Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [106]
This year, we chop down a drought-dry fir tree and set it up in the sitting room. Mum spends hours gluing candles to the tree with wax.
“If that thing doesn’t spontaneously combust,” says Dad, “I’ll eat my bloody hat.”
“Are you sure that’s safe?” I ask.
Mum (defensive) says, “It looks festive.”
“Looks like a bushfire waiting to happen.”
Vanessa, as designated artist in the family, spends one afternoon supervising the decoration of the tree. In the four years since leaving Malawi, we have accumulated a small box of real decorations (angels, trumpets, halos, doves), which are lost among the balls of cotton wool and the candles. We dare not put anything too close to the candles.
On the veranda stands a dead protea bush we have dragged from the north, sandy end of the farm. It still boasts the odd, brown, head-hanging bloom, to which we add cutouts from old Christmas cards, sewn with red thread into hanging loops. Two lizards set up house on the tree and add to the decoration.
“Couldn’t buy a decoration like that at Harrods,” says Dad.
The lizards lurk, waiting, tongue-quick, for flies (of which there are plenty). They are as thick as the air.
Christmas Eve. It still hasn’t rained. By now, the tobacco seedlings are thin-necked, yellow-pale, growing into the heat with telltale signs of drought on their leaves already. We have filled the huge trailer water tanks and they stand, like army equipment awaiting battle, at the seedbeds. We have already water-planted fifteen acres of tobacco, but those plants are lying flat and parched, draped thinly over the top of the soil. When we dig our fingers into the plowed soil which holds these nursery transplants, the ground is searing hot and parched. Dad says we mustn’t plant any more tobacco until it rains. So the water tanks wait. The seedlings wait.
Mum spends half an hour crawling around the Christmas tree lighting all the candles. This is the first Christmas Eve on which we still have electricity. Usually, by now, thunderstorms have brought the lines down and we are without power until the rains subside in March.
Then Mum says, “I think that’s the lot.”
And we switch out the lights and briefly enjoy the spectacle of the flaming tree before Dad loses his nerve and orders the thing extinguished. We switch on the lights again. Beetles and ants and earwigs that have made their home in the dried-up fir tree have sensed forest fire and are scurrying in panic across the sitting room.
“Eggnog, anyone?” says Mum.
It’s too hot for eggnog. We drink beer. Mum has cut the top off a watermelon and filled it with gin and ice cubes. We take it in turns sucking from the straws that spike from the watermelon’s back, a sickly-prickly porcupine of melting ice and gin in thinned watermelon juice. By bedtime, we are too drunk to sleep.
It is Dad’s idea to drive around the neighborhood and sing Christmas carols. We set off in the pickup, the English Friend driving, with Dad as chief navigator. Vanessa and I are in the back. Mum says she’ll stay home with our houseguests, a family from Zimbabwe.
We kidnap the husbands, guests, and sons of our neighbors. We acquire two guitar players, one of whom is too stoned to play anything but Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.” We override his intense, druggy riffs with loud, drunken renditions of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and snatches of the “Hallelujah” Chorus (to which we know only the word “Hallelujah”).
We disturb the malarial sleep of a Greek farmer’s wife.
We narrowly avoid being shot by Milan the Czech, who sleeps with a loaded handgun by his pillow.
“Jesus!”
“Told you not to sing bloody ‘Jingle Bells’ to a Yugoslav.”
“He’s Czech.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is to me.”
“Not to him.”
“Hey, Milan! Hold the fire!”
The stoned boy is shocked out of his “Cocaine” reverie by the gunfire. He thinks deeply for a moment and then starts to sing (accompanying himself badly on the guitar), “All we are saying, is give peace a chance. . . .” He has to keep repeating the word “peace” until he finds the right chord. “All we