Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Read Free

tattoo of camaraderie. For Jabulani they risked their feet being beaten and their heads being submarined by a gang of Mugabe’s goons.
    A student of his had come to his classroom to tell him that he’d learnt a myriad things in his class and that he now wanted to become a writer. He’d learnt how to tune in to the music of words. The boy had hidden his tears behind a hand and Jabulani had hugged him and put a Hemingway in his other hand. A book about a jinxed old fisherman was a curious gift to a boy who might never see the sea.
    As Jabulani put his books and pens into a cardboard box, he had thought Zimbabwe’s hard-earned freedom was just like that giant marlin the old man took so long to reel in. And now it was being ravaged by sharks. But in this case the fisherman did not fend off the sharks that zeroed in on his catch. He too was hacking the fish down to its bare bones. That was what was so warped.
    On the way out of school the headmaster had waylaid him and rifled through the box in Jabulani’s hands to see for himself whether Jabulani was not perhaps pinching a hole-punch or an Oxford dictionary. If Jabulani ran his country’s ruler down there was no telling how low he would go, was the headmaster’s parting shot.
    Jabulani had taught at the school for fourteen years.
    From then on he was a marked man and no school would hire him.
    Hearing his old Datsun blow up one night, he’d run out into the strung-up corpse of the family’s cat.
    They had painted VIVA MUGABE on the walls in cat blood.
    Then he’d landed a job in a bicycle shop called Cheap John’s Cycle Repair. But they had burnt it down and Cheap John had blamed Jabulani for his misfortune. In a town where a synagogue had burnt out less than a year before, the police hardly noted the end of a bicycle shop. That was in June.
    And for half a year now there’d been no meat to go with the half loaf of bread he’d stood in line for each afternoon. For half a year they had survived off the pittance his wife, Thokozile, earned as a nurse. For half a year his son and daughter had stared at him, wondering when he’d pull a rabbit out of the hat to recall the magic of the past.
    Back then he’d come home high on football fever and down a beer on the front step while the cat licked his salty shins. He’d clap his hands as his son Panganai played guitar or beatboxed and his daughter Tendai hula-hooped or cartwheeled. In his pockets he’d have a guitar pick for Panganai and a hairpin for Tendai. And, after another quart or two of beer, he’d flirt with Thokozile, flipping up her skirt to pinch her ass.
    Then he’d lost his post and all the fat and fun of his world had been pared away.
    – You have to run away from that gandanga Mugabe, that murderer, Thokozile had said while rats fidgeted in the roof overhead.
    The rats had got out of hand since the cat died.
    – He will hunt you, that fucking gandanga . And he will kill you. Just as he will kill anyone, Shona or not, who is his foe.
    – How can I go?
    – You have to, otherwise we hunger to the bone. Now, before Christmas, is a good time to go to South Africa. All tourists from overseas go to Cape Town for Christmas holidays and they have money in their pockets. You will find a job and send us money.
    – Where will I stay?
    – Other men find a way. You may be so lucky and find a job in a bar where they put a roof over your head.
    Though she’d cajoled him in this way, she’d never blamed him for the way things had panned out. She’d never reminded him that a dumb, flippant joke of his had cursed them. Though he no longer flirted so cockily, she’d still lured him to her in the dark, telling him he’d always be her man. And after their loving he’d blow cool wind from his lips along the scalp-skin furrows between her cornrows.
    And it was not just her. The holes in Panganai’s Pumas told him he had to go. The faded, let-down hem of Tendai’s school skirt told him he had to go. The empty