by Norman Rush
All I know is that in Kang the silence was almost lyrical, or more precisely, the ratio of innocuous noise to silence was perfect. I think you have to be deep inland for that kind of silence. The susurrus of wind in the thorn trees was highly occasional, not predictable. Furthermore I was so sick of talking. My last days in Gaborone had been endless structures of talk—coy talk, promises, cajolement, white lies—from morning to night. I was very ready to have it stop.
The mission was a line of squaredavels along the crest of the high side of the Kang pan. The sisters ran a tiny, overwhelmed clinic and were attempting, without luck so far, to establish a hostel cum primary school for Basarwa children. I enjoyed the sisters, who ceased being at all curious about me when I said the word anthropology. Their eyes glazed. We are not exotic in that part of the world. One of the sisters took me down into the pan to impress me with the severity of the drought. The pan at Kang is pretty deep and I had a recurrence of skepticism about the standard explanation of the origin of the pans, viz. wind action over millennia scouring out these depressions, the proof being that the rim standing most counter to the prevailing wind is supposedly always the highest. They look so much like volcanic or impact craters, though. We went down into the blinding thing. There had been next to no rain for three years. A hand-dug pit at the center of the pan which had been briefly used for watering cattle was now full of bones. We went to it. The floor of the pan was baked and checkered, and walking across it felt like walking on potsherds. In certain cracks you could insert your arm down to the biceps and your fingers would touch a wet substance like paste which would have dried into a rigid plaster coating by the time you pulled your hand out. You had to knock your coated fingers against something hard to get it off.
From an anthropological standpoint I was very interested in there being female Franciscans, women motivated by yet another embalmed male dream to live out their lives in wilderness like this. I have nothing against St. Francis of Assisi, I don’t think. I know him by image, exclusively. But it was an anthropologically interesting fact to me that the heavy work of this remote mission was being done exclusively by very nice women. And the same is true for Africa generally, for Lutherans and all the rest of them. Even when a woman gets her own order authorized, like Mother Teresa, it’s women who end up doing the cooking and cleaning and nursing and little detachments of men who get to do the fun proselytizing. As I say, I was more interested in the sisters than they were in me. It may be because people who do good, to a self-sacrificial point and on a continuous basis, seem to exist in a kind of light trance a lot of the time. When we were down in the pan I realized I had been waiting for a thing to happen that I’d gotten used to seeing happen among missionary women, id est a brief peeping out of the sin of pride. They are consciously determined not to take pride in the afflictions they endure for the love of Christ, but they tend to slip. My guide asked if I had heard the news that a nun had been trampled to death by an elephant in Zambia. I saw the gleam. And I could hear chagrin when honesty compelled her to mention that it was a sister not of their order. I commiserated appropriately, feeling ashamed of the kind of person I am.
It took me a week to get myself outfitted and provisioned for my expedition, and I could have made it take longer. I was protracting the process. Kang was hard to leave. Apparently I wasn’t alone in feeling that way, because one of the sisters was in rebellion against a command to return to Racine. The time I spent lending a hand in the clinic also slowed me down by inducing internal questioning along the lines of What would be so terrible about public health as a career for you and What is so compelling about the socalled study of man? What did I think was wrong with the idea of doing something for people whose cheeks looked like pegboard, as opposed to spending my life swimming upstream through the shrinking attention spans of the sons and daughters of the American middle class? I knew I was already too old for medical school. I knew a woman three years younger who had been told she was too old for veterinary school. The sisters were doing medicine, in effect. And they seemed happy and were living decently, male absence notwithstanding. They were all a little overweight, but were obviously content construing whatever weight they settled at as what God, in the form of interacting genes, diet, and exercise, wanted. It was not on their minds. In America the dominant female types seem to be gaunt women jogging themselves into amenorrhea or women so fat they’re barely able to force one thigh past the other when it’s time to locomote, like Mom. The problem was that there was no mystery, that I could see, connected with public health. Anthropology, even my rather mundane corner of it, seemed to me to connect with the mystery of everything, by which I think I meant why the world has to be so unpleasant.
What finally stirred me to get moving was the water in Kang. It was cloudy and had an acrid taste. The sisters were aware of it but, I thought, eerily sanguine about it. When I brought it up directly, finally, it was clear they were, it could be said, even rather proud of what they were drinking. It seems the water in Kang is dense with naturally occurring nitrates. The water has been tested by the authorities and found to be spectacularly above the danger level. Everything in the literature suggested that nitrates at this level should cause people to develop a kidney disorder called methemoglobinuria. But there was no sign of the disease among the local people, who had been drinking the water for generations, nor among the nuns. There was no feasible filtering, in any case, nor if there were would it have felt right for them to make use of it when the poor of Kang would not have access to it. It was a medical mystery and a sign that Kang was under divine protection. They said this. So then it was time to bestir myself.
My lie to the sisters as to my destination was that I was only going east about twenty-five miles to rendezvous with a team from the rural income survey, which should have made my undertaking seem unthreatening enough. Still they wanted to talk seriously with me about traveling alone in the bush. It was about sexual danger, although everything was put more than obliquely. First they wanted reassurance that I had notified the proper officials as to my itinerary, namely the district commissioners in Kanye and Maun, which I lied yes to. I had skipped doing that out of hypercaution: I thought Denoon might have some kind of early warning agreement with the Ministry of Local Government and Lands to deflect journalists and supremely cunning doctoral candidates. I let fall gems like Please remember that Batswana think white women have an unattractive odor due to the amount of meat in our diets. Lastly I felt I had to lie that I had a pistol, which, as soon as I had uttered it, seemed like not a bad idea. I hadn’t felt the need of any sort of firearm when I was in the bush near Tswapong, but then that piece of wilderness was closer to town than anyplace I was going, and there were occasional farms and ranches scattered around there. The wildlife in the Tswapong Hills was sparser and smaller by a long chalk than what I might be facing in the central Kalahari. I inquired around offhandedly the next day, but there were no guns for sale in Kang, at least not to me. So I repeated to myself all the reasons I had originally concluded a gun would be superfluous and that was the end of that.
MY EXPEDITION
The Hunchbacks
I have to begin to be more synoptic.
I thought it would take me four days, at twenty-five miles a day, to get to Tsau, which it has become emotionally convenient lately for me to refer to inwardly as Pellucidar, after a book in the Tarzan series. It took me six-plus or seven-plus days, one or the other, to get there. Toward the end I was in serious straits. Calling Tsau Pellucidar is partly distancing and partly apposite. Pellucidar sounds like the way Tsau felt to me in one respect: it was like being, for the first time in my existence, in a correctly lighted place. I’ve never read the book, but I assume Pellucidar was one of the numerous lost and weird but still functioning cities Tarzan visited, and it was in Africa, naturally, although possibly it was at the earth’s core, with only the opening leading down to it being in Africa proper. So it all coheres. Nelson was a boyhood fan of the Tarzan series. The f
irst meal he personally prepared for us was a curried dish he called Rice Edgar Burroughs because it had some of Tarzan’s favorite ingredients in it, whatever those might be.
Somewhere I have a list of the authors of Nelson’s favorite boys’ books. Most of them were news to me, like Roy Rockwood and Talbot Mundy. I now think the reason I have so much detail about the boyhood phase of his life is because telling me about it was a form of misdirection it took me forever to identify as such. I wanted details of his marriage and serious attachments generally and instead I got the thousand and one nights of his life as a boy, Denoon again and again taking ingenious revenges on the neighbor pharisee boys, who seemed to love to torment him and keep him from reading without interruption in the treehouses he constructed as reading pavilia. On the other hand, and to be absolutely fair, reading was one of his religions. In fact he gave as an instance of a consummate experience of pleasure reading straight through a collected edition of Sax Rohmer one summer. This was also an example of not knowing you were having a peak experience at the time you were having it and mistakenly assuming that it was the forerunner of many equal experiences waiting for you onward in life. I gathered he wished he had read more savoringly, possibly stopping after each paragraph and going Ah. He seemed to think that the idea that you should know when you’re having fun and concentrate on it passim was original. I tried to suggest that this looked to me a lot like our old Aquarian friend Mindfulness, but he wouldn’t have it. I must be vulgarizing him a little here. In any case it was his reading of Sax Rohmer, in particular a book starring his favorite Sax Rohmer hero, Morris Klaw, the Dream Detective, a prodigy who solves mysteries by inhaling verbena and going to sleep, that redneck neighbor boys disrupted by vandalizing his treehouse. His family owned a summer place in a dank redwood grove near the Russian River. Denoon’s revenge was ingenious, but it escapes me. I did drift off now and then, toward dawn, during the thousand and one nights.
There was a formula, I pointed out, to the way he had resolved his difficulties with his enemy peers. I asked him if he was aware what it was. He thought. He had no idea. I delineated it. I said Routinely after you got revenge you undid renewed persecution against you by becoming the leader of your tormentors, at least until you moved. I count several times that you turned your former enemies into a club with you as president and got the club involved in time-consuming activities you could partake in glancingly, as a supervisor, such as building grandiose earthworks in vacant lots in preparation for mud war attacks from boys in other neighborhoods that rarely eventuated. There are patterns in all our lives, I said. Saying this may have contributed to a decline in his preoccupation with telling me about his boyhood, or it may have been genuine evolution in our relationship. Something helped.
The day I left Kang I got up at five, dressed quietly, and was slipping out of the mission courtyard when the entire sisterbody waylaid me with godspeed and bags of hardboiled eggs and other treats. I was gracious even though I had trouble figuring out quickly where to put the additional provisions they were forcing on me. I had everything planned down to the last ounce. My two donkeys were already loaded to the point of being in danger of tipping over. This is pure cavil. But actually I did feel slight irritation at their interposing themselves between me and one of the great unalloyed solitary joys of life—being up at first light and setting out on empty roads to go someplace difficult and significant. I think this is best enjoyed alone but I don’t know why I say that. It was a nice bon voyage despite its being imposed on me.
In the outskirts of Kang something happened that I took as a reminder not to interpret experiential oddities too quickly. I was approaching the path leading to the primary school, and I stopped to watch the children running to class, a stream of them, and I thought Oh god! No! because as they passed I was seeing a stream of little hunchbacks, every one of them hunchbacked. I thought So many hunchbacks in one little spot in the Kalahari! What a commentary! Why was this never reported? How can this be? But then I watched as one little girl’s hump disappeared. A tin bowl appeared at her feet and one of her schoolmates kicked it in my direction. In Kang it was the custom to carry your mealie bowl to school on your back with your jersey pulled tight over it to hold it in place, that was all. So with that I set off into the unknown, telling myself to remember that there is less to the mysterious than meets the eye. Because of what was to come, this was salutary. I used it as a talisman in the desert more than once.
Lions
The first day went perfectly. The heat was moderate. There were clouds in the afternoon. My donkeys looked like galleons, with all the extra feed and reserve water I had felt compelled to bring in case we struck some burned-over tract that extended farther than it should or we missed a water point. They had names. The bigger and older one was Baph, short for Baphomey. The Herero guy who sold me the animals had been unable to explain the provenance or meaning of the name. Denoon later had a freakish reaction to it which I never fully understood. Baphomey may have been a corruption of baphoumedi, which means roughly a group of rash people, or it may have been a corruption of bapola, a verb meaning to stretch out and peg down a hide. Neither association was too comforting. The younger donkey was Mmo, for mmoduhadi or sluggard. That was clear enough. I thought of the donkeys as the boys, my boys.
The grass thinned and gave way to patches of hardpan and bare sand. The trees began to be fewer. I passed my last attended cattle at ten and by midafternoon I had seen my last stray cow. The boys seemed fairly catholic about the available kinds of grasses, which was a relief. Toward evening I found my first water point exactly where it was supposed to be, although I had to do more digging in the bed of the sand river than I’d expected. I finally got visible seepage in the trough I’d dug. We stopped there. I tethered my animals and uncorked my pop-up alpine tent and zipped myself into it. I made a meal out of the hardboiled eggs, which was a mistake. I have no idea what I thought about that day. I think I was subsisting mentally on the singing feeling you get from beginning a great action. I was even too tired to write anything. I sank like a stone into sleep.
At two a.m. I awoke, my mind on fire with the question of lions. I knew I was supposedly safe, myself, in my tent, because there were no cases on record of lions actually forcing their way into a closed one. Also the game migrations were over with, which were what drew lions, and the migration routes in any case went in a curve deep to the west and north of my itinerary. But of course now in the small hours I was asking myself how much of everything you’re told in Africa is folklore. I might be safe, but what about my boys? In Gaborone there was a public attraction, a lion park socalled, and what the tourists came to watch was fresh donkey meat being flung over a chainlink fence to a couple of lions at feeding time. Was the lion-tent copula a piece of folklore? and were lions really so strictly nocturnal in their hunting? There was a man in Gaborone I had had drinks with, the lion man. He was one of my sources. He was one of the people who had been reassuring. But he himself had started out as a student of lions and had been turned into an obsessive on the subject. He was a bar character you bought drinks for. I remembered his descriptions of lions bringing down gigantic Cape buffalo: one would swallow the buffalo’s snout, suffocating it, while other lions tore at the buffalo’s legs. The lion man never wanted to see another lion. It was pointless, but I spent a good part of the rest of the night listening.
A Brief Mania
The next day I got up tired and swearing that from then on every night I would do the prudent thing of building either a perimeter fire or at least a large campfire and staking the boys next to it. I was annoyed at myself for gorging on eggs and naturally getting constipated. So it was onward.
It was a long time before Denoon really took my vocational crisis for anything like the real thing. The world was my oyster if only I got organized, was his initial thrust. Why couldn’t I write about travel, for example. I loved travel. Need Travel Constipate? could be a selling article in something. All this was in the con
text of his proposal that I should found a magazine called True Travel analogous to True Crime or True Detective. I should found a travel magazine that would tell the absolute truth, for a change, which would lead to more people staying home, a consummation devoutly to be wished, according to him. Tourism corrupts, was his tune. I would be perfect for True Travel because according to Denoon I had never been in a country I really liked. America the Beautiful included.
Of course I proposed my share of alternative careers for him. One of us would be depressed and the other would say Well, you could always do such and such, and it would be off to the races. This began as a benign device for getting out of moments of discouragement. It evolved. The concept was that the one who noticed the other was depressed was thereby authorized to select a new vocation the depressed person would be forced to follow thenceforward, and in the pursuit of which depression would perforce not be logical. This jeu maintained its facetious character, but there came a time when I began to resent it as a concealed way of short-circuiting my episode of depression, because he preferred me to be merry, naturally. Finally, when I’d had many more vocations imposed on me than I was ever likely to be able to impose on him, it was enough and I made us discuss it, with the interesting result that he realized our jeu was probably vaguely filial to a species of game he’d enticed his unfortunate younger brother into playing when they were on boring car trips as children. He would get his little brother to agree that each of them would have the right to pick out, from the array of housing they would pass as they drove, the house that the other would have to live in for the rest of his life. The idea was to saddle the other with the worst-looking, worst-circumstanced hovel they saw on that particular trip. But of course Denoon, being older, had more patience and knew his younger brother would choose precipitately, and that by biding his time he, Denoon, would find something infinitely more humiliating for his brother than his brother would for him. He always won. He found houses on eroding cliffs and frightening little houses in cemeteries, for example. Denoon always won, but he also won the more important metagame, which was to get his brother to play another time, and another. Nelson wasn’t proud of this. Looking it in the face even interested him. Through talking about it he remembered a parallel game he had gotten his brother to play, out of his brother’s desire to be in his zone. Peter was four years younger. This was not a car game, because it involved recourse to lists and books. You’re really good for me, Denoon would say when we got into these purlieus. You amaze me. Nelson would propose to Peter that they each have the power to name the other’s firstborns, always assumed to be male, interestingly. During these accounts I felt fortunate having no siblings. I was seeing something foreign. The name would have to be documentable, either by appearing in the sorts of lists of names that are appended to big dictionaries—which Peter was more or less restricted to by reason of youth and lack of imagination—or by appearing in some other printed text. Again he could count on his brother’s being premature and going with something like Percy, something that sounded unmanly, which in the early games Denoon might counter with something like Uriel, thusly bringing bodily wastes associatively into the picture. So Denoon would win and his brother in frustration would scream that all right then he was taking back Percy and somehow was going to make Nelson call his son Shitler. Denoon was always on the lookout for humiliating names. In the last game in the series, Denoon’s greatest triumph, his brother was forced to accept naming his firstborn Dong, as in Dong Kingman, the painter, dong of course being slang in those days for penis. The protocol in these games and the bait that kept getting Peter to play was that each new game would allow the players to wipe out the results of the last preceding game in the genre. I was seeing a true vortex of oppression. When they played cowboys, for instance, Denoon would inveigle his brother into calling himself something like Roy Mucus, Sheriff of Scrotum County, when these words meant nothing to Peter. The games could go on for days. Where were your parents during all this? I wanted to know. They were otherwise beset, he said: beset is Afrikaans for occupied, and you see it on the restroom doors on South African Airways planes.