Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [59]
One of the soldiers says, “Ah, comrade . . .”
Dad says, “And there’s another thing. You can call me Mr. Fuller or Silly Old Bugger or Old Goat Fuller or any damn thing you like but comrade . . . never! You can never call me comrade.”
The soldiers look at Dad in astonishment.
“I’m not your comrade.” Dad takes the tip of one of the soldier’s guns and moves the barrel out of the way. He says, “Didn’t anyone teach you not to point these things at live targets?”
The afternoon turns into a thick mellow evening, the light filters syrup-yellow and as the heat of the day melts away, so does the anger in the men. The soldiers grow tired; some of them sprawl on the top of the wall, slouched over the barrels of their guns and watch, eyes hooded, as Dad speaks to the soldier who seems to be in charge. Vanessa and I sit on the steps with the dogs, picking ticks out of their coats and popping the little gray and red bodies on the stone flags. Mum is very pale, breathing in quick shallow breaths. At last the soldier in charge stands up and stretches, “Okay, okay. Let’s leave this incident to sleep now. You just keep your wife under control from now on,” he tells Dad. “This is Zimbabwe now. You can’t just do as you please from now. From now it is we who are in charge.”
They drive away. We watch them until their lorry humps over the culvert at the bottom of the drive.
Dad says, “You okay, Tub?”
Mum nods. She says, “Let’s have a drink.”
Vanessa says, “Oh no! My cake.”
That night we go out to the Club. While Vanessa and I sit on the black plastic chairs in the smoky bar sipping Cokes and crunching on salt-and-vinegar chips, kicking our heels against the chair legs, Mum and Dad drink and tell the story of their day’s adventure. By the time deep night has come and the nocturnal creatures have started to sing and croak and screech, Mum and Dad are drunk and Vanessa and I are curled up in the back of the car, staring out of the windows at the slowly swinging bright stars as they make their way across the cloud-scudding sky. We are eating our third packet of chips and sipping on dumpy-sized bottles of Coke.
“Did you think you were going to die?” I ask Vanessa, carefully licking a chip to get the salt off it before I put the whole thing into my mouth.
“What?”
“Did you think we were going to be shot by those Affies?”
Vanessa yawns and scrunches up her chip packet. “Have you finished your chips?”
“No.”
“Give them to me.”
“No!”
“Do you want a Chinese bangle?”
I stuff the remaining chips into my mouth. My eyes sting and tears roll down my cheeks with the effort of it. Vanessa scrambles over the seat and squashes my cheeks together until the food squeezes out of my mouth.
I start to cry. “I’m telling on you,” I weep. “I’m telling Mum and Dad.”
Vanessa snorts. “Go ahead,” she says.
Robandi is put up for mandatory auction under the new land distribution program. It is sold, in the loosest sense of the word, to a black Zimbabwean. The money that changes hands in this exchange doesn’t even touch the sides of our pockets. Everything from the farm is given to the Farmers’ Co-op, from which we had borrowed money to buy the farm in the first place.
Robandi never belonged to us, and it doesn’t belong to the new Zimbabwean farmer. It belongs to the mortgage company. They, alone, seem unmoved by the fierce fight for land through which we have just come.
The Fullers—Devuli
DEVULI
On a recent map entitled “Comfort-Discomfort Belts,” Devuli Ranch is shown in the area of Zimbabwe that is shaded with tight red lines. This means that it is an uncomfortably hot place, bordering on oppressive. “Health and efficiency suffer,” the map’s legend says.
The older maps, drawn up in the 1920s, are more blunt. On these old maps, the area in which Devuli Ranch sits has stamped across it in bold black letters, “Not Fit for White Man’s Habitation.”
Dad bends over a map and shows me: “See?” He lights a cigarette and points with the two fingers which hold the cigarette at the ranch. Blue smoke floats over the flat, yellow,