When I said goodbye to my parents in the last week of September 2003, I wasn’t sure I would see them at Drifters again. I wasn’t sure I would even see them alive again. I hugged my father awkwardly for a moment before pulling away. But Mom held me tight for well over a minute, and I felt such strength in her fragile frame, her racing heart pounding through her birdcage chest, as she tried desperately not to cry.
Once at the bottom of the drive I looked in the rear-view mirror. Mom had already run back into the house, but my father was standing there watching me go, dead still except for his right hand rubbing the back of his head, messing up the thinning mop of grey hair, as he always did when he was deep in thought.
And an image came to me. I saw an old man lying down in a garden with a newspaper wrapped around his head. I saw another old man sitting on a rock under moonlight with a gun pointed at his head. The men were one and the same. The image would not leave me.
FIVE
Prostitutes Demand Payment in Diesel
IN 2004 GRACE and I got engaged and moved from Harlem to a brownstone garden apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, trading bodegas and merengue music for prams and vintage Italian bakeries. After nine years in a dingy squat in London and a year in a tenement in Harlem, I felt I was finally joining the middle class. My parents would have been pleased. Sadly, they were hurtling in the opposite direction.
I dreaded the phone call I was certain would come: They’ve lost the farm… They’ve gone down in a hail of bullets and buckshot defending the farm… Dad has shot himself in the head with the 12-bore.
The Mugabe regime was now so oppressive that the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, regularly denounced it. The New York Times ran frequent articles on Zimbabwe’s economic collapse. European Union countries and the United States imposed a travel ban on the top members of the regime, although the president was still welcomed at the United Nations. Just before I moved to New York an African-American Brooklyn council member named Charles Barron hosted a gala reception for Mugabe at City Hall, where he was given a standing ovation for his struggle on behalf of oppressed Zimbabweans against Western imperialism. It wasn’t the first such occasion – or the last. At the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, hundreds of delegates and journalists – journalists – leapt to their feet to applaud Mugabe. Years later, when Zimbabwe was experiencing mass famine, Mugabe would be fêted at a UN conference on global hunger in Rome.
When I mentioned to Americans I met that I was from Zimbabwe and that my parents still lived there, they were flabbergasted. I, in turn, was surprised by how much Americans knew about Zimbabwe. Once, on a travel-writing assignment in Nashville, I was speaking to a country singer in a ten-gallon hat and steel-tipped boots who was drinking in Tootsie’s, the famous downtown honky-tonk.
‘Your folks live in Zimbabwe? They not farmers, are they?’
‘Yes, they live on a farm.’
‘That ain’t safe.’
‘They sleep with a shotgun by the bed.’
‘Hell, yeah, I would, too.’
Late-night phone calls made me nervous. And yet my father didn’t seem suicidal. Indeed, the e-mails I was receiving began to take on an almost jaunty tone. He would send me quotes from President Mugabe’s latest speeches: ‘Western nations are meddling in Zimbabwean affairs. What do they want here? Do they want to take away our wives?’
‘You got to hand it to him,’ Dad would say. ‘He’s quite the statesman.’
When Zimbabwe was mentioned by George Bush or Colin Powell in a speech, my father would cheer up markedly. ‘Does that mean we’re part of the axis of evil?’ he wrote. ‘Any chance of an intervention?’
I even felt a sharp surge of envy – if not sheer panic – when my father informed me that he’d bought a brand-new computer (I wasn’t sure how he could afford it) and was now writing a book about his experiences. Wasn’t I supposed to be the writer? What if he published a book before me?
By 2005, though, not only were my parents still on their land, but my father had still not got around to shooting himself in the head.
Grace and I would be getting married on 30 April 2005. We booked the Church of the Guardian Angel on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-first Street for the service, and rented a Chelsea loft with a beautiful rooftop view of the city for the reception. It would be a very New York wedding, and my parents would be coming, the first time either of them had been to America.
In February, two months before the wedding, I visited them again.
And here’s the thing: I have to confess that I was worried about how my parents might behave in a sophisticated First World setting. What child is not embarrassed by his old people? What child, even at the age of thirty-six, doesn’t in some way cringe at his parents’ eccentricities? I was concerned that their growing isolation, their life in the bush, had cut them off from the norms of the real world.
I thought of Grace’s parents in suburban New Jersey. Her father, Ed, now retired, day-traded in the stock market and attended garage sales. Her mother, Barbara, had season tickets to the opera, read The New Yorker, and went to church on Sundays. They took cruises in the Caribbean, river trips in Europe down the Danube. They barely drank.
My parents? Mom now travelled with a bottle of Bols and cartons of cheap Kingsgates in her suitcase to save money. She was known, even in polite company, to tell people: ‘If these bastards come for my land, I swear I’ll shoot them.’ My father could be tactless at the best of times. And now? Would he tease my future mother-in-law about her Catholicism? Ask Grace if she had enough money to support his son? Did he even have a suit?
The bush was not only closing in on their farm and their home, but also, in some ways, colonising their minds, claiming their personalities. On the flight over it occurred to me I would have to gauge how they were doing, and subtly suggest to them that they avoid doing or saying anything that might embarrass me.
My sister Stephanie and her husband, Rob, lent me a car to drive out east this time. It was evening, a twilight dusk, when I neared the farm, but I missed the turnoff altogether. The bush along the road had grown much wilder. It had the desired effect. You had to look hard to see that there was a house up there at all, and when I drove up, the home was dark.
Other things were different. An electric security fence had gone up around the perimeter of the house, and a uniformed armed guard patrolled the road that wound up to the cottages. They never used to have this protection before, and I wondered how they afforded it.
I walked onto the lawn and saw them waiting there watching the sunset, as relaxed as if they were at a mountain spa resort.
‘Look who,’ said my mother with a smile, walking over to hug me. ‘Welcome back, my darling.’
‘So you made it, did you,’ chuckled Dad, patting me on the back.
They looked very well, much healthier than the year before. My father had put some weight back on, and I saw that he was drinking fresh lemonade, not Coke.
I was surprised by how attractive the house looked, too. The carpets were clean; the antique chairs, piano and oak bookshelves all were polished and gleaming. The walls of the passage, bare last time, had now been given over to framed pictures of my sisters and me and old relatives, many long since dead.
Other signs of depression and decline I had seen a year ago were gone. Dad not only had a new computer but also a fancy new television set. He showed it off to me before dinner, flashing his remote control.
‘Jeez, it’s better than our TV,’ I had to admit.
‘Got it down south. Ja, it’s pretty good. The dish is working well.’
Grace and I had given up cable to save for the wedding; my parents had a hundred channels at their fingertips.
Of course, they couldn’t hold back the tide. There was still a lot of wildlife. House geckoes clung to the walls and ceilings, and I discovered that the albino frog had now become a permanent fixture in the kitchen, making its home on the rim of the copper coffeepot th
at hung next to the egg rack. I still found the creature disturbing, but my mother had grown rather fond of it. ‘He disappeared for a while but then he came back,’ she smiled. ‘He’s so determined.’
There were dietary improvements, too. The fridge, once dirty and filled with mouldy cheese and curdled milk, was now stocked with jugs of fresh lemonade and mounds of ripe fruit, vegetables and herbs. Flower beds my mother had dug up a year ago were now bearing tomatoes, lettuce, aubergine, basil, rosemary and coriander.
There were food shortages across the country, but Mom roasted chicken for dinner, and Dad hauled out a bottle of prize Meerendal Pinotage from the cellar to toast my return.
And then a thought came to me: perhaps all these changes, these improvements, were all just coating. Perhaps my parents were simply facing their own mortality, reaching out to the tangible and the familiar as they neared the end of their lives, trying to bow out with dignity.
‘How are the cottages?’ I asked at dinner.
‘Well, we have a few new tenants at last,’ Mom said cheerily.
I was surprised. Was she just putting on a brave face?
‘Really? What about the camp?’
I thought I heard Dad stifle a chuckle, which was a little odd.
‘You better have some more wine,’ he said, changing the subject and filling up my glass.
They clearly didn’t want to speak about it, and I feared the worst.
I went to bed early but was woken at eleven that night by the distant thud of music drifting through my window. For a second I thought I was back in Brooklyn and panicked that Grace had turned on our iPod speakers and was about to wake our landlord, who lived two floors above us. Then I smelled the mangos on the trees outside and felt the lumps in the mattress. I was very much at home.
The music was indistinct at first, a faraway muffled sound with a repetitive bass line. But soon my ears, like eyes getting used to the dark, began to make out the sound. It became clearer as I lay there: the unmistakable, low-down dance beats of New York rapper 50 Cent’s hit song ‘In da Club.’
Very strange, I thought. Had my mother traded in her Neil Diamond records for Get Rich or Die Tryin’?
I got out of bed, put on jeans and walked out onto the polished cement veranda. A full moon hovered over the valley. Bougainvillea dripped down the Mediterranean arches of the veranda, silhouetting the tall acacia trees that ran along the main road below. Through wide-open French doors to the right, Mom and Dad were fast asleep in their bedroom, the 12-gauge leaning against Dad’s bedside table.
It still shocked me that they slept with everything wide open. Despite their new security – the guard and the electric fence – the only door to the house that was locked was the one into the study. The front of the house had no doors. It seemed to me an open invitation to come get us. It wouldn’t have been hard. You could bribe the guard, and while there was the electric fence to climb, all you would have to do would be to wait for one of the numerous power cuts. And since Tello was no longer around, there would be no barked alarm to warn of intruders.
Question was, could my dad get to the gun before they got to him?
At the same time, my parents’ old philosophy – ‘If you lock things up, people will think you have something to steal’ – appeared to be working. They had been left alone. It did them no harm, either, that everyone in the valley knew by now that Dad had a gun on him and wasn’t afraid to use it. The squatters had found that out when he blasted away at their hounds.
50 Cent had given way by now to R Kelly’s soaring ballad ‘I Believe I Can Fly,’ a popular hit in New York, and apparently here. The music was coming from the backpacker camp.
I got a flashlight and keys to the front gate from the milk pail in the kitchen next to the copper coffeepot, from where the albino frog, all-seeing, stared at me reproachfully. Then I wandered on down, through the Rhodes grass, under the avocado trees, and across the wooden footbridge.
When I had started going down to the camp at night on my last visit, this walk made me nervous. There were snakes in the grass, bats in the branches. What if I bumped into those bandits coming to steal from the cottages? But now I found myself enjoying it: the full moon, the sound of crickets, the long grass already wet from the evening dew. Best of all, there would be a cold beer at the other end, cigarettes and music. Music! What was happening down there? Had tourists returned to the valley? By now the hip-hop had given way to traditional beats, the jangling guitars of an Oliver Mtukudzi song.
The lodge appeared in its clearing, silhouetted in the moonlight. The last time I had seen Drifters it was empty, abandoned. Now, though, I saw something remarkable: it was close to midnight on a Thursday, and a dozen vehicles were parked on the lawn outside – SUVs, a white Pajero, a Land Rover with government plates. I watched a black couple emerge silently from one of the thatched chalets by the pool and amble up the wooden exterior stairwell toward the bar. The woman seemed drunk, a pair of platform shoes in her hand. The man walked ahead. I emerged from the leaves and followed.
Inside, I was blown away by the sight of about twenty black men and women drinking beer around the bar or slowly dancing to the music blaring from a sleek new hi-fi system behind the counter. No one showed any interest in my arrival, nor did I recognise anyone. I ordered a beer from the barman, a dashing kid in his early twenties with a shaved head. Where was John Muranda, who would normally be serving drinks if guests were around at this hour?
The barman introduced himself to me as Sydney.
‘Hi,’ I said, ‘I’m Douglas.’
‘Douglas?’ he boomed. ‘Mr Rogers’s son? I know of you. Welcome!’
I had no idea who the hell he was.
‘You are the one who lives in America,’ he said. ‘How is it there?’
‘It’s good,’ I told him.
‘How is Puff Daddy?’
I laughed.
‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘But 50 Cent is fine.’
I wasn’t that familiar with the hip-hop pantheon, but I had recently seen 50 Cent and Eminem play in Detroit when I was there on a travel-writing assignment for the London Times, which was how I knew the lyrics to ‘In da Club.’
‘Jay-Z?’ he asked.
‘I have no idea, man. I never meet these guys.’
He wasn’t giving up.
‘Snoop Dogg?’
‘He’s still a gangster.’
‘Aish,’ said Sydney, ‘tight!’
He slapped my hand with his and snapped his fingers.
I asked where Muranda was.
‘Muranda? John Old? The sekuru? He is sleeping. John Agoneka, he is sleeping, too.’
He looked at the swaying patrons before him.
‘These people – they are not sleeping. They are drinking! Haha!’
I ordered a Zambezi and a box of Madisons. I had given up smoking in New York, but something about being out here made me pick up my old habit. They tasted stale.
I was surprised to find the bar in such good condition. A secondhand television had been attached to the wall of the chimney in the middle of the floor, and it was tuned to ZTV, although the sound was off. The president was attending a ceremony in some village. Women wearing his face on their skirts were ululating. He waved his little fist.
The only people not drinking were two downcast youths, no more than twenty years old, sitting on stools in the corner, arms crossed, watching the TV. One wore a Hawaiian-style shirt, except instead of palm trees it bore the many faces of Saddam Hussein. The other had on a soccer shirt emblazoned with the face of David Beckham. In contrast to the other customers, a couple of whom were in suits with wives in high heels and glamorous dresses, they wore mud-stained rubber sandals. If this were a Harare nightclub, these kids would be gate-crashers.
I drank my beer and smoked the cigarettes. A moth singed itself on the overhead fluorescent.
At the far end of the bar a slightly overweight woman in a tight denim miniskirt that barely constrained her bulging th
ighs smiled and winked at me. I laughed and gave her a thumbs-up, felt stupid for doing so, and sipped my beer. Then, from my left, a tall, beautiful girl, graceful as a gazelle in skintight jeans and high heels, slinked over to me.
She said sulkily: ‘Buy me beer.’
I bought her a beer. She pressed her legs against the bar. Then, in one slick move, she took a swig from the beer in her left hand and slid the long-fingered nails of her other hand between my legs and started stroking my crotch. I choked and spat out the sip, the liquid dribbling down my chin.
‘Sixty thousand,’ she said, staring straight ahead. ‘Let’s go.’
I tried to gather my formerly smooth composure. What was the black-market exchange rate these days? Since I was paying three thousand for the beers, I worked out that sixty thousand must have been about US$20.
The girl was stroking my leg now.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m about to be married. But I’ll buy you another beer.’
I looked around at the dance floor and saw that other men were similarly engaged with various women, dancing close. A pattern developed: a couple would disappear for fifteen minutes and then return; the same woman might then leave with a different man. It was a conveyer belt.
Sydney saw me checking out the scene.
‘Douglas,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘These women – they are not their wives.’
‘No, I don’t think they are,’ I told him.
The gazelle was at my side again, and I bought her a third beer. The denim miniskirt was walking out with one of the gents, a drunk in a suit. Saddam and Beckham ignored it all and watched soundless images on TV. The president was at a political rally now, still making use of his fist.
‘Sydney, who are those guys?’ I said, nodding at the two.
‘Settlers,’ he said. ‘New farmers from across the road. Maybe you can say they are squatters. They come here for TV, then they go back.’
The Last Resort Page 8
