Victoria Falls

by James Hornor

  Copyright © 2019 by James Hornor.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States

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  Victoria Falls is a work of fiction. Apart from the actual historic figures, events, and locales that provide background for the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Green Writers Press is a Vermont-based publisher whose mission is to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist groupsand The Southern Poverty Law Foundation. Green Writers Press gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, friends, and readers to help support the environment and our publishing initiative. Green Place Books curates books that tell literary and compelling stories with a focus on writing about place—these books are more personal stories/memoir and biographies.

  Giving Voice to Writers & Artists Who Will Make the World a Better Place

  Green Writers Press | Brattleboro, Vermont

  www.greenwriterspress.com

  ISBN: 978-0-9990766-9-9

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  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

  —PROVERBS 1:7

  Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

  —ALEKSANDER SOLZHENITSYN, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956

  For Eileen

  CHAPTER ONE

  FLYING IN A PLANE WITHOUT A PRESSURIZED CABIN makes you more aware of the altitude. I could tell that Sheldon, our former RAF pilot, flew in the same way that professional racers drive—he listened to the engine, ignoring most of the instrument panel in favor of pilot instinct. These twice-a-day forays over the thunderous roar of Victoria Falls were the last vestige of his earlier life as a Royal Air Force war pilot, reaffirming his remarkable agility with the joystick and providing the intoxicating sense of freedom, albeit momentary, he must have experienced flying his Supermarine Spitfire over the fields of France at night, the steady hum of the engine the only link to the safety and civilization he had left behind.

  The falls themselves present a full array of challenges to a single-engine plane. Depending on the season, there is fog and mist to contend with along with constant plumes of spray. If your dive below the crest of the falls is at too steep an angle, the plane can stall as it lifts out of the gorge. If the dive is too shallow, you risk crashing into the high embankments on the Zambia side and falling headlong into the gorge. For a conservative pilot, neither of these possibilities would ever materialize; for Sheldon, the exhilaration of cheating death was a daily occurrence.

  As the plane dipped and rolled over the vast expanse of falls, Teresa Benjamin instinctively grabbed my hand.

  “Crocodiles!” Sheldon yelled back at us, and he half pointed to the banks of the Zambezi on the Zambia side, which somehow seemed above us as we crested over the lip of the falls. Several crocodiles lay basking on the riverbank, seemingly oblivious to the vertical drop just a few meters away.

  “You should join us for cocktails.”

  Our hands were now pressed together, and we were banking back over the falls and directly into a rainbow created by the mountains of spray.

  Teresa Benjamin, as I was later to discover, was completely fearless, and her invitation for cocktails as we followed the rush of water over the falls was also an early indication of her constant delight in magnifying the intensity of any emotionally charged moment by transforming it into something of her own creation.

  “Do you mean this evening?” I shouted back, feigning the same nonchalance and realizing that I had just missed the opportunity to speak directly into her ear.

  “We’ll meet you at six.”

  I sensed that I had earned at least temporary acceptance with her and that it would never have happened this way in any other context. As if to confirm that intuition, Sheldon chose as his finale to fly under Victoria Falls Bridge—certainly not a part of his normal itinerary, yet a stunt (I hoped) he’d performed on earlier occasions.

  “I’ve never hit a bungee jumper yet,” he shouted as we roared through.

  Teresa smiled broadly as he confidently pulled back on the rudder and we lifted, birdlike, out of the gorge. As we rumbled to a stop on the grass runway above the falls, Teresa placed her right hand on Sheldon’s right shoulder.

  “Nice piece of flying.” She emphasized “nice” in a way that sort of rolled off her tongue. I realized at that moment that the few additional risks he had taken were all for her. Some men can’t resist taking it to the limit when there is a woman involved. I thought of those Hemingway short stories where the guide ends up sleeping with the wife of an insipid husband.

  She turned; in fact, she deftly pivoted in the confined cockpit, lightly touched my face, and was halfway across the field before I realized that I was still seated, my seatbelt still buckled, simply staring back at her as she strolled toward the hotel.

  “Wanna go up again?”

  “No,” I replied, “One Flight of Angels is probably enough for one day.”

  At dinner that evening I was reminded of all the reasons I love sub-Saharan Africa. While I was only there on an eight-week mission as an AFREA consultant to the World Bank, on previous assignments in Africa for the Bank and earlier for the IMF, I had come to appreciate the incredible drama of the African landscape. It has the illusion of always being in motion, and indeed the constant movement of exotic wildlife is accentuated by the light that is at once muted, and at the same time vibrant, creating an affinity of existence that can only be described as prelapsarian.

  In the late afternoons in Zimbabwe, a russet-colored light blankets the land and the sky in a splendid surrender to the day. The entire subcontinent begins to settle in for the night and the air has a velvety texture that is both soothing and strangely exhilarating.

  I arrived for cocktails promptly at six and found the Benjamins enjoying a drink on the outdoor veranda of The Victoria Falls Hotel. The hotel was built in 1906, just five years after the end of Queen Victoria’s sixty-three-year reign. It remains one of those extant outposts of British imperialism, and despite Zimbabwe’s political independence in 1980, there are vestiges of British influence throughout what had been Southern Rhodesia.

  Despite all of our non-proliferation treaties, many Americans like at least the idea of empire, even if it is more a romantic notion than a political reality. It is always interesting to watch Americans on holiday in one of these post-empire (yet nevertheless very British) settings, since American parents somehow expect their children to behave in a manner that they perceive to be more British, and so more “proper,” and adults do the same.

  “James, I don’t think you’ve met my husband, Richard.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Delighted.”

  Suddenly we were both addressing one another like Eton school chums.

  “Teresa tells me you had quite a flight over the falls.”

  I immediately thought of Teresa’s elegant fingers as she had taken my hand into hers as
the plane crested above the Zambezi.

  “We had a flight that certainly deserves a stiff drink.” Now I was sounding stilted and faux British. “What brings you to Africa?” I was aware that it was not a question I would normally ask in America but somehow in this setting it didn’t sound so ridiculous.

  “It was actually Teresa’s idea. She made me promise that we would go on safari before she turned forty, so we only have two years to spare.” Teresa had been attended to by several hotel waiters, and now she walked toward us and gave me one of her broad smiles.

  “What are you drinking, James?”

  Her white cotton dress reflected the intoxicating glow of the African sunset so that it seemed as if she had lived her entire life on this veranda.

  “You should try their gimlets. The bartender is from Cambridge, so he knows how to mix cocktails for academics.”

  “Do I appear to be an academic?”

  “You appear to be studious, which is the same thing.”

  Teresa moved very close to me, allowing her hair to brush lightly across my shoulder.

  “Mr. Monroe works for the World Bank,” interjected Richard, and I wondered how much more he knew about my sojourn in Zimbabwe.

  “I do research for the Bank,” which was only partly true since my work did involve limited research. I sensed that Teresa actually hoped that I really was a quiet and introspective academic.

  “Are you related to President James Monroe?” Teresa was now standing between Richard and me, holding her gimlet glass as if she actually owned the hotel, which immediately alerted me to the fact that Richard probably had little in the way of ancestral heritage.

  “President Monroe’s brother, Andrew Augustine Monroe, was five generations back on my father’s side. They were all from Westmoreland County, Virginia. My family is from Fredericksburg, and there are at least five Monroes—including President Monroe—who attended William and Mary. I was the renegade. Against my father’s wishes I went to Washington and Lee.”

  Teresa seemed genuinely interested, but Richard had turned away and was striding across the terrace with children in tow.

  “Escort me into dinner, James.” I felt her arm slip through mine with the same graceful confidence I noticed as she exited the airplane.

  “Tell me more about Virginia and the research you do for the World Bank.”

  I lay there under the plume of mosquito netting, the low roar of the falls in the distance. Since my divorce I sought out these moments where I reached an equilibrium—a temporary satisfaction when all the disparate parts of my existence seemed to coalesce due to a harmony of circumstance. Victoria Falls, where the unsuspecting Zambezi is flung headlong into the abyss, seemed a great equalizer. A place of terror and authority, where man tempted fate with airplane antics and bungee jumps. A place of endless fascination, where people stand for hours just observing. The circumstance of the falls and all the unlikely events of the previous day reinforced my anonymity, the quiet mystery that I longed to envelop my existence. I would probably never see Teresa and Richard Benjamin again, and yet there we were enjoying cocktails and dinner together on the veranda. We could have been neighbors with adjoining lawns in Lake Forest. Yet I preferred that these brief forays into normalcy ended without expectation, without further commitment.

  I awakened a little after two to the sound of voices probably twenty yards from my window. The constant din of the falls made it hard to make out what was being said. I went to the window. Out past the veranda, near the path leading down to the falls, were two people, a man and a woman, arguing. They shouted at intervals, and one of the voices sounded like Teresa’s. I stood there for a quarter of an hour as their voices fluctuated from barely audible to occasional exclamations or shouts.

  A few minutes later the man—it was clearly Richard Benjamin—came walking back up the hill alone and disappeared into the hotel. I gazed into the darkness, thinking that Teresa would also soon return, but thirty minutes passed with no sign of her.

  I thought about going back to bed. Their marital conflicts—no matter how serious—really did not involve me. Teresa and I were barely more than acquaintances, although I thought of her lovely fingers in mine just twelve hours earlier and the way she had lightly touched my face as she exited the plane.

  For several minutes I was frozen by indecision, gazing blankly into the darkness. Finally, I hastily dressed and headed out of the hotel across the veranda and down to the path that led to the falls.

  If this had been the United States, there would have been security gates and permanent lighting on a path leading to falls that were twice as high as Niagara. But, this was sub-Saharan Africa, and because of the overhanging trees, the path was close to pitch black. Using the railing, I began the long descent, now vaguely aware that the local wildlife (including the monkeys and baboons that Sheldon had mentioned) were as unregulated as the path itself.

  The navigation of the path became even more of a challenge once I came to the section that was continually inundated with spray from the falls, the lights of the hotel quickly retreating behind me. I was suddenly reminded of the spelunking adventure of a decade earlier with my daughter, Jenny. She was only nine or ten at the time and we were exploring a cave in southern West Virginia.

  The section of the cave we were in had an underground stream that led into a narrow gorge. The small path came to a point where only one person at a time could slip through the crevice into the next cavern. The cave was lit with a primitive electric system that was reminiscent of pictures of underground coal mines in the 1930s. Jenny was ahead of me on the path and had just slipped through the narrow crevice when all the lights first went dim, then completely out. It was pitch black. I couldn’t even see my hands.

  “Jenny, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you, Dad.” Her voice sounded surprisingly far away.

  “Just stay where you are, I will come to you.”

  Whatever she said next I couldn’t really understand.

  “Stay right there, sweetie. I will come for you.”

  And I began to crawl down the path on all fours, feeling with my hands the delineation of the rocks lining the narrow passage. Just before I reached her, the lights flickered and came back on. But in the ten-minute interval of complete blackness, it was just our two voices connecting—father and daughter drawn back together after five years of separation.

  “I will come for you.”

  It was the secret wish of all children of divorced parents—that they would not be abandoned, that all the love and trust from early childhood was real, that their connection, even engulfed in darkness, was mysteriously sustained by the reassuring sound of their parents’ voice.

  I struggled down the pitch-black walkway, now only vaguely aware of the hotel one hundred yards up the hill. I knew that the Zambezi River was far below, and in the complete darkness I began to imagine that if I slipped and fell forward, there would be little resistance to my body rolling down the steep embankment and into the river. This imagined fear was intensified by the sound of the falls and the continuous clouds of spray that saturated the walkway and soaked my white cotton shirt and chinos.

  Through the darkness I saw a dim outline of a figure down and to my left. She was standing, facing the falls on a small platform that extended ten feet from the walkway. Although her back was turned, as I moved slowly down the walkway, I could see that she was crying and her hair was already wet from the spray as she attempted to tuck a small strand behind her left ear. We were now both soaked with spray, which in the darkness seemed to accentuate the complete loneliness of the situation, and I suddenly realized how ridiculous it would be for me to approach her on the small platform. She was a married woman who had been fighting with her husband. Her escape down the walkway had simply been a way for her to separate from him for a short while before returning to the hotel and to her marriage. I wanted to avoid attachments, but perhaps I was unwilling to accept the abject loneliness which seemed now to engulf
me in indecision.

  At that very moment she turned with arms crossed and began to walk back towards the pathway. I could have avoided her altogether if at the same moment I too had turned and started back towards the hotel. Instead I froze, seemingly incapable of forming any response to her shadowy figure as she made her way up the walkway.

  “Teresa, it’s me.”

  It was one of those moments when the sound of your own voice sounds foreign and unattached to anything. Now she was frozen and not moving.

  “James?”

  I struggled to decipher her intonation of my name, searching in that split second for some shred of reassurance that she was somehow glad to see me.

  “What the hell are you doing down here?”

  And in that three or four seconds she had brought back the Teresa from the airplane, the cocktails Teresa from the terrace. She had moved quickly from the unguarded Teresa (perhaps even vulnerable Teresa) to the persona who confronted all situations—even her marriage—with casual fearlessness.

  “I couldn’t sleep. I heard voices on the terrace, and I saw you from the window as you headed for the walkway.”

  It sounded contrived, but Teresa had assumed a certain trust towards me that was evident even on the airplane. It was completely nonjudgmental, and it made me want to regard all things about her in the same nonjudgmental way.

  As she took my hand and led us back up the slippery walkway, I was aware that just as I had guessed on the terrace, Teresa liked me because I was so very different from her husband. In me she had already sensed a kindness and an acceptance that she secretly longed for in her marriage. I was already completing something in her that allowed both of us to ascend the hill to the hotel with a certain degree of anticipation about what might happen as we reached the summit and the familiar veranda where we had cocktails just hours before.

  “Do you have any brandy?” she asked when we reached the top.

  “No brandy, but I do have some Canadian whiskey.”