When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (24 page)

A
FTER VISITING HOURS
, my father and I have an appointment at Christchurch, nearby. Keith Martin, the former funeral director who knows everything about death in this country, has suggested this as a suitable place to rebury Jain, and now I want to get Dad’s approval before I leave. Father Bertram, the white-bearded parish priest, shows us around the sheltered internal courtyard that serves as a small garden of remembrance for cremated remains. It is well tended and invisible from the road. We are trailed by the church gardener, Rodgers, who adjusts the sprinklers — the church has its own well, which makes its garden a lush oasis of magnolia and agapantha, pride of India and frangipani, in a desert of crisp khaki.

“What do you think, Dad?” I ask gently.

“Very nice,” he says. “Yes, very nice.”

“Actually,” explains Father Bertram, pointing out the vacant spots among the rows of gravestones set into the lawn, “I’ve got some extra plots available, for the rest of the family, if you like? These had all been booked and paid for in advance, but so many people have left the country . . .”

I’m appalled — it seems wrong to be offering to sell Dad his own grave, as if we are giving up on his health improving. I start to decline, but Dad interrupts. “Oh, we might as well, Pete,” he says, trying to sound lighthearted.

So we agree to reserve the extra graves, one for each of us — because in the end, I suppose, you want to be buried where you belong.

T
HAT NIGHT
over dinner at the house of Richard and Penny Beattie, local architects, I hear the first reports about the progress of the Final Push, from two MDC members of Parliament, Tendai Biti, their justice affairs spokesman, and Paul Themba-Nyathi, their foreign affairs shadow minister. Themba-Nyathi I have known for years. During the independence war, I fought — on the opposite side — in his home area of Gwanda, in southern Matabeleland. After independence, I worked with him as a lawyer, defending his ZAPU colleagues who were charged with treason by Mugabe. Now he seems depressed at the conduct of the protests. The “secret” marches, which were supposed to be taking routes from various townships into the city center, were not secret at all, and were broken up almost immediately. I mention that some supporters are disappointed that the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has not led the marches himself, but Biti points out that to do so Tsvangirai would break his treason-trial bail conditions and be imprisoned immediately.

A guest admires Biti’s Nigerian garb — a white brocade dashiki tunic and trousers, and a kente kofi hat. The hat is obviously terribly itchy, and every few minutes he removes it and scratches his head vigorously.

“No, no, it’s not Nigerian,” he says crossly, “it’s
Ghanaian.
Why does everyone think it’s Nigerian?”

The Nigerians are unpopular here because their president, Olusun Obasanjo, has just hosted Mugabe, and they appeared together on the local TV news last night, holding hands on a brown sofa.

Tendai Biti is also angry that the marchers today have been so easily cowed. A single CIO officer driving by in an old unmarked VW Golf turned an entire column of protesters back.

“All he had to do was to pull his pistol out of his waistband and fire it into the air once, just once, and they all ran away,” he says in disgust.

Others, though, have been dealt with more savagely. Beattie’s kitchen has been turned into a major supply and logistics center for the protest, with MDC members cooking vats of food to take to all those hundreds who have been arrested. Joel Mugariri is organizing things. He is an accountant who ran — and lost — as an MDC candidate in Rushinga, down in the Zambezi Valley. After the elections, his house was burned down, so he rebuilt it, and they burned it down again, and, because he’s brave and stubborn, he rebuilt it a second time, and this time they came openly during daylight and torched it.

“Staying in Rushinga has become very dangerous,” he says unnecessarily. “They can come and kill you at any time.”

Joel was forced to move into a Harare township where he set up a house that serves as a refuge for other opposition supporters from his tribal home, people who have lost everything, including their homes, for daring to oppose the government in what they misunderstood to be free elections.

“None of us can go home or we will be murdered,” Joel says. But apparently he hasn’t run far enough away. “At noon on Monday they came to my house, the riot police together with soldiers and youth militia, and they just began beating whoever they found there, my wife, my sisters, even small kids, beaten on the head with batons.”

He pauses to stir a huge aluminum pot.

“I was taken away with four of my guys, and they drove around picking up other activists until there were thirty-three of us in the back of the truck. And then we were taken to Makoni Police Station, where there is also an army base. There we were made to lie flat on the ground, and they beat us with different kinds of whips. They did the beatings in teams of six, taking turns so they wouldn’t get tired.

“After that, they dumped all thirty-three of us in a police cell designed to hold eight. There was no flushing toilet, no beds or blankets, no food, no water to drink, and yet we were kept there for more than forty-eight hours.

“We weren’t charged or registered as prisoners, so no one knew where we were. Eventually one of our activists tracked us down and had the courage to bring food to us, and he came back with a lawyer.

“When we were finally released, they kept all our belongings, our money, cell phones, our IDs and driver’s licenses. One of our guys who went back to try to reclaim his things — they threw him in the cell, and he’s still there.”

The young man preparing food next to him is Henry Chimbiri, a photographer, who’s been trying to record the police abuses and been arrested nearly forty times for his efforts. He has downloaded some of his photos onto Richard’s laptop, and he scrolls rapidly through them, giving me a guided tour of the brutality.

“This one is Conrad, he has a broken arm, seven stitches to the head. He was sleeping in his own bed when they burst in and began beating him.”

He clicks on the next thumbnail.

“This here is Tobias. He was shot in the leg and had his neck fractured.”

Click.

“This is an MDC councillor’s house. They smashed the TV with a rifle butt and tried to demolish the walls with a pick ax.”

Click.

“And this is all that’s left of a small factory, a cooperative making fiberglass bathtubs and basins. The soldiers burned it down.”

Click.

“This is a woman who was forced to sit on the electric ring of her stove. Look how badly her thighs are burned — look, you can actually see the spiral mark of the red-hot element.”

Click.

“And this is a one-day-old baby, born at home during the protests because there was no transport to get her mother to the hospital. The baby was teargassed. Her mother — who has nothing to do with politics at all — was pointed out by an informer and beaten until her arm was broken. I think they did it just for fun.”

Pearson Mungofa, an MDC member of parliament from Highfield, is also in the Beatties’ crowded kitchen. He was accused of organizing mass action and arrested too. “We were marching peacefully,” he says. “And all of a sudden two trucks of soldiers drove up and began firing at us without warning. Not in the air, but among us, with live bullets. Some of us fell down . . .” He lowers his voice. “I don’t know what happened to them, those ones who fell down. I ran away,” he admits. “Later the police arrested me.”

“H
OW WAS YOUR EVENING
?” asks my father when I return.

“It was fine,” I say. “Fine.”

He asks me whom I met, and I gloss over it all. I can’t bring myself to tell him what is happening around us. His life is difficult enough as it is.

And the next day, unbelievable as it seems, I leave. I have commitments elsewhere: assignments, appointments, inflexible tickets, children, deadlines. My mother is much improved, though she is staying on in Dandara for a few more days because of its convenience, mostly, until she is fully mobile again. And Dad has enough fuel now. There is a support system of sorts with Linnea and the Watsons, and Gomo is coming for a few hours each day to help with the cleaning and clothes washing. And I’ll be back soon, I promise.

My mother is enjoying a supper of sweet-and-sour pork when I say good-bye to her at Dandara. Dad sits by her bed, holding her hand, and they are murmuring to each other like new lovers. He looks up and sees me looking at them.

“I’d miss the old girl if she died,” he says, and grins.

Mum gives him a box elephant. And me one too.

A
ND THEN
, suddenly, I’m gone. It’s like the end of a macabre fairground ride. From my expense account seat, I listen to the comforting tones of the British Airways captain wafting through the air-conditioned cabin. I look out my window to see three helicopters lift off from the air force base. They hover briefly over the runway, their snouts tipped down like malevolent dragonflies, then they swoop off low over the tin roofs of Harare township to deal with the morning’s opposition marches, ready to rain tear gas on Joel and his friends, ready to direct the police and the army, the militia and the party youth, to beat the protesters and arrest them, to put them in jail and leave them on cold cement floors without blankets or food or water or access to lawyers.

And as we soar away into a crisp, cloudless sky, I feel the profound guilt of those who can escape. I am soaring away from my fragile, breathless father with his tentative hold on life. I’m soaring away from my mother, who still lies in her hospital bed surrounded by wounded demonstrators — the trembling black women with broken limbs and puffy eyes and backs striated with the angry whip marks of the dictatorship. Away from John Worsley-Worswick, squinting through his cigarette smoke, phone clenched between ear and shoulder, trying to encourage evicted farmers. From Caro, the British colonel’s wife, now ferrying around anti–tear gas solvent kits and bottled water, her toenails painted a riot of different colors, her posh Home Counties diction already absorbing the shortened vowels of our southern African dialect. From Roy Bennett, gray-haired now with his tribulations, but still bloody well
there.
The marchers for democracy are being shot at and teargassed, and I am flying away from it all. A nation is bleeding while I sit here cosseted with my baked trout and crispy bacon, my flute of Laurent-Perrier brut champagne, my choice of movies and my hot face towel.

I am abandoning my post. Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity. I am committing cultural treason.

W
HEN
I
GET BACK
to New York I am listless and distracted. In my head, I’m still in Africa. I sit online at my computer, following the increasing pace of repression in Zimbabwe and listening to African music, cranked up fat and sweet. Mostly I listen to Oliver Mtukudzi, who I last heard live at the Harare International Festival of the Arts. And I listen to his fellow Zimbabwean, Thomas Mapfumo. The intricate cyclical melodies of his
mbiras
are almost narcotic in their trance-inducing effect — quintessentially African, though they are being played and recorded now in Oregon.

No one knows exactly how many of us have fled, because few of us emigrate officially. But the numbers are high — between one and two million, mostly black, energetic, educated, experienced people, the leadership cadre of a country — the Katyžn cadre. And the irony is that from our exile, we, whom Mugabe has chased away, inadvertently contribute to his survival. The money we send home to our relatives, our hard currency remittances (often multiplied by the black-market exchange rate), supports millions of people in Zimbabwe and helps to defer the country’s continuously imminent collapse.

Thomas and Hugo, my sons, dance around me, trying to get my attention, puzzled at my detachment. I know I must snap out of this. That I cannot live the life of an exile, a perpetual sojourner, feeling my past more emphatically than my present, carrying this sadness within me, this spiritual fracture, unspoken mostly, but always there, an insistent ache. I must become a real immigrant, positive, engaged, hopeful.

At night I lie awake, listening to the roar of air conditioners all around me, until finally, in the glow of first light, I fall into a shallow, dream-tossed sleep. And I dream a version of a dream that Joanna once had when she was pregnant with Thomas: I am trying to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in front of a huge Superbowl stadium crowd before the game begins, but when I reach for the high notes I start coughing up blood.

J
OANNA DECIDES
we all need a break, that we will take the kids on vacation to Jamaica. But I am wrestling with “resident alien” restrictions. My green card still hasn’t come through, and I worry that it’s my Hatfill anthrax “connection” that’s holding up my security clearance. Every time I leave the country I need an “advance parole” to travel (they use the terminology of the penitentiary for us foreign supplicants) or my application for permanent residence will be considered “abandoned.” Though I have applied in plenty of time for the parole renewal, this time it is late in coming.

Then I receive a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service informing me that my application for advance parole to travel has been denied and must be resubmitted, with all the contingent delays. I have sent them a passport-style head shot, which is not sufficient: they insist on a three-quarter view that must include one ear (and only one), for reasons of closer identification. They enclose a sample photo of a model, smiling coquettishly, her ear peeking out from behind a curtain of glossy black hair. I stomp around our apartment threatening to do something van Goghian. Staple an ear to the picture and return it, a bloodstained three-dimensional ID. My error only seems to underline the tentativeness of my presence here.

There is ominous news from home on the health front too. My mother tells me that Dad has “a tiny touch of gangrene” on the tip of one toe, but that it should “resolve itself.” I start to plan a return trip. A friend at
Forbes
commissions me to write a piece on luxury safaris in South Africa, and I quickly book my flight over Joanna’s objections.