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By Root 1338 0

looking up to find the bedroom block, for it was higher than the hotel itself. When I came out of my room (shared, I was married then), I looked down over a flight of steps into the kitchens and the dining-room windows. I used to stand at the top of stone steps and stare and stare at a moon so bright, so large, I have never seen another like it. Yet most of the nights of my life on the farm were spent sitting out in front of the house watching the sky. There was something about the air of Macheke that enhanced and enlarged the moon–probably my feverish, self-hypnotized state. Yes, in Macheke the moon was always full or near full, no matter what weekend we went down, or if half-grown, then in the shape of a pistachio nut, silver on hazy blue-black. I was always stopping myself outside the bedroom to say: Look at it, there will never be another moon like this one, there couldn’t be–while the voices of my friends and comrades rose from the bar or the dining-room. And there hasn’t been…for the good reason that pollution has overtaken the skies of Africa, just like everywhere else. You forget how skies used to be. Not long ago, in north-west Argentina I went out into the night and thought, My God, look, there it is, that’s the night sky–like a Christmas tree, or a jeweller’s window, the stars so brilliant and so close you could reach up and pick them one by one out of the dark.

Floating on moonlight, and on a hundred intoxications, I stepped carefully down, down the stone steps that were edged with the sweet-smelling plants Mrs Boothby (Mrs Who?) was so fond of and crammed into every crevice, and then…but it was impossible to see anything through this litter of planks, rubbish, broken bricks, neglected shrubs. No, this was impossible, there was perhaps another hotel…no, nonsense, this was the hotel, and here was the bar and here…if I were to sort out what had been here, and what I had made of it, then it would take…how long? Weeks? No, it was silly, useless, what was the point, and I must in any case drive on, because of this man beside me who sat squeezing his hands between thin chilly knees, while the tears fell steadily over his already crumpled suit.

I wished there was something in the car to eat. Perhaps I should look for a store and buy him…it occurred to me this renewed weeping was because we were about to leave Macheke, this metropolis of urban delights, the last before his exile must begin.

I drove back to the new main road, recognizing among smart new buildings paltry survivors from the very first days of the Colony. I tried to make out where we had walked away from the little township on a narrow sandy track into the kopjes and vleis where butterflies and birds and grasshoppers were so plentiful that I have only to remember how we, the group, walked there to hear a shrilling of birds, the somnolence of doves, the clicking of grasshoppers. And the scents, the smells, the warm dry herby odours…well, enough.

About five miles from Macheke the poor young man said, ‘It is here.’ I stopped. We were nowhere. I mean, we were on the road, but around us were miles of grass, a clump or two of trees, and the blue mountains. He did not at once get out, but sat staring miserably ahead.

He said violently: ‘I shall never see any of my friends again. I shall never see you again. I shall never…’ He scrambled out of the car, and went off into the long grass by the road, clutching his little suitcase. I watched his head and shoulders move above the grasses, and then he was not there.

This year, 1991, it is thought that there are a million unemployed in Zimbabwe.

I began watching the sides of the road for someone to lift. Far from the big town Harare, still a good distance from the smaller big town Mutare, there were fewer people waiting at the bus-stops–places by the road where people came to wait, with perhaps a kiosk for soft drinks, or nothing at all, not even a turn-off to somewhere else. When I slowed the crowd surged forward, but I drove on until I saw by the road, by themselves, three men who looked pleasant, so I stopped.