Leaving Before the Rains Come (16 page)

“She’ll be all right,” my father said.

“But what about us?” I wanted to ask. “What about Vanessa and me? What about you?”

I wanted someone—a mother to be precise, our mother to be exact—to see us, to feel what we were feeling, or even to acknowledge that we existed, but we were motherless in the most literal sense of the word. It was nothing new. It’s not as if Mum hadn’t taken long solo voyages into her dark, grief-disturbed interior before, but now Vanessa and I were mothers ourselves, and there is nothing like the profound loneliness of early motherhood to make a person ache to be embraced by their person of origin.

“Your mother was very good with all of you when you were little,” Dad said. He frowned as if trying to remember back. “Which is just as well because I certainly wasn’t getting anywhere near the business end of a baby.” He shuddered. “Babies will do
anything
,” he said. “Lots of hollering and buckets of nappies, that’s what I remember. Good God, if I’d been left alone with any of you lot, I’d have called an ambulance.”

But I recall Olivia’s childhood as a time of uncharacteristic tranquility, our house redolent with comfort: Woodward’s Gripe Water, Fortris juice, Germolene. I think of Mum as happy then, her tuneless singing as she danced the baby into the garden. I remember feeling jealous and proud all at once. Jealous of the attention the baby was getting, proud that this was our mother. She was so good with her infant, so practical and capable but also so smitten and joyful.

There is a reason women become a version of their own mothers when babies are born: having lost themselves in the moment of their child’s birth, it is a way of anchoring themselves back to the habits—the smells and foods and rituals—of their own childhood. So I soaked Sarah’s soiled nappies in bleach before boiling them in a huge vat over a woodstove. I rubbed her head, feet, and elbows with Vaseline. I kept a basin of Dettol handy to swab the stump of her umbilical cord. I bathed her prickly heat in calamine lotion.

Motherhood—the way too many of us do it alone now—without an exaltation of female relatives, without a heft of knowing matrons to buoy us up, is unnatural. But all the women I had anticipated being here at this stage in my life—my sister, my mother, my grandmother—had been tied off from me with a vast, invisible tourniquet. Granny was dead. I couldn’t ax my way through the deep, frozen sea of Mum’s sorrow to beg for help. And Vanessa was two toddling sons and one bad marriage under deep water of her own. When she did resurface it was only to gesture distress. The signal flag Victor is a no-nonsense, unambiguous red X on a white flag. It means, “I require assistance.” We all did.

I found our Belgian landlady as sympathetic and helpful as a woman in her position could be—Grand’Mere, she had asked me to call her, as if that might bridge the distance between my youthful need and her elderly inability to supply it—but she’d had her own difficult and wearying journey. She had been a young mother herself when she had first left Europe for the brilliant white hope of the Belgian Congo: “Allez-Y & Faites Comme Eux”
3
was the tagline of a propaganda poster from the colony that showed a European man, dandyish in a white linen suit, lording it over half a dozen robust oxen and several industriously slaving black men. But our landlady’s luck had been more equivocal than the colonial marketing poster had suggested it would be. And she had added even more uncertainty to her already uncertain future on an upheaving continent, her choices spurred more by romance than by rationality. Perhaps, like most of us, she believed time would circle back and catch up with her quixotic notions of how the world would treat her. But instead of a long, slow African sunset cooling into night surrounded by certainty and grandchildren and promise, she was ending her life alone on a bend on the Zambezi River, her body flooded by an array of known and unknowable parasites.

Her skin was yellow and she felt cold most of the time. More or less permanent malaria had thinned her blood to a watery chill. She kept a fire stoked in her bedroom, even in steaming midsummer, and at night she warmed her feet in tubs of river water brought to a boil over a fire in the kitchen. Dust and smoke covered everything she owned: a portrait of herself as a young woman in Brussels; books and maps and letters; a cuckoo clock that had long ceased working but that carried with it a fading aura of European concern for timetables and deadlines.

“No, don’t bring the baby near me,” she begged. “Perhaps I am contagious. You see how yellow I am? What if I have the fever?” She could no more reach out to help me than she could force disease out of her blood, or conjure crocodiles out of the Zambezi to inhale her collection of horrible village dogs. So we sat on opposite ends of her table on the veranda, Sarah curved in a heat-drugged sleep on my lap, Grand’Mere’s two bad-tempered African gray parrots singing “La Marseillaise” and cursing complainingly in French, the troop of monkeys she had adopted clattering on the asbestos-sheeting roof. “Have a lemon cream,” she offered.

I knew I had come from women who had done much better with a lot less, but there was also the closed-circuit cautionary tale of the women in my history who had done a lot worse with very much more, and who was to say how childbirth and mothering and isolation would catalyze in my mind? “I suppose it was after her mother died that my mother went completely to pieces,” Dad told me. “Before that, it was just practice. Soaked through, but probably not beyond repair.” And I pictured Mugger like the moon to Boofy’s tide, pulling her back into the shallows every time she got too deep.

Exhausted and more than a little scared, I acknowledged I needed help to get me through Sarah’s baby months. So I hired a villager, Jamie Nkomo, to bring buckets of water up from the river and help me with my struggling attempt at a heatstroked vegetable garden. I hired Mildred Tembo—the daughter of one of the supervisors at a nearby safari camp—to help me with the housework. Then one afternoon, as I lay nursing Sarah in the heat of the day, a woman suddenly materialized in the bedroom outside my mosquito net. I sat up, startled, holding the milk-drowsy baby against myself.

“I’m Josephine,” the woman announced, crouching down next to the bed. She smelled of uncured tobacco and carbolic soap, smells so familiar to me I was instantly transported back to my own early childhood and the no-nonsense slightly impatient nannies of my youth who had allowed me onto their laps and in times of pain and distress had lowered their shirts to let me rest against their skin.

I fell back onto the pillows, and Sarah began to nurse again. Josephine slipped her hands under the mosquito net and reached for Sarah’s head. She said she had recently lost her own infant to the yellow fever outbreak in the village. So many children were dying around here, she said, hadn’t I heard? “You are too thin to take care of this baby alone,” she told me. “Babies aren’t safe.”

“I know,” I said.

Grand’Mere had told me about the yellow fever epidemic when Sarah was just eight days old. But at the little clinic in Livingstone, the Indian doctor—whom I visited frequently and with increasing discomfort in the weeks after Sarah’s birth—had equivocated and added to my fear by expanding the list of possible pathogens. “Maybe yellow fever, maybe just malaria. Who knows with these people? They say yellow fever, they mean hepatitis. They say malaria, they mean meningitis. Are they doctors? No. Are you doctor? No. Am I doctor? Yes.”

Then I explained I was still in considerable pain from the delivery, but before I could expound further or attempt to show him my aching rear end, the doctor threw up his hands preemptively. “No titties, no bottoms,” he cried. So I went home to Quiet Waters and treated myself as best I could from my copy of
Where There Is No Doctor,
misdiagnosing hemorrhoids coupled with mild malaria as an infection from childbirth. The book said nothing about yellow fever, but sometimes if the wind picked up from the river I could hear village women on the way to their little funerals, ululating their limitless grief. So when Josephine emerged that hot afternoon and her capable hands spoke hungry sorrow for her lost child, I hired her on the spot.

I also found a local tailor and had myself measured for a wearable mosquito-net cloud under which I could keep Sarah while I was nursing her anytime between four in the afternoon and sunrise, when the mosquitoes would be out to feed. And all the rest of the time—even in the supposedly mosquito-free middle of the day—I watched her soft skin for the slightest passing shadow of a drifting parasite. Her white terrycloth diapers hung on a washing line above our heads in the sitting room and kitchen, like strings of white flags requesting cease-fire or signaling surrender.

Most days, Josephine and I took turns walking Sarah along the banks of the Zambezi, while inside the cottage Mildred sweated over piles of cloth diapers with a charcoal-heated iron—unironed clothes risked carrying the eggs of putzi flies, which hatched as maggots under the skin and produced squirming boils. I also insisted that drinking water and water for bathing the baby be boiled to avoid bilharzia. From dawn to dusk, the kitchen was thick with vapor and mopane-wood smoke. But now I was not alone. The voices of the two women filled the house. Josephine sang Congolese kwasa kwasa; Mildred competed with mournful religious dirges. Jamie sat on the veranda between chores and chatted to the women with cups of tea and slabs of white-bread sandwiches.

By February the heat had become so unbearable that I moved our bed outside under a Bohemia tree and brought Sarah from her crib to sleep with us: a shared being between Charlie and me, sweetly sweating, her arms flung above her head in capitulation to the temperature. If rain threatened, we would drag the bed back inside, but at least on dry nights the breeze from the river could reach us. And, lying under the mosquito net with my child and my husband next to me, listening to the shouting hippos, the pulsing night insects, the shrieking bush babies, I fell deeply back in love with the land of my childhood. The fight against heat and the worry about my new baby seeped out of me and I felt myself yielding to this place and to my new life.

Then, sometime toward the end of February’s oppressive humidity, the mild buzz of what felt like permanent, low-grade malaria morphed into serious, recurring malaria. Fever abutted fever until at last I had an unending dose of tropical malaise. One night in March, a fortnight or so before my twenty-fifth birthday, riding a collapsing wave of infection, it occurred to me that I was probably dying. I could feel the parasites exploding in my blood, flooding my organs, clouding my brain. I woke Charlie up. “I don’t think I can hold on,” I told him.

Charlie leaned over me. “Bummer,” he said.

I remember the outrageous instinct of laughter.
Bummer! Bummer?
I’m dying, and that’s it? But I didn’t have the energy to laugh. And anyway, it seemed a perfectly reasonable response. Charlie’s love for me was waning—I’d been a disappointment, it was obvious—but I was still his wife and the mother of his child; there still remained a residue of dutiful love in sickness and in health. After all, isn’t that what we had signed up for? Isn’t that what the Polish priest had warned us we were in for? Charlie was the mate I had chosen, and he had chosen me. Marriage was a contract: you could hope it would be for better, but it might also be for worse. In any case, we had the baby now. There was no going back from how much we both loved her.

I turned my head, and by the light of the silver moon I looked at Sarah, asleep next to me. I ached to put my hands on her face, to trace the milky luminosity of her skin, but I couldn’t make my arms move. Instead I stared at her with all that was left of my focus, imprinting her onto my soul: the silky cloud of blonde hair, the huge, bruised-looking eyelids, the red stain of her birth still evident on her forehead as if the scarification of her delivery from my body into this world would be with her always. I willed her to know that I loved her and that if there was a capacity for love beyond this life, I would go on loving her always. Then I closed my eyes and felt something darker and deeper than sleep pull me away.

Afterward, Charlie would sometimes say that we left Zambia to save me from the seemingly permanent malaria I had contracted, to save my life. But that was only half true; we had already decided to leave the country. Months after arriving in Livingstone, we had begun to send boxes with my books and our clothes and Charlie’s African curios to Wyoming. We found prospective homes for our animals. We started to look at flights. By March, by the time of my full-blown almost constant malaria, we were already half gone.

The whole truth is that we left Zambia not only because I had almost died of malaria but also because the reality of the country had not matched Charlie’s vision of how it should have been and he wasn’t prepared to beach up against the reality of the place in the manner of Grand’Mere and my parents and any number of other hanging-in-there settlers and their descendants. Romance isn’t everything. In fact, romance is what gets you killed if you get too enveloped by it. Charlie had choices, and he was going to make the right one.

Westerners came to Zambia and felt an inexplicable sense of connection in part because back then in the early 1990s, the country still had much of what the developed world had destroyed: vast pockets of roadless land; wild rivers; sizable herds of charismatic and sometimes dangerous animals. But our south-central African beauty wasn’t as unspoiled as it looked, and we Zambians weren’t as innocent and uncomplicated as we first appeared. Most Zambians I knew would pick air-conditioning over virgin forests; a car over a bicycle; antidepressants over despair. The purity that foreign visitors elected to see in many of us—so friendly, so earthy, so naïve—was partly a glitch in translation and partly a willing suspension of disbelief.

Charlie shook me and said my name, and when I did not respond he pulled me from under the mosquito net, draped my weight over his arms, hurried across the garden and into the cottage. He made his way through the dark, stifling sitting room and through our tiny bedroom into the bathroom. He hoisted me against his chest and switched on the light—a single electric bulb sizzling from beneath its banana-leaf-woven lampshade. Then he lowered me into the bathtub, still full of cool boiled river water from Sarah’s bath earlier that evening. I woke up startled to find myself wet. Charlie held my head and my back. My cotton nightie stuck to my belly and hips.