Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [75]
“He had the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, just like Dad’s,” Mum says. “He looked perfect—perfect little face, perfect little body.” She puts her fingers to her lips. “But there was something not right inside; the back of his palate, you know, wasn’t quite formed. . . .” Still, the baby managed to nurse a little and when he cried, Mum held him on her shoulder and sang to him. But as the days went by, the baby became more lethargic, he seemed less able to grip Mum’s fingers and his crying turned plaintive. “We were waiting for a medical device from South Africa,” Mum says. “Something to attach to his palate so that he could swallow without choking.” But before the shipment could arrive from Johannesburg, one of the nurses came to Mum’s bed. “You’d better go and see your child,” the nurse said. “He isn’t well.”
Mum held the stitches across the bottom of her stomach and hurried out of the maternity ward into the nursery. “Lots of the nurses were black by then,” Mum says, “and after everything we’d been through . . . well, I suppose it’s only natural. They weren’t very sympathetic.” Mum sighs. “They might even have been a little vindictive.” She looks away. “Anyway, it was very cruel.” When she got to the nursery, Mum found the baby jarringly still in his crib. “Oh God, it was just awful,” Mum says. “He died alone. You know? He died all alone, the little thing.” She scooped up her son’s tiny, stiff body and rocked him—“I’m sorry,” she told him, “Oh, I am so, so sorry”—letting her tears fall on his face. Then she carefully put the baby back in the hospital crib, covered him with a blanket and went to her knees.
She waited for the old, customary pain to overwhelm her. Instead, everything Mum had ever felt receded and receded until she could hardly comprehend her own physical self anymore: her knees on the red cement floor had self-defensively deadened against any more pain; her recent incision was nothing more than a remote pang. Nothing, nothing—a void. My parents never named the child. Mum shakes her head. “He didn’t live long enough. We just wanted to try to forget, move on.” But unable to imagine a brother without a name, Vanessa and I privately christened the absent baby Richard. He is, of my three dead siblings, the most unmentioned and the most unmentionable.
For weeks after the baby had been born and died, Mum lay in the lacy-hot shade of a camel thorn tree near the ranch house at Devuli, radiant with emptiness. At night, when the generator was turned on for a few hours of electricity, she drank brandy and played and replayed “The Final Farewell” from a Roger Whittaker album. Sometimes in the cooler mornings she rode her horse along the dry riverbank that ran along the boundary of the ranch and she hummed that song to herself and she thought how she had no fear of death and about how she did not have words for how she loved the child she had lost. No words at all.
MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS after we had given up Robandi, I returned to the Burma Valley in October 2002 to see what traces of my family remained there. We didn’t live on Robandi for very long—a little more than half a dozen years—not even a seventh of Mum’s life, as I write this. But those years have blossomed like a stain over everything else in her life because of what we lost there. Even now, Robandi is the geography of my nightmares: the rusty streaks on the walls of the white barns where the roofs had oxidized; the sour-breath smell of the workshops; the toughening astringent of gun oil against fingers. If I peel back the corner of memories of that place, what races in is too big for me to feel at one sitting—no mere piece of land can be responsible for that.
I found the essential shape of our old farm unchanged, although it was no longer recognizable as the struggling commercial enterprise my parents ran