When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  “She needs a blood transfusion,” he says.

  “Not bloody likely,” says Mum, and rolls her eyes.

  He leaves us alone for a moment, my cue to persuade her. But no one knows better than her how high the country’s AIDS rate is. “Let’s just say that the screening of blood stocks is less than perfect,” she says.

  As I draw breath to begin bullying her into compliance, she hands me a copy of the Daily News. “There’s an ad in there from the National Blood Service,” she says.

  I open it and page through until I find the half-page advertisement announcing that it has essentially collapsed. It has no fuel, no foreign currency for plasma, no “refreshments,” which are used to entice indigent blood donors.

  The head nurse comes in, and I try to recruit her to my cause.

  “If you were in my position, would you have a blood transfusion?” asks Mum.

  The nurse looks around to make sure the doctor has gone. “Nuh uh,” she says, and she shakes her head vigorously.

  IN THE MAYHEM of that week, as St. Anne’s teeters on the brink of collapse, the person my mother fixates on as her potential savior is her physical therapist, a young woman called Sue Francis. She has just the right blend of strictness and sympathy.

  When Mum falls off the commode and thinks she’s dislocated her new hip, I buzz Sue and she arrives within minutes, out of breath. After she has calmed down my mother, I walk her outside, out of earshot, and tell her how much my mother has come to rely on her. Sue looks stricken, and she takes a deep breath.

  “I’m so sorry, but tomorrow’s my last day at work,” she says. “I’m emigrating to the U.K.”

  Her eight-year-old son has managed to get a cricket scholarship at a private school in North Yorkshire, and her husband — a game warden who has lost his job since the collapse of tourism — is going to be a groundsman there. Sue will work as a physical therapist at the local hospital.

  How strange is that? A whole family getting a lifeboat out of here on the back of an eight-year-old kid’s talent with a cricket bat and ball.

  Sue suggests that I move my mother to Dandara, a small nursing home annexed to a gated retirement community next to the Borrowdale Race Course, just up the road from the State House. “They’re still short staffed,” she says. “But they’re smaller, and they seem to have planned better for this strike.”

  So we load Mum into an ambulance and take her to the new hospital. For most of the way, the city is still deserted, but outside the university an air force helicopter clatters overhead, a green armored personnel carrier full of riot police roars by, and we hear the puh, puh of distant gunfire coming from the campus.

  DANDARA CLINIC is small and clean and modern and almost empty. My mother has a private room with her own bathroom and a bedside window that looks out onto some rosebushes. She is immediately calmed by her move, and her spirits improve. Without a blood transfusion, her recovery will take much longer, but now that she realizes she is out of danger, she becomes appalled at how her illness has drained my father. “I think I may have killed him,” she says, aghast.

  Once I have settled her in, I go and collect Dad for a visit. He sits by her bed and they hold hands, and I leave them alone together, while I take a look around. In the next room there is an elderly emaciated white woman, who lies on her back, staring at the ceiling, waiting to die. On the other side is middle-aged woman with a hacking cough who sits on her bed, smoking, with the door open, surveying the comings and goings.

  As I drive Dad back from Dandara, I see that the fuel gauge is dipping into the red reserve zone. I have failed to get any fuel at JAG, and there is still none available at any fuel station, so I have no option but to try to acquire some on the black market. There are several problems to overcome — quite apart from breaking the protest strike. Black-market fuel has to be bought in U.S. dollars, possession of which is now a criminal offense. It’s also a crime to carry fuel around in a jerrican (to discourage hoarding, the government says). But I am due to depart within the week, and I want to leave Dad with enough fuel to visit Mum while she recuperates.

  One of the places to meet “private” fuel suppliers, apparently, is the Italian bakery in Avondale Shopping Center. I have been wondering how I will identify the black-marketeers, but once there, it’s immediately obvious. A young white man at one of the veranda tables is doing deals on his cell phone in a booming voice.

  “I’ve got plenty of both, gas and diesel. I know it’s four times the official price. If you can find any at the pumps, good luck to you! OK, then, you’ve got the address? That’s right, just past the white wall, the sign says Kuala. I’ll be there. Ciao.”

  I’m just getting ready to make my approach when an elegantly dressed black woman sits down at his table. She discusses golf with him for a few minutes — they are evidently occasional golfing partners — and then she does a fuel deal with him too.

  Now is definitely my chance, before his phone rings again. I get up and walk over, but just as he looks up at me, a young white man at the next table who has also been listening in, leans across to the black-marketeer.

  “You know, you make me sick!” he says vehemently. “You’re a bloodsucker. You should be ashamed of yourself. Haven’t you, haven’t you got any . . . any decency?”

  The crowd goes quiet, and I retrace my steps to my table, pretending I have just been checking on my car.

  “Hey, man, I’m just trying to help,” shrugs the dealer.

  “Bullshit,” says the young man, pushing back his chair and standing up now. “You’re exploiting all of us.”

  He looks around for moral support, but no one backs him up. The dealer stands up too. He is taller than his critic.

  “Listen, china, you get out of my fucking face, OK? I’m not hassling you, I’m just going about my business, so why don’t you go about yours.”

  The critic turns as if to leave, but he is just winding up to throw a punch. The dealer deflects it with his forearm, and then they are grappling, tumbling to the floor, upsetting a table and spilling cappuccinos, until they are pulled apart.

  The critic seems suddenly deflated. “I was going about my own business,” he says. “But we got thrown off our farm and lost everything. And here you are growing rich on it all. Guys like you make me wanna puke, man.” He picks up his keys and stalks off into the parking lot.

  I wait for a few minutes, working up the nerve, and then I make my approach.

  “Jeez,” says the dealer. “What a fuckin’ idiot. Dunno what his case was.”

  I know what his case was, and I feel grubby and ashamed to be making this deal, but I must.

  So the next day I drive over and pay my U.S. dollars and fill the tank of my car and drive back to my parents’ house, and Isaac siphons the tank into the fifty-five-gallon drum hidden in the back of the garage, and I repeat the journey several times until the drum is full to the brim, and the needle on the fuel gauge in the car is hard over to right, as far as it can go.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, the protests are to start in earnest. The city is in lockdown. On my drive to the hospital, there are soldiers and policeman at almost every corner, and plainclothes officers from the CIO or C-10 as it’s now nicknamed by the young activists, and roving squads of party youth militia jogging importantly down the middle of the road, and helicopters clattering overhead. It seems that every member of the security forces is out in the city today, and I am pulled over several times by sullen and suspicious policemen. There are policemen outside Dandara too. When I finally get inside, I notice that the rooms are all occupied, with murmurings behind closed doors.

  “What’s going on?” I ask my mother.

  She tells me to close the door.

  “They’ve been admitting women who’ve been beaten up by the police,” she whispers hoarsely. “Women who were trying to join the protests.”

  I venture out of her room and a nurse emerges from the room opposite — inside I can hear a woman groaning with pain.
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  “What’s happening?” I ask the nurse, who has also been looking after my mother.

  “Ah, it’s too terrible,” she says. “They have all been beaten, with rifle butts and sticks and sjamboks [heavy whips]. They have broken arms and broken legs and lacerations, and some have head wounds, and one has a gunshot wound. But if they are found here they will be arrested,” she says. “And probably us too.”

  In Zimbabwe it seems that injury has become proof of guilt.

  Later, a delivery truck pulls up to the laundry bay. There is a flurry of nurses, and instead of laundry, several more injured people come in. Their clothes bear the overwhelming aroma of tear gas. Not ordinary civilian tear gas, but the potent, military-strength stuff. Soon, all our faces are streaming with tears.

  A blue-overalled gardener pressed into emergency indoor duty squeaks into my mother’s room in his Wellington boots, holding out a rattling tray in work-horned hands. His face is a study in fierce concentration — he too is in tears but he ignores them. He lays the tray down gently and, drawing himself up to his full height, gestures grandly at the cup and the teapot and the milk jug. “Your afternoon tea, madam,” he announces.

  Then he wipes his tears away with the back of his sleeve and withdraws, walking squeakily backward out of the room.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much,” my mother calls after him, and she is crying too. Whether it’s from the tear gas or not, I no longer know.

  WHEN I GO TO SEE if there’s anything I can do for the injured women, they ask to use my cell phone to call their families. Most of the women are from Women of Zimbabwe Arise! (WOZA), and they had been trying to march into the city center when they were attacked. They are middle-aged black ladies — the pillars of society, normally to be found at the Women’s Institute or organizing church teas. Yet here they are, their arms in casts, patches over their eyes, and bandages around their heads. And still they are spirited and indignant. This, it seems to me, is true courage. These women had a pretty good idea of what would happen to them and still they marched.

  AFTER VISITING HOURS, my father and I have an appointment at Christchurch, nearby. Keith Martin, the former funeral director who knows everything about death in this country, has suggested this as a suitable place to rebury Jain, and now I want to get Dad’s approval before I leave. Father Bertram, the white-bearded parish priest, shows us around the sheltered internal courtyard that serves as a small garden of remembrance for cremated remains. It is well tended and invisible from the road. We are trailed by the church gardener, Rodgers, who adjusts the sprinklers — the church has its own well, which makes its garden a lush oasis of magnolia and agapantha, pride of India and frangipani, in a desert of crisp khaki.

  “What do you think, Dad?” I ask gently.

  “Very nice,” he says. “Yes, very nice.”

  “Actually,” explains Father Bertram, pointing out the vacant spots among the rows of gravestones set into the lawn, “I’ve got some extra plots available, for the rest of the family, if you like? These had all been booked and paid for in advance, but so many people have left the country . . .”

  I’m appalled — it seems wrong to be offering to sell Dad his own grave, as if we are giving up on his health improving. I start to decline, but Dad interrupts. “Oh, we might as well, Pete,” he says, trying to sound lighthearted.

  So we agree to reserve the extra graves, one for each of us — because in the end, I suppose, you want to be buried where you belong.

  THAT NIGHT over dinner at the house of Richard and Penny Beattie, local architects, I hear the first reports about the progress of the Final Push, from two MDC members of Parliament, Tendai Biti, their justice affairs spokesman, and Paul Themba-Nyathi, their foreign affairs shadow minister. Themba-Nyathi I have known for years. During the independence war, I fought — on the opposite side — in his home area of Gwanda, in southern Matabeleland. After independence, I worked with him as a lawyer, defending his ZAPU colleagues who were charged with treason by Mugabe. Now he seems depressed at the conduct of the protests. The “secret” marches, which were supposed to be taking routes from various townships into the city center, were not secret at all, and were broken up almost immediately. I mention that some supporters are disappointed that the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has not led the marches himself, but Biti points out that to do so Tsvangirai would break his treason-trial bail conditions and be imprisoned immediately.

  A guest admires Biti’s Nigerian garb — a white brocade dashiki tunic and trousers, and a kente kofi hat. The hat is obviously terribly itchy, and every few minutes he removes it and scratches his head vigorously.

  “No, no, it’s not Nigerian,” he says crossly, “it’s Ghanaian. Why does everyone think it’s Nigerian?”

  The Nigerians are unpopular here because their president, Olusun Obasanjo, has just hosted Mugabe, and they appeared together on the local TV news last night, holding hands on a brown sofa.

  Tendai Biti is also angry that the marchers today have been so easily cowed. A single CIO officer driving by in an old unmarked VW Golf turned an entire column of protesters back.

  “All he had to do was to pull his pistol out of his waistband and fire it into the air once, just once, and they all ran away,” he says in disgust.

  Others, though, have been dealt with more savagely. Beattie’s kitchen has been turned into a major supply and logistics center for the protest, with MDC members cooking vats of food to take to all those hundreds who have been arrested. Joel Mugariri is organizing things. He is an accountant who ran — and lost — as an MDC candidate in Rushinga, down in the Zambezi Valley. After the elections, his house was burned down, so he rebuilt it, and they burned it down again, and, because he’s brave and stubborn, he rebuilt it a second time, and this time they came openly during daylight and torched it.

  “Staying in Rushinga has become very dangerous,” he says unnecessarily. “They can come and kill you at any time.”

  Joel was forced to move into a Harare township where he set up a house that serves as a refuge for other opposition supporters from his tribal home, people who have lost everything, including their homes, for daring to oppose the government in what they misunderstood to be free elections.

  “None of us can go home or we will be murdered,” Joel says. But apparently he hasn’t run far enough away. “At noon on Monday they came to my house, the riot police together with soldiers and youth militia, and they just began beating whoever they found there, my wife, my sisters, even small kids, beaten on the head with batons.”

  He pauses to stir a huge aluminum pot.

  “I was taken away with four of my guys, and they drove around picking up other activists until there were thirty-three of us in the back of the truck. And then we were taken to Makoni Police Station, where there is also an army base. There we were made to lie flat on the ground, and they beat us with different kinds of whips. They did the beatings in teams of six, taking turns so they wouldn’t get tired.

  “After that, they dumped all thirty-three of us in a police cell designed to hold eight. There was no flushing toilet, no beds or blankets, no food, no water to drink, and yet we were kept there for more than forty-eight hours.

  “We weren’t charged or registered as prisoners, so no one knew where we were. Eventually one of our activists tracked us down and had the courage to bring food to us, and he came back with a lawyer.

  “When we were finally released, they kept all our belongings, our money, cell phones, our IDs and driver’s licenses. One of our guys who went back to try to reclaim his things — they threw him in the cell, and he’s still there.”

  The young man preparing food next to him is Henry Chimbiri, a photographer, who’s been trying to record the police abuses and been arrested nearly forty times for his efforts. He has downloaded some of his photos onto Richard’s laptop, and he scrolls rapidly through them, giving me a guided tour of the brutality.

  “This one is Conrad, he has a broken arm, seven st
itches to the head. He was sleeping in his own bed when they burst in and began beating him.”

  He clicks on the next thumbnail.

  “This here is Tobias. He was shot in the leg and had his neck fractured.”

  Click.

  “This is an MDC councillor’s house. They smashed the TV with a rifle butt and tried to demolish the walls with a pick ax.”

  Click.

  “And this is all that’s left of a small factory, a cooperative making fiberglass bathtubs and basins. The soldiers burned it down.”

  Click.

  “This is a woman who was forced to sit on the electric ring of her stove. Look how badly her thighs are burned — look, you can actually see the spiral mark of the red-hot element.”

  Click.

  “And this is a one-day-old baby, born at home during the protests because there was no transport to get her mother to the hospital. The baby was teargassed. Her mother — who has nothing to do with politics at all — was pointed out by an informer and beaten until her arm was broken. I think they did it just for fun.”

  Pearson Mungofa, an MDC member of parliament from Highfield, is also in the Beatties’ crowded kitchen. He was accused of organizing mass action and arrested too. “We were marching peacefully,” he says. “And all of a sudden two trucks of soldiers drove up and began firing at us without warning. Not in the air, but among us, with live bullets. Some of us fell down . . .” He lowers his voice. “I don’t know what happened to them, those ones who fell down. I ran away,” he admits. “Later the police arrested me.”

  “HOW WAS YOUR EVENING?” asks my father when I return.

  “It was fine,” I say. “Fine.”

  He asks me whom I met, and I gloss over it all. I can’t bring myself to tell him what is happening around us. His life is difficult enough as it is.

  And the next day, unbelievable as it seems, I leave. I have commitments elsewhere: assignments, appointments, inflexible tickets, children, deadlines. My mother is much improved, though she is staying on in Dandara for a few more days because of its convenience, mostly, until she is fully mobile again. And Dad has enough fuel now. There is a support system of sorts with Linnea and the Watsons, and Gomo is coming for a few hours each day to help with the cleaning and clothes washing. And I’ll be back soon, I promise.