abigail

The coffin costs 12 US. A small coffin, for a child.

Abigail was standing by my gate this morning. Her 10 month-old died last night. The body was down at the mortuary at the provincial hospital.

She was sorry to trouble me again, she said. But she had no money. And she needed a sheet to wrap the body in.

I look at Abigail, her tattered boots, the woolly hat she always wears jammed down on her head. This time, she has no tears.

Her 2 year-old son, Tapiwa, died 18 months ago. A couple of months later, Violet, the exuberant 6-year-old who stayed with her, set Abigail's hut on fire, playing with plastic. Violet died too.

There were children before, two or three of them. "They all died," she told me once. "And my husband chased me away."

When Violet died, the villagers out past Zimunya chased Abigail away, tired of her demands (it didn't help that Violet had managed to burn down the neighbour's grain store when she set Abigail's hut on fire). Over the months we helped out when we could, under the disapproving eye of both my housekeeper and the gardener ("we Shonas, we do not help people like that"), handing out secondhand clothes, soap to sell, jamjars of rice, tomatoes, paying for the cart to take Violet's body to the mortuary. I parcelled up these things with a certain sense of anger, as well as guilt. How far can you blame someone when things go so terribly wrong in her life?

When Abigail got chased away from her hut, she slept at the msika market under a couple of royal blue BA blankets (they're in her bag today, along with a school exercise book that has the baby's hospital records in: "I can't wrap the body in them," she says. "Then I will have nothing."). She got raped "by the men who cook sadza there". When she went to the hospital, they wouldn't perform an abortion, even though the local surgeon had warned her never to get pregnant again. The baby was born last year, when -- by my calculations -- Abigail was nearly 10 months gone. The baby weighed more than 5 kilogrammes.

Abigail brought her to my gate when they were discharged. I found a white babygro in amongst my child's old things. "You name her," she said. Her face was weary. We settled on the name Nyasha. It means grace.

I find a sheet trimmed with white broderie anglaise and ribbons and hand it over silently. There is so much and so little to say.