When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin Read Free Book Online

it’s not that.”
    “Well, what, then?” I am beginning to get irked at her defense of him.
    She pauses and then says quietly, “It’s because he’s afraid.”
    “Afraid?”
    “He’s afraid to enjoy this wedding, to anticipate it, after what happened before Jain’s wedding.”
    Jain is my other sister, my dead sister, older than me by seven years, but forever frozen at twenty-seven, killed just weeks before her own wedding. It was in 1978, during the civil war. She and her fiancé and their best man were traveling back to their home in Shamva in the northeast of the country, when their car ran into an army ambush that was preparing to attack guerrillas in a roadside village. The only survivor was Spence, the best man’s fox terrier. Jain was the nurturing one, the glue that held our family together, a grade school teacher, a homebody, the organizer of reunions and Sunday lunches, the keeper of the domestic flame. Her death is the ugly scar that overlays our family’s emotional topography, less a scar really than a sore that even after all these years still suppurates.
    “The wedding’s going to go off fine this time,” I say to my father later.
    “What do you mean?” he says blankly.
    “We’re all here and we’re safe and it’s going to be a great wedding.”
    But he still can’t bring himself to acknowledge its lethal precedent, let alone discuss it, so it just hangs there full of menace, this grenade of history rolled onto the dance floor of the present, primed to sabotage our family festivities.
    “Y OU’D BETTER come and let Jeremy show you around the car,” says Georgina.
    I am to be the wedding chauffeur, and the car is a 1976 bronze Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow that belongs to the Summerfields, the parents-in-law to be. It is said to be one of only three Rollers in the entire country, two of which are theirs. It sits now in the hotel parking lot, looking quite out of place among the beaten-up pickup trucks and the little Japanese compacts. A black gardener with a rag is gingerly polishing the silver Spirit of Ecstasy statuette mounted on the hood.
    Looking at it I feel a twinge of unease. “You don’t think it might be a little over the top?” I say.
    “Over the top?” Georgina frowns. “Why?”
    “I dunno. Maybe it’s a bit . . . insensitive for us to ride around the African bush in a Roller?”
    Georgina rolls her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake! It’s an ancient borrowed Roller at a wedding, not a fucking Ferrari at a famine.”
    Jeremy is explaining the foibles of the car’s eccentric gear-shift.
    “Tell me, then,” Georgina lobs from over my shoulder, “would it have worried you if I’d been getting married in England and we drove to the church in a rented Rolls there? Why is it OK to do it there but not here?”
    I ignore her as Jeremy moves on to explain the badly adjusted clutch.
    “And anyway,” she continues, “the black elite here swan around in squadrons of the latest luxury SUVs, each of which is worth ten times this eccentric old thing.”
    “It’s true,” says Jeremy ruefully. “We’ve been trying to sell her for ages, but they’re impossible to get spare parts for, so no one wants to buy her.”
    O N THE DAY of the wedding, I knock on the door of my sister’s hotel room. From within, ABBA is blasting. She appears, wearing a dress of cream lace and green chiffon looped at the waist with strings of pearls, and on her head a hooded cape instead of a veil.
    “I know green is an unlucky color to get married in, but it’s supposed to echo the bucolic venue,” she laughs.
    My father is waiting for us in the lobby, trussed in a tuxedo, his previous objections notwithstanding. He takes Georgina’s arm and escorts her to the car. I slide in behind the ivory wheel and settle back into the age-scored cream-leather seat and drive them slowly down the pitted red-dirt lane around the side of the mountain toward Bridal Veil Falls. It’s a dead-end road leading up to the