Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  “Let’s do it for free the first time,” she said.

  “Let’s not,” I said, collecting my beers and limping out the door. I went back to the room, lugged out the satellite phone, set it up in the courtyard, and called home to check on Vita and Chipo and Robert. I was thick-tongued and exhausted and could not really think. I wanted to talk to somebody so that I could block out the heat and the smell and the scenes from the fire. The images played back to me now that I had a moment to rest. The corpses in the light of the flames, the bodies burned down to the tissue, the sound they made when dumped out of the wheelbarrows. The phone rang until the answering machine picked up. I started to leave a message, and then Vita came on. Her voice was more than sleepy. Something was wrong.

  “It’s Robert,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  It seemed to me then that I was in something like a car crash, dazed by the impact and unable to speak. I could neither formulate nor produce speech. He had not been that sick, Vita was saying. She had seen him two days ago, had stayed late. The next morning, he had not been well. He was gasping and coughing and crying. A young worker was assigned to take him to the hospital. She strapped him to her back, got a ride to the emergency room, and sat down to wait. When they finally called her name, he wasn’t breathing at all. She had sat in the waiting room as he was dying, unaware of his condition and too timid to call for help. She gave the hospital the corpse and returned to the orphanage.

  He was buried before Vita knew he was dead.

  She was crying now, inconsolable. Never had I heard the hollowness in my wife’s voice that I could hear now, even through the static. I could not think of a single thing to say.

  As I listened to the sounds coming down the phone line and looked up at the moonlight through the palms, my mind seemed to go into free fall. I found myself remembering the corpses I had seen in various states of decay in the past six months—I stopped counting at twelve hundred—and then the past six years, the number of people I had watched killed or dying, the number of brutally raped women I had interviewed in how many different languages, the face of a condemned man strapped into the electric chair in Florida just before the hood was dropped over his head. I remembered the thought from long ago that had led me to this courtyard in southwestern Nigeria: the idea that there was some sort of truth to be found in the world’s most sorrowful places. It was something I had viewed as critical to my understanding of the world, and I had pursued it since the day I had come of age in Mississippi and began to see things as they really were. And here I sat, many years and many places later. Surely I knew something by now. Surely I had learned some great lesson. I listened to the crackle of the phone. The only thing it said to me was that I had been gone. Not there. Ferai was dead because I had not been there. Robert was dead because I had not been there. Had it been left to me, Chipo, my very own daughter, would be dead because I had not been there. There are defining moments in your life, in which your measure is taken for good and you remember it always. So it was for me then. There was no court of appeal, and I had the rest of my life to think about it.

  I hung up the phone. I leaned over in the courtyard and threw up.

  10

  “REJECTED”

  THE FOLLOWING DAYS were as dark and deadening as any I had ever known. I kept moving, kept traveling, for reasons I was no longer sure of or could no longer recall. On the four- and five-hour plane flights across the continent, I no longer read the thick background files on an upcoming assignment. Instead, I found myself looking out the window at the storm clouds or the nightfall, nursing a glass of bourbon, and somehow two or three hours would pass, the files unopened on the seat beside me. After Robert’s death, something ticked over in me, in Vita, and in our relationship. We never spoke his name, and yet his death seemed to hang over us, an unseen and unmentioned influence that seeped into our lives like the shade of late afternoon. We knew, in the unspoken way that couples communicate, that we would no longer try to bring another child home. That was all over, and the shaky breathing that kept Chipo alive came to seem a visible thing, a cobweb of existence that could float away in a passing breeze.

  I found myself thinking, again and again, of John Mungai and his dead daughter at the Nairobi morgue. The image of the dead girl in Sarajevo floated in and out of my dreams. There seemed to be no way I could articulate such things even to Vita, my closest friend for nearly a decade. She withdrew into her own hurts and memories. Day by day, we found our worries for Chipo’s health and for our custody of her slipping into near paranoia. The mortality rate of Chinyaradzo’s infants continued to roll forward unchecked. Beauty Chiwasa, whom everybody called Sarah, and Mable Kachembere both died in the hospital of “coughing and diarrhea.” They were the seventeenth and eighteenth fatalities of children under two in eleven months.

  It was about this time, when riots rocked downtown Harare and police moved in with billy clubs and tear gas, that we began to realize how deep the rabbit hole we had fallen into actually went. This was just a few weeks before the Department of Social Welfare tried to take Chipo away from us, when we first began to realize that Zimbabwe’s deteriorating political and social situation was not only a national tragedy, but a series of seemingly disconnected events that was going to, among a million other things, turn our attempt to adopt Chipo into a bizarre race against the clock. A crackdown on journalists was coming that would soon make international headlines, and I began to look for ways to get Chipo out of the country safely. This was me thinking as a father first, journalist second, which was natural enough—except for the fact there was still not a piece of paper anywhere that suggested Chipo was legally our child. At the time, I considered this to be more of an irritation than a matter of substance. But it was only a matter of weeks before I would encounter an irony worthy of Greek theater—my job, the thing that I loved so much, that had taken me wherever I wanted to go, would now become the thing that threatened to have Chipo taken away from us.

  In the early days of January 1998, Mugabe’s administration had raised the state-controlled price of cornmeal by 21 percent overnight. It set off riots that left six people dead. Now, in late October, the administration again raised the price of bread and meat by 30 percent. As with the previous price hike, it was done by fiat. A week later, it put into play a 67 percent jump in the state-controlled price of gasoline, effective immediately.

  Riots ensued.

  Taxi and minivan operators nearly doubled their prices for a one-way trip into the city center to about ten Zimbabwe dollars (then about twenty-seven cents). Commuters retaliated by heaving rocks and stones at taxis and buses rather than paying the higher fares. The owners of those vehicles responded by turning their automobiles sideways across the main thoroughfares, blocking routes into the city center. No one could get to work. Cars passing the barricades were stoned. Other cars were torched. Smoke began to rise. In Chitungwiza, Harare’s most impoverished suburb, soldiers, not the police, were dispatched to handle mobs of young men who were attacking cars and taxi vans. The protesters responded by torching an army truck. Riot squads and heavily armed troops struck back in force.

  It was the second riot to rip through the capital in eleven months, but urban ghettos were not the locus of the nation’s discontent. More than 61 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, as per-capita income had fallen below what it had been a generation earlier. Most people, who still lived in the rural areas, were caught in a grinding poverty that led to malnutrition, increased infant mortality, and a withering life expectancy that was growing worse by the year. Zimbabwe had begun the decade ranked 111th in the United Nations Development Programme index. Eight years later, it had fallen to 130th.

  It was in the midst of this crisis, one morning in late November, that Stella Mesikano called our house. She was upset. She talked to Vita for quite a while. I could hear Vita shouting all the way down the hallway and across the living room.r />
  She finally hung up and stomped her way across the floor. “You know Kaseke, the deputy director down at Social Welfare?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stella says she just rejected our foster application. She wants Chipo returned to the orphanage immediately.”

  “She does what?”

  “Wants to send Chipo back!” Vita was leaning forward, yelling. “Thinks we bribed somebody. Told Stella our file was a ‘nonstarter.’ No way. No how.”

  “Bribed somebody?” I shouted back. “To do what, take home the sickest kid in the orphanage? So that we could go, what is it, four months, without our file going anywhere? This is bribery?”

  Vita was blinking back tears, which was only partially successful, because they were leaking out of the side of her eyes and down her face, hard, shiny things born of equal parts fury and desperation. She stalked back to the bedroom, slamming doors as she went. Chipo was back there, I knew, and Vita was closing every door between them and whoever might come.

  Shaking, I picked up the phone and made a call of my own. I had developed a friendly source in the department who would pass along what was really happening, instead of just what we were told. This source verified what Stella had said. Kaseke, it seemed, was developing a willful sort of amnesia. Now that Chipo was doing better, she seemed to forget that the child had been critically ill. She forgot that Dr. Paz had asked us to take her in. She told Stella that it was very curious that we had yet to be approved as foster parents, yet we had a child at our home. She began to suspect—yes, yes, it had to be true—that someone had sold Chipo to us.

  She stamped our file “rejected.” Refused to process paperwork. Called Stella and told her to have us return Chipo. Stella, looking at more kids than she could handle, told her that didn’t make sense. She was, in fact, bringing Kaseke to our house in two days for a meeting. That didn’t guarantee anything, she warned Vita; it just meant that we had another couple of days and a chance to argue our case.

  I couldn’t help but marvel at the way Kaseke had chosen to do this. It spoke volumes about how the department worked and how we were regarded. No one had said a word to us about alleged improprieties. No one had hinted there was something amiss. Kaseke, a short, heavyset woman, had smiled and been pleasant, at least to our faces, when we were in her office. Then one day she called Stella, who didn’t even work for the department, and told her to go get Chipo. Given her legal status as a court officer mandated to look out for abandoned children’s best interests, her position was all the more remarkable. While in the orphanage, Chipo had lost more than one-third of her body weight, been hospitalized three times, and nearly died. Since she had come home with us, her weight had nearly quadrupled and she had learned to smile and giggle, to touch and respond. That the court officer in charge of her welfare thought it was in her best interest to go back to the orphanage didn’t make any sense.

  But given my experience with the government’s information minister, with her, and with the sullen anti-Western editorials beginning to appear in the state-run media, it was becoming clear that Mugabe’s administration wanted very little to do with Americans, a position that would soon would be staked out in neon. There was no reason to doubt that she meant what she told Stella.

  Still, there was no way Chipo was going back to that orphanage, whatever Florence Kaseke thought. There is the way the world is supposed to work, and the way it often does. I’d seen enough countries falling into anarchy to know that sometimes people are forced into desperate circumstances when the law becomes elastic. But this was something I reported about, not something that I knew firsthand. I found myself amazed at the difference between the two now that I was on the other side. Either we would have to somehow persuade Kaseke to change her mind, or we would have to run with Chipo, an act that some people might refer to as kidnapping.

  In this light, we put together an emergency plan. It was very simple. I called a friend who lived across town. She was a single mom with young girls of her own and a flurry of nieces and nephews. I told her the situation. I asked if, in the event of a full-blown crisis, we could leave Chipo at her house for a short time. Hers would be a safe house of sorts, I explained.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ve got so many little girls around here, nobody will notice one more, anyway,” she said.

  I thanked her, hung up, and called a different friend. He went to the rural areas every weekend to visit his family. I repeated my explanation and request, this time asking if he might take Chipo home with him, a remote safe house and emergency option number two.

  “Not a problem,” he said.

  The next day, with the meeting with Kaseke less than twenty-four hours away, I talked to a third Zimbabwean friend about the next step of the plan. If things got nasty, she, Vita, and Chipo would go by bus to Beitbridge, the border crossing into South Africa. A number of market women crossed there every morning, buying trinkets and tourist goods, then bringing them back to sell in Harare the same day. Our friend would don the typical market-woman attire—wrapped skirt, long shirt, head wrap—and tie Chipo to her back, as if she were her sleeping child. Passports were seldom examined for the traders, and even if they were, the guard would not expect a child Chipo’s age to have documentation. In theory, they would cross the border first. Vita would make sure they were across safely, then do so herself. Our friend would walk into a bathroom stall and hand Chipo to Vita. Meanwhile, I would keep my pale face out of the mix, fly to Johannesburg, rent a car, and drive to pick up Vita and Chipo. Our friend would buy a few trinkets, walk back across the border, and take the bus home.

  “Nice plan,” she said, and then her lips pursed into a crease. “But what do you do then?”

  “Nice question,” I said. “I have no clue.”

  But to tell the truth, I didn’t think it would ever get to that. I was pretty sure that if Florence Kaseke tried to take Chipo at the end of our meeting, Vita would knock her flat with a haymaker to the chin, then stand over her like Muhammad Ali over Sonny Liston, daring her to get up and try it again.

  THE GATE BUZZER sounded a little after nine.

  Mavis had cleaned the house till it shone. Judah had the lawn trimmed and manicured. Vita had scrubbed Chipo so clean, she was nearly pink. I had set out the medical records, emergency placement documents, and other Social Welfare paperwork on the coffee table in chronological order.

  With the stage set, Vita asked Mavis to prepare tea—a required bit of social etiquette—and I buzzed open the gate. I stepped into the drive to welcome Stella and Kaseke as they pulled up in the orphanage van. I opened the doors for them, helping them step down to the pavement, my best southern manners at full throttle.

  A few moments later, we were all sitting in the living room around the circular coffee table. Mavis poured tea, and everyone tried to act as though they weren’t nervous, that this was something we did every morning. Chipo sat on Vita’s lap and pulled at her dreadlocks, giggling. Stella made small talk, admiring the palm trees outside the open glass doorway with a flutter of her hands. And then she said, “I was just telling Mrs. Kaseke how fat Chipo is now! Look at her little cheeks! When she left the orphanage, she was so tiny!”

  Vita seized on this opening with a recitation of Chipo’s dietary habits. I held up her growth chart, as if we were hosting an infomercial. I handed Kaseke the records from the Avenues Clinic, from the Trauma Center, bills that totaled more than the government spent on the entire orphanage for a month. I handed her the section 15’s, each signed and stamped fourteen days apart. I noted that they had been signed by two different social workers, Chapara and Sibanda, as well as her boss, Tony Mtero.

  Kaseke, smiling, distant, crossing and uncrossing her legs at the ankles, was polite but hardly swayed. It was clear in an instant that she was the person who administered the department on a daily basis, regardless of Mtero’s higher job title, and thus she was the person who carried the most weight. That wasn’t good, because she dismissed our little demon
stration of Chipo’s recovery.

  “But there are many children in need of care,” she was saying, sounding tired already. “Chipo is not the only one.”

  There was a pause. I could feel a web of heat spreading along my back to the base of my skull. There was a thin bead of sweat on the back of my neck.

  “And that’s why we work at Chinyaradzo,” I mumbled. Vita, as if on cue, reached onto the table, picked up copies of papers showing our donations of food and of medical and sanitary supplies, and handed them to Kaseke. I could see her face was beginning to have a glassy sheen of sweat as well, even through her makeup. “I’m very well aware of the level of needy children, Mrs. Kaseke,” I went on, gaining speed and confidence. “In fact, we’ll be happy to bring another child home. Two, if you like, since the need is so great. Tell you what. Why don’t you select the child, Mrs. Kaseke? You pick a child and we’ll foster it. The child can be in our house by nightfall.”

  Vita, leaning forward, arched her eyebrows at me but said nothing.

  I was sincere in this off-the-cuff offer, but it was also a not very subtle trap. If Kaseke sent a child home with us, then she would be vulnerable to bribery charges herself. Therefore she would have to defend us against such allegations in the future. It sounded good, but I didn’t hold out much hope, which was good, because it fell flat before the tea could cool off.

  “Ah, but that’s the thing, Mr. Tucker. You haven’t been approved as foster parents. The law is quite clear. No child in state custody can go to a home that is not approved in advance. You have not been approved, and yet you have a child. Many parents would like to have a child but do not. This looks very improper, for wealthy Americans to just have a child.”