Forever | A Day in Panda

Forever Then – 1943, a Thursday

Time stretches and contracts again, breathing into an infinite loop of Yesterdays melting into Tomorrows without ever being Now. 

The weather is just pretend seasons of a forever Spring that only exist because the almanack on the wall says so. Warmth, colours, smells twirl and wrap themselves up in the fluffy embrace of certainty. Gone are the pain, the screams, the splinters. Just men, women, plants, flowers, animals, insects even, floating in an ethereal harmony. 

Panda, the house, the garden, the giant grass, the bush. 

The veranda, a dimensional threshold: inside outside, and outside inside. The line between the Tame and the Wild, the Wild and the Tame. Everything and everyone wild tame and tame wild. Chameleons on flower stalks in the living room and children sitting on tree branches in Gulungu. 

The dungarees and the dresses, the yin and the yang, Suzanne’s and François’ world. 

As above, so below. Paradise Lost, found again.

And the two demiurges give reality to life every day, in a whirlwind of sights and sounds, smells and textures, words and bearings, shaping lives and guiding fates, forever: anything and anyone goes. 

Absolute freedom within absolute rules. 

Suzanne, the omniscient djinn of the household, its benevolent maker, its omnipotent fairy godmother. The Romans called these spirits the Penates, the house protectors. Watching, fending, feeding, clothing, prodding, pointing, showing, telling, helping, hovering. Shaping.  

Suzanne. The Master of Life’s many Clocks.

Every morning, she holds the hands of her little troupe of three daughters and leads them to the narrow ore train tracks. Everyone wears the same dress they all agreed with Suzanne, from the patterns she bought at the company store. The party stops at the level crossing to watch and wave as it trundles and rattles past, huffing and puffing clouds of white steam, red carbuncles and black scoria. The conductor, standing next on the tender, smiles and waves back. A short walk, and here is school, Institute Saint Sauveur. The Reverend Mother greets them at the gate, in her immaculate white robes and hood.

Spiritual guidance is the food of the mind. François thinks and reads what he wants, this is her private domain.

She picks them back up at 16h30, walks them home, asking about their day. Listening, nodding and silently ticking boxes. And, once they reach the little gate, the garden is theirs! 17h00 homework, if any, else run in the garden and play with the dog to get some fresh air. 17h30 light reading. 18h00 food and table manners. Then one last look outside, and off to bed. Exactly what the Swiss doctors recommend. A schedule written in stone. She eats with François at 20h00, to talk and giggle at Colette’s latest prank: she is allowed, she is expected to, she is the youngest. The others have to set the example. 

Suzanne. The ringmaster of Panda. 

Life is both the fridge and the censer, the sewing machine and the court etiquette: it is modernity and tradition. And willpower. Women mend, sew, cook, and lead, and tell, and argue politics and ideas. They drive reality. Frankly, it takes a woman to give a man an iron will and the necessary stubbornness. Colette, the writer that is, had been right all along. So were the Aunties. 

Not stubborn, not difficult, just confident. Militant. 

What, who else to rely on? The whole of Europe is incommunicado. Embrace the circle of eucalyptus trees, the purple clouds of jacarandas, the whispering fans of tropical plants, the dripping golden cascades of willow trees. Rejoice in the wonders, the marvels. Why would you need anything more? Life is just full. They live with Nature and Nature lives with them. Birds are in tall cages and flowers in vases, filling the house with Nature’s smells and sounds. 

Inside outside, outside inside. 

And to know what is out there, on the outer rim of the laager, read, and read again. Babar the Elephant is the runaway favourite, even if Suzanne prefers Gédéon, King of Matapa. Both books are worn out, threadbare, dialogues and illustrations learnt by heart, and the life lessons distilled every evening. Babar is barely a fiction out here: he could just be living over there, in one of these forsaken woods, distrustful of the city and its citizens. For society may corrupt. Does corrupt? 

Babar. A tame wild elephant. Or is it a wild tame elephant? She closes the book. The daughters sat around her on the deckchair, pondering the words.

The very last sunbeams pierce the bright orange and stark pink clouds. Birds trill and warble the end of the day: bulbuls sing over canaries and weavers… They sing their day, the joys, the losses, François quietly says. Only the coucals are silent. And the bats drop out of the trees in huge swarms: no rain tonight. Claude stares at the skies, mesmerised by the show. Like every day. He points for the group: look there, here they come! 

He names, translates, connects the visible and the invisible: for, out there, everything has a role to play, not good nor evil, just ageless cycles of imperatives. 

His smile broadens at the pennant nightjars corkscrewing like ribbons, fluttering like silk banners trailing fighting kites,… Claude smiles beatifically: if only she could soar like them, spread her beautiful wings and twirl them in impossible patterns, turn and dive in for one last farewell, to fly away forever in the last beam of the setting Sun. Who knows? he winks. 

François of the Old Forest. 

And, at the weekend, he will take them along ancient trails only a few know. And even less remember. Further and further they will walk, into the heart of the deepest forest, across the tallest fields of swaying grass, up the steepest hills. To bask in the scents of primeval woods, the sounds of churning waters and the sights at dramatic waterfalls. 

Frans, Wòden of the Wild Hunt. 

This is where improbable legends live. The gorillas, the lions, all the animals you saw and read about in Babar. But more, better than that, the ones you will never read about: the mudfishes, who can live without water. Legionary ants who leave nothing, not even grass, just a trail of destruction. Squirrels who do not fear humans. And the Greater Nkudu, with its impossible antlers. To all of them, that is his real realm, the kingdom he watches with a benevolent eye, where the trees are old, the grass tall, waters unbowed and the ground red. Where Nature roams, free.

François, Oberon, King of The Fairies, leads them on a trip that will never end. 

To the village, where they are welcomed as soon as they park the truck. Everyone turns up to look, smile, enquire and laugh. Curious, inquisitive, intrigued. A life without walls, nor doors, where houses are not hard edged, but blend into the forest, paths pounded into streets, and ground pounded into floors, by decades of footsteps. The village, topsy turvy and yet obviously logical. Where even the Wild feels at home: over there, a warthog family trundles past, tails aggressively pointed at the sky. 

François, the ringmaster of Nature. Outside inside and inside outside. 

Primordial power. And what wonders! Primitive, brutal, the waterfall of Gulungu, stone glaring with furious waters, black and white memories that will follow them everywhere. 

And on Monday, Suzanne will drop the kids back at school, leading them up to the narrow train tracks.

A Youth? A Life? 

Memories stitched together and seared in their minds

Not a Past, never a Past 

Their only Life

Forever

Now – From the diary of Claude-Anne Bollon-Dulière (1937-2022)

“There is no chronology, because happiness is a whole, built from small things, one next to the other. This is what the memories of a life are made of. 

They are memories, either in Black and White or in colours, but they are so cumbersome in their beauty that I would like to make this gift to you, because life is beautiful, but short, and I wish [the memories] are not lost.

I hope my father, the one that made me live this Africa, his Africa, will guide me to try and make you understand the beauty of its landscapes, its smells. And the silences too.

I dream to be reincarnated as a nightjar: an evening bird, black and white, a bird of silence and mystery, who flies off when the car arrives after, back from a picnic on the Bunkeya road.”

– 8th of May 2009, Rueil-Malmaison, France | Translated from French

---

You read the Finale of Transvaal Blue Skies: the true story of how, early last century, Suzanne moved to Africa and built her laager. This is a series of loose dots weaved in a chronological thread, wrapped into a story to be plucked and observed, heard and remembered, recognised and judged. Suzanne Dulière was my grandmother.  

Read Transvaal Blue Skies from the beginning, start here.