Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [65]
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