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By Root 1323 0

on for ever, the miles made longer by the need to concentrate on everything. This is sandveld country, not the heavy red, brown and bright pink soils of Banket, and the landscape has a light dry airiness. Mountains and more mountains accompany the road, but at distances that paint them blue, mauve, purple, while close to the road are clusters of granite boulders unique in the world; at least, I have not seen anything like them elsewhere, or in photographs. The boulders erupt from pale soil to balance on each other so lightly it seems impossible a strong wind will not topple them. The great stones, a light bright grey, with a sparkle to them if you look close, but patched and patterned with lichens, radiate heat waves against the intense blue of the sky. Everyone who passes speculates about how long they have impossibly balanced there and enjoy notions of giants who have played with pebbles. ‘That one, there,’ I would think, fixing its exact shape and position in my mind, ‘it might have fallen off by the time we come back next week.’ But that boulder, the size of a hut or a baobab tree, contacting the one beneath it only for a square inch or two, had won the battle against gravity, and was still there in 1982 on that day I sped past on the road, not to Marandellas and Umtali, but to Marondera and Mutare, after so many rain storms, powerful winds, bolts of lightning; after half a century of history and the years of the civil war: the War of Liberation, the Bush War.

The road went up. The road went down. Roads do this everywhere, but never as emphatically as on those journeys at thirty miles an hour, the car labouring to the top of a crest and reaching it in a climax of achievement, then the reward of a descent freewheeling into the valley, then the grind up the next rise, in second gear, because second gear is a solid, responsible state to be in, top gear has something about it of frivolity, even recklessness. Each crest brought another magnificent view, and my mother exclaimed and directed our attention in her way that mingled admiration and regret, as if such beauty must have a penalty to pay in sorrow. Meanwhile I was cramming into my mind, like photographs in an album, these views and vistas that would never stay put, but were changed by memory, as I would find out on the next trip. A ‘view’ I had believed was fixed for ever, had disappeared. A coil of mountains was lower than I remembered. A peak had come forward and attracted to itself a lesser hill. A river had changed course and acquired a tributary I had simply not noticed. Perhaps there had been a different ‘view’, and I had been mistaken? No, because that hill, there, near the road, had not changed, and I had used it as a marker. Yet how I had laboured over that view, my eyes stretched wide in case a blink shifted a perspective or spoiled my attention, my mind set to receive and record. I was in a contest with Time, and I knew it. I was obsessed with Time, always had been, and my very earliest memories are of how I insisted to myself, Hold this…don’t forget it–as if I had been born with a knowledge of its sleights and deceptions. When I was very young, perhaps not more than two or three years old, someone must have said to me, ‘I’m telling you, it’s like this.’ But I knew that ‘it’ was like that. They said: ‘This happened, this is the truth’–but I knew that had happened, that was the truth. Someone trying to talk me out of what I knew was true, must have been the important thing that happened to me in my childhood, for I was continually holding fast to moments, when I said to myself, ‘Remember this. Remember what really happened. Don’t let yourself be talked out of what really happened.’ Even now I hold a series of sharp little scenes, like photographs, or eidetic memory, which I refer to. So when I fought to retain a ‘view’, a perspective on a road, the little effort was only one on a long list. Time, like grown-ups, possessed all these slippery qualities, but if you labour enough over an event, a moment, you make a solid thing of it, may revisit it…Is it still