When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  AS WE GET into the car Dad sobers up enough to become fearful of being carjacked.

  “Make sure we’re not followed, Pete,” he warns me. “Don’t go straight home, go around the block first to see if anyone’s tailing us.”

  The streetlights are all out, and it is a tar-dark, moonless night. We drive in silence, and I loop around once, but there are no other cars on the road, not a single one. No one has fuel. Finally, we turn into my parents’ road, St. Aubins Walk.

  “Nearly there,” I say, and I start to pat my pockets for the house keys. But our proximity to home does not relax Dad at all; it is here he was attacked the last time. Here, at his own gate, he now feels most vulnerable.

  As we mount the final speed bump, our headlights point skyward for a second, and when the beams descend they illuminate dark moving forms. People are rising from the grass shoulder, many of them, armed with clubs and sticks, their heads shrouded in balaclavas.

  “Oh, God!” says Mum. “We’re being hijacked again — and there are so many of them.”

  I can’t believe this is happening, that I have bullied my parents into coming out at night, brushing aside their fears, just so I can feel like a good son, and now we are going to be robbed. I’m scared and angry, both at the same time.

  “Put your foot down,” urges Dad, even though St. Aubins Walk is a cul-de-sac.

  I rev up the engine, wondering if there’s enough room, enough time to do a three-point turn. Then I notice that some of the hijackers are wearing Day-Glo reflective flashes on their backs — not the usual livery of the hijacker — and with a flood of relief I realize this is the local neighborhood watch forming for a night patrol. There must be about thirty of them, black men and women, led by a special officer like Ephraim.

  I roll down my window. “Manheru,” I say in Shona, my voice still a little shaky. “Tatenda, fambai zvakanaka.” “Good evening. Thank you, and go well.”

  They all shout greetings back, and the column of women at the back begin an impromptu dance and a rhythmic chanting and form into a sort of honor guard for us as I get out to unlock the security gate.

  I feel like weeping. Weeping at the way Africa does this to you. Just as you’re about to dismiss it and walk away, it delivers something so unexpected, so tender. One minute you’re scared shitless, the next you’re choked with affection. My parents are giddy with relief.

  “I hope we didn’t embarrass you too much tonight,” says Mum as I hoist her out of the car. Dad walks very gingerly from chair back to chair back to the front door. I navigate them inside, switch off the lights, lock the doors, and bolt the rape gate behind us. And as I shut my bedroom door, I can hear my mother at my father’s bedside. She is singing a gentle lullaby to him.

  ON MY LAST MORNING, we sit out on the jasmine patio drinking our tea, overlooked by the hawkers. I blather on about last-minute administrative things, and Dad closes his eyes in apparent concentration, a quirk I have become used to over the years. Then he lowers his forehead onto the white plastic garden table and falls profoundly asleep. It is past his naptime, and his extra medications have taken their toll.

  I creep away to say good-bye to the staff. Isaac is already standing patiently at the front gate, ready to let me out. Cheesely, in her school pinafore, is at his side, holding his hand, smiling a dazzling smile. She is about to be wrenched from her good city school and tossed into a dilapidated rural one, without pens or paper or even desks. And soon she will probably stop going to school altogether, and at fourteen she will start having babies and spend her days stooped over in the fields, hoeing.

  Isaac and I both know this is the last time we will see each other.

  “Good luck farming,” I say. “I hope the rains are good.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I hope so too.”

  I walk back and call Gomo, taking him away from the kitchen, away from his washing and his ironing, away from my parents’ ears, into the courtyard. I slip him a block of bright pink Z$10,000 bearer-bond notes, and he flicks a supersonic glance at them, so quick I think I may have imagined it.

  “Please look after my parents well.”

  He cocks his head slightly to one side, a vigilant listener. And to confirm comprehension, he echoes the last part of my sentence in a beautifully soft baritone, with a lilting Shona accent.

  “Parents well.”

  “They will need your help more and more as they get older.”

  Gomo nods emphatically. “Get older.”

  “And if there’s any problem you must call me in America.”

  He nods again. “Call you in America.”

  “The number is by the phone in the hall.”

  “By the phone in the hall.”

  “If you’re worried about anything, just call me. Anything at all.”

  “Anything at all.”

  We shake hands, his still damp with sudsy washing water. I try to complete it the double African way, but he breaks off after one Western-style shake. We are on opposite trajectories of politeness, Gomo and I.

  Mum and Dad have now arranged themselves in the hall on the two telephone chairs, waiting for me. For our farewell, Mum has put on her “special dress,” a green-striped mail-order dress sent to her by her sister, Honor, in the mideighties and only broken out for special occasions. Dad has donned a crisp blue short-sleeved shirt and gray trousers with cuffs over his GOIF slippers.

  “Are those chinos?” asks Mum, pronouncing the word very deliberately, a foreign land mine to her native tongue.

  “Sort of,” I say, then realizing that she wants them to be. “Yes, yes, they are chinos.”

  “See, Dad, I told you. You’re wearing chinos. They’re very fashionable, you know.”

  My father comes out only as far as the front step. I hug him close, and in my arms he seems suddenly insubstantial. I can feel the crenulated notches of his vertebrae, the fragile runnel of his shoulder blade and the curl of individual ribs — a birdcage in which his labored heart beats with the irregular fluttering of captive wings.

  “You stay alive, Dad, OK?”

  He nods, and I see his pale blue eyes shimmering behind their tortoiseshell frames.

  “I’m coming back soon with the boys, and they want to meet their grandfather, so you just stick around, you hear?”

  “OK,” he smiles. “I will.”

  My mother gives me a less tentative hug than usual, though she manages to hold back her own tears. We all do in the end. We have to.

  Twenty

  January 2004

  DAD’S FALLEN OUT of bed twice,” says Mum when I finally get through to them on the phone one morning in late January, worried because I haven’t heard from them for a week.

  “Why does he keep falling?” I ask.

  “It’s because he spends a lot of time sitting on his bed to ease the pain in his feet, and he must have dozed off and fallen. It may also be the effect of new nerve-relaxing drugs. He’s broken two pairs of glasses, and grazed his forehead. It looks as though he’s been fighting,” she says. Dad snorts on the extension.

  “He also has chronic diarrhea,” says Mum.

  “I was just about to e-mail you,” Dad says, “but it would have been a one-word e-mail: shits.”

  Mum doesn’t want to daunt Gomo from starting full-time for them, so she has been hand-washing all the soiled laundry herself and can barely keep up. Dad sounds despondent. When Mum gets off the line “to feed the dogs” and leaves the two of us alone, he can think of little to say. “So, the boys have been enjoying the snow,” he finally manages, echoing my earlier chirpy report.

  I chat on about tobogganing with the kids in Central Park and the Hudson being thick with ice floes. And when I run out of news, he says, “OK, well, good-bye, then.” The phone clicks off, and all I can hear is the buzzing of distance. And instead of hanging up, I leave it at my ear, listening to the audio signature of the long line to Africa, something I have listened to much of my adult life. I imagine the lines looping from pole
to pole across Harare, with paradise flycatchers and blackeyed bulbuls and masked weavers perched on it as it strings through the jacaranda and musasa trees until it swoops down past the Hindhead hawkers and over our garden, over the aloes and papyrus reeds, the monkey puzzle and Jain’s kapok tree and onto the Dutch gables of the house, where my mother is up to her elbows in crappy sheets, and Dad is toppling off his bed, and Gomo is padding quietly about the kitchen.

  THE NEXT DAY, I return to our apartment on Riverside Drive, red faced, wet nosed, and steam breathed from playing in the snow with the kids, to find the single red eye of the answering machine blinking.

  It is a message from my mother: “Peter, can you call home.”

  She tells me that Dad has been admitted to the hospital with abdominal pain, probably gallstones. It is nothing too serious, nothing to worry about, she says. But there is a quality to her voice, a sort of damped-down vibrato, that makes me suspicious, so as soon as I hang up I call the Watsons.

  “We’ve been put on our oath to tell you it’s just gallstones,” Sydney confesses immediately. He was so ill he couldn’t go by car to the hospital. Dad, normally allergic to any “fussing,” meekly accepted that Mum call a private ambulance. “At the hospital,” says Sydney, “he was seen by the Yugoslavian, Mr. Dakovic. He operated on my brother’s stomach,” she offers brightly. “With good results.”

  One more in the roster of world conflicts reflected in my father’s health care. Over the years, they have all washed up in Zimbabwe: Sudanese, Ugandans, Congolese, Cubans, Ethiopians, and now a Yugoslav. And it seems entirely fitting, as Dad too is on the run from conflict; they are all refugees there together.

  I phone Georgina in London, and an hour later she delivers Dakovic’s phone numbers: home, office, clinic, beeper. I start with his home number, and get through after multiple attempts. It is now after 9:00 p.m. in central Africa, and Dakovic sounds a little sleepy. “I’m sorry to bother you at home, I hope I didn’t wake you,” I say, and he laughs the bitter little laugh of an on-call doctor. “How is he really?” I ask, in what I hope is a cut-the-bullshit way.

  “He’s a very, very sick man,” says Dakovic in a marked Balkan accent. “But I would never operate on him. He is too sick. He would not survive anesthesia.” There is a pause on the crackling line, and he adds in a deliberately italicized voice, “Perhaps sicker than you realize . . .”

  What I want to ask without bluntly blurting it out, as Dakovic well understands, is whether my father is about to die. But we continue to dance around it.

  “He is definitely very ill,” he says. “Look, I am surgeon, but he has symptoms from heart, blood pressure is low, pulse is fast, he is lacking in oxygen.” He pauses to marshal his English. “I see your mother is used to situation where he recovers, but I must admit that this time he is seriously ill.” The seriously is elongated to commandeer the whole sentence. “She asked me, ‘When he will be going home?’ and I told her, I said, ‘Well, let’s hope he is going home . . . ’?” There is another pause while I try to take stock. “If you are in doubt to come, you make reservation on flight now,” he says finally.

  I hang up and call my mother, and when I eventually reach her, she comes clean immediately, clearly relieved to do so. “He’s on a morphine drip,” she says. “I’ve put a ‘do not resuscitate’ notice on him. But he’s fully compos mentis,” she adds. “Before he left for the hospital he was still joking as Fiona Watson rummaged his shelves for spare pajamas. ‘Look, Mum!’ he said. ‘There’s a girl in my closet!’?”

  After I hang up, I book my flight to Harare. I pack late into the night, and at the top of my suitcase I place my folded black Nehru suit.

  I awake at dawn and check my e-mail. There is one from Mum headed “future plans.” It says simply, “please phone home ASAP.” The time of transmission is Sunday, February 8, just before 4:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. I begin dialing immediately but keep getting a hissing recording that tells me that “All international circuits to the country you are calling are busy — please try your call later.” On my twelfth attempt, I get through. Mum picks up promptly. She is sitting by the phone waiting for me to wake and make this call.

  “How’s Dad?”

  “Peter, he’s gone,” she says in a hushed voice.

  This is a conversation I have been anticipating and yet it still seems so unexpected.

  “Very peacefully,” she continues. “We were there, the Watsons and me. He went just before 11:00 a.m., at the end of visiting hour. I had been talking to him, his eyes were open. I was holding his hand and smoothing his forehead the whole time. He was breathing quietly, then he just exhaled and didn’t breathe in again.”

  She sounds exhausted — and relieved.

  “He seemed to be with us right until the end. It felt completely natural. As he died, the Salvation Army brass band was playing ‘Abide with Me’ beneath his window.”

  My father has died a week short of his eightieth birthday. I sit at my desk, stunned. My younger son, Hugo, arrives at my side and starts humming a manic version of the theme song to “Batman,” then he switches midphrase to an equally demented rendition of “Frère Jacques.” Sometime in the middle of our winter night, as the wind howled down the Hudson and rattled our windows, he had burrowed into our bed and demanded, “Milk? Milk in a bottle, please!” And in spite of all the importuning of the child-rearing manuals, I had gotten up to get him a bottle, and as I did so I had noticed the red digital readout on the clock radio showing a few minutes to four. Exactly then, a continent away, my father lay dying.

  Hugo wanders off, and I sit numbly at my desk, trying to assemble the resolution to phone Georgina and break the news. She is at her daughter’s fourth birthday party, and Mum has begged me not to spoil it for her. The phone rings, and I answer to hear the sound of little girls laughing and squealing. Georgina has sensed that something more serious is wrong with Dad than Mum has told her. I start to dissemble, as instructed, but she interrupts. “Don’t you lie to me too!” she shouts, trying to make herself heard above the party. “For God’s sake, just tell me the truth.”

  And so I do.

  “I’m sorry I tried to lie,” I say, after I’ve told her that Dad is dead. “Mum didn’t want the news to ruin Xanthe’s party.”

  “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to,” sings Georgina tremulously. She swallows back her tears and tries to compose herself. “I’ll tell Xanthe later. I’d better get back to musical chairs.”

  I put the phone down, and in front of me, the computer screen kicks into screen-saver mode, parading a random medley of photos from my album. They are mostly shots of the kids, but then the screen fills with a black-and-white image of my parents as a young couple at a party. Mum with a broad grin and a dark dress, flared sharply out from her wasp-thin waist; Dad in black dinner jacket with satin lapels. He looks dashing, vital. Alive.

  Twenty-one

  February 2004

  ON MY FIRST MORNING back in Africa after my father died, I sit with Mum in the sunroom. “He was still a man, you know, not an invalid, when he died,” she says. “At the end he asked me, ‘Why am I staying alive? What good am I doing?’ And I said to him, ‘You stop me from being alone.’?”

  And she remembers the day of the big fight in the garden, the fight between Isaac and the man with the clubfoot, when Dad hobbled painfully out onto the plastic chair at the front door and sat there with his revolver in his lap, still trying to protect her though he could barely walk himself. Still a man, not an invalid. A man.

  MUM TELLS ME that while I was in the air on the way home, she was visited by a delegation of her nurses from the hospital. They bring chema with them, an envelope stuffed with cash for funeral expenses, as is the African custom. And my mother accepts it, as she should. They ask if they might pray, and my mother nods. And they get down on their knees on our tatty brown carpet and they pray for practical things: for a safe flight for me and for my mother to be strong. And then they decide to sin
g, and soon our spartan house is filled with the thrilling swell of four-part harmony as they sing Psalm 46 in Shona, the one that goes, “We will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.”

  And my mother sits, her knees together, on the edge of our old sofa, the one with the Java print slipcover, tears finally flowing freely down her face. It is all right to weep, for she is among friends.

  ON THAT FIRST EVENING in Africa after my father died, it rains. Afterward, my mother and I sit on the veranda listening to the clear, clean call of the Heuglin’s robin — always the first in the morning and last at night to sing. The garden is a riot of greens and reds.

  “The two colors that your father could not distinguish,” she remembers wistfully. “He always complained that there was no color in this garden.” I think of his Polish gunners firing at a passing submarine because Kazio Goldfarb couldn’t see the red warning flag against the green Scottish hillside. I look around at the vividness of it all, this lush oasis, one that he saw drained of its brightness and its contrast. Maybe this color blindness reflected something — an inner numbing, the result of losing his family to the Holocaust, and of his boyhood exile, losses that prevented him from enjoying things to the full, a filter of fear that strained out the full luster of his life.

  The Heuglin’s robin pauses to catch its breath, and in its absence the arrow-chested babblers take up their chorus of raucous derision, a vulgar taunting call.

  “When Dad was a boy at St. Leonard’s before the war, his mother sent him some Polish delicacies, a care package in a box, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string,” says Mum. “He saved a piece of that string and carried it around in his pocket for years. He said it was the last contact he had with his mother before she was killed by the Nazis. The last thing that she had actually touched. When he lost the string not very long ago, he was heartbroken.”