Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [112]
The nurse was astonished.
“I just need to sleep,” said Mum. “Put me to sleep.”
Mum slept on and off—mostly on—for almost two years. Overtired from life.
Dad took her down to the loony bin in Harare, through the border at Chirundu, where she now looked less like her passport photo than ever.
They gave her so many drugs that she lay flattened on the sheets of her bed like a damp towel. Barely able to speak. Unable, for the first time in her well-read life, to lift a book.
“It wasn’t so bad. I wasn’t really there,” says Mum. “I was just sort of floating. Not feeling. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad. It really wasn’t anything. Whenever anything like a feeling floated to the surface, they gave me more drugs and the feeling went away and I found I was so heavy and flat. . . . I just slept, mostly.”
Then one morning a fellow patient let himself into Mum’s room, stood on her bed, pulled out his penis, and peed on her. Mum was too weak to react. She tried to scream.
“I would have knocked the bloody fellow out,” says Mum. But her arms and legs and voice wouldn’t work.
“That’s when I knew that the only thing worse than being crazy was being like this . . . like a lump.”
Mum and Dad have a fish farm now, on the Lower Zambezi. For a couple of years after Mum’s major nervous breakdown, they lived in a thatched hut. Their dining room was a table under a tree. Their kitchen was a fire under another tree. The bath was a tin tub under the stars, surrounded by a grass fence. I could look up from my tub and stare at the black, deep sky pinpricked with silver stars. The toilet was a ridiculously narrow hole in the ground, a long-drop the size of which, when I was visiting from America, I protested against.
Dad said, “We don’t make long-drops in stretch-limo size out here. We Africans don’t need supersized holes.”
They split their time between the cottage at Oribi Ridge and the farm in Chirundu. Once their new house is finished, they will live full time at Chirundu. Their nearest European neighbors are some Italian nuns who run a hospital for local villagers and a family who run a fishing lodge. The local villagers have traditionally made their living through poaching wildlife, fishing the perilously crocodile-thick waters, and chopping down slow-growing hardwood trees to make charcoal, which they sell in Lusaka. Chirundu is one of the least healthy, most malarial, hot, disagreeable places in Zambia. But it is, as Dad says, “far from the madding crowd.”
“Because even the madding crowd aren’t mad enough to live there,” I point out.
“Yup.” Dad pauses to fiddle with his pipe. “But we have hippo in the garden.”
As if that can make up for the thick clouds of mosquitoes, the isolation, the insufferable, deadening heat, the lack of rain.
Mum takes little white pills every day now. She says, “They’re just enough to keep my brain quiet, but not so much to knock me out.”
She repeats her stories. They said that would be a side effect.
I say, “You’ve always repeated stories.”
She has twenty feet of copper wire hanging from the trees, attached to shortwave radio. She is reading, planting a garden, listening to the radio, talking to her dogs, supervising lunch, and trying to write a letter all at the same time. She is gently manic, in a pottering sort of way.
Vanessa left her first husband, and has remarried and now lives a few hours up the road from Mum and Dad in a house facetiously called the rock palace, a beautiful, fanciful settlement frequented by snakes. She has just had her fourth baby.
A letter to me in America, from Mum in Zambia, dated 12 December 2000, reads, in part,
When we get water, then I’m going mad on the garden and lawn. I keep putting trees in, which the staff resent because they’ve got to haul water from a well to water them, and the beastly Madam crawls from plant to plant and bird table to bird bath the minute I get there from Oribi Ridge—the birds down there