Leaving Before the Rains Come Read online

  The rumor in Zambia was that Coyne had committed suicide after several dams he had engineered in Italy had collapsed. This turned out to be a typically Zambian almost-truth: in fact only one of the seventy dams designed by Coyne, the Malpasset in southern France, had ever collapsed. On December 2, 1959, that dam on the Reyran River breached and burst. In the ensuing flood, villages, roads, and railways were flooded and 423 people were killed. Coyne himself died six months later of natural causes, although it was said he never got over the heartbreaking guilt of that tragedy.

  A pod of hippos snorted at us as we began our wobbling descent downstream. I closed my eyes and paddled as calmly as I could. Behind me, I could hear Charlie taking deliberate, sweeping strokes through the water. He was unafraid of what might happen, because he saw the hippos not as I did, as the most murderous of all African wildlife, but as fellow river dwellers. Charlie knew he was supposed to be here. I knew I was a trespasser. “Don’t panic,” Charlie said. We were wearing lifejackets, Charlie had a throw bag and a river runner’s knife. He knew CPR and had taught river rescue on rivers in Wyoming and Colorado as well as on the Zambezi. But I understood; it’s rarely the thing you prepare for that undoes you.

  Still, I also had grasped enough of the West’s views of such fatalism—that it made of us primitives, naïfs, and fools—to keep such beliefs to myself. In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned no one was immune to capricious tragedy. What I didn’t know then was that ignoring my own southern African knowledge was its own kind of mischief: it rendered me speechless when I should have spoken, helpless when I was profoundly capable, and broken when in fact the very places inside me that had been damaged and snapped were their own kind of strength. I saw the landscape around us as tattooed with death, fraught with the possibility of unrecovered land mines and undetonated ordnance. Charlie, however, saw it as recreationally pristine and friendly. Instead of trusting my own experience, I wanted to borrow Charlie’s vision and innocence, the way a visitor at a party walks away with a stranger’s fortuitously fitting coat a universe away from her own taste or means.

  We pulled away from the wall, away from the hippos, away from Nyaminyami’s rock. The sun struck the water in burning silver threads and bounced back into our faces. I never really got the hang of canoeing, counterproductively dipping my paddle into the water just when Charlie had pulled his out. Still, he managed to compensate for my ineptitude, and by the early afternoon we had made enough progress to justify beaching the canoes for something to eat. After lunch, Charlie decided it would do us good to walk up a gully and “stretch our legs.” If it had been up to me, I’d have stuck close to the river, drunk another beer, slept in the shade. The midday sun was at its most intense and the bush was at its most flat and unknowable this time of day, as well as being particularly dense just here. “Unless there’s really no other choice, never walk where you can’t see forty paces ahead of you,” Dad had always warned us. Still, I followed Charlie.

  “Mad dogs and Englishmen,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Charlie said, turning back toward me.

  But before I could repeat myself, the foliage in front of us exploded and an enraged elephant emerged, ears flapping, trunk raised, dust clouding at her feet. The dry-season jesse bush clattered. It was a classic mock charge, but on the ground, facing her, it seemed undeniably serious to me. Charlie, who had read his guidebooks and therefore knew not to run, turned implacably to face her; I scurried up the nearest anthill. The elephant stopped short of full attack, tossed her ears at Charlie, and then retreated, her tail straight up in the air.

  When he had first told me his name—Charlie Ross—my mind had snagged on it, and then whirred backward, searching for the familiar reference. Charlie Ross had also been the name of a famous rogue elephant hunter in Zambia in the early part of the century. Eventually, sometime in the 1930s, he had been charged and killed by an elephant near Mpika and was buried under a tree there, and it’s said that elephants came to visit his grave in the months and years that followed.

  But when this elephant stopped short of this Charlie Ross—my Charlie Ross—I remember thinking in a superstitious way, “He’s charmed. He’s the Charlie Ross who walks away from an elephant charge.” Which was silly, of course. The historic Charlie Ross must have been charged by elephants—and stood his ground—hundreds of times. Even he probably didn’t think much of the elephant that killed him until it was too late; until his gun jammed, or his foot slipped, or whatever it was that caused a man who knew elephants with the intimacy of a person who hunts them to be destroyed by one.

  MARITAL ADVICE FROM A MILDLY STONED COOK

  Six months later, Charlie and I were engaged. Six months after that, we were married on the farm. A day before the wedding, I sat out on the kitchen veranda with Adamson, our legs stretched toward the pale heat of an early June sun. Mum’s scruffy flock of guinea fowl scratched in the flowerbeds, the horses cropped in the home paddocks, a couple of dogs flattened themselves at our sides. It was like it had always been with Adamson and me; as if tomorrow would always come around in more or less the same shape as yesterday, and time was meaningless, and we had nowhere else to go.

  Except now, in recognition of my upcoming marriage, Adamson had brought me a rough, hand-carved wooden chalice as a gift. It had been wrapped in months-old newspaper on which Adamson had written, “Madam Bob.” Until then, Adamson had always addressed me as “Miss Bob,” or simply “Bob.” I read that salutation, the weightiness of those two syllables—“Mad-am”—and I felt a new, unwelcome distance between us. It was evident my soon-to-be bride status had made time unnaturally solid; tomorrow was inevitable and it would change everything. Soon I would be a foreign man’s wife, I would no longer live on this farm, or even on a farm in the district, and all of those things shoved me beyond the reach of Adamson and beyond the protection of our historic status as allies.

  Until this moment, until that solemnizing “Mad-am,” Adamson and I had always been coconspirators. I covered for him when cigarettes and brandy went missing from the pantry, and he protected me from all the ways life could go missing or awry on a Zambian farm. He had secretly tended my wounds with hydrogen peroxide the time I put Dad’s motorbike through a barbed-wire fence. And when I ill-advisedly experimented with some nastily potent Malawi Gold—smuggled across the border and into our community by some pre-Eurotrash relatives of a Yugoslav neighbor—he ferried me tea and comfort until the worst of the hallucinations had worn off.

  Now I asked, “Do you remember those soldiers, Abambo? The ones that came here for meat and beer.”

  Adamson laughed raucously.

  “It wasn’t funny,” I said, reaching out my hand reflexively for his, closing the circuit on his humor.

  “Too funny,” Adamson said when his coughing fit abated.

  It was during the Easter break of my sixteenth birthday—“I’m sixteen and I’m not ashamed of my body,” my parents kept saying in awful Cockney accents whenever the subject of my age came up. Given that Vanessa was still wowing London with her face-of-the-eighties looks, and Mum and Dad had gone for the day to the Copperbelt to do the farm shopping, Adamson and I were alone in the house. Although truthfully we were alone only in the ways Westerners speak of being alone in Africa, as if the few hundred locals by whom they are almost always surrounded are part of the landscape, instead of part of humanity.

  I had spent the morning on horseback, riding the north fence checking for poachers’ snares, keeping an eye on the clouds massing to the west. And after lunch I had taken the dogs for a walk up to the vlei, returning well before the threatening evening storm. Then as rain drummed on the roof, Adamson and I ate our supper in front of the television. The electricity sizzled off and on a few times until we eventually lost our nerve and unplugged the set so it wouldn’t blow up. After that, Adamson took his time over an enormous leisurely joint on the b
ack veranda and I settled into Dad’s chair in the sitting room with a book.

  The rain let up, and now there was the thick contentment that comes after a storm, everything tranquilized and heavy, the world freighted with dripping vegetation and buzzing with insects. I always reminded myself on these occasions never to leave Africa—as if terrified I might inadvertently forget and accidentally drift off the continent. I suppose I knew even then that if I did, an essential part of my connection with this earth would become forever detached, like a soulless body or a heartless lover. Africa had been my primary relationship for most of my life, defining, sustaining, and unequivocal in a way that no human relationship had ever been, with the exception of my parents, whom, in any case, I could never separate from this soil.

  “Do you ever regret moving to Africa?” I asked Dad years later, when it was clear I might never return permanently.

  Dad took his pipe out of his mouth and tapped the spent tobacco from it. “Regret’s a waste of bloody time,” he said.

  “But still,” I persisted. “After everything.” And I recited a partial list of all that he had lost in his fifty years on the continent: several farms; miles of beautifully straight painstakingly laid fence; herds of pedigree cattle; tobacco barns; contoured fields; communities. I didn’t mention his three lost children and the lost Rhodesian war, partly because he hardly ever did and partly because I hated to see his face cloud over.

  “No, Bobo,” Dad said. He made a gesture, like a magician blowing a silk scarf out of his clenched fist. “Pfff, there went your life. There’s no time for regret. Get up, dust yourself off, shake a leg.” Then he tapped more tobacco into his pipe and added, “Your mother and I will be here until it is time for lights-out. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  He didn’t ask me if I had regretted leaving Africa. Having no patience for regret, Dad has a hard time understanding why anyone else would bother wallowing in it. In any case, my leaving Zambia had been tied to my marriage to Charlie and to his nationality and life. It made sense to my father that a wife should follow her husband. Although it was Dad who had come from England and found Mum in Africa, and stayed on with her even when things got unwelcomingly rough because she would never leave the continent. “Loss is part of the game,” he said. “What else are we going to do? Retire to some horrible semidetached hovel in England and die of rising damp?”

  Most of the people we knew died in harness, usually of drink, or a car accident, or some tropical disease. “Of natural causes, in other words,” Dad said. Whereas to die of old age, infirm of body and mind frittered away, this was something horrible and unnatural to him. “Malaria,” Dad said when his bank manager asked him what contingencies he had made for his senior years. “A bloody good, permanently fatal dose of malaria.”

  Suddenly, the dogs lifted their heads and a few of them stiffened. I put down my book. A snake was always my first thought, but that usually got the Jack Russells going in a frenzy of hysterical, especially high-pitched barking, and now they were hackles up, low-throat growling. This was something else, something outside. A few of the dogs got up and went to the door; a couple of them began to bark. Then I heard it myself, the contralto whine of an engine powering a heavy vehicle through the sandy patch of road by the gum trees. Whatever it was, it wasn’t supposed to be here this time of night on this road.

  I turned out the lamp and stood beside the window, my body shielded by the wall, and strained to see into the darkness. In a short time, a single bumping headlight jiggled in dismembered confusion down our driveway, as if the eye of one of the Cyclopes had torn loose from the giant’s forehead and was now on a mission to find its owner. In another half minute, by the farmyard floodlights, I could make out the unmistakable silhouette of a Zambian army lorry. It rumbled to a halt in front of the dairy. A couple dozen soldiers, some with guns shrugged over their shoulders, peeled out its back and a few more streamed out of the cab. Then, as if our house were some sort of enemy camp, they swarmed around the garden looking for an entrance, at last seeping in through every door.

  Now the dogs set up a wall of barking fury that took some quelling, but at last order was restored, inasmuch as there can be order when there are a dozen or so armed, inebriated Zambian soldiers milling in your sitting room bringing with them the scents of campfires and gun oil released by rain. “We want rations,” the man I took to be the commanding officer said. “We’ve come for meat and beer.” It was easy to see the soldiers were already bleary with drink. They clustered in front of me, as if I were an interesting exhibit at an agricultural show, peering over one another’s shoulders to get a better look. The smell was of a collective souring, a bad night about to get worse. “Meat and beer,” the commander repeated.

  I said that we had not slaughtered a steer lately, and lied that there was no beer in the house, but that everyone was welcome to tea. So Adamson stoked the stove, boiled water, and made a fresh tray, and there was an awkward half hour while the soldiers lurched around the sitting room drinking sweet, milky tea they didn’t want, and Adamson stationed himself behind my armchair reeking of marijuana. Then nothing else happened. The soldiers thanked me for my hospitality and I thanked them, not insincerely, for not shooting me, and we all laughed and they drove off, I assumed to harass the neighboring farmers.

  Adamson and I stood for several minutes under the farmyard’s floodlights that were now zinging with post-rain moths and sausage flies. We watched the Cyclops eye of the army lorry bob and weave searchingly back down the farm road until it got to the gum trees and vanished into the night. Then as we turned back to the house, I noticed that Adamson was holding behind his back the big butcher’s knife Mum used to chop up the dogs’ soup bones. “Abambo,” I said, touched. “Were you going to stab them if they hurt me?”

  Adamson looked down at the knife. “No, Bob,” he said. “I was going to stab you if you said something stupid.”

  When I told Dad the story the next morning, he laughed and said, “Good for Adamson.”

  “It was very frightening,” I objected.

  “Oh Bobo, you were all right, as long as the soldiers weren’t speaking French,” Dad said.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Then you were in Zaire and in proper trouble.”

  That winter morning before the wedding, when I sat with Adamson’s wedding gift in my lap, I had somehow not realized it would be my last morning with the old cook. I should have seen it coming, not just for all the obvious reasons, but also because of the wooden chalice. It was rough in my hands and smelled endangered and tinny like the freshly spilled blood of something magnificent and old. But I could already see the splitting thread in its grain where the first crack would form, and a few years from now cause the container to irreparably shatter on a Wyoming windowsill. By then, Adamson would be dead from the slow-boil tuberculosis that we had misdiagnosed as chronic bronchitis, and I would be nursing my second child, and Mum would be whirling her way into a madness so deep she’d end up restrained in a Zimbabwean asylum. Had I been more skilled, or perhaps more aware, I might have read all of our troubled futures into that single emerging flaw, but as it was that winter day, everything seemed to me to be perfect and, if it were possible, improving.

  “This is very kind, Abambo,” I said. “It’s mukwa, isn’t it?” I lifted it up. “I’ll put it somewhere special so I can always remember you.”

  “Ah, you don’t have to remember me,” Adamson said. “You must forget all of this. You must go forward. Have children. You’re getting too old.” He rubbed his arms. Although it was already winter-cool in the mornings, he was still wearing his old summer shirt, short-sleeved and frayed at the cuffs. The vats and vats of curry Mum had ordered from an Indian restaurant in Ndola for the two hundred expected guests had putrefied on the way down to the farm.

  “Well, that goes to show you, never put peas in food and send it for a long drive,” Mum said. She si
ghed. “And it hasn’t even fermented into anything interesting we can drink.” So Dad had gone over to the Yugoslav neighbor and ordered a whole steer and a whole pig, both of which were to be roasted over an open fire in the garden. The kitchen steamed the rest of the wedding feast.

  “I think you must have a child very soon.” Adamson took his left hand and cupped his right elbow, pointing to the sun to measure the passage of time. “Before the next rains.”

  “No, I won’t,” I said. “I can’t.”

  Adamson gave me a look as if I had cursed myself. “Madam!” He appeared ready to snatch my careless blasphemy from the air and stuff it back into my mouth. “Don’t say such a thing. Your husband will go looking for another woman. You will be without a small child. What is the matter with you?” Adamson had nine surviving children out of a total of thirteen. I launched into a lecture on the pros of birth control, but Adamson grew impatient. If I was going to damn myself to a barren life and a straying husband, so be it, it wasn’t his lookout. He rolled one of his enormous marijuana cigarettes, lit it, and stood up, cutting my discourse short. “I have work,” he announced and went back into the kitchen, his cigarette stuck to his lower lip from which marijuana ash dripped liberally into the pots.

  I went in search of Mum. “Don’t blame me if all the guests get stoned,” I told her. “Half of Adamson’s pot crop is in the creamed spinach.”

  “Just as well,” Mum said. “It’ll take the edge off.” She looked at me, her brows lowered meaningfully. “Some people find weddings bring back the most unfortunate memories.”