Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [100]
“That’s okay,” says Mum.
“I brought a muntu for you. He used to be the cook here.” An African in a grubby khaki uniform grins broadly behind Gordon’s shoulder.
“Hello,” Mum says to the African.
I say, “How are you?”
“Bwino, bwino, bwino.”
“What’s your name?” Gordy asks him.
“Adamson,” says the African.
Gordy shrugs. “I can’t keep track,” he says. “They like to change their names like it’s going out of style, hey.” He waves in the direction of Adamson, as at a mosquito or a fly.
Gordy has preceded us on the farm by a couple of months. He is supposed to be fixing the stable of tractors, combine harvesters, motorbikes, generators, water pumps, and trailers with which Dad will rework—regenerate—this exhausted, lovely farm. Gordy lights a cigarette and tells us, “Aside from your truck, there’s only one working vehicle on the whole bloody farm.” He takes a drag off his cigarette and adds, “Which is my motorbike.”
The kitchen sighs and creaks to itself, settling around us.
Gordy kicks himself into action. “So you have everything you need?”
We nod.
“I’ll see you tomorrow then, hey?”
We troop back out of the kitchen, into the long concrete drain that lines the front of the house, and watch Gordy spin up the driveway on the only working piece of machinery, aside from our truck, on the farm.
Dad lights a cigarette.
Mum says, “His wife’s quite pretty. Pregnant, too.”
I wrinkle my nose. “She must have got that way through wind pollination, then.”
“Bobo!”
For supper, we eat fried meat on top of fried bread, with boiled black-jack greens on the side. Mum found the black-jacks growing in what had once been the vegetable garden and is now overgrown with weeds and encroaching bush.
“You eat?” Adamson points incredulously at the weeds.
“Black-jacks are jolly good for you,” Mum tells him. “Taste like spinach.”
“For African, yes, madam. But for wazungu?”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
We drink the barely cool locally brewed Mosi from the leaky mildew-smelling fridge, keeping an eye out for UFOs, unidentified floating objects, in the bottles. We had been warned by Gordy, “I know a bloke who found a muntu’s finger in his beer, hey. Struze fact.” The beer is yeasty and mild and flat, but it tastes better than the red-brown water that splutters out of the faucets.
I take a few swallows of the meat and bread and then push my plate away. There is a taste in African meat sometimes that is strong, like the smell of a sun-blown carcass. It is a taste of fright-and-flight and then of the sweat that has come off the hands and brows of the butchers who have cut the beast into pieces. It makes the meat tough and chewy and it jags in my throat when I swallow.
“Not hungry, Chooks?”
“I’m okay.” I sip my beer and stare up at the ceiling, which is flecked with thick crusts of fly shit, most concentrated directly above the dining room table.
Adamson appears to clear the dishes (the kitchen door is coming apart; it is two pieces of plywood held together by a handle and it chatters to itself whenever it is opened and closed). Adamson says, “I can cook Yorkshire pudding.”
“You can?” says Dad.
“I work for Englishman, many years.”
“I see,” says Dad.
“I work for the last mazungu bwana here.”
“Ah.”
“And now I am to cook for you.”
“Good.” Dad puts both hands down on the table in front of him, looks up at the cook, and says, “Then no silly buggers with Mr. Fuller, eh?”
“No, Bwana. No.”
Adamson has a large, sorrowful head, so heavy and bone-dense