Leaving Before the Rains Come (9 page)

But I had written and written and here we still were. For the first time, I admitted this might be something I would not be able to write my way out of. I couldn’t make words take the shape of an escape for either of us. This couldn’t go on. On the other hand, what options did we have? Charlie and I were in this together, house lifting off its foundation or not, sweat equity and tears, thick and thin. We had children together, we had history together, we had dwindling bank accounts and accumulated debt together.

I looked around at the couples we knew and none of them seemed to be tripping the light fantastic either. Most people I knew complained more or less tirelessly about their spouses: they disagreed about how to spend their money, how to raise their children, and how often or seldom they should have sex. They complained of being bored, of their lives being habitual and careful, of feeling spied upon, of carrying with them a perpetual hangover of guilt. It seemed that no one felt good enough at being married. Maybe marriage wasn’t supposed to be unfettered joy. Maybe this was it, coupledom as a slog with the reward being the comfort of believing you were doing your best, not for yourself, but for those to whom you had pledged your allegiance. Maybe marriage was a long exercise in compromise, and self-denial, and an increasingly furtive internal life. To aim for anything else seemed a fatal swim too far from shore in unknown waters.

There seemed nothing for it but to double down. Dig deeper. Work more and harder and longer. The Zulu signal flag is four triangles—black, yellow, blue, and red—making up a four-colored square. Ordinarily, it means, “I need a tug.” But in 1905, when the Zulu flag was hoisted by Admiral Togo at the Battle of Tsushima, it meant, “The empire’s fate depends on the result of this battle, let every man do his utmost duty.”

T
hen in a kind of fin-de-siècle madness, we both planned working trips to Africa. Charlie said he would guide potential investors around Zambian safari camps. I said I’d go home and collect photographs for my new book. We planned our travel so as not to be in Zambia longer than a couple of nights together. I said I didn’t want to leave the children home alone; Charlie said he would need to focus on the logistics of his clients’ itineraries and wouldn’t be able to deal with distractions. What neither of us said was that we couldn’t bear to be together, that we couldn’t breathe around each other any-more.

In their 1977 piece “Breathing In/Breathing Out (Death Itself),” the performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay kneel face-to-face, pressing their mouths together. Their noses are blocked with cigarette filters. The image is that of a passionate kiss, but it is in fact an intense, exhausting physical struggle. For the duration of the piece—nearly twenty minutes—the couple have no external access to air. Shortly after the performance starts, Marina’s face grows shiny with exertion; she is audibly suffering. Soon, Ulay is gasping too. At last, they let go of one another’s mouths—propelled backward by their need for oxygen and space.

Breath,
pneuma,
has also been understood since ancient times as soul, as the connection between the outer world and our inner beings, as our integrity. When we breathe deeply, we connect head and heart, and we are connected to the atmosphere. When we hold our breath, when our breath is forbidden, then we are isolated from all creation. Even if we can still function, we are not integral, we cannot be trusted, we are not whole, we have no hope of being authentic. We are dependent and immobile and fixed. In that way, the lack of breath between two people is an isolating, suffocating, limited contract. The couple, gasping, will eventually have to fall apart from one another.

In early September, I wrote letters to our three children, hid them under the cleaning products in the back of the bathroom cabinet where I was sure they would not be found until sufficiently long after my death, and flew to Zambia. By now, the hilarity of my father’s seventieth birthday party had long worn off. A banana-leaf-ruining frost in July had left him with recurrent bouts of bronchitis. Then the rains returned and he came down with a particularly stubborn dose of malaria. Suspicious of medicine in general and of Western medicine in particular, Dad submitted himself to the care of a Chinese doctor, new to Lusaka.

Dr. Quek diagnosed him with polluted blood—“We could have told you that for free,” the rest of us shrieked—and she prescribed inpatient injections of antimalarial medicine, intravenous infusions of antibiotics, and capsules of vitamins. Dad had to eat an egg a day, two servings of red meat, and a variety of green vegetables. He was to avoid drinking beer and water, he was prohibited the enervating effects of ice, but he was allowed as much red wine and tea as he liked. “You see?” Dad said. “Very sensible.” I had my doubts but nonetheless offered to accompany him to town for his appointments.

Accordingly, we left the farm at dawn, hitting the edge of Lusaka just after rush hour. The city was barely recognizable from the one Charlie and I had left in the early nineties. The official end of the Cold War in 1992 meant the communist bloc no longer subsidized Zambia’s social-humanist ideology. Decades of complacent economic stagnation had given way to a sudden proliferation of petty capitalism. Traffic lights and intersections were clogged with vendors hawking counterfeit perfume, pirated music, and plastic toys from China. Then the Chinese themselves arrived and instituted seriously consequential capitalism.

First they built roads. Then they took over mines and opened industrial plants. After that, they went onto the farms. Now they were in the shops, schools, and clinics. There were scores of Chinese restaurants, oddly empty and often bafflingly free of either menus or chefs. By 2006, there were more Chinese in Zambia than there had ever been British. Advertisements at the airport welcomed visitors in English and Chinese. Trucks and cars with Chinese characters on their doors teemed up and down Cha Cha Cha Road and disappeared into the compounds and suburbs loaded with gravel, bricks, cement. Hospitals, schools, and compounds with swooping double-eaved roofs sprung up all over Lusaka.

Suddenly time, which had never mattered before, had meaning. Nearly everyone seemed to have a cell phone, people could text,
SMS
, update their Facebook statuses. In kiosks and intersections across the country it was impossible to avoid vendors selling talk time. Until now, time was an abstract idea, possessing the languid pointlessness of all socialist-era states; striving was fruitless. Government clocks in post offices, hospitals, and police stations had rusted to a stop with dust and neglect. Waiting had been a national pastime. Now there were cell phones and time came in sheets of little scratch-off tickets, and people could make appointments. Unseemly speed was the new order of the delineated twenty-four-hour day.

“We’re orphans of the empire,” Mum lamented. “Our hour is over.”

But Dad admired the Chinese workers he saw on the road over the Muchinga Escarpment on the way to and from the farm. They worked quickly and single-mindedly with the focus of a hungry people who have a historic understanding that things always could get worse. “Look at that,” Dad said, indicating the men in their conical hats and their blue pajama uniforms toiling over steaming layers of freshly laid asphalt. “You wouldn’t find a Brit or a Yank slogging so hard in this heat, would you?” He leaned out the window and waved his pipe at the surprised laborers. “Well done, chaps, well done! Good effort. Keep it up.”

“Oh, don’t encourage them, Tim,” Mum said, lifting her head out of her book. “Or they’ll never leave.”

Then at the end of March 2009, toward the close of a particularly rainy season, a tanker-ship-sized chunk of the new Chinese-built road collapsed, leaving a massive hole between the hill on one side and a steep, high embankment on the other. Traffic was backed up for days; Mum and Dad were stranded on the farm. “Zhing-zhong construction,” the regional press jeered. But Dad’s support of the Chinese remained unwavering. “Very bad luck. Could have happened to anyone,” he said.

“Not to the Romans, it couldn’t,” Mum countered.

Dr. Quek’s clinic was in a little whitewashed house down an unmarked, refuse-lined lane in the eastern part of town. When we arrived, the doctor was relaxing in a bottomed-out chair, her legs thrown girlishly over one of its arms. She was watching a South African game show that seemed to involve very excitable contestants trying to gain the cooperation of profoundly perplexed chickens. “Ah, Mr. Fuller,” the doctor said, glancing away from the screen. She waved her hands around her head where little explosions of white hair mushroomed. “Go lie down. Bed waiting. Nurse coming.” I followed Dad down a short passage. Gray streaks on the walls showed where the roof had leaked during the rains. Floor tiles had peeled up. A few flies hung drowsily midair.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked.

“A hundred and ten percent,” Dad said.

We went into a room in which there was an old single bed like the sort Vanessa and I had slept in at boarding school, and a gurney upholstered in heavy plastic. Dad stretched out on the bed, exposed his inner arm, and shut his eyes. A nurse came in and set up an
IV
. She said I could rest on the gurney if I liked. So I got up on the plastic mattress next to Dad’s bed and lay down. Dad appeared to doze off. A colorless liquid fed into his veins. At the end of the hall I could hear the muffled rapture of the television set. Outside, starlings chattered in a droughty bougainvillea. Once in a while, the nurse came back into the room, fiddled with the
IV
, and killed a fly or two with her plastic swatter. It was all very serene. I felt a surge of affection for Dr. Quek.

It was rare for my father to admit to any illness bad enough to warrant a visit to a clinic. He believes most accidents and ailments—hangovers, heart attacks, and backaches, for example—can be fixed with a couple of aspirins and tea and/or brandy. My mother isn’t much different. Aside from medicine for her bipolar (“mad pills, happy pills, panic pills, and sleeping pills”) and inhalers for both my parents’ asthma (“our puffers”), Mum believes Epsom salts will cure everything from constipation to a difficult labor. The shelf in their bathroom reflects my parents’ medical austerity. Aside from aspirin and Epsom salts, there is Dettol for scrapes and scratches, and Andrews liver salts for indigestion. “Ninety-nine percent of what ails is all up here,” Dad said, tapping his head.

“Unless there’s actual blood,” I argued.

“Even then,” Dad said.

Several years ago, one late midweek morning, not so far from the farm, three armed men had jumped into the front of Dad’s pickup and without much in the way of an overture began beating him with their fists and the butts of their guns. They took his watch, what little cash he had in his pockets, and then left him bleeding by the side of the road, having stolen his pickup. “Must’ve thought I was someone else,” Dad said.

“Who else could you possibly have been?” I asked.

Everyone on the road between the Kafue confluence and the Chirundu turnoff knows my father. “He is most famous for five hundred miles,” a Chirundu shopkeeper told me when I went to the market to get groceries and supplies for the farm. “Because of his good deeds and his kindness, his humanitarian acts.”

“Good deeds?” I said, unconvinced. “Humanitarian acts? Are you sure you’re not confusing my father with the Italian nuns?”

The shopkeeper became animatedly defensive then. He expounded on Dad’s acts of service to the community. “He doesn’t say anything,” the shopkeeper insisted. “But he shows pity when there is a catastrophe.” My father was there with fish and bananas when there were cholera epidemics, he told me. He arrived in the pickup to help clean up when a fire swept through the market. He ferried stranded villagers when the river breached its banks. “He is an angel of mercy,” the shopkeeper concluded, hyperbolic with emotion.

“Well that’s very nice for all of you,” I said. “But I’m not sure he’s ever been an angel of mercy to me.”

“Then you must not have had a catastrophe yet,” the shopkeeper said.

For some time after being thrown out of the pickup by the thieves, Dad sat under the lacy shade of a mopane tree by the side of the road thinking things through. He concluded that no one short of an East African Rally driving mechanic would get very far with his car because, like most vehicles he had owned, it was temperamental and required the loving understanding of a dedicated owner. Villagers, a crowd of children, and a man on a bike stopped and expressed concern. Dad, remembering his manners, stood up and mopped the blood off his face with his red-spotted handkerchief as best he could. “Bwanji?” he asked.

“Bwino,” everyone replied.

Then, refusing the offers of help—the man with the bike suggested ferrying my father home on his handlebars—my father made shakily by foot for the nearest bar. The man with the bike and the other concerned villagers followed him, like supporters at the end of a marathon. Once at the bar, Dad ordered Cokes and beers for his new friend and eleven brandies for himself. “That’s a medicinal quantity,” Dad explained afterward.

As he had predicted, the pickup had stalled as soon as it reached the deep sand close to the Chirundu turnoff. The thieves had fled north on foot, into the millet fields that lined the road just there. Villagers near the market, seeing my father’s vehicle veer wildly up the road, had given chase shouting, “Bwana Fuller! Bwana Fuller!” Two of the culprits had been caught, one already wearing my father’s watch. The police put the thieves in custody, and indefinitely retained my father’s watch as evidence. “So it all worked out in the end,” Dad said. “Other than the watch.”

But I couldn’t get used to my father’s new profile: his once straight nose buckled sideways in the center where it had been broken, a ribbon of pink in the middle of his scalp where it had been torn, a missing tooth where it had been shaken loose. Every time I caught myself being surprised by his altered appearance, I felt a flutter of anxiety. Now, lying there in the steamy calm of Dr. Quek’s clinic with Dad dozing next to me, I recognized a common, irrational impulse. I wanted to stop what would happen next, whatever it was. We were okay here, now. Now. Now. Now. I watched the pulse in my father’s temple beat time.