by Will McGrath
EVERYTHING LOST
IS FOUND AGAIN
EVERYTHING
LOST IS
FOUND AGAIN
FOUR SEASONS IN LESOTHO
WILL McGRATH
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
EVERYTHING LOST IS FOUND AGAIN. Copyright © 2018, text by Will McGrath. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McGrath, Will, 1980- author.
Title: Everything lost is found again : four seasons in Lesotho / By Will McGrath.
Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018005799 | ISBN 9781945814624
Subjects: LCSH: McGrath, Will, 1980---Travel--Lesotho. | Lesotho--Description and travel. | Lesotho-Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC DT2572 .M34 2018 | DDC 868.85032--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005799
First Edition: November 2018
Cover design by Matthew Revert
Interior design by Leslie Vedder
Portions of this work originally appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following publications: “Jink”—Christian Science Monitor; “Midnight Basotho Dance Party”—Roads & Kingdoms; “Killing a Pig”—Gastronomica; “Good & Bad Joala”—Asymptote (Pushcart Prize nominee); “Forty-One Months”—Bellevue Literary Review (winner of the 2014 Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction); “Ghosts in Snow & Rock”—Sundog Lit
Some names have been changed, to protect the innocent and the guilty.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
I. SPRING – KENA KA KHOTSO
Prelude
Looking for Rapitsoe
The Unlikely Graduation of Tseli Moeletsi
Jink
Call Me Moshoeshoe
Valentine’s Day
A Brief Primer on Some Matters of Etiquette (as Presented by an Outsider)
The Girl Behind the Counter
II. SUMMER – WE EAT, WE DRINK, WE DANCE
Prelude
Party Crashing, or The Kingdom of Lesotho
A Visit to the Whitehouse
A Brief Primer on the Sesotho Language (as Presented by a Non-Speaker)
Midnight Basotho Dance Party
Killing a Pig
A Partial Dictionary of Food & Drink
Good & Bad Joala
III. AUTUMN – GROWING UP
Prelude
On the Occasion of Buying Something for Which I Have No Need
Whipping
Portrait of a Path through Town
In the Realm of Vanished Beasts
Down in the Flood
Forty-One Months
IV. WINTER – TAKING LEAVE
Prelude
Requiem for a Dead Donkey
Pakela the Guard
A Partial Dictionary of Vehicular Motion
Ghosts in Snow & Rock
An Encounter at Sani Bottom
Epilogue: How She Almost Died
APPENDIX
Language Notes & Miscellany
For Ellen, who took me there,
and Nthabeleng, who brought me back.
Strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel
and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
I.
SPRING
KENA KA KHOTSO
At the border crossing, I saw a sign and copied the words into my notebook.
We hired a driver and he brought us through the lowlands, past fields of junked cars, past a sandstone quarry where men hammered rocks, formed them into pale smooth bricks, and stacked them in Jenga columns along the road: waist-high towers of shocked white stone against green grass. We climbed into vernal mountains and at a tight pass, where the land fell away into valley, a cloud had settled across the road ahead of us. It lay densely over the ground, flocculent and dirty white, rippling tufts obscuring the path.
It was sheep—several hundred, whipped onward by shepherds wrapped in heavy blankets. Our driver approached the flock slowly and then we entered, passed through a living membrane that sealed around us, sheep on all sides, bleating with exasperation as they strained to keep clear of the wheel wells. We inched forward, suspended somewhere, and then emerged into a new place. The sea closed behind us.
As we passed into Mokhotlong District, I saw another sign, same as the one at the border crossing. I checked against the words in my notebook: Kena ka khotso.
I asked the driver what it meant.
“Kena ka khotso?” he said. “That is the motto for this place. It means: Enter with peace. If you want to know about this place, then come peacefully and with eyes open. That is all you need here.”
LOOKING FOR RAPITSOE
Reid and I are lost in Maseru.
Maseru, capital of Lesotho. You know the place.
He is in the white pickup truck loaded with two bright green fifty-five-gallon petrol drums. I am behind him in a low-riding minivan borrowed from a friend. There is a children’s sing-along cassette stuck in the tape deck—the eject button has jammed and the volume on/off knob has been downsized from essential components—and so I’m juking through traffic to a soundtrack of high-decibel morality plays about the importance of share-share-sharing your toys. I’m following those bright green petrol drums, clinging to them, but people keep cutting me off and veering madly through intersections and attempting to sell me new windshield wipers when they can see that I have perfectly good windshield wipers. It is not raining in Maseru and perhaps it never has: it’s a lambent spring day in southern Africa, in which my only thought is of destroying this sing-along cassette and flinging it into the dusty thoroughfare.
Three things happen in quick succession: my borrowed cell phone beeps once as the battery dies. It occurs to me that this may prove logistically challenging. Then the low-riding minivan abruptly halts. The anti-carjacking device—for reasons unknown, since I am not currently carjacking—has engaged with shocking righteousness. A chorus of horns strikes up behind me as I grope around the interior of the car, searching for the secret button to restart the minivan. But I cannot find the secret button because it is secret.
Reid slips through a stoplight, around a traffic circle, and is gone.
Fifteen seconds have elapsed. I lay my head against the locked steering wheel to ponder my reversal. An instant ago, I was driving a minivan and listening to children’s music like any good American. Now, suddenly, I am alone and stranded in the capital city of a small African nation, without communication, without transportation, without destination.
Traffic piles up. People attempt to circumvent my marooned vehicle, driving up on the sidewalk and onto the median. Dogs weave between log-jammed cars. At my window, men laud the latest developments in leopard print steering-wheel-cover technology, all while the children’s tape plangently counsels me on the importance of dental hygiene.
To rewind, briefly:
This story really begins in my bed. It was in that cool pre-dawn before consciousness fully arrives, when the room is suffused with blue light and the edges of dreams are at
their haziest. In my memory, sunlight is seeping into the room and the curtains are blowing gauzily inward, but I know this cannot be entirely true since we have Venetian blinds. The brain enjoys furnishing our memories with props from forgotten Hollywood back lots.
“Hey.” My wife, Ellen, is shaking me gently awake.
I crack an eyelid.
“Hey, do you want to move to Lesotho?”
I let the question settle over me. “Sure, I guess.”
I close my eyes again and sink my face farther into the pillow.
Then after a moment: “What’s Lesotho?”
I would learn an answer to that question, but it would be an incomplete answer at best. Later I would come to know Lesotho—it’s LEH-SOO-TOO, if you’re wondering—as the mountainous dreamland surrounded entirely by South Africa, the land of Khotso Pula Nala, of Moshoeshoe, of dinosaurs and double galaxies—a place where board games are carved into boulders and the phone company texts you about the king’s birthday party. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It was my wife who first brought us to Lesotho. Ellen is a cultural anthropologist who studies AIDS and orphan care, and Lesotho sits at the disquieting intersection of her research areas. The kingdom has the second highest HIV prevalence rate on the planet, 25 percent of the adult population—a figure that leads inexorably to the number of orphans in Lesotho. Of the 766,000 children in the country, around 211,000 have lost one or both parents, nearly 28 percent. Yet statistics like these often obscure more than they enlighten, painting with a macro brush at the expense of the granularity of human experience. What can a number, hovering in the abstract, really say about the character of a place?
I had recently completed a teacher training program and was eager to explore Lesotho for myself, hungry to know more of the world before embarking on a lifelong journey of high school teaching. (I use the word “embark” here because secondary education is in many ways similar to a lengthy voyage at sea. The surrounding fauna are beautiful and alien—glass-eyed and sharp-toothed, suddenly aggressive, asleep, quicksilver brilliant—and the surface beneath is in perpetual tilt. The whole enterprise is claustrophobic and thrilling and not infrequently marked by vomiting.) But my preliminary Googling of Lesotho had turned up somewhat circumscribed results: statistics that pointed toward generalized tragedy and news factoids that forever contained the descriptors “impoverished” and “landlocked.” This is how the search engines of the outside world viewed it—Lesotho is an impoverished and landlocked nation within South Africa—and in an age mediated by internet connectivity, this becomes its own kind of truth, raising a related question along the way: if the outside world continually classifies you as tragic, poor, and penned in, do you eventually begin to see yourself that way? At what point does perception become reality? I would ask my students as they dozed sweetly at their desks or furtively sexted one another.
Whenever my wife and I told someone where we were headed, the first question posed was: “Is it dangerous?” People assumed sand, safaris, and jungles; assumed lions, rhinos, and giraffes; assumed malaria, assumed AIDS. (Only one of those exists in Lesotho.) “What about warlords?” people said. It became clear that the only things we had managed to import from the African continent were clichés.
Lesotho is one of the smallest fragments of an expanse of earth that stretches five thousand miles north to south, home to fifty-four countries and thousands of languages and ethnic groups. Lesotho and Libya are both technically “African” and are as similar as the United States and the United Arab Emirates. How significant is it, really, to label something in this way—to note that two places exist on a contiguous landmass, which also holds true for the Yukon and Uruguay, Siberia and Cambodia?
I can say one thing with certainty: I did not come to Lesotho to find myself. There is nothing more tedious than white people venturing into foreign territory in search of self-knowledge, in search of authenticity—which must be among the language’s emptiest words. There is something deeply unsettling about people who collect the essential stuff of someone else’s existence for exotic furniture in their own small-scale dramas. I did not come to Lesotho for set dressing; I came to learn about the different ways that people live.
So we moved to Lesotho, Ellen and I, to the remote eastern district of Mokhotlong, up where the scorched-red earth of the foothills gives way to wind-blasted basalt, out past the diamond mine where mechanized brontosaurs churn through the night, their cones of light illuminating lunar terrain. We would live for a year in a circular rondavel with a thatched roof (this time; I didn’t know then how many times we would return to Lesotho). Ellen would travel to distant villages to see how families were adapting to the AIDS crisis while I taught at the local high school. We would both spend time working at an NGO for a woman named Nthabeleng, who came recommended, in rather understated fashion, as someone worth knowing.
We did not know much else.
We did not know Sesotho, the native language, but we did know English, the language spoken in government and education. We did not know how we would acclimate to the culture, but we knew the place was peaceful. We did not know if we would be lonely. We did not know how long we would stay. We did not know Reid and Bridget, the other Americans in town, but we would always know them after. We did not know Neo or Tseli, Baholo or Poho, Mokete or Mokati. We did not know how broken the animals were. We did not know how many coffins there would be. We did not know they would ask to pray over Ellen. We did not know I would chop wood for a funeral in my school clothes. We did not know how bright the moon, how bright the stars, how dark the night.
We did not know how joyful it all would be.
We could not have guessed.
Anyway: let me just finish my story.
Reid and I had driven down from the highlands—from Mokhotlong, on the mountainous eastern border of the country, to Maseru, on the slightly-less-mountainous western border—to accomplish two things: fill two bright green fifty-five-gallon drums with gasoline and get the white pickup fixed. Nthabeleng, our boss in Mokhotlong, had asked us to leave the white pickup for repairs with a man named Rapitsoe, a maneuver that necessitated the borrowed minivan for our return trip.
The problem: we cannot find Rapitsoe. This is because the map Nthabeleng has drawn is just lines on a scrap of napkin. And while Nthabeleng is a great hero in many ways, she is no cartographer. The streets on her napkin map have no names, which is semi-reasonable in rural Mokhotlong—where roads are called things like “that one down by the butchery”—but in Maseru, in the capital city, the names of streets are of at least moderate importance. Only later will we discover that Nthabeleng has omitted three important turns from her napkin map. Nor has she included a phone number for Rapitsoe’s shop, something now irrelevant since I have no functioning phone. All finger-pointing aside, I am lost. Reid disappeared around that traffic circle fifteen minutes ago and has not resurfaced.
So here I sit, like an old Bob Dylan bootleg, stuck inside Maseru on a Friday afternoon. The enraged honking has mostly subsided; people have taken in stride that this route now includes a sidewalk detour. I briefly entertain the notion of exiting the minivan, but the traffic around me is comically dangerous. Minibuses scoot across the median while people in the street sell cheese curls in Ziploc bags and just barely avoid death-by-taxi. I take a deep breath and come to terms with my situation. There is a sense of peace, a certain freedom in being optionless, with this genial madness orbiting me. The day is warm, and there is sunlight on my face.
And then the minivan comes to life. This is because I have found the secret button to disengage the anti-carjacking device (it is a piece of floor that looks like all the other pieces of floor). Things are suddenly looking up—I am lost, yes, but I am mobile again.
I drive aimlessly through Maseru, searching for Reid and taking in the wild glory of the day. Schoolchildren in plaid uniforms run through shallow gullies just off the main road, loose-limbed and freewheeling in a way that can only be achi
eved on a Friday afternoon, when the weekend in all its sunny potential unfurls before them. I cruise past the Palace of Justice, then the border crossing—Kena ka khotso, reads the sign—and soon I have reached the spiny chaos of the taxi rank. Maseru’s taxi rank is parking lot-cum-labyrinth: a tangle of impromptu shacks, wandering vendors, and hundreds of idling vehicles ready to set out for Qacha’s Nek, Mohale’s Hoek, Mafeteng, and Teyateyaneng. This is the jittery cerebrum of the city, minibuses and four-plus-ones darting along axons and across synapses, heading for the highlands or into South Africa. Taxi drivers laugh at their own jokes, some of them openly drinking from quarts of beer, while travelers grab last packets of food for the ride. In jury-rigged metal shacks, cockeyed and listing like ships at sea, men are cooking sausages on handmade grills. Beside them women fry fat cakes or slices of nuclear pink bologna in pools of oil. A grandmother roasts yellow-black maize cobs while sliding indeterminate chunks of street meat onto skewers.
Directly off the taxi rank runs a dense warren of merchants’ stalls, a street market that coils around itself like an Escher print. There are tiny districts of barber shanties where the hair clippers are powered by car batteries, then a row of cobblers stitching shoes, then a conclave of traditional healers—ngaka ea Sesotho—who display shoeboxes filled with nests of dark roots, hunks of wet clay, and tiny glass bottles of colored tincture, marshaled like soldiers into rank and file. It is in this narrow and unmapped corner of the city that I will wander later—many months later—and find a snooker table in a sudden clearing, out in the open air, the green baize running flat like farmland. The snooker table is untouched by the elements, perfect and pristine, and men are hustling, inviting me into the game. The sight hits me like the half-remembered shard of a dream, but it is real—I can feel the fabric under my hand, I can hear the gentle click of the balls.