Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (14 page)

“Wait,” I say. “You didn’t walk around the fields first? You didn’t feel the soil? You didn’t inspect the barns or check the water supply?”

Mum gives me a look, as if I am the murderer of fairy stories. “We didn’t feel it was necessary. There was such a pretty view across the valley to John Parodi’s farm and beyond that to Mozambique, wasn’t there, Tim?”

“What’s that?” Dad says.

“A TERRIFIC VIEW OF MOZAMBIQUE,” Mum shouts. “FROM THE HOUSE!”

SO MY PARENTS BORROWED MONEY to buy the farm, and we moved from Karoi to the Burma Valley (two children, three dogs, two cats, one horse, some china, the linen, Wellington, the two hunting prints, a second-hand treadle sewing machine and the Le Creuset pots). Seen without the beneficial filter of every different color liqueur in John Parodi’s liquor cabinet, Robandi was rockier than would have been ideal and it was in a rain shadow. The flamboyant trees seethed with termite nests and nothing would grow under them. The house, which had looked mysterious beneath a canopy of fiery red blooms, was, on closer inspection, a dreary bunker. “But it was our own farm in Africa.” Mum sighs. “And we were so happy, so proud, so sure this was where we would spend the rest of our lives.”

Mum painted the outside of the house an apricot-peachy color. She brought out the treadle sewing machine and made curtains out of mattress ticking. She hung Irish linen tea cloths and china plates on the walls to augment the hunting prints, and she planted the garden with vegetation guaranteed to thrive on the maximum amount of neglect. Finally, she filled up the swimming pool, but without an electric pump and expensive chemicals, it quickly turned green and in a short while, played host to scores of frogs, a family of ducks, some geese and the occasional Nile monitor. “Well, there you go,” Mum said, squinting at the overall effect of the garden, the pink house, the verdant swimming pool. “Very soothing and picturesque, no?”

At night we ate Mum’s colorful vegetables fresh from the garden and her tough home-raised chickens tenderized into fragrant curries in the Le Creuset pots. “Ah, fantastico!” Mum took a sip of the cheapest possible Portuguese wine, and she clinked her glass against Dad’s, “Here’s to us,” she said, “there’re none like us. And if there were, they’re all dead.” And for a moment in that spluttering candlelight, with their two growing daughters, their pack of dogs, their one difficult horse, their wild swimming pool, it looked as if Mum and Dad might be happy here forever: Dad with his farm to shape into a southern African version of Douthwaite; Mum with her life to shape into something biography worthy.

And then, just a few months after we moved to Robandi, something happened halfway around the world that changed everything. In April 1974, revolutionaries marched through the streets of Lisbon holding red carnations to symbolize their socialist ideology. In the aftermath of the coup, Portuguese colonies in sub-Saharan Africa were immediately granted their independence and a million Portuguese citizens fled from those territories. Mozambique’s new Marxist-Leninist FRELIMO government announced it was supporting the ZANLA guerilla soldiers who were fighting majority rule in Rhodesia. In retaliation, the Rhodesian government funded RENAMO, an anti-Communist rebel army in central Mozambique. The border between Rhodesia and Mozambique was closed, and between the two countries, a cordon sanitaire (literally “quarantine corridor” but actually a minefield) was built a few miles above our farm.

Dad was conscripted into the Rhodesian Army Reserves and Mum voluntarily joined the Police Reservists. She became a Red Cross emergency responder. Every few weeks, Dad put on his camouflage uniform and disappeared with six other Burma Valley farmers to fight in the Himalayas. Mum learned to run the farm in his absence. They slept with an Uzi and an FN rifle next to the bed, they ate with Browning Hi-Power pistols on their side plates and they taught Vanessa and me how to shoot to kill. They put sandbags in front of the windows and surrounded the farmhouse with security fencing. We bought an old Land Rover, mine-proofed it and named it Lucy. And Mum came up with her Olé! war cry, which we sang on Wednesday and Saturday evenings on our way to the Burma Valley Club, where Mum danced on the bar (gorgeous with her long auburn hair, her pale green eyes).

But in those early days, the war was more like the unwelcome threat of bad weather than something perpetually violent. “The big thing was to pull up your socks and carry on as effortlessly as possible,” Mum says. She was scornful of the ten thousand whites who left the country: “The chicken run,” we called it. And she had no tolerance for those who said black rule was inevitable. “Over my dead body,” she said. “Life must go on.”

So she taught Vanessa and me proper elocution for hours and hours. “There,” we said, trying not to flatten the end of the word. “Women,” we said, as if the word had only
i
’s and two
m
’s. “Nice,” we said, smiling over the
i
instead of rhyming it with “farce.” We rescued several dogs. We were given another horse. Vanessa was packed off to boarding school in Umtali. (“She pretends not to be able to read,” Mum told her teacher, “but she really knows quite a lot of Shakespeare.”)

I was given correspondence school lessons at home with an emphasis on what my mother considered the sacred arts of storytelling, and after lunch, before we both fell asleep in the limb-deadening afternoon heat, Mum read to me:
The Jungle Book
,
Winnie-the-Pooh
,
The Wind in the Willows.
In the cool evenings, Mum sat with tea on her lap, eyes half closed. “Story of the Week,” she would demand. And I would tell her, “This week I rode through the river on my horse with one eye.”

“Hm.” Mum would smile. “
Splashed
is better than
rode,
don’t you think?
I splashed through the river on my one-eyed horse, the dogs paddling next to me
. . . . How about something like that?”

Then in the humid November of 1975, Mum felt suddenly overwhelmed by a familiar nausea. By early August of the following year, she was heavily pregnant. “A week or two left I would have said,” Doctor Mitchell told her, frowning. “And in this condition, must you be all the way out there on that farm? It’s not safe.” Almost on cue, the war suddenly escalated. On the night of August 11, 1976, the Mozambican army launched a mortar attack into the southern suburbs of Umtali. Vanessa—at boarding school—was herded with the other girls downstairs, where they were pushed onto the concrete floor and had mattresses thrown on them with such hurried force that some of them ended up with contusions. When she came home for the weekend, I admired her bruised knees, the egg on her forehead, and bombarded her with questions. Was she frightened? Did she see any dead bodies? Did she see a terrorist? But Vanessa only looked self-protectively bored, and Mum said, “Don’t go on and on and on about it, Bobo. It’s over now, isn’t it?”

The Rhodesian government issued thousands of prewritten air letters for white families to send to friends and relatives overseas with institutionally authoritative language that nonetheless accurately mirrored our internal denial: “No doubt you are worried about the situation in Rhodesia, particularly in view of all the sensational headlines and horrific articles which appear in the press,” the letter began. “What much of the world press does not wish to print are the true facts about Rhodesia. That she has weathered the last ten years so well, in terms of internal peace, productivity, growth and racial harmony, despite the effects of boycotts and sanctions.”

In the days following the reported mailing of more than fifteen thousand of these letters, ambushes on white Rhodesian farmers and government forces became more common and the artillery even more deadly, and whatever else this was, it wasn’t a scrappy little bush war anymore. Doctor Mitchell was adamant, “Get into town, for God’s sake, Nicola,” he told Mum. “And stay in town until that child is born.”

“But you have mortars there too,” Mum objected.

“Yes, but at least we also have a hospital.”

So with Dad off fighting in the Himalayas, Mum and I moved into town and stayed with friends and waited and waited for the baby to arrive. “I would have been bored half to death,” Mum says. “But luckily
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
had finally found its way to the Rainbow Theatre, so I watched that at least three times.” And on August 28, Olivia Jane Fuller was born in the Umtali General Hospital—dark curls, full Garrard lips and the most extraordinary violet-blue eyes anyone had ever seen. The nurses called one another from different stations to show off Olivia’s eyes and they took her to visit the wounded convalescents in other wards. In this suddenly very bloody war, Olivia seemed an unlikely and almost redemptive thing of beauty.

From her window in the maternity ward, Mum could see the casualties arriving from the front lines in red dust–covered army trucks and Land Rovers and ambulances (all the incoming soldiers to this particular hospital were white; black soldiers fighting for Rhodesia were sent to the hospital for black people, proving that you can die for a cause for which you won’t necessarily be saved). “I do remember those wounded troops. They were so young, some of them, they looked like schoolboys,” Mum says. “Their razor haircuts fresh enough that the sunburn hadn’t yet had time to scorch the white off their necks.” Mum heard the boys calling for their mothers and she cradled Olivia on her shoulder. “It’s all right, little girl,” she told the baby. “It’s all right.”

When Olivia was a week old, we brought her home through Zamunya Tribal Trust Land and into the valley, escorted by a convoy of soldiers and minesweepers. Seeing the new baby, the soldiers were especially assiduous in their work that day. “Her eardrums won’t take it if there’s an incident hey,” the convoy leader told Mum. He cradled Olivia’s downy head in his gun-oily hand, incongruously tender in his camouflage, his belts of ammunition, his war-weary boots. “Agh shame,” he said awkwardly, as if gentleness was something nearly forgotten on his tongue. “She’s so sweet—look at those eyes.”

And this nearly forgotten gentleness enveloped Robandi too. There were still the stripped guns on newspaper in the sitting room, the antigrenade defenses outside the windows, the Agric Alert radio crackling security updates morning and evening: “Oscar Papa two-eight, Oscar Papa two-eight, this is HQ. How do you read? Over.” But there was also the routine comfort of boiled bottles in the kitchen; a curtain of white nappies on the washing line behind the house; Mum reading in bed late into the morning with the baby asleep against her neck. And in the evenings, instead of the dread news with reports of casualties and attacks and counterattacks, Mum took the wireless out onto the veranda, tuned it to the classical-and-oldies station and slow-waltzed Olivia into the garden, around the frangipani tree. “Everybody loves my baby,” she sang. “But my baby don’t love nobody but me.”

In January 1977, I joined Vanessa at boarding school in Umtali. “Good luck, Bobo,” Mum told me. “Be good for your teachers, listen to your matrons and try not to be homesick.” She picked up my dachshund. “I’m sure Jason will miss you terribly.” She waggled Jason’s paw in my direction. “Won’t you, Jason King?” Olivia stayed home with Mum and with Violet, the nanny. Once a month, Mum and Dad came to fetch us for the weekend and we were escorted back to the valley by a convoy of security vehicles and minesweepers. All the way home Vanessa and I fought over who would have Olivia on her lap.

“I’m eldest.”

“Ja, but she likes me better.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Look, I can make her laugh.”

“Don’t tickle her, she doesn’t like it.”

“Ja, she does.”

“Doesn’t.”

Until Mum (sitting in the front with her Uzi pointed out the window) swiveled around and threatened to swat both of us unless we settled down, shut up and looked after the baby. “Are you paying attention?” she asked, and we both knew what that meant. After that we got serious and put Olivia on the seat between us, below the level of a window so that if we were ambushed, a bullet would have to go through the Land Rover door
and
one of us before it could ever reach our baby. There was an unspoken rule. If we were all going to die, it would be in this order: Dad, Mum, Vanessa, me and then unthinkably last but only over all of our dead bodies, Olivia.

Olivia

A
fter the drought-breaking storms of October, November usually brings steady afternoon showers, and with that predictable rain there is the returning hope that this year will be better. Mbudzi, the Shona call it, “month of goat fertility.” The veldt lights up with a simmer of fresh growth, like pale green flames; wood smoke and dust are washed from the sky; white storks and black Abdim’s storks return from their European holidays. So when Mum says, “It must have been November on Robandi,” I imagine all of these hopeful things, but I also think of the perennial hopelessness of that farm, the way we always seemed to be at least one rainy season behind making a profit.

“Yes, it must have been November,” Mum says. “And it was very hot, very humid, so I decided to leave Olivia with Violet at the house, just for an hour or so. Dad wanted to show me something at the seedbeds.” Mum looks at her work-worn hands. “I was very involved with the farm, you see.” And I envision Mum as she was then, with her hair tucked behind her ears in the tobacco fields; or sweating on the receiving end of a calving cow; or riding her horse across the star grass, her Uzi seven pounds and seven ounces across her belly, pocking marks into the saddle’s pommel with its stubby barrel. “I had to run the whole place single-handed when Dad was off fighting,” she says.

By November 1977, Dad was thirty-seven, but war costs men and it costs money, so every year the Rhodesian government raised our taxes and they upped the age of conscription—all white males under the age of sixty were subject to call-up; younger white men spent twenty-five or thirty weeks a year in the army in six-week increments. Mum paddles the fingers on both hands and counts them off, her lips moving. “I think Dad was forty by the time the war ended. Forty but very fit, weren’t you, Tim?”

“Sick of it,” Dad says.

“Yes, but in
marvelous
shape,” Mum says.

THE TOBACCO SEEDBEDS were on the far end of the farm, four or five miles from the house. I picture them now, rows of black plastic–covered beds on the edge of the field above the gully that sliced the farm in two. The soil here was pale and a little sandy. Baboons used to live in the msasa forest around this field, foraying into the open in the evenings. The odd duiker or bushbuck still came through from the Himalayas, and once or twice a leopard. So when Mum caught movement in the trees out of the corner of her eye, her initial reaction was not one of alarm. “I thought maybe an animal,” she says.

But then the movement stepped out of the shadows into the bright sun and resolved into two men, dressed in the uniform worn by FRELIMO. “Two terrorists,” my mother says, “very scruffy and desperate looking. They were each shouldering an AK47 and their shirts were dripping with grenades. One was limping badly.” Mum shakes her head. “My mind went wild. I thought, ‘My God, they’re going to kill us in broad daylight. And then they’ll go to the house and kill the baby.’ We’d all seen the pictures of what the terrs had done—maimed and murdered children. God, my skin went absolutely marble cold. It was terrifying, wasn’t it, Tim.”

“Pretty horrible,” Dad agrees.

Mum makes a fist. “But I’ll tell you what—your father was so cool. He didn’t panic at all.” Her eyes are shining. “They say you can take the measure of a man by how he behaves at gunpoint, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that.”

MY FATHER WATCHED the two men walk toward the Land Rover, the one barely able to bear weight on his leg. Dad took his revolver off his belt and put it on my mother’s knee. “Get into the driver’s seat,” he told her. He lit a cigarette, slowly opened the Land Rover door and got out. The two terrorists kept coming toward my father, their hands lifted slightly away from their sides. Dad never took his eyes off them, but he continued to speak quietly to my mother. “Nothing’s going to happen,” he told her. “But if it does, fetch Olivia and get the hell off the farm. Don’t look back.” Then he began to walk toward the terrorists, openly unarmed.

My mother slid over from the passenger’s side into the driver’s seat and held the gun. She prayed silently, “Please God, not Tim. Not Tim.” And then, “Please God, not the baby. Not the baby. Not the baby.” She watched Dad’s back, a dark stain of sweat growing between his shoulder blades. He threw his cigarette onto the ground, and squashed it dead with the toe of his veltskoen. Then he looked up, as if only just noticing the two men. “Yes, boys,” he said. “Anything I can do for you?”

For a moment nothing happened. And then the limping man sank to his knees. “Baas, we’re pseudo ops.”

My father glanced over his shoulder at my mother. “It’s okay, Tub,” he said. “They’re on our side.”

“We need water, we need food,” the limping man said. He lifted his trouser leg to reveal a gunshot in his ankle, badly infected and smelling of gangrene in that damp heat. “Please, baas, I need assistance.”

My father looked at the men for a moment. “You bastards had better be who you say you are,” he said quietly. He lit three cigarettes at once, handed one to each of the men and kept one for himself. Then he turned back to my mother and in a loud, reassuringly normal voice told her, “Bring the first aid kit, Tub. We’ve got a bit of a situation here.”

Mum got out of the Land Rover, shaking with spent adrenaline. She went around to the far side of the vehicle where she could not be seen and sank onto her heels. Then she took a deep breath, got her first aid kit, walked into the bright rain-clean sunlight and did what she could for the man’s ankle; swabbed it with iodine, retrieved what grit and bone fragments she could and wrapped it with a supporting bandage. “We sent them on their way after an hour or so,” Dad says. “And afterward, when we phoned the police to report the incident, they told us RENAMO operatives were using our farm as a stopover on their way in and out of Mozambique. So then we knew. Mostly they came after dark; they slept in the barns and they were gone before dawn. They were self-sufficient—on the whole didn’t ask for food or water. We didn’t often see them unless, like that time, they were wounded and needed help, and then we’d hear them in the shateen—‘Maiwe! Maiwe!’—and you’d know some poor bastard had been hit and that he’d dragged himself back over the minefield, and we were their first chance of help.” Dad shakes his head as if trying to dislodge the sound of that cry, “Maiwe! Maiwe!”

FOR A LONG TIME it’s very quiet under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Then one of the dogs at Mr. Zalu’s house begins to bark and my parents’ dogs spill out into the darkness in answer, hackles stiff with suspicion. Mum’s geese honk. Rose beetles crack against the lightbulbs above our heads and spin on their backs at our feet. Dad relights his pipe and puffs on it for a moment. “Well,” he says at last, “the only people who think war is a glorious game are the bloody fools who’ve never had to be on the pointy end of it.”

A MONTH LATER, a bus detonated a land mine on its way through the Burma Valley. Then, just before Christmas, up in the Himalayas, Dad and the rest of his patrol were dropped off by helicopter to find a group of terrorists suspected of attempting an attack on the Leopard Rock Hotel the night before. “It wasn’t much fun,” Dad says, “like looking for a bloody wounded buffalo in jesse bush.” In the Tribal Trust Lands there were daily reports of guerillas in the taverns and kraals waiting to ambush farmers on their way into town. Near the Davises’ house there was a contact between guerillas and security forces and the sound of gunfire echoed across the valley so that it was hard to distinguish where the fighting was.

So on the morning of January 9, 1978, Mum and Dad weighed their options. Our school fees were due, which meant Mum and Dad needed to take a slaughtered steer into the township on the edge of Umtali and scrape together enough money from the sale of meat to pay the bursar. On top of that, Vanessa had undergone a sudden growth spurt, and she needed a new pair of school shoes. Mum bit the inside of her lip. “Safest and best,” she said, “to leave Bobo and Olivia at Mazonwe with Rena, don’t you think?” She looked at the steer, fly-attracting and taking up more than all the room in the back of the Land Rover. “Nicer for the little ones, yes?” Mum strapped the Uzi across her chest, Dad shouldered his FN rifle and we all climbed into the Land Rover, hot and coppery with the smell of the steer’s blood.

“I’m going to get shoes and you’re not,” Vanessa said to me.

“Don’t tease Bobo,” Mum said.

Vanessa pulled a face at me and mouthed, “I’m going to town. I’m going to town. I’m going to town!”

I pulled a face at Vanessa and mouthed, “I’ll see Aunty Rena. I’ll see Aunty Rena. I’ll see Aunty Rena!”

Rena Viljeon, our favorite neighbor, was a kind and practical Scottish nurse married to an Afrikaner farmer. They had four children (also favorites), all older than Vanessa and me (their eldest son was eighteen and in the Rhodesian Special Forces), and they owned the local grocery store a couple of farms west of Robandi. The store was a child’s dream: salty with dried fish and bright with sweets, soap and beads. On the veranda of the store, there was always a tailor, strips of cloth whipping through his fingers as his feet treadled: “Ka-thunka, ka-thunka, ka-thunka.”

On that rainy-season morning, the sun fresh and bright through the washed sky, Olivia and I were dropped off with Aunty Rena. We stood at the security fence and waved at the Land Rover carrying Vanessa, Mum, Dad and the chopped-up steer into Umtali. Mum leaned out the window, the wind whipping her auburn hair into her mouth. “Be good and help Aunty Rena look after Olivia!” she shouted. We watched the Land Rover turn right at the end of the road, Mum’s Uzi and Dad’s FN rifle poking out of the window against the worst that the war could throw at them, and then we turned back to the store.

IN THOSE DAYS, it took more than an hour to get into town–the convoys were slow, following the minesweepers. Dad dropped Vanessa and Mum at the OK Bazaar and went into the markets in the African part of town. Mum and Vanessa each had a sausage roll and a Coke at Mitchell the Baker (brother of Mitchell the doctor) and then went shopping for school shoes at the Bata on Main Street. It was here, in the early afternoon, that the local member in charge of the Umtali Police found them, Mum bent over Vanessa’s stocking-clad foot, a brown lace-up in her hand. “Nicola?” he said.

Mum looked up, a half smile on her lips. “What are you doing here, Malcolm?” But seeing his stricken face, Mum straightened up and dropped Vanessa’s foot.

Malcolm put his hands on Mum’s shoulders. “Nicola, I’m so sorry. There’s been an accident.”

Mum’s knees gave way and she sank onto the red plastic seat next to Vanessa. She dropped the brown lace-up. “No,” she said. “Don’t tell me.”

“I’m so sorry. Oh God.” Malcolm looked over his shoulder. “Where’s Tim?”

Mum shut her eyes, and the breath came out of her in short puffs, as if she’d been hit in the chest. “He’s selling meat.” She swallowed. “Malcolm, what is it?”

Malcolm crouched down and put his hands on Mum’s shoulders. “It’s . . . Oh God, I am so sorry. It’s your little one....”

“Not her,” Mum said. Now all the breath fell out of her and the blood drained from her face. “Oh please, God, not the baby.” And then in a whisper, “Not my baby, don’t tell me. Not shot, please. She’s been shot? Is she all right?”

“I’m so sorry,” Malcolm said, gripping Mum’s shoulders tighter. “I’m so, so sorry. She’s dead.”

Mum began shaking all over, “What? They were attacked? She was . . . Was she shot? What happened? An ambush?”

“She . . . We got a phone call from Rena. She drowned.”

Mum shook her head, bewildered by the impossibility of this. “No! How? She didn’t drown. Who drowned her? No! No!” She stood up and pushed Malcolm. “Please no, please no, please no.” And then she walked blindly into the bright sun on Main Street, her whole body convulsing with shock. “No! No! No!”

AND YET THERE WAS OLIVIA on the spare bed of the neighbor’s house, drowned in the duck pond at Mazonwe because somehow that afternoon at the Viljoen’s grocery story we all believed that someone else was keeping an eye on her. Aunty Rena assumed she was with me; I assumed she was with Aunty Rena and there was also Duncan, Rena’s fourteen-year-old son with whom Olivia might have wandered off without either of us knowing. And after everything else there was to protect her from—land mines, mortars, abduction, ambush—none of us thought a foot of slimy water behind the store was the greatest danger that could confront the baby.

While I was waiting for Mum, Dad and Vanessa to come back from Umtali, I put purple flowers around Olivia’s head. Her curls had dried in crisp ringlets on the white, cotton pillowcase. I heard the neighbors’ dogs barking and the sound of our Land Rover pulling into the driveway. Then, in the ensuing horrified hush, I could hear Mum running across the veranda, her shoes urgent down the passage into the spare bedroom. She fell into the room, her whole being attached to the small, perfectly still body on the bed. She sank to her knees and I watched her press her pale lips onto Olivia’s blue lips and breathe, her eyes closed, her auburn hair streaked across Olivia’s ivory-colored face. It looked as if she were trying to exchange breath with her dead child. “My breath for yours. Take me instead. My breath for yours.” And when Olivia’s lips did not grow any pinker, Mum sank back on her heels and her chin dropped onto her chest.

Dad came to the door. He picked me up and held me against his shoulder. His face an unseeing mask. “You’re so brave,” he said. “You must be so brave.” Behind him, standing in blank disbelief, I saw Vanessa. Her hands were slack by her side, her eyes open, her face utterly composed except for the two silver lines of tears running down her face. When her eyes caught mine, she shook her head very slightly, almost imperceptibly.

OLIVIA DIED IN THE WET SEASON and we buried her in the tiny, muddy community graveyard in the jungle, beneath the Vumba Mountains, where monkeys smashed through the branches of the old trees and birds nested noisily in the canopy. We marked her grave with a granite stone: OLIVIA JANE FULLER BORN 28 . 8 . 76. DIED 9. 1. 78. DEARLY LOVED DAUGHTER, SISTER. At her funeral, which was held at the house of an Afrikaner family who lived near the graveyard, we sang sad country music about loving and losing and about this being a fine time to leave us and we ate Afrikaner food: fatty lamb, boervors and koeksisters. We grieved in the way of stoical people: tight lipped, moist eyed; the remote death, the little funeral. And we sang some more about hard times and bad times and how there are some pains so deep that they just won’t ever heal.