It would be all right now if the little bridge collapsed, or if we hit a goat, or if the pickup suddenly had a cadenza and refused to budge another inch. We could walk from here. We were among our people, we were among his people; we were willfully understood, our passage was assured, our word was good.
We were safe, because he’d been celebrated here. “Fuller!” “Fuller!” “Fuller!” The shout followed the pickup; in a town with few cars a man is known by the vehicle he drives. Dad had become synonymous with this white Ford; it was new, only six months old, but he’d made such a fuss of showing it off. He’d always given lifts to people he knew, up and down that hot, sandy road. It had paid to know him.
“Fuller!” people shouted, and waved.
“Oh, Kalusha,” Mum said. “They don’t know he’s gone, they think you’re Mr. Fuller. They still think he’s here. Oh, Kalusha, who will tell them?” And then for one split moment, her mask slipped. She’d looked at Mr. Kalusha with naked terror, her hands gripped around the comforting little shiny blue creature on her lap. “How will we manage, Kalusha? What will we do without him?”
* * *
—
THERE WERE THE DOGS.
Or there were more dogs.
“This family’s going to the dogs,” Dad used to say. “The whole way.” Not just the four dogs they’d left on the farm when they’d gone to Budapest. Nor just the addition of the shiny blue puppy, but also one of the Jack Russell terriers had delivered five more on the spare bed in the guesthouse while Dad had been dying in the ICU in Budapest, a world away.
An unthinkable, unbelievable, unnatural world away.
“What a clever mother,” Mum had observed, patting Coco on the head. “What lovely, fat puppies you’ve had.” Mum decided to keep two of the males. “I need names,” she said. She was usually very good with names: Che Guevara, Mapp, Smokey, Button, Brucie, Pippin, Bumi, Lucia, Coco, “Chanel, not nut,” Mum always added.
“How about Buddha and Pest,” I suggested.
Mum looked aghast. “Oh, that’s not at all amusing, Bobo. That’s far too close to the bone,” she said; she sounded shocked at the suggestion. “No, no, no, Bobo. I’ll have to come up with something else. And I need to come up with a very special name for my precious new blue baby.” Mum smiled. “So that’s something to look forward to, three new names for three new puppies.”
It was comforting, the routine, the dogs, the life, the insistence on so much of it; it was easier not to feel such a terrible, echoing, repeated, drastic loss, the way I had in Budapest. The sterile cocoon of hotel rooms and airplanes and airports had lent grief the added dimension of isolation. The farm croaked and sang and yelped with life; it slithered and crackled and exploded.
Dad’s death had felt so final in the hot streets of Budapest; now I wasn’t so sure in the Zambezi Valley, still wild in ways, impassive but vibrant. The hippos shouting from the river, roosters calling from the village, wild birds and frogs. Nothing felt final; it was exactly as Dad had always said: “If I pop my clogs, you’ll barely notice. Everything will carry on as usual. It will be all right.”
And it was all right.
It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t what I wanted, but it was all right. And it was lively enough that I could believe it wasn’t the end, just an ending. It was an inevitable ending, and heaps of inevitable beginnings—a new season, a new crop of bananas, new ponds of fish fingerlings, new piles of puppies.
Dad was gone; but life pressed in to fill the gap.
In fact, life pressed in so firmly, so exuberantly, like a jungle straining to cover every patch of bare earth, there was hardly room for the living. One had to assert oneself for space; Dad had always found that to be the case. “If I barked and wagged my tail,” he used to say, “I’d get a lot more attention.”
Coco and her litter stayed in the spare bed in the guest cottage; Mum stuffed towels in the cracks under the door. “Puppies are such snacks for pythons,” she explained. The new blue puppy slept with Mum; there’d had to be a rearrangement of the pack, obviously, unavoidably hackles had gone up. Some of the Jack Russell terriers had had to be spoken to very firmly. But in the end, everyone settled down around the new Best Beloved; bruised egos, but nothing more.
I slept in Dad’s bed; it was more than I could stand. A lifetime I’d burrowed into this smell; and now it would be fading, every minute, fading. I couldn’t breathe him in fast enough. I burst into more tears.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Mum had said. She can’t abide sniveling. “There are hankies in the top drawer if you can wrestle it open.” I couldn’t manage the drawers. It made me cry harder, thinking of Dad flinging the furniture around in his nightmares. “It’s all right, Bobo,” Mum said. She was trying to be comforting. “I know it’s sad. It’s very sad. Very, very sad. But it doesn’t help to go on and on about it.”
Harry slept on the cotton rug next to me. Or rather, he didn’t sleep. He kept getting up, and pacing from the library door to Mum’s slightly air-conditioned, more opulent section of the bedroom, and back to his cotton rug. He’d been such a one-man dog, Harry. For him, Dad’s absence, his failure to return, the fact of an impostor in his bed, it was all a horrible realization, an undeniable dawning of loss.
“I think Harry knows,” I said.
“Of course Harry knows,” Mum said from her side of the room. Her voice was slightly muffled by all the hangings and drapes she’d pinned up around her bed.
I stretched my hand out beneath the mosquito net and tried to pat his head. Harry whined, disconsolate. “Oh Harry,” I said.
“Poor Harry,” Mum said. “People who say dogs don’t have feelings have no idea what they’re talking about. Harry has enormous emotional capacity, don’t you, Harry?”
“Yes,” I said. “He does.”
There was a pause. “I was talking to Harry,” Mum said.
Harry gave another whimper.
“I know, Harry,” Mum said. “Me too, old boy. Me too.”
* * *
—
THE HOUSE ON THE FARM, Mum and Dad’s final house together, was the only house my father ever designed and engineered from scratch; he also undertook to supervise its construction. “All the other wonky places we lived were not Dad’s fault,” Mum had said.
But this house was entirely Dad’s fault.
It wasn’t overly grand; ambition had not been its downfall. It consisted of a lozenge-shaped library, a hexagonal bedroom, and a rectangular bathroom with an attached donkey boiler outside for hot water, although the bedroom and bathroom doubled as libraries too; Mum keeps books everywhere. It’s a very funny shape, obviously, the house; a whole bunch of walls at odds with one another.
As a result, it’s falling down.
“Dad just made a few scratches with a stick on the ground one morning, and then he told some builder he’d fished out of the pub, ‘Go ahead, build a house here,’” Mum had said. “The builder did his best, but it was a ridiculously difficult assignment. Also, he had to work with Dad’s sun-dried bricks. They aren’t very good. Half of them dissolved on the spot.”
In addition to these handicaps, the builder apparently had pointed out that Dad had ordered the house be built on black cotton soil. Black cotton soil swells in the rains and shrinks into hard squares in the dry season. “Good God, what a fussy old lady you are,” Dad had admonished the builder. “Just build the thing and we’ll prop it up with a gum pole or two afterward if we have to.”
So the builder did as he was told as best he could, and repaired to the pub for a long weekend afterward, to restore his mind. The foundation of the house buckled and cracked; ants build nests in the crevices. Also, the roof is tilting, and a few years ago the ceiling fan in the library spun out and nearly decapitated Vanessa’s eldest daughter, Nastasya. On top of this, part of the library wall is falling down; you can see daylight. Snakes
seep into the house that way.
There are bats everywhere. Harry has jumped through the windows—bursting through the shattering glass unscathed, like in the movies—and he’s broken them all. Now, following Harry’s lead, the entire pack of dogs rocket back and forth through the paneless holes, as they please, as do snakes sometimes, and more rarely but also alarmingly, I feel, rabid dogs.
“People have entirely the wrong idea about us,” Mum had said. “Because of the books, I suppose.” Mum owns them all: Out of Africa; The Flame Trees of Thika; Northern Rhodesia to Zambia: Recollections of a DO/DC 1962–73. She’d owned My Life Was a Ranch until someone took it and didn’t bring it back.
“People think it’s all pink gin and White Mischief all the time, but it’s not. Mostly it’s too hot for any sort of mischief, and there are snakes. You need the drink, for goodness’ sake. And your father insists we live a very spartan existence. I blame that mediocre boarding school he went to: Latin masters, frequent canings, and boiled cabbage. The effects can be lasting, you know.”
* * *
—
IT WAS TRUE; Dad had eschewed luxury.
It made a person soft; that had been his chief objection. Also, it inspired jealousy in others, then you ended up dying for whatever unnecessary thing it was, a maradadi watch, a fancy television, the latest cell phone. As to what constituted a luxury, Dad concluded that if most Zambians couldn’t afford it, then it was a luxury.
Therefore everything was a luxury, including life itself.
“Your father is so absolutist,” Mum had complained. “I think he gets it from the aunts.” She had glanced reflexively at her shapely ankles. “They turned into do-gooders and Christian Scientists, you know; the ones that didn’t drink. It’s all about suffering in silence as far as I can tell, being a Christian Scientist, I mean. Drinking is about suffering sensibly. Anyway, you can’t drink enough for this heat; you sweat the stuff out before it can do you any good.”
The ordeal implicit in an ordinary Day in the Life of Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is something in which my mother delights. Or rather, she sometimes resents the ordeal, and she complained bitterly about my father’s frugality, but she takes overt pleasure in her guests’ shock at the picturesque but primitive chaos that greets them when they arrive at her home.
“They try to act cool as cucumbers, but it’s not what they’re expecting. White people living so simply, you can tell it shocks them. They say, ‘Oh, your orange Le Creuset pots, how quaint. It’s so open-air; look at your bird feeders. I simply adore your style, it’s very authentic,’ and they take lots of photos,” Mum says. “But let me tell you, they drop their cameras in a hurry when the first reptile lunges out at them.”
My father took quiet pleasure in shocking the guests too, he always did. “Excitement of the week,” he’d write to me from the farm. “Guest attacked by python in the library,” he’d once reported. There had been hysterics on behalf of the guest, understandably. “British charity worker,” he’d added. I could tell this especially delighted Dad. He despised aid workers. He hated them, as far back as I can remember he’s hated them.
“Bunch of bloody long-drop diggers,” he’d mutter. He’d sometimes swerve pointedly into the road when he saw their SUVs. Save the Children, World Wildlife Fund, CARE, USAID, Oxfam. His eyes blazed. Mum clung on to the car door and pretended to protest; Vanessa and I said our final prayers.
“That’ll teach the baskets to stay home and dig long drops in their own damn villages,” Dad would say, eyes lifted to the rearview mirror in unapologetic assessment, having driven the alarmed do-gooders into the bush. He’d brandish his fist out the window, a final defiant gesture. “Go home. Piss off. Foutez le camp!”
But Dad had mellowed with time.
Or he’d realized that if you allowed it, the world would do all the teaching that was required. Also, age had humbled him, exposed him. He reasoned he’d done at least as much wrong in his long, busy life as the do-gooders had in their short, lazy ones. So while I wouldn’t say he went out of his way to invite aid workers to the farm, if they showed up, he was gracious enough. “You can have the guest cottage as long as you like,” he offered. He didn’t add that the guest cottage lacked hot water, fans, and a ceiling, and was preferred by the area’s breeding frogs.
“I find luxury only encourages guests to outstay their welcome. A reptile or two keeps everyone on their toes,” he’d said.
In recent memory, there’d been a German journalist reporting on postcolonial race relations in southern Africa; that visit had gone as expected. Then there was a suicidal Dutch microfinance expert; he’d redoubled his efforts at self-annihilation after a single night on the farm. And most notorious of all, there had been the Frog Croc Bird, a young French scientist who’d come to Zambia to study crocodiles; according to Mum she’d mostly poked around the poor creatures’ reproductive organs.
“She was sponsored by some fancy university,” Mum had said. She’d paused, and then added, “A well-endowed institution, I’m given to believe. Although their budget didn’t seem to extend to laboratory coats.” Mum shut her eyes against the memory of the vision. “The Frog Croc Bird’s outfits were like the American cocktail hour—jarringly brief. It nearly bankrupted us. I couldn’t get any of the men to do a stroke of work for me on the farm for months.”
“What did she find out about crocs?” I’d asked. “Anything interesting?”
But Mum didn’t know; the Frog Croc Bird kept her findings to herself, or to the paper she’d published in France long after the memory of her too-brief outfits and her molestation of the local wildlife had faded in the malarial haze of another rainy season. “She didn’t send us her article, so I know nothing of her conclusions,” Mum had said. “Nor did she ask us any questions, which I thought was odd. Crocodiles are the natural enemy of the fish farmer, Bobo. That Frog Croc Bird could have learned an awful lot from me if she’d bothered to ask. I know my enemies well, very well.” She paused thoughtfully. “It’s the Highland blood, I suppose. The very distilled blood, to be precise, of the Inner Hebrides archipelago.”
* * *
—
STEEP STAIRS PLUMMET through Mum’s jungle of a garden to the kitchen. Cobras, black mambas, and pythons prefer her garden to any other place in the Zambezi Valley; also there are several monitor lizards and a half dozen crocodiles that live between her garden, the fishponds, and the irrigation canal. The dining room and sitting room aren’t rooms, there are no walls, just a roof propped up by a few dissolving brick pillars; animals and humans come and go as they please, vervet monkeys spill around, stealing sugar and bananas off the dining room table.
“It’s a death trap down there,” Vanessa had said. She had refused to visit ever since her sixth child was born. “Dad won’t put a fan in the guesthouse, or netting. You lie there in a puddle of sweat getting dive-bombed by bats the whole time. Dad says they’re a tremendous luxury; live mosquito control.”
Mum eschewed luxury too, not because she didn’t long for it—she craved it wholeheartedly—but because it terrified her. She was scared of breaking things, she had a tendency to pull knobs off machines and to microwave tinfoil. The sight of white carpets and pale furniture made her spill tea and red wine compulsively. Automatic paper towels in public restrooms made her scream and leap into the air. “In my experience something shooting out the wall is not usually benign, let alone hygienic,” she’d explained.
Air-conditioning in America made her sick, it was always turned down so wastefully low; so did the air-conditioning at the Rock. Still, she pined for moderate coolness. “Just a tiny puff of relief from the unrelenting swelter,” she’d said. She wanted her own little patch of pretend-Simla-away-from-Calcutta, her imaginary bungalow in the hills, an invisible swath of up-country. “It’s like absolute dog years to make it through a single rainy season in the Zambezi Valley,” she’d complained. “The heat. Th
e humidity. I feel a hundred by four o’clock every afternoon.”
Dad hadn’t appeared to believe Mum’s complaints of nausea and dizziness were caused by heat, or that it was possible even to be sickened by heat, but when both she and one of the larger dogs, Smokey, had nearly died of heatstroke on the same afternoon, both of them spiking fevers in the odd-shaped sweatbox of a hexagonal bedroom, Dad had finally agreed to the addition of a single air-conditioning unit.
“You really do have to be without a pulse for the better part of an afternoon before Dad will take you seriously,” Mum had reported with understandable outrage. “For weeks and weeks it’s been about forty degrees centigrade, and a million percent humidity. That’s seriously hot. The bananas were flopping over. Poor Smokey nearly croaked. I nearly croaked.”
Dad had instructed the farm electrician to put the unit over Mum’s bed, behind all her drapery that hid from his view her dogs and books and teacups and special collections. The effects of the air-conditioning barely wheezed over to his side of the room, kitty-corner/dogleg across from hers.
He was a creature of habit, discipline, and in spite all his frenetic whirring about, he was also a creature of routine. He slept in his wedge-shaped corner of the bedroom on a simple wooden bed, with a thin blanket from the Chirundu market. Since he was habitually intent on rising before dawn, there weren’t curtains on his side of the room, and as in the rest of the house, nor were there windowpanes. At night, Harry flopped down on the cotton rug by Dad’s bedside and slept deeply.
They both had been in the habit of retiring early, rising before the sun.
“Old dogs aren’t gorgeous by accident,” Dad had said. “Good night, everyone, see you all at sparrow’s fart.”
He had slept beneath a mosquito net, face to the door, back to the wall. He had never set an alarm, but in the pinking half hour before sunrise the mosquito net around Dad’s humble little farm-made bed had parted. His bandy legs had swung out; then there he was shaking out his slippers, spiders mostly, or rose beetles if there’d been a recent hatch of those. “Good morning, Harry.” Dad had always addressed Harry with the utmost cordiality. “Did you sleep well?”
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