When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (4 page)

The nurse pulls the curtain around my father’s bed, and I realize that she is preparing for his death, so he can die in private. While I wait for him to go, I look out the window at the treetops over Mazowe Street and then blankly watch the flies battering themselves at the windowpane, trying to escape. “
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
” And while I stare, I become aware that the soundscape is changing subtly. It is the rhythm of the cardiac monitor getting slower. His heart is weakening, the thumping of those clarinet keys finally fading. His labored breathing seems to ease a little as his pulse lowers on the way to stopping. I look at his face. Nothing. Then back up at the monitor.

“You still here?”

At the sound of my father’s voice, I lurch back in my chair and upset the bedside tray. My father is grinning his lopsided grin. A blush of color is returning to his face.

“Can you help me sit up?”

I prop the pillows behind him.

“What I’d really like is some tea,” he says.

The ward nurse goes to get it.

And when Mum and Georgina return from the bathroom, they find Dad sitting up, chatting and drinking tea.

T
HE WONDER DRUG
, it seems, has lived up to its billing. By delivering it, I have actually saved my father’s life. I have proved myself as a son.

Soon he is ready to come home.

“You know, I felt you would actually be sorry if I died,” he says to me on his last day in the hospital, as though surprised by this discovery.

The nurse, the same one who had tested Lion Man’s restraining straps, insists on packing up his clothes and his wash things and his leftover medications. She hums as she works.

“I am so happy for Dr. Godwin,” she says to me. “She looks after us very well at the staff clinic when we are sick. I am happy that she will not be a widow, as I am.”

She embraces me, and I can see that her eyes are wet.

What my mother does not tell me, at least not until much later, is that among my father’s possessions, helpfully assembled by the nursing staff, is my box of wonder drugs. My mother eventually looks inside and notices four of the glass vials are still there — still full. The nurse had misunderstood the doctor’s instructions. Instead of administering all six vials in the last megadose, she had injected only two, which is too little to have played any significant role in my father’s recovery. And though my mother doesn’t tell him this, my father has recovered on his own, spontaneously, unaided by me.

“What did you do about it?” I ask my mother.

“Do? I did nothing,” she says.

“But the mistake could easily have killed him.”

“Well, she was her family’s only breadwinner, and she was about to retire,” my mother says. “I didn’t want to put her pension at risk.”

S
O MY FATHER
survives, and I don’t have to seek out an aloe under which to bury him to keep Kipling’s hyenas at bay. At least not yet. He can sail on toward the landmarks of old age. And the first of those landmarks is Georgina’s wedding the following year.

Three

March 1997

I
TRAVEL UP FROM
Cape Town, where I have been living for the past six months, to be closer to home. With me is Joanna, my English girlfriend, a reporter for the
Guardian,
who has come over from London for the wedding. At home, I find that Dad has shrugged off his brush with mortality and is completely restored to his old bluff, inaccessible self. Our relationship is back in its default of remoteness.

Before the wedding, Joanna and I stay at the Chisipite house. We swim lengths of the pool while Dad fiddles happily with the filter and tests the pH balance of the water, carefully adjusting the ionizer to keep the water sparklingly clear. Though he designed the pool — an irregular curved shape finished in a ceramic mosaic of blues and greens with a vaguely Moorish feel and a stone waterfall at one end — and though he monitors it lovingly, he seldom gets in it himself; he just likes to admire it. The surroundings of the pool are admirable too. It is bordered by agave plants entwined with pink rambling roses reaching out to a small frangipani tree. A mass of blue plumbago grows around the waterfall and up a sturdy aloe plant. The lawn is broken up by an acacia thorn tree, supporting a lilac potato vine and a slender ivory-flowered kapok tree.

G
EORGINA’S WEDDING
is scheduled to take place a week before her thirtieth birthday.

“I promised myself I’d get married before I was thirty,” she says briskly.

We are having tea in the orchid house of the thatched stone cottage where she lives with her fiancé, in a converted stable block at the bottom of the eight-acre garden of her future in-laws, who occupy the big ship of a house on the crest of the hill overlooking them. Together Georgina and her fiancé, Jeremy, a blond photographer, run a public relations firm that handles hotels and airlines. She has returned to Africa after three years at an English drama school and another two to secure her actor’s Equity card. This she did as Georgie Porgie, a clown who performed at children’s parties. She also toured with repertory theater groups for a year, principally as the tart in a rather successful farce called
The Tart and the Vicar’s Wife.
But she missed Africa. So after six years away, she came back to become something of a celebrity in a somewhat smaller pond.

Back home she helped Jeremy research and write
Mhondoro
(The Lion Spirit),
a play about Ambuya Nehanda, a famous Shona spirit medium who had largely inspired the 1896 uprising — the First
Chimurenga
— against white rule. When Nehanda was executed, she was said to have declared, “My bones will rise again,” and one night shortly after her death wild lions were seen trotting through the center of Harare. The lead role of Nehanda was played by Georgina’s best friend and colleague at the state broadcaster, ZBC radio, Tsitsi Naledi Vera, and it was the first truly multiracial Zimbabwean drama. Georgina and Tsitsi were also busy writing a soap opera,
Radio Rumpere
(“to break” in Latin), about two girls, best friends who work for a radio station, when one of them gets AIDS. It was supposed to explain cultural differences and challenge racial stereotypes. But they never finished it. Tsitsi suddenly died — officially, from pneumonia.

Later, Georgina was the lead actress in
Strange Bedfellows,
an adaptation by the black Zimbabwean playwright Steven Chifunyise of August Strindberg’s
Miss Julie.
Georgina played Sandi Grobelaar, a white Zimbabwean, who complains to Farai, the black servant, “I cannot be held accountable for the sins of my fathers,” and eventually snogs him onstage. The play toured through Europe, showcasing the artistic vitality of the new Zimbabwe.

Now Georgina presents the early morning drive-time radio program,
The Good Morning Show,
for ZBC; she reads the TV news and hosts a TV interview program; and she writes a column called “Between the Sheets” about social life in the “low-density” suburbs for the
Northern News,
a monthly newspaper. She wears big hats to open supermarkets, rappels down tall buildings to raise money for the mayor’s Christmas Cheer Fund, and produces comedy reviews for Save the Rhino. She emcees the Mr. Iron Man competition, and judges karaoke contests and Elvis look-alike gigs and the “Jacaranda Queen” drag festival. Georgina’s approach to these enterprises is cheerfully casual. Her TV interview show is dizzyingly improvised, featuring whatever flotsam washes through town, from Aboriginal Australian didgeridoo players to entire troupes of Congolese
kwasa kwasa
dancers who speak no English. On air she’s as relaxed doing horoscopes as she is introducing sporting events for sports she has no idea how to play.

“How’s business going?” I ask.

Her ZBC salary is a pittance, but it doesn’t really matter. The fact that she is back home, near our parents, as they grow old, is of huge comfort to them and worth any subsidy that might be necessary. Her presence enables my absence.

“It’s going OK, I suppose,” she says. She lets one of her Dalmatians curl up on her lap.

“We had an incident with a lion cub the other day at Meikles Hotel,” says Jeremy as he lowers one of the rolls of plastic sheeting that form the sides of their bush conservatory.

Meikles is one of the oldest hotels in the country, opened in 1915 by a pioneering Scottish trader. The low colonial building has long since been rebuilt as a five-star high-rise, but it is still guarded by its original twin stone lions, who are supposed to roar every time a virgin walks by. (To date they have remained oddly silent.)

“We’d organized a bit of a do,” Georgina says, “to promote their refurbishment. They’ve put in lovely beige carpets with a lion paw-print motif. Anyway, it was a must-be-seen-at event, with the whole press corps in attendance. In one corner we had a harpsichordist, the only one in the country, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, and for backup, in the hotel lounge, the British high commissioner’s wife on a baby grand playing her repertoire of show tunes. And in keeping with the carpet motif, a tame six-month-old lion cub.”

“He was called Hercules,” calls Jeremy, from behind a fuchsia orchid he’s tenderly spritzing.

“That’s right,” says Georgina, “and he was fine to begin with, padding around frightening the waiters. But then . . .”

“But then indeed . . .” says Jeremy.

“But then, he came up behind the lady high commissioner as she sat playing, jumped up and put his front paws on her shoulders, and started dry humping her, just like a dog!”

“She was very game about it,” says Jeremy, deadheading a rhododendron.

“Yes,” says my sister, “she just carried on playing ‘Climb Every Mountain,’ while Hercules lunged at her back with his engorged pimento. The handler had disappeared, and no one else quite knew what to do. She got halfway through ‘Send in the Clowns’ before she abandoned the piano and made a dash for the restroom, with Hercules, me, and a stringer from the
Daily Telegraph
in hot pursuit.”

“It was good publicity for the hotel,” says Jeremy dryly from somewhere behind the plinth of their decorative fountain.

“Yes,” says Georgina, “and we did pay her dry-cleaning bill.”

She squints at a chip on her fingernail. “By the way, I’ve block-booked manicures and pedicures for the whole bridal party.”

I examine my own nails. They are clipped short and square. “No, I’m fine, thanks,” I say.

“Oh, come
on
.” She rolls her eyes. “Pamper yourself. I’m getting a full set of acrylic nails. You won’t be the only man, you know. Manuel and Jeremy will be there.”

“Nah. I’m OK, really.”

“I’ve reserved Esnat to do you,” she says.

Esnat is Georgina’s Deep Throat in a lurid case that is about to come to trial in Harare. The manicurist’s boyfriend, a hand-some young policeman, Jefta Dube, was aide-de-camp to Canaan Sodindo Banana, the country’s first black president (a largely ceremonial position that disappeared in 1987 when the British-style post of prime minister was abolished in favor of an executive presidency — assumed by Robert Mugabe). Banana is also a Methodist minister who became a liberation theologian and once reworked the Lord’s Prayer to include the lines: “Teach us to demand our share of the gold, / And forgive us our docility.”

And despite being married with four children, it was rumored that President Banana was partial to men, a somewhat precarious position given that Mugabe had denounced gays as “lower than pigs and dogs,” declared them to be “a colonial invention, unknown in African tradition,” and passed laws punishing consensual homosexuality with ten years’ hard labor.

Jefta Dube was being tried for the murder of a fellow policeman, and though the trial was held in secret, salacious tidbits were beginning to leak. Dube was pleading in mitigation that the president had repeatedly raped him and that finally, when a colleague had taunted him calling him “Banana’s girlfriend,” he’d snapped and shot the colleague dead.

“She’s quite happy to chat to you about the case,” Georgina promises.

S
OON
I
AM
reclining in a chair at Cleopatra’s Beauty Salon in Newlands Shopping Center. It sits above a Greek restaurant and is permeated with the fumes of dolmades and sheftalia and stale retsina.

“Hold out your hand,” says Esnat. She is a slender black woman in a white smock with her name embroidered in pink on its breast. She scrabbles around in her tray of utensils, many of which look alarmingly like surgical instruments, selects a metal nail file with a curved point, and begins to scrape back my cuticles. I am just summoning up the courage to ask her about President Banana when the file slips and stabs my thumb.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she says, aghast.

She looks over to see if the manageress has noticed.

“That’s OK,” I say quietly.

But her file has punctured a vein, and my thumb is pumping out blood with each beat of my pulse. It quickly overwhelms her tissue and her paper towel, and soon the salon has come to a standstill to stanch my spurting wound as Esnat writhes with embarrassment.

“I told you I didn’t want my nails done,” I say to Georgina.

T
HE DRIVE
to the village of Chimanimani, where the wedding is to be held, is about three hundred miles. Joanna and I have rented a little Nissan in an arresting shade of canary yellow. Its faded blue velour seats are infused with the sour aroma of sweat, and its history of accidents and improvised repairs is manifested in an awkward crablike diagonal trajectory. At the industrial eastern suburb of Msasa we leave the city behind us, and soon the vista is punctuated by huge outcrops of granite boulders, balanced improbably on one another since time prehistoric, and then the central plateau slowly tilts up through some of the country’s richest farmlands toward the hazy blue mountains of Nyanga, the roof of Zimbabwe. To either side of the main road stretch tracks that lead to the network of commercial farms, the junctions festooned with clusters of signposts bearing witness to old allegiances and origins, farm names like Tipperary, Tintagel, Grimsby, Saffron Walden.

Until about fifteen years ago, when the war for independence ended, you could only make such journeys in heavily guarded convoys, which were frequently attacked. But today the countryside radiates peace. We stop the car at a rest stop and sit on a concrete bench to eat our picnic on the inverted cement mushroom of a table, in the shade of a musasa tree. The occasional faint chug of a tractor plowing a distant field, and the slow
tuc, tuc, tuc
of a diesel generator come floating across the ridge in little wind-borne swells. And behind this is the background screech of cicadas — the tinnitus of nature.

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.

A
FTER 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.