Free When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin Page B

When Olds goes out to speak to them, they shoot at him, so he retreats inside. The men take up six ambush positions around his homestead and open fire. Olds calls the police, pleading for help, but no one comes. He calls his neighbors, who try to help but are forced back with gunfire, as is an ambulance they have requested.
    For three desperate hours, the gun battle rages. Olds was once a soldier; he knows how to defend himself. But he is one against a hundred. He is shot in the leg; he ties it with a makeshift splint and fights on. The attackers lob burning Molotov cocktails through the windows. A neighbor flies over the homestead in a little Cessna and sees the house in flames below, sees the gunmen converging on it, but can do nothing to help. And as the house burns, Olds retreats from room to room, finally to the bathroom, where he fills the tub with water, wets his clothes, and prepares to make his final stand. He returns fire until he runs out of bullets, until he is overcome by the smoke and the heat, and then he climbs out the window, hands raised.
    He is barely outside before the gunmen converge on him, beat him with shovels and rifle butts, stones and machetes. Then they get into their trucks and drive back north. Those injured in the attack are escorted by police to a nearby hospital where they are treated and released. Police confirm that no arrests have been made.
    Surreptitiously the Congolese businessman leans across the empty seat between us to see what I am studying so intently. He sees the picture and raises his eyes to look at me with an expression I cannot quite recognize at first. Then I realize it is pity. He feels sorry for Olds and for me and for our little tribe of white Africans. I feel embarrassed, humiliated, mortified. I am not used to being the one pitied. I am the one who pities others. I casually close the magazine and pretend to look out at the roiling black clouds we are about to penetrate on our way down to land.
    It is raining heavily when we disembark at Harare Airport, which is gently atrophying as plans for a new one are pondered. We jog across the tarmac to line up in the immigration shed. The rain drums down on the corrugated-tin roof, making it hard to hear. Strategically positioned pails catch the gushing leaks. Above us an electronic ticker flashes a message from the Zimbabwe Investment Center: “Welcome to the most favorable investment destination on the continent.” But when it comes to the telephone number for potential investors to call, the ticker lettering breaks up into a jumble of
x
’s and
y
’s and
z
’s.
    When I reach the head of the line, I hand my passport to the black official and greet him in Shona, Zimbabwe’s main vernacular. He ripens in smile and demands, “Why don’t you stay here? We need people like you.”
    By “people like you,” he means white Zimbabweans. I shrug and feel half pleased, half ashamed. It always has this sweet-and-sour effect on me, this place. Even as it gets poorer, more ramshackle, more dangerous, its slide accentuated for me by my periodic overviews, snapshots separated by absence, I am tempted each time to tear up my return ticket and stay. For whether I like it or not, I am home.
    Dad is noticeably more frail; he now has early-stage emphysema. Mum’s back hurts constantly, and she thinks she may need it operated on. Mavis, the housekeeper, is aging with them, stooped and slow now, and being kept alive by expensive hypertension drugs that Mum gets her.
    The swimming pool lies green and still and opaque, its pump quiet, with a slimy watermark around its rim. Dad has given up. The chemicals, he says, have increased tenfold in price and are often unavailable. Georgina warned me about this, and I e-mailed them to say that I would arrange to have the chemicals delivered monthly to them, via a Web site I have discovered. It is important to keep exercising, I argue.
    “Please let me help?” I say to my father, but he gets