BABIES IN THE TIME OF YELLOW FEVER
By August Charlie’s work wasn’t going well. His investors in the safari company decided the government-issued permits were taking too long to procure. The canoe and walking safaris were canceled; Charlie needed to move closer to the whitewater rafting operations below Victoria Falls and concentrate his energies on that part of the business. So we packed up the house, sold two ponies, and rented a cottage in Livingstone on the banks of the Zambezi River.
Before we left Lusaka, I invented a reference for Mr. Njovu that might help him get work elsewhere. Freddy waved me away like a cholera fly, insisting the last thing he needed was a reference from me. His uncle, he assured me, had a car and a good nose for business. “I am going to be a taxi driver,” he announced. Then he invited me to see the house he had been building near the Great East Road.
I was astonished. “You’ve been building a house?” I thought I knew Freddy and that I had been on friendly enough terms that I would have known something this monumental. “When?”
“On my days off,” Freddy said. “You should see it.”
So Freddy and I took one last terrifying drive together through town, over the bridge that spanned the railway line, past the Anglican cathedral, and out toward the airport. Then we turned down a jumble of dirt roads and stopped at a small house, redolent with fresh cement. Freddy negotiated the cluster of padlocks on the door and let me in. My eyes adjusted to the light and I saw that not all our belongings had made it down to our new house in Livingstone. Freddy’s new house was furnished almost entirely from what he had gleaned from ours: a couple of small tables, two garden chairs, some pots and pans, plates and cups, cushions, a few vases, photo frames.
It took me a while to know what to say. “It’s very nice,” I said at last.
Freddy smiled. “We like the same things,” he agreed.
Charlie and I moved south with the two remaining horses and the puppy. At the end of the month, when my belly had stretched far beyond the limit of what it seemed possible my skin could contain, we drove across the border into Zimbabwe and found lodgings on a farm next to a clinic in Marondera. I worried about being alone for the delivery, by which I meant I was worried about being beyond the reach of anyone related to me by blood. I phoned Dad and asked for Mum, even as I feared that her latest depression compounded with her own mother’s precipitous final decline had put her out of the running as a potential helpmeet. “I’ll have a word with her,” Dad said. “She’ll pull her socks up for you, Bobo. She always does.”
So Mum joined us—her hair slightly askew, her eyes paled to yellow, and her hands more unsteady than normal. I could tell it was a great effort of will for her to stay on the surface of her mind, to keep her madness at bay. She had difficulty concentrating, she drank a little too much too early, her sentences sometimes came out of sequence, slurred and breaking the bounds of customary logic. I could tell she felt my watchfulness, anxiety, and wariness and she wanted to compensate with a level of caring she was barely capable of giving to herself. “Come on, Bobo,” she said. “Isn’t it time for your afternoon nap?” Or, “Here’s a nice cup of tea,” by which I knew everything she had left unspoken.
In the mornings, we went for walks around the lodge. In the afternoons, we drank tea under the flamboyant trees in the yard and read. In the evenings, we ate an early supper on the veranda and listened to the sounds of a southern African spring: bush babies, crickets, and frogs. About once every three hours, Mum looked at her watch and said, “This has been a biblically long pregnancy, Bobo. Why don’t you drink some Epsom salts and hop up and down?” Then, early on the morning of September 15, 1993, the slight contractions I had been having all week tugged stronger. We drove to the little clinic nearby and the midwife declared the baby ready for arrival. “First we give you an enema,” she said, snapping rubber gloves onto her hands.
I looked at Mum in terror.
“Oh sorry, Bobo. I forgot to tell you about this bit.” But the truth is, no one had told me about any bit, or at least not in any way that might now be helpful. Anything I knew about childbirth I had gleaned from my Where There Is No Doctor book, from high school biology, and from Vanessa who had closed her eyes when I asked her what to expect. “Oh Al, it’s not the most fun I’ve ever had.”
I labored hard for eight hours. And then, at two in the afternoon, I suddenly felt the baby insisting itself into the world, its head crashing against my pelvis. But as hard as I strained, nothing would change. The baby stayed inside me, and I stayed helplessly beetle-turned-up, my spine buckling with the pressure of this unproductive heaving. I searched for Mum. “Is this bad?” I asked.
“You’re fine,” Mum said, which I didn’t think I was, but if she sounded calm, almost bored, then I reasoned we were probably still okay. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
Charlie told me not to panic. Then he said something about the difficulty he’d sometimes faced breathing thin air near the summit of Kilimanjaro back when he’d guided it for American clients. I glared at him. A cigar poked preemptively out of his shirt pocket. Another wave of agony surged through me. Another hour passed. I pushed and breathed and pushed and breathed. Yet another hour came and went. Then Mum said, “Oh, do get a move on, Bobo. It’s jolly nearly time for tea.” Which is how I knew even she was beginning to worry, seriously.
So I redoubled my efforts, and still nothing happened. More time passed. Then the doctor made an impatient noise. She brought out a scalpel, made an incision in what felt like the epicenter of my pain, sank her arms between my legs, attached something to the baby’s head, and began pulling. Charlie put his foot on the end of the bed to stop it skidding across the room, Mum held on to my shoulders. I pushed and breathed and told myself I’d never do this again. Then there was an abrupt release, and there she was: a long-limbed, waxy, blood-smeared baby unfurling on my chest, her lips a perfect rosebud of query, and everything I had ever thought I knew about pain and love and fear of death raced out of me and was replaced by a fierce, murderous adoration. I looked at Mum in astonishment.
“I know,” she said, and for a moment something swam between us that had to do with the children she had lost, although it wasn’t anything I was prepared to put into words. Then before I could try, Mum cleared her throat. “Don’t worry, Bobo. They all look like that when they’re born. Chinless and a bit squashed.” The baby closed her mouth over my nipple. Mum pulled the sheet back off my stomach with careful apprehension, as if expecting to unearth a small but vicious animal, and allowed herself a proper inspection of her first granddaughter. “Well at least she has a nice leg for a riding boot,” she said at last.
Our new cottage, several miles upstream from Victoria Falls, had seemed romantic and charmingly eccentric when I was pregnant. But now that Sarah was here, I could tell it was not suitable for a newborn. Our landlady, a Belgian of White Russian descent, had come out from the gloom of postwar Brussels to the violently bright promise of the Belgian Congo. In subsequent decades, divorce, war, and her own restlessness had kicked her about the African continent and even for brief stints to Pakistan and England. But in the 1970s she had ended up in Zambia, teaching French in a Catholic mission school. When she retired, she bought this dry little farm at a bend in the river and named it Quiet Waters.
Out of rocks harvested from the farm, she built a house for herself and cottages for potential renters. We were the only takers. The buildings were picturesque enough from a distance. Up close, however, the concrete floors were cracked and seeped colonies of stinging guinea-fowl ants. The small, uneven rooms were stiflingly hot, absorbing heat all day and exhaling it at night. Electricity was sporadic; there was no running water. I became frantic and tearful, holding Charlie up on his way to work in the morning to plead my case. “Nappies,” I argued, pointing to the washing line. “The baby,” I implored. “And it’s so hot.”
I wanted the luxury of running
water, a fan, and reliable refrigeration. And more than at any other time since leaving for boarding school at the age of seven, I needed my mother. But one morning, not long after Sarah was born, Granny had refused her morning cup of tea, turned her face to the wall, and closed her eyes in the final Highland gesture. So in early October, Mum flew to Scotland and stayed in the antiseptic hum of a Scottish hospital for weeks, watching her mother gradually let go. Granny had already relinquished most of her mind, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Now she went about losing her appetite, her worldly attachments, and her will to live.
Her final words were, “I don’t want to be a nuisance.” Then Granny closed her eyes and seemed to hold her breath until everything stilled and she was gone. After that, Mum left the Dundee Infirmary and went back to the bungalow with its tropical-setting radiators and its radio forever statically lost beyond the reaches of The Archers. She found her father in his garden, bent over his potato bed, preemptively turning the hard winter soil for next year’s crop, as if grief could be stanched as long as there was the promise of seasonal vegetables. Mum stood, cocooned in the sheepskin jacket she had kept in her parents’ spare room since she had left England in the early 1970s. The wide collar had come and gone out of fashion at least twice in that time.
My grandfather saw my mother watching him, straightened up, and tapped his pipe out against his corduroy pants. “It’s eleven,” Mum said. My grandfather confirmed this fact with a glance to the soupy sky. Wordlessly, he propped his hoe against the shed wall, broke the clods of clay off his shoes, and went inside. Mum followed him into the kitchen. They had their aperitifs—a couple of rough martinis—then Mum set the table with her mother’s cracked or chipped china plates and with the old silver cutlery worn with the teeth of their ancestors. My grandfather took the food out of the oven and brought it to the dining room.
They sat down to lunch. My grandfather poured them both a Guinness stout. “She’s gone, you know,” Mum said. My grandfather nodded and a few huge tears rolled down his impressive nose. Then he carved the reheated mutton and handed her a plate. The green beans had been boiled gray, which was one of those details you notice after someone has died, and then can never stop noticing. My grandmother always blanched beans to perfection; salted water to a boil, the beans added and cooked for no longer than four minutes, rinsed in a shock of cold water, and served within minutes of coming off the stove. These colorless, limp things were the beans that would forever more come to this table now she was gone.
A week after her death there was a small memorial service for my grandmother at the village kirk, but there turned out to be remarkably little to say about a woman who had been born on the Isle of Skye, found her way to Kenya to raise her two daughters, and had come home to Britain for the last decades of her life. The fact of her having taken safaris in the shadow of Mount Elgon, or of her having been fluent in both Gaelic and Swahili, and of her ability to kill a rabbit with a single well-placed chop to the back of its neck did not seem worth recounting to a group of mostly dutiful, slightly doddering parishioners attending the service. They had known her only as the old woman in the Second World War cottage on the edge of the village, the owner of a sweet dog, the wife of the chivalrous, absentminded English gentleman who spent most of his days in his vegetable garden.
“Well, that’s the thing. There’s never very much to say at the end,” Dad said. “Or there shouldn’t be. Someone’s born, does the bit in the middle, and then they die. It doesn’t change all that much from one bloke to the next.”
In the New Year, Mum flew back to Zambia and surrendered completely to that old undertow of grief. Although this time she went so deep that looking down even we—her daughters and husband—couldn’t see much more than the waving shadow of her limbs. We missed her as much for who she was in particular—irreverent, intelligent, capable of surprising surges of compassion—as we did for who she represented for us: the mother ship.
Perhaps most of us never stop needing a person from whom we can fledge and return repeatedly, continually trying out our independence in the knowledge that there is somewhere and someone to which and to whom we can return. Vanessa and I had learned the beginning of this universal truth piecemeal and early in the sinkholes of our mother’s periodic depressions and manic attacks, but what we didn’t know then was the whole of that truth: the only way to stop needing a mother ship was to become the mother ship yourself.
Mum spent most of her days in bed, refusing to notice anything around her. She didn’t notice mealtimes come and go, she didn’t notice Vanessa or Vanessa’s two young sons, she didn’t notice Sarah or me when we came up to visit. She drank mostly brandy, and often she took pills, and the combination of the two caused her days to bleed into one long deferment. She had taken our family lifeboat—the one in which I had vaguely expected us all to reconvene and reunite from time to time—and she had wobbled off alone on her own compelling current. She was now impossible to reach by either ordinary or extraordinary means.
“She’ll be all right,” my father said.
“But what about us?” I wanted to ask. “What about Vanessa and me? What about you?”
I wanted someone—a mother to be precise, our mother to be exact—to see us, to feel what we were feeling, or even to acknowledge that we existed, but we were motherless in the most literal sense of the word. It was nothing new. It’s not as if Mum hadn’t taken long solo voyages into her dark, grief-disturbed interior before, but now Vanessa and I were mothers ourselves, and there is nothing like the profound loneliness of early motherhood to make a person ache to be embraced by their person of origin.
“Your mother was very good with all of you when you were little,” Dad said. He frowned as if trying to remember back. “Which is just as well because I certainly wasn’t getting anywhere near the business end of a baby.” He shuddered. “Babies will do anything,” he said. “Lots of hollering and buckets of nappies, that’s what I remember. Good God, if I’d been left alone with any of you lot, I’d have called an ambulance.”
But I recall Olivia’s childhood as a time of uncharacteristic tranquility, our house redolent with comfort: Woodward’s Gripe Water, Fortris juice, Germolene. I think of Mum as happy then, her tuneless singing as she danced the baby into the garden. I remember feeling jealous and proud all at once. Jealous of the attention the baby was getting, proud that this was our mother. She was so good with her infant, so practical and capable but also so smitten and joyful.
There is a reason women become a version of their own mothers when babies are born: having lost themselves in the moment of their child’s birth, it is a way of anchoring themselves back to the habits—the smells and foods and rituals—of their own childhood. So I soaked Sarah’s soiled nappies in bleach before boiling them in a huge vat over a woodstove. I rubbed her head, feet, and elbows with Vaseline. I kept a basin of Dettol handy to swab the stump of her umbilical cord. I bathed her prickly heat in calamine lotion.
Motherhood—the way too many of us do it alone now—without an exaltation of female relatives, without a heft of knowing matrons to buoy us up, is unnatural. But all the women I had anticipated being here at this stage in my life—my sister, my mother, my grandmother—had been tied off from me with a vast, invisible tourniquet. Granny was dead. I couldn’t ax my way through the deep, frozen sea of Mum’s sorrow to beg for help. And Vanessa was two toddling sons and one bad marriage under deep water of her own. When she did resurface it was only to gesture distress. The signal flag Victor is a no-nonsense, unambiguous red X on a white flag. It means, “I require assistance.” We all did.
I found our Belgian landlady as sympathetic and helpful as a woman in her position could be—Grand’Mere, she had asked me to call her, as if that might bridge the distance between my youthful need and her elderly inability to supply it—but she’d had her own difficult and wearying journey. She had been a young mother herself when she had first l
eft Europe for the brilliant white hope of the Belgian Congo: “Allez-Y & Faites Comme Eux”3 was the tagline of a propaganda poster from the colony that showed a European man, dandyish in a white linen suit, lording it over half a dozen robust oxen and several industriously slaving black men. But our landlady’s luck had been more equivocal than the colonial marketing poster had suggested it would be. And she had added even more uncertainty to her already uncertain future on an upheaving continent, her choices spurred more by romance than by rationality. Perhaps, like most of us, she believed time would circle back and catch up with her quixotic notions of how the world would treat her. But instead of a long, slow African sunset cooling into night surrounded by certainty and grandchildren and promise, she was ending her life alone on a bend on the Zambezi River, her body flooded by an array of known and unknowable parasites.
Her skin was yellow and she felt cold most of the time. More or less permanent malaria had thinned her blood to a watery chill. She kept a fire stoked in her bedroom, even in steaming midsummer, and at night she warmed her feet in tubs of river water brought to a boil over a fire in the kitchen. Dust and smoke covered everything she owned: a portrait of herself as a young woman in Brussels; books and maps and letters; a cuckoo clock that had long ceased working but that carried with it a fading aura of European concern for timetables and deadlines.
“No, don’t bring the baby near me,” she begged. “Perhaps I am contagious. You see how yellow I am? What if I have the fever?” She could no more reach out to help me than she could force disease out of her blood, or conjure crocodiles out of the Zambezi to inhale her collection of horrible village dogs. So we sat on opposite ends of her table on the veranda, Sarah curved in a heat-drugged sleep on my lap, Grand’Mere’s two bad-tempered African gray parrots singing “La Marseillaise” and cursing complainingly in French, the troop of monkeys she had adopted clattering on the asbestos-sheeting roof. “Have a lemon cream,” she offered.
Leaving Before the Rains Come Page 14
