Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

by Alexandra Fuller

  I say, “Let me have a go, hey. Can I have a go? Look, Van, watch me.”

  But she has turned away and is going inside. A couple of the dogs follow her.

  Mum, Dad, and Bobo

  MISSIONARIES,

  1975

  My second sister—my mother’s fourth child—was born on 28 August 1976.

  Early in October 1975, when the first rains had already come but were still deciding what sort of season to create (overfull, with floods and swollen, dead cows in our river, or a sparse and teasing drought), a small plague of two missionaries descended upon us.

  They had driven from Salisbury, through Umtali, and down to the valley, to the farthest house they could find with people in it in the whole of Rhodesia, which was Mum and me lying on her bed at two o’clock in the afternoon listening to Sally Donaldson on the radio. Dad is away in the bush, fighting gooks. Vanessa is at boarding school. Mum and I are waiting for Women’s Hour to come on.

  It’s eyeball-burning hot. I lie on my belly and let my legs wag lazily back and forth, my head in the crook of my arms where my forehead is pressing a sweaty band into the skin. Mum is reading to herself. It is so hot that the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire. The dogs are splayed on the floor, wherever they can find bare cement, panting and creating wet pools with their dripping tongues. Our throats are papered with the heat; we sip at cups of cold, milky tea just enough to make spit in our mouths. The sky and air are so thick with wildfire smoke that we can’t see the hills, they are distant, gauzy shapes, the same color as the haze, only denser. The color is hot, yellow-gray, a breathless, breath-sucking color. Swollen clouds scrape purple, fat bellies on the tops of the surrounding hills.

  Suddenly, there is the claw-scrabbling alarm of dogs, raised from sodden, deep, two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon heat into full alarm. They rush outside, into the yard, kicking up a cloud of terra-cotta behind them, barking with their thirsty, hoarse summer voices.

  “What now?” says Mum. She slings her Uzi over her shoulder, checks that the safety latch is on (although she keeps her finger against the latch, prepared to change that setting at a moment’s notice), and scuffles her feet into the thick, black sandals, made from strips of used tractor tires, which we both wear. We call them manutellas. They are good farm shoes. There is not a thorn in Africa that can get through their soles, and they are cool in the heat and it doesn’t matter if they get wet, muddy, or covered in oil. Their only fault, as farm shoes, is that they leave our ankles and the tops of our feet exposed, the place where a snake is most likely to bite.

  “Right before Women’s Hour, too,” says Mum.

  The dogs are still barking. Especially Bubbles, who is an unfortunate mix, half Labrador and half Rhodesian ridgeback. He’s the color of a lion, with lion-yellow eyes and a mean, snaky way of walking, like a lion. Bubbles can kill baboons. He’s the only dog I know that can kill a baboon. Baboons are huge, as big as a small man when they stand on their back legs. And they have long, pointy teeth and they work in troops. They flip their prey onto its back and tear its stomach out. Bubbles runs away from us sometimes for a day or two and comes back leg-hanging exhausted and with scratches on his belly, but otherwise very pleased with himself. There are dead baboons in his wake.

  The fox terrier, the dachshund, the German shepherd, the two black Labradors, and the springer spaniels come back into the house to see what is taking us so long. Bubbles alone keeps up a fierce rally of deep-throated barks outside.

  Mum calls, “I’m coming, I’m coming. Who is it?”

  I follow her outside. The dogs scramble for position behind me.

  A vision: two men climbing out of a white station wagon. They are wearing button-down white shirts tucked neatly into pulled-up-high creased shorts, plus pulled-up socks and proper lace-up shoes. They have dark glasses but they are not wearing hats. I don’t know many men who wear dark glasses. The men I know squint into the sun. If they have sunglasses, they use them to chew on while they stare into the distance, into the hope-of-rain, or the threat-of-terrorists, or the possibility-of-a-kudu.

  Mum shades her eyes from the sun and walks slowly, suspiciously, toward the car. I stay behind her. Mum’s finger plays lightly over the top of the safety catch on her gun. “Yes? Can I help you?” We can’t trust anyone anymore. Not even white men.

  It is only then we see that both men are armed with thick shiny black Bibles.

  Mum shuffles her gun behind her back. “Oh shit, Jesus creepers,” she mutters, and then, more loudly, “Hello.”

  The men approach. Our pack of dogs growl, hackles raised, around their ankles, swarming. One of the men, blond and overweight (overweight for the heat, overweight for a war, overweight for a poor farm this far from the city), comes forward, his Bible outstretched, hand extended. He introduces himself and his partner: “And we’re here to tell you about the Lord.” He’s American. I start to giggle.

  Mum sighs. “Well, come in for a cup of tea, anyway,” she says.

  The other man is fat, too. As he turns to follow Mum into the house I see that his shorts have gathered into the crack of his bum; his legs extend baggy and gray and hairy like elephant’s legs from the too-pulled-up shorts. His shirt is stuck to his back with sweat, two wet rings extend from under his armpits. I giggle some more.

  Mum says, “Bobo, go and ask July to make us a tray of tea, please.”

  I find July asleep on the cool, damp patch of cement behind the laundry.

  “There are some bosses from God,” I tell him, poking his rib with the toe of my manutella, “come all the way from town for tea.”

  “Eh?” July jumps to his feet.

  “Faga moto,” I tell July. Which means, literally, “Put fire,” but figuratively, “Get moving.”

  July glares at me. “You are too cheeky,” he tells me.

  “Hurry! Hey! Hurry. They are waiting.” I am eager to make the most of our afternoon’s surprise. We don’t have fresh visitors very often. Especially not since the land mines and ambushes got worse.

  “Tea’s coming,” I say, and sit on the floor with my back to the dead-ash-smelling fireplace where I can observe everyone well. The sitting room is stifling: the sofa and chairs breathe out heat; humid, heat-saturated air billows in the windows. The dogs start to pace restlessly in front of the missionaries, who are sitting in the dogs’ chairs. The fox terrier glares; the Labrador-ridgeback is growling softly, looking baboon-murderer indignant. The springer spaniels make repeated attempts to fling themselves up on the visitors’ laps, and the missionaries fight them off, in an offhand, I’m-not-really-pushing-your-dog-off-my-lap-I-love-dogs-really way.

  The blond American says, “We’ve come to share the teachings of Christ with you.”

  “How kind.” Mum pauses. “We’re Anglican.”

  Which makes the missionaries glance at each other.

  July brings the tea. He smells strongly of green laundry soap and of freshly smoked gwayi—a raw, coarsely chopped native tobacco. The cups are greasy and unmatched, and all but one are chipped. Mum hands out the chipped mugs to the guests and to me; she keeps the best mug for herself. On a plate are slabs of homemade bread with slices of curling butter and cucumbers balanced on them. The cucumbers have been liberally sprinkled with salt and they are beading water.

  Mum asks me, “Will you hand out the sugar?”

  The missionaries sit with their cups of tea balanced in mismatched saucers on their laps, where there is a good chance a zealous spaniel might, at any moment, send the cup flying. I offer them sugar and then a slice of salty cucumber and bread, which they are too polite to refuse and too polite to know how to eat. The bread is days old and crumbling; the dough for the bread was a mix of corn and wheat to make the flour last longer. The visitors are disarmed. They can’t get to their Bibles now, what with the tea and the dogs and the toppling bread.

  The tea makes us sweat. Mum says that’s why tea is good for you. If
you drink a cup of tea and eat something salty in the middle of the afternoon, you won’t get heat exhaustion. The sweat will cool us down. The sweat runs down the back of my legs, tickling. The salt will replace the salt we lose in sweat. I munch my bread; the dogs become more frantic in their efforts to climb onto our laps. They lick crumbs from my hands. I pour a little tea out in a saucer for the dachshund.

  “I’ve never seen a dog drink tea,” says Elephant Bottom.

  Mum fixes the man with cold surprise. “How extraordinary,” she says.

  The missionaries wilt.

  Mum finishes her tea. “Anyone for a second cup?”

  The missionaries smile, shake their heads. The blond one clears his throat. He is starting to squirm on the sofa, like dogs when they’re rubbing worms out of their bum on a rug, or on the furniture, which we call sailing. “Oh, look, Mum, Shea’s sailing!” And Mum says, “I’ll have to worm the whole lot of them again.” The Elephant Bottom starts to writhe, too. They put down their cups of tea, disburden themselves of their pecked-at salty-cucumber bread, and stand up, as if to leave. Already. I am disappointed. I was hoping for battle. I was hoping to see these two men fight the good fight.

  “Well, thank you . . .” says Elephant Bottom, and makes for the door, followed by his partner. Mum and I notice, at the same time, that both men have pink welting fleabites down the backs of their soft, white, fatty legs. I start giggling again.

  Mum has tried and tried to kill the fleas, but fleas are as tough as dirt. Fleas cling to dog hair until the last moment and drown like flecks of pepper in the scum on top of the milky poisonous wash that Mum mixes up in a drum in the backyard once a month. A few brave, knowing fleas jump onto Mum’s arms while she’s washing the dogs (holding them by the scruffs of their necks with her lips pressed together so that she won’t get any of the poison in her mouth when the dogs struggle and shake) but she crushes them between her nails and they pop and die, usually before they can bite her. I have fleabites up and down my arms and on my legs because of the dogs; they are small, familiar red bumps—almost friendly—and are less irritating than the swollen lumps from mosquitoes, or the burning place where a tick has bitten and which needs to be watched in case of infection. My fleabites are tiny, the kind of bites you get when you are used to fleas so they don’t bother you so much anymore. The missionaries’ bites—even new as they are—already look irritated and itchy and plaguing because these men are evidently not accustomed to fleas.

  Mum says, “So nice of you to drop by.” And regrets it instantly because the missionaries seize on this: “Will you pray with us before we leave?”

  So we gather in the red-dusty yard with the dogs, who are now restless for their afternoon walk, milling around at our feet. The missionaries hold out their hands. “Let’s hold hands,” says the blond one.

  Mum looks icy, but she holds out her hands. She says, “Hold their hands, Bobo.”

  I slouch with embarrassment, but take the offered hands reluctantly. We hardly ever hold hands in our family and we never hold hands with strangers. Sis, man. Mum is glaring at me fiercely. From my vantage point, I can see July and Violet and the gardener gathered under the kitchen door and peering out at us with undisguised amusement. Violet is giggling behind her hand.

  The men start to pray. They pray and pray for ages. Our hands swap sweat, start slipping, and are reclutched. I cannot concentrate on the words the men are saying because I am thinking how slithering our hands have become. Elephant Bottom says, “Would you like to pray?” It is a few moments before I realize that he is talking to me.

  “What?”

  “You can ask God for anything you want.”

  I speak quickly, before my chance to communicate directly with God is taken away. “A baby brother or sister,” I say. “I want a new baby in the family. Please.”

  Everyone laughs uncomfortably except me.

  At that moment Bubbles lifts his leg on the blond missionary’s leg and lets forth a thick yellow stream of alpha-male-dog pee and our prayer session direct-line-to-God is abruptly terminated.

  Ten months later, Olivia Jane Fuller is born in the hospital in Umtali. Which goes to show, some prayers are answered. Olivia is my fault. She is the direct result of my prayer. I am secretly, ecstatically proud.

  In January 1977, when Olivia is five months old, I join Vanessa at boarding school.

  Olivia

  OLIVIA,

  JANUARY 1978

  It’s during the Christmas holidays when everything is green-growing with the rainy season. The roads are slick with rutted mud. Mum and Dad have taken Vanessa into Umtali to buy some new school shoes and catch up with farm shopping. They leave Olivia and me at Aunty Rena’ s. It is January, steaming with the middle of the rainy season.

  Aunty Rena has a store on her farm. It is called the Pa Mazonwe store and it is sweet with treasures. There are bright nylon dresses hanging from the beams in the roof among the gleaming silver-black bicycle wheels. On the far right of the store, there are wads of thick gray and pink blankets which have a special itchy smell to them and the smell makes you think of the feeling of catching rough skin against polyester. And there are crates of Coca-Cola and bolts of cloth. Next are boxes of tea and coffee and Panadol and Enos Liver Salts and cigarettes, sold either by the box or by one stick, one stick.

  And then comes the explosion of incandescent sweets: the butternut rocks wrapped in transparent paper with blue writing on it; bubble gum with gold foil inside a pink, bubbled wrapper; jars of yellow thumb-sized synthetic apricots and black, sweet gobstoppers which reveal layers of different colors when sucked. And next to the sweets, the bags of Willards chips and the rows of limp penny cools, which are cigar-shaped plastic packets of sugared water and which we drink by biting a corner of plastic off and squirting the warm nectar into the backs of our throats.

  On the right, by the door which leads to Aunty Rena’s clinic, are the stacks of Pronutro and baby food, powdered milk, sugar, salt, and hessian bags filled with dried kapenta—a tiny salted fish, complete with eyeballs and tail—which give the whole store its salty, sharp flavor. Under glass at the end of the counter are tinny gold earrings and spools of multicolored thread and cards of bright, shiny buttons. On the veranda, an old tailor sits whirring swaths of fabric through his fingers, his pedaling eating up the shapeless cloth and turning it magically into puff-sleeved dresses and button-down shirts. His treadle-treadle is a rhythmic, constant background noise along with the store’s small black radio, its back hanging open to reveal batteries and wires, which plays the hip-swaying African music which I am supposed to despise but which is impossible for me not to listen to with guilty pleasure.

  “Keep an eye on your little sister,” says Mum.

  “I will,” I say, swinging in the gap in the countertop through which only the privileged are allowed.

  “Do you love your little sister?” asks Aunty Rena.

  I love Olivia more than anything else I can think of but I say, “Not really.”

  The grown-ups laugh.

  While I am being mesmerized by the glut of treasures in the store and by the customers who are coming up to the counter, cautiously, to carefully spend their monthly wages, Olivia must have tottered out of the store and wandered out the back where the ducks splash in an ankle-deep, duck-shit-green pond. Aunty Rena is in the small, thatched, whitewashed hut out at the front of the store doling out rations to the Mazonwe laborers; some of their monthly wages came in the form of salt, mealie-meal, dried fish, tea, soap, sugar, and oil.

  “Give these buggers money and they’ll only spend most of it on Chibuku,” says Dad. Chibuku is the lumpy, sorghum-brewed beer on which the African men get drunk on payday.

  Duncan, Rena’s younger son, and I are in the store to watch the Africans buy what they have not received as part of their rations: thread, sweets, batteries, buttons. I am still swinging from the gap in the counter where the wood is worn soft-smooth and soft-greasy by so many hands.

/>   The African women keep their money in a folded wad in their dresses, against their breasts, so that it is soft and creased and warm when they lay it out on the counter to count it. One bag of flour, one box of matches, and then, after a voluptuous hesitation, a single cigarette and one Coke. Their children clamor for boiled sweets.

  It is almost lunch before anyone notices Olivia is missing.

  She is floating facedown in the pond. The ducks are used to her body by now, paddling and waddling around it, throwing back their heads and drinking the water that is full of her last breaths. She is wearing a purple and white vest that Mum had tie-dyed during one of her artistic inspirations to dress us differently from all the rest. When we turn her over, her lips are as violet as her eyes, her cheeks are gray-white. Aunty Rena puts her on the floor in the clinic and pumps duck shit out of her lungs. The green slop is pumped up onto the gray concrete and lies around her head, halolike. My whole happy world spins away from me then—I feel it leave, like something warm and comfortable leaving in hot breath—and a chill settles onto the top of my stomach. Even my skin has gone cold with shock.

  Mum, Olivia, and Van

  I will never know peace again, I know. I will never be comfortable or happy again in my life.

  Oh my darling, oh my darling,

  Oh my darling Clementine,

  You are lost and gone forever.

  Dreadful sorry, Clementine.

  After half an hour Aunty Rena sinks back on her heels. She has been pressing soft-dead, green water from Olivia’s mouth and breathing air into her nose and mouth in slow, hopeless rhythm. Now she says, “Olivia’s dead.” And then she says, “My God, it’s the second one.”

  I say, “Please do something, Aunty Rena. Aunty Rena, please.”

  She says to Duncan, “Take Bobo to the house.”