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By Root 1416 0

a single small bunch of leaves. Five leaves each. Talent said, ‘Sometimes I look back and I don’t know how I did those things. I couldn’t do them now.’ She was one of the team that collected bits of body after a bomb went off. ‘You’d find a hand or a foot or a bit of liver, or a heart, and you’d think, But this is one of my comrades…we used to bury just bits of people. You have to get hard, you make yourself not care about what you are doing.’ For a time Talent was defusing bombs. Where was that going on? ‘In Zambia–they used to bomb where they thought our camps were. Sometimes they hit us, sometimes not.’ I could tell from how Cathie was listening that Talent did not often talk about the War. ‘I was lucky,’ said Talent, ‘I wasn’t one of the pretty girls. The pretty ones used to be taken off into the bush by the Commanders.’ This remark surprised me: I think she is very attractive.

Her war went on for years. She was never a girl and then a young woman with clothes and make-up and flirtations: she was a soldier when she was a child. She was a soldier when she met her future husband, for she was one of the men and women who agreed, at the Collection Point, to make a communal farm of ex-guerillas, at Simukai. She remarked that she lived with her husband for years before marrying him. ‘I can’t understand how girls can marry men they don’t know.’ Now she has three small children and her husband looks after them when she is on one of these trips. So does Cathie’s husband. Both say they could never do this work if they didn’t have such good husbands.

‘Sometimes I can’t believe I am doing this work,’ says Talent. ‘I can’t believe I am alive. When I was in the bush, I often could not believe the War would end, and I would live an ordinary life.’

But it seems the War has never really left her: she has terrible headaches and sometimes cannot move for days.

Listening to Talent was like sitting with my brother talking about war.

A war ends, you bury the dead, you look after the cripples–but everywhere among ordinary people is this army whose wounds don’t show: the numbed, or the brutalized, or those who can never, not really, believe in the innocence of life, of living; or those who will for ever be slowed by grief.

Meanwhile rumours enliven the train: the trouble is the brakes, the engine has broken down, rain has flooded the track. Puddles lie everywhere, and the sky is full of lively clouds, blue appearing only intermittently.

The train moved forward, stopped. Round about Gweru it summoned enough energy for a short move forward of a mile or so, then another, stopping in between like a wounded centipede.

People left the train and strolled about or sat on the embankment, Chris among them, first in ones and twos, then in groups, then it seemed everyone on the train was out there. It looked like a picnic, but without food. The scene reminded me of what I had been told of the old days–in this case before I was born, up to about the time of the First World War, when the train running north to Sinoia (Chinhoyi) would stop long enough for a man to leap down and shoot a duiker, a bush buck, a koodoo, if game appeared near the railway line. The meat was distributed among the passengers. When the booty was a lion the sportsman was given time to get the skin off. If in a good mood, the engine driver might halt long enough for everyone to have a picnic.

When our train gathered enough energy for a short move forward, it summoned the wanderers with short nagging snorts, and everyone ran back to it. Soon, when we stopped, people lugging suitcases ran to the road, hoping for a lift. But there were dozens of them, and hardly any cars, and these days people don’t easily give lifts.

During one long wait two white youths from first class sat by themselves under a tree watching the lively scenes they could not allow themselves to be part of.

Round about midday the train stood idling near a village. People ran in crowds to buy soft drinks, biscuits. While they streamed one way, a small half-naked black boy ran from his hut where his mother stood