Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [2]
Twelve years later, Mum reviewed her life and matched it up against the kind of biography she hoped to inspire, something along the lines of West with the Night, The Flame Trees of Thika or Out of Africa. On the whole, she was satisfied. In fact, all things considered, she felt as if she even may have overdone it in some areas (tragedies, war and poverty, for example). However, there remained one glaring omission from her portfolio: there had been no airplanes, and airplanes had featured prominently in the lives of Mum’s literary role models.
“And then, as if by magic,” Mum says, “My Dashing Little Sri Lankan appeared.”
My Dashing Little Sri Lankan did not really belong to Mum—although there were whole moments in the course of her relationship with him when you could have been forgiven for thinking exactly that—and there was debate in the family, some of it quite vigorous, as to whether or not he was dashing, but we could all agree that the Sri Lankan was definitely little. His real name was Mr. Vaas and he said he had come to Zambia to escape all the pain and violence of his native land.
“Then you should feel quite at home with us,” Dad said, which made Mr. Vaas look at him sharply. But my father said nothing more, returning his attention calmly to Farmers Weekly. On the whole, I took my father’s side. “As usual,” Mum said.
“Didn’t the last pilot who stayed with us fly his plane into an electricity pole?” I asked, pouring myself another cup of tea.
Without looking up from his magazine, my father said, “I’m afraid so.”
Mr. Vaas wilted somewhat.
“Don’t listen to them,” Mum said, steering Mr. Vaas firmly away from the veranda and tilting him across her garden—an encouraged tangle of bougainvillea and passion fruit vines, beds of lilies and strelitzia, rows of lilac bushes and caladiums looming over borders of impatiens. Mum’s current assortment of dogs gamboled at their heels. “My family bullies me terribly,” she said. Mr. Vaas patted her arm tactfully, for which the little man was rewarded with a voracious smile. “You and I,” Mum foretold, “will show them all what real courage looks like. We will be the Blixen and Finch Hatton of Zambia.”
Mr. Vaas blinked an SOS back at me and Dad from the gloaming.
“How’s that tea, Bobo?” Dad asked. “Still hot?”
“Scorching,” I said.
NOW FADED MR. VAAS, then Mum, into the home paddock, where the dairy cattle had come into the open to shelter from the evening mosquitoes. “Come fly with me,” I could hear Mum sing, “let’s fly, let’s fly away. If you can use some exotic booze, there’s a bar in far Bombay. Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.”
Dad is quite deaf as a result of hearing too many guns go off during the course of his life, not all of them fired by Mum, so he could not hear Nicola Fuller of Central Africa but I felt it was only fair to warn him that Sinatra had entered into the picture. Dad put down his magazine. “Well, good luck to the little Indian,” he said.
“Sri Lankan,” I corrected him.
Dad lit a cigarette.
“Come fly with me,” Mum serenaded—now her voice seemed to be drifting to us from the direction of the tobacco barns—“let’s float down to Peru.”
So, encouraged by Mum’s almost aggressive enthusiasm, Mr. Vaas parked his elderly and very basic Cessna on the airstrip by the Mkushi Country Club (whose tennis courts had ruptured little trees and which housed bats in the bar) and