Leaving Before the Rains Come Read online

  MARRIAGE VOWS IN THE TIME OF MALARIA

  The memories of my wedding are not unfortunate, although they are swimming and episodic because I had woken up with malaria, and in a frantic bid to get me well, my parents had overdosed me with their cures. First, Mum had treated me with chloroquine, and when that didn’t work, she had made me swallow Halfan and then Fansidar. Then, on the morning of the wedding, Dad had given me a double gin with extra tonic, and a couple of aspirin. As I walked into the horse paddock where I had insisted Charlie and I exchange vows, the fever broke out of the bounds of the chemical straitjacket it had been in, and I could feel the tiny prickling explosions of what I imagined to be parasites in my blood. “That flushed, delirious look you have in all the wedding photos,” Mum said. “In retrospect, it was probably just a temperature of a hundred and five.”

  When I reached Charlie’s side, I looked behind me one last time, across the field where our guests sat on garden chairs and hay bales. It was standing room only because the entire farm and half the villagers from the surrounding area had showed up for the spectacle. Guests sat in order of their perceived importance: in the front sat family, close neighbors, and old friends; behind them were recent friends and distant neighbors; next came top farm staff and gatecrashers; last were the casual day laborers and people who had no particular business being there except that it was a Saturday morning at the beginning of winter and there was nothing else of much note going on in a fifty-mile radius.

  I searched out Adamson with his two wives and several of his children. He caught my eye and, as if we were at an anti-apartheid political rally rather than an Anglo-African-American wedding, raised his fist in a Black Power salute. I smiled at him and held my bouquet of wild grasses a little higher. Then, as serene and confident as I have ever felt, I turned my back on the people who had seen me through a turbulent childhood and raised me through my happy adolescence and submitted myself to the bishop’s proactive warnings. “Marriage,” he said, “is not by any to be taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for which matrimony was ordained.”

  We exchanged vows, Charlie put a ring on my finger, and we were pronounced man and wife. I suppose there must have been music, because Mum had recruited the choir from a nearby boarding school, and I remember vividly that half the choristers got uproariously drunk and were violently sick in the canna lilies before the wedding speeches. I remember too Vanessa and her first husband, freshly married themselves but already looking as if they were on different boats in a choppy sea connected only by the rope of their frenzied toddler and the rising bump of their second child in her belly. Vanessa had refused to be my matron of honor and she avoided me at the wedding. “Oh Al, I just felt like I was bad luck,” she said afterward. “Things were going so badly with me. I didn’t want to pass it on to you.”

  But most vivid of all in my memory was the encounter with Dad’s friend, the Polish father from the Catholic mission at Old Mkushi. He caught me by the shoulders just as I was making my way into the garden for the photographs, as if he had an urgent message to impart. “The first year is hard, and after that it gets worse,” he said, his mouth so close to my ear that I could smell the red-dust-infused scent of his river-washed, sun-dried clothes. I laughed at him, excusing his sentiment as the meaningless words of a celibate East European who has lived too long in the Zambian bush. “No really, it’s true,” he insisted. “I should know. I’ve been married to God for fifty years.”

  The next day, we left Mkushi and honeymooned for a week, with a game scout and a cook, in a small fly camp on the edge of Luangwa National Park. We paddled a banana boat down the Luangwa River to our campsite. It was loaded with wine and food and a metal table on which we planned to put a white tablecloth and candles every night. The cook was a Malawian we’d picked up in Chirundu, a Muslim. He had frowned disapprovingly at our boxes of alcohol and at the skimpiness of my sundress. Then a female hippo defending her calf charged the boat. After that, the cook concentrated on his prayers until we pulled up on shore.

  In the early mornings, we walked with the scout toward the hills, our backs to the river, skirting a small elephant herd, a matriarch with several younger females and two babies; tracking the night’s journey of a resident leopard; seeing where lions had stalked. In the heat of the day, we read in our tents until we fell into the uncompromising, near-death afternoon sleep that invites ghosts and visions into your dreams. In the late afternoon we walked down to the river and bathed in the shallow eddies, keeping a wary eye open for crocodiles. Then we dressed and walked again, following the river downstream to the open meadow by a grove of ebony trees where there were often zebras, and occasionally Cape buffalo, and once a spotted hyena. We didn’t talk much, except occasionally in whispers to point out an unusual bird, or the fresh spoor of something interesting, or to marvel at our uncommon luck to be here now, with one another.

  At night, we sat under the stars and drank wine—me chattering away in my usual fashion, Charlie listening indulgently in his—until the Muslim cook scurried out of the cooking tent with our supper. On our second day in camp, a boomslang had slain a pigeon in the tree under which we had dug our latrine. This, on top of the incident of the charging hippo, had put the cook off ablutions in particular and a life in the wild in general. Couldn’t we cut this whole ridiculous honeymoon short? he wanted to know. Hadn’t nuptials been sufficiently established? How long could two people stare into each other’s eyes? Plus, he would like to be back in Chipata in time for Friday prayers.

  So on Thursday afternoon we packed up camp and walked back across the river, pulling the banana boat behind us with what was left of our provisions. Was this the only way? What if we got into the boat? Couldn’t we paddle back upstream? the cook wanted to know, now more afraid of crocodiles than charging hippos or murderous boomslangs. Charlie patiently explained the dynamics of a river’s free-surface hydraulics. “It’s not impossible to paddle against the current,” he concluded. “But it’s very hard.” To be fair, I wasn’t any less baffled by Charlie’s explanation, or any more thrilled than the cook, at the prospect of wading across a crocodile-infested river. As the brown water came up to our thighs, and then our waists, the cook and I glued our bodies to the scout’s side and to the comforting reassurance of his AK-47. “When I said, ‘Until death do us part,’ I didn’t mean day five,” I told Charlie. “The honeymoon’s a bit early to bump me off, don’t you think?”

  But my own death wasn’t my biggest fear. Charlie’s death was my biggest fear. He seemed to be such an irreplaceable impossibility, so exactly the unlikely and correct combination of person for me—someone who wasn’t a stranger to adventure, but yet who was not unpredictably, superfluously dangerous. For these reasons, it hadn’t seemed rash and foolhardy to have married him at twenty-three. On the contrary, it seemed as if not marrying Charlie would have been a rash and foolhardy decision. My marrying him would mean I’d be all right forever. He’d be all right too. And our children would have double doses of all-rightness.

  Plus, I was so in love I now understood the condition as a sickness. My physical self changed in Charlie’s presence: my heart flipped; blood surged; nerves strayed out of their protective sheaths and misfired. The sudden shock of coming into such sharp focus—the sheer, unlikely, extraordinary luck of being loved by this man—was wonderful, but it was also slightly confusing. The few other men I had been with had found my intensity off-putting, unseemly, alarming, but Charlie calmly, fearlessly turned toward it, as if warmed by the heat I threw off.

  Secretly, I couldn’t help suspecting our courtship and marriage had all been a laughable misunderstanding. Surely Charlie would find out what my family had been saying all along, that I was none of the things he believed me to be—passionate and witty and articulate. Instead he would discover for himself that I was difficult and noisy and unpredictable.
“Oh no,” Mum said. “I did warn him you were impossible. He can’t say I didn’t warn him.” She shook her head in the manner of a breeder who has pointed out the flaws of a filly, and managed to sell it anyway. “But that’s the lucky thing about Americans. They’re very susceptible to an accent.” She dusted her hands victoriously. “Isn’t it lucky we taught you how to enunciate properly?”

  CONTINENTAL DRIFT

  By the beginning of April 2010 in Wyoming, the earth’s orbit had tipped enough to allow the sun’s warmth to penetrate layers of tree bark and snow. Redwing blackbirds had returned to the willow bottoms along the river where I walked Dilly most days; our horses over in their field in Idaho had begun shedding their winter coats in salt-matted chunks; the snow was receding in a series of white high-tide marks from the south-facing wall of our house. Grape hyacinth and crocuses speared pioneering shoots out of the freshly thawed ground. Spring in the Rocky Mountains was a time of everything up and out and forward. Last month’s winter, with its blizzards and below-zero wind chills and torporing chickadees, was something that seemed to have happened to other people in another world.

  In late spring, I was scheduled to do a reading in Dallas where it was already ninety degrees. I flew south from Wyoming and talked about my Zimbabwean/Zambian childhood to Texans in a vigorously air-conditioned building filled with artifacts from Africa. It looked as if the closet of a continent had tipped into the place: Yoruba headdresses and Tuareg silver; Zulu beads and Ghanaian robes; Masai necklaces and Kuba cloth. The audience was well traveled, adventurously secure, university educated. They seemed to have formed strong opinions about Africa in the course of their studies and journeys. I had no such strength of opinion.

  What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything, but I’d lived in the States for sixteen years now. Plus, I didn’t look or sound the way most people imagine a Zimbabwean or a Zambian should look or sound. I had a Wyoming-winter complexion and my accent had morphed transatlantic. Also, there had been too many things of the sort I couldn’t have imagined or insured myself against—love and love’s loss, a wide and rising ocean, an unexpected attachment to the high plains of the Rocky Mountains—between my childhood and now to have left me with much of a sense of certainty about anything. “Do you consider yourself African?” someone asked during the Q and A, as someone almost always does.

  I thought about giving my usual accident-of-biology-and-geography answer. I thought about explaining that identity is fluid; it is not only the color of my skin, or my mother tongue, or where I was raised, or even a combination of all those things that makes me who I am, it’s more complicated than that. I thought about appropriating a line from ex–South African president Thabo Mbeki’s famous “I Am an African” speech: “I come from those . . . who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign.” But that seemed willfully naïve. Most Africans violently reject the label of foreign, and for good reason: not only are they usually several generations into a place, but it can also be unpleasant, even life-threatening, to be identified as (for example) Malawian in Zambia, Zimbabwean in South Africa, or British almost anywhere.

  I thought about explaining that, technically speaking, in terms of passports and birthrights, I had only ever been African in the loosest sense of the word and even then for only a fraction of my life. For a few years in the 1970s, we had become Rhodesians, but the Rhodesia of those days was a pariah nation, an illegal republic unrecognized by the rest of the world. The Rhodesia of my blue passport embossed with two rampant sable antelope was a country at war with itself, out of step with social progress, and at vehement odds with prevailing global attitudes toward civil rights, racial equality, and black African independence.

  And when my family could have become legitimate Africans, at the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980, my parents relinquished our claims to Zimbabwean passports and opted to revert British. Thereafter, we continued to live in southern Africa as expatriates; “Poms,” we were scornfully dubbed, as in “Prisoners of Mother England,” or “soutpiel,” as in one foot in Britain, one foot in southern Africa, and a salty penis in the sea between. And by the time Mum and Dad embraced the obvious fact that they could never be anything but Zambian, it turned out to be easier said than done.

  It took scores of visits to the immigration office, mountains of paperwork, and years of waiting for the correct authority to recover from malaria or to return from a funeral and then to find the correct rubber stamp for Mum and Dad to be granted permanent residency in Zambia. But by that time, I had long since married Charlie, moved to Wyoming, and sworn allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. The fact that I felt more at home in southern Africa than I did anywhere else on earth, and that I missed the countries of my youth with a physical ache, didn’t make me a legitimate citizen of Zimbabwe or Zambia any more than an amputee’s cruel sensation of a missing limb renders them whole again.

  Did I consider myself African? The truth is, I longed to say, “Yes,” as I had years ago. Even, defensively, “Of course, yes.” I longed to have an identity so solid, so obvious, and so unassailable that I, or anyone else, could dig all the way back into it for generations and generations and find nothing but more and further proof of the bedrock of my Africanness. I wanted to be like my fellow speaker. No one would have asked her if she considered herself African, because she looked and sounded exactly as anyone might imagine an African should. Although maybe, if challenged, she would have rejected the label of African, and instead insisted on her identity as Nigerian, or more specifically as Igbo, or less particularly as a citizen of the whole world, or more broadly as a feminist. Perhaps she would have said she was none of the above. But we would never know, because she wasn’t the one whose identity was in question.

  I said, “Not anymore. Not especially.”

  After the reading, I found my way up to the rooftop of my hotel and lay shoeless on a sun lounger until midnight. High, thin clouds were misted pink with city lights. Behind them, the stars were muted in a moonless sky (the moon—waning crescent—would be rising late). I knew without being able to see them that a few thousand feet up, there would be star-reading birds migrating north out of this heat toward our unrolling Wyoming mountain summer: owls, thrushes, orioles, sparrows. I knew that for some birds, migration is almost all they do, nonstop, hundreds of miles north, hundreds of miles south, back and forth, a ceaseless rustle of wings, years shaved off their wild lives with all the effort of near perpetual motion.

  Once, twenty-five years ago, camping near a waterfall on the Zambian border with Zaire, I had caught a glimpse of a distant flock of birds traveling at night against a full moon, fleeting black cut-out shapes, intent on destination. Often since then, I’ve searched the night sky, and although I have caught the brief twist of bats flitting through currents of insects, I have never again seen that nighttime miracle of birds, secretly stitching together south and north with their hunger, with their collective, insistent, mounting realization of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “I am an African,” I said aloud to myself now. It sounded ridiculous. To be honest, I had thought it sounded faintly ridiculous even when Thabo Mbeki had said it, like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster assessing Shakespeare: “Sounds well, but doesn’t mean anything.” I knew I would never apply the label of African to myself again, and not only because it wasn’t strictly correct (how can a person belong to a whole continent?), but also because it was something I would be called upon to defend endlessly. So, as long as the question continued to be asked, I would likely continue to respond as I had tonight: “Not anymore. Not especially.” And in any case, what life had taught me is that where we come from is a point—not the starting point, not the defining point—just a point. It’s where we are that really counts.

  MARRIAGE ADVICE FROM THE END OF THE WORLD

/>   The next day, I caught the plane back from Texas to Wyoming, and two weeks later, I fell ill. I lay in bed with a fever, the windows thrown open, our brown velvet curtains billowing in an early June breeze. The fever evolved into a cough. The cough evolved into something that became all I was. I coughed until I lost my voice. I coughed until I felt as if my ribs might disconnect from my spine. I coughed until I was the sum of my biology. By night, I sat with my back against the cool tile of the bathroom, hot water running into clouds of steam, and I coughed until I was winded. I grew exhausted. Charlie grew exhausted too. Not only from being up nights listening to me but also from some nameless, deeper, more worrying weariness.

  Then one late morning, in the middle of the illness—proving unseemly long—Charlie walked into our bedroom with his latest calculation of our finances and abruptly announced, “If something doesn’t happen soon we’re going to lose the house.” In my drained, mildly hallucinatory state, I pictured the house lifting off its foundation and splintering to pieces in the sky. I pictured Carl Fredricksen, the retired balloon salesman from the movie Up, flying our house to Paradise Falls (or, more likely, Idaho Falls, Sioux Falls, Twin Falls). I pictured us coming home from the children’s school one day and finding the house gone, the land reforested and wild-encroached.

  I contemplated Charlie’s profile, gray and shadowy in the darkened room. I wanted to ask him, “If you and I are not this house, then who are we?” But I said nothing partly because I didn’t have the spare breath, and partly because I knew neither of us had the answer to that question. Without the house, Charlie and I were undone from one another, uprooted and uncoupled. We had reached the point of speaking past one another, as if in a code intended for someone else entirely. And yet the idea of not belonging under the same roof was unthinkable to both of us.