“The bloody bitch and the bloody bastard!” John bellowed, waving his fist in the direction of the offending neighbor, the straying wife. “I shoot them!”
A clap of thunder broke above the house, and an afternoon storm rolled across the valley. “Amore!” Mum shouted, raising her glass to the sky.
“Amore!” John replied.
IT NEED HARDLY BE SAID that by the time my parents finally climbed into John’s pickup and bumped across the valley to be shown Robandi Farm they had begun to see the world in distinctly rainbow shades. “The whole place was freshly washed in rain. The flamboyant trees on the driveway were in bloom,” Mum says. “The Persian lilacs were dripping nectar.” And the garden, lightly soaked, gave off the scents of frangipani and red earth. “We told John we must have the farm,” Mum says. “He agreed that it should be ours. That was it. I think we signed some sort of agreement on the spot.”
“Wait,” I say. “You didn’t walk around the fields first? You didn’t feel the soil? You didn’t inspect the barns or check the water supply?”
Mum gives me a look, as if I am the murderer of fairy stories. “We didn’t feel it was necessary. There was such a pretty view across the valley to John Parodi’s farm and beyond that to Mozambique, wasn’t there, Tim?”
“What’s that?” Dad says.
“A TERRIFIC VIEW OF MOZAMBIQUE,” Mum shouts. “FROM THE HOUSE!”
SO MY PARENTS BORROWED MONEY to buy the farm, and we moved from Karoi to the Burma Valley (two children, three dogs, two cats, one horse, some china, the linen, Wellington, the two hunting prints, a second-hand treadle sewing machine and the Le Creuset pots). Seen without the beneficial filter of every different color liqueur in John Parodi’s liquor cabinet, Robandi was rockier than would have been ideal and it was in a rain shadow. The flamboyant trees seethed with termite nests and nothing would grow under them. The house, which had looked mysterious beneath a canopy of fiery red blooms, was, on closer inspection, a dreary bunker. “But it was our own farm in Africa.” Mum sighs. “And we were so happy, so proud, so sure this was where we would spend the rest of our lives.”
Mum painted the outside of the house an apricot-peachy color. She brought out the treadle sewing machine and made curtains out of mattress ticking. She hung Irish linen tea cloths and china plates on the walls to augment the hunting prints, and she planted the garden with vegetation guaranteed to thrive on the maximum amount of neglect. Finally, she filled up the swimming pool, but without an electric pump and expensive chemicals, it quickly turned green and in a short while, played host to scores of frogs, a family of ducks, some geese and the occasional Nile monitor. “Well, there you go,” Mum said, squinting at the overall effect of the garden, the pink house, the verdant swimming pool. “Very soothing and picturesque, no?”
At night we ate Mum’s colorful vegetables fresh from the garden and her tough home-raised chickens tenderized into fragrant curries in the Le Creuset pots. “Ah, fantastico!” Mum took a sip of the cheapest possible Portuguese wine, and she clinked her glass against Dad’s, “Here’s to us,” she said, “there’re none like us. And if there were, they’re all dead.” And for a moment in that spluttering candlelight, with their two growing daughters, their pack of dogs, their one difficult horse, their wild swimming pool, it looked as if Mum and Dad might be happy here forever: Dad with his farm to shape into a southern African version of Douthwaite; Mum with her life to shape into something biography worthy.
And then, just a few months after we moved to Robandi, something happened halfway around the world that changed everything. In April 1974, revolutionaries marched through the streets of Lisbon holding red carnations to symbolize their socialist ideology. In the aftermath of the coup, Portuguese colonies in sub-Saharan Africa were immediately granted their independence and a million Portuguese citizens fled from those territories. Mozambique’s new Marxist-Leninist FRELIMO government announced it was supporting the ZANLA guerilla soldiers who were fighting majority rule in Rhodesia. In retaliation, the Rhodesian government funded RENAMO, an anti-Communist rebel army in central Mozambique. The border between Rhodesia and Mozambique was closed, and between the two countries, a cordon sanitaire (literally “quarantine corridor” but actually a minefield) was built a few miles above our farm.
Dad was conscripted into the Rhodesian Army Reserves and Mum voluntarily joined the Police Reservists. She became a Red Cross emergency responder. Every few weeks, Dad put on his camouflage uniform and disappeared with six other Burma Valley farmers to fight in the Himalayas. Mum learned to run the farm in his absence. They slept with an Uzi and an FN rifle next to the bed, they ate with Browning Hi-Power pistols on their side plates and they taught Vanessa and me how to shoot to kill. They put sandbags in front of the windows and surrounded the farmhouse with security fencing. We bought an old Land Rover, mine-proofed it and named it Lucy. And Mum came up with her Olé! war cry, which we sang on Wednesday and Saturday evenings on our way to the Burma Valley Club, where Mum danced on the bar (gorgeous with her long auburn hair, her pale green eyes).
But in those early days, the war was more like the unwelcome threat of bad weather than something perpetually violent. “The big thing was to pull up your socks and carry on as effortlessly as possible,” Mum says. She was scornful of the ten thousand whites who left the country: “The chicken run,” we called it. And she had no tolerance for those who said black rule was inevitable. “Over my dead body,” she said. “Life must go on.”
So she taught Vanessa and me proper elocution for hours and hours. “There,” we said, trying not to flatten the end of the word. “Women,” we said, as if the word had only i’s and two m’s. “Nice,” we said, smiling over the i instead of rhyming it with “farce.” We rescued several dogs. We were given another horse. Vanessa was packed off to boarding school in Umtali. (“She pretends not to be able to read,” Mum told her teacher, “but she really knows quite a lot of Shakespeare.”)
I was given correspondence school lessons at home with an emphasis on what my mother considered the sacred arts of storytelling, and after lunch, before we both fell asleep in the limb-deadening afternoon heat, Mum read to me: The Jungle Book, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows. In the cool evenings, Mum sat with tea on her lap, eyes half closed. “Story of the Week,” she would demand. And I would tell her, “This week I rode through the river on my horse with one eye.”
“Hm.” Mum would smile. “Splashed is better than rode, don’t you think? I splashed through the river on my one-eyed horse, the dogs paddling next to me. . . . How about something like that?”
Then in the humid November of 1975, Mum felt suddenly overwhelmed by a familiar nausea. By early August of the following year, she was heavily pregnant. “A week or two left I would have said,” Doctor Mitchell told her, frowning. “And in this condition, must you be all the way out there on that farm? It’s not safe.” Almost on cue, the war suddenly escalated. On the night of August 11, 1976, the Mozambican army launched a mortar attack into the southern suburbs of Umtali. Vanessa—at boarding school—was herded with the other girls downstairs, where they were pushed onto the concrete floor and had mattresses thrown on them with such hurried force that some of them ended up with contusions. When she came home for the weekend, I admired her bruised knees, the egg on her forehead, and bombarded her with questions. Was she frightened? Did she see any dead bodies? Did she see a terrorist? But Vanessa only looked self-protectively bored, and Mum said, “Don’t go on and on and on about it, Bobo. It’s over now, isn’t it?”
The Rhodesian government issued thousands of prewritten air letters for white families to send to friends and relatives overseas with institutionally authoritative language that nonetheless accurately mirrored our internal denial: “No doubt you are worried about the situation in Rhodesia, particularly in view of all the sensational headlines and horrific articles which appear in the press,” the letter began. “What much of the world press does not wish to print are the true facts ab
out Rhodesia. That she has weathered the last ten years so well, in terms of internal peace, productivity, growth and racial harmony, despite the effects of boycotts and sanctions.”
In the days following the reported mailing of more than fifteen thousand of these letters, ambushes on white Rhodesian farmers and government forces became more common and the artillery even more deadly, and whatever else this was, it wasn’t a scrappy little bush war anymore. Doctor Mitchell was adamant, “Get into town, for God’s sake, Nicola,” he told Mum. “And stay in town until that child is born.”
“But you have mortars there too,” Mum objected.
“Yes, but at least we also have a hospital.”
So with Dad off fighting in the Himalayas, Mum and I moved into town and stayed with friends and waited and waited for the baby to arrive. “I would have been bored half to death,” Mum says. “But luckily The Rocky Horror Picture Show had finally found its way to the Rainbow Theatre, so I watched that at least three times.” And on August 28, Olivia Jane Fuller was born in the Umtali General Hospital—dark curls, full Garrard lips and the most extraordinary violet-blue eyes anyone had ever seen. The nurses called one another from different stations to show off Olivia’s eyes and they took her to visit the wounded convalescents in other wards. In this suddenly very bloody war, Olivia seemed an unlikely and almost redemptive thing of beauty.
From her window in the maternity ward, Mum could see the casualties arriving from the front lines in red dust–covered army trucks and Land Rovers and ambulances (all the incoming soldiers to this particular hospital were white; black soldiers fighting for Rhodesia were sent to the hospital for black people, proving that you can die for a cause for which you won’t necessarily be saved). “I do remember those wounded troops. They were so young, some of them, they looked like schoolboys,” Mum says. “Their razor haircuts fresh enough that the sunburn hadn’t yet had time to scorch the white off their necks.” Mum heard the boys calling for their mothers and she cradled Olivia on her shoulder. “It’s all right, little girl,” she told the baby. “It’s all right.”
When Olivia was a week old, we brought her home through Zamunya Tribal Trust Land and into the valley, escorted by a convoy of soldiers and minesweepers. Seeing the new baby, the soldiers were especially assiduous in their work that day. “Her eardrums won’t take it if there’s an incident hey,” the convoy leader told Mum. He cradled Olivia’s downy head in his gun-oily hand, incongruously tender in his camouflage, his belts of ammunition, his war-weary boots. “Agh shame,” he said awkwardly, as if gentleness was something nearly forgotten on his tongue. “She’s so sweet—look at those eyes.”
And this nearly forgotten gentleness enveloped Robandi too. There were still the stripped guns on newspaper in the sitting room, the antigrenade defenses outside the windows, the Agric Alert radio crackling security updates morning and evening: “Oscar Papa two-eight, Oscar Papa two-eight, this is HQ. How do you read? Over.” But there was also the routine comfort of boiled bottles in the kitchen; a curtain of white nappies on the washing line behind the house; Mum reading in bed late into the morning with the baby asleep against her neck. And in the evenings, instead of the dread news with reports of casualties and attacks and counterattacks, Mum took the wireless out onto the veranda, tuned it to the classical-and-oldies station and slow-waltzed Olivia into the garden, around the frangipani tree. “Everybody loves my baby,” she sang. “But my baby don’t love nobody but me.”
In January 1977, I joined Vanessa at boarding school in Umtali. “Good luck, Bobo,” Mum told me. “Be good for your teachers, listen to your matrons and try not to be homesick.” She picked up my dachshund. “I’m sure Jason will miss you terribly.” She waggled Jason’s paw in my direction. “Won’t you, Jason King?” Olivia stayed home with Mum and with Violet, the nanny. Once a month, Mum and Dad came to fetch us for the weekend and we were escorted back to the valley by a convoy of security vehicles and minesweepers. All the way home Vanessa and I fought over who would have Olivia on her lap.
“I’m eldest.”
“Ja, but she likes me better.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Look, I can make her laugh.”
“Don’t tickle her, she doesn’t like it.”
“Ja, she does.”
“Doesn’t.”
Until Mum (sitting in the front with her Uzi pointed out the window) swiveled around and threatened to swat both of us unless we settled down, shut up and looked after the baby. “Are you paying attention?” she asked, and we both knew what that meant. After that we got serious and put Olivia on the seat between us, below the level of a window so that if we were ambushed, a bullet would have to go through the Land Rover door and one of us before it could ever reach our baby. There was an unspoken rule. If we were all going to die, it would be in this order: Dad, Mum, Vanessa, me and then unthinkably last but only over all of our dead bodies, Olivia.
Olivia
After the drought-breaking storms of October, November usually brings steady afternoon showers, and with that predictable rain there is the returning hope that this year will be better. Mbudzi, the Shona call it, “month of goat fertility.” The veldt lights up with a simmer of fresh growth, like pale green flames; wood smoke and dust are washed from the sky; white storks and black Abdim’s storks return from their European holidays. So when Mum says, “It must have been November on Robandi,” I imagine all of these hopeful things, but I also think of the perennial hopelessness of that farm, the way we always seemed to be at least one rainy season behind making a profit.
“Yes, it must have been November,” Mum says. “And it was very hot, very humid, so I decided to leave Olivia with Violet at the house, just for an hour or so. Dad wanted to show me something at the seedbeds.” Mum looks at her work-worn hands. “I was very involved with the farm, you see.” And I envision Mum as she was then, with her hair tucked behind her ears in the tobacco fields; or sweating on the receiving end of a calving cow; or riding her horse across the star grass, her Uzi seven pounds and seven ounces across her belly, pocking marks into the saddle’s pommel with its stubby barrel. “I had to run the whole place single-handed when Dad was off fighting,” she says.
By November 1977, Dad was thirty-seven, but war costs men and it costs money, so every year the Rhodesian government raised our taxes and they upped the age of conscription—all white males under the age of sixty were subject to call-up; younger white men spent twenty-five or thirty weeks a year in the army in six-week increments. Mum paddles the fingers on both hands and counts them off, her lips moving. “I think Dad was forty by the time the war ended. Forty but very fit, weren’t you, Tim?”
“Sick of it,” Dad says.
“Yes, but in marvelous shape,” Mum says.
THE TOBACCO SEEDBEDS were on the far end of the farm, four or five miles from the house. I picture them now, rows of black plastic–covered beds on the edge of the field above the gully that sliced the farm in two. The soil here was pale and a little sandy. Baboons used to live in the msasa forest around this field, foraying into the open in the evenings. The odd duiker or bushbuck still came through from the Himalayas, and once or twice a leopard. So when Mum caught movement in the trees out of the corner of her eye, her initial reaction was not one of alarm. “I thought maybe an animal,” she says.
But then the movement stepped out of the shadows into the bright sun and resolved into two men, dressed in the uniform worn by FRELIMO. “Two terrorists,” my mother says, “very scruffy and desperate looking. They were each shouldering an AK47 and their shirts were dripping with grenades. One was limping badly.” Mum shakes her head. “My mind went wild. I thought, ‘My God, they’re going to kill us in broad daylight. And then they’ll go to the house and kill the baby.’ We’d all seen the pictures of what the terrs had done—maimed and murdered children. God, my skin went absolutely marble cold. It was terrifying, wasn’t it, Tim.”
“Pretty horrible,” Dad agrees.
&nb
sp; Mum makes a fist. “But I’ll tell you what—your father was so cool. He didn’t panic at all.” Her eyes are shining. “They say you can take the measure of a man by how he behaves at gunpoint, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that.”
MY FATHER WATCHED the two men walk toward the Land Rover, the one barely able to bear weight on his leg. Dad took his revolver off his belt and put it on my mother’s knee. “Get into the driver’s seat,” he told her. He lit a cigarette, slowly opened the Land Rover door and got out. The two terrorists kept coming toward my father, their hands lifted slightly away from their sides. Dad never took his eyes off them, but he continued to speak quietly to my mother. “Nothing’s going to happen,” he told her. “But if it does, fetch Olivia and get the hell off the farm. Don’t look back.” Then he began to walk toward the terrorists, openly unarmed.
My mother slid over from the passenger’s side into the driver’s seat and held the gun. She prayed silently, “Please God, not Tim. Not Tim.” And then, “Please God, not the baby. Not the baby. Not the baby.” She watched Dad’s back, a dark stain of sweat growing between his shoulder blades. He threw his cigarette onto the ground, and squashed it dead with the toe of his veltskoen. Then he looked up, as if only just noticing the two men. “Yes, boys,” he said. “Anything I can do for you?”
For a moment nothing happened. And then the limping man sank to his knees. “Baas, we’re pseudo ops.”
My father glanced over his shoulder at my mother. “It’s okay, Tub,” he said. “They’re on our side.”
“We need water, we need food,” the limping man said. He lifted his trouser leg to reveal a gunshot in his ankle, badly infected and smelling of gangrene in that damp heat. “Please, baas, I need assistance.”