The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

To the right of us the grass and bush started shaking wildly and a loud grunting noise came from within. It sounded like a pair of bush pigs or a wounded baboon stuck in there. For a second I thought it might even have been a leopard, one of those that had scared my friend David and me off this mountain when we were kids.

  Suddenly, crashing out of the undergrowth, hunched like trolls, their arms filled with pieces of wood, came two wild-haired white tramps, a man and a woman, their clothes torn rags, their eyes a methyl-alcohol blue. They had bulbous red noses and scabbed faces, and they grunted like Neanderthals as they barrelled toward us.

  I leapt off the path; Gracie and Tweed Jacket did the same. The Commissar, though, ponderous as a drugged elephant, stood perfectly still and calmly watched them scurry past him and disappear into the corridor of bush that ran along the side of the road.

  My heart was racing. Gracie’s eyes were saucers. But the Commissar was utterly calm.

  ‘They are just collecting firewood,’ he said drowsily.

  We gave up the hike after ten minutes. The bush was too thick. There was no way to get up the mountain anymore. I wondered whether the Commissar had actually been up there at all.

  ‘So when did you say you were last here?’ I asked.

  ‘I am going to call the Parks Department,’ he said to himself, shaking his head. ‘This is simply no good. They have to keep this place maintained.’

  ‘As soon as you pay the fine you owe them for the eland,’ I muttered under my breath, not loud enough for him to hear.

  The Commissar and his nephew stayed in town; I dropped them at ZANU-PF headquarters on Robert Mugabe Avenue, just off the main street. Gracie drove back over the pass with me. She needed to visit settlers on a farm in the eastern part of the valley to carry out the Commissar’s instructions for finding a headman. She also wanted to get back to her fields. I could tell she was annoyed with the Commissar.

  ‘I don’t have time to waste like this,’ she moaned about the aborted trip. ‘Farming is hard work. This was just so much time wasted.’

  I had mentioned Gracie to Mom – how she’d said she looked after me as a child – and we figured out that she was the daughter of the Russells’ nanny. I asked Gracie how she’d come to be a settler on Frank’s land. In a high-pitched voice laced with anger and bitterness, she recounted how for nineteen years she had been a housekeeper for a Mrs Baker.

  ‘My father worked for Mrs Baker for twenty-five years. Mrs Baker gave my father a piece of land on her farm. She said that my father is going to stay there, and when he dies Gracie can have this piece of land. She write it down on a piece of paper.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘But then, when my father died, Mrs Baker fired me. She said this is not my land and I must go. I said, ‘I want my benefit for nineteen years!’ Mrs Baker said to me, ‘No – you support ZANU-PF. I am not giving you land.’ So nineteen years I am without benefit. How can this be right?’

  This had happened in 2003, the height of the land invasions. I hadn’t heard of Mrs Baker, but it seemed likely that she had since lost her farm; according to Gracie, she was now living in South Africa. Then Gracie had heard about the Commissar’s moving into the valley, and she went to see him about getting a plot on Frank’s place.

  ‘I go see him and he let me stay there.’

  I recalled the Commissar’s words about the land reform programme: Believe you me, there are advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I hadn’t seen any advantages, but it seemed that in Gracie, perhaps, there was one. I was pleased she had land, and I could tell by how frustrated she was at the time we wasted in town that she worked hard on it. She was gutsy, determined.

  We took a right turn at the bottom of the pass and drove east. We motored past once thriving fields now overgrown with bush. Gracie directed me down a bumpy dirt track, and after a while we came to a tumbledown red-roofed farmhouse on a hill. The farm used to belong to a family called Palmer; clearly it had been taken years ago. The house was in worse condition than Frank’s, and the fields around it were desolate. A barefoot woman with a baby on her back appeared in the doorway of the house. Gracie spoke to her in Shona. The woman pointed to a barn a hundred metres away. Milling in front of it were half a dozen young men, no different in age or appearance from the listless, defeated settlers on Frank’s place. We sat silently in the car for a while, looking at them. They looked at us.

  After a time Gracie said: ‘Okay, I am going now.’

  ‘How are you going to get back, Gracie?’

  ‘By foot.’

  It was at least sixteen kilometres to our part of the valley. It would take her forever to get home. I gave her a brick of notes, everything I had left in my bag.

  ‘Here, take this. Maybe you can catch a bus home.’

  She took the money with urgency and thanked me. Then she scurried off to tell the settlers on this farm to choose headmen to report to their new leader, the Political Commissar.

  Good luck, Gracie, I said to myself as I watched her go. Good luck.

  It was just two o’clock. As I was pulling away I realised I was only ten minutes’ drive from the chicken farm where we had lived. I hadn’t been back there in twelve years. I didn’t know what I would find, but I decided to go and see it. I turned onto a gravel road up into the mountains, and then onto a bumpier, rockier track forged into the cliffs of the slopes.

  I felt I was going back to more than just the old house; I was going back to the first bright bone of consciousness, my very earliest memory. My father had carved this road out of the cliffs, just as he had the road at Drifters, but it had seen better times, and I made sure to hug the side of the mountain. Below, to the left, was a steep drop to a roof of dense jungle in a deep ravine. For some reason I pictured a gleaming silver spaceship. Then I remembered: Skylab, the American space station.

  Stephanie was a voracious reader and a news junkie, but she’d been a tormentor, too.

  ‘Skylab is going to fall out of the sky and land on us,’ she’d told me.

  ‘No, it isn’t!’

  ‘It is. It’s going to fall on the house and probably kill us all.’

  ‘Waaaaaaahhhhh!’

  For weeks on end I’d looked up at the sky and waited for it. I prayed it would land gently in the ravine below the road. When we moved to the grape farm in late 1978 I actually thought it was to avoid Skylab.

  I pulled up to the house – or at least what was left of it. The stone walls still stood, but the roof was mostly gone.

  In my mind’s eye it was a mansion on a high cliff overlooking a vast estate. It turned out to be no more than a small stone cottage on a few hectares of gently undulating ground. The ‘cliff ’ was a brief slope down to a grassy vlei, now wildly overgrown. I could see no trace of the chicken sheds that used to stand below or the cold-storage freezers in the hills behind, where Mom would slaughter, pack and freeze a thousand grade-A broilers a week. The orange groves and apple orchard were gone, too. I remember Lawrence, our Shona gardener, peeling oranges for me in the shade of those trees and telling me magical tales of Manyika kings and Shona princesses as he stirred a pot of sadza on a wood fire during breaks from slashing the grass. Lawrence left my parents’ employ in 1975 to join the Rhodesian police force. My father next ran into him twenty-five years later. Older, greyer, he was still a policeman but had never risen above the rank of sergeant. It is one thing to be white and on the losing side in a race war, but to be black and to have served on the side of the white regime, as tens of thousands of black Rhodesians did, is to carry a mark of shame in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – and little chance of promotion.

  The jacaranda tree in front of the house was still there, bigger than ever. The branch our dog Ruff would violently gnaw on, honing his jaws, still bore the scars of his rage. If I cut it open, I thought, I might find one of his teeth.

  My parents had sold the house to the Rhodesian government in 1978, and because the war was raging around us, no one moved in. But now, it appeared
, a black family had, and a pretty young girl in a dirty red dress carrying a romance novel came out to greet me. She said her name was Grace and that her father, a bus driver, had moved the family in here in 2002.

  ‘Hi, Grace. That’s my wife’s name. I used to live here – can I go inside?’

  ‘Yes, it’s okay.’

  I started in the living room, walking through the hole in the wall that used to frame sliding glass doors opening onto the slate-stone veranda. Some of the fleur-de-lys-shaped clay tiles laid by Dad’s builder, Lekan Mukwamba, were still there, but most had been uprooted. Dad always hired black contractors from rural districts, and Lekan had helped build Drifters, too. ‘They’re cheaper and they give you less shit,’ Dad reckoned.

  I climbed the stairs to the landing that used to be the dining room. I remembered aiming a pellet gun at the head of my mother’s bridge friend, Libby Bentley, before Dad, looking up from the Time magazine he was reading on the couch, leapt up in a rage and ran over to give me a good hiding. ‘Do not point a gun at anyone. Do you understand?’

  Gracie had the room Helen and I had shared, so small I could barely swing my arms. I found the bathroom and shower stall, all the fittings looted. Dad used to sing ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine’ to me when I showered with him in the mornings, his Barlow-Wadley radio on the towel rail, always tuned to some crackling foreign news station.

  Stephanie used to give me our weekly sports quiz while I sat on the toilet in here. One day in 1978 she asked me, ‘Who won the Grand National?’

  ‘Red Rum.’

  ‘Who scored a perfect ten in Montreal?’

  ‘Nadia Comaneci.’

  ‘Who’s the heavyweight champion of the world?’

  ‘Ali.’

  ‘Incorrect.’

  ‘He is!’

  ‘He’s not!’

  She’d showed me the back page of the Rhodesia Herald. I couldn’t believe it. Ali had been beaten by some loser called Leon Spinks. I was upset for weeks.

  A goat and some chickens had claimed what used to be Stephanie’s room, and the walls of the passageway had concertinaed, giving a clear view of the front lawn.

  Sandra’s room, in the middle of the house, was still intact. I remembered we’d taken shelter in there one terrifying night in 1978. Helen and I were woken up by Mom and Dad arguing loudly in their bedroom next door. It was raining outside. The frogs in the fish pond were silent, but for some reason the weaverbirds were screaming. Through the curtains I could see our tree house, in the fork of the fig tree at the bottom of the garden, light up with each crack of lightning. Suddenly the house shook with an almighty explosion.

  ‘Christ,’ screamed Dad. ‘You’re fucking right! It’s not a thunderstorm – it’s an attack!’

  ZANLA guerrillas had begun mortar-bombing Umtali from the top of the mountain behind us, as they often did. The Rhodesian artillery were firing back from the Vumba, on the far side of Umtali’s valley. The problem was, they were overshooting, and their salvos were sailing over their target and landing around us. We were being shelled by our own side! The house shuddered again. Stof, Zaan, Hel and I blocked our ears and wept under our Basotho blankets. Our dog Flossy’s litter of puppies squirmed in our hands. Mom and Dad cursed the bright light on top of the rigging of a gold mine that had recently begun drilling operations on the western edge of our land. The light lit up our house like a beacon.

  ‘We might as well have a fucking bull’s-eye on the roof!’ Dad screamed.

  There was another explosion.

  ‘We should have built a bunker,’ Sandra wept.

  Bunkers were all the rage in Umtali. Our friends’ fathers were digging up their front lawns and turning them into underground bomb shelters.

  ‘The Gobles have a bunker,’ I said.

  Mom rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not digging up our lawn for a bloody hole in ground,’ she swore. There was another explosion.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Dad, grabbing the FN. ‘I’m going to shoot out the mine light.’

  My mother was incredulous.

  ‘No, you are bloody not,’ she said. ‘You’re staying right here.’

  But my father had made his mind up. He couldn’t keep still.

  ‘Rosalind, they can see us down here. I have to shoot out the light.’

  And with that he was gone, out the door with the gun, into the night.

  Seconds later we heard the biggest explosion yet. The windows shook; it seemed the ceiling might cave in. We looked at each other and we knew: our Dad was dead. Blown up by a 25-pounder on our front lawn. Just then the front door opened, we heard cursing and Dad was back, diving for cover into Sandy’s bedroom. ‘Okay, okay’ he muttered. ‘Maybe that wasn’t such a bright idea.’

  The firing lasted for about an hour, and in the end we survived, shaken but intact. We thought we would get the day off from school, but of course we didn’t. I didn’t mind. Michael Russell and I found lots of shrapnel on the roof of Dad’s office on the main street. Another friend let us hold the tail end of a mortar his brother had picked up on Hillside Golf Course. It had Chinese writing on it. I wished it was mine.

  We left the chicken farm soon after that attack. Most people would have moved to a town by then. My parents bought the grape farm, in an even more dangerous area.

  But it was walking out onto the lawn that the most powerful memory returned to me again, with an intensity that overwhelmed me. It was a dusky evening in November 1977. Mom and Dad were drinking gin and tonics on the veranda. I was hitting cricket balls against the front wall of the house. Stof, Zaan and Hel were pretending to be horses, jumping over imaginary hurdles on the lawn. Our cousins Neil and Barbara, champion show jumpers, had recently come down to compete in the Umtali Agricultural Show. They’d won all the events, and Stof insisted we learn to ride ourselves, even though we didn’t have horses.

  We heard them first: a low, rumbling thwack-thwack-thwack like an electric saw blade wheeling in the air, coming in from the twilight of Mozambique. The noise built to a crescendo. Then we saw them. One, three, ten, twenty – finally more than thirty. They were Rhodesian Air Force helicopters, green-camouflaged, flying through the valley, almost eye level to us on this high promontory, and close enough for us to see the helmeted pilots and the gunners with their weapons in their arms. Dusk was falling, and the choppers’ red warning lights glowed like burning coals as they moved slowly west, toward Salisbury. We all stopped what we were doing and walked silently to the edge of the lawn, hearts racing, eyes on the sky. For several minutes the entire formation was framed in front of us, close enough for us to wave to them and for them to see us waving. It was beautiful. Then my father yelled at me: ‘Douglas! Go get the radio! Hurry!’

  I ran to get his Barlow-Wadley shortwave.

  We knew something big had happened – a raid in Mozambique. We tuned in to all the stations to find out. The attack is known in Zimbabwe today as the Chimoio Massacre. It was known to us Rhodesians at the time as Operation Dingo. It was a surprise dawn raid on a chain of ZANLA guerrilla training camps at Chimoio, eighty kilometres into Mozambique, involving Selous Scouts, ground troops, helicopters, fighter jets and vintage 1940s transport planes. The intention was to kill the ZANLA leadership based in the camps, including Robert Mugabe and the Top Man. It turned out the leaders were all away at a meeting in Maputo. More than twelve hundred people were killed in the daylong assault, and more than three thousand were injured. European radio stations said the dead were mostly refugees, women and children. Our station said they were terrorists.

  I knew what to believe. I ran around the garden, my heart beating madly, my hands in the air. ‘We’ve killed twelve hundred, we’re going to win the war! We’ve killed twelve hundred, we’re going to win the war!’

  I was nine years old.

  I drove home and started packing for our Kariba trip. We would be leaving for Harare at six o’clock the following morning, where we would meet Grace at the airport. Back in New York she would
be getting ready to fly out of JFK. I was excited about her visit, and nervous. A rat had died under the floorboards in my bedroom, and I set up my mattress on the floor of the living room because of the terrible smell. I hoped it would be gone by the time Grace got here.

  The power had gone out, and Mom padded softly through with a gas lantern to get the coffee ready for the morning while I set up my bed. She came and stood in the living room when she was done, and we spoke for a while in the dim glow of the gaslight.

  ‘Ma, was it the mortar attack in seventy-eight that made us leave the chicken farm?’

  ‘No, darling. It was the mine. It made so much bloody noise we couldn’t sleep at night.’

  ‘Wasn’t the grape farm in a more dangerous area?’

  ‘Oh, we didn’t think of that. There was a war on. Land was cheap.’

  She reached over to pull out a box of cigarettes from the chess table drawer and lit one.

  I propped myself up on the mattress. ‘How cheap?’

  ‘Well,’ she said after a while, ‘they said the grape farmhouse was cursed …’

  I loved the way my mother told a story. She spoke slowly, with exaggerated drama, often pausing to look up, as if at the balcony of a theatre, to find the right words.

  ‘The original owner died after being poisoned by her dentist. was having an affair with a socialite in Salisbury. She gathered her seven kids and drove to Mozambique. In Beira she walked out into the sea and drowned herself.’

  She took a deep drag and exhaled an elegant plume. ‘As for the lady we bought it from, she wanted out. She had just seen her neighbour get blown sky high by a land mine while driving a tractor in his fields. She watched it from the living room.’

  ‘Weren’t you afraid to move us there? Helen was only eight. I was ten.’

  She paused again and her mind drifted back to that time. ‘A little. But I spoke to that house. For days I sat in the living room before we moved in, sewing the curtains, and I said to it, “Be good to us. Be good to us.”’