by Norman Rush
Something had happened in the desert. Had he decided to prolong that thing for his own reasons, such as putting me to some impossible test, which I had failed, making me obsolete, and then had he prolonged his state in order to get rid of me or so he could relax into Tsau in some whole new mode involving dressing in white? So now was he sorry about it? Was this message from him: had he made the call or had it made? This was where my mind was. I’ve been over and over the list of candidates for secret caller so often it makes me sick. Could Dineo have organized the call? Would the idea be to tell me that all’s well at Tsau and I could come back, or more likely that I should descend and take away the increasingly irrelevant Nelson? Or on the other hand was it a genuine nervous breakdown thanks to his own whole particular foregoing, his mother, his father, the Tao, the events that precipitated the trip to Tikwe, the horror of his experience in the desert? But then I thought: you left to leave. Staying in his ambience like this is stupid and it is lacerative. I told myself I am hardly going to save him via a marxist interpretation of the Tao, although stranger things have probably happened. Who else could have sent the message? Could? have? And what had lustrous Bronwen been about? Irritation this intense is intolerable.
The Bronwen part of the message reads Bronwen sent from Tsau after one week. That means Bronwen is no more.
And of course what finally enrages me is that it feels highly possible to me that I have been maneuvered by a liar somewhere in all this. And the thing is that Nelson knows that you lie to me at your peril. I will not have it. He had ample warning. What is to be done?
Je viens.
Why not?
Glossary
S: Setswana A: Afrikaans
ANC African National Congress
Baherero members of the Herero tribal group
bana children (S)
basadi women (S)
Basarwa members of the San, or Bushman tribal group
batlodi bad people, spies (S)
Batswana inhabitants of Botswana. A single inhabitant: Motswana (S)
biltong air-dried game meats (A)
BNP Botswana National Party, the (fictional) governing party in 1980–81
Boso familiar abbreviation for Botswana Social Front
braai barbecue (A)
chibuku commercial maize beer (S)
colgrad college graduate, abbreviated in speedwriting ads
cooperants development volunteers
CTO Central Transport Organisation
CUSO Canadian University Services Overseas
Diamond Police special police branch devoted to diamond-smuggling suppression
expat expatriate worker
gosiame all-purpose term meaning variously: I agree; Okay; Everything’s fine (S)
graywater rinsewater
karosse mat or rug of pieced furs or hide
kgosigadi a queen or chieftainess (S)
kgotla traditional village council of (male) elders and representatives of the chief (S)
klang as in “klang association”: the first thing that comes to mind when the analyst directs the patient to unmediatedly associate with a particular word or image
koko knock, knock. Said to announce oneself on arrival (S)
koppie island-mountain. Isolated stony hill
kraal corral (A)
lakhoa European (any foreigner). Plural: makhoa (S)
lefatshe la madi country of money, country money comes from (S)
lolwapa courtyard of traditional homestead (S)
Mainstay South African cane liquor
mealie cornmeal (A)
memcon memorandum of conversation (U.S. diplomatic usage)
mma mother, senior woman (S)
mmamogolo old woman (S)
mme my mother (S)
nethouse open structure of shade-netting over beds of plants
pan craterlike depression (in the Kalahari desert)
paraffin kerosene
permsec Permanent Secretary
pula the national unit of currency; rain (S)
rondavel traditional round, thatched hut (squaredavel, ovaldavel—contemporary variants) (A)
rra sir, father (S)
SADF South African Defence Force
sakkie plastic sack (A)
Selous Scouts elite counterinsurgency group in Rhodesian Army during the war of independence
Setswana the national language
SWAPO Southwest Africa Peoples’ Organization
UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence (regime under which Rhodesia prosecuted its civil war)
UNDP United Nations Development Program
Waygard commercial security guards
Wits University of the Witwatersrand
yakuta Japanese bathrobe
Zed CC Zionist Christian Church
Note: The author has taken the liberty of borrowing the place name Tsau, which belongs to a village in Ngamiland, for the women’s settlement in the Central Kalahari.
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful for material support during the writing of this book from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation, for a Bellagio Residency.
For love and encouragement from earliest days I thank my dear friends Dorothy Gallagher and Sylvia Roth, and Ruth Gonze—my loyal sister-in-law, critic, and advocate. For steadfastness on my behalf or for varieties of help at crucial times I’m grateful to my friend and father-in-law Edward Scheidt and the late Ruth Scheidt, to Tom Disch, Dan Menaker, Ben Sonnenberg, Henry H. Roth, my editor Ann Close, my agent Andrew Wylie, Sam Brown, Alison Teal, Elizabeth Udall, Lynn Luria Sukenick, Bob Nichols, Phalatse Tshoagong, Dick Mullaney, Mzichoe Mogobe, Elizabeth and Dick Voigt, Bob Hitchcock, Bill Picon, my brothers Chris, Nick, and Robert, and my late sister, Cathy. For his bravery in persevering in the making of literature under conditions of unimaginable hardship Jacob Khalala is my talisman.