Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [85]
I burst breathlessly out into the steaming, humid air of the main airport where Mum, Dad, and Vanessa have grown bored, waiting for me to emerge. Mum is reading; Vanessa has wandered outside and is doing handstands on a patch of grass near a bed of bright canna lilies; Dad is smoking and staring at the ceiling.
Our letters are censored, clumsily torn open and read by the greasy-fingered immigration officials at the post office, so that by the time we get them, they are smudged and fingerprinted and rumpled and smell of fried fish, Coke’ n’ buns, and fried potato chips: the office food of Africa. We may make phone calls only when the operator at Liwonde is on duty so that our calls can be monitored. If the operator is taking the rest of the day off, or is at home with malaria, or if the operator is attending a funeral, we cannot make a phone call.
I do not remember anyone making or receiving a phone call in that house. The Liwonde operator and his family appeared to suffer the most unfortunate ill health.
Butchery
TOUCHING
THE GROUND
Mgodi Estate is set up on gently sloping, sandy soil, seeping into the horizon, where a yellowing haze hanging over Lake Chilwa (less a lake than a large, mosquito-breeding swamp) marks the end of the farm and the beginning of the fishermen and their dugout canoes and their low, smoking fires over which they have stretched the gutted bodies of fish (spread thin, like large irregular dinner plates). From the spot where our garden ends (which Mum immediately encloses within a grass fence), the bodies start, and stretch as far as you can see on any side. Wherever we drive in Malawi there are people, and people in the act of creating food, whether scratching into the red soil with hoes and seed or raking the lakes for fish. It doesn’t seem possible that there can be enough air for all the upturned mouths. The land bleeds red and eroding when it rains, staggering and sliding under the weight of all the prying, cultivating fingers.
Our house is big, airy, well-designed, and cool, with a mock Spanish grandeur that holds up only under fleeting scrutiny. Arches and a gauzed veranda surround the house; a large sitting room, a dining room, a passage down which there are three bedrooms and (unheard-of luxury!) two bathrooms. The kitchen, dominated by a massive woodstove and a deep sink, is set in a little cement hut behind the house where its heat and smoke can be contained. Our cook is a gentle, avuncular Muslim called Doud whose careful rhythm of prayer and cooking and cleaning washes like a balm from his small inferno behind the dining room and soothes in waves across our house. The floors are covered with shiny, peeling-in-places linoleum, and the made-on-the-farm doors and cupboards have swollen in the humidity and must be forced into their holes. Termites and lizards have set up house on the walls.
The large garden is thick with mango trees and is a sanctuary for birds, snakes, and the massive black and yellow four- to six-foot-long monitor lizards. There is a swimming pool and a fishpond behind the house, but these bodies of water are a stubborn, frothing, seething mess of algae in which monitor lizards float, their small faces hiding their large, hanging bodies, and in which there are scorpions and frogs in staggering numbers. There is still the occasional goldfish, from previous managers, hanging in the murky fishpond, but between the monitor lizards and the fishing birds, their numbers dwindle monthly.
Dad strides down the passage in the morning, when the sun is just beginning to finger the skyline, banging first on my door—“Rise and shine!”—and then on Vanessa’s on his way to the veranda where Doud has set tea and fresh biscuits on a tray. Vanessa and I each have two beds in our rooms. Vanessa has taken the mattress off her spare bed and has laid it up against her door to dampen Dad’s early-morning wake-up calls and to ensure that when she doesn’t appear for tea he can’t come crashing into her room shouting in blustery, sergeant-major tones, “C’ mon, rise