One Hundred and Four Horses. Mandy Retzlaff

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СКАЧАТЬ he continued. “When my son Pat first introduced me to …”

      “Amanda!” somebody shouted.

      “Amanda,” Pat’s father repeated. “Of course. When Pat first introduced me to Aman—”

      In that instant, the wedding party fell silent. Pat’s father’s eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance, and, as one, the men at the party turned to follow his gaze. I stood. Out there, a vehicle moved, thick, choking black exhaust fumes behind it. It seemed to shimmer in the heat, banking along the same farm roads over which the wedding convoy had come. It was, it appeared, heading straight for us.

      Nobody said a word. Nobody had to. All the men at the wedding simply stood and hurtled for their cars.

      “What is it?” I asked.

      Pat stood. “Terrs …”

      Terrorists: the Rhodesian name for the black insurgents making war on the ruling government. The vehicles we had traveled in were all wheeling around, sending up flurries of dust, as men piled inside and checked their weapons. Pat ran to join his father’s car, stopped, and hurried back to where I was standing.

      “Here,” he said, “take this.”

      I found a gun pressed into my hands. Though I took it, I had no idea how to hold it. Pat told me it was an LDP, a submachine gun that only Rhodesians ever wielded. After UDI there had been so many international sanctions against the country that importing almost anything had been impossible. This had given rise to industries in which Rhodesia had never before operated, and, with the outbreak of guerrilla warfare in 1966, one of those boom industries had been in weaponry like this. The gun I was holding was nothing less than a Rhodesian imitation of the infamous Uzi.

      “What do I do with it?”

      “You just point and shoot,” Pat said. He turned and began to lope after the other men. Then, absently, he looked over his shoulder. “But only at the terrs,” he added. “Don’t point it at us …”

      I had never held a gun before—though, in the years to come, I would receive training in all kinds of weaponry, just as all Rhodesian women would, in case we too found ourselves caught up in war.

      I was sitting, slumped over the bridal table with the submachine gun in my lap and an empty glass of champagne in my hand, when the men returned. Looking up, I saw Pat striding back to the wedding table.

      “Terrorists?”

      Pat shook his head. “It was only a bus.”

      “Is this what life is going to be like?” I asked. “Too much drink, guns, chasing after terrorists through the bush …”

      Pat could not have known what was in store for us twenty years from that day, when we would find ourselves having to leave the country I had come to love, but today he threw me a rakish grin and helped me to stand.

      “Probably,” he said.

      I put down the gun. If this was the man I was going to love, I supposed I had better love his absurd, wild country as well.

      “Then we’d better get on with the speeches.”

      Our first son, Paul, was born in Pietermaritzburg five months after the wedding. I was twenty-three years old, Pat twenty-one, and we were ready to start our family life together. As soon as Pat graduated from university we prepared to return to Rhodesia permanently and forge a life there. There was only one complication: like all men of fighting age, on his return Pat would be called up to join the army. Members of the South African government had tried to persuade him to remain and commit his new training in animal sciences to the nation in which he had studied, but Pat was Rhodesian at heart, and Rhodesians never die. His country needed him, and I followed him into a country at war. Like all young Rhodesian men, Pat joined the army and was stationed at a barracks in the capital, Salisbury (now called Harare), while Paul and I lived close by.

      In 1980, the bush war drew to a bitter, negotiated end. Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party won a landslide election in March, and white Rhodesia began its transition into Zimbabwe. A sense of defeat hung over Pat and his compatriots, and across Rhodesia many families made preparations to leave and find some new corner of the world. For many, the thought of living in a country governed by one of the terrorists they had been fighting was too much to bear. Australia, South Africa, and Canada were richer countries for their leaving. Pat and I talked about finding a new life in Australia, somewhere for Paul and the brothers and sisters who might follow him, but I knew that, in his heart, Pat belonged in Rhodesia. And since Rhodesia was no more, Zimbabwe would have to do.

      We sat together, late at night.

      “I want him to have the life I had,” Pat said, bouncing baby Paul on his knee. “I want the same sort of childhood for him. Somewhere he can ride with game, go wild in the bush, be surrounded by dogs and cattle and duiker and baboons. If he can have just ten years of a life like that, it has to be worth it, doesn’t it?”

      I looked at the way Paul gazed up at his father. That, I decided, was the life I wanted for my children as well. If they could look back on their childhoods with as much vivid nostalgia as Pat did his own, we would have given them the best possible start.

      “What do you think, Paul? Do you want to be a Zimbabwean?”

      Paul looked at me, then at his father. Stoutly, he nodded.

      “The master has spoken,” I said.

      So Zimbabwean we were, and Zimbabwean we would stay.

      It was those thoughts that returned to me as, ten years later, we unloaded our packs at Crofton to begin our new lives. As I watched Pat swing into the elderly Frisky’s saddle, and Kate and Jay tumble out of the barren house that would soon become our beloved home, I was thinking of the baby Paul, of those first days after Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, of the hopes and dreams Pat and I had shared long into the night. We had spent the last ten years living in various places across Zimbabwe—the agricultural research station where Pat first worked, the rugged farm Lonely Park, where Pat’s brother kept one of the nation’s biggest dairy herds—but the land around us was finally ours. It was a place we could mold, a place we could pour ourselves into and live until our lives were done. Ten years before, in one of our earliest homes, we had buried a baby, Nicholas, only a few weeks old when he died, and the feeling of leaving him behind was not one we wanted to live through again. Here, this new land on which we now stood, could be a place to put down roots, a place to live a good life and never leave anything behind again. It was scrubby, untamed, with low jagged hills crowned in bush and red earth that seemed impenetrable to the eye—but Pat brought Frisky around and, as he gazed into the distance, I knew already what he was thinking. Here, he would build barns; here, he would build workshops; here, the irrigation channels; here, the grading sheds for our tobacco. Behind him, Jay’s eyes were on the hills. He listened for the sound of baboons and searched the shadows between the trees for antelope or signs of leopard. Kate reached up and wrapped one arm around a lower bough of the mango tree. She was scrabbling to pull herself up when Paul appeared behind her and gave her the lift that she needed.

      In front of me, Frisky snorted softly. She turned her head against Pat’s reins, as if all she wanted to do was look me in the eye. She too must have been considering the land. It dawned on me that this would be her final home, just as I wished it would be mine.

      The СКАЧАТЬ