Travel Light, Move Fast

by Alexandra Fuller

  Also, Mum can quote the Bible, chapter and verse, in a careless, offhand Anglican sort of way, although it was “those bitter, frustrated Catholic nuns in Eldoret” who beat it into her. And she knows the Latin for nearly everything. “Adansonia digitata,” she says. “Acacia albida.” It seems likely they’d have understood her in Rome. She’d have fitted in too. “Oh, I’ve read heaps and heaps about the Roman Empire,” Mum said. “Empires fascinate me.”

  Everything fascinates her.

  She’s transfixed by life.

  There’s too much of it, she’s terrified of missing out.

  To help assuage her terror, Mum always has three or four books on the go, plus whatever newspapers she’s been able to get her hands on from Britain. Meantime, she also reads the Times of Zambia and the Zambia Daily Mail as well as the Lusaka Lowdown. It takes her forever to get through everything; she’s a lifetime behind.

  “I really need to be two people,” she says. “I’ll never catch up otherwise.”

  Mum reads every article in everything from start to finish. She scrutinizes each advertisement with detective-like attention or as if searching for hidden meaning, she avidly follows sports and the arts, and she absorbs every detail about the British royal family. She keeps a sharp eye on the financial markets, although they unnerve her. She leaves the obituaries for last, as a treat.

  “I like to walk everywhere very slowly and look at things very carefully,” Mum says. “Meanwhile, Dad charges off for the horizon like a madman. He loses the dogs half the time. The dogs prefer the way I walk; they like to stop and look at things too.”

  But she’d needed him.

  She’d needed him for balance, even if it wasn’t balance a casual observer would notice or appreciate as such. Dad hadn’t pondered and wavered the way she did; he’d jettisoned and bounded. And he’d checked her impulses to root and stockpile. “It’s been very trying for someone of my personality,” Mum had complained. “I’m a hoarder trapped in a mad arrangement with a renouncing nomad.” Mum gave a sigh of exasperated envy. “Rich built Van a whole separate thatched cottage just for her junk.”

  Nostalgie de la boue, the French say; nostalgia for mud, a longing to return to a kind of wanton ease, a murky complacency. Mum would have stayed there, but my father was like a bolting horse; a terror of sinking kept him plunging forward, not so much with a sense of direction as with a sense of urgency. He avoided mire, he shook off the excess, he honed, he scraped.

  And after thirty-five years of this, Mum went on strike.

  My parents had been between farms again; Dad had been between work permits again, between jobs. And Mum had had a complete nervous breakdown. After that, she’d lain in bed in a borrowed cottage on the outskirts of Lusaka with the dogs, and had refused to participate in any of Dad’s harebrained schemes until further notice.

  “I pulled a fetlock—strained brain more like—and had to go under the covers with the dogs,” Mum said afterward. “I didn’t have much choice, I was so exhausted. I think Dad was worried he’d broken me forever and for good. I think it gave him quite a fright when I stayed in bed a whole year.”

  But it worked.

  Dad stopped scouring the Southern Hemisphere.

  At the age of fifty-nine, Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode finally resigned. He went on bended knee, hat in hand, to the headman of a remote and difficult district in the Zambezi Valley. He brought gifts—a shortwave radio, size 8 shoes—and he promised to bring jobs to the valley, and expertise. “My wife is a very good farmer,” he’d said. “She’s the expert.”

  After months and months of this, he had it in writing.

  Henceforth he’d be Tim Fuller of No-Man’s-Land.

  My father delivered to my mother the title deed. He was granted two donkeys from the minister of agriculture to clear the land. When he’d cut a boundary, a triangle of a couple of hundred acres beginning in mopane woodland and ending at the Zambezi River, he drove Mum down to see their future farm. He’d put her in the shade on a camp chair with a thermos of tea and two boiled eggs. “Work out where we should put the house,” he’d said.

  It nourished them both, this eleventh-hour concession to take root somewhere at last, but only because it had been so hard won on both sides. She brought topsoil and plants from up-country; a jungle ensued, there was vibrancy. She got ducks and sheep. She got cats and puppies. Monkeys, birds, skinks, and frogs moved in, there were little animal faces behind every frond. Mum welcomes all but the most venomous of snakes, and even those she cherishes as much as possible.

  “I ask them politely to leave the garden and the house. Very politely,” she said. “But sometimes Dad has to shoot them. I don’t like that; I feel rotten, such magnificent creatures, perfect skins. But what can you do? You can’t have a black mamba sunbathing directly over the front door for months on end, can you? The staff was on the verge of mutiny.” She paused. “And they do kill dogs. I explained myself to the mamba as clearly as I could.”

  Mum talks to animals incessantly.

  I took notes once: By breakfast, Mum had already found and rescued a nest of baby mice, all the time reprimanding her erudite ginger cat Professor for his probable intent to murder the helpless, sweet little things. She’d held a delighted if respectfully distant conversation with a massive and beautiful cobra roped around the jesse bush on the path to the small dam. She’d spoken perfect paragraphs of poetry to a flock of white egrets leaving their roosts on the farm and going upriver for their morning commute.

  “A pile of books on every piece of furniture,” Dad complained happily. “And a dog on every pile of books.” When they’d finally built a proper house, he’d made a corner for Mum in the bedroom where she could cordon herself off behind a desk, drape curtains from her mosquito-net frame around her bed, and luxuriate in her piles of books, her heaps of dogs, her pyramids of teacups.

  Dad kept his section of the bedroom monkish neat. His drawers and trunk were organized like those of a soldier, everything folded precisely. Next to his bed, there was a rug on which Harry slept. Dad saved his excesses for public consumption.

  * * *

  —

  IN HIS LATE THIRTIES, my father had been thrown out of a Greek restaurant in Rhodesia for breaking not only all the plates of the diners at his table, but also those of the diners around him. “Well, apparently,” Dad explained afterward, his face set in blameless surprise, “we were at the Bombay Duck on Central Avenue. Not the Aphrodite in Strathaven.”

  By which mistake my father concluded that the touchiest Chinaman he ever met was the Rhodesian manager of Salisbury’s most sincere attempt at Oriental cuisine. The Rhodesian manager was ex–British South Africa Police, a commander. It had given him the impression he could be anything, or anyone, he liked. “In those days, you’d never see an actual Chinaman north of the Limpopo,” Dad said. “Now the whole of bloody Africa’s Beijing South.”

  My father was British, he declared his Englishness until his death. Or he didn’t pretend to be other than what he was, but he didn’t defend the national character he’d been born to either. He’d been too stung by his own people, made too unwelcome by them, too early. Also, the country was small, belittling; it would have shrunk him to live there.

  Anyway, over time, the English had eroded out of him; or he’d eroded the English out of himself until all that was left of his upbringing was a peculiar and dated brand of British insouciance. Or perhaps that’s just what happens if you leave an illogical optimist of any nationality out in the full glare of life for long enough.

  He’d become heroic, by which I mean, my father lived by his own rigorous if unorthodox rules. He had natural internal discipline, but he hated discipline imposed. And he never let anything get him down for very long, unless it was the sort of thing that is supposed to get you down; for example, a hangover, or a bad decision, or deadliest of all, a combination of the two.

/>   Above all, my father was that ancient instruction fulfilled. Nosce te ipsum, know yourself. Know yourself to the core, and you will know everything there is worth knowing. Know yourself until there is nothing more to fear, or to hope. Know yourself, and since you’ll know your place in the world, you’ll become the world.

  Then even if you lose your place in the world, you’ll still be of it.

  Even if your mind goes, you won’t go with it.

  And there is no distance for your soul to travel to find yourself.

  * * *

  —

  DAD HADN’T JUST WOKEN UP THERE, liberated from the usual tethers of nationhood or identity. He hadn’t just woken up, a white man in south-central Africa, dismantled to his essence, traveling light, moving fast. He’d gotten there the hard way; or he’d taken the hard way. Or he’d tried like most people to attach himself to an identity and the identity had insisted on blood in return.

  He was English, and we were English along with him. Long after Mum and Dad had become permanent residents of Zambia they still received invitations to the Awful Dos at the British High Commission. The Queen’s Birthday, all right-thinking Brits were supposed to celebrate that, of course, also royal weddings and coronations, if there’d ever be another one in our lifetimes.

  But for six years, we’d revolted against Britain.

  For six years, we’d been officially Rhodesian. For six years only, but it had made an indelible impression on us. It must have meant something to Dad too, because after he died, among his very few belongings I found a small, green leather-bound booklet given “to Timothy Donald Fuller with the Compliments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a memento on becoming a citizen of Rhodesia at Umtali on 17th October, 1974.”

  Inside the pamphlet were a few of the sorts of things meant to inspire Rhodesian citizens onward and upward to greater things. A statue of Cecil John Rhodes, looking gouty; that was page 1. Page 2 was a nearly illegible manuscript of a poem by Rudyard Kipling.

  Following that was a list of My Duties as a Citizen of Rhodesia. These included nine instructions, the last of which was: “It is my duty to be just, tolerant and courteous to my fellow countrymen. . . .” I couldn’t feel it then, at all. Our hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of white Rhodesians, was so official, so complete, so pathological we couldn’t feel it ourselves. We could say one thing; we could believe and feel and do another.

  * * *

  —

  THE NIGHT OF MY FATHER’S DEATH, I got back to my room late; it had been a long day, and I’d already spoken to Rich, broken the news. But I phoned Zambia again. Vanessa picked up on the first ring, already awake. Or she was still awake; she’d been awake for hours, she’d be awake all night.

  “Oh, huzzit, man,” Vanessa said now.

  “Oh, huzzit, man,” I said back.

  We didn’t speak to anyone else this way, in exaggerated accents, using slang from a country with no name, and as if we had no one to talk to but each other, as if the war were still on.

  “Is she asleep?” Vanessa asked.

  “I tucked her in myself.”

  “You what?”

  “Well, I stood at the door and said, ‘Good night.’”

  “Oh,” Vanessa said. “Slight exaggeration. You had me worried for a moment.” I heard her light a cigarette and inhale. “Oh, this isn’t going to be a picnic.” She exhaled.

  “We’re supposed to have quit three days ago,” I reminded her.

  “I know,” Vanessa said.

  Then we listened to each other not speaking for a long time. It was a way to bridge the unthinkable gap between Kafue and Budapest, a way for Vanessa to burn the hours of talk time purchased for her phone from the kiosk by the railway line. Vanessa had stockpiled talk time when Dad was taken to the hospital, as if both talk and time could be bought, or brought back.

  “I didn’t say good-bye to him,” Vanessa said at last.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  I closed my eyes. I could picture Vanessa in her shawl, pacing the area around her veranda, her garden bathed in moonlight, the scent of lavender bushes and roses sweet and thick in the air. She’d have her phone to her left ear, her hair long down her shoulders, her right hand waving a silver-grey trail of cigarette smoke. Suddenly she gave a little gasp. “Oh, Al-Bo,” she said. “Did you hear that?” She paused. “There it is again. Did you hear anything?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The jackals are out tonight. It must be the moon; it’s been such a big moon, hasn’t it? It’s got everything howling.” There was a rustle while she held the phone away from her ear, but the jackals had stopped yipping by then, or they were too far away and faint for me to hear them.

  “No,” I said again.

  “Oh, Al.” Vanessa broke down. “Dad loved the jackals.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Everything I ever did, everything I saw, or heard, it was to tell him about it,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t know, not really.

  I couldn’t know.

  Each daughter experiences her father’s death as if she were the only daughter on Earth, and he the only father. And to each daughter, a father is a particular set of facts, a peculiar series of circumstances. To think of him otherwise, to see him through another’s eyes, feels like a betrayal.

  He’d been one father to me, and another to her.

  “I was always his favorite,” Vanessa said.

  “I know,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  WITH DAD AT THE HELM, our family of four had had mettle. We’d gone through hells of our own making, and hellish acts of God, and we’d always emerged from the flames, sooty, buckled, and staggering, a child down perhaps; but we’d emerged one way or the other, we bloody Fullers.

  Until now, we’d always emerged, we four, we final, essential, skeletal family of four. Three seemed a vanishing number, the dead outliving the quick. There wasn’t backup with three; no one to fall back on if a man went down. “Three bloody women in the house,” Dad had always lamented. “No wonder I can never get anything done.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Make a Plan, and If That Doesn’t Work, Make Another Plan

  At four-thirty a.m., a little more than a full day since Dad had died, I gave up my sleepless night. I made two cups of tea. I put sugar in both. Then I let myself out of my room, went down the hallway, and into Mum’s room. I turned on the light and stood, fixed to the spot in disbelief; I’d have dropped the teacups, like they do in movies, except I’m fanatical about my morning tea. I put down both cups carefully, and then I panicked.

  “Mum!” I said, addressing the heap of bedding.

  I’m good and quick at assessing the scene of a crime, something I attribute to my inherited addiction to soothing murders with British protagonists and foreign detectives. “Twaddle or not,” Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot responds when he’s falsely accused of reaching the wrong conclusion about the identity of Arlena Marshall’s killer in Guy Hamilton’s 1982 adaptation of Evil Under the Sun. “It’s the only explanation which fits all the facts.”

  I adore Poirot’s rigorous, logical little grey cells; I love the inevitability that the criminal perpetrators in his world will always be brought to justice. I’m comforted by Poirot’s unassailable certainty that he’s completed the investigation, and by sheer deductive brilliance he knows what he knows.

  His truth is his line in the sand.

  The whole thing’s a balm to me.

  “Mum!” I said again, shaking the heap of bedding.

  It was clear that after I’d left Mum shortly before eleven the previous evening, she had decided to redo the packing entirely. Now, her once neat suitcase was bursting with plastic bags, sticks, and feathers. She’d semiwrapped the half-eaten block of crusty pink cheese in a hotel facecloth and
popped that into an ashtray next to the little white vase with the fake daisy poking out of it.

  Dad’s duffel bag had been emptied too; most of his belongings were on the bed, in the bed, his clothes tangled up with the sheets. Also, there were now four empty wine bottles in the dustbin that hadn’t been there the night before. Mum had draped Dad’s socks over their mouths and necks, perhaps in the hope this made them look more like ornamental fake flowers, and less like four empty wine bottles.

  “Mum!” I shook the heap of bedding again, more vigorously this time. At last there was a reply of sorts from beneath the layers of sheets, pillows, clothes, and comforters, a faint, slightly annoyed snore; the noise one of Mum’s terriers makes if you try to boot it off a chair to sit there yourself.

  “Mum!” I said again. “Are you awake? Say something!”

  The top of Mum’s head appeared. She looked a little like an annoyed terrier too, disheveled as a Jack Russell after a tussle with a monitor lizard. Mum’s dogs will take on anything, mostly it’s reptiles versus canines; it doesn’t end well for the pets, usually. “Oh, hello, Bobo,” Mum said.

  “You’re conscious,” I said. “Thank God!”

  “Of course I’m conscious,” Mum said. She blinked at me blearily. “But I’m very sad.”

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “Terribly sad,” Mum reiterated.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  Mum gave a hiccup. “We’ve got to get out of this place, Bobo.”

  “That’s right,” I said, encouraged. “Our taxi leaves in fifteen minutes. And look, I’ve brought you tea. I put in some sugar for the shock.”

  Mum disappeared back under the covers. “Okay,” she said.

  “So you should get up,” I said, my voice rising.

  Mum reemerged. “But I’m very sad,” she argued. She sniffed. “You said it yourself, I’m in shock. I can’t possibly get up.”