by Norman Rush
We were going so fitfully there was even time, between lunges, to chat with my copassenger, a young pregnant woman from Mogoditsane who was under the impression her cousin could get her a job as a cleaner at the abattoir in Lobatse. Her questions showed she was sorry for me that at my advanced age I was unmarried and childless. She also was unmarried. In Botswana, in the villages, the practice is for women to produce a child first, to advertise their marriageability.
That’s up to them, I thought, which reminds me that I have to stop using phrases meaningless except between me and Denoon. See what happen! is another phrase I have to stop using for the same reason. That’s up to them arises from an older Jewish couple who had come to Botswana with the Peace Corps and had had a number of difficult cultural adjustments to make, the one they talked about most being that their Indian upstairs neighbors ate rice every day. The Roths believed strongly that it was more appropriate to eat potatoes every day as a starch staple. Mr. Roth agreed with his wife that the Indians were strange, but when she continued to wonder over and over at this matter in front of people, his attempt to get her to abbreviate her going on about this was to say—of the Indians preferring rice—That’s up to them. I told this story to Nelson and he found it as obscurely funny as I did, and between us it became indispensable as a signum of the recurring problem of other people doing things you find peculiar or stressful but probably shouldn’t. The provenance of See what happen! was a lake in a park in Oakland where there were flocks of geese and ducks. A rabble of Hispanic boys was there, with one ten- or eleven-year-old ringleader urging a five-year-old minion to try to urinate on a duck. The five-year-old was reluctant but began complying, running after some ducks with his tiny penis out, after the older boy had inspired him with cries of See what happen! The deed was being done in the scientific spirit, apparently. Where could you find a better emblem for dubious propositions being vigorously encouraged, and where is Denoon, who understands, and what is he doing now?
One attractive thing about me is that I’m never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me. I looked at my copassenger. Was it possible I was homing in on Tsau out of maternal urges I was incapable of recognizing in myself? Was that the kind of fool I was, underneath? I think and hope I’m averagely maternal, but I think I reject the idea that the repetition compulsion, which is my private phrase for the drive to reproduce, is shadowily behind every move we make while we’re fertile.
I don’t see myself as antimaternal, but I’m not under any compulsion to repeat myself, either. I think if I were laden with accomplishments to date or saw some on the horizon I might feel differently. Nor had there been up to then any particular male person I was so impressed with I thought I should contribute to his replication. Was I being attacked by this whole question now because the impetus of my drive to reach Denoon had slackened, physically, for the first time since I began it: I was on a track, being conveyed, passive, stopped, and had a pregnant woman as part of the landscape. Denoon was childless, so far as I knew: and that was interesting. But, next question, if the whole issue of repetition is so uninteresting, why was Denoon’s childlessness interesting? Was he also waiting for the perfect missing jigsaw puzzle partner to complete his inner wholeness and so release him into wanting to reproduce? That I could be swept out of myself under the sign of absolute love and into embracing motherhood was something I suppose I was assuming, but this has to be bracketed with the population question, on which I’m a fanatic, still. In the cities of the third world your heart is constantly breaking for the children who are either homeless or next door to it, excess children that you feel in your heart of hearts you should be doing something concrete for, creating crèches or schools, something. Also who would want what I was as an adolescent? Pas moi. Denoon once said Do you realize that ninety percent of all the adolescents who have ever lived are alive today? I think I wanted the question of reproduction to be deliberative, as in Well, should we reproduce? or What are we that we should want to reproduce? and so on, à la Immanuel Kant. Of course, this would give you a minuscule world population.
Or was I in fact holding the repetition compulsion at bay at a deeper level with vague self-admonitions that there were more options available in my wonderful home culture than I could shake a stick at, more than there had ever been, e.g., single motherhood via a friend or a sperm bank. Or, just to mention everything, what about a relationship with another woman? This was happening. I have no inclination toward it, but then, presumably, neither had some of the women in my personal range of acquaintance who had astonishingly turned up in that category, mostly during their forties or fifties. In fact I remembered hearing about a woman who was seeing a psychotherapist with the object of overcoming her heterosexuality, presumably in response to the dearth of decent men. Wait, consider the source, I said to myself when it came to me that this story was a gem from the lips of a man with whom I’d had a short sharp relationship which ended when it dawned on me that he was a complete fool, an example of whose level of wit was his whistling or humming the first bars of Two Different Worlds whenever we happened to pass by an interracial couple. There was nothing interesting about Gary, or rather an index of his blankness was that the most interesting thing about him was that he was lactose intolerant. I think I like children. I know I like intelligent children. I might be impatient for a child of mine to talk. I never wanted pets. My mother wanted me to have a dog once, which I tried, and which I rejected because it couldn’t talk to me. This may relate. Infants qua infants fail to produce faintness and emotional synesthesia in me. I might have bonded with my dog if my mother had gotten it for me when I was younger. I had too high expectations by the time I got it. I was precocious.
At Lobatse the drivers offered to let someone ride in the cab with them. All declined but me. The cab is roomy and seemed as though it might be restful for part of the trip and that at the very least riding in it would give me a chance to extract the hemp spines from my palms. It was all right until we got onto rough ground during a detour outside Kanye. There was a jack and crank sitting loose in an open box at my feet. On the washboarding we drove at a speed that was only a foretaste of what would be the norm later but that was still excessive, with the result that whenever we hit a bump thirty pounds of metal would float up into the air and rotate in the void between my knees before crashing back down. I’m attached to my feet, so I suggested to the reserve driver—who seemed like a sensible family man and not a daredevil like the fiendish shavenheaded adolescent at the wheel—that if we tried we could force the jack under the seat. But he pretended not to hear me. This was, after all, a suggestion from a woman. Also this continuous limb-threatening hazard probably helped keep everybody alert. So when we stopped in Kanye it was al fresco time for me again.
The tarmac ends at Sekgoma Pan, which looks like a lobe of hell, which is appropriate because driving through the bush on the back of a Bedford being operated according to the CTO theory of how to drive over unpaved road is identical with flying through hell. The pan had been ravaged by veldfires: what had been thorn trees looked like black candelabras and pylons. The ground was scorched black, with drifts of gray and white ash here and there. There were four of us on the load, all women. I couldn’t help thinking of the pol-econ officer at the American embassy who liked to say that Botswana was missing its calling: his notion was that it was a perfect setting for day-after-the-end-of-the-world movies, with a few outnumbered good guys running around in post-wargasm desolations, protecting the last nubile woman from the dregs of the lumpenproletariat.
The Bedford isn’t a four wheel drive vehicle, so the CTO full-tilt theory of driving may not be insane. The idea is to go, over the cross-rutted stretches, so fast that you’re touching only the tops of the ruts, in effect making them a continuous surface. Also your intense speed is supposed to carry you through the intermittent tracts of pure sand. We began. This way lies madness, I thought, which became the ca
ption for my experience between Sekgoma Pan and Kang.
The wind ripped out everything that was holding my hair in place, so I thought So be it. I was keeping my hair long for attractiveness’ sake, against every rule about bush living there is. The blast made consecutive thought impossible. I stood up in the blast, the back of my shirt blown out taut like a turtleshell, and sang the Marseillaise. Faster! I frequently murmured. Denoon is the only non-French person I ever met who knows all the verses of the Marseillaise. He also knew other anthems, and specialized in ones from minor countries. He thought anthems were hilarious, as a genus. He thought occupations should have anthems. For chefs there could be one called La Mayonnaise. He did a hilarious English version of the Boer anthem, Die Stem, which I have on tape.
We stopped a few times before reaching Kang, once to pick up a hitchhiking young woman, a teacher, and to let all hands relieve themselves, and again when we hit deep sand outside Mabuasehube and the passenger-side door burst open and the teacher and the jack and the crank flew onto the road. The sand was soft, fortunately. She wasn’t hurt. The same or a slightly preceding jolt had cracked a carton of Daylight soap, so that bars of soap were distributed down the road behind us in a long array, The drivers were scrupulous, I must say. They climbed up high on the load to oversee us, the passengers, as we retrieved every spilled bar, and were very encouraging with their shouts and cries. This was our main rest break.
There was a moment when it looked as though getting out of the sand might be a problem. The breakdown kit, when it was extricated, surprised us by containing only a spare carburetor—no shovel, no sand mat of the absolutely reliable and time-tested kind they use all over the Sahel, no first aid kit. In point of fact, it wasn’t a spare carburetor but rather one that had given out sometime in the past.
Apparently our drivers would get us out through sheer experience. I was told how long they had successfully been driving this route, and it was years and years. The adolescent must have begun driving as a tot. I hoped they were right, because I wasn’t happy at the prospect of camping right there if they were wrong. We would be okay: there was water, although drinking water was siphoned out for us with the same length of hose used to refill the gas tank from the spare petrol drum. I was asked why I was asking the most questions.
By a trick, which no doubt took years of life off the drive train, a violent shifting back and forth between forward and reverse, they got us out. So it was back to more of the same searing thing, Botswana passing in a sepia blur. Ultimately I was too parched even for mental singing. I had to give up on the private travel game of guessing when the glittering decor along the roadside, the cans and bottles and broken glass, would thin out and stop. It never stopped. My mind emptied.
I was exhausted but increasingly elated. This was travel at its purest. This was velocitude, the feeling of wellbeing associated with being in prolonged transit. I had no idea this was a faintly contemptible thing. For someone who had traveled everywhere, Denoon was peculiarly scathing on people who liked to travel. Of all the enthusiasms, the one for sheer travel was the one he claimed to find the most boring. You could rarely if ever get a travel buff to tell you one thing of interest, he would say. They can tell you the names of the places they’ve been and the number of places they’ve been. If you’re lucky they can tell if someplace was fabulously cheap or criminally expensive. The quintessence of it was something Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, to wit, I travel not to go anywhere but to go, which was imprinted, fittingly enough, on the paper the Banana Republic wrapped your purchases in. Nelson was against recreational travel. It was his puritanism. If your work compelled you to travel, that was fine. Then you could enjoy it, presumably. But he hated tourism and thought people should stay home and make their own backyards interesting enough to hold their attention. There was something about Denoon not realizing he was having his cake and eating it too in this connection that drove me to distraction. He wasn’t a good sport about confronting it, either, or not at first.
The roar stopped and we were in Kang. Day was done. It was abrupt. I felt like one of those disciples of Gurdjieff who demonstrated the depth of their servitude by freezing in midcourse of whatever action they were performing, at Gurdjieff’s command, not excluding when they were running from the back of a stage straight at the audience. Naturally many of them sailed into the orchestra pit in marvelously frozen postures, crashing down triumphantly among the chairs and music stands.
The moon was up. We were under the wings of a beautiful tree, or a tree whose stasis seemed beautiful. I was still vibrating and still a blur as I got my gear together and set off to find shelter with the nuns at a mission oddly called, as I understood it, Mary, Star of the Sea.
The Sisters
Kang has douceur. The village is very dispersed, but the heart of it is under the canopy of a healthy acacia grove in which lots of the trees are lordly mature specimens of the umbrella and cloud genuses. The red aloes were up. At one time Kang was a government camp, and there is still a handful of government officers posted there who are typically away hunting or attending conferences or on leave, which doesn’t bother the Bakgalagadi farmers and herders who populate Kang. The dominant tribes tease and look down on the Bakgalagadi as hopeless rustics only one step above the absolute bottom dogs, the Basarwa. Sometimes in the most unimaginably remote spots in Africa you find a bemused lakhoa staying for years, unable to leave, gripped by the particular genius loci. I could conceive that happening in Kang. The atmosphere is drowsy and floral. Underfoot is fine dark-grayish sand, soft, almost a talc, overlaid with a lattice of some vine resembling trailing myrtle, with small tough white blooms you hate to step on. You have a silence decorated by occasional goatbell and cowbell sounds. All the housing is in the old style: the male and the common rondavels have trimmed thatch and the female houses have loose, weeping thatch. The people are ragged and the place is poor, but there is a sense that things are being seen to. Kang is not demoralized. The brush fencing around the lolwapas is kept tight.
Whites in Kang are few and far between. There is the Boer general dealer and moneylender. There are the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, at Mary, Star of the Sea, where I was crashing, six of them. There were supposed to be whites out at the half-built new consolidated secondary school outside Kang. I stopped out to see the place. The school complex is very futurist, in pink cement. A considerable error was made in preparing the site: they tore up the ground vines and whatever grass they could find and consequently sand is everywhere and in everything, a real affliction. The Dane who gave me tea was obsessed with managing the sand. He was shaking out a rug when I came up. When we sat down he kept clearing the gleaming tabletop between us with the side of his hand. The other teachers had gone and he was about to go. He was bitter. He had been surcharged for a watering violation: he had been caught pouring pitchers of water on the sand around the front door of his bungalow, to keep it down. The Italian contractors who had been putting up the school had gone bankrupt. He was the one who had believed the longest that the government would restart construction any day. But that was his curse, he had decided: he was credulous. He was using the time to review his life.
In Kang you are definitely at the still center of nowhere. Facing north you have bush running hundreds of miles unto Angola. To your west is the Kalahari and then Namibia, which is emptiness folded into emptiness until you get to the Atlantic, except for the flyspeck of Gobabis. To your east is more Kalahari, but an even more restricted and empty zone of it, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The desert gets drier and stonier to the west, but in the north, south, and east the Kalahari is flat to rolling thornveld, with trees and brush occasionally clustered but predominantly hot, dry grasslands, no surface water anywhere, absurd succulents you would be wasting your time trying to find in any field guide. Tsau, the omphalos of my idioverse, lay dead east in the reserve, a hundred miles away. I was listening circumspectly to see if anyone had anything to say about Tsau or Denoon, but nothing emerge
d. Conversation was arduous in Kang, which was not what I expected. I think people on the whole preferred to be silent. I began to understand it.
I loved the silence in Kang. My time in the bush had made me think about silence in a concerted way for the first time in my life, but there my appreciation of the silence had been colored by apprehension: I was listening through it for anything that might mean danger, intruders. In Kang I was always safe. I had also just survived the aural battering of the ride from Gabs. In any case I discovered I had a craving for silence that Kang seemed to feed. Conversation among the sisters was minimal, not out of obedience to any doctrinal rule I was aware of but because people preferred it that way. I halfway wondered if part of the success of cloistered institutions comes from parasitic exploitation of a deep thirst for silence that certain people may have and be unaware of. Denoon thought there might be something to this idea, although he also thought the taste for silence was draining out of mankind under conditions of civilization, and at a cost, if he was correct that the price of lamb in the United States was getting prohibitive because fewer and fewer people could be found who were capable of enduring the solitude entailed by being a shepherd. He claimed there had been a scheme to train welfare recipients for the occupation—the pay is quite decent—which had foundered spectacularly on entrenched silence aversion among the poor. This may be why he seemed fairly interested in my positive attitude toward silence. Not only should I have been more distinctly marked in this area by my low-income origins, but there was my escape from the generalized hatred of silence Americans are trained in, as manifested in the freezing horror that seizes us when the conversation during a date or at a dinner party falters. This was when it became clear that Denoon hardly thought of himself as an American. What he did think of himself as was another matter. In fact, for all my rather earnest musings on the subject, he had deeper feelings re silence than I did. When I was getting to know Denoon during what I allow myself to think of as a courtship period, we drifted into the inevitable eddying exchanges about our happiest memories, our most unpleasant experiences. For my most unpleasant experience I had come up trivially with once having had nothing to put a grease fire out with except a tray of cat litter. I should have scanned for something higher level. His was seeing a young cousin reading Lord Jim for the first time while a Doors album blasted on the stereo, the same side repeated over and over. He related this passionately. Of course in his own way he was being trivial too.