“Okay,” I said to Vanessa, putting out my cigarette. “But if we do split up, can you at least be neutral this time? You know, impartial. Like Switzerland.” Ten years ago, Charlie and I had separated for a six-month trial period, and while Dad and Richard had stayed tight-lipped, Mum and Vanessa had supported me by taking Charlie’s side, agreeing with him and with each other that he was far too good for me. It was their way, I understood later, of trying to keep the seas calm until I righted myself, came to my senses, and stayed safe and married. Vanessa spent hours on the phone from Zambia, consoling him. Mum came over to help me move out of the house, but ended up acting like emergency services, stabilizing things until someone who really knew what they were doing came on the scene. “I had such a nice lunch with Charlie today,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “Are you sure this isn’t just you being difficult?”
“I think this might be you,” Vanessa said now, and there were tears starting in the corners of her eyes. And she said again, in case I had missed it all the other times, “He’s too good for you, anyway.” She sounded angry, bordering on scarily furious, but I knew from long experience that her anger came from somewhere old and not her fault, a defense mechanism with its fuse blown to hell. Me about to hurt myself, or about to get hurt, made Vanessa turn irrationally hostile, because protection and hostility had landed on the same place in her psyche. “Oh Al, I have this recurring nightmare,” she told me recently. “We’re being mortared and I can’t get all the kids under the bed. Because that was always my job, right? I mean if we were getting bombed or whatever, I was supposed to get you all under the bed.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh Al, me too,” Vanessa said.
Then there was a long silence filled with all the things we knew, but could not say.
“It was confusing,” I said at last.
It wasn’t just the war and all the casual ways in which a sibling might die in southern Africa that melded the place between love and anger in both of us. It was also the ways some men used the cover of ubiquitous violence to turn into casual violators of anyone weaker than themselves. Perhaps the mechanism that allowed ordinary citizens to become killers also broke other basic codes of civil behavior. Or maybe there was something about the power of having a gun, and seeing behavior bend like gravity or magnetism at the end of its barrel, that turned our protectors into predators. Or maybe war and oppression and injustice had stolen the innocence of those men, and it made them want to torment the innocence out of the whole world around them.
Time and again, Vanessa stood between me and that peculiar version of friendly fire, between me and the men we had been told were fighting for our lives, our freedom, our precious white skin. “Don’t touch my sister!” she said, uncharacteristically loud and speaking out. Then, too often, she stood in the path of whatever was coming my way, not willingly, but with the flustered alarm of someone saving a life not her own, human-shielding me from that common, blundering, opportunistic ungodliness.
I suppose we were both more confused than hurt that at least some adults in our midst had not protected us better from those too-large, insistent hands; the wet, alcohol-smelling mouths; the bodies too big and heavy pressed against ours. At the time Vanessa and I didn’t have the vocabulary for what happened, since not only were our mouths too small for the necessary words, but also such things are taboo and unspoken and unspeakable. And anyway, it was so common, and could something so common be so bad? Didn’t it happen to almost every little girl? The awful, silencing fingers? The touch not brushed away? Crafty molestation disguised as avuncular affection?
Decades afterward, Mum said, “But we didn’t know it was going on. We were so naïve and trusting.” Which, by the way, are the other two things that this sort of casual abuse destroys in children, naïveté and trust. They lose too their sweetness and exchange it with unstable personal boundaries and irrational rage, unbecoming in a girl, unacceptable in a woman.
In the years that followed, Vanessa put her anger under a thin, beautiful veneer of calm, while I put mine, tempered with humor to make it more palatable, on the page. “I wish you wouldn’t,” Vanessa implored. But I didn’t want to be her, keeping every broken thing inside. I wanted to break everything around me, especially the walls that had hidden what had happened to us. My noise wasn’t a cure for what had happened, I knew that, nor would it be a preventative for what would happen in the future—the one in three women and girls in the world whose deepest, most private power would be forever stolen—but my silence wouldn’t serve any purpose either. “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless,’” Arundhati Roy has said. “There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
Then Vanessa and I had both married men who looked like protectors; she, a soldier from our war, and I, a man who had stood up to the mock charge of an angry she-elephant. But it was unfair and unrealistic to expect we were completely salvageable. Neither of those men could protect us when we had both most needed it, twenty years earlier in some dark corridor on the way to the neighbor’s lavatory, or in the spare bedroom of someone else’s unfamiliar house. Which was why Vanessa’s second marriage made so much sense to me. Richard had been raised in Malaysia and educated in English boarding schools; he was similar enough to us to know who we were without ever having been complicit in the ways in which violence slopped over and down through our collective memory to make us who we were now. For that, for his straightforwardness, for his gruff humor, for his irrational generosity, I adored him.
“Oh good heavens, have another glass of wine,” Vanessa said, and sloshed more into my glass with a couple of ice cubes.
Then Richard came out onto the veranda and poured himself a drink. “All right, Sweetie?” Vanessa asked.
Richard nodded. “Yep.” He talks so seldom and with such seeming reluctance, it’s as if he’s had to chisel his words from granite. A few years ago, visiting Mum and Dad on the farm, he came back from a morning’s fishing on the Zambezi looking a little pale. “Hippo,” he explained. “Chomped the boat.” So the family trooped down to the riverbank to inspect the damage. The whole front of the boat had been spectacularly torn away, the hippo’s teeth slicing easily through fiberglass.
“With you in it?” Vanessa wanted to know.
“Yep,” Richard said.
“Did you see God, angels, and whatnot?” Vanessa asked. She likes to read books and magazine articles by people who have had near-death experiences, and who write subsequent moving accounts of the heaven they found beyond earth. She’s always looking for proof of a peaceful, better life after this one. She wants to know there are shafts of sunlight and soft clouds like an illustration out of our Enid Blyton book of Children’s Bible stories. “Did your life flash in front of your eyes?”
“Nope.”
Vanessa sighed. “Oh, what a waste of nearly dying,” she said. “You should pay more attention next time, Sweetie.”
“Cheers,” Richard said now, lifting his glass.
“Guess what?” Vanessa said. She blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke and announced the end of my marriage. “Al’s getting divorced.”
“Ah,” Richard said.
“And I have to be Sweden,” Vanessa said.
Richard took a long sip of whisky and then appeared to consult his glass. “Well,” he said at last. “KBO.”
“What?” I asked.
“Churchill,” Richard said. “Keep buggering on.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
Vanessa blocked her ears. “La la la la.” Then she looked at Richard and me. “I’m not taking sides. I’m Sweden, remember?” Which must have reminded her of our beloved childhood anthems, because now she turned to me. “Hey Al, do your Swedish accent. It’s so hilarious when you do it. I don’t vant to talk about zings we’ve gone through . . .”
“Switzerland,” I corre
cted her.
“Oh, Al-Bo.” Vanessa sounded disappointed.
But I didn’t want to make Vanessa laugh. I wanted her to take me seriously. I wanted her on my side, unequivocally. I wanted her to express her unassailable, unconditional, irrational love for me. Because of all the kinds of love there are out there—romantic, passionate, parental, spousal, brotherly—the love that is touted as most unassailable, complicit, and colluding is the love between sisters. But whatever she felt about me deep down, Vanessa wasn’t going to offer her unconditional support right now.
For one thing, she couldn’t stand a rocking boat coming anywhere near her vessel’s berth. She was a ship carrying the signal flag Delta. A thick blue stripe sandwiched between two yellow stripes, it means, “Keep clear of me; I am maneuvering with difficulty.” And for another thing, perhaps more fundamental than that, Vanessa and I are so dissimilar it is hard to imagine we are related at all; there is barely a cousinly resemblance, much less a sisterly one. We look nothing alike, we think nothing alike, we share few of the same beliefs. We don’t share a common vocabulary. If we had passed one another in the street, we would have seen nothing at all in common. There would have been no second glance of surprised recognition.
For that, we need to look back into the spiral of our families. Only then you can see peripheral glimpses of each of us; the hint of something shared about the mouth, a similar way of standing, sloped with one bent knee, like a resting horse. Unbraid each of us back, strand over strand, and only then you can see where we begin. Follow the sinewy rope of our cores and you can see how tenaciously we’re knotted. So forever and always, whatever irrationality comes out of our mouths, whatever we’ve said and done to one another, it’s preemptively forgiven. Because in the end, we have blood in common, and we have history in common, and we have coping mechanisms in common—the way we throw up dust clouds of laughter or anger as a mock charge, the way our deadly serious defense is all ways of surviving at once. “You’re sink and swim; fight and flight,” my friend Bryan said of me once. “I didn’t know that was biologically possible.”
THIS GRAND INHERITANCE
From my earliest memory of her, Mum spoke longingly of her childhood in Kenya, and of her own parents. She unequivocally adored her English father, his love of horses and dogs, his impressive ability to build and repair almost anything, his deeply honed knowledge of earth and farming. She also took definite pride in coming from mad, savage Scottish stock on her mother’s side and she warned us of our likely inherited Celtic inclinations, none of which sounded good, but she was unable to keep the satisfaction out of her voice. “Irritability,” she said. “Intolerance. Irascibility.”
By contrast, I knew almost nothing of my English father or his people. He seemed airdropped upon us, formed from soil and water, like Adam. And if he was sprung from earth, there was nothing of his smell or behavior or look that suggested otherwise. He was elemental, eternal, as if a version of him had always existed in perpetual adulthood, as I had always known him. But gradually with the instinctive impulse of a girl-child trying to feel her way forward by looking back, I created the parameters of my father’s family and heritage from the habits and adages that had slipped out of his Englishness and into our African lives, their peculiarities made more vivid by their inappropriateness for either our climate or lifestyle. “Bath and dress before dinner,” Dad always insisted.
“For whom?” I wanted to know, looking out into the unpeopled farmyards around us, the empty dirt roads leading all the way into the deep bush beyond our cultivated fields or to our neighbors some miles distant.
“It’s just the rule,” Dad said.
Our days were mostly open, without rules. “You’ve got the whole of bloody Africa to play in,” Dad told Vanessa and me, as if that were instruction enough, and we were supposed to disappear into as many hours of self-entertainment as it took until the gardener stoked the boiler at the back of the house to provide hot water for our mandatory evening baths. Also, while I had to exercise my horse like religion, Vanessa—who had been bitten and kicked too often, thrown off and bolted with one too many times—was expected to paint. “After that, as long as you don’t shoot each other above the knees, it’s your own lookout,” Dad said.
But Dad couldn’t fully explain why we all had to arrive at the dinner table every evening, washed and freshly clothed, napkins on laps, fingernails scrubbed. “Madness,” he offered. “Weak minds.”
“What?”
“It’s the beginning of every end, Bobo. Let your socks sag and the spine will follow.” I pictured a wax figure, drooping under the tropical sun, stiff upper lip warping into a fearful grimace. “Present and correct at the appointed hour. Pass inspection. Excellent company until dismissed.”
So we came to dinner at eight, dressed as if for the captain’s table, although I knew, without knowing why I knew I knew it, that ours was really a lifeboat flung out onto the high sea of disorder. “Bloody dogs,” Dad said, kicking indiscriminately under the table. He put his revolver next to his side-plate. Mum put her Uzi on an empty chair beside her. “Safety on?” Dad always asked. “Those things are liable to go off at the touch of a gnat’s testicle.”
Then Dad asked for us to pass the green beans, or the chicken, and we helped ourselves to supper—“Footmen’s night off,” Dad said every night—and that was the signal that we were now expected to be charming and entertaining, making light of the day’s hardships, engaging in competitive banter, flinging words back and forth at one another like deck tennis. And regardless of reality—Mum occasionally sliding off her chair, the dogs always squabbling at our ankles, the odd distant explosion of a land mine in the hills behind the house—we kept up the banter, as if practicing for a time we might be called upon to sing slightly off-color sea shanties as the ship went down.
Until an undertow of anguish pulled her out beyond the reach of reason—too far for our agile little leaking lifeboat to reach her—it was a game at which Mum excelled and at which Vanessa and I could hope only to be also-rans because, for one thing, my father could hardly take his eyes off her, and for another, neither of us could match her wit, her poetry, and her vocabulary colored by whatever book she was reading at that moment. “There were picanins laying snares in the dairy paddock today, naughty blighters. I chased them all the way to the road and one of them hopped right out of his little blue jersey with fright.” That was her Beatrix Potter phase.
It took a fluid mind to navigate the choppy waters of my father’s unwritten rules, to be properly improper, to see just how far we could sail into the wind of the required amount of jocularity and poor taste before my father’s fork lowered, the mast went down, and we were cast into the doldrums. Because beyond the usual strictures of acceptable and unacceptable vocabulary (some swearing was fine, overrefined use of language was not), basic table manners (it was okay to lob a bread roll at someone, not okay to cut a bread roll with a knife, it had to be dismantled by hand), and codes of conduct (dancing on the table was encouraged, elbows on the table were not), the rules weren’t clear. They weren’t supposed to be.
I gradually came to understand that in my father’s view, those who needed clear rules revealed a forbidden degree of self-doubt, exposed a fatal lack of confidence. “You either know what to do, or you don’t. It’s either cricket, or it’s not.” The same went for anyone caught praying publicly beyond the sacred confines of a church. Dad blinked in bewildered noncompliance if anyone stretched out a hand to be held before a meal in preparation for saying grace. “I don’t mind having my knee groped between courses, or a little footsie-footsie during port, but what’s this peculiar bloody thing of clutching one another before you even get offered a glass of wine?” Dad asked.
I can only imagine the energy and discipline it took to get us all together at our table every night. This wasn’t a directive from some instruction booklet on how to get closer to one’s overscheduled children through
the mandate of family nights. It was more like a survival tip from the equivalent of D. H. Grainger’s 1967 Don’t Die in the Bundu, a book Mum kept in the loo, the pages dog-eared to the chapter on way-finding. Somehow, if we kept showing up for dinner, dressed and bathed, we were keeping madness and fatal dishevelment at bay. We would not, God forbid, “Go native.”
It was only much later that I was able to trace the root of my father’s uncompromising insistence that we be vitally present at dinner not just to a blind desire to hold on to what was left of his English upbringing in the remotest reaches of southern Africa, but also to his own mother’s chronic inability to make it to the table at night. Because as far as he was concerned, you weren’t irrevocably off course and permanently lost at sea until you could no longer steer your way toward the evening meal, properly attired.
While my mother’s family was mentally ill in ways that should have had a wing of the local hospital dedicated to their memory—a great-uncle who tried to murder his own mother with a poker at the precocious age of three; another ancestor who kept two Tasmanian Palawa Aborigines as pets in his garden on the Isle of Skye; shell-shocked Uncle Allan who kept up a secret marriage to the postmistress’s daughter for decades, too timid to admit to his mother that he had married below their class—my father’s side of the family seemed to put most of their genetic energy into producing at least one seriously impressive drunk every other generation or so.
It was as if all the stirrup cups, Pimm’s, and a snifter before dinner, all the genteel drinking that went along with their masked dances, regimental balls, and polo matches, occasionally tidal-pooled into a tragic, dipsomaniacal disaster. And although this exterminating birthright very likely goes back further, the first record of a bona fide alcoholic on my father’s side of the family is also one of the most spectacularly awful. My great-great-grandmother, Mary Mortimer Garrard, fell backward into a fireplace, drunk as a lord, and died. “Well, she was Australian,” Dad explained. “And also probably pretty flammable by then.”