Leaving Before the Rains Come Read online

  When my father spoke of his parents’ divorce, which he did rarely, and then only when it sounded as if I was contemplating the same thing, he would not use that word. Instead, he would say, “When the house broke apart.” And I knew what he meant. You hear about so-called good divorces, about amicable detachments, about houses morphing into two—holidays taken together, Christmas Days spent under one roof, children’s graduations attended en masse. But ours would not be that kind of uncoupling. We’d come together with too much passion to break apart gently. We’d tried separations before and the trauma of the near-catastrophic implications of what our divorce would be had always pulled us together again. Ours would be a house breaking apart and that is a monumental, irreversible event, as if a geological eruption has occurred. Survivors will be scattered to the four corners of the earth; they will have the shocked, wounded expressions of people who have endured an explosion. It will be terrible and biblical. “And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

  A few more days passed. Friends phoned to say they had dropped off soup and flowers for me at the bottom of the stairs. Mum sent a care package of Epsom salts and aspirin from Zambia. Vanessa sent an e-mail that read like a fractured hallucinogenic neon sign pulsing over a midnight diner: “Hi Al, are you DYING? Mum says you’re ‘dying.’ Do you have the BLACK plague? Leave me something juicy in YOUR WILL . . . ‘Only joking.’ Love you lots and lots, so please don’t peg it. Xxxxxx Van.” The kids pushed get-well notes under the door and shouted requests; could they eat this, play that, go there? Charlie ebbed in and out of the room, anxious and depressed. I felt restless with worry too, but helpless to do much about it.

  My eyes, bloodshot with coughing, were too sore for reading or writing. The radio—hours of indifferent contemporary music and repeating loops of news for much of the day—only added to my sense of shiftlessness. Eventually, as much to reassure myself out of my unproductivity as anything else, I went up into my office and found my old tape recorder and the stack of tapes of the dozens of interviews I had done with my parents over the years. I brought the tape recorder down to our bed and put it on the pillow next to my head.

  I had made the tapes in part because I had wanted some concrete way to reach back home; a way to tell my U.S.-raised children, “These are the other people you came from. Here are their stories. Here is how they sound.” But I had never played the tapes for any of our three children because it turns out real children don’t tend to work the way we imagine they might, as little vessels into which we can decant our own reconstituted pasts. In my experience, young children exist almost forcibly in the present; they have scant interest in their heritage. They little care if their ancestral histories are erased, or if the graves of their forebears and relatives have been untraceably overrun. To begin with, it’s we who care and we try to make our children care too; we remind them to hold on to the idea we have created of ourselves; we tell them to remember where they come from. We are the ones who say, “This is your special identity.” And by extension there is the implicit instruction, “Become violently attached to it.”

  Listening to the tapes now, I was struck by my younger voice asking the questions, the accent still purely colonial English so that it’s almost indistinguishable from Mum’s and certainly nothing like the accent I now have. I was struck too by how impatiently I spoke, how quickly I filled any silence, how little I appeared to be listening to my parents’ answers. Not for the first time in my life, I wished I had spoken less and heard more. It had taken this illness—my own loss of voice, a mild fever, forced seclusion—for the quality of my listening to begin to change.

  Mum’s voice was firmer than Dad’s. She painted life gilded, she skipped over the difficult bits, and she put a positive spin on Rhodesia’s long and bloody civil war (“Best years of my life!”). She repeated her favorite stories over and over like church, and I think for the same reason: the more often you say something, the more likely it is to affirm itself, to become an accepted truth and to evolve into a communal memory. She was an upholder of myth, a creator of burnished image, a best-foot forwarder. “I know most people remember most vividly the horrible gruesome tragic bits of their lives,” she said. “But I don’t see things that way.”

  When Dad spoke, he said everything only once, and then quite clearly, which is the only way I have known him. “Those who talk the most, usually have the least to say,” he said when I complained about the long silences he was leaving on my tapes. Perhaps it’s his native British reticence, combined with years of war and common-or-garden trauma plus a few seriously uncommon tragedies that pared down his utterances to only the essentials. When he was not much younger than I am now, and we were living on a drought-prone farm in eastern Rhodesia, the workers gave my father the nickname “Boss Fuck-Off.” With retrospect, I can see how intonation and context could render that phrase uniformly useful to a tobacco farmer of English origin turned reluctant, conscripted Rhodesian soldier.

  But although Dad has a definite sense of delivery, he doesn’t have Mum’s definite sense of belonging. In fact, his most determining act seems to have been an early decision to go against generations of military tradition on his father’s side of the family and not join the British navy. Unlike my mother, who has long defined herself as belonging to Africa, my father is defined not by place but by an unbelonging to anywhere. My father eschewed both the nation and the much-flaunted naval tradition of his British forefathers, it was the earth—any earth, as long as it was far from the madding crowd—that suited him.

  “No, the sea wasn’t really my strong suite,” Dad admitted. And it is true I have seen him swimming in it only once, and then only reluctantly. Goaded by the rest of us on a rare vacation to the seaside, he finally agreed to paddle out with exaggerated laboriousness from the beach a little way, before splashing uneasily back to shore. He looked hapless and incompetent enough that some German tourists appeared seriously to be considering a rescue. “Bloody wet,” Dad said, toweling himself dry with the urgent vigor of someone emerging from hours among deep ice floes rather than a brief warm tropical bath. “And some bastard’s overseasoned it with salt.”

  As a little boy, Dad was occasionally dressed up in sailor suits that he loathed, the way most children hate the smart clothes imposed on them by their elders. He remembers posh regimental dinners, hours of dreaded stuffy nonsense and kowtowing. Once, when he was old enough to have such inspirations but not yet old enough to fully think through the consequences of his actions, he had the idea of putting an exploding cigar in the humidor to liven up the dreariness of after-dinner port. The effect on the nerves of elderly shell-shocked naval officers turned out to be spectacularly rewarding. “I really got bollocked for that one,” Dad said. “But it was worth it.”

  A few times his father took Dad out on a ship, and although the enormous, imposing battle-readiness of the thing was impressive, Dad doesn’t remember feeling a thrill of wanting to be a part of it. “All that discipline,” he confesses on the tapes. “Bit awkward with someone of my temperament.” So, in Dad’s telling, he fled England (“An aunt and half a dozen cousins in every county”) for a farm-laborer job in Canada, found it cold and alcoholically dry; tried a stint in the West Indies, where he stayed until his bar bill exceeded his salary; went to Kenya to see a giraffe and met my mother. And she, fresh from the confines of dreary finishing school in London (“Tweedy lesbians and boiled cabbage,” she says), was ready for the sort of adventure he promised. “Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode,” he introduced himself. Which would have rung out as a warning to anyone else, but manifested as a mating cry to Mum.

  Ten years into my own marriage, when it was becoming clear that Charlie had receded from me, or that I had flowed out beyond his reach, maybe irrevocably, I asked Mum if she had any advice about being married, or (more to the point) staying married. I was home on the farm from the States, it was early morning and we were a little hungover, inspect
ing the fishponds before the heat of the day could really pick up. The dogs, as usual, were spilling all around us, scaring up pigeons and grasshoppers.

  Mum frowned at me and, thinking she hadn’t heard, I repeated the question. “No, no, no, I heard you perfectly well the first time,” she said. She dusted flies away from her ears. “Oh Bobo, I don’t know. Marry the right chap to begin with, I suppose.” And then she whistled for the dogs and marched on ahead. It occurred to me then that Mum had probably never thought of herself as married. She just sailed on with life as she saw fit, and Dad, smitten with her, more or less steered from the stern, occasionally shouting (usually unheeded) words of warning.

  By all logic and by any standards, my parents should have spun away from one another years ago. Together they had lost three children, a war, a few farms, and for a while my mother had seriously lost her mind. And yet they incorporated these losses into their marriage along with what they had gained, assigning very little in the way of either blame or praise almost anywhere. They put no more weight on despair than they did on joy. The way they did love was also the way they did tragedy, as if it was all an inevitable part of the gift of being alive. It was rare for my parents to make a production out of their tragedies unless sometimes, drunk, the past eddied out in Mum’s mind and she was caught in the circulation of her old grief for a day or a week or a season until the sorrow passed.

  “I was just bloody lucky to find your mother,” my father told me after breakfast when I asked him the same question. “No one else would have put up with me.” He thumbed some tobacco into his pipe and tapped it down. “Anyway, we’ve always given each other heaps of room.” Then he added, as if this mattered more than anything, “Whole bloody acres of room.” He clamped his pipe between his teeth and lit it. “Yep, that’s it. Acres and acres of room.” Dad set his cards out for a game of solitaire. “Now,” he said. “Let’s see what sort of day we’re going to have.” By Dad’s questionable reckoning, if his game came out, the day would be good. If it didn’t come out, Dad cheated and the day would still be good. “Win-win,” he said.

  I watched Dad’s hands hovering over his old cards, sticky with spilled tea and dog hair. I remained confused: Charlie and I seemed to have nothing but acres of room between us, and my parents, who had the kind of marriage to which I thought it worth aspiring, had none. They had lived, worked, and played together for the better part of forty years. Their tastes have cleaved and overlapped; they share bathwater, silently conceding that the grubbiest person goes last; they sleep under the claustrophobic confines of a single mosquito net. I said, “That’s absolute rubbish, Dad. You give each other no room whatsoever.”

  Dad looked up at me, his eyes crinkled against pipe smoke, eyebrows raised as if I had said something of surprising stupidity. He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Ah, yes, but it’s all in the head, Bobo. All in the head.”

  I had a glimmering of understanding then. No, my parents are not two solitudes, as Rainer Maria Rilke would have had it, protecting, touching, and greeting one another. To the contrary, they are indistinguishable from one another, inseparably connected; they have become a single recognizable culture with its own food, its own scents, and its own private language. Even the way they have annoyed one another over the years has become part of their shared culture, the way mosquitoes are a difficult but inevitable part of the Zambezi valley, or rain has become a standard joke in Scotland. Over time, they have learned to make their foibles part of the ties that bind them, their love is everything about them—not only the passion and humor and resilience, but also the aggravating habits, the quirks, the flaws.

  When they were younger, Mum’s excessive love of plastic bags made for one of those plaguing marital recurring arguments that are always about more than the subject at hand. As if terrified that they would run out in her lifetime, Mum collected bags, washed them, reused them, washed them and reused them again until eventually they disintegrated into little plastic dust atoms. Until then, like neurotically beloved pets, they came with her everywhere. “Just in case,” she said.

  Dad, more worried about broken-down lorries and armed bandits in the forest than he was about a dearth of petrochemical packaging, grew increasingly impatient. “Nicola, I am leaving now,” he would suddenly declare, as if an invisible starting flag had been dropped. “We need to get back before dark.” Then he roared off in the pickup while Mum still had only one leg in the car. Meanwhile, plastic bags were strewn like wind-buffeted reprimands all over the driveway. “And my poor limbs ripped off at the knee, arms severed at the elbow,” Mum remembers.

  Now, though, Dad sits behind the steering wheel calmly smoking his pipe while Mum has a last, protracted faff in the house. “She’s getting together all her plastic bags, the bane of my existence,” Dad says cheerfully. “Just you watch, she’ll have about five hundred of them and she’ll rifle through them all the way to Lusaka.”

  At last Mum emerges from the house and gets into the car clutching her treasured cache. Dad waits for her to swat the dogs away from the car. “Don’t run over the terrorists,” she says. “Go on, Harry. Off you go, Sprocket.” Then she shuts the door and after that there’s the lengthy performance of the seat belt. Finally she’s ready, and she flashes Dad a victorious smile and a thumbs-up, like a Formula One racer leaving the pit.

  “Got all your plastic bags, Tub?” Dad asks.

  “Yup,” Mum says. And after that for a hundred or more happy miles, Dad drives and Mum rustles around making small, satisfying discoveries—“Ooh look, I found my copper bracelet. I knew I had put it somewhere safe,” or “Ah, there’s my receipt for the fingerlings, Tim. See? It had to show up somewhere”—until we reach the Munda Wanga Botanical Gardens on the outskirts of Lusaka where there’s always a chance the caged lions will be eyeing a bunch of children on their school outing. As soon as she catches sight of the huge trees that line the gardens’ walls, Mum’s attention is diverted from her plastic bags and is riveted instead on the enclosure. “Oh, no schoolchildren today,” she says, disappointed.

  “Mum can’t wait to see a schoolchild being eaten by a lion,” Dad says.

  “I’VE TOLD BOBO THAT A HUNDRED TIMES ALREADY,” Mum shouts. Then she turns back to me. “It’s like living with a sheep,” she says. “Every day’s a fresh day for Dad.”

  SIGNAL FLAGS

  By early July, I had been treated for swine flu, tested for pneumonia, and had subjected my lung meridian to acupuncture needles, but still my illness would not abate. A friend brought me flowers, soup, and bottles of eucalyptus oil. Then she sat on the end of the bed and watched me cough. “This won’t do,” she said at last, and had me phone a doctor who specialized in tropical diseases. He made a house call, listened to me for a few minutes, and diagnosed me with whooping cough. He prescribed steroids for me, and prophylactic antibiotics for the rest of the family. Even after I felt well, he cautioned that I should probably stay out of circulation for a while. Whooping cough, he warned, is very contagious.

  I thought of a ship in harbor flying the international maritime signal flag Lima, also known as the Yellow Jack. It meant, “This ship is quarantined.” I liked the word, quarantine, and all the protective cover it implied. I liked too the idea of signal flags. In a crisis of the sort that unlanguages a person, when there is no longer any possibility of intimate and complex communication, there is still the simple, dread symbol of two yellow squares juxtaposed with two black squares: “You should stop your vessel instantly.”

  After a few days, the fever subsided. I stopped coughing. Spinning from the steroids, I woke before dawn and started tidying the yard of its winter debris. “Sweat equity,” Charlie called it, a phrase I hated for the way it took the joy out of labor, but one that had nonetheless stuck in my mind, reemerging every time I swept the driveway, weeded the flowerbeds, raked the lawn. After that, I went up to my office. Beginning that afternoon, and in the weeks that followed, I did t
he seventh draft of a frustratingly out-of-reach screenplay. I wrote eighty pages of a new book. I reviewed a couple of novels for newspapers, I accepted a magazine assignment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for the following summer. I worked and worked as if so doing could tether our house to the earth; Charlie to me; our family to itself.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said. “Won’t it?” But Charlie’s anxiety swelled and began to fill the room. Although he went into the office every day, and stayed there all nine or ten hours and sometimes late into the night, his real estate business was dead; there was nothing left now but the phantom labor of shuffling papers from one side of his desk to the other. The edges of other people’s panic leaked into our lives. Charlie talked about clients who had lost their jobs, their homes, their savings. Then he said we would have to put our own house on the market and move into something smaller, downsize. “We’re going to have to tighten our belts,” he said. “Batten down the hatches. Save every penny we can.” At night our sighs and exhaustion left our mouths and settled over our bodies; a cloud of unmet expectations, a threatening storm of broken promises, a low pressure system of the unsaid.

  I thought of how it isn’t impossible, but it’s overwhelmingly daunting and perhaps even pointless to construct a viable future from an imperfect past. I thought of Charlie and me confined again to a little cottage; his brooding silence, my reactive chatter. It was too late. Fifteen years ago, I would have moved into a teepee or a hut or a tent with him. But we’d killed the very possibility of small air between us. We were a broken working relationship. Dread played a long, low note in my chest. We couldn’t move into something smaller. If we were going to stay together, we needed a wing each, adjoining cottages with a drawbridge, two houses divided by state lines. We needed the kind of extraordinary space ordinary people could never afford.