The Last Resort Read online

‘The finance minister? He sat and watched?’

  ‘Of course. This is the kind of thing that happens here. That’s our Alan Greenspan.’

  My mother laughed again, her bewildered, defensive laugh.

  ‘I did say welcome to the front lines.’

  Not all farmers went quietly. A man named Blondie Bezuidenhout, whose farm was a few kilometres to the west, hit and killed a settler with his vehicle and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He escaped the death penalty by pleading that it had been an accident – he’d panicked after being set upon in his car by war veterans who were allocating themselves plots on his farm, and the victim had leapt in front of his car as he tried to escape. Blondie, the farmer, turned out to have a black common-law wife, and the dead settler – who wore a suit to the invasion – turned out to be a thirty-one-year-old CEO of a corporation. Was this really a Ku Klux Klan-style, premeditated murder of a landless peasant, as the state-owned media claimed, or a fatal accident in the wake of a violent land grab? Regardless, the war veterans went on a rampage through the valley after the killing. Yet somehow, despite the chaos around them, my parents were still on their land, untouched. They had received no eviction notice yet from the Ministry of Lands, Land Reform and Resettlement, and no visit from the war veterans or the youth militia. What they had received was a scribbled note from the settlers who now occupied Frank’s place across the road.

  ‘You must see this,’ said Mom, and she trotted into the house and returned a minute later with a crumpled piece of paper torn from a school textbook.

  Scrawled in pencil across the page were these words: Open your gates, we come in peace.

  ‘When did you get this?’

  ‘A couple months ago. They dropped it off with John Muranda. He’s the old guy who now runs the bar down at the camp. I mean, we never lock our gates anyway, but I’m not sure old Frank Bekker thought that they came in peace.’

  It was dark now. The moon had ducked behind the hills.

  When the mosquitoes started up we moved inside for supper.

  My mother had made oxtail stew, my favourite dish, and Dad opened a bottle of Pinotage. We sat at the antique yellowwood table in the dining room and talked late into the night. Or rather, they talked, I listened. They were letting go, a catharsis; they needed someone who would listen.

  In the background the television was on, tuned to some international news channel, and occasionally it would broadcast a report on Zimbabwe. My parents would fall silent for a moment and listen to what was being said. Usually it would be accompanied by a speech from the president. You could see their faces drop when they heard what Mugabe had to say.

  My parents seemed to be holding up well, though, and I knew the reason why. They had one thing to cling to, the reason I was here: the elections.

  The poll was to take place over the two days of the coming weekend, and for the first time in any presidential election in Zimbabwe there was a tangible feeling that this actually might be the end of Robert Mugabe, that the people were going to vote him out.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. State-run newspapers and the national television station, ZTV, kept up a constant stream of vitriol aimed at whites and the opposition party, which it considered a puppet of Britain, Tony Blair and the West. ‘We will not go back to being a colony,’ Mugabe railed on the news. The state security minister, head of the notorious Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), or secret police, warned there would be another war if the Movement for Democratic Change won. Meanwhile, Western election observers had all left the country, unable to move around freely since they had arrived. The only observers allowed in were friendly to the regime, mostly those from neighbouring African countries.

  And yet despite the violence and intimidation, the MDC was campaigning strongly. The party was led by a fifty-year-old trade unionist named Morgan Tsvangirai, who was drawing huge crowds at rallies in Harare and elsewhere – bigger crowds than Mugabe. Across the country MDC supporters were bravely waving the MDC’s open-hand salute.

  I knew my parents were praying for an MDC win and would vote MDC, yet it was still a shock when, putting down his wine glass during dinner, my father calmly announced to me that he had become a member of the opposition. He pulled out a card from his pocket and tossed it to me across the table, like he was throwing down chips at a casino. It had his name on it and the letters MDC in block capitals.-

  ‘You did what?’ I spluttered.

  ‘I joined the MDC.’

  I was stunned. David Stevens had been an active MDC member, and look at what had happened to him. Many white farmers who had lost their land had funded the MDC. To me it seemed fine to support the party, but to join them? My father was making a target of himself and my mother.

  ‘Jeez, Dad, are you sure that’s wise?’

  He didn’t seem too bothered about their security. It was as if not losing the farm these two years had filled him with a sense of invulnerability and bravado.

  ‘The way I see it, it’s our last chance,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get this government out, they’re definitely going to come for this place. Then what? Either we die defending it or we leave. It’s no time to be sitting on the fence. Anyway, on Saturday I have to drive around to some of the polling stations, check if our polling agents are okay. There are no proper observers here. It’s up to us. Quite a lot of whites are getting involved. Come with me if you want.’

  It still sounded too strange to me. This wasn’t like joining the Labour Party in Britain, or becoming a Republican in the United States. This was Zimbabwe; politics was life and death. More than a hundred MDC members had been murdered in the past two years. But my father, at the age of sixty-six, had become a political volunteer.

  We had argued a lot about politics these past twelve years. It was another thing that had come between us. Since going to university I had come to see my parents as typical white landowners in Africa: businesspeople who worked hard, made money and paid taxes but, despite being Zimbabweans, lived a life apart, a privileged minority behind the high walls of their sprawling homes and sports clubs. Few whites ever got involved in politics in Zimbabwe. It was safer to stay out of it, and the government wanted it that way. Yet here was my father, risking his home, and possibly his life, in a campaign against the president.

  And suddenly I felt something else. It was hard to place at first, but then I got it: a pang of envy. Wasn’t I supposed to be the idealist? It was what had made me want to become a journalist. To be part of events. To make a difference. But it occurred to me now that I had never joined a political party or voted in an election in my life. I was a sojourner, a global traveller: at the age of thirty-four I had already lived in three countries – Zimbabwe, South Africa, the UK – and held two passports. I barely felt Zimbabwean anymore. Where did I belong?

  I was envious, but I was nervous, too.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to join my father driving around to polling stations on election weekend, meeting MDC agents, making a target of myself. But I could hardly tell him that.

  ‘Ja, that sounds great.’ I gulped. ‘Of course I’ll go with you.’

  He grinned. ‘Who knows – it might get interesting.’

  I looked at my mother. She calmly sipped her wine, saying nothing.

  ‘So, Ma, what do you think? Do you think Tsvangirai can win?’

  She smiled at me.

  ‘Do you really want to know what I think?’ she said softly.

  ‘Ja, tell me.’

  And then she burst the bubble.

  ‘Never. I’m sorry, but it’s just not going to happen. Mark my words: the result of this election is already decided. And don’t think this government doesn’t know what we’re up to. Whom we support. They have long memories. They know who did what in the war, and they know who is doing what now. They’re watching us as we speak, and if we’re not careful, they will come for us.’

  I could see my father physically deflate as she spoke.

  ‘Oh, come on, Rosal
ind, have a bit of faith here,’ he snapped.

  ‘Faith!’ she spluttered. ‘Faith? I can’t believe how naive you’re being! They have rigged this election already! Just watch. You’ll see.’

  And here were their personalities in perfect profile: he the romantic dreamer, she the rooted realist. One of them was in for a surprise.

  Outside the owl kept up its maudlin call, and down in the valley shadows huddled around flickering wood fires.

  I woke early the following morning, set up my laptop in Dad’s study off the back patio, and made some phone calls – interviews for my article.

  A momentous election was three days away, but life seemed to carry on as normal for my parents. In the afternoon my father went to play golf in town – he was a former club champion at Hillside and still shot off a six – and Mom hosted her weekly bridge four up at the house.

  A more surreal scene you could not hope to see: down in the valley a land war was simmering, while up here four middle-aged white ladies sat around a table on a sun-kissed veranda bidding ‘two no trump’ over tea, coffee and chocolate cake served by Philip Pangara, my parents’ elderly Mozambican housekeeper of five years, a magnificent giant of a man – nearly two metres tall when he stooped. As the afternoon wore on, the ladies broke out gin and brandy from the cabinet and got more reckless in their bids.

  ‘So this is what it’s like on the front lines, hey, Ma?’ I chuckled, helping myself to a fat slice of cake.

  ‘Darling, civilization would fall apart if we couldn’t play bridge,’ she said.

  Later I took a walk down to the camp. Not so much for the exercise – I was never one for farm walks – but to get some sun on my skin and perhaps a beer in the bar.

  The lodge was in a grassy clearing just back from the Harare road, but I took the long way round to get to it, walking past the sixteen cottages on the back of the farm, which were linked to the camp by a dirt road my dad and a dozen black workers had carved into the hillside ten years ago.

  As far removed as I felt from this farm and my parents’ lives, it was impossible not to be impressed by what they had built here. From the high point of the road I gazed down on the rooftops of the cottages, the lodge, the chalets. The electric game fence surged up the spine of one hill, along the ridge behind, and down the other side. A tenant watered a garden; another drove up and parked in a garage beside his cottage. It was incredibly quiet, the air crisp as cut glass, the only sound the low hum of the electric fence and the weaverbirds in the trees. Time seemed to have been suspended. I had the feeling everyone was waiting.

  I reached the lodge as a dazzle of zebras trotted across the dirt road into thorny scrub by the game fence, and a lone kudu gazed up at me from the short grass near the swimming pool. Usually Drifters would be busy at this time of year: backpackers would be around the pool sipping beers, writing in diaries, lounging in front of the chalets or on the lawns of the tent site.

  But it was quiet. Two cars with local plates were parked in the drive: travelling salesmen passing through, the only guests. A few lodge staff – a uniformed cleaning woman, two kitchen workers – sat at the cement picnic tables by the swimming pool with nothing to do.

  I walked up the creaking pine steps, past the brick pizza oven my father had built in lieu of a trip to Florence he had promised my mother, and into the bar. It was empty, too, except for an old black man in a floppy blue hat and denim overalls stooped over an open cooler, counting beer stock behind the counter. I pulled up a stool and he turned round. He was about sixty, with an absurdly long face and a cartoonish mouth that seemed to droop way below his chin. He had yellow teeth and bloodshot eyes, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have said he was stoned. I did know better. My parents ran a tight ship; they wouldn’t tolerate drinking on the job by their black staff, let alone smoking dagga. My father hated the fact that my mother smoked cigarettes.

  ‘Hello, Douglas,’ the old man said drowsily, with a crooked grin.

  I was taken aback that he knew my name. I didn’t recall meeting him before. The voice was even more surprising. He spoke in a deep gurgled baritone that seemed to come less from his larynx than from his belly. He sounded like a saxophone.

  ‘Hello, um … er … sorry, man, I’ve forgotten your name.’

  He smiled droopily again.

  ‘I am John. John Muranda. I was cooking for you pizza last time.’

  Ah … last time.

  I hadn’t exactly made a habit of coming out. I’d visited my parents four times in the twelve years since they’d moved here. But the last time had been at the millennium, a family reunion, two and a half years before. We’d had a dinner here the first Friday of the New Year – Friday was pizza night – and John must have made the pies. I recalled that night. The bar had been packed. We’d all gotten drunk, and Mom and Dad had danced to Neil Diamond’s ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’ between the tables. I remember thinking, They look so happy.

  ‘Yes, John,’ I lied. ‘Good to see you again. So you are barman now?’

  ‘Chef and barman,’ he said. ‘It is quiet these days. Little customers.’

  My parents had employed a dozen staff at the camp in 2000. Now they had been forced to let half of them go. For some reason they’d kept this old man on, though. I ordered a Zambezi beer, which he poured with a priestlike sense of devotion, tilting the glass on a bar coaster and wiping away some spilled foam with a napkin. Then he lit a Madison and went back to work.

  I looked around. The lodge smelled of straw and wood smoke. A dozen pine tables were dotted across the floor. A red-brick fireplace stood smack in the centre. In winter it was always lit, and the smoke had blackened part of the thatch and the ceiling beams. The windows looked out on the tops of acacia trees, but the reed curtains were down and it was gloomy inside.

  The bar was handsomely stocked, though. Neat rows of Beefeater gin, Mainstay cane spirit, Bols brandy, and Johnnie Walker Red lined the shelves next to packets of Willards chips, cartons of Madison, Kingsgate and Everest cigarettes and boxes of Lion matches.

  There was an old radio on the shelf, too, and I recognised it instantly. It was my father’s Barlow-Wadley shortwave, the one we’d had on the chicken farm in the 1970s during the war. We’d never had a television growing up – one of the reasons my sisters and I hated living on farms – and that radio had been our only connection to the outside world. We’d listened to Wimbledon, the Olympic Games, Currie Cup rugby matches and news of trouble in faraway places – Berlin, Belfast, Beirut – but mostly news about us, our war. And suddenly I remembered it: the helicopters, forty of them flying low in formation through the valley directly in front of our house, coming from Mozambique, so low that I could see the helmeted pilots, the boots of the soldiers, the barrels of their machine guns. My father yelled at me: ‘Douglas! Go get the radio! Hurry!’ We tuned in to all the stations with their unique view of the conflict: ‘Twelve hundred refugees massacred in air raid,’ ‘Twelve hundred guerrillas killed in Rhodesian attack,’ ‘Twelve hundred terrorists dead in Mozambique.’ Terrorists, that was it – that was the one.

  I thanked John, took the beer out to the front deck, and tried to call Grace on my cell.

  A beautiful, straight-talking New Jersey girl, half Irish, half Armenian, we’d met at a party in London four months earlier. She had been a television news producer in Hong Kong and was now studying at the London School of Economics. My mother had been trying to get me to visit them these past two years – ‘There are lots of stories out here, darling, lots of stories,’ she would say enticingly – but it was Grace who’d finally persuaded me to come.

  ‘I suppose I could write about the elections,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t go because of that. Go for your parents. You should see them.’

  ‘But it’s so boring there,’ I told her. Zimbabwe seemed like a regression to me. I had left it behind, moved on.

  ‘No, it isn’t. It’s on the news every night.’

  Now I was glad she’d made me come,
and I wanted to describe the farm to her, the view from where I was sitting: the acacias, the kudu bull grazing on the grass by the swimming pool and looking up at me with sad eyes. The signal was poor, though, and I couldn’t get through.

  The kudu was soon joined by an eland, and I found myself thinking of my sisters. When my parents had first introduced animals to the property they’d named three of the eland does Stephanie, Sandra and Helen. Apparently, when they released them from the holding pens, the three young antelope had run helter-skelter straight for the hills. ‘We’ll probably never see them again,’ Mom muttered sadly, ‘just like the girls.’ I wondered if this was one of them.

  I finished my beer and went back into the bar.

  John had been joined by another employee, who sat on a stool under the dartboard. He was about forty years old, not much more than four foot nine, with a perfectly shaved head, a long, glossy black beard, and a dazzling white-toothed smile. He had on orange overalls, which lit up his handsome face, and sandals made of car-tyre rubber. He looked like a prophet.

  ‘Hello, Douglas,’ he grinned at me, his teeth beaming like headlamps.

  He knew my name, too? What was it with these guys?

  ‘Hi. And you are …?’

  ‘I am John, Douglas. John Agoneka. I am the tour guide here. I met you last time.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ I lied again. ‘Another John. You are the two Johns?’

  ‘Yes, we are the two Johns,’ the younger one laughed. ‘Sometimes your parents are calling me John Orange for my overalls. And Mr Muranda they are calling John Old.’

  The older John muttered something in Shona under his breath from behind the counter. He seemed to take it as an insult. He was trying to tune in a station on the radio, but all he was getting was static. It was annoying the hell out of him. My father used to be the same way.

  ‘Have you got any tourists to take on game walks?’

  ‘Not right now, Douglas,’ said John Orange. ‘Actually, I can say the political climate in our country is not conducive to the tourism business at this point in time.’