Love in the Driest Season

by Neely Tucker

  Journalists, meanwhile, were trying to get in as fast as everyone else was trying to get out. Since there was no direct flight from Harare to Kinshasa, I booked a flight to Nairobi on Monday, and then on to Kinshasa the next day.

  We slept with Chipo between us again on Saturday night. We didn’t leave the house all day Sunday, keeping to the steady, unnerving routine of helping her to breathe, to get some sort of nourishment, to ease her screams. It was long after nightfall when we reluctantly took her back to the orphanage, as required. Helen Tanyayiwa was heading the night shift. We helped her tuck in one infant, then another, under their sheets. The night was chilly, and we bundled up Chipo in a forest of blankets. She was dozing again.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, little baby,” Vita whispered, giving her a light kiss on the cheek, so as to not wake her. I added my own, and then we slipped outside. We started the truck and drove home in the darkness. The roads were deserted.

  “I wish I weren’t leaving just now,” I said.

  “She’ll be fine,” Vita said. “I’ll go see her every day. We girls will manage.”

  I smiled. “I know. I’ll check in on the satellite phone.”

  The next morning, Vita rode with me in a taxi to the airport. I slung my computer bag across one shoulder and gripped a small carry-on in the other hand. “I’ll be back when this thing blows over,” I said. “Three weeks, six on the outside.”

  “Don’t get dead,” she said, giving me a kiss at our standard parting line. Then she told the taxi driver to stop by Chinyaradzo before heading home.

  5

  “BREATHE, BABY, BREATHE”

  THE INFANT WARD was in high clamor when Vita walked in, with children crawling on playmates or eating or being changed or crying in their cribs. The second crib on the right was still. Vita looked down to see Chipo wriggling silently. She was struggling to breathe. Vita pulled open the child’s clothes and was stunned to see Chipo’s heart ricocheting off her chest, each beat etching a sharp tattoo against her rib cage. She could scarcely open her eyes, the lids puffy and discolored. Her diaper was filled with diarrhea. It appeared no one had touched her since the previous evening.

  Vita didn’t hesitate. She picked up the soiled infant, rushed out of the ward, turned into another short hallway, and barged into Stella’s office. “I’m taking her to the hospital,” she said. Stella looked up, startled. She stood up, looked Chipo over, and quickly agreed with Vita’s decision. Protocol was for a worker to take the sick child to the hospital in the orphanage’s van or to have the hospital send an ambulance. Vita had no legal authority to admit the child to a hospital. But the situation was critical, and Stella gave Vita directions to the public ward of Harare Hospital.

  Vita got back in the waiting cab and ignored that. She told the driver to rush to the Trauma Center, a privately run, cash-only clinic that offered the country’s best medical care. They pulled up to the emergency entrance in a screech. The gatekeeper peered inside, saw a black woman with a child, and refused to open the gate.

  Vita responded with a Motown flair for the direct. “My baby is sick!” she shouted, coming halfway out of the car. “Now open this gate before I beat your behind into the asphalt!”

  Startled, the man did.

  Inside, the doctor on call took Chipo from Vita and placed her on an examining table. Chipo was in a frenzy by now, screaming and shaking her arms and legs. The doctor looked at Vita, slowly shaking his head.

  “It’s her heart,” he said.

  He gave her an injection to calm her, then transferred her to the Avenues Clinic, the town’s premier hospital. He scribbled a note that she was to be taken to one of the only pediatric cardiologists in the country, Isidore Pazvakavambwa.

  When Dr. Pazvakavambwa touched Chipo, she screamed as if her skin were on fire. Vita was so upset that nurses had to lead her from the room. She sat in the gloomy hallway until Dr. Paz, as Vita began calling him, appeared. He was an albino, his pale face almost hidden beneath a large safari hat and thick glasses. When he learned Vita was not the child’s birth mother, he was touched by her devotion, for his own youth as a social oddity had taught him something about the fate of left-behind or ostracized children.

  He asked for Chipo’s history. Vita relayed the tale of her birth and hospitalizations. He said the child had been born prematurely, perhaps by as much as a month. Her vital organs were very weak, especially her heart. She also had pneumonia and bronchitis. “If she makes it through tonight, the immediate danger will be past,” he said. “But that is only a chance. She is a very sick child.”

  Vita rushed to buy diapers, bottles, clothes, and formula—the hospital did not provide any—and settled in for the vigil. Chipo had been placed in an outdated oxygen tent, actually a clear plastic shell that fit over her head. She was so small that it could have covered her entire body. There were two other children in the four-bed ward, with equally concerned mothers. They regarded Vita with glares. Her clothes, the goods she had bought Chipo, and her direct manner in talking with the doctors and nurses were conspicuously Western and upscale. She didn’t need to be told she was resented. It was the first time in her life that she didn’t feel like an African American. The looks she got made it clear: She was an American, period.

  The women turned inward then, and each settled in for the long hours ahead. There was little Vita could do but tap on the plastic shell when Chipo was awake and make eye contact. “Breathe, baby, breathe,” she coaxed. Time dragged by into the small hours. It was 2 and then 3 A.M. The hallways were dark and deserted. It was quiet. In spite of herself, Vita gradually nodded off. She came to, sitting bolt upright in a chair, just after daylight. Chipo was asleep, her chest moving slightly up and down with each breath. Vita closed her eyes and said a prayer of thanks. Dr. Paz was delighted when he came by on his morning rounds. By that afternoon, he even allowed Chipo out of the oxygen tent for a few minutes so that Vita could walk her back and forth in the hall. Her body was warm, a sensation that delighted Vita, but her breathing was shallow and fast. Her eyes seemed a listless shade of brown. Her head lolled back on her shoulders. She went back under the shell, into the hiss of the oxygen.

  The next day, the shell stayed on for twenty-two hours. The day after, twelve hours. By this point, Vita had all but moved into the ward, returning home only to shower and sleep for a couple of hours.

  “I have a question for you,” Dr. Paz said to her late one afternoon. “Chipo is well enough to go home. But she is so small, her lungs and heart so weak. If I sign the papers for her to return to Chinyaradzo, I am signing her death warrant. She will not live if she is returned there. I want to know if you and your husband would take this child in. I do not mean for a while. I mean to stay for always. If you say yes, I will inform the home and the Department of Social Welfare that this will be my recommendation.”

  “You mean she would be ours?”

  “If you wish.”

  Vita, who had given up on ever having children, felt a swoop of hope pass through her, a sensation like the flapping of the wings of a small and unseen bird.

  “Of course we will,” she said.

  The next morning, Vita found herself taking Chipo home in a taxi. She had tried to call my hotel in Kinshasa but could not get through. This was particularly unnerving, because Chipo would never have been released at that stage in a Western country, and now Vita had the child alone—in better conditions than the orphanage, and perhaps even better than the hospital, but still alone. She nervously eyed the combinations of liquid medicines Chipo needed to combat the pneumonia and break up the fluid in her lungs. It was difficult. Like most every infant, Chipo would take a teaspoon of medicine and spray it back out, but her life depended on that medicine getting into her bloodstream. Vita would let one blast of medicine splatter onto her shirt, then get another and coax it down, time after time. She tapped her on the back four or five sessions a day to try to dislodge the phlegm. She grew unnerved and exhausted, for Chipo rarely slept mor
e than an hour at a time.

  After several days, the disorientation of sleep deprivation became apparent. There didn’t seem to be a way out. The intensive-care session had no doubt saved Chipo’s life, but there was no hospital in Zimbabwe Vita trusted enough to call for help in an emergency. She had learned that distrust firsthand.

  The previous year, a minibus had plowed the wrong way down a one-way street, smashing into her car head-on. It cracked her collarbone, which the paramedics snapped in two when they lifted her out of the car by picking her up under the shoulders. A crowd gathered as she lay on the grass next to the wreckage. She felt a tugging on her boots, at first thinking it was the paramedics. But it persisted, and she opened her eyes to see that a bystander had knelt down and was stealing the boots off her feet, tugging hard to get them off. Once he got them, he stood up and walked away. No one stopped him. Then the paramedic stuck an ungloved finger into the open gash on her leg. “Uuhh, that’s deep,” he said. Later, after doctors set the fracture, they allowed an artery to fuse onto the snapped collarbone. It wound up requiring a trip to Johannesburg and a four-hour operation, all to set a broken bone.

  She was grateful to Dr. Paz, but in fact she was dependent on him now. Chipo had little documentation that she even existed, much less a birth certificate or traveling papers. The first-rate hospitals of Johannesburg were just a ninety-minute flight away, but there was no way Vita could get Chipo there. Fortunately, Mavis Ganuka, the housekeeper who lived on the grounds, was enchanted with Chipo. She had raised five children of her own. She didn’t hesitate to tie Chipo onto her back, in the traditional mode of child transport, and go about her chores. Chipo, soothed by the intimate body contact, would drift to sleep. In a gradual rotation, the two women made it through one day, and then one more.

  HALF A CONTINENT AWAY, I was not calling home every day. I had fallen into a different world. Kinshasa was filled with the pandemonium of a city expecting a military invasion. Congo was a sprawling country, but to effectively seize control of what little government apparatus there was required only that Kinshasa be taken. The rebels knew this and, rather than fight their way through each section of the country, were making for the capital.

  I flew into Kinshasa with my buddy and frequent travel partner, Ann Simmons, the Nairobi bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. Since our papers did not compete for readers, we often watched each other’s back on difficult assignments. We landed in Kinshasa’s tumultuous airport, where men shoved and fought to grab luggage to take to a friend’s aging car, euphemistically called a taxi. Then you paid a hefty tip so that you might leave with your luggage. It only took a day or two in the city before we discovered we were an almost comically unpopular pair. My passport was American, which was bad enough, but the only thing people noticed about me on the street was my close-cropped beard and long ponytail. “Frenchman,” they spat. Since France had been one of the colonial exploiters of Congo, the French were perhaps more despised than the Americans at this emotional juncture. Ann was a British national but had an equally problematic appearance: She was six feet two inches tall, slim, and had the dark skin of the West Indies, thanks to Caribbean parents. She was also graced with a long, slender neck. The combination made Ann a striking woman anywhere she went—and in Kinshasa, it made her appear strikingly Tutsi, the hated Nilotic “invaders.”

  The rebel army, whatever its soldiers’ ethnic composition, was closing in. They took the hydroelectric dam that gave power to the city. They would cut the power off, then turn it on and shut it off again to proclaim their approach.

  In return, Kabila announced he wanted to arm the general population to defend themselves. The streets went electric. Shops belonging to Tutsis, or people thought to be Tutsis, were torched. Large bands of young men roamed the avenues, pointing sticks at passing cars as if they were holding rifles. Businesses were shutting down, except for travel agents’ offices, which were drawing steady lines of expatriates.

  There was a rally scheduled for 10 A.M. the next day at the city stadium. We went to the stadium half an hour early, when people would be streaming in but not yet stirred by speeches. We agreed to stay less than fifteen minutes. It’s a rule of thumb of sorts among correspondents that if your car is not attacked upon arrival in a hostile neighborhood, you’ve probably got a few minutes before a crowd forms and emotions soar. In most places, the idea is to get off the street, into a shop or even a market stall, where you are not immediately visible.

  As we pulled into the dirt-and-gravel parking lot of the stadium, set in a poor section of a very poor city, there were no such stalls or closed spaces. There were only streams of thousands of young men, apparently none over thirty and most in their teens. Some were squaring off into military squads. They tried to march, with exaggerated goose steps and set faces, while a man in front screamed directions.

  We told the driver to stay in the car, roll up the windows, and not open the door for anyone but us. “If you see us come running,” I said, “be ready to go.” We stepped out with our interpreter, who went by the name of Jean-Peter. I clicked my watch over to its stopwatch mode so that we would stay no longer than the fifteen minutes we’d decided on. We headed for a group of men who were flying banners and chanting “Vive Kabila!” then, in Lingala, “Death to the Tutsis!” We stepped over a large pipe, the crowd around us growing thicker as we approached the chanting men. The noise was deafening. A tall man was walking alongside me, shouting in French. I shouted back, tapping on my chest, that I was American. He stood between Ann and me and shouted, “The Banyamulenge [the word for Tutsis born in Congo] are animals! They are savages who must be exterminated! They want to come in, stay forever, and colonize us! They must go home to Rwanda!’’ He gave his name as Steve Mukena, an electrician, and as I wrote I glanced at my watch. Seven minutes. Someone yanked on my hair. Jean-Peter was trying to hold several men back, leaning up against them with his shoulder. An alarmed look came over his face in response to what he was hearing. He looked at Ann, then me, and shouted, “Leave this place!” He then turned and yelled back at the men who were shouting at him. It was impossible to hear anything. I grabbed his arm, Ann locked her arm in his other one, and we began to try to move backward through the crowd. The men saw this for what it was, an awkward retreat, and responded with jeers and whistles. Someone shoved me in the back. Someone kicked at my leg. We moved faster, Ann letting go of my arm to step over the pipe, and I felt a sharp whack across my shoulders. It felt like a stiff rubber hose or a slender stick, but I didn’t turn to look. A man spat in my face. Rocks began flying. A hand was in my back, steadily shoving. Jean-Peter, I thought, give me a break. I’m going. The man with the hose or stick skittered alongside of me, lashing my back, then the back of my knee, causing it to swing out in front of me. From the other side, a man began kicking me in the ass with his foot. I acknowledged none of this, just concentrated on moving forward and not falling down. I turned to tell Ann something, and Ann was not there.

  My stomach fell into a pit. I turned to yell at Jean-Peter that we had to find her, but the man shoving me in the back wasn’t Jean-Peter. It was a young man, his mouth turned into a snarl, his shirt ripped, his eyes glazed. I turned to look for the car and it wasn’t there. I was, in fact, standing amid rows and rows of cars that I didn’t remember from when we had parked. I turned, looking for our car, but my nerves were rattled and the shouting was intense and I suddenly couldn’t remember what color or make it was. I had just seen the thing for a second when we got in that morning. I cursed myself now for not having paid closer attention. Dust was kicking up from all the feet. Sweat was pouring down my back. The man who had been kicking me reached out and kicked me again, aiming at the side of my knee. I blocked him with my arm, still scanning the crowd, starting to move again, and then I saw the top of Ann’s head, moving above the others, perhaps fifty yards away. I loved her just then for being so tall. I made my way as quickly as I could, ignoring the lashings, and caught up with her and Jean-Peter as
we reached the car. We got in. “Get moving!” Ann snapped at the driver, but he pointed over the hood of the car. I turned, and there was a soldier at the front bumper, an AK-47 pointed at us. He glared, swung it to the left, and stepped aside. The driver edged forward, then hit the gas.

  AT TEN IN the morning the following day in Nairobi, U.S. ambassador Prudence Bushnell was conducting a polite meeting with several Kenyan trade officials on the eighteenth floor of the Cooperative Bank building, a high-rise with long rows of windows on each floor, affording views of the entire city. She had a brief news conference for local reporters, then they served tea. Two doors down at the embassy, State Department employee Frank Pressley was talking to his colleague Michelle O’Connor about a broken fax machine in the General Services office. He noticed a commotion outside. They were at the back of the building, with a view of the parking lot, and he could see men running. A tremor ran along the walls and windows, as if there had been a small explosion. People joined him at the window.

  Then there was a tremendous blast that seemed white at its core, and the shock waves roared through ten blocks of downtown Nairobi. Vans were blown off the street, cars flipped into the air. Eighteen stories up, the windows shattered, the furniture flew across the room, and Ambassador Bushnell was thrown to the floor. Ufundi House, a five-story office building between the embassy and the bank, collapsed like a stack of pancakes. In the embassy, Michelle O’Connor was decapitated. A passing school bus was lashed with flame, killing several children on board. The twenty-two floors of glass in the Cooperative Bank building blew out, the shattered panes spinning two hundred feet above the street, and then they tumbled down, down, falling sheets of glass that cut pedestrians in half and gouged out their eyes and sliced off their arms and fingers. Pressley, knocked unconscious, came to on the floor of the embassy, looking at blood on the walls and O’Connor’s remains. He looked down. “I saw my body sticking out of my shirt,” he later told a Manhattan jury. His jaw and part of one shoulder had been torn away from his body.