A Child Called Happiness

by Stephan Collishaw

  ‘Bastards,’ he muttered.

  Leaving the light burning in the kitchen, Roy indicated for Natalie to follow him. They went out through the back of the house, down by the barn and crept past the hedges and the cottage to the fencing. Around the front of the house the light of the bonfire flickered brightly now and a large crowd of men had gathered.

  ‘Looks like they might be getting ready for some action,’ Roy said.

  He glanced at his watch, it was a little after four in the morning; the sky had not begun to lighten yet, but dawn was no more than an hour away.

  ‘My guess is that they will be ready to move in as soon as it begins to get light,’ Roy said. ‘Nobody likes surprises and they’re going to want to see how we are going to respond. I don’t think they’ll move in darkness.’

  They walked quietly forward across the grass to get a closer look at the crowd of men. Natalie estimated there were around thirty of them now, squatting around the fire. A few others wandered back and forth along the perimeter fence smoking. The scent of the cigarettes drifted on the light breeze.

  ‘Mbanje,’ Roy said. ‘They’re smoking marijuana.’

  He signalled for Natalie to move and they doubled back around the barn to the house. In the back room, Roy stopped and gazed out of the window into the darkness.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Roy said. ‘The atmosphere doesn’t feel good. I don’t like that they’ll be high.’

  He turned around and ran a hand through his grey hair.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Roy shook his head and sighed. He looked suddenly very weary.

  ‘Let’s wait till dawn,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what they do. Hopefully there will be some reasoning with them.’

  As he spoke the sound of voices grew louder outside. The sound of a ragged chant and the beating of drums. From the window Natalie saw lights moving around the perimeter of the fence. She felt a lurch in her chest and a sudden fear gripped her. Roy turned sharply back to the window.

  ‘Kristine!’ he shouted. ‘Kristine, are you dressed?’

  He moved quickly into the hall and leapt up the stairs, Natalie followed him. Roy ran down the corridor and opened the door of his bedroom. Natalie stood on the landing feeling her legs tremble. She gazed down into the stairwell where the dog stood growling softly in front of the oak doors.

  A moment later Roy reappeared and behind him Kristine, dressed in jeans and a khaki shirt, her hair tied back. She must have already been dressed and ready; her jaw was set and her eyes were hard.

  ‘Have you called the others?’ she asked.

  Roy shook his head. ‘I’m going to phone Boyle now, see if he can get up here fast.’

  The sound of chanting had grown louder and as they moved down the stairs they could hear the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path. The dog began barking, running backwards and forwards in front of the door. At the back of the hallway another door opened and the maid appeared, her face drawn with fear.

  ‘They’re coming, ma’am,’ she said, turning to Kristine, her voice shaking, ‘they’re coming across the lawns.’

  ‘Where are Bhekinkosi and the others?’ Kristine said. Her voice was tight and controlled showing little sign of fear.

  ‘They’re out the back, ma’am. Some of them wanted to run away, they are afraid ma’am. They don’t want to be beaten.’

  Kristine glanced at Roy who stood in the doorway to the lounge. Roy looked back at her but seemed at a loss as to what he should suggest.

  ‘Tell them to remain in their homes,’ Kristine said, turning back to the maid. ‘Tell them not to come out unless they have to. They shouldn’t try to confront the men and they will be safer if they stay on the farm.’

  The maid disappeared through the door into the darkness. Roy remained in the doorway.

  ‘Do you think that is best?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kristine leaned back against the wall. ‘They’re probably better off running for it.’

  A knock silenced them. For a moment they stood looking at the large oak door. It was not a violent banging, or even a loud knock; it was quiet, but authoritative, and in the middle of the night, above the chanting and the sound of the drums and the dog barking it seemed incongruous. Kristine’s eyebrows shot up. Roy held up his hand and put a finger to his lips.

  ‘The police?’ he whispered.

  He stepped over to the door and put his hand on the black, metal handle. He waited some moments, turning briefly to look at his wife. Then he opened the door.

  For some moments they could see nothing. Whoever had knocked had stepped backwards into the darkness and against the glare of the light in the hallway it was not possible to see more than a couple of feet out into the garden. Roy leaned across and flicked on the outside light.

  Standing alone in the sudden illumination was an elderly man, half naked, dressed on the lower half in traditional Shona costume. In his hand he held no club or primitive axe as many of the veterans did, but rather a photograph. He held it out. Natalie did not recognise him immediately, though the face and the shock of greying hair seemed familiar. Roy glanced at the photograph the old man held out.

  ‘Moses… ’ he said.

  27

  It was dark when we met beneath the flame tree at the top of the ridge north of Bindura. The sun had long since set. Its brief, brassy light had lit the path up over the top of the kopje as I made my way from my mother’s house. As darkness descended, it began to grow cold and I shivered in my thin shirt. I glanced back only once at the flickering lights of the township and tried to make out my mother’s house, a black space. My mother would not be home until much later.

  For a brief moment I imagined her pushing wearily through the front door and seeing the bed empty. Pictured her face as she picked up the note I had written, scribbled rapidly on a sheet pulled from an old school exercise jotter. Steeling myself, I turned my back on her and, slouching against the wind, tramped after the shadow that was disappearing into the darkness ahead of me.

  There were five other men squatting in the dust beneath the flame tree. They barely looked up as the three of us flung ourselves down on the ground beside them.

  ‘Kanjani,’ a stocky man in his mid-thirties said.

  We nodded our heads. ‘Hi.’

  I glanced around timidly. I barely knew my two travelling companions. I had met them only the previous evening in a house on the edge of Bindura. Mugabe had been there, sat primly on a wooden chair by the table, a book under the palm of his hand, that serious look on his face. He had introduced us, had given us instructions on where to meet. We used code names: Lion, Desert Dog and Gazelle. I was Gazelle, ‘Swift and young,’ Mugabe said looking at me with his intense eyes.

  For an hour we sat there, shivering, barely saying a word. At one point one of the young men took out the butt of a cigarette and lit it.

  ‘Put it out,’ the stocky man hissed.

  The youth looked up and for a moment I noted the defiant crease of his brow as though he was about to argue, but then he thought better of it and stubbed it out carefully in the dust and put it back into the pocket of his shirt. It was after midnight when the sound of a low whistle broke the silence and the stocky man pricked up his ears and motioned to us.

  We moved out quickly, sliding over the edge of the ridge, keeping low, so that our silhouettes would not be noticed against the clear, star-studded night sky. For some miles we followed a ravine that ran down the side of the hill and then, fording it, the water rushing around our knees, we cut north and headed off across the grassland keeping in single-file, not saying a word.

  The young smoker was ahead of me, and I noticed how often his hand would fly up to his pocket to extract the cigarette. He would bring it up to his nose and inhale the stale scent of it deeply. Then carefully poke it back into his shirt.

  It was almost dawn when we crept up the side of a rocky escarpment and crawled into a narrow fissure in the rock, barely wider than ou
r thin bodies, and crouched down. The sky lightened rapidly, and before long it was day. The heat rose with the sun and the cool moisture of the night quickly evaporated. My stomach ached with hunger and my legs were worn sore. Resting my head against the rock behind me, I fell into a dazed slumber, waking occasionally, my neck aching and my bones crying out to lay flat against the earth, but there was not space.

  Sometime later a bottle of water was passed along the line and we all drank from it thirstily. There was bread too, a crust that you could only nibble at, it was so dry; but it kept the worst of the hunger at bay.

  When it grew dark, we moved on again, and the second night was harder than the first. The young man dropped behind me, and I heard the scratch of a match and a moment later the scent of his cigarette. Turning I could see little, he had it cupped tight within his hands, so tight it must have been burning them.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, dropping behind.

  ‘What?’ he shot back, his voice sullen and tight with aggression.

  ‘Give me a drag, or I’ll shout up front.’

  ‘You shout and I’ll knock every tooth out of your mouth,’ he said, but he quickly handed me the stub and I inhaled the hot smoke greedily.

  It was on the third morning that we crossed the border. A small village clung to the side of a hill and as the sun rose we staggered up the low incline and collapsed among the ragged huts.

  A few days later a truck picked us up and we drove to a camp deep in the bush. There were about fifty men at the camp, some of them little older than me, grizzled men in their thirties, dressed in rags, thin and with eyes haunted by hunger, and one who was younger, a boy of no more than fourteen.

  The food we got in the camp was basic, but it was probably better than what most of us were used to. We were given a uniform too, khaki clothes that didn’t fit. We trained hard and in the evenings, exhausted, we gathered in the huts to listen to political instruction; Marxism, visions of an Africa liberated from imperial white control, united, free. The English gone. Once Mugabe came to a meeting. He watched us as we paraded in the dust, stood bolt upright, shaded by an umbrella he held delicately in his soft scholar’s hands.

  It’s hard to explain how much we idolised Mugabe – he was something we had not seen before, an educated African, smart, knowledgeable, cultured and with a deep, bitter, visceral hatred of the colonial powers. He had no fear of the white man, he taught us to spit in their faces.

  Most of the lectures in the evenings were dry and pedantic and often I would fall to sleep, buried away in the corner, but when Mugabe came, my eyes were wide. He could have spoken all night and I would not have slept. If I had felt my eyelids closing, I would have ripped them off, but they never closed. He filled the air with an electric current. I was ready to die for him.

  I grew up there, on that camp. Physically I grew stronger, but it wasn’t just that, nor the passing of the months, the year, the slow turn from the blistering, dry weather in August when we set out from Bindura, through the rains, the hot sultry days with their sudden downpours, when we would emerge from treks through the bush soaked through to the skin, and then the cool weather, dry and temperate. I learned to carry a gun, to fire it. And I learned there, in that dusty camp, to focus the burning inarticulate rage I had felt ever since I could remember, ever since I had seen my father hanging from a tree. I learned to hate. To hate enough to kill.

  It was the day after we heard that Mugabe had been arrested that we finally moved out of the camp, in small groups, and began our journey back to the border. The evening the news arrived I walked up out of the camp, and climbed to the top of a low hill. The ground was rocky and bare and there was a good view over the surrounding countryside. It reminded me of the kopje behind our old farm, where my mother had taken me to see the grave of my great-grandfather Chimukoko. We had stood in the cool silence of the grave and my mother had poured out a jug of beer on the hard-packed earth floor.

  ‘Mudzimu,’ she breathed, ‘spirits hear!’

  I stood by her side trembling in the still darkness.

  ‘Guide your son,’ she whispered, rocking backwards and forwards, ‘have mercy upon him.’

  A low ululation broke from her lips, a haunting, grieving sound that rose and rose and sent a chill down my spine as it echoed around the walls of the cave. I looked up and saw her staring eyes roll back. She faced the ceiling, the veins stood out on her throat and the noise rose.

  ‘Amai!’ I called, gripping her arm.

  At that moment a shadow darkened the entrance of the cave and I cried out and fell to the ground.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ the red haired apparition bellowed, his voice drowning out that of my mother’s.

  Amai stopped and turned and I saw a sudden look of fear and something else flash across her face. Reginald Drew lifted his arm and it was only then that I saw that he was carrying a rod, a thick stick he had been using to walk with. He swung it hard and it hit my mother across her side. She cried out and fell to the earth. He lifted it again and I screamed as it fell, unable to move, unable to save my mother from its blow.

  ‘Get out, get off my land,’ the white man screamed, thrashing at my mother with his stick.

  Crawling and grunting, arm raised above her head to ward off the blows, she grabbed my hand and we scrambled through the beery dirt, out of the cave. Sobbing and howling we staggered down the hillside. Snot bubbled from my nose. Only at the bottom of the path did we pause and look back up to see Drew standing there in the entrance to the cave, a tall, wiry man, his white skin almost as red as his short cropped hair, still brandishing his stick.

  Kare kare. That was how she always started. Long, long ago. Late into the night, when she came home and sat on the bed beside me she told me the stories of my father, of Tafara, my grandfather, and of his father before him, the unbroken line of men who had farmed the land beneath the kopje and hunted in the woods that surrounded it, who had raised cattle there, had married and borne sons.

  Kare kare. Long ago now. They seemed little more than fairy tales.

  As I lay on the rocks staring up into the star-studded night I longed for her tales, for her stories of the land that had existed before the white man came.

  We left the camp in small groups, each with a commander, an older soldier who had already been involved in guerrilla activities. Trekking south we reached the shores of the Zambezi at the end of the second day and when darkness fell we took a small wooden boat, which we paddled as silently as we were able across the waters.

  Working south, following a narrow, winding river, we joined up with a small detachment in a village north of Chinhoyi. From there we travelled west, moving only at night through the fertile farm land. Dogs barked, and occasionally a white farmer ventured out, rifle cocked and let off a few shots into the darkness, and I would feel my heart thump as we waded along the bed of the shallow stream, our heads low.

  Late one evening we entered a village in the Dande region. Smoke hung low over the village and from several huts could be seen the faint flickering of firelight. We spread out between the huts and shouted out, slapping our hands against the crumbling mud walls.

  ‘Out, out.’

  The villagers crept out of the buildings, faces tight with fear. We collected them together in the centre of the huts and built up a fire. The chief of the village was an old man. His bald head reflected the light of the fire as if it has been polished. The younger children huddled close to the legs of their mothers. As I stood there, with the old rifle flung across my shoulder, I felt a power I had never felt before. And a pride too.

  The commander of our group stepped forward.

  ‘Forward with ZANU!’ he shouted.

  The villagers gawped at him silently.

  ‘You must answer, “forward!” the commander told them. He tried it again, calling out loudly.

  ‘Forward!’ the villagers replied obediently.

  Behind the legs of the women some of the children grinned at the sudd
en chanting.

  ‘Do you know who we are?’ the commander asked. ‘We are the spirits of Zimbabwe. For many years the white people have taken our land. They have forced us from our farms and away from the lands of our ancestors. They drove us onto barren reserves, while they themselves took the best of what was left. They beat us and imprison us.

  ‘Well, no longer. The spirit of Nehanda has returned. ‘My bones will rise again,’ she said. We are the bones of Nehanda risen from the soil of our land, come to reclaim it.’

  Later we taught them songs we had learned in the training camps. ‘We come to free Zimbabwe, grandmother Nehanda, ancestral, spirits of war.’

  For some months we stayed in those villages in the north of the country, living first in one village, teaching the young people, recruiting new fighters who were sent across the border for training, then moving to neighbouring areas. But as I lay down each night, I longed to move south, to go back to the valleys around Bindura, back to where my ancestors land had been. In truth, when the time came to move from recruitment to fighting, I knew which white face I wanted to seek out. I knew in whose body my first bullet would lodge.

  One morning, Hopeful called us together. Hopeful was the commander of our small group. He was a thin man with an odd shaped face and beneath his pinched, small forehead, a large nose bulged out. We squatted around him and watched as he took a stick and drew out a crude map of the area in the dirt. When he had finished he pointed to a cross he had drawn.

  ‘After the disaster at Sinoia,’ he said, ‘when seven of our fighters were killed, a spirit of dismay fell upon us. We threw ourselves forward and such was our enthusiasm that we imagined that nothing could hold us back.’

  I nodded eagerly. I felt that Hopeful did not like me. He was slightly shorter than I was, and often he would throw off a snide remark about my looks.