THE VIEW

In his debut novel, Avenues By Train, Farai Mudzingwa explores themes such as politics and trauma through the eyes of siblings Jedza and Natsai. In this extract, Jedza’s life is turned upside down

Above: Farai Mudzingwe, author of Avenues By Train

Back at Harare station, the switchboard lights up and the signals are working again. The driver rouses from his dreamless sleep feeling as if a steam train is charging around in his head. When he gets up, his insides stay behind on the bench while he staggers onto his feet, and when they then come up into his belly, they swim up into his throat. He heaves painfully, then wipes his mouth with his sleeves. He has had rough mornings before but this one is laced with trepidation. He could still get this day off as sick leave but he also knows that he is walking a tightrope with all his drunken missed days. He shrugs and heads to the platform boards. He needs no prompting from the station manager, knowing he has to make up for lost time. He pulls out of the yard and accelerates out of the city, sliding out with well-practiced mechanical motions. He has done this routine so many times that the responses are automatic: he flips switches, turns knobs and pulls levers in a daze. He usually blows the horn when passing Chenga Ose. It is his good-luck ritual. A part of him wishes his neighbours knew it was him driving the engine. Indeed, he has told people often about his important position, bragged while drunk.

This morning a fog hangs over Chenga Ose. A fog unlike any he has seen at this time of the year. The white orb appears as an opaque wall across the tracks and extends into nothingness in each direction. The engine ploughs into it. A chill passes through him and brings on another volley of coughs and sneezes. The locomotive is going at full tilt and blows through the white blanket, the wagons rattling at pace. A sense of dread washes over him as he takes measured breaths to calm himself down.

The train emerges from the fog and a pastoral landscape opens out with the city behind him. The train’s contact to the electric line above the train sings out and the contact of the wheels on the rails responds. The trucks rattle on as the train sweeps into wide curves and down through gently sloping valleys. It cuts through the hillside along a dyke and the red banks of earth zip by in a blur. On the other side, a cluster of shops, a crossing, fields and fields of some crops too young and low-growing to recognise, another cluster of shops, and beyond the fields, a weir that strains to contain a river whose pent-up waters are eager for a signal to erupt.

If the driver were to observe these hills that he has passed mindlessly on numerous trips, he would count seven. Seven hills that the ancients may have considered sacred. If he were to hear the voices echoing around the granite boulders, what would he hear? Pleas from those who came before, not to blast away the hillsides? Not to alter the configuration of this granite amphitheatre which lends an elegiac acoustic quality to the rainmaking ululations of old women who brew millet beer? Are these not the hills of Bangidza, the first hills of the first people? Would the voices of the ancients ask the driver what is a road or a railway, and what mighty gods do they serve who demand that they shift mountains and dry rivers? They would certainly insist that he look more closely at the fields and see the morning sun gleaming on the sweaty backs of farm workers whose fathers and mothers followed these same tracks to break their backs in these fields. They would ask the driver, “Who dares to own land?” The ancients would want to know if those who cleared this land knew that they were cutting down rain-making trees. It is as if they knew that tobacco would take and take from the soil, depleting it of nutrients. As if the interlopers and forgetful youth did not care to know that the people of the soil embedded the fertile umbilical cords of generations before and generations to come, in the same earth. The ancestors would warn that to leach goodness from the earth is to starve the people of the soil. They would advise them not to take as if this land never had those who lived upon it and with it, those whom they exiled from it and who now live it in their dreams. Those who came before would demand that these hills be protected from quarry excavators and mining shafts in which cages and pulleys are worn and strained to the limit. If only the train driver would prise open his heavy eyelids and see these bal-an-cing granite boulders used by the ancestors as granaries, burial sites and worship sites. They would show him these forgotten battlefields, sites of ambush and the desecration and betrayal of a people. Then, he would feel the ground shake, ever so slightly, as the train thundered across rivers that had been cut off and around valleys that had been flooded. If only he would see that our people now fish and hunt under cover of darkness. If he were to listen, allowing the ancestors to bite his ear, he would feel each sideways shake of the carriages as the spirits in the hills leaned into the train.

Alas, the train attains top speed and locks in. The driver sounds his horn and conquest reverberates through the hills. The train swerves again and thunders on, fortissimo, unstoppable.

Miner’s Drift. On our bicycles we speed along a wide footpath until we join the road heading into the township. Takunda and I pedal ourselves ragged trying to get ahead of one another to maintain front position. We get to the slight incline that leads up to the railway crossing, riding abreast and pumping furiously. Dalitso keeps up effortlessly, uninterested in our competition.

“Stop, the boom is coming down.” Takunda focuses ahead while riding on.

“You first.”

“Look Takunda, the lights are flashing!” “I don’t care. You must stop.”

“No, you. I said it first,” I counter. “Doesn’t matter. I’m in front.”

“No, I am.”

“No, I am.”

“No, I am.”

The train begins the long sweeping arc over a ridge and into Miner’s Drift. Dotted along the ridge are the verticals of mining scaffolding and pulleys. The town itself is not visible yet, save for grain silos and a couple of communication towers. The train driver looks at his watch and sees that he has made up for the lost time. He takes a deep breath and swallows to ease his throat. His tongue catches on the roof of his mouth. He looks around for the bottle of water he knows is somewhere in the cab. The headache is now at full steam and he feels hot, feverish, his insides begin their revolt again. The sideways rocking and jolting of the train has had him fighting off nausea for a while. He looks ahead and sees that he has turned into the final straight entering the town. Ahead, he can see flashing lights at the crossing and the booms coming down. He sounds the horn, then turns back and resumes his search for the fallen water bottle.

The train horn blasts into my ears.

I start pumping my brakes while keeping my eyes on the train. Takunda’s foot misses a pedal; he cuts across me and jams our front wheels. We both land in the red dust. Dalitso comes crashing into us. I push him off me, but I push too hard and my shove lands him in the path of the train.

The driver sees the water bottle rolling under his seat and reaches for it, crouching low. Shakes his head and struggles back onto his feet. He unscrews the cap and takes a few painful swallows. The hot reflux remains lodged in his tract. A mouthful of water only nudges it down a notch.

The tracks in front of him, at the crossing point.

Something there that shouldn’t be. White blanket. No, not déjà vu. Small this time. He sees a little kid in white garments scrambling up onto his feet, right there on the rails. Not possible. But yes, there is someone, there is this fucking kid. The ball of acid stops in his tract. He just stares as it happens. The acid burns. Paralysed to the spot. Why does he not move? The corrosive burn radiates outwards into his chest and belly, rises back up his throat. What is he doing on the tracks? Why this, why now? His stomach lurches and caustic bile shoots back out of his mouth. No, he thinks, no, not this. Shaken, unsteady, light dimming, he lunges for the brakes.

Trains blew past him, Sekuru Jairos, at intervals as he walked. He travelled alone but knew he was part of a long human chain seeking their fortune southwards. There was evidence of those who were travelling ahead of him. Remnants of a fire here. Tall grasses flattened out as a temporary bed. Empty cigarette packets, matchboxes, corned beef tins, rotting flesh picked at by crows and vultures, a mound of earth the length of a grown man, with stones laid over it and stuck in at the head a crude cross made from branches and tree bark. Sometimes he passed groups of men working shirtless to repair the rails, shivering with fever and sweating with exhaustion, replacing timber on the tracks, laying new lines at a mile each day for trains they would never ride.

Sekuru Jairos swore at each train as it blew past. A great beast snorting clouds of black dust and sparks of fire, with red eyes, a shrill bellow, a charging animal with insatiable hunger, gasping and heaving forward, grinding its jaws. He spat on the railway tracks and cursed them as he set off each morning. Swore he never wanted to see another train ever in his life, if he only made it to Salisbury, and if anyone ever made him look at one again, he would never let them rest.

High in the skies, a line of storks breaks formation and scatters. One spirals downwards in broken flight.

A small thud of noise, insignificant, no louder than the odd calf struck down on the tracks.

Somewhere near the boy sprawled in the dust, another boy is screaming, hands covering his eyes. What cannot beunseen. The bird impacts the ground in a soundless burst of white feathers.

Up on the ridge, the earth is trembling: shaft cables snap in quick succession, sending loose cages crashing down into the depths.

Streams in surrounding farms break through weirs and cascade downstream in cathartic waves of release.

Below Pfumojena township, at the pool in the stream, bubbles rise from the depths and sigh into the surface air. Reeds tremble in waves radiating outwards from the pool, sending weaver birds into upward surges of panicked flight.

I lie in the dust looking around me. The top of the rail is smooth and shiny. The sides are caked in dull soot blending in with the dirty quarry stones and wooden sleepers. The smell of the hot tarred road at midday, oil, steel and red clay soil fills my nostrils. I sit up and stare. At the tracks, at the pair of feet and white garment. The train blows past with a sound like a rounders bat swinging into a small bean bag. Like a bag of flour landing on the floor in a puff of white.

Then train brakes start screeching and the horn blasts long and hard. The trucks speed past and mesmerise me.

The horn trails off and a high-pitched whine rises louder and louder. I have energy rising within me, singing in my veins and making my limbs tingle. All
I can see is what is directly in front of me. Inside my head blankness, that is all I know. Time slows down and then stops. The whining recedes. It’s all too quiet now. The sky closes in on me. All around me the world darkens.

The figure in white reappears but it is now Sekuru Jairos sitting on the tracks in his armchair, staring at me. I squeeze my eyes shut. When I peek through them again, it is now Dalitso. My heart leaps into my throat and thumps at my epiglottis. I squeeze my eyes shut again. I do not know for how long. I want to keep them shut forever.

Slowly, I reopen them. It is Sekuru Jairos, and he stands up, eyes boring into me and points at me. Silently, he mouths,

“You. You. You.”

His voice loops in my head, over and over. Then he fades away. The sky rifts apart and light filters back in, widening my field of vision. A heavy molten light that leans on me. The surge of energy abates and seeps out of me. My limbs weaken under the weight of the sky.

The train has come to a standstill further down the track. A man, bent double, vomits beside the engine. Running feet come closer. Distant scream after distant scream floats in from above and across the tracks. Silence again.

The world has cracked open.

Then someone places a hand on my shoulder and shakes me, hard. I can see what they are doing even though I cannot feel it. My teeth are grinding back and forth, molar on molar, bone on bone, and I can’t hear what they are saying. The whining sound pierces my hearing again but not as loud as before. Overhead, the noon sun blinds me like the township tower lights in the evenings, sunspots floating black and giddy.

I squeeze my eyes tight closed and scream into the dust. I feel the raw strain in my throat but I do not hear my voice.

Dalitso is gone.

Avenues By Train by Farai Mudzingwa (Cassava Republic Press) is out now.