Mating

by Norman Rush

  I felt absurdly recovered but decided it would be prudent to conduct myself convalescently for the time being. I got dressed in my bush gear: longsleeved army shirt, jeans, boots. There was a mirror to use. I looked fairly banged up. I did a cursory toilette, which was all any toilette would be until I could get my hair clean. I borrowed a headscarf. At some point in the intervals in my sleepfest, I remembered vaguely I had been promised I could bathe.

  We would be having breakfast with some women, Mma Isang said, surprising me by speaking in English. We would be speaking in English also when the delegation came. They would be bringing our food behind them, she said.

  Waiting, I sauntered around outside a little, going up the main avenue, Gladys and Ruth Street, as far as the mysterious white object that had frightened me when I first noticed it. The main avenue was named for the wives of the first and second presidents of Botswana. An oddity was that at the gate end the street was Gladys and Ruth, but at the plaza end it was Ruth and Gladys Street. People were touchingly scrupulous about which name order they used, depending on which end of the street they were at. The white object was a gauze shroud covering a flayed carcass hanging from a tree, the meat tree, to age. It was to keep flies off. I had seen meat trees before, but never with this refinement. There was an attendant at the tree, and people were coming up and indicating which sections of the cow they wanted when it was cut up. The attendant, actually the cow’s owner, was taking these orders down in a notebook, and chits or tokens of some kind were being handed to her. I observed all this from a distance, not wanting to overstep.

  It was a cool morning, bright, no different than any other morning since Kang, but now I was able to experience the pleasure there was in it. Breathing was a pleasure. I’m sure I’ve never been so pleased with myself. All the innocent industry of the households getting mobilized for the day was a pleasure to see. And I loved Tsau from the compositional standpoint, from the pastel motley feeling of the rondavels to the red rock jumble crowning the koppie. I was already thinking of these rocks as the Citadel, portentously.

  Another mystery fell away. Twice I saw children pushing light wooden two-wheeled carts whose sideboards were decorated with simple figures or symbols in enamels in spectrum colors. The wheels were bicycle wheels. In the case of the two carts I got a glimpse of the decor consisted of female imagos with pierced disks of glass screwed into the wood where eyes or a necklace would be. Clearly carts like these, in their shuttlings, were responsible for the vivid blurts of color I had seen recurring at odd points in the landscape. Why these rococo vehicles were always called dung carts when in fact collecting dung from the kraals and pens was the last and least thing they were used for is something I never figured out. The dung carts did well on the packed earth of the pathways and must have been strongly made, because I saw them routinely bumped very hard up and down the short intermittent runs of steps in the paved routes to the plaza without flying apart. Children personally owned these carts and could earn credits for conveying goods or messages in them. You might see a cart being furiously rushed someplace with a folded piece of paper in it and nothing more. This was not totally laughable, because there was always the possibility that something more substantial might be picked up for the return trip. As I was to discover, the explanation was that there was a greatly indulgent attitude toward the small, petted population of children. People sent the children on perpetual errands, many of them invented or marginal, out of love, essentially. The carts made a contribution to the visual agitation or liveliness you felt in Tsau, which was especially noticeable in late afternoon or during the innumerable holidays when the children were out of school.

  Feeling unauthorized, I kept my saunterings close to home. The women I watched transacting at the meat tree watched back. I could tell I was being talked about, but it seemed friendly.

  I had a moment of fear when all the women began, I thought, pointing at me. But they were only directing my attention to Mma Isang, who had come out into the yard and was summoning me by striking a thing like a glass sashweight with a ball-peen hammer. The notes produced were pleasant and musical, and did carry. What a genteel way to get somebody’s attention, I thought, although it seemed to me you would have to be on the qui vive to pick out this particular line of sound amid the general aural glitter of Tsau—the jinkling of the wind chimes, the cowbells and goatbells and dogbells, the drivel of birds and poultry, and all the other as yet unidentified ingredients in the sinfonia domestica playing from sunrise to sunset in this intricate place.

  The Mother Committee

  Three women arrived. These are of the mother committee, Mma Isang said.

  Breakfast would be al fresco, I had already observed, at a table under the cloud tree.

  I wondered if everyone in Tsau was always beautifully dressed. I already knew that no one, children included, went barefoot. People wore sandals or moccasins. If they went out into the bush they were supposed to strap on leather leggings, like shin guards, as protection against snakes, but these were unpopular. There was a definite municipal costume. It was modular. People wore either a long sack dress, sleeveless, belted or unbelted, or a tunic and shorter-skirt combination. There was another type of skirt, much fuller and with complexly arranged buttoning panels that would supposedly permit the skirt to be fastened back into pantaloons, which only a few women wore any longer. It had been an experiment. Everything was made from the same material, a tan muslin. But here uniformity ended. Garments were individualistically decorated, either dyed in different solid or combined colors, or printed with motifs like eyes, crosses, stars, ankhs, letters of the alphabet—some quite majuscule. The printing, some dense and some sparse, was done with dies cut from different local tubers. There was some not overambitious embroidery around neckholes and armholes. Headscarves were universal but entirely individual as to color and tie-style. Headscarf art at Tsau would make a coffeetable book. Plain modes were the norm, but there were always triumphs of excess turning up: anything went, and stuffings were sometimes used to create truly startling ridged and tiara effects. When jewelry was worn it was usually glass, what else?, or the Basarwa ostrich-eggshell-chip bracelets and chokers that are staple trade goods all over the Kalahari. I felt quite drab and masculine as we went to the table.

  Mma Isang muttered a Setswana phrase to me that translates as We are walking on our toenails. This equates to our Walking on eggs.

  There were two women in Mma Isang’s age range and one, Dineo, in her forties. Introductions were in Setswana. It was formal. I sat down with the delegation. There were only four chairs, regular European straight chairs, so Mma Isang went to get a chair for herself, placing it at a little distance from the setting around the table. We served ourselves tea. In English Mma Isang again said I should be patient because these sisters were bringing our breakfast behind them, which was meaningless to me until a young boy appeared propelling a vermilion cart into the yard. He was in the standard schoolboy kit of khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt and appeared to be in a hurry to finish with us and get somewhere else. He was cutely officious, expertly prying the fitted lid off a sheet metal chest, inside which was straw, beneath which was another box, containing our breakfast of scones, socalled, and hardboiled eggs. It was done like lightning. The boy was given a token. He shot away. Everything was hot. We ate off cloth serviettes.

  You must eat so many eggs as you please, Mma Isang said, again in English, for which she drew a reproving gesture from Dineo. I gathered that it would be Dineo who would determine when English would be spoken at this interview.

  Dineo was clearly primus inter pares here. She was sinewy. Men would find her sexually interesting, I thought. She was tall for a Tswana, true black, Nilotic, with what the Batswana call long eyes. She had a hard, narrow face. Her dress, slit to the knee on one side, was printed with bands of tiny black crosses, black on tan, which gave a faintly sacerdotal air to her presence. She had presence. She was wearing an amber headscarf draped like the one the Sphi
nx wears. There was a trick, possibly starch, to the way the delta panels of the scarf stayed spread at the sides of her neck. This was her signature headdress. I only saw it varied a few times. She had force. I liked it that white though I am, she was looking me straight in the eye, unlike her companions, who were doing the more typical side-glancing and down-glancing as they absorbed themselves in studious tea drinking or egg peeling. Something in her expression reminded me how stern Batswana women can be about malingering, and I readjusted my plan to look more done in than I actually felt. I felt myself involuntarily wanting to appease her.

  The other two were subalterns. I came to think of them as the twins and then learned that other people used that term for them. These two women were fairly inseparable. One, called Dimakatso, had a ruined, white left eye. Joyce’s hands were badly gnarled by arthritis. Dimakatso peeled Joyce’s egg for her. Joyce was only a nominal participant. But I had the feeling that Dimakatso was listening keenly the whole time, and this was confirmed when at the end she took out a ballpoint pen and made some sort of notations on the flesh of the palm of her hand.

  Mma Isang brought out oranges, honey, and paring knives. Dineo had some preliminary things to say to me in English about speaking English. I must not be misled to think that no one in Tsau could speak English save for very few women and Rra Puleng. But I must well understand, because there were some sisters still who could not speak English, that it was decided for all time to never have meetings conducted in English as they were at district council and parliament, where even should women attend it could never be told by them what was happening. That was an injustice I would never find in Tsau. At all events we must now speak in Setswana and later in English again.

  The questioning was polite but acute, led by Dineo. There was interest in how I had learned to speak Setswana so well. I gave them a truthful Botswana curriculum vitae except that I substituted ornithology for anthropology. I especially disliked doing this to Mma Isang. I invented a Kalahari itinerary that would have taken me ultimately in a long curve to Lake Ngami—a place that is in fact a wellknown ornithological three-ring circus. They could well understand how I had come to grief on such a long expedition undertaken alone. Here I had to improvise about a companion who had been unable to join me at the last moment. Going alone into the desert was something for Bushmen, and my questioners weren’t satisfied until I was more demonstrative about how foolhardy I had been to proceed with it. Then Dineo pressed me rather hard around my assertion that Tsau was a surprise to me, that I had never heard of it. She slipped into English. How was it that I hadn’t heard any stories or whispers about what the people of Tsau were doing, making a city in which no one was poor, which no Europeans could yet say they had done in their own countries? Had I not heard whisperings of Rra Puleng, a man famous among Europeans, being at Tsau? I was steadfast in my claims of ignorance and finally she let up.

  The coda was in English. Unfortunately Tsau was not yet ready to receive visitors of any kind except in cases of distressful accident such as mine, so that unfortunately the mother committee and Rra Puleng himself must tell me I must go away when that could be arranged and I was fully able for going. Unfortunately Rra Puleng was the strictest of them all as to this. Tsau was like a tree not yet ready to drop its fruits. No visitors could come except helpers like doctors at times. When Tsau was ready to drop its fruits, as many visitors would be free to come as would be pleased to. As for herself, she welcomed me as a sister, and she would be very pleased to have me stay too long with them and not rush away to be only with birds to discuss with.

  I was asked what I wanted and if I was in eagerness to return elsewhere.

  I said I had never been in a place I wanted to see more than I did Tsau and that I regarded everyone there as a sister or mother to me. I wanted to stay for as long as it could be allowed. I said that the birds would be waiting for me at Lake Ngami in any case at whatever time I got there. We were all nodding in accord.

  Dineo said that in not above five days I would meet with all the sisters of the mother committee and they would say what must be. Until then I must go all about Tsau and look everywhere to see what kinds of works could be raised up by women if only they lock together as one.

  My Journal

  Today when I look at the journal I started in Tsau and see how microscopically I felt I had to inscribe my initial entries I know I was more than hyper. I must have been rather disturbed.

  My normal handwriting is above average in size. The idea behind writing in miniature was to create something that would be unforthcoming in the case of someone giving a quick, furtive scan, which is also why I resorted so berserkly to abbreviations and code words as well as studding my text with bogus ornithological observations as further camouflage. The result is a bolus not completely intelligible to me without serious concentration and the effort to think myself back into the moments that led me to choose particular codes and evasions. I could have used Pitman’s, which I know, but was afraid it would look suspicious to an unsophisticated person taking a quick snoop. Also I was speaking very little English for long stretches and found it a relief to use it in my journal: writing minutely served the need to enforce some selectivity on myself in dealing with the cascade of novelties and rarae aves Tsau confronted me with. There are also glyphs. Crossed swords mean sex. A truth about me is that when I visit a house where there are letters or other interesting-looking private papers lying around, I may have a quick look. I’m not convinced of my uniqueness in this tendency, although my excuse for it is anthropology. I would never do anything with information I got from my quick snoops, which are really quite disinterested. Anyone who could see into my heart would exculpate me and realize I was doing it pursuant to my consuming interest in the mystery of the world.

  So the below represents an anthology, in effect, from my notes for early May 1981, up to and just through my full-dress meeting with the whole mother committee. I’ve tried to collect things under headings. Saying “the below” is yet another residue of Denoon, who thought that since people say “the above,” as in None of the above, it was unreasonable not to use “the below” identically, and also amusing. The below is an impure text, in that I have, where necessary, drawn out and restored what I was concealing in my abbreviations and enigmatica.

  200 homesteads, 12 new ones under construction, all laid out NE to NW quadrant on level ground and on slopes almost to the plaza terrace. Thus, at 2.5 persons per compound, circa 450 total population. 50 men, at most: uncles soi-disant, long-lost-type cousins or brothers, but some authentic prodigal husbands retiring from migrant minework in RSA. Children 40, up to preadolescence. All the rest women, 70 percent past childbearing age, 30 percent otherwise. Younger women known as queens or kgosigadi, older women aunts or aunties or mmamogolo: these terms used openly and not unfriendlily by both sides. Denoon’s house a separate isolate cement octagon high NW on the koppie, above the plaza terrace. E below the koppie: sheds, workshops, kraals, mealie fields, nethouses, kiln, blockyard. S all the way around to W raw koppie, overlooking sand river as it turns due S. NE subterrace, on several levels, below plaza terrace: primary school, laundry, kitchen complex, infirmary, sewing house. How are longlost male collaterals, who seem to be increasing, getting to Tsau? Not overland from Kang. Some were arriving one by one by plane, was part of the answer. Tsau had an airstrip to the southeast, where the Barclays Bank plane stopped every two weeks to bring in mail and exchange banking documents. This was a revelation to me. There had been a way into Tsau I had failed to discover, not that I would have been able to make use of it. The individual men who would occasionally be dropped off at Tsau were ones who had convinced the government that they were legitimate male relatives of residents of Tsau. I calmed myself over not knowing about the Barclays plane link by telling myself that it made my trek look even more heroic and authentic.

  The longitudinal thoroughfares that converge on the plaza are called streets and are named for eminent African women, with o
ne exception: there is a Blessed Mary Slessor Street. She was a Scots clergywoman who hunted through the bush in Ashantiland rescuing children, female infants, left out to die. There was a struggle over honoring her, which ended when it was decided that it was enough that she was a woman and that she had performed her good deeds in Africa. The names committee is apparently a hotbed of contention. Latitudinal thoroughfares are called ways. You live streetside or wayside. Ways are named after different social virtues, like Ipelegeng, or pulling together. There is a network of unnamed paths running everywhere, to the top of the koppie and throughout its wild slopes. Where trees are sparse along the streets and ways, efforts are being made to install lattices and to entice vines to grow out, creating stretches of loggia. The deep summer here is blinding and brutal, everybody says, and more shade is wanted. People use parasols in the summer and wear straw sun hats imported from Lesotho. There is a plan to set up toriis like the one next to the gatehouse at the mouth of each of the six main streets. But this is stalled because the gum tree plantation started eight years ago is just now producing trees of adequate height, and there are competing ideas of what to do with them. The gum tree plantation is deep SE, near the airstrip. Rra Puleng is the one who would most like the toriis set up, I sense. There is no map of this place. Everyone knows where everything is. The backlog of unnamed landmarks and venues is growing and causing grumbling.