Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (17 page)

Mum and Dad’s letters were steamed open and all their phone calls were monitored by a spy working at the telephone exchange. “You could hear the spy eating his lunch over the line,” Mum says. “Nshima and relish. Squelch-squelch.” And once or twice Dad was dragged off by the police for questioning. “Pages and pages of accusations of all the stuff we were supposed to have been up to,” Mum says. She takes a sip of tea and absentmindedly picks a tick off one of the Jack Russells sitting on her lap. “Oh yes, things could get very sinister in a hurry and it was very stressful,” she says. “I got a plague of boils, Dad’s hair started to fall out, we both had malaria all the time. When our two-year contract was up, we had had enough of that. Two years was all we could take.”

SO MY PARENTS found work in Zambia with a German company, raising maize, soya beans, tobacco and cattle on a farm near the Zaire border. “We liked working for zee Germans,” Mum says. She puts the Jack Russell nose to nose against her face. “Didn’t we, Bumble Bee? Yes, we loved zee Germans.” Mum gives me a look. “Well, you know what Germans are like. They preferred things orderly and picturesque when they came out for their annual visit. So they bought us a couple of bush horses to graze nicely in the home paddock and they got us a set of new wineglasses, all matching instead of just whatever wasn’t broken. And they imported terrifying chemicals to keep the pool blue so they could go for invigorating swims or whatever it is Germans like to do before breakfast.”

Mum brought a Chinyanja phrasebook and dictionary and began to practice on Adamson Phiri, the cook. “Muli bwanji. Dzina landa ndine Nicola Fuller of Central Africa,” she said. She especially liked the Chinyanja word for brain. “Bongo,” she said triumphantly, “bongo, bongo. Isn’t that onomatopoeic? That describes my brain perfectly. ” Then she pulled out her Berlitz German course left over from the days Dad worked for the veterinary-supply company in Kenya (“I knew this would come in handy one day,” she said, triumphantly) and walked around the house asking the animals, “Wie geht es dir?”

And for a few years, Mum and Dad were, on the whole, very happy. It is true that some of their Mkushi farming neighbors were armed and excitable—“all those Yugoslavs and Greeks,” Mum says appreciatively, “very volatile”—but at least there wasn’t a war on. And the Zambian bush ponies were stubborn and they reared, but they gave Mum the idea that she would like to show-jump again, so she bought herself a proper horse (a Hanoverian called Hannah) and began to enter agricultural shows. And Dad, inspired by Mum’s show-jumping, took up polo again, competing in dusty, dangerous tournaments in Lusaka. (“Gangway! Gangway!” riders would shriek as yet another out-of-control amateur bolted screaming toward the goal.)

But then something happened halfway around the world that changed everything. In late 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and almost overnight, the predictable Cold War system on which Zambia (a socialist country) had relied for so long was far less certain. The markets opened up, currency controls started to collapse, American food aid poured into the country and suddenly farmers couldn’t sell their maize and soya beans locally for any price at all. “Why buy food when it’s being given to you for nothing?” Dad says.

By the early 1990s, the Germans were getting anxious. “They wanted to get their money out of Zambia,” Mum says. So the farm was sold and my parents found themselves without work and without a place to live. A friend offered them the use of Oribi Ridge, a little cottage with adjoining stables and an orange orchard on a hilly, msasa-forested plot twenty miles or so east of Lusaka. “Rent free,” Mum says, shaking her head in amazement. “Isn’t that kind? We’ve been so lucky with our friends all our lives. The only thing Graeme asked us to do in exchange was to stop the villagers around there chopping down his trees—all virgin forest you know, very wonderful, very old miombo woodland.”

So Mum and Dad moved into a tiny cottage on Oribi Ridge with half a dozen ponies, several dogs, Mum’s books, the hunting prints, the bronze of Wellington, and the Le Creuset pots. But even with her horses and her dogs, Mum was bored and restless. For most of the last twenty-five years, she had helped my father run a series of farms, and now, without the routine of the seasons, without the discipline of seedbeds and without the rigor of grading sheds, Mum’s inclination to be either subaqua, or cut afloat from the world, was more easily indulged.

For his part, without a farm to run, Dad did the only thing he could think of for work: he traded fish in Lusaka out of the back of a small truck. Trader Tim, Mum called him, and although she kept her voice light, there was a disparaging edge to the comment. Dad looked a little bewildered, as if his feet missed the pacing of earth. He complained of feeling out of shape and liverish, and he gave up eating breakfast. “It’s a farmer’s meal,” he explained, “and I am not a farmer anymore.” But still he couldn’t help himself, absentmindedly picking up and sniffing the soil wherever he stood; mentally calculating its probable pH; subconsciously assessing its appropriateness for tobacco, soya beans or maize; automatically feeling its ability to hold moisture.

And so one Sunday morning in 1995, Dad set out from the cottage and followed a poachers’ route off Oribi Ridge to the edge of the escarpment overlooking the Zambezi River and he sat out there until sunset, smoking and thinking and scribbling figures on the back of a cigarette packet. Dad can’t say exactly what resolved in his head that day, or why, but when he came back to the cottage that night, he told Mum he had a plan. “Why trade fish when you can grow them yourself?” he asked. “We’re going to get a piece of land on the river, and we’re going to start farming fish.”

Mum looked up from the campfire. “But I thought you said Africa was for the Africans,” she said.

Dad squatted in front of the campfire and turned a log until a flame shook awake from the embers. “I did,” he said. He lit a cigarette with the glowing end of the log and squinted through the smoke at Mum. “I did.”

The next week, Dad drove two hours to the banks of the middle Zambezi River and presented himself at the boma of Chief Sikongo. He took off his hat, handed a gift to the chief’s assistant (a bag of maize meal and some cooking oil) and asked if he could have an audience with the chief. He was told to wait under a mango tree. So Dad settled himself down in the shade and passed the time watching the villagers come and go from the river while chickens pecked around his feet and dogs curled up next to him in dusty nests. A few hours later, the chief emerged from his palace (a modest brick house), and after the customary back-and-forth (How are the rains in Lusaka? How was the journey?), my father explained to the chief that he wanted a small farm on the edge of the river on which to raise fish in ponds, bananas in a field, a few sheep here and there. The chief listened and then told Dad to come back in one week with a pair of size six Bata slip-ons. (“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Dad thought.)

So the next week Dad returned to Chief Sikongo’s boma with a pair of size six Bata slip-ons. Again he handed the gift to the chief’s assistant and waited for an audience with the chief under the mango tree in the liquid-white Zambezi sun. A few hours later, the chief appeared, and again Dad explained his need for a farm—the fish, the bananas, the sheep. The chief listened and then he told Dad to return in one month with a portable radio, spare batteries and some salt.

So in a month Dad returned to the chief’s boma with the gifts, as instructed. And yet again he explained how his farm would work and how many of the chief’s subjects he would employ—people to work on the fish section, people to work on the bananas, shepherds for the sheep. The chief listened and nodded and occasionally muttered something to his assistant. And then he told Dad to come back in two months, this time with a dinner jacket and a bullock.

So like some character in a fairy story on an ever more impossible quest, Dad returned to the chief again and again with offerings, with explanations and with calculations. Eighteen times he went back to the boma and waited under the mango tree, usually all through the burning middle of the day, for the chief to see him. Eighteen times the chief accepted Dad’s gifts and heard his story and at the end of eighteen times, Dad finally said, “Chief Sikongo, it’s not just for me alone. Your subjects will be trained to farm fish, they will have proper housing and there will be jobs for women. All of us together will make something of this place.” Dad stood one legged, schoolboylike, and scratched his calf with the toe of his shoe. “Pamodzi, pamodzi.”

The chief looked up at Dad and he nodded. “All right, I have seen,” he said. There was a pause and then the chief opened his hands and pointed downstream. “There is one piece of land you can have below the bridge; no one is using it—there is no road, there are no buildings. I think it will work for your scheme.”

Dad blinked at the chief, almost not daring to believe it. Then he remembered himself and gave a little bow. “Zikomo kwambili, Chief Sikongo,” he said.

So Dad’s proposal for the fish and banana farm was put before the Siavonga District Counsil (a month or two passed). Then the land was inspected by a local counsilor and was approved for development (another few months went by). Then a planning officer went to Zimbabwe to see for himself what a fish farm might look like, and after a delay of yet more months, he approved the project. Then the land was surveyed and surveyed again. And all of this happened in accordance with the weather; the availability of transportation; the health of various officials (malaria so often striking at an inopportune time). So that nearly three years after his first meeting with the chief, Dad still did not have title to the farm.

MEANTIME, MUM HAD had her two million percent nervous breakdown and now she lay in her bed in the borrowed cottage at Oribi Ridge, the curtains closed against the light, her mind shut against the world, her Royal Ascot hats in ruins. She sold her horses, she gave up reading, she no longer walked the dogs. Dad fretted around her, trying to cajole her out of bed and at night he sat alone by the campfire, kicking the night’s embers into life and staring into the flames, thinking and considering that perhaps his instincts had been correct in the first place; perhaps it was folly to try to own land in Africa again.

Then all of a sudden, just as he was about to give up hope, all the pieces of ritual and custom and law shook loose and resolved themselves on a land officer’s desk into an acceptable application. And one morning in February 1999, a few weeks before my father’s fifty-ninth birthday, the Land Office of Zambia issued him title deed, a ninety-nine-year lease, for a small farm in the middle Zambezi Valley. Dad raced home and burst into the bedroom. “Tub!” he shouted. “A farm! We’ve got ourselves a farm!” Mum turned toward the door, lowered the blankets and sat up. “What?” she asked.

“A farm,” Dad said again, “on the banks of the Zambezi River.” Dad waggled his hips. “How about some plonk in the garden?” He held up a box of South African wine. “Come on, Tub!” And he put an arm under Mum’s shoulder and got her out of bed. Flustered and a bit shaky, Mum put her hands to her hair and tried to flatten it. “It’s okay,” Dad said, calming down a little. “Take your time. I’ll wait for you outside.”

Dad went into the garden, the dogs spilling after him, and he poured a little wine into two glasses. Several minutes passed, and then he heard the bedroom door open. The dogs sprang to their feet, their tails beating a fervent greeting. Even in the steamy February heat, Mum was dressed as if she were preparing for a long, difficult journey to a lonely, cold place—pajamas, a shawl around her neck, thick socks—but she had brushed her hair as best she could (it still skewed sideways) and there was a line of bright lipstick on her lips.

“There you are, Tub,” Dad said.

Mum sat down next to Dad and looked out at the msasa forest. “Hm,” she said.

“Here,” Dad said, handing her a glass.

Mum raised her glass. “Here’s to us,” she said. She smiled. “There’s none like us, and if there were, they’re all dead.”

Dad took a sip of his wine. “You can say that again,” he said.

MY FATHER BOUGHT two working donkeys from the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture. His old cattle manager from Mkushi who had gone on to be Mum’s groom insisted on coming down to the farm to work with the donkeys. “If you have some donkeys,” Dama Zulu told my father, “then I must come and help you.” Mr. Zulu appraised the donkeys with his expert eye, “We can call them Flash and Lightning,” he concluded with what turned out to be prescient optimism. And so my father and Mr. Zulu, the donkeys and a span of men from the surrounding villages worked together for months. They cleared the farm’s boundary, pulled stumps, created firebreaks, opened up thick scrub. It was terrifically hot—far too hot to sleep in a tent (“You’d roast to death,” Dad says)—so Dad and Mr. Zulu slept under a tarpaulin strung across some mopane branches. And as people do who are so closely thrown together, they began to acquire one another’s habits: Mr. Zulu, for example, taking on something of my father’s bandy-legged walk and his manner of not speaking except in short barks; and my father settling into Mr. Zulu’s habit of walking everywhere with a long stick, a defense against snakes and ropey vines of buffalo bean. “And at night they both got bitten to death by mosquitoes,” Mum adds. “Mosquitoes like jackals, siphoning out gallons of blood until there was nothing left of Dad or Mr. Zulu except little bits of skin.”

“Oh, you do exaggerate, Tub,” Dad says.

“Well, she can put that in one of her Awful Books then,” Mum replies.

By April, Mr. Zulu, whose two obsessions were land and wives, had damaged two young women from the village (and had married one of them, much to the consternation of his first three wives) and Dad had malaria, but a road had been cleared to the river and it was possible now to see the layout of the farm; the top mud flats where the fish ponds would go; the more loamy soil below where the bananas would fit; a stretch by the river reserved for a future fishing lodge and bar. “Today,” Dad told Mr. Zulu, “I am going to get the madam from Lusaka so she can choose a place to put her hut. You must also choose where you want to live.”