The Flower Plantation

by Nora Anne Brown

  The condition of the eight-kilometre track from home to the main road was terrible, and it took most people thirty minutes by car. It took Mother ten. I never knew if Mother was the best or worst of drivers: all I knew was that I loved the bone-shaking ride. When we hit the narrowest section of road with the largest potholes and the sharpest bends Mother would yell, “Hold on tight, boy, here comes the fun!”

  I loved looking back in the side mirror at the orange dust the truck kicked up. It blurred the brown faces of women with enormous bundles of wood on their heads and babies on their backs. I loved watching the men at the side of the road who filled in the potholes and stood with their hands stretched out, waiting for passing drivers to give them spare change. I loved the noise of the gears crunching and the exhaust pipe scraping on the boulders. I loved the warm scent of smoke and manure that filtered through the dashboard vents, and I loved the way I had to peel my legs off the hot sticky seat.

  The pleasure came to an end when we turned onto the smooth tarmac that led steeply down to town. The road to Gisenyi terrified me almost as much as the forest. Huge lorries swayed from one side of the road to the other; bodabodas laden with entire families – including their goats and chickens – dodged in and out of the traffic, while matatus bursting with passengers stopped, without warning, every few hundred yards. Most vehicles had their indicators on, yet few ever turned.

  Mother's hand hovered over the horn as endless people, in no hurry to get anywhere, dawdled by the roadside. Every now and then she'd push down with the heel of her hand and swerve to miss a sauntering cow or a small child dressed in an oversized T-shirt bunched in the middle with a piece of rope. The horn was completely hopeless: even the one on my trike was louder. The people we passed watched as we charged on, down into the heat that we managed to avoid up in the mountains. The further we went – past the Honda C90s loaded with household furniture balanced precariously, past the lorries whose brakes had failed, now cast aside like tin cans by the side of the road, and past the prisoners in their orange uniforms ploughing the fields – the hotter it got.

  At last we rounded the bend and descended into Gisenyi, on the shores of Lake Kivu. That's where Mother slowed down. The town moved slowly past the window of our pickup, like film through Father's home projector. We drove past the lake, sparkling and blue, in the direction of the border with Zaire. We passed the schoolchildren in their khaki shorts, the foam-mattress shops and the decaying colonial buildings in every colour of ice cream.

  Our first stop was the petrol station. Sebazungu leapt from the back of the pickup to supervise the pump attendant. While the fuel was being put in, the attendant's son, an old-looking boy with a heavy brow in a black leatherette jacket and long trousers, appeared from the giant tree in the far corner of the forecourt. He'd been harvesting mangoes. Changing his machete for his bucket and rag, he strode towards us, leapt onto the bonnet and set about cleaning the windscreen.

  Our eyes met as he lathered the glass. Trying to avoid his stare, I looked towards the volcano and its billow of steam – the only cloud in the sky.

  “Oya, oya,” said Mother. “No, no! Little pest.” She dismissed him with a swat of her hand. “Anything for a few francs,” she muttered, and he ran off. We watched the boy climb the mango tree, machete between his teeth, his eyes firmly on me.

  The attendant's fat wife approached our pickup with cold sodas.

  “Mwaramutse,” said Mother.

  “Bonjour,” replied the woman.

  Mother pointed at a brown and an orange soda and gave the woman two coins. The woman removed the caps from the bottles and handed them to us. I tried not to look at the boy in the tree and drank my soda to the warbling call of a cuckoo bird.

  With the truck refuelled, Sebazungu gave our soda bottles back to the attendant's wife and then jumped into the back. Mother turned on the ignition and we set off again, continuing our journey round the lake.

  After a short while we drove past Madame Dubois's house. Mother said she'd lived in Gisenyi “since the dawn of time”. Whenever we passed her house, she'd be outside in a long dress and floppy hat, clipping her topiary hedge, which formed the words: “I Love Jesus”.

  A little farther down the road, past the stall that sold rag dolls to tourists, was the post office. It was a big pastel-pink building set back from the main road. Its narrow entrance was on top of an open storm drain, which Mother hated driving over. Every time we went to the post office I'd hang out of the window and watch as the tyres inched perilously close to slipping six feet into the gutter. We never did fall, but there was always the danger that we might, and that was fun enough.

  Mother and I left Sebazungu and Monty in the pickup at the side of the building and walked around to the shady front entrance. I ran my hand along the peeling paintwork and stopped to pick at pieces that came away like bark from eucalyptus trees.

  “Arthur,” Mother called, and I caught up with her, a handful of dry paint crumbling between my fingers.

  The postmaster looked up as we entered. He was an elderly man who worked alone in the cavernous building, which was more like a railway station with its wooden benches, large broken clock and glass partitions. It smelt of sawdust and glue.

  The old man squinted from behind the glass as Mother approached, peering around the little clouds that floated in the centre of his eyes. Mother told me he had cataracts and that I “wasn't to stare”. When she was within a few feet of him and clearly visible, he said:

  “Eh, Madame Baptiste. Comment ça va?”

  “Ne meza,” Mother answered. “Has my parcel arrived?” Mother had been waiting for shoes from England for weeks. This was her third attempt to collect them.

  “Non, Madame, je suis désolé, mais—”

  From under the counter the old man produced a parcel wrapped in brown paper and placed it in front of her. It was covered in stamps of the Queen of England.

  “Pour le Docteur.”

  Mother sighed, I didn't know why: I thought the parcel was exciting.

  The postmaster opened the huge ledger and went to look for a pen. Mother and I took a seat on a bench by the window, where I stared at the picture of the President. It was as if he was watching me. I admired the post office: everything about it was great. There was a parquet floor made up of thousands of interlocking pieces and hundreds of little wooden boxes, each with its own tiny door, number and miniature key. There were narrow shelves that sat in perfect order with nothing on them. And everything had to be completed in triplicate. Being the postmaster seemed like the perfect job.

  “How can something that looks so efficient actually be utter chaos?” Mother asked, staring at the ceiling while drumming her nails on the bench.

  The shadows in the room had shifted by the time the old man returned with his pen. Mother printed her name and address and signed three times on three separate pages of the very large book. She handed me the parcel, which I held like a prized possession. Mother thanked the old man, who winked at me, as though he thought the parcel was exciting too. Then we stepped back into the searing heat. I climbed into the pickup and placed the stamp-covered parcel on the centre seat.

  We took the short cut to market. The steep dirt road made the engine roar. Mother moved from third gear to second, and we leant forward, as if to stop the pickup from slipping back down towards the lake. I loved doing that with Mother: it was our private little game. At the top of the hill she parked in the shade of an acacia tree, instructed Sebazungu to buy a sack of rice, took my hand and led me into the marketplace with Monty limping behind us.

  “It won't take long,” she told me above the noise of haggling market vendors, blaring radios and bleating goats. We wove in and out of piles of mismatched shoes heaped up on the dirt and past stalls selling ladies’ underwear. “I just need some fabric.”

  I knew that would take for ever. Fabric-shopping was torture.

  Big-bosomed women began to bustle around Mother as if she were the Queen of England. Eac
h of them rushed off and reappeared with piles of cloth with patterns so intricate they made my head spin.

  I sat down on a little stool, sank into myself and thought about Father's parcel. I wondered what was in it.

  Gradually the sounds and smells of the marketplace shrank into one, and there I remained, with three-legged Monty by my side, until Mother was done.

  * * *

  “One last stop, Arthur, and then we can go for tea with Dr Sadler,” said Mother, a roll of purple-and-green batik wedged under her arm. We wound our way out of the busy market, past potato sacks as tall as me, towering pyramids of tomatoes and endless boxes of dried fish, the smell of which made me feel sick.

  At the exit of the market, where boda-boda drivers usually huddled round Mother offering to carry her shopping and drive us home, a crowd had formed. People were saying “Kirogoya, Kirogoya” in hushed voices. I couldn't remember what that word meant until Mother and I got closer and I spotted a tall white woman with a mass of red hair in the centre of the crowd. Sebazungu whispered in my ear, “Wicked Person.”

  The witch! I tugged at Mother's hand.

  “Just a minute, Arthur,” she said, stopping at the edge of the crowd to see what was going on. Clearly Mother didn't know what she was looking at or the danger we were in. Monty let out a high-pitched bark and ran off in the direction of the pickup.

  Mother watched the witch: I hid behind her, too terrified to look. Had people gathered to see her snarling and foaming at the mouth like the wild animals she'd snared and caged in the forest? Could she attack at any moment? I didn't want to find out. I pressed my face into the top of Mother's legs and groaned.

  “It's OK, Arthur,” said Mother, and I peaked round her leg. The witch raised her hand in the air, making her as tall as a giant pine tree, and waved in our direction. I ducked back behind Mother.

  “Martha,” she called. I wondered how the witch knew Mother's name and decided she must have magic powers. “Martha,” she called again, but Mother didn't respond: she moved away in a hurry, the way I did when I was listening at doors and heard someone coming.

  “Let's go, Arthur,” she said, whisking me along and ignoring the witch's calls. We crossed the road without stopping to check both ways for cars and went into the shop that was only frequented by Americans and Europeans.

  “Bertie!” said Mother, entering the store. Mother's friend, Mrs Blanchett, whom everyone referred to as Madame B., was buying chocolate. She was a plump French lady who owned the local tea plantation. Whenever she saw me she'd try to squeeze my cheeks and pinch my nose: that day was no exception. Before she could get her hands on me I slunk away to the fridge and took in the cold air and the pong of the French cheese and Italian ham, trying to think about Father's parcel and not about the witch.

  “How are you, Martha?” asked Madame B. I didn't catch Mother's reply. “And Arthur?” This time Mother didn't answer. Instead she asked about Madame B.’s husband. Then they talked about shoes and someone called Laura Laney.

  “It's so rare for her to be in town during the day,” said Madame B., and Mother agreed with a disdainful laugh.

  “Come for coffee soon,” said Mother, and she kissed the air by Madame B.’s face.

  Mother paid for her shampoo and handed me a lollipop. We went back to the pickup, where the crowd had dispersed and the witch was gone.

  * * *

  “Remember not to touch things,” warned Mother as she fixed her hair and put on lipstick in the car park of the Kivu Hotel, just a stone's throw from the border. I repositioned Father's parcel in the centre seat. “Keep your hands to yourself and don't stare.” Mother said this each time we arrived at the Kivu – I didn't know why. I neither touched anything nor paid any attention to the hotel guests who came to see the gorillas.

  Father had told me about the gorillas on Mount Visoke, one of the few places in the world where they still lived in the wild. He told me a group of gorillas was called a band. He said there were very few left, and that some people thought the gorillas’ bodies had special powers that could “turn dying men into dancing men”. Those people killed the gorillas, chopping off their heads, hands and feet. I figured the witch must be one of them, and that made me angry.

  Father also said the gorillas were hugely strong and protective of their babies, and that they could easily kill a man who got in the way of their young. But he said I shouldn't be afraid, because they lived too far up the mountain and would not bother with someone as little as me. From time to time I'd look up to Visoke and hope that one day I might see one, just to know what they smelt and sounded like. But most of all I hoped that one of them would kill the witch. The gardeners said she snared, caged and trained them. I hoped that one would break free and that would be the end of her.

  As I thought about the gorillas and the witch, someone knocked on the driver's window. It was the beggar who sold wooden objects – masks, little motorbikes, salad tongs. He wore black shades, flip-flops and a heavy wool coat, even in the scorching heat. Every time we came to town he badgered Mother to buy something. She never bought a thing.

  “Get away,” shouted Mr Umuhoza, the hotel manager, who was coming over to greet us. The beggar scrammed. Sebazungu carted flowers to the cold-storage room.

  Mr Umuhoza was a tall man who looked like a camel: long legs, a big belly, flabby lips and rotten teeth. I didn't like Mr Umuhoza: he always ruffled my hair like Father. This time, when he tried, I ducked out of his way.

  “Good to see you, Arthur,” he said. He placed his hand in the small of Mother's back and took us through to the lounge, which had leafy wallpaper and giant glass windows overlooking the pool. There was a long bar and lots of tables and wicker chairs with thick cushions. Usually it was full of men wearing safari jackets and large-bottomed women in shorts and long socks; this day was no exception.

  Dr Sadler was waiting for Mother, sipping tea and, as always, blotting his brow with a red handkerchief. He was a large, friendly man with grey curly hair and soft eyes. I never saw him in anything other than a crumpled beige linen suit. I wanted to know why he didn't have someone kind like Celeste to iron his clothes. One day, I thought, I might be able to ask.

  “Hello Martha,” he said, standing to greet Mother and squeezing her hand.

  “Edward,” she said and pressed her cheek against his.

  “And hello, Arthur.” He smiled brightly, but didn't try to touch me. I liked Dr Sadler for that. “Do you feel like saying hello today?” I didn't.

  Mother and the doctor sat down. Her legs leant against his. She looked like someone in the magazines she had sent over from England and laughed like one of the American actresses she watched on her video player. She had forgotten about me already.

  I went outside and skirted the side of the pool, where ladies in brightly coloured swimming costumes lay on loungers. Monty limped behind me as I followed the little stone path that led to the beach.

  Sitting down under a palm tree I watched the local children splash in the water. I hoped they wouldn't see me, the pale-skinned boy under the tree. The Mzungu Boy. My hope was in vain.

  “Mzungu!” yelled one boy and ran up the sand. His sinewy wet muscles shone in the sun.

  “Mzungu!” he said again, and waved his arm for the other children to join him. One by one they saw what he saw and ran up the beach. Within moments their lean black bodies enveloped me. Salt water and sand splattered my skin.

  “Mzungu! Mzungu!” they chanted and jumped about wildly, brandishing jerrycans and sticks and kicking sand in my face. I wanted to explain that Father was half Rwandan. Only Mother was white. But the words stuck in my throat.

  Monty yapped and growled and defended me as best he could, but it didn't stop them. It wasn't long before one of their sticks caught me on the head and I fell to the ground. They scurried down the beach like rats.

  After a few moments I struggled to my feet and staggered back up the stone path, where I found Mr Umuhoza and Sebazungu standing by the pool. />
  “Arthur,” said Mr Umuhoza, ruffling my hair. My head hurt too much to pull away. “What happened?”

  “He won't answer,” laughed Sebazungu, picking me up and looking at my head. “That's a big bump, Arthur. Let's get your mother.”

  Mother wasn't in the lounge, so Sebazungu put me on a couch while Mr Umuhoza went off to find her. Monty kept guard. Mother arrived a few minutes later, followed hastily by Dr Sadler. Sweat clung to her upper lip, and her lipstick was faded.

  “Arthur,” she said, standing over me and feeling the area around the bruise. “Are you all right? You gave me a fright.”

  Dr Sadler knelt to examine me. My head was pounding.

  “Can you tell me how you feel, Arthur?” I couldn't. Dr Sadler's eyes told me that was OK. He smiled at me.

  “No long-term damage,” he concluded with a laugh and mopped his brow.

  “How did this happen?” Mother asked.

  “The local children, Madame,” replied Sebazungu.

  “Where were you? Why weren't you keeping an eye on him?” Mother didn't give Sebazungu a chance to reply.

  On her command he scooped me up and carried me to the pickup. She drove recklessly back to the flower plantation. I didn't love it this time: I felt sick.

  When we arrived, she slammed on the brakes, creating a cloud of dust that engulfed us. She jumped out, tore open the passenger door and shouted, “Take him inside, Sebazungu!” – which he did, placing me on my bed and leaving Mother and me alone.

  Mother paced like a leopard round the bedroom and muttered something about Father being displeased. She bit her fingernails. As dark descended, the evening chorus of crickets became louder, as if someone had turned up the volume on a record player. Beneath the din of crickets I heard the horn of Father's car at the gate and the sound of Joseph, boots slapping, running down the gravel drive.