and less like she has any influence on the direction her life will take. She will find out tomorrow whether she will live another day, whether she will ever escape home, and those answers will depend on chance and on others, not on herself. But at least she is still here, battered and exhausted but also alive and free, at least for now. She closes her eyes and lets the swaying motion of the bus rock her to sleep.
* * *
Veronica opens her eyes to the dawn sun through the dew-streaked window. The first thing she sees is a hand-painted CHITUNGWIZA NO. 1 BUTCHER sign above a dozen bloody carcasses hanging on hooks. As she watches, civilization slowly grows denser: filthy shantytowns, busy shopping streets, long rows of tiny brick houses, warehouses and workshops, open-air markets, all jumbled together like a madman's jigsaw puzzle. Ditches full of plastic bags and rotting trash cut through muddy vacant lots cratered like World War I no-man's-land. Pools of dirty water, obviously sewage leaks, molder in culverts and trenches crossed by improvised bridges made of planks or rusting pipes.
Chitungwiza's taxi park is a huge dirt field surrounded by barbed wire. Lovemore, Jacob and Veronica emerge from their taxi, admit they are going to Harare, and are immediately and not quite forcibly hustled to another vehicle which then hangs about for forty minutes, waiting to fill, before embarking on the thirty-minute ride to Harare.
En route, Lovemore says, "Look over there. That is Zimbabwe."
Veronica looks over and sees a mostly flat field, studded with granite boulders, strewn with trash, rubble, tufts of grass, and occasional one-room tin-roofed shacks.
"That was a big commercial farm, maize and potatoes, some tobacco. A white farmer. Five years ago the war vets came and stole it from him. After they took the land they started putting up buildings. Little houses, vegetable gardens, there was a market, all this land was covered with them, people everywhere. And then, earlier this year, the government, the same government that put them there, sent in bulldozers and flattened everything, destroyed everything, threw them all off the land. Operation Murambatsvina. That means 'clean up the trash.' Thousands of houses, whole little towns, trading stalls, markets, all over the country, all destroyed. Because the war vets were becoming powerful. No one is allowed to be powerful. No one but Mugabe."
* * *
Harare proper is a strikingly pretty city, well-watered and full of greenery, its major streets lined by flowering trees that turn them into purple- and orange-latticed tunnels. The downtown towers are skyscrapers, by African standards. The city buzzes with traffic. They reach Harare's downtown taxi park at midmorning.
"We made it," Veronica says, not quite believing her own words, as they stand in Harare's central taxi park, stretching their cramped and battered limbs. Around them the capital's skyscrapers and shopping complexes stretch in every direction. The streets throng with traffic, and pedestrians hustle through the taxi park. Denizens of Harare, in the way of big-city people everywhere, move much faster than their rural cousins.
"Where now?" Jacob asks, yawning.
"Avondale," Lovemore says, which means nothing to them. "You will wait. I will seek out Lysander."
Avondale appears to be a mall full of white people. Veronica finds being among a white majority, for the first time since she came to Africa, a little shocking and disturbing. Lovemore leaves them at an Italian coffee shop that would not look out of place in San Francisco.
"Stay here," he says. "I will try to find Lysander. If he is gone I will find his friend Duncan. I will come back and we will take care of you. You will be safe."
"How long do you think you'll be?" Veronica asks.
Lovemore hesitates. "One hour. Not more."
He limps away.
* * *
One hour falls past, and then a second, and then a third.
The cappuccino is excellent. The peoplewatching is interesting. The movie theatre, supermarket, fast-food restaurant, ice-cream stall and Internet café in the mall are refreshing and enticing. But as time trickles onwards, and Lovemore fails to reappear, a numb dread begins to take root in Veronica's gut and then to spread.
After the fourth hour she can no longer tell herself and Jacob that Lovemore has merely been delayed, that everything in Africa takes longer than you think, that he has just been held up. She is forced to begin to wonder what they can possibly do if he does not come back at all. They have ten US dollars and nowhere else to go.
As the fifth