AFTER THE PEACEFUL FIRST days at Boscobel Drive, our guest started growing restless. When I did not want to go with him, he hitched lifts into town and came home drunk.

One night, at 2 am, there was a knock on our bedroom window, then Dambudzo's voice, barking: ‘Hey! It's me!’

Startled, I sat up in bed.

‘What is it?’ I hissed. ‘Go to bed. Let us sleep.’

Victor stirred, then turned over, pulling the blanket over his head.

‘The taxi.’

‘What about it?’

‘The taxi is waiting. It has to be paid.’

I could hear the faint growling of an engine running in the close on the other side of the house. What should I do? Hoping to salvage a few hours of sleep, I got up, grumbling, put my robe on, and, wallet in hand, walked to the gate, Dambudzo following me at a distance. When the taxi driver saw me, he got out of his R4.

‘How much is it?’

‘Four eighty, madam.’

I handed the money over through the gate and shuffled back to bed.

At the time that I met Marechera I was a novice in the field of African literature. I had done undergraduate studies in French and German, but apart from a few student essays I had never written with any authority about literature. The political movement had taken over the focus of my attention and had also shaped my perspective on the arts in a onesided and often superficial way. In Zimbabwe, propelled by the impetus of assignments for my journalism course and also by my own growing interest, I had begun groping my way towards understanding and writing about the literature of the country.

Now here was Dambudzo, our house guest, my lover. I could talk to him, listen to him, hear him argue with others, interview him.

Dambudzo was an excellent interviewee. The many interviews journalists and critics conducted with him over the years, some published here and there, many transcribed by me after his death, were so lucid and full of surprising statements and insights that they have become canonical reading material for the large corpus of Marechera research.

I did my own first interview with him that November 1983, not long after he had moved in with us.