When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  My mother is enjoying a supper of sweet-and-sour pork when I say good-bye to her at Dandara. Dad sits by her bed, holding her hand, and they are murmuring to each other like new lovers. He looks up and sees me looking at them.

  “I’d miss the old girl if she died,” he says, and grins.

  Mum gives him a box elephant. And me one too.

  AND THEN, suddenly, I’m gone. It’s like the end of a macabre fairground ride. From my expense account seat, I listen to the comforting tones of the British Airways captain wafting through the air-conditioned cabin. I look out my window to see three helicopters lift off from the air force base. They hover briefly over the runway, their snouts tipped down like malevolent dragonflies, then they swoop off low over the tin roofs of Harare township to deal with the morning’s opposition marches, ready to rain tear gas on Joel and his friends, ready to direct the police and the army, the militia and the party youth, to beat the protesters and arrest them, to put them in jail and leave them on cold cement floors without blankets or food or water or access to lawyers.

  And as we soar away into a crisp, cloudless sky, I feel the profound guilt of those who can escape. I am soaring away from my fragile, breathless father with his tentative hold on life. I’m soaring away from my mother, who still lies in her hospital bed surrounded by wounded demonstrators — the trembling black women with broken limbs and puffy eyes and backs striated with the angry whip marks of the dictatorship. Away from John Worsley-Worswick, squinting through his cigarette smoke, phone clenched between ear and shoulder, trying to encourage evicted farmers. From Caro, the British colonel’s wife, now ferrying around anti–tear gas solvent kits and bottled water, her toenails painted a riot of different colors, her posh Home Counties diction already absorbing the shortened vowels of our southern African dialect. From Roy Bennett, gray-haired now with his tribulations, but still bloody well there. The marchers for democracy are being shot at and teargassed, and I am flying away from it all. A nation is bleeding while I sit here cosseted with my baked trout and crispy bacon, my flute of Laurent-Perrier brut champagne, my choice of movies and my hot face towel.

  I am abandoning my post. Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity. I am committing cultural treason.

  WHEN I GET BACK to New York I am listless and distracted. In my head, I’m still in Africa. I sit online at my computer, following the increasing pace of repression in Zimbabwe and listening to African music, cranked up fat and sweet. Mostly I listen to Oliver Mtukudzi, who I last heard live at the Harare International Festival of the Arts. And I listen to his fellow Zimbabwean, Thomas Mapfumo. The intricate cyclical melodies of his mbiras are almost narcotic in their trance-inducing effect — quintessentially African, though they are being played and recorded now in Oregon.

  No one knows exactly how many of us have fled, because few of us emigrate officially. But the numbers are high — between one and two million, mostly black, energetic, educated, experienced people, the leadership cadre of a country — the Katyžn cadre. And the irony is that from our exile, we, whom Mugabe has chased away, inadvertently contribute to his survival. The money we send home to our relatives, our hard currency remittances (often multiplied by the black-market exchange rate), supports millions of people in Zimbabwe and helps to defer the country’s continuously imminent collapse.

  Thomas and Hugo, my sons, dance around me, trying to get my attention, puzzled at my detachment. I know I must snap out of this. That I cannot live the life of an exile, a perpetual sojourner, feeling my past more emphatically than my present, carrying this sadness within me, this spiritual fracture, unspoken mostly, but always there, an insistent ache. I must become a real immigrant, positive, engaged, hopeful.

  At night I lie awake, listening to the roar of air conditioners all around me, until finally, in the glow of first light, I fall into a shallow, dream-tossed sleep. And I dream a version of a dream that Joanna once had when she was pregnant with Thomas: I am trying to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in front of a huge Superbowl stadium crowd before the game begins, but when I reach for the high notes I start coughing up blood.

  JOANNA DECIDES we all need a break, that we will take the kids on vacation to Jamaica. But I am wrestling with “resident alien” restrictions. My green card still hasn’t come through, and I worry that it’s my Hatfill anthrax “connection” that’s holding up my security clearance. Every time I leave the country I need an “advance parole” to travel (they use the terminology of the penitentiary for us foreign supplicants) or my application for permanent residence will be considered “abandoned.” Though I have applied in plenty of time for the parole renewal, this time it is late in coming.

  Then I receive a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service informing me that my application for advance parole to travel has been denied and must be resubmitted, with all the contingent delays. I have sent them a passport-style head shot, which is not sufficient: they insist on a three-quarter view that must include one ear (and only one), for reasons of closer identification. They enclose a sample photo of a model, smiling coquettishly, her ear peeking out from behind a curtain of glossy black hair. I stomp around our apartment threatening to do something van Goghian. Staple an ear to the picture and return it, a bloodstained three-dimensional ID. My error only seems to underline the tentativeness of my presence here.

  There is ominous news from home on the health front too. My mother tells me that Dad has “a tiny touch of gangrene” on the tip of one toe, but that it should “resolve itself.” I start to plan a return trip. A friend at Forbes commissions me to write a piece on luxury safaris in South Africa, and I quickly book my flight over Joanna’s objections.

  “But you’ve only just gotten back,” she complains. Increasingly she sees Africa as a capricious mistress, something she must compete with, something dangerous and diverting.

  Seventeen

  November 2003

  ON THE WAY to Zimbabwe I stop over in London. I find Georgina exhausted and demoralized. Every day she catches the Thameslink train across London to the Radio Africa studio in an office park on the city’s northern edge. (We jokingly refer to it as “an undisclosed location” because there are fears that, even in London, they are not beyond the reach of Mugabe’s goons, so none of the staff is permitted to reveal its address.) Here she spends hours on the phone with people in Zimbabwe, and broadcasts morale-raising programs back to them. She works straight through the weekends, and in the evenings she attends political functions, lobbies members of Parliament, gives evidence to the foreign-affairs select committees, and does TV and radio interviews. But she is starting to lose faith in the prospect of change. Like so many members of the opposition, she has set out on a sprint that has turned into a marathon, with no finish line in sight.

  And now her marriage has collapsed. Jeremy, who has been unable to find a job, has been going through a crisis of his own. After protracted agonizing about it, he has decided that he is, after all, gay, and has moved out. Like so many young gay men from the infamously homophobic Zimbabwe, where the consequences of coming out can be so extreme, it has taken him all this time to come to terms with his own sexuality.

  Auxillia, Xanthe’s Zimbabwean nanny, who came over with them from Harare and lives with them in North London, has also announced that she too is decamping. Since they arrived she has had her teeth fixed, smoothed out her Shona accent, and — largely through Georgina’s efforts — obtained a residence permit. Now she wants to go to Birmingham to join a friend who is a real estate agent of sorts, selling property in Harare to Zimbabwean exiles for pounds sterling.

  I sleep that night under an Angelina Ballerina duvet, in Xanthe’s small, pink-walled room, surrounded by her Barbie dolls and the tiny plastic cups and saucers from their tea service. A fairy costume with white-sequined wings hangs on the back of her closet door.

  In the morning Georgina makes coffee and we sit at the dining table. The room is furnished with Shona soapstone sculptures
and oils of the African countryside. As I check my ticket to Harare, she bursts into tears. “It’s not bloody fair! I want to get on the plane with you and go home too,” she sobs. “And I can’t. I work all God’s hours and for what? I’ve no idea who listens to us, or whether we make any difference at all. We just broadcast into a vacuum. Nothing changes over there, and I’m stuck here. And now my whole damn life is collapsing around me. My marriage is over, even Auxillia’s deserting me. I so miss my life in Africa. I just want it back.”

  She is crying hard now, taking in big gulps of air. I put my arm around her shoulders and try to comfort her, but it only seems to make it worse.

  “Your sacrifice is worth it,” I say. “People do notice. They do listen. It helps them feel that they’re not alone to hear your broadcasts.”

  But she doesn’t really hear me.

  “Xanthe will never know Africa the way we did,” she weeps, and lowers her head into her hands. She is crying still when I leave for the airport.

  AS THE PILOT TELLS the passengers to prepare for our descent into Harare, I begin patrolling the aisle to scrounge used flight socks from fellow passengers. My mother has asked me if I can collect them, as she finds stretchy airline socks to be ideal for holding Dad’s foot dressings in place, much better than bandages.

  Several passengers hand theirs over wordlessly, but then a frequent-flying banker bridles. “Why do you want them?” he asks brusquely.

  “They’re for the sick in Zimbabwe,” I say.

  I have not told a lie.

  At Harare, I line up to pay for my visitor’s visa, now US$55, hard currency that the government is gasping for. Then I join another line to clear immigration. This is always where it starts to get nerve-racking for me. Although I have been on the “banned” list for years, I have managed to get in and out under the protection of Dumiso Dabengwa, the cabinet minister I once helped defend from a high-treason charge. But all that has changed now. Dabengwa has lost his seat to the MDC. And my sister is broadcasting daily under our surname on Radio Africa, a station that so infuriates Mugabe that he has ordered the CIO to jam it. And now entering the country as a journalist without a special visa has become its own crime with a minimum two-year jail term.

  The immigration officer wears a threadbare white shirt and a sad, patient face as he sits behind a counter in his booth. When I finally reach him, I proffer my passport with an affected world weariness. While he examines it, I focus on the top of his lowered head. His bald spot gleams like a burnished conker. I stand on tiptoes to examine his workstation.

  “Still no computers,” I say, trying to conceal my relief. No computers means no searchable database.

  “No,” he sighs, head still down. “We are so behind here now.” He glances up at me and down again at my passport.

  Then he makes a little hmpf noise, half through his nose, half in his throat, a noise that, frankly, does not sound good.

  “G-o-d-win,” he says, drawing out the first syllable. I concentrate on his gleaming conker, trying to beam thoughts into it. “I know who you are,” he says.

  He pauses, as if inviting me to guess who he thinks I am, but I remain silent.

  “You,” he announces quietly, looking up briefly, “are a troublemaker. And so is that sister of yours, Georgina, broadcasting on that rebel radio station.”

  As he speaks, I think, at least I can tell her someone is aware of her programs. Then I am overcome by a hernia of panic. Great polyps of fear threaten to burst through the wall of my resolve. I am terrified that they will dump me in Chikurubi Prison, as an example. That they will dust off all the old spying allegations, put me in front of a pliant judge, and lock me up for years in a filthy, crowded, shit-fumed cell, where my teeth will fall out as I succumb to malnutrition or tuberculosis or cholera, and I will never see my kids again.

  Getting caught like this suddenly feels so inevitable. I have become too complacent, too impatient to bother with the circuitous route through Victoria Falls that I used to take — attaching myself to tour groups and following the raised umbrella of their guides through the Falls Airport — and now I have to pay the price. I do not argue with the immigration officer. I just smile weakly and shrug, trying to stay calm, waiting to see what happens next. His head is still bowed, his eyes cast down. And, oddly, I hear the thumps of what sounds like stamping, coming from his desk.

  “Tell her I liked last night’s program,” he murmurs, handing over my passport and grinning broadly. “Welcome back to Zimbabwe. Welcome home.”

  I feel dizzy with the reprieve.

  “Next,” he says.

  I COLLECT MY BAGGAGE in something of a daze, and the customs officer waves me through the green channel. On the other side, the Watsons are waiting to meet me. They are accompanied by Ephraim, their cook of forty years, in his police reserve special officer’s uniform — bronze serge safari suit and cap, his shoes shined to mirrors. He sits up front so as to face down any militia roadblocks. Robin drives, and a great glowing shoulder of moon rising low in the east over Mukuvisi Woodlands follows our progress.

  Robin’s daughter, Fiona, with whom I grew up in Chimanimani, is telling me about their recent burglary. She and Robin, and her mother, Sydney, had rushed to the local shops on rumors of salt — another commodity in short supply. They returned, triumphantly clutching a very small bag of salt, to find their house ransacked. Alasdair, Fiona’s younger brother, and Ephraim are missing — kidnapped, they assume. The Watsons are distraught, but after a frantic half hour Alasdair and Ephraim arrive, cut and bleeding, in a car with two policemen, driven by Mrs. Muguti, a black surgeon’s wife, who is a member of their local Catholic congregation. They tell them that robbers barged in, armed with pistols and knives, and one held a knife at Ephraim’s throat. Alasdair was out on the veranda so Ephraim, with the blade still at his jugular, shouted, “Run, Alasdair, run!” Alasdair sprinted out, dived through the three-foot-thick hedge and onto the road where Ephraim joined him (once the robbers took off), and there Mrs. Muguti spots them fleeing along Montgomery Road and offers them a lift.

  The next Sunday, after the service at Rhodesville church, says Fiona, Sydney shakes hands with the professor’s wife, and as she draws her hand away she realizes that Mrs. Muguti has pressed a wad of notes into her palm. “Buy yourself some cheese,” she murmurs, “ . . . as a treat.”

  Tonight we take a route past their house, where we stop briefly at the gate for Robin to give a cryptic sequence of honks in Morse code. Standing inside, silhouetted in the window, Sydney acknowledges us with a double-handed wave; now she will rush to the phone to warn Mum of our impending arrival, and Mum will set off for the gate, as Isaac, the gardener, will have knocked off for the night.

  It is five months since her hip operation, but she is still on crutches.

  “I don’t really need them,” she quickly insists. “I only lean on them when I’m tired. But they’re a good defensive weapon.” She lifts a crutch and makes sharp jabbing motions with it, nearly toppling over in her enthusiasm. Then she begins the painstaking and elaborate ritual of unchaining and unlocking the gate. Special Officer Ephraim stands a benign guard over her, gazing sternly out at the horizon.

  MY FATHER is noticeably more stooped and frail, though his head remains imposing and Rushmorish, his hair leonine and full. When the Watsons have gone, I lay out my bounty on the living room carpet. Dad’s eyes glitter as he surveys the hoard, and he absently squirts a Nicorette inhaler into his mouth.

  “It has been four weeks since his last cigarette,” says Mum proudly.

  This must be about the tenth time he’s tried to quit. His doctor has told him that giving up may boost the oxygen in his blood by up to 5 percent, which will improve the circulation in his feet.

  My main haul consists of various medications he needs that are impossible to get here. They include an experimental transdermal foot cream called Healthibetic that I discovered online in an issue of Diabetes Care. According to a pilot test — on onl
y eleven people, it’s true — it increased blood flow to the feet by an average of 10 percent. I contacted the doctor running the test and bought several jars of the stuff, enough for about six months.

  “I hope it’s more rigorously administered than the last ‘wonder drug’ I cadged,” I say to Mum out of Dad’s earshot.

  The rest of the loot includes single-malt scotch, a pair of nail clippers, a dozen books, and printer cartridges that my father has specifically requested. There are four of them sealed in their crinkly silver foil cocoons, and Dad fondles them, as valuable to him as Fabergé eggs.

  “I won’t need any more,” he says. “These should be sufficient to see me through.” He is measuring out the remains of his life in printer cartridges.

  I offer him a bag full of diabetic chocolate that Georgina has sent, and he seizes it with relish.

  “When I was a child,” he says, “I had a ritual with my mother. Every evening, after dinner, I would approach her as she sat reading, and in silence she would break six squares of chocolate from the bar — never more, never less — and hand them to me.” He pauses to wince as his foot touches the table and shoots a bolt of pain through him. “Even to this day,” he goes on, “I eat chocolate in units of six squares. It’s somehow imprinted on me.”

  I PHONE NEW YORK to tell my family that I’ve arrived safely.

  Joanna tells me that Thomas came through to our bedroom this morning asking, “Where’s Daddy?”

  “In Africa,” she replies.