When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (3 page)

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.

T
HE 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.”

T
HAT 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.

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.

D
R
. O
KWANGA, 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.