The Flower Plantation (3 page)

“And Dr Sadler doesn't know what's wrong with him anyway,” continued Mother. “He doesn't know what causes his absences. And he has no clue why Arthur's so afraid to talk: all he can come up with is something to do with anxiety, some sort of phobia.” I thought about the elephants. “There's nothing wrong with him physically, Albert. Maybe in England someone could help. A psychiatrist.”

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Martha. He's still young.”

“But he's not safe here. What was he doing in the forest, for Christ's sake? Anything could have happened. If it
wasn't for…” Mother didn't finish. I heard the chink of the decanter on her glass.

“Let's just be thankful he got home safely,” said Father, and he went out to the front veranda for a cigarette.

I heard the shuffle of Mother's slippers on the red concrete floor coming towards my room. The door opened a little, creating a shaft of light.

“It's time for you to go to bed,” she said, shutting the album. She scooped me up, laid me down and told me the story of my birth. When she was finished and the thought of elephants rampaging through the house was well and truly embedded in my mind, she kissed me on the forehead and left, closing the door tightly shut. Then I heard her close her door too. Father was still on the veranda.

The arguments about my schooling went on for weeks. Mostly they ended with Mother going to her room, Father smoking a cigarette and me sitting alone in the dark.

In the end it was Father who won.

3

1986

Some time after my sixth birthday, Mother began to teach me at home. She refused to “act as schoolmarm” and told me, “You're not going to spend the next twelve years with your nose in a textbook.” A timetable was devised, more by trial and error than by design.

On Mondays I'd help the gardeners in the fields. Depending on what time of year it was, I'd learn to plant seeds, thin saplings, weed, deadhead and harvest. I got to know how to treat insect infestations and how crops differed from dry season to wet. Mother always used to tell me that being taught about life on the plantation was “far more useful than anything you'll find in a book”.

Tuesday was the day we went to town. Mother called this “life skills”, which mostly meant shopping – something she was particularly good at and something I particularly loathed.

On Wednesday mornings, Mother made me study art, which I liked about as much as shopping, but Wednesday afternoons were great. That was when Father stopped wearing his tie and serious expression and replaced them
with a short-sleeve shirt and smile. He'd come home from the city at lunchtime, put his briefcase in his study and close the door saying, “Where's my boy?” What I loved best about those afternoons was the time we spent together in the garden and the stories Father told about Rwanda.

Thursdays I spent with Sebazungu learning Kinyarwanda and French and, from time to time, some maths. Sebazungu was the foreman. He was a solid man with dark, pock-marked skin and a scar on his jaw that looked like a new moon. He spoke English, French, Kinyarwanda and Kswahili, he knew how to drive, and Father said his brain was quicker than a calculator. The gardeners were afraid of him, but Mother adored him. Without Sebazungu the plantation wouldn't have been running at all. He knew it better than anyone, even Mother. When Mother came to Rwanda, it was Sebazungu who showed her how the plantation worked – and when I was six he did the same for me.

“You'll learn more from him than from me,” Mother would tell me whenever I was dragging my feet. “Before you know it, you'll be doing long divisions in your sleep, speaking four languages and managing the plantation yourself.” I didn't see how. Sebazungu spoke so quickly and switched between languages so often that I was lucky to understand my own name, let alone anything else.

Fridays were for English, and one Saturday a month everyone had to do voluntary work, because of a government directive. I was made to do the chores Fabrice and Celeste would usually do, such as washing floors and peeling potatoes. Saturdays were the worst – and Sundays weren't much better.

Sunday mornings were spent in church, since religious education was not Mother's forte. “I'll leave it to the priest,” she used to say, even though the priest preached in Kinyarwanda and I barely understood him. And then in the afternoon the gardeners and their families would come for music and dance in the side garden, so that I might learn “a little bit of culture”.

That was how my weekly routine went and, on the whole, it suited me just fine.

* * *

“Life is an education!” Mother told me for what felt like the hundredth time that year, as we thundered down the potholed track on our way to Gisenyi.

The flowers bounced around in buckets in the back of our pickup – pink and red blooms blazing through the orange-and-green countryside. Sebazungu squatted in the back, guarding every stem. Monty sat on my lap, his paws resting on the open window. Since the incident in the forest he'd lost one of his hind legs, making him much less fun
– but I loved him all the same. At that time he was my only friend. Mother told me he'd come with her from England. She said when Father was working in the city she'd talk to Monty, because “no one else for miles around understood English”. It never occurred to me when I was six that Monty couldn't understand it either.

The condition of the eight-kilometre track from home to the main road was terrible, and it took most people thirty minutes by car. It took Mother ten. I never knew if Mother was the best or worst of drivers: all I knew was that I loved the bone-shaking ride. When we hit the narrowest section of road with the largest potholes and the sharpest bends Mother would yell, “Hold on tight, boy, here comes the fun!”

I loved looking back in the side mirror at the orange dust the truck kicked up. It blurred the brown faces of women with enormous bundles of wood on their heads and babies on their backs. I loved watching the men at the side of the road who filled in the potholes and stood with their hands stretched out, waiting for passing drivers to give them spare change. I loved the noise of the gears crunching and the exhaust pipe scraping on the boulders. I loved the warm scent of smoke and manure that filtered through the dashboard vents, and I loved the way I had to peel my legs off the hot sticky seat.

The pleasure came to an end when we turned onto the smooth tarmac that led steeply down to town. The road
to Gisenyi terrified me almost as much as the forest. Huge lorries swayed from one side of the road to the other;
bodabodas
laden with entire families – including their goats and chickens – dodged in and out of the traffic, while
matatus
bursting with passengers stopped, without warning, every few hundred yards. Most vehicles had their indicators on, yet few ever turned.

Mother's hand hovered over the horn as endless people, in no hurry to get anywhere, dawdled by the roadside. Every now and then she'd push down with the heel of her hand and swerve to miss a sauntering cow or a small child dressed in an oversized T-shirt bunched in the middle with a piece of rope. The horn was completely hopeless: even the one on my trike was louder. The people we passed watched as we charged on, down into the heat that we managed to avoid up in the mountains. The further we went – past the Honda C90s loaded with household furniture balanced precariously, past the lorries whose brakes had failed, now cast aside like tin cans by the side of the road, and past the prisoners in their orange uniforms ploughing the fields – the hotter it got.

At last we rounded the bend and descended into Gisenyi, on the shores of Lake Kivu. That's where Mother slowed down. The town moved slowly past the window of our pickup, like film through Father's home projector. We drove past the lake, sparkling and blue, in the direction of the border with Zaire. We
passed the schoolchildren in their khaki shorts, the foam-mattress shops and the decaying colonial buildings in every colour of ice cream.

Our first stop was the petrol station. Sebazungu leapt from the back of the pickup to supervise the pump attendant. While the fuel was being put in, the attendant's son, an old-looking boy with a heavy brow in a black leatherette jacket and long trousers, appeared from the giant tree in the far corner of the forecourt. He'd been harvesting mangoes. Changing his machete for his bucket and rag, he strode towards us, leapt onto the bonnet and set about cleaning the windscreen.

Our eyes met as he lathered the glass. Trying to avoid his stare, I looked towards the volcano and its billow of steam – the only cloud in the sky.

“Oya, oya
,” said Mother. “No, no! Little pest.” She dismissed him with a swat of her hand. “Anything for a few francs,” she muttered, and he ran off. We watched the boy climb the mango tree, machete between his teeth, his eyes firmly on me.

The attendant's fat wife approached our pickup with cold sodas.

“Mwaramutse
,” said Mother.

“
Bonjour
,” replied the woman.

Mother pointed at a brown and an orange soda and gave the woman two coins. The woman removed the caps from the bottles and handed them to us. I tried not to look at
the boy in the tree and drank my soda to the warbling call of a cuckoo bird.

With the truck refuelled, Sebazungu gave our soda bottles back to the attendant's wife and then jumped into the back. Mother turned on the ignition and we set off again, continuing our journey round the lake.

After a short while we drove past Madame Dubois's house. Mother said she'd lived in Gisenyi “since the dawn of time”. Whenever we passed her house, she'd be outside in a long dress and floppy hat, clipping her topiary hedge, which formed the words: “I Love Jesus”.

A little farther down the road, past the stall that sold rag dolls to tourists, was the post office. It was a big pastel-pink building set back from the main road. Its narrow entrance was on top of an open storm drain, which Mother hated driving over. Every time we went to the post office I'd hang out of the window and watch as the tyres inched perilously close to slipping six feet into the gutter. We never did fall, but there was always the danger that we might, and that was fun enough.

Mother and I left Sebazungu and Monty in the pickup at the side of the building and walked around to the shady front entrance. I ran my hand along the peeling paintwork and stopped to pick at pieces that came away like bark from eucalyptus trees.

“Arthur,” Mother called, and I caught up with her, a handful of dry paint crumbling between my fingers.

The postmaster looked up as we entered. He was an elderly man who worked alone in the cavernous building, which was more like a railway station with its wooden benches, large broken clock and glass partitions. It smelt of sawdust and glue.

The old man squinted from behind the glass as Mother approached, peering around the little clouds that floated in the centre of his eyes. Mother told me he had cataracts and that I “wasn't to stare”. When she was within a few feet of him and clearly visible, he said:

“Eh, Madame Baptiste.
Comment ça va?”

“
Ne meza
,” Mother answered. “Has my parcel arrived?” Mother had been waiting for shoes from England for weeks. This was her third attempt to collect them.

“Non, Madame, je suis désolé, mais—”

From under the counter the old man produced a parcel wrapped in brown paper and placed it in front of her. It was covered in stamps of the Queen of England.

“Pour le Docteur
.”

Mother sighed, I didn't know why: I thought the parcel was exciting.

The postmaster opened the huge ledger and went to look for a pen. Mother and I took a seat on a bench by the window, where I stared at the picture of the President. It was as if he was watching me. I admired the post office: everything about it was great. There was a parquet floor made up of thousands of interlocking pieces and hundreds of little wooden boxes,
each with its own tiny door, number and miniature key. There were narrow shelves that sat in perfect order with nothing on them. And everything had to be completed in triplicate. Being the postmaster seemed like the perfect job.

“How can something that looks so efficient actually be utter chaos?” Mother asked, staring at the ceiling while drumming her nails on the bench.

The shadows in the room had shifted by the time the old man returned with his pen. Mother printed her name and address and signed three times on three separate pages of the very large book. She handed me the parcel, which I held like a prized possession. Mother thanked the old man, who winked at me, as though he thought the parcel was exciting too. Then we stepped back into the searing heat. I climbed into the pickup and placed the stamp-covered parcel on the centre seat.

We took the short cut to market. The steep dirt road made the engine roar. Mother moved from third gear to second, and we leant forward, as if to stop the pickup from slipping back down towards the lake. I loved doing that with Mother: it was our private little game. At the top of the hill she parked in the shade of an acacia tree, instructed Sebazungu to buy a sack of rice, took my hand and led me into the marketplace with Monty limping behind us.

“It won't take long,” she told me above the noise of haggling market vendors, blaring radios and bleating goats.
We wove in and out of piles of mismatched shoes heaped up on the dirt and past stalls selling ladies' underwear. “I just need some fabric.”

I knew that would take for ever. Fabric-shopping was torture.

Big-bosomed women began to bustle around Mother as if
she
were the Queen of England. Each of them rushed off and reappeared with piles of cloth with patterns so intricate they made my head spin.

I sat down on a little stool, sank into myself and thought about Father's parcel. I wondered what was in it.

Gradually the sounds and smells of the marketplace shrank into one, and there I remained, with three-legged Monty by my side, until Mother was done.

* * *

“One last stop, Arthur, and then we can go for tea with Dr Sadler,” said Mother, a roll of purple-and-green batik wedged under her arm. We wound our way out of the busy market, past potato sacks as tall as me, towering pyramids of tomatoes and endless boxes of dried fish, the smell of which made me feel sick.

At the exit of the market, where
boda-boda
drivers usually huddled round Mother offering to carry her shopping and drive us home, a crowd had formed. People were saying “
Kirogoya, Kirogoya”
in hushed voices. I couldn't remember
what that word meant until Mother and I got closer and I spotted a tall white woman with a mass of red hair in the centre of the crowd. Sebazungu whispered in my ear, “Wicked Person.”

The witch! I tugged at Mother's hand.

“Just a minute, Arthur,” she said, stopping at the edge of the crowd to see what was going on. Clearly Mother didn't know what she was looking at or the danger we were in. Monty let out a high-pitched bark and ran off in the direction of the pickup.

Mother watched the witch: I hid behind her, too terrified to look. Had people gathered to see her snarling and foaming at the mouth like the wild animals she'd snared and caged in the forest? Could she attack at any moment? I didn't want to find out. I pressed my face into the top of Mother's legs and groaned.

“It's OK, Arthur,” said Mother, and I peaked round her leg. The witch raised her hand in the air, making her as tall as a giant pine tree, and waved in our direction. I ducked back behind Mother.