Travel Light, Move Fast

by Alexandra Fuller

  * * *

  —

  I COULD TELL DAD HAD BEEN a rotten patient in Budapest too. There were saucer-sized bruises up and down his forearms from the restraints they’d had to put on; I’d taken those off right away. He’d tried to escape more than once; and he’d threatened to punch the nurse attempting to give him an enema.

  “My husband is very old-fashioned,” my mother explained slowly and carefully to the offended nurse, a younger member of staff with regrettably proficient English.

  “A beach,” the young nurse protested; she had a lot of jewelry on her face, a stud in her tongue flashed. “He called me a beach, and also some other very bad words. Very, very bad.”

  “Yes, well,” Mum said, staring pointedly at one of the nurse’s nose piercings. “An Englishman’s bottom is his castle.”

  The young nurse looked astonished, “He’s an Englishman?”

  I could understand her skepticism.

  Dad didn’t look like a typical, elderly, dying Englishman, pale and soft, untouched by an excess of ultraviolet light. Fifty years of sunburn, fifty years of tearing the ring out of it. He looked exactly what he was, a banana farmer from Zambia’s Zambezi Valley. Any moment, it seemed inevitable he’d sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed, and say, “Right, no more silly buggers!”

  In fact, three weeks earlier, Dad had been on the farm in Zambia with his big, black, gentlemanly mutt, Harry, by his side, delivering a lecture to Comrade Connie, the banana plantation forewoman, on the importance of weeding the bananas and telling her, “Comrade Connie, weeding is next to godliness.”

  And that’s how he should have died. Cracking a joke with Comrade Connie. Dead before he hit the ground, and Comrade Connie would’ve been there, so would have Harry, to comfort him in those final moments. They’d have called Mr. Chrissford and Mrs. Tembo; Mum would have been summoned.

  They’d have had him in the ground by morning, in that heat.

  That had been his plan. “A heart attack on the job, or a decent dose of malaria,” he’d once told an inquisitive financial adviser when she’d asked about his strategies for retirement; he was in his late sixties at the time. “And until then,” he’d added, “I intend to misspend what’s left of my youth.”

  But with bushy-top disease sweeping banana plantations worldwide, yields hadn’t quite been up to two tickets to Paris. Two tickets to the poor man’s Paris then, and Mum had been having so much fun—swanking about on a riverboat up the Danube, taking in the medieval castles, showing off her very good legs in the famous aquamarine public thermal baths—that he hadn’t wanted to mention he didn’t feel very well.

  “Typical. He didn’t complain at all,” Mum said. “Then all of a sudden, he said, ‘Watch out for that waiter, he’s a spy,’ and collapsed.”

  “The waiter’s a spy?” I asked.

  “Well, he probably was a spy. That’s not the point. The point is, Dad suddenly crumpled like a soufflé and I had to call a Hungarian ambulance. Or the spy had to call a Hungarian ambulance.”

  “You mean the waiter,” I said.

  “Oh, Bobo,” Mum said; disappointed reproach isn’t an easy note to strike when the basic emotion is justified irritation. “It’s not as simple as it looks, trying to have an emergency in a foreign language.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE END, it took Dad twelve days to die in Budapest.

  “Technically, just Pest,” Mum said. “Buda’s across the river, the hilly pretty part. You never saw it.”

  Twelve days seems no time, to have it back. But to do it once, alone in a strange city, it was real time and no time, as if it were just he and I suspended in another realm, a holding dock or a leaving station; nowhere we’d ever been before and nowhere from which we’d ever be returning.

  Mum was fond of quoting Leslie Poles Hartley, “The past is a foreign country,” but I was finding out, so was dying. Or dying was a baffling amalgamation of all countries; the suddenly brief past meeting an endless future in which every breath was now, exactly as they instruct you, the only thing that counted.

  I phoned my sister in Zambia as soon I was back in my own room. Mum and I had become such a cause célèbre—we inadvertent longtime guests—the hotel had generously given me a room down the hall from Mum’s at no extra cost. The whole staff knew us by name—Madam Fuller and Daughter Fuller—and by tragedy, like we were folklore come to life. They bestowed us sympathetic looks when they passed us in the corridors; we’d receive extra sachets of tea, little cartons of milk. “Such a humane people,” Mum had said, her eyes moistening. “It’s not how you imagine the Hungarians, is it?”

  It wasn’t, although truthfully until now I hadn’t really taken the time to imagine the Hungarians at all.

  “Van?” I was shouting into the phone now. I always shout when I call Zambia, as if the world is what it was, jerky old phone lines under the sea.

  Vanessa lives a couple of hours from our parents’ farm; they’re close neighbors by our standards. I get all my news from home via Vanessa, unless she isn’t talking to me, or to Mum and Dad, in which case I get no news, or I get the news as edited by Mum, which requires much insider knowledge, and the ability to listen between the lines.

  Predictably, Vanessa and I had reacted very differently to the news of Dad’s collapse. I’m fight and flight; I’d immediately set about getting myself from the United States to Budapest. Vanessa’s freeze; she’d taken to her bed in the hills above the Kafue River, turned the air-conditioning to North England in winter, and piled a heap of cats on her knees for warmth.

  “Oh, huzzit, Al-Bo,” Vanessa said. I heard her scuffling about, organizing cats. “I’ll just take the phone outside so I don’t bug Rich.” Rich was Van’s husband; we were all scared of bugging him. I pictured Van stuffing one of the Persians under her arm, grabbing her cigarettes, her lighter, looking around for her phone before realizing she was holding it. “Oh, Al, how do we do this? Thank goodness you’re there. I don’t have what it takes. I’m drained. Bindi says I’m drained.”

  Bindi was Vanessa’s therapist.

  Mum drags the word out, the-rapist.

  Mum has a powerful dislike for Bindi, especially after Bindi had strongly encouraged Vanessa to complete a twenty-eight-day stint at a clinic in KwaZulu-Natal. Vanessa had done so, and had come back to Zambia with a diagnosis.

  “A what?” Mum had asked, but it was too late by then. Vanessa was already in recovery. “She’s where?” Mum couldn’t bring herself to say the phrase. Bindi had also been recommending for some time now that Vanessa take a break from us, her family. “A mental-health sabbatical?” Mum had repeated, offended, you could tell, by each and every word of the therapist’s suggestion. “From us? I’ve never heard such rot.”

  In the end, it had been more restful for Vanessa to pretend Bindi hadn’t said anything; it had been more peaceful to stay in the eye of the storm than battle through a cyclone to calm. In any case, Vanessa and I were accustomed to drama, acclimated to it, adapted to thrive in its peculiar conditions; drama had always been our family’s independent weather system.

  “I’m praying for you nonstop,” Vanessa said now.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She sent me inspirational quotes off the internet to keep me going, photos of the hands of God poking through the clouds. She said she’d set up a table for Dad on her veranda overlooking the hills and the little game farm where drongos swooped above the long grass. She’d have Mr. Nixon bring him endless trays of tea.

  Mr. Nixon is the cook at the Rock.

  The Rock is Vanessa and Rich’s house. It’s built on prime snake habitat. Vanessa has a lot of dogs and cats, though, and they tend to alert her when there are snakes, but also when there aren’t, frankly. It’s all very chaotic, but the staff is excellent; they sweep around in their pressed uniforms and keep the place looking or
derly.

  “I don’t know how they do it,” Mum always says. She leaves surreptitious extravagant tips for the staff; Rich doesn’t like it. He likes total control at all times of all things.

  Mr. Nixon has worked for Rich for so long, the two have become mirror images of each other. Mr. Nixon has the figure and grace of an Edgar Degas ballerina. Rich does not. We call Rich “God” to his face. Or really, to his knees; he commands a room. Mr. Nixon, on the other hand, leaves a room backward, one limb at a time, like he’s just received a knighthood; I don’t know how he keeps it up day after day, the irony, I mean. “Mr. Nixon doesn’t like me, but he’ll do anything for Dad,” Vanessa said.

  Mum wasn’t much use either. She is terrific in a crisis, but in the non-emergency of dying, she was aimless. She drifted about the weedy hospital grounds, where patients from the oncology ward perched on benches among parched weeds, smoking. Hungarian ambulances—yellow and green like grocery delivery vans—pulled up from time to time with crashed, collapsed bodies that then had to be wrestled upstairs; the elevator hadn’t worked in months.

  A couple of dozen stray cats streamed through the undergrowth or curled up in patches of tattered shade; Mum named them all, had long conversations with the gateman about their breeding. As if stray cats have breeding. “Of course they do,” Mum said.

  Of course they did: Felis silvestris, Mum informed me; some of them were a European wildcat hybrid, explaining, she said, their gorgeous stripes. It was a problem for the integrity of the species, this crossbreeding with domestic strays. She’d learned all this from the gateman, he with almost no English, Mum never having tried until now a single word of Hungarian.

  At mealtimes, Mum ferried down Dad’s untouched trays of food—beige- and concrete-colored pastes and porridges—and spread them around the grounds for the cats.

  “Smoking’s a national pastime,” she observed. “They must get them started as infants. Budapest’s freshest air is like being in an English pub fifty years ago.”

  That, and the heat wave, the pollution, the stress, Mum’s allergy to cats, her asthma, of course she got hopelessly sick too; her lungs weak anyway after all those years of everyone’s secondhand smoke. She was wracked with frequent coughing fits. She was losing weight.

  “No, no, Bobo. I’m fine,” Mum insisted.

  But I carted her back to the hotel nevertheless. It would be just like me to rush over to help one parent die, and accidentally kill the other. I tuned the television to a nice, soothing village murder, a BBC production; all the proper accents in all the proper places. I mixed Mum a drink and ordered her to stay in bed.

  “See if you can figure out whodunit before the end,” I said.

  “The cats,” Mum protested. “Who will feed the cats? Will you feed the cats?”

  She slumped, suddenly tiny on the too-big hotel bed. Her eyes slid over the fluffed, stacked pillows to the novel still sitting on Dad’s bedside table, an Ian Fleming. “At least he went out with a good James Bond,” Mum said. “You wouldn’t want the last book you read to be absolute drivel, would you?”

  My heart seized with helplessness.

  I knew her stress wasn’t just Dad dying, it was also being separated from her library and her pets and from her life on the little fish and banana farm in the hot, drought-prone valley where my parents had finally settled after decades of nearly itinerant drifting around southern and south-central Africa.

  She missed the little mopane forest in the clay pan at the top of the farm, the fishponds overseen by silver-pink barked baobab trees, the tangle of wild between the farmyard and the banana plantation, the wide Zambezi River swirling brown and lazy, flowing ever south toward Mozambique.

  If not for the snakes, buffalo bean, and other perils, Mum could walk the farm’s boundary with eyes closed, past the seasonal wetland on the farm’s easternmost boundary, through the river in which a cow-eating crocodile lived during the rains, then up the hill toward the fishponds, and from there westerly home along the swath cut through the bush for the electricity lines.

  I knew my mother knew all those paths like a mantra; they were a sacred refrain to her. She needed her routine of a twice-daily walk with her flock of ill-behaved dogs; her evening consultation with Professor, her erudite ginger cat. She required the constant companionship of wild birds, skinks, monkeys, and snakes. The shouting of hippos from the river comforted her.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll feed the cats.”

  * * *

  —

  SO IN THE MORNINGS when I arrived, and in the evenings before I left, I fed the cats and took photos on my phone to prove it to Mum, heads down, tails emerging like little question marks from the contented clowder. The rest of the time I sat by Dad’s bedside and sweated in the late-summer heat and waited.

  It was weirdly familiar, like being back in boarding school, a perpetual season of sweltering humidity. Except this time our terms overlapped, Dad’s and mine, meted out hour by hour together, the end of his term signaling the end of mine. It felt of longing and displacement both; and because of that, camaraderie. Also, like boarding school, there was the capricious nature of a large authoritative institution with which to contend.

  For example, as the result of a sudden new rule—a rule that appeared to coincide with some loudly expressed views I had regarding my father’s care—visiting hours were severely curtailed. Now visitors were allowed in for only half an hour morning and evening; the doors to the ICU were suddenly locked during the day.

  I pretended not to notice.

  A couple of times, the young nurse with the regrettably proficient English ordered me out of the ward, but inspired by a technique I’d watched Vanessa perfect for most of our childhoods I made vague, agreeable noises and smiled as angelically as possible. But I didn’t leave my post.

  Jazmin, I discovered, was her name.

  “Very common,” Mum said, when I divulged this piece of information as part of our evening routine, a debriefing of all that had happened at the hospital that day. Mum especially relished news of the escalating tensions between Jazmin and me, usually taking the side of the nurse.

  “Jazmin,” Mum said, trying out the name again. “Well, no wonder.” Mum attempted a humble expression. “I named you after a princess. Alexandra, the Honorable Lady Ogilvy. Minor royalty, but not nobody.”

  Jazmin had printed out copies of the new visiting hours in English, and taped them not only at the entrance to the ICU but also, aggressively I felt, on the wall next to Dad’s bed. “Quite right,” Mum said, reverting to the nurse’s side. “Patients need their rest, and nurses need to do their work.”

  Still, I persisted.

  “Don’t bother Dad too long,” Mum reminded me as I left her every morning, alone at our breakfast table for two, a tiny fake daisy in a little white pot. Mum eked out her time over tea, forcing herself to eat two or three pastries with lots of extra butter to keep up her strength. “Dad does not like lots of disturbance,” she said pointedly. “At least not lots of disturbance that he doesn’t generate himself.”

  But I stayed all day.

  I’m such a reluctant rebel. I’m a rule keeper, in fact. I imagined Jazmin’s angry eyes on me, I imagined she’d spread her poison; I imagined everyone wanted me out. I wondered how Vanessa had kept it up her whole life, her utter indifference to authority; it’s impressively harder than it looks to pull off.

  * * *

  —

  BEYOND THE HOSPITAL WALLS, the city sweltered and stalled. Hundreds of thousands of refugees on the border had been pressing relentlessly west all summer, now they were here in central Hungary on the outskirts of the city; authorities had closed the central train station.

  Meantime, Dad froze under the blankets, hypothermic as his organs closed down. Then he turned a contradictory healthy shade of pink and began to sweat a little. “I’ve been very lucky,
” Dad said suddenly, on the eleventh day.

  I’d been sitting very still on the metal chair I’d pulled up next to the bed, listening to Dad’s labored breaths, watching his chest rise and fall, wondering if he’d slipped into something deeper than sleep. Behind me, a couple of nurses drank coffee and chatted in front of vintage computers.

  I squeezed Dad’s arm. “Dad?”

  “I’ve been very lucky,” Dad said again; as if, even dying, he wanted to point out that there were fates far worse than his; and even then, there were more or less fortunate ways to die.

  * * *

  —

  “IT’S POSSIBLE HE’S SAID his last words,” I warned Mum. I brought her to visiting hours that evening; the sun still building on the heat of the day.

  “Did he mention me?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Who else?” Mum wanted to know.

  He’d mentioned Mr. Kalusha, the farm’s driver; and Mr. Chrissford, the farm’s foreman; and Mrs. Hilda Tembo, the farmhouse’s cook; and Boss Shupi, the barman at the pub at the bottom of the farm. “He mentioned Harry a lot too,” I said.

  “Quite right,” Mum said approvingly.

  Dad’s corner of the ICU had taken on the scent of the farm: diesel, soil, fever trees, bananas, the roiling Zambezi River. The essence of that soil and water were eking out of him now, the room was taking on my father’s life; it was a clear exchange.

  “He still looks good, though,” Mum said. “Doesn’t he?” And he did; slightly flushed, breathing with concentrated effort as if participating in something slightly more active than dying; like he was comfortably cycling up a gentle incline. He’d never have done that in real life, or yoga, but that was his breath.

  Mum and I sat on either side of the bed and watched Dad for a while; the effort he was making. “Oh, Bobo,” Mum whispered. “It’s the final stretch, isn’t it?”