Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  It was in the midst of this planning, on a quiet Sunday morning in early November, as we all waited for the rainy season to descend upon us, that most expatriates and a good number of Zimbabweans woke up to wonder if the head of state had gone slightly out of his mind.

  “Blair Using Gay-Gangster Tactics: Mugabe,” screamed the headline stripped across the front page in the Sunday Mail, the government paper’s Sunday edition. The proudly homophobic president was accusing the British prime minister of hiring homosexual thugs to force him to change his stance on Zimbabwean land reform. Britain’s intelligence wing, MI-5, was said to be lending a secret, guiding hand.

  This remarkable claim arose from an incident on the street outside the St. James Court Hotel in London, where Mugabe was staying. It hit on a popular refrain for him, as he had been saying for years that homosexuals were “lower than dogs and pigs,” that they were not deserving of human rights, and so on. This vitriol had alarmed gay-rights activists the world over. So when he began to step into his limousine outside the St. James, four activists from a group called Outrage ran at him. Led by Peter Tatchell, they said they were going to “arrest” Mugabe for human rights violations. His bodyguards were inattentive or not present; Tatchell’s crew got a hand on Mugabe before he was hustled into the limo.

  Mugabe translated this publicity stunt to be a coordinated attack from the top echelons of Britain’s new Labor government, orchestrated by Tony Blair himself.

  Mugabe had scheduled a constitutional referendum for February. If passed, the new constitution would allow Mugabe to “take back” the land from white Zimbabwean farmers—most of them British descendants—at will, without paying anyone for it. Britain, like most everyone else, said this was unconstitutional and outside the rule of law. Mugabe said Blair was dispatching homosexuals to harass him into backing off the policy. He repeated the “gay gangster” allegations to reporters during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Durban, which grouped fifty-two national delegations from what had once been part of the British Empire.

  The whole episode was so daft, so bizarre, that most diplomats and journalists in Zimbabwe—and a good number of citizens—simply threw back their heads and howled with laughter. It was the joke of every dinner party, every afternoon braai. The state-run paper printed an editorial telling citizens it wasn’t patriotic to laugh at the president, but nobody cared. Tony Blair and his Gangster Gays! It sounded like a garage band in drag.

  Edgar Langeveldt, Zimbabwe’s first stand-up comic, picked up on the mood in his one-man show at Harare’s Seven Arts Theatre later that month. He was colored, the regional term for mixed-race, and his often raunchy act encompassed song and dance, female impersonations, skits in which a bumbling black detective investigates the murder of an obnoxious Rhodesian housewife (she wore lime green bell-bottoms, made jokes about blacks, and danced around the kitchen to Abba; you felt she had it coming). In a taped monologue that played on a huge screen while he changed clothes during one skit, he appeared as Grace Mugabe—but all that could be seen on the screen was one of her trademark huge hats. It obliterated everything else. The audience gasped, then laughed so hard you couldn’t hear the rest of the act. No one had done such in-your-face comedy in Zimbabwe, and certainly not about the president. I did a feature story about Langeveldt, interviewing him over a late lunch before the last show.

  Not everyone was laughing.

  Langeveldt went to a popular bar a few weeks later. Several men approached. They didn’t say anything. They just beat him senseless. His jaw was grotesquely fractured. He could barely speak, much less perform, for weeks.

  Needless to say, at this point in the story there were no arrests.

  That wasn’t all. On November 25, three local journalists received death threats. Ray Choto, one of the authors of the alleged coup story who was still awaiting trial, got a small package at his house. It contained a toy, two bullets, and a note: “See you in heaven before Y2K.” Basildon Peta, news editor at the Financial Gazette and head of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, opened his mailbox to find three bullets and a note: “Watch out or you are dead.” Ibbo Mandaza of the Zimbabwe Mirror, that had published the story about the soldier’s head being returned from the Congo, got the threat by phone.

  “Damn it,” I told Vita. “I’ve got to go somewhere, get out of town. This could blow up any day. They could say they didn’t like the story about Langeveldt. They could say anything they want. Sooner or later, they’re going to come after foreign journalists, and they’re not going to care about an excuse.”

  19

  ON THE RECORD

  I BEGAN setting up logistics for one last trip to Nigeria when Margaret Tsiga called. She asked me to come into her office the next day. Her voice sounded tense, and I could feel my pulse quicken to a steady throb.

  “It’s the police clearance,” she said when I walked in the following morning. “Or the lack of it, perhaps. There’s no record police ever investigated this case. There’s no history of any search for the people who abandoned Chipo.”

  “But I talked to the officers who conducted the search,” I said. “I spent almost an entire day with them. They told me about the investigation. There has to be a record. I mean, that’s the only reason we could bring Chipo home. They had just completed their investigation and closed the file.”

  She shrugged. “Well, it isn’t here now, and we must have it. It’s really one of the most important documents in the whole package, you understand. Without it, Chipo is not legally an orphan, and therefore you have no right to adopt her. As far as the law is concerned, she could be kidnapped.”

  “I don’t believe this. I know those guys filed that report. Mr. Mtero called out there himself to confirm the details. Chipo has been with us for sixteen months. They spent six months going over our case before approving us as foster parents. The judge approved it. Then Munautsi spent another ten months before he forwarded it to you. And now you’re saying the department has never had any evidence that Chipo was abandoned?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps the notice was there and slipped out of the file. Perhaps the police wrote it out but never mailed it in. In any event, it isn’t in your file now, which is the only thing that matters.”

  She pulled out a piece of paper and began writing. When she finished, she pushed the piece of paper across the desk. The note, written in cursive on a sheet of pulp paper, was addressed to the police officer in charge of the district where Chipo had been found. It said there were “indications the case had been investigated,” which I guessed I had just made, but it stated she had no official clearance to continue.

  “Before we proceed with this application to adopt we would like to know if investigations have been completed to find the natural parents. We would like for you to kindly confirm in writing,” it continued. After I read to the end, I handed it back to her. She stamped it with the department’s official seal, folded it into an envelope, sealed it, and gave it back to me.

  “I would like for you to take this to that police station,” she said. “See if you can convince them to look it up. If I mail this, they might answer it promptly. Or it might get put on the bottom of a stack of papers and be lost. I don’t know what they’ll tell you when you go out there. But I can’t do anything else without it.”

  I rolled out just after dawn the next day, clearing Harare’s light traffic in half an hour. I turned onto a four-lane road that led out of town and kept going as it hit the outskirts and turned into a two-lane blacktop. Harare’s urban sprawl quickly gives over to broad ranches, commercial farms, and open grasslands, and I was soon deep into the countryside. The truck had no working radio and I drove in silence, just the wind rushing past the open windows. It was a beautiful morning, the temperature in the mid-seventies, a light breeze and brilliant sunshine. I dangled my right arm out of the window, still bemused by driving on the “wrong” side of the road. Several hours later, I turned off the highway onto a gravel road, putting up the window
halfway to keep out the dust. The fields were poorer now, more weeds, fewer crops. The trees came up close on the road, the branches forming a canopy overhead. The miles rolled by, slower, in thicker clouds of dust. There was a turn to the right, where the road became more washed out and rutted. There was a turn to the left across a narrow bridge that spanned a dried-up creek bed. Then I was back on a paved road in the tall, waving grasslands. The police station lay just ahead in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees.

  Several buildings were clustered together in the shade, as the station provided living quarters for many of its officers. The office itself was a one-story concrete block building painted a watery blue. It was set on a concrete slab, which formed a walkway around its perimeter. The roof, red and rusty, was made of tin. I walked across the gravel parking lot to the building at the front. There were perhaps a dozen people milling about. Voices murmured; a manual typewriter clattered away in a side room. Everyone stared. A white American with long white hair was, apparently, a rare sight. The electricity wasn’t on. The illumination from the day spilled in through open doors and windows, the interior holding a cool, gloomy light. I walked up to a desk and asked for the officer in charge, explaining that I was delivering a note from Harare’s Department of Social Welfare. An officer asked me to wait. I sat on the edge of the concrete sidewalk, plucking blades of grass. Twenty minutes later, the officer returned and led me to a room toward the end of the building. A thin, unsmiling man sat behind a desk. He was on the telephone, idly tapping ash from his cigarette into a tray as he listened. He looked up, saw me, and waved me to a chair. He was the same officer I had seen the previous year when I had come to investigate Chipo’s case.

  I sat down and looked around the room, trying to keep my hopes up. The case had been closed more than eighteen months ago. The commander’s desk was wide, wooden, and old, covered with papers and two telephones. There were trays marked O.I.C., Pending, Administrative, Crime, Out, and In. Each was stenciled in red ink. There was a picture of a pink rose, apparently clipped from a glossy magazine, glued to each one. A pair of huge maps were on the wall behind me. With the officer’s conversation continuing, I made a gesture toward them, and he nodded. I got up to inspect them. The national map said Zimbabwe, but it still listed the capital as Salisbury, the colonial name for the place, meaning the map was at least twenty years old. It also showed the “Tribal Trust Areas,” the colonial term for African-owned land. The other map was a street atlas of the main town in the district, with a series of different colored pins marking the location of each recent crime. The color of the pin indicated the type of offense, so that the officers could track robberies or assaults in a particular area.

  The officer finished his phone call then, stood up, and shook my hand. “Ah, the man with the baby,” he said, almost smiling. “How is our little sister?”

  “Fat and happy,” I said, and he laughed.

  “What brings you back to me today?”

  I explained the situation, trying to disguise the nervousness in my voice, and gave him the letter from Tsiga. He opened it, looked it over, and called out to a junior officer. He spoke quietly to him. “You may go with him,” he said to me.

  I followed the young officer back onto the concrete walkway, past what looked to be several defendants waiting to be booked, and into another room. Behind a desk, there was a wall of shelves. Each was sagging under rows of fat ledgers. The officer—he never said his name, and I never asked—went to the stack, ran his fingers over the edges of the leather-bound volumes, looking, looking, and then he pulled out one. He opened it and put it back. He pulled out the next one and brought it over to the table.

  “We need to find the case number,” he said.

  He flipped open the book. I blinked back a migraine. On the front and back of each page were hand-drawn grids, lined out with an unsteady ruler, stretching across and up and down the two-page spread. Small blocks were listed for the date, site of the crime, the time, investigating officer and so on. The last block on the right-hand side, running down the page, was headed “Case Resolution.” The binding formed an uneven bump in the middle, so that you had to count up or down on both sides to make sure you were following the same line, and thus the same case, across the page. The ink was in blue on the left, in red on the right.

  Taken page after page, in volume after volume, in its differing shades of ink, the effect of the cramped writing was overwhelming. It looked and read like some sort of mysterious code, a vast library of secrets and passwords and multiple volumes. But the officer knew what he was looking for and, my apprehension aside, it did appear to be studious police work—so long as you could find the right book and the pages didn’t rot and someone had remembered to enter the case on the right day.

  So look up the date and there it is, you say. Cut the drama, man, and get on with it. Aye, but there was the problem. Neither he nor I knew the exact date Chipo had been discovered, nor did we know the precise date the case had been closed, and there appeared to be dozens of entries on most dates. I couldn’t tell if the entries were just the loggings of each case into the system or whether updates, changes, and developments in preexisting cases were also noted. The officer might have entered it the day he got the case, or on the day he thought Chipo had been born. Or he might have entered it in end-of-the-month loggings. He was, after all, based in a precinct miles away. He only came into this office when needed. If he entered it when the case was closed, the single-line entry would be three months ahead or even later, at the end of that month. Further, although the log was chronologically ordered, it wasn’t absolutely so. There were dozens of entries in the first few pages that seemed to have no date at all. Others had dates mixed in and out of sequence. I guessed that it added up to more than one thousand entries we might have to scan in several different types of handwriting, some clear, some convoluted, some in blue ink, some in black, or red, the colors apparently in random sequence.

  Or, in the worst-case scenario, he might have forgotten to log it at all. Abandoned children, as he’d told me, were depressingly common. Maybe it just didn’t rate.

  I tried to force that last possibility from my mind as we flipped the ledger’s pages to the days preceding the date on Chipo’s birth certificate. There was a three-day window that seemed certain to be the correct date, and there were only a few dozen cases to scan. The officer ran his finger slowly down the rows of entries. Nothing. We expanded our search to the three-month period the case had been under investigation, pages and pages and pages of entries. Down the rows we went, looking for something that appeared familiar. I followed his finger down the page, both of our lips moving, whispering over this entry, now that one. We came across an abandoned child—no, no, it was a boy. Break-ins, burglaries, robberies, rapes; down the criminal history of the region we plowed, day after day, month after month.

  Nothing.

  “Let’s look again,” he said, and back we went, slower this time, the minutes peeling away into an hour. His finger was sliding down a page, slowly, and it came to a stop near the bottom. “Here,” he said.

  The ink was fading, the page beginning to tear away from the binding. But there was a scrawled-out case of an abandoned infant, female. There was a closure date and an original entry date that was so far to the right it was half in the wrong column, which was how we had missed it the first time. The binding in the middle had skewed the lines on the right from those on the left. We counted up from the bottom, three lines, on the left side of the binding, then on the right. And there was the date cleared, in fading red ink at the far right-hand side of the page. On a crumbling section of this page, rotting into nothingness, the notation read: “No arrest. Case closed.”

  The officer copied down the file number and the dates. He flipped the ledger shut and went to find the file. I walked around the room a couple of times, then wandered back to the front yard. There was still a sullen line of men in ragged clothes, sitting, not speaking, waiting to be booked or charged o
r to pay a fine. None was handcuffed. I looked at the grasslands and the woods and figured if they all made a run for it, scattering in different directions, at least half of them would make it. Then I remembered that everybody knew everybody in the countryside. The cops would know their family members and where they stayed and who their friends were and they would get caught, eventually, because there really wasn’t anywhere else to go. I suppose the resolute desperado could hitch a ride all the way to Harare, but what would he do there with no family and no contacts? I moved out into the sunshine, plucking more grass stems out of the yard and flicking them off the end of my finger, restless. The officer stepped to the door and called out.

  I turned, walking out of the sunshine and back into the gloom, momentarily blinded.

  “Your daughter’s name,” he said. “Is it . . .” He looked at a brown folder opened in front of him.

  I held my breath and closed my eyes.

  “Chipo?”

  “Yes!” I shouted, startling him and the suspects outside, everybody seeming to jump into the air. “I mean, yes. It is. Chipo. Of course. Yes. My daughter.”

  He led me back into the head officer’s room.

  I sat back down in the chair, trying to keep still now. They spoke between themselves. Neither looked at me. The officer looked down at the paper, grimaced, and lit a cigarette. He reached for a pen and began to write. The young officer left. The phone rang and the old man took it, setting down the pen and cradling the receiver between his shoulder and his ear, listening, then speaking rapidly in Shona.

  It was growing late in the afternoon. Clouds passed in front of the sun and the shadows rippled across the open fields of grass. The old man hung up the phone after a time. He looked back at the paper, set his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray, considered what he had written, and then resumed. I made a great study of the map on the wall. At length there was a rip of paper and the officer called out to his junior staff member. The young man returned, took the piece of paper and left. The officer took a drag on his cigarette and motioned to the yard outside his door. “You can go out there,” he said.