Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [35]
Like a hitchhiker.
And now this. The two mazungu figures looming out of the hot rush of road.
“We don’t have room for hijackers,” says Vanessa, pointing at the pile between us and the back of the car, which is already stuffed to overflowing with suitcases and sleeping bags.
“Hear that, Tim, ha ha. Vanessa calls them hijackers.”
Dad stops and shouts out the window. “Where are you going?”
“Wherever you’re going,” says the little blond one in an American accent.
“We don’t have a plan,” says Dad, getting out and trying to make room for the two men among our luggage, among the sleeping bags, between Vanessa and me.
“That’s fine with us,” says the little one.
“Not us,” mutters Vanessa.
The hitchhikers squeeze into their allotted spaces and Dad drives on through the empty land.
The little one says, “I’m Scott.”
“You’re a bloody idiot,” says Dad.
Scott laughs. Dad lights a cigarette.
The big, dark one says, “I’m Kiki.” He has a thick German accent.
Mum turns around and smiles expansively to make up for Dad’s unfriendliness. “I’m Nicola,” she says, and then the effort of staring back at our new passengers obviously does not mix with coffee and brandy because she pales, hiccups, and turns abruptly to the front.
“I’m Bobo,” I say. “I’m eight. Nearly nine.”
Dad says, “Did you know there’s a war on?”
“Oh, ja. Ve thought it vould be a good time to travel. Not too many other tourists.”
Dad raises his eyebrows at our hitchhikers in the rearview mirror. He has sky-blue eyes that can be very piercing. He blows smoke out of his nose and flicks ash out of the window and his jaw starts to clench and unclench so I know it will be a long time before he speaks again.
I say, “And that’s Vanessa, she’s eleven, nearly twelve.”
Our avocado-green Peugeot heads into the sunset, toward the Motopos Hills. We stop to pee behind some bushes and Mum gives us each a banana and a plastic mug of hot, stewed tea from the thermos flask. We’re all reluctant to get back into the car. Kiki sleeps, Scott reads. Dad smokes, Mum looks at herself in the side mirror. I am reduced to staring out of the windows. Reading my collection of books (I have brought a small library to accompany me on my journey) is making me carsick, and the pungent rotting-sausage smell emanating from Kiki’s socks doesn’t help. The effort of being confined in a small space is making Kiki sweat. With six of us in one station wagon, Kiki has to lie with his nose pressed against the roof, on top of the suitcases and sleeping bags in the rear of the car. His feet poke out on either side of Scott and me.
On the stretches of road that pass through European settlements, there are flowering shrubs and trees—clipped bougainvilleas or small frangipanis, jacarandas, and flame trees—planted at picturesque intervals. The verges of the road have been mown to reveal neat, upright barbed-wire fencing and fields of army-straight tobacco, maize, cotton, or placidly grazing cattle shiny and plump with sweet pasture. Occasionally, gleaming out of a soothing oasis of trees and a sweep of lawn, I can see the white-owned farmhouses, all of them behind razor-gleaming fences, bristling with their defense.
In contrast, the Tribal Trust Lands are blown clear of vegetation. Spiky euphorbia hedges which bleed poisonous, burning milk when their stems are broken poke greenly out of otherwise barren, worn soil. The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives. Thin cattle sway in long lines coming to and from distant water and even more distant grazing.