* * *
—
DAD DIDN’T CELEBRATE BIRTHDAYS, he didn’t see the point; it wasn’t a trick to be born. But not everyone could face misfortune with the requisite stoicism and illogical hilarity. Not everyone could risk everything season after season, and then celebrate disappointment as if he’d won the lottery, or as if he were attempting to live Rudyard Kipling’s British-boarding-school-permeating poem “If—” to the letter. “Triumph and disaster, Bobo,” Dad had said. “They’re the same coin, different sides; it’s worth remembering.”
It had happened over and over. There’d been eelworms in the bananas, so he and Mum had torn up the crop, made of it a maze at the dead ends of which were bottles of booze, and invited everyone in the valley to go wild for two days; that had been in our farming-in-a-war-zone era. Or there’d have been a drought, the maize stalling at shoulder height, tasseling under baking, cloudless skies; then we’d be in for a monumental rain dance. “Before the bank manager notices,” Dad would say; these calamities were celebrated until at least one person, usually my father, was in drag. But after that, we’d be under the auspices of one of Dad’s not-infrequent austerity plans.
“Everyone take in your belt a notch,” he’d give the order.
Mum groaned. She hated Dad’s austerity plans. They made her long for luxuries she’d otherwise been quite content to do without. Suddenly she craved caviar and champagne. She longed for escargot swimming in butter and garlic. “Such a succulent dish; so French, it even comes with its own little ashtrays.” Also, the idea of never again going to the West End in a fabulous hat—designed to annoy theater lovers everywhere, you’d need a periscope to see around Mum—or the Bolshoi Ballet, that tore into her. “Never, ever, forever,” she’d bemoaned.
“Nothing’s forever,” Dad would remind her.
Mum had a special look she gave Dad when he dared get philosophical on her. “Oh,” she’d say, rolling her eyes. “How inspiring. Deep Croak. You should write a book of Dad’s pithy and comforting sayings, Bobo. Maybe I will.” But Dad was always right; a season or two would pass, some seasons would pass. And once in a while everything hit just right; the rain, the sun, the markets. Then they’d be flush with money, and we could let out our belts again. There might even be a trip to Paris, or in the end, the poor man’s Paris.
The Paris of Africa was out of the question. Luanda, Angola, was routinely voted the city with the wealth, the fancy restaurants, the centuries’ old European architecture to carry off the nickname; it was a single border crossing from Zambia, but only the filthy rich and the dirt poor could afford that place. There had been war there longer than anyone could remember, generations of war. All that oil, those diamonds, the ivory; it was too much.
“According to Paul Theroux, the whole country is now smothered with dictators and half-dead peasants,” Mum had said. “You haven’t read The Last Train to Zona Verde, have you, Bobo? I have. I’m Theroux’s biggest fan. The poor man hated every moment; and he’s been to Turkmenistan and places like that, so he’d know.” As a result, Angola was not on a list of places Mum wanted to visit. “But I find it very interesting when other people subject themselves to hell on my behalf,” she’d said. “It’s very refreshing.”
Mum was more accustomed to being subjected to hell on her own behalf. When Dad had finally been able to coax Mum down here to their final farm in the Zambezi Valley, to the scrubby patch of no-man’s-land between the border post and the Kafue confluence, they’d slept on camping mattresses on the ground under mosquito nets tied to a mopane tree for a season, and then in a hut made of reed mats for a few more.
“No, Bobo, even for me, it was quite primitive and difficult,” Mum had said afterward. “I don’t think anyone can appreciate quite how primitive and difficult.” I had tried to appreciate quite how primitive and difficult, and it had frightened me, honestly. My parents, heading for the age at which most people are considering retirement, had taken it upon themselves to start over, yet again, on a young couple’s place, not a place for people soon to be the world’s most reluctant, slightly appalled great-grandparents.
“Mm,” Dad had agreed, puffing on his pipe. “I did it for Mum more than anything. She gets bored if things are too easy.”
The mosquitoes in the valley are like jackals, the heat’s abusive, the soil is shallow, and the river rises and falls at the capricious whim of the Zambezi River Authority, a joint effort between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and overseen by the Chinese, to manage the hydroelectric station upstream. “We all expect to get swept into the Mozambique Channel in a huge tsunami when the dam wall fails any moment now,” Mum had said. “Three and a half million sub-Saharan Africans will drown, the BBC even had a whole special report on it, can you imagine? Three and a half million, and then you start to matter to the Brits. They’d care if they knew my Jack Russells were in peril.”
* * *
—
AFTER MY FATHER DIED, I was surprised by some of what he’d kept over the years; baffled by what it meant about him, or what he’d thought it had meant about him. In the top drawer next to his bed, where I found the green leather booklet commemorating his brief conversion to a Rhodesian citizen, I’d found a few other markers of his life, such as they were; proof that he’d stamped the world with his violence, his seed, his passion, his sorrows.
There was, for example, a thin exercise book—the paper was rough newsprint, left over from Zambia’s socialist days—in which Dad had recorded every drop of rain that had fallen near or around him going back thirty years. There were the birth certificates of his five children, and the death certificates of three of them. He’d also kept the telegrams read out at my parents’ wedding reception. One of them made no sense, at least not in the context of marriage.
“ALL THE VERY BEST TO YOU (STOP) DON’T HANG AROUND THE BASE OF THE SCRUM, TIM (STOP) GET IN AND PUSH (STOP) THE FORTHERGILLS.” I read it aloud to Mum. “It sounds suggestive, in a very 1964 sort of way,” I observed.
“Does it?” Mum didn’t agree. “I think it sounds very outdoorsy and wholesome. It’s a rugby reference, Bobo. Let me see.” Mum took the telegram and then she riffled through the others, her nose turning pink. “Who’d have thought he’d kept them all, all these years, all those border crossings?” she said. “He was a very sentimental man, my husband, a romantic at heart. Who’d have known?”
Dad had also kept his Post Office Savings Bank Book from 1958. He was just eighteen, and already on his way to becoming Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode even then, scratching out his grandparents’ address in York and replacing it with his father’s address in Powys, Wales, then in turn scribbling out that address to replace it with an address in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
“I didn’t know Dad had lived in Ireland,” I said.
“Not for long,” Mum said. “Just to hide out from the aunts until he could flee the UK.”
It had taken the man-boy who’d become my father a year to spend thirty-six pounds, fourteen shillings, and sixpence. At that point, the savings book zeroed out. It didn’t make sense to me that of all things, my father would have kept a defunct savings book; the money was long spent and he was too much of a rule breaker to heed the warning, “KEEP THIS BOOK IN A SAFE PLACE. Its loss may cause you trouble.”
But in the very last pages of the book, perhaps as a holdover from the world wars in which eighteen-year-old men were routinely shipped off to die, there was a page unapologetically headlined “Instructions for disposal of your income in the event of your death.” Under this, my father had written clearly: “Have a party.” I could almost hear him saying it, his signature cry when all else was lost. “Let’s have a party!”
Tears had sprung to my eyes. “Look, Mum!”
Mum had taken the Post Office Savings Bank Book and clutched her throat. “Oh, Bobo. He’d known even then how he’d wanted to be seen off.” Her eyes blazed. “Well, we won’t let him do
wn.” She searched the room for the dogs. “Will we, Harry? Button? Coco?” Then she kissed the puppy cradled in her arms. “Will we, my Blue Duna?”
It was typical of my father, encouraging his bereaved friends and relatives to suffer spectacularly in the event of his death. Drinking was what you did when things were so overwhelmingly good you needed a hangover to tamp them down, or when things were so overwhelmingly bad you needed to forget. From that point of view, there was no reason not to get drunk at a memorial service; one of those things was bound to apply.
In the end, perhaps my father had held on to this old Post Office Savings Bank Book for practical reasons. Where else but in an old-fashioned bank ledger would he have been able to record his instructions for the disposal of his income in the event of his death? Online banking didn’t make room for such a basic, but fundamentally important, question.
* * *
—
THE DAY OF THE MEMORIAL SERVICE DAWNED clear and still, eight days after Dad’s death in Budapest, and a world away. We’d set the time for the service for the early afternoon, but from late morning villagers began to arrive and settle on the lawn in front of the pub at the bottom of the farm. Representatives from the Customs and Immigration Department, nurses from the Italian Mission Hospital, neighboring farmers, and local fishermen silently congregated. Everyone wore black; most of the women had covered their heads with scarves.
“Oh, dear,” Mum had said, taking her place front and center of the hushed gathering. “It is like a funeral, isn’t it?” She wore a white silk blouse with large black dots on it, something a jockey might get away with, and a pair of black, light linen trousers, suitable for the heat. “Black is supposedly a forgiving color,” Mum had observed desperately, brushing the dog hair off her knees. “Unless you’re surrounded by a flock of Jack Russell terriers with mostly white coats.”
We sat together; the family and the dogs, plus everyone Dad had mentioned in his final days—Mrs. Tembo, Mr. Chrissford, Mr. Kalusha, Comrade Connie—also a few people he’d forgotten about, or whom he’d willfully ignored. Vanessa’s second son, the pregnant daughter-in-law, and the great-grandchild, they were with us. Serenity had dissolved in tears at the sight of Mum and had had to be removed to gaze upon tranquil scenes of banana leaves.
“I never see the point of small children at these things,” Mum hissed at Vanessa. “Do you?” Mum had long ago declared her intention to forgo attending church until sensible rules had been set in place by the Archbishop of Canterbury if need be, or the Queen of England herself, for the disposal of unweaned and/or unruly children during services. “How are you supposed to observe the proper liturgies for special days when you’re confronted with a dozen slurping Little Pig Robinsons and a whole bunch of howling little Serenities?”
Vanessa wore a blue tunic over blue palazzo pants; she had a long blue-and-white scarf wrapped around her neck and trailing behind her, much to the interest of Mum’s Jack Russell terriers. Isadora Duncan sprang to mind. “I tell you what, Al-Bo,” Vanessa said, leaning over to me and speaking in a stage whisper. “I’m a total wreck. I don’t know if I can take this.” Mum glared at us. Vanessa popped one of Mum’s knockout pills under her tongue and handed me one. “Mum thinks this is a dud batch,” she said. “Do you think we should have two? I’d like to be wafting in the rafters, if possible.”
After that there was a pause, as if we’d all inhaled collectively, but now none of us quite knew how to exhale, to start this ending. Then Vanessa’s middle daughter, Megan, stood up and took center stage, in front of the pub’s kitchen hutch. She sang “Jerusalem” a cappella. “And did those feet in ancient times,” we’d all sung that enough over the years, on the roof of a Land Rover usually, Dad at the wheel.
Mum nodded approvingly, mouthed along as Megan sang, swayed a little from side to side. Mum adored Megan; Megan Nicola, she was the only one of the nine grandchildren who’d been named after her. Megan was fanatical about animals, and was very good with them, also she loved the farm, she was blindingly blonde, she read well, and was squeamish about anything to do with nudity and hugging. She disapproved of swearing, drugs, and anything else not wholesome and outdoorsy. She wasn’t nosy and she didn’t like nosy people. She was, in Mum’s opinion, practically the perfect child.
“Megan would have been head girl of her junior school in Lusaka,” Mum never tired of reminding anyone who’d listen. “The headmaster begged and begged for her to stay on; but Vanessa and Rich wanted to send her to South Africa.” Mum had taken this blow personally. “Poor Megan. She’d have made a very good head girl. She’s a star in the classroom. She’s very athletic.”
She could also sing like an angel; it was a lot to take, and very hard not to cry. William Blake’s epic poem set to Sir Hubert Parry’s music, piping out across the banks of the roiling Zambezi River. “Dark Satanic Mills,” Mum warbled softly, a beat behind Megan. She’d issued stern warnings ahead of the memorial; there’d be no performances of any kind tolerated. She had been to those services, lots of wailing and shrieking. “Catholics are a proper sweat,” she’d shuddered. “There’s always lots of guilty secrets, mistresses howling like hyenas, illegitimate kids scattered all over the place looking murderous.”
Megan took her place next to Mum; there was a round of applause, it was an ovation-worthy performance. Mum patted Megan’s knee. “Oh, encore, my darling. Encore,” she whispered. “That means ‘once more’ in French.” Mum had been panicking about Megan’s education, and supplementing it the way she’d supplemented ours, a sprinkling of French here, a smattering of Swahili there, an introduction to this opera, an obsession with Picasso, potted histories of everywhere, natural histories of everything. She’d been born with a vast, eclectic appetite for life; it was enough for three, it was enough for scores, it was enough for an army. She took Megan’s victories and defeats personally. “Beautifully done,” Mum assured Megan.
The applause died down. Then I’d stood in front of the kitchen hutch; the pub was like a small airplane hangar, it was designed to catch the breeze, not the eye of an editor at South Africa’s Garden and Home magazine. The space still quivered with Megan’s gorgeous song and with my father’s sprit; he’d have loved it, and suddenly the plaintive fact of that conditional tense overwhelmed me. We’d never know for sure what my father would have felt or said about anything; certainty had been quenched.
Dad would have.
He would have.
It was like loving God, and then guessing what God would prefer. We’d never really know from now on, but from now on we’d all be striving for it and fighting over it. I could feel it already; each of us taking a stand behind the man we’d known, each feeling our knowing of him to be superior. The primacy of marriage, the importance of the oldest child, my incessant probing and processing; we’d all understood ourselves in relation to this man as if our understanding of him were central to our beings.
“Yes, well, you write very flatteringly of Dad,” Mum had complained. “You’ve made him sound like Marcus Aurelius, all stoicism and bon mots, and you’ve made me sound like a racist alcoholic, forever oppressing the natives and swilling booze. Anyway, it’s brandy, by the way, not whisky. You’ve written ‘whisky.’ That is inaccurate; I very rarely drink whisky.”
Now, Mum was glaring at me intently. I cleared my throat and read a poem about love and a long marriage in honor of my parents. It wasn’t something I had written myself, so Mum hadn’t minded too much, although she’d stifled a yawn when the poem proved to have not only a third but also a fourth verse. “I was afraid you were never going to start, and then once you started I was afraid you were going to go on and on,” she said under her breath when I sat back down.
After that, Rich gave a eulogy to celebrate Dad’s life. Actually, it was mostly a list of notable fish caught by Rich as a result of having been introduced to fly-fishing by Dad. “Surprisingly, Rich loves fly-fishing,” Mum had sa
id. “Standing for hours and hours staring at the same little patch of water, who’d have thought God had the patience?” But Rich not only had the patience for fishing; his entire life revolved around it. He tied his own flies, he had built his house near a reservoir on a game farm, and he organized his family holidays around fishing.
“Very boring for moi,” Vanessa whispered, leaning over me to roll her eyes extravagantly at Rich. But Rich wasn’t deterred from the trajectory of his eulogy; he lovingly laid out details of the fishing expedition accompanying each notable fish caught, the bodies of water in which the fish had been found, the lure or fly used. He also made mention of the climatic conditions and alcohol consumed on the days in question. A lot of the fishermen at the service were riveted.
“Very suitable.” Mum smiled and nodded when Rich sat down.
Then Mr. Chrissford had taken command of the space in front of the kitchen hutch. Boss Shupi had given Mr. Chrissford a tie to wear, on which there were small golden Zimbabwe birds, “to commemorate Mr. Fuller’s ties on that side of the river,” Boss Shupi had explained.
“Witty.” I’d noticed.
Boss Shupi had nodded modestly. “Exactly.”
Mr. Chrissford was solemn and venerable; he’s always reminded me of an English village policeman taken straight from the pages of E. F. Benson’s comic novels set in the fictitious 1930s Sussex town of Tilling. He rode a bicycle most places, even through the thick sand, sitting bolt upright and looking out at the bananas, the irrigation ditch, the fishponds. Also, while he appeared tolerant of everyone’s foibles, there was a sense that we were each a single transgression away from being hauled in for a stern lecture. Mr. Chrissford was a serious man of God.
Travel Light, Move Fast Page 14