The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  III

  The Children

  Joseph

  2014

  Dad was coming home to die, or at least that’s what he had told them over the phone. He arrived on a Thursday. They were late to pick him up so they found him already outside the airport. He was waiting under the covered walkway to the car park, with its blue canopy and its white tent walls plastered with ads for Airtel and Standard Chartered and Digit-All. American suitcases, bedecked with buckles and pockets, sat on either side of him like guard dogs. Chinese passengers – their presence in Lusaka had swelled in the early 2000s – swarmed around him.

  He wasn’t yet forty but he could have been sixty. He had The Virus, as did Joseph’s mother and younger brother, Farai. Only Joseph had escaped its clutches. But Dad had never shown the symptoms before. He was thin now – as thin as sixteen-year-old Joseph – and his beige skin looked leathery. In grey slacks and a flag-green golf shirt that rippled in the breeze, he looked like an old tree in rainy season, especially backed by the blue glow of the canopy.

  Grandpa Ronald stayed in the car while the others got out to hug the prodigal son. Ba Grace loaded suitcases into the boot while Joseph helped Dad into the passenger seat. His arm felt light – Joseph thought again of parched wood – and his eyes glassy and blinky. When they were all in again, Gran leaned forward from the back and clutched the edge of his seat.

  ‘How was the flight, darling?’ she asked, her voice trembling.

  ‘Not too bad,’ he replied, turning so she could hear him. ‘These days, flights feel like nothing. I have had more flights than I’ve had beers. Well, that’s not true, since I’ve had beers on flights, but you know what I mean.’

  He chuckled and inhaled expansively as they picked up speed, the breeze purring through the open windows. The outskirts of the airport whipped by. Men on bicycles stacked high with firewood seemed to zip backward as the car passed.

  ‘You know what? I’m good,’ he said to Grandpa Ronald, who had not asked, who was busy driving while old, his spectacles pincering the round tip of his nose. ‘It’s good to be home.’

  Home. When he had called last week to tell them he was coming, he had offered to stay in one of the houses he owned in Lusaka. Joseph had overheard Gran’s end of the conversation.

  ‘How bad is it?’ she’d asked.

  Pause.

  ‘What?’ Gran had paced the kitchen in her patapatas. ‘You ought to be with your family!’

  Pause.

  ‘One of your properties? No, please, darling, don’t be absurd. Just come home.’

  What home? Joseph had wondered then. What home? he wondered now, staring at the pale spotty rag of Gran’s hand still clutching the edge of the passenger seat. The family home in Thorn Park where Joseph had grown up had been sold in 2012, after the divorce. Joseph had gone to stay with his grandparents in Handsworth Park while his mother took little Farai to London to get medical treatment. A few months had turned into a year, then two, as a series of infections haunted the boy’s lungs. Mum had said it wasn’t worth it for Joseph to join them until he was done with his IGCSE exams. The thread connecting him to her was going slack.

  Dad had drifted away, too. He technically lived in Addis Ababa with his new wife, Salina – no one in the family had met her, no one had even attended their wedding – but he had spent much of the past five years hopping between international conferences and workshops about The Virus. Joseph had been deemed too young to travel alone to visit him. Their relationship these days consisted of terse WhatsApps, mostly about Joseph’s studies: How’s Rhodes Park, how’s exam prep? Fine, where r u? New York, Cape Town, Beijing. Dr Lionel Banda was anywhere but Lusaka, spreading the word about his research on a vaccine for The Virus, which was now about to kill him – a world tour of futility.

  This was apparently his last stop. Joseph didn’t really believe his father was dying and he didn’t understand why he would come back to Zambia if he were. Would Mum come home from England to help him die? What sort of preparation, what sort of entertainment does a dying man want? Last things? Joseph had no idea what those would be – he was still obsessed with first things.

  When they got home from the airport, Dad’s first thing was tea. To please Gran, of course. Except then, at the last minute, he chose coffee – ‘I’ve become too used in Addis. Black as night, please’ – and they all joined him even though it was late, and they would all have insomnia, bad dreams, a bad morning. Such toppling effects seemed inconsequential in the face of Death. Joseph stared at his father, trying to see if Death hung over him like a smell or a colour – egg-yolk sulphurous and yellow. But he was the same – tall, handsome Dr Banda, just thinner and darker, the colour of honey on toast. Was that from the Ethiopian sun? Or The Virus?

  ‘Did the antiretrovirals stop working?’ Gran asked then blew over her mug. She was always unwilling to ignore the elephant in the room. It was the least Zambian thing about her.

  ‘The ARVs are still effective,’ said Dad. ‘It isn’t The Virus that’s doing it, it’s the side effects of the vaccine.’

  He shuffled off a rack of obscure technical terms to make his point: he was going to die; he was a doctor, he would know. Joseph sipped his bitter coffee. What else is like that? An obstetrician knowing she’s pregnant? A priest knowing he’s sinned? Heal thyself. Grandpa lit a pipe and changed the topic. Dad’s laugh was still outrageously loud, his chin shirring as he cackled, but he fell asleep in the middle of their conversation. He had to be nudged and prodded and in the end, half-carried to bed.

  ‘No, no,’ he kept saying. ‘I just got here!’

  Dad slept in Joseph’s bedroom and Joseph slept on the sofa. The tinny aqua light from the stereo turned the sitting room into a dull aquarium through which Joseph’s eyes swam back and forth, thinking proud prod prodigal prodigious, until sleep finally drowned him.

  * * *

  When Joseph got home from school on Friday – he was in grade ten – he found his father napping in front of the TV, a red book closed in his lap. It was small but its musty smell perfumed the whole room. They shared a mango and laughed about Joseph’s teachers. Joseph was at that stage of feeling superior to them. He was at the top of his class and auditing online MIT courses in his spare time. Dad was amused by this arrogance in a son he had always believed to be shy; Joseph was pleased that he had changed enough to surprise his father. They indulged each other for a while, bantering about biology and chemistry. Then they bickered over DSTV. Joseph wanted to watch Mzansi Magic, Dad wanted to watch Real Madrid: the dancing girls vs the kicking lads. Dad won. Joseph fell out of humour. Just because you’re dying – he didn’t say it but his father rubbed his head as if he had, as if condescending to his worry.

  On Saturday morning, over breakfast, Dad announced that he was going golfing. They all stopped eating Ba Sakala’s cold, rubbery pancakes.

  ‘This is no laughing matter,’ said Gran.

  ‘Don’t be foolish,’ said Grandpa.

  They refused to drive or accompany him to Lusaka Golf Club. Unflappable, Dad sent the gardener down the road to whistle for a taxi and took off by himself. He came back hours later, the ankles of his plaid trousers red with dried mud. He had hit par.

  ‘A toast!’ Dad said and sent Joseph for some liquor.

  He hunted around the larder for a while but all he could find was an old bottle of Grandpa’s cognac, which he poured into crystal glasses that he had to wipe clear of dust. The four of them toasted. Joseph sipped and winced at the thin sweet tang.

  ‘Lusaka, you cannot compete!’ Dad kept boasting. He was full of dirty jokes about the arthritic caddy, about his swollen knuckles. ‘You know what they say about busy hands!’

  ‘Oh, you’re terrible, Lionel,’ said Gran, sheepish about how anxious she had been.

  ‘Don’t be obscene,’ said Grandpa, puffing his pipe.

  ‘Don’t play
innocent!’ Dad scoffed. ‘I know how you guys did back in the seventies.’

  Grandpa cleared his throat. There was an awkward silence. Joseph stared. The notion of his grandparents anywhere near sex was both self-evident and terrifying, like seeing a ghost.

  * * *

  That night, Dad had a stroke or a heart attack or both. Gran stumbled into him lying unconscious on the bathroom floor, still in his plaid golf trousers. An ambulance would have taken too long, so they drove him to the hospital, Dad’s head on Joseph’s lap in the back. They arrived just as dawn chinked through the clouded glass of the sky. The doctors determined that it was best to leave him unconscious, in the hopes that the swelling in his head would go down.

  They sat and waited. They alternated between speaking to him and about him, and pronouns and verb tenses began to muddle – you are, he was. His hospital bed looked more like a contraption than a place for rest. He seemed tangled in it, held prisoner by the machines monitoring him. At 11 a.m. or so, his eyes locked open, the tendons starting in his neck.

  ‘Where is she?’ he said, gazing around wildly.

  Gran scrambled for his hand in the sheets. ‘Lionel? Lionel!’ She turned to Joseph and it seemed for a moment that her skin was blazing with eyes. ‘Get the doctor, Joe! Now!’

  But by the time the doctors had rushed in, Dad had closed his eyes and nuzzled back into his coma. Joseph’s grandparents whispered about which ‘she’ he had meant. Before the stroke, Dad had asked after Thandi and Farai in England. But maybe he had meant his new wife Salina?

  On Sunday afternoon, his lungs gave up and the doctors put him on a respirator. It took a while to adjust to the staticky sound of the breathing tube, and to the light spatter of tracheal blood visible in it. His bare feet were yellow and cracked and they would intermittently curl inwards as his shoulders rolled forward. The nurse came in and punctured their hopes. No, she said, this was not a sign of life. It was pronation, an involuntary convulsion of the body. Oh.

  ‘It’s time to gather the family,’ Grandpa noted grimly, and went outside to make calls.

  Tears rolled from Gran’s unseeing eyes. She wiped them with her hand repeatedly, uselessly, a windscreen wiper in a tornado. Ba Grace cried with her, a brief squall. Joseph didn’t yet feel his grief so he cried at a remove. He cried for his grandmother’s crying, quietly, so as not to disturb it.

  * * *

  Joseph’s mother arrived early Monday morning, a small boy clutching her hand. Joseph hugged her stiffly and waved down at his three-year-old brother, whom he hadn’t seen since Farai was an infant. Farai had inherited their father’s golden skin and dark brown eyes but their mother’s reddish hair. Hers was hidden now under a black chitambala, a sign of her haste. Joseph could tell that she had been weeping the whole flight over, too, even though on the call to London, he had only heard Gran say: ‘Lionel’s sick. Come home.’

  Mum had learned that he was dead once she got to the house, once she had been settled with a cup of tea and Farai had been extricated from her lap. Joseph and Grandpa had driven to the hospital to pick up the death certificate, so they missed the drama. Ba Grace filled them in on how Mum had reacted.

  ‘But Bana Joseph? She was cry-ying, bwana,’ she said, making bee-like patterns around the room, bouncing Farai in her arms. The boy was weeping, his head kneading rhythmically into her shoulder. ‘I was with this one so I could not help. That ka lazy muntu’ – her disdain for the gardener was palpable – ‘he was not around. So Madamu was the one who held her down. Iye! Mwebantu. Hm? Hm.’

  Ba Grace made to papu Farai, adopting a precarious pose: her body bent perpendicular, with the boy balanced belly down on her back. She cast a chitenge over him like a sail, tied its corners in a knot over her heart, and rose with him strapped to her back. Farai slipped a thumb in his mouth and melted against her.

  Gran came in and stood in the middle of the kitchen, stricken and silent. Grandpa went over and put his arms around her. Joseph realised he had never seen them like this. He almost laughed at the incongruous sight – the short black man and the tall white woman, gently rocking.

  * * *

  The will seemed simple at first. Lee had named Agnes his executor, and everything was to go to Salina apart from some funds for his two sons’ education. But it seemed Lee had neglected to update part of the document: his bank account and houses in Lusaka were still bequeathed to Thandi. This meant that the most complicated estate items – three houses in three different neighbourhoods – were now her responsibility. Thandi had started to build a new life in England. She had a job at a travel agency and was working towards right of abode for her and her sons. An inheritance in Zambia was more of a headache than a gift.

  Salina apparently felt the same way. When Gran called to inform her of Lee’s death, she sighed. ‘I told him he would only reach death sooner if he went to greet it.’ She was Virus-positive too but she had refused his experimental treatment. She told Gran she would fly into Lusaka for the funeral and went on to enquire about the new upscale Radisson Blu hotel in town.

  ‘Typical,’ Aunt Carol muttered. Her face was puffy from crying, her cargo pants creased at the joints. She had just flown in from Malawi, where she worked as a wildlife conservationist.

  ‘I invited her to stay but she said she wouldn’t want to impose,’ said Gran, flustered.

  Aunt Carol sipped her tea. ‘They were only married for a year, Mum.’ She herself was unmarried.

  ‘They must have meant something to each other,’ said Gran. ‘But Salina did seem awfully calm to learn she was a widow.’

  ‘It is very rude,’ said Grandpa. ‘She has dishonoured my son.’

  They stared at him. He had always had a strained relationship with his son. Now that Lee was dead, Grandpa seemed unusually interested in honouring him, or at least in displaying that honour to others. Grandpa had six siblings, two of whom had had eight children each. Having long kept his life with his white wife and coloured children separate from this ‘village’, as he called it, he had recently reconnected with the relatives to organise the funeral. They had eagerly inserted themselves into the arrangements. They loved Lee with an assumed bloodlove and boasted of his successes – and there would of course be plentiful leavings, bones to pick, at a funeral of this calibre.

  When his grandparents came home from choosing the coffin, Joseph could tell that they had argued. Gran looked bewildered, Grandpa fractious. Gran told Joseph later that it had been a madhouse at the warehouse in town, a dozen relatives vying for the honour of selecting the perfect box. In the end, Grandpa had bought a gold-plated coffin lined in white satin, the most expensive one in the place. The funerals, both the home one and the church one, would be opulent and grand. Dr Lionel Banda would receive all the ceremonial honours due to him.

  * * *

  The home funeral came first. The mourners – relatives, friends, colleagues and patients – trickled into the house in Handsworth Park over the course of three days. Women knelt on the sitting-room floor and wailed. Men sat outside in armchairs and murmured. Joseph was sent to the TV room, where all the ‘kids’ – those under twenty – had been banished. The girls were heaped on the sofas, dabbling on their phones, chatting and laughing. The boys lay prone on the floor, gazing at the flat-screen TV, where Serena Williams and some white woman were driving a neon ball back and forth across flush green parcelled in white. The volume was up. Grunts and pocks and hushed British voices filled the room. Joseph sat in a corner and took out his phone.

  ‘Joseph!’ Ba Grace’s voice came from the doorway. She was holding Farai by the hand. ‘Please, you must take care of your bluther and give your mother some time.’

  Joseph got up reluctantly and led the boy into the room by the hand, Farai looking forlornly over his shoulder at Ba Grace’s retreating back. The two of them sat in the corner.

  ‘You’re my brother?’ Farai asked.


  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have a car?’

  Joseph shook his head.

  ‘A bike?’

  ‘No.’

  Farai proceeded to interrogate him about every vehicle imaginable: planes and motorcycles and vans and trains. Finally, Joseph collapsed onto his back and begged him to stop. Farai giggled and put his small heavy head on Joseph’s stomach, sighing ‘Hokay, hokay.’ For the rest of the afternoon, Farai was content to sit next to him, his hand coiled inside Joseph’s while they watched the tennis match.

  When it was over, they went to the kitchen together to fetch a drink, Farai trotting at Joseph’s side. The house had been rearranged, furniture shoved to the walls, bookshelves turned to face them, valuable items locked up. It didn’t seem like home. They passed the open door to the veranda, where the men chatted quietly in mbaula-lit dimness. They passed the open door to the dining room, where Gran and Aunt Carol sat in silence at the table. Gran looked frail beside her muscular daughter, cowed by the traditional chitenge wrapper she was wearing. Their faces were human and sad in the evening light.

  In the kitchen, Joseph took two Fantas from the battalion in the fridge, handed one to Farai, and searched for a bottle opener. One of Dad’s colleagues came in and plucked a Mosi from a crate on the floor. Joseph felt intimidated until he zoomed in on the doctor. His white lab coat was wrinkled and stained; his afro was flat on one side and speckled with grey; a withered black stethoscope hung from his neck, a prop too far.

  ‘You are the sons of the diseased?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Joseph stood taller. ‘I’m Joseph. This is Farai.’

  ‘Ah! Me, am Dr Musadabwe.’ They shook hands. ‘Your father was a great man! I heard a lot of goody things about you. Am velly-solly for your losses.’ The man’s breath was putrid.