When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (28 page)
I wish this letter could get to you more quickly as I want to beg you not to make the same mistakes I made when Jain was killed, but you are probably much more sensible anyway. I went all aloof and introverted, as I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because I would cry, and I spurned offers of help and companionship and as a result it has taken me all these years to get back to normal. Do keep in very close touch.
Much love from us both,
Helen
That night, the night before we are to rebury Jain, I ask my mother about the letter she has written to Joan Simpson.
“Losing a sister was bad enough,” I say. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose one of my children. I think it would kill me.”
“Fifteen wild Decembers,” she murmurs.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t you know the poem? It’s by Emily Brontë. It’s called “Remembrance” and was inspired, as I recall, by the deaths of her mother and two elder sisters when Emily was a little girl, more than fifteen years before.”
She goes to the bookcase in the living room and brings back a battered hardback with hand-tooled leather cover and a broken spine and pages unthreading from their binding. She lays it carefully on the dining table next to the silver donkey cruet holder and begins to read aloud.
“Cold in the earth — and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave? . . .
“Cold in the earth — and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring;
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!
“Brontë ends with a warning,” says Mum, and goes to the last verses.
“Then did I check the tears of useless passion —
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.
“And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?”
“That’s the danger of grieving,” she says. “The dead can become more real to you than the living.”
T
HAT NIGHT
, Dad listens to Georgina on Radio Africa and breaks into his last bottle of soda water. The radio tells of Zimbabwe’s collapsing hospital system, a matter close to my mother’s heart. Both nurses and doctors are on strike — their salaries have lagged badly behind hyperinflation. No new patients are being admitted. Three “airport personnel” and one army doctor are trying to assist all new inpatients at the entire giant Parirenyatwa Hospital.
Dad keeps interjecting over the broadcast, as though he’s having a conversation with Georgina. The air traffic controllers are also on strike. So are university students, post office workers, garbage men. “But it’s difficult to tell the difference these days,” says Dad. “Everything is such a shambles anyway.”
A court order has been successfully sought by Morgan Tsvangirai to imprison the registrar general of elections for contempt of court for refusing to bring all ballots to Harare for safekeeping, as specified in the Electoral Act. “But we all know it will never be acted on,” pipes Rustic Realist.
I sit on the sofa half listening and half reading back issues of the newspapers that Dad has saved for me. One carries a Reuters report headlined “Rent-a-Corpse,” which starts, “Two Zimbabwean mortuary workers have been arrested on charges they rented out corpses to motorists to enable them to take advantage of special fuel preferences given to hearses.”
In the
Zimbabwe Independent,
an opposition weekly paper, I read the “Hijack Update” headed “Mayhem Continues.” The Update is sponsored by Track-it, makers of a car-tracking device, whose logo is a man pointing a pistol at a driver’s head.
Another paper carries a story about the burning down of the synagogue in Bulawayo a few weeks ago on the eve of Yom Kippur, under mysterious circumstances. A government commentator, under the pen name “Busybody,” is alleging that the city’s tiny Jewish community — now down to only 159, nearly all more than seventy years old — were hoarding contraband there: foreign currency, and even black-market fuel, which, “Busybody” claims, boosted the fire. “Busybody” knows this, apparently, because of “the amount of emotion, dejection, and desperation on the faces of the victims that fateful Saturday.”
T
HE NEXT DAY
, the day we are to rebury my sister, my father calls me into his room. He sits hunched on his bed.
“Sit, Pete,” he says, gesturing to a hard plastic chair. “Let me tell you where I am.” He sighs and gathers his thoughts. “I’m going downhill fast. My memory’s shot. I tire easily. I can hardly walk. I could go at any time. We have almost no real income left, Pete. I’m so sorry, son. The thing you will have to decide is what to do with Mum when I’m gone — which could literally be at any moment. I’m finished, Pete. Finished.”
I sit there wondering how to respond. “Don’t worry about Mum. I’ll make sure she’s OK,” I say.
Mum shuffles through the door, as if on cue. “What are you two moping about?” she inquires brightly.
We both remain silent. She doesn’t press it.
A
S WE ARE
getting ready to leave for the cemetery, I realize that we have no flowers.
“We can buy them from the flower hawkers at Chisipite Shopping Center,” I suggest.
“No! They’re probably
blood flowers,
” Mum hisses, meaning the looted produce of ejected farmers whose in-the-field crops have been taken over by ruling party fat cats.
I carry the wooden box containing Jain’s ashes out to the car and place it gently on the backseat. I wonder about strapping it in with a seat belt. Then, as I wait for my parents to make their slow way out, I notice that Isaac had been pruning the tall bougainvillea hedge. Cerise branches lay thick on the drive, destined for the compost heap. So I gather up a great armful of the thorny clippings and put them in the backseat next to the wooden box.
We drive in silence across town, me at the wheel with Mum up front, and Dad in the back with Jain, in her box, nestled in her thorny crown of bougainvillea. I try to think of the last time all four of us were on a drive together, sometime before Georgina was born. Fate seems to have conspired to keep our family apart from each other, especially at death. Dad was stranded in England while his mother and sister were killed. His father died in Poland, unable to get out to the West, and Dad was not able to be at his graveside. And after my mother’s father died — when she was eleven — she was kept from the funeral by her mother, had barely known he’d been ill. At Jain’s first funeral, I was the absentee — my parents not wanting me to come back to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia (as it then was) and risk being called up again into the army. And at this second one, it is Georgina who is persona non grata. Why is it that we can never seem to mourn together, to have unity in our grief?
And I realize that for three generations, men in our family — my grandfather, my father, and I — had fought in battle. Yet it was our women — my grandmother, my aunt, and my sister — who got killed in war.
A
T THE CHURCH
, Father Bertram greets us, and the Watsons, in a white cassock with a busily purple-patterned surplice. I hand him the wooden box of ashes, and he puts them on a little table next to a square hole, freshly dug in the courtyard lawn by Rodgers the church gardener. Fiona, the Watsons’ daughter, takes the bougainvillea branches and skillfully arranges them into several sprays, which she ties together with hair bands and places at the graveside.
Father Bertram begins the obligatory reading from John, of Lazarus being raised from the dead. Then he turns to me and asks whether I should like to place Jain’s remains in the grave. It is a shallow hole, no deeper than my elbows, with a small ledge around the rim on which to rest the tombstone. The earth is rich, red, and loamy. I kiss the box and set it down. Above and behind I can hear my mother quietly weeping, and Sydney and Fiona too.
Dad has said that he does not wish to say anything at this interment, but that I should. I have written down some thoughts, but they seem trite now. What can I say about Jain that her own parents and godparents don’t already know?
I start to speak but my voice sounds far off.
What I want to say is that even though she has now been gone for almost as long as she lived, I still miss her. That even now when something funny happens I sometimes find myself wanting to recount it to her, just for the reward of her laugh. That her premature death has rendered her forever young in our memories, overtaken in years by the younger siblings she once protected and nurtured.
What I want to say this afternoon is that it was Jain’s death that sealed for me the utter futility of war. That when our civil war was over in 1980, I remember half expecting that the dead would be restored to us, like some weary column of POWs returning after an armistice. And that it was only then, a full two years after her death, that I finally realized she was really dead. That there is no literal Lazarus. There is only a void where once there was a life.
And the only solace I can find in all of it is that Jain has been spared the intervening tragedy in which we are all now embroiled, the needless moral and physical debasement of this place we used to call home. She has been spared the scattering of so many of its sons and daughters in a far-flung diaspora from which each passing day makes a return less likely.
Robin reads from a piece of liturgy from the Russian Orthodox
panikhida,
selected by Anastasia Heath, my mother’s cousin in England (who changed her name from Rosalind when she converted to Russian Orthodoxy many years ago).
“With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of thy servant, where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting.”
But in this place, this here and this now, there is still sorrow and sighing and sickness.
A dog in a neighboring garden barks urgently, but we ignore it, and Father Bertram starts reading from Psalm 121. It begins: “I lift up mine eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come?”
From whence indeed,
I find myself thinking bitterly.
Dad can stand no longer, and he shuffles slowly over to a wrought-iron bench in the corner of the cemetery and eases himself down onto it.
Next to the hole, Rodgers stands with the new headstone. It is made from natural unpolished granite, chiseled with an exact copy of the inscription on the original brass plate, which now probably serves as someone else’s coffin handles.
Jain Godwin
daughter of Helen & George
sister of Peter & Georgina
killed near Shamva
aged 27
on 22nd April 1978
together with her
fiancé Neville Williams
At a sign from Bertram, Rodgers kneels down to place the stone over the casket. But the hole he has cut in the lawn is slightly too small. He struggles for a while to force it in.
“She always was an awkward fit,” I say, and Sydney laughs through her tears.
Then I kneel down to help Rodgers while he grabs his shovel and cuts an extra sliver of turf away, and finally the slab slips in.
Father Bertram gives a final blessing, and the breeze picks up, and we can hear rain showers approaching fast from the south. We don’t bother to move inside, enjoying the fat, cool drops splattering on our warm faces. The shower passes in a few minutes.
We drive home in silence, in convoy with the Watsons, for a little wake. On the veranda under the jasmine pergola, we drink tea and eat scones freshly baked by Fiona and then we graduate to pizza, which I collect from Chisipite Shopping Center. Take-out pizza is the biggest extravagance my parents can think of. Dad suggests I break out the good whiskey, the single-malt scotch I have brought with me. I pour shots for everyone, and we sit in the gloaming and toast my sister. The streetlights flicker on, and we all give a ragged cheer. The light nearest us is immediately surrounded by a hazy halo of flying ants. On the hillside across the valley, the rest of Chisipite lights up too.
Then the lights sputter and die, and darkness is restored to our corner of Africa.
November 2003
B
EFORE LEAVING
on the
Forbes
side trip to South Africa that is both the pretext and the paymaster for my visit to Zimbabwe, I drop off my car — rented from a dispossessed farmer’s wife — at the JAG offices, with a full tank. I have managed to find the only place in the city with fuel, a party-owned station on Manica Road. The JAG offices are bustling with farmers. Kerry Kay, whose former employees I had met at Rock Haven Refugee Camp, is there, like a whirlwind, trying to record what is happening to evicted farmworkers. And so is Marcus Hale, whose farm has just been
jambanja
’d by no less than the Very Reverend Nolbert Kunonga, Anglican bishop of Harare. (Kunonga has also thrown off fifty farmworkers and their families.) This is the bishop’s earthly reward for preaching in favor of the president, which has caused a mutiny among Anglican rank and file. (Pius Ncube, the Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, by contrast, is a major thorn in Mugabe’s side.)
“We sent a letter of complaint to the archbishop of Canterbury,” says Hale, “and he wrote back to say that he was ‘very annoyed,’ but Bishop Kunonga continues to squat on our farm nonetheless.”
For my
Forbes
assignment, I am to sample luxury hotels in Cape Town and then three high-end safaris. Mudiwa Mundawarara, an old school friend from St. George’s, is on the same flight so he gives me a lift to the airport in his pickup truck. His sister, Mandisa, broadcasts alongside my sister for Radio Africa in London (as does Ellah’s husband, Richard). Mudiwa’s father was a doctor, a colleague of my mum’s. He was Shona, while Mudiwa’s mother is Xhosa, and his wife, Julia, who teaches English literature to twelfth graders at our old school, is Ugandan. They are a true pan-African family, the kind of people who give me hope that this place
could
work. As an American-qualified pharmacist, who was CEO of a large pharmaceutical company in Zimbabwe, Mudiwa can emigrate tomorrow, but has so far chosen not to join the swelling diaspora.
As we drive slowly through the city, he talks enviously of the velvet revolution presently unfolding in ex-Soviet Georgia. “Why can’t that happen here?” he wonders. “It’s so humiliating, all of us just waiting for the old man to go, while the country dies around us.”
“Behold the great image of authority . . .” I say.
“. . .a dog’s obeyed in office,” he completes, from
King Lear,
required reading at St. George’s.
“We’re like a goat being slowly devoured by a python,” I say as we drive through the moribund city to the airport. We bleat a bit, twist a little, and occasionally kick feebly, but on the whole we’re afflicted by some lethal lassitude that allows us to accept that we will slowly rot in the belly of the beast.
Later generations will shake their heads in incredulous contempt and ask: But why? Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you rise up? How could all of you, so many millions of you, stay in the thrall of this one old man? Look at him, he looks almost fragile, effete even —
this
little man was your ogre?
This
was the man who had his heel on your throats for so long? And they will despise us. I wonder what happened to Tatchell’s Black Mamba guerrillas?
At the airport, the customs officer wants to know if I have local currency, which it is illegal to export.
“No way,” I say. “With this hyperinflation, I have none left over at all,” and we all laugh.
“I have no more questions,” he declaims in mock stentorian tones. “And no answers either.” And he chortles some more.
Airside, Paul Themba-Nyathi, dressed in a Cuban shirt and a baseball cap, ambles over to greet me. It is his penance now to circle the globe, in perpetual motion, drumming indefatigably for The Cause. Nyathi is on his way to appear before an open session of the South African Parliamentary Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, which I promise to attend.
I
HAVE ALWAYS
wanted to love Cape Town, and I still do. In many ways it is the perfect place for me, a compromise city between Africa and the First World. I used to come here often over the five years I was stationed in Johannesburg, and in 1997, following my father’s heart attack, I tried to live here, but after six months, I gagged on its isolation from the rest of the continent.
Somehow, Cape Town doesn’t feel like part of Africa. The real Africa, Black Africa, stops five hundred miles to the east at the Great Fish River. Jared Diamond explained that to me when we were making our Africa film. The Great Fish River is where the climate changes from a tropical one, with dry winters and wet summers, into a Mediterranean one, with wet winters and dry summers. And the crops that the Bantu people grew up in the tropical north — millet and sorghum — didn’t work down here; they didn’t germinate at the right time. Because of that, the Great Fish River is where the Bantu’s southern migration fizzled out. That is why the western Cape doesn’t really feel African. It isn’t. That’s why the Dutch were able to establish a beachhead so easily here in 1652; there were no regiments of Xhosa to drive them back into the sea at spearpoint. There were just the retreating remnants of Bushmen and their pastoral cousins, the Khoi.
It sometimes feels to me as though Cape Town might also serve as the white man’s last redoubt, where our vanguards will hold back the onslaught — the
swart gevaar,
the “black peril,” as P. W. Botha used to call it — while our women and children board lifeboats out to the tall ships waiting in False Bay, ships that will sail over the horizon taking us back to England and Holland and France and Germany, or on to ex-colonies where we have conveniently decimated the indigenous inhabitants, to North America and the Antipodes.
I check in at my hotel, the Twelve Apostles, nestled under the west side of Table Mountain past Camps Bay, and then dash to Parliament for Themba-Nyathi’s show-and-tell. I arrive late, and he is already being grilled by parliamentarians who ask obvious and repetitive questions. He answers patiently, explaining over and over how bad the situation has become in Zimbabwe, and why South Africa must take a strong line against Mugabe. Themba-Nyathi seems so much more intelligent and sophisticated than most of his interrogators and yet he is the humble mendicant here, pleading for help. But it is obvious that these people will never help us. He knows it, and so do I.
Afterward, a reception for Themba-Nyathi at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa is almost empty. No one is interested; no one here cares that our democracy has been trampled. The fact that many black South Africans, in particular, continue to salute Mugabe when his policies have destroyed a once-promising nation depresses Themba-Nyathi. They don’t seem to care that the vast number of Mugabe’s victims are his own people, black people. Maybe, I say to him, South African blacks, with only a decade’s distance from white rule themselves, are still partial to Mugabe’s race-baiting stagecraft, “the righting of historic wrongs” plume of dry ice that he has pumped over his real machinations.
I remember this conversation later, when Mugabe arrives at the celebrations in Pretoria to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of apartheid, and he is greeted with what looks like a standing ovation (although I am assured that some of the crowd booed). It gives me a shiver of negative epiphany — a zemblanity, a fear that we will never really surmount race here. And when
New African
magazine surveys its readers to find the top African leaders of all time, they rate Mugabe third (behind Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana), and that fear only deepens.
How many generations will it take before the taste of colonialism has been washed from our mouths? And I have to live my own life in the meantime. I can’t bear the guilt, the feeling of responsibility. I can’t lug the sins of my forebears on my back wherever I go. I will be just like my father. I will dispel from my head all the arcane details of this place, the language, the history, the memory. I will turn my back on the land that made me. Like Poland was to him, Africa is for me: a place in which I can never truly belong, a dangerous place that will, if I allow it to, reach into my life and hurt my family. A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere — on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility.
After another drink at the desultory reception, Themba-Nyathi reminds me that not all Africans are cheering Mugabe as he stands on our throats. Many of the continent’s moral standard-bearers are not fooled at all. Dambudzo Marechera wasn’t. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize–winning Nigerian writer, compares the Zimbabwean land program with Stalin’s land collectivization in Soviet Russia, designed to get rid of the kulaks, the prerevolutionary commercial farmers whom he saw as a political threat. And Archbishop Desmond Tutu, another Nobel laureate, calls Mugabe the “very caricature of an African tyrant.”
T
HERE IS ONE PLACE
I have told my father I will visit in Cape Town before I head back to Zimbabwe: the Holocaust Center, to learn more about how his family met their end.
“He’s always distressed about what happened to his mother and sister before they were killed,” says Mum. “He’s still haunted by what they must have gone through in their last days, their last hours.”
In my briefcase I have the reply I have just received from the Red Cross tracing service. I sit on the terrace at the Twelve Apostles with the South Atlantic Ocean lapping below me, across the bay from Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for eighteen years, and reread it.
We deeply regret we could not provide you with the information you sought. Though the Third Reich documented the names of many of their victims . . . many records were deliberately destroyed in occupied areas as the Allies advanced; others were accidentally destroyed during the course of the war. Finally, Nazi authorities did not always record the fate of individuals, including those sent to ghettos or concentration camps.
It is from the children of Sophie, my father’s aunt, that I have found out a little more about the fate of his mother and sister. Sophie is his mother’s younger sister. Her husband was killed in Auschwitz. But Sophie, a chemist, survived, shielded by her colleagues at a Warsaw hospital, sleeping every night on a doctor’s examination table, and giving up her infant son, Alexander, to be looked after by Catholic nuns. At the end of the war, she retrieves him and escapes to France, where she settles near Bordeaux, remarries, and has another child, Jeannette. Since going to Africa, my father has cut off all contact with Sophie, and she, just like Dad, keeps her Jewishness secret until shortly before her own death in 1989. Only then does she start to tell her children some of what she can remember.
It seems that by late 1942 or early 1943, the Goldfarbs, who have managed to remain outside the Jewish ghetto, finally get hold of foreign passports. They are preparing to leave Warsaw, when mother and daughter, Janina and Halina, are arrested. Either an informer “denounces” them as Jews to a German patrol or they are caught up in a street cordon-and-search, nobody knows. And then they are put on a death camp train. Sophie has drawn a family tree of her own, which Jeannette later sends me. Under both Halina and Janina it says
“morte à Treblinka.”
T
HE
C
APE
T
OWN
H
OLOCAUST
C
ENTER
is near Parliament, on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, just below the handsome pink-and-white confection of the Mount Nelson Hotel. It features a 1:400 scale replica of Treblinka made by Peter Laponder, a Dutch model maker, based on maps and eyewitness testimony from Yankel Wernik, a prisoner who worked there as a carpenter for more than a year and finally escaped. Treblinka was a new species of camp. It was not a
Konzentrationslager
— a “concentration camp” — like Dachau and Buchenwald, ghastly places to be sure, where many people died. Treblinka was a
Vernichtungslager,
an “extermination center” designed with a single purpose: the annihilation of the Jews of Europe.
There were six extermination camps built in Poland: Che?mno, Auschwitz II, Majdanek, Sobibór, Be?z?ec, and Treblinka. The last four, all in the east of the country, were part of Operation Reinhard, named after Reinhard Heydrich, the man who had planned the genocide, the “Final Solution” for Europe’s eleven million Jews. And of these four, Treblinka was the most lethal. It opened in July 1942 and was an industrial-scale killing factory where the average stay for new arrivals was about an hour. I know that no one can truly imagine the reality of what it must have been like for those taken there. But I look at this replica of the camp and I feel that I must try.
The train from Warsaw is made up of fifty to sixty freight cars, packed eighty people to a car for the four-hour journey. The small vents are wrapped with barbed wire, and the smell of chlorine is overwhelming. Many vomit or faint. The train crosses the Bug River and stops at Treblinka Village Station, where it is uncoupled and the locomotive pushes twenty railway cars at a time down a specially built spur line to the camp itself.
The doors open and everyone is ordered out onto a ramp. On the walls are signs for a ticket office, a restaurant, a telephone kiosk, and train schedules, posters of vacation destinations, and a clock. All are fake. The hands of the clock are always at three o’clock. The windows don’t open, they are painted on the walls. The German SS officers, who designed and oversee Treblinka, are trying to postpone the passengers’ understanding of their fate, for once the full horror becomes plain, they will panic and try to escape, or to commit suicide, and killing them will take longer. So the SS officers tell them that this is just a transit camp from which they will shortly be transported to the east, to work in factories.
But sometimes the deadly charade is impossible to maintain, especially when the pace of the arrivals accelerates to twelve thousand Jews a day. Then many deportees die of exhaustion or suffocation in the cattle cars. And those who have realized what awaits them have to be forced to disembark. In his testimony, Abraham Goldfarb, our namesake, records the mayhem of his own arrival.