The Last Resort Read online

  ‘Maybe grenades or bullets,’ I said, suddenly excited.

  But Agoneka didn’t seem to think it funny or exciting.

  ‘At that time, Douglas, all I wanted was to return to school. I was fishing once with my friend in a river and I would say to him, ‘When can this war be over so we can just go back to school?’ I was fourteen years of age and all the schools were closed because of the war.’

  Then Agoneka laughed.

  ‘That was 1978. And in two years the war was over and we were back at school.’

  I asked Agoneka what he thought of the land invasions, the resettlement programme, and he summed it up in his brilliantly wordy way.

  ‘Actually, Douglas, I can say the government failed to ascertain whether these new farmers were of sufficient quality to produce high yields on such lands.’

  When I asked Muranda the same question, though, he told me a story about his father during the war – not the liberation war, but the Second World War.

  ‘He go to fight Hitler in second war. He fighting there in Egypt for British. Many African soldiers fighting Hitler for British. When he come back he get medal. Only medal. But when white soldier come back, he getting land.’

  Four hundred thousand black Africans from Britain’s colonies fought with heroism and distinction in Egypt, Burma and Malaya during the Second World War, a service largely forgotten today in Africa and Britain. Whites who fought in the same theatre were not given free land as John suggested, but they were given cheap land. Burma Valley south of Mutare, where Philip Pangara came from, was supposedly named because British expatriates who settled there had fought in Burma.

  I wondered for a moment whether Muranda approved of the land invasions, saw it as redress for this historic wound. But he didn’t think that, either.

  ‘Me, I am not farmer,’ he told me. ‘I am cook. What I’m going to do with land?’ He nodded vaguely in the direction of Frank’s place. ‘All that is growing there now is snakes.’

  It was only later that I learned the two Johns were fervent MDC supporters and had been for years. It was one of the reasons my father kept them both on. He enjoyed speaking to them about politics, and it was why he had given them his old shortwave radio: so that they could tune in to SW Radio Africa, that pro-democracy station I had heard on my last visit that broadcast out of London. But they were MDC not out of obedience to him, a white man, as the government often tried to portray the strong support for the opposition party among Zimbabwe’s six hundred thousand black farmworkers and their extended families. They were their own men, with their own minds, and a far more sophisticated reading of history and current events than anyone gave them credit for.

  They would make their decisions accordingly.

  During these nights I started to think of the few times I had grudgingly visited my parents, and I wondered why I hadn’t ventured back more often. It wasn’t so bad out here. I could have written about it. I was a travel writer, after all, and my parents ran a tourism business. But it had never interested me. And now? Now it was too late.

  I remembered some of the characters I had met on those few trips. There was Mac the mercenary, a rugged former Rhodesian soldier with a thick white beard who carried a hunting knife in his crocodile-skin briefcase and kept a Magnum .45 under the front seat of the Land Rover he drove. During the war he’d been a Selous Scout, one of the elite Rhodesian troops who went on incursions deep into Mozambique to attack ZANLA base camps. Later, he fought as a mercenary in the Congo.

  Eventually he’d given up on war and, just as many Vietnam veterans are drawn back to Southeast Asia, he had moved to Mozambique, where he worked as a timber trader. He lived in a tree house he had built in a teak forest, and I visited him there once with an English girlfriend, Emma. We hitched across the border with a shopping order from Mac: a bottle of Bols brandy, a pack of ice cubes, a frozen chicken. He smoked the chicken on a wood fire, downed the brandy on the rocks and then let us fire his Magnum at a tree trunk. Emma, a published poet, said: ‘I don’t care what anyone says, this is fucking cool.’ I’d felt safe in the bush with Mac.

  When I asked my father what had happened to Mac, Dad said he’d died of a heart attack. Even the mercenaries couldn’t survive.

  Muranda would get drunk with me; Agoneka didn’t drink and would usually fall asleep on the pine counter, exhausted. Between beers I started to page through the camp guest book, filled over the years with names and comments of hundreds of tourists from around the world. It now gathered dust on one of the tables, a document from a lost age.

  I was surprised that I could mark my few visits by names in the book.

  ‘Underarm darts; the best barman in the world,’ Dave and Stan, two English travellers I had met on one trip back in 1994, had written. I was that barman. I remembered we’d gotten drunk and hurled darts at the board from the other side of the bar while dancing to a demo tape some friends of Dave’s in Oxford had made.

  ‘“We are young, we are free, keep our teeth nice and clean, see our friends, see the sights, feel all right,”’ we sang as we threw darts.

  ‘These guys are going to be big,’ Dave reckoned.

  A few months later I was buying a pair of trainers in Top Shop in London and a song came on the radio: ‘We are young, we are free, keep our teeth nice and clean …’ The band was called Supergrass, and they were suddenly very big. Soon Dave, with whom I’d become good friends in London, was backstage at their concerts meeting supermodels.

  Not all of the comments in the guest book were complimentary.

  One Dutch tourist had written in disgust that he’d watched ‘the white owner of the lodge’ shout at one of his black employees and threaten to assault him. That sounded about right. My dad frequently bellowed at his staff for some minor misdemeanour in a way that reminded me of my upbringing. At least he had been honest enough not to delete the review.

  As I read those words, in my mind I could hear that bellow all the way from the grape farm: ‘Douglas!’ he would shout from his workshop. ‘Douglas!’ I was being summoned to help him lay drainage pipes, mend fence posts or fix the spark plugs on a tractor. But I would cower in the house. I was hopeless at farm work. My father could make a canoe out of a crocodile; I could just about paddle a canoe.

  One night after Muranda and I closed up, I took the comments book up to the main house to go through it with my parents, and for a while I regretted it. They had no interest in a nostalgic trip down memory lane. ‘We didn’t run it as a business,’ said Dad. ‘We ran it as an extension of our home. It was like a living room. Hell, we had some fun nights. Who knows. One day it might come back.’

  I doubted it.

  Then my mother, a few brandies to the good, said: ‘We never made much money from the place. But that wasn’t the point. It made up for the gap left in our lives when all you children left home and never came back.’

  She wasn’t looking for sympathy, but her words twisted in my gut.

  What would fill that gap now?

  A night or two later, though, a strange thing happened. Mom started paging through the book, which I had left on the dining table, and came across some names she recognised – a Dutch couple from Utrecht. ‘Look, Lyn,’ she said, showing him the entry. ‘Remember them?’

  Dad’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes! My God! They were the two university lecturers who earned their travel money from their marijuana window box. Hey, give me that book.’

  And suddenly they were off: The Swiss banker who bicycled all the way through Africa from Geneva and stayed with them for two months. The English family with nine children who took up six chalets. The travelling Irish fiddlers who paid for their stay with free concerts on pizza night. The hippie from San Francisco who barely said a word for three weeks and then set fire to his tent when a money transfer he was waiting for never come through. Emma Sadler, an English girl from Southampton who helped run Drifters for two years, became a surrogate daughter to them, and broke the heart of every white farmer in the v
alley when she left to study fruit bats in Papua New Guinea.

  I watched my parents reminisce and wondered again: Why hadn’t I come out more often?

  Strangely, though, while things around them were falling apart, my parents had an incredible ability to laugh at the absurdity of their situation.

  We took a shopping trip into town one morning, and Dad took his bakkie to be serviced at a garage in the industrial estates. He was always looking for cheap deals, and he told me a mechanic he knew named Gavin le Grange had agreed to do all his vehicle repairs for free.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Well, you see, Gavin’s divorced and there are no eligible women left in this town. They’ve all buggered off. He doesn’t know about computers, but I have the Internet, so I’ve agreed to look for a mail-order bride for him if he fixes my car.’

  ‘Heh-heh – excellent. Found anyone yet?’

  There was a piece of paper on the front seat. He showed it to me. It was a page of Russian brides.

  ‘Well, I’m giving him this. The thing is, I’m worried that if I do find him someone, he’s going to bugger off out of the country and that’ll be the end of my free garage service.’

  I could see why that would be a problem.

  When we got to the garage Gavin was looking morose, sitting in his office. He had apparently just returned from South Africa to vet some candidates at a dating service.

  ‘Who’s the lucky girl?’ Dad muttered, worried his friend was about to leave town.

  ‘No, Lyn, it’s not going to work. I couldn’t bring a nice South African girl here. What do I have to offer them? Everything’s much better down there.’

  ‘What, so the intention is to bring someone to live with you here?’

  ‘Ja, well, that’s the idea.’

  Dad’s eyes lit up. ‘In that case, Gavin, take a look at these Russian brides.’

  I had the feeling his free service was safe for a while longer.

  While their house had so far been safe from the thieves and bandits who roamed the area, the empty cottages were routinely burgled, entire living room suites and fridges dragged away through the bush at night. They suspected the settlers across the road.

  Mom told me of the time she’d phoned the police about one robbery. ‘I called them up, and the officer in charge barely stirred. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I have no car. Can you come pick me up?’ Then a few days later I found a stray goat in the garden down at the camp. It must have belonged to one of the bloody settlers. Anyway, I called the same station, spoke to the same policeman to tell him someone’s goat was missing. I swear, he drove around here in minutes. Of course I refused to hand over the goat. He obviously wanted to eat it.’

  That was their life: one minute Orwellian nightmare, the next Evelyn Waugh farce.

  One afternoon, though, when Dad was back in town visiting Miss Moneypenny – the name he’d given to his black-market money dealer, who got him the best rate for those dwindling South African rands he had (it was foreign money and exchange that was keeping them alive), my mother told me something that made me realise how bad things really were.

  We were smoking her Kingsgates on the lawn chairs between sips of wine, gazing down on the valley. The main road below was empty, quiet, the only sound the hum of the wind in the grass. We joked about which of the settlers, whose huts we could see over on Frank’s place, would one day move into my bedroom. Then tears started rolling down her face.

  I hated it when my mother cried.

  Thin and frail as she looked, her appearance was deceptive. She was still strong, and I knew that she was as proud and fiercely determined to stay on the land as my father, so when her grey eyes welled with tears I felt a sudden helplessness, as much for myself as for her. Typically, though, she wasn’t concerned about herself.

  ‘I’m really worried about your dad,’ she said.

  ‘What, Ma? Tell me.’

  ‘He doesn’t show it to you – he’s so happy when you’re around – but when you’re not here, he gets in these terrible moods. I’m scared he’s going to do something stupid.’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked, though I thought I knew what she meant.

  They had told me about the night they’d been woken by screaming from one of the cottages: a burglar had attacked Chris Anthony, an English tenant of my parents’, with a crowbar. Dad had run over to Chris’s cottage with the shotgun and saved him by blasting the weapon in the air, and then firing again as the burglar fled. ‘Did you shoot to chase him away?’ I had asked my dad. ‘No,’ he’d told me. ‘I shot at him as he ran. I was pissed off that I missed.’

  ‘Do you really think he might kill someone?’ I asked my mother now.

  ‘He might,’ she said, grim-faced, taking a long sip of wine. ‘But I reckon I would shoot anyone who came for this place, too. No, I’m more worried that he’s going to shoot himself.’

  I heard her words in slow motion, disbelieving them. ‘Jeez, Mom. C’mon. Don’t joke about something like that.’

  ‘I’m not joking,’ she said. ‘He goes up into the hills behind the house some nights and sits there on a rock with the gun. I followed him once. He just sat there for hours in the moonlight. He’s so furious about what’s happening. I swear, if things don’t get better he might do it.’

  I imagine we were both thinking the same thing: my dad’s family had a history of suicide. It was a poorly kept secret that his father, my grandfather, Roland Kitchener Rogers, 83 years old, half blind, sick with diabetes and barely able to walk, had shot himself in the head in the garden of the Knysna house in January 1983. We had spent a wonderful Christmas there and had just arrived home after a two-day drive when we got the news, Gran frantically calling from Knysna.

  I was fourteen at the time, and all my parents told us was that Grandpa had died. But Stephanie, who’d stayed in South Africa after that holiday to begin a year at university in Cape Town, had heard the shot and seen Gran cover Gramps’s lifeless body with a white sheet. He had apparently filed down the bullet from his Second World War-issue revolver, wrapped a newspaper around his head and lain down in the front garden to do it. Gran said later that he had bathed himself that morning for the first time in years. He had dressed himself, too, and when she asked him where he was going, he’d replied simply: ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ She’d thought he was joking, but he walked perfectly upright and without a cane for the first time in ages, and made his way to the garden to do it. She heard the shot a minute later.

  My grandfather was born in 1900, at the height of the Second Boer War. He lied about his age to fight in the trenches in the First World War, and fought in Egypt and Italy in the Second World War. He was mayor of his hometown, Kuruman, in the hot, dusty Northern Cape, before moving to Knysna for the clean sea air in 1960, when his eldest son, Donald, the first of two sons to die before he did, fell ill with mesothelioma, asbestos cancer. In the end my grandfather killed himself.

  Would my father do the same?

  What signs would I have to look for? And what would my mother do if he committed suicide?

  Blam!

  I was woken by a shotgun blast. Crows squawked in the baobab tree.

  What time was it?

  Blam!

  Another shot. I leapt out of bed and ran to the kitchen.

  My mother was in her nightgown, stirring a pot. She didn’t seem too bothered.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked frantically.

  In the distance I could hear howling.

  ‘Not this time,’ she said. ‘He’s shooting at the poachers’ dogs.’

  ‘The poachers’ dogs?’

  ‘Yes the poachers come in from across the road with their bloody mongrels to hunt down a zebra or an antelope. The dogs catch the animal and the poachers start hacking at it with pangas and sticks. It’s happening a lot, but your dad has caught on and he’s chasing after them, shooting at their dogs.’

  Apparently my father was in the habit of using his gun now. Often he would shoot at t
he crows in the trees, or the baboons on the back of the land. He didn’t need to kill crows or baboons, but he did need people to know that he had a gun. He wanted word to get around that the old white man at Drifters was armed.

  My mother made me swear not to mention to my father any of her fears about his shooting himself, and I promised her I would not. But after hearing those gunshots I took it as my cue to tell them about Helen’s plot on the far north coast of Mozambique.

  At dinner that night I told them how they could go live on the plot and help build a house there, and if things ever got better back home, they could always return. I felt terrible telling them this, as if I was passing a vote of no-confidence on their lives, on their ability to survive out here much longer, but to be honest, their world was collapsing anyway.

  My father weighed my words. My mother did the same. But, in the end, they did as I expected.

  ‘We’re not stupid,’ said Dad. ‘We’re not going to kill ourselves over a piece of land. But neither are we going to give up. This is our land, and we’ll fight to fucking keep it.’

  Mom sipped her brandy and gritted her teeth.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ was all she said.

  There used to be a joke whites told in postcolonial Africa. When the Jews leave, it’s time to go. When the Portuguese leave, it’s too late. My sisters and I had been with the Jews on this one, and most of the Portuguese were already long gone from Zimbabwe. But my parents were like rabbits in the headlights.

  From London, Helen called them ‘the last of the white Mohicans’. Sandra, a fashion designer in Johannesburg who hated farm life more than any of the rest of us did, always said their life was a long episode of Little House on the Prairie; now she reckoned it was a movie being directed by Sam Peckinpah. Back in Harare, Stephanie tried to remain diplomatic. After all, she was still in Zimbabwe. What could she say? But we were all in agreement that my father had made a huge mistake selling Gran’s house on Leisure Isle in Knysna. Leisure Isle was now some of the most valuable real estate in the world. If he had kept hold of that house, they could be living there now.