PAT AND I stood at the fences of Biri Farm’s new, hastily erected paddocks, the first lights of dawn beginning to spread. We were here to see the horses come to their new home.
It had been a long walk from Braeside, as driving the horses through farms already ceded to war vets and party officials would draw too much attention, but the grooms had reached us at last. They led the horses through the paddock gates. It was a mismatched herd, but with Charl and Tertia gone it seemed strangely fitting that the Crofton and Two Tree horses should have come together. Grooms had walked the horses off the remnants of Rob Flanagan’s farm, too. Here were Grey and Deja-vous standing together, Fleur with Lady, Imprevu with Duke. Duchess and Marquess were the last to come through the gate, and as they settled in, we clambered over the fences to run our hands across their flanks and make sure they had reached their new home without any harm. Grey’s hoof seemed to have healed, though he walked tentatively, still uncertain of how much of his weight it could bear.
“It’s going to feel strange,” Pat called, “living with them again.”
It was going to feel strange living anywhere, I thought, but perhaps it would feel more like home with the horses nearby. For the first time in what felt like an age, we could try and build some semblance of normality into our lives—and the first step on that road was to take a long ride around Biri Dam.
Once the horses were rested, Pat and I saddled up and set about exploring our new home. Biri Dam, completed only recently, was developed jointly by the farmers (for irrigation) and the government (for water to Chinhoyi). Fred had been employed to manage the finishing touches to the dam and to control the water. All of this seemed so absurd now. The land here had been pioneered long before our own, its contours less jagged and wild than the ones we had hewn out at our own farm. On the slopes above the fields the crowns of bush did not grow as densely, and the air hung heavy with the tang of citrus groves along the shores of the dam.
We set off around the farm, not knowing exactly which way the paths would lead us. I had chosen to ride Grey, while Pat had chosen Imprevu. The earth did not have the same vibrant redness as at Two Tree and Crofton, but the land was of a similar quality, hard and unforgiving, laced with the same scree that forbade farming without a careful cultivation of the soil. Here the land had been given to tobacco and, in its fallow years, long grasses for the cattle who still roamed here.
We found a bush trail, steep and punishing for the horses, and followed a switchback to its top. Here, we could look down on the waters of Biri Dam. In the east the great dam wall loomed, while on the farthest side farms much older than our own had been resettled long before. Ten kilometers away, east of the dam wall, stood Avalon, a farm that belonged to Nick Swanepoel, while in the west, along the line of the dam, Biri was bordered by Portland Estates, a cattle ranch belonging to John Crawford. The dam stood, a formidable blue scar in the green land.
We looked down on the houses where the dam’s construction workers had once lived, concrete shacks for their foremen and huts of poles and thatching grass for the other staff. In the past few days, those old workers of ours who had been clinging to their homes at Crofton had made the journey down to be with us again. As we rode through, I was glad to see familiar faces: Charles and Albert. For the moment, they would be free from the scourge of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.
The farmhouse in which we lived was next door to the house belonging to Fred and Janey Wallis. As we rode back to our new paddocks, Fred, shaved bald to get rid of the lice from his recent imprisonment, with spectacles perched on his nose, was sitting on the step, as he often did. He called out, and we brought Grey and Imprevu around.
Physically, Fred seemed to have changed little since he and Pat were at school, but the signs of the three weeks he had spent in prison were visible. His eyes did not seem to settle, he moved with the jittery air of a scarecrow, and the cough that had set in during those weeks inside still plagued him.
“Settling in?” he asked.
I threw a look backward. Lady had bounded over to the edge of the paddock and was studying me carefully, greedy as ever and desperate to be doted on.
“Well, Fred, there’s a lot to settle in …”
Fred rolled his eyes. I think he remembered something about Pat from their schooldays: endless stories of the chickens and cattle he was collecting on his father’s farm. It must have been an absurd sight for two people like Fred and Janey, to suddenly have their home invaded not just by Retzlaffs but by a random collection of rescued horses, too.
“I suppose you’ll have to talk to John,” said Fred.
“John Crawford?”
Fred’s eyes lit up, as if he was daring us with a practical joke.
“Didn’t you know?” he ventured. “John’s finally having to leave. He doesn’t have much time left. But he has a Retzlaff kind of a problem … fifty horses, stuck out there on his farm. I think you’ll be receiving a call.”
We knew when we hit the boundaries of the Crawfords’ farm, some way west of Biri, for we could see their cattle ranged before us, hundreds of heads watching dolefully from the fields. John’s was a good old-fashioned cattle ranch of the kind the first pioneers in this part of the world had kept. We rode in on Grey and Deja-vous. There were horses in the fields, too. A big gray mare, as strong as any stallion, tracked us with her eyes while, around her, two foals tentatively pushed their muzzles at each other. The smaller of the foals held itself much like the gray mare, with the same strong-set shoulders. Most telling of all, both the mare and foal had two white feet, a mark that they were surely mother and son. These, we would soon learn, were Jade and her foal, later to be named Brutus, two horses I will never forget.
John Crawford was waiting for us at the farmhouse. John was a lovely, soft-spoken man, approaching thirty years old. Pat and I had known his father well, for he also bred cattle and we had often seen him at shows and auctions.
“It’s been two years since they appeared,” John explained as he helped us water Grey and Deja-vous in front of the low, sprawling farmhouse. “We could ignore it at first. It was only a little thing. A few faces at the gates, a few men at the sides of the roads. It got worse.” He paused. “There started being parts of the farm we couldn’t touch. Then those sections started growing. They built their huts, brought in their cattle. Brought distemper with them. It killed my dogs. Ticks got into the cattle.” He ran his hands along Grey’s flank. “A year ago, they told us it wasn’t our farm anymore. We stayed. I can’t count the number of times we’ve been told we have to leave.”
John led us into the fields where his cattle were grazing. There, we walked among his horses. Some of them, we could see, were strong cattle horses. There were foals as well, six or seven younger than a year old.
Every one of them seemed to spook at our appearance. I watched as a ripple seemed to move through the herd. Mares turned as if to protect their foals, while a dark bay gelding turned tail and kicked into a trot.
“They’re wild,” I said.
“I can’t remember how long it’s been since we could work these horses. They know, Mandy. They get a feeling when something’s wrong. It doesn’t take many months for wildness to set back in.”
My eyes were drawn to the big gray mare we had seen upon approaching the farm. Up close, I could see that she wore a great scar in her left flank. At first I took it for the mark made by some marauding war vet, too stoned or drunk to know what he was doing. I asked John.
“No,” he began. “It’s the cattle. There’s a few with marks like that. Sometimes a cow doesn’t want to be driven …” He paused. “She came through it, though. Jade’s a strong girl.”
John moved as if to run his hands through Jade’s mane. It was obvious that he and the horse had once been close, for she did not startle so easily as the others.
“What do you think?” John ventured. “Can you help?”
There must have been fifty horses in the field, and perhaps just as many cattle. Here were the old and the young, the strong and the lame, more horses than we had had on Crofton and Two Tree combined, more even than we had collected up on Biri. When I turned back, the horses blurring in front of my eyes, the last thing I caught sight of was Pat’s face. He was wearing an inscrutable expression, as if going through a calculation too complex to comprehend.
Then he simply nodded.
“We’ll take as many as we can.”
Rounding up the horses was difficult. Perhaps they had seen some terrible things from the invading war vets, but the wildness in them seemed to have made them distrust humans again.
As we were about to set off, Pat’s eyes had landed on the big gray mare and her plaintive little foal.
“What about Jade?” Pat asked. “And this foal of hers?”
There was no hesitation. John simply shook his head.
“She isn’t just one of the herd, Pat. She’s my horse.”
I knew what that relationship was like. Every horse is an individual, but, just like humans, sometimes those individuals click. That was the way it had been for Pat and Frisky.
“John, you’re not thinking straight. See it from Jade’s perspective. How long have you got left? Two months? Three?”
“Less,” John admitted.
“When it comes, it comes fast. You might not have time. What if you couldn’t get Jade off? What if they …”
For a young man, John looked suddenly very old.
“If you get the farm back one day, John, I’ll ride her back here myself. I’m not trying to steal your horse off you … but I don’t want to leave her, not when I’ve seen what’s coming.” Pat paused. “And I have seen it, John.”
Jade seemed to move her head between Pat and John, following the conversation.
“You mean, if it ends, you’ll send her back?”
“If it ends, I don’t think I could stop her.”
In resignation, John passed Jade’s lead rope to Pat. Then, he ran his hand along the length of her muzzle. Good luck, he mouthed. Jade’s ears swiveled and folded forward, her lips turning to nibble at John’s hand.
As Pat led Jade off, her foal followed after. In the end we drove twelve horses from John’s fields to Biri. That same day we had to work on the foals in a round pen, and by the evening we had them eating out of our hands.
Back at Biri, Pat put his arm around me. I nestled into his shoulder and soaked up his smell: the smell of earth, of home, of our long years of work. We looked out across the land together. On one side of the field, the Two Tree and Crofton horses seemed to be gathering, while on the other, Jade, the little foal whom I had named Brutus—for there was never a less likely looking Brutus in the whole of Zimbabwe—and the rest of the Crawford horses were making a separate herd of their own. In between, the other horses we had taken in looked like dark islands in a sea of green. Then, one of the Crawford mares ventured out and Deja-vous, recognizing her from the day’s journey, shifted from her side of the paddock, too. It was, I decided, a sight wonderful enough to make all thoughts of tomorrow, and the day after, simply evaporate away. The horses were getting to know one another.
“I think we’ve collected enough,” I began. My count had reached thirty-five before I started seeing double.
“Mandy,” Pat said, grinning, “we haven’t even started.”
Late that night, Fred came to see us. In the sitting room, he sat down with Pat, opened a cold beer, and looked at him with sad but eager eyes. From the kitchen doorway, I listened to them talking—or, rather, I listened to Fred talk and watched Pat’s reaction. Pat, Fred was certain, had to see sense. The more horses we took in, the less able we would be to provide for them; the more horses we took in, the less able we would be to provide for ourselves. Some people, Fred said, had nervous episodes that could manifest themselves in the most curious of ways; the sooner Pat recognized his mania for what it was, the better.
It dawned on me that Fred was probably right. I had seen Pat’s mania manifest itself like this before. I had borne the brunt of the hundreds of turkeys he had collected in the early days of our marriage. Farmers around us were constantly losing their heads as their lives unraveled. We had heard of countless heart attacks, divorces, extramarital affairs. Was it really so far-fetched to believe the same thing was happening to Pat, and showing itself in this most incredible of ways?
“There are herds and herds of animals out there,” Fred said. “Cattle and sheep. You can’t rescue them all.”
Pat looked suddenly like Jay had as a young boy, thrilled to be out hunting with a new bird of prey.
“Do you know, Fred,” Pat said, “you might have given me an idea. Cattle and sheep! Somebody has to rescue those cattle and sheep!”
Even though Pat was only joking, Fred looked suddenly downcast, perplexed beyond measure.
In the doorway, my face broke into the widest grin. Pat, I decided, might well have been mad—but in the new Zimbabwe, only the truly insane could ever hope to prosper.
For a while, now, the impact of the land invasions on Zimbabwe’s economy had been clear. We watched helplessly as the nation’s only real resource—its agricultural land—was systematically destroyed. Most of the farms taken did not go to the local black populace, as was being promised. Instead, they became the country residences of party officials, or else they were simply put to the torch or abandoned. If any farming was happening on Crofton, Two Tree, or the countless other farms to have fallen, it was simple, subsistence stuff by the settlers. Commercial agriculture was finished and, with it, the Zimbabwean dollar.
In Harare one morning, my mother left home to withdraw her pension. At the bank, she produced her passport and identification. Having withdrawn her money for the month, she set about her regular routine: first to the shops for supplies, and later to a restaurant in town for afternoon tea with an old friend.
It was only upon opening her bag and seeing the money she had withdrawn that she realized: her month’s pension, that symbol of the lifetime she had spent nursing, was worth little more than half a loaf of bread and a bottle of Coke.
She looked up when the waitress came to take her order and politely excused herself without ordering.
On the table behind her, her month’s pension fluttered on a plate. It was the biggest and yet smallest tip the waitress ever received.
“Only in Zimbabwe, Amanda.”
In Harare, all of my mother’s possessions were in cases, carefully being loaded into the back of our car. We had packed as much as possible off to relatives, and it felt strange to see my mother’s long lifetime reduced to a few boxes and bags. She was seventy-three years old and now she had nothing.
When I closed the trunk, I saw her slipping into the driver’s seat.
“Mum, I’ll drive.”
“Amanda …”
“You don’t know the way.”
She relented and shuffled to the other side of the car.
“Come on, Mum, let’s get out of here …”
There had been a great influx of farmers into Harare, those who could not flee the country often finding new homes in the city. Perhaps Pat and I would have considered it, were it not for the horses out on Biri. Pat was spending his days with John Crawford’s foals in his training ring—and the idea of him giving up that life to move to the city felt as objectionable as what Mugabe was doing to the land.
We pulled off into Harare traffic. The roads were ragged at their edges and full of great potholes. Darkness was falling and the streetlights shone only intermittently, so that we had to roll from one halo of light to the next through pools of blackness. In that blackness, I saw that the streets were filled with men in uniform, soldiers out on patrol. I checked the dashboard and saw that our fuel was running low—yet every garage we passed had big signs outside declaring that there was no gas, no diesel, nothing in their stores.
“Mum,” I began, “how long has it been … ?”
“Oh, Amanda,” my mother said with a lofty grin. “This is nothing.”
I wanted to tell her I was glad she was coming to live with us. Biri Farm, at least, was at peace. Then, the thought occurred to me that it might not always be that way, and in silence I drove on.
My mother did not deserve this.
Beryl Sheldon Whitfield had been born in Hyde in England in 1929 and did not find herself in African climes until she married my father, John, in 1952. My father was an architect from Galashiels in Scotland and, soon after they were married, answered the clarion call for architects to seek their fortunes in Ghana in West Africa. My grandparents, horrified that their little girl was being dragged off to the Dark Continent, pleaded with my father to reconsider. But my parents had their hearts and minds set on adventure. It was to dictate the shape of their lives.
It was in Ghana that I spent my early years, before my parents finally settled in South Africa to raise me and my two younger brothers. After twenty-one years, my mother and father went their separate ways. Beryl left Africa to live with her mother in Spain, but, on hearing that I had taken up with a Rhodesian and was moving to live in a country at war, she decided to return to the continent that had dominated so much of her life. She found work as a hospital nurse and gave her days and nights to helping old and sick Zimbabweans, both black and white.
Now, that country to which she had given everything for twenty-five years was condemning her to a cruel, impoverished old age.
“Do you know, Amanda, I believe I may even owe the bank. The pension doesn’t even cover the account costs now.”
When we reached Biri Farm, Albert and Caetano, two of the workers who had come with us from River Ranch, helped Granny Beryl to unload her packs. There was so little, and yet it was the sum of a life.
“Welcome home, Mum.”
She looked up at the face of Biri farmhouse.
“Amanda, it’s positively a palace.”
With a wry grin, I showed Granny Beryl around her new home. In front of the farmhouse sat Pat’s training ring, and farther on stood the beginnings of a gymkhana setup he and the laborers were building as part of the training regimen he was instituting for the newest horses. So far, the foals from John Crawford’s farm, including the tormented little Brutus, were being handled daily, getting them used to close human contact. Pat would spend long hours settling them, then lifting each of their hooves so that, when the time came to ride and work with them, they would not instinctively kick out. When they were old enough, he would begin a long process of groundwork, fitting them with halters and lead ropes, training them from the ground with long reins, before finally climbing into the saddle. It could take two years to school one of these horses properly; I only hoped Biri lasted that long.
On the hill that backed onto the farm, some of the laborers were working at clearing an eight-kilometer trail for riding. It was to be the last part of Pat’s makeshift training program, a twisting track full of surprises—ditches, crests, sudden switchbacks—to help desensitize the horses and teach them not to be spooked. Looking at Brutus, standing forlorn in the field, and Lady, still bounding boisterously about, I wondered if they’d ever get to walk that trail.
We had prepared a room for Granny Beryl and I showed her to it. As she unpacked clothes into drawers, I produced a small bag, no bigger than a school satchel.
“Mum, put this somewhere safe.”
“What is it?”
“It’s your ditch kit. Don’t worry about it—just keep it to hand.”
My mother set the bag down, drew back the zipper, and peered inside. One by one, she lifted the items out: first, a clean pair of panties; next, a tube of toothpaste with a new toothbrush; then a bar of soap, some other toiletries, a small roll of U.S. banknotes. Using U.S. currency was still illegal in Zimbabwe, but at least it was worth something in a market spiraling out of control.
“But … what’s it for?”
“I’ve been keeping mine ever since Palmerston. Keep your passport with it too, Mum. And if anyone ever comes to the farm, anybody who looks like they’re Party or Air Force or CIO …” I trailed off. It was not fair to heap this on her after the shell shock of her pension disappearing. “Just keep it safe.” I folded my hands over hers.
I was almost out the door, off to find Pat, when my mother stopped me short.
“Amanda, is everything all right?”
“No, Mum,” I said, the last few months hitting me with all the power of a road train, “things aren’t all right at all.”
Sometime after dark, a car pulled into Biri Farm, our driver Jonathan at the wheel. From the backseat, Kate tumbled out. The school run was longer than it had been when we lived at Crofton or the safehouse, but, for the sake of continuity in her important exam years, we had not wanted Kate to be uprooted. Exhausted, she came into the farmhouse, ditched her bags, and ran straight into her grandmother.
Kate beamed and threw her arms open wide. “What are you doing here?”
“Kate,” Granny Beryl announced, “this is where I live.”
Momentarily confused, Kate scoured the room until her eyes locked with mine.
I’ll explain later, I mouthed.
We drifted into the living room, where a table had been set for dinner. Pat was nowhere to be seen, still no doubt in his training ring with Brutus, and I hurried off to bellow for him. It would not have been the first time he had missed a meal while playing with his horses.
By the time I got back to the dining room, Kate and Granny Beryl were in the midst of catching up.
“And how’s school?”
“Mum …”
“Amanda, I’m asking the girl a question.”
But it was a question Pat and I had been shying away from asking. Ever since Crofton, Kate had come home with rumors she had heard in the schoolyard, her friends’ families beset by war vets and driven from their farms. The school ground was a place where stories fermented, but, more than that, it seemed a microcosm of what was happening in the rest of Zimbabwe. It wasn’t only in the cities and on the farms that the rivalry between Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and the MDC was viciously played out; it was happening in Kate’s world as well.
“It’s pretty empty,” Kate said, turning to Granny Beryl. “Lots of students didn’t come back at the start of term.”
“Where are they?”
“Australia, mostly. Some of them went to England, I think, like Paul.” Kate paused. “Lots of mothers are going, too. They’re finding work caring, now they don’t have their farms.”
“Caring?”
“Old people’s homes, Mum,” I interjected. “There are agencies for it.”
“There was a …” Kate hesitated, searching for the right word. “ … thing after school,” she went on. “Some of the older students, they keep wearing their MDC shirts. Some of the others … well, they don’t like it. They came in with their ZANU-PF shirts. It was like those horses out there, everyone sticking to their own side of the field …”
“Politics, is it?”
“It’s because of the election,” said Kate.
March was not far away. In ballot boxes across Zimbabwe, the battle would be lost or won: four more years of Mugabe and his rape of our country, or a fresh beginning with Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change. Knowing how overwhelmingly the nation had refuted Mugabe’s referendum two years before, I was convinced that the country felt the same way as we did, desperate for the MDC to take control and stabilize this chaos; what I was not convinced of was that the election would reflect the true will of the people. I had seen how terrorized the workers on Crofton, Two Tree, and Palmerston Estates had been by ZANU-PF pedagogues. The same thing was happening nationwide.
At that moment, Pat came into the room, still wearing his chaps. Without stopping to wash up, he wrapped Kate in a big bear hug and dropped into his seat.
“I’m starving,” he began, looking at what was left in the bowls. “Oh well, I suppose I’ll be the dustbin again …”
He proceeded to shovel everything that was left onto his plate. It was a moment before he noticed Kate squinting at him.
“What is it?”
“Dad,” Kate ventured, “you stink.”
Pat lifted his hands to his nose. “I’ve been dipping the horses,” he said. “For ticks.”
While Pat rushed off to scrub himself, Kate, Granny Beryl, and I put down our plates and took a walk down to the paddocks. Over the fence, Jade, Brutus, and the other horses from John Crawford’s farm lifted their teeth to tear at the low-lying branches of the trees beside them. Having stripped each twig, they proceeded to carefully chew the leaves. It was a habit not even Pat had seen before. Our only thought was that there had been too much competition for grass to graze among the Crawford cattle, and these enterprising horses had found a unique solution.
On seeing us, Lady bounded over. I could see why Pat was having an ordeal trying to properly train her; this little madam was spoiled beyond saving.
“What do you think, Mum?” I asked. “Not bad for a group of desperadoes on the run?”
Granny Beryl nodded sternly.
“Amanda,” she said, as if it had only just occurred, “I thought I’d made it clear with that horrible little horse Ticky. Just what are you doing with all these horses?”
In the farmhouse, the phone rang. Granny Beryl, sensing an opportunity to help out, strode energetically over.
“Don’t worry, Mum. It’s probably another call about some horses …”
It was with a pleasant surprise, then, that I heard a familiar voice on the other end of the line, vaguely distorted as it made its way halfway across the world.
“Hello, Mandy.”
“Hello … Charl.”
Charl and Tertia had been settled in New Zealand for some weeks, and it occurred to me now how much I missed them.
“How’s Biri Farm?” Charl asked.
It was a good feeling to share some positive news. I told him about Brutus and Jade, the other foals who had come from John Crawford. I did not tell him that Pat still believed some of these horses might be restored to their rightful homes.
“How about you, Charl?”
“It’s … difficult, Mandy. I won’t complain. I’m glad we came. It’s …” He paused. “Work’s hard to come by, that’s all. But we’re not the only ones in this boat.”
“Are you working, Charl?”
“I am,” he replied. “I’m on a cattle lot.”
I had to ask him to repeat it. I thought I had misheard.
“Charl, you’ve been a farm manager for twenty years! Surely …”
“It’s for the kids, Mandy. That’s all that matters.” He meant it, but I could still hear a hint of defeat in his voice. “But I didn’t call to complain. There’s something else—and, with all these horses Pat’s collecting, maybe I called at just the right time … Tell me,” he went on, “do you remember a mare called Princess?”
How could I forget? I rode Princess’s half brother, Grey, almost every day. I vividly remembered seeing them as foals on Two Tree, a family of noble half-Arabians, and watching them grow. I remembered, too, the day we had been riding across Two Tree, only to see Resje being thrown from Princess’s back and, her foot caught in the stirrup, trailing wildly behind.
“Charl, has something happened?”
“Ormeston’s gone,” Charl replied. “It’s where I sent her, after the accident.” His voice trailed off. “We sent her there, and now the war vets have it. Isn’t it the stupidest thing? I haven’t thought about Princess in years, but since I heard …”
“It isn’t stupid at all.”
“I suppose she might be gone already. But … it doesn’t seem right not to know. You and Pat have already done so much … but you have Grey and Fleur and the rest. If Princess is still alive, it seems she should be with them.”
An image hit me: Pat sneaking onto another occupied farm, but this time without Charl. I was not sure how to feel about that; at least, together, Pat and Charl had been able to cover each other as they moved through the darkness.
“Charl,” I said, “let’s make a plan.”
Ormeston had been jambanjaed some weeks previously, and its owners had not been back to the land since. That night, I called the CFU, hoping to hear that Pat and I would be safe going onto the farm in search of Princess. The news I heard was grave: settlers had moved onto Ormeston in droves, the farm was already being partitioned, and under no circumstances could we risk sneaking on.
“Not even under cover of night?”
I looked at Pat, willing him to stop. I shook my head.
The next morning, I telephoned a local member of the SPCA. It seemed a strange contradiction, even in this most contradictory of countries, that the same war vets who had calculatedly slaughtered farmers’ dogs just to cultivate fear might let the doughty, often white, women of the SPCA onto the farms in order to rescue domestic pets—but, if there was a way of getting Princess out safely, this was our only hope.
“She’s a horse,” a flinty voice explained. “Our purview is domestic pets only. We don’t have dispensation to take livestock.”
Livestock were considered part of a farm, so no longer belonged to the farmers who had raised them for generations. It was part of the reason that countless farmers had taken to slaughtering their herds as soon as they realized they would be evicted. With the market flooded by such wholesale slaughter, the price of beef and lamb had suddenly plummeted; generations of breeding were lost, and all for less than ten cents per kilogram of flesh. In the new Zimbabwe, it was hardly worth the paper it was written on.
“Princess wasn’t a working horse,” I explained. “How can she be livestock?”
“It’s a gray area, I’ll—”
“They’re not even classed as agricultural livestock, they’re domestic animals—”
I realized I was talking over the SPCA member.
“Mandy,” she said, “let’s see what we can do.”
February 2002, and the parliamentary election was only a month away. Coming back into Biri Farm one afternoon, Pat and I saw an unfamiliar truck sitting outside the farmhouse. Instinctively, Pat eased his foot off the accelerator. We crawled along the track, the horse paddock just coming into view over the next ridge of red.
“Who is it?”
At first, I did not venture a reply. Then, I saw a horse box decoupled from the wagon and breathed a sigh of relief. “I think it’s Princess …”
We drew into Biri Farm’s yard and climbed out of the car. A man was standing at the edge of the horse box, tall and black, wearing khaki shorts and a simple plain shirt.
“I thought nobody’s home!”
“Why didn’t you ask the labor and get her in the paddock?” Pat asked, trying not to sound aggrieved. “She’ll be burning up in there …”
“Boss, they said you should do it.”
Pat climbed up into the horse box, disappeared for a minute, and then returned, leading the statuesque Princess by a lead rope. As her head emerged I saw the same Arabian features that her brother, Grey, displayed. It had been more than five years since I last saw her, but she seemed so familiar: her shining bay hide, her dark, flowing mane.
Then she was out of the horse box, and what I saw left me without words.
Princess’s withers were dressed in gauze that had once been white, now stained a horrible red and yellow, as blood and pus seeped out of some unknown wound at the base of her mane. The dressing was huge, the wound it buried bigger than a clenched fist. Wordlessly, Pat led her around and I saw that the same dressing was applied to her other side.
Pat ran his hands along Princess’s flank. His fingers came a foot away from the dressing and she shifted in pain, straining against her lead rope.
Pat whispered, “Let’s get her in the stable.”
We had turned to lead Princess off when the driver called out.
“Boss, you’re forgetting …”
Pat passed me Princess’s lead rope and turned, as if to bawl at the driver, when he saw another face appearing from the darkness in the horse box. The face of a tiny chestnut mare appeared, blinking into the light. She must have been less than a year old. Except for the wound on Princess’s withers, this foal was a perfect replica of her.
“She’s called Evita,” the driver explained. He began to chatter on, but the words were lost. I approached the tentative foal. She cringed back into darkness.
“Come on, girl,” I said. “You’re home now.”
There had already been stables when we arrived at Biri Farm, but, between them, our laborers had built more stalls, simple things where the horses might be led for feeding or veterinary care. We settled the dainty Evita in one stall; in the one next door, Pat calmed Princess.
Then, gently, he began to peel back the dressing.
It was a long operation, the dressing matted to Princess’s hide. Inside, the wound had been packed tightly with gauze. Pat lifted a corner and teased it out. As far as it came, it seemed there was always more to come. Layer by layer, the wound revealed itself, deeper and deeper. Sinew started to show. Nerves exposed. I stroked Princess’s muzzle as Pat crossed the stall and began to tease at the dressing from the other side.
At last, the wound was open to the air. Pat stooped, stared along the length of the festering wound.
“It’s a gunshot wound,” he said. “Somebody has shot her.”
I watched in growing horror as Pat extended his arm toward the wound. The gaping maw swallowed his whole fist. Were it not for her exposed nerves and raw muscle, he could have put his arm straight through Princess’s withers and out the other side.
“The bastards,” Pat whispered.
“What are we going to do?”
In the next stall, Evita shifted, as if sensing what we were doing with her mother.
“I’m not going to put her down,” said Pat. “I know that. I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.”
“Darling, she’s—”
Pat’s eyes blazed at me. “She’s Charl’s horse. Resje’s horse.” He reached for his medicine bag, fumbled inside for an antiseptic spray and packs of gauze. “I’m going to make her well again. She’s going to be so strong I could ride her from here to Victoria Falls and back. And, most of all”—he began to pack the wound with gauze as I steadied Princess’s muzzle and looked into her dark, sad eyes—“I’m going to pray this election’s lost. Mandy, it has to be the MDC.”
Grey and I cantered along the line of the dam. I could hear the thunder of his hooves, feel the wind rampaging in my hair. It was enough to make me forget.
I was urging him to a gallop, and could already sense his excitement at the challenge, when I saw two figures appear on the horizon, back in the direction of Biri farmhouse. Instinctively, I teased the reins, and Grey, acknowledging the gentle request with the barest bowing of his head, slowed back from a canter to a trot. We glided around and headed across the open field.
Pat rode toward the dam, Deja-vous beneath him, and we came together in the middle of the field. It did not seem right to stop, so as the horses acknowledged each other, we turned and followed my trail back along the shore of the dam.
“Mugabe won,” was all Pat said. “It’s ZANU-PF.”
I had, I supposed, been stopping myself from asking the question all day. The champagne we had optimistically earmarked would stay in the storeroom tonight. There would be no popping of corks, no glasses raised in celebration. There would be no midnight dreaming of returning to Crofton.
“How bad?”
“Only just,” Pat replied, “but fifty-six percent is still a majority.”
It should not have been this way. Instinctively, I squeezed Grey. He gave a burst of speed, but then he dropped back to a slow, languorous walk. Like me, he knew there was nowhere to run to.
“It should have been like the referendum,” I said aloud, thinking back to that moment in which the land invasions truly began. “Eighty percent against. The MDC …”
“Were robbed,” Pat interjected. “Is it any wonder? We’ve seen what they did to our labor. On Palmerston and Braeside and … They knew what they were doing. Driving us off our farms was never about us being white. It was about votes, pure and simple.” Pat edged Deja-vous on. “He wasn’t going after us. He was going after our labor. What do the votes of a few white people count against all that?”
We came almost as far as the Crawford farm before we lapped around to make the long ride home. Along the way, we barely exchanged a word. Only when we came back toward Biri, saw the rest of the herd in their paddocks, did I break the silence.
“When we took John’s horses in,” I began, “you said we would send them back … when it was over.”
Pat nodded.
“Well, it’s already over, isn’t it? It was over a year ago. We just didn’t want to admit it. There isn’t any going back home, is there, Pat?”
I did not know if I was saying it in anger or relief, but it was relief that flooded me when Pat nodded. I did not like the idea of his hope being lost, of Patrick Retzlaff having abandoned the wild-eyed optimism that had seen him rampaging into a bar brawl on the very first day we stepped out together, but somehow it was consoling to think he believed it properly, for the very first time. We would not, I knew, stop taking in horses—but at least now we knew what we were letting ourselves in for. The rules of the game had just been forcefully declared. Now all we had to do was play.
“Let’s make a plan,” said Pat.
Back at the farmhouse, I found my mother asleep over a book. I roused her gently, placing a cup of steaming tea in front of her.
“Mum,” I ventured, “did you hear?”
She nodded absently.
“You’re not surprised?”
Granny Beryl shrugged. “It happens, dear.”
I could not believe she could be quite so sanguine about it, but suddenly all the sourness of our ride home lifted from me in waves.
“What are you thinking, Amanda?”
I was thinking about Paul, our last days on Palmerston, of taking him to the airport and waving good-bye. I was thinking that there were places in the world better than this—and if Pat and I could not go there for fear of leaving our horses behind, perhaps there was yet a way of seeing my mother safe and comfortable in her old age. Mum had been born in England; perhaps there was a home for her there, a place to spend her twilight years without the fear of Mugabe’s panga hanging over her head.
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that it’s about time we got you out of here. How would you feel, Mum, about going back home?”