Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  On our first date, Vita was charmed when I opened the car door for her, pulled back her chair at the restaurant, and helped her with her coat. Nothing fancy; just the old-school southern courtesies, but a manner of respect that resonated with her.

  This didn’t mean I was entirely aware of what was happening between us. I had to move forty-five hundred miles away to discover that the girl next door was the one for me.

  The Free Press named me as their European correspondent, and I moved to Warsaw. As I wandered Europe, Russia, and the Mideast, traveling alone from one city or conflict zone to another, the loneliness that accompanied me made it clear—I missed my best friend and next-door neighbor. She had become, in so many ways, the love of my life.

  While I was stuck for several weeks in Sarajevo during the blistering summer of 1993, when the Bosnian war was at its height and the city was under a vicious siege, I ran over to the Associated Press office during a lull in the shelling and the shooting. I peeled off my flak jacket at the door and, sweating profusely, picked up the satellite phone. I caught Vita at her office.

  “Name the most romantic place you can think of,” I said.

  “Right now? I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

  “The line is eighteen dollars a minute, baby. Now would be good.”

  “Well—wait—okay, the Greek islands.”

  “When can you meet me there?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I suppose I could call somebody else if you’re busy. What was that girl’s name? You know, the one who lived down the hall—”

  “September,” she said, laughing now. “Just after Labor Day.”

  “Great. I’m a working man, you know. You’ll have to fly coach.”

  “Coach? You mean as in economy? All my other international suitors send me first-class tickets. With champagne.”

  “What was that girl’s name again? The one who stayed down—”

  We met at the Athens airport in mid-September. We took a steamer out to Santorini, which was nearly empty in the off-season. The hotel we found was perched on one of the island’s famous cliffs. We soaked up the sun each day, ate fresh fish each night, and forgot the rest of the world.

  One night just before we were to leave, we took our rented motorcycle for a ride after dinner. Vita climbed on the seat behind me. It was late, and we swept up the empty roads alone, the moon breaking out of the clouds, the pale light floating across the cliffs. I pulled to a stop in the gravel on the side of the road, the ocean hundreds of feet below.

  “I think,” Vita said over my shoulder, into my ear, “that I could stay here for the rest of my life.”

  We were married at our house in Poland the following September.

  My family boycotted the ceremony—they didn’t approve of our marriage, to put it mildly. Vita’s father had died, her mother was too old to travel, and her brothers and sisters sent their regards. It was her second marriage and seen as something of a lark.

  “What does she want with that little white boy?” Vita’s mother, Ida Helen, asked Kathie, Vita’s youngest sister. “Is the girl just lonely?”

  “Mama,” Kathie sighed, “black people do not move to Poland because they’re lonely.”

  We jumped the broom in a rollicking party in our backyard, on Warsaw’s Pilicka Street, Al Green’s chorus from “Let’s Stay Together” on the invitations and twenty-eight guests from eight countries on four continents jamming to what sounded like a Belle Isle street party back in Detroit. The house came down when Patricia Wicks, Vita’s best friend from childhood, showed the inebriated Polish wedding photographer how to bend over and dance to “Shoop.”

  I wasn’t bothered by my family’s snub of our wedding. In fact, very little bothered me anymore. I had developed a certain harshness after leaving Mississippi, a play-it-as-it-lays mind-set that was attuned to the bitterness in the world. I had the working idea that there was a higher form of truth to be found in the world’s most impoverished and violent places, a rough-hewn honesty that could not be found elsewhere. Life had a tautness to it there, a sheen that seemed to say something about the way the world was, not how anyone wanted it to be. That was what seemed true and honest, and that was what I tried hardest to write about.

  Given that, I found myself in the world of foreign correspondents and roving reporters. It was the first time in my adult life that I felt like I was where I belonged. I loved it—the travel and challenges, the friends flung out in a wide orbit of countries, getting on a plane time and again to write about the most compelling international events of the day—and at the end of each trip, there was Vita, my best friend, wife, and confidant. We went dancing till the clubs closed, had champagne brunches with friends that lasted all afternoon. So when Nancy Laughlin, the Free Press foreign editor, called our home in Warsaw one snowy evening and asked if I’d like to take the paper’s Africa posting, I said sure. It was the most wide-open job in journalism as far as I was concerned. To Vita, the chance to live on the mother continent was irresistible. We had all of our belongings in storage back in Detroit shipped to Zimbabwe.

  We had no intention of returning to the United States.

  3

  THE GIRL-CHILD

  AN OLD LAND ROVER came bumping down the red dirt road and slowed to a stop. Two police officers got out. It had taken several hours, but the young man Herbert sent running for help had finally reached the nearest police outpost. In rural Zimbabwe, where villages are scarce and paved roads are few, that was more marathon than sprint. He had hitched a ride on a bread truck for the first few miles, got off when the truck turned at an intersection, then walked and hitched again for several more miles until he came to a dusty clutter of one-story concrete-block shops. He walked past the butcher’s and the beer hall, turned through an open field, and came to a police barracks. He told an officer a newborn child had been found.

  The officer sighed—this was not the first time this had happened—and placed a call to a police station in the nearest town for a truck to be dispatched. More than twenty miles away, all on dirt roads, the truck took a while to appear.

  The officers eventually made their way, the young boy as their guide. Herbert was relieved. The child was in great distress. The women had rocked and comforted her, but she needed a doctor, and soon. One of the officers took the child to a clinic, perhaps five miles away, where she would spend the night. The other officer stayed to ask questions. Abandoning a child was a criminal charge. Attempted murder might be added by a stern prosecutor. Had there been pregnancies in the village? Had any young girls suddenly gone to visit relatives? No, none, said the women. Herbert concurred.

  The officer walked the paths, looking for something, anything—a note, a scrap of clothing—that might serve as a clue. There was nothing. Then he followed his partner to the clinic, where he questioned the staff. Had there been deliveries? Did they know of anyone who had come in for pregnancy or health counseling? None. He returned several weeks later, asking the same questions, trying to catch someone in a changed story, but got the same results. Three months later, he would close the case. More than two dozen infants had been mysteriously abandoned in his precinct alone in recent months.

  “The children are not there in the evening, then they are in the morning,” he said later. “Some are found close to roads. Others are dropped into sewers or ditches. We only find the corpses when people tell us about them. I think it is the mothers who leave them, because the fathers are gone, but it is only my theory. Who can say where they come from?”

  The wave of abandoned children was unprecedented in the nine hundred years since the Shona-speaking people had built dzimba dzimbabwe, the magnificent stone fortress on the southern plains that formed the cornerstone of the national identity. There had always been isolated cases of abandonment, children set down in the forests for the animals to find—after colonialism, parliament adopted something called the Infanticide Act to provide for such cases—but only during the long war for indepe
ndence had there been anything remotely similar.

  In the mid-1970s, when the war was at its peak, Rhodesian troops would raid villages suspected of harboring rebel soldiers, guns blazing. Everyone would scatter. Parents would be killed or separated in the cross fire, losing children in the chaos. Most children had some form of extended family to care for them. For those who had no one, there was Chinyaradzo Children’s Home in Harare. Stella Mesikano had been a worker at the orphanage during the war and she later became the matron, or director. In 1980, she began keeping a bar chart on graph paper showing the number of abandoned children brought to Chinyaradzo. Each year was carefully shaded with different colored pencils. In 1980, the year independence was declared, ending fourteen years of conflict, the bar was colored in black and showed that 40 children had been admitted. The next year was pink, and the number of children dropped to 23. It held at that level, or dropped to the low teens, for a decade. Then it shot to 35 in 1991. By 1994, it was up to 56. The orphanage was set up to handle a total of 58 children but had taken in 159 in four years. Other orphanages or children’s homes began to take in the overflow. As Mesikano’s chart began to move toward the edge of the page with each new year, she began to lose the enthusiasm for keeping detailed statistics for a government that had so little interest.

  By the late 1990s, the administration of Robert Mugabe was skittish about acknowledging the depth of the AIDS disaster, and unable or unwilling to administer a program that might care for the nation’s most vulnerable charges. The state was allocating only about five Zimbabwean dollars (then the equivalent of about thirty American cents, a rate that would drop by more than 60 percent in the coming months) per day to feed, clothe, educate, and care for each orphan. This was to provide about one-third of the total cost of administering the home. The government plan called for other agencies or donors to cover the other two-thirds. The agency that was to administer Chinyaradzo, and raise most of its funds, was the Child Protection Society (CPS). During what would come to be recognized as one of the largest wave of orphans in human history, the agency was almost completely moribund. “The organization currently does little research or advocacy on behalf of children,” an internal study reported. “The CPS has become somewhat stagnant . . . there has been no director for a number of years.”

  As more orphans came in but more money did not, Mesikano became the de facto fund-raiser. She got help from a local Rotary club and a handful of Western aid agencies, most notably from the Canadian division of World Vision, the U.S.-based Christian charity, and the Qantas Cabin Crew Team, volunteers from the Australian airline.

  The orphanage appeared modern and clean, for Mesikano and her staff worked hard. But there was only so much to be done with three dimes a day per child. Flies settled on the children, food, and dishes. The in-house clinic had shut down for lack of medicine. Diapers were old washcloths folded into triangles. Food was cornmeal mush and a lumpy porridge. Most of the fifteen to twenty infants in the ward at any one time had chronic diarrhea. Because many of the workers had little training in hygiene or lacked the proper sanitary materials, diapers were not properly disinfected before being put on another infant, allowing bacteria and disease to slink from child to child.

  In January 1998, a newborn named Memory Chinyanga was sent from the orphanage to the hospital. She had not been well, though the workers at the orphanage could not list any specific illness. She died a few days later. The listed cause of death was dehydration. As was the standard procedure, no one at the orphanage saw her again. Her corpse would have been taken to the city’s overburdened morgue, eventually wrapped in a white sheet, and put in a wooden coffin. A truck would have taken her to a potter’s field on the outside of town. Her corpse would have been lowered into the red dirt soil. Prison inmates would shovel soil on top of her coffin until she lay under a rounded lump of earth.

  A few days after Memory died, an infant a few cribs over was also sent to the hospital. Her name was Tatenda Jeselant (her first name means “we give thanks”). She had chronic diarrhea and was vomiting all day. She died two days later.

  The next week, the workers called for a van to rush young Godfrey Muparutsa, not yet two years old, to the hospital. He never came back. The doctors said he died of pneumonia, a rather elastic term used to connote any inflammation of the lungs or to note they had become filled with fluid. Was its origin a virus? Bacterium? No one could say. There were no autopsies performed. There were no inquiries as to how three children in a state-run orphanage died in four weeks. There were no newspaper headlines, no staff shake-ups, and no change in procedure, for AIDS had rendered this scenario routine.

  The calendar turned to February, and an infant named Shingirai Nyamayaro was brought in by social welfare officers. She had been abandoned, origins unknown. She developed diarrhea, which, because the orphanage could not afford rehydration packets or antidiarrhea medications, could not be stopped. She became dehydrated and died after a very short stay in the hospital. Then Munashe Tsekete fell ill. His breathing was raspy. He coughed a lot. They took him to the hospital, where he stopped breathing altogether. Five Chinyaradzo infants or toddlers were dead in eight weeks. Munashe’s official cause of death was listed as “difficulties in breathing.”

  Joe Bhebbe, another infant, went a few weeks later too.

  A month passed, and so did the short lives of Frasia Chateuka, who died of pneumonia, and Ashley Mhlanga, who “could not breathe.”

  Early one evening in the dry season of 1998, several weeks before we first encountered the orphanage, a van arrived. Darkness was falling as the social welfare officer walked in, calling for Mesikano. He was holding the infant Constance had found. The clinic in the rural area had no place to keep her, he explained, so the police officers had driven her into Harare. The girl-child was squalling to high heaven.

  “She still had blood on her, they hadn’t cleaned her up,” Mesikano would later remember. “She had a clip on her umbilical cord, a stump. But she looked healthy. She had nice black hair, very full. She was actually sort of pink and plump.”

  She and a couple of the other women set to work cleaning the child. They soaked her in a small tub of soap and warm water, washing off the blood and dirt. They put antibiotic cream on the ear wounds. She had a small, fleshy stump on the outer edge of her left hand, a sixth finger. They looped a thread around it, pulled in opposite directions, and popped it off. They put cream over that, too. Then they looked over her body and facial features in an attempt to guess the new child’s ethnic heritage, a popular orphanage pastime.

  They could rule out that she was Shona, the nation’s largest ethnic group. She lacked the deep black skin and broad facial structure for that. Nor was she a mixture of black and white; she was much too dark to be biracial. Someone looked at her burnt-tan complexion and her deep-set eyes and suggested she was from Mozambique, the country to the east. Then again, someone else said, she looked almost like the Ndebele, the nation’s second largest ethnic group, cousins of the Zulu peoples of South Africa. But that downy hair on the back of her ears—didn’t Indian babies have that? Perhaps, but then there was the puzzle of her small, rather flat nose.

  Mesikano finally laughed and gave up the game.

  “She is a child of Africa,” she said. “That much we know.”

  It was up to her as matron to name the new children. This was a great power, of course, and she did not take it lightly. She wanted something pretty, for the little girl now sleeping peacefully in her arms was a thing of beauty. She finally settled on Chipo, a popular girl’s name in the region. It translates from Shona as “gift.”

  “I wanted her to have a pretty African name, something she would be proud of all her life,” Mesikano would later say, explaining her name selection process. “I wanted something to remind her of how special she is, and the circumstances of how she came to be. She seemed a gift of the land itself.”

  A worker opened the home’s daily medical chart, where they kept a log of each child�
�s health and condition. She wrote “Chipo” on a line of the ledger, putting a star next to her name. “New admission. 3.1 kilos (6.8 pounds). Brought in by social welfare officers. Wound on ear but the baby looks healthy.”

  The entries in the log read something like a status report of the ward. It showed that Chipo was one of fourteen infants, nine crawlers, and thirty-one toddlers in a three-room ward. Of the fourteen infants, six were in bad shape.

  Caroline Razo was “coughing and crying in the night. She is severely wasted,” the log read. Tinashe, whose last name was not recorded, had diarrhea and was vomiting. “Keep an eye on him,” the nightly report noted. An infant named Gladys had some sort of unknown fluid oozing from her ears. Ester was on antibiotics and Tatenda needed amoxicillin, which, the log noted, they did not have.

  The next day, three infants were rushed to Harare Hospital.

  Caroline was gasping for breath by this point, desperately crying, waving her arms to and fro. Then she stopped gasping and died in the van while they were still in traffic. Tinashe was admitted minutes later, for similar difficulties in breathing. Yemurai had an ugly knot on her right arm.

  For her part, the girl-child named Chipo was placed in the second crib to the right of the entrance. A bright yellow note card was put above her crib, noting her name, her date of birth, and the day she was brought in. Workers scarcely had time to pick her up, though, because the week after Caroline died, Collins Murehwa began vomiting, over and over again, until he was spitting blood and not much else. He was taken to the hospital, where they could do nothing for him. He vomited until he died. Clara Mlambo didn’t last much longer; her tiny body withered and dehydrated until her lungs seemed to collapse and her heart stopped. Sandra Mahohoma didn’t have a chance, coughing and gasping day by day until her strength left her.