Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [7]
Chapter One: The War
Chapter Two: Dead Children
Chapter Three: Insanity
Chapter Four: Being Nicola Fuller of Central Africa
Chapter Four is really a subchapter of the other chapters. Chapter Four is when Mum sits quietly, having drunk so much that every pore in her body is soaked. She is yoga-cross-legged, and she stares, with a look of stupefied wonder, at the garden and at the dawn breaking through wood-smoke haze and the thin gray-brown band of dust and pollution that hangs above the city of Lusaka. And she’s thinking, So this is what it’s like being Me.
Kelvin comes. “Good night.”
Mum is already sitting yoga-cross-legged, cradling a drink on her lap. “Good night, Kelvin,” she says with great emphasis, almost with respect (a sad, dignified respect). As if he were dead and she were throwing the first clump of soil onto his coffin.
Dad and I excuse ourselves, gather a collection of dogs, and make for our separate bedrooms, leaving Mum, the Englishman, and two swooping bats in the company of the sinking fire. The Englishman, who spent much of supper
warily eyeing the bats and ducking every time one flitted over the table, has now got beyond worrying about bats.
Mum, Dad, Van—Kenya
Guests trapped by Mum have Chapters of their own.
Chapter One: Delight
Chapter Two: Mild Intoxication Coupled with Growing Disbelief
Chapter Three: Extreme Intoxication Coupled with Growing Panic
Chapter Four: Lack of Consciousness
I am here visiting from America. Smoking cigarettes when I shouldn’t be. Drinking carelessly under a huge African sky. So happy to be home I feel as if I’m swimming in syrup. My bed is closest to the window. The orange light from the dying fire glows against my bedroom wall. The bedding is sweet-bitter with wood smoke. The dogs wrestle for position on the bed. The old, toothless spaniel on the pillow, one Jack Russell at each foot.
“Rhodesia was run by a white man, Ian Douglas Smith, remember him?”
“Of course,” says the unfortunate captive guest, now too drunk to negotiate the steep, dusty driveway through the thick, black-barked trees to the long, red-powdered road that leads back to the city of Lusaka, where he has a nice, European-style house with an ex–embassy servant and a watchman (complete with trained German shepherd). Now, instead of going back to his guarded African-city suburbia, he will sit up until dawn, drinking with Mum.
“He came to power in 1964. On the eleventh of November, 1965, he made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. He made it clear that there would never be majority rule in Rhodesia.” Even when Mum is so drunk that she is practicing her yoga moves, she can remember the key dates relating to Our Tragedies.
“So we moved there in 1966. Our daughter—Vanessa, our eldest—was only one year old. We were prepared”—Mum’s voice grows suitably dramatic—“to take our baby into a war to live in a country where white men still ruled.”
Bumi, the spaniel, tucks her chin onto the pillow next to my head, where she grunts with content before she begins to snore. She has dead-rabbit breath. I turn over, my face away from hers, and go to sleep.
The last thing I hear is Mum say, “We were prepared to die, you see, to keep one country white-run.”
In the morning Mum is Chapter Four, smiling idiotically to herself, a warm, flat beer propped between her thighs, her head cockeyed. She is staring damply into the pink-yellow dawn. The guest is Chapter Four too, lying grayly on the lawn. He isn’t convulsing, but in almost every other respect, he looks astonishingly like Kelvin did yesterday afternoon.
Kelvin has brought the tea and is laying the table for breakfast As If Everything Were Normal.
Which it is. For us.
Village
CHIMURENGA:
THE BEGINNING