Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  “Very well nourished,” he wrote.

  By mid-January, the movers had come and turned the house upside-down. They were so slow it took them four days to pack up one house for two people. The last day, they brought in two extra crews to wrap up the job. It started at 7 A.M. and was nowhere close to finished at nightfall. We strung up lights in the driveway so we could see the package numbers as we loaded them onto the truck. The company made no provision to feed their workers. They were expected to work from daybreak until long after dark with only what they had brought for their lunch. I went to Nando’s, a fast-food outlet, and returned with nineteen carry-out chicken dinners. We all sat down in the driveway, eating with our fingers, and then stood up and kept going. It was midnight when it was finally done.

  We woke up the next morning in a house empty save for a few pieces of furniture the landlord had left behind. There was nothing on the walls and nothing on the shelves. Our voices echoed.

  The departure date on our plane tickets came and went. We pushed it back a week. That passed, too.

  I was, at least until I arrived in Washington, unemployed. Vita had been barred from working by Zimbabwean customs protocols for three years, and I had been without a paycheck for three months during leave the previous year. We had no more pockets. We resigned ourselves to Chipo and Vita staying behind with Bill and Dumisille. There was no telling when, if ever, the adoption might be approved. The parliamentary elections were just two months away.

  “We knew this might happen,” I told Vita one night, trying to make it sound like a small detail. “If something goes wrong, they won’t know where you are. If we get the adoption hearing, I’ll be back on the next flight.”

  The next afternoon, four days before I was to leave the country, I was down to my last card to play. I drove down to see Margaret Tsiga one more time. We talked for an hour and a half, about families and children and some of her cases, about the rainy season and the problems in government. The hour grew late; everyone had left. I had always called her Mrs. Tsiga because she never told me not to.

  “Margaret,” I said at last, “we’ve got to leave Zimbabwe now. I have no job. I’m running out of money. I have to have my baby now.”

  “I know,” she said with a sigh. “Meet me in the morning at eight o’clock.”

  I didn’t have much hope. I went home and told Vita I was going to waste another day sitting around at Compensation House, and then I went to sleep.

  The next morning, Margaret and I pulled into a parking space on the street outside the building. She was in a very nice dress, and I was again in a suit and tie. I started to get out. “No, no,” she said. “You’ll just be in the way.”

  I sat back down in the driver’s seat. I left the door open, dangling a foot outside. I read the morning paper. I stood up and stretched, walked over, sat down in the shade of a tree on the sidewalk. Ten vendors tried to sell me fake gold watches at cut-rate prices. I went to get a Coke and sat back down in the car.

  The sun rose in the sky. I pulled a novel from the backseat. Workers spilled from the office buildings; it was somehow lunch hour. I was dozing in the afternoon heat, sweating into my starched shirt, when the passenger door swung open and Margaret sat down. She did not smile.

  “So how did we do?”

  “Not good.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  She flipped open a folder.

  “I believe,” she said, looking down at the paper in front of her and working to keep the edges of her mouth turned down, “that we do not have a court appointment until tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. Or is it eight-thirty? Could you stay with us in Zimbabwe that long?” And then she was breaking into a smile, a schoolgirl’s laugh, and she held out the ministerial dispensation. It was a single sheet of paper. It was signed, stamped, and approved.

  I took it in hand as if it were the Holy Grail, found at last. With the minister’s consent, the judicial hearing would be a fifteen-minute formality. I debated about the proper course of action at a time such as this. It was really an auspicious moment, not to be repeated in my lifetime. The record will show I hollered out loud and gave my social worker a big fat wet one, right on the cheek.

  She didn’t seem to mind.

  THE NEXT DAY, we made it through the hearing in nothing flat. Then Margaret took us to the city registry to get a new birth certificate, walking past the throng of people lined up from the reception desk to the outside steps. She opened a door into the back room and we followed her through rows of tall shelves stuffed with files, around a corner, through another door, into an office, and there sat the registrar herself. This was the last step, and my palms were suddenly sweaty. Margaret spoke in Shona. The woman—I never knew her name—nodded kindly. She handed me a piece of paper, an application for a new birth certificate. I filled out the dates and so on, but stopped when it came to the line about filling in the child’s name.

  My handwriting looks like a fifth-grader’s scrawl. I didn’t want Chipo’s name to look like that the first time it was written.

  “You do it,” I said, handing it to Vita.

  She rolled her eyes. “There are times,” she said, “when you can be the most ridiculous man.”

  She leaned over the table and wrote it quickly. She wrote “Chipo Katherine Tucker.” The middle name was an amalgamation of Kathie, Vita’s sister; and Catherine, the given name of my maternal grandmother, whose last name I carry as my first.

  And so it was set down, stamped, and handed back to us. I took the paper in hand, kissed Vita, and looked down at Chipo.

  She was asleep in her mother’s arms, peacefully sucking on the same three fingers she had been on the day we first saw her.

  IT’S FUNNY, the way your entire life can boil down to a moment nobody else in the world notices, and so it was with us that night. Vita sprayed champagne and we laughed and hugged and shouted and turned the boom box music up, Al Green and Barry White and Marvin Gaye old-school jam. We danced and shouted at the top of our lungs with a handful of friends in our empty house, because joy is a gift that should not be wasted, because our hearts had been touched with fire, and because when I took Chipo outside the stars seemed aflame and the night sky seemed to flow and shimmer with the secrets of the world, an invisible river of happiness that floated above and around us all.

  “Look, baby,” I said softly, as if in a trance, pointing to the sky. “Look at the stars.”

  EPILOGUE

  In the end, stories are what’s left of us,

  we are no more than the few tales that persist.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  The Moor’s Last Sigh

  THE POLITICAL CRISIS that had been brewing in Zimbabwe erupted eight days after we flew out of the country.

  Mugabe suffered a humiliating defeat at the polls, as his bid for a new constitution was rejected. He had asked his countrymen to give him the power to take land from white farmers at his will—completing the war for independence, as he put it.

  But Zimbabweans, with fewer than twenty years of anything that resembled democracy, understood a thing or two about political maturity. The last thing they wanted to give an autocratic old man who took his young wife on shopping trips to cities they only read about was the power to take land from people he didn’t like. They might very well be next.

  So they went to the voting booth and told the father of the nation to get lost. They rejected the new constitution, 55 percent against to 45 percent for. The streets of Harare erupted in horn-honking celebrations.

  Mugabe was furious.

  Less than two weeks later, his followers began invading hundreds of farms, beating and killing their political opponents—some white, but most of them black. They ransacked factories, assaulting anyone who was not a ZANU-PF supporter. It didn’t seem to work. Mugabe lost again in the parliamentary elections, as the upstart MDC claimed nearly half of all seats, a stunning result for a party that was eight months old. This time there was more violence—mur
der, assault, intimidation, and disenfranchisement. The next time that ZANU-PF counted ballots, in the presidential elections, they came up with a tally that showed Mugabe to be the winner.

  Journalists were special targets of violence. The printing presses for the Daily News, a new independent paper, were firebombed shortly after we left. The government said that foreign journalists were the likely culprits, as they got to the scene “suspiciously quickly,” and briefly arrested a photographer for the Associated Press. My erstwhile travel partner, Ann Simmons, called me from Harare the day after the bombing.

  “You wouldn’t believe how the police are cracking down,” she said. “This place has changed so—” and the line went dead.

  I looked at the receiver there in the Post building and remembered my tapped line back in Harare. Nah, I thought. I called her back at her hotel. The switchboard operator patched me through to her room. Ann came on the line, laughing.

  “But it’s really quite serious here,” she said. “They are after journalists here like—” and the line went dead again.

  Rob Cooper, my photographer friend, was attacked along with several other journalists while covering the farm invasions. Several men accosted them, ordered them onto the ground, broke their cameras, and beat them with steel phone cables. Rob sent me a picture of his back. His skin was slashed open in dozens of wounds from his neck to below his buttocks.

  Joe Winter, the BBC correspondent in Harare, was awakened one night by a mob of men trying to break down his door. Thinking fast, with his wife and infant child huddled beside him, Joe called every photographer he knew. They arrived minutes later, standing at the gates of his yard and flooding the scene with flash after flash of pictures. The men fled, fearing identification, and Joe and his family were rushed to the safety of the British High Commission. They left the country the next morning.

  By the first anniversary of our departure, the death toll of opposition figures had grown to forty-one, all but five of them black. In the same time frame, more than four hundred factories reportedly went out of business, more than ten thousand people lost industrial jobs, the unemployment rate soared above 50 percent, and inflation rose to more than 60 percent. Farm production collapsed so badly the country had to ask for international assistance to feed its population, and the World Food Program was warning of an impending famine.

  And, almost one year to the day after we left, the nation’s Information Minister began a policy to bar foreign correspondents from living or even working in Zimbabwe. Foreign reporters who wished to visit the country would have to file an application a month in advance. They might, or might not, be allowed in for five days.

  I READ THESE reports from the other side of the world, and I sometimes wonder how close we came to everything collapsing on top of us. I think we probably had at least two more weeks. We certainly did not have twelve more months.

  In the wake of a long story I wrote about Chipo’s ordeal in the Post, more than two hundred people from five countries on three continents wrote or called or e-mailed Vita and me, wanting to know how to adopt other children, or to help Chinyaradzo, or to convey that they were moved by her experience. One minister in Baltimore even used it as the basis for a sermon. I found that somewhat amusing for someone like myself, long considered the religious black sheep of a family that includes a church pianist (my mother) and a seminarian with a degree in liberation theology (Vita). I probably liked the blunter messages, such as this note from a French television executive: “Bravo for Chipo!”

  I laughed at that one, but I have rarely found solace in those letters from strangers, as kind as they are. I walk into Chipo’s bedroom on some nights to listen to the magic of her breathing, soft and even in the darkness, and as she exhales I sometimes hear a sound that is not there, the silence of the dead children whom we might have saved, perhaps Robert or Ferai, had I not been so focused on my travels. We left the others to their fate.

  The last alone is a staggering thought, but perhaps it was required triage. In fact, I believe it proved to be a necessity in the course of events. But I did not realize then the weight that action would carry over time. My daughter lived while so many around her died, and her beauty is the sharper now for the absence of those children who passed away at the orphanage, from the epidemic in Zimbabwe and beyond, in their tens of thousands, across the continent. There is the phantom weight of Ferai’s soon-to-be-dead body in my arms and the sound of my foot in the child’s rib cage in Rwanda, and the heat and dust of those days seem to be with me when I find myself lost in thought.

  We now live on a pleasant, tree-lined street in the nation’s capital. Upon our return, Vita tried to resume her profession as a paralegal and a research librarian. After nearly a year of trying one law firm and then another, she found it too empty in the wake of her experiences at the orphanage. At the age of forty-eight, she changed careers. She now works as the East Africa project coordinator for World Vision, the same charity that sent volunteers to Chinyaradzo. She specializes in children’s issues.

  Miss Chipo is a talkative, effervescent five-year-old with dreadlocks. She is happy to tell you, if you ask, that she is a big girl and a princess, or a pretty girl from Africa, depending on her mood. She visits her cousins in Detroit and Chicago, and likes the week she spends alone with her Mississippi grandparents each summer. My father eventually recovered from his burns and dotes on his grandchild.

  I still work for the Post, currently at work on a series of stories about former prison inmates. I no longer travel abroad at all.

  Back in the swirl of American life, the months have rushed past us, the days falling into the past as if into the pages of a faded scrapbook, to be recalled in a different time. We go to the mall, to church, to the park, just another family lost among the many. I had imagined that in these most American of surroundings, with cinemas and shops and well-lit restaurants, the disturbing images from those days might recede, but this is not always so. Sometimes, late at night, it seems there is some unsettled disturbance within me. I roam the house for two hours, aimless, restless, and then sit on our front step and watch cars go by. The images can be so clear, so achingly clear, as if time has stopped and I can examine each moment as if it were a still frame. I see John Mungai in his three-piece suit, waiting for the remains of his daughter to be pulled from the wreckage of Ufundi House. I see the young dead girl in Sarajevo, once again pulled from the car, this time as if in slow motion, the sunlight on her bare skin. I see an overcast afternoon later in that city at the end of the war. I was with Alija Hodzic, the bus driver who had volunteered to run the morgue during the war because no one else would do it, because his Islamic faith told him that human beings should be buried with dignity. He ran the morgue amid worms and formaldehyde and snipers for four years, and the reward for his faith was to come to work one afternoon and see his dead son lying on the floor, waiting for a coffin of his own, killed by a blast of shrapnel. One overcast winter day he took me into the Lion Cemetery, just down the hill from the hospital. We wound through the graves and then he stopped by a wooden slat of a marker, kneeling down beside it, running his fingers over the letters. Then he wept openly, great chest-heaving sobs that racked his whole body. I’d never seen a grown man in that kind of emotional agony before, and as the cold wind blew hard across the open field, I fidgeted with my hands and looked at the ground.

  I see these images, frozen in memory if not in time, and I think I have finally come to understand John Mungai and Alija Hodzic. It wasn’t just the pain of their loss that tormented them. It was that the love for their children was still in them, and it had nowhere to go.

  THESE IMAGES COME less often with the passing of time, I find, and the depressions that fall over me are almost all of the twilight variety now, an ebbing tide of darkness that can fall along with the night from the sky on a summer evening, when the world seems stilled and far away. At the end of it all, I consider myself the luckiest man I know.

  I sometimes sit in chur
ch, listening to Vita and the rest of the choir blow through “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” or “It Was a Great Thing,” and in the voices and organ and percussion I seem to drift away, lost in something that I would describe as a state of grace.

  And that is why, on this particular Sunday, I am thrust out of my reverie by the sound of my daughter coming out of the back door into our small backyard. Her mother is in the kitchen and has just turned on the light over the sink, the one in front of the window, a small torchlight in the darkening air. She is cooking, I see, attuned to the stove next to her.

  I stand and pick up Chipo, then fling her playfully into the air, a daddy-daughter game, listening to her laughter spill over me like warm summer rain. I toss her up, up above the shadows of the trees, her tiny body framed against the darkening sky, an image etched on my mind’s eye, and then she is falling, falling back into my arms, happy and safe and warm, giggling against my chest.

  The porch light comes on. We turn, her arm thrown around my neck. Her mother is watching us from the kitchen door, smiling, a glass of wine in her hand, and suddenly the resigned sadness of that place in that time seems something that happened long ago, far away, like a fairy tale I once knew but can no longer recall.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, I had lunch with Tom Shroder, then the editor of the Sunday Style section of the Washington Post, at the Red Sage restaurant in downtown Washington. Tom was a friend from when we both worked at the Miami Herald.

  We had not seen each other in many years. Tom politely asked what Zimbabwe had been like. He was rewarded with a rambling summary of Chipo’s adoption that lasted for most of the entrée. I finished up by saying that I was considering writing a lengthy, complicated book about race, family, and American society.