Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  No one starts a war warning that those involved will lose their innocence—that children will definitely die and be forever lost as a result of the conflict; that the war will not end for generations and generations, even after cease-fires have been declared and peace treaties have been signed. No one starts a war that way, but they should. It would at least be fair warning and an honest admission: even a good war—if there is such a thing—will kill anyone old enough to die.

  PART THREE

  Power said to the world, “You are mine.”

  The world kept it prisoner on her throne.

  Love said to the world, “I am thine.”

  The world gave it the freedom of her house.

  —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.

  — W. C. FIELDS

  Nicola Fuller of Central Africa and the Tree of Forgetfulness

  Mum at her fish ponds. Zambia, 2008.

  If I had to put a date on the moment Mum began to swim away from us, I would say it was after Richard died, because for years after that she was like someone whose refuge was a remote subaqua world. And how could she have been otherwise? Mum’s brain, already highly strung with a genetic predisposition to “funny moods, depression, mental wobbliness” must certainly have tripped on the tragedy and stress of what she had lost: three children, a war, a farm. To say nothing of what she had lost of herself: the whimsical Kenyan girl, the winklepicker-wearing bride, the hilarious-amount-of-fun young mother.

  And although sometimes in the years after the baby’s death, Mum would come to the surface of her subaqua refuge, occasionally for months and months at a time, the threat that she’d recede from us again was always there. Something would set her off—a minor upset (the car breaking down) or a major blow (her mother’s death in 1993)—and she would be back below our reach, sleeping late into the morning, unconcerned about her appearance, listlessly incurious about the world around her.

  And then—alarmingly—something altogether different began to happen: as well as sinking into subaqua depths, Mum would now sometimes seem to lose her tether altogether and float sky high. On these occasions she would be riddled with energy: riding her horse with wild indifference as opposed to wild courage; driving at high speeds on rough roads; drinking with no care and less joy. A couple of car wrecks date back to this time: spinning the vehicle elegantly on the apex of its left front headlight; an abrupt sideways flip into a storm drain. “Bloody silly place to put a ditch,” a sympathetic neighbor said, pulling her to safety.

  Then in 1998, eighteen years after Richard had come and gone and five years after the death of her mother, Mum had the worst episode of madness ever. Her father had died earlier in the year, peacefully drifting off after his evening allowance of J & B at the age of nearly ninety, beloved of everyone in the nursing home near Perth, Scotland, in which he spent his final days. Mum took his death as well as could be expected and the funeral at Waternish went off without a hitch. “Skye people are very respectful of the dead,” Mum says approvingly. “So we didn’t have to pay the toll to go over the bridge from the mainland. Wasn’t that nice?”

  Dad led the procession to the Trumpan Church, followed by the vicar, followed by the hearse, followed by Auntie Glug and Uncle Sandy. Dad, accustomed to covering long distances on rough African roads, kept up a decent pace, weaving expertly around the baleful sheep as if they were potholes. “The vicar was flicking his headlights at us like mad because he wanted us to slow down, but Dad thought it meant we should go faster. I think it’s the only time a hearse has gone whizzing through Skye on two wheels.”

  The little funeral procession, slightly breathless from what had felt to most of them like a rally-car race, gathered around the grave next to the ruined church. Uncle Sandy—properly kitted out in kilt, Glengarry bonnet and sporran—began to play “Flowers of the Forest” on his bagpipes. “And suddenly, right in the middle of it, with the bagpipes going and all of us softly weeping, the clouds parted and a brilliant sky opened up overhead. Then a figure appeared just beyond the church wall in a blue anorak. We all saw him.” Mum’s eyes go Clanranald fey. “And we all agreed it was the ghost of dear, shell-shocked Uncle Allan come to welcome my father to the other side. A very Highland greeting I should have said.”

  But in spite of the successful funeral and before Mum left Scotland, there were signs that she was about to throw a wobbly. Her eyes went light yellow and she began to counsel anyone who would listen on the best way for the Scots to plot their secession from England. (“You should try UDI, like we had in Rhodesia.”) Finally, she packed pounds and pounds of haggis in her suitcase, which she then tried to smuggle through international customs.

  When she got back to Zambia, Mum didn’t sleep or eat, whirring around their tiny borrowed cottage near Lusaka like a trapped hummingbird. She gave up the usual niceties—tea before breakfast, the dogs’ evening walk, a soak in the bathtub before supper with the BBC World Service—and skipped directly to a steady infusion of Valium and brandy, which didn’t seem to have even a remotely sedating effect on her. Dad, who had managed Mum’s previous wobblies by ignoring them, was genuinely worried by this one. All the hours he could spare, he sat outside her bedroom door smoking cigarettes and playing solitaire. Inside, Mum lay in a state of pretend sleep, plotting her escape to remote and impossible places: the Democratic Republic of Congo (“Je m’appelle Nicola Fuller de Afrique centrale!”) or London’s West End (Starlight Express, Cats, Les Misérables!). And the moment she sensed Dad’s vigil had lapsed, she bolted, driving into Lusaka to buy airplane tickets to London or making it as far as Lubumbashi before being retrieved by my father. (“Oh, why must everyone bully me so much?”)

  This went on for a few months until finally, ragged with exhaustion, asthmatic and underweight, she admitted herself to a clinic in Lusaka, banging on the gates in the middle of the night, barefoot and trembling, having run miles on a dirt road, until a watchman heard her and let her in. The next day Dad drove Mum five or six hours across the border to the psychiatric ward of a Zimbabwean hospital. There she was strapped to a bed and drugged to a standstill until she could be stabilized, diagnosed, medicated. “My mad pills, my happy pills, my panic pills, my sleeping pills,” she says. “Wonderful psychiatrist I had, very talented. He knew exactly what was wrong with me and he knew what to give me to fix it.” Mum jabs her walking stick in the ground a few times for emphasis. “It was just a little chemical imbalance.”

  We’re having this conversation on a late-afternoon walk back from the Zambezi River to the Tree of Forgetfulness. The dogs surge ahead of us, rooting out snake smells and scaring up locusts the size of small pigeons. “So yes,” Mum agrees, “I am mad. We all know that, but it’s not a problem. It’s nothing Cairo Chemist can’t put right.” Suddenly she puts her binoculars to her eyes with a little gasp of excitement and says, “Look, a paradise flycatcher. How wonderful! What a glorious tail! Did you see it?” But she doesn’t offer me her binoculars. “Off he goes. There, look at him—swoop, swoop.” Mum inhales deeply, a soft smile on her lips. “Ah, I love the evenings,” she says. “Such a reward after the daily toil, isn’t it?”

  And she’s right. The evenings here on the north bank of the Zambezi River are tremulously beautiful. A shaky ribbon of blue smoke from a nearby village’s cooking fire hangs over the farm. Emerald-spotted doves are calling, “My mother is dead, my father is dead, my relatives are dead and my heart goes dum-dum-dum.” Frogs are bellowing from the causeway. The air boils with beetles and cicadas, mosquitoes and tsetse flies. Egrets, white against the gray-pink sky are floating upriver to roost in the winterthorn trees in the middle of Dad’s bananas. “I won’t let him chop down those trees,” Mum says, “the birds love them.”

  But you can’t have all this life on one end without a corresponding amount of death and decay on the other: in the morning, my parents’ maid, Hilda Tembo (“Big H” to the family), wi
ll sweep up half a bucket of insect carcasses and two gecko bodies from under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Months from now three of the Jack Russells will have been killed by a cobra in Dad’s office, and one will have been eaten by a crocodile in Mum’s fish ponds. And Dad will walk out of the bedroom one morning to see a python coiled in cartoonish perfection around Wallace (the late cat). “You learn not to mourn every little thing out here,” Mum says. She shakes her head. “No, you can’t, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.”

  What my mother won’t say—lost in all her talk of chemicals and pills—is that she knows not only the route grief takes through blood but also the route it takes through the heart’s cracks. What she won’t tell me is that recovering from the madness of grief wasn’t just a matter of prescriptions, but of willpower. “I sometimes used to envy the people you see running up and down the Kafue Road in hessian sacks,” she said once. And it is true that Mum seriously considered that level of deep, irretrievable insanity an option. But instead, she took a different route and she regained herself and that had very little to do with the very talented psychiatrist and everything to do with forgiveness: she forgave the world and her mind returned. She gave herself amnesty and her soul had a home again. The forgiveness took years and it took this farm and it took the Tree of Forgetfulness. It took all of that, but above all it took the one thing grief could never steal from my mother: her courage.

  FOR NEARLY A YEAR after Mum had been strapped down in the mental ward of the hospital in Zimbabwe and given various doses of mad pills, happy pills, panic pills and sleeping pills, she stayed in bed in the little borrowed cottage outside Lusaka, utterly exhausted. By now Vanessa and I were both married with young children of our own (I in America, and Vanessa, for the time being, in England), and neither of us could easily come home. So Dad fussed around Mum; brought her tea; took the dogs out for their evening walk so they would leave her in peace; ran her a bath each evening and tuned her radio to the BBC World Service. But in her midfifties, it would seem Mum had finally given up.

  She took the pills prescribed to her by the very talented psychiatrist and drew the curtains. A bat took up residence in her closet and ruined her Royal Ascot hats and Mum did not go to war with it; charcoal burners came onto the place and their axes sang against old-growth mukwa trees and she did not go to war with them; thieves took off with her old treadle sewing machine (the device responsible for helping my mother create our infamously tortuous Fancy Dress costumes) and she just sighed.

  Dad tried everything. “I think I saw an oribi this evening when I was out with the dogs,” he would say (a sighting usually guaranteed to make Mum leap to her feet, binoculars in hand). Or he’d bring Mum piri piri prawns and proper wine (in a bottle as opposed to a box) from the Italian merchant in Lusaka, but she would retire after a single prawn and half a glass of wine. And even when Dad brought home a new puppy, a comical, smoke-colored Great Dane cross Labrador (“the best halves of both,” Dad promised), Mum could manage little more than a wan smile of thanks.

  So at night while Mum slept, Dad built a campfire outside their little cottage; he propped up his chin on a thumb, two fingers nestled around a cigarette on his bottom lip and he worried his way to a solution. “There was no question of letting her give up,” Dad says. “No, I knew all she needed was a little encouragement and she’d be all right.” Dad pauses and rubs his fist under each eye. When he continues, his voice is thicker. “She never gave up on me through everything,” he says. “No, as far as I am concerned, she has always been the most number one lady in all of Africa.”

  AFTER WE’D LEFT ROBANDI, my father said he would never again try to own an African farm. “You put your blood and sweat into a place and then . . .” Dad shook his head. “The government goes apex over teakettle—there’s a coup, squatters show up, or the wind changes direction—and suddenly it’s all gone. No, there’s no point; you can still work in Africa without trying to own any of it.” And then Dad quoted Marcus Garvey, “Africa is for the Africans.”

  So to begin with, Dad took a position as manager of a massive tobacco estate in Malawi. His boss was Malawi’s president for life, the aging dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda, or His Excellency as he preferred to be called (H.E. for short). It was, Mum says, a useful and humbling experience to have a very powerful, very serious black boss after the white supremacy of Rhodesia. “A short, sharp education on how to live and behave in a black African country run by black Africans,” she says.

  H.E.’s actual date of birth was an official state secret, but he was undeniably old and unquestionably old-fashioned. He affected crisply tailored three-piece suits with matching handkerchiefs and went everywhere with a traditional fly whisk, as if expecting perpetual annoyance. “Everyone was scared stiff of him,” Mum says. “You had to bow and scrape and be at his beck and call. And if you upset him, then that was it.” Her eyes open wide. “The end of our first year on the estate, the deputy president of our company had some little disagreement with H.E., and the next thing we knew, his Mercedes had gone over a cliff, mysteriously riddled with bullet holes.”

  Days after my parents’ arrival in the country, an official spy was sent to the tobacco estate to keep an eye on their activities, and to ensure that they were behaving in an acceptably Malawian manner at all times: no long hair or beards for men; women had to wear skirts below the knee (no trousers allowed); no kissing in public; no uncensored literature; and above all, H.E. was to be constantly revered and honored. “You weren’t even allowed to throw away or burn a newspaper if it contained his image,” Mum says, “which got tricky because every edition of the Malawian Times, or whatever it was, had lots of photographs of him in it—hovering over this hospital bed, blessing that schoolchild, getting out of another bullet-proof helicopter. In the end, it was safest not to buy a newspaper at all, because where would you store them all?”

  Mum and Dad’s letters were steamed open and all their phone calls were monitored by a spy working at the telephone exchange. “You could hear the spy eating his lunch over the line,” Mum says. “Nshima and relish. Squelch-squelch.” And once or twice Dad was dragged off by the police for questioning. “Pages and pages of accusations of all the stuff we were supposed to have been up to,” Mum says. She takes a sip of tea and absentmindedly picks a tick off one of the Jack Russells sitting on her lap. “Oh yes, things could get very sinister in a hurry and it was very stressful,” she says. “I got a plague of boils, Dad’s hair started to fall out, we both had malaria all the time. When our two-year contract was up, we had had enough of that. Two years was all we could take.”

  SO MY PARENTS found work in Zambia with a German company, raising maize, soya beans, tobacco and cattle on a farm near the Zaire border. “We liked working for zee Germans,” Mum says. She puts the Jack Russell nose to nose against her face. “Didn’t we, Bumble Bee? Yes, we loved zee Germans.” Mum gives me a look. “Well, you know what Germans are like. They preferred things orderly and picturesque when they came out for their annual visit. So they bought us a couple of bush horses to graze nicely in the home paddock and they got us a set of new wineglasses, all matching instead of just whatever wasn’t broken. And they imported terrifying chemicals to keep the pool blue so they could go for invigorating swims or whatever it is Germans like to do before breakfast.”

  Mum brought a Chinyanja phrasebook and dictionary and began to practice on Adamson Phiri, the cook. “Muli bwanji. Dzina landa ndine Nicola Fuller of Central Africa,” she said. She especially liked the Chinyanja word for brain. “Bongo,” she said triumphantly, “bongo, bongo. Isn’t that onomatopoeic? That describes my brain perfectly. ” Then she pulled out her Berlitz German course left over from the days Dad worked for the veterinary-supply company in Kenya (“I knew this would come in handy one day,” she said, triumphantly) and walked around the house asking the animals, “Wie geht es dir?”

  And for a few years, Mum and Dad were, on the whole, very happy. It is true that some of their Mkushi farming n
eighbors were armed and excitable—“all those Yugoslavs and Greeks,” Mum says appreciatively, “very volatile”—but at least there wasn’t a war on. And the Zambian bush ponies were stubborn and they reared, but they gave Mum the idea that she would like to show-jump again, so she bought herself a proper horse (a Hanoverian called Hannah) and began to enter agricultural shows. And Dad, inspired by Mum’s show-jumping, took up polo again, competing in dusty, dangerous tournaments in Lusaka. (“Gangway! Gangway!” riders would shriek as yet another out-of-control amateur bolted screaming toward the goal.)

  But then something happened halfway around the world that changed everything. In late 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and almost overnight, the predictable Cold War system on which Zambia (a socialist country) had relied for so long was far less certain. The markets opened up, currency controls started to collapse, American food aid poured into the country and suddenly farmers couldn’t sell their maize and soya beans locally for any price at all. “Why buy food when it’s being given to you for nothing?” Dad says.