Mating

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.