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By Root 335 0

Take My Hand,” which put our relationship to God in a whole new light, bordering on an erstwhile frowned-upon Public Display of Affection (until now, it would not have occurred to us to ask even our own parents to take our hands, let alone the Lord). And instead of praying for our boys, our brothers, our fathers, our men, we now prayed for peace, unity and forgiveness. Instead of mashed potatoes for lunch, we were now served sadza and we were encouraged to eat it the traditional way: rolled into balls in the palm of one hand and eaten with fingers. Our new black matron (much younger and more energetic than our old white one) told us that changing the words we used would be the beginning of changing our hearts. She told us that we should say liberation fighters instead of terrs; we should say indigenous people instead of munts; we should not call grown men “garden boys” or “boss boys”—we should call them “gardeners” or “headmen.”

“I SUPPOSE WE ALL SAW it coming,” Mum says, “but it was still a terrible shock to lose the war like that, lose the country, lose everything. One morning we woke up and it had all been decided and there was nothing left to fight for.” She leans back in her chair, her mouth folded at the edges as if the memory of this time exhausts her. “Everyone was going on and on about peace and reconciliation, but I knew it wasn’t going to work like that. No, I knew it wasn’t going to be simple and easy.”

Zimbabwean refugees who had spent the war in Mozambique came flooding back over the border and began squatting along the river at the top of Robandi, silting up the farm’s water supply and bringing tick disease into our cattle herds with their undipped livestock. “So we ended up with a whole new fight on our hands,” Mum says. “I wanted those squatters off our farm. They wouldn’t leave. We were harassed and exhausted; our nerves were in shreds.” Mum found herself unable to sleep, jumpy and tearful. “I suppose now we would say I had depression, but in those days we didn’t have a word for it.” (Actually, we did. Vanessa and I would have said Mum was having “a wobbly.”)

In light of this, Dad decided it would be best for everyone if we left Robandi, left the squatters, left the apricot-peach colored house and its constant reminders of everything we’d lost. He signed a year-long contract as section manager on Devuli Ranch, a vast, remote piece of nearly wild earth in the southeast of the country. His job was to round up the cattle that had gone feral over the seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-acre ranch during the course of the war. “A year away from it all,” Dad says. “Some real peace, a chance to breathe for a bit.”

Once a fortnight for the next year Dad packed a mosquito net, a sleeping bag, two bottles of brandy, a tin of coffee, some rice and a gun. Then he set up camp in the wild, unpeopled mopane woodlands far from any sign of civilization. At night he slept under a darkly innocent sky, a day’s full drive on rough bush tracks from the nearest human habitation. And I have no proof that day after day he walked six years of fighting out of his system, but it seems as likely an explanation as any for how he recovered most of the pieces of himself after that bush war.

To begin with, he brought Mum with him to camp. He set her up for the day on a camp chair in the shelter of a baobab tree with his best pair of binoculars and a new bird book. Then he went off to track and capture cattle. Once a week, he shot a young impala ram and hung it to cure in a wire safe so that there would always be fresh meat for her. He maintained a burning fire all night and he lit paraffin lamps around the camp so that she wouldn’t trip or stand on a snake if she needed to get up in the night.

But Mum didn’t respond to the isolation as well as Dad hoped. She looked haunted and confused. She couldn’t concentrate long enough to read a single page of her book and, distressingly, she lost all interest in the birds. Her skin grew yellow as if the intense, low-veldt sun was stealing her color, and she began to have heart palpitations.