Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Page 4

  You could not look to the relief of mountains or banks of green trees on a day when the heat waves danced like spear-toting warriors off the grassland and when the long, wide airstrip above our house and the pale-yellow maize fields below it shimmered behind dry-season dust.

  Grass, earth, air, buildings, skin, clothes, all took on the same dust-blown glare of too much heat trapped in too little air.

  We lived on a farm near Karoi.

  “Karoi” meaning Little Witch. In the olden days, which aren’t so olden as all that (within living memory), witches had been thrown into the nearby Angwa River (barely deep enough to drown a small goblin). Only black witches were drowned, of course. No one would have allowed a white woman, however witchly, to be sent plunging to her death in this way.

  Vanessa went to the little, flat school in town every morning. Her school looked like a bomb bunker. The playground smelled like sweat on metal from the chipped-paint swings and slides. The playground’s grass was scrubbed down to bald, pale earth.

  I had to stay at home with Violet, the nanny, and Snake, the cook.

  Mum was don’t-interrupt-me-I’m-busy all day. She rode on the farm with the dogs in the morning and then went down to the workshop, where she made wooden bookshelves and spice racks and pepper pots for the fancy ladies’ shops in Salisbury.

  Dad was gone at dawn, coming back when the light was dusky-gray and the night animals were starting to call, after Violet had given us our supper and bathed us. He was just in time to kiss us with tobacco-sour breath and tuck us in to bed.

  In the morning, one of our horses would be brought down to the house and I was led around the garden until Mum came out to take the dogs for their morning ride. Then I was sent outside to play. “But not in the bamboo.”

  “Why not?”

  Snake and Violet settled down for plastic mugs of sweet milky tea and thick slabs of buttery bread as soon as Mum was out of sight. “There are things in there that might bite you.”

  “Like snakes?”

  “Yes, like snakes.” Violet took a bite of bread and a mouthful of tea and mixed the two together in her mouth. We called this cement mixing, and we were not allowed to do it.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s something only muntus do. Like picking your nose.”

  “But I’ve seen Euros picking their noses.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “I have.”

  “Don’t exaggerate.”

  So I went into the bamboo behind the kitchen and played in the crisp fallen leaves and lay on my back and looked up at the tall, strong, grass-colored stems, so shiny it looked as if they had been painted with thin green and thick golden stripes and then varnished. And nothing happened to me, even though Violet shook her head at me and said, “I should beat you.”

  “Then I’ll fire you, hey.”

  “Tch, tch.”

  Then one morning, as I was playing as usual in the bamboo, I felt an intense burning bite on what my mother called downthere. Screaming in pain, I ran into the house and yelled for Violet or Snake to help me.

  They put down their tea and put their bread over the top of the cup so that flies would not drown in their tea and they frowned at me. But they would not look downthere.

  “Owie, owie.”

  But “Not there,” said Snake, “I can’t look there.” He picked up his bread, wafted the flies off his peels of butter, and began to drink his tea again. But the spell had been broken for him. The moment of peace in the morning was ruined by me and my bitten, burning downthere.

  Violet hid her mouth behind her hand and giggled.

  Bobo and Van

  I would have to wait for my mother to get home from her ride.

  “It was a spider,” said Snake.

  “Or a scorpion,” said Violet, taking a bite of bread and a mouthful of tea.

  “A scorpion?” I screamed louder.

  “Maybe a little snake.” The cook shut his eyes.

  I tugged at Violet. “A snake? A snake!”

  Violet shook me off and quickly swallowed her tea and bread without enjoyment. Glaring at me angrily as if I were giving her a stomachache.

  “Help me! Owie, man!” I wondered if I was going to die.

  I said, “Look in my brookies! Please help me!” But Violet looked disgusted and Snake looked away.

  I lay on the floor in the kitchen and screamed, holding my shorts, writhing and waiting to die from the poison of whatever had bitten me.

  When Mum came back from her ride I ran to her before she could even slip off the horse, stripping down my shorts and crying, “I’ve been bitten! I’m going to die!”

  “What nonsense,” said Mum. She dismounted and handed the reins to the groom.

  “On my downthere.”

  “Bobo!”

  “A scorp or a snake, I swear, I swear.”

  Mum pressed her lips together. “Oh, fergodsake.” She pulled at my wrist. “Pull up your shorts,” she hissed.

  “But it’s owie, man.”

  “Not in front of the servants,” she said. She dragged me into the sitting room and shut the door. “Never, ever pull down your shorts in front of an African again.”

  “Owie!”

  “Do you hear me?”

  “Ja, ja! Oh it hurts!”

  She bent down and tugged at the soft, bitten skin.

  “There,” she said, presenting me with a tiny tick pressed between her forefingers, “all that fuss for a little tick.”

  “What?”

  “See?” The tick waved its legs at me in salute. It still had a mouthful of pink skin, my pink skin, in its jaws. “Nothing to get your knickers in a twist about.”

  I shook my head and wiped my nose on my arm.

  “Now go and find Violet and tell her to wash your face,” said Mum. She pressed the tick between her nails until it popped, my blood bursting out of the tick and staining the tips of Mum’s fingers.

  That’s how I remember Karoi. And the dust-stinging wind blowing through the mealies on a hot, dry September night. And a fold-up and rip-away lawn prickled with paper thorns. And the beginning of the army guys: men in camouflage, breaking like a ribbon out of the back of an army lorry and uncurling onto the road, heads shaved, faces fresh and blank. Men cradling guns. And the beginning of men not in camouflage anymore, looking blank-faced, limbs lost.

  Bobo and Van

  THE BURMA VALLEY

  The central vein of Rhodesia rises up into a plateau called the Great Dyke. It is where most of the country’s population have chosen to stay. The edges of the country tend toward extreme heat, flat heartless scrub, droughts, malaria. The central vein is fertile. Rhododendrons will grow here. Horses will gleam with fat, shiny coats. Children look long-limbed, high-browed, intelligent. Vitamin sufficient.

  And then, in the east, beyond Salisbury, there is a thin, strangled hump, a knotted fist of highlands. And there if you look carefully, nestled into the sweet purple-colored swellings, where it is almost always cool, and the air is sharp and wholesome with eucalyptus and pine, and where there are no mosquitoes, is a deep, sudden valley. (The map plunges from purple to pink then orange and yellow to indicate one’s descent into heat and flatness and malaria.) That valley, in the far east of the country, is the Burma Valley. Here, horses hang thin in the thick, wet heat, their skin stretched over hips like slings. Children are elbow-knee wormy and hollow-orange with too much heat, skin-pinching dehydration, and smoking-drinking parents. Dogs have scabs from putzi flies, which lay eggs on damp patches of earth or unironed clothes, burrow under the skin, the eggs becoming maggots, bursting into living, squirming boils, emerging as full-blown, winged flies.

  “Don’t wear clothes that haven’t been ironed.”

  “Why?”

  “Or you’ll get putzis.” Which babies get on their bottoms from damp, cloth nappies.

  Mum told us that Vanessa got them once from an unironed nappy.

  “Vanessa had putzis on her bott-om. Vanessa had
putzis on her bott-om.”

  “Ja? Well at least I’ve never had a tick on my downthere.”

  Mum and Dad left Karoi and bought the farm in the Burma Valley because they loved the view. When they had stood where the new veranda would one day be built on the front of the old farmhouse and when they had looked out at the view of the hills, stretching blue-green into a haze of distant forest fires, and when they had seen the innocent-looking hump of the farm stretched out at their feet toward Mozambique, it seemed to them like this farm could hold their dreams in its secret valleys and gushing rivers and rocky hills.

  The plumbing was temperamental and obvious (a leach field bleeding green slime at the back of the house) and there was no electricity.

  They said, “We’ll take it.”

  Unsurprisingly, the valley had reminded one of its first European settlers of Burma. It was humid and thick with jungle and creepers, and cut through with rivers whose banks spilled prolific ferns and mossy rocks and lichen-dripping trees teetering on the edge of falling in, and it was fertile-foul smelling (as if on the verge of rotting) and held a green-leafy lie of prosperity in its jeweled fist.

  The valley represented the insanity of the tropics so precarious for the fragile European psyche. The valley could send you into a spiral of madness overnight if you were white and highly strung. Which we were.

  It was easy to leave Karoi. Karoi had always felt like a train station platform, a flat place from which we hoped to leave at any moment for somewhere more interesting and picturesque.

  We loaded up two cats called Fred and Basil and three dogs called Tina, Shea, and Jacko, and we drove, our worldly possessions balanced perilously on the roof of our car, clear across Rhodesia from flat west to convoluted east. We stopped to fill up the petrol tank, drink Cokes, and buy bags of Willards chips (“Make music in your mouth”). Everyone, dogs included, was let out for a pee on the side of the road, behind the bougainvillea bushes.

  “Go now or forever hold your pee.”

  Dad doesn’t like to stop. Even if your legs are crossed and you can’t see straight you have to pee so much, he doesn’t like to stop. He says, “You should have gone back there when you had a chance.”

  “Ja, but I didn’t need to go back there.”

  Dad lights a cigarette and ignores us.

  “Agh, please, Dad.”

  “I have to pee, man.”

  “She’s going to widdle in her knickers,” warns Vanessa.

  “Oh fergodsake. Tim, pull over, won’t you?”

  The dogs panted hotly down our necks and we itched with their irritably scratched-off hair, the cats cried angrily from their boxes, strong gusts of wind threatened to flip the mattresses off our roof. Dad smoked and we ducked his ash in the back seat. Mum read, occasionally nodding off into broken-chicken-neck sleep. Vanessa and I fought and whined and dodged the consequent flailing hands aimed toward our bottoms.

  Rebel, the horse, was on a lorry with the sofa and the dining room table and Mum’s woodwork machines. He was padded by our sheets and towels and two suitcases in which Mum had packed all our clothes. Our whole lives, everything we were and everything we owned, were in a Peugeot station wagon and a lorry. If we had been vanished away, sucked up into the atmosphere, just as we were, there would have been no trace of our little family ever having been on the planet. Not even Adrian’s grave, which was never marked, would tell of our short, unimportant passage on this earth.

  As we drove over Christmas Pass, through the Mutarandanda Hills, the small city of Umtali suddenly winked up at us in the bright eastern highland sun, which seemed more glittering and intense out here than it did in the dust-yellow western part of the country.

  Umtali (corruption of the word mutare, meaning “piece of metal”) is the last city in Rhodesia before the somewhat mysterious, faintly exotic border of Portuguese-held Mozambique draws a red line across the map.

  Against a cliff overlooking the road, a hedge had been planted to read welcome to umtali. During the war, the terrorists chopped out the “l” in welcome, so that the subsequent greeting read a chilling we come to umtali. As quickly as the women from the Umtali Gardening Club directed the “garden boys” to replant the all-important missing “l,” it was ripped out again, until the war was won (or lost, depending on whose side you were on) and the hedge was replanted to read welcome to mutare.

  We stopped in Umtali, at the Cecil Hotel (renamed the Manica Hotel after the war). Vanessa and I were given a Coke, not out of the bottle and warm but in a glass, floating with little wondrous cubes of ice. A shiny African waiter with impeccable hands and careful, clean nails brought us little white plates of ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off and green shreds of lettuce and paper-thin tomatoes sprinkled all over them.

  Mum and Dad were in the bar for a beer or two.

  Vanessa and I picked the vegetables off the sandwiches and finished our meal quickly, eyeing each other competitively, mouths bulging. Then we ran around on the blue patterned carpet, dizzy with luxury and Coke (“Adds life”); wall-to-wall carpeting; the unfamiliar bitter-smelling chill of air-conditioning; hushed lights; vigorously flushing loos; soft-footed waiters whose gleaming uniforms were made of thick, shiny cream nylon, crisply piped in gold, sharp-shouldered with blue epaulets. The chairs were swallowingly soft, the colors were bubble-gold and shades of greeny-blue. A white lady with hair like a purple-rinsed haystack and long red nails frowned at us from behind the reception desk. I had never been anywhere so comfortable. I would have been happy to sleep on the floor, under one of the round, glass-topped coffee tables, for the rest of my life. I would never need to sting with sweat again, being forever nicely, lightly chilled. No ticks or flies or scorps or snakes on this prickling, clean carpet. Cold Coke and ham sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and supper for ever and ever. Our-men.

  On the way out of Umtali, heading always east, farther and farther toward Mozambique, we stopped at the little rural post office, Paulington, which serviced the Vumba highlands and the Burma Valley, to collect our new postbox key. And then we snaked across the rim of the mountains leading out of Umtali, barreled across the dusty Tribal Trust Lands, and dipped down off the mountains into the floor of the valley.

  It was breathtaking, that first drive into the valley, dropping off the sandy plateau of the denuded Zamunya TTL, where African cattle swung heavy horns and collected in thorny corrals for the evening and where the land was ribbed with erosion, and then banking steeply into the valley, the road now shouldered by thick, old, vine-covered trees with a dense light-sucking canopy and impenetrable undergrowth. We had gone from desert to jungle in one steep turn in the road.

  Then we drove almost as far across the valley as we could go in the direction of the Mozambican hills until we arrived, dusty and stinging with sweat, coated with dog hair, at the large, ugly squat house that was to be our home for the next six years. We were going to be here until the end of the thirteen-year-long civil war.

  “Home,” Mum announced cheerfully.

  We scrambled out of the car, seasick after the choppy passage across the unfolding hills (Coke and ham sandwiches churning uncomfortably). We stared suspiciously, unimpressed at the house. It looked like an army barracks, low to the ground and solid with closed-in windows and a blank stare. The yard, littered with flamboyant pods, was big and bald and red.

  Dad

  CHIMURENGA,

  1974

  That was 1974, the year I turned five.

  That year, in neighboring Mozambique, a ten-year civil war between Frelimo rebels and colonial Portugal was just drawing to a close and a new civil war between Renamo rebel forces and the new Frelimo government was just beginning.

  We could see the Mozambican hills from our house. Our farm ended where the Mozambican hills started.

  In 1974, the civil war in Rhodesia was eight years old. In a matter of months, terrorist forces based in Mozambique under the new and guerrilla-friendly Frelimo government would be flooding over the borde
r to Rhodesia to conduct nightly raids, plant land mines, and, they said, chop off the ears and lips and eyelids of little white children.

  “Do you think it hurts?”

  “What?”

  “To get your lips chopped off.”

  “Why would you get your lips chopped off?”

  I shrug.

  “By whom? Who told you that?”

  “Everyone knows terrs chop off your lips if they catch you.”

  My sister and I both have big lips. Tackie lips is what the other children call them. Africans have tackie lips, too. I try and remember to suck in my lips, especially for photographs in case anyone thinks I’m part muntu. I wouldn’t mind getting my lips chopped off, or at least pared down a size or two, and then I wouldn’t be teased by the other children.

  “You’ve got tackie lips. Like a muntu.”

  “I do not.” I suck them in.

  “You’re sucking in your lips.”

  “Am not!”

  Mum says, “They’re not tackie lips, they’re full lips.” She says, “Brigitte Bardot has full lips.”

  “Is she a muntu?”

  “No, she most certainly is not. She’s very glamorous. She’s French.”

  But I don’t care how French or glamorous Brigitte Bardot is; she is not the one getting teased about my lips.

  Vanessa says, “Getting your lips chopped off would hurt like sterik. Of course it hurts, man.”

  Of course. It hurts.

  “I wouldn’t cry.”

  “Yes you would.”

  “Would not.”

  Vanessa takes my wrist in both her hands and gently twists the skin in opposite directions, a Chinese bangle. I have long hairs on my arms, pulled back with smears of snot from where I’ve wiped my nose. The snot makes a green, long pattern through the blond, sunburnt hair.

  “Yurrah man!”

  “Does that hurt?”

  “Ja, ja! Oh it hurts!” I start to cry.

  “See?”