When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  “Have I had my cup of tea yet? No, I haven’t. I think that’s my teatime.”

  She focuses on us again. “Where did he die?”

  “The Avenues Clinic,” says Mum.

  “Lucky bugger,” she says. “I wish it were me.”

  We chat on for a few minutes, then she suddenly tires. She turns her face up for a good-bye kiss, and I lower my lips to her steroid-grizzled cheek.

  “When are you coming back?” she asks, suddenly in tears.

  “Soon,” I lie.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Mum and I sit at our dining table with a lawyer. We are trying to do estate planning in a country with nearly a thousand percent inflation. He tries to explain the situation. Dad’s stocks and shares are worth little; most commercial activity here is on life support or winding down. His life insurance policies, several of them, after years of his struggling to pay the premiums, forgoing vacations and treats and even new clothes to keep them up, are almost worthless. In fact, says the lawyer, the policies will cost more in legal fees to wind up than they are actually worth. Mum might as well tear them up. Her doctor’s pension is not adjusted to inflation and is almost worthless. The house is her main asset, and that’s not worth much these days. Her only other asset is her elderly Mazda car — for as long as she can keep it from being stolen like the last two were.

  My plan, in as much as I have one, is to sell the house and buy her a garden apartment in a serviced, gated community elsewhere in Harare, possibly Dandara, which I would subsidize from abroad. I cannot bear to have her ending up like Margaret, alone with a flyswatter and a nine-year-old magazine, watching pop videos in the cabbage fumes. She still has many friends here, she insists, and she feels too old to start again somewhere else. I know her well enough not to argue. But she agrees that I can arrange for her to go on a short vacation to visit Georgina in London in a few months, if her “good” hip doesn’t fail first.

  THE WORSLEY-WORSWICKS invite us to supper the next day to help discuss Mum’s options. They are still stranded in town while the wovits occupy their farm. John’s wife, Paula, has recently qualified as a real estate agent, and she knows about various gated communities that might be suitable for Mum. But at the last minute, Mum feels too tired, so I go alone.

  The Worswicks have changed address again, this time to a short-term rental on the hill behind the British ambassador’s residence, which, despite the power cut, is blazing with privately generated security lights. John shows me around his garden, which has a series of ornamental ponds and a planted rain forest. But what he really sees are potential parking places. “If we can get the equipment off the farm,” he says, lighting up another cigarette, “we could park tractors here; we could get masses of equipment in the space behind the rain forest.”

  The ornamental ponds are stocked with tame koi, he says. And I remember Meryl, chief inspector of the ZNSPCA, telling me how she saved the koi in one farm pond by convincing the wovits that the fish were highly poisonous. John begins to tap the ground with the sole of his brogue, which, he assures me, will attract them. None comes, so he steps up to the pond and begins tapping his sole on the surface of the dark green water. Still nothing. “They’re usually quite forthcoming,” he frowns, now wetting his entire shoe in his determination to summon the promised friendly koi. “Actually,” he suddenly remembers, “I haven’t seen them for a few days. I suspect the gardener may have eaten them.”

  After supper, we repair for coffee to the living room, most of which John has converted into a fly-tying workshop with a trestle table along one wall. It is covered with thin spools of wire and tufts of various feathers and dozens of small instruments — just like Dad’s radio tools. It has a small vise clamped to one edge. Here, with his broad farmer’s fingers, John sits nimbly tying the most exquisitely delicate trout-fishing flies. His latest, which he proudly brings over, is the Glorious 12th, an intricate combination of red grouse feathers and klipspringer hair. While I examine the fly, Paula paces impatiently up and down the confines of their suburban kitchen, a caged feline, waiting for the coffee to brew.

  Over coffee, John confides JAG’s latest attempts to save their farms. Mugabe is preparing new legislation that will retrospectively legalize the farm seizures, without any financial compensation to the evicted farmers, thus voiding all the farmers’ present legal challenges.

  Now, in what John is careful to present as a backup tactic, he is thinking of suing the British Crown. “Yes,” he says, “the Queen. In her capacity as head of the British state, for handing on to us defective title to the land. We’ve asked a senior barrister in London to prepare us an opinion.”

  I DRIVE HOME up Enterprise Road to see if they have any fuel yet at the Chisipite service station, as my gauge is on red. The streetlights are dark because of the power cut. Ahead, I see the glowing tip of a pedestrian’s cigarette, and I slow up a little and move into the center of the road to avoid a huge pothole. Suddenly men with guns loom. It’s a police roadblock. I slam on my brakes. I should have anticipated it; tomorrow is another in a series of less and less effective opposition strikes, and the police always cordon off the city the day before a strike to stop the opposition from moving its supporters around.

  Two armed policemen are standing in the middle of the road, across which they have dragged a couple of logs. There are no warning signs, and the policemen themselves wear no reflective armbands or vests. The roadblock is all but invisible, save for the red glow of their cigarettes.

  A baby-faced sergeant leans into my window and exhales a beery plume of smoke into the car.

  “You should be stopping farther back,” he says crossly.

  “Your roadblock is very hard to see,” I smile.

  He ignores me. “License,” he says thickly.

  I explain that I don’t actually have it on me, but I’m happy to go and get it, happy for him to escort me if necessary. His interest is piqued, there is a potential for baksheesh here.

  “If you no have license then you have to wait over there until our shift is finished, and then you must go to the police station with me.” He pauses for effect. “You have broken the law,” he says magisterially. “You will have to pay a fine.”

  “According to the law,” I say genially, “I only have to produce my license at a police station within twenty-four hours of having been so requested.”

  He looks momentarily disconcerted and then reverts to his script. “Where is your license?” And we do another round. And this time he warns me that I will have to spend the entire night “in the prison cells.”

  “OK,” I say, giving up. “Where would you like me to wait?”

  He looks confused again. Our roadblock duet is discordant. I am supposed to be in a hurry, offer a bribe, and be allowed on my way. But no, I am a freak. A white man with time on his hands.

  Annoyed now, he motions me to park at the side of the road. I sit there for a few minutes in the inky dark under a tree. Then a bus wheezes up. According to its route window, it is coming in from the tribal area north of Mount Darwin, where Gomo and Richard are from. The policemen order everyone off the bus and instruct the conductors to hand down the mountain of goods on the roof rack. Down it all comes: wicker cages of chickens, bicycles, dozens of red-and-white-striped jute bags, a hobbled goat, furniture, firewood. The contraband the police are most interested in is cornmeal, the local staple. The government still insists on a monopoly of grain sales. To transport more than five kilograms of it constitutes the crime of black marketeering.

  The country is on the verge of a famine, and the United Nations has warned Mugabe that half of the country’s twelve million people are now in danger of starvation. But he has spurned offers of more international food aid, saying, “Why do they want to choke us with their food? We have enough.” And one of his most senior ministers, Didymus Mutasa, on hearing of the UN famine projection, implied that such a die-off, at least in opposition areas, was actually desirable. “We would be better off with only six million peo
ple, with our own people, who supported the liberation struggle,” he was reported as saying. “We don’t want these extra people.”

  The policemen confiscate several bags and put them on their growing pile of loot at the side of the road. An old lady my mother’s age pleads with them. She has come all the way from the Zambezi Valley to bring this small burlap bag of meal to her grandson, “a young boy just like you,” she says, “but he is without a job; he has nothing to eat.” The sergeant does not want to be stripped of his badges of office and humanized. He knows that she doesn’t have enough for a bribe, so the cornmeal itself will be his bounty.

  She is determined not to cry, but two tears well over onto her long lined cheeks. This is not store-bought cornmeal. This is from corn that she has tended from the beginning, that she has plowed and seeded and watered as tiny, tender lime green shoots, and hoed and weeded and harvested and dried and shucked and carried for miles to a grinding mill and paid to have it ground there into powdered meal and carried back home on her head and loaded onto this bus. It has evaded drought and birds and locusts and rats and antelopes and elephants. And just a few miles and a few minutes from its intended beneficiary, it has been wrenched away from her. This is what this young policeman is casually stealing tonight, all these months and months of work by this old lady. But he is unmoved by her earnest entreaties.

  I should sit quietly in my car. I know this woman is beyond my help. But if I don’t at least try, I will hate myself for it. I will lie awake during New York nights remembering this moment, the look on her face.

  I open my door and walk over. “Sergeant?”

  He starts at my voice. “Back! Back inside your car!” he says.

  “Please, Sergeant, it’s such a small bag of mealie meal, please can you let her take it? I can give you bonsela . . .” I reach for my wallet. For this I can break my father’s ban on bribes.

  “Wena, mukiwa!” — “You, white man!” he says, furiously fumbling with the press stud of his holster. Realizing how badly I have misread the situation, I start to retreat, my arms out, palms forward, placating. Over his shoulder, I can see that the passengers on the bus, which is repacked and ready to go, are agog. The sergeant has managed to pull out his pistol now and he’s waving it at me. “This is not your business. Do not interfere with police matters,” he screams.

  The bus conductor is fearful of getting caught up in crossfire, and he calls down urgently to the old lady that they are leaving and she must board now or be left behind. So she limps over to the door and hauls herself up on the chipped metal rail, shaking her head in disgust that it has come to this. That young boys, young enough to be her grandsons, would steal the food she has worked for a whole season to grow. As she reaches the top of the stairs, she half turns and looks down at me as I stand there with my hands up, facing the fulminating sergeant. She inclines her head slightly and raises a hand, bestowing on me her acknowledgment. And then she turns and is gone. The conductor hops in after her, bangs on the side, and the bus revs up and accelerates away in a great black belch of diesel fumes.

  The sergeant frog-marches me to my car. If I come out again, he says, he will shoot me “for resisting arrest,” and he slams my door shut.

  I need to call Mum and tell her not to wait up for me. I dial the number on her cell phone, which I have borrowed. It rings and rings and the answering machine message kicks in just as she picks up.

  “Hello? Hello?” says Mum.

  “This is 490947,” says Dad, in his deliberately enunciated voice.

  We wait for him to finish his outgoing message, and then I tell her that the Worsley-Worswicks’ supper is running late and she should go to bed.

  I sit there in the dark, incarcerated in my car, until finally, as the sun rises, the policemen drag the branches off the road and pack up their roadblock. The sergeant saunters over to me. “I’m going off shift now,” he says. “I’m too busy to be bothered with you. Go,” and he cocks his head in dismissal.

  “Thank you so much, Sergeant,” I say with a smile he recognizes as false.

  “Ah, just voetsak,” he says. It’s an Afrikaans expletive. Like fuck off, only worse.

  I SIT IN DAD’S STUDY, red eyed from my night at the roadblock, trying to make sense of his files, trying to regularize the bills and accounts so that it will be easy for Mum to administer. Already the study feels like a mausoleum. Lining the pelmets are my maternal grandfather’s trophies — for athletics, rowing, swimming, golf. The silver cups and pewter tankards are dusty and tarnished. Dehydrated husks of small spiders are trapped behind the glass of my old school team photos on the wall.

  In front of me, the garden is alive with birds. The egret is at its post on the steps of the fishpond, eyeing the murky water intently. Fire finches with jaunty red bellies, and bronze mannikins hop on the surrounding lawn, pecking at the grass seeds. Up in the acacia thorn tree, a trio of purple-crested louries converse raucously, and a group of wood hoopoes with long hooked scarlet beaks sit quietly on a branch of Jain’s kapok tree. Around us, the city — in the grip of another strike, this time organized by the trade unions — is quiet.

  I toil there for most of the day, and as it starts to get dark I have worked through all the files and come to one last locked drawer. Mum bustles around and finally finds the key. In this last cabinet there are thick albums, half a dozen of them, each dated, covering periods from the early eighties onward. They contain clippings of all the pieces I have ever written, carefully glued down and meticulously cross-referenced. Every review of my books and TV documentaries. Every ad for every book reading. Videos of all my programs. It is a master record of my entire career. My father has been minutely following it, the career he officially hoped I would abandon in favor of “a real job.” And the pages show signs of some serious wear and tear. Of having been well thumbed.

  “He would come in here some nights and get them all out and just sit here on his own reading through it all,” says my mother, who has entered with a mug of chicory for me. “And he would rewatch your old documentaries too. It was almost as though he was seeing the world through your eyes.” I struggle to hold back tears.

  “He was very proud of you, really,” says my mother, putting her hand on my shoulder and squeezing it. “For some reason he found it so difficult to tell you.”

  I just start to howl, and the egret flaps away up over the burned bougainvillea.

  WE ARE STILL WAITING to hear from Keith when Dad’s body can be cremated. There is only one crematorium in Harare, the one out at Warren Hills, where Jain was cremated. They are waiting for a delivery of butane gas, he says. Some is expected soon.

  But this morning I get a call from the mortuary where Dad’s body is stored. Like so many parts of the city, they too are without power. And now they are running out of diesel for their backup generator. They have only enough to last another two days. After that the morgue will rapidly heat up and the corpses will begin to decompose. If we do not claim my father’s body by then, they will have no choice but to give it up to the Ministry of Health for burial in the mass grave out past the city limits. Health regulations stipulate this. He is very sorry. These are difficult times.

  I put the phone down and sit there in a daze. The one thing that Dad made me promise him was that I would have him cremated and not buried. Why the hell hadn’t I paid closer attention? The last thing he’d asked me to do for him, and now I can’t deliver it.

  I phone Keith and ask him what options I have.

  “Well, there’s Bulawayo, but I think that’s out of order at present,” he says. “And it would be tough to get the paperwork done in time.”

  “And I don’t have the fuel to get there,” I say miserably.

  He pauses. “I suppose you might try the Hindus, a couple of whites went that route a while back.”

  “The Hindus?”

  “Yeah, you know, a funeral pyre,” he says. “Burn him yourself.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Keith, I can’t torch m
y own father.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to bury him, then.”

  I page through our old phone book and find a number for the archaically spelled “Hindoo” Society.

  “I’m so sorry,” says the man who answers in a singsong Indian accent, “but the government has banned all non-Hindus from being burned here. And anyway we are between priests at present. The old one has already left, and we have sent to India for a new one, but he has not arrived yet. In any case, the metal trolley on which the pyre is built is broken. But, listen, I am new here, you should speak to Mr. Patel. Mr. Kiran Patel.”

  Patel answers his cell phone in what is obviously a bustling shop with voices bargaining in the background and the regular ker-ching of a cash register. I put my case to him: that I need to cremate my father before the end of the week, or they will put him in a mass grave. He repeats the ordinance banning pyres for non-Hindus. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We can’t burn whites.”

  I plead and plead, repeating that I’ve come all the way from New York to do this, and that it was my father’s dying wish.

  Finally his voice softens. “Well, there is one way around the ban. As head of the Hindu community, I suppose I have the authority to declare him an honorary Hindu, and then you could go ahead and burn him on our pyre.”

  “How would you do that?” I ask.

  “Well, I would just declare it, and then it would be so,” he says.

  “Will you do it?”

  “You buy me a beer sometime if I come to New York, OK?”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “Several.”

  “All right,” he says. “What’s his name?”

  “Godwin, George Godwin.”

  He clears his throat and asks for quiet in the shop. The hubbub dies down and then in a formal voice he says: “I solemnly declare that your father, George Godwin, is hereby an honorary Hindu.”

  I thank him profusely.

  “You come to our temple and make the arrangements there, OK? And remember my beer sometime in New York?” He laughs and turns back to his shop, where the background ker-chinging has started up once more.