Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [66]
“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
After 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