Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [14]
“There,” she said, presenting me with a tiny tick pressed between her forefingers, “all that fuss for a little tick.”
“What?”
“See?” The tick waved its legs at me in salute. It still had a mouthful of pink skin, my pink skin, in its jaws. “Nothing to get your knickers in a twist about.”
I shook my head and wiped my nose on my arm.
“Now go and find Violet and tell her to wash your face,” said Mum. She pressed the tick between her nails until it popped, my blood bursting out of the tick and staining the tips of Mum’s fingers.
That’s how I remember Karoi. And the dust-stinging wind blowing through the mealies on a hot, dry September night. And a fold-up and rip-away lawn prickled with paper thorns. And the beginning of the army guys: men in camouflage, breaking like a ribbon out of the back of an army lorry and uncurling onto the road, heads shaved, faces fresh and blank. Men cradling guns. And the beginning of men not in camouflage anymore, looking blank-faced, limbs lost.
Bobo and Van
THE BURMA VALLEY
The central vein of Rhodesia rises up into a plateau called the Great Dyke. It is where most of the country’s population have chosen to stay. The edges of the country tend toward extreme heat, flat heartless scrub, droughts, malaria. The central vein is fertile. Rhododendrons will grow here. Horses will gleam with fat, shiny coats. Children look long-limbed, high-browed, intelligent. Vitamin sufficient.
And then, in the east, beyond Salisbury, there is a thin, strangled hump, a knotted fist of highlands. And there if you look carefully, nestled into the sweet purple-colored swellings, where it is almost always cool, and the air is sharp and wholesome with eucalyptus and pine, and where there are no mosquitoes, is a deep, sudden valley. (The map plunges from purple to pink then orange and yellow to indicate one’s descent into heat and flatness and malaria.) That valley, in the far east of the country, is the Burma Valley. Here, horses hang thin in the thick, wet heat, their skin stretched over hips like slings. Children are elbow-knee wormy and hollow-orange with too much heat, skin-pinching dehydration, and smoking-drinking parents. Dogs have scabs from putzi flies, which lay eggs on damp patches of earth or unironed clothes, burrow under the skin, the eggs becoming maggots, bursting into living, squirming boils, emerging as full-blown, winged flies.
“Don’t wear clothes that haven’t been ironed.”
“Why?”
“Or you’ll get putzis.” Which babies get on their bottoms from damp, cloth nappies.
Mum told us that Vanessa got them once from an unironed nappy.
“Vanessa had putzis on her bott-om. Vanessa had putzis on her bott-om.”
“Ja? Well at least I’ve never had a tick on my downthere.”
Mum and Dad left Karoi and bought the farm in the Burma Valley because they loved the view. When they had stood where the new veranda would one day be built on the front of the old farmhouse and when they had looked out at the view of the hills, stretching blue-green into a haze of distant forest fires, and when they had seen the innocent-looking hump of the farm stretched out at their feet toward Mozambique, it seemed to them like this farm could hold their dreams in its secret valleys and gushing rivers and rocky hills.
The plumbing was temperamental and obvious (a leach field bleeding green slime at the back of the house) and there was no electricity.
They said, “We’ll take it.”
Unsurprisingly, the valley had reminded one of its first European settlers of Burma. It was humid and thick with jungle and creepers, and cut through with rivers whose banks spilled prolific ferns and mossy rocks and lichen-dripping trees teetering on the edge of falling in, and it was fertile-foul smelling (as if on the verge of rotting) and held a green-leafy lie of prosperity in its jeweled fist.
The valley represented the insanity of the tropics so precarious for the fragile European psyche. The valley could send you into a spiral of madness overnight if you were white and highly strung. Which we were.
It was easy to leave Karoi.