One Hundred and Four Horses. Mandy Retzlaff

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СКАЧАТЬ When I got close, I could see Princess standing at a distance, seemingly calmed down. Pat was cradling Resje in his arms. She was battered, bruised, shaken beyond measure, but mercifully she did not appear to be seriously hurt.

      Soon, Charl appeared through the maize. He brought Grey to a sudden halt and leaped out of the saddle.

      “She’s okay, Charl,” Pat said, gently lifting Resje toward him. “What happened?”

      “It wasn’t her fault. Something came out of the bush, a duiker or a … I don’t know. But it spooked Princess.”

      “We saw her buck.”

      Charl nodded, running a finger along Resje’s brow.

      “Thank God nothing’s broken.”

      Princess, startled at whatever had hurtled out of the bush, had panicked, shying away. In the saddle, the reins had whipped from Resje’s hands. Though she grappled out to take them again, it was too late. She flew up and out of the saddle, and would have crashed into the ground at Princess’s flank had her foot not caught in the stirrup.

      We accompanied Charl and Resje back to Two Tree farmhouse. I watched Resje, finally able to breathe again, following Tertia into the farmhouse and remembered vividly my weekends trying to climb into Ticky’s saddle and stay there, my father’s face swimming in and out of focus that afternoon at the gymkhana when Ticky had thrown me off and wandered, dispassionately, away.

      That, I remembered now, was the last time I rode until Pat walked into my life, in his undersize suit and battered cowboy boots. A fright like the one Resje had had today was enough to drive somebody away from the riding life forever.

      While Tertia tended to Resje, Charl led Princess back into her paddock, along with Grey and all the other horses of Two Tree. In the garden at the back of the house, Lady was aware that something had happened and turned in little circles, as if demanding attention.

      That was the very last day that Resje ever rode. She loved horses and would always love horses, but the thought of being thrown from the saddle and snaring her foot in the stirrup would live with her forever.

      At last, it was decided that Princess could not remain on Two Tree. The memory was too fresh, and though Resje would always love Lady, Grey, Fleur, and the other Two Tree horses, the thought of Princess spooked her. Like Frisky long ago, Princess would have to be sent to a new home, to find a new family to love her, without the shadow of that one terrible moment in her past.

      Charl did not have to look far to find a new home for Princess. Les De Jager’s son farmed at Ormeston, in the district of Lion’s Den, and agreed to take Princess on board. As well as being a strong working mare, Princess had her Arabian ancestry, and with careful management might add a little of her Arabian strength and endurance to the bloodline in Lion’s Den.

      I will always remember the day that Princess walked up the ramp into Charl’s truck and left Two Tree Hill Farm. We thought we would not see her again—but the world has a strange way of subverting your expectations. Princess had left Two Tree, but she had not left our lives for long. When she returned, it was to be under the most terrible circumstances. More change was about to come to our beloved Zimbabwe, and devastation as well to the new world we had tried to create at Crofton and Two Tree.

      Everything was about to change—for our families and our horses.

      In the early evening dark, Pat sat outside Crofton, working through the books in which we inscribed the farm’s history: its seasons and yields, our cropping loans, the details of the workers who had stayed with us through the years. His head was buried in the books when he heard footsteps, a soft knocking at the door. He looked up to see Charles, one of our drivers, approach.

      “Boss?”

      “Charles …”

      “It’s about tomorrow, boss.”

      Pat shuffled back. “What’s tomorrow?”

      “I was hoping we can use the tractor tomorrow. To take everybody to the voting.”

      “Voting?”

      Charles nodded, and as Pat questioned him further, things began to stir in the back of his mind, half-forgotten conversations and fragments of news items. Only a few months before, in November 1999, Mugabe’s government had published the draft of a new constitution, which would be ratified in an upcoming referendum. The draft constitution effectively rewrote the constitution first created when Zimbabwe achieved independence, through the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979. It would, it dawned on Pat as Charles continued to speak, give Mugabe the right to serve an unlimited time in office, and even the right to appoint his own successor. What hit even closer to home, however, was the idea that, under the rules of the new constitution, the government would be able to forcibly acquire lands, even those that the government itself had sold since independence, without the owners having any legal right to be compensated for their loss. There was still inequality in the way in which land was held in Zimbabwe, even these twenty years after the coming of independence and the end of old Rhodesia, and we had always known something had to change. Yet, we had bought our farm in good faith; its sale had been sanctioned by the very same government whose efforts now seemed to threaten to take it away. I had the horrible feeling that the land reform program, which was not being handled properly by the government, would now be used by Mugabe for his own political gains.

      In the weeks and months to come, Pat and I would think long and hard about this moment. That we had not properly recognized the importance of the upcoming referendum would one day come to sadden us. Were we really living so separately, out here in the corner of Africa we had pioneered for ourselves, that we had blinded ourselves to the path our country was traveling?

      After Pat had promised Charles the use of the farm vehicles to ship all our workers off to vote, he found me at the back of the farmhouse, wearily preparing crates of tomatoes.

      “What is it?” I asked.

      “Did you know,” Pat began, “about this referendum?”

      I knew about it, of course, but not in the same way as I knew about how low the water table was, or how weak our yields had been in the last harvest, or how quickly the bank interest was gathering on our cropping loan. The referendum was a thing that was happening somewhere out there. There were problems enough at Crofton to dominate the day.

      “It’s tomorrow,” said Pat. “A whole new constitution.”

      When he put it like that, it seemed suddenly to loom a lot larger in my mind. Behind us, in the darkness, the horses nickered in their stalls.

      Things had become increasingly unstable in Zimbabwe over the past several years. We had thought things might improve once our drought years were over, but instead they seemed to get worse. Mugabe had been supporting the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ostensibly sending troops to support the president there, but really hoping to be able to exploit the DRC’s mineral deposits in return—and, in response, the World Bank and various European countries had suspended all funding with Zimbabwe and placed various embargoes upon us. All this contributed to an economy rife with unrest—but nothing more so than when the government, under pressure from the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association, led by the aptly named Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, agreed to hand out massive payouts and pensions to all the association’s fifty thousand members. The Zimbabwean dollar had plummeted in value; inflation had soared, with a loaf СКАЧАТЬ