by Peter Godwin
“Oh,” he says, as though Africa was on the next block, and he trots through to the kitchen for breakfast.
Hugo, she says, is barreling around the apartment singing the first line of a song I have taught him in Shona, the old Zimbabwean national anthem: “Ishe Komberera Africa” — “God Bless Africa.” He puts manic emphasis on the first syllable of the continent: Ishe Komberera Aaaaa-frica.
I CARRY MY BAGS into the guest room, which now doubles as a study. Over by the computer, where my father has sat for hours typing out e-mails to me about himself, there are piles of medical and engineering papers, which he recycles by printing on their backs. New paper now costs Z$100 a sheet.
Mum has cleared some space in the closet, and I hang my New York clothes next to a row of her white doctor’s coats.
My parents turn in early, but with the time difference, sleep eludes me. I lie on the single bed staring at the widening structural cracks that fracture the walls, the white ceiling panels discolored by repeated leaks, and I listen to the rats scurrying frenetically back and forth up there. I cannot go out onto the veranda, as I’d have to unlock the rape gate, which would wake my light-sleeping mother. So I get up and stand at the window and look out through the curlicued burglar bars, out across the swollen profusion of our garden, to the massive bowers of bougainvillea that mark the boundary of Fort Godwin. My parents have had Isaac plant sisal bushes along the inside border of the hedge and now their savagely serrated blades form an interlocking barrier. Still, through it all, I can make out the flickering of the fires of the street hawkers camped out along Hindhead Avenue. During the day, they sit at their pathetic rickety wooden stands and sell groundnuts in tiny bags, single mangos, bananas, tomatoes, and cigarettes, and they roast corn on small fires and sell half a cob at a time. Sometimes, they don’t even make enough for the bus fare home to the townships, so they sleep right there, under our bougainvillea hedge, like tonight. I can hear them murmuring to each other, gently scolding their children. I can hear their liquid coughing and spitting, and their babies mewling. They must be lying fifteen yards away from my bed, and the harsh smoke from their fires seeps though the hedge and in through my open windows and catches in my throat.
My parents are wary of them. They feel watched all the time. The hawkers know everything about their routine — when the dogs are fed, when Isaac is out. My parents worry that the hawkers will provide intelligence to attackers.
FOR BREAKFAST Mum makes my father a fried egg on a slice of “cake bread,” a dish worthy of Marie Antoinette. There is a price control on ordinary bread made from flour, a control that pegs it at such a low price that the bakers take a loss on every loaf they sell. Long lines form for the few loaves produced. The bakers have gotten around the price control by introducing “fancy loaves” with a smidgen of sugar and the very occasional raisin in them, which are not controlled by the price-fixing statute, and are very expensive — way beyond the reach of most people. Mum worries that Dad is losing too much weight. After his lavish breakfast, he has nothing for lunch, and then another two thin slices of bread with either a single sliver of ham or cheese on them for dinner, washed down by cane-spirit whiskey. Mum herself has given up bread completely, she confides. The cake bread is simply too expensive for both of them to eat.
“I eat cabbage instead,” she says. “And minced pork. It’s the cheapest meat at the moment, it’s going for four thousand dollars for five hundred grams.”
Beef has suddenly quadrupled in price because the national herd, 1.4 million strong three years ago, has been decimated.
“People are saying that a chicken breast goes farther,” she muses. “A small tin of tuna will last for four meals, if you mix it with cabbage. And we don’t drink real coffee anymore, we drink chicory.”
“If you’ve taken the decision to live, you have to spend a lot on food, and that’s that,” says Dad, munching his way through his second slice of cake bread.
As he eats, I notice that his arms are lined with plum-colored contusions. “What are they from?” I ask.
“Your mother,” he replies, in a false falsetto, “she beats me up when I don’t behave.”
Mum snorts on her chicory. “It’s his anticoagulant drugs,” she says. “They make him bruise very easily.”
In front of him, she has lined up the drugs he needs to take after breakfast: salbutamol, to assist his breathing; glibenclamide, to control his type 2 diabetes; aspirin, to thin his blood and prevent a stroke; digoxin, to strengthen his heart muscle and moderate its beat; indomethacin, to ease the inflammation and pain of his lumbar disc lesion; furosemide, to help his kidneys work more effectively; Slow-K, to counteract the potassium loss caused by furosemide; becotide, a corticosteroid to alleviate the congestion in his lungs; and doxypol, a light morphine-based painkiller.
After he’s swallowed the last of them, he stands up to leave the table. The legs of his shorts flap around his much-reduced thighs, and his feet are encased in dark blue terry cloth slippers that bear the slogan “GOLF,” a game my father says he has never played, nor indeed shown any interest in. As he boasts that he has not purchased a single new item of clothing since he retired three years ago, I challenge him on the slippers.
“Real shoes are too painful for him,” says Mum. “These are the only things that don’t put pressure on his toes.” He eases his feet up onto a wicker stool, and up close I see that the slippers do not bear the word GOLF at all, but GOIF.
“Yes, they misinterpreted the L,” he laughs.
And the little club underneath it, on closer inspection, looks suspiciously like a croquet mallet. Obviously the people at the Chinese factory churning out GOIF slippers have even less sporting knowledge than my father.
After reading the paper, he retreats to his bedroom, groaning in pain. I can hear the murmur of Mum ministering to him. Eventually she emerges.
“Is he OK?” I ask, though it is quite clear that he is not.
“He’s in acute pain,” she says briskly, “a stabbing pain that shoots up his legs. He’s complaining that it’s unbearable. So I told him that women put up with acute pain in labor, knowing that it’s only going to last so long, and that he should just shut up and breathe through his mouth and it’ll ease soon.”
Mum has arranged for me to see Dad’s doctor, Mr. Bowers, the man who replaced her hip, so that I can help decide what we should do. I sit in his waiting room in a suburban house at the bottom of Tongogara Avenue looking at Bowers’s world-class qualifications on the wall: MBChB (Zim), LRCP (Edinburgh), LRCS (Edinburgh), LRCPS (Glasgow), FRCS (England). He is one of the last orthopedic surgeons in the country. On the wall are his latest financial rules for patients: “Due to current harsh economic conditions, consultation and operation fees are being reviewed contin-uously,” it warns. “Please check with the office closer to your consultation or operation to confirm the current fees.”
“Gangrene almost never resolves,” Bowers tells me. When he worked on a vascular ward in Glasgow, they were forbidden to cut off toes. “You would simply cut one off, and then another, and then the foot, and finally what you should have done in the first place, take the leg off below the knee and fit a prosthesis.” But he agrees that Dad may not be strong enough for that operation, the amputation of both his legs. His only chance of surviving is to want to have it done and to have the will to live afterward.
“The pain your father feels at present, ischemic pain, is the pain of a muscle being deprived of oxygen. It is,” says Bowers, “the very worst, most intense kind of pain there is.”
DESPITE HIS LEVEL OF PAIN, Dad continues to do the shopping. It’s a duty he has long claimed and clearly enjoys. And some weeks it is all that prevents him from tipping over into complete misanthropy. Today, he takes me with him. First stop is Vasilly’s, the bakery, which apparently invented the Marie Antoinette “cake bread” exception. Dad loads his little basket with a small selection of loaves, which he will later freeze, and, as a special treat, he says, becaus
e I am here, two croissants. The assistant wraps them individually and rings up the total on the till. It comes to Z$12,000.
“What!” says Dad. “How can it possibly be that much?”
The black shop assistant manages to look sympathetic and embarrassed at the same time. “It’s the inflation,” she says, and looks down at the till, waiting for Dad to make a decision.
Dad slowly counts out all the notes in his wallet but they fall short of the total required. I haven’t yet changed any money so I am unable to make up the difference. Vasilly’s, like most shops here, stopped taking checks ages ago — they are not worth their face value by the time they clear. He points to one of the loaves, and she removes it and subtracts it from the total. But the total is still too much, so he hands back the rolls one at a time until finally all that’s left are the two “special treat” croissants.
But then, inexplicably, the cashier wraps up the whole order, including the items he cannot pay for, and presents them to Dad. He is confused, as am I. The cashier nods her head toward the line that has formed behind us, to a tall, well-dressed black woman. “She is paying the extra for you,” says the cashier.
I am not sure whether to offer to pay her back, or if that will offend her, and clearly neither is Dad.
“Thank you so much . . . for helping us,” I say as we leave.
“You are welcome.” She smiles. Dad just looks at the floor.
“Many’s the time,” my mother says, when I tell her about it later, “that we have done that for a black person struggling to pay.”
DAD IS INDIGNANT rather than humiliated. People like him who rely on pensions that are not adjusted to inflation have to live on less and less with every passing month. Some have simply run out of money. A few have committed suicide at the shame of it.
Dad’s British pension — for the years he worked in England before he emigrated — is £36 a month, about US$60. Mum’s pension for working as a government doctor here for the past twenty-five years amounts to Z$15,000 a month — just US$5 at black-market rates.
Next stop is across the road at Bon Marché, where Dad wants to return empty bottles to collect the refund. As we wait, the only white people in line, a steady stream of customers push bulging carts out of the supermarket. Our line sullenly watches these diplomats and black-marketeers, expatriots, and corrupt government officials packing their Pajeros and Range Rovers and Mercs with mountains of groceries.
On our return, Isaac shlumps over in his Wellington boots to help us unpack, but the haul is so meager his help is unnecessary.
“You know he’s leaving in December,” Mum says, “going back to his tribal area in Mount Darwin to try farming full-time.”
“Why now?” I ask.
“Well, the government has increased the producer prices for corn, trying to offset the collapse in production on the former white-owned farms, so he thinks he can turn a profit,” she says. “Anyway, he’s gone a bit peculiar.”
“How?”
“Recently we were gardening together perfectly amicably, when he turned to me and said, ‘I want a tea break.’ Quite forcefully,” my mother adds.
So she says, “Very well, off you go, have a break.”
And he says, “No, every day.”
“But you have one every day,” she says.
“No,” he says. “I want one at a set time.”
“OK — how about ten to ten thirty?” she says.
“Right,” he says triumphantly. “You owe me a lot of money for all the years that I have worked without a tea break. You must add up those half hours and pay me for them.”
“Well, you must talk to my husband about that,” my mother says.
And so he does. Dad shows him a copy of the domestic workers’ statute. “Each employee has the right to a forty-five-minute lunch break and two fifteen-minute breaks during the working day,” he reads.
“At present,” says Dad, “you take two hours at lunch and another hour over the course of the day.”
Isaac nods, for he knows this to be true.
“In that case,” says Dad, “you should pay me back for one and a quarter hours a day.”
Isaac drops the demand. My father hasn’t needed to mention that he pays Cheesely’s school fees and pays for her uniform, and has given Isaac my old motorbike, with a market value of Z$5 million. There is a premium on motorbikes in these fuel-challenged times.
Shortly after the pay dispute, says Mum, she is on her dusk patrol of the garden — a very slow patrol — when Isaac’s wife, who is a Mapostori, starts praying “aggressively” at her. I hoot with laughter when Mum tells me this and she looks offended.
“Well, she was. As I approached, she was on her knees facing the setting sun. I was careful not to walk in front of her, but she turned toward me, and she raised her voice until she was shouting. Frankly, I felt as though she was trying to put a curse on me. It gave me quite a turn. And it wasn’t the first time.”
“What was she saying?”
“I don’t know,” says Mum glumly. “It was in Shona.”
Things finally come to a head one afternoon when they hear a terrible ruckus outside the gate — men shouting and a woman screaming. The gate bursts open, and Isaac appears, shoving his wife in ahead of him, pursued by three men.
“We’re under attack!” shouts Mum. Dad emerges from the house with the .45 revolver in his hand and sits on one of the chairs he has placed strategically five paces apart along the drive — his “resting chairs” — with the gun on his lap. Two of the men — one of the hawkers on our corner, and an off-duty security guard — run away when they see the gun. But the third man, who has a clubfoot, remains, and he and Isaac begin to brawl, and as they trade blows, the clubfooted man drops the little plastic shopping bag he is holding. Inside is a small bottle of cooking oil, precious because it is so scarce now. It shatters, and at this, the fight drains out of him, and he begins to weep. Isaac runs off to his house, and Mum tries to soothe the man with the clubfoot. She sits him down on one of Dad’s resting chairs and gives him a glass of water and a wet washcloth for his face, and he explains the root of the dispute.
Isaac, he says, has done a painting job for him — with our paint, of course — and the man gave Isaac a bicycle tire as security. “But now I have paid in full,” he says, “and Isaac is still refusing to return my tire. He has stolen it.”
This is what this vile president has done to us — made scavengers of us all and stripped these grown men of their dignity as they fight over a worn bike tire. Reduced us all to desperadoes and thieves, made us small and bleak and old and tired. Made us lose our love of life itself. Split our families and left my parents impoverished, alone, afraid.
THE NEXT DAY Mum summons me into my father’s bedroom to observe the daily ritual of the Changing of the Dressing. She wishes me to see this so I will be better informed of his condition, so I can help with the decisions that lie ahead. She gets down on her knees, “like Mary Magdalene,” she jokes, and Dad makes the sign of the cross, bestowing a blessing to the top of her head. She gingerly pulls away the gauze that covers his feet, right one first. As it comes away, Dad does not look down. The foot is swollen and puffy, and the toes and the pad underneath are blackened and oozing. I had no idea it was this bad. It is an appalling sight, and the smell is rancid. I feel a retch rising from my chest into my throat. I am going to throw up at my father’s feet.
“This is the good one,” I hear my mother saying for my benefit, “and I must say, it looks a little better this morning.”
I battle to swallow my own vomit.
“Hmmm, distinct improvement,” she continues. She gently massages the new diabetic cream into it, while Dad winces and squinches his eyes shut in pain. Then she moves to the suppurating ulcerous ruin of his left foot.
I rise to flee, but she fixes me with a steely gaze that says, don’t-you-bloody-dare-wimp-out-on-me. So I sit back down and make small talk to Dad, as though this is no big deal, really, rottin
g alive from your feet up.
Finally the phone rings in the hall, and I gratefully leap up to answer it. Mum follows me out a few minutes later. She has been trying to suggest bringing forward his next doctor’s appointment. But Dad will have none of it; he wants to avoid amputation, any amputation, even of individual toes.
“He’s suicidally depressed, you know,” she sighs. “I’m worried he’ll go for a gun and shoot himself.”
We decide that if he’s going to kill himself, he’ll most likely do it while I am here, so as not to leave Mum to deal with the after-math on her own. So together we remove all the guns — the .38 pistol and the .45, the .410 shotgun and the .303 rifle — from the safe and hide them right at the top of the cupboard in the study, where I’m staying.
“Maybe we should move his extra medical supplies,” she suggests, “in case he decides to OD.” So we gather up the pill bottles from the medicine cabinet, and I take them away and conceal them in my room, under my New York clothes.
Later we discuss his pain threshold.
“He’s on the maximum doses of pain relievers already,” says Mum. “That’s why he keeps falling asleep.”
“What else can we do?” I ask.
“It could be time to move him on to morphine.” She pauses. “I wonder how soon he’ll get addicted?”
DAD RALLIES later that evening and settles into his old armchair, munching his cake bread supper. Though I have offered to pay for it, my parents refuse to get satellite TV, refuse to retreat into the expatriate compound of the mind. They prefer to wrestle with the country that is all around them, to remain engaged. Their only concession is the BBC World Service radio news, which they’ve listened to for fifty years, and Georgina’s Radio Africa.
Next to Dad’s chair is the Tempest Super Sixty stereo. “Super Sixty” because when he bought it in 1970, sixty watts was something to boast about. It is finished in wood veneer and is the size of an oven. Each speaker is as big as a tea chest, and they emit a background hiss when music is played through them. But it is an old Sony shortwave radio of mine, linked to an outside antenna Dad has strung up along the avenue of cypress trees, that provides their only window on the world now.
