soil must be buried deep.
"All Zimbabwe prays for rain," Lovemore says, in a rasping voice. "Last year's rainy season did not even begin. If the drought continues… " He leaves the sentence unfinished. "These are hard times."
About an hour past dawn they come across what was once a fence. The posts still stand in the ground, stretching towards the horizon to their left and right, but the three strands of rusted barbed wire that once connected them have fallen in so many places that what remains is more the idea of a fence than an actual barrier. The dried grass beyond has a different character, more geometric, and there are ragged patches of ground covered by the withered remains of different vegetation.
"Tobacco. This was a farm, once." Lovemore sounds worried. He stops walking and looks around warily.
Jacob looks at him, confused. "What's wrong?"
"An abandoned farm means war vets. War vets mean trouble."
Veronica shrugs helplessly. "You got somewhere else to go?"
She keeps walking forward. After a moment Jacob joins her. They have nowhere else to go, and little strength left, and his thirst has turned from an ache into a fiery need. Eventually Lovemore follows too.
They keep going, crossing rolling hills for about twenty minutes before coming across the remains of a tractor trail. The tread marks in the dried dirt look like a paleontological discovery.
"It feels like the end of the world," Veronica says in a near-whisper, "like there's no one else alive."
They follow the trail past a few rusted pipes that are all that remain of what was once an advanced irrigation system. After the withered fields they pass into a huge orchard of dead orange trees, where branches flutter and whisper eerily in the light wind. When they crest a ridge on the other side they see a copse of silver-leafed eucalyptus trees, and in their midst, buildings: a big house and two barns, near a pool of muddy sludge created by damming a local stream.
There are a dozen other shelters, round mud huts with wooden skeletons and raggedly thatched roofs, along the gravel road that runs between the barns and up to the house. Smoke rises from several of them. Clothes hang from a line stretched between two eucalyptus trees. Jacob sees sudden darting motions near the back of the house; children, running through the weed-strewn garden decorated with faded old lawn furniture. Plots of hand-tilled land surround the two barns. The gravel road runs from the house down through a kilometre more of dead farmland, in which a few dangerously lean cattle and maybe fifty goats graze, before it merges with a road that is dirt but for two paved strips barely wide enough for tires. The road was lined by fallen power and telephone wires.
"War vets," Lovemore says, in the same way he might say crocodiles.
They stand watching for a moment. Then Jacob says, his voice rattling in his parched throat, "I guess we go say hi."
Chapter 33
The children see them as they descend the gentle slope, and by the time they reach the house, the unexpected visitors have attracted a crowd of more than fifty people. About a dozen are adults. Their once-bright clothes are ragged and faded; several of the smaller children wear no clothes at all. A few of the adults looked dangerously thin. Some of the men carry hoes and big sticks, but Veronica is almost too exhausted to be afraid. If these people attack them, so be it. But she doesn't think they will. They look more to be pitied than frightened.
"Hello," she says, as loudly as she could manage, and holds her hands up in the universal we-come-in-peace gesture.
Lovemore greets the crowd that faces them in an African language. Shona, Veronica supposes. After a brief pause the eldest man answers. His voice is clear, but he is so thin and weak that he has to lean on another man, and there are visible sores on his face. He and the several other gaunt adults are dying of AIDS. Veronica guesses there are more in the house and the shelters, too weak to come see their visitors.
Lovemore pauses in conversation with the eldest man to update Jacob and Veronica. "I told him we got off the train to look around when it stopped, and it left without us."
"Are you sure that was a good idea?" Jacob asks, keeping his voice very low. Veronica supposes on one level that's sensible, English is the country's official language and some of them might