When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  “It’s the damned hawkers,” says Mum. “Their fire has got into our hedge.”

  I pull on some clothes, unlock the rape gate and the door to the veranda, and go out into the garden. I fumble in the dark to find the hose and connect it to a garden tap. But there is no water. I get a bucket, fill it from the pool, and throw it onto the flames. It makes no difference, but I keep doing it, running back and forth with buckets of water, the dogs following me, barking. Mum and Dad appear on the veranda in their bathrobes. Dad has the .38. “Just in case it’s a setup,” says Mum. “It could be deliberate.”

  Dad calls the fire brigade from his cell phone, as our landline has been cut, perhaps by the flames burning the overhead wires. Or perhaps, Mum worries, by would-be robbers in cahoots with the hawkers. The fire burns for an hour or so, and just as it is dying down, a fire engine finally arrives. The firemen slowly unroll their hoses and douse the embers of the hedge.

  It is nearly dawn, and Mum brings out a tray of milkless tea — milk is unavailable again. We sit on the patio, watching the sunrise through the smoke. The bougainvillea bowers have more or less vanished, and the sisal has been reduced to blackened hulks like the innards of airplane wreckage. The fence that winds its way through the middle of the hedge is charred and sagging and broken in several places. And as the day lightens, we see that we are completely exposed, looking directly into the hawkers’ camp and the busy throng of curious passersby beyond. The hawkers sit there at their little stalls, staring in at us, murmuring to themselves, unapologetic for burning down our barrier. Several of their kids stand by the ruined fence, coughing their liquid coughs, watching us drink our milkless tea.

  My parents have spent the last fifteen years tending this barrier against the huddled masses outside, reinforcing it until they have judged it impregnable, and it has been incinerated in an hour.

  “We could replace it with a wall,” I suggest.

  “No,” says Mum. “Too expensive. And anyway, if you have ostentatious security it makes it look like you have something worth stealing. It only encourages robbers. That was the whole beauty of the hedge.”

  As we sit there, the mournful wail of the air-raid siren marks the first class of the day across the road at Oriel Boys School.

  “Always reminds me of being in London during the Blitz,” says Mum. “Feels like it now too,” she says, surveying the smoldering cinders of Fort Godwin’s bougainvillea battlements.

  The breeze is picking up again, swaying the fir trees on the other boundary. Crows, with their awful cawing, used to gather in the hundreds on these trees.

  “No crows,” I say.

  “What?” says Dad.

  “Where are the crows,” I say, louder, pointing up at the firs, and the hawkers all look up at the firs too. “What happened to that great flock of crows that used to congregate around the school?”

  “Not the flock,” says Dad, ever the stickler for his adopted tongue, “the murder. They disappeared recently. I have a theory: since the food shortages, the Oriel schoolboys have been eating up all their packed lunches. They no longer strew bread crusts and bits of fruit and the like on the playing fields and courtyards. Everyone’s hungry now. Nothing is wasted. So no scraps for crows.”

  At the siren, Isaac appears.

  “Well, well, not a moment too soon,” says Mum under her breath as he approaches.

  “Ah! Ah! It is too bad,” he says, surveying the scorched earth.

  Mum tasks him to dig holes along the fence line. I start mending the wire breaks while he transplants yesterday-today-and-tomorrow shrubs to obstruct the hawkers’ sight line. But to little effect. We remain totally exposed; anyone can peer straight into our inner sanctum, the little patio where my parents habitually sit on their white garden furniture under the jasmine pergola and drink their weak tea and read their plastic-covered library books.

  Dad retires to his room in pain. Later that evening he calls me in. “Shut the door, Pete,” he says.

  Once again, he is sitting hunched over on his bed. His arms are wreathed in bruises from the anticoagulants, which have also made his eyes bloodshot. “This fire is the last bloody straw,” he says. “This whole place is going to hell. I’m in so much pain now, Pete. I’ve taken all my meds at once, and I’m still in pain. I think this is the beginning of the next stage: permanent pain. I’m not fit to go on. My bloody memory’s gone. I forget to pay bills. We’ll soon be cut off from services. We spend over five hundred million Zimbabwe dollars a month on medications. Our savings are gone. If it goes on like this, I’m going to end it myself. I want you to cremate my body, Pete. Put it in a hole in the garden for all I care. Nothing fancy. But be sure to cremate me. I don’t want to be buried whole, with worms eating my flesh. And you must look after Mum. You’re the only one now who can arrange it all.”

  I sense he is not to be mollified, that his rage needs to flow freely. So I just stay quiet and, after a while, he continues. “I mean, Derek died, and I didn’t even know about it. No one did. Well, that’s what can happen to me. I can die, and no one will know. No one needs to know.”

  Outside, Isaac calls the dogs to their supper bowls. A bus chugs noisily down Hindhead Avenue, its sound amplified by the loss of the bougainvillea baffling. When he speaks again, my father’s voice has changed; it is softer, less angry. “What did you manage to find out about my mother and my sister?” he says. “How was it for them? At the end?”

  Of course, I have been expecting this conversation, rehearsing different ways of telling him what I’ve found out. I can’t possibly tell him the real details of how people died at Treblinka.

  “From all the research I’ve done, the books I’ve read, it would have been quick, Dad. They wouldn’t have suffered much.”

  He closes his eyes and nods. “Well, that’s something, at least,” he says. “I’m glad of that.” And he reaches across and pats my arm. “Thanks, Pete, for doing that.”

  I can see, though, that he is just pretending to believe me. He knows that they probably did suffer terribly. But he wants me to believe that I have successfully reassured him. I am lying, and so is he. We are lying to each other.

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, I go through to the study and squeeze the one-eyed wooden frog clip that sits on the desk, to make it regurgitate its diet of letters and lists and utility bills. Dad has asked me to check them — a huge concession from someone as organized as he. It soon becomes apparent that our phone is not out of order; it has been cut off because the check he sent to pay the bill has been returned. The figures he has written do not jibe with the words.

  Among the bills is a newspaper advertisement he has clipped. It’s another “Hijack Update.” But the sponsorship has changed. Now it is: “A community service brought to you by TV Sales and Hire.” Under that is the headline “Watch Out — You Could Be Next! If you are the victim of a hijacking or are sure you are being followed, these are the numbers to call. Cut them out and if you have a cell phone, program one or two of these numbers into the phone. These numbers will go directly to the vehicle theft squad and they will respond.” These instructions are followed by news of recent hijackings, in particular a spate of SUVs being driven into neighboring Zambia. “Hijacking causes many problems within the victim’s family, sparked off by their terror and fear of reprisal. Mrs. C lost her twin cab in Marondera last week. The thieves were lying in ambush for her and were armed with AK-47s.”

  WE HAVE SATURDAY LUNCH with Georgina’s in-laws, Shaina and Gerald, in their garden. Their tame crow sits in the munhondo tree above. “It’s called Jekel,” says Shaina. “It had a mate called Hekel who was in the habit of eating from our Rhodesian ridgeback’s bowl until last week, when the ridgeback bit Hekel’s head off.” Their cockerel leaps up on the back of the guinea fowl and tries to mate with it; their peacock trumpets loudly until fed tidbits from the table.

  Mum is telling them about the fire, and Shaina offers to give her some shrub cuttings to help fill the gaps in our hedge. Gerald h
ollers for Naison, the gardener. As he approaches, Shaina’s tiny Yorkshire terrier yaps and nips at the back of his blue-overalled legs, but Naison ignores it.

  “It’s a very good watchdog, you know,” says Shaina. “I use it to alert the bigger dogs. It never gives a false alarm. Last night it was growling and growling, and then suddenly there were four gunshots right by our bedroom window. They keep trying to steal the neighbor’s swimming pool pump, and he was shooting at them. He has a very high-powered rifle, you know. You could hear the bullets zinging through the trees.”

  Naison is assembling a variety of plants, placing them carefully in Bon Marché bags for Mum.

  “He’s a lovely old chap,” says Shaina of her gardener. “He’s the only one of them I really trust. Shame, he lost his girlfriend and his daughter to AIDS. And now his real wife has died too. And the bastards, her family, they said that he’d never finished paying lobola to them for her so they wouldn’t let him bury her body. It lay there in the reserve, getting all stinky, for about a week, until he sold three cows and paid off the bride price. These people, honestly. Imagine holding a corpse hostage. Now he’s dying of AIDS too, poor old bugger. Every time I see him he’s got a new blister on his lip or something and I think, Oh, oh, and I rush off to give him extra treats to eat. You know that’s my instinct, to nourish the sick. I used to work at the hospice, you know. There was a picture in the Herald yesterday of a little black boy who died of meningitis. It said his last words were, ‘Look, Dad, I’m flying.’ That’s what that famous author Kubla something says, isn’t it? That when you die, your soul flies out of your body. When I worked at the hospice, the dying always used to say they were flying.”

  “When we drive down to South Africa we prefer to go through Botswana,” Gerald is saying to Dad. “It’s much more civilized. I hate the Beitbridge border crossing. You line up inside for hours while outside they steal the headlights from your car.”

  Shaina is telling Mum about the contentious divorce of her daughter, Jacaranda, whose ex-husband accused her of withholding some of his belongings, paintings, and other valuables, hiding them here at Summerfield Close. When marshals of the court arrived with policemen to raid the house, they mistakenly arrested the other daughter, Topaz, who had just arrived from Los Angeles.

  “Topaz went to Chikurubi Prison for the night, you know, with her baby, Sable, not even two years old. They were crowded into a cell with thirty-one others. There was menstrual yuck all over the floor, but the other prisoners, all of them black women, they were so kind to her, they all moved to the side and put their blankets together so she could have a bed. And the black lady warden took the baby and mixed some powdered milk and gave her a bottle.”

  Now Shaina turns to me to ask about the recent breakup of her son’s marriage to my sister. Jeremy has written to Shaina, trying to tell her he has finally accepted that he is gay.

  “You know I wrote back to Jeremy saying we’ll always love you whatever you are, but I’m hurt that you never felt you could tell me. And he wrote back saying he’d assumed I’d always known.” She pauses for a sip of her iced water. “So do you think he’s really gay?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say, not wanting to get involved.

  “Well, I wish you’d ask him, man to man. I think it’s just a state of mind. That you can come out of it. Anyway, there’s been nothing like this in our family. Only one of Gerald’s distant relatives who’s a bit effeminate.”

  “But he has kids,” objects Gerald mildly.

  “Yes,” concedes Shaina, playfully, “but he only really came alive when he was playing the dame in the pantomime.”

  MY PARENTS ARE EXHAUSTED after their outing. Mum is fast asleep before 6:00 p.m. Her glasses are still on, and one hand clutches the corner of her Sony radio, which hangs by its black nylon strap from her monkey-chain stand. Unheard by her on Radio Africa is A Different Point of View, in which an American accent is calling for “days of prayer to get rid of Mugabe and his whole regime.”

  Prayer. Is that all we have left?

  I remove Mum’s glasses and gently pry her fingers from the radio, and she snuggles under the duvet. “Night, night,” she murmurs, without really waking up.

  In bed I lie listening to the hawkers quarreling. The walls dance with the shadows caused by their fires, fires that now burn along the edge of our garden and seem to surround us.

  ON SUNDAY, for a break, I go out by myself. American aid-worker friends have invited me to a barbecue — what we call a braaivleis — at their house high on Hogerty Hill, in Borrowdale. It is raining as I drive there, a tropical downpour that overwhelms the little wipers of my small blue Korean rental car with a blanket of water, but in this blighted country even the rain is bad news. The small winter-wheat crop is largely unharvested, its new black farmers unfamiliar with the ritual of advance booking combine harvesters. Rain will rot it in the fields.

  Later, up on Hogerty Hill, the clouds clear to reveal a wide view across the valley toward a broken farm, and on the other side of the hill, red scars where the earth is being excavated to construct mansions for the new elite. One of the barbecue guests, a rhino expert, plays the bagpipes, while his wife accompanies him on the accordion, a hauntingly melancholy medley of Gaelic laments and Slavic ballads.

  Out on the porch, an elephant expert from the States, Loki Osborn, is telling me about his dissertation on elephants’ abhorrence of pepper, something I can understand after my chili chakalaka experience. This matters because it provides a nonlethal way for tribespeople to keep elephants from eating their crops. If you spray an elephant with pepper, he says, it will stay away from that place for years. He’s been working with a small group of villagers in the isolated Dande tribal area down in the Zambezi Valley. As they have only one spring and walk miles each day for water, Loki says he wanted to help them by drilling a well. They welcome the idea, though doubt he can pull it off. When his drilling crew finally hits water, the villagers start feuding furiously about the altered walk-to-water hierarchy, and Osborn is eventually forced to fill the well back in. Now the tribeswomen once again spend hours each day trudging to fetch water, and calm has returned.

  It’s always instructive to observe the life cycle of the First World aid worker. A wary enthusiasm blooms into an almost messianic sense of what might be possible. Then, as they bump up against the local cultural limits of acceptable change, comes the inevitable disappointment, which can harden into cynicism and even racism, until they are no better than the resident whites they have initially disparaged. Even those like Osborn, who have learned the language and done thorough research, often have their faith eroded by the vagaries of Africa, which can start to look horribly like irrationality to the northern eye.

  Witchcraft still grips Dande, says Osborn. “They have cleansing ceremonies where they dance around, get possessed. They accuse the old women, their own grandmothers, the ambuyas, of being witches. And the amazing thing is that the ambuyas play along with the accusations: ‘Do you promise to stop eating babies?’ ‘Yes, we won’t do it anymore.’ The people slice the ambuyas’ foreheads with razors and rub dirt into them. Then they all become possessed with the spirits of baboons and leap around making baboon calls.”

  The next day, he says, everything is as normal — except that the old ladies have cuts on their foreheads.

  The jealousy in traditional societies can be extreme if someone garners any sort of advantage. This is the downside of their egalitarianism. When big shots who have made money in the city return to their home areas to build grand houses, these rural mansions are often vandalized and stoned. Of course, anyone who has better crops or cattle is at risk of being accused of witchcraft. And such allegations often come from family members. Osborn shakes his head at it all.

  His adventure in elephant pepper has finally become victim to the cult of jambanja too. It happens when he tries to turn his research trust into a company so that he can encourage the tribespeople to grow pepper commercially. He explains
to his own staff — his drivers, translators, and research assistants, with whom he’s been working intimately for five years — that they will all still be employed under exactly the same conditions, but that as a bonsela, a “bonus,” he will give them a month’s salary for each year of their employ when he switches their contracts. But still they bring in the war vets and demand “retrenchment packages” of about twice their annual salaries (of which the war vets will take half). Now Osborn is packing up and leaving. No new well for Dande. No pepper cash crops. No jobs for his own staff. Nothing. He has moved his projects to other African countries, ones where things are a little less deranged.

  WHEN I RETURN at 10:00, our house is ablaze with lights. Usually my parents are in bed by 8:30 p.m. and though I have my own keys, they are both still up, waiting to lock down Fort Godwin. We congregate in Mum’s room. She hauls herself up on her monkey chain and demands a debriefing. Dad arrives, very slowly, wearing only his sleeping shorts, airline socks over his bandages, and his GOIF slippers. I tell them about all the new mansions springing up in Borrowdale Brook, and they request a tour of it soon.

  After I’ve put my parents back to bed, I test the phone line. It has been reconnected since I paid the bill. It takes almost an hour to get an international line, and when I get through it is crackling with static.

  “Have a quick word with the boys first,” says Joanna, and Thomas comes on the line.

  “Have you seen baby rhinos?” he asks, and before I can reply. “And elephants?”

  “Yes,” I say. I have seen both on safari.

  “Will you bring me back a Power Ranger costume?”

  “No,” I say. “They don’t have Power Rangers in Africa.”

  I take a breath to offer alternatives, but in the pause, he darts away like a silver minnow in the surf. “Bye, then,” he says, and hangs up.