When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Page 18

So the next day, Dad humps a large briefcase with all his receipts and contracts and files to the ministry. He sits in the ministry waiting room for most of the day, eats the ham sandwich Mum has made him for lunch, and, finally, in the late afternoon, he is ushered in front of an official, a black middle-aged lady. He explains the visit by Chintotimba’s men.

  “These people, these people . . .” she says, and shakes her head and sighs.

  He spreads out his records on her desk, including the thirteenth-month salary checks he has paid Mavis each year as a bonus. She looks at them all carefully and deems everything to be in order.

  “You have been generous,” she says, and she writes at the end of the pay book that it has been examined and approved by her, and stamps it with the ministry stamp.

  Dad thinks this is an end to it all. When Mavis and the thugs return, the same two men and a woman too, Mum ushers them into the courtyard and offers them tea, which they refuse. Dad shows them the pay books with the labor ministry’s approval stamps on them, but they dismiss them without even looking.

  “We decide, not the ministry,” says their leader. “We are the ultimate authority.”

  “You should be ashamed, trying to cheat your faithful servant,” says the woman.

  “Have we not always treated you well?” Mum asks Mavis. She draws breath to answer, but looks up at Chinotimba’s men and says nothing.

  “What about the clothes you are wearing?” asks my mother.

  Mavis looks down at her navy blue tailored jacket. “Yes,” she says, suddenly brightening. “The madam gave me this jacket. But it is not an old one of hers. She made this jacket for me from new cloth.” And she mimes how my mother had measured her, and cut the cloth from a paper pattern, and pinned the material. “She sewed it on her sewing machine and made the buttonholes and bought the buttons.” Mavis stands up and smooths the jacket and twirls slowly so the union leaders can examine it. “It is a beautiful jacket,” she says. And they all nod.

  When Dad gets up to go to the study in search of yet another document, the two men follow him.

  “You have been wasting our time,” says the less big of the two men, though he still looms above my father. “And now we have run out of patience.”

  “It is time for you to just pay us,” says the bigger man, his voice rising.

  “Yes, pay your maid,” corrects the less big one. “It is too dangerous to make us angry.”

  “We know where you live,” says the bigger one, unnecessarily. He starts jabbing Dad in the V of his farmer’s tan. “We will come and get you. Do you understand?”

  And finally, Dad does understand. He understands that this is extortion. My father, who has never given a bribe in his life, for whom bribery is anathema, who believes that the bribe giver is just as morally corrupt as the bribe taker, realizes that he now has no option but to pay them. So he goes to the bank and comes back with a dozen bricks of Zimbabwe dollars. But even then, he insists on giving it to Mavis — and getting a receipt. She lowers the car window, scribbles her initials on Dad’s invoice book, and he hands her the money, which she quickly gives to the bigger man. He counts out the bricks, takes half of them, and hands the other half back to her. And suddenly, all jovial at his hoard, he comes over and tries to shake Dad’s hand, as though they have just finished a legitimate business transaction. My father just shakes his head in disgust. “You are nothing but a thief,” Dad says, and the man looks at him like thunder.

  By now, Mum has come out of the house. She raps on Mavis’s window, and Mavis lowers it again.

  “How could you, Mavis?” Mum says. “How could you do this to us after all we’ve done for you? How could you bring these people here and steal from us?”

  Mavis finally breaks down and begins to weep. “It was my nieces,” she says, finally meeting my mother’s eyes. “They made me to do this. They are too greedy.”

  My mother just walks away.

  And the goons drive Mavis back to her house, where she stops taking the hypertension drugs that Mum has stockpiled for her and dies a few months later.

  ALTHOUGH HER BACK PAIN — sciatica that ebbs and flows — is quite severe now, and she sometimes finds it difficult to walk, my mother says she doesn’t want anyone else inside the house. “We’ll just cope on our own,” she insists, and she retreats to her bed to listen to Georgina on the radio, even before it is dark outside.

  Dad and I are sitting alone in the living room. The picture of his parents and his sister still hangs on the wall where he nailed it on my last visit. I walk over to look at it up close. He watches me but says nothing.

  “I wish you’d told me before,” I say finally.

  He gives a long sigh. “What real difference would it have made, Pete?” he asks. “It’s all so long ago.”

  “I don’t know,” I reply truthfully. “I suppose it might have made us closer, as a family.”

  My father shrugs.

  “Well, I just wish I’d known,” I say. “You know I was in Poland once, when I was East European correspondent for the Sunday Times.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “And I probably walked right past your old home on Kredytowa Street.”

  “What did you think of Warsaw?” he asks.

  “Well, those were the dark days before the Iron Curtain was lifted, and Solidarity was being harshly repressed. I don’t know. It all seemed so foreign to me, and it was midwinter, freezing cold, and there was nowhere to eat, and I was being followed around by the secret police.”

  “Just as well I moved, then,” he says, and laughs harshly.

  “One image stands out from my time there,” I continue. “It was a demonstration one evening in Old Town. It’s been restored, you know.”

  “No,” he says. “I didn’t.”

  “The protesters were met by a solid phalanx of black-helmeted riot police, the ZOMO. And as the two sides fronted up to one another, I thought it was about to get, you know, really violent. Then the protesters reached into their pockets and began throwing handfuls of pennies, zloty coins, at the officers, and chanting, ‘Ju-das! Ju-das! Ju-das!’ and the coins tinkled as they fell onto the cobbles, and the police just stood there looking ashamed.”

  My father lights a cigarette and says nothing.

  “And shortly after that, I was banned from going back to Poland, because the government didn’t like a piece I’d written.”

  “Oh,” says Dad.

  “Why did you conceal the Jewish stuff anyway, Dad?” I ask.

  He looks at me as though I am being deliberately obtuse.

  “Why?” he says. “For my children. For you. So that you could be safe. So that what happened to them,” he nods toward the photo of his mother and his sister, “would never happen to you. Because it will never really go away, this thing. It goes underground for a generation or two, but always reemerges.”

  I wonder if he’s right, if this hatred of Jews is one of those atavistic urges we will always return to. That it is aimed as much against assimilated Jews as it is against those who keep themselves distinct. That the fear and suspicion may be even greater against those who seek to assimilate, to pass. The fraud, the impostor, the enemy in disguise, an infiltrator who appears in many forms, like Marechera’s njuzu, the manfish.

  In fact there is a small Jewish community in Zimbabwe. The Shona call them maJuta, and they are mostly descendents of Jews who fled the Baltics to escape Russian pogroms in the early 1900s. They had originally set off for South Africa but found the “quota” for Jews there already full, so ended up as accidental immigrants to Rhodesia. From a peak of around three thousand, there are now only a few hundred left.

  But they are not quite the only Jews. Some of the Lemba, a small tribe who straddle the South Africa–Zimbabwe border, have long claimed to be a “lost tribe of Israel,” a claim treated until recently with some doubt, as they are classically Bantu in appearance. But when the men volunteered for Y chromosome DNA tests, they proved not only that they are of Jew
ish descent, arriving on the African coast about a thousand years ago, probably by ocean-going dhows from Yemen, but that they hail from the rabbinical Cohanim line.

  Dad looks at his watch and switches on the ZTV news. It’s preceded by an advertisement extolling the current “fast-track” land reform campaign. The ad begins with a jingle: “Chave Chimu-renga — ‘Now it’s war.’?” Then a well-dressed black man opens his refrigerator and, seeing that it’s empty but for a couple of wilted lettuce heads, he leaps into a yellow Mercedes and drives to a supermarket, only to be met by more empty shelves. He drives on into the countryside in his search for sustenance, stopping briefly at a farm gate adorned with a sign reading: WELCOME TO THE LITTLE ENGLAND HOMESTEAD — MR. BIG WHITE. Frightened off by cutaways of lion and leopard — for farms that have been turned into wildlife conservancies are also being seized — he finally arrives at a resettlement farm where he joins other well-dressed settlers in spirited hoeing of the soil followed by some boisterous dancing, albeit still on an empty stomach.

  Dad switches it off. “Fine lot of good it’s done us anyway. Being a white here is starting to feel a bit like being a Jew in Poland in 1939 — an endangered minority — the target of ethnic cleansing.”

  THAT NIGHT, I sleep in the converted garage, with the dogs groaning contentedly in their creaking wicker baskets outside. And on the bedside table still sits the Greek mythology book I had been paging through when I was last lying here, listening to the war vets banging on the sides of their trucks as they went to invade the farms. I pick it up again and examine the picture of the Chimera on the cover. Since I saw it last I have looked up the word to discover that chimera has another meaning. In biology, it is any organism that contains tissues from at least two genetically distinct parents. So I suppose I am a chimera of sorts too. Half Jew, half Gentile. A hybrid, a crossbreed. A mongrel.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I get back to work on my National Geographic piece. Mugabe’s farm-seizure program is now in its final stages. By the latest count, 97 percent of six thousand white-owned farms have been served with eviction notices. But the one I’m visiting today — Zanado — is not one of them. The Selbys show me a high court order pinned to the wall of the farm office. It proclaims that the Selbys are still its legal owners. But in reality, Zanado Farm is already occupied. Major Kanouruka has taken over the front half and Mrs. Molly Mapfumo, a senior government official, has taken the back. After a four-month legal tug-of-war in which the Selbys have been chased off and then returned by court order no fewer than nine times, they are losing heart. Mick Selby, who farmed here with his parents, Jeremy and Janet, had his house broken into and occupied two months ago by the major and his men, a cadre of young toughs from the major’s home area down in the Zambezi Valley. They are graduates of the ruling party’s Border Gezi militia-training camp and have their own riff on the history of land ownership in Zimbabwe. When the first white pioneers approached Chief Lobengula to ask for a land grant, he was seated on a revolving chair, they tell me. Beguiled by his first taste of sugar, a sly gift from the whites, he raised his hand meaning only to indicate a small portion of land for the whites to farm, but the chair spun a full circle, suggesting he would give it all away. Thus was the paramount chief outmaneuvered by a sweet tooth and an item of well-lubricated office furniture.

  “Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans,” chant the major’s young toughs.

  “I was born here, I’m Zimbabwean too,” Mick points out, in Shona, but they aren’t listening.

  Each Saturday morning at 9:00, Major Kanouruka drives down from Harare, thirty miles away, in his company car, an olive green Peugeot sedan with military plates. He sits on his veranda, fires up the barbecue, and chugs his way through a bottle of Glenfiddich. From time to time, if he catches sight of Mick, he calls out in a not entirely believable way: “Hey, Mickey, come over and have a shot with me.”

  Today, I have come to see the Selbys supervise a squadron of combine harvesters churning through their winter-wheat crop. That they have been allowed to plant the wheat at all is due only to a desperate deal they have made with the major to prepare, plow, plant, fertilize, and harvest a similar field of wheat for him. For this, the major has promised to pay them back, once he sells the crop. But they have little hope of recouping the debt. The major has already seized their bakery, which supplied fifteen thousand people in the neighboring Chiweshe tribal reserve with bread, and their butchery. He has expropriated their flour and sold their loaves and their meat.

  After the winter wheat is reaped, there will be almost no more agricultural activity on Zanado Farm. The fifty acres of citrus trees are wilting and will soon die. The irrigation piping on which they depend has been dug up and sold by the major’s boys. The greenhouses are nothing now but torn skeins of plastic that flap in the stiff breeze against their exposed wooden ribs. The main homestead is already looking derelict. The swimming pool is dark with rotting leaves. The clay tennis court has sprouted a quiff of elephant grass. Goats nibble at the lawn, and the flower beds are rapidly returning to bush.

  Mick Selby and his mother, Janet, survey the ravages of neglect with mournful disbelief. Their two dogs lurk in the trees, thin and tick infested, reduced to cowering curs by the continuous taunting of their new overlords. The previous week, Mick had to shoot their two horses. And before the sun sets this evening, he must take the dogs to the vet to be put down.

  Janet Selby, armed with pruning shears and spade, walks purposefully to the rose garden. Her mission today, she tells me, is to retrieve the rosebushes given to her by her mother-in-law as an anniversary gift, twenty-five of them, one for every year of her marriage. She manages to unearth two, which Panga, the family cook, places in their pickup truck. But as she kneels to dig up the third, Kumbirai, one of the major’s enforcers, strides over to her, an open quart bottle of Lion beer sloshing in his pocket. “Put those down now!” he screams.

  Janet Selby rises from her knees and, in a somewhat tremulous but determined voice, reminds him that this rose retrieval has been negotiated with the major. With his mouth only several inches from her face, Kumbirai issues another spit-flecked command. “You shaddap!”

  Mick strides over, his fist already clenched to thump Kumbirai, but I restrain him. If he hits this youth we will probably die here this morning. All the while, Marumbu, a tall and somewhat drunken youth, dances around us, throwing kung fu punches and kicks into the air.

  “Sabotage! Sabotage!” he shouts to no one in particular.

  Panga looks down at the lush kikuyu grass beneath his laceless shoes. “God sees everything,” he says in a quiet voice. “They will be made to suffer, these ones, for what they do.” But his tone is one of defiance, not prediction.

  FIFTY MILES AWAY, in Marondera, Roy and Louise McIl-waine take a similar sanctuary in the idea of some kind of divine accounting.

  Today is the day that Roy and Louise must leave their farm, Larkhill. Today is D-day, the expiry of the notice period on their “Order to Vacate.” Most of their household stuff is already gone — pictures, photo albums, rugs, books — and the place has a desolate air. The farm equipment is still there, though. That has to stay. This is how the latest iteration of the land reform formula works: the government confiscates the farm without compensation. It then insists that the farmer pay large “retrenchment packages” to the labor force. To guarantee this payment, the labor force is encouraged to set up a barricade to ensure the farmer doesn’t try to “smuggle” out any of his assets.

  The entire Larkhill Farm, including the farmhouse and well and fields, has already been divided into hundred-hectare plots and allocated to black settlers. They have responded to advertisements in the Herald and on ZTV offering free land under the “A2 resettlement model.” For months, you could see the applicants in their jackets and ties lining up around the block outside the Ministry of Land in Harare. The only lines that are longer are those for bread, cooking oil, cornmeal, fuel, and South African visas. Many of the prospective settlers are alr
eady visiting their plots, even before the McIlwaines have gone. Most of them are civil servants and office workers from town. Few of them intend to live here or farm full-time.

  Roy opens a dusty manila file to show me the history of Lark-hill Farm. It has been in McIlwaine hands since Major Mac, a retired British artillery major, who had played for England in eight rugby internationals, saw a stand at Earls Court Olympia with a big banner declaring, COME TO ROMANTIC RHODESIA. In 1927 Major Mac came out and toured the country with his wife and four kids in an old Model T Ford. He wanted to start a dairy farm and supply butter and cheese to the capital, so he bought Larkhill because it was close to the railway line.

  Major Mac told his wife, “Shin up that tree, dear, and see what the view’s like.”

  “Marvelous,” she replied, so he traced the outline of their house with the heel of his boot. There they constructed a pole-and-mud hut and a long-drop privy and set about making a farm. But when a depression struck in 1930, Mac, along with many pioneering white farmers, went bust. It was only years later, after he came back from World War II, from fighting in the western Sahara and in Italy, that he finally got out from under his original debt.

  Yesterday afternoon, seventy-five years after Major Mac bought this land, Louise hears the singing start up outside. She has been expecting it. It is jambanja time. Jambanja. In Shona it means “to turn everything upside down, to cause violent confusion.” That is what they call it now when they drive a farmer off the land. Louise goes out to see the crowd that has gathered there. They are led by strangers, agitators who have come to orchestrate the McIlwaines’ eviction. But some are their own workers, scared, greedy for the huge retrenchment payouts they’ve been promised, or just worried about their future. The farm is their only home. They have seen other white farmers leaving and so they have changed sides. Changed masters. Among them are the three orphaned black youths that the McIlwaines adopted after picking one up as a tiny hitchhiker fifteen years ago.