Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller Read Free Book Online Page B

practical to begin with, but after Tony died, they gave up caring about worldly things altogether.”
    My grandfather’s oldest brother, Uncle Dicken, grew up to become a linguist and an anthropologist, and he wrote the first dictionary of the Nandi people. “He lived with the Nandi for ten years, knew all their customs and everything. This was back in the late 1920s and 30s when it wasn’t very fashionable to go off and live with the natives, but he didn’t do it in a creepy sort of way, he was studying the people.” Mum narrows her eyes at me and says, “I just know you’re going to put that in an Awful Book and make it sound as if he went native, but he didn’t. He was very British and very proper, and I am sure he didn’t touch a young Nandi maiden or anything horrible like that.”
    This remark made me think Uncle Dicken must have done something to unnerve Mum, an impression that was enhanced when I discovered a paper titled “Sexual Growth Among the Nandi of Kenya” that cited his work. The sex life of a Nandi boy, according to the research of my great-uncle Dicken, “begins as soon as he has emerged from the seclusion of circumcision (kakoman tum) and a girl’s when she reaches the age of puberty, i.e. about twelve. . . .”
    My grandfather, Roger “Hodge,” taught himself engineering and was hired to build the branch railway line from Eldoret to Kitale. “He had a donkey for transport,” Mum says, “but the donkey fell in love with a herd of zebra and ran away to be with them. After that Dad had to use a bicycle.”
    It wasn’t long after losing his donkey and taking up with a bicycle that my grandfather met and married my grandmother. Then war broke out and everyone reassessed their idea of home and loyalty, and my grandparents found themselves back in Skye from where my grandfather enlisted, lying that his mother was “Scotch” so that he could join up with the Cameron Highlanders. Seeing that he had grown up and worked in Kenya, the war board sent him to Burma and put him in charge of Nigerian troops.
    “Well, you know how the Brits are,” my grandfather told me once when my grandparents came out to visit us in Malawi. “They don’t know there is a bloody great difference between a Nigerian and a Kenyan, let alone between a Kikuyu and a Kalenjin or an Igbo and a Hausa.” My grandfather chewed on the end of his pipe, and belched a cloud of fragrant tobacco at me. “Can’t say I thought much of Nigeria,” he said. “All the Brits thought it was the prime spot, but it was swampy hot, for one thing, and smothered in mosquitoes for another. Burma wasn’t too bad. At least there was the war to take your mind off the bloody humidity.”
    My grandfather had amused gray eyes and a magnificently unapologetic Roman nose. Throughout the time I knew him, he talked about Burma now and again, but in disconnected snatches, as if his memories were like the bouts of amebic dysentery that occasionally haunted him after the war—appearing without warning, sometimes violently, and then disappearing just as suddenly.
    At some point during the war, my grandfather was wounded. “In Burma, I think. I don’t know how,” Mum says. “Of course, we didn’t really talk about it. I suppose shrapnel or something. He had this tennis ball–sized lump on his hip. Glug and I always begged him, ‘Show us your war wound! Show us your war wound!’ and he would drop his shorts so we could admire it. And then the next thing was, ‘Daddy, take your teeth out!’ because everyone had false teeth in those days. As soon as they turned forty, that was it—off they all went to the dentist—out with the old and in with the snappers.”
    But Auntie Glug says, “No, no, no. It wasn’t shrapnel in Burma. It was a rock in Nigeria. I’m sure of it. Someone threw a rock at him and he ended up with a very impressive lump on his hip.” She waves her cigarette at me. “I’m convinced that’s how he got his wound.” And