When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (33 page)
February 2004
O
N MY FIRST MORNING
back in Africa after my father died, I sit with Mum in the sunroom. “He was still a man, you know, not an invalid, when he died,” she says. “At the end he asked me, ‘Why am I staying alive? What good am I doing?’ And I said to him, ‘You stop me from being alone.’?”
And she remembers the day of the big fight in the garden, the fight between Isaac and the man with the clubfoot, when Dad hobbled painfully out onto the plastic chair at the front door and sat there with his revolver in his lap, still trying to protect her though he could barely walk himself. Still a man, not an invalid. A man.
M
UM TELLS ME
that while I was in the air on the way home, she was visited by a delegation of her nurses from the hospital. They bring
chema
with them, an envelope stuffed with cash for funeral expenses, as is the African custom. And my mother accepts it, as she should. They ask if they might pray, and my mother nods. And they get down on their knees on our tatty brown carpet and they pray for practical things: for a safe flight for me and for my mother to be strong. And then they decide to sing, and soon our spartan house is filled with the thrilling swell of four-part harmony as they sing Psalm 46 in Shona, the one that goes, “We will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.”
And my mother sits, her knees together, on the edge of our old sofa, the one with the Java print slipcover, tears finally flowing freely down her face. It is all right to weep, for she is among friends.
O
N THAT FIRST EVENING
in Africa after my father died, it rains. Afterward, my mother and I sit on the veranda listening to the clear, clean call of the Heuglin’s robin — always the first in the morning and last at night to sing. The garden is a riot of greens and reds.
“The two colors that your father could not distinguish,” she remembers wistfully. “He always complained that there was no color in this garden.” I think of his Polish gunners firing at a passing submarine because Kazio Goldfarb couldn’t see the red warning flag against the green Scottish hillside. I look around at the vividness of it all, this lush oasis, one that he saw drained of its brightness and its contrast. Maybe this color blindness reflected something — an inner numbing, the result of losing his family to the Holocaust, and of his boyhood exile, losses that prevented him from enjoying things to the full, a filter of fear that strained out the full luster of his life.
The Heuglin’s robin pauses to catch its breath, and in its absence the arrow-chested babblers take up their chorus of raucous derision, a vulgar taunting call.
“When Dad was a boy at St. Leonard’s before the war, his mother sent him some Polish delicacies, a care package in a box, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string,” says Mum. “He saved a piece of that string and carried it around in his pocket for years. He said it was the last contact he had with his mother before she was killed by the Nazis. The last thing that she had actually touched. When he lost the string not very long ago, he was heartbroken.”
T
HE NEXT MORNING
Mum is all bustling practicality. She opens her diary to make a to-do list. I notice it is a diary of the year 1997, and I wonder if it is not confusing.
“Not at all,” she says. “New diaries are exorbitant, so Dad recycled old, unused ones. 1997 had the same days of the week to dates as 2004, until February 29. Then, because this is a leap year, we move on to a 1998 diary.” She turns to a new page. “Now, we need to inform people, so they can come to the funeral.”
She is determined to muster a good turnout and is diverting all her energy into this. She opens up their Christmas-card book containing the names and addresses of all the friends and acquaintances to whom they send cards. Then she suddenly saddens again.
“You know the last time we sent Christmas cards was two years ago. It got too expensive. A local stamp is going up to Z$2,300. To the UK, it’s Z$19,000.” She is defiant, not ashamed.
“We are too poor to send Christmas cards,” she says, and shakes her head in wonder at this bald fact. “Most of our friends are too.”
We’re interrupted by a great splash from the other side of the fir trees.
“Abyssinians,” says Mum, as though she is identifying a bird species. “It’s the Abyssinian children swimming.”
“Abyssinians, Mum? They haven’t been called that since Mussolini fled!”
“Well, anyway, that’s where the Air Ethiopia manager lives. It’s like the American South in the aftermath of the Civil War. When people lose everything, your social status is determined by whether you have to turn your swimming pool into a fishpond. All the rest are carpetbaggers.”
She goes back to the stiff browned pages of the old Christmas-card book, scanning down her list of antique friends. Many of the names are crossed out because they have died, and most of the rest have their African addresses crossed out and replaced with new ones in England and America, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and Canada.
Even my mother is surprised, seeing them all listed like this. “So very few of us remain,” she says quietly.
There is a honking at the gate — short, long, short, short — Morse code for Linnea, and I go out to let her in. Linnea, like my late sister Jain, is a grade school teacher, and though some years older, in some ways I think Linnea is my mother’s substitute for Jain. She has come today, she says, to administer “needle therapy.” It doesn’t involve injecting drugs; it involves hard-core sewing. The two of them get busy running up a funeral dress for Mum. Soon they both have mouths full of pins.
“I’m not going to wear stockings at the funeral,” says Mum defiantly. “It’s too hot.”
I leave them sewing and go to call my family, to tell them I’ve arrived safely. Joanna puts Thomas on the line.
“Are you missing me while you’re in Africa, Dad?” he asks.
“Yes, I am.”
“Do you sleep while you’re there?”
“Sleep? Yes, of course. You sleep at night in Africa just like you do in New York, it’s just that night here is at a different time — ”
“And do you dream?” he asks, cutting short my attempt to explain time zones.
“Yes, sometimes I dream.”
“What do you dream about?”
“Well, I dream about you and Hugo and Holly.”
“And do you dream about Grandpa,
your
dad?”
“Yes, sometimes I do.”
“But he’s
dead
now, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but you can still dream about people after they’re dead.”
He pauses. “Mr. Debussy’s dead,” he says. “But his
music
lives on.”
Joanna comes back on the line. “They’ve been studying Debussy in Mr. Colligan’s music class,” she explains.
T
HERE IS NO FOOD
in the house, so I take Mum grocery shopping. At the butcher, as we try to replicate my father’s very particular meat order, of dog bones and tiny portions of ham and chopped pork, she suddenly erupts into tears, and the whole shop stills. “Shopping was Dad’s job,” she wails, and flees.
In our local supermarket, Bon Marché, the black manager beckons us into his cubicle. “I have something for Mr. Godwin,” he says, smiling as he reaches under his desk to retrieve a special stash of Schweppes soda water and Indian tonic.
“I’m afraid George passed away last week,” says my mother.
The manager looks confused.
“He died,” I say. “Mr. Godwin is dead.”
The manager is astonished, as though such an event is unthinkable. And then, to his own evident consternation, he begins to cry, and this sets Mum off again.
“I can’t believe it,” he says, and turns away to hide his tears. “He was here just last week. I wondered where he was when he missed last Saturday, but I thought he’ll definitely come on pensioners’ discount day, so I saved his soda and tonic . . .”
He loads it into our cart anyway, and we trundle it sadly away. When I look back he has closed the door to his glass cubicle and through it I see he has his head in his hands, crying.
On our return from the shops, Mudiwa arrives on a condolence visit. He had sat with my mother while I was on my long flight over from New York. “Until your own son gets here,” he had told her, “think of me as your son.”
We discuss the funeral arrangements. It is to be held on Monday, at Christchurch in Borrowdale, the same church where Jain is now buried, where my father bought a plot that afternoon during the Final Push last May, after the surprise offer from Father Bertram. And now Bertram will preside over Dad’s funeral too — he is becoming our regular Stygian boatman. Mudiwa will place the funeral notices in the newspaper — but not in the
Herald,
the government paper, which my mother refuses to subsidize.
When he has gone, we start working out the order of the service. Father Bertram has sent us three Bible readings to choose from, and Mum decides on Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, which she hands me. It is that famous passage, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” But if you read on, beyond the nominated lines, it gets much darker, and it starts to resonate with the cowed country around us, where the populace has been beaten back so many times that now the master only has to so much as reach for his whip for them to skulk off back to their hovels in fear.
Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. . . .
My father is well out of it.
My mother likes the idea of choosing only hymns with lyrics written by C. F. Alexander, a distant great-aunt, Frances (Fanny, as she was known), who was married to William Alexander, the archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland. It was for her own Sunday school kids that she penned such favorites as “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” “Do No Sinful Action,” “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and “Once in Royal David’s City.” She had a stirring turn of phrase, old Fanny, and most have remained remarkably popular. One, however, “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” had needed reworking to make it politically correct, explains my mother. She begins to sing in a clear alto soprano:
“The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at the gate,
He made them high or lowly
And ordered their estate.”
“That’s the verse that had to be cut,” she says. And I could see why. It seems to be calling down divine justification of our earthly class status.
It reminds me of how the old South African president, the last grand defender of apartheid, P. W. Botha — who liked to be called the “
Groot Krokodil
,” the “Great Crocodile” — once tried to use the scriptures as a justification for white rule. Addressing nearly three million black Vapostori pilgrims (from the Zion Christian Church sect) at their annual Easter gathering in the Moria Hills north of Pietersburg, he said that the Bible had a clear message for the rulers and those ruled. “Thus we read in Romans 13,” he told them, “that every person is subject to the governing authorities. There is no authority but from God.”
In the end this invocation of the divine right of presidents wasn’t enough to save him, and the
Groot Krokodil
was forced to regurgitate the sun, and to watch his successor, F. W. de Klerk, hand the country over to black rule. And the city of Pietersburg (named after a Boer general) became Polokwane (Place of Safety, in Ndebele).
But things have changed here too. Many of the rich men in their castles are of different hue, though the poor men at the gate are the same, only there are more of them now and they are poorer still.
The phone is ringing regularly with condolence calls. This morning it is Dr. David Parirenyatwa. He is the minister of health, and his father was Zimbabwe’s first black doctor, the one after whom the hospital was named. My mother likes him even though he is in the government. She feels he is a technocrat, not an ideologue. But she’s worried that coming to the funeral might cause problems for him, as it will be full of opposition stalwarts. Pius Wakatama, Ellah’s dad, who is now a firebrand columnist for the last opposition paper, has asked if he may preach.
My former classmate James Mushore, the owner of Borrowdale Brook Spar Supermarket, drops by to say that he might be able to help find a way out of another problem — Georgina’s inclusion on a new personae non grata list of a hundred and nineteen “enemies of the state.” The minister of information, Professor Jonathan Moyo (widely reviled as a turncoat), is on record as saying that anyone on the list is welcome to return, and that he would arrange convenient accommodation for them at Chikurubi Prison.
But in the end, we decide that Georgina should not come. It is Mum’s call, and she is petrified that Georgina will be arrested. This fear, Mum says, will overshadow the funeral for her. So Georgina complies with her wish — cross, frustrated, sad. (In the end James himself has to flee the country two weeks later, accused of exchange-control violations.)
The Walls arrive bearing an elaborately frosted homemade cake. After the Simpsons, they took over at Chimanimani School, where Honest is probably still waiting to be picked up. When we return from seeing them off at the gate, we discover that our deaf Dalmatian has jumped up on the veranda table and eaten their whole cake. He spends the night retching noisily on the lawn.
O
N MY THIRD DAY
in Africa after my father died, it rains again, in the late afternoon. Before the rain I go to the funeral of a school friend of mine, Andy van der Ruit, an architect, someone I have known all my life, my age to the very month. The funeral is at the Chisipite Girls School, the school Georgina once attended. I sit on a concrete step with Julia, Mudiwa’s wife, and as we wait for mourners to file in, she fills me in on the reports of Andy’s death. He was taking a presupper nap at about 8:00, she says, when he awoke to see intruders standing at the end of his bed. When he shouted out, one of them pulled a gun from his waistband and shot him point-blank. On hearing the gunshots, Felicity, his wife, tried to press the alarm button to summon the security guards, and the robbers shot her too.