In Mbenje town, memory wasn’t a thing of the mind. Memory was a currency, an instrument, and sometimes a curse. The people spoke of it like they spoke about the weather — capricious, potent, and always ruling the day.
Old Wowa, who ran the herbal stand close to the dry market road, claimed he could take away any sorrow for a chicken. He would boil one root until it smelled of rain on dry ground, then mutter over it in a language older than the village. People who drank the brew swore they forgot the faces of those who had wronged them, though sometimes they forgot their own children’s names as well.
But there was not the sole magic in Mbenje. There was also Kadingoli, the machine. No one knew who had brought it, only that it appeared at some of the dry seasons in the courtyard of the old post office, shining like the money of the colonial period from its brass hardware. It was supposed to be able to erase, write over again, or bring back any memory, so long as someone was willing to pay.
Its guardian was a man named Didwa — tall, thin, and always crowned with a bowler hat as if the Brits had merely forgotten to pack him off when they left. He spoke in tones so polite they could slice glass.
“It is very simple,” Didwa would explain to his customers. “You tell me the memory, and I tell you the price.”
Others arrived to forget grief — widows who could not bear the emptiness of their huts, men who had watched the river take their children. Others arrived with evil intent: to burn off debts, treasons, and transgressions.
It was on a Tuesday, when the sun was setting behind the baobabs, that Gombeleke came. She was a tailor, renowned for her delicate touch and kind heart, but her work of late had been marred with mistakes. Stitches wandered astray like lost goats, colors clashed. Her clients whispered that she was under a hex.
Didwa looked at her with dull interest. “What memory shall we take from you, madam?”
She hesitated. “I would like to recapture a memory lost.”
Didwa’s brow furrowed. “Ah, retrieval. Costly. Continue.”
Gombeleke’s whisper was almost inaudible. “It was the night my son disappeared. I remember sending him to bed, and then. nothing. Only morning, and the blanket empty. I have searched for that night in my mind, but it is as though the page has been torn from a book.”
Didwa leaned back, hands clasped together. “This is dangerous business. Often the forgotten memory is forgotten for a reason.”
But Gombeleke was resolute. “Even if it kills me, I must know.”
Didwa named his price: seven silver armlets and three days of her life. She agreed without reservation.
The device whirred with the sound of an antique sewing machine, the gears clicking with the slow deliberateness of a spider constructing a web. Didwa instructed her to sit down, place hands on the brass plate, and shut her eyes.
What came was not the recall of one memory but the coming of many — smoky, intersecting, as if to see twenty fires burn in the darkness. She remembers her hut, the small shape of her son beneath the blanket, the moonlight on the reed mat. She remembers the shadow — tall, off, moving without sound. She tried to scream in the recollection, but no voice would come.
The shadow bent over her son, said something she couldn’t hear, and both of them vanished. But just as the vision was vanishing, she saw the shadow’s hand — mechanical, copper-colored knuckles that glinted like the hardware on the Kadingoli machine.
Gombeleke sat up screaming. Didwa towered over her, as serene as a churchgoer.
“Sometimes,” he said quietly, “the truth is not a gift.”
She staggered out of the courtyard, bracelets lost, mind burdened by the knowledge that the keeper of memories might be the thief of memories as well.
In the following months, tales of the town about Kadingoli grew stranger.
A merchant testified he had bought a memory of a fruitful harvest from another farmer, only to find that his fields now produced the other man’s crops while his own remained barren.
One teacher erased his students’ memories of a failed test, but when he tested them again, they failed in exactly the same way, as if something about them had been predestined to do so.
Rumors circulated that Didwa himself was no longer human — that his bowler hat hid not hair but shining brass plates, and that his memories stretched back not only to his own birth but to centuries he had never lived.
One day, a stranger appeared at Mbenje’s place — a woman with a long grey coat, a satchel full of strange tools. She marched right up to Didwa and insisted on being led to the machine.
“I am Dr. Alice Janiko,” she announced. “And I know what you’ve taken.”
Didwa smiled falteringly. “Blunt words from a stranger.”
“I have seen you work before,” she said to him. “In Lilongwe, in Mzuzu, even across the lake. You pilfer memories not only from your clients but from anyone whose existence overlaps with yours. And then you sell them to the machine so that it could live.”
The people of Mbenje, drawn in by the yelling, came running.
“Is this true?” thundered Old Wowa.
Didwa stroked his bowler hat. “Do you complain when a river takes what you throw into it? An unspent memory is a river stone — the stream will carry it off.”
Dr. Janiko came up to him. “You are not a river. You are a thief.”
She pulled from her satchel a small object — a mirror in an iron case. She held it up to Didwa, and for the first time his mask cracked.
In the glass, his was not the face of a man but of a skeleton constructed of brass wire with eyes that glowed from pilfered moments of light.
A gasp arose from the crowd. Gombeleke, in the back, her heart pounded.
Dr. Janiko held up the mirror towards the machine, and it began to shake. The gears clanged, the steam whistled, and from its mouth came hundreds of small lights — all recollections. They revolved in the air over the group of people like fireflies before vanishing into the minds from which they had been removed.
Gombeleke’s knees shook as her son’s laughter returned to her mind. She remembered the tapping of his small feet on the clay floor, the warmth of him in her arms — and also the harshness of that night.
The shadow had been Didwa himself, or the version of him that existed previously, who had arrived to appropriate the boy’s memories for the machine. The boy had fought, though, and in fighting, he had been engulfed by one of the memory-lights, held captive until the present.
There was a cry from the front — the cry of a boy — and Gombeleke pushed through the crowd to see her two years older but still alive son. They embraced, crying.
Didwa had disappeared. Some said he had run into the bush; others that he had been drawn into the breaking machine. The Kadingoli was a tangle of wrecked brass and wire.
Later that night, while everybody was celebrating in town, Old Wowa balanced a calabash of masese on her head and said, “A memory is a seed — you may bury it, you may lose it, but if it is yours, it will find its way back to you.”
Gombeleke held her son tightly, knowing that the mind could be healed but never kept unguarded. And somewhere out in the hills, a figure walked with the step of a man who had once worn a bowler hat, looking for the next place where memories were sold and purchased.
For in Mbenje they had been taught the oldest of maxims: What is taken by guile will one day be paid back by guile yet more great.
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Image: TyliJura Pixabay remixed