HARARE, ZIMBABWE — When Asiatu thinks about having her first child, she wipes her hands over her face, as if washing away bad memories.
When Junica Dube thinks about giving birth again, she rests her hands on her belly, as still and silent as a statue.
The story of two babies, to be born in the new year, should be a joyful one. But their mothers do not smile.
Dube's baby will be the first to arrive, in January. Last year, she spent four days in labor, in a hospital where nothing worked and the nurses scolded her for crying out in pain. Her firstborn son lived just a few minutes. He died with no name.
Asiatu's baby is expected in May. Pretty and slender, with the same thin wrists and sad eyes as Dube, she doesn't know who the father is. All she knows is that he isn't the man she loved, the man she lost.
Haunted by their fears, the only thing that keeps these two going is a luminous thread of hope, looping forward against all odds into the darkness that is Zimbabwe, like a firefly fluttering out of reach.
The story of the two women, and the two babies yet to be born, is the story of Zimbabwe's violent journey between hope and fear this last year.
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It's September. I'm running down a dusty Harare street. The frightened slap-slap of my feet joins an orchestra of thumping shoes, a crowd running away. Everyone is scared.
Part of it is pounding herd fear. But not far behind come our pursuers, a mob of young thugs for the ruling ZANU-PF party, hurling rocks.
As I run across a road called Rotten Row and pull around a corner out of the danger zone, a couple of old men laugh at me, and the idea that this 5-foot-tall white woman would come to their country in the state it's in.
"Look at the murungu!" they say, using the Shona word for a white. "Hey, white lady! Don't you know? This is Zimbabwe!"
I slap-slap for another half a block before slowing down, feeling slightly foolish.
When this day began, the sun was warm; people danced and sang. They believed that President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years, was finally going to agree to share power six months after voters handed him a stunning defeat. I perched on a precarious rock to see the singing crowd, a forest of red-and-white opposition T-shirts, swaying in hypnotic rhythm.
Everyone was smiling.
Then she appeared at the foot of my perch, a sunny girl of 21 with a smile so wide I didn't recognize her at first. The last time I had seen her, she was crying.
Asiatu.
I jumped down and she introduced me to her mother. And then I watched her dive back into the choppy, joyful sea of people.
It was the only time I saw Asiatu really smile.
But then fights erupted between opposition supporters and a load of ZANU-PF reinforcements who had arrived after the power-sharing deal was signed. Rocks were hurled; T-shirts were torn. Hope evaporated.
Asiatu saw the crowds of people running away, and ran too.
When I first meet Asiatu, an opposition activist, in July, she's been imprisoned for nearly two months in a ZANU-PF militia base, a rambling old farmhouse with a thatched roof outside Harare. She has to call her captors "comrades."
It's just after the second round of the presidential vote, and Mugabe's campaign of violence, designed to reverse his poor first-round result in March, is still at full throttle.
Asiatu has seen his supporters kill people at the base, stoning them with bricks. She fears she could be killed too, if her full name is published.
When she's not cleaning or cooking, she's forced to sing ZANU-PF songs for hours on end. By turns bored and terrified, she is allowed out of the base for only a couple of hours each day to do family chores.
I meet her during one of her brief stints of freedom.
When I ask about her story, her face crumples and she starts to weep. She whispers that she's raped daily by five men.
I hug her as her body shakes with sobs.
The year in Zimbabwe began with soaring expectations, like a kite on a wind: People were sure of a change. Then it plunged into despair, as if someone had shot the fragile paper-and-wood construction from the sky. Most of the time, though, people are so preoccupied with the grind of just surviving that change seems a quixotic dream.
As I've traveled across Zimbabwe over the last two years, I've met people in moments of tragic upheaval. I tell their stories and go my way. Finding them later is often difficult. But if and when I do, things have usually gone downhill.
People don't fit their trousers anymore. Skinny limbs swim in their clothes like twigs tossed into a sack. In Harare, ragged beggar girls dash between the cars, palms open in supplication, dwarfed by the babies they carry on their backs. A mother sits on a dusty curb, her toddler's belly distended. Dilapidated pickup trucks plow between the potholes, with people crammed in the back like sheep going to slaughter.
