Elephant Dawn

by Sharon Pincott

  I pick up a gleaming black mug and stare at it with a sinking heart. It reads life’s a bitch. then you die.

  I hadn’t actually lived in Grantham for 30 years, and hadn’t used any of my household items for the ten years that I’d been in Zimbabwe. And I know that there are lots of people worse off than me. During my years in Hwange, material possessions have become far less important to me, but I still feel a very real sense of personal loss. It’s the thought of all those irreplaceable photographs and video footage, and books and letters and diaries and journals, that pains me the most, along with knowing that I now have very little to fall back on.

  The debris around my parents’ house had been so thick that the tall back staircase was completely blocked and there’d been deep, thick, stinking silt everywhere. Before I arrived, a 30-strong Army contingent was assigned for a day to help my parents with their cleanup. In Africa, the word ‘army’ often evokes fear, but in Australia, I have to remind myself, these personnel are admired as highly trained soldiers and peacekeepers who expertly assist with search-and-rescue and disaster relief. They helped my parents greatly in their efforts to return to some degree of normality. But dramas continued for my family. My mum, attempting to get her beloved garden back to some semblance of order, dropped a lump of concrete onto her foot, smashing three toes. My niece, Rebecca, who had only recently moved to north Queensland, found herself directly in the path of Cyclone Yasi, which devastated the township of Tully. My nephew, Matthew, in flooded outback Queensland, was stricken by a waterborne disease associated with cattle and found himself recovering in hospital.

  Karen, my hippo friend, emails that perhaps the flood is a sign that Zimbabwe is where I’m meant to be, where I’m meant to stay. But I am not nearly so sure, despite struggling with First World life. I can’t get the microwave to start; I can’t work the iron with its strange steamer attachment; I don’t know which button to press to answer the phone, before realising that I don’t have to press any button at all. I feel unsure of so much, and strangely insecure.

  Then comes news of more shocking devastation. On 22 February, just five weeks after the Grantham catastrophe, Christchurch, New Zealand, home to my friend Eileen’s family, is hit by an earthquake. Close to two hundred are feared dead and much of the city is in ruins. When I lived in Auckland I travelled often to Christchurch on business and knew it well. Eileen’s family are shaken but unhurt. Even so, my emotions are already too close to the surface and, especially while watching news reports on television, I find myself struggling with a dreadfully heavy heart.

  I need to go and walk on a beach.

  When I arrive in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast it is raining. It doesn’t matter though. I don’t need sunshine, I just need some peace.

  Standing still in waist-deep water, letting the foamy waves wash over me, I breathe deeply and feel months of stress roll off my shoulders. For a few minutes an incredibly bright and beautiful double rainbow envelops the rolling ocean. I’m startled when the head of a cormorant pops up in front of me. For a second I imagine it’s a sea snake. He’s trying to fish in these choppy seas, his sleek, agile form ducking and diving under the waves. The name Maroochydore comes from the Aboriginal word Murukutchida, meaning ‘home of the black swan’. I don’t see any black swans, but the graceful black cormorant won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

  As I walk the beach, I find it difficult to even recollect my life in land-locked Zimbabwe; a life a million miles from this peaceful beach; a life that I’m not feeling particularly keen to return to. I recall the words of a poem I once read. They described the dash between the dates of birth and death inscribed on a gravestone as all that really matters. This rings more true now than ever before. Is Zimbabwe where I want to continue to spend my dash? I really don’t know. I certainly don’t want my life to pass me by feeling constantly unsettled. Yet despite everything, I do know that what is still most important to me right now is my elephant family in Hwange.

  The week after I leave Grantham and fly back to Zimbabwe, my little devastated hometown is once again in lockdown. This time its residents are being treated to a right royal visit. Soon to marry in spectacular style, Prince William arrives in this tiny town to lift their spirits. Known to have a soft spot for elephants, Prince William is royal patron of a UK conservation group called Tusk Trust. If Zimbabwe and its president weren’t so widely condemned, I’d have tried to make a plan to get a letter of introduction into his hands.

  STARTING ANEW

  2011

  I fly from Brisbane into Harare, wondering what the rest of the year might have in store for me. I need to collect my recently purchased Land Cruiser from Carol and drive it to Bulawayo, and then on to Hwange. Call me crazy, but I’m going back to start again.

  Not everything has gone to plan in my absence. The cruiser’s roof has been cut out nicely, but the roof-cover is a disaster. When it’s raining, it is like Victoria Falls inside my vehicle. I’ll have to completely redo ‘my hat’, as my indigenous friends like to call this fitted tarpaulin.

  The lodge that Val once owned has been through several changes of ownership over the past ten years and is now called Miombo Safari Camp. It’s where I’m heading back to live. Although more uncertain now than ever about what might lie ahead, I feel a sense of déjà vu as I drive back. I pass a beautiful big baobab by the roadside, which signals that my turn-off is close. There’s a bateleur in the sky. I like to think that it is Andy, encouraging me on.

  I’m incredibly fortunate that the lodge owners have offered me this cottage free of charge, so long as I make it liveable. Nobody (at least nobody human) has lived in it for many years. I mean, how bad can it be? Right?

  A couple of attractive pot plants have thoughtfully been placed at my front door. When I open it though, a pungent smell of urine hits me right between the eyes. I involuntarily wrinkle my nose and walk in. It’s a proper little house, nothing like the tiny one-room rondavel in which I’d lived for so many years. For that, I’m extremely grateful.

  A sizeable white bucket, almost half full of water, is sitting ominously on the floor. High above it, perched under the A-framed thatched roof, sits an old geyser (the Zimbabwean name for a hot-water system), and a 44-gallon drum (which is the water tank). One or both of these is sending frequent fat drops of water down into the bucket below.

  There’s another worrying puddle of water around the base of the toilet and yet another underneath the nearby sink. I peer into the shower. I can’t imagine ever feeling clean after bathing in there.

  ‘Easily fixed,’ I reassure myself, looking around for something a little more encouraging. I glance up, and cringe. Patches of sunlight are visible through the rotting thatched roof. I breathe deeply, and tell myself that all will be fine, eventually.

  As night falls, an army of giant praying mantises flutter in through a broken window. I generally like these gentle insects, but this is a winged invasion. I decide to shower and take refuge under a mosquito net. The hot water is cold, and while dancing a jig under the chilly flow I manage to stand on a scorpion. It’s a tiny little fellow and as I grasp the soft ball of my foot, cursing, I remember that it’s the small ones that are usually the most lethal.

  I flop into bed—a real bed, in a bedroom that is mine, for the first time in ten years (even if it doesn’t have a door). I tuck my mosquito net in especially tightly all around me. My throbbing foot, combined with the continuous drip, drip, drip from the peculiar geyser setup, and a horde of overly active rodents, means that sleep does not come easily.

  Craig is still around and has thoughtfully offered to help me settle in. He collects Amos, his odd-job man, to help too. First, they disconnect the geyser and drum and lower them to the ground. There are hoses and pipes everywhere. It eventually becomes apparent that it’s the drum which has been leaking steadily onto the wooden support rails and down onto the floor.

  ‘Arrhhh, this drum, madam,’ Amos announces, ‘it is dead.’

  Drum
s are incredibly difficult to come by right now. ‘There are no other drums, Amos. You need to try to fix it,’ I insist.

  ‘But you can’t fix dead, madam,’ Amos declares.

  Well, how can I argue with that?

  I encourage him on regardless. He uses a soldering stick, straight out of the red-hot coals of a fire he has made in my front yard, to apply silver solder to hole after hole after tiny hole.

  ‘Arrhhh, but there are too many leaks, madam,’ Amos keeps muttering quietly as he works away at it for hours.

  ‘Let’s get this all back up in the roof,’ Craig ultimately urges, visibly tired after a day of similar challenges in my bathroom.

  The next day Amos goes off to the township called Hwange (a polluted, rather smelly, coal-mining settlement 70 kilometres away, which I try to avoid) to purchase a pane of glass to mend the broken window in my living room. It’s just a standard size but before leaving, he measures and re-measures it methodically. He reappears carrying a compact parcel. Craig walks in front of him, shaking his head.

  ‘You don’t want to know what’s in that package,’ Craig mutters.

  I glance down at the parcel wrapped sturdily with both cardboard and tape. If that’s the window glass it certainly isn’t the right size.

  ‘That’s the glass?’ I ask tentatively.

  Of course it is the glass! Amos decided that it would be easier to carry if he had it cut in half.

  ‘Amos! How does this glass fit my window nicely now?’ I challenge.

  ‘You just put putty across the middle, madam,’ says Amos. ‘And also use Trinepon glue.’

  I close my eyes, and bite down hard on my tongue. Yes, I am now certain that I’m back in the Hwange bush. I think of John. Trinepon—Trinepon glue, Trinepon putty, Trinepon plastic steel—had been his universal fix-it-all too.

  Soon it’s time to move on to the roof problem. I need a young man named Thabani, a thatcher who lives just down the road in Dete.

  ‘Please Amos, will you ask Thabani to come and talk to me tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, madam. That is no problem, madam.’

  All of this ‘madam’ stuff makes me feel 200 years old. When I ask Amos to call me Sharon, or better still Mandlovu, he insists that it’s much more polite to call me madam and that’s what he continues to do.

  After yet another night of busy rats and mice (my rodent intruders come in so many different shapes and sizes that I can’t help imagining that I’ll succumb to bubonic plague), Thabani arrives, bright-eyed and hopeful of some well-paid work.

  ‘This roof, Mandlo, it needs to come off. It is rotten,’ Thabani exclaims.

  ‘No, Thabani, for now you just need to patch it for me, please.’

  It’ll be another two months before the local ladies begin their annual ritual of cutting thatching grass in the veld. There’s little thatch left in the area from last season and certainly not enough to cover my entire roof. Right now, still unsure of what might lie ahead, I’m not prepared to invest in a complete rethatching job anyway.

  ‘But Mandlo, this roof it is very little all over,’ Thabani insists.

  ‘Yes, Thabani, I know. It’s rotten and it’s thin. But for now we have to just patch it, even though there are giant rats in it too.’

  ‘Rats?’ Thabani queries, his eyes shifting skywards.

  And then, precisely on cue, the performance commences. There we all are, Thabani, Craig, Amos and me, standing in the living area and gazing up, watching a huge rat cavorting on the wooden beams.

  ‘Look at the tail on that thing,’ Amos urges.

  ‘I think it likes to be looking at the stars up there through those holes,’ offers Thabani.

  By now I can only roll my eyes and groan. ‘Please, Thabani, get a thatch cap on this roof by tomorrow afternoon,’ I plead.

  Craig’s early morning arrivals are becoming routine. It’s no longer ‘Sit back, relax, pull up a spider’ or ‘Sit back, relax, pull up a snake’. Now I welcome people with ‘Pull up a rat’!

  Craig comes armed with tools and paint and putty and cement . . . and rat poison.

  I’ve bought clay birdbaths from the roadside in nearby Gwayi. Craig helps me place them in my front yard. Why am I not surprised when neither of them holds water for longer than an hour? I also bought a couple of new owl- and elephant-shaped clay planters. I wander over to the lodge, bucket in hand, to collect a little soil since everything around my cottage appears to be pure sand. As I use my hands to scoop up some dirt, a wriggling baby cobra slithers right beside my fingers.

  It’s 2 p.m. on my sixth day back in Hwange and I badly need some red wine. Forget the glass, by now I’m ready to drink straight from the bottle.

  My cottage still smells of urine—rat urine as it turns out—so in desperation I go with Craig to Hwange town to buy disinfectant, air freshener, and more rat poison. On the way back we stop to buy watermelons by the roadside. In Australia you might find honesty boxes beside crates of produce on the roadside. Here, before your engine is even switched off, you’re mobbed by half a dozen or more dishevelled folk, frenzied by lack of business, all desperate to sell a single melon, a handful of baobab fruit, or tomatoes from enamel dishes. I also buy a hand-made wooden chair with a classy elephant carved into its back, hoping the wood has been legally obtained.

  By Day 10, my cottage is looking more liveable. Poor Craig and Amos are exhausted, and I’m thrilled. I now have mended windows and locks, a tiled shower tray and hand-built towel rack, a welded gate and security bars, a painted front door and shower, a cemented doorstep, functional power outlets, a working geyser, a working toilet and sink, not to mention birdbaths that don’t leak. I also have a tidy thatched roof and polished cement floor.

  Life is good. Even the rat population is gradually declining. I decide to keep my rubber thongs that have deep rodent teeth marks all around their outer edges as a souvenir of what I arrived to.

  It’s a full moon, and I sit on my doorstep with a glass of red wine feeling a deep sense of satisfaction. After all of these harrowing, and often hilarious, days, I no longer feel compelled to drink straight from the bottle.

  But at two o’clock that morning I’m sitting bolt upright in bed. ‘Oh man. Are you kidding me? What now?’ I mutter.

  Bats. Now I have bats. Two of these pint-sized creatures fly overhead, around and around and around. (Perhaps I’ll end up dying of rabies instead of bubonic plague!)

  The next day is décor day. I welcome Craig with, ‘Sit back, relax, pull up a bat.’

  There’s not much relaxing going on here though. We set to work and use buckets of crack-filler and paint, and then drill holes for pictures and curtains. I arrange brightly coloured African fabrics and cushions, dust on layers of Doom Blue Death insecticide (I can’t imagine anything surviving a name like that), make ‘snake blockers’ for my doors, dig and cement a braai pit and some birdbaths and ponds outside in the rock hard earth, and attach my Thandeka Mandlovu signs to the outside wall. Craig also sets to work on painting an elephant—Whole, my favourite W family elephant—on my front door.

  Now that all of my home improvements are complete, I long to get out in the field with the elephants. Sitting outside planning how to tackle my land access hurdle, all of a sudden there’s a thunderous explosion, followed by ominous crackling, from my cottage. I race inside to find the electricity distribution box, mounted on a wall in my bedroom, on fire. (Now is not the time to wonder why this electricity box is above my bed.) Long orange flames are licking skywards, towards the thatched roof.

  I let fly with a four-letter word and then yell ‘Help!’ and ‘Fire!’ while frantically moving my bed. My attempts to extinguish the flames with a blanket don’t seem to be doing much good, and I dash outside to holler again, hoping that the lodge gardener might be close enough to hear me. Sprinting back inside I do the only thing I can think of. Not fully appreciating the risk of electrocution, I put my hand through the flames and flick off the switches on the distribution box, before
bellowing some more. I sound like a wounded buffalo. The flames are out before help arrives, and I’m not too badly burnt.

  My blackened bedroom wall tells the tale. The flames have reached extremely close to the very dry, highly combustible thatched roof. Had my roof gone up, so would have my whole cottage with all that I owned inside it, and then the surrounding bush, and possibly even the lodge as well.

  Is somebody trying to tell me something? For months now I’ve been feeling as if a hex has been cast on me. I imagine a tocholoshe, a mean little gremlin-like creature sometimes said to be only ten centimetres tall, creeping around me. The locals believe that an inyanga (a witchdoctor) can, for a fee, craft a tocholoshe. This often-bearded little goblin is said to execute dastardly deeds as instructed by its master. The lodge staff hope one hasn’t taken up residence in my house.

  For now I just need to get rid of all the thick smoke inside. I borrow a fan from the lodge, and open wide the windows and the front and back doors. Somebody is already attempting to fix the electricity box.

  By nightfall power is finally restored, but I’m feeling decidedly uneasy. Although everyone seems to have an opinion, nobody has properly determined the cause of the fire. Will this scenario repeat itself while I sleep? Smoke still chokes the air, and although I do shut the doors, I keep the windows open, planning to close them before I drift off to sleep. The security bars that Craig has repaired mean I don’t feel too vulnerable. Exhausted, I lie on my bed for just a moment, and promptly fall fast asleep.