Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [67]
“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,