Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [69]
“Not her,” Mum said. Now all the breath fell out of her and the blood drained from her face. “Oh please, God, not the baby.” And then in a whisper, “Not my baby, don’t tell me. Not shot, please. She’s been shot? Is she all right?”
“I’m so sorry,” Malcolm said, gripping Mum’s shoulders tighter. “I’m so, so sorry. She’s dead.”
Mum began shaking all over, “What? They were attacked? She was . . . Was she shot? What happened? An ambush?”
“She . . . We got a phone call from Rena. She drowned.”
Mum shook her head, bewildered by the impossibility of this. “No! How? She didn’t drown. Who drowned her? No! No!” She stood up and pushed Malcolm. “Please no, please no, please no.” And then she walked blindly into the bright sun on Main Street, her whole body convulsing with shock. “No! No! No!”
AND YET THERE WAS OLIVIA on the spare bed of the neighbor’s house, drowned in the duck pond at Mazonwe because somehow that afternoon at the Viljoen’s grocery story we all believed that someone else was keeping an eye on her. Aunty Rena assumed she was with me; I assumed she was with Aunty Rena and there was also Duncan, Rena’s fourteen-year-old son with whom Olivia might have wandered off without either of us knowing. And after everything else there was to protect her from—land mines, mortars, abduction, ambush—none of us thought a foot of slimy water behind the store was the greatest danger that could confront the baby.
While I was waiting for Mum, Dad and Vanessa to come back from Umtali, I put purple flowers around Olivia’s head. Her curls had dried in crisp ringlets on the white, cotton pillowcase. I heard the neighbors’ dogs barking and the sound of our Land Rover pulling into the driveway. Then, in the ensuing horrified hush, I could hear Mum running across the veranda, her shoes urgent down the passage into the spare bedroom. She fell into the room, her whole being attached to the small, perfectly still body on the bed. She sank to her knees and I watched her press her pale lips onto Olivia’s blue lips and breathe, her eyes closed, her auburn hair streaked across Olivia’s ivory-colored face. It looked as if she were trying to exchange breath with her dead child. “My breath for yours. Take me instead. My breath for yours.” And when Olivia’s lips did not grow any pinker, Mum sank back on her heels and her chin dropped onto her chest.
Dad came to the door. He picked me up and held me against his shoulder. His face an unseeing mask. “You’re so brave,” he said. “You must be so brave.” Behind him, standing in blank disbelief, I saw Vanessa. Her hands were slack by her side, her eyes open, her face utterly composed except for the two silver lines of tears running down her face. When her eyes caught mine, she shook her head very slightly, almost imperceptibly.
OLIVIA DIED IN THE WET SEASON and we buried her in the tiny, muddy community graveyard in the jungle, beneath the Vumba Mountains, where monkeys smashed through the branches of the old trees and birds nested noisily in the canopy. We marked her grave with a granite stone: OLIVIA JANE FULLER BORN 28 . 8 . 76. DIED 9. 1. 78. DEARLY LOVED DAUGHTER, SISTER. At her funeral, which was held at the house of an Afrikaner family who lived near the graveyard, we sang sad country music about loving and losing and about this being a fine time to leave us and we ate Afrikaner food: fatty lamb, boervors and koeksisters. We grieved in the way of stoical people: tight lipped, moist eyed; the remote death, the little funeral. And we sang some more about hard times and bad times and how there are some pains so deep that they just won’t ever heal.
ELEVEN DAYS AFTER OLIVIA DROWNED, the Rhodesian government distributed pamphlets in the Tribal Trust Lands with nine new instructions for black civilians:
1. Human curfew from last light to 12 o’clock daily.
2. Cattle, yoked oxen, goats and sheep curfew from last light to 12 o’clock daily.
3. No vehicles, including bicycles and buses to run