Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [55]
Eventually Mum breaks the silence. She says, “I remember walking out of the hospital and being so shocked that the world was still there. All the jacarandas were in blossom. Salisbury looked so beautiful. The flower sellers were in Meikles Park, the agapanthus were out, the jasmine was so sweet. And I thought, ‘How can the world look normal? How are people walking around? How can everyone not understand that the world has come to an end?’”
The doctors tranquilized Mum until her grief receded to a place so deep that she was the only person who could hear it. In this way, everything about Adrian’s death became a devastatingly slow injury, shards of hurt surfacing sometimes unexpectedly decades later the way pieces of shrapnel emerge from soldiers’ wounds years after they have been hit. “It’s the most terrible thing to go home and you walk into the nursery and all his things are there—the toys, the cot, his nappies,” Mum says. “It’s the most horrible thing that can happen to anyone. So I just thought, ‘I’ve got to buck up.’ And I did what I could to get on with my life.”
Then Mum shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, that’s not true. I didn’t get on with my life. I couldn’t. Vanessa kept asking, ‘Where’s the baby? Where’s Adrian?’ No one tells you how you should handle the situation, and I handled it very badly. I couldn’t stand it. I asked Cherry to look after Vanessa for a few days. I took more of those awful tranquilizers and I lay in a dark room with a pillow over my head. I didn’t want to hear anything. I didn’t want to see anything. I wanted to stop. Just stop being.”
Three days after Adrian died, Dad spent half his month’s wages on a two-piece suit from an Indian tailor in the second-class district. Then he drove to the children’s hospital, picked up the small urn they gave him and interred Adrian’s ashes at the Warren Hills Cemetery in southern Salisbury.
“All alone?” I ask.
Dad’s eyes threaten to brim. “Well, it’s not the sort of thing you send invitations out for.”
As Adrian’s ashes were closed into the wall, the season’s first rain began to fall. Water pooled at my father’s feet on the hard earth. It ran down his face. The suit from the second-class district shrank, the sleeves crawled up his arms, the legs receded up his calves, and blue dye ran on the red soil. Dad stood in place and memorized everything: the rangy lilac bushes, the pied crows, the cold rain on hot earth, the small and lonely grave.
A few years ago, my parents went back to look for it, the bronze marker with my brother’s name on it, but along with anything else of value in that cemetery, the marker had been ripped off, melted down and sold or used for something else. I had always believed that Adrian’s grave was unmarked, but it was more than that: his grave had been unmarked after the fact. In this way, Adrian is most African: a victim of circumstances, he lies anonymous in that beautiful, bloodied soil, with no date to mark either his birth or his passing. His grave as good as empty. “You can’t blame desperate people for that,” Dad says.
Mum looks up and her eyes are bright. “Yes, you can,” she says. She is adamant. “Yes, you must.”
And it seems to me that both my parents are correct. Whether out of desperation, ignorance or hostility, humans have an unerring capacity to ignore one another’s sacred traditions and to defile one another’s hallowed grounds: the Palawa Aborigines lost on Waternish, the Macdonalds trapped in St. Francis Cave on Eigg, the MacLeods burned in Trumpan Church, the Boers dying in British concentration camps, thousands of Kikuyu perishing during the Mau Mau, the Rucks family hacked to death in Kenya’s White Highlands, Adrian’s grave desecrated. Surely until all of us own and honor one another’s dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.
BEFORE THE END OF the next disappointing rainy season (another drought), Boofy—worn out by gin, cigarettes and disappointment—finally died of