Love in the Driest Season (20 page)

He was slightly puzzled by my appearance in his office—the Social Welfare office had never put our request on his desk—but he said it all seemed reasonable to him. He was a man of his word. He signed the authorization letter within days. I couldn’t help but marvel when I saw it. We had spent five months to get a plain sheet of paper with three lines typed on it. It said we could take Chipo out of the country for a trip, and it was signed, dated, and stamped. It wasn’t even on letterhead. I could knock off a copy in fifteen minutes or less.

That wasn’t going to be necessary, as it turned out. Vita came home from another trek to the U.S. embassy a few days later, honking the horn as she pulled in the driveway. She jumped out of the car and came in the house.

“Lookit
this,
” she said, tossing Chipo’s passport on the couch where I was sitting.

I flipped it open. There was Chipo’s visa. “Great, great,” I said.

“No,” she insisted, “
look
at it.”

I opened it again, perplexed. I looked it over carefully, reading it aloud, and then I nearly dropped it.

It was a multiple-entry visa, with an expiration date of 2008. Chipo could go back and forth into the United States, whenever she liked for as long as she liked, for the next nine years.

It took me a minute to get a word out. “How did you do it?” I finally managed.

Vita was laughing, dancing around the room.

“I didn’t,” she said. “I applied for a single entry. That’s what I got back.”

I smiled, then thew up both hands. “Touchdown!”

Either someone at the consular offices had just made a mistake—and it seemed unlikely they would make a nine-year error for a two-foot-high toddler—or someone in there knew of our situation and had just tossed us a valentine.

I never asked.

16

H
OUSE OF
E
CHOES

I
T WAS THREE
days later that I called Peter Ndarowa, a taxi driver who had driven us around town so much that he was somewhere between a steady employee and a family friend, to give us a ride to the airport. There were heavy bags and packed suitcases, but none of them was mine. Vita and Chipo were going. I was staying behind. It wasn’t exactly a bait-and-switch operation, but it was in our best interest for Vita and Chipo to be out of the country as long as possible. I was going on home leave, just as I told the Department of Social Welfare, but I never said we were all traveling together. The fact was, my leave was finished, and I had to get back to work. I would take the trip home in two or three months on regular vacation time, as I was calling in every chit I had earned over the past six years.

Meanwhile, Vita and Chipo would be at my parents’ house in rural Mississippi, or at her sister Kathie’s in Detroit. Their lengthy stay was not quite the risk it might seem, for we long had noticed that while social workers had been poring over our files and records for a year—or just ignoring them—they had never asked to see Chipo. It was odd. There was no document about Vita or me that was too arcane for inspection—for example, they had our marriage certificate but demanded that Vita produce evidence that her first husband had actually died. Persuading Health Department workers in the city of Detroit to issue a death certificate for a citizen who had died years before, via a satellite telephone call from sub-Saharan Africa, and then convincing them to mail a certified copy of the same to Harare, Zimbabwe is not a task for the faint of heart. But it can be done, and was, and the document was placed on the appropriate desk. But nobody—and I mean nobody—ever asked to see the object of this whole process. They never asked us to bring Chipo in for an evaluation; they never checked to see if she was bonding to us or even if she might have been abused in some way. They did not ask to see her health card, her schedule of immunizations, or any proof that we were taking her for checkups. After the foster hearing, they didn’t ask to see her at all. How is Chipo? they would ask. Fine, we would say. Chipo could have been summering in St. Tropez for all anyone knew.

In fact, Chipo was summering on a farm near Starkville, Mississippi, not exactly what you would call tourist country. The series of plane flights was torturous for Vita and Chipo—Harare south to Johannesburg, then back north to London, then to Atlanta, then to Mississippi. By the time they boarded the transatlantic flight, Chipo was so sleepless and irritable, and Vita so visibly exhausted, that a couple of women in the row ahead of her insisted on holding Chipo for a few hours.

“You look exhausted, sister,” one of them said. “And we’re at thirty-five thousand feet. It’s not like we’re going anywhere with her.”

Vita conceded this was so, and slept.

The last leg of the trip, from Atlanta to northeast Mississippi, is an hourlong hop on a prop plane. After a brief stint in the clouds heading west, the plane glides down over a series of lakes and pastures just outside of a town called Columbus, turns south to pass over a four-lane highway, and lands on a runway next to a field of soybeans. The plane had not yet taxied to a stop when Vita, Miss Big City Girl, found herself wondering how she was going to spend a couple of months out here with white people she barely knew. She tried to imagine how many black women, in the entire history of Detroit, had married white men from Mississippi and spent two months down on the family farm, complete with African child in tow. She looked at her hand and figured she had plenty of fingers to spare.

Duane and Betty were waiting inside the tiny airport building, perhaps a little nervous about the visit too but delighted to see Chipo and Vita again. Driving into Starkville, past the long row of gas stations and fast-food restaurants that lined the main drag, Vita’s sense of unease returned. But by the time they got out to my parents’ small, quiet farm—they had sold off the livestock years ago—she began to find it peaceful. She and my mother chatted easily, and my old man was so enchanted with Chipo that he had built her a swing on the back porch even before she got there. He had been a stern to terrorizing figure when I was growing up, maybe five foot six and two hundred pounds, all muscle, bone, and gristle, gruff and demanding. He was still a solidly built, barrel-chested man, though his hair was graying and his knees were giving out on him, and he was a buttercup with his only grandchild. He helped her into the special seat, buckled her in, tickled her under the chin, and then pushed her back and forth in the shade of the late afternoon. Vita wasn’t sure who had the bigger smile, him or Chipo.

A couple of days after they arrived, Vita and my mother took Chipo to the doctor’s office for a rigorous exam. Chipo wobbled into the clinic in downtown Starkville like a trouper. She stepped on the scales, stuck her tongue out when she was supposed to, and howled like a banshee when they drew a small sample of blood. The tests confirmed our wildest hopes—she was just fine. She was twenty-three pounds and twenty-nine inches long, which was small for American children, but she was walking now, climbing over everything in the house.

She didn’t have much of a vocabulary, but one of her favorite things to say was “Hello,” usually blared out like a little foghorn. She was delighted at a word that always drew an identical response. She would call it out during breakfast, playing on the back porch, or eating ice cream after dinner. It was during these evenings, with no one but family for miles around, that she and my old man began to form their own relationship. She couldn’t say “Granddaddy,” so she called him “Big Daddy,” which came out sounding like one word, “Bidadn.”

Chipo would give an “oof!” or “unfh!” going up and down steps or picking up something in the living room after dinner. Pop would repeat those grunts each time she made them. “Oof,” Chipo would say, attempting to climb onto a chair. “Ooofff,” my old man would mimic from his chair. She would turn her head and look at him, suspiciously at first, then give another grunt. He did it again. She did it louder. He did it louder. And then she was giggling, and they would do it back and forth, nose to nose.

“Oofff!”

“Oooofffff!”

“Duane,” my exasperated mother called out from the kitchen, “don’t you teach my grandbaby to grunt.”

As the weeks passed, with Vita learning to watch rodeo on cable with my father after dinner (“It’s not like there are viewing options,” she would mutter over the phone), he noticed something odd about his daughter-in-law: She stayed awfully close to the house. With the livestock gone and the fences pulled down, there was now a large, well-kept backyard, huge shade trees, some open pasture, and miles of woods stretching beyond them. With this freedom at her disposal, Vita would scarcely go off the back porch. And when she discovered there were deer that would come into the yard at night, eating flowers or the feed my father left out for them in a bucket, she became resolute—she wasn’t going anywhere out there.

My father thought this was a hoot, a grown-up who was frightened of deer. I confess I did too. “Honey,” I’d say in a phone call, “articulate to me what it is you think the deer are going to do. What, you come out of the house and they rush you? Push you in a corner and take your lunch money?”

She wasn’t moved, though she would laugh about it. “I’m not going out in those woods to mess around. They stay out there, I’ll stay in here.”

But she was also surprised to find how comfortable she felt in rural Mississippi. It was a different but familiar feel to black life, she said, sounding as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. “A lot of white people in Mississippi are a lot more like black people than they realize,” she said. “Maybe it’s just country southern culture and I’m not used to it. But did you know your mama made greens and corn bread for dinner the other night? And fried catfish? That’s what
my
mother cooked. I didn’t know white people ate like that. And church is a lot different, but it’s still Baptist and everybody sits out front and talks and gossips afterward, and it seems to play the same sort of central role in everyone’s life. The respect people have for their grandparents, their elders, is like black people too, in an old-school way.”

“I don’t know why you’re so surprised. I used to tell you this in Detroit all the time,” I said.

“Well, yeah, but this is
Mississippi.
”

“Who you telling?”

“It’s just not what I thought it would be. I wouldn’t want to move down here, understand, but I’m actually enjoying this. The other day, I caught myself looking forward to going to Wal-Mart.”

“Whoa.”

“Scary, isn’t it?”

O
N THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD,
I went back to the other life I was married to, airplanes and two-bit hotels and a suitcase and a satellite phone set up next to the hotel window. I woke up one morning back in Sarajevo, covering President Clinton’s trip to that city, where there were now stoplights and traffic jams. I had dinner with Aida Cerkez, who had taught herself journalism during the war and become the backbone of the Associated Press operation there. She put her toddler son on a bus out of the city with her mother when the war began, and she rarely saw him for years. When she was out of the city on assignment, she would loan me her apartment. I hauled water and took baths each morning during the war by squatting in the tub, then dumping a bucket of the stuff over my head, gasping and cursing in the cold.

Now the war was over, Aida’s son was back, she was happily married, and we all had dinner in a nice place with tablecloths. The war days seemed another lifetime, something that had happened to someone else. Time blurred and I woke up in another hotel in Monrovia, a steady rain beating down on the Liberian shoreline, the waves rolling in on dirty sand while children in rags played in the shelled-out hulk of a building across the street. In Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, rebels whose modus operandi was chopping off the arms and ears of civilians who didn’t support their cause had been granted a part of the government in a peace agreement that only the United Nations thought would work. To emphasize the bitterness of the agreement, President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah had taken a two-year-old orphan whose arm had been blown off to the signing of the cease-fire.

I worked out of my room at the Cape Sierra Hotel on the waterfront. They charged $125 per night, cash only, for a shabby room that reeked of bug spray, with dirty brown water spilling from the faucets. There was a rat paddling around in my toilet when I lifted the lid. I pulled the satellite phone and the computer into the open courtyard in the moonlight, the roar of the ocean on the other side of the hotel, and bounced a story about the orphan who accompanied the president, Memunatu Mansaray, off a satellite and back down to Washington. I closed down the computer and sat in the soft light for a moment, resting from the day’s work, enjoying the quiet beauty of the shoreline. A moment passed, and I could make out the whisper of footsteps behind me. I swore, silently, as I was sitting alone in the dark with $5,000 worth of equipment. But when I turned, it was only two prostitutes from the hotel bar, looking for a customer. I said no thanks, two, three, four times, and they finally left, sullen, hips in tight skirts turning back to the bar.

O
N THE MORNINGS
I awoke in Zimbabwe, I found it depressing beyond reason. Being alone in a hotel was fine. But alone in that house, rattling around the kitchen cooking dinner for no one but myself, building a fire to keep warm while I read late into the evenings, engendered a sense of loneliness that seemed to echo in my bones. I had lived alone for thirteen years as a single man, often moving to cities where I knew no one, and was no stranger to long periods of solitude. But this was different. The apartments I lived in during those years had been shells in which I invested little and from which I expected less. But this was a home filled with the smells and scents and voices of the women in my life. I kept waiting for Chipo to come tottering around the corner, or Vita to call out to me from the patio, and there was never anyone or anything there. I opened Vita’s closet and could smell the perfume of her clothes; I saw the ghostly imprint of Chipo’s hand on a window above her changing table. I found myself staring at it, startled back into the present only by one of the dogs licking my hand.

I let them outside, feeling the chill breeze across my skin, but couldn’t place the feeling that was twitching beneath the surface. There was only a well of emptiness, in which I seemed to drown a little more day by day. Reuters photographer Corinne Dufka, a good friend, and I had met again during the Freetown trip. We wound up discussing such things in her apartment there. After almost a decade of photographing some of the most intense conflicts in South America, Africa, and the Balkans, Corinne had just left the media to work for Human Rights Watch. I was surprised, because I considered her to be one of the best—and toughest—conflict photographers working.

“Why did you stop?” I asked.

“Because I just couldn’t feel anything anymore,” she said. “I mean, what manner of human cruelty have I not witnessed at this point? How many people have I watched be killed in front of me? I can watch an execution, process my film, eat a good dinner, and get a good night’s sleep. Which is fine. That’s how it is. But you reach a point.”

I did not realize it then, but when I was back in Harare in my house of echoes and voices that were not there, it began to dawn on me that I had passed that point myself. Everyone has a limit of how much violence he or she can stand—cops, criminals, firefighters, soldiers, even journalists—and although I had never had any intention of reaching such a point, I now realized I had crossed some barrier the day I picked up Chipo in Chinyaradzo. I never got over how fragile she was, and that fear had turned me into someone else, different, stronger, more resolute, and yet more vulnerable. Before she and Vita had left, I would let Chipo sleep between us, and I would lie awake, watching her sleep, with no desire to do anything else at all. Even in the daylight, I no longer wanted the constant travel, the risks. I no longer wanted to deal with heavily armed, drugged-out sixteen-year-olds at checkpoints in the middle of nowhere; I didn’t want to drive out of a different Sarajevo over a different Mount Igman under a different siege with different people shooting at the truck. I didn’t really care what I did anymore; I just wanted to wake up in a house where my daughter was safe. The tenuous nature of our position in the country was a corrosive acid, eating away at me, and it marked its progress in steady fashion. The possibility of going to sleep without a drink, then two, or three or more, became nonexistent. I would sit by the fire in the darkened house, sipping a whiskey over ice, watching the middle distance, and then the glass would be empty. I would get up, stir the fire, and pour another. I would awake several hours later, unrested and sweaty and apprehensive, walking through the house at four in the morning.