Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [73]
She grew thin and sinewy, her feet calloused in the nailed strips of old tractor tires she now wore for sandals, her hands blistered and toughened. Whatever soft motherliness she had started out with—that smiling young woman in a gingham dress cradling a Shakespeare-saturated Vanessa on the lawn at Lavender’s Corner—was all but worn away. But then, one night in September 1979, Mum suddenly shoved herself back from the dining room table, a hand over her mouth, her eyes glassy with nausea. She glared at her plate, “Oh, the smell!” she said. Knowing the telltale signs, my father put down his knife and fork. “All right, Tub?”
Mum held up a finger, “I’ll be fine.”
She hurried from the room and Dad watched her retreating back. Then he pushed away his plate, lit a cigarette and put his head in his hands—the smoke curled up through his thinning hair. Outside, insects continued to pulse; Mum’s dairy cows screamed at a disturbance (a stray dog perhaps) and up in the hills there was a muffled explosion—something or someone on the cordon sanitaire detonating a mine. Whether she was ready for it or not, motherhood had imposed itself on Mum once again.
IT IS AN ANCIENT and misguided ruse, this introduction of a baby to trick the universe back into innocence, an effort to force the unraveling world to meet the comforting routine of a milk-scented nursery, a wish to have our sins washed clean by the blamelessness inherent in a newborn. But by late 1979, our country was beyond the reach of any child, however miraculous. The war had gone on so long and had become so desperate that it wasn’t a civil war anymore so much as it was a civilians’ war, a hand-to-hand, deeply personal conflict. The front line had spread from the borders to the urban areas to our doorsteps, and if we didn’t all have bloody hands, we were all related by blood to someone who did.
And now, awfully, the half-life of our violence had been extended indefinitely: the war had turned biological. Rhodesian Special Forces with the help of South African military had salted the water along the Mozambique border with cholera and warfarin; they had injected tins of food with thallium and dropped them into conflict zones; they had infused clothes with organophosphate and left them out for the guerilla fighters and for sympathizers of the guerilla cause. And they had planted anthrax in the villages; and more than ten thousand men, women and children living in the country’s Tribal Trust Lands were sickened with sometimes fatal necrotic boils, fevers, shock and respiratory failure in what would end up being the largest outbreak of anthrax among humans in recorded history.
All of this ongoing and deepening enmity, even as the leaders of the Rhodesian government and the leaders of the liberation forces were meeting at Lancaster House in London to discuss how to transition from rogue state to majority rule—from war to peace. Lord Carrington, British secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, opened the meeting tersely. “It is, I must say, a matter of great regret and disappointment to me and my colleagues that hostilities are continuing during this conference. . . .”
There had been peace talks before—held in the carriage of a train on the railway bridge across the Victoria Falls in 1975, for example—but the dialogue had always broken down. So it was something of a surprise—actually, to some it was an irredeemable blow—when on December 6, 1979, after three months of brittle negotiations, the Lancaster House Agreement was finally signed by all the relevant leaders. And just like that, it was settled. The war was over. Within a matter of weeks, the country would have a new name, Zimbabwe. And we would have a new prime minister, Robert Mugabe.
At school we were told that from now on, we were all equal. After morning announcements, we no longer sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” at assembly; now we sang “Precious Lord,