Love in the Driest Season (15 page)

12

P
ERSONA
N
ON
G
RATA

F
OR 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 plants, 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.

Domestically, this was terrible news. Mugabe had not consulted parliament, never mind the public, before dispatching the troops. The war was now extremely unpopular among family members of soldiers who were suddenly incommunicado a thousand miles from home.

Ray’s story was important because it alleged that discontent about the conflict was far more widespread than just among family members of fighting men—it charged that the questioning had spread to army officers themselves. The highest-ranking officer supposed to be involved was a colonel. There were also alleged links to a cabinet minister and a parliamentarian. Ray reported that the government had learned of the plot the night of December 16, nearly a month earlier, when more than twenty thousand “loyal” troops had been put on alert. It wasn’t clear whether the plot merely had been discovered that day or if someone had made an attempt on the president’s life. The accused plotters had been arrested and were now facing military trial, the story said.

The
Standard
stripped it across the top of its front page. It was the talk of the town, as you might expect, but it scarcely attracted attention outside the country. Newspapers in South Africa dutifully reported it on the inside pages, and wire services put it on the record, but that was about all there was to it. This lack of response was largely because the alleged incident had transpired nearly a month earlier and had no obvious impact on the country. And one had to keep in mind that Zimbabwe’s independent papers trumpeted claims of government failures in each edition, and sometimes these claims were overstated or poorly sourced.

I often talked with Iden Wetherell, the editor (and later recognized as International Editor of the Year by the World Press Review) of the
Zimbabwe
Independent,
one of the best papers in town, and once asked him if he worried about government response to his paper’s caustic articles.

“Oh, no,” he had said at the time. “They dine out on what we say about them. They consider it amusing, such as, ‘Did you hear what the
Independent
said about me this week?’”

All that ended on January 10. Ray’s story hit like an A-bomb.

Army soldiers stormed into the
Standard
’s office and hauled out Mark Chavunduka, Ray’s editor. They went hunting for Ray. Defense Minister Moven Mahachi could barely contain himself in an interview with the BBC. “These are lies!
All
lies!
” He was screaming into the microphone. He shouted that journalists were “enemies of the state,” the moral equivalent of the Congolese rebels.

Mark was still missing two days later, and his newspaper was frantic. The paper’s attorney pushed a legal writ into the nation’s high court, demanding that he be released immediately, on the grounds that his detention was illegal—police are the agency that deals with civilians, after all, not army squadrons. The judge agreed and ordered the army to release Mark within thirty minutes.

They refused.

A few days later, Ray was arrested. Another judge, now thoroughly incensed, ordered both men released. That was ignored, too. After some more legal tussling, Mark and Ray were finally brought into court, where they were charged with contravening something called the Law and Order Maintenance Act. The irony was too rich to ignore—this was a draconian law introduced by the white-supremacist government in the 1960s to suppress African nationalists led by . . . Robert Mugabe. The journalists were charged with “spreading alarm and despondency’’ and released on bail to await trial. If convicted, they faced up to seven years in prison.

At a press conference, they told of their ordeal. They had been handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven around town. When their blindfolds were stripped off, they appeared to be in a basement cold-storage room. The officer in charge asked Mark what he saw.

“I said, ‘Blood on the walls,’” Mark recounted.

They said their interrogators attached electrodes to their bodies, including their genitalia. Then an officer would flip a switch, delivering a sharp jolt of electricity. They said they were handcuffed, with burlap bags pulled over their heads, and then the upper half of their bodies was dunked in a barrel of water. In between these near drownings, the officers demanded to know their sources. Mark wrote out more than one hundred pages of statements.

Their faces were bruised and puffy. They had cigarette burns. Ray’s feet were so swollen—he had been beaten on the soles of his feet with wooden rods—that he could barely walk. His right ear was leaking a clear fluid.

Mahachi, the defense minister, dismissed the idea they had been tortured. “It looks like they probably scratched themselves,” he said.

By now, the government’s response had elevated one newspaper story into a constitutional crisis at home and an ugly incident abroad. The incident was reported across Africa, Europe, and the United States. British Foreign Office minister Tony Lloyd summoned Zimbabwe’s acting high commissioner in London, Pavelyn Musaka, to explain the affair. In Washington, State Department spokesman James Rubin denounced the torture.

I flew back to Harare the day Mark and Ray appeared in court. The place was in an uproar. Dumiso Dabengwa, the minister of home affairs, was promising to crack down on journalists. “Stringent measures will be put in place to ensure political stability in the country by protecting the military against bad press,” he said. “I would like to warn the press that granting them the freedom of expression does not give them the right to publish lies, with the intention of creating public disorder.”

Meanwhile, dozens of the nation’s judges and lawyers staged a black-robed demonstration against the crackdown. A judge on the nation’s high court, the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote to Mugabe, asking him to make a public statement affirming the rule of law. He was joined by his colleagues on that bench, and by three superior court judges as well, who added their own letter.

In the middle of that tumultuous week, as I was running to interviews and press conferences, we got a call from the Department of Social Welfare. Florence Sibanda, our case worker, left a cryptic message on my answering machine late on a Friday, saying we were to be in court next Tuesday for a “custody hearing.” But she didn’t say which court, which judge, or what time. It sounded like good news—our foster hearing at last—but what it all meant wasn’t clear, particularly considering my job, the current environment, and Kaseke’s charges of two months ago. Sibanda wasn’t in her office that Friday afternoon or on Monday.

So at 7:30 Tuesday morning, we were in our Sunday best waiting outside the locked gates of the municipal court. This was a complex of tin-roofed buildings set inside a fenced-off yard downtown. There was a large crowd milling about the gate. Then it swung open and everyone ran, hustling to be the first in line for their particular courtroom. We didn’t have any idea of where we were going, but we ran too, keeping up with the herd because, well, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Then the crowd split up at the different buildings. None appeared to be marked. We wandered from building to building, from line to line, until we found the juvenile court. We sat down to wait. An hour later, the judge still wasn’t there. He called in half an hour later to say he wasn’t going to make it that day. A substitute magistrate was summoned, and about that time Sibanda, our social worker, appeared. But now no one had the key to the original judge’s office, where all the files were. Half an hour later, somehow, they were produced.

Ours was missing.

Sibanda said, “Oh, shame. We must try again next week.”

I said, as politely as possible, “Oh,
hell
no.” Then I was sprinting back to our truck, a good quarter of a mile, a crazy white man in a double-breasted suit skipping through traffic, my tie flapping over my shoulder. I cranked the truck, swung by the court, and picked up Sibanda. We rushed across town to her office, the entrance to which was now jammed with people wanting her attention on other cases. She waded through them and retrieved our file, and we went back to court.

While we were gone, another case had gotten under way. It was a divorce with a nasty custody dispute. The father had taken the children and put them with his relatives in the rural areas. When the mother went to see her children, the relatives ran her off with hoes and axes. This was actually getting pretty interesting when the court interpreter got sick. He had stomach ulcers and had to leave. So they summoned a substitute.

Sibanda was tapping her foot by this point, politely muttering that she really had other things to do. Vita, trying to keep Chipo still in her new red dress, replied that she was glad we all had something in common. So Sibanda interrupted the judge, explained our case, and he agreed to recess the divorce case for ten minutes.

We sat down behind a table, and I was suddenly aware I could not take off my suit jacket because, particularly after my sprint through downtown traffic, my starched white shirt was now soaked through with sweat. My fingers were twitching. Vita looked to be just as tense. Meanwhile, Sibanda stood and addressed the court. She recited the case history. She pulled out a few documents. She pointed out how fat and happy Chipo now appeared to be. Chipo gave evidence of this by trying to eat a court-provided pencil. Sibanda said that she was recommending Chipo be placed with us as our foster child.

The judge never looked up. He said, “Okay.”

Then the bailiff prodded me by tapping on the table, smiling and saying, “You can go now.”

We didn’t even know the hearing had really started, and it was over. “That was
it
?” Vita said. “Seven months of work for a three-minute hearing?” The judge had neither asked us a question nor acknowledged our presence.

We picked up Stella for a celebratory lunch, stopping at a popular Greek restaurant where I often met sources for lunch interviews. I parked the car and got Chipo out of her infant’s seat while Vita and Stella went to get a table. When I walked in, something was wrong. Vita was glaring, and Stella looked embarrassed.

“They say there aren’t any tables,” Vita hissed, gesturing at two white waiters standing at the entrance to the dining room.

“Maybe we should go somewhere else,” Stella said.

I looked. The restaurant wasn’t even half full. It was 1:30 in the afternoon. There was no more lunch crowd coming at this hour. The maître d’ saw me. His face blanched.

“Oh, Mr.
Tucker,
” he said, as if I were Bill Gates appearing at his door. “Why didn’t you make your usual reservation?” Now he looked as uncomfortable as Stella. He and his assistant studied the reservation list as if it were a missive from the oracle at Delphi. “Yes, yes,” he said, tapping on the list, “it looks like there might be a table opening just now.” We were seated immediately. No other customer came in while we were there.

It soured the enthusiasm of the day. A country 99 percent black, and two well-dressed black women couldn’t get a table at one of the capital city’s nicer restaurants. I left a two-cent tip.

W
E WERE DELIGHTED
to have the foster question settled, but in the ensuing weeks it began to seem as if I had blown some sort of gasket. I began to physically break down, as if the years of traveling and the past seven months of near-sleepless exhaustion started taking their toll all at once. I had always been slender, but now I was so strung out as to be bony. My knee was still in a brace. A large boil developed under my left arm. A specialist in Harare lanced it. The next morning, my upper arm was bright red and nearly double its usual size. It was rigid with cellulites. I could scarcely bend my elbow. A fever started burning behind my temples.