Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (27 page)

Rainstorm at Serioes

THE LAST
CHRISTMAS

The year I turn eighteen, the rains are late.

The first rain had come as usual, in early October, and the world had turned a hopeful, premature green. But now that early green has turned a limp, poisonous, scorched blue-gray. The air is thick with mocking and sucks back the moisture from the plants. The clouds that form from this stolen earth-plant water scud north and south, torn by hot wind, and are left scattered like a thin white scarf across the sky. It makes us thirsty for beer.

The pump spits mud into the water tank from the sinking, stinking dam, and the water chugs from the faucet thick and red and muddy. We can only have water for drinking and we share baths. A small frog is spat into the hot bath one night. It is boiled, petrified, eyes wide open, dead and astonished. The boreholes dry-heave, and the thin trickle that issues from the lips of their pipes is as yellow as bile. The riverbed glitters glassily up from between islands of rock. A farmer next door says he saw a crocodile sauntering across his fields, prehistorically out of place, in search of water.

It is the year that Vanessa, who has been working in London for a children’s television channel, comes home to travel Africa with her English friend. The friend is sexy and worldly and she dances at a party at the Mkushi Country Club and the old Greek-coloured who, it is known, hasn’t smiled in forty-something years, raises his glass of beer to the ceiling and his eyes grow glassy and his lips grow wet and if he could find the words, he would say, “Here’s to women with legs that go on forever!” His trembling lips break over his teeth.

I say he smiled.

Dad says it was a prelude to a stroke.

I am in awe. I start trying to emulate the way she smokes, slow and needy and intimate. I get smoke in my eyes and revert to smoking the old way, like an African, with the cigarette between thumb and forefinger.

I have briefly, and not very seriously, found God and I have stood up in front of the charismatic church (which I attended, briefly, in Harare) and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. The rest of my family finds this development eye-rollingly embarrassing. Once (when drunk) at a neighbor’s house I take the conversation-chilling opportunity to profess to the collected company that I love Jesus. Mum declares that I will get over it. Dad offers me another beer and tells me to cheer up. Vanessa hisses, “Shut up.” And I tell them all that I will pray for them. Which gets a laugh.

To be just like the English Friend, I am—to everyone’s collective relief—restored to godlessness.

But still the rains do not come.

We hold a rain dance. We invite all the neighbors. There are Greeks, Yugoslavs, Zambians, Czechs, Coloureds, expats-like-us, Afrikaners, a woman who is said to be part Native American, a Canadian, the English Friend, and one Indian.

We make a fire outside (under the brittle, chattering, weaverbird-full bougainvillea) over which we braai steak and boervors. Adamson, tottering with filched booze, brings out trays of parched gray-boiled greens and boiled potatoes and soggy-hot, peanut-oil-covered salads from the kitchen. The ash from his joint and sweat from his brow drip into the food tray. We drink into the lowering, relentless sun until the groom is called from his Sunday beer-drink to saddle the horses and we go out riding, looking for rain beetles. Mum (who is the best horsewoman among us) slides off her saddle (but does not spill her drink). She is still laughing when she hits the ground, and for quite some time after that. Someone heaves Mum back onto her mount, where she slowly tips forward in a perfect Pony Club exercise: “Now, children, everyone touch your nose to the horse’s mane.”

None of us can catch rain beetles (which are the cicadas whose dry, thirsty rasp has been reminding us of our drought day in and day out). We ride home for more beer.

Dad threatens to find a virgin, to sacrifice to the gods. None among our party are considered worthy. Instead, several of the female guests are thrown into the drought-stagnant pool.

And still the rains do not come.

Since October, Mum has been using a hypodermic needle to inject the Christmas cake (bought months ago in the U.K.) with brandy. Needles and syringes are scarce; we boil and reuse those we have. The cake, however, has designated instruments of its own.

“He, he, he,” says Adamson. “Madam, the cake is sick?”

“That’s right,” says Mum, “I’m helping it get better.”

Adamson chuckles and shakes his massive head. His face seems to be dissolving in sweat. It glows in a shiny film. He shuffles outside, where he sits on his haunches under the great msasa tree and smokes. His head hangs, his arms are stretched over his knees, and, except to adjust the angle of the joint on his lower lip, he is a motionless figure, gently wafting blue marijuana smoke.

The heat in the kitchen is breath-sucking. There are two small windows at either end of the huge tacked-together room, and one stable door, which leads off to the back veranda where the dairyman (surrounded by a halo of flies) labors over the milk churn (milk spits into buckets, cream chugs into a jug; both are in danger of going off before they can reach refrigeration). The fridges, unable to compete with the heat, leak (they bleed, actually: thin watered-down blood from defrosting chunks of cow) and add a fusty-smelling steam to the atmosphere. The aroma here is defrosting flesh, soon-to-be-off milk, sweating butter, and the always present salty-meat-old-vegetable effluvium of the dogs’ stew toiling away on the stove.

The end of the kitchen is dedicated to laundry, where a maid (a baby asleep on her back) with a charcoal iron sweats over piles of clothes. She sprinkles water onto the back of her neck and onto the clothes and slams the charcoal iron down onto the table where her ironing lies. Her sweat sprinkles the cloth along with the specks of water, and singes up with the steam. The crescent-shaped air vents in the iron glow fiercely red with fresh coals. The clothes are ironed to paper in the heat and are crisp, starched with sweat.

Every time any of us walks outside, we glance upward automatically and search the sky for likely clouds. Still, it does not rain.

This year, we chop down a drought-dry fir tree and set it up in the sitting room. Mum spends hours gluing candles to the tree with wax.

“If that thing doesn’t spontaneously combust,” says Dad, “I’ll eat my bloody hat.”

“Are you sure that’s safe?” I ask.

Mum (defensive) says, “It looks
festive.
”

“Looks like a bushfire waiting to happen.”

Vanessa, as designated artist in the family, spends one afternoon supervising the decoration of the tree. In the four years since leaving Malawi, we have accumulated a small box of real decorations (angels, trumpets, halos, doves), which are lost among the balls of cotton wool and the candles. We dare not put anything too close to the candles.

On the veranda stands a dead protea bush we have dragged from the north, sandy end of the farm. It still boasts the odd, brown, head-hanging bloom, to which we add cutouts from old Christmas cards, sewn with red thread into hanging loops. Two lizards set up house on the tree and add to the decoration.

“Couldn’t buy a decoration like that at Harrods,” says Dad.

The lizards lurk, waiting, tongue-quick, for flies (of which there are plenty). They are as thick as the air.

Christmas Eve. It still hasn’t rained. By now, the tobacco seedlings are thin-necked, yellow-pale, growing into the heat with telltale signs of drought on their leaves already. We have filled the huge trailer water tanks and they stand, like army equipment awaiting battle, at the seedbeds. We have already water-planted fifteen acres of tobacco, but those plants are lying flat and parched, draped thinly over the top of the soil. When we dig our fingers into the plowed soil which holds these nursery transplants, the ground is searing hot and parched. Dad says we mustn’t plant any more tobacco until it rains. So the water tanks wait. The seedlings wait.

Mum spends half an hour crawling around the Christmas tree lighting all the candles. This is the first Christmas Eve on which we still have electricity. Usually, by now, thunderstorms have brought the lines down and we are without power until the rains subside in March.

Then Mum says, “I think that’s the lot.”

And we switch out the lights and briefly enjoy the spectacle of the flaming tree before Dad loses his nerve and orders the thing extinguished. We switch on the lights again. Beetles and ants and earwigs that have made their home in the dried-up fir tree have sensed forest fire and are scurrying in panic across the sitting room.

“Eggnog, anyone?” says Mum.

It’s too hot for eggnog. We drink beer. Mum has cut the top off a watermelon and filled it with gin and ice cubes. We take it in turns sucking from the straws that spike from the watermelon’s back, a sickly-prickly porcupine of melting ice and gin in thinned watermelon juice. By bedtime, we are too drunk to sleep.

It is Dad’s idea to drive around the neighborhood and sing Christmas carols. We set off in the pickup, the English Friend driving, with Dad as chief navigator. Vanessa and I are in the back. Mum says she’ll stay home with our houseguests, a family from Zimbabwe.

We kidnap the husbands, guests, and sons of our neighbors. We acquire two guitar players, one of whom is too stoned to play anything but Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.” We override his intense, druggy riffs with loud, drunken renditions of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and snatches of the “Hallelujah” Chorus (to which we know only the word “Hallelujah”).

We disturb the malarial sleep of a Greek farmer’s wife.

We narrowly avoid being shot by Milan the Czech, who sleeps with a loaded handgun by his pillow.

“Jesus!”

“Told you not to sing bloody ‘Jingle Bells’ to a Yugoslav.”

“He’s Czech.”

“Same thing.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It is to me.”

“Not to him.”

“Hey, Milan! Hold the fire!”

The stoned boy is shocked out of his “Cocaine” reverie by the gunfire. He thinks deeply for a moment and then starts to sing (accompanying himself badly on the guitar), “All we are saying, is give peace a chance. . . .” He has to keep repeating the word “peace” until he finds the right chord. “All we are saying is give peace . . . peace . . . peace . . . peace . . .”

We drink hot, mulled wine with Swedish aid workers.

It is dawn and we still have to sing for the Indians and the Yugoslavs.

Dad says, “Look at that bloody sunset, would you? Never seen a sunset like it.”

“Sunrise, Dad. Sunrise.”

And it is truly a stunning, low-hanging, deep-bellied sunrise. A vividly pink sky under thick gray clouds. Thick, gray, massing, rolling, swollen-bellied clouds. We blink into their pile upon pile of gray and we are briefly, startlingly sober.

“That looks like something.”

Vanessa sniffs the air.

The guitar player says, “Man. I think this is it.”

Dad has fallen into a quick coma-drunk sleep on the English Friend’s shoulder. We wake him up. “Looks like rain.”

“Great sunset,” mumbles Dad. “No one shut any doors or windows.”

Finally, rain.

The English Friend drives toward the gathering clouds and they come tumbling out of the west to meet us, gathering and rolling until suddenly the sky sags open and the road is instantly as thick and sticky as porridge.

We lie in the back of the pickup with our mouths open. “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring!” The pickup churns and slides through thick heavy mud. The English Friend is driving like an East Africa Rally driver.

Dad, awakened by the storm, is still chief navigator, although as far as we can tell he no longer knows which way is up, nor is he consistently conscious.
“Pamberi!”
he shouts above the whine of the laboring engine. It is the slogan of the ruling party in Zimbabwe: “
Pamberi
to final victory!”

Mum and Dad with tobacco

In the back we are clinging to one another, wet to the skin, skin-against-skin, drunk, screaming into the great gray sky. Hair slicks over our foreheads.