We blasted through Lourenço Marques, headed north to Xai-Xai, where Evan was stung by a jellyfish; Ross, still a toddler, defecated under the table in the hotel dining room; and I developed my first ever crush – on the boy at the next table. But even Xai-Xai wasn’t far afield enough for my mother, so we continued on, over stony roads and green countryside in red heat, until my mother spotted a dirt road branching off towards the ocean – with a half-rotten wooden sign that read, Pomene.
“Let’s go to Pomene.”
I said, “Where’s Pomene?”
She said, “I don’t know.”
Lexi said, “Then let’s not go there.”
She said, “Don’t be so lacking in interest and adventure. We’re going.”
“We don’t want to go to Pomene,” I frowned, speaking up for the others.
But she was the adult and we were the pipsqueaks. Pipsqueaks had no say in the running of things, so it was one hour, two, three hours across sand-dune roads, past swamps with red-and-black crabs like small gladiators, carapace armour, warring in thick, muddy muck.
“When will we get there?”
“Over the next bump.”
And then over the next bump, four more bumps.
“When?”
“Soon, stop asking.”
“We’re car sick.”
“Shut up, all you brats.”
“I hate Pomene. I never wanted to go there,” Lexi muttered, sucking her thumb.
And then we crested the last bump and found paradise lost: at the end of the road, sea all colours of blue, and parrotfish and turtles, black circles through translucent waves, and a crab cove with so many brown-and-red crabs that entire rock walls moved red-brown.
“Who hates Pomene now?” My mother.
“I don’t, I never said I hated Pomene.” Me.
“I love Pomene! Let’s always come here.” Lexi.
“I knew I’d love Pomene; I just didn’t want to say so.” Evan.
Then onward still, to Gorongosa, the national park way up north, down serpentine roads, the white station wagon vanishing into storms of dust, car coated thick, kids at the back like seated sarcophagi, alive under towels and blankets, still breathing, and coughing and protesting, eyelashes coated and grey.
“When are we going to get there?”
“Soon.”
“When?”
“Around the next bend, stop nagging!”
And around that next dusty bend more winding sand roads, endless anacondas.
There were no tourists at Gorongosa, the reserve populated by Renamo soldiers only: big, black men with shiny faces slick with sweat and sensual mouths and white teeth, who sat at wooden tables, played cards in the massive dark shade under the baobabs. Beyond in muddy wallows warthogs wrestled, bony tusk on tusk, and giraffes came the long distance to the water to drink. In the baobab trees above, orb spiders spun webs from trunk to trunk, vertical trampolines so large they could catch birds. We spent three days looking at animals and talking to the soldiers while they played cards and waited for war. After my mother drove us out, finally headed south, Frelimo forces ran into camp, AK-47s blazing, and Mozambique shot at Mozambique. All the beautiful black men with white teeth were killed: blood on ruptured green uniforms like thick red oil paint, pooling and skin torn sideways to reveal ropes of intestines and calves lying separated from knees and green flies in eyes and fingers shot off and rotting in the sun like small black bananas.
So we drove out unscathed, back along all those dangerous sand roads, crossed the border into South Africa, and chaotic civil war was replaced with the punitive order that had come care of apartheid, no roads with landmines; heading farther south where the bush tamed itself into farms with regular rows of pineapples whipping past the windows in green stripes and, farther still, towards Johannesburg where benches were reserved for either whites or blacks, races not allowed to sit on the same bench, because maybe our colours would run, and back to the city where blacks were corralled for safe keeping in townships, spread out horizontal like swamps seen only from the safety of our passing cars. And if you had a letter to send, you had your own Whites Only entrance to the post office, because blacks and whites weren’t allowed to use the same doorway. No blacks in movie houses or restaurants, all blacks off the streets by nine at night, and no rebellion tolerated, no uprising, no landmines. We drove back to the house where my father was still marking papers and eating pickles, the big pickle fiesta – pickled herring, pickled tongue, pickled cucumbers, pickled onions, pickled radishes – from the well-stocked fridge.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked.
“To Pomene.”
“Ross made a poo in the dining room.”
“I didn’t.”
“He did. Under the table.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then we went to a game reserve.”
“With lots of men with guns.”
My mother and father take each other in.
“Mozambique?”
She nods.
“But there’s a civil war going on there.”
“I know.”
Silence.
Okay.
Point made.
Start over.
CHAPTER 7
Love is Blind
It is Friday afternoon.
Evan is looking stronger. He is sitting and reading and we are preparing the Sabbath meal. Melida is crying into her pink-and-orange ruffles.
“What, Melida?” my mother asks.
But Melida can only shell the peas and wail. Then finally it comes out: her husband Peter has a girlfriend. “Another woman is washing his clothes.”
This is the betrayal. It is Melida’s right to wash her husband’s clothes and that another woman has been given the privilege cements the infidelity.
“He’s no good, Melida. Isn’t one woman enough for him?” my mother asks. “He thinks it’s manly to have more than one woman! Let him go! Good riddance. What do you want him for? You work, you make money and all he does is drink. Am I right, Julia?” my mother calls to Julia, who comes once a week to iron and sits, her four hundred pounds taking up the seat in the scullery, making her deliberate way through the pile of clothes and linens that bank up all week.
“Love-is-blind, love-is-blind,” she says, her words keeping rhythm with her stroking of the iron across everything that needs to be pressed straight in this house. She shakes her head, a baby pink streaking