Love in the Driest Season (22 page)

“That is the problem, Mr. Tucker. It is actually someone who knows you quite well. Ah, it is your friends Heather and Steve. They have been in your home many times. I believe you have been to theirs. Heather has told me a great deal, and Steve was very clear about the bribes, I am sorry to say for you. There must be an investigation, one that is very thorough. I cannot advance any application that has these charges.”

“Heather?” Vita nearly shouted. Kaseke had played her cards well.

Heather and Steve had indeed been to our house many times, and we in theirs. Heather had an adolescent daughter by a previous marriage. Steve was trying to formally adopt her. We knew that, of course, but it had not really registered. In fact, we had distanced ourselves from them after a series of incidents. There were a few unpleasantries, but the main event had been a reception I hosted for my editor, Joyce, when she had visited the year before. It was an evening affair, filled with an array of Zimbabweans and expatriates who worked at a wide variety of professions, from art gallery owners to political activists to architects. There were sixty or seventy people milling about, sipping wine and chatting. I thought the evening was going rather well when Nevio, my friend the cafe owner, mentioned that Steve was raising hell on the patio. I stepped outside, where the air was noticeably tense. Steve had been loudly proclaiming racist views of black Americans and Africans. It didn’t seem to matter that his wife was Zambian and his audience entirely black. “I don’t know who’s worse,” I was told he blared, “idiots who run these countries or black Americans who show up and think they know something. There’s nothing more arrogant and ignorant than a black American in Africa.”

Not surprisingly, people began leaving. By the time I had learned of the incident, it was pretty much over. “You’re all right with me,” said Jamar Evans, a friend from Texas who is black and was working in Harare, “but you need to look out for the white boys you run with.”

Heather, meanwhile, had too much to drink and was holding court among a small group of women inside. At that time she was making clothes for Grace Mugabe, the country’s new First Lady, who was half the age of her husband. She had arisen, amongst great scandal, from being one of the president’s secretaries to being his wife. She was awkward in public and extravagantly overdressed for the simplest of occasions. She shopped in South Africa and the capitals of Europe. Her trademark large hats were parodied around town. She wasn’t popular, to say the least. Heather—very attractive, always impeccably dressed, and with a walk that leaned toward a sashay—thought her high-profile client was a laughingstock.

“She’s a simple country girl, a peasant,” she told the women.

Then she went out to their car, an open bottle of wine in hand, and passed out in the front seat.

We had not seen them since that evening, politely declining invitations for dinner or get-togethers. We had no interest in being anywhere around Heather when her gossip got back to State House, and I didn’t sip whiskey with men who held Steve’s view of the world.

And now, we learned, we were targets of their anger.

“We haven’t seen them in ages,” Vita told Kaseke. “Heather doesn’t know a damn thing about Chipo, much less our paperwork.”

Kaseke smiled, looked down, held up her hands. “Ah, I am so sorry. But you must understand, we must investigate.”

We got in the car. My hands were shaking as I put the key in the ignition. Heather would have been sure to oh-so-casually mention she made clothes for the First Lady to Kaseke, playing up her visits to State House. That would give her charges extra clout.

“This has to be some sort of bullshit,” I said. “Kaseke is twisting something. Let me call Heather and see what’s going on.”

I walked in the house and dialed her number without slowing down to take off my jacket. She picked up the phone.

“Hey, Heather, I’m sorry to bother you, but you won’t believe the nonsense I just heard,” I said. “I just wanted to bounce it off you. Florence Kaseke told me just now that you and Steve were down there saying we paid people for Chipo. I know that can’t be right, but I wanted to get it straight how she is under that impression.”

There was a pause.

“I don’t know that this is as untrue as you think,” she said.

“I need you to tell me what that means,” I said, struggling to keep the tremor out of my voice.

“We have been trying for Steve to adopt my daughter, as you know,” she said. “It has been three years! Three years! I went to Kaseke’s office, and she didn’t even know where our file was. Can you imagine! I told her of your case and how you had no problems, you came and got a baby and that was that. It makes me mad, when we Africans are made to sit in the backseat to you Americans. Steve was furious, I tell you. He went to Margaret Tsiga and yelled at her for some time. You are paying her off—oh, we know. That is fine for you, but it pushes our case to the back.”

“Heather,” I said, snapping a pencil in two, “who is Margaret Tsiga?”

“The adoption officer, of course.”

“Heather, goddammit, our file has never made it to adoptions. We are still in
foster care.
I don’t know who this woman is. She could step on my toes and I—wait a minute. Three years? How many times have you been down there? To the department?”

“I told you. I went the other day.”

“No, I mean before that. Like in the whole three years.”

“I filled out the form and gave it to them. Then nothing happened. I had almost forgotten about it. I went by the other day to pick it up, and that’s when they couldn’t find it.”

“Are you saying you’ve been down there two or three times in three years?”

“One or two times more than that. I don’t count such things. I mean, one fills out the form and picks it up. It’s very simple.”

I was trying very hard to keep my temper in check. I kept telling myself silently
Make the smart play. Think two steps ahead. Picture a good outcome.
What kept coming to mind instead was an image of whopping Heather over the head with a baseball bat.

I lowered my voice and spoke as evenly as possible.

“Heather. We have been to that building more than thirty-five times.
This
year.
More than sixty-five in all. I
do
count such things. I log them with fucking notations. They have lost our file, just like they lost yours. We got ours back because Vita crawled around on her hands and knees for two days. They don’t do anything unless you make them do it, Heather. You put your file in a couple years ago and never called in? Of course it went missing.”

She harrumphed into the phone.

The noise seemed like a shove in the chest.

“Do you know, woman, that you have just put my daughter’s life at risk? That you just gave them ammunition to put her in an orphanage? That she will likely not survive if that happens? You know they hate Western journalists. You’ve seen the anti-American marches. If you thought we were doing something wrong, for chrissake, why didn’t you complain to us? How does it help you to have Chipo taken away?”

“Don’t be a fool,” she said.

“
Me?
Did you just
fucking
say that
I
was the fool in this conversation? Jesus
Christ.
Put Steve on the phone. I want him to say to my face what he’s been saying behind my back.”

“He’s not here.”

“Fine. I’ll call the motherfucker at the office.”

“Steve will not take any call from you.”

The line stopped me. It suddenly became clear, in a Zen-like moment of clarity, that they might have been among our enemies within the department all along. I suddenly remembered a day months earlier. We had seen Heather in Kaseke’s office. She had stood up to go when we walked in, saying in passing that she was getting their adoption finished. Had she whispered in Kaseke’s ear then? Was that why our file had been stuck for so long? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Whatever the case, there was no good outcome to be had. I was ready to give it to her in a double dose—but, I realized, I couldn’t. The humiliating fact was that she had more pull than we did. Making her angry was only going to make the situation worse.

I slammed down the phone.

Vita and I roamed the house that night, all but breaking things. I threw book after book against the wall. I went in my office and shattered clipboards over my knee. We spit out every epithet, insult, expletive and threat known to either of us—and considering my southern roots and Vita’s urban flair, this was a fairly colorful (and extensive) array of language. I think it fair to say that both of us were unbalanced for a period of several hours. One of the risks of reporting on so many conflicts, it seems to me, is that you deal with so much violence and so many unstable situations that the whole process begins to seem ordinary. You get on the plane in one violent spot, land back at your home base a few hours later, then go back, and return and go back and return and go back and return, and after it gets to be years of this sort of mental and moral Ping-Pong, sometimes you have to shake your head to remind yourself of what is “normal.” I had interviewed enough people whose lives had been ruined to know better than to think disaster only happened to someone else, and the whole situation seemed askew, beyond reason.
This,
I thought,
is how your life blows up.

Neither of us slept that night.

By nine the next morning, I had been for a ten-mile run in an effort to calm my nerves. Whatever benefit there had been to venting our anger the night before, ranting was no longer helpful. We needed something to break the logjam. There were no other flanking movements or misdirections or other pieces of documentation that we could obtain to nudge the process forward.

There was just the adoption order. Nothing else mattered now.

It was the last days of October. The parliamentary elections were in six months.

Other than the time Kaseke had come to our house, I had never seriously considered that we would lose Chipo. As I often told our friends, we wanted her more than the department did and, eventually, desire trumps bureaucracy. But with the political climate collapsing, our phone line tapped, the president naming individual journalists as enemies of the state, the law making foreign adoptions all but impossible—and now with the bizarre twist of the First Lady’s dressmaker denouncing us—I had to concede we were about out of options. If this had felt like a tennis match a couple of months ago, I was no longer so jocular now that we were down to match point.

“We need a silver bullet,” I said to Vita.

We were both in the office, drooped in our chairs, and she didn’t say anything. Instead, she raised herself, cup of coffee in hand, and went to the filing cabinet. She began pulling notarized copies of every document that related to Chipo’s birth, medical history, and our custody of her. I turned to the computer and, with a muttered curse, began to write a response to the bribery allegations.

The tactic we had decided to take was that Steve and Heather had done us a favor.

They had assumed we were much further along than we were. By accusing us of bribing Margaret Tsiga, whom the department managers had spent fifteen months preventing us from reaching, their own files would show the allegation to be false. If they said we bribed one of our foster-care officers, it might have been a body blow. Instead, we would treat it as a roundhouse that missed.

That was the plan, anyway.

I addressed the letter to Kaseke and, after pleasantries this time, it began: “Yesterday you informed us of allegations made by another client that we had taken ‘shortcuts’ during the fostering/adoption process. This letter is to clarify, I hope for the final time, the life-threatening situation that brought Chipo into our care. It appears the nature of Chipo’s illness at the time has been frequently misunderstood within the department, giving rise to allegations of premature placement in our home.”

I went on for three single-spaced pages, delineating every record in Chipo’s medical history, the corresponding emergency custody orders, the times and dates of every substantial meeting we had with department officers (sometimes it helps to be a compulsive note-taker) and listed, by name and title, every person in the department who had signed off on our files.

The name Margaret Tsiga appeared nowhere.

Vita, meanwhile, was assembling copies and documents, down to the receipt for the oxygen Chipo had been given in intensive care. It was 2
A.M.
by the time we finished. The table held two empty take-out pizza containers and two bottles of wine.

We pulled Chipo out of her crib to sleep between us that night. She sat up in the middle of the bed about an hour later, saw both of us, and was delighted. “Hellloooo!” she sang out. “Hellloooo!” she said again, louder, when that failed to draw a prompt response. I woke up and said, “Hey.”

She went back to sleep. I couldn’t.

At first light, I was in the front yard, throwing a ball for the dogs to chase. By 7:45, I was showered and dressed in the best suit I owned. Thirty minutes later, I was in Kaseke’s office. I gave her the file, a brief assessment of its contents, and another one of my cards. “Call anytime,” I said.

Then I pulled rank. The art of getting mad, after all, is getting even.

I went a few blocks over to her boss’s office—that of Mr. Soko, the man who had signed off on our visit to the United States. I walked in without an appointment because I knew he wouldn’t give me one if I called. I sat in the front room for an hour and a half before his secretary, after speaking on the phone, came over and said he would see me at 9
A.M.
Monday. It was then Thursday. I said fine.

I could not sleep that night, nor the next. I became so sleep-deprived I couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to write a coherent sentence. I finally went to see Dr. Paruch, our friendly Polish doctor. He was a remarkable man. Raised in communist-era Poland, he had moved his family to Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, a country friendly to the Soviet bloc in the Cold War years. Somehow, on a state salary in an impoverished country, he had managed to put his two daughters through Ivy League colleges on scholarships. He counseled me not to worry so much, swallow the sleeping pills he gave me, and take the longer view of life. I promised to do the second and get back to him on the other two.