by Gabi Moore
“Vik,” I said and looked at him earnestly. “You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to” I said.
He smiled. “I want to.”
He took a sip and contemplated the box on the shelf.
“That’s my passport. Some documents. When my mother came to Malawi, she met my father here. She was ill and he was the doctor who saved her life. They ended up falling in love. And, well, the rest is history…” He looked back down into his cup.
“But where’s your mother now?” It was a question I had been dying to ask. He so rarely spoke about any of this that I thought I might as well ask it now, while he at least seemed open to the idea. He sighed loudly and swirled the tea in his cup.
“She left,” he said, and then we sat in silence for a while.
He took a few more sips and started speaking again.
“I never really knew her, to be honest. I remember a little form when I was very young. She left when I was five or six. I can remember a few things. I remember her face, sometimes. Her name was Oksana. She worked with one of the NGOs that was big at the time. But the thing you have to remember is…” here he stopped and looked a little pained. “Well, she was ashamed of us, what can I say. Back then people were worse about mixed relationships, and my father was as black as they come. She didn’t want a baby either. I think she wanted to pretend none of it ever happened. She was …how can I put this? She was a “society lady”, very prim, she was supposed to go around and do charity work. Honestly, she just saw me and my father as a big mistake.”
“So she just left her child?” It seemed inconceivable to me. And what’s more, I was suddenly madly uncomfortable with the parallels between her story and mine.
“Well, I don’t think it was easy for her. But she had nothing here. She was spoiled, from what I hear. She wanted a life of luxury. She wasn’t made for this place, you know? So her and my father fought. She said she would send money. Do what she could to help. But that she never wanted to hear from us again. My father told her to shove her money. Growing up here was hard. I didn’t belong. I told myself I’d leave one day, and go to Russia and find her” he said.
“And so? You never did?”
“The older I got the more I realized that …well, she was gone. There was no point in finding her. Before he died, it was just my dad and me. To be honest, I’m sure she doesn’t even remember my name.”
“I’m sure that’s not true. How could a mother forget her son?”
He scowled a little, then leaned forward and kissed me.
“No, it’s fine. When you think about it, why would she have stayed? For some two-bit life in the jungle with a kid who was an embarrassment? She had a wealthy family. A whole life in Russia. What was she going to do, come live here in the middle of nowhere with us?”
“That doesn’t sound like such a crazy idea” I said, and he kissed me again.
Chapter 18 - Penelope
“And that one?” he asked.
I peered up at a chaotic looking tree with sausage shaped pods scattered in its branches.
“Too easy! It’s tamarind, obviously!” I said, and carried on walking.
There are herbs for everything. Herbs to make you sleep and those to wake you up. Herbs for broken bones and sore eyes and insect bites. Herbs to make babies come, or to keep them away. Vik knew them all.
“Ok, then, smarty pants, what about this?”
“Honeybush. Easy.”
“This?” he asked, walking on and pointing to something I didn’t recognize. I peered at it for a moment.
“That’s a rusted piece of can” I said and laughed.
“Just seeing if you’re paying attention.”
I loved these walks with him. Back at home, the sum total of my gardening experience started and ended at buying a basil pot from Walmart and putting it in the kitchen window. But Vik had shown me a whole new world. That for so many things in life, you didn’t need to garden at all. That mother nature was already her own garden, complete and wonderful, and all you needed to do was know what you were looking for. And where to find it. Coming out with him in the mornings like this to fetch ingredients was a little like going to Walmart, I thought with a secret smile. Shopping in the wilderness.
He handed me a yellow pom pom flower and I put it in my basket, but not before holding it up against my blue kitenge and marveling at the contrast.
“Look how beautiful we look together.” He looked, smiled and carried on walking.
I could tell people in the village thought it was dumb for me to wear things like this, but I simply didn’t give a shit. The wax batik fabric was sturdy, easy to clean and incredibly hard wearing. It held its shape, was cool to wear and came in festive prints. What’s not to like? Little did they know, I was fully planning to start wearing one on my head soon, just as soon as I got the hang of tying it properly.
“If you lived in America, you could be on TV. Like, you could have your own reality show, where you teach people about how to survive in the wild and stuff,” I said, merrily walking after him in the warm sun. I loved these kinds of days: broad, warm and bright. A day that was like a hug. Nobody outside except us two.
“Well, thank God I don’t live in America then” he said, a little gruffly.
“Hey I was just joking. Just saying.”
We walked on in silence.
“Still, I think you have such amazing skills. You’re really going to make something of them one day.”
He stopped in his tracks.
“One day…?”
“Yeah. One day. I mean when you finally leave her or …whatever.”
I saw his hand swish with agitation through the grass, trying to shake the seeds loose.
“Why do you assume I would leave?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t assume, it’s just that …well, don’t look at me like that, surely you’re not going to stay here forever?”
His hand went roughly through the long grass as he started walking again, picking up the pace.
“Well, are you?” he said to me, still not turning around to face me. I had to trot a little to keep up with his long, muscular strides through the bush. His big, hard thighs were mostly bare, but the grass never seemed to bother him.
“Jeez, Vik, I don’t know. I’m just saying. Maybe you could come with me back to America. We could organize something…”
“But who said I want to go to America with you?” he snapped. The conversation was beginning to hurt.
“Nobody. Nobody said anything about that. I’m just thinking about, you know, down the line. In the future…”
“Are you happy with me here, right now, Penny?”
“Of course I’m happy! I’m happier than I’ve ever been, you know how happy I’ve –”
“Then why are you already thinking of leaving? Why does everything have to lead somewhere? Why does everything have to be something else?”
I had never seen him angry before.
“I …I don’t know what you mean,” I sputtered. He was turned towards me now, and his figure was imposing. A quick, ugly thought flashed into my mind. There was nobody else here but us two. He could do whatever he liked with me.
“I’m just saying that …eventually we have to think of the future, right? I don’t understand why you’re angry,” I said at last, my voice cracking. I was meant to go home a full week ago, but had extended my stay. Dylan was giving me the silent treatment, but nobody in the village had said a word about me staying on.
“So, how much longer are you going to grace us with your presence for then? Another six months? Three?”
Before I could reply he was speaking again.
“Maybe we should all just wait to see what your plans are and then adjust our whole lives for you?”
My face grew hot.
“Ok, what in the hell is your problem?” I said, raising my voice. I would argue till I was blue in the face that I had not stayed just for his sake. I hadn’t. But he was certainly pa
rt of the reason. In fact, I had more or less thrown away my relationship with Dylan to come here and work on this stupid garden, and spend time with him. So why was he being like this?
“Do you realize how much I’ve had to give up to stay here?” I said, my voice matching the bitterness in his.
“To give up? You poor thing.”
“I’m serious Vik. You’re acting like all of this is easy for me. There’s no way I can ever marry Dylan now, and it’s all beca--”
“Oh? How sad for you. How will you survive without a husband?”
My eyes prickled with tears. He recoiled a little, and looked sorry to have said it.
“Look, I’m just confused about why you’re talking about ‘a future’ like that when you’re going to leave anyway”
“But…”
“You’re going to leave right?” he barked.
“Well, eventually, yes.”
“Then, there is no future,” he said and spun around to walk on again.
“But …we could work something out. We could find a way to…”
“Yes? To what? Live happily ever after? Are you going to put me in your backpack and take me home and keep me under your bed?” he said.
“Vik. That’s unfair.”
His face sunk a little.
“I know. You’re right, I’m sorry. This is my fault. I already knew all of this was going to happen.”
“All of what?”
He was turning into a big pouting child before my very eyes. This was a side to him I’d never seen before. Did he want me to stay? To go? I was so confused.
“That we’d just have some fun together and then part ways. That’s just how these things go,” he said, his voice cold.
I walked after him for a few paces, the ground beneath me suddenly seeming so much drier and cracklier than it did a moment before.
“So …let me get this straight. You don’t see us, like, staying together,” I said, hating how young and naïve I sounded. I heard my own voice with his ears and hated myself for it. He turned again and looked at me. His gaze was hard, and all the warm depth I was so used to finding in those beautiful blue eyes seemed closed off to me now, and everything became hard and flinty instead.
His jaw looked so tight. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. Waiting for me to utter some magical words that he needed to hear. But I was at a loss.
I had held the full heft of his body between my thighs almost every day for months now. I had anchored against this same chest over and over again as he pummeled into me, and shuddered and came in my arms, and we had fallen asleep together, his great big body beside mine, and he had said he loved me. I started to cry.
“So, I was just …’fun’…”
He kicked the ground.
“Obviously, this conversation isn’t very much fucking fun…” he said and spat into the grass. I hated him just then. I wanted to slap him right across his big arrogant face.
I tightened my own jaw. Fine. I could handle it. I could handle this.
“Well, if we’re only just going to end things and it doesn’t mean anything to you, then why bother carrying on at all? Why not just end them now?” I said. I balled my hands into fists to stop them from shaking. He looked wounded for a second, but then laughed.
“Yeah, good point. Thank you. So glad I had you to point that out to me,” he said, his voice dripping with bitterness. He flung the branch he had in his hand to the ground and stared daggers at it.
“Off you go then, don’t let me fucking keep you,” he spat. He couldn’t even look at me. Somewhere deep in the back of my throat, a painful, angry knot rose up and choked me, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I threw my own basket on the ground and took off in the other direction, the stinging tears blurring my path back to the dorm. It was though someone had kicked my guts and split open a bag of acid inside me, and now it was bubbling over and I didn’t know how to stop it from spilling everywhere.
I raced home and flung myself on my bed, a flood of sobs wracking my body.
Chapter 19 - Penelope
Without Vik, things lost their luster. Malawi all at once seemed so maddeningly brown.
The thing about this country is that nothing is for free here. Nothing at all. Every last little scrap costs you, sometimes dearly. The garden was too expensive. There was no way around it. For every measly maize plant we hoped to coax out of the ground, we poured in straw, and fish fertilizer, and barrels of water. I don’t know how much of my life went into each cob, into each little kernel, but it was a lot. And it was a lousy return on investment.
After a while there was no point pretending anymore. The villagers politely came to visit the plot occasionally, and Mama Tembi did her best to appear grateful, but the fact was that nobody needed that community garden. Nobody wanted it. The maize would get eaten, once we finally managed to get it out the ground, but it was clear what everything would have preferred to have: currency. Gainful employment. Proper housing.
I felt ashamed of the garden after a while. I had simply trusted that the mission leaders had known what the correct thing to do was. The Malawians would get a community garden, end of story. Sounded good, but a few months in and I realized: the mission leaders never even came here. They had no idea what they were doing. The Malawians needed good sewage and internet and proper roads and something to export. The longer I stayed here, the more the whole thing seemed like a joke.
I was a different kind of disappointment I felt when I first arrived. An obvious kind of disappointment. Dirt was one thing. Poverty was one thing, and scorpions. That was all fine, I guess. What was really getting me down was how badly I had thought any of this through. How little of an effect I was really having. Why had nobody told me? That I was wasting my time?
The heat beat down on me, out in that open field. I threw my body weight down onto the spade and tried to wrench it out again. The skin on my hands was beyond sore, but I didn’t care. If I couldn’t do anything useful in this place, at least let me dig a proper hole. At least let me get the stupid stuff in the ground, and put that damn seed in there, and at least I could claim that as a triumph, no matter how small and stupid it might be.
Lots of things felt stupid these days. I had no clue anymore, to be honest. It sounds stupid, but I missed him. It sounds stupid, but I couldn’t see him again. I just couldn’t go back. And it sounds stupid, but even now, a whole lifetime since I had picked through those weeds to his cabin, even now, I still felt him, in me.
He didn’t wash out of my skin. When I woke up in the morning, he was still there somehow, inside me, aching, the first thought in my brain. My stupid brain.
I hadn’t heard from Dylan in ages, too, although that was a less complicated situation. He didn’t know what I had been doing here, without him, but he didn’t need to. He could tell just through the few messages we exchanged, that I had gone. I had broken free. And I wasn’t ever coming back. Something had been released in me, and I wasn’t going to pack it away again. Not for him, not for anyone.
There were some new missionaries. They avoided me. I wondered if people were gossiping about me. I didn’t care. I threw my weight into the spade handle again and wrenched it, pulling out a rock in clumps of dead grass. Things had grown here before, and died. The soil kept giving and giving, although it got tired. I reached down and crumbled the clumps in my hand. At least there was soil. At least, if you fed it and tilled it, the soil could give you something marvelous in return. The thought provided me some comfort.
I stood back up again, wiped the sweat from my brow. I wanted to puke.
“You OK, mama?” one of the other workers asked me.
I nodded. We carried on working.
I liked working with them. Seven of us there were, in total. We worked for the most part in silence. We found a rhythm together: down came the spade, out came the soil, in went the fish, on went the straw, then over with the spade again to bury it all in. Then again down with the spade, out with s
oil… again and again they worked. Occasionally there was a joke or someone cursed a rock that ruined the flow, but together we were a loose machine, working that field like there was nothing else to do with life.
I could go home. I guess. But why? Why not just extend my visa and…?
I couldn’t dust the powdery red soil off of me. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. He had dug deep into me, loosened the clumps and now strange parts of my heart and mind were exposed for the first time ever. My eye caught a fat, pale yellow worm wriggling away from my spade tip. The sight of it made me retch and before I knew it, I was bent double and vomiting into the hole I just dug.
“Penny! You’re sick! Come let’s go, enough work for you today…” one of them said, and grabbed me by the arm. I was dropped off at Mama Tembi’s, naturally, and then bid adieu. I felt awful. It was empty inside, just Mama Tembi cleaning up and a cat winding its way through the stool legs. She gave me a Grandpa headache powder and rested a broad hand on my back, stroking me with sympathy.
“How’s the garden?” she said.
“Crap,” I said and groaned.
She laughed and clucked her tongue.
“Ey, I don’t know what you’re doing out there anyway. Why don’t you go work with Valerie at the school instead?”
I gave her a leery look.
“Because I came to work here on the garden. So I’m working on the garden.” Besides, Valerie could go to hell.
She took my chin in her hands and lifted my face to hers, giving me a long, hard look.
“How are you feeling?”
“Crap,” I said again, and tried to wriggle away from her. But she held me firm and peered into my eyes. Strangely, something like anger flashed over her face.
“I’m sorry, Mama, I’m just …just tired I think. Working too hard. I’m going to go home and sleep it off, ok?” I said, hoping I hadn’t offended her.
“Yes, go home and sleep it off. Good idea” she said and patted my back again. She stood to carry on with her cleaning. “Ask Valerie tonight to give you some proper medicine, she always has something.”
