When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  “He was hijacked,” says Mum, handing me a drink.

  “Where?”

  “Right here, at our front gate.”

  “It wasn’t very late,” says Dad, “just after dark. I drove up to the gate and I got out to unlock it, and then suddenly there were all these armed men, about eight of them. They’d blocked my car in with some big vehicle — a Toyota Land Cruiser, I think — I never saw the license plate. You know, it all happened so quickly. Of course, I realized what was happening — there’s been a spate of them recently — so I was just about to say, ‘Take whatever you want,’ when . . . Well the next thing I knew I’d been hit from behind and I was on the ground. Someone wearing a big boot kicked me in the chest, my glasses were knocked off and stomped on, and I couldn’t really see what was going on. They took my wallet, ripped off my watch, and stole the car. End of story. The whole thing was over in a few minutes, and there were no witnesses.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I say.

  “Because it would only have worried you unnecessarily,” says my mother. “There’s nothing you could have done. No point in fussing.”

  “The car was insured,” says Dad, inhaling on his cigarette. He starts to cough and winces, holding his bruised ribs. “But with inflation being what it is, the payout won’t cover a replacement.”

  Later, my mother tells me that Dad suspects the men who carjacked him were off-duty soldiers. They were armed, she emphasizes, and seemed to have a military bearing. They knew what they were doing, had obviously done it a lot. And they weren’t nervous at all. They were almost casual about the whole thing. He reported it to the police, but nothing has come of it.

  Later, as we eat, I look at Dad unobserved. He seems smaller, hunched over, as though he has lost some essential core of self-confidence. And I feel a rage building up inside me, a fury at all the people I have seen being humiliated and beaten, at the powerlessness of them all, at my own impotence.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask Georgina later.

  “They made me promise not to,” she says.

  She and I set about persuading my parents to hire a security guard for the nights. They are unwilling at first, even though we offer to pay, but in the end they reluctantly accept, and we make all the arrangements. I go up to the back of the garden to tell Isaac, the gardener, the new security procedures. I find him on his knees planting reeds into the swimming pool, their roots encased in hessian sacks of earth. It is the final stage of its conversion into a fish farm. I ask about his daughter, Cheesely. I no longer notice her name — it was given to her, he once told me, because her mother had a craving for cheese when she was pregnant. Isaac’s wife commutes back and forth from their small farm in their tribal area of Mount Darwin, but Cheesely mostly lives here, and Dad pays for her to attend an upscale school around the corner. Every morning, Cheesely puts on her gray and green pinafore and trots off to the school where she is educated with the children of cabinet ministers and Reserve Bank governors and senior civil servants — most of whom she regularly outperforms, even though she never speaks English at home.

  “It is winter coming,” Isaac is saying. “And they should have a different uniform for winter, a warmer one. And she needs sports whites too. And tennis shoes. I did tell Mr. Godwin . . .” He trails off.

  “I will make sure it is done,” I tell him, and only then do we discuss the security changes.

  The next day a man in an olive uniform with an orange lanyard and a nightstick reports for duty and takes up his position on a garden chair at the gate. I feel slightly more secure in leaving. The four Dalmatians are roaming the front garden, and Isaac still lives up at the back.

  “Oh, do stop fussing,” says my mother. “We’ll be fine.”

  I look skeptical so she puts the knuckle of her index finger on her nose and waggles the fingertip. We call this a “box elephant”; the finger is supposed to be a trunk, and it is our family sign. Years ago, in Chimanimani, Jain was opening one of many barbed-wire farm gates one windy night, not long after our neighbor had been murdered in the first guerrilla attack of what was to become the civil war. Everyone was feeling jumpy, and my mother kept a loaded pistol in the glove compartment. As Jain struggled to get the gate pole out of the wire loop, a huge shape suddenly loomed across the headlights toward her.

  “It’s an elephant!” she screamed, and bolted back to the car.

  Mum scooped up the gun. Ahead the shape took form: it was a large cardboard box, sailing on a gust of wind, its side tabs flapping like elephant ears. Ever since then, a box elephant has meant for us, “take courage, things aren’t necessarily as bad as they look.” Although, depending on the context, it can also mean, “I know all your embarrassing secrets,” or, “The person you are being rude about is approaching from behind you.”

  Despite my mother’s breezy assurances, Dad seems distracted. He is even more difficult to talk to than usual and has a distant, preoccupied expression. He doesn’t want to talk about the hijack anymore, or their security; he gets irritated when I try to raise the issue again.

  “Is he OK?” I ask my mother.

  “Given what he’s gone through, I think he’s bearing up rather well,” she says. “You know your father. He would never admit it, but I think it was pretty traumatic. He told me he thought he was going to be killed. That one hijacker pointed a pistol at him and sort of smiled like he was going to shoot Dad, even though he was offering no resistance and was already lying on the ground; like he was going to shoot him just for fun, just because he could.”

  ON MY LAST DAY, I hear hammering in the living room, and later, when I go in there, I see a new picture hanging on the wall. It is a framed photograph I recognize as the one I had found stored behind the circuit tester in Dad’s “light” workshop when he was in the hospital, the one of a middle-aged couple and between them, a young girl. I look at it more closely this time. The man wears a three-piece suit, a white handkerchief peeping from his top pocket, and a dark necktie with little stars speckled across it. The woman has an aquiline nose as she looks across in profile at the girl. They are both wearing summer dresses with busy floral prints, and the girl has a daisy-chain headband holding down exuberantly glossy dark hair. She is trying to suppress a smile.

  “Who are these people?” I ask my mother when Dad is out of the room.

  “These people,” she says, taking a deep breath, “these people are Dad’s parents and his younger sister — your grandparents and your aunt.”

  It is the first time my father has ever displayed any photos of his family. I look at it again, and now I see the family resemblance. The man, Dad’s father, has his same important ears. His strong sloping brow is absolutely Dad’s. The woman, his mother, shares her nose with him. The girl — the girl looks oddly familiar. I adjust my focus to catch my own reflection in the glass over the photo, and then back to her again. Of course, the girl looks like me.

  When was this picture taken? Why isn’t my father in it? Why has it suddenly appeared now, after half a century?

  I ask my mother all these things; they come out in a rush.

  “Listen,” she says in a hushed voice so as not to be overheard by my father. “I’m afraid we haven’t been entirely honest with you. Dad’s family wasn’t from England. They were from Poland. He’s from Poland. They were Jews.”

  “Jews?”

  “Yes, Polish Jews. Like him. He’s a Jew. He changed his name.”

  For a moment I still can’t quite grasp what she’s saying. My father, as I know him — George Godwin, this Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped British accent — is an invention? All these years, he has been living a lie? His name — my name — is not our own?

  But even as I struggle to absorb this, aspects of his character begin to fall into place. His truculence, his intense privacy, the minefield he has laid around all things personal. He has been sitting on this huge secret all this time.

  “What’s his real name?”
I ask my mother.

  “Goldfarb,” she murmurs.

  “Goldfarb?”

  “Yes,” she sighs, and spells it out. “G-o-l-d-f-a-r-b. Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb.”

  “Why did he keep all this a secret? Why did you keep it a secret?”

  “I gave him my word,” she says, and then she is cut short by my father’s arrival. We stop talking as he walks through the room, and I find myself looking at him differently — shorn now of his cover, his assumed identity. He seems to look different, more . . . more Middle European. His handlebar mustache no longer looks like a Victorian English accessory, but a Slavic one. Stalin as rendered by Peter Ustinov. I find myself examining him for stereotypical Jewish features.

  “I’m going to ask him about it,” I say to my mother as soon as Dad leaves the room. “He did display the photo. He must be ready to talk.”

  She looks immensely weary.

  “Please, Peter,” she says, and she reaches out and holds both my hands in hers. “Can you wait a while? Just a little while longer? He’s really not up to it yet. He’s been badly shaken by the attack. Much more than he’s letting on to you. Let’s do it next time you’re back, when he’s feeling stronger. Please?”

  Ten

  August 2001

  I REALLY DON’T KNOW what to do with my father’s Jewish secret. Initially I think that perhaps I should just let it lie. After all, if it was so important for him to keep his Jewish identity hidden, then he can continue to do so.

  And then I begin to wonder what this means for my own identity. I’m already muddled enough trying to work out where I fit in — between Africa, England, and now America, where I’ve been living for four years. Everyone in my own home — Joanna, our son, Thomas, me — speaks with a different accent; it’s a Babel of dialects. What am I supposed to do now? Garnish myself with a dash of ethnic condiment, instant Jewry? Cast off eight years of Jesuit education and convert? I vaguely recall that Judaism is passed down through the female line, so I probably can’t achieve genuine Jewhood anyway. I think of that Jonathan Miller (himself a Jew) quip, “I’m not really a Jew, just Jew-ish.” Perhaps I can be a drive-through Jew, a semi-Semite, deploying my postponed part-Jewishness only when it suits me.

  Back in Manhattan, I tell Joanna.

  “How do you feel about it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t know.”

  She begins to reel off recent late-onset public “Jewish revelations”: Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, Christopher Hitchens. And she points out that to be Jewish in New York City is pretty commonplace. It has the largest population of Jews of any city in the world outside Tel Aviv.

  “Anyway, everyone’s a mishmash here,” she says. “I’m not really English either, if you go back a bit. I’m a Viking, a Dane. Lots of us in Yorkshire are.”

  Later I pull on my black jogging suit and sneakers and pound off down Riverside Park to try to clear my head. I cut right off the boulevard and down along the bank of the Hudson River, running faster and farther than usual, until my chest is tight and my arches ache and a stitch throbs in my side. It’s a good pain, a penitent pain, as my Jesuit athletics coach at school once said, like the Roman centurion’s spear in Christ’s side. Run on through the pain to your salvation. But today it feels more like the Zulu stabbing spear, the ixlwa, plunging in and out of my flesh. My Anglo-African-Ashkenazi-American flesh. Finally I turn and head for home. When I’m nearly there I remember that I’ve promised to pick up food, so I cut east onto Broadway to Barzini’s, a deli.

  As I walk back, north up Broadway, weighed down with shopping bags, I become aware of a fluttering figure on the sidewalk ahead, canvasing passersby. Closer up, I see he is dressed all in black, like me. He wears an ill-fitting black suit, black shoes, black hat, and he has some kind of tatty string knotted around his waist. His face, though, is white — an etiolated unhealthy white, as though he never goes outdoors — and a ginger fuzz of baby beard inhabits his cheeks and chin. His broad-brimmed black hat is set back on his head, framing his pale face in a dark halo.

  His manner is insistent; even as I try to walk around him, he steps into my path and blocks me with his clipboard.

  “Are you a Jew?” he asks, without preamble.

  I think I have misheard him, transposed my internal dialogue onto the world outside.

  “What?”

  “Are you a Jew?” He looks at me intently with black eyes.

  “No,” I say. “No, I’m not,” and I shoulder my way past him.

  Georgina and I talk on the phone about Dad’s Jewish secret. Mum has told her too.

  “It’s like that changeling syndrome,” she says, “when adopted people first hear that they’re adopted, it suddenly all falls into place.”

  There is a long pause on the line, and when she speaks again it is in a reverie. “Dad only ever took me to see two movies when I was kid,” she says. “You know what they were? Raid on Entebbe, and its remake, I think it was called Operation Thunderbolt. Strange, huh?”

  “I suppose it makes sense that he took you to see a movie about the Israeli commandos going to great lengths to rescue Jews held hostage in Africa.”

  “I suppose so,” she says. “I suppose lots of things start to make sense. Have you heard the proverb ‘When the bird alights too long upon the tree it will have stones cast upon it’?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a Yiddish saying I found. It explains why we’re always moving around.”

  “Maybe we do have the nomad gene,” I say. “I wonder why he kept it a secret all these years?”

  “You should ask him,” she says.

  SINCE CAPITAL RADIO was raided and closed down, Georgina has been feeling increasingly under threat. She is only mildly cheered by the timely death of Hitler Hunzvi, of AIDS. In June, there is a total eclipse of the sun, and she drives north down into the Zambezi Valley to view it. As the moon blots out the sun and skies grow dark, the animals of the bush are confused. Birds begin to roost, bees return to their hives. Frogs come hopping out at midday, owls hoot, hippos make for the shore, and hyenas stir. It’s an event so rare that panic spreads among the remote villagers. The Shona call an eclipse koura kwezuva — “the rotting of the sun” — and they say it’s caused by angered ancestors. Some of Prince Biyela’s people, the Zulus, and the Vendas too, believe that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below. It is the very worst of omens.

  Georgina is deeply affected by it. Mugabe’s clan totem is garwe, she reminds me, a crocodile. And she has a premonition of terrible days ahead. Not long after, she writes to tell me that she is planning to leave Zimbabwe for London with Xanthe and Jeremy. She is helping to start a new radio station there, Radio Africa, a successor to short-lived Capital Radio, which will broadcast into Zimbabwe via satellite.

  THE ATTACK on my father increases my own sense of unease, especially now that Georgina will be leaving. Her presence has enabled my absence. She promises that she won’t go without setting up all sorts of support systems. Mum and Dad seem unperturbed by the idea of her departure. She says they have been encouraging her to go, knowing that it is in her best interest. But I feel like our family is starting to disintegrate, spreading out across three continents — a minidiaspora of Godwins.

  I feel too that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downward into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical — a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely.

  Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that so
ciety constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.

  In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With most Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.

  Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death.

  For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or in America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-size portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age.

  At least you used to.

  But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels as though I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

  By Thursday evening, the wind changes. It brings with it the acrid fumes of destruction, which sting our eyes and catch in our chests. Late at night, a dramatic electrical storm strikes, and with the first great roll of thunder, lights go on all over the city as nervous residents check that it is indeed only the weather. The lashing rain turns the smoldering disaster site into a quagmire.