It is the year that Vanessa, who has been working in London for a children’s television channel, comes home to travel Africa with her English friend. The friend is sexy and worldly and she dances at a party at the Mkushi Country Club and the old Greek-coloured who, it is known, hasn’t smiled in forty-something years, raises his glass of beer to the ceiling and his eyes grow glassy and his lips grow wet and if he could find the words, he would say, “Here’s to women with legs that go on forever!” His trembling lips break over his teeth.
I say he smiled.
Dad says it was a prelude to a stroke.
I am in awe. I start trying to emulate the way she smokes, slow and needy and intimate. I get smoke in my eyes and revert to smoking the old way, like an African, with the cigarette between thumb and forefinger.
I have briefly, and not very seriously, found God and I have stood up in front of the charismatic church (which I attended, briefly, in Harare) and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. The rest of my family finds this development eye-rollingly embarrassing. Once (when drunk) at a neighbor’s house I take the conversation-chilling opportunity to profess to the collected company that I love Jesus. Mum declares that I will get over it. Dad offers me another beer and tells me to cheer up. Vanessa hisses, “Shut up.” And I tell them all that I will pray for them. Which gets a laugh.
To be just like the English Friend, I am—to everyone’s collective relief—restored to godlessness.
But still the rains do not come.
We hold a rain dance. We invite all the neighbors. There are Greeks, Yugoslavs, Zambians, Czechs, Coloureds, expats-like-us, Afrikaners, a woman who is said to be part Native American, a Canadian, the English Friend, and one Indian.
We make a fire outside (under the brittle, chattering, weaverbird-full bougainvillea) over which we braai steak and boervors. Adamson, tottering with filched booze, brings out trays of parched gray-boiled greens and boiled potatoes and soggy-hot, peanut-oil-covered salads from the kitchen. The ash from his joint and sweat from his brow drip into the food tray. We drink into the lowering, relentless sun until the groom is called from his Sunday beer-drink to saddle the horses and we go out riding, looking for rain beetles. Mum (who is the best horsewoman among us) slides off her saddle (but does not spill her drink). She is still laughing when she hits the ground, and for quite some time after that. Someone heaves Mum back onto her mount, where she slowly tips forward in a perfect Pony Club exercise: “Now, children, everyone touch your nose to the horse’s mane.”
None of us can catch rain beetles (which are the cicadas whose dry, thirsty rasp has been reminding us of our drought day in and day out). We ride home for more beer.
Dad threatens to find a virgin, to sacrifice to the gods. None among our party are considered worthy. Instead, several of the female guests are thrown into the drought-stagnant pool.
And still the rains do not come.
Since October, Mum has been using a hypodermic needle to inject the Christmas cake (bought months ago in the U.K.) with brandy. Needles and syringes are scarce; we boil and reuse those we have. The cake, however, has designated instruments of its own.
“He, he, he,” says Adamson. “Madam, the cake is sick?”
“That’s right,” says Mum, “I’m helping it get better.”
Adamson chuckles and shakes his massive head. His face seems to be dissolving in sweat. It glows in a shiny film. He shuffles outside, where he sits on his haunches under the great msasa tree and smokes. His head hangs, his arms are stretched over his knees, and, except to adjust the angle of the joint on his lower lip, he is a motionless figure, gently wafting blue marijuana smoke.
The heat in the kitchen is breath-sucking. There are two small windows at either end of the huge tacked-together room, and one stable door, which leads off to the back veranda where the dairyman (surrounded by a halo of flies) labors over the milk churn (milk spits into buckets, cream chugs into a jug; both are in danger of going off before they can reach refrigeration). The fridges, unable to compete with the heat, leak (they bleed, actually: thin watered-down blood from defrosting chunks of cow) and add a fusty-smelling steam to the atmosphere. The aroma here is defrosting flesh, soon-to-be-off milk, sweating butter, and the always present salty-meat-old-vegetable effluvium of the dogs’ stew toiling away on the stove.
The end of the kitchen is dedicated to laundry, where a maid (a baby asleep on her back) with a charcoal iron sweats over piles of clothes. She sprinkles water onto the back of her neck and onto the clothes and slams the charcoal iron down onto the table where her ironing lies. Her sweat sprinkles the cloth along with the specks of water, and singes up with the steam. The crescent-shaped air vents in the iron glow fiercely red with fresh coals. The clothes are ironed to paper in the heat and are crisp, starched with sweat.
Every time any of us walks outside, we glance upward automatically and search the sky for likely clouds. Still, it does not rain.
This year, we chop down a drought-dry fir tree and set it up in the sitting room. Mum spends hours gluing candles to the tree with wax.
“If that thing doesn’t spontaneously combust,” says Dad, “I’ll eat my bloody hat.”
“Are you sure that’s safe?” I ask.
Mum (defensive) says, “It looks festive.”
“Looks like a bushfire waiting to happen.”
Vanessa, as designated artist in the family, spends one afternoon supervising the decoration of the tree. In the four years since leaving Malawi, we have accumulated a small box of real decorations (angels, trumpets, halos, doves), which are lost among the balls of cotton wool and the candles. We dare not put anything too close to the candles.
On the veranda stands a dead protea bush we have dragged from the north, sandy end of the farm. It still boasts the odd, brown, head-hanging bloom, to which we add cutouts from old Christmas cards, sewn with red thread into hanging loops. Two lizards set up house on the tree and add to the decoration.
“Couldn’t buy a decoration like that at Harrods,” says Dad.
The lizards lurk, waiting, tongue-quick, for flies (of which there are plenty). They are as thick as the air.
Christmas Eve. It still hasn’t rained. By now, the tobacco seedlings are thin-necked, yellow-pale, growing into the heat with telltale signs of drought on their leaves already. We have filled the huge trailer water tanks and they stand, like army equipment awaiting battle, at the seedbeds. We have already water-planted fifteen acres of tobacco, but those plants are lying flat and parched, draped thinly over the top of the soil. When we dig our fingers into the plowed soil which holds these nursery transplants, the ground is searing hot and parched. Dad says we mustn’t plant any more tobacco until it rains. So the water tanks wait. The seedlings wait.
Mum spends half an hour crawling around the Christmas tree lighting all the candles. This is the first Christmas Eve on which we still have electricity. Usually, by now, thunderstorms have brought the lines down and we are without power until the rains subside in March.
Then Mum says, “I think that’s the lot.”
And we switch out the lights and briefly enjoy the spectacle of the flaming tree before Dad loses his nerve and orders the thing extinguished. We switch on the lights again. Beetles and ants and earwigs that have made their home in the dried-up fir tree have sensed forest fire and are scurrying in panic across the sitting room.
“Eggnog, anyone?” says Mum.
It’s too hot for eggnog. We drink beer. Mum has cut the top off a watermelon and filled it with gin and ice cubes. We take it in turns sucking from the straws that spike from the watermelon’s back, a sickly-prickly porcupine of melting ice and gin in thinned watermelon juice. By bedtime, we are too drunk to sleep.
It is Dad’s idea to drive around the neighborhood and sing Christmas carols. We set off in the pickup, the English Friend driving, with Dad as chief navigator. Vanessa and I are in the back. Mum says she’ll stay home with our houseguests, a family from Zimbabwe.
&nb
sp; We kidnap the husbands, guests, and sons of our neighbors. We acquire two guitar players, one of whom is too stoned to play anything but Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.” We override his intense, druggy riffs with loud, drunken renditions of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and snatches of the “Hallelujah” Chorus (to which we know only the word “Hallelujah”).
We disturb the malarial sleep of a Greek farmer’s wife.
We narrowly avoid being shot by Milan the Czech, who sleeps with a loaded handgun by his pillow.
“Jesus!”
“Told you not to sing bloody ‘Jingle Bells’ to a Yugoslav.”
“He’s Czech.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is to me.”
“Not to him.”
“Hey, Milan! Hold the fire!”
The stoned boy is shocked out of his “Cocaine” reverie by the gunfire. He thinks deeply for a moment and then starts to sing (accompanying himself badly on the guitar), “All we are saying, is give peace a chance. . . .” He has to keep repeating the word “peace” until he finds the right chord. “All we are saying is give peace . . . peace . . . peace . . . peace . . .”
We drink hot, mulled wine with Swedish aid workers.
It is dawn and we still have to sing for the Indians and the Yugoslavs.
Dad says, “Look at that bloody sunset, would you? Never seen a sunset like it.”
“Sunrise, Dad. Sunrise.”
And it is truly a stunning, low-hanging, deep-bellied sunrise. A vividly pink sky under thick gray clouds. Thick, gray, massing, rolling, swollen-bellied clouds. We blink into their pile upon pile of gray and we are briefly, startlingly sober.
“That looks like something.”
Vanessa sniffs the air.
The guitar player says, “Man. I think this is it.”
Dad has fallen into a quick coma-drunk sleep on the English Friend’s shoulder. We wake him up. “Looks like rain.”
“Great sunset,” mumbles Dad. “No one shut any doors or windows.”
Finally, rain.
The English Friend drives toward the gathering clouds and they come tumbling out of the west to meet us, gathering and rolling until suddenly the sky sags open and the road is instantly as thick and sticky as porridge.
We lie in the back of the pickup with our mouths open. “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring!” The pickup churns and slides through thick heavy mud. The English Friend is driving like an East Africa Rally driver.
Dad, awakened by the storm, is still chief navigator, although as far as we can tell he no longer knows which way is up, nor is he consistently conscious. “Pamberi!” he shouts above the whine of the laboring engine. It is the slogan of the ruling party in Zimbabwe: “Pamberi to final victory!”
Mum and Dad with tobacco
In the back we are clinging to one another, wet to the skin, skin-against-skin, drunk, screaming into the great gray sky. Hair slicks over our foreheads.
By the time we get home, just before lunch, Dad is in drag. We take off the black Afro wig and put him to bed.
Mum has told the farm laborers she will pay a ten-kwacha bonus to anyone who comes out to plant tobacco. She takes a hip flask of brandy and rides out in the rain (horse steaming saltily under her) to the fields. The laborers are already drunk. They crawl, stagger, supporting each other, singing and damply cheerful out to the field. The crop is planted, but the tobacco is not in straight lines that year.
We are supposed to be holding a proper English Christmas lunch at noon for our houseguests and various neighbors. The electricity is out. Adamson has been passing out beers to anyone who comes up to the back door. He is crouched over a fire he has made on the back veranda and is roasting the Christmas goose, though he is almost too drunk to crouch without toppling headlong into the flames. The only thing that seems to keep him a reasonable distance from the fire is his anxiety not to catch the end of his enormous, newspaper-rolled joint on fire. He rocks and swings and sings. Everyone within a thirty-mile radius of our farm is drunk.
Except our freshly arrived guests, hair uncomfortably pressed into place, polite in new Christmas dresses and ties, throat-clearing at the sitting room door.
Mum, mud-splattered and cheerfully sloshed, is determined to inject the Christmas cake with more brandy before its appearance after the goose.
Dad is in a worryingly deep alcoholic coma. His lipstick is smudged. His snores are throaty and deep and roll into the sitting room from the bedroom section.
It is long after noon when the goose is cooked, by which time our Christmas guests are drunk, too. One has fallen asleep on the pile of old flea-ridden carpets and sacks that make up the dogs’ bed.
We wear paper hats and share gin from another watermelon porcupine. We eat goose and lamb, potatoes, beans, and squash all rich with the taste of wood smoke. Adamson is asleep against a pillar on the back veranda; the rain blows in occasionally and licks him mildly wet. His soft, enormous lips are curled into a happy smile.
When the Christmas cake appears on the table, there is a moment of quiet expectation. It is the ultimate gesture of a proper English Christmas. Mum has made brandy butter to accompany the cake.
“I’ve soaked the cake in a little brandy, too,” says Mum, who is as saturated as the cake by now. She tips a few more glugs onto the cake, “just to be on the safe side,” and refills her own glass.
“Now we light it,” says Vanessa.
Mum struggles to light a match, so the guest from Zimbabwe offers his services. He stands up and strikes a match. We hold our breath. The cake, sagging a little from all the alcohol, is momentarily licked in a blue flame. A chorus of ahs goes up from the table. The flame, feeding on months of brandy, gathers strength. The cake explodes, splattering ceiling, floor, and walls. The guests clap and cheer. We rescue currants and raisins and seared cake flesh from the pyre and douse our scraps in brandy butter.
Zoron (a Muslim) raises his glass. “Not even in Oxford,” he pronounces in a thick Yugoslav drawl, “can they have such a proper, pukka Christmas, eh?”
Bo and Charlie
CHARLIE
I’ve been overseas, in Canada and Scotland, at university. The more I am away from the farm in Mkushi, the more I long for it. I fly home from university at least once a year, and when I step off the plane in Lusaka and that sweet, raw-onion, wood-smoke, acrid smell of Africa rushes into my face I want to weep for joy.
The airport officials wave their guns at me, casually hostile, as we climb off the stale-breath, flooding-toilet-smelling plane into Africa’s hot embrace, and I grin happily. I want to kiss the gun-swinging officials. I want to open my arms into the sweet familiarity of home. The incongruous, lawless, joyful, violent, upside-down, illogical certainty of Africa comes at me like a rolling rainstorm, until I am drenched with relief.
These are the signs I know:
The hot, blond grass on the edge of the runway, where it is not uncommon to see the occasional scuttling duiker, or long-legged, stalking secretary birds raking the area for grasshoppers.
The hanging gray sky of wood smoke that hovers over the city; the sky is open and wide, great with sun and dust and smoke.
The undisciplined soldiers, slouching and slit-eyed and bribable.
The high-wheeling vultures and the ground-hopping pied crows, the stinging-dry song of grasshoppers.
The immigration officer picks his nose elaborately and then thumbs his way through my passport, leaving greasy prints on the pages. He leans back and talks at length to the woman behind him about the soccer game last night, seemingly oblivious to the growing line of exhausted disembarked passengers in front of him. When, at length, he returns his attention to me, he asks, “What is the purpose of your visit?”
“Pleasure,” I say.
“The nature of your pleasure?”
“Holiday.”
“With whom will you be staying?”
“My parents.”
“Just outside.” I nod toward the great mouth of the airport, where there are signs warning tourists not to take photographs of official buildings—the airport, bridges, military roadblocks, army barracks, and government offices included. On pain of imprisonment or death (which amount to the same thing, most of the time, in Zambia).
The officer frowns at my passport. “But you are not Zambian?”
“No.”
“Your parents are Zambian?”
“They have a work permit.”
Mum and Van
“Ah. Let me see your return ticket. I see, I see.” He flips through my ticket, thumbs my inoculation “yellow book” (which I have signed myself—as Dr. Someone-or-Other—and stamped with a rubber stamp bought at an office supply store to certify that I am inoculated against cholera, yellow fever, hepatitis). He stamps my passport and hands my documents back to me. “You have three months,” he tells me.
“Zikomo,” I say.
And his face breaks into a smile. “You speak ‘Nyanja.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, yes,” he insists, “of course, of course. You do. Welcome back to Zambia.”
“It’s good to be home.”
“You should marry a Zambian national; then you can stay here forever,” he tells me.
“I’ll try,” I say.
Vanessa gets married first, in London, to a Zimbabwean.
The little lump under the wedding dress, behind the bouquet of flowers, is my nephew.
Mum, very glamorous in red and black, sweeps through the wedding with a cigar in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. She looks ready to fight a bull. She takes a swig of champagne and it trickles down her chin. “God doesn’t mind,” she says. She takes a pull on her cigar; great clouds of smoke envelop her head and she emerges, coughing, after a few minutes to announce, “Jesus was a wine drinker himself.”
In the end, I don’t marry a Zambian.
I’ve been up in Lusaka, between semesters at university, riding Dad’s polo ponies, when I spot my future husband. I’ve just turned twenty-two.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Page 25
