That seemed very Stefan Zweig too.
“If nothing else,” Mum was continuing, “Budapest’s not a boring place to die.”
Then suddenly, down the corridor, Little Péter walked out of an office and into the gloomy hall; his gauzy green scrubs puffed out in great billows, the surgical-garb equivalent of Princess Di’s wedding dress. “Ah!” Mum gave a shout of happy surprise. “There you are, Little Péter!” Little Péter froze in his tracks. In the burned-out fluorescent light, he looked like a swollen green bovine in the mist; bewildered.
“Ah,” he said.
“And here I am!” Mum said as she hurried toward him. She planted herself in front of Little Péter and seized him by both shoulders. “Remember me? I’m Mrs. Fuller. My husband was your patient, Mr. Fuller.” She paused importantly; she was splendid. “I am the widow.” She gave his shoulders a reassuring squeeze.
Little Péter winced; I’d calculated second-degree burns at least, and now those sheets of bubbling, blistered skin covering his shoulders were in Mum’s viselike grip. “Yes, I know,” Mum said. “I know, but we did ring the bell. And, well, we did knock,” Mum explained. “Didn’t we, Bobo? Then we rang the bell some more, but there wasn’t an answer. So then we gave the door a tiny nudge.”
Little Péter repressed a yelp.
“No, no, no,” Mum said. “We’re not all upset, are we, Bobo? It’s a miracle he survived so long.”
There was a low moan.
“Oh, dear,” Mum said. She was rubbing Little Péter’s arms vigorously now, the way you’d rub down a sweating horse. Another yelp ensued. “You really mustn’t blame yourself, Little Péter. My husband had a very full life, very.”
I thought I saw a tear roll down Little Péter’s nose, although since he was also sweating profusely, and the light was poor, it was hard to tell. It was a pretty dreadful spectacle anyway. I can see where Mum lost her nerve, honestly.
“Um,” Mum said, her voice quavering with uncertainty. She turned to me. “He’s falling apart a bit,” she said, sotto voce.
“I’m not sure he understands English very well,” I said.
“Oh, right,” Mum said. “Of course! How stupid of me.” She turned back to Little Péter, her face set in her best Memsahib Abroad expression. “We will leave you to get on with your rounds now,” she said slowly and loudly. “A great man . . .” Mum paused. “A good man,” she amended with hard-won modesty, “has died, and we will all just have to get on with our lives without him now.”
Little Péter gargled.
“Yes, all of us,” Mum said, fixing Little Péter with a look supposed to restore all our dignities. “Thank you so very much.” And then, in determined Hungarian, continuing to massage Little Péter’s arm through his scrubs as she did so, “Köszönöm.”
Little Péter looked close to complete breakdown.
“Oh, dear”—Mum looked at me—“köszönöm szépen. It’s supposed to mean ‘Thank you very much.’ I asked the concierge.”
Little Péter slipped Mum’s grip.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mum said. “Of course, you must be very busy. Well, don’t let us keep you. My daughter will be in touch about the . . . My daughter will be in touch concerning the details. Won’t you, Bobo?”
I nodded.
“Good. Well, that’s that, then.” Mum’s far stronger than she looks. She gave Little Péter one last, terrifying smile, then marched us both out of the swing doors, back into the corridor. “Little Péter looked shocked to the absolute quick, poor man,” she said, hurrying me as fast as her asthma would allow down the stairs. “Positively feverish with emotion.”
“He’s severely sunburned,” I said.
Mum stopped for a moment, and regarded me with mild surprise. “Is he?”
“You could see it for yourself,” I said.
“No, I couldn’t,” Mum said. “He was covered head to toe in surgical togs.”
“He did it waterskiing on his day off,” I said.
“Well, why didn’t you say something?” Mum asked.
“It didn’t seem newsworthy,” I said. “At the time.”
Mum hobbled down a few more steps. “Well,” she said. “I still think Little Péter was very moved by Dad’s death. Very. We all are; everyone is. I’m sure he shed a tear or two; I could swear I thought I saw tears.”
“Me too,” I said.
And then we were outside again. Mum stalled to catch her breath and to bid each cat farewell by name. “Marmalade,” on account of her stripes; “Greedy,” for obvious reasons; “Sponge Bob,” on account of his yellowish square pants. They emerged at the sound of her voice, more and more cats. “What a handsome fellow,” Mum crooned, crouching down, the better to ensure no one was being left out of the conversation. “Oh, hello, Kanga.”
After that, there was a whole exchange with the gateman; Mum leafing over a little pile of cash so he’d feed the cats when she was gone. “Sometimes you just have to believe in the kindness of strangers,” she told me, methodically counting the notes into the gateman’s outstretched hand; Mum always manages to look furtive around money, like someone involved in a drug deal. “You really do, Bobo.”
There were pools of surprised and grateful tears in the gateman’s eyes; I could already tell the cats weren’t going to be fed. But this was where Mum’s deep suspicion of humans failed her. Or rather, her deep suspicion remained firmly lodged, but her nearly incredible affinity for animals overrode all her normal prejudices and reservations.
“He’ll probably drink it,” she said. “But that’s all right. We all need a little anesthetic from time to time.”
Mum could charm birds from trees, chameleons ceased their hissing in her presence, and snakes sunbathed placidly in her garden. Animals adored her, she loved animals, and she pre-forgave anyone whom she perceived as being a fellow animal lover, regardless of things that would ordinarily have them struck from her consideration: a fault in their religion, ethnicity, or class, for example.
Mum and the gateman were smiling and patting each other. “Isten áldja meg,” Mum said. Then turning to me, “It means ‘God bless you.’ I learned that from the concierge too. They’re very Catholic around here, you know.” The gateman patted the top of Mum’s head, the way a person might pat a dog; it was a memorable gesture. Mum smiled and patted the gateman on the cheek in return, the way she might comfort a horse.
Then we left.
* * *
—
OUT IN THE STREETS the day continued, hot and oppressive. It seemed to me the world should have stopped altogether; its gaskets blown, its gears stripped, its engine on blocks. Instead it felt merely stalled, as if something urgent still might happen, a thunderstorm, for example, or a riot. The world hadn’t ended when Dad did and it wasn’t pausing for him; it was pausing for itself.
Mum was wheezing worse than ever, walking haltingly. “You know, Bobo,” she said as we trudged the city block that encompassed the crumbling hospital, “I really do think it’s worth remembering . . . Oh, look at all the starlings, over there, on the steeple, like dark emeralds in the sun. Do you see them?”
I looked for the gemlike birds.
“Very shiny,” I agreed. “Oh look, there’s more over there.”
But Mum was continuing. “I think it’s worth remembering, it was really a very good death, Bobo. It wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.” The starlings took wing, churning in the hazy sky as a single entity; they whirred and planed on hot currents; ash from a wildfire behaves in a similar way.
“But he died alone,” I blurted out, wishing I could unsay the words even as they were falling from my lips. “Alone, in a strange city, away from everything he loved.”
“Mm,” Mum said; she stopped and clung on to a nearby rusty railing that was demarking the sidewalk from a chalk-dry fountain, a melting parking lot, and the hospital labora
tories. She took a puff from her inhaler. “Yes, Bobo. Put that way, it does sound horrible and desperate.”
Mum cleared her throat. She refuses to wallow in the past, however recent. “Did you see the moon last night?” she asked, giving her chest a bit of a thump. She straightened her shoulders and continued up the sidewalk. I straightened my shoulders and followed her.
Mum excels at this: She excels at the next thing.
Her supremely agile mind is ready to change the topic away from the unpleasant toward the soothing at any moment. To this end, it’s been stuffed to the brim with the essentials; old maps, home remedies, a remnant of Swahili, the latest news from the BBC, serviceable Nyanja, advanced first aid, self-taught snake and bird identification. An emergency store of detailed weather reports, witty pet anecdotes, and recent planetary observations is updated and refreshed regularly. She’s made a link somewhere, a butterfly mind, a magpie mind, a fox mind; nectar, shiny objects, cats.
“Yes,” I said. “I saw the moon last night.”
Mum smiled. “A blood moon,” she said.
I nodded. “I know.”
Unable to sleep, I’d sat at the window of my hotel room and watched the moon go down over the city, a ponderous red globe. It was only natural my mother had seen the moon too; she’d have opened the curtains to the little balcony where she’d strung up her laundry and sat there to watch it, taking in the hot city’s thick night air.
Both my parents could always tell you the phase of the moon without needing to see it; without glancing skyward, they just knew. Of course they did; farmers, fishermen, soldiers acutely observe the sky.
Waxing, crescent, waning, gibbous, blue, full, new.
“A blood moon was Dad’s favorite, you know,” Mum said. “I think that’s very auspicious. Although a new moon is supposed to be very lucky too, unless you see it through glass, and then it’s very unlucky. Did you know that? Yes, of course you knew that. You’re supposed to turn money over in your pocket and bow seven times when you see a new moon. It’s supposed to make you rich.”
“Yes, I knew that,” I said.
I knew Mum turned money over in her pocket and bowed seven times whenever there was a new moon; running out into the garden, or hopping out of the car to avoid seeing it through glass. I could never see a new moon without thinking of the fortune it owed Mum.
And I would never see another blood moon without thinking of Dad. I worked it out from the medical records afterward; he’d died soon after moonset. I wondered then if he’d lain awake in those final hours and seen the moonrise late—red and slow and sorrowful—the way Mum and I had. I wondered if he had seen it sliding past the outline of this unfamiliar cityscape, setting behind domes and turrets. And if then, as Mum must have suspected, he’d slipped away with her, his old friend, a blood moon, a harvester’s moon, not alone at all.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sometimes, You Just Have to Bite the Bullet
Dad had shot pheasant in England; he had done a little deer stalking in Scotland; he’d nearly frozen to death in a duck blind in Quebec. “I was forced to be sober for the entire twelve-hour ordeal,” Dad remembered with a shudder decades later. “It turned out, they were dry Canadians. I think that’s the closest I’ve come to a gun-related fatality in my life, and that’s up against some stiff competition.”
The war had been one thing. But the war bled into everything else, at least for a few years. The earliest of my father’s hunting companions that I could remember were left over from the war; I’d never known them not slung about with arms. The Brothers H. had been our neighbors in the valley; they were part of Dad’s unit on patrol.
“We always started at the Impala Arms, and two weeks later, we were supposed to end up at Leopard’s Rock,” Dad said. “Those two pubs were the really dangerous parts of the war, although the bits in between could get quite hairy too.”
The Brothers H. never let Dad forget that he was English. They made him walk forty paces behind and sleep eighty paces downwind; he snored and left unmistakable bandy-legged Englishman spoor. They, on the other hand, were poster-child Rhodesians; their father had been the first white settler to reach the valley, with all that implies.
They could navigate by the stars, and they’d been tracking and hunting big game since toddlerhood. None of the Brothers H. was what could be described as dry; one of them drank like the aunts. “At least I didn’t have to choose between drunkenness and death,” Dad had said. “With those three, I could have both.”
The mother of the Brothers H. was the grandest woman I’ve ever known; she seems imaginary now when I think of her peculiarities. She spoke the Queen’s English; she used an ebony cigarette holder; she piled her silver hair into an Edwardian bun secured with an ivory comb. Her husband, the father of the Brothers H., had died before we moved to the valley—malaria, I think; a fever of some sort, I believe—but not before naming everything he saw after somewhere else.
He’d named the valley Burma. It had been wild jungle then, when he’d first settled it. It was humid too, boiling beneath the misty highlands to the north and west. He’d named the hills bordering Mozambique to the east the Himalayas. The Rhodesian government put in one of the largest minefields in the world along that border.
After the war, the youngest Brother H. was forced at gunpoint to walk across the minefield, although it was technically Zimbabwe’s minefield by then; the half-life of war is more indiscriminate than you’d think. He lost the better part of a leg out there that day. “He never once complained,” Dad said, impressed with the youngest Brother H. “He didn’t even let on he might be a bit disappointed, losing a leg like that.”
They weren’t high, our Himalayas, but they looked daunting. In memory now, the hills appear to me always smoky purple, as if dryly bruised. But, of course, they weren’t always this way. It must have rained. Of course it rained. There were times those hills were verdant, fragrant with wild blooms and iridescent with fresh msasa leaves.
It definitely rained.
Seven cows drowned in a flood once, seven inches it rained that night, an inch for each cow; my cat, Tapioca, died in that storm too. And I know too, there were times of bucolic, lush tranquillity when it had rained just enough, a gentle rain all through the night, and we awoke to find the place washed fresh: red soil, blue sky, and green trees.
We awoke to a sense of peace and possibility and optimism.
We awoke to those things, before fear washed back in.
But I have to deduce my way back to those memories.
* * *
—
IT WASN’T CLEAR WHY MY FATHER went hunting with the Brothers H., or with anyone at all. Dad wasn’t interested in trophies. He’d spent a few of his school holidays in the homes of posh, distant relations who’d already plundered the fauna of an empire; tiger rugs in the hall, elephant tusks bracketing the chimneypiece, a surprised leopard snarling on the wall in the smoking room. Dad shot for the pot only, and wasted nothing. He saved every hide; he kept the skulls for Mum’s dogs to chew on.
“I’m a harvester, not a hunter,” Dad said.
But my father didn’t turn down an invitation to hunt, or to do anything almost, on principle. “I’ll try anything once,” he paraphrased the old adage. “Except buggery, incest, and moderation.” It amused the Brothers H. to have Dad along on their expeditions. They preyed on his English naïveté and his natural propensity for drama. “He lengthened his stride when it would have been more prudent to shorten it,” the middle Brother H. told me much later. “It was worth having him along for that reason alone.”
The Brothers H. had smirked wordlessly when Dad pitched his tent under a marula tree, the fruit of which is irresistibly intoxicating to elephants; they’d watched from optimal distance, propped up on their rifles, weak with laughter, as a rhino they’d been tracking doubled back and charged Dad, causing him to have to run and dive
twenty feet into a dry riverbed.
“Dad’s so trusting, he’s terribly innocent in a lot of ways. And those rotten brothers were merciless pranksters, always leading poor Dad into serious peril,” Mum said. “No wonder he never managed to bag anything larger than a scrawny francolin while he was with them.”
But Dad wasn’t there for the pursuit of wildlife or to pit himself against their territory. He went because he didn’t have a reason not to go; with an open mind, in other words. And he found that he was repaired and restored by the experience; the medicine of such a wild wilderness seemed endless. “The secret to life, I learned it there,” he said long afterward, a few brandies into an afternoon session.
“Which was?” I wanted to know.
Dad sat for a long time before shaking his head and looking at me with amused puzzlement. “Sorry, Bobo. I’m a bit assholes, plus I’m getting bloody senile. What was the question again?”
“What’s the secret to life?” I reminded him.
“Oh,” Dad said, remembering.
* * *
—
MY FATHER HAD LEARNED about getting lost and wilderness from the war and from the Brothers H. In turn, I’d learned about war by hapless experience and I had learned about getting lost and wilderness from my father. For example, we’d be six flat tires into an already long day, miles deep in hot camel-thorn country, far from anything remotely resembling a road. “Here is our stop, apparently,” Dad would say.
So we’d scramble out of the Land Rover and look around.
“Nice and quiet,” Dad would comment; the bush sang with insects and heat. “I bet they have a room for the night.”
Then someone would start a small fire; the big black kettle would emerge from the tin trunk. Tents would be set up. The tea, sugar, and powdered milk would be retrieved from the ammo can, maybe we’d find rusks if we were lucky, and if we were very lucky there’d be oranges. Everything we needed within reach.
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