Love in the Driest Season Read Online Free PDF Page A

twenty-eight guests from eight countries on four continents jamming to what sounded like a Belle Isle street party back in Detroit. The house came down when Patricia Wicks, Vita’s best friend from childhood, showed the inebriated Polish wedding photographer how to bend over and dance to “Shoop.”
    I wasn’t bothered by my family’s snub of our wedding. In fact, very little bothered me anymore. I had developed a certain harshness after leaving Mississippi, a play-it-as-it-lays mind-set that was attuned to the bitterness in the world. I had the working idea that there was a higher form of truth to be found in the world’s most impoverished and violent places, a rough-hewn honesty that could not be found elsewhere. Life had a tautness to it there, a sheen that seemed to say something about the way the world was, not how anyone wanted it to be. That was what seemed true and honest, and that was what I tried hardest to write about.
    Given that, I found myself in the world of foreign correspondents and roving reporters. It was the first time in my adult life that I felt like I was where I belonged. I loved it—the travel and challenges, the friends flung out in a wide orbit of countries, getting on a plane time and again to write about the most compelling international events of the day—and at the end of each trip, there was Vita, my best friend, wife, and confidant. We went dancing till the clubs closed, had champagne brunches with friends that lasted all afternoon. So when Nancy Laughlin, the
Free Press
foreign editor, called our home in Warsaw one snowy evening and asked if I’d like to take the paper’s Africa posting, I said sure. It was the most wide-open job in journalism as far as I was concerned. To Vita, the chance to live on the mother continent was irresistible. We had all of our belongings in storage back in Detroit shipped to Zimbabwe.
    We had no intention of returning to the United States.

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    T HE G IRL -C HILD
    A N OLD L AND R OVER came bumping down the red dirt road and slowed to a stop. Two police officers got out. It had taken several hours, but the young man Herbert sent running for help had finally reached the nearest police outpost. In rural Zimbabwe, where villages are scarce and paved roads are few, that was more marathon than sprint. He had hitched a ride on a bread truck for the first few miles, got off when the truck turned at an intersection, then walked and hitched again for several more miles until he came to a dusty clutter of one-story concrete-block shops. He walked past the butcher’s and the beer hall, turned through an open field, and came to a police barracks. He told an officer a newborn child had been found.
    The officer sighed—this was not the first time this had happened—and placed a call to a police station in the nearest town for a truck to be dispatched. More than twenty miles away, all on dirt roads, the truck took a while to appear.
    The officers eventually made their way, the young boy as their guide. Herbert was relieved. The child was in great distress. The women had rocked and comforted her, but she needed a doctor, and soon. One of the officers took the child to a clinic, perhaps five miles away, where she would spend the night. The other officer stayed to ask questions. Abandoning a child was a criminal charge. Attempted murder might be added by a stern prosecutor. Had there been pregnancies in the village? Had any young girls suddenly gone to visit relatives? No, none, said the women. Herbert concurred.
    The officer walked the paths, looking for something, anything—a note, a scrap of clothing—that might serve as a clue. There was nothing. Then he followed his partner to the clinic, where he questioned the staff. Had there been deliveries? Did they know of anyone who had come in for pregnancy or health counseling? None. He returned several weeks later, asking the same questions, trying to catch someone in a changed story, but got the same results. Three