When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  Later, Dad explains to me that with hyperinflation, prices have been doubling every four months, but the Reserve Bank hasn’t put any more banknotes into circulation.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Why not?” He chuckles. “Because the banknotes are printed overseas, and the Reserve Bank doesn’t have the foreign currency to pay for them.”

  Next, I need to get fuel, if we are to be visiting Mum in the hospital for several weeks. But everywhere there are cars waiting in lines outside fuel stations. Some lines are a mile or more long and have been there for weeks. They have become campsites, surrounded by rubbish — wads of toilet paper and thin plastic bags blowing in the wind, all the detritus of delay. Fuel prices went up 300 percent several weeks ago, but there is still no fuel to be had. We have enough for about six round-trips to the hospital.

  John Worsley-Worswick, an old school friend of mine who now works for Justice for Agriculture(JAG), a new farmers’ group struggling to resist the land seizures, says some farmers — who are allowed to buy in bulk for their businesses — may have fuel to spare, especially as most have stopped active farming, so on the way home I call in at the JAG office to source the fuel. The little house is being used as a logistics center for the strike, and it is bustling with activity. In the yard, Caro, a British colonel’s wife who fell in love with Africa and remained behind when the colonel was reassigned home, is assembling tear gas solvent kits for protesters — bottled water and breathing masks. A team of young black MDC members, many of them still in their teens, are loading the kits into the back of her cherry red pickup truck, throwing them one to the next in a chain from the veranda, while the sound system belts out Oliver Mtukudzi’s “Wasakara” (“You Are Worn Out”). Roy Bennett comes careening in with his own team of MDC youths, who load up with tear gas kits and dash out again.

  Inside, Worsley-Worswick sits behind his wooden desk in the open-plan room squinting through his cigarette smoke, phone clenched between shoulder and ear, flicking through papers and barking out instructions to farmers calling in for advice.

  Everyone is buzzing with anticipation. This is it: the Final Push, the big one, the one that will finally get the momentum going to eject Mugabe, the Emperor of Borrowdale Road. Their enthusiasm is infectious — maybe this time something really will happen?

  I drive home as darkness settles over the city. It is winter in Africa, when the warm breath of day dies quickly on the lips of dusk. The city is as quiet as a cave. A city waiting to be liberated. Large parts of it are without electricity, and along the entire length of Enterprise Road not a streetlight shines. Many of them stand at drunken angles, downed in old accidents and never repaired, like snapped stalks of elephant grass.

  THE NEXT DAY, I help my mother prepare for her hospital stay. Under her close supervision I pack her various sets of color-coordinated nighties and bed jackets into separate Bon Marché shopping bags and carefully decant white glops of moisturizing cream into a small jar, assemble hair clips, brush, plastic shower cap, and toothpaste and pack them all carefully into her black toiletry bag.

  Because she can no longer reach back to do her hair, which is still long enough for her to sit on, she asks me to weave it into a single thick braid. I can follow her age by her hair, as by the rings of a tree trunk — closest to her scalp it is quite white, then it gradually reddens farther along, and the last few inches are still Titian red. She asks me to write her name in the books she is taking to the hospital. I feel as though the roles are reversed from the days when I was going off to boarding school and she was sewing name tags onto my uniform. She gives me the key to the gun cabinet and shows me where the loaded .38 revolver is and the extra ammo. She shows me again how to lock the newly installed “rape gate” across the corridor at night to seal off the bedrooms in an inner sanctum, inviolable — they hope — even if the rest of the house is being ransacked.

  “Do make a bit of a fuss over Dad,” she says. “He’s feeling exhausted and neglected, having had to look after me when he’s got a bad heart. And try to make him eat regularly.”

  I get down on my knees to pull her new elasticized terry cloth slippers onto her cold, dry feet, and tie the furry sash of her homemade fleece robe, decorated with gamboling reindeer. She thrusts her shoulders back and takes a last look around the room that has become her prison these last three months.

  “Right,” she says decisively. “I’m ready to go now.”

  THE SUN is already low in the sky and drained of heat. The journey to St. Anne’s Hospital in Avondale is a quick one. It is Africa Day, a public holiday for those few with jobs, and the deserted city is preparing itself for trouble.

  We decant Mum into an old wheelchair at the ambulance bay. From an alcove above us, a large plaster Virgin Mary trades glances with the mandatory unsmiling photograph of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe, complete with his little toothbrush mustache — the man who would grimly turn his country into an African Albania rather than relinquish power.

  We follow the orderly pushing Mum along the polished red-cement corridors and settle her into her room, with its high white ceiling and a long veranda overlooking the crisp, winter-dry lawn.

  After my mother is admitted, I drive Dad home. He doesn’t like being out after dark since his hijacking. And his smaller, older replacement car has been stolen too, this time from within the yard, at night. The dogs failed to bark, and shortly afterward one of them died. The usual method of pacifying dogs is to infuse slabs of meat with horse tranquilizer and toss them over the fence. The intruders used industrial bolt cutters to cut the heavy-duty padlock off the barbed-wire-topped iron gate. Neither Mum nor Dad woke up. The first Dad knew of it was when he went to fetch the newspaper early in the morning and found that the car was gone — again.

  Now he has taken a number of extra precautions to prevent Mum’s small, elderly Mazda from being stolen. He has welded a metal plate to the gate so that the padlock is not exposed and cannot be pried or cut off as easily. He has purchased a massive new padlock that doesn’t have a cuttable U and fits so tightly it’s almost impossible to get a blade or screwdriver in. Only Dad has the keys to this master lock. Neither Gomo nor Isaac is allowed a key. They might be threatened to hand it over, he says.

  In addition Dad has devised a number of antitheft rituals. The car is, of course, wired with an electronic alarm and engine kill. He has also fitted a crook lock on the steering wheel and another lock over the stick shift, making it impossible to change gear, as well as one that locks the accelerator to the clutch. He parks the car right beneath his bedroom window, as close as possible to the wall. He manages this by hanging a tennis ball from the eaves: when the ball touches the windshield, the bumper is an inch from the wall. After Dad switches off the engine, he turns the radio to full volume, so that even if someone breaks open the gate; neutralizes the car alarm; pries off the gear lock, the accelerator lock, and the crook lock on the steering wheel; bypasses the engine kill and hot-wires the ignition — the radio will immediately burst into life at full blast and, he hopes, wake him up.

  I think he has been seriously considering roping himself to it somehow, through the bedroom window, but so far wiser counsel has prevailed.

  I RETURN LATER that night to the hospital to deliver Mum her watch and her shortwave radio so she can listen to Georgina broadcasting on Radio Africa from London. I find her in the middle of a supper of chicken, sautéed potato, and red jelly. She is wolfing it down — the best meal she’s had in months, she says, certainly an improvement on pilchards chakalaka. I tease her that when the orderly arrives to remove her tray prematurely, she bares her teeth at him, like a lioness protecting its kill.

  While she finishes her supper, we listen to the radio together. Everyone believes that the revolution is nigh. In response to the threatened street demonstrations, the government is going to deploy its new riot-control vehicles, freshly imported from Israel. They come equipped with water cannons that, apparently, can target demonstrators wit
h high-pressure bursts of military-strength mustard-gas solution, which causes a painful stinging, or indelible dye, which stains both the clothes and skin of those sprayed so they can be identified later.

  While we listen to the radio, I page through the billing paperwork for Mum’s surgery, and I see that she is to have the cheap plastic version of a hip joint, instead of the more expensive one with a ceramic ball and titanium setting, which I have been looking at in the United States.

  “If only I’d known you were getting a plastic one,” I tell her, “I would have brought the good one.”

  “But this is the one they are experienced at putting in here,” she says. “If you’d got the fancy one, they probably would have made some mistake putting it in.”

  I continue to look penitent.

  “Heavens,” she says, impatiently. “It’s not as though I’m going to be training as an Olympic hurdler. I just want to be able to shuffle around the house. And it won’t have to last for that long. The plastic one will do fine.”

  Our last conversation the night before her surgery is in no way maudlin or even portentous. She may be seventy-eight, but this is a routine procedure, she says, and she clearly doesn’t expect to die. She is looking forward to being out of pain, to being mobile again. But, by now we both know there is no such thing as a “routine procedure” in Zimbabwe, especially on the eve of an attempted revolution.

  THAT EVENING, my father follows his normal ritual: a fake scotch and soda and a prolonged coughing fit. He sits in his armchair trying to listen to Radio Africa, trying to get news of the Final Push. But the signal is terrible, smothered by waves of static interference and violent atmospheric raspberries caused by distant thunderstorms. From time to time, the manic sawing of high-pitched violins encroaches from Radio Taiwan, which has the neighboring frequency.

  Dad sits with his eyes squinched shut in concentration behind his bifocals, trying to hear his daughter in a studio in North London, five thousand miles away from home. Occasionally he descends into another bout of what my mother would describe as a “productive cough,” swats the radio irritably, and mutters, “It’s hopeless, hopeless.”

  But he never switches off the radio.

  THE GENERAL STRIKE begins the next morning, but hospitals and emergency services have a dispensation, and at 11:00 a.m., as planned, my mother goes under the knife. Her surgeon is Mr. Bowers (in the English tradition, Zimbabwean surgeons are still referred to as Mr. or Mrs., not Dr., a custom dating back to the days when their trade was plied by barbers), whom I have met several times, and who looks disconcertingly young — barely in his mid-thirties.

  Dad seems oblivious, puttering around the house while Mum is on the operating table. I keep imagining the scalpel slicing open her thigh, Mr. Bowers prying out the old joint of her hip, tossing it into the garbage bin of medical waste, and attaching the plastic ball joint in its place.

  By midafternoon, we have heard nothing. I begin to wonder what I am going to do if she dies. How Dad will cope without her. Where he will live. Where we will bury Mum. By 4:00 p.m., I can stand it no longer and call St. Anne’s. I am transferred from extension to extension, but nobody seems to know where she is. Finally, we get in the car and drive over through the deserted streets.

  Her room is empty, but her belongings are still there. I start to get a bad feeling. Several nurses we ask don’t know where she is. One suggests we try the critical care unit, and there we finally find her, flanked by unconscious black men with heavily bandaged heads. She is giddy still from her anesthetic, speaking in an excited, slurred whisper. As she can’t talk properly, and Dad can’t hear properly — a result of prolonged exposure to gunfire during the war — I find myself interpreting for two people who’ve been married for fifty-five years. Dad holds her hand while she tells us how things have gone.

  She says that when the anesthetist (a black man) injected the anesthetic, “Instead of asking me to count backward, he grinned at me said, ‘I hear you are the mother of infamous children?’?” And she replied, “If you mean that my son was declared an enemy of the state, and my daughter is on the current list of people banned from entering Zimbabwe, then yes, I am.” And then she lost consciousness.

  A male albino nurse comes over and adjusts the IV in my mother’s arm. Mum says she feels fine and can now wiggle her toes and flex her leg muscles. It is the first time she has been pain-free for more than six months. She is elated and high on the drugs.

  Nurses and aides whom she has treated in the staff clinic at the Parirenyatwa keep appearing at her bedside to pay homage. They come shyly up to her and curtsy.

  “Dr. Godwin, it is me, Patience.”

  “Doctor, remember me? I am Charity.”

  “Doctor, you looked after me — my name is Ruth.”

  And my mother says, “Yes, yes, of course I remember you, and how are you feeling now?” She can’t possibly remember them all — she has spent the last twenty-five years seeing up to eighty patients a day.

  THAT EVENING I go to supper at Barker’s Lodge. Once the smartest boutique hotel in the city, it consists of a series of stone buildings with steep cathedral eaves and pristine thatched roofs, the work of Zimbabwe’s legendary thatchers. But with the general collapse of tourism, Barker’s is closed. It has stood empty for some months, and now the Worsley-Worswicks are living here, since they’ve been kicked off their farm. A fire is roaring in the huge mock-medieval fireplace, the stone floor is scattered with impala skins and the walls are hung with dusty wildlife prints. The electricity is out, so we sit around a table made of old teak railroad ties, and eat by candlelight.

  Around the table are MDC supporters, elected councillors, and members of other civic groups. All of them are white. The MDC has warned whites that it has heard the police and army will specifically target us, so we should stay in the background and provide logistical and planning support. There is also the propaganda value to the government of large numbers of whites at the barricades, which would help it to portray the MDC as a puppet to white interests.

  Everyone is worried that the protest hasn’t been properly organized. The “stay-away,” as strikes are called here, is already almost total — the MDC, with its trade union roots, is good at those. But getting people out in large numbers to march into town is a different matter entirely. A people who once rose against white rule and joined guerrilla movements in the thousands has now been cowed by a twenty-three-year dictatorship.

  There are all sorts of rumors flying around: the government has infiltrated the MDC, the army has orders to shoot to kill. On the other hand, the MDC claims to have been assured by two army units, the Commandos and the Paras, that they will not fire on civilians. The actual routes of the marches have been kept secret, but there are only a handful of main roads leading into the city center from the townships, with relatively few choke points.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have called it the Final Push,” I suggest. “It sounds awfully, well, final. What if it doesn’t work?”

  “What would you rather have it called?” says Dale, an MDC councillor. “The Initial Push?”

  “Or how about One of Several Pushes?” offers John.

  IN THE CRITICAL CARE UNIT the next morning, my mother is in a querulous state — tearful and angry and indignant. She has woken up to find herself paralyzed from the waist down. After having been able to use her legs the day before, she assumes that there has been some awful nerve damage. Then she discovers that during the night, without any complaint of pain on her part, the nurses have taken it upon themselves to turn the epidural way up. This is contrary to all the principles of pain management, she declares, which is to keep medication to a minimum. She strongly suspects the staff has knocked out the patients so they can enjoy a hassle-free shift. When she complains to the white physician on his morning rounds, he eyes the nurses over at the ward station. “I see,” he says, nodding gravely. But my mother doubts he will do anything.

  Later that day, after her legs regain some f
eeling, she is returned to her own room, relieved to be back within the warm realm of a head nurse she knows. I take her a bunch of tall yellow and blue crane flowers, and she seems calmer, rousing herself to berate me for trimming the flowers with her good nail scissors.

  But things soon deteriorate as the national strike takes effect. Most of the nurses get stranded in the townships where they live, as there is no public transportation. Food supplies are erratic. Milk runs out, then bread. Strawberry-flavored jelly begins to feature heavily on the menu.

  On our next visit, Mum looks pale and shaken. Late that afternoon she was taken out to the end of the veranda to enjoy the last rays of the winter sun, but no one came to collect her — with the staff shortages she was forgotten. She shouted weakly for help, but no one heard her. Hours later, in the gathering gloom, a nurse finally stumbled upon her, in tears, trembling with cold.

  “It’s all right, madam, it’s all right,” she soothed, and helped her back inside.

  But it doesn’t stop there. In the middle of the night, when she needs to use the bedpan, she presses her buzzer again and again, but no one comes. Eventually, she can hold on no longer and wets the bed.

  The entire hospital is hanging by a thread, with just a few senior nurses keeping it going.

  That afternoon I decide I will ignore the visiting hours and camp out there to make sure that she is taken care of. By now she looks terribly pale and subdued, crying at the slightest problem. I fuss around, fetching her books and water and adjusting her bed. She asks me to pick up the comb she has dropped on the floor, so I feel around under her bed for it. The cement down there is wet and sticky to my touch. My fingertips are coated with a viscous red substance. At first I think it might be floor polish, but then I realize it is blood.

  “Jesus!” I peel back her blankets to look at the dressing on her wound. It is bright red. When the surgeon arrives, he says she lost two pints of blood during the operation and more from the wound. Her red cell count is now dangerously low: six and falling.