by Norman Rush
I put the climax of this period at my return from one of the grapple plant expeditions, probably the last. It was toward two or three in the afternoon. Nelson was nowhere, no one had seen him, so I sought him in a place I knew he liked, a ledge on the south side of the koppie, high up, overhung with mopane trees, and there he was.
There he was, on a goatskin, prone, furiously reading his Nonesuch Blake, doing something he was always haranguing the world, through harangues to me, to do—that is, stop and read during the prime part of the day, not when you’re at the end of your strength and when reading competes with television and paying your bills. In the good society you would see people reading during the heart of the day: there would be provision for it. Nelson was lying on the goatskin with two pillows under his chest, wearing canvas shorts, no socks or sandals, and a bulky black cowl sweater I didn’t know he owned.
I crept up. His legs were in three tones, pale below where his kneesocks came to, and then darker, then darker yet where a strip of shadow fell across his upper thighs. I had read a certain amount of Blake in a dutiful way in the course of things, and it had seemed clotted and recursive to me, so I had never thought much about the poetry except for the three or four short lyrics everybody likes, and certainly I had never attempted to memorize any Blake at all. What remained with me was what remains with everybody, Tyger tyger and What is it that in women men desire?/The lineaments of gratified desire. What I almost idly wished for as I crept up on Nelson was for some apposite line out of the whole blur and ruck of William Blake to come to me. That would be perfect. And lo, out of nowhere, and thanks to cryptomnesia being a real capacity, I retrieved the line He rested on the Desart wild. I felt mediumistic. Nelson rolled over in shock. It turned out that he had just been going from browsing the Four Zoas to reading the Additional Fragments and Notes section, where in fact my line came from.
This must be the right life, I thought.
The Batlodi
At the ostrich pen: two stanchions were bent far outward and the diamond mesh fencing between them had been pressed down into a chute over which our breeding pair of ostriches had decamped. Nelson suspected human agency, I knew, so I spent some time hurling my weight against one of the still-standing stanchions to prove to him that nothing I did made traces anything like what we were seeing. It was life and it was what everyone had told him: ostriches are insanely powerful beasts.
His mood wasn’t helped by Raboupi appearing out of the boskage, taking an interest. Worse was that our two newest residents, the batlodi, the bad girls, were with Raboupi. These were sisters, late adolescent, related to the minister of Local Government and Lands, and they had been inside-parties in a longterm robbery of stock from a bottle store in Mmadinare owned by a Chinese. Against his better judgment and as an unavoidable favor to the minister, Nelson had agreed to accept them as parolees. This was to be a once-only exception. The minister’s idea had been that all the batlodi needed was a spell of healthy country living away from the discos and bright lights of periurban Gabs. Patently this was a joke. The girls were very hard. And they exploited a certain ambiguity in the feelings of some of our people toward crimes committed against Chinese or Indians, I should say larcenies to be more accurate. The Batswana hate crime, especially intragroup. They will drop everything to chase down a pickpocket and surround him, yelling and imprecating until the police arrive. And they are more than swift with cattle rustlers out in the sandveld. But a lot of the Chinese in particular are disliked as bosses and shopkeepers. The batlodi had a faint feel of celebrity about them. They had been caught through their own reckless boasting. They would be with us for only six months. They had immediately attached themselves to the Raboupis and our malcontent nurse and a few others distinguished by a critical attitude toward Tsau. The batlodi were highly sporadic about regular work. Hector and the batlodi melted away toward the tannery.
I think Nelson liked being convinced that with the ostrich escape, he was at worst a victim of avian force and cunning. I could be married to you, he said, then quickly went on to praise my good sense, ask what thoughts I was having about my thesis, if any, and generally imply I was impressive and could do more things in the world than I probably thought I could.
The Basarwa
Another reason for not worrying unduly about the escape of the ostriches was that more fresh and dried meat was coming into Tsau. This had nothing to do with the Enfields, yet, which were still on order. Sekopololo was bartering for meat and for honeycomb with the Basarwa, whose encampment on the sand river had gotten very permanent-looking and populous. In the past they had camped there intermittently, the usual pattern, leaving when the lice and fleas got too bad. No one had paid much attention to them, they were so evanescent. There were eight families in the camp. Our children were also dealing independently with the Basarwa: the Basarwa were superb at locating anthills, fresh ones, which our children were bringing back chopped up in their dung carts to feed our chickens, who were suddenly doing very well, better than ever.
Denoon began to wonder about the terms of the barter deals, their fairness or lack of it. Sekopololo was importing more salt than it ever had, and for the first time quantities of pipe tobacco. These were, of course, the key trade goods the Basarwa wanted. Unequal exchange, as a general thing, disgruntled Nelson. I asked him if he knew that there were Peace Corps volunteers who saved up their worn-out shirts and jeans and then took them on the train to Francistown and when it stopped at Shashe traded their rags, actual rags, for terrific woodcarvings produced by the Basarwa destitutes living in a little colony run by the Mennonites near the rail line. We may be convinced that this is objectively wrong, I told him, but unfortunately the evidence is that the Basarwa are delighted with the deals. His ideal of exchange was for it to take place only when all parties were in surplus, hopelessly enough. His inquiries into how barter was going were a little resented. He is pressurizing us, a couple of women in Sekopololo had said to me. I passed the word to him.
I wonder what the Basarwa thought of Nelson, because he began dropping in on their camp, but in rather a moonstruck or disembodied and shy way. Sometimes he would sit in the brush on the slope above the camp and seemingly study them. He couldn’t speak their language, and the fact is he made no attempt to learn any of it, beyond the basic greetings. The camp was doing decently. Because of the rains everyone credited me with inspiring, the sand river was a good source of water, yielding more than they were used to when they dug their seep wells. The Basarwa were another universe. They were somehow too much. They fascinated him. He contrasted the strain and devising and committee meetings that went into making Tsau run with the workable planlessness he saw in the Basarwa setup. What was his responsibility to the Basarwa, however that might be construed? He was confused. He knew Tsau had some responsibility, even though the fact that the camp was becoming more dependent on Tsau was nobody’s devising. I think a problem was that he had had eight years of Tsau with only the most glancing visitations by the Basarwa. If they’d attached themselves to Tsau during the beginnings, when he was fresh, it might have been easier for him. I think inwardly he was supplicating them to be gone. When we talked about them the discussion invariably led sideways into the most absolute questions, such as how you tell that one society is genuinely superior to another, granted both are equally uncruel. We were dealing with the Basarwa on terms Nelson thought were unfair, on our side, but putting that aside, what did we owe them, medically for example, and how helpful longterm was it going to be for them to make use of what we could offer? He was just at the wrong ebb for all this, I think.
Now when he went missing I had a new place to look for him, one that was closer to home than some of the others—the pyramidon, which is what he called the summit of the koppie, or his ledge, or the glassworks. It got surreal, in that I would go to look for him and find him brooding from the brush overlooking the camp, and I might sit for a while and watch him watching.
I suppose I should fault myself for
keeping my distance on this issue for as long as I did. I liked to watch the Basarwa too. It was like observing fairies, they seemed so nice with each other, so tentative and patient. And of course why would I want to disturb any connection he felt with a specimen of a society so close to his ideal in the matter of not injuring the earth? When finally I felt he was too much in the grip of a romance about the Basarwa, I tried to tell him that in fact there were more offstage killings male on male and more wife beating than he might be aware of. But good luck: he knew this wasn’t my field, which I had to admit. He didn’t really want to hear it, and he had on his side the evidence of his senses, which was that life in the encampment was so pacific it was practically treacly.
A few times I was able to watch Nelson during one of his silent visitations to the camp. They accepted him with the same attitude they might have shown toward a heron or stork wandering through their site. Free time was what kept coming up with Nelson after these visits, how much free time does a society guarantee to all its members and not just the preferred classes within it? I reminded him that as far as free time goes, the Basarwa men had rather more of it than the women did. I brought up my information about the degree of concealed violence there was. Then the phrase “organized innocence,” out of William Blake, slipped moonily into the conversation.
There was never a true resolution of his feelings about them, or of mine, to tell the truth. In my mind I can still see the camp with utter clarity. I see the eight dome-shaped huts, the lattice showing in places but mostly covered with a mélange of reed, bark, sacking, scraps of polyvinyl sheeting that looked suspiciously like the ground shielding we used in the nethouses. I see the central campfire, kept smoldering all day by what looked like a completely random system of attentions to it, and fed into a blaze each night. There go the men filing off in the mornings sometimes, and sometimes not, according to rules you would love to be able to figure out and which you felt you might someday divine just by watching long enough. There go the women, off to dig up tubers or gather other varia, the chores getting done by groups that seemed to agglutinate differently each time you watched. They were always chatting. I’ve slightly gentrified the camp I carry in my mind: it was slovenly, but I don’t see that.
Denoon was cogitating, cogitating. We had to do more. There were certain health conditions we had to be more aggressive about. I associated a couple of nights of loud bruxism with his having gone over earlier in the day to the Basarwa camp. The Basarwa can disorient you. I know two colleagues who did fieldwork with the Basarwa and who afterward struck me as different, more meek or dreamy than they had been, in a sense, and they were always eager to justify more fieldwork, more going back.
Pine Nut Soda
An amazing episode, I thought: Nelson sat down with me and said Instead of going to the mother committee or back to Sekopololo I’m going to complain to you about something, the composition of our requisitions lately, the trend, and that’ll be the end of it.
I said So am I not supposed to do something with your complaint?
Nothing. This is by way of an experiment. Before I kept on complaining about the brassieres I talked it over with you and you convinced me. Also you convinced me I was wrong opposing white tea, camphor oil, and what else? Hair thread. But now something else is getting me. First of all, we’re letting ourselves run low on bonemeal and cordage, but that’s not it, it’s going to register with somebody before we’re in trouble. Then I noticed a new import item, Pine Nut Soda, which struck me as the last straw. But that was only the first last straw. The next last straw was Milk Stout.
I stopped him in order to defend Pine Nut Soda, if not Milk Stout. It was true the soda cans took up inordinate space on the plane, but for what it was, it was doing good things. Sekopololo was making it available at an astronomically high credit rate because people wanted it for special occasions, where it was treated almost as champagne. It was for special occasions. When it was traded it went into the solar refrigerator at the infirmary to chill, and people were delighted. I assumed it was about the same with the Milk Stout, although the premium for it would be even higher and admittedly the market for it might be more predominantly the men. And it was alcoholic, granted, whereas Pine Nut was not. But I reiterated, and truthfully, how Sekopololo was thriving on these commodities, in terms of the work people were willing to exchange for them. He grimaced.
He said I don’t want a defense of these things from you; what I want is to stop thinking about them by telling you about them. I mean it. This is what I’m saying. I don’t need to feel that mistakes aren’t being made. But I want to feel that I don’t have to dot every T, you know what I mean. He was embarrassed. I want to stop with things at this level, I think. I think I should. And this might help me. I essentially want my mind elsewhere.
This may be wise, I said. I was flattered, deeply.
The Summarist
We were strolling near the kraals at dusk and watching the bats come out everywhere. Denoon could be eloquent about bats, their wonderful dung, which got collected from the numerous cylindrical bat hotels he’d had affixed to trees everywhere, bats and their insect-destroying qualities, and so on. Anyway, we were rich with bats curving and diving and piping everywhere at dusk, coming out from the koppie and over the flats, even as far as the kraals.
Near one of the dip tanks we ran into three women carrying spades for no purpose I could discern. Dirang Motsidisi had her arm around the shoulders of an obviously distressed woman, Mma Sithebe, our summarist. Acting as a sort of lookout, I decided, was Idol, the kitchenmaster. I liked her although the dynamic she created in the kitchen was not for the faint of heart, because she was a volcano of abuse and mockery which paradoxically kept her co-workers in a state of permanent hilarity. It was a little like the House of Commons when heckling is in order. And people did riposte. More than once I’d heard Idol’s voice compared to the screams of mating leopards. I’d made good-faith tries at working in the kitchen and been unable to take the incessancy of the raillery. But there was a core of regulars who seemed to love it. Outside the kitchen, Idol was very quiet, and very tender with her little granddaughter.
What the summarist did for a job was turn up by appointment before different work groups and read to them, either at breaks or, if the work process was quiet enough, while they were at it, but never for very long, never intrusively. It could be something in English or in Setswana, whatever people wanted. She had a range of things to offer. Tsau was supplied by a virtual cottage industry Denoon had stimulated at the university in Gaborone. He paid students to translate various classics into Setswana in their down time. There was Austen, Kafka, some Dickens, some Thoreau, lots of a poet he liked better than Yeats called Edwin Muir whom I had never heard of until Tsau, who is in fact magnificent, some Blake, needless to say. He stuck to short texts, mostly, excerpts. The only African writers I’m sure were included were Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ayi Kwei Armah. One of his translators had abandoned a major project, Wuthering Heights, halfway through, just when people had gotten interested.
The idea of a summarist had come to Nelson through contact with one of the down-on-their-luck radicals his father had put up from time to time, this one an anarchist cigarmaker from Cuba whose union had hired unemployed actors to read Calderón and Kropotkin to them while they rolled cigars. The chronology of all this is inexact in my mind. But Nelson’s father during a good patch had been sent as a perquisite to have fun in Cuba under Batista by some advertising company or other, or possibly he had won a prize. In a burst of drinking bonhomie and heavy tipping he had gotten to be friends with some of the waiters he’d met there, who had given him a complimentary subscription to their union newsletter, Solidaridad Gastronómica. He remembers his father looking crushed when what was clearly the last issue came in the mail, the union having been extinguished by Fidel Castro. Naturally Castro hated them because they were anarchosyndicalists. So despite their having fought valiantly against Batista, Castro destroyed the
m, expropriated their credit unions, shut their cooperative restaurants, and created a diaspora—particles of which turned up now and then on the Denoon household doorstep to be waited on hand and foot by Mrs. Denoon. Nelson liked to call Fidel Fidel Catastro. Nelson described his father as being promiscuously left, a fan of the left generically, in the sense that to get his approval you could be any variety of leftist so long as you were rank and file. It didn’t matter to him that your leftism was at loggerheads with the variant or tendency of leftism of the person he had invited you to take potluck with. That is, you could be an old Wobbly and be invited to dinner with a Stalinist stevedore, your deadly historical enemy. All you had to be was real, not a piecard, meaning bureaucrat, and not an academic, either. I gather that one reason his father had very little use for the Socialist Party was that they were all schoolteachers or pharmacists, supposedly.
Mma Sithebe had a clear, steady voice, she could translate from English to Setswana or the reverse quite decently, and she was uniformly nice to everyone. Her nine-year-old son, Sithebe, was studious and was also pleasant. There was nothing invasive about Mma Sithebe. Even when she summarized current events at cream teas or other common meals, which she sometimes did, she was almost apologetic before commencing, and she was always brief. She was our town crier. There had never been the slightest sign that anyone was anything but happy with her, even when it was her task to roam around calling out reminders about meetings or classes, or when she named people who were defaulting on inoculation schedules at the clinic, or when she announced deadlines for the multifarious contests always being promoted. Now, we learned, three enterprises had voted against her coming to them in the future, on the grounds that they would rather have conversation among themselves than have makhoa literature forced upon them. The three women had set out to intercept us with this. Mma Sithebe was distressed. They say they have no need of me, she said. Dirang said Dorcas Raboupi was behind it, at least as it touched the laundry and the fabric print house. Idol had defeated a similar maneuver in the central kitchen.