When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (30 page)

Of course, I have been expecting this conversation, rehearsing different ways of telling him what I’ve found out. I can’t possibly tell him the real details of how people died at Treblinka.

“From all the research I’ve done, the books I’ve read, it would have been quick, Dad. They wouldn’t have suffered much.”

He closes his eyes and nods. “Well, that’s something, at least,” he says. “I’m glad of that.” And he reaches across and pats my arm. “Thanks, Pete, for doing that.”

I can see, though, that he is just pretending to believe me. He knows that they probably did suffer terribly. But he wants me to believe that I have successfully reassured him. I am lying, and so is he. We are lying to each other.

O
N
S
ATURDAY MORNING
, I go through to the study and squeeze the one-eyed wooden frog clip that sits on the desk, to make it regurgitate its diet of letters and lists and utility bills. Dad has asked me to check them — a huge concession from someone as organized as he. It soon becomes apparent that our phone is not out of order; it has been cut off because the check he sent to pay the bill has been returned. The figures he has written do not jibe with the words.

Among the bills is a newspaper advertisement he has clipped. It’s another “Hijack Update.” But the sponsorship has changed. Now it is: “A community service brought to you by TV Sales and Hire.” Under that is the headline “Watch Out — You Could Be Next! If you are the victim of a hijacking or are sure you are being followed, these are the numbers to call. Cut them out and if you have a cell phone, program one or two of these numbers into the phone. These numbers will go directly to the vehicle theft squad and they will respond.” These instructions are followed by news of recent hijackings, in particular a spate of SUVs being driven into neighboring Zambia. “Hijacking causes many problems within the victim’s family, sparked off by their terror and fear of reprisal. Mrs. C lost her twin cab in Marondera last week. The thieves were lying in ambush for her and were armed with AK-47s.”

W
E HAVE
S
ATURDAY LUNCH
with Georgina’s in-laws, Shaina and Gerald, in their garden. Their tame crow sits in the munhondo tree above. “It’s called Jekel,” says Shaina. “It had a mate called Hekel who was in the habit of eating from our Rhodesian ridgeback’s bowl until last week, when the ridgeback bit Hekel’s head off.” Their cockerel leaps up on the back of the guinea fowl and tries to mate with it; their peacock trumpets loudly until fed tidbits from the table.

Mum is telling them about the fire, and Shaina offers to give her some shrub cuttings to help fill the gaps in our hedge. Gerald hollers for Naison, the gardener. As he approaches, Shaina’s tiny Yorkshire terrier yaps and nips at the back of his blue-overalled legs, but Naison ignores it.

“It’s a very good watchdog, you know,” says Shaina. “I use it to alert the bigger dogs. It never gives a false alarm. Last night it was growling and growling, and then suddenly there were four gunshots right by our bedroom window. They keep trying to steal the neighbor’s swimming pool pump, and he was shooting at them. He has a very high-powered rifle, you know. You could hear the bullets zinging through the trees.”

Naison is assembling a variety of plants, placing them carefully in Bon Marché bags for Mum.

“He’s a lovely old chap,” says Shaina of her gardener. “He’s the only one of them I really trust. Shame, he lost his girlfriend and his daughter to AIDS. And now his real wife has died too. And the bastards, her family, they said that he’d never finished paying
lobola
to them for her so they wouldn’t let him bury her body. It lay there in the reserve, getting all stinky, for about a week, until he sold three cows and paid off the bride price. These people, honestly. Imagine holding a corpse hostage. Now he’s dying of AIDS too, poor old bugger. Every time I see him he’s got a new blister on his lip or something and I think,
Oh, oh,
and I rush off to give him extra treats to eat. You know that’s my instinct, to nourish the sick. I used to work at the hospice, you know. There was a picture in the
Herald
yesterday of a little black boy who died of meningitis. It said his last words were, ‘Look, Dad, I’m flying.’ That’s what that famous author Kubla something says, isn’t it? That when you die, your soul flies out of your body. When I worked at the hospice, the dying always used to say they were flying.”

“When we drive down to South Africa we prefer to go through Botswana,” Gerald is saying to Dad. “It’s much more
civilized.
I hate the Beitbridge border crossing. You line up inside for hours while outside they steal the headlights from your car.”

Shaina is telling Mum about the contentious divorce of her daughter, Jacaranda, whose ex-husband accused her of withholding some of his belongings, paintings, and other valuables, hiding them here at Summerfield Close. When marshals of the court arrived with policemen to raid the house, they mistakenly arrested the other daughter, Topaz, who had just arrived from Los Angeles.

“Topaz went to Chikurubi Prison for the night, you know, with her baby, Sable, not even two years old. They were crowded into a cell with thirty-one others. There was menstrual yuck all over the floor, but the other prisoners, all of them black women, they were so kind to her, they all moved to the side and put their blankets together so she could have a bed. And the black lady warden took the baby and mixed some powdered milk and gave her a bottle.”

Now Shaina turns to me to ask about the recent breakup of her son’s marriage to my sister. Jeremy has written to Shaina, trying to tell her he has finally accepted that he is gay.

“You know I wrote back to Jeremy saying we’ll always love you whatever you are, but I’m hurt that you never felt you could tell me. And he wrote back saying he’d assumed I’d always known.” She pauses for a sip of her iced water. “So do
you
think he’s really gay?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, not wanting to get involved.

“Well, I wish you’d ask him, man to man. I think it’s just a state of mind. That you can come out of it. Anyway, there’s been nothing like this in our family. Only one of Gerald’s distant relatives who’s a bit effeminate.”

“But he has kids,” objects Gerald mildly.

“Yes,” concedes Shaina, playfully, “but he only
really
came alive when he was playing the dame in the pantomime.”

M
Y PARENTS ARE EXHAUSTED
after their outing. Mum is fast asleep before 6:00 p.m. Her glasses are still on, and one hand clutches the corner of her Sony radio, which hangs by its black nylon strap from her monkey-chain stand. Unheard by her on Radio Africa is
A Different Point of View,
in which an American accent is calling for “days of prayer to get rid of Mugabe and his whole regime.”

Prayer. Is that all we have left?

I remove Mum’s glasses and gently pry her fingers from the radio, and she snuggles under the duvet. “Night, night,” she murmurs, without really waking up.

In bed I lie listening to the hawkers quarreling. The walls dance with the shadows caused by their fires, fires that now burn along the edge of our garden and seem to surround us.

O
N
S
UNDAY
, for a break, I go out by myself. American aid-worker friends have invited me to a barbecue — what we call a
braaivleis
— at their house high on Hogerty Hill, in Borrowdale. It is raining as I drive there, a tropical downpour that overwhelms the little wipers of my small blue Korean rental car with a blanket of water, but in this blighted country even the rain is bad news. The small winter-wheat crop is largely unharvested, its new black farmers unfamiliar with the ritual of advance booking combine harvesters. Rain will rot it in the fields.

Later, up on Hogerty Hill, the clouds clear to reveal a wide view across the valley toward a broken farm, and on the other side of the hill, red scars where the earth is being excavated to construct mansions for the new elite. One of the barbecue guests, a rhino expert, plays the bagpipes, while his wife accompanies him on the accordion, a hauntingly melancholy medley of Gaelic laments and Slavic ballads.

Out on the porch, an elephant expert from the States, Loki Osborn, is telling me about his dissertation on elephants’ abhorrence of pepper, something I can understand after my chili
chakalaka
experience. This matters because it provides a nonlethal way for tribespeople to keep elephants from eating their crops. If you spray an elephant with pepper, he says, it will stay away from that place for years. He’s been working with a small group of villagers in the isolated Dande tribal area down in the Zambezi Valley. As they have only one spring and walk miles each day for water, Loki says he wanted to help them by drilling a well. They welcome the idea, though doubt he can pull it off. When his drilling crew finally hits water, the villagers start feuding furiously about the altered walk-to-water hierarchy, and Osborn is eventually forced to fill the well back in. Now the tribeswomen once again spend hours each day trudging to fetch water, and calm has returned.

It’s always instructive to observe the life cycle of the First World aid worker. A wary enthusiasm blooms into an almost messianic sense of what might be possible. Then, as they bump up against the local cultural limits of acceptable change, comes the inevitable disappointment, which can harden into cynicism and even racism, until they are no better than the resident whites they have initially disparaged. Even those like Osborn, who have learned the language and done thorough research, often have their faith eroded by the vagaries of Africa, which can start to look horribly like irrationality to the northern eye.

Witchcraft still grips Dande, says Osborn. “They have cleansing ceremonies where they dance around, get possessed. They accuse the old women, their own grandmothers, the
ambuyas,
of being witches. And the amazing thing is that the
ambuyas
play along with the accusations: ‘Do you promise to stop eating babies?’ ‘Yes, we won’t do it anymore.’ The people slice the
ambuyas’
foreheads with razors and rub dirt into them. Then they all become possessed with the spirits of baboons and leap around making baboon calls.”

The next day, he says, everything is as normal — except that the old ladies have cuts on their foreheads.

The jealousy in traditional societies can be extreme if someone garners any sort of advantage. This is the downside of their egalitarianism. When big shots who have made money in the city return to their home areas to build grand houses, these rural mansions are often vandalized and stoned. Of course, anyone who has better crops or cattle is at risk of being accused of witchcraft. And such allegations often come from family members. Osborn shakes his head at it all.

His adventure in elephant pepper has finally become victim to the cult of
jambanja
too. It happens when he tries to turn his research trust into a company so that he can encourage the tribespeople to grow pepper commercially. He explains to his own staff — his drivers, translators, and research assistants, with whom he’s been working intimately for five years — that they will all still be employed under exactly the same conditions, but that as a
bonsela,
a “bonus,” he will give them a month’s salary for each year of their employ when he switches their contracts. But still they bring in the war vets and demand “retrenchment packages” of about twice their annual salaries (of which the war vets will take half). Now Osborn is packing up and leaving. No new well for Dande. No pepper cash crops. No jobs for his own staff. Nothing. He has moved his projects to other African countries, ones where things are a little less deranged.

W
HEN
I
RETURN
at 10:00, our house is ablaze with lights. Usually my parents are in bed by 8:30 p.m. and though I have my own keys, they are both still up, waiting to lock down Fort Godwin. We congregate in Mum’s room. She hauls herself up on her monkey chain and demands a debriefing. Dad arrives, very slowly, wearing only his sleeping shorts, airline socks over his bandages, and his
GOIF
slippers. I tell them about all the new mansions springing up in Borrowdale Brook, and they request a tour of it soon.

After I’ve put my parents back to bed, I test the phone line. It has been reconnected since I paid the bill. It takes almost an hour to get an international line, and when I get through it is crackling with static.

“Have a quick word with the boys first,” says Joanna, and Thomas comes on the line.

“Have you seen baby rhinos?” he asks, and before I can reply. “And elephants?”

“Yes,” I say. I have seen both on safari.

“Will you bring me back a Power Ranger costume?”

“No,” I say. “They don’t have Power Rangers in Africa.”

I take a breath to offer alternatives, but in the pause, he darts away like a silver minnow in the surf. “Bye, then,” he says, and hangs up.

I’m too tired to try again. I flop into bed. The rats scurry back and forth across the ceiling, their claws scrabbling for traction, and in my half-asleep state it feels as though they are scrabbling within my skull. Finally I sleep, and in my restless dreams, the Hindhead hawkers are barking and whooping like the Dande
ambuyas,
the grandmothers forced by their own children to imitate baboons. They are scampering up and down the foot of our garden. Their eyes reflect the flames of their fires. They are whooping and barking and waiting.

M
ARGARET’S ROOM
at the B. S. Leon Home for the Elderly is down the end of a long corridor, way too far for my father to walk, so I ask the staff if there is a wheelchair I might borrow.

“They all have people sitting in them,” the caregiver says. Then another remembers where there is a spare one and she skips off and returns with an extraordinary contraption, a massive antique iron wheelchair that looks like a Victorian bath chair. Its brake is tied with wire, and its footplate is missing, but it’s a set of wheels.

“It used to belong to an old lady. But she died,” an aide says to me. “Ah, but that one was very fat!” She giggles.