The Last Resort Read online

  ‘So it’s like camouflage?’ I said, suddenly intrigued.

  ‘Exactly,’ he grinned. ‘We’re in hiding.’

  There was a perverse genius to it. The history of development in Africa is one of clearing bush. My father had to clear the bush to build Drifters. That was progress. But now he had come to the conclusion that to survive out here they had to do the exact opposite. They had to go back to bush, let the earth grow wild again, return it to its natural state so they could hide.

  Of course they weren’t off the radar to people who knew the area, and I was alarmed to hear that a few months earlier a senior official had driven around the farm. Not just any senior official, it turned out.

  My parents were in the house one Sunday afternoon when a black Jeep Cherokee turned off the main road into their driveway. They’d looked down at the vehicle, then at each other. Eight of the twelve cottage occupants from 2002 had by now left the country, but none of the remaining four had a shiny black Jeep Cherokee. Who could afford such a car? A chef could. A Jeep Cherokee was exactly the kind of car chefs drove, and a Sunday afternoon was exactly the kind of time they arrived to claim a farm.

  ‘Shit,’ said Dad. ‘I don’t like the look of this.’

  My mother hummed to herself and bit her lip. Her heart was pounding.

  They ran into the kitchen and stood at a curtained window from which they could get a view of their front gate. The car pulled alongside the gate and idled, but no one got out. They waited. It was quiet. They could hear a tap dripping.

  ‘Can you see who it is?’ whispered Mom.

  ‘No, the windows are tinted,’ Dad shot back.

  They waited. The car waited. Then, menacing as a crocodile, it slowly oozed its way into the back of the land. For a second they were relieved, but then my father remembered something. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘He’s going to see the dam!’

  Since receiving their Section Five they had appealed the designation and had lands inspectors come to check the farm – not once but three times. My father had protested that Drifters was a tourist business, and hotels were supposed to be exempt from resettlement. It was also on hilly ground, totally unsuitable for agriculture, and there was no water to irrigate crops. The inspectors, to his relief, had agreed. But since then it had rained heavily and the low area where the dirt road crossed the creek in the saddle of the hills had dammed up in the last few days.

  Right then the property did have water.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Mom. ‘That’s all we need.’

  They waited, and after half an hour, when the car still hadn’t emerged, they walked out to the back of the land. And there they saw something incredible. The day before, the saddle below the road had been full of water. Now it was empty. The water had drained away in twenty-four hours.

  They looked at each other, bemused.

  ‘That’s weird. How did that happen?’ said Mom.

  My father shook his head.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he said.

  But the danger wasn’t over. The Jeep was still out there. They walked down to the lodge and found it parked outside Chalet 7. There was no sign of the driver. Dad walked up into the bar. And there, sitting at a stool, calmly sipping a Coke, was a short, plump black man in a smart blue suit and wire-rimmed glasses. Dad didn’t recognise him.

  Mr Muranda was behind the counter. He nodded at my father but said nothing.

  ‘Hello. Can I help you?’ Dad asked the visitor.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said politely. ‘I am just looking around.’

  Just looking around… That was what Dad was worried about.

  The man spoke English with an accent that sounded like he might have gone to Oxford.

  ‘Sure you don’t need a room for the night?’ my father asked.

  ‘No, thank you. Just looking.’

  Dad gulped. There was an awkward silence. The man sat perfectly still, sipping his drink.

  ‘Okay, then,’ my father said eventually. ‘Have a good night.’

  He walked out. He had barely reached the bottom of the steps, though, when Muranda was suddenly at his side, calmly staring straight ahead and whispering under his breath: ‘Sa, that is the minister, sa.’

  ‘The minister?’

  ‘The minister, sa.’

  Dad’s heart was racing. They kept walking, talking under their breath.

  ‘You mean the Top Man, John?’

  ‘Yes, sa, that is the minister. That is the Top Man.’

  My father heard a deafening silence: the sound of the world collapsing around him.

  Christ. The Top Man.

  ‘Top Man’ was the code name he and Mom had given to the most senior government minister in their area, a chef who was in charge not only of the Central Intelligence Organisation, the secret police, but also of the land reform programme. It was said by many that after the president, the Top Man was the most powerful man in the country. He had claimed several farms already, and he was ruthless.

  ‘What’s he doing here, John?’

  ‘He was looking at the chalets, sa,’ Muranda said, pronouncing the t on the word so it sounded like ‘shallots.’ ‘He is not wanting a room at this time.’

  ‘Okay, thank you, John. Let me know what he does and when he leaves, all right?’

  ‘Yes, sa, goodnight sa.’

  He joined Mom by the swimming pool and they walked in silence up to the house.

  Now, they told me, they wondered whether the miracle of the empty dam had somehow saved them. It had been four months since the visit from the Top Man, and they hadn’t seen him since.

  But they weren’t going to rely on miracles. I was shocked at dinner on my second night to discover they were taking steps for a return visit: they were locking the front gate at night for the first time, and locking the door to my father’s study off the back patio, where he kept his computer. Plus they’d hauled out the shotgun, a vintage double-barrelled 12-bore, mothballed since the end of the bush war twenty-three years earlier. I saw it leaning against the dresser in their bedroom and recalled my mother’s words: Over my dead body will they take this place. I realised it might come to that. They were prepared to go down fighting.

  Next to his tools and Mizuno golf clubs, the shotgun was my father’s favourite possession in the world. It was a vintage Hollis and Son side-by-side with beautiful engraving on its barrels. He had bought it from the estate of a deceased client in the early 1970s, and although it was a great hunting gun, it was hardly the best weapon to have in the circumstances.

  That would have been the FN, the Belgian-made police-issue automatic we’d had on the other two farms during the war. Now there was a gun. Dad would ride shotgun with it as Mom drove us to school in the morning: Stof, Zaan, Hel and me in the back seat of the Chevrolet, eyes peeled in the bush for ‘terrs’, terrorists – ZANLA guerrillas – who would attack the farms. At night he would sleep with it next to the bed in case of an attack. Then, in the morning, Mom would unload it, check that the barrel was clear, and load it again while Dad was in the shower. Except, of course, for the time she unloaded it into the roof instead. A single shot, it made a noise like a sledgehammer, so loud the house shook and we all thought we were under attack. Somewhere outside, a peacock shrieked. Dad ran out of the shower naked, bellowing: ‘Jesus Christ, Rosalind! What the fuck are you doing?’

  He took the weapon from her as she stood there shaking in her pink lace nightgown. He picked up the spent cartridge, which had been discharged onto the parquet floor. We gathered round with our coffee, looking up at the small hole in the ceiling. ‘Good shot, Ma!’ said Stof when our ears had stopped ringing.

  We went out onto the lawn to inspect the damage. About fifty tiles had been blown off the roof, and a whole section of it was twisted outward like a tin can. There were feathers everywhere. Debris from the roof had shaved the tail of one of Mom’s prize green peacocks. The bird was all right, but it was sprinting around the lawn in circles, bewildered.

 
‘Wow, really good shot, Ma!’ said Zaan.

  ‘Can we have the day off school?’ squeaked Helen.

  ‘No, you certainly cannot,’ said Mom, who had composed herself by now.

  They never let us have a day off from school. We had a war to win.

  Of course, when the war ended, my parents had to turn over the FN to the police, as well as the smaller, lighter Uzi submachine gun Mom used to sport around the farm during the day. How could they have known, twenty-three years ago, they might need them one day for another war? Now the shotgun was the only weapon they had left, and it would have to do. It didn’t make me feel any safer, though. Dad loaded it every evening and stood it against the dresser in their bedroom or behind the curtain close to their bed when they slept, but when a branch snapped in the bush outside one evening while we read in the living room, I flinched.

  ‘See that, Rosalind?’ Dad chuckled. ‘City boy just got scared by a twig.’

  Mom looked up from her weekly Telegraph crossword.

  ‘Yes, I noticed,’ she chuckled. ‘He’s been out of the country too long. He was complaining about a spiderweb in his room the other day, a tiny little spiderweb!’

  And they laughed their heads off.

  The house was in terrible condition – and I say that having lived in pretty basic places in my time – but Philip the housekeeper looked worse. He had been in such good spirits on my last visit. I remembered practising Portuguese phrases on him that I had learned on a travel-writing assignment in Brazil. Philip’s eyes lit up when he heard his old language. Yet now, when I saw him, he had become a ghost. Gaunt and frail, he shuffled around looking like the burnt branch of a gum tree. Mostly he didn’t come to work at all.

  ‘Jesus, Philip, are you okay?’ I asked when I first saw him.

  He was sweeping the back patio, bent double, and had to lean against the freezer to rest. That toothy grin was long gone.

  ‘Douglas, I have a malaria,’ he said.

  ‘Have you taken medicine?’

  ‘I have Disprin,’ he told me. I knew that was just aspirin.

  ‘Philip, you need proper medicine.’

  ‘I only have Disprin, Douglas.’

  I ran to tell my mother, but she shook her head. He didn’t have malaria, apparently.

  ‘The staff down at the camp say he’s been bewitched,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus, by whom?’

  She rolled her eyes. I was always looking for the exotic in Africa.

  ‘Of course he hasn’t been bewitched. He has HIV. We’ve told the staff about AIDS, but they don’t believe in it. If someone falls ill, people just say he’s been bewitched. They say if someone gets ill, he’s slept with someone’s wife and the husband has put a curse on him.’

  Zimbabwe had one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world at this time – two thousand people were dying of AIDS a week – and an entire industry had built up around it. Michael Russell, an old school friend I’d met up with briefly on my last visit, had gotten into making headstones.

  ‘Used to be a good business,’ he told me.

  ‘Why used to be?’

  ‘Because now everyone is bloody making them.’

  A few days later, when Philip looked no better, my mother gave me a wad of cash and told me to drive him to the Methodist mission clinic in the valley. Philip sat in the passenger seat of her battered truck on the way over, eyes closed, mumbling through his yellow teeth.

  ‘I am dying, Douglas. … I am dying.’

  ‘No, Philip, you’re fine. The clinic will give you proper medicine. You’ll be okay.’

  The clinic gave him more headache tablets. They told me to take him to the General Hospital in Mutare. I drove over the pass, passing the roadblock, where the four police officers were back in cheery mode again. I checked Philip in and returned home.

  ‘The General Hospital?’ my mother said when I told her, tears welling in her eyes. ‘Shit. That’s where they send people to die. Mark my words, he’ll be dead in a week.’

  Philip actually died two weeks later, soon after I returned to New York. John Muranda tracked down his family in the Burma Valley on the Mozambique border, and Dad drove out to hand them Philip’s pension. Then he drove them to the Green Market in Mutare to purchase a coffin and to collect the body from the hospital. My parents didn’t attend the funeral. Philip was the fifth member of their staff to die of AIDS, and they were getting used to it. It was just another thing that happened out there.

  Down at the camp, meanwhile, things were desperate. Apart from the occasional lost-looking salesman who still checked in, there were no guests to cook for, and tourists had long since stopped coming to Zimbabwe.

  There were only three staff left now: John Muranda; his wife, Naomi; and John Agoneka.

  John Muranda looked after the bar and booked any surprise guests into the chalets, Naomi cleaned the rooms, and John Agoneka, without tourists to take on game walks, now tended the lawns and gardens of the property, a job my parents said he was hopeless at, though it suited their needs at the front of the land, where they wanted the bush to grow wild.

  After dinner at the house, I started spending time down at the camp bar at night with the two Johns. I went partly because I was freaked out by all the bugs and spiders in the house. I wanted to get out. I would walk down through the Rhodes grass with my dad’s flashlight, then run through the thicker bush, terrified I would step on a puff adder or python or bump into one of the poachers who came to lay traps on the land under cover of darkness. As a child I used to love it out in the bush at night. I had lost that. Now the bush scared me.

  But I enjoyed being down at the lodge, chatting with the two Johns.

  This time when I offered Muranda a beer he immediately said yes. My mother didn’t come down here at night anymore, since there were no guests to check up on.

  As with the big house, the past year hadn’t been kind to the lodge. Cobwebs colonised the corners, and a cockroach stared at me from the top of a Gordon’s gin bottle. The tables were scattered haphazardly across the floor, as if a hurricane had come through. The old radio was still there, but when I asked Muranda to find us a station he shook his head.

  ‘Radio broken,’ he said, ‘just like business.’

  I had hardly spoken to the two Johns on my previous visit, but now I got to know them around the deserted bar. We would prop up the counter while Naomi – Mrs John, we called her, an old, shy, birdlike Malawian woman who always wore a neat red headscarf – shuffled in, head down, with bowls of warm sadza, the country’s staple maize dish. She cooked it on a wood fire outside their house, which was behind a fence just past the swimming pool.

  Seeing my parents up at the house with a loaded gun had reminded me of the war, and I wondered what the two Johns had done back then, and what their politics were now. Perhaps they were with the ruling party? Perhaps they wanted to claim my parents’ place?

  Muranda was born in 1942 and was kraal headman – like a subchief – in his village up in the Honde Valley, a mountainous area 128 kilometres to the north that nudges the Mozambique border. The Honde Valley had been one of the most dangerous parts of the country during the war, but John had left it in 1963 for Mazoe, a citrus-farming area north of Harare, in central Zimbabwe, to train as a cook. He got a job as a chef at a hotel called Rylands. And not just any chef.

  ‘I am baker at Rylands Hotel,’ he said in that deep, gurgled baritone as we sipped our beers. ‘I baking best bread, Douglas. I win first prize at agricultural show. First prize.’

  He met and married Naomi in Mazoe, and they had six children, two of whom had since died. He returned to work in the Mutare area in the 1980s and got a job at Drifters in 1998 as a cleaner. But John was ambitious. He didn’t want to be a cleaner, he wanted to be a cook. The problem was, my parents already had enough chefs.

  One day a British tourist checked into Drifters and ordered fish and chips.

  ‘He want fish and chips, this British, but kitchen here not make fi
sh and chips. But at Rylands Hotel I make the best fish and chips. So I tell this British, “I make you fish and chips.”’

  That afternoon he took his fishing rod across the road and caught a bream in the Mutare River. He brought it back and fried it in a pan at his house, along with some diced potatoes from the lodge kitchen. He presented it to the guest.

  ‘This British say, “This is best fish and chips I am ever tasting.” I tell him: “You tell madam this, that way she makes me chef.”’

  Muranda grinned from under the shade of his big blue floppy hat.

  ‘Then I am becoming chef,’ he said.

  During the war Agoneka, twenty years younger than Muranda, had been a teenager in a village near Rusape, in the west of the valley, an area almost as dangerous as the Honde Valley.

  I wasn’t surprised when he told me he had been a mujiba. Mujibas were young collaborators, village boys, who passed information to ZANLA guerrillas about Rhodesian troop movements, transported weapons and committed small acts of sabotage on white farms: setting cattle loose, slashing maize. They were recruited and trained at pungwes – all-night political education rallies the guerrillas held in rural villages to educate people about the reasons for going to war, the history of colonial rule and the need to overthrow the whites.

  One afternoon, in 1978, Agoneka’s village was raided by Rhodesian soldiers.

  ‘The helicopters came and my friend started running. But I had learned at pungwes, if the whites come, do not run. Stay in your home. But my friend was running. That time I saw he was killed.’

  I lit one of Muranda’s Madisons and felt the burn in my throat.

  ‘Did you ever have to carry weapons, John?’ I asked Agoneka after a while.

  ‘Actually, Douglas, I think so, but I could not tell.’

  ‘What do you mean, you could not tell?’

  ‘Many times the guerrillas put a satchel on my back. A heavy satchel. My task was to transport it on a bus and take it to another location. They asked me, “Is it too heavy?” or “Is it fine?” and I say no or I say yes. But I never looked inside this satchel. I was too scared.’