I WAS IN the office at Palmerston Estates when I knew that something was wrong. Perhaps Pat was too engrossed in his work to notice, but through the walls I heard the rumbling of a car engine. When I looked up, I could see a black car winding its way up the farm track.
In front of the farmhouse, the car ground to a halt. The engine died. A single figure emerged, quickly joined by three more men. The driver was dressed in the uniform of the Zimbabwean Air Force. He held himself at the side of the car for a second; then he turned, and his eyes fell on mine through the window.
He strode toward us, and the three other men approached in his wake. The one closest to him, sinewy and lean, was dressed in a slick suit, and I felt certain that he belonged to the CIO, the Central Intelligence Organisation—nothing less, I knew, than Mugabe’s secret police.
My eyes flitted between Pat, his head still buried in his work, and the advancing figures.
I decided to step out of the door.
In front of the farmhouse, the four men enveloped me in a broad semicircle. It was the driver who spoke first, his shoulders rising and falling beneath the big pads of his air force uniform.
“We’ll need to see the maps,” he began.
Silence lingered between us. I tried to see, in the corner of my eye, where the farm workers were, but all around me was stillness. Paul was somewhere on the farm, but I had no idea where. There was only me and, in the office, Pat, obliviously hunkered over his books.
“Maps?” I ventured.
The CIO man shuffled from foot to foot, but it was the air force officer’s eyes that remained fixed on my own.
“Where,” he said, “are the borders of the farm?”
“It isn’t my farm,” I began.
At this, the air force officer’s eyes seemed to glow. “No, it is not—”
“We’re leasing it,” I interjected, knowing what that strange inflection in his voice meant. “We don’t have maps.”
After a few chilling moments, the air force officer broke away and paced around the farmhouse yard, looking out over the fields.
“What are you irrigating here?”
My reply stuck in my throat. I knew exactly why he was asking the question; he was weighing the farm up, thinking about what might be done with Palmerston Estates once it was his.
“Tomatoes,” I finally breathed. “Paprika.”
“You do well with tomatoes and paprika.”
He had a withering look in his eyes, and I understood, at last: I was a mouse in a trap, and he was playing with me. He began to ask more questions about our work on the farm: the extent of our irrigation system; how we rotated the crops; what our labor was like and how much turnover we made each season. They seemed to stand closer to me now, the semicircle closing in to trap me. Unable to answer their flurry of questions, I risked a glance back, over my shoulder, at the farmhouse and the office inside.
I didn’t seem to have any other choice.
As soon as I told them I would take them to Pat, they seemed to lighten. Even so, as I led them to the office, I registered the looks they shared and had the inalienable feeling that, even though it was they who were following me, it was I who was walking into danger.
In the office, Pat was waiting. As I pushed through the door, he acknowledged me with a mutter, a gentle exhalation of breath. I hovered there, knowing it could not last.
He looked up. I have often imagined what it must have looked like to him, me standing there, dwarfed by four of Mugabe’s men. He seemed to take it in with one sweeping look. He barely moved.
I thought I could see every muscle and sinew in his body tense, up and down his arms, his face, his neck.
He was opening his lips to speak when the air force officer pushed bodily past me. In three strides he had crossed the room. Trapped in his seat, Pat froze—but it was not in fear. I saw him level his hands on the desk, his fingers straining. After all these years, I knew the signs: he was trying to restrain himself.
“Where,” the air force officer barked, “are the boundaries of the farm?”
Pat breathed, long and slow.
“Why,” he began, “would you need to know that?”
“I know your kind,” the air force officer went on. “You think because you sit on this land, because you have your house and your crops, that it’s yours. You don’t dare think who this land really belongs to.” He stopped. “Tell me, who do you think owns this land?”
“We lease it from—”
“This land,” the air force officer uttered, lifting his forefinger to stab it at Pat’s chest, “belonged to my forefathers—”
In an instant, Pat’s grip on the desk disappeared. He threw himself up and out of his seat. The only thing separating him from the officer was the desk. His face grew purple.
He brought his hand up, curling it into a fist. In the office, everything seemed to slow. I took a step forward, opening my mouth to cry out, but I was too late. Pat brought his closed fist down on the desk with a reverberating thud. I thought I could hear the bones in his hand crunch.
“We’ve had enough,” Pat thundered, his voice hoarse with rage. “Had enough of you, everyone like you …”
On the other side of the desk, the air force officer seemed to back off. I saw it all written on Pat’s face: the day he and Jay had been shot at from high in the bush; Dave Stevens and all the other terrorized farmers whose stories we had seen and heard; the images of butchered family pets, of horses doused in gas and set alight. It poured out of him. He had been holding it in too long.
“Don’t you understand?” Pat seethed. “Are you really too blind to see what you’re doing to this country?” He checked himself, fixed his eyes on the officer. “To my country?” he went on. “I’m sick of being treated like this. We—all of us—are sick of being treated like this.”
The men around me closed ranks. Pat lifted his closed fist, and, in the doorway, I could barely catch a breath. I tried to catch his eye, to plead with him to stop. Once, I had loved him for this, his fire, his willingness to walk into a fight when he could just as easily have walked away. Now there were no words to stop him. Cold fear gripped my stomach. I understood now: We were going to die. Our names and bloodied pictures would be seen across the nation in the evening news and, like those murdered farmers who had gone before us, we would leave our children to face this new, corrupted world alone. Paul and Jay and Kate would have to pick up the phone and hear the world-shattering news: their parents were gone, and never coming back.
At the desk in front of Pat, the air force officer turned around. If I had any resolve left, it evaporated. My body gave up. Now stuck between the three other men, I crumpled to the ground, my legs refusing to function. I lay there between them and felt the first flush of warmth between my legs. I did not move as the pool spread around me, soaking me and everything I wore.
I did not fully understand when the footsteps marched past me. I lay prostrate, eyes half-closed, body curled up, as the air force officer stepped over me and out of the office. One after another, his henchmen followed, until only the CIO officer was left. As he departed, he crouched at my side, his big, expressive eyes level with mine.
“You must watch your husband,” he said. “Otherwise, he will be no more.”
Whether he meant it as warning or threat, I did not know. He stepped over me, and then only Pat and I remained.
I was still lying there when I heard the engine of the black car gunning, turning tightly around in the farmhouse yard. Then, slowly, the rumble of the engine faded.
It took long moments for the strength to return to my legs. I stood, feeling like a newborn foal who doesn’t quite trust her own limbs.
Pat was still at the desk, his fists still closed. A new fire surged through me, and I threw myself across the room, my own fists clenched. I hurled those fists at him, but he only stood there, unflinching.
“You risked our lives!” I cried. “We might have …”
His hands closed around my own, stopping me from striking any more blows. I looked into his unrepentant eyes, called him every name under the sun, cursed him and raved.
“What would you have had me do, Mandy? Just walk away? Let happen here what happened at Crofton?”
I could hold myself back no longer. Uncontrollable tears began to flow. They poured out of me and I couldn’t stop.
Pat released his hold on me, and I stumbled back. He said nothing more, just gazed, unrepentant, in the direction the departing men had taken.
“We have to leave,” I said. “For Paul … For Kate …”
At last, Pat nodded, but his face was as sad as I’d ever seen it.
The Commercial Farmers’ Union had an office in Chinhoyi, and it was to them that we found ourselves turning. We were not the only ones. Thousands of the nation’s farmers subscribed to the union and, in the past months, its responsibilities had swollen. The CFU had taken up the cause of finding temporary homes for farmers, as well as facilitating their flight from the country if the farmers decided to leave, but the union’s resources were thin, and it didn’t have sufficient staff for such widespread chaos.
Nevertheless, there was good news for us here. There was a property here in Chinhoyi itself that might suit our needs, a “safehouse” donated to the cause by a wealthy English businessman who was out of the country and sympathetic to the plight of Zimbabwean farmers and their families. What the union staff described to us seemed almost too good to be true: on the outskirts of town, a house big enough for Pat, Kate, and me on one floor, and another for Charl, Tertia, Resje, and baby Charl-Emil on their return from South Africa. There was good security, tennis courts, and even a swimming pool in which we could relax and pretend we were not living there against our wishes. We would be able to stay there for three months, or until other evicted farmers needed it, more than enough time to order our lives and, in true Rhodesian fashion, to “make a plan.” As the union people told me about it, I felt myself flushed with a new feeling of optimism. For the time being, Pat, Kate, and I would be safe.
We moved into the safehouse the very next day. Settling in was surreal. It was a town house on the edge of Chinhoyi, with private gates and gardens, very secluded and secure. Behind the gates of the grounds, it might have been any moment in Zimbabwe’s long history. Here, we were cocooned from the world, cocooned even from the rest of Chinhoyi, whose streets still swirled with rumors of what was happening on local farms. It was easy, here, to forget.
We spent the first days organizing ourselves and beginning to make the plans from which we might put our fragmented lives in order. On the third day, a huge truck arrived at the gates and the driver opened up to reveal a great pile of household furniture piled up within. It was a gift from old friends of ours, the Pearces. Like us, they had experienced hostilities on their farm and decided to leave while they still had a choice; now, they were bound for Australia with high hopes of beginning a new life out there, and their furniture was a parting gift. As we unloaded it and tried each piece in different corners of our new home, I was overwhelmed. There were, I knew, still good things happening in the world.
I had expected Paul to move into the safehouse with us, but the events on Palmerston Estates had taken a greater toll on our eldest son than I had imagined. On the night we abandoned Palmerston, he had confided that he would not be joining us in whichever new home we could find. Like countless others, he had decided to leave and was making plans to travel to England and find work there. There were big Zimbabwean communities in London, communities that had swollen since the land invasions began, and the idea that Paul would be joining them was both painful and a blessed relief. I did not like the idea of our family fracturing, but I knew exactly how much Paul had inherited from his father, and I felt sick at the thought of him standing up to another invasion. Perhaps, if the country lurched from bad to worse, it was for the best that Paul was not here.
Even so, our new temporary home would be busy. Charl and Tertia were soon to return from South Africa, and I looked forward to their arrival like nothing else. It was only in these past few weeks, with the clarity of mind that comes with staring death directly in the face, that I realized how much our neighbors truly meant to us. At night, I closed my eyes and images of the attacks on Two Tree and Palmerston flashed through my mind—and I could not find the words to express how fortunate I felt that we had come through it unscathed.
On the day that they returned, Pat and I watched the car come through the safehouse gates and into the yard. For a moment we faced one another across the safehouse garden. Then, at last, we rushed over. Pat clasped Charl’s hand in his own, and, though few words were said, we were overjoyed to have them back. I threw my arms around Tertia and held her tight, Charl-Emil pressed between us and gazing up at us with his big brown eyes. Resje hung quietly back, her tiny hand pressed into Tertia’s. I pulled back. Tertia’s smile was wider than ever, but I could sense the strain in her eyes. It was, I knew, taking enormous strength to do this, but Tertia would not show it in front of her children.
I took her around the safehouse, pointing out the swimming pool, the tennis court, the little parlor where I had taken to making soap to keep myself busy and occupy my mind.
“Not bad for refugees,” she grinned, laying her hand softly on my back.
Once we had shown the Geldenhuyses around the safehouse, we gathered for an early evening meal.
“Have you been back, Mandy?”
Charl had been wanting to ask the question all night. My eyes darted at Tertia’s, and hers at Resje and Charl-Emil. It was time, it seemed, for them to be put to bed.
“Crofton was ruined. Two Tree too,” I said. “They were just shells. Photographs, furniture, window frames—it was all gone.”
“What about the horses, Pat?” Charl interjected.
At last, we could relate some good news.
“They hadn’t been touched,” Pat began. “They were roaming free at Crofton, some of them down by the dam. Grey and the rest were still up on Two Tree. Not a scratch on them. The workers had cut them loose.”
Leaving our workers behind had caused us great concern, especially when we knew how Mugabe’s thugs treated any workers who remained loyal to their farms. That they were still on Crofton and Two Tree was both a relief and a worry, but at least they had been there to tend to our horses. We sat in silence, imagining what it must have been like, the horses spooked and running down the farm trails while the mobs moved into the farmhouses.
“They can’t stay there,” Charl said.
Pat weighed the idea up. Since we had settled in the safehouse his thoughts had been heading in the same direction as Charl’s. Deja-vous, Imprevu, and the rest could look after themselves for a time—there was plentiful grazing, and water was not scarce—but they could not be left to go wild. The horses had been fortunate once, escaping the attacks wrought against our other animals, but to risk them again would have been foolish.
“Charl’s right,” Pat began.
Before he could say anything else, Tertia cut him off. “Then what?” Her eyes drifted up, as if she could see Resje and Charl-Emil sleeping in the rooms above. “Go back onto Two Tree?” Her voice faltered. “How?”
“Under cover of night,” said Pat. “And as quickly as possible.”
With so many animals left behind on the terrorized farms, the SPCA—Zimbabwe’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—found itself at the forefront of a crusade to rescue domestic pets from the looted farms. Officers of the SPCA had special dispensation, and often police escorts, that allowed them to enter occupied territory and coax out a family’s beloved animals. In this way, a multitude of house cats and farm dogs had been brought to safety, not a few by Meryl Harrison, a doughty and stalwart SPCA officer who, time and again, risked her own personal safety for the betterment of the animals in her care. Yet the SPCA had dispensation to go onto occupied farms to remove the livestock only under extreme circumstances. So if we were to rescue the Two Tree and Crofton horses, we would have to do it ourselves.
As Pat and Charl steered a farm truck out of the gates of the safehouse that morning, I will admit to a faint stirring of unease in the pit of my stomach—but perhaps I was grateful that I would not have to see Charl’s anguish when he saw what had become of their home.
It was quiet as they turned from the Chinhoyi road into fields where Charl had once sown and reaped soybeans and wheat. Pat and Charl were not alone—they pushed the vehicle carefully past the eyes of settlers who watched them from the sides of the road. Voices did not cry out. Weapons were not raised. Pat looked at Charl and saw his eyes glassy and glazed. He said nothing, but simply stared ahead, as memories of his last day on Two Tree flashed through his mind.
He did not flinch as they drove along the farm track and the ruin that had once been Two Tree’s farmhouse appeared on the hill. He simply kept his eyes on the track, and the truck rolled past the empty shell, past the gutted barns, on past the fringes of Two Tree Dam, and out toward Crofton.
Deja-vous, Imprevu, and the rest were waiting to be rounded up, and even Imprevu seemed not to complain as Pat led her up the ramp into the back of the truck. Once they were secured, Charl pulled the truck around and nosed back along the trail, leaving the remains of Crofton behind. Some of the bricks had been taken from the wall to build more shacks in the bush. Soon, the farmhouse we had spent all those years in would be gone forever, like a mountain eroded by time.
With our horses loaded up, Pat and Charl returned the way they had come. Once they had gone past the dam, they banked left, up the hill toward what was left of Two Tree Hill.
Charl pressed his foot to the brake and brought the truck to a grinding halt. In the back, Deja-vous and the rest shifted awkwardly. A single snort split the silence.
“What is it?” asked Pat.
Charl said nothing, only kicked open the door of the cab and swung out of his seat. Guardedly, Pat followed.
His eyes were on the ridges around him, seeking figures in the bush. Certain that this was what Charl had seen, and remembering the day he and Jay had been shot at along these very same tracks, he followed Charl along the banks of the path.
There, lying at Charl’s feet, was the body of a dead antelope. A terrible wound had been opened in its side, and a mass of flies billowed out on a cloud of sour, meaty scent.
Pat stood at a distance, but Charl grew close, crouched, and turned the dead antelope’s head. Two distinctive spiral horns protruded from its forehead, marking it as an eland.
Charl looked up.
“Em,” he said.
Now Pat recognized her, too. In death she looked like any of the other game that had been slaughtered across Two Tree, so much of it, it seemed, not even out of a necessity for finding meat to butcher, but just for the thrill of the killing.
“Come on,” said Charl, eyes lifting to Two Tree farmhouse sitting above. “Let’s get this finished.”
He was about to climb back into the truck when Pat stalled him.
“What about Em?”
Charl’s eyes said it all: there was no helping her now; there was still time, though, to do something about Grey and the rest of his horses.
They rumbled the truck up the hill and into the yard where, weeks before, the mob had bayed. In silence, they stepped out. The building still stood above them, its empty windows like sightless eyes.
At the back of the farmhouse, the horses were waiting.
Some were grazing nearby, in the paddocks in which they had always lived, but others seemed to have jumped the fences and begun to roam. A brown mare with dark points lingered between two of the enormous barn buildings, while a chestnut gelding seemed to spook at Charl’s sudden appearance and trotted off, disappearing into shadow. Pat and Charl pushed to the fences to inspect them further, but a sudden movement from behind startled them, and they turned to see a slight, dark mare shifting in the shadows of the ruin.
“Where’s Grey?” Charl began.
Pat scoured the paddock, but the silvery half-Arabian gelding was nowhere to be seen.
“They didn’t …”
Pat did not want Charl to finish the question and sharply shook his head. “They didn’t touch the other horses, Charl. Why would they harm Grey?”
They scoured Two Tree, rounding the other horses back into the paddock as they did so. The sun disappeared behind a fleeting cloud, spreading a gray pall across the farm. When at last they had ridden from one end of the grounds to another, there was Grey, standing alone and bereft, hugging the walls of one of the farm buildings. As they approached he seemed diminished, somehow, a shadow of the horse he had been only a few weeks gone.
Charl called out for him, and Grey turned, his ears revolving. Softly, he blew through his nostrils.
By the time Charl got near, he understood what was wrong. Somehow, Grey had been confined. Against one side, the barn building rose; against the other, farm equipment precluded him from easing his way out. The grass around his hooves was grazed to the quick, and the trough at which he had been drinking was dry as the earth.
He was visibly malnourished, his withers thin and ragged. As Charl spoke to him, his eyes lifted. He pushed awkwardly forward and nuzzled Charl’s shoulder, listening to his words of reconciliation.
There was anger in Charl’s eyes, then, that it had come to this.
Once Grey had been coaxed out into the open and fitted with a halter, it became clear that malnourishment was only the beginning of his troubles. Every time he placed his right foreleg down, his body lurched and, cringing, he lifted his hoof again. Between two tall barns, on the way to the waiting truck, Charl eased him to a halt. Careful not to startle him, he crouched and lifted his ailing foreleg.
There was no injury to speak of, no mark where some war vet had taken to him with a panga or spear. Yet Grey’s hoof seemed beyond repair. The flesh hung, thin and loose, around his lower leg, separated almost entirely from his hoof. Grey cringed when Charl’s fingers brushed softly around the tender area, but Charl ran his other hand firmly across the underside of Grey’s flank, assuring him that everything was all right. Pat, too, tried to fix him with a look, wordlessly imploring the poor horse to be still.
“He can’t walk on this,” said Charl.
The hoof, Pat saw, was almost hanging off, connected only by bone and thin strips of Grey’s hide.
“We should get out of here,” said Pat.
Yet Charl remained crouched at Grey’s side, studying his damaged hoof: Grey, who had been born and raised on this very farm; Grey, on whose back he had ridden; Grey who, now, might be lame for the rest of his days, whose eyes a lesser horseman might cover while he pressed a gun to his temple and shot.
Charl gently placed Grey’s hoof back on the ground, but as soon as the wretched-looking gelding put any weight on it, his body started to shake.
“I don’t think he can walk, Pat. We should have come sooner.”
“Sooner?” Pat returned. “Don’t you remember what it was like here?”
Pat and Charl coaxed Grey forward, but each time he put the damaged hoof to the ground his head lifted and he drew back, eyes rolling in pain. With one hand on his bare flank, Charl ushered him on. He came forward tentatively, refusing to put weight on his damaged hoof. The effect was heartbreaking: his head bobbed like that of a horse incurably lame, his gait ugly and slow.
Pat hurried back to the truck to collect a lead rope and returned to fit it to Grey’s halter. Even with the rope attached, Grey came slowly. Again, Charl crouched, checking the hoof for any stray stone or piece of brick that might have become lodged in there. Tiny stones like that had been known to cause great trouble before—but there was nothing there.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Charl said, looking into Grey’s sorry, soulful eyes. “He isn’t lame because he was attacked. He’s lame because …” Charl could hardly bring himself to say it. The truth of the matter was Grey had been reduced to this because of lack of water, because of malnutrition, because Charl and Pat had not been on Two Tree to tend to the horses. While the other horses had been able to fend for themselves, with access to grazing and fresh water, Grey’s body had started to wither away; his hoof was simply a symptom of his body shutting itself down. Telling Charl that it was not his fault would do nothing to soothe his conscience, nor Pat’s; as every good farmer knows, livestock need to be tended to, cared for. Without it, they can wither and die. The same was true of our horses; the once-beautiful Grey had become a living embodiment of what can happen when a horseman abandons his post.
“Come on, Charl. It isn’t too late. Not yet …”
Slowly, they brought Grey back to Two Tree farmhouse, where Deja-vous, Imprevu, and the rest of the Two Tree horses were waiting. They seemed to snort, sadly, at Grey’s appearance. It is telling how sensitive horses can be, whether to one of their own kind or to the humans with whom they have made such a strong bond. Perhaps the horses could see the torment in Charl’s eyes too, for they watched him cut a sad figure across the yard.
Grey took little coaxing to limp toward the water trough where the rest of the herd had been drinking. As he took in the water he had been crying out for through his long imprisonment, Pat readied the other horses to get into the truck. His eyes wandered over the fields Charl would never farm again. Already they were going to waste; Mugabe might have claimed that these farms were being handed over to landless war vets, but the reality was they would be left barren, waiting for the bush to reclaim them.
There was movement on the trail below Two Tree, a truck Pat did not know winding its way through the fields with black men—not workers from Two Tree—piled up in its back. For an instant, he froze, his hands resting on the crests in Grey’s spine, poking up through his threadbare hide. Then, the truck rolled on, bound no doubt for Crofton or the land beyond.
“Where are we even going to take them, Pat?”
It was a question they had not yet asked themselves. Lady, Duchess, Duke, Marquess, and Fleur were still on Rob Flanagan’s farm, but there were no guarantees that they would stay safe for long.
“Do you know Braeside?” asked Pat.
Charl nodded. Braeside was a farm that bordered the land we had been leasing at Palmerston Estates. In a time not so very long ago, Braeside had been an African idyll. It sat near Palmerston, between sheer hills crowned in scrub, where jacaranda trees stood heavy with scent. Its owners, Rory and Lindy Hensman, were farmers like us, but their lives really revolved around the amazing menagerie of orphaned animals who called Braeside their home. Their house was open for all the lost things of the bush. At Braeside, Hoggles, an enormous bristly warthog, dominated the sitting room, taking over settees and armchairs in preference to his basket of woven grass; at Braeside, a scaly anteater, known as a pangolin, wandered along a passage, a kudu calf drank daintily from a china cup, an orphaned owl perched curiously at an attic window, searching for a way in. And, on Braeside, a whole herd of orphaned elephants roamed the tracks or swam in the rivers with Rory and Lindy clinging to their backs.
“The war vets will come there, too,” said Charl, gently pushing Grey up the ramp and into the back of the truck, there to be received by Deja-vous and the rest of the mismatched herd.
“Maybe,” said Pat. “But better that they’re there than … here.” He turned, surveying the familiar fields through which we would ride no longer. “If there’s one place animals can still be safe, it has to be Braeside,” said Pat, and he ran his hand tenderly along Grey’s sore, patchy muzzle.