When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  The BBC World Service for Africa is trailing a story that a new guerrilla group called the Zimbabwe Freedom Movement is launching an insurgency to overthrow Mugabe. The leader of the new group goes by the nom de guerre Charles Black Mamba. Their rather unlikely spokesman is Peter Tatchell, the gay rights activist from Outrage! who ambushed Mugabe outside Harrods. He says he’s been in contact with Black Mamba for eighteen months and that Mamba and his men are all serving members of the Zimbabwean army.

  “What do you reckon?” says Dad.

  I am skeptical and so is he. After seven years of guerrilla war, followed by the Matabeleland massacres after independence, few here have the appetite for more armed conflict, even as the opposition falters and the dictatorship tightens.

  KEITH MARTIN has now managed to secure Jain’s ashes, and we are clear to rebury her at Christchurch in Borrowdale. It will be a small ceremony, just us and the Watsons. And then I wonder whether we should invite Aunt Margaret.

  Margaret Gray is not my real aunt, she’s my godmother. She was a nurse back in England, where she had looked after George Bernard Shaw. Then, responding to the “Sunshine Girl” campaign, she was recruited to work in Rhodesia after World War II, and went on to become a senior nurse at the hospital in Mbare township. On Sundays she and her husband, Derek, a retired policeman, used to fetch me from boarding school and take me back for the day, to their small farm at Christon Bank near Mazowe. I haven’t seen them in years.

  “I’m so ashamed,” says Mum. “We’ve quite lost touch with them.”

  Last she heard, they had sold their house and moved into managed care.

  With Keith’s help, I call around to the various nursing homes and finally track her down to the B. S. Leon Home for the Elderly. It’s OK, he says, it’s one of the good ones.

  “Remember,” says Mum, as I leave for B. S. Leon, “Margaret Gray saved your life — twice.”

  This is the first I’ve heard of it.

  “I had a pregnancy that went wrong, before you were born. The placental tissue grew uncontrollably into the wall of my womb to form an invasive hydatidiform mole, and the gynecologist was all set to do a hysterectomy, which was then standard treatment, but Margaret talked me out of letting him do it, and I went to another doctor who spent hours dissecting it out instead. And later, when you were conceived, they said my womb would tear, and I should have an abortion, but Margaret persuaded me to keep you. That’s why I made her your godmother.”

  There is no obvious reception area at B. S. Leon, and I find myself in a large room where dozens of chairs have been arranged in a semicircle around a TV set. About fifteen very elderly white men and women and several black aides are watching a pop video through the snowstorm of static. It is “I Could Be the One” by Donna Lewis and the volume is turned up, way up. The nursing aides are bopping to it while the old folks just sit and stare at the snowy screen in silence.

  One of the aides directs me to Margaret’s ward, and I walk to the end of a long linoleum-covered corridor that smells of cabbage and disinfectant. I find her, short and grizzled, in a pink housecoat, sitting at a Formica table with her back to the window, reading This England magazine, issue of Spring ’93. It is open at an article entitled “The Spirit of England,” illustrated with a portrait of Winston Churchill and quotations from him on the eve of World War II, warning his people that “Appeasement is feeding the crocodile, hoping it will eat you last,” and imploring, “Nothing can save England if she will not save herself.” In her hand is a green plastic flyswatter. Two other elderly ladies sit hunched over on the ends of their beds, observing me silently.

  Margaret looks up and sees me. She frowns for a moment and then her face brightens.

  “Peter. Well, I never!” she chirps in the Shropshire accent that fifty years in Africa have failed to dent. “It’s been years.”

  She flicks deftly at a fly and kills it. I congratulate her.

  “I killed twenty-one in a single day once,” she says, and gives her little signature hoot of laughter.

  I sit down on her narrow iron bed and fill her in on family news, and then I ask, “How’s Derek?”

  “Derek.” She blinks. “Derek?”

  “Yes,” I say, nodding at the framed wedding photo on her side table. Margaret with soft blonde hair and Ming blue eyes, in a feathery flounce of taffeta; Derek in British South Africa police dress uniform — diagonal leather Sam Browne belt, jodhpurs, puttees, silver sword snug in its scabbard.

  “Derek’s dead.”

  “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a few months back I think. I never went to the funeral,” she says. “I don’t really go out anymore, I get . . . tired. I don’t even know where he’s buried, you know.”

  I go over and hug her awkwardly, and she starts to cry. “I miss him terribly,” she says into my shoulder.

  I SIT ON THE SOFA that night, letting the ZTV news wash over me. Canaan Banana has died in a London clinic. An undertaker condemns the local hospital’s practice of dumping bodies in mass graves after relatives fail to claim them because they cannot afford funerals. A poet, Bernard Sibanda, is interviewed. “How is it? To be a poet?” he is asked. “Ah, you have to be tough to be a poet,” he says, and he assumes a boxer’s stance. President Obasanjo of Nigeria arrives tomorrow to try to broker a deal to keep Zimbabwe from being expelled from the commonwealth. “He comes to Zimbabwe after a display of white arrogance by Australian Prime Minister John Howard.” The Chinese Embassy has donated eight electric sewing machines to a secondary school in Goromonzi. Prior to this, more than a hundred students have shared each machine.

  Later, Dad listens to Georgina again. She is interviewing a protest leader who has just been arrested and locked into the back of a police Land Rover. He has hidden his cell phone in his sock and is now calling in his version of events. “I must stop now,” he whispers. “They see me.” There is a squawk and the line goes dead. “We apologize for technical difficulties with that interview,” says Georgina, and goes on to the next item: Roy Bennett’s farmworkers have been attacked, shot at by a combined force of army, police, and party youth militia. There are casualties, but no one knows how many yet. This attack is despite a high court order excluding the security forces from the farm.

  I think of that evening two years ago when we waited for just such an attack. And I know the young men who are in the firing line this time are the same ones as back then — those boys drinking raw farm coffee from chipped enamel mugs, waiting for an ambush or dawn, whichever came first.

  KEITH MARTIN has given me the “authority to disinter” document for Jain’s ashes, and I ask Dad where to put it.

  “Put it in the Jain file, in the top drawer of the filing cabinet in the study,” he says.

  Way at the back of the cabinet, jammed in behind a screed of engineering standards files, I find a set of hanging files labeled “Jain.” I heave them out and lay them in a pile on the desk. Together they form a complete record of my sister’s life — twenty-seven years of it. Her first school reports, theater programs, team photos, applications for teachers training college, letters from ex-pupils, grateful parents. It takes me several hours to work my way through the counterfoil of her existence, until there is only one file remaining. It is a dusty, plum-toned folder. I know what it must be, and I don’t want to open it. I sit for a long time looking out the study window at the swimming pool fishpond. Dragonflies hover over the murky water, mating, and masked weavers fly back and forth collecting pink-headed pampas grass for their nests. And the kapok tree that Mum transplanted from Jain’s garden after she died is blossoming with small, soft, ivory flowers.

  Finally, I flip open the folder. Inside is all the documentation of Jain’s death — first the clipped obituaries and condolence notices from the newspaper, browned now, with age. Then the inquest report, the Warned-and-Cautioned Statement for the possible culpable homicide charges against several soldiers, the sudden-death docket, witness statements from other so
ldiers detailing the disputed sequence of events, the injuries sustained by Jain, Neville, and Mark, who’d died where and how. As a former policeman, I have written reports like these, but this is different. This is the one that has torn my own family apart, that has created two worlds for us: before and after.

  I’m terrified that I am going to encounter photographs of Jain’s battered corpse — an image I cannot bear to hold within me. Georgina and I have heard that Jain was decapitated. As I turn each page, I look first through half-closed eyes, to censor whatever is next. Finally I reach the autopsy report. Under “Cause of Death,” it concludes simply, “extensive head injuries.” And it confirms one small mercy — that she was killed instantly. Thankfully there are no photos of her body.

  There are other photos, though, which Dad has stored at the back of this folder, early ones of Jain as a toddler on the lawn in Cobham, ones I have not seen. For me, these pictures are almost unbearable. I cannot look at them without also seeing the police forensic photos of her crushed vehicle, the black type of her death report. And yet here she is, holding the hands of the parents who will soon take her out to Africa and ultimately to her death. And here she is again wearing a little white dress with short puffed sleeves, her grass-stained knees peeking out below the hem, dimpled fists clutching the handle of her doll’s carriage, practicing to be the mother she will never become. She is smiling shyly up at Dad’s camera. A dying man’s photo of his dead daughter on a lawn in Kent.

  But in that telescoping of lives, in that wrangling of memories with the rough rope of hindsight, madness lies. I close the folder, replace it, and slide the drawer shut.

  RETURNING TO THE STUDY DESK, I see a pile of letters waiting to be filed. One is a copy of Mum’s letter to Joan Simpson, the wife of my old headmaster at Chimanimani School. When her husband died, Joan finally left Zimbabwe and her younger daughter, Liz, to go to live in Scotland with her middle daughter, Elaine, a doctor. Now Elaine has died of breast cancer. I begin to read.

  My dear Joan,

  Liz rang me with the news last night. How cruel and senseless it all seems to be. I ache so much for you and know only too well how you are feeling. The only consolation is that you had a wonderful daughter who fulfilled her potential and gave so much of herself to everything she did. “More geese than swans now live.”

  How do you see your future? I am sure it pleased Elaine very much that she had arranged a safe and secure place for you to live. Life really is very uncertain here and I no longer go out anywhere. You-know-who is obviously quite mentally unstable. Anyone who was a polling official for the MDC is being hunted down ruthlessly and very severely beaten if not killed and their property destroyed, and the white farmers increasingly savaged. The town whites must obviously be the next targets. We have got gap bags packed and what an upheaval that was with essential documents missing and turning up in the oddest places and just a handful of clothes suddenly becoming so heavy. And one doesn’t know what to pack for: walking to Beira; a transit camp in Messina; freezing in U.K. or arriving in a heat wave. You have already done all that in a composed and orderly fashion, and I do so admire you for all the traumas you must have gone through and yet hidden from the rest of us.

  If we do have to go it would probably be to remote wildest north Wales where my sister has this cottage that is cut off by snow every winter and threatened by floods every spring and a car is essential to get to the nearest village. My sister is permanently in a nursing home with a speech defect, which sounds like Mrs. Thatcher’s, and other problems resulting from a series of small strokes. Her husband died last year.

  Your Liz is the only person I know who, while remaining well aware of all the problems and choices confronting her and her family because of the situation here, yet continues calm and serene and a pleasure to talk to. You raised her well. Everyone else is bewailing fate and starting to panic.

  I wish this letter could get to you more quickly as I want to beg you not to make the same mistakes I made when Jain was killed, but you are probably much more sensible anyway. I went all aloof and introverted, as I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because I would cry, and I spurned offers of help and companionship and as a result it has taken me all these years to get back to normal. Do keep in very close touch.

  Much love from us both,

  Helen

  That night, the night before we are to rebury Jain, I ask my mother about the letter she has written to Joan Simpson.

  “Losing a sister was bad enough,” I say. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose one of my children. I think it would kill me.”

  “Fifteen wild Decembers,” she murmurs.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t you know the poem? It’s by Emily Brontë. It’s called “Remembrance” and was inspired, as I recall, by the deaths of her mother and two elder sisters when Emily was a little girl, more than fifteen years before.”

  She goes to the bookcase in the living room and brings back a battered hardback with hand-tooled leather cover and a broken spine and pages unthreading from their binding. She lays it carefully on the dining table next to the silver donkey cruet holder and begins to read aloud.

  “Cold in the earth — and the deep snow piled above thee,

  Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!

  Have I forgot, my only love, to love thee,

  Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave? . . .

  “Cold in the earth — and fifteen wild Decembers,

  From those brown hills, have melted into spring;

  Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers

  After such years of change and suffering!

  “Brontë ends with a warning,” says Mum, and goes to the last verses.

  “Then did I check the tears of useless passion —

  Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;

  Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten

  Down to that tomb already more than mine.

  “And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,

  Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;

  Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,

  How could I seek the empty world again?”

  “That’s the danger of grieving,” she says. “The dead can become more real to you than the living.”

  THAT NIGHT, Dad listens to Georgina on Radio Africa and breaks into his last bottle of soda water. The radio tells of Zimbabwe’s collapsing hospital system, a matter close to my mother’s heart. Both nurses and doctors are on strike — their salaries have lagged badly behind hyperinflation. No new patients are being admitted. Three “airport personnel” and one army doctor are trying to assist all new inpatients at the entire giant Parirenyatwa Hospital.

  Dad keeps interjecting over the broadcast, as though he’s having a conversation with Georgina. The air traffic controllers are also on strike. So are university students, post office workers, garbage men. “But it’s difficult to tell the difference these days,” says Dad. “Everything is such a shambles anyway.”

  A court order has been successfully sought by Morgan Tsvangirai to imprison the registrar general of elections for contempt of court for refusing to bring all ballots to Harare for safekeeping, as specified in the Electoral Act. “But we all know it will never be acted on,” pipes Rustic Realist.

  I sit on the sofa half listening and half reading back issues of the newspapers that Dad has saved for me. One carries a Reuters report headlined “Rent-a-Corpse,” which starts, “Two Zimbabwean mortuary workers have been arrested on charges they rented out corpses to motorists to enable them to take advantage of special fuel preferences given to hearses.”

  In the Zimbabwe Independent, an opposition weekly paper, I read the “Hijack Update” headed “Mayhem Continues.” The Update is sponsored by Track-it, makers of a car-tracking device, whose logo is a man pointing a pistol at a driver’s head.

  Another paper carries a story about the burning down of the synagogue
in Bulawayo a few weeks ago on the eve of Yom Kippur, under mysterious circumstances. A government commentator, under the pen name “Busybody,” is alleging that the city’s tiny Jewish community — now down to only 159, nearly all more than seventy years old — were hoarding contraband there: foreign currency, and even black-market fuel, which, “Busybody” claims, boosted the fire. “Busybody” knows this, apparently, because of “the amount of emotion, dejection, and desperation on the faces of the victims that fateful Saturday.”

  THE NEXT DAY, the day we are to rebury my sister, my father calls me into his room. He sits hunched on his bed.

  “Sit, Pete,” he says, gesturing to a hard plastic chair. “Let me tell you where I am.” He sighs and gathers his thoughts. “I’m going downhill fast. My memory’s shot. I tire easily. I can hardly walk. I could go at any time. We have almost no real income left, Pete. I’m so sorry, son. The thing you will have to decide is what to do with Mum when I’m gone — which could literally be at any moment. I’m finished, Pete. Finished.”

  I sit there wondering how to respond. “Don’t worry about Mum. I’ll make sure she’s OK,” I say.

  Mum shuffles through the door, as if on cue. “What are you two moping about?” she inquires brightly.

  We both remain silent. She doesn’t press it.

  AS WE ARE getting ready to leave for the cemetery, I realize that we have no flowers.

  “We can buy them from the flower hawkers at Chisipite Shopping Center,” I suggest.

  “No! They’re probably blood flowers,” Mum hisses, meaning the looted produce of ejected farmers whose in-the-field crops have been taken over by ruling party fat cats.

  I carry the wooden box containing Jain’s ashes out to the car and place it gently on the backseat. I wonder about strapping it in with a seat belt. Then, as I wait for my parents to make their slow way out, I notice that Isaac had been pruning the tall bougainvillea hedge. Cerise branches lay thick on the drive, destined for the compost heap. So I gather up a great armful of the thorny clippings and put them in the backseat next to the wooden box.