Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller Page A

too by how impatiently I spoke, how quickly I filled any silence, how little I appeared to be listening to my parents’ answers. Not for the first time in my life, I wished I had spoken less and heard more. It had taken this illness—my own loss of voice, a mild fever, forced seclusion—for the quality of my listening to begin to change.
    Mum’s voice was firmer than Dad’s. She painted life gilded, she skipped over the difficult bits, and she put a positive spin on Rhodesia’s long and bloody civil war (“Best years of my life!”). She repeated her favorite stories over and over like church, and I think for the same reason: the more often you say something, the more likely it is to affirm itself, to become an accepted truth and to evolve into a communal memory. She was an upholder of myth, a creator of burnished image, a best-foot forwarder. “I know most people remember most vividly the horrible gruesome tragic bits of their lives,” she said. “But I don’t see things that way.”
    When Dad spoke, he said everything only once, and then quite clearly, which is the only way I have known him. “Those who talk the most, usually have the least to say,” he said when I complained about the long silences he was leaving on my tapes. Perhaps it’s his native British reticence, combined with years of war and common-or-garden trauma plus a few seriously uncommon tragedies that pared down his utterances to only the essentials. When he was not much younger than I am now, and we were living on a drought-prone farm in eastern Rhodesia, the workers gave my father the nickname “Boss Fuck-Off.” With retrospect, I can see how intonation and context could render that phrase uniformly useful to a tobacco farmer of English origin turned reluctant, conscripted Rhodesian soldier.
    But although Dad has a definite sense of delivery, he doesn’t have Mum’s definite sense of belonging. In fact, his most determining act seems to have been an early decision to go against generations of military tradition on his father’s side of the family and not join the British navy. Unlike my mother, who has long defined herself as belonging to Africa, my father is defined not by place but by an unbelonging to anywhere. My father eschewed both the nation and the much-flaunted naval tradition of his British forefathers, it was the earth—
any
earth, as long as it was far from the madding crowd—that suited him.
    “No, the sea wasn’t really my strong suite,” Dad admitted. And it is true I have seen him swimming in it only once, and then only reluctantly. Goaded by the rest of us on a rare vacation to the seaside, he finally agreed to paddle out with exaggerated laboriousness from the beach a little way, before splashing uneasily back to shore. He looked hapless and incompetent enough that some German tourists appeared seriously to be considering a rescue. “Bloody wet,” Dad said, toweling himself dry with the urgent vigor of someone emerging from hours among deep ice floes rather than a brief warm tropical bath. “And some bastard’s overseasoned it with salt.”
    As a little boy, Dad was occasionally dressed up in sailor suits that he loathed, the way most children hate the smart clothes imposed on them by their elders. He remembers posh regimental dinners, hours of dreaded stuffy nonsense and kowtowing. Once, when he was old enough to have such inspirations but not yet old enough to fully think through the consequences of his actions, he had the idea of putting an exploding cigar in the humidor to liven up the dreariness of after-dinner port. The effect on the nerves of elderly shell-shocked naval officers turned out to be spectacularly rewarding. “I really got bollocked for that one,” Dad said. “But it was worth it.”
    A few times his father took Dad out on a ship, and although the enormous, imposing battle-readiness of the thing was impressive, Dad doesn’t remember feeling a thrill of wanting to be a part of it. “All