The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  A month later Sandra called. The first stage, citizenship, was complete. But now she needed money up front to process the passport fee.

  ‘She wanted another US$100 – in addition to the US$200 I would pay her when I actually got my new passport. But I trusted her and I paid it.’ When Mom asked how long it would take, Sandra told her one more month, no longer than that.

  A month later Mom got another call. Sandra asked to meet her downtown, at the lower end of Herbert Chitepo Road, near the Indian quarter. My mother was excited. At last she was going to get her passport! She arrived at the address, a little disturbed to discover that it was directly opposite a police station. Sandra was waiting for her on the curb and climbed into the car.

  ‘The price has gone up,’ she said calmly. ‘I need an extra US$100 before they can process the document.’

  My mother was stunned.

  ‘What? I’m sorry, Sandra, but we had a deal. You told me it would cost US$200 in total. I’ve already paid you US$100 extra. I will pay you the US$200 when I get my passport. That’s all.’

  A policemen walked past. Two other cops stood at the doorway to the station. Was she just being paranoid, or were they watching her? Sandra suddenly flew into a rage.

  ‘It has gone up! You need to give me US$100 more. You must pay!’

  My mother suddenly felt annoyed – as much with herself as with Sandra. What had she been thinking, going down this route? She was sixty-six years old and being forced to fence for her birthright with a woman younger than her own daughters. But she tried to stay calm.

  ‘No, Sandra. I’m not giving you US$100. I don’t know what’s happened and why you’re doing this to me now, but I’m not paying any more money.’

  ‘Then you will not get your passport!’ Sandra snapped.

  ‘Fine. Forget my fucking passport – you won’t get your money.’

  ‘But you have to pay me for the work I have done. The time I have spent!’

  ‘Sandra, I have already given you US$100!’

  ‘That was for the processing! That was not for me. If you do not pay me for the work I have done, I will report you inside.’ She pointed to the police station. ‘I will tell them you are stealing from me. They are my friends.’

  So this was why Sandra had wanted to meet there – to intimidate Mom.

  My mother suddenly wondered how things had gone downhill so fast. The early cordiality of their relationship had disappeared. Only a minute ago she had liked Sandra, even admired her. But now a line was drawn: they were enemies. And for the first time, my mother was genuinely frightened. She felt a pit in her stomach, the same hollow fear she always experienced when a strange car appeared in the driveway, the same feeling she’d had down at the camp when the drunk man in the dark glasses told her that he was a guerrilla and they were only on the farm because he was allowing them to stay. I’m too old for all this, she thought. And who is this Sandra? Did she really know the police? Or is she bluffing, trying to frighten me? She was struck, too, by a desperate irony that almost made her laugh: this twenty-one-year-old woman blackmailing her had the same name as her own daughter, whose passport she had once gotten from the same office forty years ago – in two days. What had happened to her once orderly and law-abiding hometown?

  My mother weighed her options and decided on the only feasible one.

  ‘Okay, Sandra, what do you want for this supposed work you’ve done?’

  ‘US$50.’

  My mother thought it outrageous. But at that point she just wanted to get away. Hell, for the first time she even wanted to leave the godforsaken country. Maybe it was time to get out, to go to Mozambique, South Africa. But then it hit her: she couldn’t! She had no passport! She was stuck – a prisoner.

  ‘Okay, Sandra,’ she said. ‘I will pay you US$50 and then I never want to see you again. I think you have lied to me here. You’ve gone against your word.’ She had two crisp US$100 notes in her handbag to pay for the passport. ‘I have US$100 on me – you need to give me change.’

  ‘Give me the US$100 and I will go and get change,’ said Sandra.

  ‘No, no, no, young lady! I don’t trust you to bring me my change. You wait here and I will go and get change.’

  She had decided she would go see Miss Moneypenny, but there was no way she was going to take Sandra with her and expose Moneypenny’s hideout.

  ‘I don’t trust you, either,’ scoffed Sandra. ‘You will not come back.’

  My mother was furious. ‘You don’t trust me? I’m not the one who broke her word!’

  ‘I did not break my word – the price went up!’

  They were getting nowhere.

  ‘We can change on the street,’ said Sandra.

  She pointed to some dealers on the pavement, those same streetwise teenagers fencing fuel, cooking oil, sugar, bread and flour. Mom was struck by how much commercial activity still seemed to go on in town despite the economic morass: where did people find the money? She and Dad had wondered about it in recent months. There seemed to be a wild energy – new cars on the streets, more dealers. Did remittances fuel all this trade? But she knew one thing and told Sandra as much: no mere street dealer in Mutare was possibly rich enough to carry change for US$100 – it was a small fortune.

  Sandra looked at her, incredulous.

  ‘They have! They all have! Come, we can change.’

  Though my mother doubted it, she said, ‘Okay, but not here. Not by your police station.’

  They drove into the centre of town, several blocks north, where they parked outside the Dairy Den, a popular ice cream and burger shack with outdoor seating right next to Dad’s old law firm. Dairy Den was where Mutare schoolkids used to hang out – our own mall. Helen and I had drunk brown cows (Coke floats) here with our friends, waiting for Dad to finish work and take us home. No longer frequented by schoolkids, its red tables were filled with street dealers sporting baseball caps and baggy jeans.

  And then my mother witnessed something extraordinary.

  Sandra went to ask the four dealers at the first table if they had change for US$100, and they all casually pulled out thick bundles of cash from their pockets. Not Zimbabwe dollars – greenbacks! Huge wads of crisp $20, $50 and $100 bills. My mother’s eyes were wide as saucers. She had never seen so much cash in her life. How was this possible? How had they gotten it?

  Getting change was easy after that. She handed over US$100, got two US$50 bills back, and gave Sandra one. Their deal was over. There was no warm goodbye. No ‘see you later’. No love lost at all. My mother walked back to her car, shaking, on the verge of tears. She no longer understood her town, the town where she had been born sixty-six years before.

  If the catastrophic economic consequences of the land invasions were entirely predictable back in 2000, in July 2007 the government came close to surpassing that policy for stupidity. With inflation nearing 20 000 per cent and prices surging by the hour, they came up with a new law: they ordered shop owners to slash prices by fifty per cent. The brain trust behind the policy, the National Incomes and Pricing Commission, was headed by a convicted criminal. As for the president, he maintained that it wasn’t corruption, mismanagement or the arbitrary printing of vast amounts of cash that created hyperinflation and high costs; rather, it was unscrupulous businessmen ‘in collusion with the West’ who charged too much in order to drive the desperate population to drag down his government.

  And so, in an urban reenactment of the land invasions, in the second week of July 2007, soldiers, policemen, war veterans and youth militia – the inflation Taliban – raided shops and businesses across the country and forced them to cut prices. Prices were to be set back to mid-June levels, when inflation was around 10 000 percent, half the July rate. The result was state-sanctioned theft. In an insane, week-long shopping orgy, supermarket shelves were emptied within hours as militiamen hovered over checkout counters and called out new prices as they saw fit, and their friends and family members rampaged down the aisles. Bak
eries, bottle stores and the few remaining butcheries were cleaned out. Thousands of horrified shop owners who didn’t comply were arrested for ‘profiteering’.

  It wasn’t only food prices that were slashed, but luxury goods, too: computers and flat-screen televisions were snapped up for a few black-market dollars; the Bata shoe company lost its entire inventory in two days; motorcars were rolled out of showrooms by militia youths who could barely afford bread weeks earlier. Meikles, the most famous hotel in Harare, lost a celebrated wine collection in one sitting as diners discovered prized bottles of French Bordeaux now cost the equivalent of US$5. The country had no bread, but Harare street vendors suddenly discovered they could actually afford high tea in Meikles’s sumptuous Edwardian lobby, and they swarmed the salon for cream scones.

  ‘I thought we had reached the bottom, but the lift keeps going down,’ Mom wrote to me. ‘We are passing the basement now. Nevertheless, it is quite exciting to watch. You never know what a new day will bring.’

  My father compared the regime’s thinking at this point to King Canute. ‘Canute commanded the tide to recede, but the sea and tides don’t listen to the commandments of men. Basic economic laws do not, either. The consequences of this will be even greater disaster,’ he wrote me. And of course, they were.

  Shop owners who lost everything overnight could no longer afford to buy new stock. Manufacturers, unpaid by shop owners, could no longer afford to produce. Plants and factories shut down. The government tried to pass a law forcing them to produce, but the tides didn’t obey. By August, virtually every supermarket in the country was bare, and surreal film footage of endless empty aisles was broadcast around the world. Then, in September, for the first time in its history, Zimbabwe ran out of beer. Breweries closed down, and taverns, beer halls and restaurants ran dry. Five-star hotels where chefs and CEOs drank had only the cheapest lager. Some wags speculated that this was it: the shortage of booze would finally rouse the population to rebellion and bring down the regime.

  Every bar in the country had run out of beer except one, that is, and that one had lots of it.

  On a bright morning in early September a seven-ton truck pulled up at Drifters. The truck belonged to Tendai. It was the one he had bought with the proceeds from the sale of an imported London bus. Tendai, it turned out, was no bullshitter. He was very much for real. Four boys sat in the back atop a cargo of wooden crates piled high. The crates were filled with beer, a complete menu of it: Castle Lager, emerald-green bottles of golden Zambezi, tall amber quarts of crisp Black Label. Tendai was there to greet his crew and help them carry the cargo upstairs into a new refrigerator he’d installed. Drifters even had regular power at this point (one of the ZESA tenants informed my mother that a government minister had taken a farm in the valley on the same feeder as Drifters), and so not only did Tendai have beer, but it was cold. The seven-ton truck left. It returned the following day with more beer. Then it left and returned with food: goat, lamb, pork chops, chicken, beef, maize meal and hamburgers.

  My parents realised something odd was up when the phone started ringing. They hadn’t received inquiries about Drifters for a year.

  ‘We hear you have beer!’ a caller would say. ‘Is this really true?’

  ‘We hear you have cold beer!’ exclaimed another. ‘Is this possible?’

  They even got a call from La Rochelle, the hotel and botanical garden in the east of the valley: could they come and buy beer from them? By this time Muranda had run up to deliver even more remarkable news.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, wide-eyed in astonishment. ‘We have customers! Very many customers!’

  And so they did.

  My parents walked down to the lodge and laid eyes on a remarkable sight: a line of motorcars stretched all the way to the gate. Four acolytes slashed at the bush by the camp to make way for more parking. Up in the bar, meanwhile, it appeared that the entire beer-starved population of Mutare was quenching its thirst, knocking back the golden nectar faster than they could order it, and feasting on chicken, chips, stew, sadza, lamb chops and hamburgers from the kitchen.

  My parents looked on in wonder. Drifters had not been this busy since the millennium – and that seemed about a thousand years ago. As for Tendai, they now saw him in an entirely new light.

  ‘He calmly glides above the fray of rowdy young drunks, making notes in his black accounts book on the couch at the back of the bar, and even instructs his barmen not to play the music too loud so it won’t disturb the neighbours,’ wrote Mom. ‘I have to say, he’s rather impressive.’

  Dad asked Tendai how it had happened. He replied calmly: ‘My strategies are paying off, Mr Rogers.’

  Mom jokingly complained to Tendai that the telephone hadn’t stopped ringing.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Rogers,’ he apologised. ‘Perhaps you can just leave a message on the machine: “This is Drifters, we have beer – plenty plus!”’

  My parents didn’t ask him where he’d gotten that beer. They didn’t want to know. But it dawned on them that he must really be connected to the Top Man, and they weren’t quite sure what to make of it at that point. What surprised them even more, though, was the clientele. They were mostly men and women in their twenties and thirties – a generation younger than the usual well-connected fat cats who frequented the place. How did these young people have so much money? Tendai was charging five times the usual price for beer and much more for food – there were no inflation Taliban out in the bush – and yet his customers happily ponied up the bucks. Even the fleet of chariots surprised my parents. There were Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, gleaming Opels and several neat little Nissan Suns, one with a private licence plate that read 007. Often, standing beside the cars and drinking beer or flirting with a girl from the bar, would be a guard, taking his turn while his friends partied inside.

  But who were my parents to wonder? Drifters had miraculously reinvented itself again. And their chalet business, their main source of income, was thriving once more. For the first time in years some of the customers were even genuine guests. They would get too drunk and choose to spend the night, or they would phone to book a chalet for a weekend of nonstop liquor. The lodge had become an oasis of alcohol in the bush, and the good times rolled.

  And yet, if Drifters was a drink-fuelled oasis, it was on an island. For just beyond the gates of the farm, the valley was in disarray and as dangerous as ever. My parents had long since lost their fence and animals to poachers and had their cottages and toolshed burgled. But now the last three commercial farmers in the area – the black farmers Ernest Muzorewa, Margaret Matongo and Dr John Pfumojena – were becoming victims of crime, too. Their farms were raided for irrigation equipment, feedstock, fuel supplies, fencing, cables and even telephone wires as bandits ran rampant. Which was why Ernest Muzorewa came to see Dad at the house one afternoon with a proposition. He and the other farmers wanted to get policemen to run permanent security patrols in the area. If they could find good policemen, would it be possible to base these men at Drifters? Dad listened to his request. He quietly wished Ernest had suggested it six years ago, when Drifters was first under siege. But he still thought it a good idea. Actually, he considered it a brilliant idea, and he knew just the man to help them find the right kind of policemen: Walter the soldier.

  My father had gotten closer to Walter these past nine months. Walter still hadn’t procured him an offer letter, but he often came to stay the night at Drifters before trips to Harare on Dad’s behalf. He phoned regularly to update him, and even apologised for the slow progress. Dad still wasn’t sure whether to trust him, but he’d worked out that if the soldier had been going to take Drifters for himself, he would have done so by now. Besides, there were those strange words the soldier had said at the bus stop, which I had duly reported back to them: Don’t worry, Rogers junior, I will protect your mother and father.

  By now Dad had even introduced Walter to Miss Moneypenny (not at her lair, of course), and she had agreed to pay him a small f
ortune if he would take her to meet the Destroyer, that famous n’anga, in the hope that he might be able to exact her revenge on the slimebag who’d stolen her money and house. A drive to the mountains to visit a world-ranked witch? Dad wanted in on that trip. In the meantime, he phoned Walter about security.

  ‘Walter, can you help me?’ he asked. ‘There is lots of crime around this area right now. Muzorewa, Matongo, and I are thinking of getting some policemen in to stay here at Drifters and do patrols of the area. Some good men.’

  There was a long silence.

  Usually my father practised the pregnant pause, not Walter.

  Finally the soldier spoke.

  ‘Mr Rogers,’ he said softly, ‘I don’t think that will be a wise idea.’

  Dad was surprised.

  ‘Why is that, Walter?’

  ‘Mr Rogers, you are prospering at this time. I have seen your place. It is very busy. This is good. Why do you want to change that situation?’

  ‘Why will it change, Walter? It might make it better. Safer for the customers. They won’t even have to worry about having to guard their cars.’

  ‘Mr Rogers, I don’t think you understand. The young people who come to drink at your place – they do not want my police friends to be watching them.’

  ‘Ah, Walter, I understand. It’s because these customers bring prostitutes out here. Yes, I can see why that would be difficult.’

  ‘No, Mr Rogers,’ said Walter. ‘That is not the reason. The people who frequent your place are diamond dealers. Illegal diamond dealers.’

  SIXTEEN

  Diamonds

  THE DIAMOND FIELD had been discovered in the Marange communal lands of southeastern Zimbabwe in September 2006, right next to the now barren and derelict Kondozi farm and adjacent to Speros Landos’s old place. It was a mere 24 kilometres over the camel-humped hills at the back of Drifters.