The Laboratory of Love, page 12
Before Sister Bridget vanishes in the jungle and the other nuns are sent home to Holland, they often seem to appear out of nowhere, in the most unlikely locations. We glimpse a dozen of them filing across the golf course at the Morogoro Country Club early in the morning, or clustered in the back of a pickup truck whirling down the road. Moving with surprising swiftness, a pack encircles us to flap black habits like wings in our faces. When MJ and Lily become a class of two taught up in the convent by Sister Cecilia, the nun who speaks English best; we’re still unable to distinguish the others easily. Their costumes lend them anonymity. Gradually we learn that Sister Bridget is tall and thin, Sister Ingrid short and plump, Sister Elsa always flushed. The nuns sigh and cluck and pat our heads. In guttural Dutch, they discuss us between themselves, seeming to search for the solution to a difficult problem. They attempt sentences of severely accented English that we barely understand. “By the sea of Galilee,” I think Sister Elsa says. MJ believes they’re telling us to prepare for the Second Coming. Lily doesn’t like the nuns; she won’t look at them but glares at the ground instead. When they pull skirts and blouses from beneath their robes like magicians and offer my sister these clothes donated by the Dutch to dress a little native girl, she accepts them rudely. They pat our heads once more, then turn toward their convent perched at the mission’s highest point, where a confusing tangle of jungle begins. During the months before the nuns leave Morogoro, MJ’s head hurts almost every day, and Lily refuses to attend Sister Cecilia’s makeshift classroom without him. She and I slip past the convent to explore a universe of thick green vines. The sound of sweet voices raised in hymn follows us. Rather than soothe, the song seems to add a jarring note to the setting, as if the air were incapable of receiving words of praise and thanks.
When Lily turns twelve, she begins to pick at her blouse, lift the cloth that chafes her budding breasts. The unconsciously repeated gesture reminds me of the way Ginger shakes his head in a violent, vain attempt to banish flies clustered on his bloody ears. The flaps aren’t able to heal; his hind paw scratches them constantly raw. The houseboy is left to feed Ginger during our frequent safaris through East Africa, and whenever we make a longer trip because Mitch decides it’s time for us to see the Sphinx or the Suez Canal or the Wailing Wall before it’s too late. During the fifth year in Tanzania, Ginger doesn’t show up for three days after one of our returns to the cinder-block house. He stays away for two weeks the next time. Soon he’s at home only intermittently. Between his visits, I forget the shape of Ginger’s nose, the colour of his eyes. We spy him infrequently in the distance, among the pack of wild dogs that makes wide-ranging expeditions through the area. They run in a loose cluster, with noses near the ground, direction determined by invisible forces, snarling at each other. I try to call Ginger, but he no longer knows his name. “Leave him alone,” says Lily, turning away. “It was a stupid name. His coat was never the colour of ginger.” Although Mitch might be unaware just how elusive our dog has become, he appears to sense things are somehow not the same for us, and tries to put a finger on it. “Do you have everything you need?” he asks once. Our father seems less confident of holding the winning play for each of life’s hands like a wild card up his sleeve. He inquires less often at evening about where we’ve been that day. Perhaps Lily causes him particular unease; his eyes ponder her, glide away. He suggests she spend time with Prima, the stylish young East Indian woman who lives in the house below ours. Lily stares at him. “Why?” she asks. Mitch rubs his head, glances at his watch, hums. Suddenly, his fingers snap. “Chess!” he exclaims. “Which of you kids thinks he’s smart enough to beat the old man?”
As the pack grows larger, people begin to say the wild dogs are getting out of hand. No longer skulking warily at a distance, they become bolder, more threatening. They will circle a house with howls all night, trapping sleepless inhabitants inside. They kill chickens in the village beyond the mission. More than actual damage, they cause disturbance, fear. “Rabies,” it is muttered. Africans want to get rid of the wild dogs with axes and machetes. Our houseboy says these animals are evil spirits arisen from centuries of tortured sleep. They are demons escaped from nightmare. One night, we listen to the wild dogs tear Prima’s pet colobus apart. “Go back to sleep,” says Mitch, a black shape in the bedroom doorway. The monkey’s screams die. In his bed between Lily’s and mine, MJ moans. His headaches have grown worse, though the Morogoro doctor, a graduate of the Bombay Institute of Dental Hygiene, promised he would grow out of them. Lily slips from bed and stands with her face pressed against the wire-mesh screen that’s supposed to keep out snakes. “What are you doing?” I ask. Lily’s nightdress, an old gift from the Dutch nuns, falls too short around her thin, scratched legs. It gleams in the darkness. “Where are you going?” I whisper, as my sister’s bare feet pad from the room. I hear the kitchen door click open then shut. In my safe, hot bed, I fall asleep while Lily searches outside for secrets contained within the mutilated carcass of a monkey. I dream her eyes burn yellow in the dark. Her mouth froths white. Thick blood smears her nose.
What did I see, what did I dream? Later, I will never know for certain if I glimpse Lily poised at the edge of the sisal field below the mission, encircled by wild dogs that leap up to snap at her face. With her back straight and arms folded across her chest, she stands unmoving amid the whirling beasts. Do her lips move? Is she speaking to the dogs? All at once, she turns on her heels and runs from the writhing ring. The dogs take after her, barking madly; they are hunting Lily or they are following Lily. The pack enters the sisal that grows taller than my sister. All I can see is a dense green field, with no hint of what it contains, unfolding still and calm before me. Troubling my eyes.
Finally we return to Canada and to our mother, who manages to stay out of the clinic as long as she takes her Lithium. None of us speaks about Morogoro much. Mitch seems disappointed that we aren’t grateful for his gift of an exotic experience. My father’s efforts to settle down in the small British Columbia town seem half-hearted; his temper grows uncharacteristically short. In five years, he will go away again. This time alone, this time for good. Lily refuses to remember anything about Africa; she barely admits we lived there. In Brale, BC, my sister says she can’t recall our chameleon with the leash of string around its neck or our hunts for frogs in the gutters above the mission church. Or seeing the Milky Way creamed above the Serengeti during a night drive home, when Mitch stops the car and insists we climb out to view the sky. “The stars are closer when you’re in Africa,” he tells us. I believe that still, as I continue to believe many of my father’s patent untruths. But Lily denies knowledge of the shape formed by a baobab against Arusha sky and the shriek of a colobus when you pass beneath its jungle perch. In Brale, she disguises herself with makeup and drinks home-made wine with Italian boys down by the Columbia River. Now she has long hair hanging over her eyes. From beneath the bangs, Lily watches Ardis warily, sniffs at our mother from safe distance, tries to determine whether this stranger poses danger. “Go back to the loony bin where you belong,” she snarls, when told by Ardis to be home before dark. Our mother retreats behind the closed door of her room again; in the basement, MJ watches another hour of TV. Despite a battery of tests and medications, my brother’s headaches are never diagnosed or treated with success; in cold Canada, they’re clearly due to more than just the heat. MJ is unable to attend high school frequently enough to graduate. At eighteen, he disappears on his way to Montreal, where he’s headed to look for work. I think he can’t stand for us to see the veins still throbbing with angry blood beneath his brow. He needs to lose Africa, to lose us. I continue to believe a dark continent lies concealed beneath our skin. A sharp knife could peel away a layer of flesh to uncover the rich taste of mango, smells of charcoal and dust and rotting fruit, the mocking laughter of hyenas in the night.
Perhaps Lily was seeking such things when she used the razor on herself. By then—like MJ, like Mitch—I had left the haunted house beneath the reeling crows, below a white sift of icy powder. We went our separate ways, abandoned the possibility that safety lies in numbers. Only Ardis remained in Brale when Lily entered the regional hospital’s psychiatric wing. (“Jesus,” Mitch wrote to me in London. “We should have the family name engraved on the place.”) During the next three years, while Lily stayed stubbornly silent at the far side of the world, I would sometimes think of Ginger. By the time we left Morogoro, he had become one of the wild dogs entirely, no longer ours at all. He never came to the cinder-block house even to snarl over a plate of bones; his teeth would have sunk into our hands if we reached out to pet him. We heard that disease had swept through the pack of dogs. For a while, their number did seem smaller; then they appeared as many as before. Several times, in the car, we might have seen Ginger loping along the ditch beside the road. We weren’t sure. I said yes; Lily disagreed. “He’s dead,” she flatly stated. “He died a long time ago.” When I finally heard from Lily, she said she had found Jesus. Intermittently, He allowed her to leave the clinic and live with Ardis in the Columbia Avenue house below; then the burden of sin would drive my sister back to her cold white room upon the hill. I couldn’t help but imagine Jesus wandering lost amid the bamboo shoots beside the Ngondo River, impractical white robes tangled in vines and roots, waiting for Lily to find Him and to bring Him home before dark. My sister wouldn’t see me when I visited Brale in 1986 and 1995. On both occasions, she retreated into the hospital before my arrival and remained incommunicado there until I left. On my return to Europe and then North Africa, she sent me poorly printed religious tracts and urged me to save myself before it was too late. Through postcards mailed to me from Thailand and Indonesia and Tibet, I understood that Mitch also received warnings of a Second Coming. Apparently, his strategy to avoid final judgment involves fleeing ever farther from its reach. And mine? Today, in Morocco, skeletal dogs haunt my step, whine in my ear; the market teems with icons whose obscure shapes tug my mind. The mosque bell clangs hollowly just before dusk; below my balcony, the street suddenly fills with believers scurrying home before dark. Night creeps into the derbs of El Jadida, descends on barren desert beyond. Stars rise in the sky. “They’re closer when you’re in Africa,” I used to write to Lily. With Ardis and Jesus and medication, beside the Columbia River’s frigid sweep, she attempts to stitch calm years out of cleaning and dusting and other careful rituals. The last time I heard from Lily, she enclosed a photograph. I couldn’t recognize the woman with puffy face devoid of freckles, with hair pinned into a neat bun, with untroubled eyes. Lily looks into the camera without smiling, as if afraid her face will crack. As if parted lips would allow a wild dog’s howl to swell the air.
Shells
“Bury or boil,” replies Rogacion when Mitch asks our houseboy what to do with the shells. We’ve brought them home from the coast for our mother. They need to be rid of what’s starting to rot inside them before she arrives from the clinic in Canada in three weeks. It isn’t clear to MJ, Lily, and me how long our mother’s going to stay; whether this time she might remain. Mitch wouldn’t answer when my sister asked. “She’ll be the old Ardis again,” he vowed in his jaunty way instead. Maybe then our father recalled how badly the same promise had been broken two years before. It wasn’t either an old or a new version of our mother who haunted these Ngondo hills for several months. The muscles of that woman’s face would twist at the sight of us three children; a jolt, some powerful electric shock, made her twitch and stiffen if we approached too near. What happened once the rainy season began , how that got bad then worse, until she had to be sent back to Canada—suddenly, ahead of time, with a nurse. Mitch peers toward the fields spread below our cinder-block house, as though sisal might conceal an elusive key to a difficult puzzle. Everything worth finding hides. My father’s eyes clear. Fingers snap to announce another of his famous inspirations. “Shells,” he exclaims.
Things went badly last time because we failed to welcome Ardis with presents, Mitch seems to suggest in the days leading up to the shell-gathering expedition. Three years apart from us were sufficient to turn our mother into a member of some savage tribe that must be appeased by the right token. Or it isn’t the amount of time away from her family, grown to five years now, but where that exile has occurred, that makes Ardis a threat. As if Canada, not Tanzania, were the more dangerous, uncivilized influence. Like any primitive, our mother would be simple as well as savage. Vulnerable to being tricked into swapping her most valuable possession for the cheapest trinket. It might as well be plastic combs that gain us what we want.
It’s not enough to drive an hour to the coast and gather shells from some convenient Dar es Salaam shore. Commonplace conches might do for the damn Brits, but not for Ardis, not for our Cedar Bay girl. We can manage better than that. Mitch claims to have extracted, from his most reliable source among the ancient men he likes to squat with in the village dust, the name of the best shelling spot in the Indian Ocean. An unspoiled island offshore from Kunduchi, known only to natives; a speck of land not on the map. Good old Christophe, the best shell man in the business, would take us out in his ungalawa. Such outriggers were navigating these waters long before the white man arrived. Thatch sails, palm-trunk pontoons: the crudest kind of handmade craft. An authentic African adventure all the way, another Robinson Crusoe experience for the whole gang to enjoy. “Don’t you remember Lanzarote and Ios and Formentera?” our father wonders to his less-than-enthusiastic gang, showing us implements resembling fireplace pokers with bent ends that will assist the imminent hunt for treasure. As if we ought to understand that every island encountered since we wandered away from Brale, BC has served as one more stepping stone in a plan whose secret purpose is to offer Ardis what she needs, what we don’t have.
“You never find what you’re looking for in plain sight,” warns Mitch, when Lily and I bring him shells quickly gathered from the island’s stony beach. We definitely won’t run into any damn Brits here. An hour out from a shore now beyond view, this scrap of rock barely interrupts ocean; it has no fresh water to drink, no bushes or trees for shelter. The sun is fierce by midmorning; already it has inflicted another of his headaches on MJ. A bad one, I can tell. My brother sits stiff as a wooden voodoo doll near to where the best shell man in the business has crawled into a slice of shade cast by his boat, after a vague wave to indicate where treasure waits. For once, Mitch doesn’t accuse MJ of being a stick in the mud; doesn’t sulk because his oldest son won’t participate in making a fantasy real. “Everything valuable always hides,” Mitch reminds Lily and me again, brandishing his tire iron as though it were less a tool than a weapon drawn against some invisible enemy. Three birds—resembling oversize, prehistoric pelicans—circle patiently above. I don’t know what these birds are called; nor the names of shells we’re searching for, what they look like. “We’ll recognize them when we see them,” declares Mitch in the extra-hearty tone that, even at age ten, always makes me doubt him. Rather than reliable fellows and the best men in every business, don’t we need one or two plain facts to help us to interpret this landscape, and to elicit its secrets?
Shells valuable enough to be offered to Ardis apparently lurk in tidal pools where soupy water slaps, gurgles, sucks at ankles. Under rocks, in fissured pockets, intricately swirled or spiked shapes conceal their pinks, their golds from sunlight that bleached my sister’s and my heads white soon after arriving to this continent. (MJ’s still-dark hair evidences how much his headaches keep him inside; as for Mitch, it isn’t so easy to change an old dog’s coat, he smirks.) You have to turn over rocks with your tire-iron lever; you have to wrest shells from the wet, salty darkness to which their mantles cling for life. Mitch dismisses each specimen Lily and I offer. “Good try,” he says, “but I guess you don’t have the old man’s eye.” He wants us to witness his discoveries instead of making our own; he needs us to share his excitement on capturing one more exotic prize. “Found another beauty,” he crows again. Lily and I flutter starfish limbs in a separate tide pool, pretend we can’t hear. “He doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing,” my sister scorns. We watch our father’s tanned back glisten as it shifts the landscape for our mother’s sake. Muscles jumping beneath skin like kittens drowning in a sack. Then glare drains away definition, blackens Mitch into only shadow. The ngalawa no longer provides any shade; exposed to the sun, Christophe still snores. MJ’s pale face has turned paler and an angry blister blooms on one corner of a moving lip. I know my brother will silently count until he reaches the number that marks that this too has passed.
Five buckets of shells slosh in the back of the white Peugeot, spit and hiss all the way home. A strong smell, briny and gamy at once, becomes increasingly heavy as we drive inland, thickens as though we’re nearing the same pungent element we’re trying to leave. “Phew,” exhales Mitch, cracking his window an inch wider, while MJ gags again.
“Bury or boil,” Mitch mutters like a mantra all evening. After our houseboy offers us this choice, something distorts his fixed mask, exposes itself in his eyes, makes him move quickly away from the house. (Disgust, I think, twenty years later.) Rogacion spits, once, at the end of the yard. Without sending a child over with an excuse, he fails to show up for work the next morning or on following ones. Village sources won’t shed light on our houseboy’s whereabouts. Sometimes the toothless old fellows don’t seem to understand Mitch’s Swahili, pretend it’s a whole other lingo they speak. My father’s face shadows, as it does whenever an obstacle comes between him and the elevated source of an earthbound dream. “Boy,” he says, shaking a disappointed head and dishing out a version of one of his boyhood Regina suppers on Rogacion’s first AWOL evening. “Some fellows sure are quick to jump ship even when the old gal isn’t sinking.” A row of five buckets just inside the door emit an aromatic question, pungently pose it throughout the house all night.
