Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [53]
Winter came early and hard. “Pawpaw trees turned black and fell over,” Dad says. “The low veldt was scorched with frost. People’s boreholes froze solid. I don’t know how many farmers went broke, but you could see them on the streets of Salisbury on the bones of their asses.” Dad got a job as a bouncer at Salisbury’s only nightclub, La Boheme.
“A very sleazy joint,” Mum says. “Zilla the Snake Charmer, that sort of thing.”
I stare at my father. “Zilla the Snake Charmer?” I say.
Dad blushes and tampers with his pipe, tapping ash out of the bowl and refilling it with tobacco.
“No, Bobo, those were desperate, desperate times, and they called for desperate, desperate measures,” Mum says. “It wasn’t an easy job—you can just imagine the customers all having a good time, armed to the teeth. And you know what Rhodesians are—they can’t see a snake without wanting to blow its head off.”
MY PARENTS’ SECOND CHILD, Adrian Connell Fuller, was born on a bitterly cold day in early winter at the Lady Chancellor Maternity Home in Salisbury. “It was a very difficult, very lonely labor,” Mum says. “Terribly cruel treatment. All the nurses and doctors were attending other people. They just left me to get on with it. I suppose they knew I was the homeless, penniless wife of the bouncer at La Boheme, so they didn’t care about me.” But then the child was born, a blond, blue-eyed son, and Mum was overwhelmed with joy. “The happiest day of my life,” she has told me, “was the day I held that little baby in my arms for the first time.”
When Adrian was a few weeks old, Dad found work building a smelting plant on a nickel mine near Shamva, fifty miles northeast of Salisbury. Dad had never built anything bigger than a chicken coop in his life, “but the money was okay, so I talked my way into it,” Dad says. “I had to do something. Four of us couldn’t live off the wages of a bouncer.” Dad worked all the hours he could get, leaving Mum before dawn and returning after dark.
Mike Dawson, a farmer near Shamva, let my parents live rent free in a cottage on his farm until they could get their feet under them. “You will never, ever forget the kindness of strangers,” Mum says, pushing a work-blunted forefinger into the palm of her hand for emphasis, “Such selflessness, such generosity.” Mike’s wife, Cherry Dawson, was a depressed Australian. “I think she tried to be kind, but we were all struggling. We all had problems. She wasn’t from Africa so she didn’t have that open-door policy that we all grew up with. We were an added burden for her.” Moreover, Adrian’s system seemed shocked by the very bitter winter.
THE PATTERN LOOKED LIKE THIS: Adrian woke up with a frighteningly high temperature and Mum gave him paracetamol syrup. Then because Mum didn’t have a car or a telephone, she ran from the cottage over to the main house with Adrian in her arms, trailing Vanessa. She begged Cherry for a lift to the clinic, fifteen miles away in Bindura. “I could tell Cherry resented the intrusion, let alone the cost of the petrol ferrying me back and forth, which I could never afford to repay.” By the time Adrian got to the clinic, his fever was back down because of the paracetamol and Mum was told to take him home.
A day or two passed. Mum put blankets on the cottage’s dry lawn and prayed that fresh air and the weak winter sun would somehow penetrate her child’s body and boost his strength. Then the next morning, Adrian would again throw a frighteningly high temperature, and again Mum trickled paracetemol down his throat and ran to the main house. “It was obvious they were all thinking I was just a neurotic new mother. But I wasn’t. It was such a bad winter, we were so hard up and Adrian just kept getting sicker and sicker.” So then Mum wrapped Adrian in wool blankets and kept him inside. And for a day or two, this appeared to be the magical formula to keeping her son well.
Until it wasn’t.