Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [3]
Mum took to flying “like a bird to the wing,” she sang, although she had some difficulty with the paperwork required to ensure a reasonably uneventful journey. “Numbers,” she confided, darkly. “I suppose I should have paid more attention when those bloody nuns were trying to teach me how to count.” Navigation and fuel loads, for example, she found “very confusing.” Still, a minor detail like her complete inability to count further than the ten fingers on her two hands did nothing to dissuade either Mum or Mr. Vaas from pursuing her dream of taking to the air all through the smoky haze of that winter and into the first burning days of spring.
The late October afternoon on which Mum scheduled her first attempts to take off and land coincided with a full moon. Mum and Mr. Vaas took the creaking Cessna down to the end of the airstrip, its wings juddering in the settling heat of the long day. She turned it into the wind and faced the rising hunter’s moon, blood red in a smoke-stained sky. Mr. Vaas talked Mum through a final instrument check and from the tiny, greasy cockpit window, she looked back at the little tin hut in which the other flying students waited and gave the world her final thumbs-up.
The plane rattled down the runway, hopping old antbear holes and kicking up red dust. It gave one or two little jumps, and then it soared upward, tipping this way and that, before clearing the tops of the msasa trees, their new spring leaves paradoxically orange, red and yellow. Mr. Vaas looked over at Mum. “How are we doing, Mrs. Fuller?”
For those other students listening in the little tin hut next to the runway, there was a crackly moment and then came the voice of Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, shaking a little with all the uncommon, crazy courage that enabled Mum to see adventure and possibility where others saw only disaster and tragedy. “Fly me to the moon,” came her voice, singing not very steady but clear enough, “let me play among the stars.”
There was a pause. Mum looked over at Mr. Vaas and smiled alarmingly. His forehead had broken out in little beads of sweat. “And it takes quite a lot to make a Sri Lankan sweat,” she said afterward.
“Take it easy,” Mr. Vaas said.
Mum’s voice came over the radio again, stronger now, “Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”
As the little plane climbed and climbed toward the dropping sun, a brave punctuation of dark purple in a vivid red sky, Mr. Vaas gesticulated wildly. “Go back to land, go back to land!”
Mum wanted to fly over the aerial gun stationed on the Mkushi River Bridge. The Rhodesians had blown up this bridge during the Rhodesian Bush War, which seems excessive, even in hindsight, given that the bridge was at least a day or two’s drive from the Rhodesian front lines (roads being what they were). Then, in belated and approximate retaliation (the war having ended), the Zambian army had set up a permanent gunner on the north side of the bridge against the South African Defense Forces. In view of the fact that South Africa is a quarter of a continent away and the real fighting was taking place elsewhere as usual, the Zambian gunners didn’t have much to shoot at. Out of sheer boredom, they’d been known to take beer-fueled potshots at anything within reasonable range: crows, eucalyptus trees, chickens. There was no saying what they would do when faced with an actual unscheduled flight of an honest-to-goodness airplane.
Mr. Vaas became very firm. “I don’t have clearance for the bridge. Take her back down to the ground.”
“In other words,” Mum sang, “hold my hand.”
Mr. Vaas glared at her. “We land. We take off. We land. We take off. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. No bridges and no singing, for God’s sake.”
Mum