The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  ‘We were never attacked.’

  ‘No,’ she smiled. ‘But close. Neil Barry’s place was shot up in the middle of the day once. Don’t you remember? Dad was away on army call-up. We were all in the swimming pool except Helen, who was riding her bike on the road outside. I had to run and get her while the attack was under way. We found out the gooks had camped the night before beside our fence right by the pool. Their fires were still warm.’

  ‘You must have been mad to move us there,’ I said.

  She took a last, deep drag. ‘That’s what our friends said. And then, two years later, the war was over and we owned a wine farm. That’s when our friends said, “Those Rogerses – lucky bastards.”’

  I soon fell asleep. I dreamed my parents were sitting on the veranda of a beautiful gabled Cape Dutch farmhouse. They were drinking homemade wine out of plastic cups. Helicopters clattered overhead. The view was not of a lawn or maize fields or vineyards, it was of ocean. A woman was walking out into the sea. She turned to wave goodbye to her children on the shore.

  Dad shook me awake. It was still dark outside. It seemed too early to be leaving already.

  ‘Joyce is on the phone,’ he said.

  It was 4:00 am.

  ‘Joyce?’

  ‘Grace’s sister.’

  ‘What? Why’s she calling?’

  ‘She’s on the phone. She needs to talk to you.’ Why would Grace’s sister be calling me in Zimbabwe from New Jersey at 4:00 am?

  I picked up the phone and heard sobbing.

  ‘Joycey?’

  Joyce said: ‘Our mom’s died. You have to get Grace.’

  For six years now I had been waiting for a call from Zimbabwe telling me one of my parents was dead. I never expected to be in Zimbabwe getting a call from America telling me that a parent of Grace’s had died. Barbara had come home from work on the afternoon of 15 June feeling tired. She had had chest pains. She lay down on the back porch of their beautiful home in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, while Ed made her tea in the kitchen. Ed heard her moaning. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital. She died at 7:08 pm in Valley Hospital, Ridgewood, from a massive heart attack.

  Grace had no idea. Her flight had left at the same time her mother was being rushed to the hospital. She was in the air right now, likely somewhere over Senegal, en route to Johannesburg, where I would have to meet her and tell her the news as she stepped off the plane. We would fly straight to New York.

  I packed up my bags. Dad drove us in near-silence to Harare, where I was to catch the emergency flight to Johannesburg. It was more than an hour before any of us spoke.

  ‘I’ll never forget going to see Faust with her at Lincoln Center,’ said Mom. ‘She was such a lovely lady.’

  ‘I’ll tell Grace that, Mom.’

  ‘She looked so young,’ said Dad.

  ‘She was. She did everything.’

  Barbara was seventy years old. Yet she worked full-time as an environmental chemist, and part-time for a dentist doing his books. And she still found time for opera, bridge, a book club, a garden club and tennis. She left the world like she lived life: with gusto, no half measures.

  FOURTEEN

  Entering the Castle

  IN JULY 2006 my parents discovered they no longer owned the farm.

  The Top Man didn’t deliver the news. The Political Commissar, who’d become strangely subdued, even polite, since my visit, was nowhere in sight. Neither was there a mob of chanting war veterans rattling their gates.

  Dad found out through an amiable estate agent in Mutare whom he went to see in a moment of rare triumph: his subdivision had come through. Six months earlier he had applied to the Department of Physical Planning in Mutare to legally separate the lodge and chalets from the rest of his land. Not only would two properties be harder to take than one, he reckoned, but if he managed to get a subdivision, he could try to sell the lodge. Now, incredibly, his man in Physical Planning had called to tell him the application had been approved. He would soon have his papers. That thousand-rand bribe had been well worth it.

  ‘I feel as if we’ve won the lottery!’ he told Mom jubilantly after he got off the phone. ‘It’s freed us up. Now, if we can only find a buyer for Drifters with some cash out of the country, that will be our security, our retirement fund.’

  Mom smiled but said little.

  Ever the optimist, imbued now with a vision of new worlds opening up for them, Dad immediately went to see an estate agent in Mutare about putting Drifters on the market. He knew he wouldn’t get a fair price for it. This was Zimbabwe, after all. People were getting farms for free; buying one was hardly a secure investment. But the approval of the subdivision meant he now owned two separate pieces of land. He was convinced someone would want to buy the lodge. Hell, maybe even one of those businessmen who came out with their hookers might put in an offer. True, the only work they really wanted to do out there was on a mattress, but who couldn’t see the potential in a rustic budget tourist resort with a dozen chalets, a swimming pool, a restaurant and a bar?

  The estate agent, a laid-back fellow by the name of George Moyo, leaned back in his chair in his office off Herbert Chitepo Road, listening to Dad’s request.

  ‘Of course we can look for a buyer for you, Mr Rogers,’ he said, ‘but are you sure you own the land?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Are you sure you own the property in question?’

  Dad laughed.

  ‘I bought it. I’ve lived there for sixteen years. It’s mine.’

  ‘Yes, but wasn’t your title deed cancelled?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Wasn’t your title deed rescinded last year?’

  Moyo was starting to annoy my father. What was he talking about?

  ‘What do you know about my title deed? I have the original, the government has a copy. Nothing’s changed. I own the bloody place.’

  The estate agent stopped rocking in his chair. He leaned forward and spoke in a low, serious tone, like a doctor about to inform a patient of a terminal illness – cancer, perhaps.

  ‘I am not sure how to tell you this, Mr Rogers, but in August 2005 the government passed an amendment cancelling the title deeds on all existing farms and stripping the owners of the right to appeal expropriations.’

  My father’s heart did a somersault and landed near his feet. What? Had he not gotten the memo? Perhaps he’d not read the Herald on the day in question. The government passed new land laws all the time and never informed the people affected by them. Farmers literally discovered that their homes had been designated for resettlement by reading it in the small print in the Herald on a Friday while scanning the newspaper for Premiership soccer results. Mom and Dad only found out Drifters had been listed in 2003 because Stephanie phoned them from Harare when she saw they had made the papers. That was one phone call he wanted to forget. But then, with a surge of relief, Dad remembered the amendment. It had been pretty big news at the time.

  ‘Oh, that!’ he said. ‘No, no. That was for farms that had been designated. Our designation never went through. We objected. The land inspectors came and saw that it wasn’t suitable for farming. It was taken off the list. It’s basically a hotel. No, that law only applied to farms that were designated.’ But then his voice rose an involuntary octave. ‘Didn’t it?’ he added.

  The estate agent sighed sympathetically.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Rogers, but I think you’ll find that the law applied to everyone. There are hundreds of people in this country who have no idea they no longer own their homes. Before we proceed, may I suggest you check with the Registrar of Deeds in Harare that they’ve not rescinded your title?’

  Dad felt a shiver run from his neck to the base of his spine. The word rescinded made his skin crawl. So did the words Regis trar of Deeds. They called to mind tall, grey, windowless cement buildings filled with faceless bureaucrats who sat at empty desks and put official stamps on pieces of paper that ruined people’s lives forever. The she
er banality of it chilled him.

  Now he started to panic. What if the amendment did apply to him? How had he missed that? He was a lawyer, constantly planning ahead, always on the lookout for the next series of hurdles the government put in his way. He thought he had stayed one step ahead of their relentless game.

  He phoned the Physical Planning official who had gotten him the subdivision.

  ‘Listen, Mr Maranga, there might be a problem here. Can you get me a copy of my title deed from the registrar in Harare? I’m sure it’s nothing, but someone here is saying the government may have, well, cancelled it.’

  David Maranga sat at an empty desk deep in the bowels of Physical Planning behind the OK Bazaars department store on Robert Mugabe Avenue. He was a vaguely competent man with a permanent half smile who always wore a neatly pressed suit and tie. He had started to complain to my father these past few months as he massaged the subdivision through that if it ever became known in the Ministry of Lands that he was helping a white man, he could lose his job.

  But he was very helpful this morning.

  ‘Yes, Mr Rogers, I can get them to fax me a copy.’

  The fax came through a couple of days later and Dad went to see him.

  ‘It’s here,’ said Mr Maranga, handing him the document with the half smile.

  It was an exact replica of the original my father had in his safe.

  But there had been an addition to it.

  A large, official-looking stamp had been planted smack in the centre. It read: In terms of Section 168(4) of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, this Property now vests in the President of Zimbabwe.

  It was dated November 2005. The government had owned my parents’ farm for eight months already.

  My father wanted to vomit. Gradually the reality of their situation began to sink in. They no longer owned their own home.

  They were still on it, but they had now joined the legions of dispossessed waiting for the new owner to claim it.

  He thought back to all the schemes he had adopted over the years to ward off the war veterans, the settlers, the Top Man, the Commissar. He’d hauled out the shotgun. Grown the bush wild. Erected an electric fence around the house. Shot at baboons and the poachers’ dogs just to let the settlers in the valley know that he had a gun. Spoken to Chief Mutasa. Contested the Section Five. Met the lands inspectors – three times – and seen them delist the property, agreeing that it wasn’t suitable for farming. Leased cottages to black tenants. Leased the camp bar to a black farmer. Given lifts to the Commissar and probed his motives. Even avoided the interests of the Top Man himself, a man with a voracious appetite for property, a man with five farms of his own. All the while the bush grew taller, the shotgun stayed loaded, and Muranda kept him abreast of the latest goings-on with the war vets and visitors to the camp.

  And for what? Nothing! Now they were sitting ducks. He envisioned how it would happen. The Ministry of Lands had what was called ‘the list’.

  It was a list of all farms now ‘vested in the president’. Ones that had not already been swept up by ministers, generals, brigadiers and senior party officials were now being handed out to ordinary applicants, those A2 farmers. An applicant simply had to go to the ministry and say he wanted to farm. He wouldn’t have to pay anything. He wouldn’t even have to be a farmer. He could be an accountant, a doctor, a hamburger flipper. All he had to prove was that he was a supporter of the ruling party and claim that he could run a farm. He might have a particular farm in mind – one he’d driven past and liked the look of – or he would simply be allocated one.

  Dad pictured how the meeting would go. The Ministry of Lands official would scroll down the list with his forefinger. Would Drifters be under D or under R? He presumed R, alphabetically lower. If it had been under D, they would have lost it months ago.

  ‘What about this one?’ the official would say, as if offering ice cream.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Seven hundred and fifty acres. On some hills near Mutare. Not good farmland. Signs of a river. Apparently lots of buildings. Chalets. A tourist lodge with a bar.’

  ‘Like a hotel? Excellent – I’ll take that.’

  The applicant would then be given an offer letter.

  An offer letter gave him the rights to the farm. (It was supposed to be followed by a 99-year lease, although these rarely came.) He would drive onto the farm and hand the farmer the letter. The farmer would then have to vacate the premises.

  Dad pictured his A2, some city twerp in a slick suit, driving through his front gate in a BMW or Land Cruiser or Toyota Camry and presenting him with his letter. He suddenly wished he was back to worrying about the Commissar. At least there he knew what he was dealing with.

  The news of the loss of the title deed spread to the cottage residents like wildfire – before he had even told any of them. It was as if the tenants just sensed something was wrong.

  Confidence dropped, like a crash in the markets, and the mood darkened. A rumour soon spread that by 20 December, every white farm in the country would be passed on to new owners. Or was it a rumour? It was hard to keep up with the new laws; fact merged easily with fantasy. Some said it was true but that farmers had forty-five days to vacate from that date or be prosecuted. Either way, a deadline appeared to be looming.

  Unita Herrer and Lady Charlotte left for South Africa at this point. They were joined on their way out the gate by Danie and Hanli Slabbert, an Afrikaner couple who’d briefly found refuge in Cottage 15 after losing their farm to the Top Man. Hanli was a famous Afrikaans gospel singer who had won music awards, performed in concerts in America, Brazil and Israel, and sung for crowds of forty thousand people at Christian festivals in South Africa. Hanli was a church minister as well as a gospel singer, and she preached to congregations throughout the valley. She said she became a born-again Christian one night in July 1978 during the war, when she and Danie were attacked in their home with RPG-7 rockets, AK-47s and mortars by ZANLA guerrillas. I could see why that might have done it. The thought that they were all about to lose their homes for a second time helped ease the sadness of their departure.

  But then, out of the blue, Dave Burnett, a veteran stalwart of the cottages who had lived in number 10 since 1998 and been something of a talisman for the community – helping to maintain levies, hosting Sunday afternoon braais and sundowners at his cottage, the highest on the hill – suddenly upped and left, too.

  Mom took the fatalist view.

  ‘Everyone has to look after themselves,’ she said.

  But Dad was annoyed.

  ‘First sign of real trouble and Dave’s out of here? Fuck me. Not the kind of guy you want in the trenches when the shit goes down.’

  ‘It’s hardly the first sign of trouble, Lyn,’ she told him. ‘Really, I’m amazed some of these people have stuck it out this long.’

  My mother had stopped worrying about the title deed at this point. She’d come to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do. Their future was in the laps of the gods, and the gods were faceless bureaucrats in those grey, windowless buildings. They would deal with an A2 when he turned up.

  But then the atmosphere at the camp bar got nasty, and she did worry. Dawson had found work at a Western-funded aid organisation that was training rural farmers to grow crops for export – exactly what he’d been doing at Kondozi for a Zimbabwean company – and he rarely opened the bar now, but one Sunday afternoon Mom and Dad were up at the house when a blast of music louder than anything they’d heard in Sydney’s hip-hop heyday rent the still air, scattering the loeries from the sycamores.

  ‘It sounded like a bloody nightclub,’ she explained to me later. ‘Dad and I went to get them to turn it down. The bar wasn’t open at all, but on the back deck there were a dozen buggers and their girlfriends or mahures having a party, several crates of beer open, and this huge ghetto-blaster on.

  ‘Your dad loses his temper in these situations, so I walked upstairs to speak to them while he stood back w
ith Muranda by the chalets. I told them, very politely, “Excuse me, gentlemen, you’re very welcome to drink here and listen to music, but please keep it down as other people live on the property.”

  ‘One of them was sitting on a garden chair, shirt off, sunglasses on, in military trousers. He sneered at me: “Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  ‘I said, “No, and frankly I don’t care. I don’t mind you listening to music, but please respect the rights of the other people living on this property.”

  ‘Then he said, “Do you know that I am a guerrilla? Do you know that you white people are only allowed to stay here because we are letting you stay?”

  ‘Well, I just laughed. He was about thirty years old! I said, “Oh, please. Come, come, young man! You’re far too young to have ever been in the war.”

  ‘His friends started laughing. I didn’t know if it was at him or me, but the stereo was next to him and he made an exaggerated show of turning it down.

  ‘But then, as I was walking away, one of the women on deck shouted after me: “Go back to Britain! Go back to Blair!”

  ‘Well, your dad heard that and he stormed over from the chalets. I wanted to turn around and tell her to shut up, but I ran down the stairs to stop your father and calm him down. But what could we do? Who knows who they were? You don’t know whom to trust anymore, and in the back of your mind you know they could very well make things very difficult for you.’

  Dawson’s lease ended a few weeks later in the controversial aftermath of a near-riot down at the camp. Mom and Dad had arrived back from a trip to town one Saturday to discover a dozen vehicles in their driveway and a long line of cars queuing up outside Drifters’ gate. It looked like a crowd for a rock concert.

  Dad stopped to ask the man in the lead car what they were doing here.

  ‘Where is the AIDS party?’ the driver asked.

  ‘AIDS party?’

  ‘I’ve bought a ticket for an AIDS party at this Drifters place. There is a band. Free food. Free drink. Some discussions on AIDS.’