When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  We are early at Christchurch. My mother is calm now, steeled at the prospect of the frantic bereavement socializing ahead; she has switched into her formidable mode, a combination of ER doctor and chaplain’s daughter.

  The Watsons arrive when we do, and Manuel Bagorro, the best man at Georgina’s wedding, is already there, testing the dusty little upright piano. “Flattering acoustics,” he says approvingly.

  Halfway down the nave, the baptismal font is full of pink rosebuds. They have been sent by my nine-year-old daughter, Holly, in London. A note attached to them reads: “Grandpa, I’m so sorry I didn’t get to spend more time with you.”

  There is no coffin. It remains at the morgue waiting to be cremated, as my father requested.

  The mourners file in and Manuel plays Chopin’s nocturnes, some of Dad’s favorite pieces of music, that very occasionally he would fire up the old Tempest valve stereo to hear.

  Mudiwa roves around, videoing the service for my missing sister. The church, plain and wide, is full of mourners of all races. I sit in the front pew with Mum, who holds her hands together on her lap and wears a fixed half-smile.

  Soon I will have to speak, and yet great sobs swell up inside me, pure and angry, grief not just at the loss of my father, but for the loss of it all, the loss of hope. Grief, at our solitude, our transience. Grief too, at my father’s alienness, his otherness, his isolation. And looking around the church, I see how we’ve all been battered by our history, by eight years of war followed by twenty-three years in thrall to a violent and vengeful ruler. Now that Dad is dead, his near-twin, Mugabe, can die too; I am free to wish this without hexing my father.

  Tears roll down my face and splash onto my black Nehru suit, and I don’t bother to wipe them away. They are welcome. I am crying at last, as I have needed to for so long now, even if it is happening in public. Just as I get a grip, Manuel plays the melancholic opening chords of Fanny Alexander’s hymn “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and it overwhelms my resolve. My mother hands me a tissue, and pats me on the leg, comforting me as I should be comforting her. Robin Watson steps up to the pulpit looking every bit the Anglo-Indian RAF wallah he once was.

  And then it is my turn. I am getting used to making tributes to my family now, having done one so recently for Jain. I read a short, moving eulogy sent by Georgina, who, with Xanthe and Holly, is attending a parallel memorial organized by Mum’s cousin, Anastasia, at the Russian Orthodox church in Oxford. Then it is time for me to say something.

  I find myself describing how it has rained every day since my father’s death, sometimes twice in a day, great downpours that have left the earth sodden and the air scrubbed and clear and fresh. And how my father’s rain gauge — a bottle green glass cone in a special iron stand on our lawn — has filled right up to its wide mouth, but I can’t bear to empty it, measuring his absence in inches of precious rain rather than in hours and days.

  And I try to recall him. I recall that he was so straight and honest in his dealings, so allergic to bribery, that it chafed me, that he became poor while all around him lesser men prospered. To recall that even when I began reporting on things that brought them into danger, he never counseled caution, though it was certainly in his nature. To recall that, however mad and sad this place has become, he could never quite bear to leave it. And now he would never have to.

  I look up at the congregation for the first time, and I feel my composure slipping. I need to finish up and sit down.

  “This morning I phoned home and my five-year-old son came on the line.

  “?‘Are you having fun in Africa, Dad?’ he asked.

  “?‘Well, I’m a bit sad, actually,’ I said, ‘because my dad is dead.’

  “And he shot back: ‘Can’t you get a new one?’

  “?‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

  “Today would have been my father’s eightieth birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad. Wherever you are.”

  AT THE END of the service Manuel plays “Ishe Komberera” variations, a haunting melody he has written himself based on the hymn “God Bless Africa,” and we file out into the church hall. The circle of widows, coming together in an age-old ritual to welcome a new member, have all baked, despite the chronic shortage of ingredients, and the trestle tables in the church hall groan under the cakes and sausage rolls and sandwiches.

  The large framed fiftieth-wedding anniversary photo of my mother and father surrounded by Dalmatians, touched up in pastels by Jeremy, like a Victorian portrait, stands on a table. Underneath it is a condolence book made by street children with paper from recycled elephant dung. Linnea has used some of her precious gasoline quota to drive out to Doon Estate on the Mutare Road to buy it, and she has sprinkled the tops of the pages with uplifting aphorisms, written in her meticulous teacher’s script, and glued little mementos to them too.

  A long line of people wishing to offer condolences coils in front of my mother and me.

  “You are now part of our extended family,” Pius Wakatama tells us.

  Maureen Mutasa, one of my father’s protégées, who is now in charge of the Standards Association, and has sons of her own at Cambridge, says, “He made me what I am, he was my mentor, always encouraging me . . .”

  Nurse Machire, my mother’s head nurse, approaches. The two of them have worked as a tight-knit team for more than a decade, imposing order on the chaos of a waiting room teeming with the sick. She is small and dainty and formidable. She takes me by the elbow and steers me to one side, away from my mother.

  “The day after your father died, I went to visit your mother, Peter,” she says earnestly. “And I found her all alone there, Peter. All alone. Not even a gardener there. Just by herself, Peter.” Then she bursts into tears of anger. “I don’t ever want to find your mother by herself again,” she says, and then she hugs me, and we discuss how we can get her son, a qualified mechanic, a visa to work in England.

  Looking at the long line, I realize that my mother is not alone, that my parents are loved and accepted, and I realize just how color-blind their society has become. Mugabe has managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive; he has created a real racial unity — not the bogus one portrayed in the beer commercials of the new South Africa, but something more substantial, a hard-won sense of comradeship, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule. I realize just how African my parents have become. That this is their home. That my father really has died at home. That finally, in this most unpromising of places, where he could never be regarded as truly indigenous, finally, he belonged.

  Twenty-two

  February 2004

  THE MORNING AFTER his funeral, as the rain pummels down outside, we finally start clearing up Dad’s things. It hasn’t seemed right to do it until now.

  I unlock the door to his room. Mum has left it just as it was when he went into the hospital. The bedclothes are still rumpled in his body shape, and the scent of him still clings to them. She has returned his tortoiseshell glasses to his bedside table, as if he might come back and need them again. I sit on the end of his hard, narrow bed, covered with its mustard candlewick bedspread, and look around.

  His GOIF slippers are under his bedside table, next to his terry cloth “stompies.” A half-burned mosquito coil nestles on a old chipped china saucer that bears the coat of arms of the short-lived Central African Federation: a sable and a leopard holding a shield with the motto Magni Esse Mereamur, “Let Us Be Great,” topped by a fish eagle, wings outstretched. Next to them a W. G. Sebald book, The Emigrants, I had sent him. The bookmark is halfway through — he had stopped being able to read about three months before he died. Cheap cotton floral curtains sewn by my mother flutter above a thin brown mat. On the table are a long green plastic shoehorn, a candle, a little pewter cup with pills, and a rough pottery mug filled with water and covered by a fly mesh with a border of little collared beads — an old Christmas present from Mavis — to weigh it down, his Nicorette inhaler, tissues, matches. On the w
alls are four paintings of English country scenes. Hanging on the closet door is his favorite green safari suit shirt, with pleated pockets and epaulets and a threadbare collar. I remember his boast, no new clothes since he retired, three years ago. In the corner stands a massive red fire extinguisher, “The Invincible No. 3,” made in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne by George Angus and Co. in 1956. A huge steel piston head from a bulldozer serves as a doorstop. On top of the closet is an old saw and a heavy crowbar.

  “What are those for?” I ask Mum.

  “He put them there so we could saw and pry our way out of the burglar bars if the house was on fire,” she says. “I told him I’d never be strong enough, but he said, ‘You wait and see. If there’s a fire you’ll find the strength.’?”

  She looks at his rumpled bed. “You know, it was only last year, Dad told me, that he finally started dreaming in English.”

  I open the closet. On one shelf he has assembled a little hoard of things that are hard to find these days: toothpaste, soap, shampoo, candles, single-malt scotch, and a jar of Willards instant coffee, still sealed, but congealed with age. The sum of Z$5,170 in notes, carefully concealed — amounting to about US$1 at today’s exchange rates. Another shelf is entirely overrun by coins, thousands of them in bags, boxes, film canisters. Saved as parking change or tipping money but, by the end, utterly worthless and no longer even in general circulation. A box containing his cuff links, tiepins, armbands for shirtsleeves. Under his hanging safari suits, he has carefully stored his camera equipment in a converted brown schoolboy’s suitcase. He has cut the exact shapes of each lens and camera body out of foam rubber, and on the outside he has attached homemade straps for his tripod.

  In the bottom of the cupboard sits Dad’s gap bag, a permanently packed bag in case they had to leave at very short notice. Hidden under his pullovers in the very top drawer, where you might expect to find contraband or valuables, is a book in Polish. Georgina bought it for him when she learned he was from Poland. He has hidden it out of habit.

  And at the back of another shelf, I find an Air Zimbabwe wash bag, full to bulging. I unzip it, and medals spill out onto the red floor. There are three wars’ worth of them. My mother’s World War II medals; her father’s World War I medals; and my father’s Zimbabwean Police Reserve medals, his radio unit badges (a pair of tom-toms — the talking drums). And there too I find his old military insignia from World War II, his Polish First Armored Division cap badge and shoulder flashes. But there are no World War II medals for him. Only later, when I write to the British Ministry of Defense, do I receive a package from their Polish Inquiries section out at RAF Northolt in West London. It contains his war record and a box of medals, four of them, nestling in baize-lined boxes (the 1939–45 Star, Defense medal, and France and Germany Star, and War Medal 1939–45, with more to follow from the Polish army). They have been sitting there on a shelf at the Polish section of the Ministry of Defense — all in the name of Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb — unclaimed for fifty years.

  MUM ASKS ME to take the remains of his medications, all his unused drugs, to the Medicine Chest, the local pharmacy.

  “They’re so hard to find, and they may help someone else,” she says.

  As usual, as soon as I get out of the car, I am assailed by hawkers. They’re selling mangos, flowers, apples, bananas, tomatoes, onions, but I fend them off politely in Shona.

  On my return from the pharmacy, I am nearly at my car when I hear a loud crash and see one of the flower hawkers who lives under our hedge falling hard against a brushed aluminum Pajero. He looks at me, startled, as he slides down the side of the SUV. No one else appears to have seen him. I stride over to find him lying on a bed of his own roses. His white shirt is speckled with red dots where the rose thorns have pierced his flesh. His eyes are rolling into the back of their sockets, his mouth is flecked with foam, he is choking on his tongue. I kneel down and hold his head up. He is having an epileptic fit. I know what I have to do. I have to reach into his mouth and pull his tongue out. But his perfect teeth, white and sharp, glint brilliantly in the sunlight, and I am afraid that he will inadvertently bite me. And I know that nearly 40 percent of Zimbabweans have AIDS.

  “Help!” I call, rather feebly, but no one comes. We are hidden between parked Pajeros. He utters another oxygen-starved groan, and I know he has run out of time. So I reach in to pull out his warm wet tongue. And he doesn’t bite me. His shivers grow less, and his eyes return to their normal position, and his seizures slowly subside. I sit with this hawker’s head in my lap until his eyes focus again, and he looks up at me, confused. And then suddenly his friends and colleagues appear and help him up to the sidewalk.

  I am left amid the pile of crushed long-stemmed roses, white ones, peach ones, red ones, custard ones. I find a pair of white roses that are less damaged than the others and peel away the bruised outer petals until the buds look almost passable. I walk slowly back to the car and sit inside in the baking heat for a minute to calm myself. And then I drive home and present the roses to my mother.

  “They may be blood roses, remember?” she chides. “You shouldn’t have bought them.”

  “I didn’t buy them,” I say.

  THAT NIGHT, in the face of another gathering storm, the power cuts out again, and so does the water. We light candles, and they give the house an eerie, Gothic feel, while outside the thunder rumbles closer, and the lightning flickers over the eastern townships. Around us are the wilting condolence bouquets, the trumpet-barreled blunderbuss padlocked to its wall mounting, and the luminous white of the steed under my befrocked great-great-great-uncle. Jain’s batik lamp shades, browns, yellows, and oranges, flowers and geometric patterns, look alive in the lambent light.

  The power cut reduces Mum to tears again. “Dad used to be so prepared,” she says, looking around at the strategically placed candles and flashlights and matchboxes, and at the gas light and battery-powered light strip above his armchair.

  Then, as she hears the generators growling to life in nearby houses, she becomes infuriated. “Whenever the power cuts out now, those bloody generators kick in,” she says bitterly. “It’s another world. Bloody fat cats.”

  Now that the funeral is over, I feel able to reopen the overdue discussion about her future. I am gently but insistently trying to persuade her that it may be time for her to leave. That the country is in free fall, getting poorer and more dangerous. That famine beckons, and with it, real anarchy. That as she gets older she will become more isolated. And when she stops driving she will be stranded. That she will be more vulnerable now that Dad is gone. She listens attentively to the apocalyptic future I am sketching for her.

  “Are you finished now?” she asks.

  I nod, and she limps over to the bookshelf and shines her flashlight along the rows of spines until she finds the one she wants. She runs her finger down the index and flicks to her desired page. And she reads silently for a moment, her glasses perched on the end of her nose. Then she hands me the book and the flashlight. It is a volume of poems by Rudyard Kipling.

  “The first two and the last stanza,” she says. “Obviously for my purposes Rome is Britain, and Britain is Africa.”

  The book is open at a poem entitled “The Roman Centurion’s Song (Roman Occupation of Britain, A.D. 300).” By flashlight I begin to read as instructed.

  LEGATE, I had the news last night — my cohort ordered home

  By ships to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome.

  I’ve marched the companies aboard, the arms are stowed below;

  Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go!

  I’ve served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall.

  I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.

  Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near

  That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here. . . .

  Legate, I come to you in tears — My cohort ordered home!

  I’ve served in Britai
n forty years. What should I do in Rome?

  Here is my heart, my soul, my mind — the only life I know,

  I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!

  “Now do you understand?” she asks when I look up.

  WE VISIT Margaret at B. S. Leon in the morning. The staff there told us she wasn’t well enough to come to the funeral, that she is scared of strangers now. Nothing at all has changed in the three months since our last visit. It feels like someone has pressed a pause button. She sits at the same Formica table with her back to the same window, reading the same magazine, This England, issue of Spring ’93. It is open at very the same page, at the article entitled “The Spirit of England,” and Churchill is still warning his people that “Appeasement is feeding the crocodile, hoping it will eat you last,” and imploring that “Nothing can save England if she will not save herself.” In her hand is the green plastic flyswatter. The two other elderly ladies still sit silently hunched over on their bed ends, observing us as Mum and I sit on Margaret’s bed.

  I must tell Margaret that Dad is dead.

  “I have some bad news,” I begin.

  “Oh, yes?” she chirps.

  “George has died.”

  “Oh, dear,” she says enviously. “I wish it were me.”

  Again, like she did last time, she suddenly whips the swat at a fly, and it falls dead to the floor, and I congratulate her.

  “I killed twenty-one in a single day once,” she repeats, with a hoot of laughter. “Is it true?” she asks. “Is George really dead?”

  “Yes, he died last week,” I say. “We’ve already had the funeral.”

  “I never went to my Derek’s funeral either,” she says sadly. “I don’t even know where he’s buried. I miss him so, you know.”

  Somewhere at the end of the disinfectant-scented corridor a bell tinkles.

  “What’s that?” she wonders.

  “It’s the bell for tea, I think,” I say.