He turned quickly.
“No!” I yelled.
The bullet hit the soldier with enough force to knock him down, his arms spinning. His Kalashnikov flew through the air. He wasn’t dead, though, and he rolled onto his front and started to drag himself with eyes bulging. He made short gasping noises.
Ivan stood over him. Over on the edge of the field I was aware of people running, getting nearer.
“You see? Kaffirs: too stupid. If he was white I’d quite rightly be dead by now.”
He pointed his gun at the back of the soldier’s skull and braced himself for the shot.
I’m not sure I remember actually picking up the Kalashnikov from the grass, just that it was in my hands with smoke drifting from the barrel. The echo of an explosion was in my ears, and Ivan was staggering backward as though he had been yanked by something invisible.
He gazed at me stupidly with a thousand and one questions in his face. Then at the small hole in the shoulder of his blazer. A second later, a small spot of dark appeared on the blue material, expanding slowly.
“What the”—the pain started to creep in on him—“fuck?”
My head spun. The metal of the Kalashnikov was searing and cold against my fingers.
“I can’t let you do it,” I told him.
“But . . .” he grimaced. The pistol hung limply from the end of his lifeless arm, he grabbed it with his left hand and waved it about to make his point. “Don’t you get it? After everything I’ve told you?”
“Yes, I get it. I get everything. You’re the one who doesn’t.”
He let my words sink in, then twisted his mouth and pointed his pistol straight at me. I could see right down the barrel. It was deep and black. Sweat ran into my eyes.
“I almost admire you, Jacko. But you’re fighting for the wrong side.”
“There are no sides. Not anymore. Can’t you see that what you’re doing is all wrong?” I said. And I remembered what a friend of mine by the name of Nelson Ndube had once told me. “Wars should be about putting an end to a wrong, not making a new one.”
His head shook from side to side. He reasserted his grip around the butt of the gun and held it steady.
“Stupid Pommie bastard.”
A second crack punctured the air.
I stumbled, expecting pain yet finding none. I looked up, and it was Ivan who was tottering on his feet. His mouth was wide-open. He blinked slowly, looking at me, though I think he’d worked out what was happening before I had, a glimmer of sadness drowning in frustrated, undiluted anger. Because that’s all it ever was: anger, with no place to put it.
“You . . .” he started.
The bodyguard shouted as he charged near. Ivan swung the gun that way, and the bodyguard dropped and fired another shot. Ivan folded at the hips as a flash of red flew out of the back of his blazer. Now there was only disbelief in him. He turned, barely in control yet managing to get upright.
“You . . .”
The bodyguard readied himself again, one eye closed, but his gun clicked harmlessly onto a jammed chamber.
Ivan landed his sights on me.
The Kalashnikov jumped in my hands and the final bullet punched into Ivan’s chest. He fell backward and landed on the ground as if at the top of a sit-up, with legs straight and arms limply by his sides.
His head nodded, fading.
“You should have let me do it,” he whispered. “You’ll see.”
Then no more words came, just a strange gurgling as his head dropped and his chin tipped closer and closer to his knees until at last it stopped. After that, he didn’t move at all. Not even as they pulled me off the field to some waiting car. As far as I was concerned he stayed like that forever, bowed to the tall bodyguard at his feet, his hair moving lightly in a sudden breeze that somehow gave no relief.
Zimbabwe
Today
FORTY
The school is closed now.
I already knew that. There were no surprises as I pulled from the main road and up the drive to find a heavy chain hanging from the gate like an ill-disciplined tie. Even so, it took me a long time to leave the car.
Tell me about your school days.
From my wife, my friends, my colleagues. The bullet I’ve excelled at dodging.
“Here it is,” I could reply for the first time. “This is the place.”
And I climbed out beneath the huge summer clouds.
The chain rattled its empty threat as I climbed the fence, but at the top the past came spiraling toward me, and in the next moment I was slipping down the other side, fingers raking metal, into a cloud of dust.
Jacko! A shout came as I hit. Run, Jacko. I’m telling you, you’d better run hard cos we’re coming to get you. Gonna slot you, one time. You’re dead.
The school is closed now, but that has nothing to do with what happened back then, with what we did.
As the bodyguards had pushed against me in the back of that car, the guest of honor had gone on to finish his speech and open the new boardinghouse as planned. He’d then been driven away—in blissful ignorance, I’m sure—and I doubt he gave that day a second thought as he returned to his eventful working life as prime minister, then president, then tyrant and oppressor. The school closures (for Haven was by no means alone) were a part of that life and had made international news, a stabbing punctuation mark amid all the sorry and sadistic stories of Mugabe’s determination to run this forsaken country into the ground. Unheard cries—a country is burning yet no one will tackle the flames.
You should have let me do it . . .
Leaning against the fence, I looked around to see who might be there watching. No one was. Just me with a whole load of ghosts.
I turned and faced the empty road, a view that had evoked so many emotions, good and bad, in the past. Those emotions weren’t there for me anymore. A relief: truly, I was no longer the boy I’d once been. Surely.
I walked on around the ring road. Heat bounced off the tarmac in waves, and I paused to peel off the boots and damp socks from another hemisphere and continued barefoot, exactly as we had done as children in Africa. Everywhere, grass lapped at buildings like a hungry sea.
The lower playing fields opened up to my left. Beyond, out there somewhere beneath the level-topped canopy, the bush hid the Cliffs, haunted forevermore by the shallow graves that had been discovered there, Nelson Ndube’s among them. All the action of some crazy from a neighboring village, apparently, or at least that had been the conclusion of the lazy police. But I know.
I know.
The sun drowned beneath slate, dark patches bled and became one.
You should have let me do it, the voice came again. You’ll see.
His voice, reaching and grabbing me just as it had always done, making me do things I knew I didn’t want to do. For one horrible moment I thought I saw him there, as I’d seen him so many times in my dreams. I couldn’t go on. It wasn’t going to work.
Dread filled my legs and I slumped to the side of the road.
I’ve no idea how long I was like that before the old man wheeled slowly past me on a bicycle that creaked and groaned as if every turn of the pedal might be its last. He gazed unemotionally down on this pale white man (and somewhat covetously at the boots by my side) before wobbling to an inelegant stop.
“Eweh! Shamwari. What is happening?”
His voice sounded stern but the lines of his face gave him away. He was just curious. He scratched at thin patches of hair, and his large brown eyes swam in a yellowy sea of age. Sad, tired eyes. No election fever there. Once upon a time, maybe, not anymore.
When I couldn’t find a response I thought he might move on, but I was too much for him to ignore. I was murungu. A white man. What on earth was the likes of me doing here? It wasn’t safe.
With a touching diligence, he put his bike to one side and sat close by. I noted his clothes: flannel trousers, shirt, sweater, and tweed jacket despite the heat. All hopelessly old and beyond better
days, yet he brushed off splashes of dirt as though he couldn’t see the decay that covered each item like a rash. He didn’t have any shoes on, probably because he didn’t have any shoes. I was hit with wood smoke and musty body odor.
He stared and produced a smile of gaps and gums.
“My friend. You are crying many tears; you must be most unhappy. What is this that you are feeling most unhappy about?”
I was touched. I liked him.
I wiped the tears I hadn’t realized were there, then picked up a rock and focused on it.
“I was at school here. Many years ago.”
“Ah! For sure?” He met the news with delight. “But this school, it was ve-ry very good. The teachers, they were ve-ry very good. You are luckyman. You have nice clothes and a nice watch. You are lucky. I think this was a good school for you.”
“Let’s just say I didn’t leave with the grades I should have had.”
“There is a lot more to an education than what happens inside the classroom.”
I sat up.
“Very true, shamwari,” I said. “Very true.”
Not realizing the importance of what he’d said, his eyes flashed over my blue-white skin.
“You have come long way, so I believe you must like it here very much. You are young man. It cannot be so long ago. You must remember it well.”
“A little too well.” I flung the rock and it fizzed into the grass. “Do you work near here?”
He laughed.
“Shamwari, there is no work here. The Old Man took it away. He lied and took everything for himself. The white man can be blamed for many things, but the Old Man must also be blamed. Mugabe was tsotsi. Mambara. Because he was a thief without care who stole our hope,” he lamented. “And now I am old man, too, the arms and the legs are verr-ry very slow now.”
The air rustled through the trees. Thunder rolled in the distance.
“The afternoon rains are on their way and I do not want my new jacket wet,” he announced. “My wife will not be pleased. My girlfriends will not be pleased, either.”
“It’s never good to upset your wife. I did, over and over. And my daughter.”
“Ah! A little one. How many years?”
“Three next month.” With a longing for the absent I was glad to feel, I showed him a picture of blonde bunches and dimpled cheeks.
“I know this!” he burst. “I know this pride that a father has for a little one such as this. I had seven daughters!”
The smile became fuller, richer. It was the sort that belonged to someone marveling at a setting sun: a moment of privilege and pleasure as you behold a sight so beautiful you never want to lose it, knowing you must.
“Now I have none. This country . . .” He gave the photo back, its light fading for him. “It is not a young person’s country, for it will never let you get old. I am old, but I am luckyman. My children . . . Now there is only my son. His name is Tuesday. He is half blinded. I pray that he can see only half the evil spirits that are surrounding us here.”
Already the tears were coming again because I knew what he would then say.
“My name is Weekend.” He offered me his coarse hand.
I took it and held it tightly, and, as with our common memories, never wanted to let it go.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”
But I could no more tell him I knew him than I could tell anyone about my school days and what we’d done back then, and what I’d done.
So I stood and said my good-bye and watched him clamber onto his bike, though not before I’d passed over my watch and boots and all the money I had in my pockets. Perhaps it was wrong, but he gave me something all those years ago for which I never repaid him, and yet I took so much.
He rode inexpertly away. I watched and let the first droplets smack against the tarmac around me before rounding the corner to Selous House.
Ignoring the rain, I stood under the gaze of those louvered windows. There was no spark of recognition in them. No emotion of any kind. All of that was on my side; it plagued me like the swarm that had once pushed me so close to the edge. Sweat pricked my scalp.
I found another stone.
It gave me no pleasure to hear the shattering of silence or to see two strips of glass disappear into my old study beyond, but there was satisfaction of a sort. Leaving this place had been a voiceless moment. There’d been no anguished cry or even a look back in anger as they’d driven me away, and I hadn’t uttered a word all through my arrest. In the end they’d had to let me go: I’d helped save a soldier’s life, thank you very much, be on your way and forget about it. That’s what they said they would do. But from that day until the time I finally left for an alien life in England, I never felt fully alone: cigarette smoke from parked cars, passersby in inappropriate suits, strangers with a knowing look . . . Ivan—my friend—had brought a gun to within spitting distance of the prime minister, so I don’t believe they ever stopped watching me, hungry to protect their corrupt leader.
“There goes a great, great man,” my father had told me as we’d headed toward my first day at Haven. “He’s given the people freedom—what could be a greater achievement than that?”
But you can’t give freedom. Freedom must be found.
The wind was gusting now, the rain strong.
You should have let me . . .
The voice that has been with me without mercy for over twenty years.
I tipped my head and let the downpour wash through me, and suddenly I was fifteen again, in history, with a teacher called Mr. van Hout asking the question.
“If I stood you in front of a man, pressed the cold metal of a gun into your palm and told you to squeeze the trigger, would you do it . . . ?”
Unlike then, I had an answer.
“Yes.”
Because I’d already done it, and Ivan was dead because of it.
But the country I’d come back to was one I scarcely recognized, a mere remnant writhing in a swamp of persecution and corruption, of anger and hatred, of death, misery, and disease. Families are destroyed by starvation and AIDS and preventable illnesses every single day. Mobs of henchmen terrorize the countryside with impunity, intimidating folk—black and white—and drive them from their homes. While up at the top the big men and women still sit and watch it all happening around them, the cronies who carved out a position of obscene privilege for themselves and sucked the life from a once-bountiful nation.
And all, ultimately, the legacy of one man.
So was I right?
Or should I have let Ivan do it?
Should I?
Should I?
It was a question for which I’d hoped to find the answer, only it wasn’t here, and I realized in that moment that I’d never find it. Which was answer in itself.
If I stood you in front of a man, pressed the cold metal of a gun into your palm and told you to squeeze the trigger, would you do it?
No, sir.
Are you sure?
Of course, sir. No ways!
What if I then told you we’d gone back in time and his name was Adolf Hitler? Would you do it then? Would you? Would you?
“I’d want to ask him: Why?”
When I looked again the rain had stopped and the charcoal ceiling was giving way to the blue.
I listened hard.
The door to Selous beckoned but I didn’t go to it. I sensed there might not be any need, and, instead, I turned and walked the other way.
The playing fields were empty. At that moment the shade evaporated from them and a warm sun pressed against my back.
I listened again and still there was nothing. Ivan had gone.
From among the trees that hid the workers’ village I saw someone move and imagined maybe it was Weekend. I raised my arm, but already I was alone again, waving a farewell to faces that weren’t there anymore, in a silence I hadn’t heard for a very long time.
As I went back through the school I suddenly noticed things weren’t quite ho
w I’d remembered them. Smaller, of course, and crumbling in places. But it’s still strong to the core. It’s a hideous waste yet at the same time I see hope, for maybe one day things will be different and the school can open again. History—the course of history—is never set.
I reached the gate, scaled it, and sparked the engine of my car back into life. I moved slowly away without even a glance in the rearview mirror, in and out of shadows down the willow-lined drive and beyond huge stone pillars that bore the school’s name.
At the end I turned west into the softening African sun. The storm clouds had gone and I was going to meet a shifting sky of wonderful, impossible color.
Author’s Note
I went to a boarding school in Zimbabwe. It was a very good school. I enjoyed my time there immensely, but even though I drew on many memories of it in the writing of this book, you will not find it here. Nor will you find any of the people who stood at the head of the class or were taught alongside me. If there is similarity, it is purely coincidental.
I say “was” good purely in relation to my time there. At the time of writing these words, the gates remain open and the school continues to flourish, despite the numerous obstacles that have endeavored to block its path. Other schools have not been so fortunate in the face of a government whose intent has been to erode the education of an entire generation as a means of clinging to power.
The government in that country has been guilty of a great many crimes against its people. This, in my opinion, is one of the worst.
There are rumors that things in Zimbabwe are changing slowly for the better. For the nation’s sake, I sincerely hope they are, though—like countless others—I’ve yet to be convinced.
—Jason Wallace
Zimbabwe: A Historical Note
The Republic of Zimbabwe is bordered by Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana, and South Africa. Its history is rich and complex, marked by tensions arising from colonial rule by Great Britain and conflict between black ethnic groups. The Portuguese were the first to attempt to rule the native people—who lived in the kingdom of Mutapa—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While they succeeded in undermining the Mutapa empire, they were eventually ousted by the Rozvi, another state.
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