When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  I’m too tired to try again. I flop into bed. The rats scurry back and forth across the ceiling, their claws scrabbling for traction, and in my half-asleep state it feels as though they are scrabbling within my skull. Finally I sleep, and in my restless dreams, the Hindhead hawkers are barking and whooping like the Dande ambuyas, the grandmothers forced by their own children to imitate baboons. They are scampering up and down the foot of our garden. Their eyes reflect the flames of their fires. They are whooping and barking and waiting.

  MARGARET’S ROOM at the B. S. Leon Home for the Elderly is down the end of a long corridor, way too far for my father to walk, so I ask the staff if there is a wheelchair I might borrow.

  “They all have people sitting in them,” the caregiver says. Then another remembers where there is a spare one and she skips off and returns with an extraordinary contraption, a massive antique iron wheelchair that looks like a Victorian bath chair. Its brake is tied with wire, and its footplate is missing, but it’s a set of wheels.

  “It used to belong to an old lady. But she died,” an aide says to me. “Ah, but that one was very fat!” She giggles.

  My parents look at it doubtfully.

  “Come on, Dad, it’s better than walking,” I say, and I help him up into the chair. He scoots over to one side, and there is so much room left that I suggest that Mum get in too, which she does, and they both fit quite comfortably into this great old boat of a wheelchair. They look rather regal, the two of them, enthroned, and I trundle them down the linoleum corridor much to the mirth of the nurses and the residents.

  Margaret is at her Formica table again, against the window. She looks blankly at my parents for a second and then gives a hoot of delight.

  “Good ’eavens! Helen and George! I ’aven’t seen you in years.”

  Mum gives her a little bag of chocolates, and Margaret immediately tears open a Crunchie bar and tucks into it, chewing in a circular motion, like a ruminant, all the while eyeing the ward warily for potential poachers.

  I listen to them reminisce. They tally up how long they’ve known each other — forty-seven years. Dad reminds Margaret that she has been awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for services to health care.

  “Oh, that?” she says dismissively, when she finally remembers. “You know what they say about OBEs — Other Buggers’ Efforts.”

  Now they are talking about doctors they worked with. “What was that la-di-da woman doctor friend of yours, Helen?” asks Margaret. She squeezes her eyes shut and pats her forehead with her palm. “No good, nothing bloody in there,” she says. And all the while she keeps interrupting herself, saying, “You will come back again, won’t you?”

  I wheel my parents back along the long corridor. Halfway down an elderly resident suddenly steps out of her doorway and blocks our way. She starts singing in a faux Cockney accent, with a surprisingly strong and melodious voice:

  “Daisy, Daisy, gi’ me an answer do,

  I’m ’alf crazy over the likes o’ you.

  It won’t be a stylish marriage,

  I can’t afford a carriage,

  But you’ll look sweet upon the seat

  Of a bicycle made for two.”

  Then she steps smartly aside and waves them through, as though seeing them off after a wedding, and my parents wave back to her.

  At the end of the corridor, in order to get the chair over the lip of the threshold, I have to heave it up on its back wheels, and they both bob up into the air. Mum shrieks, and Dad roars with laughter, as though they are on a carnival ride. Staff members appear at doorways and windows, smiling and waving too, attracted by the laughter. My parents wave back regally from their double wide; they are having a great time, holding hands as they careen along in an ugly old wheelchair through the shabby corridors of the old folks’ home. I make them pose for a photo, and when I examine it later they look surprisingly youthful.

  FOR OUR TOUR of the new suburb of Borrowdale Brook, which the locals have already christened Sin City, I drive; Mum navigates. The print in her atlas is so small, she spends most of her time tossing her head, trying to focus the sweet spot of her bifocals. The map is outdated anyway and still has the old colonial street names. But it’s somewhat academic since most of the street signs have been stolen to melt down. And Borrowdale Brook is new, crisscrossed with freshly made roads unmarked on any map. Soon we get lost, but we’re in no hurry, so we wend slowly farther north, following our noses.

  My parents are clucking in wonder at the dozens of new houses springing up out of the bush: grandiose mansions of marble and glass, with landscaped gardens and sparkling pools. In a country with the world’s fastest-shrinking economy, where people are starving, this is voodoo economics at work.

  Then the houses end abruptly, and we round a bend to be greeted by a large sign saying POLICE: NO STOPPING! It takes me a moment to realize just how far off course we are — we have blundered upon the president’s new palace. Ahead are several policemen toting AK-47s. They don’t look happy at our arrival.

  Driving in a prohibited area can be extremely hazardous in this country. The main road in front of the State House is blocked to traffic from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., and forgetful people like us have been shot dead at the roadblocks there — including the son of a former deputy governor of the Bank of England.

  “Look old,” I tell my parents, “and unthreatening.” I keep driving steadily, as the sign commands. To turn around now is to increase the risk of being shot, so we continue slowly past Mugabe’s new mansion. It is in the final stages of construction, protected from inquisitive gazes like ours by a high wall of sheet metal. But there are gaps through which we can see flashes of a tall pagoda-style roof of azure blue tiles. Newspaper reports say the Serbian-designed mansion is the largest private dwelling in Africa, three stories on a four-acre footprint, within a fifty-acre garden; they tell of twenty-four bedrooms, a bunker, and all the latest communications links so that the government can be run from here.

  We proceed under the baleful stare of the policemen. One is noting down our license number on a clipboard. Soldiers perch on the wall farther along. Two of them have rocket-propelled grenade launchers on their shoulders. For the moment, the explosive pods on the end of the barrels are turned skyward. When we round the corner, and they disappear from view, we all exhale.

  “Well, that wasn’t such a hot idea,” says my father unneces-sarily.

  Mum begins to deny responsibility for the navigational error, but she stutters to a halt as we see what lies ahead — the road comes to a dead end. We are obliged to turn and retrace our route, running the gauntlet of the gunmen again.

  As we round the bend in front of the presidential palace, we see that the soldiers have been reinforced by a dozen more. These new ones carry machine guns, and the brass bullets in their bandoliers shimmer with menace as they catch the sun. At least ten weapons are now pointed directly at us.

  “Oh, God!” mutters Mum. “We’re all going to be shot. I told you we should have gotten a new atlas, Dad.”

  No one is actively signaling for me to stop, so I keep going, very slowly now, staring purposefully ahead. Mum folds her hands in the floral print of her lap, draws her chin down onto her chest, closes her eyes, and waits for the shot. In my rearview mirror, I see Dad’s monumental head. He is adopting a different tactic, smiling and waving gaily at the scowling soldiers.

  “Don’t, Dad!” I hiss without turning. “Don’t give that open-palm wave. It’s the opposition sign, remember?”

  He can’t hear me. But the shot never comes, and we drive slowly away in silence, leaving the palace behind as the road climbs steeply out of the valley in a series of sharp bends. Just as we start to relax, a mercury Mercedes Kompressor, a maBenzi with smoked windows, appears behind us, its orange sidelights flashing urgently.

  “Oh, God, it’s the CIO,” says Mum, looking around in alarm.

  Dad reads the plate: “Echo 834,” he says, reverting to wartime radio speak. �
�That’s brand new, right out of the box.”

  I slow down, and the Merc steams past, overtaking us on the crest of a blind corner. It disappears from sight, and finally we really do exhale. And only then do I allow myself to feel angry — that a pleasant outing can turn into this, leaving my parents shaken and scared. That we are now a people cowed and fearful, vulnerable, disposable.

  WE ARE BACK in the grove of new McMansions. The huge houses are cathedrals of kitsch, as badly finished as a Husseini palace. At the bottom of their driveways stand sentry boxes, and in them loll the armed policemen, assigned to guard senior government members, and private security guards, ensuring the safety of the new kleptocratic elite, the robber barons of the bush.

  At the bottom of the valley we arrive at the new Borrowdale Brook Shopping Plaza. Here stands Spar Supermarket, just opened, reputed to be the grandest in the country — a temple of plenty in a land of paucity. It’s owned by James Mushore, another black classmate from St. George’s, who is now a successful local investment banker. My idea is to stock up here with nonperishable standbys so my parents will have enough food to last until I return. So I have come armed with two banded blocks of pink, freshly minted Z$10,000 bearer-bond notes, our new pseudocash, which the government is printing because it has run out of real money. (The bearer bonds have expiration dates on them that the governor of the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank has told us to ignore.) Each banded block totals a million bucks, but that’s now only worth about US$160 on the “parallel market.”

  I walk along sweeping armfuls of tins into the cart, beans and corned beef and tuna, and my mother comes along behind me examining the prices and putting most of them back. She is fierce about rejecting anything imported; buying imported luxuries at a time like this she considers to be appallingly extravagant and vulgar. In the end, I manage to keep about a tenth of what I select, which is still vastly more than they have bought on a single shopping trip for years. My mother marvels at the four shopping bags it fills.

  Dusty workers from the surrounding construction sites wander the marble white naves with us, wide-eyed at the largesse, almost all of it beyond their reach even though they are among the lucky few to have jobs. None has a cart or even a basket. They are looking for the very tiniest bottles of cooking oil, but Spar doesn’t stock them. Spar is not here for this kind of customer. They will not mix easily with the diplomats, the kleptocrats, the fat cats, none of whom wants to be reminded of the aching poverty around them as they buy gourmet dog food and balsamic vinegar and artichoke hearts, genuine Cuban cigars and champagne.

  “Look over here,” exclaims my father, and we congregate around a tank with live lobsters in it. “Fancy that!”

  Next to us, a construction worker is also ogling the crustaceans, looking at their bound claws, and the way their whiskers twitch as they try to climb the glass walls of their aquatic prison.

  “Excuse me,” he says to me, “but what are these ones?”

  “It’s called a lobster.”

  “Lob-i-ster,” he repeats, the new word thick upon his tongue. “And where it is from, this lobister?”

  “It comes from far away, from the ocean.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “You eat it,” I explain.

  He shakes his head in amazement, that such an animal as this exists, that it has been carried hundreds of miles from the ocean, but mostly, I suspect, that some shopper will spend Z$300,000 — five times his monthly wage — to buy it.

  We have decided on a picnic lunch, so we head for the deli counter, where I solicit orders from my parents while using my body to shield the prices from their sight. Our orders are tonged into little plastic containers, themselves a source of remark to my parents, and then we head up Hogerty Hill. At the top, we turn into a side road and pull over under a jacaranda tree, with a view out over the Domboshawa Hills. We open our doors, and my parents dig into their tubs with gusto. Roast veggies and a chicken leg for Mum; sausage rolls and a warm Zambezi lager for Dad. Mum is confused by the pull tab on her Diet Coke, so I open it for her. She has never drunk a soda out of a can before.

  Across the valley is a sweeping vista of the commercial farms, all of which are now in the hands of cabinet ministers, judges, generals, and bishops. Directly below is a lush new golf course and luxury gated housing development, mansions sprouting around it — a conclave of looters. My father lets out a low whistle and shakes his head.

  On the way home, we pass right by Christchurch, the site of Jain’s new grave. I pull in.

  “I won’t be a minute,” I tell my parents, and run out just to say good-bye.

  Rodgers, the gardener, whom I have tipped to take special care of the grave, sees me and rushes over to apologize that he hasn’t yet compressed the soil around the edges.

  “I will do it now, sir,” he says, “this very afternoon,” and he jogs over to the tool shed and returns with a hoe.

  As we drive back, Dad sinks down into his seat and closes his eyes. Despite the violent swerving as I avoid sharply cratered potholes, he dozes. At home, I help him to his bed, and he falls asleep immediately. I gently slide his glasses off and put them on his bedside table.

  THE NEXT MORNING, my father summons me into his room. Mum is there, doing her daily ritual of rebandaging his feet.

  “Once upon a time, Pete,” he begins, “twenty, thirty, forty years ago, I considered that we were among the top ten percent or so of this country, socially, economically. After yesterday, I realize we are nowhere near that now. I mean there are people there with houses worth fifty times what ours is, with three cars each worth a hundred times what ours is.”

  He winces as Mum pulls off the dressing.

  “Do you think there is any room left for an honest white in this country, Pete?”

  “I don’t,” volunteers Mum.

  “I consider that we are now like Greek slaves in Rome,” says Dad. “Some of the culture may come through us, but all the power lies with the Roman soldiers.”

  “I often feel that I’m like a Greek slave,” says Mum. “It gives me a thrill, actually. At least we have some use culturally, even though we’ve been reduced to a subclass. Some people still want to know us.”

  I worry that yesterday’s outing hasn’t been such a good idea after all. It’s as though, confronted with the new wages of corruption, Dad realizes just how irreversible it is now, that the country he thought he knew, in which he has lived for more than fifty years, has suddenly morphed into this quite separate place, one that he no longer recognizes, one that no longer has a place for him.

  TONIGHT, my last night, I finally manage to get my parents out to dinner. I have been trying to do this for weeks now, until Mum takes me to one side and reminds me that since Dad’s hijacking he won’t go out after dark. They lock themselves down in Fort Godwin at sunset. Tonight I have brokered an exception, a farewell dinner at Amanzi, probably the city’s best restaurant.

  I’ve phoned ahead for permission to park up at the kitchen delivery bay, as it’s too far for them to walk from the parking lot. At 5:59 p.m. we hobble in — the first customers of the evening. We are seated on the veranda facing the sloping lawns and ponds amid a grove of musasa trees, whose antlerlike branches, covered in lichen and dripping with ropes of vine, are spotlit from below. The waiter lights the large candelabra on our table. My parents struggle to read the menu by candlelight, so I conduct a recitation. Mum orders lamb chops, and Dad the Lebanese meze platter. Two scotch and sodas each, followed by a carafe of Western Cape table wine (Mum has banned locally produced plonk as “blood wine” since some of the Zimbabwean vineyards have been jambanja’d), and they are getting quite giggly and loud.

  “Are we embarrassing you?” Mum asks hopefully.

  I have become the parent, they the teenagers.

  On one side of us is a table of African Americans — from Nashville, by the clues in their conversation. Smartly dressed in gorgeous West African national costume, the women tchink with Yoruba bracele
ts. They are high-spirited and excited to be in Africa and in this beautiful location. I find myself resenting their enjoyment and the flattering reports of this country that they may well carry home. I suppose as viewed from the Sheraton and from Amanzi, and from a chauffeured limousine flush with fuel, this place could still seem like something. I suppose if you hadn’t been here before, you might not notice that the economy has halved in size in five years, or that 70 percent of the black middle class has fled.

  Halfway through our meal, guests arrive at the table on our other side: the leader of the opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, no less, and his wife, Susan. They are hosted by an Irish businessman.

  Mum says in a stage whisper, “Georgina helped write Susan’s speeches, you know.”

  My father, seated with his back to them, keeps craning around to see if it’s really Morgan. The movement induces one of his terrible coughing fits, but he refuses to drink a proffered glass of water to quell it.

  They order fried ice cream with toffee sauce, which is followed by Irish coffee, on the house.

  “Should Dad really be doing this?” I ask Mum, fearing that he may go into some sort of diabetic shock.

  “Hell, you only live once,” she says.

  I take a contemplative sip of my Irish coffee and, finding it too sweet, push it away. Dad seizes it and tosses it down his throat. He starts making affectionate snorts across the table to Mum, and then waggles his finger in a box elephant to her. She returns the gesture, trumpeting back.

  There is stuff I’ve been planning to say tonight, son-to-parent stuff that I have rehearsed in my head. But it doesn’t feel right to do it now. I don’t want to puncture the moment. They are young again, flirting with each other, exchanging their own secret elephant calls, oblivious of the great and good around them. For this moment my father is not in the final stages of diabetes; his feet, below the crisp linen tablecloth, are not black and gangrenous; his heart is not weak and irregular; his lungs are not slopping with fluid. They are just a couple in love, and I, I am a spectator, and that is how it should remain.