That night, we returned to Two Tree for dinner. In the farmhouse, Tertia poured us drinks. Like me, she didn’t seem to want to hear the conversation flowing at the other end of the table.
“It won’t come to that,” Pat said, his voice unfaltering. “It would be the end if they did. Agriculture’s all this country has …”
He had said the same as we rode to Two Tree, our eyes on the hills for fear of more shots. Zimbabwe was not a country rich in mineral resources like so many other nations in Africa. Our only real resource was the land itself: rich and verdant and fertile for farming. It was not for nothing that we were called the “breadbasket of Africa.” Ours was a country that did not go hungry, and one that could afford to pour grain and other crops into its neighboring nations. Without agriculture, we were nothing. The country’s economy was already in tatters; the idea that the government would exacerbate that by systematically destroying the agriculture on which it depended seemed, to Pat, absolute nonsense.
The way Charl was looking at Pat, I could tell he did not feel the same.
“It’s just not the way Mugabe’s thinking. Mugabe doesn’t think about the economy. It’s as if he still thinks there’s a war. He isn’t thinking about five, ten years … He isn’t thinking about next year, even. He’s”—Charl paused, as if weighing up the thought—“thinking about votes,” he concluded. “It isn’t even money. It’s power.”
If the reports we had heard were even fractionally true, Charl had a point. It wasn’t only the farms held by white landowners that were being targeted. Since the referendum was lost, thugs and soldiers in the government’s employ had stepped up their tactics against members of the MDC—and, perhaps more important, against those members of the electorate who had dared to voice opposition by voting with the MDC in the referendum. There was a parliamentary election on the horizon, too, and with the support the populace had shown for the MDC in the referendum, we expected the MDC to claim a record number of seats. The fact that Mugabe and his ZANU-PF government were reacting with such aggression could easily have been, as Charl contended, a deeply political move.
“It still doesn’t make sense,” Pat returned. “The economy is politics. The economy is the votes. If they ruin agriculture, they ruin it all. They’re not stupid. They have to see that.”
Lay waste to the economy, Pat argued, and they laid waste to their chances of winning even a single seat in the next election. It was, he said, 1960s politicking—but we were living, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. To Pat, it was too preposterous to believe.
“It’s worse than that,” Charl added. “It’s … personal insult. He can’t understand why he lost. He still thinks he’s the liberator, the proud black hope … How could a country he saved not vote with him?” He paused. “He has to blame somebody for that. Why not us?”
As Charl and Pat became more deeply embroiled in their discussion of Mugabe’s strategy—if it was anything so clearly thought-out as a strategy—Tertia fussed around Resje and cupped a hand around her swollen belly. It would only be a few short weeks until her son, Charl-Emil, would be born. I could see it etched onto her face: she wanted him born into the Two Tree of three, four years ago, not into the place of constant apprehension that Two Tree was about to become.
I kept my eyes fixed on her face, heard Charl and Pat’s heated debate fade in and out, and felt the first twinge of a very real fear.
A few days later, before he returned to the hunting area to continue his apprenticeship, Jay reported seeing strangers in the bush. Saddling up Imprevu, Pat set out to investigate what Jay had seen: in the hills above the farm, where the bush was dense and men might remain hidden for days, huts made out of sticks had been hastily erected. Rings of black earth marked the places where campfires had been built, and the bush was thinned where men with pangas had taken to the trees. Pat and Imprevu made long circuits of the farm, moving in tightening circles, trying to scout out where the men were coming to settle and from which vantage points they could spy on our house.
I was glad to see Jay returning to his apprenticeship, and happier still when Kate could go back to school for the week. Though Paul and Jay had often been away at school for a term at a time, Kate was boarding during the weeks and returning to Crofton for her weekends—but, now, any time that she could spend away relieved a great welter of fear. Home had always been a place of safety for our children, a place to come and hide away from the world, but now it was beginning to feel as if they were better off staying far away. On Palmerston Estates, the situation was no better. Paul reported the same scraggly grass huts growing up near the railway crossing, with groups of people gathering around them, often drunk, seemingly stoned, raising their fists and chanting every time he rode along one of the winding farm tracks.
One morning, Pat, Kate, and I were eating breakfast in the Crofton dining room. The bright sun of early morning filtered through the curtains, and, as I helped Kate to eggs from a pan, Pat stood up to draw back the curtains.
On the grounds outside, twenty men were gathered, twenty strangers outside our gate.
If they did not look violent, if they were not drunk or stoned like the men we had been hearing about, they still inspired fear. Quickly, Pat pulled the curtains back into place. But it was too late; Kate had already seen.
Looking back, I believe that the only reason I did not panic was that I was thinking about Kate. For weeks now I had been making her do drills in how to respond if the war vets ever came to Crofton. She hated the drills—perhaps hated me for it too—but at least she was prepared. There was a hallway inside Crofton, a place with narrow walls that Jay and Kate had often made a game of shimmying up, one foot braced on either wall like mountaineers scaling a sheer crevice. If they got to the top of the passage, they could reach an attic crawl space there. It was in this hole that Kate was to hide should the worst ever happen. I turned to tell her to go, but before I could hustle her away, Pat was already striding out the farmhouse door.
Hanging back, I watched as Pat approached the men. This was not a baying horde of the type we had heard about. Pat stood, only yards away from them, and asked them what they were doing on the farm.
“It isn’t what we want to do, boss,” one of the men finally said. He shrugged, almost apologetically, and refused to meet Pat’s eyes. “But we’ve been told not to leave. They told us to make some noise. Shout a lot, cause some trouble …”
I ushered Kate back into the farmhouse, where she could not see. Outside, Pat continued to talk to the men. When, at last, he turned to come back inside, his face was set hard. I remembered how he had looked, all those years ago, as he walked into the brawl in the hotel bar, decked out in his ill-fitting suit and shoddy cowboy boots.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well,” was all he could reply.
It took some hours for the men to dissipate that day—but dissipate they did. Once they were gone, we ventured back out of the farmhouse. Their trails were clearly visible, as they had cut a path away from the farmhouse and back into the bush. Where they had come from, we did not know; why they were here was only too plain.
We were at Two Tree farmhouse with Charl and Tertia when we heard the news that the first white farmer had died. Charl and Tertia had had their own experience with war vets settling around their farmhouse—and though that crowd, like ours, had dissipated without violence, it had propelled Charl to thinking about their future. Tertia had just given birth to their son, baby Charl-Emil, and foremost in Charl’s mind was how he might protect his wife and children. Some farmers had already sent their families away, anticipating worse to come, and at Two Tree that day Charl admitted that he was thinking of doing the same—not just for his family, but for his horses as well.