Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [90]
She looks at the bags uncomprehendingly.
“For you,” I insist.
She looks embarrassed. “Thank you.” She holds the bags against the round lump of sleeping baby in the hammock at her breast. “Zikomo, zikomo.”
I back away into the crowd of children who are now bouncing and clamoring around the motorbike: “Miss Bob, Miss Bob, what have you brought for me?”
When I drive away, the children run after me as long as they can keep up, shouting, “Miss Bob! Miss Bob! What have you brought for me?”
Bobo—Cape Maclear
THE GOAT SHED
The T-shirts we buy at the small white hotel overlooking the beach on Lake Malawi or at the small kiosk at the airport declare, malawi—the warm heart of africa.
We call it the Warm Fart of Africa, hee, hee.
Dad’s face erupts in boils. Mum begins to grow thick wings of gray at her temples. I become white-gilled and lethargic until Mum diagnoses anemia and feeds me liver and chopped rape. For the first time, we are all regularly malarial. Vanessa has to be hospitalized, she becomes so ill, yellow, thin, weak, fevered. In the two years we live in Malawi, all three of our dogs die. The new Rhodesian ridgeback contracts a deadly venereal disease; the spaniel contracts fatal tick fever, which turns her gums and eyeballs yellow and then kills her; ancient, faithful Shea spouts foul-smelling lumps, her ears bleed yellow pus, she scratches and whines until we shave her coat in sympathy. And then she dies in her sleep.
We feel more dangerously, teeteringly close to disease and death (in a slow, rotting, swamp-induced fashion) than we did during the war in Rhodesia where there was a zinging, adrenaline-filled, anything-goes freedom and where we were surrounded by violent, quick mutilation and a sudden, definitive end. Which now seems preferable to death by swamp rot. Death by spies. Death by lack of social contact.
In Malawi we frequently see children bent backward, as easily and rigidly as twisted paper clips, with cerebral malaria, from which, if they emerge alive, they will rarely recover completely. And here we see the effects of malnutrition and the effects of overcrowded, unsanitary shantytowns and overfilled garbage dumps and we see thin, ribby, curly-tailed dogs digging on heaps of decomposing rubbish on which children play and pick and shit.
Our nearest white neighbors are a German couple who have come out to Africa as aid workers. They are our first experience of foreigners in Africa who are here for that purpose; until now, in Rhodesia, we had seen foreigners only as missionaries or mercenaries.
Dad says, “At least death by mercenary is quicker.”
“Than what?”
“Death by aid.”
But we are desperate enough for company to visit the Germans.
“Perhaps they drink beer,” says Mum hopefully.
Dad lights a cigarette. “Maybe they cure sausages.”
I have only ever heard of Germans in the context of the Second World War.
I say, “I hope they don’t have a gas oven. Hee hee.”
Mum says, “Bobo!”
“Okay, okay.”
“Don’t mention the war,” says Dad.
“Ve have vays and means of making you talk.”
We start to giggle, hiccuping our hilarity.
But we find, to our surprise, that we are very fond of the Hartmans. Barbara does not wear makeup, she does not shave, and she smells naturally (in a pleasant way) of her own very clean body: a salty, oniony, cooking-bread smell that reminds me of the homely, breast-milk scent of my old nannies. Gerald is keen on saving the environment, which, until then, I had not noticed needed saving. I had been more concerned with staying alive myself.
Gerald lends me books. He is patient, gentle, intelligent, passionate, methodical. I fall in love with his hard accent, the way his words cut so efficiently through the sickly, sticky heat. I listen to the stories he weaves of the living planet around us. “We are minute,” he tells me. “We are grains of sand on the beach of time. We are not important. There was a time when the planet was without people and, especially with the way we