HIGH IN THE HILLS of Braeside Farm, the night was alive with fires, small cauldrons of orange and red stirring in the bush. The same fires could be seen far into the distance; below the Braeside hills, there were rings burning on Palmerston Estates, where ramshackle villages had sprung up in our carefully tended fields. The smell of smoke came on the wind, bringing with it the dull sounds of chanting. Whether it was only the war vets, or the labor force of Braeside forced into a pungwe, roaring out slogans in support of Mugabe and ZANU-PF until their throats were raw, Pat and Charl could not say. In silence, their bodies hunched over, they made haste along the track below the shell of the Braeside farmhouse until they reached the stables.
“It’s like being in the army again,” said Pat.
It was an observation he had made before. Many of Zimbabwe’s white farmers had spent their youth fighting in the bush war, and as the farm invasions intensified, all the old instincts seemed to bubble to the surface.
When they reached the stables, Pat and Charl made sure that they had not been followed and then, under cover of darkness, slipped inside. In the first stall, Grey hung, half-suspended, in a great sling made from tarpaulin and suspended from the rafters. His two hind hooves and one of his fore balanced, gently, on the stable floor, while his damaged hoof hung above. His ears turned at Charl’s approach, and he let out a muted whinny.
“Hello, old friend,” Charl whispered, hurrying over.
“How’s it looking?”
Charl crouched at Grey’s hoof, the light of his torch sweeping across the stable and picking out different corners: the pile of manure in the corner, Grey’s patchy flank where his ribs still showed.
“Better,” Charl replied. “But not healed yet …”
Ever since moving the horses onto Braeside, Pat and Charl had been coming here to tend to them. At first it had been simple—for, even though Braeside looked down on Palmerston Estates, it had not yet been abandoned to Mugabe’s thugs. As war vet activity intensified, though, Rory and Lindy had made a drastic decision—they determined they had to leave while they still could. Rory and Lindy had other concerns as well, for they were not the sort of people who could leave their orphaned elephants behind. After much careful thought, they had set out south, intent on driving their elephant herd across the border into South Africa.
The flight of the Hensmans, however, had left Grey, Deja-vous, Imprevu, and the rest stranded on Braeside. With the farmhouse abandoned, the war vets quickly moved into the farm, settling in its fields and hills. Now their stick huts could be seen along every trail and ridge; their fires burned in the bush, and the night was filled with their songs. What had become of the Braeside workforce, we did not know; terrorized and driven to pungwes, perhaps, but some of them limped on, trying to keep whatever portions of the farm they could in working order.
After making certain that Grey was as well as he could be, restrained in his sling, Pat and Charl crept on, into the stables where Deja-vous and the rest were waiting. They seemed to know they were being called upon, and they shifted, excited, at Pat and Charl’s presence. Tonight, the men were administering vaccines, and in the dull light of their torches, they prepared the syringes. After palming a fistful of horse cubes into each of the horses’ mouths, they administered the injection into the horses’ necks. Only Imprevu seemed to object. At the touch of the needle, she bucked, releasing an ill-tempered snort.
Pat and Charl froze, listening out for the sounds of footsteps. So far, they had been fortunate in their midnight trips onto Braeside; if the war vets knew they were here, they did not care or were wary of any confrontation. All the same, until there was another home for Grey, Deja-vous, and the rest to go to, Braeside was all that we had.
Confident that they were not being watched, Charl ran his hands around Imprevu, feeling the horse twitch.
“They’re getting restless.”
Pat smirked. “You want to take them out on a midnight ride?”
The sounds of the distant pungwe were carried high on the wind.
“Maybe not tonight,” Charl returned, with a wry smile.
By the time the vaccines were administered, the horses dipped and deticked, and the stables shoveled of muck, the black of night was paling into dawn. Fingers of red sunlight burst over the horizon. From Braeside, Pat could see the contours of the neighboring Palmerston Estates. It was mere weeks since we had left, but it might as well have been a lifetime.
“I think it’s about time we weren’t here,” said Pat.
As they drove back down the track, Braeside Farm was eerily silent. They rolled past the still stick huts of Palmerston, the barren fields where a single rangy cow lowed at them from where it was tethered. Then, out onto the road and past Heroes Acre, a cemetery where heroes of the bush war—those men we had once called terrorists and insurgents—were still being ceremoniously buried. Above the turnoff, a big mural of Mugabe’s face peered down.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” Charl asked.
“For where?”
“Anywhere,” said Charl. “Anywhere but here.”
Late the following night, Pat turned to me in bed and brushed the hair out of my eyes.
“What is it, Pat?” I asked.
“It’s Charl,” he whispered, careful that his voice not be heard through the safehouse walls. “There was something in his voice last night, on Braeside. I think …”
Unsettled, I reeled back. “Think what?”
“He’s thinking about leaving, Mandy. I’m sure of it. I could … hear it in his voice.”
A thought occurred to me, something that had not entered my consciousness until now. “And you, Pat?”
Half of me, I knew, was begging him to say: Let’s go; let’s buy our tickets and fly out of here. But the other half pictured him riding on Frisky, tending to Deja-vous, nursing Grey back to health.
“Never,” Pat whispered. “This is my country. Those are my horses. This is my”—his voice faltered—“world,” he finally concluded.
I looked at him. It was his country; they were his horses; it was his world. But they were mine, too. My world was Pat himself, and I felt the very same fire in my own chest.
“There was a call today,” I said. “I think you should call back.”
Pat and I had spent the day compiling data for our agronomy business. Agronomy is the science of agriculture, and ever since Crofton we had run a small business on the side, consulting for farmers across Zimbabwe, analyzing their land and providing suggestions on how they might best improve their yields and profits. Now that we no longer had Crofton or Palmerston Estates, agronomy was the only way we could make any money. Yet what had once been a straightforward task of taking soil samples from various farms and making recommendations had become more complex since the start of the land invasions. As farms fell, so did our clients, and we had to roam wider and wider for smaller and smaller incomes.
“It’ll have to wait,” said Pat. “Gaydia will wonder where I’ve got to.”
Gaydia Tiffin was an old friend who worked with Pat on the agronomy business. Gaydia was warmhearted and vivacious, and she and her husband, Roldy, had once farmed in the same area as us. The fact that they were expert polocrosse players, and almost as at home in the saddle as Pat, only cemented the union. Gaydia’s daughter, Romaen, had the same passion for horses as her mother did. Their home had often reminded me of Crofton, filled with dogs and cats of varying shapes and sizes.
“I think she’ll want to hear this one, too.”
The call had come early in the morning. Even though we felt secure in the safehouse, a call at that hour of the day had triggered my panic response. Shaking the sudden feeling away, though, I had simply picked up the phone.
“Hello?” I had tentatively begun, half expecting the guttural tone of some CIO official on the other end of the line.
“I’m looking,” a soft, female voice said instead, “for Mandy Retzlaff?”
The voice on the other end of the line introduced herself as Katherine Leggott, from a family who farmed on the outskirts of Chinhoyi. I was not familiar with the family, but we soon settled into talking about the land invasions. Even though I knew so little about the Leggotts and their farm, it seemed that, somehow, they knew about ours.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Katherine began, “but I’m just going to say it … You see, we heard you were the horse people.”
She gave a strange emphasis to the word horse, as if to intimate that we ourselves were some curious mixture of equine and human genes.
“Well,” I began, “we do have horses—”
“Yes,” she interjected, more eager now. “And I heard … I heard you were the people who could be counted on to look after them, that you wouldn’t let them go the way of …”
There had, it transpired, been increasing war vet activity across the Leggotts’ farm. Though they had not yet been evicted, the mobs had gathered, the trails had erupted with a plague of stick huts and settlers, and it seemed that the noose was constricting around them.
“We’re leaving,” Katherine’s voice buzzed at me along the line. “My husband, John, has family in Australia. We’d thought about moving before, but …” She paused, trying to fill in the blanks of her own story. Just as it felt to so many of us, everything was happening all at once. It would take years for people to look back and put these months into any semblance of order. “We’re going there for our kids, Mandy.” She paused. “But it’s our horses. Something has got to be done about our horses.”
I looked at Pat across the safehouse kitchen.
“Well,” I ventured, with a smile, “what else can I say?”
The next day, Pat and I went out to see the Leggotts. Once we had seen their horses, there was nothing else we could do but take them in. The consequences of leaving them behind passed before Pat’s eyes, and after that there was never any other option. I was worried, for our horses were already divided—some still out on Rob Flanagan’s farm, the rest on the rapidly diminishing Braeside—and there were moments when it seemed an unnecessary strain. It was only as I watched Pat loading them up and taking them to join Grey, Deja-vous, and the rest up on Braeside, smuggled onto the farm under the cloak of night, that my worries relented. While he was concentrating on all these horses, at least my husband did not have time to brood on what was happening to the country he loved. If tending horses was what it would take to keep him from exploding like he did that day on Palmerston Estates, I wouldn’t have minded if he had taken in all the horses in the whole of Zimbabwe.
The next day, I made the trip into Chinhoyi to collect more veterinary supplies. In town, I met with Rob Gordon, a veterinarian we knew well from Crofton and Palmerston. Today, he looked a shadow of the man who had ridden across Crofton with us. I caught up with him on the main strip that ran through Chinhoyi, the road flanked on either side by busy market stalls and bustling crowds. I tried not to look at the stalls too closely these days, for we were certain that items scavenged from the jambanjaed farms lay here. Indeed, we had known farmers whose furniture was piled high for sale here, and across the villages.
Rob looked distinctly harassed as I told him what we needed. His face was etched in hard lines.
“Rob?”
“Sorry, Mandy,” he began. “Of course I can help …”
I quickly understood why Rob seemed so different. He was, he said, one of only a handful of vets left in the Chinhoyi district. Since the land invasions began, veterinarians had never been more needed—and yet now they were leaving Zimbabwe in droves, just like the farmers themselves. As more farmers were driven from their farms, more and more herds of livestock were being abandoned. If those sheep and cattle were not immediately slaughtered by the war vets, they were left to die slow deaths from sickness and neglect. Dairy cattle were in particular danger, for they need milking several times a day; if just one milking is missed, it is only a matter of time before infection sets in.
“So we’re killing them all,” said Rob. “If the war vets don’t do it, it’s down to us.”
Rob’s words were like dull thunder, sounding on the horizon and growing louder as a storm grows near. The scale of this devastation was vast. Each farm looked after thousands of animals, and each farm’s herds were unique to that land, selectively bred over generations to produce a certain strain. Rob, and vets like him, were moving in where the war vets had been and euthanizing great flocks of animals.
“Rob,” I said, “it’s madness …”
He looked at me as if to say he knew.
“If not us,” he said, “who else?”
Faced with this dark new responsibility, many vets had chosen to leave Zimbabwe altogether, finding cleaner work in South Africa; Tanzania; and, like the country’s farmers, farther afield as well: Australia, New Zealand, England, and all over the world. In my heart I could not blame them; they had trained to save animals, not to cull them by the thousands.
Yet, as Rob sold me the vaccines we needed up on Braeside, I could not help thinking about the animals left behind, not only the domestic pets stranded on farms from which their owners had fled, but the herds out there in the bush and the fields, waiting in vain for their owners to come back.
“Rob,” I said, “are there more horses out there, left behind?”
He looked at me through eyes half-closed, his head cocked to one side as if he was still trying to understand what I had said.
“Mandy,” he said, “they’re everywhere.”
I stood for the longest time as he drove off.
I would, I considered, just have to tell Pat.
In the days that followed, the safehouse phone rang more and more often. The country was a chaos of rumor and misinformation, and one of the tinier rumors swirling around the streets of Chinhoyi was that Pat and Mandy Retzlaff had opened their arms to horses whose owners were being compelled to leave them behind.
It was Rob Gordon, I knew, who had been disseminating the rumor. As we sneaked more horses—a sleek roan mare, a gorgeous dappled gray gelding—onto Braeside, we could not fault him for it. Rob had put down more animals in the last twelve months than he might have done in a whole lifetime, and the idea that there was even a glimmer of hope for some of these abandoned horses must have been a temptation too difficult to ignore.
The more horses we smuggled up onto Braeside, though, the more danger Pat and Charl put themselves in every time they crept onto the farm under cover of night. With Rory and Lindy gone, the settling of Braeside was intensifying. Villages grew up out of the bush, fields were partitioned, and all through the night the fires burned and the drums were beaten. We could not neglect the horses kept there, for then they might all fall prey to the same withering devastations that Grey had endured—but the longer they were left there, the stronger the danger of going to look after them became. We were living on borrowed time and had been for too long.
With thoughts of the horses being divided circling in our minds, we resolved to make a trip to Rob Flanagan’s farm and check on the Two Tree horses being kept there. Before we had even turned off the main highway, we could see the evidence of settlers abounding. On one of the banks there spread a cluster of stick huts. A small boy darted from one to another, and a face I took to be his father’s glared at us from the darkness inside. We rolled by barns that stood gutted and empty, a tractor standing, spent and curiously alone, in the middle of a field.
“Was it like this when you brought them here?” I asked.
“There were problems,” Pat said, with a withering look. “There wasn’t this.”
We climbed out of the car and came toward the farmhouse where Rob Flanagan still clung on. On the windward side of the house, I saw the looming outlines of the great tunnels and greenhouses where Rob grew his flowers to be exported all over the world.
As my eyes swept around the farm, I caught sight of one of them: Lady, grazing between two of the greenhouses.
“There!” I exclaimed.
The farmhouse seemed dead, and there was no answer when we hammered on the door or squinted through the windows, so we crossed the yard, climbed the fences, and made haste to where Lady stood. She looked in good health, her eyes bright, her ears alert. She had the same sheen to her brown coat and did not seem to have lost weight.
I called out to her. For an instant, she spooked, as if she might hurtle off. Then she turned and came toward us. Though there was little ground to cover, the greenhouses rising tall on each side to make a narrow canyon, she broke into a trot. Exuberant, she pushed her nose into my shoulder. She whinnied softly.
“It’s good to see you, too,” I said. I can hardly describe the feeling of relief that she looked so well; my mind had been filled with images of what had happened to Grey.
We found Duke and Fleur by the foot of the same greenhouse, while Duchess and Marquess emerged, one after another, from the awning at the end of one of Rob’s long tunnels. There was little room to draw them together, but Pat and I fussed around each one, inspecting their eyes and teeth, and especially their hooves.
One of Rob’s own horses, a beautiful roan, appeared from the same tunnel. We walked on, Lady and the other Two Tree horses falling into line behind us. It must have looked a curious procession, for none of the horses were roped together. We weaved through greenhouses and tunnels, breathing in the scents of cut flowers, the aroma of those only just coming into bud.
Pat nodded, happy but somehow disturbed, and I said, “Rob’s looking after them, but for how long?”
Lady ambled past me and dropped her head to drink at a trough.
“I was thinking the same thing when we were on Braeside last night. We were with Grey, in his stable. His hoof’s almost healed, but just in time.” Pat hesitated. “I don’t think they can stay up there for long, Mandy.”
“No?”
“Now that Rory and Lindy are gone, you can barely call Braeside a farm. It’s a dozen farms now, parceled up and cut up and … butchered. We’ve left them up there too long already. Last night, Charl and I were dropping back off the farm. There were flies swarming an impala in a ditch. Just slaughter, for no reason, not even for meat. I can’t leave Grey and Deja-vous up there for much longer.”
“Then what?”
He did not mean to bring them here. Of that I was certain. Rob Flanagan’s farm was slowly being eroded by settlers. This was no land for horses. It was time, I sensed, to bring them together. It would be a mismatched herd, made up of horses from a dozen different farms, but they—and we—would be safer together than apart.
“I think it’s time we started thinking … don’t you?” Pat ran his fingers along Fleur’s muzzle, his cheek pressed to her, listening to the rhythm of the heart deep in her chest. “About moving on,” he said. “It’s the way Charl’s been talking. He doesn’t want Resje living through this. If this is Zimbabwe now, he doesn’t want Charl-Emil living it, either.”
“Leave for where?” I asked. “Out of the country?”
Pat’s face erupted into the most glorious smile.
“No,” he said. “This is my country.” He paused, standing tall at Fleur’s side. “Besides, what would we do with this lot?”
“And the rest,” I whispered, remembering the calls that kept coming in.
“So,” Pat said, “I suppose we’d better find a place. We’d better make a plan.”
On our return to Chinhoyi, I put myself to work.
“Pat,” I said, trying to control the trill in my voice, “I think I’ve found it.”
It was almost dusk. We had been back in Chinhoyi for several days, and since then I had done nothing but sit in front of the phone, dialing number after number, any old friends and contacts I could dredge up, hoping that something might turn up.
In the safehouse, Pat prowled the edges of the room.
“Found what?” he asked.
“Do you remember,” I began, “Fred and Janey Wallis?”
Fred had gone to school with Pat, in a world that now seemed very far away. He and his wife, Janey, lived on a farm about twenty kilometers from Chinhoyi, overseeing the construction of a gargantuan new dam, and Fred had been among the now infamous “Chinhoyi 24,” all farmers incarcerated without conviction when they rushed to the aid of a neighbor beset by a baying war vet mob. Though Fred had spent three crippling weeks behind bars, emerging malnourished, ridden with parasites and a bronchial cough that would not go away, he and Janey had refused to give up on Zimbabwe just yet.
“They have a house, Pat, sitting empty.”
Pat arched an eyebrow. “And?”
“And it’s ours, if we want it. Land enough for all of the horses, too …”
Now I knew I really did have Pat’s attention.
“War vets?” he said softly, those two words so heavy with meaning, for us, for our future, for the horses. For the country.
“Not yet,” I replied. “It would be a home, Pat. It would be somewhere.” I paused. “We could go there tomorrow, if we had to. What do you think?”
I could see the idea blossoming behind Pat’s eyes: land enough for the entire herd; somewhere safe for the children; and, shimmering in the distance, the fresh waters of a dam, so that the horses might never go thirsty like Grey again.
He nodded, sharply and once only. It was all that I needed. Soon, we would be on our way.
That night, the safehouse gathered for dinner. In the downstairs dining room it felt just like one of the dinners we had shared on Crofton and Two Tree. In the middle of the table, a big side of beef billowed with aroma, and, as Pat set to carving it apart, Charl and Tertia gave thanks for the meal we were about to share. Their faith, already strong, seemed to have strengthened since that day on Two Tree. Every time I heard them pray, I could not stop myself from picturing Tertia, holding tightly to Resje and Charl-Emil in the heart of the farmhouse, waiting for the mob to descend.
At the end of the table, Kate played with Charl-Emil. It was time, I decided, to break the news.
“Everybody,” I began, “there’s something Pat and I have got to say …”
A hush descended.
“We’ve known for a long time that this wasn’t forever.” I threw Tertia a grin. “Our refugee camp in the middle of town! And with the horses so divided, it’s been preying on our minds—how to bring them back together, how to make a life for ourselves in the middle of this chaos. So I’ve been searching for somewhere we could go.” I paused. “All of us. The horses included.”
“Mum?” Kate ventured. “Is everything …”
I gave her a nod. “Everything’s going to be fine, darling. You see, we have somewhere to go to now. There’s an empty farmhouse on Biri Farm. A place we could set up a home again. A place we can take Deja-vous, Grey, Lady, and all the rest. There’s a dam as big as at Two Tree, and riding trails that run all over the farmland. Janey and Fred Wallis have said we can stay there as long as we want.”
“Mandy,” Tertia chimed in, “that’s such great news …”
She reached across the table and took my hand. Yet the way she squeezed told me that something was wrong. I thought I understood.
“Tertia, Charl,” I said, trying to mask my smile. “We want you to come with us.”
Charl and Tertia shared a strange look. They held the pose for a second. Then Tertia took her hand from mine and reached out to fold it over Resje’s. Resje shifted in her seat, and silence settled across the dining room, broken only by a sudden cry from Charl-Emil.
“Mandy,” Tertia began, “there’s something we have to tell you as well.”
“It won’t come as a surprise,” added Charl. “We’ve been thinking of it for some time.” He hesitated. I saw Pat’s expression change and understood, in that moment, what Charl was about to say. “This isn’t home,” Charl went on. “Not anymore. We didn’t come back to Two Tree just to see it taken away. We’d thought …” Words seemed to fail him, as they had been failing so many of us for so long. “ … it would be paradise. Like it was the first time I worked there. A paradise for Resje and Charl-Emil. A part of the country to charm my city girl’s heart …”
At this, Tertia smiled.
“Not anymore,” she said. “Mandy, if it was just us, well, maybe we’d stay. Maybe we’d find a way to make a new life here. But it isn’t just us. There’s Resje and Charl-Emil, too. I don’t want them to have another day like that day on Two Tree. How could we ever feel safe here after that?”
“It was paradise for a little while, wasn’t it?” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
Charl nodded.
“But a paradise lost,” he said. “Pat, Mandy, we’ve made up our minds. We’re going to New Zealand.”
Throughout, Pat had not said a word. Slowly, he stretched out his hand and took hold of Charl’s.
“Of course,” said Charl, “there’s the small matter of … Lady. Fleur. Grey. Duchess, Duke, Marquess, and the rest.”
“No there isn’t,” said Pat, holding Charl’s gaze. “There never was.”
“We can’t take them with us.”
“You don’t need to. Two Tree, Crofton … It always felt the same thing to us. I’ve known those horses as long as you. I was there when you pulled Lady out of Lady Richmond. I was there when that Arabian stallion came through. We’ve watched those horses grow from foals. They’re as much family as Deja-vous, Imprevu, and the rest up there. They’re as loved as Frisky ever was.”
Charl nodded. Nothing else needed to be said.
Except perhaps:
“I think we’re going to miss you, Tertia,” I said.
Around the table, we all raised our glasses. First Pat, then Charl, then Tertia and me. Resje and Kate lifted theirs too, and, in his high chair, even Charl-Emil seemed to know something was happening. His face broke into an absurd grin, and he seemed to pump his little fist too, eager to join in with the toast.
“To old friends,” said Charl.
“Absent friends,” I added.
“And to the end of all this,” Pat interjected.
We drained our glasses, talked of Crofton and Two Tree, of rides by the dam, of the Arabian stallions, of Frisky and Lady Richmond, of all the horses who had lived and died there and not had to know the chaos that was engulfing their country.
We drank long into the night, and, with the children fast asleep around us, we said our good-byes.