The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  ‘What did we do before candles?’ went the local joke. ‘Electricity.’ The joke became dated fast, because soon shops ran out of candles.

  My parents eventually bought a generator, but as the load-shedding got worse, Charles, with typical Zimbabwean ingenuity, ‘made a plan’. He persuaded my father to lease some of the other empty cottages on the property to ZESA colleagues of his who needed homes, and soon four more black tenants – all ZESA technicians and engineers – moved onto the land. Drifters once again had a reasonable electricity supply.

  It was the discovery of the relative of another black tenant in the cottages, however, that most amazed me. On my very last evening before returning to New York I was walking back from Piet and Mienkie’s, and passing number 4, Acacia, I saw a small, elderly, well-dressed man with tortoiseshell glasses sitting on the front veranda writing in a notebook by candlelight. The old man nodded as I walked past.

  ‘Evening, sir,’ I said.

  He looked familiar. Where was he from? How did I know him? I carried on up to the house, racking my brain. Then it came to me, clear as a lightning bolt, all the way back from the grape farm in 1979.

  In that year Rhodesia was briefly known as Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and the first black leader of our country, for all of seven months before President Mugabe won power in the 1980 election, was the Methodist bishop Abel Muzorewa. Muzorewa’s United African National Congress (UANC) had clinched a democratic election in April 1979 and agreed to share power with whites. The two guerrilla movements – Mugabe’s Shona-dominated ZANLA and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) – considered Muzorewa a puppet and refused to participate in the election. No Western leaders recognised Muzorewa, either, and the war and the sanctions continued until new elections in February 1980.

  Muzorewa was still the choice of most whites for that election, and we all thought he would win easily. He was a moderate and an anti-Communist; Mugabe was a Marxist. Stephanie, Helen and I informally campaigned for Muzorewa. Driving to school in the morning from the grape farm, we threw UANC fliers out at pedestrians. We waved our hands out the windows, shouting ‘Pamberi ne UANC!’ (Forward UANC) and ‘Vote the Bishop!’ We were young kids caught in the first thrilling flush of a democratic awakening. Sandra just sat in the back of the car polishing her nails. She wouldn’t get involved, so we accused her of supporting ZANU. It’s why we started calling her Zaan, a name we still use for her today. As for the bemused black people we implored to vote UANC, they waved happily back at us. Of course, few of them ended up voting for the bishop at all: Robert Mugabe won in a landslide. We all felt like fools after that. Except my mother, that is. She kept her counsel in the lead-up to that election, too. She had a sense, even then, that nothing was as it seemed out here.

  The man on the veranda looked exactly like Abel Muzorewa. I knew it couldn’t possibly be him. That had been twenty-five years ago, and I presumed he was long dead.

  I got back to the house and found Mom cooking my farewell dinner on a gas stove on the kitchen floor. The power had gone out again, and Dad had gone to call ZESA Man. I mentioned that someone who looked just like Abel Muzorewa was staying in number 4.

  She looked up at me, barely impressed, concerned more with her chicken casserole. ‘Oh, it is him. He comes and visits his brother Ernest, who’s living here at the moment.’

  I wasn’t sure I had heard correctly.

  ‘What? Bishop Muzorewa, the former prime minister, lives in number 4?’

  ‘No, darling, his brother lives there. Ernest and his wife, Florence, farm down the road. Their house burned down on their daughter’s wedding day a while back, so they’ve moved into one of the cottages while they rebuild. The bishop comes and visits from Harare. Piet and Mienkie have got to know him. They say he’s a nice man. Do me a favour, pass the salt.’

  I reached for the salt. The albino frog blinked at me from the copper coffeepot. The lights came back on. ZESA Man had done the trick. A light came on in my head, too.

  My parents had a relative of South African president FW de Klerk in one cottage and a former political activist and African prime minister in another? I couldn’t believe what she was saying. And it suddenly dawned on me that their farm was more than just a piece of land. It had become a stage set, a metaphor for the state of the nation. You could literally see the fortunes of the country unfolding in microcosm from their front lawn: the struggling squatters tearing up the land across the road; the desperate prostitutes and the men with SUVs who paid for them down at the camp; the eccentric white farmers and their new black neighbours out back; and my parents and a staff of three in the middle of it all, conducting operations, manipulating, planning, scheming, trying to stay alive.

  I was now filled with admiration for my parents. What they had built here out of virgin bush fifteen years ago had become central to the events of the country. Things could rise or fall depending on what happened right here.

  Of course, what I didn’t know then – what none of us knew then – was that the danger was about to get closer. Much closer. It was about to move in right across the road.

  NINE

  Friends and Neighbours

  MY MOTHER DIDN’T smuggle marijuana to New York when she and my father came for my wedding in the last week of April 2005, much to my relief. Customs officers at Newark airport didn’t bother to search her suitcase, but if they had, they would have found two cartons of Kingsgate cigarettes, a bottle of Bols brandy and the rolled-up canvas of an oil painting.

  The cigarettes and the booze were for her. She always travelled with them now to save money. The painting was our wedding gift.

  It was a shimmering landscape of Osborne Dam by Itai Nyagu, a young black artist my mother, a painter herself and an avid collector, had come across in the valley, and whose work she exhibited and sold in the gallery on the ground floor of Drifters during the tourist years. The gallery no longer functioned, but my mother loved Itai’s work and had bought the painting five years ago. In it, two fisherwomen in blue headdresses cast nets into the shallows, and cotton clouds reflect in the water around them. An old bicycle leans against a msasa tree on the banks. It’s a beautiful, bucolic scene. My parents wanted me to hang it in our bedroom – ‘to remind you where you come from’.

  It was accompanied by a near-indecipherable note written by Dawson Jombe and signed by the two Johns and Naomi down at the camp. It took me a while to work out what it said.

  Douglas, they had written, we are happy you are to married. Please to be faithful. Don’t forget us in Zimbabwe.

  My parents took to New York City the way country people the world over take to big cities: with wide-eyed wonder and confusion bordering on panic.

  Within an hour of his arrival my father contrived to lose the South African credit card he had acquired specially for the trip. On that first evening in the city my three sisters, who had flown in on the same day, took them to see stand-up comedy in the East Village. Urban rookies, Mom and Dad insisted on sitting at a mysteriously empty table closest to the stage.

  ‘This, I discovered, is a big no-no,’ Dad told me the next morning, tucking into the steak I had left over from my bachelor party at Peter Luger steakhouse the night before, ‘since the comics picked on your mom and me and seemed to find it rather amusing that we’d come all the way from Africa. I’m not sure why. It’s not like we’re from somewhere weird, like Texas. Or Florida.’

  At the rehearsal dinner in a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan, Dad made a speech of surprising tact, telling Grace’s family, ‘You’re welcome to visit us in Zimbabwe,’ before adding, ‘if our house hasn’t burned down yet.’

  Grace’s dad, Ed, boomed with laughter.

  ‘No, thanks. I think we’ll stick around here!’

  We were married at two o’clock on 30 April in the Church of the Guardian Angel, at Tenth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. Helen told me she saw Dad wipe away a tear during our vows. Grace and I had joined an exclusive club: only my fat
her’s deceased uncle and dead dog had ever made him cry.

  Two Gypsy musicians – violinist and accordion player – whom Grace had met busking at the Broadway-Lafayette subway stop a week earlier marched us all up Tenth Avenue to the Chelsea loft we had hired on Twenty-eighth Street. There my parents proceeded to drink most of our supposedly hard-partying friends under the table.

  One London friend, Anna, passed out before the dinner after three mojitos. My mother, well into her fourth, watched her go down.

  ‘Can’t handle her drink too well, can she?’ she said, and ordered another.

  At dinner they sat next to a dear friend of mine, Jim Zug, who had stayed at Drifters once in 1994, while en route to Mozambique. They hadn’t seen him since then.

  ‘Jim, how was Mozambique?’ Dad boomed.

  ‘I contracted cerebral malaria and almost died.’

  ‘Yes, that can happen,’ said Dad. ‘Bloody good game fishing, though.’

  I had told several of my mates – and certainly not Grace’s parents – about the brothel and marijuana plantation back home, and my father took to his assigned role as sixty-eight-year-old pimp and dope farmer with some pride. ‘Meneer Rogers, luister, hoeveel ruk ’n zol en ’n cherry ’n ou deesdae in Zim met die inflasie en als?’ [How much would a joint and a lady put you back in Zim these days with inflation and all?] our Afrikaans buddy Deon asked him straight up.

  ‘Vergeet dit Boet, jy kan dit nie bekostig nie.’ [Forget it, young man, you can’t afford the ladies we have.] Dad chuckled.

  Mom handed out her Kingsgates on the rooftop, and I enjoyed a cigar up there with my brother-in-law Rob as a mist came in over the Hudson.

  ‘Do you ever think it was all a big mistake?’ Rob asked me as he gazed down on the city.

  ‘Jeez, Robbie, give me time. I’ve only been married three hours.’

  ‘No, not that,’ he said. ‘You know. Us. Africa.’

  Rob owned a software company in Harare and was a brilliant businessman. He had somehow kept his company afloat all these years while watching the staff he trained emigrate, the economy plummet and the government threaten to raid his business and take it away, just as it had done with white farms. Like all Zimbabwe business owners not in bed with the regime, he faced ruinous fines or even prison if he failed to pay every punitive new tax the state passed without warning.

  Now he pointed in wonder to the city around us: the Empire State Building shrouded in mist, the canyon streets below humming effortlessly with the thousand cars of a New York night, a cruise ship easing down the Hudson.

  ‘Do you ever think our ancestors got on the wrong boat?’ he said.

  I thought about Rob’s words a couple of days later when Grace’s mother, Barbara, took my mother to see La Damnation de Faust at Lincoln Centre.

  I’d long been of the belief that my parents and Grace’s parents were so far removed from one another’s experiences that they would have little in common. Barbara, half Irish, half English, and Ed, an Armenian, lived in safe, upscale American suburbia; my parents lived on a besieged farm in a chaotic, lawless country. And yet, when Grace and I watched our mothers walk out together from the opera that night, arm in arm, chatting excitedly about the performance they’d just seen, they looked as if they had been friends forever. They were the same kind of people, with the same values and love of family, art, culture and a game of bridge. But a simple quirk of geography meant they lived wildly different lives: their ancestors had taken different boats.

  I dropped Mom and Dad off at the airport bus to Newark in lower Manhattan days later. It had been a whirlwind week, but I hadn’t seen them this happy since that millennium family reunion five years earlier, and I imagined they would be devastated to be leaving, to be going back there. But it turned out they were quite excited and rather relieved.

  ‘It’s lovely here, darling,’ Mom sighed as she hugged me goodbye, ‘but really, it does make your head spin. The noise. The traffic. So many people. Phew! I don’t know how you do it. We’re looking forward to some peace and quiet.’

  ‘Peace and quiet?’ I spluttered.

  ‘Well, of course, we have a few problems of our own.’

  I waved goodbye. As the bus pulled away, the gaping hole in the ground where the World Trade Center towers had once stood came into view. My parents were going back to their own ground zero.

  Grace spent the first five weeks of our married life in Iraq, working on a documentary about the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein. Some honeymoon.

  ‘You think your country has problems?’ she said on one satellite phone call she made from a mass-grave site in Halabja, Kurdistan.

  We took a late honeymoon in Argentina and Brazil, and I wrote pieces about it for various publications. I was now writing for glossy American travel magazines, which paid better than UK ones, including expenses. I was starting to feel like a proper writer. Travel & Leisure flew me to Mozambique to do a story on Pemba, where my sister’s plot stands on a beautiful bay – the plot I’d wanted my parents to move to. I did a story during the same trip for London’s Saturday Telegraph magazine on a remarkable white Zimbabwean farmer named Jake Jackson who, unable to farm in Zimbabwe, had transformed a desperately poor, wartorn part of northern Mozambique into rich farmland by training more than forty thousand black Mozambicans to grow tobacco and other crops for export. Peasants who had recently lived in mud huts, dependent on food handouts from the West, were now building houses, driving four-by-fours and sending their children to school. Men like Jake Jackson are lost to Zimbabwe. They now live as expatriates in many remote rural parts of Africa, where their skills are used to help feed and develop those countries, as they once did in Zimbabwe. Few of them will ever return.

  I confess I paid little attention to my parents at this time. For two months in late 2005 I didn’t communicate with them at all: their phone lines were down, which meant the Internet, too, and besides, I was busy making a life with Grace and loving New York and our perfect Brooklyn neighbourhood.

  Then, early one Saturday morning in late January 2006, Grace shook me awake.

  ‘Bubba, your mom’s on the phone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your mother’s on the phone.’

  It was still dark outside; I was hung-over.

  ‘My mother? Surely not.’

  My parents never called me. They coudn’t afford to, for a start. I was amazed my mother had even worked out the dialling codes. There were a lot of numbers to get in the right order, zeroes to drop, ones to add; she couldn’t even work a VCR. She had the time zones all wrong, of course: it was midday in Africa, but there was a blizzard outside our window, and it was only two hours since I had staggered home from the Brooklyn Social, my favourite haunt on Smith Street.

  Then it hit me. She hadn’t gotten the times wrong at all. This was the call. The call I had been dreading all these years, the call everyone who has elderly parents dreads. We all know it will come. We just never know when.

  My mouth was rough as sandpaper, but I was suddenly wide awake, and I ran to the phone, heart racing, blood beating back the headache.

  ‘Hi. Mom. What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘Hello, my darling,’ she said.

  Her voice was soft, gentle, a mellifluous purr through the static. So this is how I hear about the death of my father? A phone call on a cold and dark Saturday morning from a voice that sounds like birdsong?

  ‘Oh, everything’s fine,’ she said sweetly. ‘I just want to wish you a happy New Year.’

  God. Is that it? My heart slowed to a panic.

  ‘Jeez, Mom, thanks, but it’s the middle of January.’

  ‘I know, my darling, but we haven’t heard from you in ages, and the lines have been down for so long. They say it’s “maintenance”, but we all know the Chinese have been brought in to install monitoring devices. They’re probably listening to us now. Anyway, your dad’s gone to Mozambique today to get supplies. I’m home alone and the bloody power’s gone off
. Again! I can’t even watch the cricket. So I thought I’d give you a call.’

  I was relieved, but suddenly filled with an aching sadness at the thought of my mother all alone out there, in those faraway hills, in a dark house.

  I Skyped her back, and we spoke for an hour on a signal so clear that she sounded like she was in Manhattan. It always amazed me how my computer could connect so easily to them on the farm, where the fried telephone cables were severed to make animal traps, the telegraph poles chopped down for firewood.

  She seemed so calm, and she managed to convince me, as she always did in that unfussy way of hers, that everything was perfectly fine with them.

  But in fact things were not fine with them at all. They had been robbed on New Year’s Day. They had a dangerous new

  neighbour: a man with intentions on their home. And my father was spending his nights sitting under the giant fig tree with a loaded shotgun on his lap.

  Things were not fine at all.

  No one knew exactly when the Political Commissar moved into Frank’s house across the road, but my parents found out one lunchtime in December 2005. They were sitting on the veranda working on the Recipes for Disaster cookbook idea. Mom had more than a dozen recipes by now, and they were coming up with new ones all the time. One chapter would be about bread. There were bread shortages across the country – since the state set the price of bread at such a low rate, bakeries could not afford to make it. They made croissants instead; it was easier to find croissants than loaves in Zimbabwe. My parents had now bought a bread machine, and the loaves they made were as rich and chewy as the baguettes I’d taken them to taste in the old Italian bakeries on Court Street in Brooklyn.

  Another section was dedicated to procuring meat. Zimbabwe’s currency was devaluing so fast now that instead of getting rent for Drifters in cash, Mom occasionally charged Dawson Jombe in chickens. He and his wife, Patricia, had a chicken coop in their garden at Cottage 1, and it was worth far more to her to be paid with a hen or a rooster, which they could roast, than with a brick of Zim notes that would be worthless in a few days. She was calling that chapter ‘Jombe’s Jongwes’ – jongwe being the Shona word for ‘rooster’.