It’s beautiful up there, there are wild forests, birds tumble through the sky, at sunset the light pulses in the west; it’s a whole show. And at dawn again, the light emerges from the east as if it has been dunked in the vivid blue Kafue River overnight and rinsed iridescent. It’s also much cooler on the plateau than in the valley; the rains are more predictable, it’s lusher; there are no tsetse flies, you can keep horses and cattle.
However, no one else in Zambia refers to the plateau where Alcatraz and the Rock are built as up-country, they wouldn’t understand the reference, and my mother knows this, but she doesn’t care. If she has to be the lone representative of gentility in a country of pleasant but otherwise basic fellow citizens, she’ll do it. So, up-country, she insists, thereby making sly literary and geographical reference to Simla, the summer escape for the British imperialists in India from the feverish sweatboxes of Bombay and Calcutta.
Mum has reread the Raj Quartet, The Far Pavilions, and Kim many times, and has longed to go to India her entire life. Like my father and the maps of Africa he’d pored over as a child, Mum pored over maps of the Indian subcontinent. She pictured herself drinking chai on the little blue train that wends through the mountains from Siliguri to Darjeeling. She wanted to go to all the fabulous markets in Delhi—saris, carpets, curry powder. She wanted to meet an Indian prince, she wanted to ride an elephant, and she wanted to try hashish.
“Like in one of Graham Greene’s novels,” Mum said. “Or, even better, Somerset Maugham. You know the stories. There’s always a cholera outbreak and someone getting murdered on a rubber plantation; it’s unbearably muggy.”
She knew she’d probably never go to India and lie in a bemused stupor on a pile of lavish carpets in the high desert, sharing a pipe with camel drivers—that century had slipped by—but the entertainment she derived from imagining that she might one day still sail out to the “Jewel in the Crown” kept her from longing too much for other things she also couldn’t have, or would never do.
My parents matched each other perfectly in this regard. It was a lucky coincidence; not many people would have survived what they put each other through.
* * *
—
“YOUR PARENTS WERE SO RECKLESS.” I am told this often.
And sometimes they were reckless; it was fun for them, and often for us. We’d end up in a story. But we’d also end up in a story because of nothing reckless at all; simply the way a life fully led will take you out of your way and beyond your control.
Tracking a zebra once on the ranch, it had happened; we were lost two whole days. It should have been a fairly easy early-morning outing. It should have been a heart shot at dawn. But at the last moment, the zebra snapped back against something, perhaps a tsetse-fly bite. The creature startled into a crippled trot. Dad swore, threw his rifle across the seat.
“Hold tight,” he shouted, and we were off.
Vanessa and I sat in the back of the Land Rover, flattened against the glass dividing us from the front seats, our eyes closed; the Land Rover lashed with mopane branches until the air was filled with the scent of turpentine. Dad smoked cigarette after cigarette, and occasionally shouted to Cephas Chibodo, “Do you see anything?”
And Cephas Chibodo’s reassuring, “Eh, eh,” guiding us through the mopane woodland after the animal. He deftly spider-crawled his way around the vehicle, sometimes collapsing completely backward, or folding himself down the windscreen, to avoid getting whipped off the roof altogether. Then the woodland got too dense, even for Cephas Chibodo’s prodigious ability to hang on.
Dad turned off the engine then.
We’d been going all day, high revs in thick sand a lot of the time; we’d burned one jerry can of spare diesel already. There were seven people total; three local villagers brought along to butcher the animal, two kids brought along to give their mother a break, and one Manyika tracker.
We had water enough for the rest of the day and the night; we could always make fire; there were two paraffin lamps. No one was going to starve to death or die of exposure. The mosquitoes weren’t too bad. At worst, some of us might be very thirsty in about sixteen hours.
Dad lit another cigarette.
“Okay.” He’d made up his mind. He turned to Vanessa and me. “Sit tight,” he said. “When you hear a shot, I’ll be back in the same amount of time I was gone, in reverse.”
Dad packed a flask of brandy, cigarettes, bullets. Cephas Chibodo brought tobacco and newspaper to roll it in. They both checked their pockets for matches. Then without saying anything they took off together into the mopane thicket, moving very fast, unhesitatingly.
In that blunting hot low veldt light, they appeared not as people, but as shapes. First they were dark patterns against the trees, then they were shadows between the trees, and then they were gone. After that, there was nothing to show that they’d been, except a few scuffle marks on the ground. Also the buzz of their absence; after a while, though, even that burned off.
Meantime, the earth between the trees was the same glittering, white sugary sand over cracked, dark brown clay in every direction. There was little to distinguish the east from the west; the woodland obscured the sky, everything very bright, very yellow. Vanessa and I dozed, took refuge from the heat.
The three local villagers smoked and watched the sun; they talked and slept. When the sun clipped the top of the trees to the west, the villagers strung up a tarpaulin and lit the two paraffin lamps. Then all of a sudden, the light dropped, the way it does in southern Africa, everything turned magenta, orange, a riot of violet and pink, then just as suddenly dark.
There’s no gentle dusk, no nautical twilight, no soft evening. You’re either ready for it, or not. One moment the sky is suffused with a vivid pulsing sunset, it looks as if it’ll go on forever; and the next moment it’s a black and moonless sky, sword-pierced through with stars.
Nothing prepares you for the sudden darkness of a southern African night, even if you’ve never known anything else. It’s always as if the light had been smothered rather than gently slid behind the horizon. But it prepares you for certain endings, such a leap from painted skies to night.
By which I mean definite endings.
Sudden endings.
* * *
—
VANESSA AND I, waiting with the laborers around a fire, heard the shot just after dark. It took Dad, Cephas Chibodo, and the rest of the men until dawn to skin and butcher the young stallion. For a long time we ate fresh zebra hung from the meat safe on the veranda; and for a long time after that we ate dried zebra. It tasted metallic, killed too late in the day after too much stress.
But the zebra’s magnificent hide—mesmerizing, and perfect, an argument in favor of the existence of God—lay in front of the fireplace on the sitting room floor, until the legs rotted through with too many rainy seasons, and until Mum’s dogs chewed off most of the stripes. “Like everything else,” Mum sighed.
It’s all always been about loss in our family, an abundance of loss. Although some things were surprisingly tenacious or were grimly hoarded. Books, of course, thermos flasks, and Mum’s orange Le Creuset pots; a little Buddha statue she’d stolen. We took only what could fit in a short-wheelbase Land Rover. It wasn’t much once the saddles and all the dogs were loaded up.
But my father seemed to have surrendered to loss, to have welcomed the opportunity to leave it all behind again. It must have taken some undoing, although it helped that he’d chosen to live where a title deed wasn’t a guarantee to land; a gun wasn’t a guarantee of life. “The only guarantee is you’ll end up losing it all anyway,” Dad had said.
He sounded positively cheered by this certain outcome.
It matched the experience of his life.
It affirmed his decision to pare down and down and down until he was needless, invincible, he walked alone. Or he walked with Harry, the two of them sh
aring the jaunty statesmanship of creatures near the zenith of fulfilling their contracts with the universe.
Harry was doing what he’d come to do; and my father had done the same. He’d been born with a tarnished spoon in his mouth, and he’d spent his life trying to lose the taste. He’d nearly overshot the goal. Loss and getting lost, losing, they’re underappreciated accomplishments.
“Tim Fuller went to Africa and lost everything,” the aunts had lamented.
And in every important way they were correct.
My father had gone to Africa and he’d lost nearly everything. He’d lost nearly everything, but it hadn’t been easy.
CHAPTER FIVE
Don’t Just Stand There, Do Something
For a dozen strange days, I’d divided myself, hours with Dad, hours with Mum. Hours and hours, it had seemed a peculiar concentration of parenthood all of a sudden. I hadn’t been accustomed to Mum and Dad undiluted.
Mum had been stuck in front of the television racked with coughing fits for much of our stay, too ill and distracted to enjoy the novels she’d brought for her holidays, historical fiction about the British royal family. “I’ve lost my concentration and I can’t keep track of all the trickery,” she’d complained. “All the beheadings and bastardry.”
She’d watched many BBC productions of soothing murders, but as things had become more arduous for us, she’d turned for comfort to an obscure Eastern European sports channel whose budget apparently stretched to race walking and marathons, but not much further. “It does me good to watch other people suffer pointlessly of their own accord. It makes my involuntary suffering seem less futile,” Mum had explained. She knew how to cope; they both did, my parents.
You notice these obvious things too old, too late.
Too late, I’d soaked up my hours with Mum; I’d soaked up my hours with Dad. I’d known these two people well, but I’d never known them intimately. When we were children, they seemed mostly preoccupied with their own dense worlds. They weren’t nurturing types; they let us tag along, they didn’t let us in.
“The sensible child-rearing books I read insisted children be allowed to foster a robust sense of independence,” Mum had said. She’d left Vanessa in a pram to stare into the leaves of a tree at the bottom of the garden and she’d relinquished me to the care of a goat. “Horace wasn’t housebroken, but he was very maternal,” Mum had assured me.
By this simple method, my parents had attempted to raise a couple of resilient daughters; they’d expected us to stomach a little disorder, to handle a few surprises here and there. “Keep buggering on.” We’d taken that phrase straight from Winston Churchill, or Dad had, and then we’d all started using it.
“KBO,” Rich signed off his letters and emails.
If the Fullers had a code it was that; if we’d had a coat of arms, it would have shown two rampant dogs, a shovel, and a gun. Our motto would have been along the lines of “In Vino, Invictus.”* We’d have lauded qualities of loyalty, heroism, and reverent irreverence.
And in the hours after Dad’s death, Mum and I had lived up to the code of the Fullers. We’d been dogged and brave and true, buggering on soberly and sadly through the hordes of refugees, Mum wheezing. We’d decided our first stop should be the British Embassy, where it turned out nothing we said mattered because “the gentleman in question had opted to reside abroad for the last fifty years.”
“He was still English,” Mum had argued. She’d refrained from bringing up the matter of Dad’s familial connection to the Crown Jewels and Queen Victoria, also polo with princes and shooting tigers in India with royalty, but I could tell it had cost her. “Living in Africa didn’t turn him into a Zambian,” Mum had said.
“Possibly not,” the woman from the embassy had agreed doubtfully. “But unfortunately British entitlements would have run out six months after the gentleman in question decided to leave the United Kingdom.” Mum and I had turned down the proffered cups of tea, and had left the embassy confirmed in our prejudice against the English.
“The poor queen. It used to mean something to be British,” Mum said. “I feel quite shaken. ‘The gentleman in question.’ What an irritating phrase.” She riffled around in her handbag, unearthed her anti-mad pills, and swallowed a couple. “In our day, one was expected to live abroad; it was the done thing. Wasn’t that the whole point of the bloody empire?” Mum sniffed unhappily. “Or I guess more my parents’ generation, they were expected to live abroad and keep the map pink, and even they lost India.”
I found a café with internet so we could regroup and plan our immediate future. For her part, Mum intended to rebuff her next invitation from the British High Commission in Lusaka to one of their Awful Dos for expats. “Warm white wine and crusty bits of liver pâté,” she said. “What’s the point of enduring all those dreary speeches and limp handshakes if they then won’t help you out in a crisis abroad?”
Meantime, I made arrangements for the cremation of Dad’s body. Or I believed I was making the arrangements for the cremation of Dad’s body, but Mum had been quite correct. It wasn’t as easy as it looked having an emergency in a foreign language; it was like high-stakes performance art. It was mostly guesswork, to be honest.
“What did I tell you?” Mum said. “People always accuse me of exaggerating and making things up. I never do.”
We arrived at the funeral home—I’d found it online; it had appeared to be a short walk from the café; it was not—sweating, red-faced, and Mum had to keep taking urgent hauls off her asthma puffer. We accepted the offers of water, and drank it like speed walkers.
“I can’t stay here a minute longer than absolutely necessary,” Mum had insisted as we’d slogged our way across the city.
In the funeral home lobby we spoke loudly and in chorus, we drew pictures, we mimed. We flapped our arms to indicate we had an urgent flight to catch and therefore we needed Dad’s corpse in, and his ashes out, of the facility as quickly as possible. We were ready to buy an urn, transfer cash, and sign all waivers on the spot.
Our haste was unseemly by almost any standards. It began to feel, even to us, more as if we’d committed murder than suffered bereavement. “Oh, dear,” Mum said. “I know we must look heartless to you. But really, we’re not. It’s simply that I live in central Africa and my daughter’s an American. We’re accustomed to horror.”
The funeral director hurried us out of the reception area through to another room in which there were shelves and shelves of urns, a few coffins. Mum eschewed crystal, mahogany, and porcelain for an affordable tin roughly the shape and size of a small bomb casing. “But how will we know if they’re actually Dad’s ashes in here?” she asked, shaking it as if to make sure it wasn’t already occupied.
“Oh, Mum!”
Mum flashed one of her terrifying smiles at the funeral director, but she was directing her comments at me. “Never mind, Bobo. I’m sure it’s all perfectly fine. I’m sure we’ll get Dad’s ashes back in this tin, and not the ashes of some nameless Hungarian.”
“Of course we will,” I said.
“Or some unfortunate refugee,” Mum added. She implied air quotes around the word “refugee.” There was no air-conditioning; a fan stirred the muggy air around. “All right,” Mum said, mopping her brow. “Put my husband in here, please.” She tapped the bomb casing and directed a final terrifying smile at the funeral director. “Köszönöm very much indeed,” she said. “You’ve been very helpful, most accommodating, terribly kind.”
* * *
—
WE GOT BACK TO THE HOTEL in the late afternoon, exhausted from it all; Dad’s death, tromping around the hot city in a refugee crisis. “One down, two to go,” Mum said. She put up her feet on the bed, took another anti-mad pill, and poured herself a well-earned brandy, dash of water, some ice. Meantime, I spent a few hours on the phone with unsympathetic airline officials. “You are much bossier than
I,” Mum had reasoned. “You should do it, it’s easy for you.”
I managed—after the kind of phone athletics that confirms it hasn’t been worth the exchange of simplicity for convenience—to secure two air tickets from Budapest to Lusaka via London and Johannesburg; I also negotiated the partial refund of a dead man’s air ticket along the same unlikely route; but I was having some trouble securing permission to have Dad’s ashes on board with us.
The Ethiopians were fine; the South Africans didn’t mind. The British and Germans seemed worried, though. They asked many questions, they put me on hold for fifteen minutes at a time, managers were sought. “Good thing we’re not Jewish, tell them.” Mum waved her glass at me; the ice clunked. “Or we’d have to bring the whole corpse in a tachrichim.” She seemed proud of knowing this word, and she repeated it a few times, attempting various pronunciations. “Do you think it’s a hard ‘cheem’ or more like you’re clearing your throat ‘gheeem’?”
I put my hand over the receiver. “Mum!”
Mum shrugged innocently and took a sip of her drink. “Just trying to help,” she said. “It’s lucky you’re so naturally bossy, Bobo.” She smiled encouragingly. “Tell them he’s in a very neat box.” She assessed the box. “They haven’t lost the knack of getting rid of a body quickly and efficiently around here. It’s much smaller than anything I usually try to wrestle on board as hand luggage,” she admitted.
Dad’s cremated remains weighed a little less than three kilograms minus the bomb casing and the cardboard box. “Seven pounds,” Mum said. She can do these conversions in her head, I can’t. I had to tell the airline agents my father’s exact dead weight, it was the same as his birth weight. I cried, huge unexpected tears at that realization, but Mum remained dry-eyed for the moment, her natural suspicion overriding any lurking sentimentality. “You do think it’s all of Dad?” she asked.
Travel Light, Move Fast Page 7