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South Africa, traveling up over the Great Grey-Green, Greasy Limpopo (all set about, said Rudyard Kipling, with fever-trees). Up to the long flat place where the dust blew all day and night and the air was raw with so much blowing. To Karoi, Rhodesia.

House at Karoi
    KAROI
    A colored topographical map of Rhodesia shows the west and the northwest of the country as pale yellow fading to green, which means that it is low and hot, barely undulating as it humps toward the Zambezi River valley. It means that when the wind blows it picks up fists of stinging sand and flings it against your skin.
    Dete is there, in the flat part, in the west. “Dete” meaning “Narrow Passage.” Shithole.
    When we first came back to Rhodesia, we lived in the northwest, in the flat, pale-yellow area, melted into orange in places, which meant that, unlike Dete, the land had some lift off the sunburnt lowveldt. But not enough so you’d notice the difference.
    You could not look to the relief of mountains or banks of green trees on a day when the heat waves danced like spear-toting warriors off the grassland and when the long, wide airstrip above our house and the pale-yellow maize fields below it shimmered behind dry-season dust.
    Grass, earth, air, buildings, skin, clothes, all took on the same dust-blown glare of too much heat trapped in too little air.
    We lived on a farm near Karoi.
    “Karoi” meaning Little Witch. In the olden days, which aren’t so olden as all that (within living memory), witches had been thrown into the nearby Angwa River (barely deep enough to drown a small goblin). Only black witches were drowned, of course. No one would have allowed a white woman, however witchly, to be sent plunging to her death in this way.
    Vanessa went to the little, flat school in town every morning. Her school looked like a bomb bunker. The playground smelled like sweat on metal from the chipped-paint swings and slides. The playground’s grass was scrubbed down to bald, pale earth.
    I had to stay at home with Violet, the nanny, and Snake, the cook.
    Mum was don’t-interrupt-me-I’m-busy all day. She rode on the farm with the dogs in the morning and then went down to the workshop, where she made wooden bookshelves and spice racks and pepper pots for the fancy ladies’ shops in Salisbury.
    Dad was gone at dawn, coming back when the light was dusky-gray and the night animals were starting to call, after Violet had given us our supper and bathed us. He was just in time to kiss us with tobacco-sour breath and tuck us in to bed.
    In the morning, one of our horses would be brought down to the house and I was led around the garden until Mum came out to take the dogs for their morning ride. Then I was sent outside to play. “But not in the bamboo.”
    “Why not?”
    Snake and Violet settled down for plastic mugs of sweet milky tea and thick slabs of buttery bread as soon as Mum was out of sight. “There are things in there that might bite you.”
    “Like snakes?”
    “Yes, like snakes.” Violet took a bite of bread and a mouthful of tea and mixed the two together in her mouth. We called this cement mixing, and we were not allowed to do it.
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s something only muntus do. Like picking your nose.”
    “But I’ve seen Euros picking their noses.”
    “Rubbish.”
    “I have.”
    “Don’t exaggerate.”
    So I went into the bamboo behind the kitchen and played in the crisp fallen leaves and lay on my back and looked up at the tall, strong, grass-colored stems, so shiny it looked as if they had been painted with thin green and thick golden stripes and then varnished. And nothing happened to me, even though Violet shook her head at me and said, “I should beat you.”
    “Then I’ll fire you, hey.”
    “Tch, tch.”
    Then one morning, as I was playing as usual in the bamboo, I felt an intense burning bite on what my mother called downthere. Screaming in pain, I ran into the house and yelled for Violet or Snake to help