After that had come the routine of deflecting the flock of Jack Russell terriers swooping off Mum’s bed, a morning exercise regime, a lot of bending, and kicking. “Go on, get out of here, you horrible little rats.” Dad had stopped bothering to learn the terriers’ individual names after the so-called Bloody Sunday massacre.
“Bloody Sunday.” Mum’s green eyes instantly rim red at the memory. She’d been taking her usual afternoon walk, a Sunday-afternoon walk, obviously. There was a sudden noise in the banana plantation; all the dogs went crazy. But before she had time to wade in and bludgeon it to death with her walking stick, a massive Mozambique spitting cobra had killed four dogs on the spot; another dog managed to stagger back to the yard before dying; and two had died in the night.
“The venom of these cobras replenishes,” Mum had explained. “So it could just keep killing and killing until I managed to get a good whack at it. It was a day of such dark devastation. I’ll never be the same. I’ll never get over it.”
The part I couldn’t get over was the vision of Mum wading into the confusion of a dozen frantic dogs and one large, terrified, wounded cobra and then killing the reptile with one of her walking sticks. She loves her walking sticks; they’re handmade by a blind man at the Chirundu turnoff. She’d broken it in the battle. “Precious,” she’d agreed. “But not as precious as the fallen faithful.”
She’d replaced the fallen faithful with a dozen new puppies, and as some of those had also met an untimely demise, she’d acquired a couple more, or a half dozen; she’d bred a few of her own litters. It became hard to keep track of the fallen Jack Russell terriers, let alone the flocks and flocks of new ones; Dad regarded most of the dogs under knee height as interchangeable.
“Go on, get by, you bloody little terrorists. Harry, bite them!” But Harry was a lover, not a fighter. In spite of his large size, his swaggering attitude, Harry was a lover of everyone except people on bicycles. He hated people on bicycles. He’d put on an uncharacteristic turn of speed and chase down a bike with the agility of a scrappy jackal. Once Harry had even managed to sink his teeth into a Danish aid worker on a motorbike; Dad had blushed with pride.
Harry was born to accompany Dad.
“Right, Harry, farms don’t cock themselves up without assistance,” Dad would say, opening the door from the bedroom to the library. Jack Russell terriers rained down and around Harry and him like confetti. I loved those mornings, staying on the farm in a spare bed in the library. Dad’s morning routine was like a comforting radio drama to which I awakened with delight.
“Top of the morning, Bobo. No pythons in the night?”
“Hi, Dad. Nope, still here,” I’d say.
“Well done. Well done,” and then he’d be gone, with Harry by his side, a dog of great spiritual intelligence, it was easy to see, a dog of dignity and grace, a dog who’d learned to let fools be fools on their own time, with one notable, exceptional prejudice—anyone on two wheels.
He hated anyone on two wheels.
“Yes, well, I understand that,” Mum had said. “I too never forget mine enemies.” She sniffed; it was the sniff she used before throwing down her gauntlet. She’d won the Scripture Knowledge prize three years in a row at the convent in Eldoret under the tutelage of those sour nuns. “They put a lot of emphasis on the Old Testament at that place; it influenced me greatly.” She paused to glare at me, as if any slip from the influence of God’s ancient instruction had been my doing. “But I do find Second Samuel twenty-two, verse thirty-eight, pretty unequivocal, Bobo. The Bible is very clear; people are forever smiting their enemies.”
* * *
—
I AWOKE BEFORE MUM that first morning on the farm without Dad. It was just beginning to get light, the sky streaked grey and pink. It was my favorite time of year on the farm; a good month, the Southern Hemisphere spring equinox. The days were hot, the nights nearly perfect; the dry-season wind had died down, but it was not yet dripping humidity.
Also, life was returning to the place. The mopane leaves were beginning to sprout, tiny spears of hopeful, vivid lime green against all the parched dry-season grass. The baobab trees too, those were beginning to bud. Birds were nesting in the swamp between the house and the bananas. Snakes, energized by the heat, were more visible and active; there’d be pythons in the sheephouses before long.
I parted the mosquito net and swung my legs out. “Hello, Harry,” I said quietly. “Did you sleep at all?” Harry gave me a mournful look, and sighed. He had his head in his paws; he didn’t bother to lift it. “I’m sorry,” I said. I patted him. “I miss him too.” Harry raised his eyebrows at me, penetratingly.
“Bobo.” Mum’s voice emerged from behind her self-made boudoir. I think it’s not an accident she keeps a copy of Robert K. Massie’s 1967 Nicholas and Alexandra, liberally doused in Blue Death, on the bookshelf closest to her bed.
Aside from being German and her silliness with Rasputin, Tsarina Alexandra had a very elaborate mauve boudoir in which she spent much of her time in splendid repose on a chaise longue; Massie makes much of this. There are photographs of this boudoir in the book; there’s a suffocating emphasis on drapery. There are piles of books and papers on a table within reach; it’s clear Alexandra was a collector of interesting things, a hoarder, a magpie-minded person, saved from the worst symptoms of nostalgie de la boue only by her many servants.
Sometimes you can tell where Mum gets her ideas, usually good ideas, inspired ideas, she’d have said.
“I think Harry blames me for Dad’s death,” I said.
“What rubbish you do talk, Bobo,” Mum said; the drapes and cloth hangings around the frame of her mosquito net shook. Her hands emerged, clutching the shiny blue puppy. “Harry is heartbroken, just like I am. And since you’re up, I’m gasping for a cup of tea. Also, here.” She thrust the puppy at me. “Duna can’t keep her little legs crossed another minute.”
“Duna?” I said. I took the puppy. She wiggled and squirmed and squeaked; she peed on me.
“Clever Duna,” Mum said. “Did you see that? She waited until she was off the bed before she uncrossed her legs. She’s a very intelligent creature. I knew it. I knew it right away.”
“Duna?” I said again.
Mum disappeared back into her self-made boudoir. A veil, or rather a sarong she’d picked up on a working holiday in Thailand, came between us. “It’s a perfect name for her, don’t you think?”
I looked into Duna’s eyes. They were not unlike my mother’s; pale yellow-green, very alluring, enchanting.
“My Blue Duna,” Mum said.
CHAPTER TWO
In Times of Excessive Difficulty, Cope Excessively
All the regulars at the pub at the bottom of the farm—this included some of the higher-ranking officers of the Zambia Defence Force, a couple of Customs and Immigration officials, and a few dipsomaniac fishermen from Lusaka—knew Dad’s banking business. They were invited to sit with him, console and advise him, while he conducted it. “Better make it a double, Shupi,” Dad would say. “It’s my day for online fucking banking, excuse my French.”
Shupi made it a double. Hippos submerged off the tip of the island opposite the pub shouted their condolences. Harry put the pub’s resident Jack Russell terriers in their places, then flopped down next to Dad’s barstool with a sigh. There’d be no dancing in the banana plantation today; Harry could feel the online-banking blues in his bones. He stared despondently across the river at Zimbabwe; even they, a failed state without a currency to call their own, couldn’t escape it.
“Your good health, Shupi,” Dad always said, opening his computer’s lid. “Mine’s about to take a turn for the bloody worse.” Then there’d be a delay, punctuated by a lot more cursing, while Dad went through the whole rocket-launch procedure of turning on the dust-menaced laptop, waiting for the pages to load, laboriously entering his passwords. He was always
being bounced back to screens asking for more details.
“Why do they want to know my mother’s maiden name?” Dad had asked. “She didn’t know it herself half the time.”
“It’s a security question,” Boss Shupi explained.
“Where was I New Year’s Eve 2000?” Dad was incredulous. “How the hell am I supposed to remember?”
“You were here, Mr. Fuller.”
“I’ll put, ‘In bed by nine.’ Maybe they’ll increase my overdraft.”
My father’s computer was an elderly, pampered Sony he’d bought at the duty free in O. R. Tambo back when the airport was still named for Jan Smuts, the prominent South African pro-British imperialist and son of well-to-do Afrikaner farmers. Jan Smuts had a whole string of letters after his name by the end of his life. Field Marshal the Right Honorable Jan Christian Smuts, PC, OM, CH, DTD, ED, KC, FRC.
It’s clear that whoever was coming up with the honorable acronyms didn’t see into this dishonorable future. “We’re orphans of a defunct empire,” Mum had declared. “Very few people understand what that really means anymore.” She had taken a deep breath. “One has to be very humble, very grateful. You can’t live in a country like Zambia if you aren’t.”
Meantime, O. R. Tambo, along with all other black South Africans born between the mid-seventeenth century and 1994, hadn’t been given a chance to amass a string of letters after his name. In fact, Oliver Reginald Tambo had been deemed only fractionally human at his birth in eastern Pondoland in 1917; humanish, but not entitled to ordinary human rights, and subject to a boundless number of human wrongs.
He’d wanted to be a church minister, Oliver Tambo had. He’d wanted to be a quiet, bookish, peaceful man of God. He’d fished insects out of the bath, he hated killing so much. But in the end, Oliver Tambo had seen no alternative but to turn away from the pulpit and toward the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress. “Yes,” Mum had agreed. “I love the airport, but I don’t love South Africa. The Afrikaners took it too far, the blacks are bolshie, and you can’t blame them; I find it very creepy, all of it. Just look at that Oscar Pistorius.”
* * *
—
MY FATHER WOULDN’T HAVE KNOWN who Oscar Pistorius was. He died without knowing a single thing about the Kardashians. He’d stopped being up-to-date with British politics after the Falklands. But he wasn’t removed from life, he was removed from the stories that swirl around the legs of a life, tripping it up. For example, although he knew very little about American history, or pop culture, he’d fundamentally understood the place, cut to its original wound. “A bit racialist, aren’t they?” he’d observed.
He didn’t acquire information, he didn’t see the point of stockpiling facts; the whole enterprise of a twenty-four-hour news cycle seemed to him both pointless and tragically self-fulfilling. Helped by deafness brought on by the war, he’d honed his mind to neutral. “I didn’t realize what an effort it is to stay ignorant,” he’d said, leaning back and lighting his pipe. “You can’t look anywhere without accidentally seeing the news.”
Still, the ancient television was unveiled from beneath its protective dog-hair-covered blanket for the Nightly Bloody Whine, as Dad called Sky News, also for Formula One racing and Mum’s cooking shows. The rest of the time, it sat like a monstrous, ancient pet in the corner of the library. Wasps had nested in the works, so it no longer played Mum’s collection of beloved videocassettes, “but the sound still works,” Dad had said.
In keeping with this rationale—that a horse, vehicle, or machine properly bedded down for the night lasted longer than one that wasn’t—Dad had stored the one and only laptop computer he’d ever owned in its original packaging, except on his days for online fucking banking; then he’d eased it out of its cardboard box, raised it from its Styrofoam sarcophagus, and cradled it down to the pub on his lap, driving over the bumps and potholes with extra caution. In spite of this, Dad’s computer had often stalled, and it had crashed frequently. Finally, it had died, refusing to produce even the tiniest pulse of light, no matter how many buttons Dad pushed. “It’s passed out again,” Dad had said, showing Boss Shupi a blank screen.
“It’s an old computer,” Boss Shupi had pointed out.
“Rubbish,” Dad had said. “I’ve had it only twelve years.”
He owned socks that were older, he’d argued. He had hankies and underwear that had outlived this machine. He’d even managed to keep a pair of leopard-skin slippers since 1963; and that was through hell, high water, and several hostile southern African border crossings. “Plus Mrs. Fuller’s dogs,” Dad had said. “And I haven’t let a dog near this bloody thing. It’s lived in its box since it was born. What’s its problem?”
It was Boss Shupi’s unhappy lot to explain to my father the principle of built-in obsolescence. My father had been shocked. “He’s very naïve, poor Dad,” Mum had explained afterward. “We both are. Very innocent and gullible.” My father had mentally dropped anchor somewhere in the early 1950s; he’d stopped trying to keep up with mod cons after the invention of the microwave. The startling news that even in his seventies, well beyond what he’d considered his natural shelf life, he was likely to outlive his computer had appalled him; he’d been indignant, furious.
“That’s just bloody daylight robbery,” my father had protested. “Do you mean to say that if I want to do my online fucking banking, excuse my French, I have to buy a whole new computer every twelve years? Who lets these bloody bastards get away with this?” My father had glowered. “I’d better have another double on the strength of that, Shupi,” Dad had said. “Humanity’s reached a whole new low.”
My father had been constitutionally predisposed to hate the world of passwords and security codes and computers anyway. There was nothing life enhancing about any of it, he felt. But the dishonesty of deliberately manufacturing and selling something that was designed to blow up was not only criminal, in my father’s view, but also obviously shameful. “How does that man manage to keep a straight face?” he’d asked. “He’s laughing all the way to the bank.”
In the end, Dad’s unresponsive Sony laptop had been resurrected, with some glitches, by a Tonga computer technician/hacker who kept hours in a dusty kiosk in the Chirundu market. “I left it with Comrade Malambo for the morning, and by the afternoon he had it humming along like a bee,” Dad had said victoriously. My father had considered his revived computer a triumph of Zambian ingenuity over Western corruption.
“I should write a letter to that bloody crook,” Dad had said.
“Which bloody crook?” I’d asked.
“The smarmy one,” Dad had said.
Dad had considered all computer manufacturers smarmy, but he’d focused the balance of his ire on the most visible and vocal offender, Bill Gates. He scoffed at the Gates Foundation’s pledge to eradicate malaria, TB, and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, presenting as evidence for Bill Gates’s uselessness the recently defunct Sony laptop. “Why would anyone trust that crooked bastard near a cure for malaria?” Dad had asked. “He can’t even do his own job with a straight face, and he’s trying to be a bloody doctor now. Well, between giving him the job, or Comrade Malambo, I’d put my money on Comrade Malambo any day.”
Then rumors circulated, confirmed as always by the BBC World Service: The Gates Foundation had donated $50 million toward a mass-circumcision campaign in Zambia and, of all places, Swaziland. “What did we ever do to Bill Gates?” Dad had asked, crossing his legs and covering his lap with his red-spotted hanky; he could sound hysterically distraught when he chose. “I’m putting in an order for a chain-link codpiece for both Harry and myself,” Dad had said, his voice going up two octaves. “Any other takers? Shupi?”
“Circumcision, Hon,” Mum had clarified. “It’s not the same as castration.”
“Oh, dear God!” Dad had shrieked. “The family jewels. Run for the gomos, Shupi! They’re coming for the fam
ily jewels.”
My father had believed people who made a killing for a living shouldn’t be let out among the general population without proper adult supervision, also not without a leash and a cattle prod. People who didn’t touch soil, and who didn’t have to rely on the genuine forbearance of their fellow humans, got unnaturally puffed up in his view, dangerously so. It didn’t do anyone any good, even the puffed-up people. Manufacturing an endless supply of self-imploding computers, and getting away with it, deferred necessary humility; it encouraged a person to take the same flight path as Icarus.
“And it’s only a matter of time before some touchy bastard pushes the wrong tit on one of these things and blows the world to smithereens,” Dad had said, paraphrasing cybersecurity concerns the world over. “And for once nobody will be able to blame me. I can’t even turn my bloody computer on half the time.”
Dad preferred a premechanized world, or a world humbled by vagaries. Without machines, or with more rudimentary machines, it wasn’t so easy to steal from the past, or to promise a future in which you ignored the present. In a world before drilling equipment and center pivots and online anything, you were at the mercy of the very stark here and now; your beliefs tested, your integrity tried in real time. There was nothing virtual about it.
“It stops you getting too big for your boots,” Dad had argued.
By which he meant, without the aid of technology, you did your seedbeds, you plowed your fields, then you lifted your eyes skyward, and you prayed. You went to your knees; in a bad year when the rain didn’t come until December, you wore your knees to nubs. It shaves something off a man to be that vulnerable, subject to the sun and to offshore currents two countries away. It shaves something off a man to know there are impassive, massive limits to what he can do and no limits to what can be done to him. “You don’t get anything from suffering itself,” Dad had told me. “Except suffering, and more suffering. The trick is to suffer spectacularly, and then you still have suffering, but at least it’s on your own terms.”
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