not have much of an appetite the first week, so there had been endless cups of sweet milky Tanganda tea. And when my appetite began to return, she tempted me with the food that my own mother made for me as a child. Thick cornmeal porridge with a big dollop of peanut butter; steaming mountains of sadza served with chicken feet; peanut butter rice with tender oxtail dripping with gravy. She would coax me out of bed in the late afternoon and make me sit at the kitchen table. Perched on the edge of her seat, she would watch me with careful eyes, clucking like a mother hen when I left food on the plate.
“How do you do it, Ma?” I ask.
“Do what?”
“Take care of me like this? Almost like I’m your daughter.”
“—This is the easy part,” she says. “I might not understand the other stuff, but mothering – mothering I know how to do.” The “other stuff” is as close as she ever comes to saying lesbian.
Now, Ma neatly places four triangles of bread on my plate. Then she pours out the tea before she sits down. We sit in silence as I dutifully eat the bread. When I am done, I stare at the table. As I always do after these meals from Ma, I feel compelled to share something about myself with her, as if I need to give her something in return for her kindness. Like I should share why I am up at four in the morning. Or about how sad it makes me that my own mother has shut me out, when here is Tino’s mother, even though she admits that she is still just trying to understand this “other stuff”. I try to push the feeling down, but it’s like water. The more you try to push it down, the more ways it finds to get out.
So, I tell her about the dreams. I tell her about how I bury my father every night. And in the telling, I recall details that I had forgotten I even knew. How Baba appears differently every night. Sometimes, he is the young man in his late twenties who I only know from photographs, a young man, with a full head of hair and a bushy beard, cradling his first child, staring down in wonder at the limitless possibilities of the little being in his hands. Sometimes, he is the man in his forties, full of vitality, who used to run with me on Sundays to help me build endurance for my hockey games. And sometimes he is the Baba I saw the last time my parents welcomed me home four years ago, a man in his sixties, lighter, slower. Staring at the floor and silent as I announce I am a lesbian and Mhamha rages. And I tell Ma about how in the dream Mhamha always asks me where I am. And sometimes there is anger in her eyes, sometimes confusion, sometimes worry, but always disappointment.
And when I stop, Ma pauses before she responds.
“And they happen every night?” Ma says.
“Yes,” I say.
She furrows her brow and stares into the distance, tilting her head as she puzzles it out. “Have you talked to anyone about these dreams?” she says. “Have you told Tino? Or maybe your mother?”
“I don’t want to worry Tino. She has enough on her plate.”
“And your mother?”
“Mhamha isn’t speaking to me right now.” I try to say it in a deadpan manner, but my voice breaks on the last word. “She thinks it’s the shame and disappointment of the “other stuff” that killed him,” I say.
And now Ma is getting uncomfortable. She flexes her left hand at the sound of her own words returned to her. Ma gets up and takes the empty plate and mugs to the sink. She turns and looks at me with a tea towel in her hand.
“Sometimes us mothers,” she says, “sometimes, we just need a little time to accept that our children’s lives don’t always match what we dreamed for them, you know.”
“I do know,” I say. “Being out here, it makes it easier to make the distinction between who we want to be and who our parents want to be. And I think at some point, I realised that if I was going to live the life I wanted, I had to be fine with the idea of being a disappointing daughter. And I get it, Ma. Sometimes the lives we end up living don’t look at all like you imagined. But how could you expect our lives to be the same when you sent us so far from home?”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Ma says.
She comes back to the table and sits down quietly. Her hands are now wringing the tea cloth. I recognise the look on her face. It’s the look she always has when it feels like the conversation is veering towards the “other stuff”. As always, she tries to change the topic.
“But how are you doing,” she says. “I mean, how are you really handling all this?”
“I feel so heavy, Ma,” I sigh, “like the weight of my grief is sitting on my limbs.”
“Well, I don’t know what else to say about your mum,” she says. “But I’ll tell you the best advice I ever got about grief. You have to find a way to get it out. Cry it out. Write it out. Paint it out. Just find a way to get it out.”
I begin to scratch at the small deformity on the table. “Ma,” I say, “how did you get the grief out when Tino’s dad died? What did you and Tino do then?”
She coughs and for a second, I think that my question is too personal. But then she answers.
“We danced,” she says.
“Danced?”
“I know it’s strange,” she says, “but Tino was only ten. And I could tell she was scared to talk about her dad because it made me sad. So, we listened to his favourite music to keep him close. Sometimes we laughed. Sometimes we cried. But always, we danced.”
“What did you listen to?” I say.
“All the musicians he fell in love with when he was a university student. Bee Gees. Elton John. ABBA—”
“ABBA? Really?” I say. “My Baba loved ABBA. I remember one trip, Baba played his ABBA Gold cassette all the way from Harare to Nyanga. And when we got to the lodge, Mum took the cassette out of the car. I thought she was going to throw it out, but she put it in the stereo inside and she started dancing to “Voulez-Vous” and I joined in.” I chuckle. “Funny,” I say. “I haven’t thought about that memory in years. It’s hard to remember a time when my mother still smiled around me.” I sigh. “I can’t believe my own mother won’t speak to me.”
Ma opens her mouth, but no words come out.
“Ma,” I say, “why are you here? Why did you come?”
To my surprise, she smiles.
“You know, I’ve been waiting three months for one of you to ask me that,” she says. “You think I don’t notice, but I watch you and Tino tip-toeing around this place, holding your breath as if you’re waiting for me to blow up. You’re worried that at some point, I’m going to react like your mother, aren’t you?”
“I guess I just don’t understand how you can be here, living with us, and even taking care of me. You’re a church-going woman, Ma. This can’t be easy,”
“And you want to know why I’m here,” she chuckles. “I’m not really sure myself how I got here, Charity. Like with so many things in the past year, I feel like Tino asked me something, and she looked so terrified about how I would react that I said yes. And she was so surprised I said yes, that in her excitement, it all snowballed into something else. It all keeps getting big on me. I signed up for two weeks of one-on-one time with my child. Then a few days before I got on the plane, she told me the two of you weren’t just engaged but that you were actually living with her. And a week after I got here, I discovered I couldn’t go home, and I was stuck here. With you.”
With those last words, she looks at me. I am suddenly aware of how silent the room is. Outside, I can hear cars rolling by as the early birds of Toronto begin to head out to work. But Ma and I continue to look at each other and I wonder if she is feeling what I am feeling, like we’re in a moment that we may never get again, a moment that could only exist under these exact conditions, and that we have this one chance to say things that might never feel sayable again. Who will take the chance first?
“There was no day,” Ma says “when I decided I would accept my child’s lifestyle. If anything, all I have been doing is postponing the decision. I just keep telling myself ‘We’ll see.’ Anyway, even if I went crazy, and you made changes, what would be the point? You’re grown women. You would just go back to living your lives the way you want the second I got on that plane home. So, I endure. I could give you a pretty speech. I could tell you what Mai Mfundisi told me and say, ‘I chose love,’ but I am not going to lie to you. I have spent every moment of the past year wondering how this can possibly be my real life. How did this happen to me? But I have to accept, Charity. I have to accept because there’s no one else. My parents, my siblings, my husband. They’re all gone. Tino is all I have left. How can I walk away?”
Is this all there is for disappointing daughters? Resignation and begrudging acceptance?
The abyss of grief opens up again and threatens to swallow me up, but I don’t want to sink back in just yet.
“Let’s put on some ABBA,” I say. Ma looks nervously towards the bedroom door as if she’s afraid of waking Tino, but I am already pulling up “Voulez-Vous” and linking it to my Bluetooth speaker. At first, Ma taps her foot as she watches me whirl around, but as the chorus begins, I rush to her and pull her up on her feet. She looks at me bemusedly, but then begins to sway. Slowly, she begins to pick up the rhythm and soon she is dancing almost as vigorously as I am, arms raised, hips swinging as her feet slide on the beat. Watching her dance, I notice once again how much Tino looks like her: the way she tilts her head to the left when she dances, the deep dimple in her right cheek that appears when she smiles.
“Go, Ma. Go!” I say.
“Dancing like we did kwaMurambinda!” she says.
And then it’s “Does Your Mother Know” and it’s “Mamma Mia” and we become dancing queens.
We dance. We sing. And when the song changes to “If It Wasn’t for the Nights,” we are suddenly holding hands as we sway. And we continue to sing. And even though it is an upbeat song, I am suddenly crying, and Ma is holding me. If it wasn’t for the nights…I sense Tino standing at our bedroom door. We must appear such a strange sight, Ma and I, the two of us clinging to each other. For now, Ma is crying too as she clasps me close. She grasps me to her bosom in a way my mother hasn’t in a decade. She holds me tight until I feel the warmth of her tears on my wet shoulder. And ABBA keeps singing about these endless nights as we weep for the people we will never see again.