When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (23 page)

Everyone is worried that the protest hasn’t been properly organized. The “stay-away,” as strikes are called here, is already almost total — the MDC, with its trade union roots, is good at those. But getting people out in large numbers to march into town is a different matter entirely. A people who once rose against white rule and joined guerrilla movements in the thousands has now been cowed by a twenty-three-year dictatorship.

There are all sorts of rumors flying around: the government has infiltrated the MDC, the army has orders to shoot to kill. On the other hand, the MDC claims to have been assured by two army units, the Commandos and the Paras, that they will not fire on civilians. The actual routes of the marches have been kept secret, but there are only a handful of main roads leading into the city center from the townships, with relatively few choke points.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have called it the Final Push,” I suggest. “It sounds awfully, well, final. What if it doesn’t work?”

“What would you rather have it called?” says Dale, an MDC councillor. “The Initial Push?”

“Or how about One of Several Pushes?” offers John.

I
N THE CRITICAL CARE UNIT
the next morning, my mother is in a querulous state — tearful and angry and indignant. She has woken up to find herself paralyzed from the waist down. After having been able to use her legs the day before, she assumes that there has been some awful nerve damage. Then she discovers that during the night, without any complaint of pain on her part, the nurses have taken it upon themselves to turn the epidural way up. This is contrary to all the principles of pain management, she declares, which is to keep medication to a minimum. She strongly suspects the staff has knocked out the patients so they can enjoy a hassle-free shift. When she complains to the white physician on his morning rounds, he eyes the nurses over at the ward station. “I see,” he says, nodding gravely. But my mother doubts he will do anything.

Later that day, after her legs regain some feeling, she is returned to her own room, relieved to be back within the warm realm of a head nurse she knows. I take her a bunch of tall yellow and blue crane flowers, and she seems calmer, rousing herself to berate me for trimming the flowers with her good nail scissors.

But things soon deteriorate as the national strike takes effect. Most of the nurses get stranded in the townships where they live, as there is no public transportation. Food supplies are erratic. Milk runs out, then bread. Strawberry-flavored jelly begins to feature heavily on the menu.

On our next visit, Mum looks pale and shaken. Late that afternoon she was taken out to the end of the veranda to enjoy the last rays of the winter sun, but no one came to collect her — with the staff shortages she was forgotten. She shouted weakly for help, but no one heard her. Hours later, in the gathering gloom, a nurse finally stumbled upon her, in tears, trembling with cold.

“It’s all right, madam, it’s all right,” she soothed, and helped her back inside.

But it doesn’t stop there. In the middle of the night, when she needs to use the bedpan, she presses her buzzer again and again, but no one comes. Eventually, she can hold on no longer and wets the bed.

The entire hospital is hanging by a thread, with just a few senior nurses keeping it going.

That afternoon I decide I will ignore the visiting hours and camp out there to make sure that she is taken care of. By now she looks terribly pale and subdued, crying at the slightest problem. I fuss around, fetching her books and water and adjusting her bed. She asks me to pick up the comb she has dropped on the floor, so I feel around under her bed for it. The cement down there is wet and sticky to my touch. My fingertips are coated with a viscous red substance. At first I think it might be floor polish, but then I realize it is blood.

“Jesus!” I peel back her blankets to look at the dressing on her wound. It is bright red. When the surgeon arrives, he says she lost two pints of blood during the operation and more from the wound. Her red cell count is now dangerously low: six and falling.

“She needs a blood transfusion,” he says.

“Not bloody likely,” says Mum, and rolls her eyes.

He leaves us alone for a moment, my cue to persuade her. But no one knows better than her how high the country’s AIDS rate is. “Let’s just say that the screening of blood stocks is less than perfect,” she says.

As I draw breath to begin bullying her into compliance, she hands me a copy of the
Daily News.
“There’s an ad in there from the National Blood Service,” she says.

I open it and page through until I find the half-page advertisement announcing that it has essentially collapsed. It has no fuel, no foreign currency for plasma, no “refreshments,” which are used to entice indigent blood donors.

The head nurse comes in, and I try to recruit her to my cause.

“If you were in my position, would you have a blood transfusion?” asks Mum.

The nurse looks around to make sure the doctor has gone. “Nuh uh,” she says, and she shakes her head vigorously.

I
N THE MAYHEM
of that week, as St. Anne’s teeters on the brink of collapse, the person my mother fixates on as her potential savior is her physical therapist, a young woman called Sue Francis. She has just the right blend of strictness and sympathy.

When Mum falls off the commode and thinks she’s dislocated her new hip, I buzz Sue and she arrives within minutes, out of breath. After she has calmed down my mother, I walk her outside, out of earshot, and tell her how much my mother has come to rely on her. Sue looks stricken, and she takes a deep breath.

“I’m so sorry, but tomorrow’s my last day at work,” she says. “I’m emigrating to the U.K.”

Her eight-year-old son has managed to get a cricket scholarship at a private school in North Yorkshire, and her husband — a game warden who has lost his job since the collapse of tourism — is going to be a groundsman there. Sue will work as a physical therapist at the local hospital.

How strange is that? A whole family getting a lifeboat out of here on the back of an eight-year-old kid’s talent with a cricket bat and ball.

Sue suggests that I move my mother to Dandara, a small nursing home annexed to a gated retirement community next to the Borrowdale Race Course, just up the road from the State House. “They’re still short staffed,” she says. “But they’re smaller, and they seem to have planned better for this strike.”

So we load Mum into an ambulance and take her to the new hospital. For most of the way, the city is still deserted, but outside the university an air force helicopter clatters overhead, a green armored personnel carrier full of riot police roars by, and we hear the
puh, puh
of distant gunfire coming from the campus.

D
ANDARA
C
LINIC
is small and clean and modern and almost empty. My mother has a private room with her own bathroom and a bedside window that looks out onto some rosebushes. She is immediately calmed by her move, and her spirits improve. Without a blood transfusion, her recovery will take much longer, but now that she realizes she is out of danger, she becomes appalled at how her illness has drained my father. “I think I may have killed him,” she says, aghast.

Once I have settled her in, I go and collect Dad for a visit. He sits by her bed and they hold hands, and I leave them alone together, while I take a look around. In the next room there is an elderly emaciated white woman, who lies on her back, staring at the ceiling, waiting to die. On the other side is middle-aged woman with a hacking cough who sits on her bed, smoking, with the door open, surveying the comings and goings.

As I drive Dad back from Dandara, I see that the fuel gauge is dipping into the red reserve zone. I have failed to get any fuel at JAG, and there is still none available at any fuel station, so I have no option but to try to acquire some on the black market. There are several problems to overcome — quite apart from breaking the protest strike. Black-market fuel has to be bought in U.S. dollars, possession of which is now a criminal offense. It’s also a crime to carry fuel around in a jerrican (to discourage hoarding, the government says). But I am due to depart within the week, and I want to leave Dad with enough fuel to visit Mum while she recuperates.

One of the places to meet “private” fuel suppliers, apparently, is the Italian bakery in Avondale Shopping Center. I have been wondering how I will identify the black-marketeers, but once there, it’s immediately obvious. A young white man at one of the veranda tables is doing deals on his cell phone in a booming voice.

“I’ve got plenty of both, gas
and
diesel. I know it’s four times the official price. If you can find any at the pumps, good luck to you! OK, then, you’ve got the address? That’s right, just past the white wall, the sign says
Kuala.
I’ll be there. Ciao.”

I’m just getting ready to make my approach when an elegantly dressed black woman sits down at his table. She discusses golf with him for a few minutes — they are evidently occasional golfing partners — and then she does a fuel deal with him too.

Now is definitely my chance, before his phone rings again. I get up and walk over, but just as he looks up at me, a young white man at the next table who has also been listening in, leans across to the black-marketeer.

“You know, you make me
sick!
” he says vehemently. “You’re a bloodsucker. You should be ashamed of yourself. Haven’t you, haven’t you got any . . . any
decency?
”

The crowd goes quiet, and I retrace my steps to my table, pretending I have just been checking on my car.

“Hey, man, I’m just trying to help,” shrugs the dealer.

“Bullshit,” says the young man, pushing back his chair and standing up now. “You’re exploiting all of us.”

He looks around for moral support, but no one backs him up. The dealer stands up too. He is taller than his critic.

“Listen, china, you get out of my fucking face, OK? I’m not hassling you, I’m just going about my business, so why don’t you go about yours.”

The critic turns as if to leave, but he is just winding up to throw a punch. The dealer deflects it with his forearm, and then they are grappling, tumbling to the floor, upsetting a table and spilling cappuccinos, until they are pulled apart.

The critic seems suddenly deflated. “I
was
going about my own business,” he says. “But we got thrown off our farm and lost everything. And here
you
are growing rich on it all. Guys like you make me wanna
puke,
man.” He picks up his keys and stalks off into the parking lot.

I wait for a few minutes, working up the nerve, and then I make my approach.

“Jeez,” says the dealer. “What a fuckin’ idiot. Dunno what
his
case was.”

I know what his case was, and I feel grubby and ashamed to be making this deal, but I must.

So the next day I drive over and pay my U.S. dollars and fill the tank of my car and drive back to my parents’ house, and Isaac siphons the tank into the fifty-five-gallon drum hidden in the back of the garage, and I repeat the journey several times until the drum is full to the brim, and the needle on the fuel gauge in the car is hard over to right, as far as it can go.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, the protests are to start in earnest. The city is in lockdown. On my drive to the hospital, there are soldiers and policeman at almost every corner, and plainclothes officers from the CIO or C-10 as it’s now nicknamed by the young activists, and roving squads of party youth militia jogging importantly down the middle of the road, and helicopters clattering overhead. It seems that every member of the security forces is out in the city today, and I am pulled over several times by sullen and suspicious policemen. There are policemen outside Dandara too. When I finally get inside, I notice that the rooms are all occupied, with murmurings behind closed doors.

“What’s going on?” I ask my mother.

She tells me to close the door.

“They’ve been admitting women who’ve been beaten up by the police,” she whispers hoarsely. “Women who were trying to join the protests.”

I venture out of her room and a nurse emerges from the room opposite — inside I can hear a woman groaning with pain.

“What’s happening?” I ask the nurse, who has also been looking after my mother.

“Ah, it’s too terrible,” she says. “They have all been beaten, with rifle butts and sticks and
sjamboks
[heavy whips]. They have broken arms and broken legs and lacerations, and some have head wounds, and one has a gunshot wound. But if they are found here they will be arrested,” she says. “And probably us too.”

In Zimbabwe it seems that injury has become proof of guilt.

Later, a delivery truck pulls up to the laundry bay. There is a flurry of nurses, and instead of laundry, several more injured people come in. Their clothes bear the overwhelming aroma of tear gas. Not ordinary civilian tear gas, but the potent, military-strength stuff. Soon, all our faces are streaming with tears.

A blue-overalled gardener pressed into emergency indoor duty squeaks into my mother’s room in his Wellington boots, holding out a rattling tray in work-horned hands. His face is a study in fierce concentration — he too is in tears but he ignores them. He lays the tray down gently and, drawing himself up to his full height, gestures grandly at the cup and the teapot and the milk jug. “Your afternoon tea, madam,” he announces.

Then he wipes his tears away with the back of his sleeve and withdraws, walking squeakily backward out of the room.

“Thank you. Thank you so much,” my mother calls after him, and she is crying too. Whether it’s from the tear gas or not, I no longer know.

W
HEN
I
GO TO SEE
if there’s anything I can do for the injured women, they ask to use my cell phone to call their families. Most of the women are from Women of Zimbabwe Arise! (WOZA), and they had been trying to march into the city center when they were attacked. They are middle-aged black ladies — the pillars of society, normally to be found at the Women’s Institute or organizing church teas. Yet here they are, their arms in casts, patches over their eyes, and bandages around their heads. And still they are spirited and indignant. This, it seems to me, is true courage. These women had a pretty good idea of what would happen to them and
still
they marched.