Leaving Before the Rains Come (3 page)

“What other bloke?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but there must have been at least one other.”

No one thought to tell me that it was all right to make a career choice that didn’t involve having a husband, although from the start Dad had been clear that I had to be able to stand on my own two feet. But the specifics of what that meant seemed to elude him—if I could change a flat tire, shoot a gun, and ride a horse, I think he thought it was enough. Also no one thought to let me know that my British passport, while a useful way to get off the continent, was no way to stay. And if anyone had asked what I wanted—if it had been my choice—I would have given up my British passport without a second thought and exchanged it for a Zambian one.

I was accidentally British, incidentally European—a coincidence of so many couplings. But I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look African; and yet here I still was. That seemed to me to prove a point. Someone had planted me in this soil and I had taken fierce hold. And although I had no illusions—this land wasn’t mine to inherit, none of it belonged to me—I couldn’t help knowing that I belonged to it.

When I was finally taken back to the
UK
on holiday, I felt panicked and unknowable and unknown there. I wasn’t British. I didn’t sound British. I didn’t feel British. I sat at lunch with relatives and old family friends, miserable with the choice of utensils. Why invent such a test? Who needs so many ways to get food into their mouth? It made me want to eat with my fingers. It wasn’t that my parents hadn’t taught me what knife and fork to use in the event that more than one of each be presented, or that the correct response to “How do you do?” is not, “Fine, thanks,” but rather a nod of the head. I knew what to do and say, but to me it was like a foreign language. The moment I was tested, all I could remember was that there were conjugations and rules, and beyond that I froze. I knew the vocabulary of British behavior, but its syntax often caught me out.

I was rooted in 1980s Zambia with its dearth of suitable men and zero birth control. The
AIDS
epidemic was burgeoning, our silent war; you could see the walking dead everywhere, smell disease on the rapidly diminishing bodies of the victims. And in spite of the foreign press dubbing it “the gay disease,” we knew different. It would be a quarter of a century before we knew that twenty-five million people in Sub-Saharan Africa were living with the disease, but we could see it coming. Men, women, and children were struck down seemingly without discrimination, as if an odorless, invisible toxic gas had fallen over our world. One day a man would seem healthy and virile, and two weeks later he would present at the kitchen door with boils and lesions. In a month, he would be dead of malaria, or diarrhea, or a blood-spewing cough, and six months later his wife and mistresses and half their children would be dead too.

Since having a Zambian boyfriend seemed suicidal for all sorts of reasons, and overseas men had to run the life-threatening Fullers-of-Central-Africa gauntlet to get anywhere near me, I split the difference and took up for a while with a Zimbabwean woman. “Double ouzo, hold the Coke,” Mum ordered at the Mkushi Country Club bar, during spanakopita night. “My daughter’s a lesbian.” The Greek farmers blinked at her uncomprehendingly. “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You bloody people invented it.”

However, in spite of its built-in conveniences, lesbianism hadn’t stuck with me. And although I had moved in with a Canadian boy at university—generous and caring from a steady middle-class family—I could not imagine Joey surviving afternoon tea with my family, let alone a summer vacation or a lifetime of get-togethers. Even from a distance, Mum reacted badly to the news that I was sharing not only a bed but also kitchen appliances with a man from the New World. “Double brandy, hold the water.” Mum slapped the bar at the Mkushi Country Club again. “My daughter’s gone off with a bloody Canadian.”

But I couldn’t see how anyone could object to Charlie. True, he wasn’t British, but his other virtues more than offset this otherwise serious deficiency. He seemed accomplished in the manly arts, rubbing shoulders with Eastern Bloc military, powder skiing in remote European mountains, smoking cigars; Dad might at least think twice before setting the watchman on him. He could ride horses and he had moved to Zambia with his dog; that was likely to endear him to Mum. He seemed enthralled with me, finding me funny and clever; Vanessa would hate that. But before I could ask Charlie back to the farm, he asked me to go canoeing on the Zambezi River with him for a week.

“We can camp below the wall, after the bridge, at the confluence, in the park.”

“One tent?” I clarified. “Just us?” And I thought about the way in which this would hop around the Zambian gossip circuit.

“Yes,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “You should know my dad will wave a shotgun at you.”

Charlie didn’t flinch. “That’s okay. I’ve spent every summer of my life on my grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming and she waves her shotgun at everyone, especially after cocktail hour.” Pressure I didn’t even know had been there eased off my chest. I pictured a whisky-drinking, gun-toting woman propped up in the frame of a cabin door surrounded by swales of sagebrush and prowling wolves. Then Charlie said that although Wyoming was the land he loved best, he had been raised and schooled in Pennsylvania. His family, he told me, were Main Line Philadelphia on both sides, and having no idea that this implied bluestocking, old-money elite, I happily pictured heroin addicts, pale and thin, draped over souring bedclothes, their inner arms threaded blue with needle tracks.

We were both speaking in shorthand, assuming a shared language. But the way most Westerners immediately envisioned a sepia-charmed life of hunting trips, spectacular sunsets, and fez-donned, white-gloved servants when I mentioned I had grown up on farms in Zimbabwe and Zambia, I conjured a blighted inner-city life when Charlie mentioned mainlining and Philadelphia. And it fit perfectly with what I thought I knew of the place.

The United States of my youthful imagination was an impression created by our postcolonial, Maoist-socialist governments, who were forever warning against the debauched evils of capitalism. And where our governments left off scaring us about the West, the secretary at the farm agency in Mkushi enthusiastically took up. Waving one of her South African tabloid magazines at me, she said she had it on good authority: ruthless capitalist American drug dealers casually injected unsuspecting passing pedestrians with heroin just for the evil sake of creating more addicts. “No, Bobo,” she said, speaking through an exhaled punctuation of cigarette smoke. “It’s a terrifying place, I promise you.”

The supposed fact that Charlie not only hailed from drug addicts but also had a trigger-happy grandmother who owned a ranch in Wyoming did not seem incongruous to me. After all, my family had owned a farm in Rhodesia and had worked on ranches and estates in Malawi and Zambia half the size of Rhode Island, and that did not preclude us from whole years of almost itinerant destitution. Also, having very little experience with drug addicts except the pot-smoking sons of a neighbor, and Adamson, our perpetually stoned cook, I didn’t think of the unlikelihood that heroin-riddled parents could have produced someone as straight-limbed and clear-eyed as Charlie.

Now I said to Charlie, “I’ve never canoed before.”

“That’s okay. I’m a guide. I’ll get us down.”

And he sounded so unalarmed by me, so unconcerned about my lack of experience, so sure of his own prowess, that I fell there and then. And in my experience, once the falling has started, there are few options for recovery. To struggle one’s way back to a pre-falling place, one would need to have planned in advance, to have packed parachutes, or ropes and harnesses, to have arranged for self-arrest. But, not seeing it coming, I had taken none of these precautions. And in any case, the falling was wondrous from this altitude, as if the whole world lay in miraculous miniature below us, too many miles to foresee the landing, and, gusted about by more or less comforting currents, the sensation was rather of flight than of anything plummeting.

Time took on a weird dimension too—eternity possessed in an instant. Having invented it, we tend to believe that everything happens over time, the way the seasons ease their way around the globe steady and measurable and relaxed. But the truth is, most of the things that change the course of our lives happen in fleeting unguarded moments; grief buckling us at the knees; fear shattering through us like buckshot; love pulling us out on an unseen tide. And finding ourselves in the grip of these overpowering emotions, we then invent reasons based on the flimsy evidence we have accrued why they have happened, trying to make sense of the insensible with armloads of self-justification, distortions, and deliberate misinterpretations.

So I said, “Yes,” knowing even then that this was no ordinary yes, no yes with a get-out clause, no penciled-in yes. It was a certain forever yes. It was the yes my Scottish grandmother had given when she consented to go on a picnic with my grandfather in Kenya, certain the whole rest of her life would hinge on that single syllable. “Hodge’s nose,” she told me fifty-five years later. “It takes years of breeding to get a nose like that.” And it was the yes my mother gave to my father, explaining afterward that she had approved of the length of his Bermuda shorts. It was the yes Auntie Glug had given to my uncle because he was the last man standing at the Royal Air Force bar at the end of every night. And afterward, when I was breaking down my reason for marrying Charlie to other people, I said, “He looked good on a horse.”

But even if Charlie had looked like a sack of potatoes on a horse, I would have come up with some other reason for my having said, “Yes.” I would have said it was his unkempt beard, or his long legs, or his uncompromising Romanesque profile like something off an ancient coin, that had drawn me to him. What I never would have confessed was the truth: at twenty-two, I was already exhausted, and what I projected onto Charlie’s broad-shouldered frame was an embellished biography that made him both my sanctuary and my savior. I believed that if I moored myself to Charlie, I would know tranquility interspersed with organized adventure. He would stay in Zambia because he loved the romance of it. I could remain here, safely. Our lives would be the “three rifles, supplies for a month, and Mozart” of
Out of Africa
without the plane crashes, syphilis, and Danish accent.

L
acking practice, most people report making poor decisions while under the influence of alcohol, but in our family, we made almost no major decisions sober. We did as Herodotus wrote of the Persians: “It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk, and then on the morrow when they are sober the decision to which they came the night before is put before the master of the house in which it was made, and if it is then approved they act on it; if it is not, they set it aside. Sometimes, however, they are sober at their first deliberation, but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine.”

Looking back, I suspect it was because our choices were often so limited, and required such outlandish courage to make, that the only possible way to plunge ahead was to be drunk at the time of the decision and hungover at the time of the execution. We seemed always to be on the move, crossing another more or less unfriendly southern or central African border with everything we owned stuffed into one Land Rover. But taken in the right, slightly drunken spirit of misadventure, the constant unraveling, the perpetual spinning away from the familiar, were made more bearable, wondrous even.

Mostly, though, I think my parents made major decisions drunk to avoid the possibility of ever doing anything either frugal or boring, which, of all the possible sins, are the only two they consider truly deadly. “Boring is number one,” Dad says. “Absolutely the worst possible sin.” All other offenses my parents excuse as merely venial. “Well, he who is without sin is likely to be a bit bloody boring, so there is that hitch,” Dad argues.

In 1977, when I was eight, and had first been introduced to the itchy terror of Sunday school in the Umtali Anglican Church Hall, I came home with the Ten Commandments painstakingly hand drawn in bubble letters on poster board. “Show your parents,” our Rhodesian Sunday school teacher had instructed, no doubt congratulating herself on subversively recruiting a dozen infiltrating little missionaries in one go. An enthusiastic if slightly confused convert, I considered my family could definitely use some holy guidance. “Putting a jewel in their crown in heaven,” my maternal grandmother said of the proselytizers who came to her door in England, by which time I was old enough to detect the scorn in her voice.

Dad regarded my poster for a minute or two, eyebrows raised as if in surprise, then he tapped ash from his cigarette into the fireplace and said, “Some of the best chaps I know break all ten of those before breakfast.” My father told me this with his gun stripped on newspaper at his feet, and a can of oil on the end table at his side, because in those war years, anytime he was sitting down, he was also cleaning his gun. I waited for him to elaborate, but that was clearly all he intended to say on the matter of the two stone tablets given to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Although like God, Dad had lots of inviolate Rules: never whine, talk less, eat moderately, walk more, work harder, don’t waste water. Also like God, some of Dad’s commandments seemed contradictory: for example, he insisted upon stoicism, asceticism, and clean fingernails, but he also celebrated immoderation, drunkenness, and recklessness. His overriding abhorrence of idleness had already led to some confusion. “God hates idol worship of any kind,” our Sunday school teacher told us. And a flood of relieved recognition washed over me, my arm shot up, and I blurted out, “My father hates idle bastards too.”

I watched Dad twist a piece of cheesecloth onto a cleaning rod, shake a few drops of oil onto the cloth, and run it through the bore. He brushed and lubricated the action, polished the butt, reassembled the rifle, and held it to his shoulder, one eye closed. After that, he put the gun between his legs, propping it up with two fingers, as if the weight of it was as natural as balancing part of his own body. He dug into his ammo can and retrieved a flat rubbery object, like the otherworldly worms we sometimes found under the decomposing corpses of animals along the wild edges of the farm. He rolled it over the top of the barrel. “Stops water getting in,” he explained of the condom’s military use. Which made me think of the rainy season, and swollen rivers and the smell of Dad—bitter and musty like damp hessian sacks in the tobacco grading shed—when he came back from his two weeks’ patrol in the Himalayas. He stood up and lit a cigarette, gun over his shoulder. “I’ll tell you one thing, for what it’s worth,” he said. “All the heaven and hell a person’s going to find is right now, right here, under our noses.” Then he walked onto the veranda. “More than enough to be getting on with, I would have thought.”

Vanessa was resting in our bedroom with a damp facecloth over her eyes and a cat on her pillow. Olivia was under a mosquito net in her crib. Our two beds and Olivia’s crib were clustered in the middle of the room. Dad had pushed them together away from the window in case we were mortared and the panes blew in. Olivia was naked but for a cloth nappy and a piece of muslin draped across her stomach. Years earlier, as a young man in the West Indies, Dad had awoken from a shirtless afternoon nap with a terrible gut ache. Subsequently, he believed that the exposure of one’s midsection to air, even turgid equatorial air, was the cause of poor digestion, an incitement to malaria, and the reason for gout, insanity, and weak will. I bypassed the baby’s crib and stood at the end of Vanessa’s bed, breathing loudly until she could no longer deny my presence.

“What are you creeping around for?” she asked.

“Do you want to see my poster?” I whispered, so as not to wake Olivia, who was already making the kitten noises of a baby whose dreams are interrupted. “It’s about God.”

“No,” Vanessa said, not lifting up the flannel.

“I made it myself,” I said, by not much way of persuasion.

“No,” Vanessa said again.

There was a long silence during which I attempted to make my breathing annoying and wounded, also very loud. Finally Vanessa, who had taken the average Rhodesian youth’s obsession with ABBA to a new personal depth, lifted the corner of her damp facecloth and eyed me critically. “Who would you rather be?” she asked. “Agnetha or Anni-Frid.”

“Which one’s which, again?”

Vanessa sighed aggrievedly, as if I’d questioned the identifying characteristics of a close beloved relative. “Agnetha’s the blonde one.”

“Then Anni-Frid,” I said.

“That’s who I want to be, so you can’t.”

I retreated and made my way across the veranda to my parents’ room. Mum was lying down, curtains drawn against the midday sun. I climbed onto the end of her bed with its green-and-red tropical flower cover and its pile of cats and dogs at her feet. I held up the poster for Mum’s inspection. She looked at it impassively for a moment and then said, “But Bobo, there’s no art. It’s just lots of big bulgy writing.” She sounded disappointed not to see graphic depictions of the Lord’s name being taken in vain, or the committing of adultery, although honestly the mechanics of both sins had eluded me. I could, however, imagine drawing a picture of a man with a gun and a red line through it to signify Thou Shalt Not Kill, but that seemed too much like the sign we once saw being held on a street corner in Umtali by a long-haired man in a kaftan.

“Oh, groovy, man!” Vanessa had said.

But before I could think of something flower-powerish of my own to say, Dad had silenced us all. “Bloody hippie,” he muttered. “Whole lot of them should be lined up and shot at dawn.”

God, with all his wrath and constant references to war and patriarchal rules, seemed to me to show some very Rhodesian tendencies. But I was surprised, given the detailed instruction God offered to Noah and Abraham, that he had not been more specific with his ten commandments. Thou shalt not kill, except terrorists, commies, and hippies, surely. Also, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife except if she was Mum dancing on the bar at the club on Wednesday nights. Mum and Dad both would have been very offended if everyone had averted their adoring gaze. As for keeping the Sabbath holy and praying twice a day, that was all very well if you didn’t have cattle to feed, a calving cow, or tobacco to reap. Farm work didn’t give a damn what day of the week it was.

I concluded then there were two kinds of people. There were black-and-white people who hung their faith on heavenly matters. They respected the Decalogue, and were like my Sunday school teacher with her mild stain of a mustache, her brimstone breath, and her pale, dappled, dairy-product skin. These people, I suspected, did not roll condoms over the barrels of guns, and I had a hard time picturing my Sunday school teacher dancing on any bar at any club around Umtali. I envied my Sunday school teacher her temperate life and her certainty she’d be blasted straight up to heaven if she was shot by terrorists, loved to death by a hippie, or bitten by a snake. Black-and-white people could afford to look placid.

And then there were colorful people who had no particular regard for rules as delivered by either God or man, and who were like Mum and Dad and everyone else I knew with their callused hands and their lithe hips and barbed-wire scratches on their arms. These people were soldiers because there was a war to be fought, and drinkers because there was tragedy to be endured, and farmers because there was food to be grown and tobacco to be smoked. These were the people whose lives were soil-stitched. They too knew what would happen to them if they were shot by terrorists or bitten by a snake, which is why they carried guns with them everywhere. They had the fraught, changeable expressions of those concerned with earthly business.

I had been born and bred of colorful people, but I had black-and-white leanings. I was certain that the relative absence of holy wonders in our lives—burning bushes and our many enemies smote by boils and pestilence—had more to do with a lack of faith and obedience in God than with his personal lack of interest in us. There was a clear biblical promise: if we observed God’s rules and regulations, then we would dwell safely in our land, no sword would go through us, and we could lie down and not be afraid. Desperate to be one of the faithful, chosen, salvageable people, I determined to see God in hard-to-explain phenomena: rainbows, electric power, and Benny Andersson’s womanly hair, for example.

Losing faith is not the same as losing belief, but it can break the fragile tether between a person and her innocence just the same. On the afternoon of January 9, 1978, when I was home from school for the Christmas holidays, my world as I had known it fell to pieces, and out of the devastation that remained I could never, ever again make anything whole. On that day, my sister Olivia drowned in a neighbor’s pond. The sin of omission was mine; my eyes had turned from babysitting, my attention had been captured by the earthly wonders and temptations of a bright and alluring farm grocery store, my trustworthiness had been tested and found to be lacking. “It was one of those things, Bobo,” Dad told me, trying to make it better. But I knew it wasn’t a thing; it was a fault. Specifically, it was my fault.

That night and for months afterward, my prayers were so urgent, so clear, so grief-soaked and guilt-ridden, I was a nine-year-old vessel of Old Testament awe and superstition. I did not know then that suffering and grief are universal and that there would be a time, when I was older (although not much older), that I would know my own anguish to be nothing special or personal. All I knew back then is that God was our Father and that he could bring the dead back to life, I just wasn’t sure exactly how to go about insisting that my miracle was worth his time. “Oh God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself.”

So like any child testing out the miracle-dealing propensities of an all-powerful God offered to her in church or in school, I conducted experiments. I held myself under bathwater, willing myself to take the breath that might resemble Olivia’s last fatal inhalation of green duck water. Surely, if I had the faith and courage to drown myself on purpose, God might see my sacrifice and use his all-power to bring our sister back to life? And as penance for having allowed her death and to ensure that God knew of my serious commitment to him, I spent nights on the bare wooden floorboards of the dormitory, as I imagined monks and nuns must do. And I tried fasting, as Jesus had done for forty days in the wilderness, but by midmorning break on the first day, when we boarders were allowed a sandwich and the day scholars unpacked their tuck boxes of wondrous goodies, greed drove me to crimes of savagery and theft.

Then guilt heaped on guilt since God was ever-present, omniscient, and all-seeing. “Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth?” In the black-and-white world of school, God was in all the rules about not talking after lights-out, not running the faucet for longer than a count of thirty, not taking more than one square of butter at supper. We were our surname, a number, accountable. “Be good. Our men and boys are out there dying for you,” Mrs. Martingale told us every evening, and their deaths felt immediate, as if they were happening just outside the dormitory windows.

We, who were told to be good, were not like English or American children who were told to eat their spinach because of the remote specter of starving children in Africa. Unlike the vague benefits of vegetables, being good was a tangible imperative linked directly to the war and to all our dead whose number multiplied seemingly without end. At morning assembly, we were read the words of Cyprian of Carthage: “Let us on both sides of death always pray for one another.” Then we bowed our heads and beseeched God to protect our troops, and to send us peace and plentiful rain, and to grant us an ample harvest. But God remained pretty meager with his miracles: the dead stayed dead, the war went on, the rain either came too early and too strong or not at all, and the harvest depended on whether or not we’d had eelworm and blight.