by Neely Tucker
That left us seven months.
I swore under my breath. We had planned to stay here at least five years, to buy a house. I had planned to write at least one book on African affairs, possibly even staying after my posting was finished.
All of that was in shambles now, as was a good chunk of my career—I was no longer ignoring a story in my own backyard, I was running from it. I had come to travel as little as possible, just forty days in 1999, about one-fifth of my usual work pace. This left us in something of a quandary. My paper’s parent corporation, Knight Ridder, had taken over the Africa bureau after the Detroit Free Press had sent me here. They had no obligation to provide me with a job after my posting expired—and since I had been consumed with Chipo’s adoption, they were less than impressed by my performance. In theory, I was to go back to the Free Press, but I had not worked in the city for seven years and had had little contact with anyone there since the corporate takeover of my foreign posting. The paper had been decimated by a strike in my absence, and I was now such a nonentity that the last time I’d gone into the building, the security guard at the front desk had no idea who I was—my name was no longer on the employee list—and would not let me pass. The editors upstairs made no mention of a job waiting for me.
The Washington Post had called about a job nine months earlier, offering a ticket from Harare to Washington to discuss the position. But we had not been approved as foster parents at that stage. Our prospects had seemed so bleak that I told them it would be misleading for me to even make the trip, as that might imply some possibility of us getting out of Zimbabwe. “I hope you won’t think that the Post just calls once,” the recruiting director said, in a tone that implied that my phone wouldn’t be ringing anytime in the next decade.
Looking for something, anything, I had put together a book proposal while on leave. It fell flat. I wrote a couple of short stories while stuck in one airport or another and shipped them to three small magazines. Nice, the editors said, but not for us.
In short, as I boarded a plane for my trip back to the United States, my once bright career had deteriorated into a dead-end job in a Third World country with no prospect of another. Worse, I had been to the United States once in the past four years—and I now had twenty-one days to convince someone there to hire me within twenty-eight weeks.
It was not a happy flight across the Atlantic, and I was feeling pretty low by the time I made two connecting flights and was finally aboard a small prop plane descending into rural Mississippi. As the plane came in over the pastures, I could see my parents’ car in the parking lot. Chipo and Vita came running down the corridor as soon as I walked into the tiny airport, and I dropped to my knees and let Chipo knock me over backward. I had not seen them in more than two months. Vita looked fabulous, rested and in great shape. Chipo had her hair in beautiful long braids. I swept her up into the air and spun her around, and she collapsed against my shoulder in a gigantic hug. “Dadn!” she kept saying, over and over. My father rounded us all into the car, and my mother had a table full of home-cooked food waiting at the house for what amounted to a family reunion.
After dinner, my father and I retired to the back porch rocking chairs to sip whiskey and talk about the prospects for Mississippi State’s football season—an issue of paramount importance in that part of the world—while my mother and Vita chatted as though they had been best friends for years. Chipo went from group to group. She would crawl up into my father’s lap and sit there while he rocked back and forth, her head against his chest. Then she would run into the house, banging on my mother’s piano, just as I had done when little, and then scamper around the same yard I had grown up playing in. Later, I settled her into the swing my father had built, and pushed her back and forth, back and forth. It was that in-between time of year, late summer or early fall, and Vita and I listened to the soft evening breeze pass through the trees above, sharing a drink, content to soak up each other’s presence and conversation. My home state had changed a great deal in my long absence, I was discovering, and while it wasn’t perfect, no one hassled us either, even when we went into the local Wal-Mart, hand in hand, to buy ice cream for dessert.
But the next morning, our talk turned to our diminishing array of options, and things grew somber. I packed an overnight bag with two suits and a pair of white shirts. I kissed Vita and Chipo. And then I was gone again, bouncing from city to city, airport to airport. I talked with editors at major newspapers and book agents, looking for any kind of opening. Two weeks later, after tap-dancing for anyone who would have me, I was so worn out that I was nauseous most every morning. At a pay phone in Manhattan, just across from Central Park, I called the Washington Post on a lark, asking if they’d like for me to stop in when I came down to D.C., even though I had refused to come in to talk to them eight months earlier. To my surprise, they said sure. I was on a train the next morning. Vita and Chipo flew into Washington to meet me, as we would leave from there to go back to Harare. I went through the interview process at the Post the next day, but I wasn’t optimistic, and kept my suit coat on because I was so nervous that I was sweating through my shirt.
Then I went back to my hotel room and waited two days for a phone call, from anyone, anywhere. None came. With nothing else to do, we began the long trek home. We loaded up the baggage, drove out to Dulles International Airport, and boarded an overnight flight to London. I was downright morose by the time we made the connection for the next leg of the flight, another overnighter to Harare. When we finally walked in the house, some thirty-six hours after we’d left Washington, the answering machine was beeping. It was my mother, and she was terribly upset.
The day we left, my father had been burning a pile of cut trees and branches, called “brush” in country parlance, in the small pasture behind the house. He was using a chain saw to cut up the larger limbs so that they could be tossed on the fire. He didn’t notice the machine was dripping gas over his shirt, pants, and shoes.
After a while, he set the chainsaw down and dragged a few limbs over to the fire. He stood beside the blaze to throw them in. The gas on his clothes drew in the flame, then ignited with a whoosh. His skin went with it. He was sixty-six years old, he was alone in the pasture, and he was turning into a torch. He looked at himself aflame. He didn’t panic. He didn’t even say anything. He took off his glasses and set them down on a stump. Then he pulled off his burning clothes. He lay down on the ground and rolled over. The flesh on his legs was still burning. He scooped up loose dirt and packed it on the flames until they died. Then he stood up, still smoking, and walked to the back door.
“Betty,” he called inside, “could you bring me a towel? I think we may need to go to the hospital for a minute.”
He had second- and third-degree burns from his ankles to his hips. He had patches of equally severe burns on his arms. At the hospital, he never cried out. The emergency room staff was in awe. I learned of this over the phone, shaking my head at the old man’s grit, but I wasn’t at all sure that he would live. We had barely slept on the consecutive overnight flights, and I sat up again this night, making plane reservations in case I should have to turn around and go back. Somewhere around 3 A.M., I typed up a letter for the Department of Social Welfare.
We were in Kaseke’s office six hours later. My temper was ragged and my patience finished. In our family, Vita is the one quickest to anger. She can turn on a rude store clerk in a heartbeat. When I finally go off, though, it’s one for the ages. I got arrested in Warsaw for shoving a cop (who had insulted Vita), I had to be pulled away from a twenty-something white Zimbabwean kid in the bowling alley (same reason) and, when Vita once needed surgery, I read the riot act to a doctor in Detroit (um, see above) in such fashion that the hospital put Vita in a private post-op room that looked like a hotel suite. They sent her flowers every day.
I was now at a similar pitch. In fact, I was just damn through with the lot of them. Our application to adopt had not budged in nine months (so much for my s
ource’s advice to sit back and rest assured the department would process the application). It still sat in a brown folder, one of hundreds, if not thousands, of files stacked on desks around the department, mired in the foster section paperwork. I was so livid that morning that my foot was tapping the floor, my fingers were drumming on Kaseke’s desk, and I was pretty sure I had lost the ability to blink.
Skipping the formalities, I told Kaseke of my father’s accident, that his life was in danger—and then an idea came spinning down from the void. Keeping in mind Beth’s winning example, I said this meant we would have to quit my posting and return to the United States as soon as possible. Family ties. Son needed. Surely she understood.
She expressed sympathy for my father. Then she sighed deeply and told me there was nothing she could do.
“There have been charges of bribery against you while you were gone,” she said. “The matter is very serious. There was this matter last year, and now it has arisen again. It is very, ah, unseemly. If you have paid no one, as you say, it is curious that people keep telling us you have.”
I bit the tip of my tongue, sharp enough to hurt.
“Mrs. Kaseke, I’m as tired of these allegations as you must be. As I told Mr. Munautsi, whom am I supposed to be bribing, and what am I supposed to be getting for it? You have seen Vita and me in the hallway here for hours on end, because your staff won’t make appointments, won’t return our calls, and won’t keep regular office hours. It has been fifteen months since Chipo came to our house. Fifteen. We have had home studies by two different social workers. You yourself investigated this matter, and yet our case has not budged. This is not what happens when people are bribed. Things tend to happen then. Obviously, these charges are being made by someone who doesn’t know us, or this case, at all.”
“That is the problem, Mr. Tucker. It is actually someone who knows you quite well. Ah, it is your friends Heather and Steve. They have been in your home many times. I believe you have been to theirs. Heather has told me a great deal, and Steve was very clear about the bribes, I am sorry to say for you. There must be an investigation, one that is very thorough. I cannot advance any application that has these charges.”
“Heather?” Vita nearly shouted. Kaseke had played her cards well.
Heather and Steve had indeed been to our house many times, and we in theirs. Heather had an adolescent daughter by a previous marriage. Steve was trying to formally adopt her. We knew that, of course, but it had not really registered. In fact, we had distanced ourselves from them after a series of incidents. There were a few unpleasantries, but the main event had been a reception I hosted for my editor, Joyce, when she had visited the year before. It was an evening affair, filled with an array of Zimbabweans and expatriates who worked at a wide variety of professions, from art gallery owners to political activists to architects. There were sixty or seventy people milling about, sipping wine and chatting. I thought the evening was going rather well when Nevio, my friend the cafe owner, mentioned that Steve was raising hell on the patio. I stepped outside, where the air was noticeably tense. Steve had been loudly proclaiming racist views of black Americans and Africans. It didn’t seem to matter that his wife was Zambian and his audience entirely black. “I don’t know who’s worse,” I was told he blared, “idiots who run these countries or black Americans who show up and think they know something. There’s nothing more arrogant and ignorant than a black American in Africa.”
Not surprisingly, people began leaving. By the time I had learned of the incident, it was pretty much over. “You’re all right with me,” said Jamar Evans, a friend from Texas who is black and was working in Harare, “but you need to look out for the white boys you run with.”
Heather, meanwhile, had too much to drink and was holding court among a small group of women inside. At that time she was making clothes for Grace Mugabe, the country’s new First Lady, who was half the age of her husband. She had arisen, amongst great scandal, from being one of the president’s secretaries to being his wife. She was awkward in public and extravagantly overdressed for the simplest of occasions. She shopped in South Africa and the capitals of Europe. Her trademark large hats were parodied around town. She wasn’t popular, to say the least. Heather—very attractive, always impeccably dressed, and with a walk that leaned toward a sashay—thought her high-profile client was a laughingstock.
“She’s a simple country girl, a peasant,” she told the women.
Then she went out to their car, an open bottle of wine in hand, and passed out in the front seat.
We had not seen them since that evening, politely declining invitations for dinner or get-togethers. We had no interest in being anywhere around Heather when her gossip got back to State House, and I didn’t sip whiskey with men who held Steve’s view of the world.
And now, we learned, we were targets of their anger.
“We haven’t seen them in ages,” Vita told Kaseke. “Heather doesn’t know a damn thing about Chipo, much less our paperwork.”
Kaseke smiled, looked down, held up her hands. “Ah, I am so sorry. But you must understand, we must investigate.”
We got in the car. My hands were shaking as I put the key in the ignition. Heather would have been sure to oh-so-casually mention she made clothes for the First Lady to Kaseke, playing up her visits to State House. That would give her charges extra clout.
“This has to be some sort of bullshit,” I said. “Kaseke is twisting something. Let me call Heather and see what’s going on.”
I walked in the house and dialed her number without slowing down to take off my jacket. She picked up the phone.
“Hey, Heather, I’m sorry to bother you, but you won’t believe the nonsense I just heard,” I said. “I just wanted to bounce it off you. Florence Kaseke told me just now that you and Steve were down there saying we paid people for Chipo. I know that can’t be right, but I wanted to get it straight how she is under that impression.”
There was a pause.
“I don’t know that this is as untrue as you think,” she said.
“I need you to tell me what that means,” I said, struggling to keep the tremor out of my voice.
“We have been trying for Steve to adopt my daughter, as you know,” she said. “It has been three years! Three years! I went to Kaseke’s office, and she didn’t even know where our file was. Can you imagine! I told her of your case and how you had no problems, you came and got a baby and that was that. It makes me mad, when we Africans are made to sit in the backseat to you Americans. Steve was furious, I tell you. He went to Margaret Tsiga and yelled at her for some time. You are paying her off—oh, we know. That is fine for you, but it pushes our case to the back.”
“Heather,” I said, snapping a pencil in two, “who is Margaret Tsiga?”
“The adoption officer, of course.”
“Heather, goddammit, our file has never made it to adoptions. We are still in foster care. I don’t know who this woman is. She could step on my toes and I—wait a minute. Three years? How many times have you been down there? To the department?”
“I told you. I went the other day.”
“No, I mean before that. Like in the whole three years.”
“I filled out the form and gave it to them. Then nothing happened. I had almost forgotten about it. I went by the other day to pick it up, and that’s when they couldn’t find it.”
“Are you saying you’ve been down there two or three times in three years?”
“One or two times more than that. I don’t count such things. I mean, one fills out the form and picks it up. It’s very simple.”
I was trying very hard to keep my temper in check. I kept telling myself silently Make the smart play. Think two steps ahead. Picture a good outcome. What kept coming to mind instead was an image of whopping Heather over the head with a baseball bat.
I lowered my voice and spoke as evenly as possible.
“Heather. We have been to that building more than thirty-five times. Th
is year. More than sixty-five in all. I do count such things. I log them with fucking notations. They have lost our file, just like they lost yours. We got ours back because Vita crawled around on her hands and knees for two days. They don’t do anything unless you make them do it, Heather. You put your file in a couple years ago and never called in? Of course it went missing.”
She harrumphed into the phone.
The noise seemed like a shove in the chest.
“Do you know, woman, that you have just put my daughter’s life at risk? That you just gave them ammunition to put her in an orphanage? That she will likely not survive if that happens? You know they hate Western journalists. You’ve seen the anti-American marches. If you thought we were doing something wrong, for chrissake, why didn’t you complain to us? How does it help you to have Chipo taken away?”
“Don’t be a fool,” she said.
“Me? Did you just fucking say that I was the fool in this conversation? Jesus Christ. Put Steve on the phone. I want him to say to my face what he’s been saying behind my back.”
“He’s not here.”
“Fine. I’ll call the motherfucker at the office.”
“Steve will not take any call from you.”
The line stopped me. It suddenly became clear, in a Zen-like moment of clarity, that they might have been among our enemies within the department all along. I suddenly remembered a day months earlier. We had seen Heather in Kaseke’s office. She had stood up to go when we walked in, saying in passing that she was getting their adoption finished. Had she whispered in Kaseke’s ear then? Was that why our file had been stuck for so long? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Whatever the case, there was no good outcome to be had. I was ready to give it to her in a double dose—but, I realized, I couldn’t. The humiliating fact was that she had more pull than we did. Making her angry was only going to make the situation worse.
