When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Read online

  To subsidize my thesis research, I began practicing as a lawyer, and my father basked in my respectability. But my legal career was short-lived. Most of my time was spent helping to defend seven guerrilla officers, all Matabeles, the southern Zimbabwean tribe that was an offshoot of Prince Biyela’s Zulu. The officers belonged to the Patriotic Front, one of the two factions that fought against white rule but lost to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in the country’s first universal suffrage elections. Now he accused them of plotting a coup, of committing high treason. After a lengthy trial, we secured their acquittal, but Mugabe immediately ordered them rearrested under the “emergency regulations,” draconian laws introduced by the last white prime minister, Ian Smith. So I resigned as a lawyer, to my father’s chagrin, and took up freelance journalism, still trying to write up my thesis on the side.

  The next year, 1983, I saw what the new government was really made of. Mugabe unleashed his new North Korean–trained Fifth Brigade troops on the civilians of Matabeleland, and I went down to investigate, to discover a full-scale massacre. Even after all these years no one knows the final toll — somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people were killed, possibly more. The sheer scale and ferocity of the killings dwarfed anything that had happened in the independence war, but now there was little outcry and few reprisals from the international community. When my reports ran in the London Sunday Times, they brought death threats down on my head and forced me to flee the country just before being declared a foreign spy and an enemy of the state.

  I continued as a journalist, assigned by the Sunday Times to Eastern Europe and to South Africa. Then I moved to the BBC, based in London, making TV documentaries around the world. I took a sabbatical to write a book, Mukiwa, about my African childhood and the independence war and the Matabeleland massacres. And I found I didn’t want to go back to the BBC so went freelance instead, still based in London. My father tried, but failed, to mask his puzzlement at my walking away, again, from a full-time job.

  For several years after reporting on the Matabeleland massacres, I couldn’t go home. But then the two main political parties merged, and the men I had defended in court were absorbed into the new establishment. One of them, Dumiso Dabengwa, became the minister of home affairs, and he saw to it that I could finally come back without being arrested. So for the past few years, I have returned to Harare as often as I can, and whenever I appear my father observes the same ritual.

  “Ah, Pete. Would you come here a minute,” he calls from his armchair when he has finished his supper of ham-and-cheese sandwiches. I sit on the ancient slipcovered sofa while he asks me where I’ve been and poses questions I never seem able to answer quite to his satisfaction. These questions are nearly always quantitative; his instinct is to measure. How many people do you think were killed in the Matabeleland massacre? How long will apartheid survive? When will the Berlin Wall fall? What effect will the ivory sales ban have on elephant poaching? Can Cuba survive the end of the Cold War? How dangerous are Eastern Europe’s nuclear power plants? Is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia inexorable? As if I really know. I am just a journalist, a hack. I don’t have a real job.

  DR. OKWANGA, NORMALLY quite inscrutable, now looks extremely worried. He sighs and steps away from the bedside and tells my mother that the prognosis is not good at all. As a last resort, he wants to give my father a megadose of the new drug, my new drug, in the hope that this will shock his system into rebooting at a more plausible heart rate. He orders the last six vials to be injected at once.

  We watch my father closely, but nothing happens. I sense that he is slipping away. For the first time, my mother begins to lose her composure. She has witnessed many deaths in her long medical career, and I can see she thinks he is lost. Rather than break down in public, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and my sister accompanies her.

  The nurse pulls the curtain around my father’s bed, and I realize that she is preparing for his death, so he can die in private. While I wait for him to go, I look out the window at the treetops over Mazowe Street and then blankly watch the flies battering themselves at the windowpane, trying to escape. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.” And while I stare, I become aware that the soundscape is changing subtly. It is the rhythm of the cardiac monitor getting slower. His heart is weakening, the thumping of those clarinet keys finally fading. His labored breathing seems to ease a little as his pulse lowers on the way to stopping. I look at his face. Nothing. Then back up at the monitor.

  “You still here?”

  At the sound of my father’s voice, I lurch back in my chair and upset the bedside tray. My father is grinning his lopsided grin. A blush of color is returning to his face.

  “Can you help me sit up?”

  I prop the pillows behind him.

  “What I’d really like is some tea,” he says.

  The ward nurse goes to get it.

  And when Mum and Georgina return from the bathroom, they find Dad sitting up, chatting and drinking tea.

  THE WONDER DRUG, it seems, has lived up to its billing. By delivering it, I have actually saved my father’s life. I have proved myself as a son.

  Soon he is ready to come home.

  “You know, I felt you would actually be sorry if I died,” he says to me on his last day in the hospital, as though surprised by this discovery.

  The nurse, the same one who had tested Lion Man’s restraining straps, insists on packing up his clothes and his wash things and his leftover medications. She hums as she works.

  “I am so happy for Dr. Godwin,” she says to me. “She looks after us very well at the staff clinic when we are sick. I am happy that she will not be a widow, as I am.”

  She embraces me, and I can see that her eyes are wet.

  What my mother does not tell me, at least not until much later, is that among my father’s possessions, helpfully assembled by the nursing staff, is my box of wonder drugs. My mother eventually looks inside and notices four of the glass vials are still there — still full. The nurse had misunderstood the doctor’s instructions. Instead of administering all six vials in the last megadose, she had injected only two, which is too little to have played any significant role in my father’s recovery. And though my mother doesn’t tell him this, my father has recovered on his own, spontaneously, unaided by me.

  “What did you do about it?” I ask my mother.

  “Do? I did nothing,” she says.

  “But the mistake could easily have killed him.”

  “Well, she was her family’s only breadwinner, and she was about to retire,” my mother says. “I didn’t want to put her pension at risk.”

  SO MY FATHER survives, and I don’t have to seek out an aloe under which to bury him to keep Kipling’s hyenas at bay. At least not yet. He can sail on toward the landmarks of old age. And the first of those landmarks is Georgina’s wedding the following year.

  Three

  March 1997

  I TRAVEL UP FROM Cape Town, where I have been living for the past six months, to be closer to home. With me is Joanna, my English girlfriend, a reporter for the Guardian, who has come over from London for the wedding. At home, I find that Dad has shrugged off his brush with mortality and is completely restored to his old bluff, inaccessible self. Our relationship is back in its default of remoteness.

  Before the wedding, Joanna and I stay at the Chisipite house. We swim lengths of the pool while Dad fiddles happily with the filter and tests the pH balance of the water, carefully adjusting the ionizer to keep the water sparklingly clear. Though he designed the pool — an irregular curved shape finished in a ceramic mosaic of blues and greens with a vaguely Moorish feel and a stone waterfall at one end — and though he monitors it lovingly, he seldom gets in it himself; he just likes to admire it. The surroundings of the pool are admirable too. It is bordered by agave plants entwined with pink rambling roses reaching out to a small frangipani tree. A mass of blue plumbago grows ar
ound the waterfall and up a sturdy aloe plant. The lawn is broken up by an acacia thorn tree, supporting a lilac potato vine and a slender ivory-flowered kapok tree.

  GEORGINA’S WEDDING is scheduled to take place a week before her thirtieth birthday.

  “I promised myself I’d get married before I was thirty,” she says briskly.

  We are having tea in the orchid house of the thatched stone cottage where she lives with her fiancé, in a converted stable block at the bottom of the eight-acre garden of her future in-laws, who occupy the big ship of a house on the crest of the hill overlooking them. Together Georgina and her fiancé, Jeremy, a blond photographer, run a public relations firm that handles hotels and airlines. She has returned to Africa after three years at an English drama school and another two to secure her actor’s Equity card. This she did as Georgie Porgie, a clown who performed at children’s parties. She also toured with repertory theater groups for a year, principally as the tart in a rather successful farce called The Tart and the Vicar’s Wife. But she missed Africa. So after six years away, she came back to become something of a celebrity in a somewhat smaller pond.

  Back home she helped Jeremy research and write Mhondoro (The Lion Spirit), a play about Ambuya Nehanda, a famous Shona spirit medium who had largely inspired the 1896 uprising — the First Chimurenga — against white rule. When Nehanda was executed, she was said to have declared, “My bones will rise again,” and one night shortly after her death wild lions were seen trotting through the center of Harare. The lead role of Nehanda was played by Georgina’s best friend and colleague at the state broadcaster, ZBC radio, Tsitsi Naledi Vera, and it was the first truly multiracial Zimbabwean drama. Georgina and Tsitsi were also busy writing a soap opera, Radio Rumpere (“to break” in Latin), about two girls, best friends who work for a radio station, when one of them gets AIDS. It was supposed to explain cultural differences and challenge racial stereotypes. But they never finished it. Tsitsi suddenly died — officially, from pneumonia.

  Later, Georgina was the lead actress in Strange Bedfellows, an adaptation by the black Zimbabwean playwright Steven Chifunyise of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Georgina played Sandi Grobelaar, a white Zimbabwean, who complains to Farai, the black servant, “I cannot be held accountable for the sins of my fathers,” and eventually snogs him onstage. The play toured through Europe, showcasing the artistic vitality of the new Zimbabwe.

  Now Georgina presents the early morning drive-time radio program, The Good Morning Show, for ZBC; she reads the TV news and hosts a TV interview program; and she writes a column called “Between the Sheets” about social life in the “low-density” suburbs for the Northern News, a monthly newspaper. She wears big hats to open supermarkets, rappels down tall buildings to raise money for the mayor’s Christmas Cheer Fund, and produces comedy reviews for Save the Rhino. She emcees the Mr. Iron Man competition, and judges karaoke contests and Elvis look-alike gigs and the “Jacaranda Queen” drag festival. Georgina’s approach to these enterprises is cheerfully casual. Her TV interview show is dizzyingly improvised, featuring whatever flotsam washes through town, from Aboriginal Australian didgeridoo players to entire troupes of Congolese kwasa kwasa dancers who speak no English. On air she’s as relaxed doing horoscopes as she is introducing sporting events for sports she has no idea how to play.

  “How’s business going?” I ask.

  Her ZBC salary is a pittance, but it doesn’t really matter. The fact that she is back home, near our parents, as they grow old, is of huge comfort to them and worth any subsidy that might be necessary. Her presence enables my absence.

  “It’s going OK, I suppose,” she says. She lets one of her Dalmatians curl up on her lap.

  “We had an incident with a lion cub the other day at Meikles Hotel,” says Jeremy as he lowers one of the rolls of plastic sheeting that form the sides of their bush conservatory.

  Meikles is one of the oldest hotels in the country, opened in 1915 by a pioneering Scottish trader. The low colonial building has long since been rebuilt as a five-star high-rise, but it is still guarded by its original twin stone lions, who are supposed to roar every time a virgin walks by. (To date they have remained oddly silent.)

  “We’d organized a bit of a do,” Georgina says, “to promote their refurbishment. They’ve put in lovely beige carpets with a lion paw-print motif. Anyway, it was a must-be-seen-at event, with the whole press corps in attendance. In one corner we had a harpsichordist, the only one in the country, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, and for backup, in the hotel lounge, the British high commissioner’s wife on a baby grand playing her repertoire of show tunes. And in keeping with the carpet motif, a tame six-month-old lion cub.”

  “He was called Hercules,” calls Jeremy, from behind a fuchsia orchid he’s tenderly spritzing.

  “That’s right,” says Georgina, “and he was fine to begin with, padding around frightening the waiters. But then . . .”

  “But then indeed . . .” says Jeremy.

  “But then, he came up behind the lady high commissioner as she sat playing, jumped up and put his front paws on her shoulders, and started dry humping her, just like a dog!”

  “She was very game about it,” says Jeremy, deadheading a rhododendron.

  “Yes,” says my sister, “she just carried on playing ‘Climb Every Mountain,’ while Hercules lunged at her back with his engorged pimento. The handler had disappeared, and no one else quite knew what to do. She got halfway through ‘Send in the Clowns’ before she abandoned the piano and made a dash for the restroom, with Hercules, me, and a stringer from the Daily Telegraph in hot pursuit.”

  “It was good publicity for the hotel,” says Jeremy dryly from somewhere behind the plinth of their decorative fountain.

  “Yes,” says Georgina, “and we did pay her dry-cleaning bill.”

  She squints at a chip on her fingernail. “By the way, I’ve block-booked manicures and pedicures for the whole bridal party.”

  I examine my own nails. They are clipped short and square. “No, I’m fine, thanks,” I say.

  “Oh, come on.” She rolls her eyes. “Pamper yourself. I’m getting a full set of acrylic nails. You won’t be the only man, you know. Manuel and Jeremy will be there.”

  “Nah. I’m OK, really.”

  “I’ve reserved Esnat to do you,” she says.

  Esnat is Georgina’s Deep Throat in a lurid case that is about to come to trial in Harare. The manicurist’s boyfriend, a hand-some young policeman, Jefta Dube, was aide-de-camp to Canaan Sodindo Banana, the country’s first black president (a largely ceremonial position that disappeared in 1987 when the British-style post of prime minister was abolished in favor of an executive presidency — assumed by Robert Mugabe). Banana is also a Methodist minister who became a liberation theologian and once reworked the Lord’s Prayer to include the lines: “Teach us to demand our share of the gold, / And forgive us our docility.”

  And despite being married with four children, it was rumored that President Banana was partial to men, a somewhat precarious position given that Mugabe had denounced gays as “lower than pigs and dogs,” declared them to be “a colonial invention, unknown in African tradition,” and passed laws punishing consensual homosexuality with ten years’ hard labor.

  Jefta Dube was being tried for the murder of a fellow policeman, and though the trial was held in secret, salacious tidbits were beginning to leak. Dube was pleading in mitigation that the president had repeatedly raped him and that finally, when a colleague had taunted him calling him “Banana’s girlfriend,” he’d snapped and shot the colleague dead.

  “She’s quite happy to chat to you about the case,” Georgina promises.

  SOON I AM reclining in a chair at Cleopatra’s Beauty Salon in Newlands Shopping Center. It sits above a Greek restaurant and is permeated with the fumes of dolmades and sheftalia and stale retsina.

  “Hold out your hand,” says Esnat. She is a slender black woman in a white smock with her name embroidered in pin
k on its breast. She scrabbles around in her tray of utensils, many of which look alarmingly like surgical instruments, selects a metal nail file with a curved point, and begins to scrape back my cuticles. I am just summoning up the courage to ask her about President Banana when the file slips and stabs my thumb.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she says, aghast.

  She looks over to see if the manageress has noticed.

  “That’s OK,” I say quietly.

  But her file has punctured a vein, and my thumb is pumping out blood with each beat of my pulse. It quickly overwhelms her tissue and her paper towel, and soon the salon has come to a standstill to stanch my spurting wound as Esnat writhes with embarrassment.

  “I told you I didn’t want my nails done,” I say to Georgina.

  THE DRIVE to the village of Chimanimani, where the wedding is to be held, is about three hundred miles. Joanna and I have rented a little Nissan in an arresting shade of canary yellow. Its faded blue velour seats are infused with the sour aroma of sweat, and its history of accidents and improvised repairs is manifested in an awkward crablike diagonal trajectory. At the industrial eastern suburb of Msasa we leave the city behind us, and soon the vista is punctuated by huge outcrops of granite boulders, balanced improbably on one another since time prehistoric, and then the central plateau slowly tilts up through some of the country’s richest farmlands toward the hazy blue mountains of Nyanga, the roof of Zimbabwe. To either side of the main road stretch tracks that lead to the network of commercial farms, the junctions festooned with clusters of signposts bearing witness to old allegiances and origins, farm names like Tipperary, Tintagel, Grimsby, Saffron Walden.

  Until about fifteen years ago, when the war for independence ended, you could only make such journeys in heavily guarded convoys, which were frequently attacked. But today the countryside radiates peace. We stop the car at a rest stop and sit on a concrete bench to eat our picnic on the inverted cement mushroom of a table, in the shade of a musasa tree. The occasional faint chug of a tractor plowing a distant field, and the slow tuc, tuc, tuc of a diesel generator come floating across the ridge in little wind-borne swells. And behind this is the background screech of cicadas — the tinnitus of nature.