Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

“Did you see any children you liked?” she asked hopefully.

  We got into the truck a few minutes later and shut the door. It was quiet.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, finally cranking the engine. “I feel like I just kicked six kids off a lifeboat from the Titanic.”

  “And held them underwater for a while,” Vita said.

  We drove to Emerald Hills Children’s Home. It was in Mount Pleasant, one of Harare’s nicer neighborhoods on the north end of town. The facility had large dormitory wings, for it also was home to the city’s deaf and hearing-impaired children. We went into the office of the matron, Ernestine Wasterfall. She was a serious, kindly woman, and I liked her immensely for her candor and warm demeanor.

  “Most of our children are infected with HIV,” she said. “Many already have AIDS. There are also many who are mentally or physically retarded. They need all the medical aid, not to mention love, that they can get.” We toured a ward of terribly ill children who were so listless they could scarcely blink as we passed. The advanced stages of AIDS were apparent. They were severely wasted away, their heads seeming to loll on tiny bodies.

  We went onto the grounds, where it appeared word had been passed along that a couple of Americans were coming. The children stood in clumps, giggling. They followed us from here to there as Wasterfall showed us around. I saw several young boys kicking a ball back and forth. I joined the game and was quickly surrounded by a cluster of three-foot-high children, all clamoring for me to pick them up or take them home. As Wasterfall said, many were sick, stunted, or suffering from scabies. Vita was talking with several little girls, many of whom were smiling but shy.

  We stopped back in Wasterfall’s office an hour or so later.

  “Did you see any children you liked?” she asked, raising her eyebrows in almost exactly the same way as the previous matron.

  “All of them,” I replied, mustering a smile. I explained that this was our first day, and there were still other homes we had promised to visit. I made another donation, the cliché of throwing bricks into the Grand Canyon bouncing through my head, and we left. It was impossible not to be sobered by what we had seen. Dinner that night was subdued; we ate in silence, not speaking at all.

  The next morning we drove to the south of town, to Chinyaradzo. The roads in the nearby industrial park were jammed with huge trucks belching out stacks of smoke and pollution, forming a brown haze. We honked at the gate, and a young girl came out of a one-story concrete-block building to unlatch the padlock. The interior of the compound was an open-air playground, with brightly painted yellow and red seesaws, a pair of slides, a swing set with chairs for small children. The backyard featured larger equipment for older kids. The classrooms had posters on the wall, cutouts of birds and bunny rabbits, even Winnie the Pooh and Santa Claus. It was well kept, with some rooms not appearing much different from something you might expect to find in small-town America.

  In the infant ward, there were two narrow rectangular rooms of cribs. There was an erasable board that listed the feeding schedules for each child. At the back of the first room was a partition, and behind it were stacks of old furniture, rocking chairs missing an arm or curved leg, dismantled cribs, and baby toys. There was a small kitchen on one end and a changing room at the other, connecting to a room for toddlers.

  In one crib was Christian, a chubby two-year-old in a pair of blue overalls. He was nicknamed the Old Man for the comically serious way he seemed to overlook the other children. There was a tiny infant named Robert, one of a pair of twins, who rarely awoke. Yemurai, who had recovered from her hospital trip, was a biracial baby with an endearing smile and a bad case of eczema. Tsongai was a chunky little girl who liked to bang her toys around.

  I wandered back over toward the door and down by the windows. There were four cribs. The only one that held a child was the second one. I reached under the clothes and picked up the infant, looking at the card on the wall to get her name.

  “Chipo,” I said.

  She was wrapped in a bundle of white cloths. She had dark brown eyes and delicately curled eyelashes that were so long she seemed to blink in slow motion. She kept three fingers of her right hand in her mouth. Her toes looked like little erasers on the end of miniature pencils. She seemed to weigh nothing at all. I tickled her chin. Nothing. “Hey, pretty girl,” I whispered. She blinked. I playfully bumped the end of her nose with mine. She blinked again. Then she reached out with her left hand and, in a wobbling gesture, wrapped it around my little finger.

  It is difficult to say what happened to me then. I had reported in a lot of places a lot worse than this one. I once spent the better part of a day in a slum hospital in Baghdad, a desperate place where the temperature soared above 120 degrees, the infants subsisted on less than fifty calories a day, there was no medicine, and a fifty-two-day-old infant named Maram Hassan lay on a feed sack that passed for a bed sheet. She was starving to death, even as her mother waved flies away from her mouth and eyes. I held the child and talked to her mother, and wrote a story about the child’s doomed fate. I didn’t lose sleep over it. Nor had I worried about Esmet, a six-day-old infant in northern Bosnia whom I held briefly in a refugee camp. Beset by the subzero temperatures, malnutrition, and the violence of the war, his mother had not bothered to remember his name.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s going to be dead in a few days.”

  I handed the dying child back to her and filed a story about them that night. It was eight hundred words and no big deal. Before dawn the next morning, heading out in a driving snowstorm, John Pomfret, my colleague from the Washington Post, and I were driving back to Sarajevo, munching chocolate bars and bellowing songs along with the tape deck to stay awake.

  These were two among dozens, if not hundreds, of similar experiences in dozens of countries across the years. There was the man whom I watched executed on Florida’s death row, back when they did it with the electric chair; there was Alija Hodzic, the wartime caretaker of the Sarajevo morgue, who came into work one morning to see that his dead son had been dumped on the floor. Developing a detachment from the suffering you witness and write about is a professional necessity, of course, but it can also become a job hazard of sorts. You can just keep going for so many years, not allowing yourself to feel anything, until you arrive at a place where your emotional connections have gone dark, lights out, all blown fuses that don’t work anymore. It’s not like you know when it happens. It’s a steady erosion that diminishes your heart, drop by drop, bit by bit.

  Keep moving, I had told myself time and again. Don’t think. But when the child’s fingers closed over mine, some long-forgotten part of me seemed to stir. I didn’t know what it was. I just felt something. “Hey, baby, come here,” I called to Vita. “Lookit this little punkin.”

  Vita took her in her arms, rocking her, as enchanted as I was. She asked the staff about this little newborn. “Oh, Chipo,” they said. “She’s not a newborn. She’s more than three months old.” They recounted the story of her discovery and subsequent hospitalizations. They said she had a cold and was not feeling well.

  She seemed to doze after a time, and Vita lowered her back into her crib. We were so taken with the children that we wound up staying for the afternoon. We helped spoon-feed the other infants at noon and helped put them down for naps. With sixteen children in such a small area, it seemed at least one was always crying, thus waking the infant in the next crib, and so on, until it went around the room like a chain of dominoes. We also noticed, as the day wore on, that the veneer of the place was thinner than a bad coat of paint. Vita had gone to change one child with a young clinic worker, alarmed at the foul-smelling diarrhea. The child was not cleaned properly and another washcloth, what passed for a diaper, was pinned on. The windows had no screens or were filled with ragged holes. Flies settled onto children, the damp spots around their eyes and noses, the mush meal that was lunch. The adjacent kitchen was rusted. It had no hot water and no refrigerator. Uncovered
baby formula sat on the counter, drawing more flies.

  I spent most of the afternoon on the play mat with the infants, rattling toys, changing the occasional diaper—this astounded the all-female staff—but more and more often, I found myself drawn back to the little girl who had been abandoned the day she was born. “She’s so tiny,” Vita said, looking down into the crib.

  I motioned to her to come outside. We stood in the empty playground, leaning against the red and yellow swing set. The sun was out, and the day was breezy.

  “I like that little bitty one, Chipo,” I said, smiling.

  Vita nodded. “Me too.”

  “You want to ask the matron if we can do like Tony said, that program where we take her home for the weekend, maybe be her foster parents?”

  “Of course,” Vita said. “I mean, she’s so sick. She’s not going to live without a lot of help.”

  “True,” I said, taking a deep breath, “but she may not anyway. I was talking to Mrs. Mesikano, the director. You know how many infants they’ve lost this year? Sixteen.”

  Vita mouthed the number back at me. “Sixteen? She’s going to die if we don’t do something. She is, I know it.” Her face had a narrow tic by the corner of her mouth and she had tears in the corners of her eyes, just that quick.

  I found myself impatient, if not a trifle exasperated. Vita was a realist, but she had not been traipsing around refugee camps for the past several years. A lot of adorable little kids die, I was thinking, regardless of what we or anybody else does about it.

  “And she may not make it anyway, sweetheart. Don’t get me wrong—I think she’s adorable. I think she’s the most gorgeous child in the sub-Sahara. I’m all for taking her home for as long as we can. But look at where you’re standing and let’s do the math. We are in Zimbabwe, ground zero of the deadliest epidemic known to mankind. We are at an orphanage in a high-density township. If AIDS were a bomb dropped out of an airplane, it would hit us on the head. This child is grossly malnourished, she has respiratory problems, she has little or no responses. I’ve picked grapefruit that weigh more than she does. The odds of her being infected with HIV, I would guess, run about seventy to eighty percent. Vegas wouldn’t put odds on her making it twelve months.”

  “There are times,” Vita said coldly, “when you can be such a son of a bitch.”

  “I’m having this conversation now so we don’t have it later on,” I hissed, suddenly angry. “I am not going to take this child home for weekends and then stop it if she’s got AIDS. I may be a son of a bitch, but I will not—under any goddamned circumstance—take this child home and then bring her back here because we don’t have the guts to watch her die.”

  Vita turned away. She had had two miscarriages during her first marriage. The doctor had said the damage from those made it impossible for her to ever carry a child to term. That was why we couldn’t have children. It was something I knew about when we got married. I didn’t care then and I didn’t care now. I had thought we might adopt. But then Tony’s message at dinner shot down those hopes, the misery of the orphanages brought back unpleasant memories, the odds of the young girl were not making things better, and now the sunlight showed tears glistening on Vita’s face. I softened my tone, trying to remember that I wasn’t working in some refugee camp, where emotions were something that had to be curtailed.

  “Listen, I just want you to think about what it would do to you, and to us, to get attached to a special-needs child,” I said. “Yesterday we were thinking about bringing a few needy kids over for a few weekends. Maybe even fostering. Yeah, hey, fostering, why not? We can still do that with any child we’ve met. But this, with this little girl, is very serious. I meant what I said. I will not take her home and then let her be abandoned a second time.”

  “What makes you think,” Vita said, brushing past me, “that you’re the only one?”

  MESIKANO—STELLA, as she insisted we call her—was delighted we had chosen to take home one of her most fragile children. A “trial weekend” was set up for the next day, Friday. We spent that day at the orphanage, helping out again. Late in the afternoon the workers bundled up Chipo into her green outfit—the knit cap nearly swallowed her head—and the women clapped and cheered. Few children left the orphanage, and even a weekend out was cause for celebration.

  Once home, Vita began to get her undressed for a bath while I went to heat up some milk. The shortwave radio was beeping at the top of the hour. The BBC news came on, bringing news that jolted me back to work. Laurent Kabila, the self-declared president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was facing an uprising in the eastern part of the country, the same place where the rebellion that brought him to power had begun two years earlier. Since the current unrest was centered in Goma, a city just across the border from Rwanda, it was reasonable to believe that the Tutsi-led Rwandan government was involved. It made sense.

  In the Rwandan genocide of 1994, radical militias from the Hutu ethnic group, known as the Interahamwe, had unleashed one of the deadliest episodes of the twentieth century, leading a slaughter of more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The instrument of choice was the machete, and they did their work in just one hundred days. The death toll may have been as high as eight hundred thousand; no one really knows.

  The Interahamwe was shoved out of Rwanda by a Tutsi-led army. The killers fled over the heavily forested border into Congo, then known as Zaire, where they received shelter and support from Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime dictator. From there, they continued to stage murderous raids back into tiny Rwanda. This set off the Tutsi-led rebellion to overthrow Mobutu, and the installation of Kabila as the new ruler.

  But once in power, Kabila renamed the nation the Democratic Republic of Congo and turned on his Tutsi backers. He began giving shelter and support to the same Hutu militias that had terrorized Rwanda in the first place.

  Another rebellion in the east, therefore, almost certainly involved a Rwandan attempt to neutralize Kabila. There was a message on the office answering machine from one of my editors, asking when I was planning to go in.

  I started flipping through the pages of a thick catalogue called the Overseas Airline Guide, a monthly listing of international flights around the globe that is something of a Gideon Bible among correspondents. I was checking out how I could get into Kinshasa within the next forty-eight hours—Harare-Johannesburg-Kinshasa, or maybe Harare-Nairobi-Kinshasa—when I heard a shout from Vita. I went to the bedroom. “Look at this,” she said, unwrapping the folds of cloth from Chipo’s body.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  Undressed, her belly protruded as if she’d swallowed an inflated balloon. Her arms and legs looked like spider limbs. The skin over her stomach and hips had gone a pasty shade of brown. I recognized the onset of marasmus, the staple disease of desperate refugee camps. She would open her mouth, her face contorted with pain and rage—but no sound would come out. We would pat her on the back for fifteen seconds and then a fierce wail would emerge. She would stop a few minutes later, exhausted, chest heaving, and stick three fingers of her right hand into her mouth, her comfort gesture. A few minutes later, she would start screaming again.

  We had bought a small infant tub to bathe her in, but she was lost in it. Vita ran a sinkful of water and cleaned her there, soothing her swollen belly with a warm cloth, running it over her arms and hands and fingers and feet. Chipo just looked at her. She had almost no responses. She did not smile and had never laughed. We had bought the smallest infant’s shirt we could find; it fell to her ankles. I finished warming up the infant formula and put it in a bottle. She could scarcely suck the milk from the nipple. So I went to the store and bought several syringes. I sterilized them, poured in some warm formula, and squirted a few cc’s into her mouth. She looked up in surprise when the spray of milk hit her tongue, then let it dribble off her chin. Then a few drops went down. She swallowed, looked confused for a minute, and then held her mouth open. I laughed and gave her another splash,
and then another.

  I was rocking her to sleep when she began coughing. I patted her back, as if burping her. It didn’t help. She seemed to be gasping for breath. She opened her mouth, tears rolling down her cheeks, but no sound came out for so long that her face turned red. I patted her back, harder now, calling her name, and finally she burst out in a howl. Thick mucus was coming from her nose. I wiped it away, but her nasal passages seemed clogged. Her chest began heaving.

  I felt a trickle of fear slide down my neck. “Vita!” I shouted, nearly running now. “She can’t breathe! She can’t breathe!”

  Vita had been taking a shower. She wrapped a towel around her chest and took Chipo, looking at her nose. Without hesitating, she laid her down on the bathroom counter. She bent and placed her mouth crossways over Chipo’s, as if giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then she blew. The blast of air went into Chipo’s mouth, through her sinuses and down her nasal passages, expelling clogged mucus onto Vita’s cheek. She took a breath and did it again. Chipo was screaming then, loud enough to hurt the ears, but vocal evidence she could breathe again.

  I returned her to my shoulder, rocking her back and forth, wrapped in warm, soft clothes and blankets. She finally drifted into sleep, only to awaken thirty minutes later gasping for breath, as if she had been underwater. I would give her some more warm milk and she would doze. Then the whole process would start over. That night, we placed her in an infant-carrying basket and put it between us in the bed so that we could more closely monitor her breathing.

  At some point in the night, she had another coughing fit. I took her in the bathroom and repeated the procedure Vita had used earlier. I felt the wet slap of mucus on my beard. She cried in outrage. “It’s not such a hoot on this end either, little girl,” I said, washing phlegm out of my ear.

  The next day passed in this manner, too. In between feeding and naps and rocking Chipo, I began to pack my bags and monitor reports out of Congo, trying to get my attention focused on a daunting assignment. The rebellion was advancing across the country with lightning speed. Foreign nationals were fleeing Kinshasa. The American embassy, aware of the CIA’s long and sorry history in the country during the Cold War, told its five hundred nationals to flee the country or “face attack or detention.”