MARRIAGE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

It is the perpetuating tragedy of all families: each of us believing our congenital pathologies and singular pains end with us. We think of ourselves as individual dammed rivers, the blood of generations stopped up in our veins, the accumulated habits of a lifetime ceasing at the border of our skins. We don’t think of our present, our current conditions, and our immediate decisions as incurable infections or persisting gifts that will cross through the porous vectors of inheritance and time and blossom into the future. In spite of biblically ancient warnings, we don’t think of our choices—our decision to wake up each morning and be free, or remain in the thrall of some visible or invisible jail, for example—as contaminating or blessing not only ourselves but also our children, their children unto the third and to the fourth generations.

But here I was. Look back into the double mirror images of my history, past my mother to my grandmothers, and to their mothers before them, and regardless of their true talents and ambitions, the women whose blood rushed directly into mine were basically glorified housekeepers, their fates inextricably tied to the men they married. There’s the tragically drunk Australian, understandably homesick perhaps, immolated in the fireplace of one of England’s grand homes. There’s Mugger, all her ambition going powerfully sideways into ever-greater and more extreme acts of charity. There’s Boofy, all her joie de vivre horribly funneled into self-destruction. And there’s my mother’s mother, reading late into the night through all the histories of England and Scotland, memorizing clans and battles and chiefs and kings and queens until she could have earned a double doctorate in the subject, but still rising at dawn to make oats porridge, weed the vegetable garden, and do the laundry.

“When we were first married, I kept the chamber pot within reach at all times,” my grandmother confided to me when I was over in England as a teenager. “Otherwise you never get any sleep, or any time to read, or any time to yourself.” She sighed and sank back against her pillows, Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots resting on her chest. “You need to empty it over their heads only once. They won’t pester you without your permission after that.”

Out my grandmother’s bedroom window that warm English summer, I could hear my grandfather in the garden removing the suckers off his small crop of tobacco. “If I could do it all again,” Granny said, “I’d do more of it my way.” Then she closed her eyes and with that went whatever she might have said next. What was bewildering to me then was that my grandparents seemed to have the sort of marriage anyone might think of as sound. They synched perfectly, their habits and addictions, their passion for Kenya and Cairn terriers, their love of books, strong tea, and rough midmorning martinis. They shared secret languages, speaking Gaelic or Swahili to one another so they could gossip about fellow passengers on trains and planes. And yet at least once a week in the time I spent with them that holiday from Africa, Granny would say, “Marriage is the workhouse, Bobo. Don’t do it.”

But like all newlyweds I thought I had made a contract of a different sort with my spouse, a fresh pact, distinct and separate from all the ways my grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done marriage. I thought that Charlie and I would operate out of our own unique and complete love, as if boredom, thwarted ambition, petty sulking, and the tiny ways in which we deliberately or accidentally misunderstand one another could not happen to us because we alone had fallen in love, as it had never been done before. Ours was a love across seas, between cultures, and against all the odds. Charlie was the perfect rescuer, and I the most relieved and grateful rescue victim. “Wahini,” he called me. “Chica,” he said. Or “Mamacita.” I didn’t know the meaning of Charlie’s terms of endearment, but their foreignness only served to prove to me that ours would be a new and different connection.

Still, the Polish priest at our wedding had been right. The first year was hard, and after that, well, it didn’t get worse immediately, but it got more and more silent, and silence frightened me more than almost anything else. What was confusing is that I had wanted to be saved from the uncertainty and the noise of my childhood, but beyond a definite idea that I would feel safe docked to the steady command center that was Charlie, I hadn’t thought it all the way through. I hadn’t figured that what had terrified me had also defined me; without the exuberant crazy-in-a-good-way and the disturbing crazy-in-a-bad-way pendulum that had been all I had ever known, I wasn’t sure how to be. I turned the music up, and Charlie turned it down.

“How about somewhere in the middle?” he suggested.

But I wasn’t good at the middle. I was good at the extremes; I had been trained for that. Loud was my specialty, although if I needed to—in the bush when surrounded by wildlife, in the hours and hours of chapel at boarding school under the gaze of unforgiving teachers, when the business of war turned serious and deadly—I could outsilence anyone. Still, a silent marriage—a house without banter, without one person shouting and another screaming opera, without the occasional all-out drunken brawl—was going to take some getting used to. “Marriage takes work,” I had heard over and over again, but I hadn’t believed that would be our marriage.

To begin with, we rented a sterile house on the outskirts of Lusaka. The main attraction was the land, seven walled acres, large enough to keep our four ponies and to maintain a small vegetable garden. But the house was a dismaying thing, long and dark and bricked up, clinical in its aspect. An Indian businessman had built it during the 1980s when the city was becoming increasingly violent, and it embodied his stifling paranoia: bars on the tiny windows, a metal door with a huge padlock to separate the bedrooms from the rest of the house, the yard cleared of shrubs and trees to dissuade snakes and robbers. I threw rugs on the floor, smothered the walls in bright African-print cloths, and planted scores of trees in the garden, but I couldn’t shrug the feeling that we had been institutionalized by someone else’s fear.

As far as I was concerned, the chief flaw of the Indian’s security system was the massive black gate at the entrance of the property, which could not be opened from the outside. Charlie had brought Mr. Sinazongwe with him—an officious, hostile, supernaturally silent man with the creeping aspect of a spy—whom I avoided the way a junior consort might avoid the senior wife. Mr. Sinazongwe said he would be happy to open the gate, hover under the bougainvillea whenever I left the property in readiness for my return, but I wasn’t taken in by his obsequious eagerness. “I think he just wants to know when I am coming and going,” I told Dad. “He’s such a snoop.”

“When the wife walks in the front door, the gentleman’s personal gentleman leaves out the back,” Dad said.

“Oh good heavens,” I said. “This isn’t Jeeves and Wooster. It’s Charlie’s old cook.”

“Lot of wisdom in that stuff,” Dad persisted. “Take it or leave it.”

I left it. But if I was going to have a jailkeeper, I thought I should hire him myself. I put out word at the kiosk down the road that I was looking for a gardener, whose other task would be to guard and man the padlocked gate. Among the potential candidates who came forward was an elderly man who appeared so blank and feeble I hired him on the spot.

“Have you done much gardening?” I asked.

Mr. Njovu made a face and I knew that whatever was about to come out of his mouth next was unlikely to be entirely true. “Plenty,” he said.

I showed Mr. Njovu the gate, gave him a key, and begged him to listen for me when I returned from any outing. Mr. Njovu nodded and started work right away. After that, he stayed at work, regardless of how much I offered, and then begged, for him to take days off. After a couple of weeks, it finally dawned on me he had nowhere else to go, and after that, I let him drift around the seven acres as he wished. He mostly kicked around the rear of the property, and then he acted so wounded and exhausted from his long walk to the gate from whatever he was doing back there, I put out word I needed a groom, whose secondary job would be to open the gate. So Freddy Mapulonga arrived, arrogant and full of swagger, and I felt too hapless and inadequate not to hire him.

My mother would never have hired servants the way I did—out of pity, intimidation, or habit—and allow them to run roughshod all over her and her property. She had learned her servant-managing skills from her mother, who had been sent away to a college for young ladies in Inverness specifically to learn how to run a grand home. And even after the world changed in the 1940s, war-wearied into rations and the great houses emptied of all but the most needy and least able-bodied servants, my grandmother’s notes from that college survived, ledgers containing instructions on how to pay household bills, how to adjudicate the inevitable rivalries and tensions between a butler, the housekeeper, and the cook; when to order leg of mutton and how to best prepare shoulder of lamb. And Mugger, I knew, had been raised to the task. “She kept a beautiful house,” my father said. “It ran like clockwork.”

I, on the other hand, constitutionally opposed to the idea of servants in the first place, seemed unable to manage my modest household at all. I could not prevent the staff from fighting with each other and brazenly stealing from us, and then spreading blame all around. I had no control over when anyone came to work, or when, if ever, they left. I could not even persuade Mr. Sinazongwe not to scrub the floors outside our bedroom door at midnight. “I’ll clean them myself,” I offered finally. But Mr. Sinazongwe simply smiled enigmatically and was back the following night, the scent of Cobra floor polish wafting under the threshold and into the tangle of our mosquito net.

“I think he’s spying on us,” I told Charlie.

“No, he’s just diligent,” Charlie said.

Then Dad came to visit from the farm and kicked the soil in my vegetable garden around. “Oh, you’ve got this awful red stuff, haven’t you?” he said. The soil dusted up and settled on his shoe like dried blood. “You’re going to want a lot of manure in here, tobacco scraps would be good. I’ll bring you some from the farm.” He marched around to the back of the house and disparaged my pasture. “Your horses aren’t going to get very fat on this,” he said. Then he found Mr. Njovu’s nascent marijuana crop. He pursed his lips. “Well, your gardener has done a good job with this at least.”

Charlie’s days were full of dreary government meetings and business plans and putting together safari itineraries for clients. My days stretched ahead of me interminably. With a British passport and nothing but a bachelor of arts to my name, I was both foreign and underqualified and I had been denied a work permit by the Zambian government. I gave free aerobics lessons to overweight government officials’ wives. I wrote letters to the freshly appointed and woefully careless minister of environment lamenting deforestation and pollution. After that, I hardly knew what to do with myself.

“Routine,” Dad counseled. “If all else fails, have a routine.”

So in the mornings, I exercised the ponies with Freddy, and afterward gave him driving lessons, which terrified both of us. “Brake! Brake!” I yelled, as the garden wall loomed toward us. In the afternoon, I tried to persuade Mr. Njovu to put half the effort into growing our vegetables that he put into cultivating his drugs, and I took Tank and our new puppy, Lizzie, for walks toward the army camp at the top of our road. Then I stared at the clock and waited for Charlie to come home.

It was as if, marrying Charlie, I had stepped across some invisible membrane into another country. This wasn’t my Zambia—days of unstructured freedom on the farm, chaos at the dinner table with Adamson’s undercooked chickens. This was someone else’s idea of Zambia. In the evenings, Charlie came home exhausted after a day of wrangling with ministers and government officials and exuded an air of wearied disappointment. We sat in near silence over dinner, no dancing on the table, no dogs churning at our feet, moderation, bloodless poultry. On the few occasions Mum and Dad came up from the farm to stay they too were subdued and orderly, especially after Charlie expressed his understandable opinion that we all drank too much. It was what I had wanted, a ticket out of disorder and into calm, but now that I was here I felt imprisoned, suffocated. “You should volunteer somewhere,” Charlie suggested.

But in the early nineties, with the collapse of socialism and a new culture of anything goes, Lusaka was already awash with highly skilled foreign volunteers—“Bloody missionaries are always the first to arrive,” Dad had said. “You mark my words, Bibles then bulldozers.” There were the English hydrologists saving the water, the Canadian engineers rebuilding the sewage systems, and Irish actresses teaching self-expression and theater to abused and/or fallen women. No one needed an underqualified undergraduate in their aid programs, and in any case, that kind of do-gooding only made me feel more alien, as if I too were a visiting two-year wonder with no history in the country and no real intention of creating a future in it of my own. I’d be Mugger-lite, transposed to Zambia, ineffective. I’d mess it up.

I stayed home and continued with my thankless domestic round: Charlie’s territory-seizing cook, Mr. Njovu’s increasingly skillful rejection of our vegetables, and Freddy’s death-defying driving lessons. Imbued with groundless confidence, Freddy became worse each time he got behind the wheel. In September, I decided to brave the back roads with him, hoping to encounter no other traffic. Freddy celebrated his newfound freedom with the purchase of a pair of exceedingly dark glasses and a portable radio that he put on the seat between us, the volume turned up to the maximum.

“How about somewhere in the middle?” I shouted.

“What?” Freddy said.

“Can you even see out of those things?” I yelled, as we rollicked over a culvert.

In October, the heat was fierce for everyone, but especially for big, elderly dogs. Tank labored to keep cool. We made a bed for him next to a fan in the kitchen—the coolest room in the house—and tried to get him to drink more water, but every day it became harder and harder for him to get up, and finally too hard for him to lift his head. His breathing became rasping and gurgling, as if his lungs were filling up. Charlie stayed up at nights next to Tank’s bed, massaging his chest, stroking his back. At last, we decided to ask the vet to come out to the house and put the dog down.

In November, the rains came, obliterating and heavy. Gardening—what little there had been of it—stopped. Mr. Njovu spent happy days in the horses’ shelter sampling his marijuana. The electricity surged, spluttered, and went dead, and with it went the fans. The house swelled and swamped with torpid humidity. Mold grew on shoes and saddles, our laundry stayed damp. We gave the horses their rainy-season vaccinations and turned them out.

With little else to do, Freddy and I spent the mornings in the kitchen watching the rain through the bars on the window, drinking tea and gossiping. Because our talk was mostly blather, small talk and little indiscretions, I can’t remember now the specifics of our conversations, except that we were united in our dislike of Mr. Sinazongwe, and in our fascination with magic and the new music coming out of Zaire. Also, Freddy hated Lusaka as much as I did. He had been raised by his grandfather on a marijuana farm close to a river in Zambia’s northeast. His grandfather apparently had healing and magical powers. Freddy told me of hearing animals that spoke in human tongues, seeing sunsets that went on for three days, and of women so beautiful and beguiling that men lost their minds. Listening to him, I felt homesick for a country I hadn’t even left.

Once a week, Freddy and I embarked on our marketing; bran mash for the horses, bones for the dogs, fresh vegetables and meat for the house. Freddy got behind the wheel with his especially dark glasses, turned the portable radio up to somewhere in the middle, and we ventured into town. It gave us something new to talk about—the homeless madwoman who made a living off the garbage pile in the second-class district, the pig we saw being hauled backward across Addis Ababa Avenue by its hind legs, the effect on the city of the incessant rain. Major thoroughfares in the heart of the city were flooded, and in the waterlogged compounds on the outskirts there were rumors that cholera had broken out.

“Have you heard of this?” I asked Freddy.

“Oh yes. People are dying like chickens,” he said.

So a few mornings later, Freddy drove me into George Compound and, following a funeral lorry, we found a humid, makeshift clinic in what had until recently been a small school, its classrooms and verandas converted into damp, crowded wards. There were a few cholera beds—plastic stretchers with holes in them, under which a bucket could catch the rice-water diarrhea that streamed from people’s bodies—but most of the victims lay on pieces of soggy cardboard, helplessly swamped by their own leaking selves. I got out of the pickup. Freddy wound up the windows and frantically swatted flies. “You’re going to die of cholera if you go out there,” he predicted.

I walked toward a man in a white coat stirring a huge drum of yellow liquid at the foot of the stairs leading up to the veranda. A pervasive, sweet-rotten smell hung over the place. “Can I help you?” the man asked.

I had no good answer. I said something about wanting to write an article for the papers. “Don’t you think people should know what is happening here?”

“What people?”

“I mean people who read the papers.”

“People who read the papers already know what is going on,” the man said, turning back to his drum.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Disinfectant,” the man replied. “Contaminated clothes. We are supposed to burn them. But how can you burn clothes if they are all somebody has to wear?”

On the drive home, Freddy occupied himself hunting down and killing flies. “Cholera flies, cholera flies, cholera flies,” he muttered.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” I said. “Never mind the flies.”

“If a fly lands on you, you’ll die,” he replied.

“I don’t know where you get your information.”

Freddy waved his trump card. “My grandfather was a doctor.”

“Your grandfather was a drug dealer,” I said, waving mine.

After that, until the epidemic abated in late January, Freddy and I drove into George Compound at least once a week. Sometimes there was an army lorry parked outside the cholera clinic, or another government vehicle, and then we turned back, trying as much as possible to look as if we had somehow innocently taken a wrong turn into the deep heart of this decidedly accidental-feeling place. “You should try to look like one of those Dutch,” Freddy advised. “They are only here for good reasons. You see them even digging latrines with their own hands.”

After that, I gave up the idea of writing anything about the epidemic. Instead, I brought towels and blankets from home for the patients and food for the medical orderlies. Every few days, a few more corpses were added to the morgue tent next to the clinic. Some of the bodies were so tiny they looked like punctuation marks, damp little commas, a brief pause between life and death. The invisible membrane between my old life and the one I had married into solidified into a wall. There was the dank, dying world of George Compound, and there was us—Charlie and me—in our clinical if humid bunker on Lilayi Road.

“Where are the bath towels?” Charlie asked, dripping on the threshold of the bathroom.

“Oh,” I said. My mind spun through all the possible answers I could give. Then I said, “We’re having a hard time drying them because of the rain.” It was a little lie, the first I remember telling in the marriage, and completely unnecessary because Charlie didn’t have a temper. He had disappointment, yes, and disapproval, and he felt understandably entitled to one of his own towels. But he would never have been angry with me for giving a few of them away to the cholera clinic.

“They’re not really lying. They’re just saying what they think you want to hear,” Charlie said of the Zambians he employed to work for him in his safari business. But I understood we had learned from experience, if you tell a fellow Zambian the truth, she is likely to laugh at the absurdity of it. Tell the truth to a foreigner, he is likely to yell. Except Charlie didn’t yell, or very rarely, and he didn’t view me as a Zambian. He viewed me as a wild version of himself, a Westerner in the raw. But now that he had married me, and I was out of my natural habitat, my plumage was less shiny, my skills less useful, my constant noise less charming. Instead of looking like a survivor of a tough and wondrous life, I looked like a damaged and broken survivor of sordid, violent, and undisciplined excess.

“Can you smell it?” I asked late at night, sitting up suddenly in bed, overwhelmed by the cholera scents of disinfectant and diarrhea and bodies.

Charlie put his hand out to me. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

But I couldn’t sleep. Not because I found the clinic awful and otherworldly but because it felt more knowable to me than did my new husband. The clinic disturbed me, it was life-and-death, it was tragic and unnecessary—like war and drowning and famine—and I felt at home there in a way that I knew I might never feel in this safe bed. No one in their right mind could say they prefer trauma, no one in their right mind could want injustice, no one in their right mind could like cholera. And I did hate it fiercely: the damp hopelessness of those bodies on the cardboard mats, the horror of that awful makeshift tent-morgue, the disgusting refusal of the government to acknowledge that anything bad was happening. But it was an old rut into which I could easily groove without missing a beat.

I told Dad about the clinic on one of his trips into town. “Awful,” he agreed. “Poor bastards.” Then he lit a cigarette and stared at its burning tip for a moment. “That’s the whole problem, though. How we die is how we live.”

“But no one lives like that,” I said.

“No, Bobo, no one wants to live like that. That’s a different story.”

In late January, Charlie found me temporary, illegal work with an architect whose secretary was on vacation. I was bad at being a housewife, but worse at being a secretary: I accidentally cut off my boss’s phone conversations, threw away duplicates of letters I didn’t know were supposed to be filed, lost architectural drawings, and forgot crucial lunch appointments. My boss didn’t fire me, but he sounded relieved when one morning in mid-February I felt too sick to go to work. It began with a wave of nausea at breakfast, spread to a headache by lunch, and finished with overwhelming exhaustion by dinner. The next day was just as bad, and the day after that an unwelcome repetition. By the end of the week, the sight of butter, the smell of coffee, the mere thought of alcohol made me retch. Walking made me retch. So did sunlight, exhaust fumes, and perfumed soap.

I took to my bed, the curtains drawn. Lizzie lay on the floor next to me, panting in the steamy heat. “You have cholera,” Freddy told me with satisfied authority. He stood at the end of my bed covering his mouth and nose with a shopping bag. “If a fly comes to you, and afterwards he visits me, I also will have cholera.”

“Can you fetch me a Coke from the kiosk?” I begged.

Freddy hesitated.

“Please,” I implored. “You can take the car.”

I went to the doctor and he tested my blood for malaria, hepatitis, and HIV/AIDS. He was unimpressed with my results. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he announced, waving the paper at me. “All in your head.” So I went home and tried to carry on as normal, but my body refused to work. I went back to bed, too enervated and queasy even to read. In the mornings, I begged Charlie to come home early, imagining the foods he could bring me that might quell my unstoppable biliousness: pickles, strawberries, salsa, none of which were readily available except at vast expense in one of the new South African stores. Charlie was dismayed by my depression and my sudden tearful neediness. He suggested exercise, a diet, getting out more.

“I’m dying,” I said, only half joking and wondering if years of smoke, first- and secondhand, were already catching up to me. “Isn’t this how cancer starts?”

Then Mum came up from the farm, took one look at me, and announced her diagnosis. “You’re pregnant.”

“I can’t be,” I said. “I have an IUD in.”

Mum sighed and shut her eyes. “Oh, don’t go into the gory details, Bobo. Just take my word for it.”

In July, Auntie Glug phoned from Scotland to say that my grandmother seemed irreversibly unwell. “I don’t know if she’s had a stroke, or what’s going on,” she said. “But she’s definitely lost the plot.” My parents had recently left the farm in Mkushi and were camping in a scruffy farmhouse in the district while Dad figured out what to do next. The upheaval had sent Mum into a deep depression. In part to save her mind further shock, we decided I should fly over to see Granny and report back with my findings. “And you can buy nappy rash cream while you’re at it,” Dad said. “Or whatever it is babies go in for.”

By then I appeared so hugely pregnant I brought a forged doctor’s note to the airport to prove that I was only seven months gone and therefore unlikely to give birth on the soon-to-be liquidated Zambia Airways—motto: “A Pleasure in the Skies.” The Zambian ticketing officers and the air stewardesses doubted the note and several of them put knowing hands on my belly. “Are you sure this date is correct?” they asked, waving the forgery at me. Frankly, I was beginning to doubt the calculations myself.

“Of course,” I said.

I landed in London, caught a train to Scotland, and took a bus to the village where Auntie Glug lived. My grandparents had been moved from their cottage in England to a bungalow here several years earlier when it became clear that they were becoming too vague to remember to eat regularly, or make sure the woodstove wasn’t smoldering before they went to bed. I dropped my bags at the door and followed Auntie Glug into the bedroom. The radiators blasted equatorial warmth. “All right,” Auntie Glug said, pointing to Granny’s bed. “Your turn to keep an eye on the madhouse. I’m going to put my feet up and have a cup of tea.”

“Hello there,” I said to the shape under the bedclothes.

“Nicola?” Granny pushed herself up on her elbows, her face alight with expectation. It was obvious Granny’s mind was taking its final shaky flight; it flittered around like an elderly butterfly, perhaps still capable of fancy and beauty, but mostly notable for landing without conviction and taking off with unsteadiness. Her work-worn hands, permanently curled to the shape of a milkmaid’s grip, fretted the bedclothes.

“No,” I said. “It’s Bobo.”

“Oh.” It wasn’t me Granny wanted. She sank back into her pillows, disappointed. “Where’s Nicola?” she demanded. “Where is she? Has she taken the horses out?”

“Yes,” I said. I pictured Mum depressed in her borrowed shack near our old farm. I knew her pattern well: she wouldn’t be riding, or taking the dogs for their afternoon walk, or much of anything. Her eyes would have lost their focus. “Yes, she’s out riding,” I said.

“I thought so,” Granny said, satisfied. After that, she rambled on for a while as if I were a potentially helpful stranger: Could I fix the oven? Someone had fiddled with the dial on her radio; did I know how to tune in to The Archers? Where were her slippers? Then she suddenly struggled to sit up against the gravity of her soft bed and fixed her dark, Highland eyes on me for a long time. “You look pregnant,” she said at last, her voice full of accusation.

“I know.”

“I hope you’re married.”

“I am.”

My grandmother’s eyelids fluttered and she sank against her pillows again. “Well, that’s something.” Then her mind reeled back through all the eligible men who would have been living in Kenya at around the time my mother was meeting my father. I explained that Charlie Ross was no one she had ever seen before, and from no family she had ever known or heard of. “I met him in Zambia,” I said.

“Ross,” my grandmother muttered. Then her mind skipped centuries and seized on Scottish history circa the brief, shaky reign of Mary Queen of Scots. “Chief Alexander Ross,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“The ninth of Balnagowan,” Granny insisted. “A very violent and unpleasant man. Wild and lawless. He’s given to land raiding. Land raiding. Ardmore, Aird Mhor. You can’t be too careful, you know. These tendencies are very strong. Very.”

I said, “Charlie’s from a very old Philadelphia family.”

“That’s not possible,” Granny argued.

“He’s American,” I explained. “From the United States.”

“Well then.” My grandmother looked out the window. My grandfather was making his way slowly down a row of potatoes, weeding. His pipe clamped in the lower left corner of his mouth emitted tiny blue clouds of smoke. “There will be mildew, of course,” Granny said. Then she respired in that way of the elderly, her cheeks sucking in, as if great sadness had overtaken her. We sat in silence for a while. On the wall above the dresser was a portrait of Mum as she’d been in her late thirties. She looked radiant, but also a little surprised, as if startled to find herself in a picture frame in this Scottish bedroom. The baby turned mercilessly, pushing feet into ribs. I shifted my weight.

Then Granny turned back to me and with sudden, ferocious clarity she said, “You know, you will be terribly lonely, Bobo.”

I smiled, thinking of Charlie in Lusaka, and of the family we would have, and of the ways in which our house would soon be filled with noise and life and urgency. We’d get more dogs; there would be cats and horses. We’d settle into one another and a culture would grow around us, the way culture had grown around my parents and grandparents. Mum and Dad’s house was salty with dogs and horses and sweat. My grandparents’ house was redolent with old books, pipe tobacco, and dust—as if Kenya was something that had never shaken out of the furniture. They had overcome the early days of Granny threatening Grandpa with her chamber pot. They had survived Granny’s hatred of the matrimonial state. Now, even with Granny’s mind in full flight, they were like a tiny, unassailable sovereign nation. Charlie and I would do the same.

“No I won’t,” I said. “We won’t be lonely.”

But later that evening, in the spare bedroom where I was sleeping, I noticed the end of the bed was dented, as if a dog had habitually nested there. I settled myself into the hollow and looked up. On the wall opposite the bed there was a painting my mother had done as a teenager in Kenya. It showed giraffes cruising across the grasslands of the Uasin Gishu plateau. I knew then that I was sitting where my grandmother must have sat for hours, staring at her history, remembering the irrational decades in Africa, when she had most belonged to a land that would never have her. I knew then that there was a terrible possibility Granny knew everything there was to know about loneliness and that she’d seen my likely future in her own unlikely past.