Travel Light, Move Fast

by Alexandra Fuller

  “It’s curtains for me, Vanessa,” Mum had said grandly as she was wheeled into surgery at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka the first time she’d had emergency intestinal surgery. And then, before the doors had slapped shut behind her, in her best brave Memsahib Abroad accent she’d issued her final words to Vanessa and Dad: “Hasta la vista, baby.”

  Mum hadn’t actually watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role, but she liked repeating his catchphrase on her deathbed/gurney. It was very Nicola Fuller of Central Africa to get wheeled off into the inner recesses of the teaching hospital’s surgical theaters, citing the Terminator; it had put the wind up everyone. She was behaving terminally in the last place in Zambia that could save your life and therefore where you were very likely to die.

  “I cried buckets,” Vanessa said afterward. “Mum waved like the queen as they wheeled her off. ‘Hasta la whatsit, baby,’ she said, and waved. I thought for sure she’d die. That’s why I didn’t call you. It was awful. Dad got such a fright he nearly ended up in the bed next to hers.”

  Mum took the blows of her life in the gut, literally. She didn’t weep and lament and rend her garments when all was truly lost—her babies dead, three of them, let’s start with that—and it wasn’t immediately apparent that the unspoken pain of those terrible griefs landed anywhere. But they did, they do. And still Mum will grit her teeth through the pain until she knows the alternative is permanent.

  “Those nurses at UTH have seen everything, as you can imagine,” Mum said after that first surgery. “It takes quite a lot to shock them.” Mum smiled complacently. “But I believe I shocked them to the absolute marrow. ‘Madam,’ they told me when I could sit up, ‘you were a millimeter from death’s door.’ I was gasping for a cup of tea, who wouldn’t be after all that? The doctor said it would kill me; I told him I’d risk it. That impressed the nurses too. They said, ‘Ah, madam, you are very strong.’”

  Mum’s very strong; she’s a survivor.

  “People say, ‘Oh, Nikki, you’re a survivor!’ as if it’s something I enjoy doing, like golf or knitting,” Mum told me once. “Or as if it requires no effort to survive; as if I can’t help it. But I envy the floppers. I’d love to be able to collapse, and to never have to cope again.” She’d sniffed. “Also, I hate it when people call me Nikki. I’m Nicola. Nic-o-la, only three syllables; how much effort can it take to say my whole name?”

  Mum can weather and withstand levels of pain and discomfort that have made grown men swoon and that would melt Vanessa and me to a puddle. Vanessa and I had been tough uncomplaining kids. We were not tough uncomplaining adults. Was there only so much each of us could take? Had we become afraid of pain? Had we burned through all our toughness when we were very young?

  “I know I did,” Vanessa has told me. “It was too much, Al-Bo. Wasn’t it?”

  “Some of it,” I’d agreed.

  Or it’s what we made of it; and we made too much of it. I made too much of it, I should say. “How many books is it you’ve written now?” Dad had asked from his deathbed in Budapest.

  I’d told him I’d written a few; I’d gone on and on about it, I know. Our lives, I mean; I’d gone through them with a fine-tooth comb and still there were unexpected tangles, whole invisible nests of them. Still there are things I can’t know for certain, will never know for certain. Still there are questions to which I will never have an answer.

  There are things I can never ask.

  All things considered, I don’t know how it went for Vanessa; our childhood, I mean. Not because I don’t remember. I do, and I’ve written what I remember. Or because she won’t say, she says it was difficult enough. But because getting through a life isn’t one thing, it’s an accumulation of things, and the weight of a lot of what an adult carries is invisibly left over from other lives. All our lives together we’d been pegs in a spinning wheel and all we’d done is go around; they don’t call it cycles of violence for nothing.

  I’d asked and probed and made assumptions. I’d turned our stories over and over, seen them in this light and that. I’d asked Vanessa the last question she’d ever entertain.

  It’s a stalled-out place; to have no questions left.

  Or it’s the only freedom possible; to have no questions left. To never ask again: Why? Why not? Why bother? Why anything?

  We hadn’t tended our pain; it had morphed into anger, and back to pain. We were heading toward fifty, but our grief turned us childish; we sulked and bullied and refused to listen to our mother. She advised we do what she’d always done. “I always ignore both of you when you’re being impossible,” she said. “And then I stop ignoring you when you’re being sensible.”

  “You ignore me all the time,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Mum said.

  * * *

  —

  MUM BANDAGED ME TO A BODY SPLINT; she had first-aid supplies because of being a very serious volunteer of the war effort during our farming-in-a-war-zone phase. I was given a bullet to bite, or I wasn’t given a bullet to bite, I wasn’t a soldier, merely a civilian; but a convoy was summoned and Dad slid me onto the backseat of our old green Peugeot station wagon. “Let’s try to do this with the minimum of fuss,” Mum reminded me as we jolted down the uneven driveway and over the culvert at the bottom of the hill where an elderly big black cobra lived. Dad lit another cigarette.

  I screamed.

  We met the convoy at the top of the valley rim, where the jungle abruptly gave way to the stubble of the Tribal Trust Lands, the overgrazed, overcrowded land allocated to the majority black population under the 1930 Land Apportionment Act. I’d howled; each hairpin turn in the steep road felt as if I were getting skewered. Pain like that is white, and then it’s sparkles.

  “Huzzit?” Dad had greeted the convoy’s commander.

  The convoy was small, half a dozen young soldiers in the back of a Land Rover. Their commander was in his twenties, a family friend. Ewan looked as if he’d worked through whatever fright he’d ever had in him long before now; the speed of getting to manhood so fast showed in his jaw. “What’ve we got here?” he asked, peering into the car. “Bobo, there’s a war on. Didn’t you hear, girl?”

  Dad showed Ewan the FN rifle across his lap; a full magazine locked in, another full magazine between his legs, also the Browning Hi-Power on the seat next to him. Mum showed him her Uzi, a full magazine locked in, a spare at her feet. “I’m very sorry about this,” she’d apologized. “Such a fuss.”

  “Not at all,” Ewan said, slapping the side of the Peugeot as if he were the Americans and we were the limping European Allies driving into Vichy France. “Kurumidza!” he shouted to the driver of the Land Rover. That’s how we did it; we spoke to one another in Mashona when we’d wanted to emphasize a point. Or we threw a Mashona word in the mix when we wanted to give an order; we were accustomed to the imperative mood. Most of us spoke rotten Mashona, but men like Ewan, if you shut your eyes you couldn’t tell the origin of their blood.

  Of course that didn’t stop us spilling it all over the place.

  We had to go through the Tribal Trust Lands to get to the hospital. Naturally the Tribal Trust Lands harbored insurgents. The Rhodesian government had recently issued a warning to the local blacks; “native” children and “native” dogs seen by Rhodesian government forces leaving their kraals would be shot on sight. Meantime, we expected to get shot on sight too, because it was a war; I made a huge fuss over the bumps.

  “Try to buck up, Bobo,” Mum begged.

  I howled and shrieked; I couldn’t help it.

  Mum grimaced; protesting children put her teeth on edge. She would have put her hands over her ears, except she needed them both to hold the Uzi submachine gun steadily out the window. Also, there was nothing to be done except what was being done. “It doesn’t help to holler, Bobo.” Mum attempted to be motherly. �
�Try to think about other cheerful things.”

  “Hold on, Chookies,” Dad said.

  “Imagine you’re at the seaside,” Mum said unhelpfully. I’d never been to any beach except the little bit of sand on the banks of the Nyangombe River in the eastern highlands; it was one of the few bodies of water in which we were allowed to swim because it harbored neither crocodiles nor bilharzia. “Think about a lovely picnic; chocolate cake and éclairs and things,” Mum said.

  I vomited again.

  Clearly I didn’t have it in me to suffer the way Mum did; she’d long perfected the art of removing herself from the terrible things that were happening to her, floating off to Mombasa in her head, settling down for a spread of impossible treats. As for Dad, he’d taken the art of suffering a step further; many steps further. “If you stay in the middle of your suffering, you’ll never find the edge of it,” he said.

  I swam for the shores of my agony.

  It hurt worse than drowning in it.

  Mum and Dad drove into the parking lot of the hospital; it was shaded by jacarandas. The stretcher-bearers whipped me down to the basement of the Umtali General Hospital where the X-ray machines clunked and whirred over the broken bodies of the boys coming back from the front. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end, in shreds and tears.

  I didn’t cry, I knew better; crying made you a waste of white skin. Not crying was supposed to make us whiter, tougher, manlier Rhodesians, less likely to end in shreds and tears, more likely to win the war, eventually. As it was, hardly any of us were up to the challenge. We were more mythical than actual. Or, of course, there were a few white soldiers who were better soldiers than in any other war on the planet and for all time: All wars have those heroes.

  * * *

  —

  I’D LAIN IN THE CHILDREN’S WARD waiting until I would walk again; it wasn’t long. But in that time—a couple of weeks at most—I’d become grateful for my crushed spine, my bent ribs, the bulge on my skull; I really didn’t have it so bad. I’d felt guilty for taking up room obviously needed for other patients; not that the place was crowded, but the staff were pushed hard.

  “If you won’t walk, you’ll have to lie on a bedpan,” the matron had told me. “I can’t be hopping in and out all day to take you to the loo.”

  In the rehabilitation room where I was taken once a day to see if I would walk yet, there were mostly war-shredded boys, eighteen or nineteen years old. They had it worse than I did, much worse. They were headed for St. Giles for sure, some of them, or Ingutsheni Mental Hospital in Bulawayo. In any case, they were done being hard, manly men.

  A couple of the boys had bandaged faces, no eyes. They wouldn’t see another sunset or another full moon or another msasa forest in full spring colors, orange, red, and lime green. Some of the boys would never do more than sit in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives, like unanswered questions.

  They had become unbecoming in one second, a flash of light.

  Some of the boys in physical therapy were having a hard time catching up to all the loss they had to absorb. It’s not something you can subtract fast enough from yourself, the idea of you gone, in a blink. “Anyone who wants to start a war should have to spend the night in the hospital with the boys who come back from it,” Auntie Rena said when she came to visit me in the hospital.

  Auntie Rena was the Scottish nurse with cobalt-blue eyes my father was always inviting to Paris. She’d nursed in Aberdeen during the Second World War and in Rhodesia at the start of our war. Now she was our neighbor in a war zone. She bought me a white handbag and a white plastic necklace to wear when I could walk again. “Get back on your feet soon,” Auntie Rena wrote in her card.

  Mum visited me once too. She bought me a convict’s outfit, black-and-white-striped jeans, a black-and-white-striped T-shirt, “For when you escape your imprisonment!” she’d written on her card. She also promised to buy me any shoes I wanted from Bata on the main street, if only I’d walk again.

  Dad didn’t visit; he’d already said all he had to say. I’d been hurt, I’d get over it, or I’d get used to it. And the sooner I realized it wasn’t meant for me, this suffering, the sooner the suffering would end. It wasn’t personal; none of it, no suffering was, really.

  A bullet didn’t really have your name on it, a bee hasn’t been informed of your allergy to its sting, ponies have problems of their own to worry about. A mosquito doesn’t ask anyone if they feel up to a dose of malaria.

  You happened to you, and you took the consequences.

  I happened to me, and I took the consequences.

  The band struck up and it was correct to turn and face the music. Whatever else you did, you didn’t turn the music off. Au contraire. “Music, maestro, music!” I learned from Mum and Dad: You danced through the worst days of your life; and you sat modestly admiring your very good legs on the rare occasions you triumphed. You suffered magnificently.

  My parents suffered magnificently.

  They’d loved this quality in each other.

  Over and over they’d planted a flag on the summit of the highest peaks of their suffering, then they’d slid freely to whatever valley lay below and they made a life there. They faced unthinkable pain not with composure so much, but rather with defiance. A dozen times or more they’d done this, and I come back to this central point again and again; how did they survive it all?

  I don’t know how they did it, I still don’t. In my experience there are certain kinds of pain that go through everything you can do about them. “Love conquers all,” people say. But love doesn’t conquer all; or sure, perhaps love conquers all in the end, but not immediately. In the short term, a pain so terrible there are no words for it conquers all.

  * * *

  —

  DAD DIED, and Vanessa and I fell apart, separately. Or she went down, and I went down with her; both of us tumbling, our thin skins slicing to ribbons. There were shots in the dark; shots below the belt; shots above the prow.

  We sank.

  I can see how it happened; from this view, I can see how it was inevitable, the end. We were a whole nation of traumatized children; or the rural kids were; we didn’t have sparkling pools and tennis courts like the city kids did, the white city kids, I should say. We performed a childhood gutted of innocence. And the circumstances were what they were.

  Bamba zonke, we used to say. Grab it all!

  There were no ordinary days; no rests and pauses we could count on. We’d sat down at the table too fast, we’d gobbled too much too quickly. There had been too many lies, too much authority, there had not been enough serenity.

  That childhood place was broken, and there’s no going back in time to fix it, or to fix us. Vanessa and I were accessories to the fact before we were children. We were squaddies before we were sisters. We were too many things too young to each other, and in the end, or at least in this end, it made all the difference.

  Or that’s my guess, but I don’t know for certain why we fell apart the way we did; and of course there’s a chance we’ll fall together again just as mysteriously. There’s a chance we’ll put down our grievances and wounds and stories and stand together around that baobab tree by the fishponds at the last resting place of Tim Fuller the Hon (or of the Nameless Hungarian, or the Unfortunate Refugee) and solemnly feel what it means to be family. Or what it means to be this group of people washed together by blood and marriage and children and love and accident, connected however angrily or briefly or completely or harmoniously, for a time.

  If we were all there, it’d be Vanessa and her first husband; it’d be their three boys. And it’d be Rich and the three girls. Also, the grandchildren having children, they’d be there.

  It would be my ex-husband and our three children.

  It’d be the in-laws we’d accumulated and the extended families, the cousins.

  I can’t see it happening no
w, though, not because I have no hope that I will one day be forgiven or at least tolerated and allowed back into our ever-changing family fold, but because the truth is, I can’t see beyond now. It was all so fraught after Dad died, and then it got worse. Or worse than that, it got worst. It went to the core of all pains, and beyond my ability to rise above it all.

  It went beyond my limited understanding of grief.

  EPILOGUE

  The End in the End

  This is the way it went, quickly.

  I lost Dad, and then in the next two years and three months, everything I’d assumed I’d love forever seemed to tumble after him. I should have known better. Nothing is forever, except forever; Dad had comforted me with this terror my whole life. “If possible, Bobo, try to preserve a bit of energy for the end,” he’d said at the end. “You never know when you’ll need it.”

  Maybe he’d seen my end; or maybe all ends are the same.

  Vanessa went first after Dad; I mean she removed herself from my orbit, impressively. It takes some doing to break the bonds of a sisterhood like ours, trauma bonds, I mean. Nothing gentle happened in the making of us as sisters; it wasn’t a gentle uncoupling. “Hug and make up,” a family friend had urged, as if I could walk through walls, and over minefields.

  As if I had special powers; or as if Vanessa had a magic wand.

  Vanessa’s superpower is her downfall; she can see into my future. My superpower is my downfall; I can see into my future too. We both argued about who could see more clearly, more correctly. We both lied about the superiority of our visions.

  Although it turned out, I couldn’t see into the future. I could dimly see only the present, and because of this, I could see how it would end. It was as if our past had dipped a toe into the puddle of now, and stirred up the water, muddying everything with what had been left undone, unspoken, unfelt, untouched. “Are we in the same decade?” I’d asked Vanessa, trying to catch up.