When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Read online

  Abruptly, the cicada screech stops, and the bush is eerily quiet. When I was in the armed forces, lying in ambush, waiting for so long that fear was finally displaced by boredom and fatigue, the sudden hush of the cicadas heralded the possible approach of danger — of guerrillas in a blur of olive fatigues and AK-47s and Chinese stick grenades, of shouts and the rattle of gunfire and the Doppler zinging of ricochets, and the air being sucked out of my chest by the percussion of a grenade exploding; all the orchestrated cacophony of combat, and with it that acute postadrenaline awareness of the exquisite fragility of life itself.

  That first moment of silence when cicadas cease feels like nature’s herald of danger, even now.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Joanna, and I almost tell her.

  “Nothing. I was just thinking how peaceful it sounds when the cicadas stop.”

  The cause of the cicadas’ silence crests the path into sight: a ragged crocodile of small black children jogging back from school. Joanna takes in their threadbare khaki uniforms and the striped jute book bags bouncing on bony shoulders, and I can see how it must look to her. Even when they whoop and wave and flash bright-toothed smiles as they pass by, she sees ill-fitting, hand-me-down clothes and scuffed shoes or the bare feet of kids who walk miles to and from school each day and go home to thatched huts without indoor plumbing or electricity. But what I see are functioning schools: pens and paper and near-universal education producing Africa’s most literate population. She compares up, to the First World, where privileges are treated as rights. I compare down, to the apocalyptic Africa that presses in around us, where rights are only for the privileged. After covering wars in Mozambique, Angola, Uganda, Somalia, and Sudan, Zimbabwe feels to me like Switzerland.

  AFTER FIVE HOURS on the road, just as Joanna is despairing of us ever reaching the fabled Chimanimani, we strain up a final hill to find the quartz amphitheater of the mountains glistening ahead. Soon we are coasting down through timber plantations and orchards and coffee estates to the little village itself.

  The Zulu people sometimes call us white ones inkonjane, “the swallows,” because we arrived from overseas, just as the migrating birds do. If I were a swallow, Chimanimani is the place that my avian navigation system would draw me back to. It’s my true north, the fixed point by which I situate all other points, the closest place I have to a spiritual home.

  Chimani has supplied a seedbed of images in my memory that seem as fresh today as when they first sprouted in my childhood. My mother in her white coat marching down a long line of tribespeople that coiled through the bush, vaccinating arm after arm. Or peering into the chest of a disinterred three-week-old cadaver, her scalpel poised for the autopsy. It was here, in the Biriwiri Valley, that I used to play with the lepers at their colony — who were not infectious, my mother assured me, because they were dry lepers, not wet. Here where I padded around after Albert the Mozambican, our gardener, wrenching weeds out of the rich red African earth and tossing them into his big green wheelbarrow. Here I rode on horseback with Jeremy Watson, my childhood friend, helping to herd the cattle to new grazing grounds. And at night beside the fire, Isaac, the chief herdsman, told us long magical fables about ancestors and demons.

  At Silverstream my father ran the heart of the estates, the big factory that pounded away all day and night, extracting tannin (for leather) from the bark of wattle trees, creosoting their trunks and turning them into railway sleepers and telegraph poles and pit props. During the winter, when the cane was harvested and trucked up from the Save River Valley, the factory turned it into brown sugar, and there were African bees everywhere. Dad strode around in his desert boots and shorts and cotton safari jackets, with a slide rule and a packet of Gold Leaf cigarettes in his top pockets, keeping the whole thing going.

  It was here at Silverstream that I went in secret with my nanny, Violet, to worship with the Vapostori (“Apostolics”), the African charismatic sect who wear long white robes and become possessed with the spirits of their ancestors. In their bush temple made of logs and mud and thatch, I would dance around the tree trunk in the middle or beat skin-covered drums around the outer circle until I too once spoke in tongues and everyone grew afraid.

  It was here between Biriwiri and Skyline Junction, on a road carved into the mountainside, that our next-door neighbor, Oom Piet Oberholzer, was murdered by the Crocodile Gang, in the first guerrilla attack of the war to end white rule. And after he was killed, I was sent away to boarding school. And once Mozambique became independent of Portuguese rule in 1975, and its new Marxist government, Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), threw its support behind anti-Rhodesian guerrillas, it was here, along this densely forested frontier, that our war was at its worst. One of every six adult male whites in Chimanimani was dead by the end of it, many of their bodies now buried in the little cemetery by the side of road into the village.

  And when peace was declared and Robert Mugabe ascended to power, his men took sledgehammers to the pioneer memorial in the center of the village green and smashed it to pieces, and they changed the name from Melsetter, which had been taken from a town in the Scottish Orkney Islands, to Chimanimani, the name of the mountain range, “a space too small to turn around in,” because the mountain passes were so winding and narrow and steep.

  THE WEDDING PARTY has taken over the Chimanimani Arms Hotel and the Frog and Fern Bed and Breakfast, Mawenje Lodge, and Heaven Lodge, the backpackers’ hostel. Some of us are billeted with friends in the village or on farms. We sit on the lawn of the hotel where we used to sit twenty years before, served tea by the same waiters in the same faded red-baize fezzes, looking out at the towering mountains. Just above us, in the game sanctuary on the side of the hill called Pork Pie, for its shape, a herd of eland graze. They are monumental even from a distance, Africa’s biggest antelope, bison big, with great humps at their shoulders, and wattles dangling in loose folds of skin beneath their necks. Sleek, taupe, and plump, they toss their corkscrew horns and swish their tails and chew their cud, mouths flecked with green foam. In this sanctuary they are without predators. We are too high for lion, and they are too big for leopard.

  My mother and I stroll across the village to her old clinic, a cluster of rough, round, tin-roofed huts, now closed and replaced by a new one down the valley. It was at this old clinic that as a child I used to mingle with the African patients who congregated on the grass slope, sitting patiently with their bundles, waiting to be treated. This was where I came across Mr. Arrowhead, who had a barbed fishing arrow lodged straight through his head and yet walked and talked still, though not for long. This was where my mother and her black nurse Janet endeavored to blunt the scythe of death that cut through rural African communities — tuberculosis and tetanus, bronchitis and bilharzia, pneumonia, smallpox and malaria. And blunt it they did. Infant mortality fell, life spans rose, the population swelled.

  We look at the abandoned clinic in silence, and then my mother sighs, in a way that seems to mean both “Well, fancy that,” and “Let’s not get maudlin about this.” We make our way back to the hotel to find my father alone at a wire-mesh table in the flower garden where the rose blossoms are as big as babies’ heads. He half raises a hand and grunts a greeting.

  “Where’ve you two been?”

  “Exploring,” says Mum. “We need to go for a fitting now. You too.”

  “Ugh,” he says, tossing his head like a horse refusing its harness, “not me.”

  Georgina has had green vests made for all the men in the wedding party to wear under our tuxedos, but Dad is refusing to wear either the vest or the tuxedo.

  “It’s ridiculous,” he says. “Pretentious.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Dad. It’s what Georgina wants. We’re all doing it.”

  “Well, not me,” he says crossly. And with an air of finality he lights up a cigarette.

  We leave him there at the garden table, gazing up at the mountains, refusing the embrace of his own family.

  “His
behavior’s verging on the surly,” I complain to Mum.

  “You’ll just have to tolerate it,” she says mildly.

  “I suppose it’s because he can’t stand all the socializing,” I say, “all the rushing around and the prewedding chaos.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Well, what, then?” I am beginning to get irked at her defense of him.

  She pauses and then says quietly, “It’s because he’s afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “He’s afraid to enjoy this wedding, to anticipate it, after what happened before Jain’s wedding.”

  Jain is my other sister, my dead sister, older than me by seven years, but forever frozen at twenty-seven, killed just weeks before her own wedding. It was in 1978, during the civil war. She and her fiancé and their best man were traveling back to their home in Shamva in the northeast of the country, when their car ran into an army ambush that was preparing to attack guerrillas in a roadside village. The only survivor was Spence, the best man’s fox terrier. Jain was the nurturing one, the glue that held our family together, a grade school teacher, a homebody, the organizer of reunions and Sunday lunches, the keeper of the domestic flame. Her death is the ugly scar that overlays our family’s emotional topography, less a scar really than a sore that even after all these years still suppurates.

  “The wedding’s going to go off fine this time,” I say to my father later.

  “What do you mean?” he says blankly.

  “We’re all here and we’re safe and it’s going to be a great wedding.”

  But he still can’t bring himself to acknowledge its lethal precedent, let alone discuss it, so it just hangs there full of menace, this grenade of history rolled onto the dance floor of the present, primed to sabotage our family festivities.

  “YOU’D BETTER come and let Jeremy show you around the car,” says Georgina.

  I am to be the wedding chauffeur, and the car is a 1976 bronze Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow that belongs to the Summerfields, the parents-in-law to be. It is said to be one of only three Rollers in the entire country, two of which are theirs. It sits now in the hotel parking lot, looking quite out of place among the beaten-up pickup trucks and the little Japanese compacts. A black gardener with a rag is gingerly polishing the silver Spirit of Ecstasy statuette mounted on the hood.

  Looking at it I feel a twinge of unease. “You don’t think it might be a little over the top?” I say.

  “Over the top?” Georgina frowns. “Why?”

  “I dunno. Maybe it’s a bit . . . insensitive for us to ride around the African bush in a Roller?”

  Georgina rolls her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake! It’s an ancient borrowed Roller at a wedding, not a fucking Ferrari at a famine.”

  Jeremy is explaining the foibles of the car’s eccentric gear-shift.

  “Tell me, then,” Georgina lobs from over my shoulder, “would it have worried you if I’d been getting married in England and we drove to the church in a rented Rolls there? Why is it OK to do it there but not here?”

  I ignore her as Jeremy moves on to explain the badly adjusted clutch.

  “And anyway,” she continues, “the black elite here swan around in squadrons of the latest luxury SUVs, each of which is worth ten times this eccentric old thing.”

  “It’s true,” says Jeremy ruefully. “We’ve been trying to sell her for ages, but they’re impossible to get spare parts for, so no one wants to buy her.”

  ON THE DAY of the wedding, I knock on the door of my sister’s hotel room. From within, ABBA is blasting. She appears, wearing a dress of cream lace and green chiffon looped at the waist with strings of pearls, and on her head a hooded cape instead of a veil.

  “I know green is an unlucky color to get married in, but it’s supposed to echo the bucolic venue,” she laughs.

  My father is waiting for us in the lobby, trussed in a tuxedo, his previous objections notwithstanding. He takes Georgina’s arm and escorts her to the car. I slide in behind the ivory wheel and settle back into the age-scored cream-leather seat and drive them slowly down the pitted red-dirt lane around the side of the mountain toward Bridal Veil Falls. It’s a dead-end road leading up to the eland sanctuary, its edges lined with dense foliage that teems with morning glories and flame lilies, red-hot pokers and buffalo beans, serrated bracken and perforated elephant ears. The only people we encounter are barefoot Ndau tribespeople who step back into the bush to allow our stately progress and to stare after the Silver Shadow crunching slowly by. Georgina, in her green chiffon hood and pearls, waves with the back of her hand pretending to be the Queen of England, and they return her wave, astonished at this passing specter. She giggles with nerves.

  “Stop the car,” she says as we near the falls.

  “What?”

  “Stop the car, I need to pee.”

  “Can’t you hold it?” I ask as I pull over.

  She swings out of the car, walks behind a small tree, hoicks up her chiffon frock, and pees, trying to keep the splash from wetting her shoes. Dad and I stand watching a troupe of vervet monkeys scampering in the umbrella trees above us, chattering indignantly at our intrusion. And when Georgina returns, he lights up two cigarettes and gives her one, and they stand smoking in silence.

  I get down on my knees and begin picking off the black jacks and burrs that have attached themselves to her dress.

  “I can’t go through with it,” she suddenly blurts above me.

  Dad rolls his eyes.

  “You have to. Everyone’s waiting,” I say, rising to my feet. “And we’re already late. C’mon. Let’s get back in the car.”

  I take her by the arm toward the open door.

  “No.” She shrugs off my hand. “I want to call it off.”

  “Listen.” I can hear the panic in my own voice. “Just go through with the ceremony, and if you still feel like this afterward you can get the marriage annulled.”

  She sighs and throws her cigarette down on the road and twists it out with her shoe.

  “Fodga?” asks an old Ndau tribesman who has caught up with us. He wants a cigarette.

  Dad hands him his unfinished one, and the man immediately takes a drag and exhales twin plumes through his nostrils while he cocks his head to one side and observes us arguing.

  “Oh, all right, then,” says Georgina. “Let’s get it over with.”

  At Bridal Veil Falls, I open the heavy bronze door and let her out into the enchanted fern-flush glade to greet the congregation gathered on a grassy hummock in the lee of the waterfall.

  A string quartet from her old high school is playing, but they are drowned out by a white filigree of water that tumbles a hundred and fifty feet down the cliffside behind them. When Georgina and Jeremy had reconnoitered the venue, it was dry season, and the river was far smaller. Now, as they exchange vows, we can see their lips move but can barely make out their words over the rush of the water.

  After the ceremony, we move down to a long trestle table topped in white linen where canapés and Mukuyu brut de brut, a local sparkling wine, are served. A camera crew from ZBC is filming the procession for a little feature to be shown later on the national news, Georgina arm in arm with her maid of honor and best friend, Ellah Wakatama — black and white together, totally at ease, friends since elementary school, Zimbabweans now for nearly twenty years. Race, it seems, is finally losing its headlock on our identities in this little corner of Africa.

  Four

  May 1998

  YOU DRIVE,” says Georgina.

  I am passing through Harare on my way back to New York, where I have been living for more than a year, since Joanna accepted an assignment there for the Guardian. My daughter Holly, from a previous relationship, is nearly four and lives with her mother in London, and now Joanna is pregnant. In order to be able to work in New York, I have begun the lengthy process of applying for permanent residence in the United States, a so-called green card, under the portentous category, “alien of exceptional talent.�
�� For this I’m endeavoring to prove that I’m an invaluable cultural asset to America, which, as my father suggests, grinning, “might be a bit of a reach.”

  This trip to Harare is a personal detour from another National Geographic assignment, this time on the last of the San, Africa’s aboriginal people. I have been camping with them for weeks out in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia and Botswana, and now I badly need a drink.

  The city is somnolent and soggy with a summer downpour in its third straight day, but Georgina is determined to take me out. We’re in her Renault Four. It’s the car I learned to drive in twenty-five years ago, and it was already old then. The gearshift comes straight out of the dashboard and looks like an umbrella handle. Once behind the wheel I see why she has asked me to drive; the Renault refuses to budge into second or third gear no matter what tactic I try, double declutching and fingertip gentleness or brute force. So we drive through rain-swept Harare alternating from an over-revved first gear to a lurching fourth. The internal fan has also given up, leaving the windshield permanently fogged.

  “I just had it serviced,” observes Georgina mildly, lighting up another Madison and throwing the scrunched red-and-white packet onto the backseat where it joins dozens like it.

  Jeremy is away, running a course training hotel waiters, and all she can find for us to do this wet Monday evening is an Irish-themed event in Avondale at a pub called the Phreckle and Phart. It is not an uplifting occasion. Inside, half a dozen white men and two white women, dressed all in green, are huddled in a corner resolved to get drunk. An up-tempo Irish jig executed on a lone fiddle buzzes out of the faulty overhead speakers.

  Georgina brings news of ex-President Banana, who is finally about to go on trial for sodomy. Prurient details have emerged from Jefta Dube: waltzing lessons to Kenny Rogers ballads, with the ex-President Banana holding him so close that he could “feel the stubble on his chin”; Banana’s erection digging into his belly; the former president lacing his Fanta with a sleeping potion and him then waking up facedown on the red carpet of the State House library, clad only in his shirt, with the beaming Banana looming over him announcing in a soft voice, “While you were sleeping, we have helped ourselves.”