Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  My father looked at the men for a moment. “You bastards had better be who you say you are,” he said quietly. He lit three cigarettes at once, handed one to each of the men and kept one for himself. Then he turned back to my mother and in a loud, reassuringly normal voice told her, “Bring the first aid kit, Tub. We’ve got a bit of a situation here.”

  Mum got out of the Land Rover, shaking with spent adrenaline. She went around to the far side of the vehicle where she could not be seen and sank onto her heels. Then she took a deep breath, got her first aid kit, walked into the bright rain-clean sunlight and did what she could for the man’s ankle; swabbed it with iodine, retrieved what grit and bone fragments she could and wrapped it with a supporting bandage. “We sent them on their way after an hour or so,” Dad says. “And afterward, when we phoned the police to report the incident, they told us RENAMO operatives were using our farm as a stopover on their way in and out of Mozambique. So then we knew. Mostly they came after dark; they slept in the barns and they were gone before dawn. They were self-sufficient—on the whole didn’t ask for food or water. We didn’t often see them unless, like that time, they were wounded and needed help, and then we’d hear them in the shateen—‘Maiwe! Maiwe!’—and you’d know some poor bastard had been hit and that he’d dragged himself back over the minefield, and we were their first chance of help.” Dad shakes his head as if trying to dislodge the sound of that cry, “Maiwe! Maiwe!”

  FOR A LONG TIME it’s very quiet under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Then one of the dogs at Mr. Zalu’s house begins to bark and my parents’ dogs spill out into the darkness in answer, hackles stiff with suspicion. Mum’s geese honk. Rose beetles crack against the lightbulbs above our heads and spin on their backs at our feet. Dad relights his pipe and puffs on it for a moment. “Well,” he says at last, “the only people who think war is a glorious game are the bloody fools who’ve never had to be on the pointy end of it.”

  A MONTH LATER, a bus detonated a land mine on its way through the Burma Valley. Then, just before Christmas, up in the Himalayas, Dad and the rest of his patrol were dropped off by helicopter to find a group of terrorists suspected of attempting an attack on the Leopard Rock Hotel the night before. “It wasn’t much fun,” Dad says, “like looking for a bloody wounded buffalo in jesse bush.” In the Tribal Trust Lands there were daily reports of guerillas in the taverns and kraals waiting to ambush farmers on their way into town. Near the Davises’ house there was a contact between guerillas and security forces and the sound of gunfire echoed across the valley so that it was hard to distinguish where the fighting was.

  So on the morning of January 9, 1978, Mum and Dad weighed their options. Our school fees were due, which meant Mum and Dad needed to take a slaughtered steer into the township on the edge of Umtali and scrape together enough money from the sale of meat to pay the bursar. On top of that, Vanessa had undergone a sudden growth spurt, and she needed a new pair of school shoes. Mum bit the inside of her lip. “Safest and best,” she said, “to leave Bobo and Olivia at Mazonwe with Rena, don’t you think?” She looked at the steer, fly-attracting and taking up more than all the room in the back of the Land Rover. “Nicer for the little ones, yes?” Mum strapped the Uzi across her chest, Dad shouldered his FN rifle and we all climbed into the Land Rover, hot and coppery with the smell of the steer’s blood.

  “I’m going to get shoes and you’re not,” Vanessa said to me.

  “Don’t tease Bobo,” Mum said.

  Vanessa pulled a face at me and mouthed, “I’m going to town. I’m going to town. I’m going to town!”

  I pulled a face at Vanessa and mouthed, “I’ll see Aunty Rena. I’ll see Aunty Rena. I’ll see Aunty Rena!”

  Rena Viljeon, our favorite neighbor, was a kind and practical Scottish nurse married to an Afrikaner farmer. They had four children (also favorites), all older than Vanessa and me (their eldest son was eighteen and in the Rhodesian Special Forces), and they owned the local grocery store a couple of farms west of Robandi. The store was a child’s dream: salty with dried fish and bright with sweets, soap and beads. On the veranda of the store, there was always a tailor, strips of cloth whipping through his fingers as his feet treadled: “Ka-thunka, ka-thunka, ka-thunka.”

  On that rainy-season morning, the sun fresh and bright through the washed sky, Olivia and I were dropped off with Aunty Rena. We stood at the security fence and waved at the Land Rover carrying Vanessa, Mum, Dad and the chopped-up steer into Umtali. Mum leaned out the window, the wind whipping her auburn hair into her mouth. “Be good and help Aunty Rena look after Olivia!” she shouted. We watched the Land Rover turn right at the end of the road, Mum’s Uzi and Dad’s FN rifle poking out of the window against the worst that the war could throw at them, and then we turned back to the store.

  IN THOSE DAYS, it took more than an hour to get into town–the convoys were slow, following the minesweepers. Dad dropped Vanessa and Mum at the OK Bazaar and went into the markets in the African part of town. Mum and Vanessa each had a sausage roll and a Coke at Mitchell the Baker (brother of Mitchell the doctor) and then went shopping for school shoes at the Bata on Main Street. It was here, in the early afternoon, that the local member in charge of the Umtali Police found them, Mum bent over Vanessa’s stocking-clad foot, a brown lace-up in her hand. “Nicola?” he said.

  Mum looked up, a half smile on her lips. “What are you doing here, Malcolm?” But seeing his stricken face, Mum straightened up and dropped Vanessa’s foot.

  Malcolm put his hands on Mum’s shoulders. “Nicola, I’m so sorry. There’s been an accident.”

  Mum’s knees gave way and she sank onto the red plastic seat next to Vanessa. She dropped the brown lace-up. “No,” she said. “Don’t tell me.”

  “I’m so sorry. Oh God.” Malcolm looked over his shoulder. “Where’s Tim?”

  Mum shut her eyes, and the breath came out of her in short puffs, as if she’d been hit in the chest. “He’s selling meat.” She swallowed. “Malcolm, what is it?”

  Malcolm crouched down and put his hands on Mum’s shoulders. “It’s . . . Oh God, I am so sorry. It’s your little one....”

  “Not her,” Mum said. Now all the breath fell out of her and the blood drained from her face. “Oh please, God, not the baby.” And then in a whisper, “Not my baby, don’t tell me. Not shot, please. She’s been shot? Is she all right?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Malcolm said, gripping Mum’s shoulders tighter. “I’m so, so sorry. She’s dead.”

  Mum began shaking all over, “What? They were attacked? She was . . . Was she shot? What happened? An ambush?”

  “She . . . We got a phone call from Rena. She drowned.”

  Mum shook her head, bewildered by the impossibility of this. “No! How? She didn’t drown. Who drowned her? No! No!” She stood up and pushed Malcolm. “Please no, please no, please no.” And then she walked blindly into the bright sun on Main Street, her whole body convulsing with shock. “No! No! No!”

  AND YET THERE WAS OLIVIA on the spare bed of the neighbor’s house, drowned in the duck pond at Mazonwe because somehow that afternoon at the Viljoen’s grocery story we all believed that someone else was keeping an eye on her. Aunty Rena assumed she was with me; I assumed she was with Aunty Rena and there was also Duncan, Rena’s fourteen-year-old son with whom Olivia might have wandered off without either of us knowing. And after everything else there was to protect her from—land mines, mortars, abduction, ambush—none of us thought a foot of slimy water behind the store was the greatest danger that could confront the baby.

  While I was waiting for Mum, Dad and Vanessa to come back from Umtali, I put purple flowers around Olivia’s head. Her curls had dried in crisp ringlets on the white, cotton pillowcase. I heard the neighbors’ dogs barking and the sound of our Land Rover pulling into the driveway. Then, in the ensuing horrified hush, I could hear Mum running across the veranda, her shoes urgent down the passage into the spare bedroom. She fell into the room, her whole being atta
ched to the small, perfectly still body on the bed. She sank to her knees and I watched her press her pale lips onto Olivia’s blue lips and breathe, her eyes closed, her auburn hair streaked across Olivia’s ivory-colored face. It looked as if she were trying to exchange breath with her dead child. “My breath for yours. Take me instead. My breath for yours.” And when Olivia’s lips did not grow any pinker, Mum sank back on her heels and her chin dropped onto her chest.

  Dad came to the door. He picked me up and held me against his shoulder. His face an unseeing mask. “You’re so brave,” he said. “You must be so brave.” Behind him, standing in blank disbelief, I saw Vanessa. Her hands were slack by her side, her eyes open, her face utterly composed except for the two silver lines of tears running down her face. When her eyes caught mine, she shook her head very slightly, almost imperceptibly.

  OLIVIA DIED IN THE WET SEASON and we buried her in the tiny, muddy community graveyard in the jungle, beneath the Vumba Mountains, where monkeys smashed through the branches of the old trees and birds nested noisily in the canopy. We marked her grave with a granite stone: OLIVIA JANE FULLER BORN 28 . 8 . 76. DIED 9. 1. 78. DEARLY LOVED DAUGHTER, SISTER. At her funeral, which was held at the house of an Afrikaner family who lived near the graveyard, we sang sad country music about loving and losing and about this being a fine time to leave us and we ate Afrikaner food: fatty lamb, boervors and koeksisters. We grieved in the way of stoical people: tight lipped, moist eyed; the remote death, the little funeral. And we sang some more about hard times and bad times and how there are some pains so deep that they just won’t ever heal.

  ELEVEN DAYS AFTER OLIVIA DROWNED, the Rhodesian government distributed pamphlets in the Tribal Trust Lands with nine new instructions for black civilians:

  1. Human curfew from last light to 12 o’clock daily.

  2. Cattle, yoked oxen, goats and sheep curfew from last light to 12 o’clock daily.

  3. No vehicles, including bicycles and buses to run either in the Tribal Trust Land or the African Purchase Land.

  4. No person will either go on or near any high ground or they will be shot.

  5. All dogs to be tied up 24 hours each day or they will be shot.

  6. Cattle, sheep and goats, after 12 o’clock, are only to be herded by adults.

  7. No juveniles (to the age of 16 years) will be allowed out of the kraal area at any time either day or night, or they will be shot.

  8. No schools will be open.

  9. All stores and grinding mills will be closed.

  But far from containing the growing violence, the new controls only seemed to drive the war deeper underground and strangely further into each of us, as if it had become its own force, murderously separate from mankind, unfettered from its authors, wanton and escaping the conventions that humans have laid out for it in those chastened moments between conflicts.

  Now when we drove through Zimunya, the place blew empty, as if ghosted. The minefields echoed with ever more explosions. And every morning, my mother rode her horse alone at the top of the farm, skirting the edge of the Himalayas, her gun carelessly slung across her back (instead of across her belly, the way she used to carry it), as if willing herself to be shot through the heart.

  It no longer mattered whether Vanessa and I spoke in Received Pronunciation, or whether we spoke at all. The books Mum had read to us on her bed—hours of Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Thompson Seton, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Laura Ingalls Wilder—were gone. In their place was silence. Now when the generator was kicked into life, my mother no longer played for us the vinyl recordings of Chopin nocturnes, Strauss waltzes or Brahms concertos, and meals were no longer interrupted by Mum’s toasting our uniqueness, “Here’s to us, there’re none like us!” Instead, there was the wireless, and the dread news—a civilian airliner shot down by guerilla forces in the southwest of the country, the survivors brutally massacred; an escalation of air raids by Rhodesian forces on guerilla training camps in Zambia and Mozambique; the slaying of foreign missionaries by God only knows whom (each side blamed the other).

  AND THEN, on October 17, 1978, Umtali was mortared again in the middle of the night by guerilla forces coming into the country from Mozambique, an event that coincided confusingly with a vehement thunderstorm. At our boarding school we were awoken by our matrons trying to remain calm above the scream of bombs and the roll of thunder, “This is not a drill! This is not a drill!” We were hurried out of our beds and ushered down the fire escapes. Then we were pushed onto the floor in the front hall and mattresses were thrown on top of us with such hurried panic that our chins and elbows hit the cement. “Keep your heads down!” the matrons cried. “Silence! Quiet! Shut up!”

  Miss Carr took roll call as if life depended on it and kids yelled their names back at her as if doing so might save them from being blown sky high. “Brown, Ann!” “Coetzee, Jane!” “Dean, Lynn!” “De Kock, Annette!” And there were kids crying for their mothers; people were praying out loud, shouting God’s name; and the matrons and teachers telling us to shut up and all the time the whining kaboom of another bomb and then more thunder. But above that overwhelming noise I could still hear the insistently loud voice of my sister from the other end of the makeshift bomb shelter, “Bobo! Bobo! Bobo!” and she didn’t let up until I shouted back, “Van, I’m here! It’s okay! I’m here, man!”

  And then she went quiet under her crowded mattress and I went quiet under mine, but the bombs kept coming from the Mutarandanda Hills above Umtali. I imagined that this was how Vanessa and I would die, apt punishment for allowing Olivia to die first. And I suddenly understood that our aliveness and Olivia’s death was why my father had gone silent, and my mother had retreated so far from us that she seemed like a figure at the wrong end of a telescope, familiar but too distant to touch.

  Then the attack stopped and against all natural laws we were 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.