THE PREGNANCY LASTED ELEVEN months, your mother told me.

Yainetsa ichirwadza. It was so painful she thought it would never end.

She finally released you from her body on 4 June 1952. The pain stopped, and you were perfectly still.

They called you Dambudzo (‘the one who brings trouble’) because they were destitute.

Taishupika. We were suffering.

Inside the women's hut it was sombre, with just a few rays of sunlight filtering through the thatched roof. No men were allowed in there. Mai Marechera sat on the ground with some female relatives and their children. I was given a wooden stool.

Yes, she would talk to me, she said in Shona. Her voice was low and steady. Her niece would interpret.

It felt good to be huddled there with the women of your family. And yet the enormity of space that separated me from your mother made my blood feel leaden.

What did she think? Did she guess that you and I had shared a bed? It was winter, July 1990. Three years since you had left the world you so reluctantly entered.

I REMEMBER

I remember our first night. The raucous laughter in the hotel garden. The sneers, which you had to translate. ‘Look at him and his white chick.’

I remember the silence of our room, stars spinning through the open roof.

I remember another night. Your cackling, brittle cough. A sign of what was looming in your body?

I remember how your mood lightened when you moved in with us. How you relished a proper bed, clean sheets, a shower. I remember you sitting in our garden, your myopic eyes close to the keys of your typewriter, two fingers jabbing down, as you pummelled the words out of your system.

I remember your wide face with the small scar on your forehead. Your full lips protruding into a pout or expanding into broad laughter. Or silent and so sensuous that I had to kiss them.

I remember the knock at our bedroom window at 2 a.m. one morning. Your drunken voice: ‘Hey, it's me.’ My husband and I sitting up, alarmed. ‘What is it?’ ‘The taxi driver is waiting.’ ‘So?’ ‘He needs to be paid.’