Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [70]
4. No person will either go on or near any high ground or they will be shot.
5. All dogs to be tied up 24 hours each day or they will be shot.
6. Cattle, sheep and goats, after 12 o’clock, are only to be herded by adults.
7. No juveniles (to the age of 16 years) will be allowed out of the kraal area at any time either day or night, or they will be shot.
8. No schools will be open.
9. All stores and grinding mills will be closed.
But far from containing the growing violence, the new controls only seemed to drive the war deeper underground and strangely further into each of us, as if it had become its own force, murderously separate from mankind, unfettered from its authors, wanton and escaping the conventions that humans have laid out for it in those chastened moments between conflicts.
Now when we drove through Zimunya, the place blew empty, as if ghosted. The minefields echoed with ever more explosions. And every morning, my mother rode her horse alone at the top of the farm, skirting the edge of the Himalayas, her gun carelessly slung across her back (instead of across her belly, the way she used to carry it), as if willing herself to be shot through the heart.
It no longer mattered whether Vanessa and I spoke in Received Pronunciation, or whether we spoke at all. The books Mum had read to us on her bed—hours of Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Thompson Seton, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Laura Ingalls Wilder—were gone. In their place was silence. Now when the generator was kicked into life, my mother no longer played for us the vinyl recordings of Chopin nocturnes, Strauss waltzes or Brahms concertos, and meals were no longer interrupted by Mum’s toasting our uniqueness, “Here’s to us, there’re none like us!” Instead, there was the wireless, and the dread news—a civilian airliner shot down by guerilla forces in the southwest of the country, the survivors brutally massacred; an escalation of air raids by Rhodesian forces on guerilla training camps in Zambia and Mozambique; the slaying of foreign missionaries by God only knows whom (each side blamed the other).
AND THEN, on October 17, 1978, Umtali was mortared again in the middle of the night by guerilla forces coming into the country from Mozambique, an event that coincided confusingly with a vehement thunderstorm. At our boarding school we were awoken by our matrons trying to remain calm above the scream of bombs and the roll of thunder, “This is not a drill! This is not a drill!” We were hurried out of our beds and ushered down the fire escapes. Then we were pushed onto the floor in the front hall and mattresses were thrown on top of us with such hurried panic that our chins and elbows hit the cement. “Keep your heads down!” the matrons cried. “Silence! Quiet! Shut up!”
Miss Carr took roll call as if life depended on it and kids yelled their names back at her as if doing so might save them from being blown sky high. “Brown, Ann!” “Coetzee, Jane!” “Dean, Lynn!” “De Kock, Annette!” And there were kids crying for their mothers; people were praying out loud, shouting God’s name; and the matrons and teachers telling us to shut up and all the time the whining kaboom of another bomb and then more thunder. But above that overwhelming noise I could still hear the insistently loud voice of my sister from the other end of the makeshift bomb shelter, “Bobo! Bobo! Bobo!” and she didn’t let up until I shouted back, “Van, I’m here! It’s okay! I’m here, man!”
And then she went quiet under her crowded mattress and I went quiet under mine, but the bombs kept coming from the Mutarandanda Hills above Umtali. I imagined that this was how Vanessa and I would die, apt punishment for allowing Olivia to die first. And I suddenly understood that our aliveness and Olivia’s death was why my father had gone silent, and my mother had retreated so far from us that she seemed like a figure at the wrong end of a telescope, familiar but too distant to touch.
Then the attack stopped and against all natural laws we were