Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  And then something happened that might have changed everything: my father’s father died. It took the English relatives a week before any of them thought to let Dad know. “The funeral is in two days,” Uncle Toe told Dad. “Sorry you won’t be able to make it.” My mother’s eyes go pale. “Well, we were only in Rhodesia,” she says. “It’s not as if we’d fallen off the face of the earth.” Within hours of receiving the telephone call, Dad got a cheap airplane ticket to England through Friends of Rhodesia, an organization that helped cash-strapped Rhodesians in emergencies. Then he found an Indian tailor in Umtali who agreed to put a suit together overnight. “Cash customer!” he announced. “I need a first-class suit for a third-class price.”

  The next morning, Dad arrived in London. He changed into the new suit, hired a car and made it to the church two minutes before his father’s funeral was due to begin. “It was a showstopper,” Mum says. “Here was Tim back from Africa, sunburned and elegant.” As a former colony and now renegade country, Rhodesia made frequent and alarming headlines in the international press: RHODESIA—APARTHEID HEADS NORTH; RHODESIA FACES ITS FINAL HOUR; THE ARMAGEDDON IS ON. My father must have appeared to his relatives as someone suddenly showing up after being forever lost, dark continent vanished. “It couldn’t have shocked them more if Donald had sat up in his casket and ordered a pink gin for the road,” Mum says.

  Dad took a place near a side door and looked at his fellow mourners. I picture them: Lady Fuller sitting stiffly silent in the front row, very elegant in her weeds (I knew so little of my grandfather’s second wife that I can think of her only as the name I have seen in lawyer’s letters, frozen in my imagination like a caricature from a Noel Coward play); Uncle Toe looking pale and serious in the pew behind her; in his wake a respectable showing of cousins, a few aunts, an uncle or two; then a row of solid navy types; and at the back my grandfather’s pig man.

  After the vicar had made obligatory noises, everyone was asked to stand and sing “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended.” Then a toppish-brass navy officer took the pulpit and was eloquent on the subject of Captain Connell-Fuller’s career (skillfully steering his comments so that they sailed with considerable berth around the sore point of my grandfather’s never having achieved the much-desired rank of admiral, or even rear admiral). Then an elderly relative stood up and talked about Donald’s fondness for polo; the passion he’d developed in his retirement for raising pigs (the pig man gave an unhappy little wheeze); the time he blew up an oak tree at Douthwaite because it was getting in the way of his golf swing (general chortling). Then the congregation was asked to please stand again for a closing hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”

  After that, the old man’s coffin was carried out of the church, lowered into a hole in the ground and then as if the first clod of damp English earth on the wooden lid was a starting gun, the quarrel among his heirs began and didn’t let up for a generation and a half, by which time there was almost nothing left over which to fight. My mother closes her eyes and shakes her head, “There were, as you know, let us just say, some . . . problems with the will.” But Mum won’t elaborate. She flaps the air in front of her face, “Troubled water under the bridge and all that,” she says. “No point going on and on about it, is there?”

  SO OUR FATE WAS one million per cent Rhodesian and even at this late date, we carried on fighting for Rhodesia as if it were the last place on earth, as if to lose it would be the same as losing ourselves. And life—the life that remained—went on in all its increasingly surreal impossibility. Vanessa and I continued to attend our segregated government school, where we prayed with renewed concentration and intensity at morning assembly for our fathers, our brothers, our boys, our men. Every six weeks Dad continued to disappear up in the Himalayas to fight guerilla forces, returning home exhausted, his right shoulder hunched like a broken wing from the perpetual weight of the FN rifle he carried. And Mum continued with farmwork: checking on the cattle by horseback in the morning; spending the afternoons in the tobacco fields; fretting over a pile of unpaid bills in the evenings.

  She grew thin and sinewy, her feet calloused in the nailed strips of old tractor tires she now wore for sandals, her hands blistered and toughened. Whatever soft motherliness she had started out with—that smiling young woman in a gingham dress cradling a Shakespeare-saturated Vanessa on the lawn at Lavender’s Corner—was all but worn away. But then, one night in September 1979, Mum suddenly shoved herself back from the dining room table, a hand over her mouth, her eyes glassy with nausea. She glared at her plate, “Oh, the smell!” she said. Knowing the telltale signs, my father put down his knife and fork. “All right, Tub?”

  Mum held up a finger, “I’ll be fine.”

  She hurried from the room and Dad watched her retreating back. Then he pushed away his plate, lit a cigarette and put his head in his hands—the smoke curled up through his thinning hair. Outside, insects continued to pulse; Mum’s dairy cows screamed at a disturbance (a stray dog perhaps) and up in the hills there was a muffled explosion—something or someone on the cordon sanitaire detonating a mine. Whether she was ready for it or not, motherhood had imposed itself on Mum once again.

  IT IS AN ANCIENT and misguided ruse, this introduction of a baby to trick the universe back into innocence, an effort to force the unraveling world to meet the comforting routine of a milk-scented nursery, a wish to have our sins washed clean by the blamelessness inherent in a newborn. But by late 1979, our country was beyond the reach of any child, however miraculous. The war had gone on so long and had become so desperate that it wasn’t a civil war anymore so much as it was a civilians’ war, a hand-to-hand, deeply personal conflict. The front line had spread from the borders to the urban areas to our doorsteps, and if we didn’t all have bloody hands, we were all related by blood to someone who did.

  And now, awfully, the half-life of our violence had been extended indefinitely: the war had turned biological. Rhodesian Special Forces with the help of South African military had salted the water along the Mozambique border with cholera and warfarin; they had injected tins of food with thallium and dropped them into conflict zones; they had infused clothes with organophosphate and left them out for the guerilla fighters and for sympathizers of the guerilla cause. And they had planted anthrax in the villages; and more than ten thousand men, women and children living in the country’s Tribal Trust Lands were sickened with sometimes fatal necrotic boils, fevers, shock and respiratory failure in what would end up being the largest outbreak of anthrax among humans in recorded history.

  All of this ongoing and deepening enmity, even as the leaders of the Rhodesian government and the leaders of the liberation forces were meeting at Lancaster House in London to discuss how to transition from rogue state to majority rule—from war to peace. Lord Carrington, British secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, opened the meeting tersely. “It is, I must say, a matter of great regret and disappointment to me and my colleagues that hostilities are continuing during this conference. . . .”

  There had been peace talks before—held in the carriage of a train on the railway bridge across the Victoria Falls in 1975, for example—but the dialogue had always broken down. So it was something of a surprise—actually, to some it was an irredeemable blow—when on December 6, 1979, after three months of brittle negotiations, the Lancaster House Agreement was finally signed by all the relevant leaders. And just like that, it was settled. The war was over. Within a matter of weeks, the country would have a new name, Zimbabwe. And we would have a new prime minister, Robert Mugabe.

  At school we were told that from now on, we were all equal. After morning announcements, we no longer sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” at assembly; now we sang “Precious Lord, 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. Doctor Mitchell was alarmed. He ordered my mother into the hospital. “Bed rest until this child is born,” he insisted. So Mum left the ranch and stayed in the hospital in Umtali until the baby, a boy, arrived via Cesarean section in late June 1980.

  “He had the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, just like Dad’s,” Mum says. “He looked perfect—perfect little face, perfect little body.” She puts her fingers to her lips. “But there was something not right inside; the back of his palate, you know, wasn’t quite formed. . . .” Still, the baby managed to nurse a little and when he cried, Mum held him on her shoulder and sang to him. But as the days went by, the baby became more lethargic, he seemed less able to grip Mum’s fingers and his crying turned plaintive. “We were waiting for a medical device from South Africa,” Mum says. “Something to attach to his palate so that he could swallow without choking.” But before the shipment could arrive from Johannesburg, one of the nurses came to Mum’s bed. “You’d better go and see your child,” the nurse said. “He isn’t well.”

  Mum held the stitches across the bottom of her stomach and hurried out of the maternity ward into the nursery. “Lots of the nurses were black by then,” Mum says, “and after everything we’d been through . . . well, I suppose it’s only natural. They weren’t very sympathetic.” Mum sighs. “They might even have been a little vindictive.” She looks away. “Anyway, it was very cruel.” When she got to the nursery, Mum found the baby jarringly still in his crib. “Oh God, it was just awful,” Mum says. “He died alone. You know? He died all alone, the little thing.” She scooped up her son’s tiny, stiff body and rocked him—“I’m sorry,” she told him, “Oh, I am so, so sorry”—letting her tears fall on his face. Then she carefully put the baby back in the hospital crib, covered him with a blanket and went to her knees.

  She waited for the old, customary pain to overwhelm her. Instead, everything Mum had ever felt receded and receded until she could hardly comprehend her own physical self anymore: her knees on the red cement floor had self-defensively deadened against any more pain; her recent incision was nothing more than a remote pang. Nothing, nothing—a void. My parents never named the child. Mum shakes her head. “He didn’t live long enough. We just wanted to try to forget, move on.” But unable to imagine a brother without a name, Vanessa and I privately christened the absent baby Richard. He is, of my three dead siblings, the most unmentioned and the most unmentionable.

  For weeks after the baby had been born and died, Mum lay in the lacy-hot shade of a camel thorn tree near the ranch house at Devuli, radiant with emptiness. At night, when the generator was turned on for a few hours of electricity, she drank brandy and played and replayed “The Final Farewell” from a Roger Whittaker album. Sometimes in the cooler mornings she rode her horse along the dry riverbank that ran along the boundary of the ranch and she hummed that song to herself and she thought how she had no fear of death and about how she did not have words for how she loved the child she had lost. No words at all.

  MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS after we had given up Robandi, I returned to the Burma Valley in October 2002 to see what traces of my family remained there. We didn’t live on Robandi for very long—a little more than half a dozen years—not even a seventh of Mum’s life, as I write this. But those years have blossomed like a stain over everything else in her life because of what we lost there. Even now, Robandi is the geography of my nightmares: the rusty streaks on the walls of the white barns where the roofs had oxidized; the sour-breath smell of the workshops; the toughening astringent of gun oil against fingers. If I peel back the corner of memories of that place, what races in is too big for me to feel at one sitting—no mere piece of land can be responsible for that.

  I found the essential shape of our old farm unchanged, although it was no longer recognizable as the struggling commercial enterprise my parents ran during the war. The avenue of flamboyant trees still ran from the Mazonwe road up to the apricot-peach colored house, but the road had washed away. The fences had collapsed and instead of crops or cattle, scrubby bush had begun to encroach. Where Mum had kept a neat, thatched dairy, there was only a tangle of lantana thicket. I drove as far as I could on a new, improvised trail that bumped over old contours in what was once a tobacco field. Finally I left the car by the culvert where the cobra used to live and walked up to the house.

  There were no recent tracks on the road, and when I reached it, the house appeared abandoned, its windows broken,
sections of asbestos sheeting missing from the roof and gray patches of mold spreading over the apricot-peach walls. The garden had dried up and died. I knocked at the front door (still engrained with scratches from the long-ago claws of all our dogs) and a young man came to the door. He was shirtless in the October heat and looked as if he had just woken up. I apologized for the intrusion, introduced myself and asked him if I might sit on the veranda for a moment to look at the view.

  The young man considered my request for a while, then he shrugged and said the view did not belong to him. “Look at it if you want,” he said. But before I could thank him, he shut the door and I was left alone. So I sat on the veranda and looked at that deadly, beautiful view over Robandi—the red-dusted boulders, the blue-gray kopjes, the bush-smoked Himalayas—across the valley to John Parodi’s Italian-inspired farm with its avenues of Mediterranean cypresses, its Ionic columns and its brick-paved courtyard.

  In retrospect, of course, everyone should have anticipated this outcome. We should have seen that a story begun with such one-sided, unconscious joviality—jewel-colored liqueurs and Portuguese wine on a rain-washed Rhodesian October morning—would end less than a decade later in defeat and heartbreak. But in the glow of love, in the heat of battle, in the cushioned denial of the present, how few have the wisdom to look forward with unclouded hindsight. Not my parents, certainly. Not most of us. But most of us also don’t pay so dearly for our prejudices, our passions, our mistakes. Lots of places, you can harbor the most ridiculous, the most ruining, the most intolerant beliefs and be hurt by nothing more than your own thoughts.

  I had just turned fourteen during the Easter holidays of 1983 when Mum broke the news to me that John Parodi had been shot to death on his own veranda by an assassin or assassins unknown, the war bleeding retribution and carnage long after its official end. The people who found his body said that John’s staining handprint ran the length of the veranda as he tried to reach his son, Giovanni. And Giovanni himself—only fourteen but already handsome in that eyebrow-winged way of his thick-shouldered father and with his mother’s irreverently laughing mouth—had been abducted from the farm by his father’s killers. Madeline, John’s eighteen-year-old daughter was not at home on the day of the attack but for months and years after her father’s funeral, she rode a motorbike through the Himalayas, searching for signs of her brother, calling his name profitlessly into the hot, purple hills, “Giovanni! Giovanni!”