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By Root 390 0

still alive. The matrons came back through and lifted the mattresses off our heads. The boys doubled up in the junior boys’ dormitory and the girls were laid head to toe in the senior boys’ dormitory—layers of bodies. A few of us slept, but just before dawn we heard more artillery in the hills and we disentangled ourselves from one another, our legs unwrapping from legs, our intertwined fingers uncurling from fingers. “Take cover!” we yelled. We pushed one another and dove under our beds until Miss Carr came back through. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Those are our boys. They’re keeping you safe. Get back in your beds. It’s safe, those are our mortars.” Although from my perspective I suddenly knew two things with complete clarity: that regardless of who is firing them, all mortars sound the same; and that nothing would really ever be okay or safe again.

For the next two days the phone in the hostel rang off the hook, and one student after the other was summoned to the teachers’ smoke-filled office to speak to their parents. They returned smugly solemn and tear stained to report that their folks had been sleepless with worry about them. Mum and Dad never did telephone Vanessa and me to see if we were all right. So I thought perhaps they didn’t care, that they alone among Chancellor Junior School parents were not sleepless with worry about their children. But Vanessa said, “No, it’s not that. We’ve got to be okay on our own. You’ve got to be much braver than this, Bobo. They expect us to be brave now.”

A couple of weeks after the attack we went home for the weekend. Mum gave us both a T-shirt, and we understood it was a treat for not being wimpy (the way we were taken to the secondhand bookstore in Salisbury if we were brave at the dentist). The T-shirt showed a beer bottle in the shape of a grenade. Over it were the words COME TO UMTALI AND GET BOMBED!

“There,” Mum said. “That’s a joke; isn’t it funny? It’s a pun. Do you know what a pun is?” And then she looked at her hands and her eyes went very pale, “They asked us not to phone you. They said it would clog up the lines. They said we shouldn’t . . .” There was a pause. “You do know you must look after each other.” She gave us a shaky, uncertain smile. “You do know that, don’t you?”

Nicola Fuller and the End of Rhodesia

Bo and Van in front of Victoria Falls. Rhodesia, 1978.

My mother has no patience with questions that begin, “What if.” But I spend a great deal of my time circling that insensible eddy. What if we had been thinking straight? What if the setting of our lives had been more ordinary? What if we’d tempered passion with caution? “What-ifs are boring and pointless,” Mum says. Because however close to irreparably deep madness my mother had gone in her life, she does not now live in a ruined, regretful, Miss Havisham world and she doesn’t wish any of her life away, even the awful, painful, damaging parts. “What-ifs are the worst kind of postmortem,” she says. “And I hate postmortems. Much better to face the truth, pull up your socks and get on with whatever comes next.”

So the truth is this: it’s toward the end of the war (fin de everything) and our collective thinking has been so shaken up by the hallucinatory, seductive violence of it all that we can’t see our way even to a safer address somewhere else in Rhodesia, let alone out of the country. In any case, it doesn’t occur to us to leave. We see our lives as fraught and exciting, terrible and blessed, wild and ensnaring. We see our lives as Rhodesian, and it’s not easy to leave a life as arduously rich and difficult as all that.

In addition, leaving was treason talk, cowardly stuff. Mum makes a fist. “The Fullers aren’t wimps,” she says. “No, you don’t walk away from a country you say you love without a fight just because things get rough.” So the war escalated and escalated until very few families—rural, urban, black or white—were untouched by it and still we held on.

And then something happened that might have changed everything: my father’s father died. It took the English relatives a week before