Travel Light, Move Fast

by Alexandra Fuller

  We had dogs, not bucks; we’d never have bucks. The kids at my school had bucks and dogs and also racehorses and sailboats. Some of them had ski holidays in Europe, trips to the Alps, but they’d learned to wear it all lightly, or at least with casual entitlement. They were the expectant inheritors of land and power from their parents; no one talked about the wars that had gone on in pursuit of that land and power, although that war hadn’t left us, I can see that now. It was in our fragility, our anorexia nervosa, our confusion. It was in the manner in which we averted our gaze from the discomfort and chaos and destruction we were causing.

  I went back a few years ago to the school, five years before Dad died; twenty-five years after I’d left. The children of the political classes were there still, but the white farmers’ kids were nearly all gone. Instead, there were the children of Chinese entrepreneurs; they were driving themselves to school, or being driven by chauffeurs, they now acted as if they owned the place. “The Chinese own Zimbabwe?” Mum had said when I’d commented about this shift in power. “That must be nice for them.”

  I hadn’t been able to tell if she’d meant it.

  * * *

  —

  VANESSA AND I WEREN’T EVER going to be heritage children. We would never own the place, not in the traditional gold-watch-and-portfolio sense of the word. It hadn’t been planned this way; but it was the natural order of things, our end in our beginning. We were the murderous, murdered Orphans of the Empire, the stubborn remnants of a briefly glutted people; we were the half-life of our white supremacist violence, the aftershock of colonialism.

  We belonged nowhere here; we belonged nowhere else.

  Our rootlessness had brought with it a longing for belonging; Vanessa had always dreamed of an English country cottage with roses, I’d hankered to be born into village life, into community, a commune anywhere at all. “Rubbish,” Mum had said. “You are American now. What are you saying about commune? Every American needs at least one dedicated, private bathroom per bottom.” She said “bathroom” the way she said “American,” as if it indicated an automatic territoriality and an unfortunate predilection for saving extra space for oneself, like a German on a beach holiday.

  Mum had garnered a couple of tiny inheritances from her family; there was the Scottish relative who had made her trip to London’s West End possible. And her mother had left her a little money. “Very modest,” Mum always said; but her inheritances had helped her become majority shareholder on the farm. Dad’s family had overlooked him deliberately. It had embittered him for a long time. “They hang it over your head, even if there’s nothing left to pass down,” Dad had told me. “It’s handcuffs if you look at it properly, not an inheritance.”

  Or everyone inherits something. None of us walks away unburdened; even the abandoned among us inherit rejection; the meek inherit it all. My parents had inherited the rickety scaffolding of an empire; they’d inherited a violent dismantling. Vanessa and I were inheritors of something much harder to put into words. We’d been shocked to the quick at the speed and intensity of our young lives; we’d been blinded with fear and loss and we’d been stoic, tough, and resilient.

  Or they’d been stoic, tough, and resilient. Mum and Dad had been; they’d withstood, they’d borne up, they’d come back from defeat and humiliation; they’d turned from their failures and their tragedies and they’d faced the music more than once. “That’s a bit of an understatement,” Dad had said. “Your mother was practically conducting the orchestra.”

  That was Vanessa’s and my inheritance. If we got nothing else from Mum and Dad, we knew how to face the music. They’d showed us how; we’d seen it done over and over, not easy music to face. They’d lived out of bounds all their lives, my parents; they’d made historic mistakes for which they’d paid cosmically and they’d endured in spite of it.

  “Did I do this to get into one of your Awful Books?” Dad had asked from his deathbed in Budapest; lucidly present in the world I recognized for a moment.

  I’d laughed then. “Probably.”

  Dad had chuckled too. “That’ll annoy Mum.”

  Another Awful Book, how many more can be written?

  Everyone in my family hates the books I write, they ask me to stop, but I can’t look away. “Write novels,” Dad begged, but real life never stops coming at me, and it pours from my pen more easily than fiction. It’s not only the old adage to write what I know, but also to write what I love. And it’s the artist’s impulse to turn again and again to the same subject until the subject gives up its secrets. I can’t pretend to know anyone’s secrets, people are complicated, but I’ve stared and stared at the material. I know something, or some things.

  I know Mum and Dad have come so far, too fast; they’ve stripped themselves bare again and again in their race through time and space; they’ve burned like asteroids, and crashed smoldering into other people’s lives. But they’ve arisen again and again from the ashes, wiped their faces, turned and picked up the baton to call the string section to heel, and carried on with the show.

  “Of course the show must go on,” Mum always said.

  The show went on, and on. There were reruns.

  What a ride it had been, and what a perfect finish!

  I mean the farm was the perfect finish, a magnificent flourish at the end of a full life. My father had dreamed this place into reality for my mother, and in turn my mother loves this farm. It’s hers, and it nourishes her; it’s her nostalgie de la boue satisfied.

  What solace.

  On quiet nights, you can sometimes hear lions roaring from the Zimbabwean side of the river, hyenas laughing, jackals yelping. Hippos often come up to the lawn in front of the pub to graze at night; in any case, they’d dispensed with the need for a mower. “Careful not to walk up a hippo’s arse in the dark,” Dad always warned if I left my barstool to venture into the pub’s ablution block.

  Occasionally in the dry season, elephants flicked through the electric fence and raided the bananas. In the early days, Dad always leapt out of bed to save the plantation. “It’s not unheard of for people to get trampled,” Mum had said at the time. “And there’s your father skipping about in the dark wearing nothing but his kikoi and armed only with a cooking pot and a walking stick, up against five elephants.” She’d sniffed, “I kept the dogs safely with me, and I said ‘Cheerio’ to Dad. ‘I hope you come back unscathed.’ But I didn’t hold my breath. What a performance!”

  * * *

  —

  THE PUB AND THE WILD GARDEN and the promise of reliable enemies, all that, of course, was a part of the wondrous life Dad had envisioned for Mum, but on top of this my father had decided to start fish farming. That had been a stroke of genius too, a finicky game in which thousands of creatures must be carefully watched over; fish are easily stressed, they’re susceptible to every disease and parasite you can think of, and then things you couldn’t imagine.

  “Perfect for your mother,” Dad had said.

  “I’ve had to supplement my already overwhelming pile of reading,” Mum had complained happily. “It’s impossible to keep up with all the homework I must do.” She’d added to the pile of things she needed to wade through by breakfast the most recent scientific and aquaculture papers. “Terribly technical, and a slog for the brain in this heat, but I do it, and I retain every word,” Mum had said; she passed her reading on to Mr. Chrissford.

  “Effects of Stocking Density on Growth of Tilapia nilotica Cultured in Cages in Ponds” by Antonio E. Carro-Anzalotta and Andrew S. McGinty. “Studies on the Feeding of the Tilapia nilotica in Floating Cages” by R. D. Guerrero III. They sounded like Mum’s kind of men, going by the names alone, exotically foreign, probably wine drinkers, fish experts. Every morning, in the sanctuary of her bed, Mum’s eyes are fixed on the pages of her homework, her hand reaching through the drapes for cups of tea, a couple of dogs at her feet.

  �
�Your mother is like a very good horse,” Dad had told me. “She needs a job, or she tends to kick the stable down a bit.” Also, Dad had known Mum would grow the most spectacular fish possible because she loves all animals, and doing what you love sets you free, or it returns you briefly to the wholeness from which we believe ourselves torn. Mum is the most successful fish farmer in the whole of Zambia.

  “Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Mum said. Then she lifted her eyes at me and gave me a look of mild reproach that suggested she’d rather hoped I’d go a bit further. Mum loves her fish, and in turn they flourish. They rush to greet her, a tiny tidal wave of silver fins slicing the water’s surface when she takes her thrice-daily walk around the ponds to check on them. “Oh, hello, my darlings,” Mum purrs.

  Their scales shimmer like bits of silver.

  Dad had ensured the most miraculous thing for Mum in her golden years, her reluctant great-grandmother years. He’d brought her full circle back to the thrilling vibrancy of her perfect childhood. She’d hankered for it ever since he’d torn her from it on their wedding day, Mum’s foot still dragging on the gravel as they’d raced off from their wedding reception. “I’ll never understand why your father is in such a hurry all the time,” my grandmother had complained.

  But his impulsiveness refined over time toward spontaneity; his toughness resolved toward tenacity; his exuberance softened into humor. This farm was his final lasting gesture of love to Mum. He’d made her a home in the great, roiling, storied Zambezi Valley, and in so doing he’d brought her back to the home she’d never really left.

  Or it was a hotter, denser, chattier place than her cool Kenyan highland youth, but it had all the markings of colonials gone mad, and that was the country Mum had never really left. The wild, intoxicating effects of her mother’s homemade wine, the headiness of the thin air, the addicting idea that her station gave her automatic privilege; she’d never completely shed any of it.

  “The Huntingfords had apparently dispensed with the distinction between inside and outside.” Dad had told me this about meeting his future family-in-law for the first time. “There weren’t walls, just some hessian sacks tacked up between planks. A gnat’s fart would have blown the place down.”

  There were dogs everywhere, Dad had said of that rambling little farmhouse on the edge of Eldoret. Dairy cows wandered into the kitchen licking their nostrils in that luxuriating, repetitive way contented cows have. There was always a kitten or a wild mongoose recovering from something in a cardboard box by the Dover stove. There were horses nudging the flimsy windows off their hinges in search of a scratch, or a treat. “Then you go to bed, only to find tomorrow’s breakfast, and possibly lunch, clucking away at the end of your bed,” Dad had said. “It was absolute bloody mayhem.”

  It had taken two-thirds of their life together, but eventually my father had allowed Mum’s love for absolute bloody mayhem to take root. But because it was also everything Mum knew in her blood and bones, it worked for her. It nourished her, all of it; it breathed life into her.

  Even after Dad was dead, the farm had continued to roll with the seasons, as if he’d really gone nowhere and as if he really was everywhere; his crazy-healing dream scattered across that difficult, gorgeous piece of land. And with the farm’s staff living across a narrow road from the dissolving farmhouse, with the constant lively companionship of animals, there’d be no chance Mum could ever be lonely. “Ever,” Mum emphasized, rolling her eyes in exaggerated exhaustion. “I try to hide behind my drapes with the dogs to get some rest, but there’s always someone knocking on the door, needing me for this and that.”

  * * *

  —

  FOR FOUR MONTHS AFTER HE DIED, Dad’s ashes sat in the bomb casing on the bottom of Vanessa’s bookshelf, next to her complete set of Beatrix Potter’s children’s books. “We can’t put it off forever,” I’d argued, calling Mum on the farm from my home in Wyoming. “We need to have a funeral, or burial, or a scattering, or whatever, sooner or later.”

  “But I haven’t decided where to bury him yet,” Mum had said.

  “He said we were supposed to put a match to him, and then scatter the remains under the nearest tree,” I’d said.

  “Did he?” Mum had sounded doubtful. “I didn’t hear him say anything like that.”

  “Well, he certainly didn’t say, ‘Put me on the bottom of Vanessa’s bookshelf next to Jeremy Fisher and Peter Rabbit with the cats,’” I’d said.

  “Mm,” Mum had agreed. “It is very difficult to get anything back once it’s landed on one of Vanessa’s bookshelves.” She’d paused. “You don’t think she has my copy of My Life Was a Ranch, do you?”

  “I have no doubt,” I’d said.

  But we’d never get proof. Ever since returning from the clinic in KwaZulu-Natal, and especially since submitting to the influence of Bindi, and increasingly since Dad had died, Vanessa’s bedroom had become her castle; it was her fortress. Honestly, it was a minute private kingdom perched on the edge of a rock. She had an en suite bathroom, a walk-in closet, bookshelves, a view of the hills, a bed like a huge nest. Mum and I were green with envy.

  “No one can come in here,” Vanessa had said. To help with the problem of unannounced or unwanted visitors, Vanessa had taken to locking her bedroom door when she wasn’t there, and even when she was. Only Mr. Nixon was welcome to bring in trays of tea, and clean out the cats’ litter boxes. “I have to lock my door,” Vanessa had said. “Otherwise things have a habit of growing legs and walking out of here.”

  It was true that both Vanessa and Mum had developed a habit of going in search of what they’d lost to each other, and failing to find it, replacing it with other interesting things they’d found. For decades, books and videos and even children’s stuffed animals had been ferried secretively under tea towels or in diaper bags from the Rock to the farm and back again.

  “I’ll ask Rich to bring down the ashes to the farm,” I’d finally offered. “If we don’t do it now, we’ll never do it.”

  “Mm,” Mum had agreed.

  The day we chose to scatter Dad’s ashes was a working day, the farm bustling with a new year’s fresh resolve. “We should get on with it first thing, before it gets too hot,” Mum had said. But none of us could quite manage dawn, mostly because our chosen minister for the funeral, or burial, or whatever we were having, was an American artist with whom I was madly in love. We were engaged to be married, he was the opposite of me in many ways; I’d considered this a good thing.

  “Well, yes,” Mum had agreed. “That is a good thing. One of you is plenty.”

  Wen took the enjoyment of life seriously. He took fine food and good drink seriously, he grew his own fresh vegetables and knew his way around a wine list; he took art seriously, he labored over colors. He was attracted to Eastern philosophies, but he’d not become a man of the cloth seriously. He’d done it to officiate a friend’s wedding at which there’d been buckets of strong margaritas; he’d received his ministerial certification online in seven minutes.

  “Mm,” Mum had said. “On my father’s side, there was an Episcopalian bishop; my grandfather was a reverend. It was seven years of Greek and Latin; they were very cerebral and spiritual.”

  But Wen didn’t have seven years of hard religious learning in him. He didn’t prefer being awake too early the way a real priest does, he needed sleep. He took the research on the health effects of sleep seriously. He was very healthy, vibrant with life, easily thrilled by the simple joys of a stellar digestion, a good night’s rest. “You’re a lifetime of tired,” he was always telling me. “You need to rest more, relax more.” Wen took rest and relaxation very seriously. I’d loved that about him to begin with; the way he’d loved my excessive energy to begin with.

  “He lives in a yurt,” I’d warned Vanessa.

  “A yacht?” she’d said.

  “No, a yurt.”

 
Vanessa told everyone he lived in an igloo. After I showed her his art, she pronounced us the groovy couple; she adored Wen’s whimsical style. “He looks very young,” she’d said when I’d sent a photo. I’d had to explain to Vanessa that Wen was four years older than I, but that he’d figured out how to keep his stress, and wrinkles, to a minimum. He didn’t have children, he’d never been married, and until he’d met me, if he ever felt agitated, he spent a whole day in his hammock, or went skiing in the backcountry for the weekend.

  Vanessa had preferred Charlie; she adored him. She went so far as to take his side—inasmuch as there are sides—in the divorce. She thought my ex was a good influence on me, and she found him sensible and generous; they’d agreed on how they felt about me. Wen didn’t agree with how other people in my family felt about me.

  “An artist and a writer,” I’d defended our partnership. “It’s a match made in heaven.”

  “You mean a hedonist and a narcissist,” Vanessa had said. “It’ll end in tears.”

  “Let’s scatter Dad’s ashes when we’re next home,” I’d suggested.

  Vanessa sighed. She had already declared her intention to never come back down to the farm again, or at least for a long, long time; the memorial service had been all the wild heat and chattering ceiling fans she’d needed. Also, four months after Dad’s death, his loss was wearing on her; everyone was beginning to annoy and irritate her.

  “Well, everyone’s bugging me. Even Rich,” Vanessa had said.

  “Wen is a minister,” I’d said.

  “No, he’s not,” she’d said.

  “He did it over the internet,” I’d said.

  Vanessa had sunk back against her pillows, behind her dark glasses, beneath the cats. “Oh, Al-Bo, don’t,” she’d said. “It’s not funny anymore. Bindi says I can’t take a single other thing. I have to be left in peace. We should find a proper minister. Dad would have fits.”