Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (13 page)

Before first light, before Dad leaves, the mobile medics arrive. By the time they reach the house, Violet has had three drips, one in one arm and two in the other, and her eyes have fluttered open once or twice, but each time the pain washes over her again and drags her back deep into a blessed, dark, empty place. Near death.

Mum says, “
Fergodsake,
hold on. You can make it.”

The first medic, a man, hops out of the Land Rover, gun slung over his shoulder, and comes over to look at Violet. He turns away and vomits behind the flower bed in which our gardener has allowed some cannas to live. The second man comes out. He waves a cigarette at Dad.

“Howzit?”

Dad says, “Okay.”

The medics swarm around the back of the Land Rover. Mum crawls out. Her hands and clothes are covered with blood. “She’s going to make it,” she says.

The medics stare. “Shit, I dunno, hey. She looks pretty bad,” says one.

Another says softly, “Jesus Christ!”

The medics roll Violet onto a stretcher. She is soft and heavy. The stretcher sags under her weight. They put her into the back of their Land Rover.

Mum says, “Will you have a drink?” It’s almost light. “Or a cup of tea?”

They accept tea out of tin cups and drink it quickly as the eastern sky softens with dawn. And then they drive away and we never see Violet again. We hear later that she got out of hospital and went back to her village. Afterward the
Umtali Post
writes a story, “Farmer Saves Maid’s Life.”

Mum says, “The farmer had nothing to do with it. It was the farmer’s wife.”

The sky is starting to streak vigorously now, pink-gray. Dad and his gang head off for the hills.

Mum says, “Why don’t you take the dogs, at least?”

Dad shakes his head. “Too much noise.”

Mum goes into her bedroom but she does not sleep. Vanessa and I don’t sleep. We stay on our beds, with the dogs, and our eyes sting and our mouths are dry. It is breakfast time but there is no one to feed us. Violet is sliced and bleeding in the back of the medics’ Land Rover, heading for hospital; July is running for Mozambique with all our clothes and money and Mum’s rings. Mum is not talking. Dad has gone to kill July.

“Let’s play cards,” says Vanessa.

“I can’t. I’m too hungry.”

“I’ll make you some Pronutro,” says Vanessa. “Then will you play cards with me?”

“Okay.”

Vanessa mixes the powdered soybean meal into a paste with some milk and sprinkles sugar on the top for me. She puts the kettle onto the woodstove for tea. The fire has gone out and we try to make another one but the fire from the newspapers we shove into the stove’s mouth generates only a thick, oily, black smoke.

Vanessa says, “We’ll have to wait for tea.” She finds some bottles of Coke, which we are ordinarily allowed only on Sunday, and opens one.

“We’ll get into trouble, hey.”

“We’d better share,” she says, pouring the contents of the bottle into two plastic cups. Warm Coke and Pronutro for breakfast. It feels like camping.

We sit opposite each other at the dining room table. Vanessa patiently builds a barrier around me because she can’t watch me eat. She puts the milk jug in front of my face and sits back down and says, “Not enough.” She fetches a coffee can and some boxes and bottles from the pantry. From behind the barrier she says, “I can still
hear
you. You should try and eat more slowly.” But I’m too hungry to slow down, I hurry food into my drum-tight empty stomach, which swells with the pasty, cold porridge and the warm Coke.

Then Vanessa brings the cards and dismantles the barrier, and we play war.

Dad’s story comes out in bits and pieces, and I catch it from the stories told around the bar at the Club. And sometimes, when I’m older, around campfires in Malawi and Zambia, there will be quiet after supper when we are full and heavy and drinking and staring into the fire. And Dad will be smoking a cigarette and suddenly he will clear his throat and say, as if it were still relevant, “Best damned tracker I ever saw was that Cephas.” And he tells me the story of that night.

Dad and his boys—the men—park near Ross Hilderbrand’s old farm. Before the war, there were white farmers all over these hills. They were high enough above the hot, steamy valley to grow coffee in thick red soil. But the farmers here were intimidated by their proximity to the border and they were attacked by terrorists and their labor were abducted and taken to Mozambique. All those farmers have left the area. Now, quick-growing bougainvillea and Mauritius thorn have started to hang thickly from the verandas of those old farmhouses. In the gardens, cannas have spread over the edge of their beds and the grass has grown like long untidy hair and the windows have had rocks thrown through them. Bats shit on the floors and hang upside down from the ceilings, where yellow-brown stains from rat pee spread like tea spills above them. The whitewashed sitting rooms where dinner parties (with proper place settings and flowers on the table and servants in white uniforms, stiff with desperate civilization) took place are creeping green with mold. The irrigation ditches that fed the cow troughs are swollen with buffalo bean.

Cephas is the lead tracker; he takes off at a run, watching the ground steadily, not hesitating, reading soft signs in the dew-crushed earth which tell him secrets. The other men hang back and let Cephas lead until he is steadily, confidently on the track. He has found the place, he says, where the men have gone. He says, “There are two.”

To begin with Dad can’t see how Cephas can tell which way July and his companion have gone—and he is not sure how Cephas can be so sure of himself—but then they find things that the cook has dropped. A cooking pot, a dress, some packaged food. July or his companion is wearing Dad’s gumboots. When the men come to a muddy place, they can see the tracks clearly. And then they find the gumboots, discarded in the grass. Cephas laughs: “His feet are getting pain.” July is not used to gumboots. He is given a new pair of Bata tackies every year but he chops the toe out of them and ties the laces loosely so that his dry-cracked feet will fit in them even when they swell in the heat.

When the men come to a river, wide and deep enough that it would soak them to their waists, they hesitate. Cephas shakes his head. “They didn’t cross here,” he says, and then he sees that there is an old bridge upstream. The path that used to lead to and from the bridge has long ago been swallowed by thick ground cover. Small shrubs and baby trees have started to fill in the swath cut by the cleared old growth. Cephas says, “They saw the bridge, too.” He holds up his hand and the men drop behind him. He has gone crouched and his energy is forward and is like something you can almost feel—like wind when it moves the leaves and grass. He creeps over the bridge silently and the other men follow him and then suddenly Cephas stops and shakes his head. In one sweep he retraces his steps back to the middle of the bridge and jumps up and down on it.

“They are under here,” he says. “See? This bridge should bend. It does not bend.”

Dad’s “boys” scramble into the river and pull July and his companion out from under the bridge, where they have been hanging on to the old, half-rotten beams with their fingernails. They haul them onto the bank. For some minutes Dad’s “boys” beat the thieves, kicking them and punching them, until Dad says, “Let’s get them back to the car.”

Dad radios Mum from the car. “Oscar Papa 28, Oscar Papa 28, this is Oscar Papa 28 mobile. Do you read, over?”

Mum runs from her bedroom, but Vanessa and I have heard the Agricalert crackle into life, too. “Tim? Oscar Papa 28 mobile? This is Oscar Papa 28. Are you all right? Over.”

There is a pause and then Dad’s voice, hissing with static, “I got the bastards. We found your rings. Over and out.”

Mum shouts, “Wa-hoo!”

And Vanessa and I spontaneously perform our version of a Red Indian War Dance around the veranda—“Wa-wa-wa-wa”—we skip on alternate legs.

By the time Dad comes back with July and his companion, both the cook and his accomplice have swelling eyes and lips and hard bonelike lumps on their faces. Vanessa and Mum and I are standing in the yard. When Mum sees July get out of the car, she runs at him. She is screaming, “Fucking kaffir! Murderer!” She starts to beat him but Dad pulls her back.

He says, “Let the boys deal with him.” He nods to the “boys.” The militia who have come to arrest July and his companion turn and look the other way.

Dad’s “boys” kick July and in one soft sound, like a sack of mealie meal hitting concrete, he buckles to his knees. And then they kick him again and again. July curls himself up and covers his head with his hands but the feet find holds to flip him back on his belly and prize open his arms to expose his belly and ribs, which I can hear cracking like the branches of the frangipani tree. His skin splits open like a ripe papaya.

Then Dad says, “That’s enough, hey.”

But they don’t stop.

Dad says to the militiamen, “You’d better pull them off before they kill the fucking bastard.”

The militiamen break the “boys” from the tight scrummage of kicking. They put July and his accomplice in the back of their white pickup. The accomplice folds over himself like a collapsible chair, but July grips blindly to the edge of the truck, perching on bloodied legs. He has been handcuffed and his eyes are almost shut with swelling. As the militia drive off down the road, he makes one last attempt to escape, flinging himself from the moving car and hitting the dirt road; it seems impossible he doesn’t burst on impact. Two of the militiamen explode out of the front of the truck and then dust kicks up and the white truck and the men and July vanish from view for a moment. When the dust clears, they are dragging July behind the truck by a rope. He runs, his legs spinning like an egg whisk, until he is jerked off his feet and then he is pulled twisting behind the vehicle until it reaches the end of the driveway. After that, the militiamen throw him in the back of the truck and he does not try to jump out again.

Bubbles, Bobo, and Vanessa

SELLING

What I can’t know about Africa as a child (because I have no memory of any other place) is her smell; hot, sweet, smoky, salty, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass. When, years later, I leave the continent for the first time and arrive in the damp wool sock of London-Heathrow, I am (as soon as I poke my head up from the intestinal process of travel) most struck not by the sight, but by the smell of England. How flat-empty it is; car fumes, concrete, street-wet.

The other thing I can’t know about Africa until I have left (and heard the sound of other, colder, quieter, more insulated places) is her noise.

At dawn there is an explosion of day birds, a fierce fight for territory, for females and food. This crashing of wings and the secret language of birds is such a perpetual background sound that I begin to understand its language. A change in the tone, an increase in the intensity of the birds’ activity, will break into my everyday world and I will know that there is a snake somewhere, or I will look skyward (the way a person might automatically, almost subconsciously, check their watch against the radio’s announcement of time) and confirm a hovering hawk.

In the hot, slow time of day when time and sun and thought slow to a dragging, shallow, pale crawl, there is the sound of heat. The grasshoppers and crickets sing and whine. Drying grass crackles. Dogs pant. There is the sound of breath and breathing, of an entire world collapsed under the apathy of the tropics. And at four o’clock, when the sun at last has started to slide west, and cool waves of air are mixed with the heat, there is the shuffling sound of animals coming back into action to secure themselves for the night. Cows lowing to their babies, the high-honeyed call of the cattle boys singing “Dip! Dip-dip-dip-dip” as they herd the animals to the home paddocks. Dogs rising from stunned afternoon sleep and whining for their walk.

The night creatures (which take over from the chattering, roosting birds at dusk) saw and hum with such persistence that the human brain is forced to translate the song into pulse. Night apes, owls, nightjars, jackals, hyenas; these animals have the
woo-oop
ing, sweeping, land-traveling calls that add an eerie mystery to the night. Frogs throb, impossibly loud for such small bodies.

There is only one time of absolute silence. Halfway between the dark of night and the light of morning, all animals and crickets and birds fall into a profound silence as if pressed quiet by the deep quality of the blackest time of night. This is when we are startled awake by Dad on tobacco-sale day. This silence is how I know it is not yet dawn, nor is it the middle of the night, but it is the place of no-time, when all things sleep most deeply, when their guard is dozing, and when terrorists (who know this fact) are most likely to attack.

Dad shakes my shoulder. “Come on, Chookies.”

I startle awake, in the quick, gasping, suddenly alert way of all people who have lived in a war (and for which there is no cure, ever, not even now).

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” says Dad (who naturally suffers a more extreme version of this where’ s-the-danger response to being shaken awake).

Vanessa is awakened by my quiet panic. “What?” Her urgent hiss reaches across to the jumping black shadow of Dad against candlelight.

“Time to get up.”

“Oh.” She sinks back into her pillow.

“Here’s tea.” Dad props Vanessa up and hands her a cup of hot-milky-sweet tea.

“Come on, Bobo, tea.” But I am already out of bed and dressed.

I have slept with my pajamas pulled over my best-for-the-tobacco-sale-day clothes. All I have to do is drink my tea. I have already put several books into a bag, along with my toothbrush, a change of clothes, and a torch that has ceased to work (the batteries have leaked and killed it). I am sitting in the plastic, damp-dog-smelling car, eyes stinging with tiredness, long before the rest of my family. I kick my feet against the back of Dad’s seat with anticipation.

When we turn onto the main road, Mum will hand us a banana and a boiled egg and we will be allowed sips of tea from her steaming cup (just one sip at the bottom, so we don’t spill) and then we will sleep until we reach Rusape, where the high morning sun will stroke us alert.

Today, we will arrive at the tobacco floors in Salisbury in time for the free breakfast that is provided for all farmers and buyers and Tabex personnel. Today, I will eat until I feel sick. I will eat until my belly bloats with the joyful, unaccustomed nausea of too-much. And the food is egg (fried, scrambled, omelettes), sausage, fried tomatoes, chips, bacon, and dripping-butter toast. There are several varieties of boxed cereals: Cocoa Puffs, Honey Pops, Corn Flakes, Pronutro, muesli. There is Zambezi mud porridge, oats, and mealie meal porridge. There are huge bowls of fruit salad and silver trays of cheese and crackers. I eat some of everything and fill my plate again and I am still reluctant to leave the food but Dad says, “Come on, Chooks, leave it now. You’ll make yourself sick.”

And then we make our way onto the auction floors to our two or three lines of tobacco (soldiered between similar lines belonging to other farmers). The bitter-smelling, hessian-wrapped blocks of leaf-laid-upon-leaf have miraculously made the journey from Robandi to here. They have been graded, tied into hands, and packed: primings, lugs, tips, droughted, spotted, scrap. We stand, ill with food, next to our crop. Mum takes my shoulders in a fierce, ringless grip. She alone did not eat breakfast. She drank tea in quick, nervous gulps and glanced repeatedly at the clock that hangs above the door leading to the wide, airplane-hangar-sized auction floors.

The buyers walk the line of our tobacco.

Mum tightens her clutch. She whispers, “Here they come.”

Dad nonchalantly stands, resting on one leg, like a horse at rest. He looks away, as if the buyers are a common, bland species of bird on an otherwise more exciting safari.

Mum hisses, “Try and look hungry, kids.”

I suck in my belly as far as possible and open my eyes as wide as they will go, so that they will seem hollow and needy. Vanessa sinks her head to her chest and shrinks with not-wanting-to-be-here.

Mum turns a fierce, fixed, terrifying smile on the buyers. Her look says, “Give us a good price and you will be rewarded with my love for all time. Please give us a good price. Please.” Waves of her anxiety sink down into my belly and churn with the too-greasy excess of my recent breakfast.

None of us look at the other farmers and their families, who are also hovering with palpably jittering nerves over their bales.

The bales are torn open, leaves are pulled up and smelled; the thin-veined crop is rubbed between thick fingers (fingers flashing with gold bands, which are among the many things that tell the buyers from the farmers. No farmer I know wears rings). A price is scrawled on a ticket. Dad waits until the buyers are out of earshot and then whispers to Mum in a soft, warning voice, “Steady. Hold it,” in the way he would talk to a fretful animal.

Now Mum, Vanessa, and I watch Dad’s hands as he walks the line. If he agrees with the price we have been offered for each bale, he hesitates, fingers hovering briefly above the ticket, and then walks on, leaving the ticket intact. That tobacco will be taken away to cigarette factories: famous, well-traveled Rhodesian burley all the way from our lucky farm.

If Dad disagrees with the price the buyer has offered, he tears the ticket. Those bales will be rewrapped, loaded onto lorries, and brought back to unlucky Robandi. Dad will wait to sell them later in the season, when perhaps the buyers will be more hungry for tobacco. Those bales will sit in the grading shed, open to the air, where blasts of steam will keep the leaves in a fine balance between soft and moldy. They will anger Dad whenever he sees them. Mum will spend hours, until her fingers burn with the sticky yellowing residue of the leaves, re-sorting and re-baling the leaves in the superstitious belief that a new presentation might bring a healthier price.

If Dad starts tearing tickets and his face becomes folded and deep, we feel ourselves become quiet and wishing-we-weren’t-here. But if he is walking quickly over the line of tobacco, leaving the tickets pristine, beautiful whole rectangles of yellow, we are giddy. Vanessa and I start to run between the bales, exuberant, silly, loud, and Mum doesn’t say, “Shhh girls! Behave yourselves!” And then Dad has walked the line and, without looking at the other farmers, he takes Mum by the hand and he says, “Come on, Tub.” Vanessa and I fall into line behind Mum and Dad. His fingers are wrapped around hers. By the end of today Dad will have gone to see the fat man with the wet lips from Tabex and Mum will have her rings back, and when we get home to Robandi she will polish them in Silvo to remove the tarnish of shame and disuse.

Dad doesn’t smile, or concede any kind of victory in front of the buyers. He waits until we are in the car and then he says to Mum, “Fair price.”

Which means that, in addition to our yearly and unavoidable checkup at the dentist, there will be a new set of clothes, a new pair of shoes, a visit to the used-book store, tea and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream at the tearoom in Meikles Department Store. We will spend the night in the delicious luxury of a friend’s town house with its irrigated garden, clipped lawn, tiled white shiny kitchen, properly flushing loos, and (most wondrous of all) television. When our tobacco sells well, we are rich for a day.

But whether the tobacco sells well or badly, when we arrive at Robandi it will be back to rations and rat packs.