Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  By the early 1990s, the Germans were getting anxious. “They wanted to get their money out of Zambia,” Mum says. So the farm was sold and my parents found themselves without work and without a place to live. A friend offered them the use of Oribi Ridge, a little cottage with adjoining stables and an orange orchard on a hilly, msasa-forested plot twenty miles or so east of Lusaka. “Rent free,” Mum says, shaking her head in amazement. “Isn’t that kind? We’ve been so lucky with our friends all our lives. The only thing Graeme asked us to do in exchange was to stop the villagers around there chopping down his trees—all virgin forest you know, very wonderful, very old miombo woodland.”

  So Mum and Dad moved into a tiny cottage on Oribi Ridge with half a dozen ponies, several dogs, Mum’s books, the hunting prints, the bronze of Wellington, and the Le Creuset pots. But even with her horses and her dogs, Mum was bored and restless. For most of the last twenty-five years, she had helped my father run a series of farms, and now, without the routine of the seasons, without the discipline of seedbeds and without the rigor of grading sheds, Mum’s inclination to be either subaqua, or cut afloat from the world, was more easily indulged.

  For his part, without a farm to run, Dad did the only thing he could think of for work: he traded fish in Lusaka out of the back of a small truck. Trader Tim, Mum called him, and although she kept her voice light, there was a disparaging edge to the comment. Dad looked a little bewildered, as if his feet missed the pacing of earth. He complained of feeling out of shape and liverish, and he gave up eating breakfast. “It’s a farmer’s meal,” he explained, “and I am not a farmer anymore.” But still he couldn’t help himself, absentmindedly picking up and sniffing the soil wherever he stood; mentally calculating its probable pH; subconsciously assessing its appropriateness for tobacco, soya beans or maize; automatically feeling its ability to hold moisture.

  And so one Sunday morning in 1995, Dad set out from the cottage and followed a poachers’ route off Oribi Ridge to the edge of the escarpment overlooking the Zambezi River and he sat out there until sunset, smoking and thinking and scribbling figures on the back of a cigarette packet. Dad can’t say exactly what resolved in his head that day, or why, but when he came back to the cottage that night, he told Mum he had a plan. “Why trade fish when you can grow them yourself?” he asked. “We’re going to get a piece of land on the river, and we’re going to start farming fish.”

  Mum looked up from the campfire. “But I thought you said Africa was for the Africans,” she said.

  Dad squatted in front of the campfire and turned a log until a flame shook awake from the embers. “I did,” he said. He lit a cigarette with the glowing end of the log and squinted through the smoke at Mum. “I did.”

  The next week, Dad drove two hours to the banks of the middle Zambezi River and presented himself at the boma of Chief Sikongo. He took off his hat, handed a gift to the chief’s assistant (a bag of maize meal and some cooking oil) and asked if he could have an audience with the chief. He was told to wait under a mango tree. So Dad settled himself down in the shade and passed the time watching the villagers come and go from the river while chickens pecked around his feet and dogs curled up next to him in dusty nests. A few hours later, the chief emerged from his palace (a modest brick house), and after the customary back-and-forth (How are the rains in Lusaka? How was the journey?), my father explained to the chief that he wanted a small farm on the edge of the river on which to raise fish in ponds, bananas in a field, a few sheep here and there. The chief listened and then told Dad to come back in one week with a pair of size six Bata slip-ons. (“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Dad thought.)

  So the next week Dad returned to Chief Sikongo’s boma with a pair of size six Bata slip-ons. Again he handed the gift to the chief’s assistant and waited for an audience with the chief under the mango tree in the liquid-white Zambezi sun. A few hours later, the chief appeared, and again Dad explained his need for a farm—the fish, the bananas, the sheep. The chief listened and then he told Dad to return in one month with a portable radio, spare batteries and some salt.

  So in a month Dad returned to the chief’s boma with the gifts, as instructed. And yet again he explained how his farm would work and how many of the chief’s subjects he would employ—people to work on the fish section, people to work on the bananas, shepherds for the sheep. The chief listened and nodded and occasionally muttered something to his assistant. And then he told Dad to come back in two months, this time with a dinner jacket and a bullock.

  So like some character in a fairy story on an ever more impossible quest, Dad returned to the chief again and again with offerings, with explanations and with calculations. Eighteen times he went back to the boma and waited under the mango tree, usually all through the burning middle of the day, for the chief to see him. Eighteen times the chief accepted Dad’s gifts and heard his story and at the end of eighteen times, Dad finally said, “Chief Sikongo, it’s not just for me alone. Your subjects will be trained to farm fish, they will have proper housing and there will be jobs for women. All of us together will make something of this place.” Dad stood one legged, schoolboylike, and scratched his calf with the toe of his shoe. “Pamodzi, pamodzi.”

  The chief looked up at Dad and he nodded. “All right, I have seen,” he said. There was a pause and then the chief opened his hands and pointed downstream. “There is one piece of land you can have below the bridge; no one is using it—there is no road, there are no buildings. I think it will work for your scheme.”

  Dad blinked at the chief, almost not daring to believe it. Then he remembered himself and gave a little bow. “Zikomo kwambili, Chief Sikongo,” he said.

  So Dad’s proposal for the fish and banana farm was put before the Siavonga District Counsil (a month or two passed). Then the land was inspected by a local counsilor and was approved for development (another few months went by). Then a planning officer went to Zimbabwe to see for himself what a fish farm might look like, and after a delay of yet more months, he approved the project. Then the land was surveyed and surveyed again. And all of this happened in accordance with the weather; the availability of transportation; the health of various officials (malaria so often striking at an inopportune time). So that nearly three years after his first meeting with the chief, Dad still did not have title to the farm.

  MEANTIME, MUM HAD had her two million percent nervous breakdown and now she lay in her bed in the borrowed cottage at Oribi Ridge, the curtains closed against the light, her mind shut against the world, her Royal Ascot hats in ruins. She sold her horses, she gave up reading, she no longer walked the dogs. Dad fretted around her, trying to cajole her out of bed and at night he sat alone by the campfire, kicking the night’s embers into life and staring into the flames, thinking and considering that perhaps his instincts had been correct in the first place; perhaps it was folly to try to own land in Africa again.

  Then all of a sudden, just as he was about to give up hope, all the pieces of ritual and custom and law shook loose and resolved themselves on a land officer’s desk into an acceptable application. And one morning in February 1999, a few weeks before my father’s fifty-ninth birthday, the Land Office of Zambia issued him title deed, a ninety-nine-year lease, for a small farm in the middle Zambezi Valley. Dad raced home and burst into the bedroom. “Tub!” he shouted. “A farm! We’ve got ourselves a farm!” Mum turned toward the door, lowered the blankets and sat up. “What?” she asked.

  “A farm,” Dad said again, “on the banks of the Zambezi River.” Dad waggled his hips. “How about some plonk in the garden?” He held up a box of South African wine. “Come on, Tub!” And he put an arm under Mum’s shoulder and got her out of bed. Flustered and a bit shaky, Mum put her hands to her hair and tried to flatten it. “It’s okay,” Dad said, calming down a little. “Take your time. I’ll wait for you outside.”

  Dad went into the garden, the dogs spilling after him, and he poured a little wine into two glasses. Several minutes passed, and t
hen he heard the bedroom door open. The dogs sprang to their feet, their tails beating a fervent greeting. Even in the steamy February heat, Mum was dressed as if she were preparing for a long, difficult journey to a lonely, cold place—pajamas, a shawl around her neck, thick socks—but she had brushed her hair as best she could (it still skewed sideways) and there was a line of bright lipstick on her lips.

  “There you are, Tub,” Dad said.

  Mum sat down next to Dad and looked out at the msasa forest. “Hm,” she said.

  “Here,” Dad said, handing her a glass.

  Mum raised her glass. “Here’s to us,” she said. She smiled. “There’s none like us, and if there were, they’re all dead.”

  Dad took a sip of his wine. “You can say that again,” he said.

  MY FATHER BOUGHT two working donkeys from the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture. His old cattle manager from Mkushi who had gone on to be Mum’s groom insisted on coming down to the farm to work with the donkeys. “If you have some donkeys,” Dama Zulu told my father, “then I must come and help you.” Mr. Zulu appraised the donkeys with his expert eye, “We can call them Flash and Lightning,” he concluded with what turned out to be prescient optimism. And so my father and Mr. Zulu, the donkeys and a span of men from the surrounding villages worked together for months. They cleared the farm’s boundary, pulled stumps, created firebreaks, opened up thick scrub. It was terrifically hot—far too hot to sleep in a tent (“You’d roast to death,” Dad says)—so Dad and Mr. Zulu slept under a tarpaulin strung across some mopane branches. And as people do who are so closely thrown together, they began to acquire one another’s habits: Mr. Zulu, for example, taking on something of my father’s bandy-legged walk and his manner of not speaking except in short barks; and my father settling into Mr. Zulu’s habit of walking everywhere with a long stick, a defense against snakes and ropey vines of buffalo bean. “And at night they both got bitten to death by mosquitoes,” Mum adds. “Mosquitoes like jackals, siphoning out gallons of blood until there was nothing left of Dad or Mr. Zulu except little bits of skin.”

  “Oh, you do exaggerate, Tub,” Dad says.

  “Well, she can put that in one of her Awful Books then,” Mum replies.

  By April, Mr. Zulu, whose two obsessions were land and wives, had damaged two young women from the village (and had married one of them, much to the consternation of his first three wives) and Dad had malaria, but a road had been cleared to the river and it was possible now to see the layout of the farm; the top mud flats where the fish ponds would go; the more loamy soil below where the bananas would fit; a stretch by the river reserved for a future fishing lodge and bar. “Today,” Dad told Mr. Zulu, “I am going to get the madam from Lusaka so she can choose a place to put her hut. You must also choose where you want to live.”

  Mr. Zulu staked his claim on a small hill where he would be lord and master of all he surveyed and could see any unsuspecting, promising young woman coming from a mile off. Meanwhile, my mother made her way to a tree slightly tucked away at the sloping edge of Mr. Zulu’s hill. It was a tree of modest height, with a rounded spreading crown of leathery dark leaves and drooping branches. She thumped her walking stick on the ground under the tree. “Here,” she said. She stared up into the tree’s branches, “so full of birds,” and announced, “I want my house right here.”

  Mr. Zulu came down from his hill and stood with my mother under the tree. He lit a cigarette and stared up at the tree’s canopy. Then he reached up and pulled at the leaves. “Do you know what this tree is?” he asked.

  My mother frowned. “Maybe a false marula?” she tried.

  Mr. Zulu shook his head, “No, Madam. This is the Tree of Forgetfulness. All the headmen here plant one of these trees in their village.” Mr. Zulu held his forearm steady as if to demonstrate the power of the tree. “You can plant it just like that, from one stick, and it is so strong it will become a tree. They say ancestors stay inside it. If there is some sickness or if you are troubled by spirits, then you sit under the Tree of Forget-fulness and your ancestors will assist you with whatever is wrong.” He nodded and took another drag of his cigarette. “It is true—all your troubles and arguments will be resolved.”

  “Do you believe that?” Mum asked, but before Mr. Zulu could reply she waved her own question away. “I believe it’s true,” she said. “I believe it two million percent.”

  Mum looked up into the branches of the tree again and she smiled. “Please bring me my camp chair, Mr. Zulu,” she said. “I think I will have my tea here today.” So Mr. Zulu went back to the truck to get Mum her chair. Dad, still weak from malaria, was lying under the tarpaulin watching the kettle boil over a mopane fire. “The madam has found the place for her house,” Mr. Zulu reported. Dad propped himself up on an elbow and squinted in the direction of the river. Backlit against the fierce afternoon sun, hands planted on her walking stick, was Mum—Nicola Fuller of Central Africa—mildly victorious under her Tree of Forgetfulness.

  Nicola Fuller of Central Africa at Home

  Mum and Dad, cocktail hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Zambia, 2010.

  When I step off the airplane and into the Immigration and Customs Hall at Lusaka International Airport, Mum and Dad are waiting to greet me. They are standing in front of everyone else, pinned right up against the glass. Dad is in a blue town shirt, a pair of baggy Bermuda shorts, a pipe in his mouth. Mum is tipsy with excitement, in a pinstripe shirt and khaki pedal pushers. As soon as she sees me, she starts jumping up and down, and flashing her V for Victoria sign as if I am the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. “Whoo-hoo!” she hoots. “Whoo-hoo!”

  But the closer I get to her, the less sure Mum is of what to do; she envelops me in a brief, uncomfortable embrace and tolerates a peck on the cheek. “Did they give you lots of yummy wine on the plane?” she asks. Dad—who has been looking mildly surprised since first glimpsing me (I have changed my hair color since the last time he saw me and while he can’t put his finger on the difference, he knows there is one)—pummels my shoulders affectionately and takes my suitcase. “Bloody hell, Bobo,” Dad says, and I know what he is about to say next—“How many pairs of shoes do you have in here?”—a persistent hangover from the time Mum took nothing but winklepickers and high-heel boots on their honeymoon to Tsavo National Park.

  I am put in the bed of the pickup with an oil-bleeding generator, bags of fish food and my suitcase. “Are you sure you’ll be okay back there, Bobo?” Mum asks, although she knows it’s my preference.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Yes, it’ll do her good after all that limousine treatment she’s been getting over there,” Dad says, patting the tailgate. He rolls down the window and pays the car guard. “Don’t spend it all on wine and women,” he advises, and then we’re off, whistling through the perfect Lusaka night—the city sweetly pungent with the smell of diesel engines, burning rubbish, greening drains—sparks from Dad’s pipe flying back around my shoulders and hair, for home.

  AT THE TOP OF MY PARENTS’ garden at the fish and banana farm, there is a brick archway and wide brick steps leading past the Tree of Forgetfulness to an open-air kitchen where Big H spends her mornings preparing huge redolent stews of vegetables and cow bones for the dogs’ supper, and her afternoons frowning over the supper Mum is preparing for the rest of us. “Ever since Big H got television and started watching those cooking shows, she has started to look down her nose at my curries,” Mum says. Mum has always cooked whatever she can get her hands on: ropy chickens, mutton, crocodiles, frogs on the driveway—“They had deceptively promising thighs,” Mum says—and turned them into fragrantly wonderful meals. “Big H thinks you’re supposed to swear and sweat and have tantrums like Jamie Oliver,” Mum says. “Not my nice, calm wine-infused meals.”

  On one side of the kitchen is the woodstove, its back to the garden; on the other, there is a small laboring fridge (in the heat it merely produces sweating butter or water-beaded bottles, nothing ever gets r
eally cold). Behind Big H, on a shelf dedicated to their storage, are Mum’s nine orange Le Creuset pots. Their bottoms are permanently blackened with the drippings of the hundreds of curries and stews that have been cooked in them over the years.

  To the right of the archway is a building containing my parents’ bedroom and Mum’s library with her collection of videos (musicals and operas mostly as well as British period dramas and a few nice, soothing murders); her books; and her art supplies. The top shelves are cluttered with carvings, ornaments and the brutalized bronze cast of Wellington (now missing both stirrups and reins, like a victim of a grueling Pony Club exercise).

  To the left of the archway there is a two-roomed cottage comprising the guest bedroom and Dad’s office. It is a thatched, brick structure inclined to be porous to wildlife. I open the door and wait. Nothing launches itself at my ankles, so I make my way to the bed and sit down, feet drawn up onto the bed. Big H brings me a clean towel, then stands around surveying the place. “Frogs,” she observes at last, and leaves. As my eyes become accustomed to the gloom, I see what she means. The place is smothered in large, foam-nesting tree frogs, white as alabaster. They are hanging from the mosquito net, glued to the walls, attached to the door, hopping across the floor. Later, I find that if I drink half a box of South African wine and take a sleeping pill, a frog will become attached to my cheek while I sleep and will stay there unnoticed until morning. “How lucky for you,” Mum says. “You can write about that in one of your Awful Books.”