LAST CALL ON THE AFRICAN QUEEN

Like one of those dogs trained to sense low blood sugar in diabetics, or to detect an imminent seizure in epileptics, Vanessa has uncanny radar for trouble, knowing before anyone else when things are about to start falling apart. It was a skill developed partially out of self-preservation, partially from early if unintended training, and partially as a way to bypass suffering. If I had long ago run out of whatever chemical resets to calm, Vanessa had long ago run out of whatever tolerance she may once have had for upsets. So before I had even said anything about my marriage collapsing, Vanessa’s supernatural powers had detected trouble and she set about fixing Charlie and me, attempting to cement us into each other by way of a family outing on the single day in which we overlapped on our trips to Zambia.

“Right, Al, we’re all going on the river houseboat,” she said. “As a treat. I’ve organized the whole thing.” She glared at me. “The Kafue is a fabulous river, my absolute favorite. And you’ll like the boat. There’s a bar and a braai. We’re going to have a fabulous time.” It sounded more like a stern command than a happy promise.

I said, “Of course.”

Dad demurred, citing an allergy to any body of water not sufficiently diluted by quantities of alcohol. And Richard fled for work, citing urgent business. The rest of us—Vanessa, her youngest three children, Mum, Charlie, and I—showed up on the banks of the Kafue River at midday. It was wide and brilliantly blue just here, covered with large swaths of dinner-plate-sized water lilies. Egrets, startlingly white, lifted and resettled in the grass along the river’s edge. The boat—a double-decker with tables and barstools above and a smoking charcoal grill below—lurched gently on its moorings.

“This will be fun,” Vanessa insisted again, and my heart broke a little bit because I knew she could feel trouble brewing, the way she always had, and I knew it was possible I was going to let her down.

Then some young women in impractically short skirts and impressively high heels teetered up the gangway ahead of us. “Look,” Mum said. “How lucky, we even have our own prossies.” Next a film crew showed up and a young cameraman, dressed, as if for war, in a flak jacket and a back-to-front baseball cap, flung himself on the bank, aiming a camera at us. Mum waved and smiled. The cameraman pushed his cap around impatiently. “You must move out of the way,” he said, making a motion like he was trying to rid his eyes of a disturbing vision. “We’re filming here.”

“Oh please no, kissy-kissy one kwacha,” Vanessa said.

But the alleged prostitutes turned out to be actresses for a South African soap opera. They walked up and down the gangway a few more times, stopping occasionally to stare moodily out into the middle distance. Meantime, Mum darted back and forth behind them, and encouraged Vanessa’s children to do the same. “We’ll be on tele, ek se,” she said. “We’ll be famous.” She stopped occasionally to bestow well-aimed if terrifying grins at the cameraman. “What do you think? Which would you say is my best side?” which made her laugh so uncontrollably she collapsed into a wheezing asthma attack.

“Oh dear God please save us,” Vanessa implored, really meaning it.

At last, the camera crew and the actresses left in an SUV with tinted windows—“What a pity, there goes the nightlife,” Mum said, taking a few gasps on her inhaler—and we set ourselves up on tables on the top deck near the front. Mum bought a round of drinks. “Here’s to us!” she cried, raising her sweating glass. We chugged upstream toward the gorge, into more and more lovely territory. Music piped out of speakers, and a fellow passenger with a poorly concealed pistol poking out the top of his shorts shouted approximate lyrics over the sound of the engine.

Charlie and I danced around the deck, relieved to be wordlessly in each other’s arms, out of Wyoming, and away from the collapsing U.S. economy. The river appeared sparkling and perfect; the sky was blameless and forever, and Mum’s gin and tonics lit us all young and hopeful again. Our nieces shrieked their embarrassment and covered their eyes. Vanessa put her hand over her mouth, as if she had suddenly happened upon locals behaving lewdly while in her Englishwoman-on-vacation-in-the-tropics guise. Charlie and I laughed.

Moments like this made it easier to be romantic, to feel in love, chosen, celebrated, alive. This vision of Zambia was the Africa of tourist brochures, with a smattering of wildlife, genuinely friendly people, and time oddly morphed to fill more than twenty-four hours on any given day. Here, from our slightly tipsy point of view, a kind of freedom blossomed around us, as if any miraculous thing were possible. “If you fall in love in Africa, don’t trust it until you’ve gone back to the States,” a Kenyan friend told me. “Because in Africa, none of it’s real.” By which he meant not only the passion two people might generate on the continent, but also the Africa that fostered that passion.

Anyone who knew what was behind the pleasant view of our Kafue River understood that things weren’t nearly as perfect as they looked. By any number of reliable accounts, this water was among the most polluted in the country. Pulp-and-paper mills, fertilizer plants, abattoirs, and mines all disposed of their unprocessed waste in the river. Villagers reported that fish had developed strange and unpalatable flavors; diseases were appearing—blotchy skin, ulcers, stomach problems. And above the river, hidden by tall curtains of reeds and bulrushes, forests were being chopped down at the highest per capita rate in the world, second only to Indonesia. Unchecked topsoil bled red whenever it rained, leaving deep eroded gorges.

Later, on her veranda having wine before supper, Vanessa grilled me. “Are you and Charlie doing all right? Because I really can’t handle it if you aren’t.” By the glare of the bare bulb hanging above the veranda door, I could see where a lifetime of grief, worry, and fear had accumulated in a web of fine lines around her eyes the way dreamcatchers are supposed to catch dreams. She ran her fingers along the lines now, counting her multitude of sorrows. “All I want is love and peace, and everyone getting along. No more war.” Then she spelled it out: “P-E-A-C-E. Right?” She leaned forward as if she didn’t want the space around us to hear what she was saying. “Dancing in public’s not natural,” she said, her voice tight with suspicion. “People only dance in public when they’re having problems.”

“Or when they’ve just had a double gin and tonic,” I pointed out.

Vanessa pursed her lips. When we were children, this expression usually heralded an imminent death threat as a way to divert me from real or imagined danger. “You’ll die of a snakebite if you go in the bamboos,” or “Terrorists will chop you to pieces if you leave the security fence,” or “If I say you have to get in the cupboard then you have to jump in right away.” Which isn’t to say Vanessa was happy about her role as my protector-in-chief: there was her childhood broken, flooded with too much responsibility too soon, and there was annoying little me still alive and more or less well thanks to her. And instead of being grateful and well-behaved in exchange for Vanessa’s caretaking, I used her hypervigilance as a wall from behind which to shout my discomfort and my alarming observations. “Shhh man,” Vanessa said. “Why do you always have to be such a loudmouth?”

Now she sighed and lit two cigarettes. She handed me one. “Quick,” she said. “You’d better smoke it before Charlie catches you.” I took a few guilty puffs, and then wafted fresh air around my hair like we were teenagers again. In adolescence, Vanessa made up for her early years of caretaking and preemptive death threats by acting on all the sibling rivalry she had been thus far forced to suppress—“That was hilarious, Al. Remember when I tried to throw you out of the pickup in Malawi?” But finding it harder to bump me off than she had hoped, she decided to craft a shaky alliance between us using whatever pilfered contraband was at our disposal. “Let’s have a fag, Al. And a beer.” Since then, except when one or both of us has temporarily given up, we have passed cigarettes and alcohol to one another in the event words have failed us; they are our sealed pact, our memorandum of understanding, our truce.

“Anyway, you can’t split up with him,” Vanessa said. “You’ll never find anyone else, will you? Who will look after you?” By which she meant, who would take over as my protector if I rejected the person who had replaced her in that role? As she spoke, I could hear Charlie playing with her children in the kitchen. He had bought them a toy helicopter that really flew, and was showing them how it worked. “Plus, see?” she said. “He’s so good with my kids.” But I wasn’t soothed by the idea of Charlie as uncle, or even as father. On the contrary, the sight of us as a family—this supposedly impenetrable entity of self-containment—made my heart plunge with panic because our house was falling and I knew it was only a matter of time before we blew apart. “What were you hoping for, Al? This works, doesn’t it? You’ve been good together, haven’t you?”

It’s true that for a while we had functioned well enough as a couple: me unconventional by Middle American standards, and too loud and outspoken for ordinary comfort; Charlie increasingly orthodox, containing us with his rational resoluteness. Both of us united in our love for our children. And then for years, even when kindness and trust between Charlie and me had eroded to the point of occasionally open hostility and days of silence, my mantra had remained, “But I’m in love with this unit.” Now, though, I had begun to suspect that our uncoupled marriage was its own kind of violence, sure to hurt one of us, or our children, or everyone. Unit. United. Untied.

“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 corrected 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.”