Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [30]
The Goba people say October is Gumiguru, meaning “month of the big ten”; November is the infinitely more hopeful Mbuzdi, meaning “month of goat fertility,” but October is big and ominous and obscurely ten. The Goba wisely avoid holding wedding and initiation ceremonies in October. White locals know it as suicide month. The Nyanja call it Mwenzi wa zuma, meaning “month of the sun.” They also call it Kusi piya (from kusi piya weka, “to kill yourself ”). It is not a month to be toyed with.
Dad was waiting at the border for me. He was sitting on the front of the pickup, feet hooked over the front bumper, in the shade of a mango tree. He was smoking his pipe and staring placidly through the anarchic tumult of money traders (flapping fists of money at him, as if they had caught wild birds and were trying to sell them) and the drunks who lurched occasionally into the street from nearby taverns, blinked with dismay at the unremitting sun, and then tottered back into the humid gloom of the bars. Dad smiled and waved when he saw me stagger through the gates, laden with computer, backpack, and baskets of gifts acquired at the Harare market.
“Hello, Bobo,” he said. “Manage to stay out of the clanger?”
I kissed him. “Bit bloody scary, though,” I said, looking back over the river to Zimbabwe, which, from the safety of here, looked deadened and stultified by the terrific heat and too dazed for any hope of an uprising. Which is what it needed. Either that, or a variation on a medieval theme. In those years, to ensure the continuing prosperity of the land, the Shona people of the great Munhumutapa empire had not allowed their Mambo to grow old. Instead, the Mambo was ritually slain after four years and an unfortunate replacement selected.
“Other than that, okay?” asked Dad.
I nodded. “Fine. Thanks for coming to fetch me.”
“Mum wouldn’t let me make you walk to the farm,” said Dad. “Not since the last bloke snuffed it.”
“Who snuffed it?”
“Some Pom from Lusaka wanted to be shown around the farm a couple of weeks ago, so I took him out for a little walk and he did a heels-up.”
“Completely?”
“Fell off his perch.”
“What do you mean by ‘a little walk’?”
“Just around the farm.”
“God, Dad.”
“Heat exhaustion or some bloody thing.” Dad heaved my suitcase into the back.
“Poor man.”
“He wasn’t very talkative to begin with and then he went completely quiet.”
“Dad!”
“Mum went to the funeral,” said Dad defensively.
“I suppose that’s something,” I said.
“I told her not to look conspicuous but she still dressed like a bloody bullfighter, wore a hat that could start a rebellion, and apparently sat as close as she could get to the coffin without falling into it.”
“Ha.”>
Dad looked over at me and allowed himself a little laugh.
THE FIRST TWO DAYS passed quietly. Mum and Dad were busy on the farm all morning (fish, if nothing else, seem to breed and grow extravagantly in October) and I stayed up at the camp pretending to write while they were gone. Everything felt entangled by the heat, as if it were able to throw out limb-snagging webs that caught at our ankles, our arms, and even our tongues, making us all slower-moving than usual and more languid of speech.
We woke very early—mashambanzou, the Goba say, “when the elephants wash”—to take advantage of what little respite from the sun the night might have given us (the earth swallowed heat all day and regurgitated it all night). But by midmorning, when the buffalo beans tossed up stinging hairs from their fruit into the air—hairs that found skin and burrowed into flesh with burning insistence—all activity on the farm came to a halt. Everyone found refuge in the damp shade of the banana plantation, or in the cool gloom of a hut, and slept