Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  “And where are these parents, Mrs. Kaseke, who are lining up to adopt children?” Vita said, with some heat now. “From what I read of your remarks in the Sunday Mail, the government is out of money to care for children, and you admonish parents to come forward. We did so. Now here you are this morning, trying to take a child back into an orphanage that you acknowledge has too many children.”

  “But you are not Zimbabweans. The adoption law for foreigners—”

  “Mrs. Kaseke, we have never applied to adopt Chipo, so let’s not talk about our passports,” I said. “Let’s stick to the historical record that is laid out in the documents in front of you. What those Zimbabwean government documents show,” I said, pronouncing each word slowly for emphasis, “is that we didn’t ask to bring Chipo home. Vita rushed her to the hospital, not to our house. The doctor at that institution asked us to take her in, and your office approved it. Then we had one home study. Then we had another. There is a legal mechanism to keep children in emergency placement shelters, as it turns out, but we didn’t know that until your department told us about it. Those orders are valid for fourteen days, and three different officers in your department have signed them. There is no limit on the number that can be granted and there is no statutory provision that the shelter must be the home of an approved foster parent. Meanwhile, we have applied to foster and have provided every bit of documentation Mrs. Sibanda has requested. The only medical opinion in the record is from Dr. Paz, whose letter says Chipo should be here—and specifically not at Chinyaradzo.”

  As the conversation went on, and on some more, Chipo wriggled from lap to lap. She bounced on Vita’s lap, mine, then Stella’s, and then Stella handed her to Kaseke. Chipo then did a very odd thing, which sounds invented but is not. When she sat on Kaseke’s lap, she stopped giggling and smiling. It was a shift in mood as sudden as a door slamming. She just stared up at her, almost without blinking. Vita noticed it, then Stella, and then me.

  “Hey, Chip, how about a smile over there?” Vita called, trying to lighten a very sharply worded discussion.

  Kaseke tried to laugh. Then she tried to ignore it. Then she handed the little girl back to Stella, unnerved, and Chipo went right back to her happy-girl status. It was uncanny, and Vita and I exchanged looks. Kaseke didn’t stay another five minutes. It was as if she thought Chipo had put a hex on her. She got up so abruptly that she left without any word on Chipo’s status, leaving the situation almost as ambiguous as it was at the beginning of the meeting. She had never asked us about the bribery charges.

  I followed them back to the van in the driveway, opened the door for Kaseke, and closed it behind her, smiling pleasantly, waving goodbye as they backed out of the gate. I walked over to Herbert, the guard during the day. I asked him to get a good look at the van and the people inside, particularly the woman in the passenger seat. He said he did.

  “Good,” I said. “Because I want you never to let that truck or that woman in this place again.”

  Things were about to get unpleasant.

  11

  RAIN

  THE RAINS descended on Harare then, washing out power lines, phone connections, and television reception. Ditches were turned into midafternoon streams, and water dripped from trees and arose in a spray from passing cars. Thunder would boom seemingly at the treetops, a whoomp that would make you duck and would leave teacups rattling in their saucers. Dogs scampered for cover. Then a crack of lightning hit with the force of a detonation, and the windows vibrated and the lights flickered and died, leaving only the sound of rain drumming on the tin roof.

  In these desultory afternoons, we threw open our curtains and watched the rain roll across the yard in sheets, bringing a malaise of depression and uncertainty and poverty and the sense of being a thousand miles away from the rest of the world. In Rome or Manhattan people were going to work in offices and chatting on the Internet and having cappuccino. Here the phones were down, the country was collapsing, and diversions were scarce. Bookstore shelves were lined with cheap paperbacks, celebrity memoirs, and last year’s novels that had been popular with distant, richer people. Hollywood movies of the previous season played in strip-mall theaters, the last stop on the international circuit of cinematic backwaters and afterthoughts. Cafes near them would be jammed late on weekend nights, echoing with the sound of bright chatter and clinking glasses. A friend in Egypt bound up a package to send to me, but Cairo post office clerks refused to accept it. They looked at the labeled destination and said, “There is no such place as Zimbabwe.” A supervisor ordered it opened and inspected for contraband.

  Our rooms were filled with slender candles and fat candles and tall candles and short candles; their yellow light flickered in the evening gloom. Chipo would watch them, mesmerized.

  And still the rains fell.

  The swimming pool looked as if it were being sprayed by machine-gun bursts of raindrops. Palm trees twisted sideways in the gusts. The driving rain turned into ropes so thick I could scarcely see beyond our jacarandas. On the hillside above us, the rains built into a lake behind our boundary wall. The water was one foot high and then two, three, and then four, and then the wall toppled into our driveway in a cascade of rushing water and shattering brick.

  In early December, I sent my editors this e-mail: “The local papers say Harare has been hit with the worst electrical storms in memory. Some sections of town, on priority circuits, are fine. But our phone lines are out or garbled beyond comprehension. E-mail, faxes, and phone calls have been impossible. Today our electricity has been out for fourteen hours. I am writing this on my last few minutes of computer battery power and sending via satellite phone, in which the batteries are also fading.”

  We ate in restaurants and took Chipo to the town’s only bowling alley—the rattle and noise brought out round after round of giggles. Vita was the lead organizer of a fund-raiser to pay school fees for impoverished girls; it was an auction of decorated Christmas trees. We bought one for Chinyaradzo. Along with a television my visiting parents gave the older children, this qualified us as the season’s largest patron of the nation’s main orphanage.

  “Children’s home hard hit by serious financial problems,” read a story on page four of the Herald. “Economic hardships and the AIDS scourge had seen the number of children seeking assistance shooting to unprecedented levels,” the paper reported in its trademark style of fractured tenses. “The home relies on the generosity of the public and companies especially at Christmas. However, this year the home did not receive a lot of support.”

  Stella was quoted as saying they were now diverting children to other orphanages. Florence Chitauro, the minister of public service, labor, and social welfare, said the federal monthly allocation per child, then the equivalent of about $3.90, was all the government could afford.

  Mugabe made his annual state-of-the-nation address. He said the country’s problems were due to El Niño effects on the weather, thus affecting the tobacco harvest, and also due to a conspiracy of financial speculators that was driving the nation’s currency down.

  He didn’t mention the bodies stacked up like firewood at the morgue.

  There were times, in fact, when AIDS activists said it was still difficult to get most people in the country to adapt their habits to the new reality. Western companies filled warehouses with condoms that could be bought for the equivalent of two pennies apiece. In Harare, activists and AIDS workers said it was almost impossible to get men to use them consistently. “Most everybody in Zimbabwe knows what AIDS is and how you get it,” said Andrew Mutandwa, a prominent health-care journalist. “The problem is, so few people act on it.”

  Irene Ncube, a tall, thin, pretty Ndebele woman, cut my hair every few weeks when I stopped in the salon where she worked. She would ask me where I had been traveling, or relate hilarious stories about her teenage daughter, and our conversations often made my appointments take much longer than a simple trim required. She was single and routinely castigated men for their
carelessness when she talked about the dating scene. As she cut the back of my hair one day, I asked if she was being “careful” and if she’d had an HIV test. Her expression in the mirror looked as if I’d made a vulgar proposition.

  “Neel! Condoms? An HIV test? Do you think I am a prostitute?” she whispered, shocked, in my ear. “What if it came back positive? I couldn’t work anymore. I’d give up and die in two days. I’d be disgraced and then I’d be dead.”

  A few weeks later, I traveled to Rwanda. In the northwestern province of Ruhengeri, near the heavily forested border with Congo, more than ten thousand people had been killed in the past two years. Across the border, the rebellion raged on. Hrvoje Hranski, an Associated Press reporter whom I’d known since Bosnia, was shot through the chest while reporting in Kisangani. He was airlifted out and survived. He was the fourth Western journalist to be shot in Africa in recent months. One, Myles Tierney, had been killed in Sierra Leone.

  In Ruhengeri, the Tutsi-dominated army swept everyone out of the hills, some 450,000 people, into “resettlement villages’’ in the valleys. The people could return to work their hillside fields in the day. After dark, the hills were a free-fire zone.

  At dusk, the roadways were filled with a hushed procession of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, farm tools on their heads. Soldiers eyed them closely; few people spoke. Interviews seemed to be out of the question, although we had been given written permission by the local prefect to conduct them.

  As we drove slowly through the crowd, one young woman in a simple green dress agreed to hop into our car. She lay down on the floor of the backseat so that she could not be seen. She talked as the driver moved the car forward slowly, one eye on the rearview mirror. I looked straight ahead and took notes. Her name was Anonsiata Mufankusi, I scribbled, she was Hutu, she was twenty-four. She had been run out of her mountain home a month ago. Her father and three brothers had been killed, she didn’t know by whom—it was dark and the men were not in uniform. “They were killing everyone in the area and burning the houses. I ran. I can’t say who the killers were.” We came to a crowded section of people on the road, and I leaned over and opened the back door. She slipped out quickly into the throng, the car never stopping.

  Four miles later, the guard at the camp gate stopped our car. He demanded we produce the woman. We had seen no soldiers, there were no telephones, and no car had passed. I cursed to myself, keeping my eyes locked on the soldier’s, and wondered how he could have known. I gave him a slightly puzzled smile and lied, saying I didn’t know whom he was talking about. The driver and interpreter, a Kigali man who used the name of Charles Africa, was sweating as the soldier barked commands back at me. He turned the car around and started to go back. I spoke sharply. I was furious that he had done the soldier’s bidding. I said we would drive around for twenty minutes and come back, shaking our heads, saying that we couldn’t find her. Charles didn’t reply. “There she is,” he said, finally spotting her green dress along the roadside. She got in the car. She smiled and said it was nothing. She waved as she went in the guard shack. The guard told us to leave. I said I had given the lady a ride there, I would give her a ride back. He ignored me. I pulled out the piece of paper from the prefect. The soldier turned and spoke sharply to Charles in Kinyarwanda, the principal language of Rwanda, then unslung his rifle and pulled it into the crook of his arm. Charles put the car in drive.

  We left. There was nothing else to do.

  We went south to Nyamata. More than 1,100 people had flocked into the village’s Catholic church for sanctuary during the genocide four years earlier. The Interahamwe slaughtered them with machetes and machine guns.

  Now their skulls were lined up, shelf after shelf, in an underground vault behind the church. In a side room, there was a charred husk of a woman. There appeared to be the remains of some broad object that had been forced into her vagina. She appeared to be clutching the remains of an infant. They had been burned alive.

  There was a boy walking around the grounds. His name was Casius Niyonsaba. He was ten years old, Tutsi, and had a six-inch scar across the back of his head. His mother, father, and three sisters had been hacked to death in the church, just behind the altar. He took my hand and showed me where. He lived because his mother had fallen on top of him, he said. The machete blow that ended her life went through her body and sliced through the back of his head, leaving an indentation across his skull.

  We drove a few miles to another church that had been similarly attacked. The skulls were in rows—51 rows, 11 deep—in a covered shed. The church’s interior had been left untouched as a type of grisly memorial. The floors were filled with rotted sacks of grain, decaying sacks of clothes. There were broken bricks and bones and the fetid compost of dozens of bodies.

  The caretaker, a slender, serious man in a ripped pair of trousers and an old shirt, led us inside. We stepped on bare spots of the floor that were not strewn with debris. The pews had been ripped out, but the slats that had supported them were still there. That was the way to walk above the remains on the floor.

  We stood on the slats and the caretaker, who had survived the attack, told me the tale. I shifted my weight and a foot slipped off one plank, but I continued to write notes, racing to keep up with his account. I rocked my foot back and forth. It began bumping against something.

  At first, I thought it was a chicken’s rotted bones that had somehow not yet collapsed. Then I leaned down and peered closer. I blinked. It was the splintered remains of what appeared to be an infant’s rib cage. My toe was resting just inside, and I had been twitching my foot against the bowed ribs.

  I went outside then, and sat on the hood of the car until the photographer finished his work. Then we drove back through the dusty roads to Kigali. There wasn’t a lot to say.

  IT WAS IN this season of unending rain and melancholy that a brown envelope was delivered to our house early one afternoon. It was from Dr. Paz’s office, and inside were the results of Chipo’s HIV test.

  Vita and I looked at the envelope as if it were a snake that had slithered onto the kitchen table. The enthusiasm we had felt in the previous weeks, when Chipo ate and ate and began to breathe more rhythmically, deflated like a balloon that someone had let the air out of. We knew the odds. Now we had to face them. There was no sound in the room, and the clock on the wall seemed to stop. I saw my hand reach across the table and pick up the envelope. I turned it over once, twice. My head throbbed. Then I ripped it open in a rush and tore out the piece of paper inside. I scanned the series of lines and forms and confusing medical language until my eyes came to rest on one word. It seemed to be iridescent.

  Negative.

  I threw the paper in the air with a shout. Vita doubled over, her face in her hands, and then she burst out laughing. In the celebration that followed—we ran around the house holding Chipo aloft, as if she’d just homered to win the World Series—I wondered if the woman who had given birth to her was still alive. Perhaps she had AIDS and knew it. Perhaps she had abandoned her for some other reason. The question lingered, then faded away, lost in the giggles and shouting and the burst of joy that seemed, for the afternoon, to shower over us like yellow rose petals falling from the sky.

  12

  PERSONA NON GRATA

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS afterward, a sense of relief washed over me in what almost felt like muscle spasms. I would stand at the Dutch door of the kitchen, the top half swung open, watching the rain pelt down onto the brick courtyard, and my right shoulder would start twitching. Then it would shift over to my back. It wasn’t painful. It was like unwinding the tuning knob on a guitar and watching the strings uncoil. It was the end of the year, it was Christmas, and I just couldn’t find it in me to care about the job that had taken me all over the world, the work that had turned my naive childhood dreams into an adult reality. I walked around the house, holding Chipo high above my head as though she were a diminutive superhero, swooping down over the couch and behind the plant
s, and she would laugh and laugh. We bought a Christmas tree. We shipped presents. We met friends for dinner, for nights out dancing. I could sleep for three or four hours without waking.

  In the office, I kept staring at the test result as if it were a winning lottery ticket. All of the problems she had had, the pneumonia and the weight loss and so on, were also symptoms of AIDS, and it just seemed such a long shot that they added up to negative. We had her tested again and again, went for checkup after checkup, and she was just fine. It made us wonder about the high mortality rate at the orphanage, and how often something other than AIDS, something preventable, was actually the cause of death.

  I happily did a story on Zimbabwe’s renowned sculptors, whose works in soapstone and granite were fetching world-class prices in Europe and North America, then headed back to Rwanda for a reporting trip after the New Year. And therefore I missed the story in a small weekly tabloid in Harare, initially of dubious veracity, that would mark Zimbabwe’s descent into political, economic, and legal chaos. Or, more properly, it was the government reaction to that story that would have so many implications for the country, and for our chances of adopting Chipo.

  On January 10, 1999, an article appeared in the Standard reporting that twenty-three officers of Zimbabwe’s army had been arrested for plotting a coup attempt against President Mugabe. The story was written by Ray Choto, who had once applied to work as my assistant and whom I knew both socially and professionally.

  Ray’s story said that the cadre of officers had been planning to oust Mugabe because of his one-man decision to throw the army into the Congolese civil war in August. Mugabe’s decision had been timely. The rebels had been marching on the Kinshasa airport the day Ann and I were there, but Zimbabwean troops and aircraft rushed in and turned back the advance. The triumph of that moment had faded, however, and now the army appeared to be stuck in a drawn-out battle over the vast reaches of eastern Congo.