Mating

by Norman Rush

  The alarm bell was banging.

  Nelson went voluntarily to sit and wait in a room in Sekopololo. He must stay in one spot, he must be under guard, Dorcas was shouting. He must not roam about at this time. And pointing at me, she announced that I must not be allowed to stay with him or speak to him. Some of the loyalists said Gosiame, meaning they were going along with this, while others said no, I should be with him. I paid no attention. I went inside and sat myself in a chair outside the door of the room Nelson was in. Dorcas was now certain that the voice she’d heard summoning Hector was Nelson’s. Word kept coming in that Hector was not in this venue, nor in this, nor in this. I was going to suggest a sabbatical once this was over. Dineo went in to talk to Nelson. I couldn’t make it out. Nelson was speaking in Setswana. Other people went in and out. Nobody would look at me.

  I had a moment of panic about our house, our things. I knew people had been inside our place, and I was diffusely afraid they’d found something that would be dangerous to us, although what that might be I had no idea. I had to go and check. But everything looked undisturbed, except for the transmitter, where some wires and leads at the back of the set seemed to have been pulled out. But the radio was not my province and I wasn’t certain I was seeing things correctly. I tried to get a clear mental picture of what the damage might be so I could pass it on to Nelson when we were able to talk, which I was determined was going to be soon.

  I went back to my post outside his door. Spring had come. It was a superlative morning. There is no more beautiful season in the Kalahari.

  A Cell

  Don’t pay any attention to this, he said.

  But this was a cell! There was no other word for it. They had brought in a pallet, a covered bucket, and a water jug and cup. He said This is voluntary. They need to do this. They know I don’t know anything about Raboupi: I was asleep.

  We embraced. He asked me to stop acting tragic, if I didn’t mind. This was nothing and would be over soon. We said we loved each other.

  Do you at least have privacy when you use that? I asked, pointing at the bucket. People had been going in and out fairly freely, not knocking.

  I don’t know yet, he said, but in all probability.

  I described the state of the transmitter as best I could. He seemed to think that possibly a section of lead was missing, possibly not, but it didn’t matter since he had spares for everything.

  Nothing is going to happen to anyone, he said. But I could feel effort behind his saying it.

  You have to fight more, I said. He barely let me finish. His smile had never seemed so transcendent to me. I hated it. This was a performance of his reposing his trust in the entity or organism he had created, and I was just supposed to sing along. I knew his tropes. This one reduced to a sickly fatalism. He was saying If this my child or creature fails me, then I have failed and I have done it to myself, so that must be what I deserve.

  I went outside and came directly back to say There is the most beautiful weather, can’t you come out for a second and just stand there and inhale? No, was the answer: there were meetings going on. He pretended it was his choice.

  I had theories about Raboupi, the premier one being that if he was genuinely missing, it was something faked up between him and Dorcas. Then: what about friends of Adelah’s? I hated Raboupi myself. What about Basarwa, who were undoubtedly being cruelly cheated by him? It was no use. He wouldn’t speculate. Time would take care of it. There were a few things I could bring him, if I didn’t mind.

  Nelson Is Very Calm

  Tsau was distracted with meetings, with the snake women filing in and out of the plaza on one search after another, with rumors.

  Nelson stayed under office arrest—the only term for it I can think of—for two bad days. Attitudes toward me were unstable, but I didn’t care. All I did was loiter, essentially. Everything was arbitrary: sometimes I could walk straight in and see Nelson, and sometimes I was refused. When I did get in, I found him very calm, meditative. I had to suppress impulses to tell people things they should know about Nelson, such as that he needed to wash his upper torso thoroughly every day to keep him from developing a rash under his chest hair, which was quite thick. He claimed he was allergic to his own sweat, but I knew it was bacterial because witch hazel, which we were out of in Tsau, always cleared it up in a couple of applications. His message to me was unchanging—this would all be over, the mills of the gods were grinding, the thing was to be patient.

  Routines slipped. The Barclays plane came and went, and no one met it. I was the one who, after wandering down to the airstrip, brought to the attention of the powers that were the fact that there were crates and items sitting on the ground waiting to be picked up. Somebody unknown, once, began ringing the alarm bell. Never had this happened before. There was a generalized feeling of transgression affecting us. Mma Sithebe and Mma Isang were subtly trying to keep track of me and keep me reassured. I had no appetite. I was unable to plan.

  In the end Nelson was discharged from office arrest for reasons of convenience. He was needed to get the transmitter back in working order so that Dorcas Raboupi could file a charge against him with the police in Gaborone. The damage to the transmitter was real, but it was trivial: he remarked that it must have occurred because people moved things around without being careful. He made nothing of it. And the police made nothing of Dorcas’s confused appeal to them. A male relative making himself scarce without notice was nothing. They were sure he would turn up. Dorcas went into too much detail. Her assertions that Nelson should be put under investigation because he was the one who knew more than anyone at Tsau what caves and fissures there were and how by shifting a rock a dead body could be concealed forever were simply uninterpretable to the police. So that was a misfire. I think Nelson would have volunteered for a third night of office arrest unless I’d made a move. He was very mild about captivity. He was very much enjoying reading the Tao Te Ching, which he had asked me to bring him. You have to stay here with me, I said, because I’m becoming paranoid: I get the feeling the house is being watched, and I’m afraid to be here alone. I need you to stay with me.

  There would be more meetings. There would be a hearing.

  Our first night back together was odd. He wasn’t interested in sex. I was. Odder was that he couldn’t seem to make himself help me with my panic, my need to have us acknowledge we were on a precipice together. I wanted that, and I wanted for us to pool everything we could think of about Hector and his possible fate, to try to solve it, to comprehend it. And as if that weren’t enough, I also wanted it made clear to me, in any form he could do it in, that I was living with the man I thought I was, someone of absolute delicacy in regard to human life, innocent of any connection with any injury to Hector Raboupi. Women supposedly want to marry men taller than they are on the subliminal assumption that the taller they are, the more adequately they can be expected to function as protectors, for which read killers, if need be. This was never me. Not that it proves anything, but Nelson and I are the same height. I wanted a pacific male: I suppose I always had, but he had made the need definite and intense. Wonderful, I told myself, the way you’re multiplying your desiderata as you get older, Brava! Stupidly coexisting with this value was an emotional trope that said that in matters of violence women could have latitude, because of history, which turned violence by them against men into reprisal actions.

  But I was getting no help from Nelson. All he wanted was normalcy.

  There was nothing I could do. On Hector, he wouldn’t go beyond saying he was certain that the disappearance was something Hector had staged, with help, and that the truth would out. We would have to wait for the next act. He was very tired. I had to relent. It wasn’t enough for me to feel convinced of his innocence: I wanted him to show he felt as strongly as I did that if there had been a crime, it was critical, to say the least, to find out who was responsible. But of course he was staying with the position that this was all an illusion. He wouldn’t speculate. I coul
d, if I wanted, was the best I could get.

  My ignoblest hope I managed to keep to myself, which was that after this was over, the prospect of disengaging himself, ourselves, from Tsau might be brighter.

  Duplicrats and Replicans

  Tsau oscillated for another week. The mother committee offered a five hundred pula reward for the body of Hector Raboupi. Everything was disrupted. Children and teachers left school to go on searches. Even the Basarwa were brought into it. When all this led to nothing, it was time for hearings before the justice committee.

  Written statements had been taken from a dozen of us, describing everything about our movements and observations the night of Hector’s disappearance. I was essentially no help to Nelson in terms of an alibi. He had been out that night. At the time when he was presumably back, I was out. We had had difficult words. Great interest was shown in all this, naturally. The justice committee was extremely thorough. The permutations in Dorcas’s account were noted. There had been a careful physical examination of Denoon at Sekopololo just after his removal from the bathing tent: although he had various minor scratches and bruises on his arms and trunk, all were consistent with the accidents the kind of physical work he was doing might have resulted in. The conclusion was that no one could say what had happened to Hector. Two possibilities were that he had gone off for some reason to Tikwe, a flyspeck of a settlement forty-five miles north of us, or to the Herero trek route thirty miles east of us, which was in use at this time of the year. In any case his disappearance had been reported to the district commissioner at Maun for him to proceed with. It seemed to be over. Dorcas and her friends were admonished to stop repeating accusations. This was received darkly by them. They were especially unhappy when it was pointed out that Raboupi had been away from Tsau without notice to anyone for up to three days at a time in the past. Dorcas vehemently denied this, but it did seem to be the case.

  Adelah miscarried. I have my own opinion as to how genuine this was. Dineo loved her too. So did Dirang. We all did. Now she could go to school. I gave her a locket. She said she would write to me. The weather was beyond perfect. It must really be over, I said to him when I heard he’d been requested to come to Sekopololo to help with accounts.

  His drive for it to be over was so strong and pathetic that I fell into line. Now we can go, I said. Your work is done and Tsau is a normal place: it has beggars, prostitution, and crime. The Basarwa were the beggars, the night men were the prostitutes, and I was for the moment taking the stance that Raboupi’s evanition might in fact be a crime. He bridled hugely. I apologized for being flippant.

  I knew what was happening. He was trying to take asylum in professionalism. Tsau, after all, was his profession. The message was that I should stick to my lares and penates while he got on with his work. A brain surgeon doesn’t consult with his wife on how to attack a tumor just because he loves her and she’s a lovely person. Also the message was that it was time for me to see myself not so unqualifiedly as a colleague.

  That was it for then. Never mind that I could see him filling up with sadness like a shirtcuff inadvertently dipping into an inkwell. One way he had of reminding me of how much older than I he was was by recalling that when he was in grammar school they had had inkwells set into each desk, and ink monitors to fill them. You had to be careful not to dip your sleeve into them. I was post-inkwell. So much of my imagery comes from stories and asides of Nelson’s it shocks me. I don’t want it. It isn’t as though my own life hasn’t been fairly vivid in its own way.

  Cues not to entertain the idea of getting Nelson back to America rained on me. I forget what the issue was, unless it was neither the Democrats nor the Republicans having anything to say against South Africa going back into Angola and murdering hundreds at Xangongo that August, but I was getting bitter references to the hopelessness of American political life, the two parties should be called the Duplicrats and the Replicans, and so on. I was tempted to say Then why don’t you go back to the U.S., the flagship of the thing you see destroying the world, be a man, jump into the fiery furnace, run for Congress or start a movement or something. And I felt like adding that that’s what I’d do if I were a man with all his attributes and felt as strongly as he seemed to.

  Clay-Shuttered Doors

  Denoon’s response to even my feeblest attempts at asking burning questions reminded me of one of my favorite adolescent reading experiences. He was like the mother in Clay-Shuttered Doors. A mother gets terminally ill and is on her deathbed. But her family gathers around her and somehow their love and need for her are so kinetic that although she actually dies this love force somehow reanimates her. She’s not fully alive and there are oddities about her that prove it, such as her breath being ice cold. She manages to drag around the house for a week or so, responding to simple questions and the like, making scrambled eggs but nothing more complicated. Then it’s all too much and she dies all the way. This was Nelson in that period. We had two or three very nice passages of rain. In normal times this would have elevated him enormously. But he was pro forma toward it.

  He answered my questions in good faith, I thought, but in a labored and not fully engaged way. It seemed like such an effort for him that I thought I might precipitate something untoward if I kept it up, so I fell back on my all-purpose recourse of scriptomania and made a list of all the questions that I might someday ask, when he was himself again and we could solve things according to the dictates of reason, the right questions to ask to elucidate the matter of leaving Tsau versus staying forever. These were questions like Would you be planning to stay if you had children to raise? That would have been a disastrous question, I realize in retrospect, because it suggested that he had created something second rate but good enough for other people’s children, or it suggested I might think so, if he and I had children together, or a child. It would also have struck him that I might, through this question, be subtly asking him to get me pregnant, asking please to be allowed to define myself in the world by offspring of his and their no doubt similarly worldshaking accomplishments to come. I have no idea if I’m maternal or not, but this wasn’t the way to find out. Another question might have been Would this be happening between us if we were legally married?

  Since the questions I was entertaining were for my eyes only and could always be triaged, I felt free to get ultra vires if I felt like it. Some were what he hated most, pop psychological, as in Is there anything that might be helpful to you in deciding about this if you looked at your parental constellation, id est the idea that you might be carrying out a paternal mission, converting his philoradicalism into the real thing, and at the same time creating a society your saintly mother would be proud of, in which women are supposedly never harmed by men and where temperance is queen, which also retroactively rules the cause of your father’s downfall out of existence? I’m not quite the deadly enemy of pop psychology I’m afraid I let Nelson assume I was. I’m a true eclectic. In fact I once even vaguely thought about becoming a Transactional Analyst, because they had wonderfully simple certification procedures and I don’t think you can argue with the idea that internalized family dynamics are to some degree or other critical in what we are. This was during my continual search for economic fallbacks. Nelson never fully appreciated how determined I was not to fall into poverty in America, into debt in particular. I knew what that was. Even when I went ultra vires there were limits. In none of my questions do the words midlife crisis appear, for instance.

  Another question I had was Supposing I were more vocationally clear and driven and less skeptical and ambivalent, how would that affect this? It wasn’t that I was no longer interested in nutritional anthropology. I am and was. And I knew that with a modicum of luck and encouragement I could blow on the embers and get the son et lumière back, probably. But pursuing Nelson had filled the skies of my mind with another edifice. I would try to revivify my feeling for anthropology from time to time, even carrying my efforts into little fantasies of pulling out, going alone a
nd whole hog back to Stanford and into a new thesis and a new thesis adviser and lo and behold having Nelson without warning turn up, having followed me across the world to be with me. But if he didn’t come, what then? And what about having to deal with the dynamo women who were taking over in anthropology, the ones who had been smarter and who had done it better, who would be really en route, some of them with husbands they loved, who loved them, children already? And what would I do when it turned out that the most interesting thing I could tell anyone was anything I was willing to divulge about the great social genius Nelson Denoon, who was rumored to have been very attached to me at one time?

  This moment in my life wasn’t good and had to end. To live in Tsau decently you have to attend to small things. Distraction can hurt you. I got slipshod about checking the bedclothes for scorpions, for example, and felt something on my ankle one night and that was what it was. I knocked it away before it could sting, but it was a warning to me.

  My dreams were not helping me in any way. In one of them I had a suitcase and was entering a house that was like a child’s drawing and in one of whose windows I had caught a glimpse of a name anthropologist, male, who had once expressed an interest in me but who was, I had found out, bisexual. When I got inside the house it was a place where I had lived briefly with my mother, a rickety cottage on the outskirts of a quarry. There was blasting at any time of the day, two or three times a week. In this house there were no level surfaces. You would get used to it but then the next time they blasted, things would slide in a direction you weren’t adapted to. My mother in a deluded attempt to spruce the place up had pried down the lath covering the joins in the beaverboard panels that made up the ceiling and had tried to spackle and repaint the whole thing to create a more seamless effect, because, as I recall, she hated the feeling of being under a grid. But unfortunately the outcome was that as the grout between the panels dried out and the blasting continued, little bits of stuff and dust would drop down on you, especially, it seemed, when you had your little friends over for a tea party. Anyway, that was the house I was back in, in my dream, although nothing seemed to be going on and there was no sign of my mother.