Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller Page A

only three were wounded. This proved, the Afrikaners said, that their tribe had a divine right to exist on South African land.
    My grandmother sighed and looked with some regret at her empty wineglass. “So it is,” she said. “How time flies.”
    Flip cleared his throat again. “I want to beat my cousin Pieter at the Dingaan Day races,” he said.
    My grandmother sat up. If there was one thing calculated to catch her interest, even through the fog of her homemade fig wine and lots of violent history, it was horse racing. “Is that so?”
    “Yes,” Flip said.
    “Do you have a good horse?” My grandmother gave a little hiccup and wagged her finger at Flip. “That’s the thing to win a race,” she said. “A good horse.”
    “I’ve got a very good horse,” Flip said. “But I need someone who will ride it. My sons.... Agh no, man.” Flip put his head in his enormous hands. “They’re no good.” He looked at my grandmother, his eyes desperate. “I want your daughter.”
    My grandmother gave another hiccup.
    “I’ll pay her,” Flip offered.
    My grandmother looked horrified and flapped a hand at Flip. “No, no, no. Don’t be silly.” She hiccuped again. “You must have her for nothing. Free to good friends. Go ahead. Take her.”
     
     
    SO THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Flip Prinsloo came to the house and picked up Mum and drove her to his farm. “He had a bottle of South African brandy under his seat,” Mum says, “and he’d take slurps out of it as we drove along. He offered me some, but I wasn’t about to drink from a bottle that some scrubby old Afrikaner had been gulping out of.” To make up for this, Flip bought my mother an enormous slab of chocolate when he stopped at the Venus Bar to replenish his brandy supply. “Which gave me spots,” Mum warns. “So that was an important lesson. If someone offers you either brandy or chocolate, you should always take the brandy.”
    At the farm, Mum was left alone in a dimly lit sitting room while lunch was prepared. “All the furniture pressed against the skirting boards and a host of immensely chilling ancestors glared down from the walls,” Mum says. Lunch was an awkward affair: “A very severe wife, a couple of hulking sons and one crushed-looking daughter-in-law.” Except for the occasional outburst in Afrikaans, the family ate in silence. “I didn’t understand what they said, but it certainly sounded as if they were plotting to kill me,” she says.
    Boiled mutton—“Grisly,” Mum says—was followed by stewed coffee and fried sweetbreads, and then Flip reached for his sweat-stained hat and pushed himself away from the table. “Time to race,” he said. The sons wiped their lips and stood up. They, too, reached for their veldskoen hats. “Kom,” Flip told Mum.
    The farm was on the edge of the plateau, and even though the Prinsloos had been cultivating it for fifty years, the buildings looked inadequate and hasty in the face of all the earth and sky they were trying to command. The place had a haunted feel, as if it were in mourning for its old self. From a roughhewn livestock shed a syce emerged, leading three horses: two ordinary-looking geldings and a bay mare plunging at the end of her lead rope.
    “Dit is jou perd,” Flip told Mum. “Violet.”
    Mum was speechless.
    “I’ll never forget the first time I saw her,” she says. “I don’t think she ever had two feet on the ground at any one time. She wasn’t tall but she had these long elegant legs, and a powerful chest. I could see, just looking at her, that she could run like the wind.”
    “Well,” Flip said. “Op jou merka. First one to the end of the maize field wins.”
    Without warning and certainly without waiting for my mother, the Prinsloo sons leaped onto the two geldings and took off along the edge of a maize field. “Those Afrikaners didn’t know how to train horses,” Mum says. “They just put very savage bits in their mouths and rode like mad.” Mum was still