The Greater Pearl - Reviving My Storytelling from When I was 16

Mandla found something oddly unsettling about her indifference.

Not in a troubling way. It was not coldness, and it was not punishment. Chichi had tried both of those before. This was something else. It was the kind of peace which meant she didn’t need him.

He had been married to Chichi for four years and she had never not needed his approval.

She needed him to notice her hair. To tell her the dress looked good. To laugh at the story she had already told twice because the first time he had been scrolling through his phone. She needed him to say the food was good, that she was beautiful, that he was happy, that they were okay.

Even when they were not okay, she needed him to say they were.

Especially then.

There had always been something almost desperate in the way she watched him. He had not noticed it at first. Or perhaps he had noticed it and liked it.

That possibility made him uncomfortable.

There was power in being needed.

He had never said that aloud, of course. He was not some villain from one of those Korean films she watched on Sunday afternoons. He loved his wife.

He did.

But he had become accustomed to being the weather in their home.

If Mandla was happy, Chichi relaxed. If Mandla was irritated, she became careful. If he was distant, she found a reason to cross the room and touch him. If he withdrew, she followed.

Until now.

Now, sometimes, he withdrew and Chichi simply... let him go.

The first time it happened, he had been almost offended.

They had argued about something so insignificant he could no longer remember what it was. He had done what he always did when he was tired of talking. He had picked up his keys.

"I'm going out."

Usually, that sentence changed her face.

Where?

With who?

When are you coming back?

And then the argument beneath the argument.

Are you choosing them over me again?

But that night she had only looked at him.

"Okay."

Okay?

He had stood by the door longer than necessary.

She had already returned to her book.

"You don't want to know where I'm going?"

She looked up, mildly surprised.

"You said you're going out."

"Yes."

"So... go out."

There had been no sarcasm in it. That was the worst part.

He went.

Of course he went.

He found Panda and the others at their usual spot, and for a few hours he tried very hard to remember why this had once felt like freedom.

The music was loud. The whisky was generous. One of them had made a big deal with some Chinese investors. He ordered another bottle no one needed. Panda was telling the same story about the girl from Bulawayo, embellishing it more each time, and Mandla laughed because everyone else laughed.

At eleven thirty he was warm.

At midnight he was brilliant.

By one, everybody loved everybody.

By two, they were shouting over music about politics and money and women and football and which one of them had changed since getting married.

It was familiar.

There had been a time when Mandla could disappear into nights like this.

Drink until the sharp edges softened. Laugh until nothing mattered. Come home smelling of smoke and expensive whisky and questionable decisions. Crawl into bed beside Chichi, who would be angry but relieved he had returned.

Then wake up thirsty and vaguely ashamed and do it again the following weekend.

Abandon.

That was what he missed.

Not even the alcohol, if he was truthful.

The permission to abandon himself.

To be nobody's husband. Nobody's son. Nobody's employee. Nobody's disappointment.

Just Mandla.

Or whatever version of Mandla emerged after the fourth drink.

He missed him sometimes.

But lately even that man was becoming difficult to find.

Because somewhere between the second and third whisky, he would think of Chichi at home.

Not waiting.

That was the strange thing.

He did not imagine her pacing.

He imagined her asleep.

Or reading.

Or sitting in that ridiculous corner she had made by the bedroom window with the cream chair, the candle and the Bible with so many notes stuffed into it that it could barely close.

Sometimes he woke early and found her there.

Barefoot. Wrapped in her old purple gown. No makeup. In that bonnet that needed to be retired.

Doing nothing.

That was what confused him most.

Sometimes she wasn't even reading the Bible.

She was just sitting there.

"What do you do there?" he had asked once.

"With God?"

"Yes."

She had thought about it.

"Nothing."

He laughed. "Very productive."

She smiled.

"I think that's the point."

He had rolled his eyes and gone to shower.

But the answer followed him.

Nothing.

Mandla did not know how to do nothing.

Nothing was where the thoughts lived.

Nothing was where questions waited.

Nothing was where you might discover that the life you had built so carefully was not actually a life you wanted.

Better to keep moving.

Work.

Hustle.

Friends.

Football.

Whisky.

Sex.

Noise.

There were many respectable ways for a man to avoid his own soul.

And Mandla had mastered most of them.

But Chichi was becoming quiet.

Not silent.

Quiet.

There was a difference.

Silence had always been one of her weapons. Quiet was something she seemed to inhabit now.

She laughed more easily. Apologised less unnecessarily. She had stopped explaining herself to death.

Even her prayers had changed.

He remembered how she used to pray over him in bed when she thought he was asleep.

Lord, change Mandla.

Lord, help Mandla.

Lord, make Mandla understand.

Lord, bring Mandla closer to You.

He used to lie there irritated, feeling like a project God and his wife had secretly agreed to work on together.

She didn't pray like that anymore.

At least not where he could hear.

And strangely, he missed it.

He missed being pursued.

More than that, he hated that some part of him had expected her faith to make her smaller.

More submissive, perhaps. Softer. Easier.

Instead it had made her free.

That was inconvenient.

Because Mandla understood how to deal with an unhappy wife.

You bought Nandos. Or KFC.

You went on date night.

You apologised without fully admitting wrongdoing.

You made love.

You behaved well for two weeks.

You reset the clock.

But what did you do with a woman who had found something you could not buy her?

Something you could not threaten to take away?

Something that seemed to make her more herself rather than less?

He watched her sometimes and felt an emotion he did not have a name for.

It was not jealousy.

Not exactly.

Hunger, perhaps.

That irritated him even more.

Because Mandla had questions.

Too many.

He had watched Christians lie.

Watched pastors get rich while women sold tomatoes outside their churches.

Watched people pray for healing and die anyway.

He had buried a Sekuru whose faith could have powered the whole of Harare, and no amount of fasting had kept cancer from eating through him.

He had seen Chichi herself nearly break.

Where had God been then?

And now she spoke about Him as if He had been there all along.

That was the part Mandla could not accept.

Or perhaps could not yet understand.

One night he found her in the kitchen drinking tea.

It was after midnight.

He had come home sober.

That had been happening more often lately, although he had told no one.

Chichi looked up.

"Hey Babe."

"Yo."

There was no interrogation. No inspection of his eyes. No attempt to smell his breath disguised as a kiss.

She moved her mug aside and continued reading.

Mandla opened the fridge.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

There was nothing he wanted.

"Are you happy?"

Chichi looked up.

The question seemed to surprise both of them.

"What?"

"Are you happy?"

She considered it seriously.

Not the way people did when they wanted to reassure you.

"I think I'm becoming whole."

He leaned against the counter.

"What does that even mean?"

"I don't know yet."

He laughed once. "Helpful."

She smiled.

Then she looked at him in that new way of hers.

Not through him.

Not up at him.

At him.

"I think I spent a long time trying to make you give me things you were never supposed to give me."

His jaw tightened.

"Like what?"

"Identity. Safety. Worth."

He looked away.

"Sounds like I've been the worst husband."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

"Mandla."

There it was.

His name without accusation.

He hated how quickly his defences rose around tenderness.

She reached across the table, then stopped before touching him.

That small restraint nearly undid him.

"I love you," she said. "But I think I made you too important."

He stared at her.

Any other woman saying those words might have sounded cruel.

From Chichi, they sounded like confession.

"I wanted you to be God for me," she continued quietly. "And you were never going to survive that."

Something in his chest shifted.

He looked down at the floor.

"And now?"

"Now I want you to be Mandla."

He swallowed.

"And that's enough?"

Her eyes softened.

"Yes."

He wanted to believe her.

God, he wanted to believe her.

Because there was a strange mercy in the possibility that he did not have to be everything.

But there was terror in it too.

If Chichi no longer needed him to hold her together, then she was free to see him clearly.

And if she saw him clearly...

Would she still choose him?

He pulled out the chair opposite her.

She said nothing.

That was another thing she had learned.

She no longer filled every silence.

For a while, Mandla watched the steam rise from her tea.

Then, quietly, almost resentfully, he said, "I think I want what you have."

Chichi did not smile.

He was grateful for that.

She did not turn it into a moment.

Did not say, I knew it.

Did not reach for her Bible.

She only waited.

"But I don't think I can become..." He gestured vaguely toward her. "This."

"This?"

"You know. Christian."

That made her laugh.

"You've been calling yourself Christian since I met you."

"You know what I mean."

She did.

He could see it.

"I still like drinking."

"Okay."

"I still like going out."

"Okay."

"I don't want to become one of those men who starts every sentence with 'the Lord told me.'"

She laughed harder now.

"I'm serious."

"I know."

"And I have questions."

"Good."

"No, Chi. Real questions."

"I know."

"Questions people in church don't like."

Her laughter disappeared.

"Then don't ask people who are afraid of questions."

He looked at her.

She lifted her mug.

"Mandla, God is not frightened of you."

The sentence landed somewhere deeper than he wanted it to.

He looked away.

Outside, a dog barked somewhere beyond the wall. A car moved along the road and disappeared into the night.

"What if I can't change?"

There.

Finally.

The question beneath all the questions.

Chichi was quiet for so long he almost regretted asking.

Then she said, "What if that's not where you start?"

He frowned.

"Where do I start?"

She looked at him.

"With wanting Him."

Mandla stared at the table.

Wanting Him.

Was that enough?

Because Mandla did not want holiness.

Not yet.

He did not want discipline or early morning Bible studies or accountability groups with men called Brother Something.

He wanted whisky sometimes.

He wanted loud music.

He wanted the old recklessness.

He wanted nights where nobody asked anything of him.

He wanted Jesus too.

And perhaps that was the most uncomfortable truth of all.

He wanted both.

The old abandon and whatever Chichi had found.

But somewhere inside him, beneath the arguments and cynicism and habits he had defended as personality, Mandla already knew they were not equal things.

One was escape.

The other was freedom.

One emptied him.

The other, somehow, had filled his wife without making her full of herself.

He looked at Chichi again.

There was no hunger in her face for his answer.

No desperation.

She was not trying to win his soul.

She was simply sitting there, loved.

Mandla thought suddenly of the scripture his grandmother used to quote when he was a boy. Something about a merchant who found a pearl so valuable that everything else became cheap beside it.

Matthew 13: 45-46

He had always thought that sounded excessive.

Sell everything for one pearl?

Terrible business.

But looking at his wife now, Mandla understood it differently.

The man had not been foolish.

He had simply recognised value.

That was the trouble.

Mandla was beginning to recognise it too.

And once a man knew which treasure was greater, it became much harder to pretend the lesser one was enough.

TO BE CONTINUED