When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Read online

  GEORGINA IS TEN years younger than me, with long dark hair, a marble-white complexion that she is careful to keep out of the African sun, a mordant sense of humor, and a twenty-a-day habit. She needs a cigarette now, so we go outside and she lights up a local Madison. She exhales and looks around the parking lot. “Remember when Dad got caught pissing in a bottle?” she says. He had been parked here, reading a book, waiting for my mother, who works here, and needed to pee. As he had suffered from prostate problems and the nearest lavatory was a fair distance, down several long hospital corridors, he had come equipped with a wide-necked plastic bottle with a screw top for just this purpose. Midstream, there was a tap at the window. He looked up to see a female social worker from the hospital, a friend of ours, who’d wandered over to say hello. Clutching the bottle between his thighs and drawing his book discreetly over it, he rolled down the window and the woman started chatting. Soon the urge to pee became overwhelming — he had been interrupted midstream — so he began risking little surreptitious spurts, until finally she departed, just as he was getting cramps in his thighs from clutching the bottle between them.

  It feels good to laugh out loud.

  The parking lot is baking hot in the afternoon sun and strewn with rubbish: bleached mango pips and corncobs and fibrous pulp of chewed sugarcane. Minibuses jostle for passengers, hawkers ply tiny packets of cookies and half-loaves of bread, and some are boiling up large black pots of sadza, cornmeal porridge that is the culinary mainstay of this part of Africa. Rolled-up grass mats stand against the trees; there is a whole community camping out here, the relatives of the sick, of the dying.

  A knot of women burst through the glass door behind us. They slump onto the curb, weeping and rocking on their haunches. Some have babies tied to their backs in white crocheted shawls. Their grief is raw and fierce, unmediated. A couple of men in ragged jackets stand by, embarrassed and self-conscious, and a gaggle of bewildered toddlers with mango-smeared mouths look up with wide almond eyes.

  Georgina and I move off to stand under a cassia tree. Dad had refused an ambulance, she tells me, so they had reclined a seat in the car and laid him in it to drive to the hospital. On the way, Mum realizes they are about to run out of fuel, so they pull in to a service station to fill up. One by one, the attendant, Mum, Georgina, all feverishly wrestle to get the fuel cap open while Dad lies groaning.

  Finally Mum shakes Dad by the shoulder and his eyes open. She tells him that he has to put his collapse on hold. They haul him out and support him as he staggers to the fuel cap, which he quickly undoes in a deft maneuver. Then he collapses back into the car, and the emergency drive resumes.

  Though my father’s life is clearly at stake, it is a matter of honor that he be treated here at the Parirenyatwa, this cash-strapped government hospital named after the country’s first black doctor. To take him to the smarter private hospital would be, my mother insisted, a vote of no confidence in the Parirenyatwa staff. My father agreed entirely. So they had brought him into the emergency department of the Parirenyatwa where the nurses and doctors — my mother’s colleagues — rushed to admit him to the coronary care unit. For once, Georgina says, the elevator even worked. But before they would let him into the ward, Dad lay for ages on a gurney in the corridor gasping like a grounded guppy.

  When he was finally wheeled in and connected to a cardiac monitor and an IV, my mother asked the nurse, a woman in her late fifties, about the delay. She is an ex-guerrilla, a so-called bush nurse, one of those who at the end of the civil war — the war to end white rule — was inducted, after top-up training, as a full-fledged nurse at the insistence of the new government. She looked at the floor out of embarrassment. But my mother had treated her at the staff clinic on several occasions, and they are friends, and finally the nurse looked up.

  “It was the head nurse who made us wait,” she said. “She wanted to make sure the ward was clean and tidy and that there was a proper bedspread for Mr. Godwin’s bed. But there were no bedspreads in the linen room — they have all been stolen — so we had to go searching in other wards.”

  So my father nearly died in their pursuit of a bedspread. But now, at least, he has a chance. Now he has the new wonder drug I tracked down in Johannesburg. A drug unavailable to the rest of the patients at the Parirenyatwa. An expensive drug. A First World drug.

  I SIT BY DAD’S bed, dozing. When I glance up I see his bleached blue eyes looking at me. He attempts a smile that comes out as a lopsided grimace and reaches weakly for my hand.

  “Thanks for coming, Pete.” It’s all he has the strength to croak.

  I squeeze his hand.

  Pete. He’s the only person in the world who still calls me that. Very occasionally, if he’s feeling particularly loquacious, he calls me Pedro.

  Our uncharacteristic moment of intimacy is interrupted by a sudden roar from a patient across the aisle. My father turns in panic, rattling his IV against its metal stand. Low guttural growls and barks of astonishing power burst up from the pit of his wardmate’s stomach. I worry that this tumult could tip Dad’s failing heart over the edge. There are no nurses in sight, so I get up to see what I can do. A black man in his twenties is straining to rise from his bed, the sinews in his neck cording with the effort. He looks immensely strong. He sees me and bares his teeth, growls again, and redoubles his attempt to get free, twisting up and dislodging his bedding. He is naked and as well muscled as a Nubian wrestler. His wrists and ankles are bound to the bedstead with an improvised selection of straps and belts.

  The nurse appears next to me. “He has come from Ward Twelve, you know, the psych ward. We call him Lion Man.” She giggles. “Now his sedative has worn off and we have no more left. We have no budget.” She tests his straps then wanders off again.

  I return to my father’s bedside to report that Lion Man is securely lashed to his bed and cannot escape to tear us limb from limb. Dad rolls his eyes. I do not tell him that Lion Man’s sedatives have just run out.

  We will bow down to the one who growls, I remember. One of Prince Biyela’s praise names. It already seems like months ago.

  MY MOTHER RETURNS with the consulting physician, Dr. Nelson Okwanga. He is a Ugandan. I feel the beginnings of First World panic. I take my mother aside. It is time to assert myself.

  “Dad’s life’s on the line here,” I say. “The time for political correctness is over. We must get him the best physician.”

  She narrows her eyes. “Okwanga is one of the very best,” she says. “He qualified in Britain.”

  Dr. Okwanga bustles about but says little. Then he draws us away from the bedside. In a voice that never rises above a murmur, he says that Dad’s condition is no better, that the new drug has not lowered his heart rate yet. He will give it another twelve hours. Then he will have to reevaluate — the word is somehow wreathed with menace.

  Later my father is wheeled to see the cardiologist. His name is Dr. Hakim. He is from Sudan. I say nothing. Dr. Hakim is meticulously dressed in a charcoal pin-striped suit and oxblood brogues. He makes my father lie on his side and rigs him up to a machine that videos his heart. On the screen is the blurred gray image of one of my father’s heart valves. It looks like the key of a clarinet going up and down. Up and down so fast it is shaking itself to pieces. He is literally going to die of a broken heart.

  When he is back in bed, I think of that little clarinet key racing away. And I find I am cheering it on, willing it to slow its frenetic, destructive pace. But he continues to weaken. His life hangs now from the merest trembling filament. Or on the whim of a deity. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

  Although I went to Mass every day at St. George’s, a local Jesuit boarding school, I have not prayed in years. The urge to pray now seems ridiculous, a foul-weather religious conversion, Christian only in a crisis. I know that God, any god, will need something in return, a penance for my secular life. I start silently deal making. If my father survives I will . . .
what? What will I do? I could stop running around the world and come home to Africa. Come back and spend some time with my father. Get to know him.

  As he lies there, I think how little I really know of my father. I have been conditioned by his manner not to pry. He is emotionally truculent, quick to anger, irascible, rather forbidding really, a remote Victorian paterfamilias. Mum happily talks about personal stuff. Dad does not. He sits aloof from the rest of the family, an inaccessible island with a rocky shoreline. You cannot make landfall on your own. You must first take my mother on board as the pilot to guide you through the treacherous channel. And her MO depends on the nature of the mission.

  Sometimes, when we had infuriated him, she was like one of those little grooming fish swimming right up to the great white shark in an apparently suicidal approach and nibbling at the menacing snout. And we would hold our breath, waiting for her to be gobbled up in a flash of fish fangs, but the great white would exhibit some instinctive override, some primal understanding of emotional symbiosis, and would tolerate her proximity. And so the pattern has been established over decades.

  I imagine trying to write my father’s obituary.

  George Godwin, born in 1924 in England to . . .

  Where in England? I don’t know. I realize I’ve never seen the inside of his passport. I realize that I know almost nothing about his family. I think his father’s name was Morris, a businessman of some sort.

  He was educated at . . .

  Pass again. He mentioned going to high school at St. Andrews in Scotland, I think.

  When World War II was declared . . .

  Now I’m on stronger ground.

  He joined the British army . . .

  But which regiment? An infantry unit, I think . . .

  After the war he studied engineering at London University and worked on the team that designed and built the Sunderland flying boat before coming to Africa on a contract in the early 1950s and falling in love with the place. He ran copper mines and timber estates and government transport divisions and ended up writing industrial standards for the Standards Association of Zimbabwe.

  He is survived by a wife and two children and was predeceased by a third.

  THE THREADBARE RÉSUMÉ is interrupted by my mother. She insists I go home to wash and sleep. She will wait at his bedside. “I’ll call you the second there’s any change,” she promises.

  My parents live in Chisipite (in Shona, the local language, it means “spring,” after the water source there), an outer suburb of the city, in a rather austere 1950s house, with a Dutch-style mansard roof, in an astonishingly fecund acre of garden. I don’t have keys, so at the gate I give a short honk, and Mavis comes jogging down the drive followed by Isaac, the young gardener, and by our Dalmatians. Mavis has been our housekeeper for twenty years. She was divorced by her husband and cast out by her family when her first baby was born dead and she had to have a hysterectomy and became barren. She and Isaac live in separate wings of the small brick staff quarters at the top of the garden.

  “Is boss Godwin all right?” she asks through the car window.

  “He’s alive,” I say.

  “Oh, praise Jesus!”

  “But he’s still in a serious condition.”

  “I have been praying for him,” she says. “The Lord will look after him because your father, he is a very good man.”

  THAT NIGHT, I wander around the house, looking for evidence of the man. The house itself was his choice — none of the rest of us particularly liked it, but he was taken with its location, on the very northern edge of town, close to the bush from which we were returning. It is an odd mélange of styles: imposing wooden beams appear to hold up the living room ceiling, but they are hollow and purely decorative, contributing to the bogus baronial look established by the large fireplace topped with a wide beaten-copper cowl, which my mother has attempted to smother with indoor ivy.

  All the portraits that hang on the walls of the living room are, I realize, of my mother’s family: miniatures of her great-aunts in Victorian bustles and elaborate feathered hats; a gilt-framed oil of her great-great-great-uncle as a boy in pastoral England, wearing a gold riding coat over white jodhpurs and sitting astride a white steed, a King Charles spaniel yapping at them from the foreground of the canvas. The mementos too, come from her side: a trumpet-barreled blunderbuss, salvaged by her father, a chaplain in the Royal Navy, from the gore of Gallipoli during World War I. An early eighteenth-century brass-faced, single-hand grandfather clock. A needlepoint sampler by a twelve-year-old girl, Elizabeth, in the year 1850. She has carefully embroidered a prayer: “When I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  I flip through the family photo albums. My father was quite a serious photographer once, with his own darkroom, so he was usually the one behind the camera, and there are few pictures of him here. I search in vain for a single picture of us together as adults.

  I unlock the garage and browse his “heavy workshop” — tools on boards arranged in ascending order of caliber; screws and bolts of different sizes segregated in their own recycled jam jars; car parts swaddled in burlap sackcloth, bound with twine and neatly labeled.

  Next door in his “light workshop” is all his radio equipment. In the old days when he worked on plantations in the eastern highlands, the estate managers used two-way radios to communicate. He made himself into an expert repairman and become a radio ham in the process, rigging up a lofty antenna and chatting to people on other continents via a big single-sideband (SSB) radio transmitter. The tools here are as shiny and delicate as surgical instruments: minute, long-nosed pliers and screwdrivers with heads so small that they look like spikes. Along one bench is a circuit tester he’d built himself.

  As I turn to go, I inadvertently nudge some little screws onto the floor. On my hands and knees to retrieve them, I see that there is quite a large storage space down there, concealed by the circuit tester. Mostly, it seems, he uses it to store radio parts. At the back is a flat object about twelve inches by nine, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag. I reach in and peel back the plastic to find a layer of newspaper, tear it back a little, to find another layer, stiff brown paper, which I unfold and try to look inside. It’s hard to see from this oblique angle, but I can make out that it’s a posed black-and-white photo of three strangers: a middle-aged couple with a young girl of about twelve between them. Then the phone rings, and I rush out to answer it. It’s my mother, saying nothing has changed. When I hang up, I feel grubby, prying in Dad’s things while he lies dying, so I smooth back the wrapping on the photo and slide it back.

  I walk back through to his study where a to-do list in his beautiful sloping handwriting sits on the wide mahogany desk. His silver letter opener and pens are all neatly arranged in an antique brass stand, with cut-glass inkwells that belonged to my mother’s father. Two rows of locked filing cabinets flank the desk, and along one wall is a bookcase full of technical journals and alphabetized manuals and reference books on metallurgy and standards. I check the answering machine and hear my father’s outgoing message, his voice strong and deliberate, an upper-middle-class British accent, clipped and correct and authoritative, the dialect of command.

  I can’t help thinking that I’m a disappointment to my father. He is a practical, technocratic, empirical man, a man who makes and runs things, who organizes people — he is a doer. I only describe, criticize, review — I am not really a doer.

  “When are you going to get a real job?” he often says, then laughs to signal that this is just a joke, though on one level, of course, it never really is. It’s true that I have been through a rather rapid succession of jobs. When I left school, the civil war against white rule — which the black insurgents called the Chimurenga, “the struggle” — was still raging, and I was drafted into the security forces. I was fighting on the wrong side of a losing war, but my father felt that it was dishonorable for me to dodge the draft
when my turn came, for until then we’d been guarded by other people’s sons. White rule had been conceded, anyway, so my father reckoned I would just be helping to hold the line while peace negotiations took place. After a year in uniform I managed to get into Cambridge, but Dad seemed nonplussed — he had suggested I attend the local university and train to be a district commissioner. He bridled when I wanted to major in English or history, so we compromised on law. When I graduated, I moved on to Oxford rather than coming home to face more combat. After a year of course work in international politics, I began research for a doctoral thesis on the war I had just fought in, in a belated effort to understand it.

  When peace was declared and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe the next year, I bought an antique army-surplus truck with a few friends and drove it from Oxford to the south of France, where we put it on a ferry to Algiers. We set off across the Sahara Desert and down the African continent, finally reaching my parents’ house in Harare, lean, brown, and unkempt, not having slept in beds for nearly a year. I was happy to be back home in the new, multiracial Zimbabwe.