Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (23 page)

I am aware suddenly of watching my manners, of my filthy, oil-stained, and dust-covered skirt, of my dirty hands. I turn my dirty fingernails into the palm of my hands and duck out of the heat into the soft, dark, old-smoke-smelling hut. I blink for a few moments in the sudden dim light until shapes swim out of the grayness and form into four small stools crouched around a black pot on a ring of stones. The floor is fine dust, infinitely swept into pale powder. The father is pointing to a stool.
“Khalani pansi,”
he says. “Please, sit here.”

I sit on the small smoothly worn stool, my knees drawn up above my hips.

The father crouches at the far end of the hut and shouts an order, throwing his voice beyond me and into the hot afternoon; he is half-balancing, half-supporting, the retarded boy on his knee, an elbow crooked to catch the youth’s head if it should suddenly lurch back. The boy appears to be grasping at the hanging silver particles of dust that jostle in the fine swords of sunlight slicing through the thinning gray thatch of the hut. The mother leans over the fire. She bends at the waist, gracious and limber. Her baby is suckling at an exposed breast. The woman pounds at the pot on the stones where hot nshima is bubbling and steaming, letting out burps of hot breath as it cooks. A smaller pot is emitting fiery gasps of greasy fish.

A girl child comes into the hut, tottering under the sloshing weight of the basin of water that she balances, clearly straining, on her head. She stops when she sees me and looks likely to drop her burden and run.

The father laughs and points to me.

The girl hesitates. The father encourages.

The girl lowers the basin from her head and holds it in front of me. I see that I am to wash my hands. I rinse my hands in the water, shake the drops at my feet and smile at the little girl, but still she stands there, the muscles in her thin, knobbly arms jumping under the pressure. Water and sweat have mixed on her face. Large drops quake on her eyebrow and threaten to spill at any moment.

“Thank you.” I smile again.

The whole family is watching me.
“Zikomo kwambiri,”
I try, smiling in general at everyone, for lack of knowing what else to do. The smell of the food and the heat it is giving off while cooking make me sweat. I point at the little girl. “Your daughter, too?”

The father beams and nods.

“How old?”

He tells me.

The mother hands me a plate (enameled but rusted on the edges). She spoons food.

“Thanks,” I say when the plate is just covered, making a gesture of sufficiency, half-ducking the plate out of reach.

Her large spoon hovers between her pot and my plate.

“No, really,” I say, “I had a late breakfast.”

The mother glances at her husband. He nods, barely, and she lets her spoon drop back into the pot. Carefully she covers the leftover food.

“Isn’t anyone else going to eat?”

The father shakes his head. “No, please . . . Thank you.”

The nshima is surrounded by a gray sea of barbel and oil. “This smells very good.”

Schoolboy

The children are watching me hungrily. The disabled youth has stopped patting dust fairies and is staring at me. A trembling, nervous cord of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth to his chin. The toddler has started to cry, weakly, plaintively, like a small goat. The mother absently pats the boy, nurses the baby, rocks and rocks, staring at me. The father swallows. “Eat,” he says. He sounds desperate. I sense that it is only through the greatest exertion of will that my spectators don’t fall on the food on my plate in a frenzy of hunger.

“It looks delicious.”

I make a ball of nshima with the fingers of my right hand, the way I had been taught to do as a small child by my nannies. I insert my thumb into the ball, deep enough to make a dent in the dense hot yellow porridge. Onto the dent, as if onto a spoon, I scoop up a mouthful of the fish stew.

Almost before my mouth can close around the food, the young girl (who has not left my side and whose arms still strain at the ends of the bowl) offers me the water and I see that I must wash my hands again. I am conscious of the little girl’s breath-catching effort to hold the basin, and of the groaning, sometimes audible hunger pangs that ripple through the hut. The food, which is sharp and oily in my mouth, has been eagerly anticipated by everyone except for me. I know that I am eating part of a meal intended for (I glance up) five bellies.

There are bones in the fish, which I try to maneuver around to the front of my mouth. I spit the bones into my hand and carefully wipe them on the side of the plate. I stare at the food. A fish eye stares balefully back at me from the oily pool of gravy. I have a long meal ahead of me.

It is mid-afternoon by the time I wash my hands for a final time and swim backward out of the hut, back into the mellowing heat of a yellowing afternoon, where light from the sun is sucked up and diffused by so many smoking fires over which fish are drying near the edge of Lake Chilwa. I pat my heart and bend one knee behind the other, lowering my eyes. “Thank you very much,” I say,
“Zikomo kwambiri. Zikomo, zikomo.”

The family watch as I kick the motorbike into life. I wave, and slowly drive away up the avenue of tenants’ houses, which no longer feel like an anonymous, homogenous row of grass-fronted, mud-stiff huts.

That evening I return to the hut with a good proportion of my already meager closet. I have plastic grocery bags hanging from the handlebars of my motorbike in which I have put shorts, T-shirts, skirts, a dress, one pair of shoes (worn through at the toe), and some outgrown toys and books. Mum has stopped me from taking towels and blankets. “We barely have enough for ourselves,” she told me. But our faux-Spanish house, with its stucco walls and its long, cool stretches of linoleum and its vast veranda and its spacious garden, seems, suddenly, exhaustingly, too much.

Mum shakes her head. She says, “I know, Bobo.”

“But it’s so awful.”

“It won’t go away.” She is watching me stuff plastic bags with clothes. “You can’t make it go away.”

I sniff.

“It was there before you noticed it.”

“I know, but . . .”

She gets up with a sigh, dusts her knees. She says, “And it will be there after you leave.”

“I know, but . . .”

Mum pauses at the door. “And bring back my plastic bags, we’re always short of those,” she says.

At the hut, I feel suddenly self-conscious, aware of all the curious, maybe suspicious, eyes on me from all the other huts up and down the road. Children abandon their games and cluster around me. All are in worn-through clothes; most are swollen-bellied. I hand over the plastic bags to the mother of the child I had crashed into earlier and I say, “Here.”

She looks at the bags uncomprehendingly.

“For you,” I insist.

She looks embarrassed. “Thank you.” She holds the bags against the round lump of sleeping baby in the hammock at her breast.
“Zikomo, zikomo.”

I back away into the crowd of children who are now bouncing and clamoring around the motorbike: “Miss Bob, Miss Bob, what have you brought for me?”

When I drive away, the children run after me as long as they can keep up, shouting, “Miss Bob! Miss Bob! What have you brought for
me
?”

Bobo—Cape Maclear

THE GOAT SHED

The T-shirts we buy at the small white hotel overlooking the beach on Lake Malawi or at the small kiosk at the airport declare, malawi—the warm heart of africa.

We call it the Warm Fart of Africa, hee, hee.

Dad’s face erupts in boils. Mum begins to grow thick wings of gray at her temples. I become white-gilled and lethargic until Mum diagnoses anemia and feeds me liver and chopped rape. For the first time, we are all regularly malarial. Vanessa has to be hospitalized, she becomes so ill, yellow, thin, weak, fevered. In the two years we live in Malawi, all three of our dogs die. The new Rhodesian ridgeback contracts a deadly venereal disease; the spaniel contracts fatal tick fever, which turns her gums and eyeballs yellow and then kills her; ancient, faithful Shea spouts foul-smelling lumps, her ears bleed yellow pus, she scratches and whines until we shave her coat in sympathy. And then she dies in her sleep.

We feel more dangerously, teeteringly close to disease and death (in a slow, rotting, swamp-induced fashion) than we did during the war in Rhodesia where there was a zinging, adrenaline-filled, anything-goes freedom and where we were surrounded by violent, quick mutilation and a sudden, definitive end. Which now seems preferable to death by swamp rot. Death by spies. Death by lack of social contact.

In Malawi we frequently see children bent backward, as easily and rigidly as twisted paper clips, with cerebral malaria, from which, if they emerge alive, they will rarely recover completely. And here we see the effects of malnutrition and the effects of overcrowded, unsanitary shantytowns and overfilled garbage dumps and we see thin, ribby, curly-tailed dogs digging on heaps of decomposing rubbish on which children play and pick and shit.

Our nearest white neighbors are a German couple who have come out to Africa as aid workers. They are our first experience of foreigners in Africa who are here for that purpose; until now, in Rhodesia, we had seen foreigners only as missionaries or mercenaries.

Dad says, “At least death by mercenary is quicker.”

“Than what?”

“Death by aid.”

But we are desperate enough for company to visit the Germans.

“Perhaps they drink beer,” says Mum hopefully.

Dad lights a cigarette. “Maybe they cure sausages.”

I have only ever heard of Germans in the context of the Second World War.

I say, “I hope they don’t have a gas oven. Hee hee.”

Mum says, “Bobo!”

“Okay, okay.”

“Don’t mention the war,” says Dad.

“Ve have vays and means of making you talk.”

We start to giggle, hiccuping our hilarity.

But we find, to our surprise, that we are very fond of the Hartmans. Barbara does not wear makeup, she does not shave, and she smells naturally (in a pleasant way) of her own very clean body: a salty, oniony, cooking-bread smell that reminds me of the homely, breast-milk scent of my old nannies. Gerald is keen on saving the environment, which, until then, I had not noticed needed saving. I had been more concerned with staying alive myself.

Gerald lends me books. He is patient, gentle, intelligent, passionate, methodical. I fall in love with his hard accent, the way his words cut so efficiently through the sickly, sticky heat. I listen to the stories he weaves of the living planet around us. “We are minute,” he tells me. “We are grains of sand on the beach of time. We are not important. There was a time when the planet was without people and, especially with the way we are going, there will sooner or later be a time when again we are gone from this earth.”

I declare my adolescent difference from my family as a passionate environmentalist, and if I had a choice I’d wear baggy, tie-dyed clothes like Barbara’ s. Except I don’t have a choice. I have to wear what clothes we can find at the secondhand market and castoffs from Vanessa (which I supplement with scarves and wooden beads). I consider taking up vegetarianism, briefly.

But mostly we are white and alone, an isolated island in a pressing, restless, relentless sea of Malawians whose lives continue on the periphery of ours in a seeming miracle of survival. At night, by the throb of the generator that gives us a few hours of electric light, we scramble for the tape recorder, on which we now play a recently extended collection of music (Bizet, Puccini, Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, to augment our old standards Roger Whittaker and the
1812
—Mum is trying to expose us to all the usual suspects in a glut of “Best of” tapes purchased from the budget bins at classical music stores in England). And we drink Carlsberg lager into the mosquito-humming night which is so dense with humidity we feel as if we might absorb water through our skins, as sheep are said to do.

We play fierce games of poker, Dad, Vanessa, and I. We have no money, so we use Dad’s matches as chips. We play for “If you lose you have to get the next round of beer,” which means asking Mum to hand a beer around to all of us. We play for “If you lose you have to light the next round of mosquito coils,” which burn fragrantly, like incense, at our ankles and are supposed to ward off mosquitoes although every morning our legs are polka-dotted with bites. We play for “If you lose you have to bring me a tray of tea whenever I ask for it for the next week,” which is an idle threat because we have a houseboy (who arrived one morning announcing he was here to help Doud in the kitchen) to fetch us tea.

The new houseboy scuffles idly at the door of the back kitchen, where Doud is making up the massive pot of nshima that will feed the dogs, cats, chickens. A pungent, oily soup of bones, fish heads, green cuttings, and leftovers bubbles on the woodstove.

Mum says, “Yes?” and glares.

“I have orders,” he announces.

“Orders for what?”

“I have orders to work here.”

“No, you don’t.” Mum turns her back on the man and shows Doud a recipe in her well-fingered, brown-spattered
Good Housekeeping Cookbook.

“But I have orders.”

Mum heaves a deep, irritated sigh and turns back to the man on the doorstep. “From whom?”

The new houseboy looks sullen. He shrugs his shoulders impatiently under the new crisp cut of his khaki uniform (not issued by Mum).

“It is required that I am hired.”

“Well, I unrequire you,” declares Mum.

But the next day the new houseboy arrives again (late, after we have eaten breakfast) for work and skulks around the house until Mum screams at him.

“You can’t fire me,” he says.

“I didn’t hire you to begin with.”

The new servant lets this settle for a moment before declaring, “This is not Rhodesia.”

“I know it’s not bloody Rhodesia.”

But he stays. And at the end of the month he is paid along with Doud, the gardener, the watchman, and the driver who make up the household staff. And Mum says, “I suppose it’s just as well. We need someone for Fridays,” which is Doud’s day at the mosque.

The new houseboy is caught reading our mail, looking through our drawers, rifling in the suitcases under our beds, but whenever we threaten to fire him, he only bares his teeth and tells us, “You can’t.” And it gradually dawns on us that this little man with the hostile breath and furtive tackies (squeaking sneakily from room to room) is an official employee of the government, sent to spy on us. Thus employed, he is an indifferent houseboy.

When we ask him to fetch us a tray of tea it arrives lukewarm, tea leaves floating damply in the top of the pot, with unmatched cups, and we only glance at one another and obediently drink the inferior brew. He irons wrinkles and scorched, burnt-brown stains into the clothes (he overfills the charcoal iron so that hot coals spill from its lid). He overcooks the supper (meat appears dried and flaking next to shriveled vegetables and parched rice). Even the dogs hunch their backs at him and slink wearily from his feet.

All day we must leave unspoken any thoughts that might be taken as negative with regard to the country: the country’s government, the country’s leader, the country’s roads, the country’s climate, the country’s population. But at night, with the hum of the generator throbbing light into the compound (where the Spy lives with a sad-looking young wife and a fat child always embalmed in pink wool), Mum sits yoga-cross-legged on the chair next to the beer (as if guarding it), and shouts of the conspiracy against us. She hates the Spy. She hates the breath-sucking crush of bodies around us. She hates the censorship that interrupts our mail, our phone calls, our reading, our boxes of South African crackers.

Dad smokes quietly. He looks at me over the top of his cards. He says, “You’re feeling brave.”

I’ve put down four matches on the strength of my hand. I struggle, unsuccessfully, for a poker face.

Mum’s waving a finger in the air. “Corrupt! Every last one of them. What a bloody country.”

“Don’t cheat,” says Vanessa.

“I’m not.”

“You’re trying to look at Dad’s cards.”

“Am not.”

“They can send their little spies . . .” says Mum.

“You are, I saw you,” says Vanessa, kicking me under the table.

“I am not.
Owie,
man. Hey, Vanessa kicked me.”

“It was an accident.”

“Liar.”

Dad squashes out a cigarette. “Hey, cut it out, you two. No fighting.”

“But they can’t change the way I think,” says Mum.

Dad smiles. “Now I have you girls by the short and curlies. A pair of kings, a pair of queens, and three eights.”

“
Jeez,
Dad.”

“You know the little creep is lying to them about you.”

“I’ll have another beer, please Mum.”

“What little creep?”

“That little spy of a houseboy. He’s reporting everything we do to the government.”

“Can I have a beer, too, please Mum?”

“You need to watch their every move, Tim, I’m telling you.”

Van—Cape Maclear

Dad lights a cigarette and grunts.

“My God, if we don’t get off this bloody farm, we’re going to rot.”

Mum scratches her ankles absently. They have begun to bleed from bites on bites on bites.

Near the southern tip of Lake Malawi is a bay confusingly called a cape. Cape Maclear is tucked into hills and accessible only by a long, thin, terrible road. It is protected on each side by wings of rising rocks and in front by a thin string of uninhabited islands, which are wild and secret and guarded by monitor lizards who lie sunbathing on black rocks. The bay is habitually unruffled and its waters miraculously free of those traditional drawbacks to African swimming—bilharzia and crocodiles—although the occasional hippo has been known to stray up onto the beach.

The beach is two miles long. Black, powdery sand near the water leads to sugar-coarse dunes. Sitting on the beach, we can smell the bittersweet pungency of the rising camp settlements behind us. Periodic rain flushes debris and litter down from the shanties onto the beach and into the water.

It is here that the expatriates congregate on the weekends to drink.

“Expats like us,” says Mum. By which she means, not missionaries or aid workers, “with whom one doesn’t want to drink anyway.”

We find a small patch of land among the other parcels on the edge of the lake where the expats-like-us camp in shacks or tents during the school holidays and on weekends. This is where generators throb all night to keep beer cold and milk fresh and where the beer drinking begins at breakfast, when there is a fatty, salty hum of bacon and eggs coming from each blue-smoked fire and where the crackle of radios or the
bah-bum-bah-bum
of kids’ pop music (turn-that-bloody-racket-down) wakes us from our hot, beer-heavy sleep.

Eventually, the morning sun beats us out from under our mosquito nets in search of tea and we join the other pink-shouldered soldiers blearily trudging to the refreshing lap-lap of the sweet blue bay. We swim out to the rocks and back, and then run back to our camp (over already foot-searing hot sand) for goggles and snorkels, cigarettes, towels, books. The day becomes seamless and sunlit, its passage marked only by the diminishing supply of beer in various generator-run fridges and by the peripheral activities of the local fishermen (who leave at dawn in their dugout canoes and return at dusk).