The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  They were interrupted from the creative flow by John Muranda, who suddenly appeared on the front lawn, having run up from the camp.

  It was a warm, dreamy day, one of those lazy days when all they could hear were the calls of the cuckoos in the sycamore trees and the gentle ripple of the wind through the blonde grass.

  Everything seemed right in the world.

  John punctured the mood.

  ‘Sa! Sa!’ he said to my father, out of breath and a little bit too excited for Dad’s liking.

  ‘Yes, John, what is it?’

  ‘Sa! A very important man has moved into Mr Frank’s house. A very important man!’

  Dad shifted in his chair and looked down at John on the lawn.

  ‘What do you mean, John? Who is this important man?’

  ‘A very important man, sa!’ said John. ‘He is organising the new farmers. He has made himself headman for the valley. He is replacing Chief Mutasa. He is the Political Commissar.’

  My father looked over at my mother and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘This is all we fucking need.’

  My mother’s heart sank. She turned to him and said with a weary, seen-it-all-before smile: ‘Now this is what I call a recipe for disaster.’

  There were lots of ways to lose your farm. In the beginning it was mostly violent. Now, though, the process had become highly formal, and in many ways more chilling. Ordinary citizens who supported the ruling party and claimed they wanted to farm simply applied to the Registrar of Deeds for a farm and, if approved, got what was called an offer letter. This applicant, known as an A2 farmer, simply drove onto the farm he had been allocated, handed his letter to the farmer if he was still on the land, and told him he was the new owner. ‘It’s like winning the lottery, except you don’t even have to buy a ticket,’ Dad told me. ‘You pay nothing at all.’ Incredibly, a white farmer could be prosecuted for squatting on his own farm if he didn’t vacate.

  As far as my father knew – and he would have known, for Muranda would have told him – Frank’s land had neither a chef nor an A2 applicant on it. Perhaps it was because the farmhouse looked so run-down and the land clumpy and overgrown with bush. Muranda reckoned there were only ten settlers left on the property. Across the country similar scenes played out: most of the early land invaders had given up and returned to towns or rural districts or fled the country altogether, along with three million other Zimbabweans.

  My parents had reached an uneasy standoff with the remaining settlers. True, they had ripped down my parents’ game fence, poached their animals, and stolen furniture and TV sets from the cottages. Two of them watched TV in their lodge bar at night. But generally they had been true to the words they had written in that note back in 2002: Open your gates, we come in peace.

  The arrival of a Political Commissar – a title given to high-ranking guerrilla war veterans and senior military enforcers – threatened to destroy this delicate balance. The last thing my parents needed across the road was an organiser, a militant, an ideologue, someone who might get the settlers riled up about more land and eyeing my parents’ own home.

  They hadn’t had much time to think about the Commissar before they were robbed. It was a hammer blow: on New Year’s Eve, the one night of the year they were likely to be out. What a start to the new year! They had spent the night with their close friends Joe and Claire up at their lakeside cottage in the Nyanga, the range of purple-crested mountains you could see from the front lawn of the house, and had driven back on the afternoon of 1 January 2006.

  Dad knew something was wrong as soon as he got to the front gate. The door to his workshop was flung wide open. He always locked it, especially when they went away. He ran to it, and his heart sank: the padlock was shattered, and his fuel was gone. He had kept two 38-litre drums of unleaded petrol in there – a rarity these days – and it had cost him a fortune. Now it was gone. But his tools were gone, too, and that enraged him more: an electric drill, some wrenches he had bought in Pietersburg, even a shitty old pair of pliers.

  From the safety of the kitchen, my mother watched him erupt. He started by kicking the garage door and screaming: ‘Who takes a man’s tools, for fuck’s sake? Who takes a man’s tools?’ Then he bellowed for the two Johns and charged off down to the camp. He accused them first, shouting that they were the only ones who had keys to the main gate. He knew they hadn’t taken the tools, but he felt an atavistic need to assert himself, to get back some boundaries, to let them know who was boss. Several days later he was still in a rage. He was lost without his tools, unable to fix the pump for the borehole, the grill on the coffee roaster, the leak in the geyser on the roof.

  For a while he suspected John Muranda’s teenage son, who had come to stay for Christmas. He’d seen him down at the camp one evening on their walk. He was unemployed, like every other youth in the country, and where had he got that fancy new pair of running shoes?

  But the more he thought about it, the more he suspected the Political Commissar. It seemed too much of a coincidence to be robbed for the very first time so soon after he had arrived in the neighbourhood.

  One weekend in the middle of January 2006, the weekend my mother called me out of the blue, Dad drove to Mozambique and spent a fortune he didn’t have buying two new barrels of unleaded fuel. When he got home he made a good show of letting the workers on the farm know he had a new supply. He had John Agoneka and John Muranda offload it, and watched Sydney the barman notice it as he walked past the gate down to the camp. Word would get around, he reckoned. It always did. This was Africa, and you couldn’t stop talk. He figured whoever stole it would hear that he had a new supply and would return. And this time he would be waiting.

  That night he did something he had never done before. At ten o’clock, when Mom took a book to bed, instead of leaning the shotgun behind the curtain and joining her as he usually did, he opened the gun cabinet, shoved a handful of cartridges into his pockets, and walked silently out into the dark night, the gun over his shoulder.

  Mom sat up in bed, open-mouthed, as she watched him go. With the picture in her mind of an old man lying in a garden, a newspaper wrapped around his head, she leapt out of bed, threw on her dressing gown and slippers, and ran outside.

  She found my father sitting in a garden chair under the giant fig tree facing the front gate. The shotgun was on his lap. The moonlight pressed through the leaves of the tree and shimmered on the barrel of the gun. He sat perfectly still.

  ‘Lyn, darling, what are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m keeping guard,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, darling. Come to bed.’

  ‘They stole it before, they’ll try again.’

  ‘And what are you going to do when they come?’

  ‘Shoot them,’ he replied, exasperated. ‘What do you think the gun is for?’

  He sat outside keeping guard every night for the next two months.

  He got used to being out there, to the soft sigh of the night, the whisper of the grass, the sweet scent of the fig leaves. Some nights he heard Sydney’s music, other nights familiar voices from the camp – Muranda’s baritone, Naomi’s cackling laugh. He wondered why it was that African voices seemed to carry so easily in the darkness. Did it have something to do with the oral tradition? He thought about that tradition. What a clever thing. So open to interpretation. When your history isn’t written down, who knows how it changes in the telling? How it’s modified, improved upon, exaggerated over generations? It just becomes storytelling after a while. And everyone had some bullshit story about how they really owned the land and how they were here first. It did nothing to quell his rage.

  Then one night he fell fast asleep in the chair. His arms had grown heavy and the leaves and branches of the fig tree seemed to sink warmly around him, enveloping him like a blanket. His grip had loosened on the gun. It was then that the noise came from the bushes beside the front gate. He woke up with a start. Christ. What time is it? How long have I
been asleep? Someone is out there! He gripped the gun and leaned forward, trying to keep silent while adjusting his position. It came again: a light rattle of the chain-link fence. Someone was out there! His heart pounded, the sudden exhilaration making him dizzy. He saw two red eyes in the darkness, staring straight at him. He stared straight back, trying to focus, easing the gun up to his shoulder now. It was happening – they had come back. At last, it was payback time!

  And then he saw it as clearly as if it were day: a giant full-grown antelope, a magnificent bull eland, with tall twisted horns like acacia branches, grazing in the long grass beside the fence. His heart was pounding. Jesus. An eland!

  He had presumed the settlers – the Commissar’s men – had killed every last one of them, but now one had showed itself. It stared at him with those magnificent sad eyes and he stared straight back. He had never felt so much pity for a mere animal before, and yet so much love for one, so much elation that something out there – something else out there – was surviving.

  The animal bent its neck, chewed more grass, then looked up at him again. It seemed to be nodding at him. He wanted to nod back, but he didn’t want to scare it. Then the creature wheeled away and loped off into the long grass past the avocado trees, toward the camp. My father watched it go. And for the first time in two months, the rage inside him disappeared. He felt light-headed, faint. He walked back to the house. He set the gun by the dresser and rolled into bed next to my mother. He thought: Maybe now I can get some sleep.

  The Commissar didn’t take long to announce his presence. Mom was in the kitchen in early February, adding some flour to the bread machine, when two young black men appeared silently and suddenly on the back patio.

  She got a fright at first, but they seemed more frightened of her. They stood there edgy, nervous, rubbing their hands, not armed or threatening.

  ‘They could hardly speak English,’ she recalled, ‘but they had a letter.’

  It was a note from the Political Commissar introducing himself by proxy as their new neighbour and the new headman in the valley, and requesting that they give his men a donation for the president’s birthday celebration.

  Mom read the note, then looked at his two men. They were listless, infected with fatalism. They were no more than twenty years old. If she had spent time down at the camp at night she would have recognised them: one wore a Saddam Hussein T-shirt, the other the face of David Beckham.

  She considered the president. And then she considered the thought of giving money to celebrate his birthday. And then she exploded.

  ‘I beg your pardon? I beg your pardon? Money for the president’s birthday? No! No! I am not giving you any bloody money for the president’s birthday party. Why don’t you go and ask the president for money for his own fucking birthday party? After all, he has all the money in the country. No. Go away!’

  The young men stared at her, blank-faced, open-mouthed.

  And then they trudged disconsolately away.

  Two days later the Commissar himself turned up. Dad was in his workshop near the front gate, siphoning some fuel out of one of the new drums of petrol he’d just bought. He saw a large man lumbering up to the back of the house, mumbled to himself, ‘Who the fuck is this, now?’ and then called out: ‘Hello, can I help you?’

  The man turned slowly and ambled toward him. He was heavy and thickset, with a round, puffy face and dull blank eyes. He wore a tatty khaki farmer’s shirt and trousers but had on a stylish, long grey Columbo-style raincoat, even though it was a hot day. His shoes were scuffed and covered in dirt, but he carried a brand-new businessman’s leather briefcase.

  ‘Yes, can I help you?’ my father said again.

  It always made him nervous when a car drove up to the house, as that was how the chefs and A2 farmers arrived to claim a farm. But this man was on foot. Dad presumed his car had broken down on the road and he needed some help.

  ‘I am your new neighbour,’ the man announced in a slow, deep voice. ‘I am here for a donation for the president’s birthday party. I sent my men up here two days ago and for some reason you turned them away.’

  Dad stared at him. At last, this was the famous Political Commissar! He had wondered how they would finally meet. He had wondered how he would react to the man who was now living in his friend Frank’s farmhouse, a man he suspected had sent his men to steal his fuel and his tools, a man whose settlers had already stolen his fencing wire and poached all his wildlife and were now giving him sleepless nights.

  He considered the attire: expensive briefcase, scuffed shoes; stylish raincoat, frayed shirt. It all made perfect sense. Here was the embodiment of a ZANU-PF man: part urban, part rural, caught between the trappings of the modern world and the traditions of the tribal. My father was convinced that this was the root of all the country’s problems: that its leaders existed in a cultural netherland, a schizophrenic state between two worlds. They spoke of tribal customs and traditions, then bought Armani suits and BMWs. They railed constantly against the West, then complained when the West stopped investing in them. My father could go on and on about the contradictions, but he knew right away he hated the Commissar with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

  He also knew he had to play a clever game. He couldn’t get angry and insult him, as my mother had done with his settlers. This man had power and could make things very difficult for them.

  So he surprised even himself when he shook the Commissar’s hand and said politely, ‘A misunderstanding, I am sure. My wife, she gets very stressed – the economic situation. You want a donation? How about some beer?’

  In the outbuilding where the marijuana was drying were several cases of three-year-old Castle lager that my parents had kept back from the Drifters bar for a party one year. Three-year-old lager – my dad was happy to give him that.

  The Commissar shrugged.

  ‘Thank you, that will be fine. I will get my men to come and take it away.’

  Saddam and Becks came to collect it that afternoon.

  My parents heard the party from the front lawn a few nights later, the drumbeats coming up the hill.

  ‘Who knows,’ chuckled Dad. ‘If the beer has gone off, they might all get terribly ill and we’ll never hear from them again.’

  They met the Commissar together a few weeks later.

  Dad and Mom were on their way to town in Dad’s twin-cab bakkie when, turning onto the main road and passing the entrance to Frank’s place, they spotted a thickset man in a long grey coat with a leather briefcase, hitchhiking from a bus stop.

  ‘My God,’ said Dad, ‘it’s him!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Political Commissar.’ He slowed to pull over.

  ‘Why are you slowing down?’ asked Mom, incredulous.

  ‘I’m going to give him a lift.’

  ‘No, you are not! I don’t want that man in this car.’

  ‘Rosalind, relax. It would actually be good to meet him.’

  ‘I don’t want to meet him!’

  ‘Rosalind, it’s better to get to know him and try to find out what he’s after than to ignore him and get a big shock later down the line.’

  My father had been modifying his approach to those in authority in recent weeks. In a departure from his previous habit of silently seething – the method he had used with the CIO officer at the roadblock – he now often tried to charm and probe, but also, for his own sense of dignity, to mock with irony and sarcasm, a technique that had served him well as a lawyer when dealing with corrupt magistrates or lying clients. He was convinced they wouldn’t get the sarcasm. These small triumphs kept him sane. ‘Besides,’ he once told me, ‘your mother’s angry enough to play bad cop for both of us.’

  ‘I already know what he’s like,’ she seethed. ‘I don’t need to meet him.’

  But Dad pulled over anyway.

  The Commissar clambered into the back and very politely said, ‘Morning, Mr Rogers. Morning, Mrs Rogers. Thank you for this ride.’

>   ‘Morning, Commissar,’ said Dad cheerily. ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘I don’t have a car, Mr Rogers. I travel by bus.’

  He didn’t have a car? Dad didn’t like the sound of that. The man was high enough on the party ladder to get a farm, but not high enough to get a car? Dad suspected that meant he was highly ambitious, and like ambitious middling-to-average people everywhere, all the more dangerous.

  ‘Where are you going this day?’

  ‘I am going to my town house,’ said the Commissar calmly.

  Which was when my father almost crashed the car.

  ‘Your town house?’ he spluttered.

  ‘Yes, my house in town.’

  Dad’s face went red. The Commissar had two houses! Frank’s farm was his country estate, his dacha. Christ! What was it with these people? Dad was about to ask him how he could own two homes but no car when he heard Mom chuckling to herself in the passenger seat.

  ‘I told you I knew what he was like,’ she muttered under her breath.

  Now he was fuming at her, too.

  The relationship with the Commissar soured badly soon after that. One afternoon in May, Dad heard dogs barking near the main road at the bottom of the farm. He had long ago stopped bothering to get out his gun when he heard the dogs now, since he presumed all his animals had long since been slaughtered.

  Just then Agoneka ran up to the house in a blur of orange.

  ‘Sa! Some poachers have caught a buck! They are chasing it to Mr Frank!’

  Dad was stunned: there was an animal alive on his land? And suddenly he remembered: the eland.

  There was no time to get his gun. He and John jumped into his bakkie and raced down the drive, hurtled across the main road and barrelled onto Frank’s place.