Leaving Before the Rains Come (14 page)

In November, the rains came, obliterating and heavy. Gardening—what little there had been of it—stopped. Mr. Njovu spent happy days in the horses’ shelter sampling his marijuana. The electricity surged, spluttered, and went dead, and with it went the fans. The house swelled and swamped with torpid humidity. Mold grew on shoes and saddles, our laundry stayed damp. We gave the horses their rainy-season vaccinations and turned them out.

With little else to do, Freddy and I spent the mornings in the kitchen watching the rain through the bars on the window, drinking tea and gossiping. Because our talk was mostly blather, small talk and little indiscretions, I can’t remember now the specifics of our conversations, except that we were united in our dislike of Mr. Sinazongwe, and in our fascination with magic and the new music coming out of Zaire. Also, Freddy hated Lusaka as much as I did. He had been raised by his grandfather on a marijuana farm close to a river in Zambia’s northeast. His grandfather apparently had healing and magical powers. Freddy told me of hearing animals that spoke in human tongues, seeing sunsets that went on for three days, and of women so beautiful and beguiling that men lost their minds. Listening to him, I felt homesick for a country I hadn’t even left.

Once a week, Freddy and I embarked on our marketing; bran mash for the horses, bones for the dogs, fresh vegetables and meat for the house. Freddy got behind the wheel with his especially dark glasses, turned the portable radio up to somewhere in the middle, and we ventured into town. It gave us something new to talk about—the homeless madwoman who made a living off the garbage pile in the second-class district, the pig we saw being hauled backward across Addis Ababa Avenue by its hind legs, the effect on the city of the incessant rain. Major thoroughfares in the heart of the city were flooded, and in the waterlogged compounds on the outskirts there were rumors that cholera had broken out.

“Have you heard of this?” I asked Freddy.

“Oh yes. People are dying like chickens,” he said.

So a few mornings later, Freddy drove me into George Compound and, following a funeral lorry, we found a humid, makeshift clinic in what had until recently been a small school, its classrooms and verandas converted into damp, crowded wards. There were a few cholera beds—plastic stretchers with holes in them, under which a bucket could catch the rice-water diarrhea that streamed from people’s bodies—but most of the victims lay on pieces of soggy cardboard, helplessly swamped by their own leaking selves. I got out of the pickup. Freddy wound up the windows and frantically swatted flies. “You’re going to die of cholera if you go out there,” he predicted.

I walked toward a man in a white coat stirring a huge drum of yellow liquid at the foot of the stairs leading up to the veranda. A pervasive, sweet-rotten smell hung over the place. “Can I help you?” the man asked.

I had no good answer. I said something about wanting to write an article for the papers. “Don’t you think people should know what is happening here?”

“What people?”

“I mean people who read the papers.”

“People who read the papers already know what is going on,” the man said, turning back to his drum.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Disinfectant,” the man replied. “Contaminated clothes. We are supposed to burn them. But how can you burn clothes if they are all somebody has to wear?”

On the drive home, Freddy occupied himself hunting down and killing flies. “Cholera flies, cholera flies, cholera flies,” he muttered.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” I said. “Never mind the flies.”

“If a fly lands on you, you’ll die,” he replied.

“I don’t know where you get your information.”

Freddy waved his trump card. “My grandfather was a doctor.”

“Your grandfather was a drug dealer,” I said, waving mine.

After that, until the epidemic abated in late January, Freddy and I drove into George Compound at least once a week. Sometimes there was an army lorry parked outside the cholera clinic, or another government vehicle, and then we turned back, trying as much as possible to look as if we had somehow innocently taken a wrong turn into the deep heart of this decidedly accidental-feeling place. “You should try to look like one of those Dutch,” Freddy advised. “They are only here for good reasons. You see them even digging latrines with their own hands.”

After that, I gave up the idea of writing anything about the epidemic. Instead, I brought towels and blankets from home for the patients and food for the medical orderlies. Every few days, a few more corpses were added to the morgue tent next to the clinic. Some of the bodies were so tiny they looked like punctuation marks, damp little commas, a brief pause between life and death. The invisible membrane between my old life and the one I had married into solidified into a wall. There was the dank, dying world of George Compound, and there was us—Charlie and me—in our clinical if humid bunker on Lilayi Road.

“Where are the bath towels?” Charlie asked, dripping on the threshold of the bathroom.

“Oh,” I said. My mind spun through all the possible answers I could give. Then I said, “We’re having a hard time drying them because of the rain.” It was a little lie, the first I remember telling in the marriage, and completely unnecessary because Charlie didn’t have a temper. He had disappointment, yes, and disapproval, and he felt understandably entitled to one of his own towels. But he would never have been angry with me for giving a few of them away to the cholera clinic.

“They’re not really lying. They’re just saying what they think you want to hear,” Charlie said of the Zambians he employed to work for him in his safari business. But I understood we had learned from experience, if you tell a fellow Zambian the truth, she is likely to laugh at the absurdity of it. Tell the truth to a foreigner, he is likely to yell. Except Charlie didn’t yell, or very rarely, and he didn’t view me as a Zambian. He viewed me as a wild version of himself, a Westerner in the raw. But now that he had married me, and I was out of my natural habitat, my plumage was less shiny, my skills less useful, my constant noise less charming. Instead of looking like a survivor of a tough and wondrous life, I looked like a damaged and broken survivor of sordid, violent, and undisciplined excess.

“Can you smell it?” I asked late at night, sitting up suddenly in bed, overwhelmed by the cholera scents of disinfectant and diarrhea and bodies.

Charlie put his hand out to me. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

But I couldn’t sleep. Not because I found the clinic awful and otherworldly but because it felt more knowable to me than did my new husband. The clinic disturbed me, it was life-and-death, it was tragic and unnecessary—like war and drowning and famine—and I felt at home there in a way that I knew I might never feel in this safe bed. No one in their right mind could say they prefer trauma, no one in their right mind could want injustice, no one in their right mind could like cholera. And I did hate it fiercely: the damp hopelessness of those bodies on the cardboard mats, the horror of that awful makeshift tent-morgue, the disgusting refusal of the government to acknowledge that anything bad was happening. But it was an old rut into which I could easily groove without missing a beat.

I told Dad about the clinic on one of his trips into town. “Awful,” he agreed. “Poor bastards.” Then he lit a cigarette and stared at its burning tip for a moment. “That’s the whole problem, though. How we die is how we live.”

“But no one lives like that,” I said.

“No, Bobo, no one
wants
to live like that. That’s a different story.”

In late January, Charlie found me temporary, illegal work with an architect whose secretary was on vacation. I was bad at being a housewife, but worse at being a secretary: I accidentally cut off my boss’s phone conversations, threw away duplicates of letters I didn’t know were supposed to be filed, lost architectural drawings, and forgot crucial lunch appointments. My boss didn’t fire me, but he sounded relieved when one morning in mid-February I felt too sick to go to work. It began with a wave of nausea at breakfast, spread to a headache by lunch, and finished with overwhelming exhaustion by dinner. The next day was just as bad, and the day after that an unwelcome repetition. By the end of the week, the sight of butter, the smell of coffee, the mere thought of alcohol made me retch. Walking made me retch. So did sunlight, exhaust fumes, and perfumed soap.

I took to my bed, the curtains drawn. Lizzie lay on the floor next to me, panting in the steamy heat. “You have cholera,” Freddy told me with satisfied authority. He stood at the end of my bed covering his mouth and nose with a shopping bag. “If a fly comes to you, and afterwards he visits me, I also will have cholera.”

“Can you fetch me a Coke from the kiosk?” I begged.

Freddy hesitated.

“Please,” I implored. “You can take the car.”

I went to the doctor and he tested my blood for malaria, hepatitis, and
HIV/AIDS
. He was unimpressed with my results. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he announced, waving the paper at me. “All in your head.” So I went home and tried to carry on as normal, but my body refused to work. I went back to bed, too enervated and queasy even to read. In the mornings, I begged Charlie to come home early, imagining the foods he could bring me that might quell my unstoppable biliousness: pickles, strawberries, salsa, none of which were readily available except at vast expense in one of the new South African stores. Charlie was dismayed by my depression and my sudden tearful neediness. He suggested exercise, a diet, getting out more.

“I’m dying,” I said, only half joking and wondering if years of smoke, first- and secondhand, were already catching up to me. “Isn’t this how cancer starts?”

Then Mum came up from the farm, took one look at me, and announced her diagnosis. “You’re pregnant.”

“I can’t be,” I said. “I have an
IUD
in.”

Mum sighed and shut her eyes. “Oh, don’t go into the gory details, Bobo. Just take my word for it.”

In July, Auntie Glug phoned from Scotland to say that my grandmother seemed irreversibly unwell. “I don’t know if she’s had a stroke, or what’s going on,” she said. “But she’s definitely lost the plot.” My parents had recently left the farm in Mkushi and were camping in a scruffy farmhouse in the district while Dad figured out what to do next. The upheaval had sent Mum into a deep depression. In part to save her mind further shock, we decided I should fly over to see Granny and report back with my findings. “And you can buy nappy rash cream while you’re at it,” Dad said. “Or whatever it is babies go in for.”

By then I appeared so hugely pregnant I brought a forged doctor’s note to the airport to prove that I was only seven months gone and therefore unlikely to give birth on the soon-to-be liquidated Zambia Airways—motto: “A Pleasure in the Skies.” The Zambian ticketing officers and the air stewardesses doubted the note and several of them put knowing hands on my belly. “Are you sure this date is correct?” they asked, waving the forgery at me. Frankly, I was beginning to doubt the calculations myself.

“Of course,” I said.

I landed in London, caught a train to Scotland, and took a bus to the village where Auntie Glug lived. My grandparents had been moved from their cottage in England to a bungalow here several years earlier when it became clear that they were becoming too vague to remember to eat regularly, or make sure the woodstove wasn’t smoldering before they went to bed. I dropped my bags at the door and followed Auntie Glug into the bedroom. The radiators blasted equatorial warmth. “All right,” Auntie Glug said, pointing to Granny’s bed. “Your turn to keep an eye on the madhouse. I’m going to put my feet up and have a cup of tea.”

“Hello there,” I said to the shape under the bedclothes.

“Nicola?” Granny pushed herself up on her elbows, her face alight with expectation. It was obvious Granny’s mind was taking its final shaky flight; it flittered around like an elderly butterfly, perhaps still capable of fancy and beauty, but mostly notable for landing without conviction and taking off with unsteadiness. Her work-worn hands, permanently curled to the shape of a milkmaid’s grip, fretted the bedclothes.

“No,” I said. “It’s Bobo.”

“Oh.” It wasn’t me Granny wanted. She sank back into her pillows, disappointed. “Where’s Nicola?” she demanded. “Where is she? Has she taken the horses out?”

“Yes,” I said. I pictured Mum depressed in her borrowed shack near our old farm. I knew her pattern well: she wouldn’t be riding, or taking the dogs for their afternoon walk, or much of anything. Her eyes would have lost their focus. “Yes, she’s out riding,” I said.

“I thought so,” Granny said, satisfied. After that, she rambled on for a while as if I were a potentially helpful stranger: Could I fix the oven? Someone had fiddled with the dial on her radio; did I know how to tune in to
The Archers
? Where were her slippers? Then she suddenly struggled to sit up against the gravity of her soft bed and fixed her dark, Highland eyes on me for a long time. “You look pregnant,” she said at last, her voice full of accusation.