A brief stint in England, then back to Rhodesia, then to Malawi, and finally Zambia, my parents moved and moved. Vanessa and I tried to add it all up once, twenty times or more we moved, for all sorts of reasons—political upheaval, market vagaries, drought, a funny feeling my mother had, a weekend’s bad fishing, my father’s restlessness, disease in the crops, and after the deaths, one by one, of three of their five children.
Each dislodgment must have panicked Mum; but somehow she’d model every crumbling farmhouse or converted barn into something homey and familiar. Over and over again with nearly undiminished energy, she rerooted our peripatetic little family, always the four of us, a pack of dogs, sometimes a couple of cats.
“Very clever curtains she made wherever she went,” an old family friend reminded me recently. I remembered that—the curtains made of tobacco sacking, bordered with cheap cheerful cotton; the tablecloths made of calico sheets. Mum stitched our way into new homes over and over; she kept us sewn together, she threaded us into place.
She’d done it here too; her Budapest hotel room was beginning to resemble one of our homes. There was her little library, her books from home smothered in Blue Death. Blue Death is an insecticide made for markets that have not yet got around to banning it, guaranteed to turn insects into exoskeletons on the spot. Mum loves it; she drops it into conversation here and there, as if Blue Death were her official sponsor.
Next to her library, there was her tea station, her drinks tray, an ugly white ashtray advertising a boat cruise on the Danube. “Dad made a fuss when I was trying to stuff that into my handbag,” Mum had said. “But now at least I have a memento of our last excursion together before he collapsed, poor Dad.”
“That’s very romantic,” I’d said.
“Yes,” Mum had said. “Very. I don’t know if Dad had fun, though. You know how he is. He always looks sour when I make him do touristy things; he doesn’t like to be told what to look at, and he doesn’t like being told interesting facts. In Hungary, for example, they call it the Duna River. That’s almost more poetic, isn’t it? Duna. Our last excursion was on the Duna River. I like that; it sounds mysterious. They gave a very informative presentation.” She’d paused. “Dad pretended to sleep throughout.”
* * *
—
I NEVER DID SEE THE DUNA, the Blue Danube, although the hospital was only a few blocks away. But I could feel it, the city pulled toward it, the way most cities are drawn to and built from their water. “If you’re ever lost, walk downhill,” Dad had always said. “Eventually you’ll find a river.”
“What if it’s flat where I’m lost?”
“Then keep going until you find a hill,” Dad had said.
As I got closer to the hospital, and to the river, toward the ancient inner city, its narrow cobbled streets made for a different world, the press of refugees thinned. Now, instead of a mass of humanity, there were scattered clusters of people, like tragic little birds broken off from the main migratory group, but it didn’t lessen the weight of their sorrow.
Grief is like weather when it’s held by so many; a grief cell, a grief cloud, a grief front. An area of grief stalled now, for the moment, over Budapest; stalled, not ended. And there was no end in sight.
Grief is not a landing place.
Unlike the past and death, grief isn’t another country; it’s a place between countries, a holding pattern, a purgatory. I didn’t know what expression to assume. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I wanted to say over and over, as if I were at a hundred funerals. “I’m sorry for your many, many losses.”
Unlike me, Dad would have known the correct demeanor in these circumstances; the reasonable balance between the little grief of one timely death and the tidal grief of these exiles. “Put everything in perspective, Bobo,” Dad always said.
In perspective, Dad would have seen the whole. He’d have seen his one well-used life draining away versus the blood of whole countries draining away, lives and livelihoods; identities tattered like ribbons. People are people until they’re a people. Then they move as a single entity, insolubly bonded by their shared trauma.
“Where’s the Red Cross?” I’d thought. “The aid workers.”
Dad would never have looked for the do-gooders; he hated do-gooders. He’d have done the correct thing instinctively. He’d have done what he could to mitigate a reality that was older than all centuries and bigger than all lands. “Have a cigarette,” he’d have said. “Let me light that for you.”
And everyone would have been disburdened for a moment while cigarettes were lit, smoke exhaled into the unkind air, sighs exchanged. “It looks like you might be in for a long day,” Dad may have commented, looking at the morning sun, new in the sky but already pale and hot. “Here, you’d better take the whole pack.”
Cigarettes are not the way to extend life; that wasn’t my father’s goal or concern. He wasn’t doling out longevity; he was doling out endurance. Endurance was one of his signature characteristics. He could keep going strong long after lesser men and women had slid unceremoniously under the table.
“Man down!” Dad would shout. “Someone, administer the kiss of life. What? Must I do everything myself?” Now he was man down too, slid under the table, and there was no one to bring him back. He was gone, and a time had gone with him, and my way of knowing how to be in all time; that too had vanished.
So this is grief, I’d thought.
It’s the theft of time, all time for all of time.
CHAPTER THREE
Befriend the Moon
There is a difference, I found, between a hospital housing your sick, and one in which you imagine vividly your dead is lying, tagged like you see in movies, on a slab in the basement mortuary. Timothy Donald Fuller. Born unremarkably March 9, 1940, Northampton, England. Died improbably September 4, 2015, Pest, Hungary.
Until yesterday, I’d viewed this rambling, ugly hospital as a temporary holding station in which my father was serving out an inevitable sentence in a hot, strange, sad city with me as witness. But the fact of his dying had changed the shape of everything. Now the building was a monument to his death. Dad’s final breaths taken here, his soul untangling from flesh within these walls.
His determinedly good death, his noble suffering had visited grandeur where previously there’d been only a kind of surrendered sadness, a rotation of bodies, washing in and out of view. I’d had too much of a colonial upbringing, and my father had been too English, for Rupert Brooke not to tumble unbidden into my head. “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.”
But neither my father nor I was so deluded to think an Englishman’s blood was enough to stain the soil of any nation richer, or that dying somewhere as a soldier, or a civilian, or a refugee, or a tourist made that land yours no matter how much you’d suffered on it, or for it. Nothing seemed that certain anymore, such claims were fighting words, words to get lost by; and certainly not the reassurance I was seeking.
Still, a few days ago, back when he’d still been laboring toward death, and shouting instructions in his morphine haze to Mr. Kalusha, the farm’s driver, to hurry home before dark, I’d given semi-serious thought to getting my father in the back of a rental van and making a break for it with him, driving east from Hungary, then south to Gibraltar. I’d have opened the van doors; propped my father up as close as I could to the strait. On a clear day he might have seen Africa one last time.
I’d have fed him brandy; he’d have died in Mum’s arms.
Or he’d have died in no one’s arms; that’s someone else’s family. But at least Mum and I could have been fussing with the picnic basket; cursing the lid to the thermos; fighting off a troop of Barbary macaques in the vicinity. He might have died then, gazing south from Europe toward his beloved farm, a familiar, cheerful chaos in the background, Mum shrieking at some monke
ys.
That would have been a fathomable death for me, a more coherent inscription in my mind: Timothy Donald Fuller, born unremarkably March 9, 1940, England. Died within sight of Africa, September 4, 2015. But it doesn’t work like that, of course: Death comes where it comes, and when it comes, and it doesn’t wait around for any man, wife, parent, or daughter to announce his or her readiness for it.
There’s no planning for the perfect death, or rather, there is, but there’s no planning for the perfect aftershock of a loved one’s death. The assault of it is always new, always, each grief finding a new wormhole into our hearts. Like all life’s shocks, beginning with our own unasked-for births, there’s no guarding against the shock of sorrow, the shock of losing parts of the self.
And death, like birth, afterward everything’s a first. A long pileup of firsts. The first decisions I’d be making on Dad’s departed behalf; the first true uncertainty about whom I’d become with his death, because until now, whatever else I’d been, I’d always also been Tim Fuller’s daughter, and that had really meant something in one or two places.
The Chirundu market, for example, where Dad did all his farm shopping, he’d be sorely missed there. Also the little safari lodge on the Kafue River, they’d notice he was gone. Of course Boss Shupi would look for him in vain every morning at eleven for the remainder of the dry season.
And they’d never forget my father at Huey’s Pub and Grill in Lusaka, where in recent memory Dad had set his trousers on fire, dancing on the table over wilting paraffin candles. “I was led astray by a Malawian waiter,” my father explained in his defense. “Three Irish whiskies after a fulsome dinner. Of course I got a bit overexcited.”
* * *
—
I STOOD ALONE at the locked doors of the ICU, peering through the small, greasy panes of glass into the dim hall beyond. I rang the bell and waited. After a few minutes, I rang the bell again. Bodies in green scrubs floated around in the frame of the scummy glass, emerging into the fluorescent glare of the hallway only to submerge out of it again into dark rooms.
I rang the bell, longer this time, really leaning on it. I heard myself saying lines from American movies, “Who is supposed to be in charge here?” “Does anyone know what’s going on?” But those not raised in North America know these are absurd things to say in countries that are still getting accustomed to the free market’s stated assertion that the customer is always right.
No Zambian would make this mistake.
Mum, for example, who although an avowed anti-communist has spent most of her life under various socialist regimes in southern Africa. She thought the Hungarian hospital was a model operation; the sort of place where the customer is always not only automatically assumed to be wrong but also willfully stupid. “This place is top-notch,” she’d insisted, wheezing as she’d hauled herself up the stairs in the terrible heat. “State of the art.”
I rang the bell again, hammered on the doors.
Behind me, a row of patients in worn pajamas sagged on wooden benches, more vulnerable-looking than if they had been completely naked; the faded little flowers on mildly stained gowns, the manly plaid stripes imagined for livelier legs, the frills meant for younger necks. They all looked much more corpselike than Dad had just twelve hours earlier, and yet here they were, and here he wasn’t.
And at least in their country of sickness, the Hungarian patients made a little village, a community; they were richer than I was in that regard. Their united babble of a language like no tongue I’d ever heard before translated in my mind as a kind of absurd theatricality. As if, dying, they’d come to practice this noise on one another in preparation for the language they’d use in the next world.
“It’s one of the Uralic family of languages, so called because of the mountains,” Mum had informed me when I’d complained to her about the alphabet, forty-four strange, extended letters; words hatched with diacritical marks. It was impossible for me to make anything of any street signs or notices. She’d done her research, of course, long conversations at the front desk. “I find it rather romantic,” she’d said.
“Which mountains?” I’d asked.
“The Urals, obviously. Goodness, Bobo, who was your poor geography teacher? It’s very specific to the region; the Hungarian language, I mean, like Finnish. The rules are extremely complicated and there are lots of exceptions. The accusative suffix is a nasal sound, apparently.”
“The accusative suffix?” I’d repeated.
Mum had regarded me with diminishing hope, her shoulders dropping. “Did you retain none of the elements of grammar?”
“Mrs. Fryer hated me,” I’d reminded her.
“Yes, well,” Mum had said.
* * *
—
I BATTERED THE DOORS, rang the bell.
It was as if I’d ceased to exist, as if my father’s death had taken me with him. “It’ll be all right in the end,” Dad used to say. “If it isn’t all right, it isn’t the end.” But this wasn’t the end I had in mind; that made it harder to accept, as did the fact that dozens of spells of malaria, a war, and the road to Lusaka hadn’t killed my father, but a sudden bout of pneumonia had snatched him off, same as any other common old mortal person.
Six months earlier on the farm, one night before supper, when Dad had hit the sweet spot of his second brandy, lots of water, no ice, he’d said, “Let me tell you the secret to life right now, in case I suddenly give up the ghost.” Then he lit his pipe and stroked Harry’s head. Harry put his paw on Dad’s lap and they sat there, the two of them, one man and his dog, keepers to the secret of life.
“Well?” I said.
“Nothing comes to mind, quite honestly, Bobo,” Dad said, looking at me with some surprise. “Now that I think about it, maybe there isn’t a secret to life. It’s just what it is, right under your nose. What do you think, Harry?” Harry gave Dad a look of utter agreement. He was a very superior dog. “Well, there you have it,” Dad said.
I laughed. Mrs. Hilda Tembo, in the kitchen overseeing the roasting of one of Mum’s lambs, also laughed. Mum was in the bath listening to opera. From the radio on top of the low wall that more or less divided the kitchen from not-the-kitchen, the BBC chattered on, companionably static; choruses of frogs kicked up a racket in the wetlands at the bottom of the garden.
I remember thinking then, my father couldn’t give up the ghost. Or he’d die eventually, of course, everyone does, but surely he’d die like a tree. He’d remain standing, casting cool shade on all of us on hot days, offering us fuel for warmth with his breaking branches on cold nights; he’d petrify like those fossilized forests near the Muchinga Escarpment. He’d be forever preserved a rose-colored pink, but he couldn’t be gone.
Except now he was.
* * *
—
“COR BLIMEY, IT’S ’OT.”
I swung around, the terrible attempt at a Cockney accent was unmistakable; Mum suddenly appeared on the landing. She stopped to take a few puffs from her inhaler. “Those stairs,” she gasped. “Very good exercise.” She looked oxygen deprived, also she’d shrunk about six inches since I’d put her in the taxi in the hotel what felt like hours ago, two at least. It was midmorning now. “Luckily I keep myself very fit. Walking the dogs, you know.”
She staggered up to me, steadied herself on my arm, wiped her brow and cleared her throat; a boxer between rounds. “It’s about ninety degrees out there already, Fahrenheit,” she reported. “And all the streets are completely jammed. Did you see? The taxi simply had to crawl along to get here.” Then she frowned at the locked doors, glanced at her watch. “Have you been here this whole time? And you couldn’t get in? Where’s Little Péter?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have. And no. I don’t know. I’ve hammered on the doors. I’ve rung the bell. I’ve hammered on the doors some more. I was beginning to wonder if I’d died myself.”
> Mum rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t be silly, Bobo.” She gave the door a testing nudge, then she lowered her voice: “The thing you need to remember about these old locks”—she paused and glanced furtively over her shoulder at the sagging patients on the bench behind us—“is that they’re susceptible to a good shove.”
And then that diminished, bereft woman, my mum, barely a bird of her former self, hauled back and quietly, but firmly, crashed the doors to the ICU open. “Phew,” she said. She took a couple more draws off her inhaler, then serenely closed the doors behind us.
“That, Bobo,” she said, “is communist-era construction for you. You’d never see that in America.” She looked at me then, pityingly, as if my life had been dimmed by mere dint of the fact that half of it had taken place in the United States, a country that had defined itself in large part by its opposition to all things communist, thereby denying its citizens and immigrants the chance to experience communism’s exciting difficulties firsthand. “That is why Budapest is my kind of place,” Mum said. “We understand each other.” She squared her shoulders. “Right,” she said. “Best foot forward.”
With sudden shock, I realized Mum had already committed this dreadful humid hospital to her memory as one of the finest institutions; she’d already made courageous peace with this moment; she’d already decided to make friends with this city where her husband had died.
“Budapest! It has a ring to it, doesn’t it?” Mum said. “Who hasn’t invaded this place? The Mongols, the Turks, the Nazis, the Russians, and last but not least, Tim Fuller the Hon. Requiescat in pace!”
I felt suspended in a Stefan Zweig novel.
It was the Middle Eastern refugees, the Hungarian patients waiting for death, the freshly widowed ex-colonial crashing her way into the hospital ward where earlier in the story her husband had died far from his people; his people twice removed—there was always the question of my father’s people. I was never sure who they were, exactly.
Travel Light, Move Fast Page 4