Whites

by Norman Rush

  She came back with her experience in hotel work. Desk clerks might say there was nothing available, but if you were important enough there would always be a room. She reminded Carl that they were official Americans in Botswana, not contract people.

  He explained again that the ambassador saw himself as a new broom. Under the previous ambassador, the housing committee had been a circus, an uproar, a black mark for the ambassador when the inspectors came through. As a sign of strength, the new ambassador had killed the whole appeal process in the housing committee. Now it was policy that people took the housing they were assigned and liked it, or they were sent home.

  Finally, he had to explain about Elaine and housing—something he had minimized until now. He was under an emotional injunction from Lois against speaking ill of Elaine, which he accepted. But there had to be exceptions. Elaine had made a hobby out of challenging their housing assignments. She had become notorious. It had gotten into his efficiency rating reports. In short, there was a negative history to be lived down. He recognized that Elaine had needed to assert herself as a person, under what she probably saw as difficult overseas conditions. Nevertheless, there had been a difficult result. Lois seemed to be understanding all this. He finished by saying that going to the ambassador, besides being absolutely not in their own interest, would make her look childish—like someone who couldn’t appreciate facts. It would look like a tantrum.

  She was unhappy, but she promised. He stood up. He was reluctant to go until she released him with some sign of forgiveness for everything.

  A hornbill called in the garden. He had a thought. Lo had no idea that the one bird he could always identify was the hornbill. He remembered the first time he had heard it, years ago in Rwanda. He had stiffened at whatever he was doing, guiltily. He always heard the harsh, drawn-out aww as a cry of disapproval, probably maternal. “I think that’s a hornbill,” he said.

  She looked up, pleased. He could go.

  Walking home late that evening, Carl made himself contemplate trying to see Letsamao again. He had already spoken to Letsamao, once by phone and once in person, but both times he had been too gingerly. Whether to avoid seeming neurotic or to engage Letsamao’s chivalrous side, Carl had put it that it was mainly Lois who was suffering from the dogs. Both times, Letsamao had said the same things—that Carl’s wife was oversensitive and would in time adapt; that the dogs were not extreme, as shown by the fact that no one else was complaining; that among the numerous Europeans who had lived in Carl’s house previously there were none who had ever complained. Letsamao had as much as said that it was the business of a husband to manage a wife’s problems and to avoid intruding on the valuable time of a cabinet minister. Letsamao had reacted in no way to the suggestion that he might take his dogs in at night. It was as though the suggestion hadn’t even been made. Now Carl had a better and more moderate idea. It was that someone from among Letsamao’s retinue—that was the wrong word and unfair—be appointed to come out and quiet the dogs when they started up. This time when he spoke to Letsamao he would bring himself into it, confessing that he was the one primarily suffering. Letsamao had dominated their earlier conversations, pressing Carl to finish his business quickly. Their second conversation had been short and sharp. When nothing resulted from the exchanges, Carl had gone over twice more, at times when he knew Letsamao was at home, only to be told each time by the maid that the Minister was not to be disturbed. Trying to relay complaints through Letsamao’s domestics was a waste of time.

  Letsamao was a rough customer he had a right to be afraid of. The Minister of Labor had oversight of all expatriates working in the country. Letsamao was a power in the ruling party. Moreover, he was a favorite of the AID mission director and the ambassador, largely because of a reputation as a strong administrator. Carl thought of the Batswana as an unusually agreeable people, so long as you remembered to greet them properly with dumela. Letsamao was atypical. He was permanently expressionless. He was short, thickly built, hard-looking. He was cicatriced, with three faint scars like cat scratches on each cheek. Carl had never seen Letsamao in casual dress.

  He was approaching Letsamao’s house. The gates in the high front walls were ajar. Carl had a flash of irritation. Letsamao’s front yard, with its oblong of chive-green lawn, was beautifully landscaped and tended, but the backyard, which faced the front of Carl’s house through a wire fence, was a wasteland of bare earth, flailing laundry, children, dog life. Servant Theatre was what Elaine had called a similar scene they had lived with briefly, in Blantyre.

  The coach lights on either side of the gate came on. That meant Letsamao was expected imminently. On impulse, Carl stopped. He would wait at the gate to intercept Letsamao. He had time. It would be pleasant. Because of the drought, mosquitoes were scarce. The first stars were out, twitching.

  Letsamao’s silver Peugeot appeared at the bend in Sefhare Road, traveling briskly. Carl waved. The Peugeot swung toward the driveway. Carl stepped into the middle of the drive, one hand up, smiling hard. Letsamao stopped—more abruptly than he had to, Carl felt.

  He went around to Letsamao’s window and tapped. Letsamao sat looking at him for a moment before lowering the window very slowly halfway. Carl noted that Letsamao was playing the clutch, keeping the car moving slightly forward. Carl was off balance. He did remember to begin with dumela, but then he rushed. There was too much to convey. He said he was getting sick. He used the word “insomnia,” which he had decided against using. When he said he thought it was time for an indaba, he could see Letsamao stiffen. Carl knew the term, meaning “powwow,” from reading the Rand Daily Mail. The term was Zulu and was supposed to be lingua franca all over southern Africa—but was it? Had he patronized Letsamao?

  Letsamao cut him off in a voice that was high-pitched, almost strangulated. “Mr. Schmoll, dumela, you must not trouble me with this matter time and again! I must have my watchdogs. In fact, my dogs are giving you protection, if you can understand, because they are alert as to your place as well. So, really, you must leave this! Because really my dogs are watching over you, yet I must feed them. Mr. Schmoll, you must consider your position.” He drove on. Carl was now on Letsamao’s grounds. Two yardmen, anxious, ran up to usher him out. Letsamao’s last words had been spoken heavily, meaningfully.

  It was dim in the police station. Why was it so damned dark in Africa, indoors, where people had to work? Carl thought of the artisan workshops in Mombasa—coffin-makers and metalsmiths laboring in cavelike slots lit by one light bulb or fluorescent tube. Maybe because people grew up in windowless rondavels, a little light seemed like a lot. The cost of electricity was probably nine-tenths of the explanation. Decent lighting would do wonders for productivity, he would bet. He ought to write something on it when this was over and he felt less half dead. There was such a thing as his career.

  Carl sat down on a bench among silent Batswana. They were the poor. Some of them looked banged-up. There was no conversation. There was nothing to read. He decided that he had never seen a Motswana he would describe as nervous. The room was an oven.

  An hour passed. The station commander would see him. Carl had already spoken to the charge officer, whose English was poor. Carl was hoping he had misunderstood the charge officer’s advice.

  But the station commander only reiterated what the charge officer had said. There were no laws to protect Carl. The barking of watchdogs could never be seen as a nuisance under the law. There was nothing in the law to limit the number of animals a man could keep on his grounds. All Carl could do was slay these dogs when they set foot on his plot. He could shoot them. But the best was to lure them with meat, and poison them—taking care that the poison was given within his plot. And it would be best if the animals, once they were slain, could be found on his plot as well, although that was sometimes difficult and was not essential. The station commander recommended an arsenic compound available from a stockist near the railway station. Carl was assured that this was a thing commonly done.
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br />   The skirl of the hot comb ceased. Carl sampled the soup Lois had made for dinner. It was dawning on him that Lois—all her sympathy re the dogs to the contrary notwithstanding—felt deep down that his real problem was crabbéd age. The soup was a case in point. It was dense with powdered kelp or lecithin or some other additive she’d looked up in her health library. She was doctoring his soup because he was at the outer limits of what a human being could be expected to ingest in the form of pills. The soup had a medicinal tang. He would deny it. He served the soup. Lois came in, damp and pink, in her bathrobe. Her eyes looked a little red. His report of the police-station incident had obviously upset her. They sat down.

  He still needed to talk about the business with the police. He couldn’t believe that poisoning dogs was commonplace. On the other hand, when it came to considering such an extreme proposition, not everybody lived next door to the Minister of Labor.

  Lo had nothing to say. Her problem was that she loved animals. He had even caught her patting Letsamao’s dogs once or twice, when she’d found them nosing around the house during the day.

  Carl said, “And what if you poisoned some meat and it got into the wrong hands, kids picking it up? Kids eat paint and bark—all kinds of things. It’s called pica. This soup is delicious.”

  It was evident Lo wanted to change the subject. He knew he was being compulsive. He said, “And how do you even go about it? Do you marinate the meat in it, or do you sprinkle it on like salt?” Lo was barely eating.

  “It’s ironic,” he said. “Because I like dogs all right. I had dogs as a kid. But these dogs make me physically ill, almost, when I see them. Especially the ringleader bitch, who’s pregnant again, by the way. Her nipples stick out like thumbs.”

  He had to get off the topic, and now. He was an adult who was aware that he couldn’t have everything, such as a wife who was both cheerful and depressed on his behalf in the same instant of time. She was still on the verge of tears. He realized that he’d seen Lois really crying only once in Africa, so far—when Letsamao’s dogs had gotten into the yard and torn up the parsley she’d planted. The parsley had been dedicated to Carl, for his clotting-factor needs. She had been horrified to find that weeks could elapse without parsley showing up in the markets. She loved him. He apologized for bringing up the police nonsense again.

  “It isn’t that,” she said, pushing her soup away, definitely crying.

  She said, “Oh, Carl. It isn’t about that. But, Carl, today I found out that Scott Nearing died.” She waited. Her voice was faint. “I just found out that Scott Nearing died.”

  Carl said, “I don’t know the name, I don’t think.”

  She was surprised. “Well, he wrote some wonderful books with his wife, about living and diet and so forth, that I really loved. I don’t even know why this upsets me and I’m crying like this. Well, he was wonderful and he was really old, about in his nineties. And he had a wonderful life in Maine. I don’t know. I guess partly it’s because I just found out he died a few months ago, because I’m in Africa. You can’t experience your feelings for a person when they make transition at the time they do if you didn’t even know about it at the time. But now Helen is all alone.” Her tears coursed down.

  At midnight, the dogs woke him—a trio. The barking was listless. It was the heat. Tonight it was so hot he knew he’d never get back to sleep, even if the dogs quit. He sat up slowly. Sweat crept down his sides. It was December. High summer had come.

  All the windows were open, and an electric fan sent a stream of tepid air across the foot of the bed. There was an air-conditioner, but Lois was opposed to it. She had once worked for six months in an office at a desk directly under an air-conditioner, and that had been the beginning of the sinus problem, which only Botswana had ever helped. At work, he used his air-conditioner, but guiltily. Lo’s point was that man had evolved without air-conditioning, and that using it had to deprive the body of some positive adaptive exercise. Her main dogma seemed to be to preserve the body’s flexibility, by any means necessary. Lois fasted for a day every couple of weeks, just to be fasting and just because there had to be something in the body’s capacity to adapt that would be triggered by fasting. He wouldn’t relish fasting, but he could see it coming, a cloud no larger than a woman’s hand. He could deal with it.

  Carl got out of bed. He was going to be restless. His unhappiness was too great. He knew what he was going to have to do: because of the dogs, he was going to have to sleep alone from now on.

  There had to be a good side to this, somewhere, because the pain of it was too much, and the heaviness coming into him. The only thing was that his night vision was improving, from all his creeping around in total darkness. He could get from room to room, find things, fix snacks, all in pitch blackness. It was a useless skill, unless it was rehearsal for blindness or becoming a cat burglar. Another thing was that if he slept in his study, he could work when he was awake. He could attack his paperwork arrears, which were getting to be significant. He could do anything that didn’t involve noise, like typing. Visualizing himself working at night, he felt worse. Working at night was for students, the young.

  In his study, Carl lay down on the couch. It was no good: he was sticking to the vinyl surface. He would have to spread towels over the cushions. Being in the study reminded him of an option he’d toyed with early on. He had thought of turning the study into a soundproof chamber, lining the walls with slabs of corkboard gotten from somewhere. That idea had broken up on the reef of ventilation. It would have been like lying in a crypt. There was no way he could have asked Lo to join him there. Now he had to get the towels.

  The hinges on the linen closet needed oil. Lo was awake now. He heard her coming out into the hall, saying his name.

  She found him at the closet and embraced him. He put the towels down and held her.

  He told her he had decided he had to sleep in the study for the time being because he was destroying her sleep. He patted her. He could feel her nodding yes.

  A queue lengthened outside the Ministry of Agriculture stand, where a hermaphrodite calf was on display. I could be an exhibit myself, Carl thought. Heat corrugated the hill view over the metal roofs of the food stalls. People could come and marvel at me for being able to stand up.

  His plan for Saturday had been to sleep like the dead. But the deputy chief of mission’s wife had struck by phone. Lois had been reminded about what it meant to be an official American. The ambassador wanted total attendance by official Americans at the Red Cross Fête. The D.C.M.’s wife had been blunt. The ambassador was determined that the American exhibit should take second place this year. By custom, first place always went to an African entry. The chief of station said Zambia was looking strong. Second place was between Britain and the United States. Vigorous attendance by an exhibit’s nationals counted with the judges.

  An unfamiliar American wife handed Carl a red, white, and blue paper shoulder sash and matching boutonniere. He was wearing a T-shirt, so he attached the rosette to a belt loop at his hip, hoping that that would be acceptable. The American pavilion was major—bigger than ever before. But Carl was picking up anxiety—two kinds of it. The Americans were worried, not by the British but by the Swedes and their Southern Cross Coffee House. Apparently, the Swedes were underpricing tortes and pastries worth a fortune in terms of ingredients, let alone labor. The Batswana were notorious for their love of sweets. The other anxiety was that a certain number of official Americans had been noticed stocking up on tortes for the freezer, until the ambassador had expressed himself on the subject. The word was that the judges were staying a little longer in the coffee house than was standard. It would be unfair if the Swedes won, because their exhibit had only two elements—the coffee house and a borehole-pump demonstration. Carl knew all about the wood-fired pump, which had a bad image among the American technical people. First of all, there was a famous fuel-wood shortage in Botswana. Secondly, even though the pump could run on low-quality coal, which was ch
eap in Botswana, the cost of transporting coal out into the Kalahari would be too high. America had gone with diversity—a cartoon-show tent, a used-clothes-and-white-elephant table, a fashion show, a bake table, a palmist. Somebody had traveled to the Republic and come back with sausages that could almost pass for American hot dogs. Carl had to make sure that the ambassador saw he was there. Should he go up and say it might be a good idea to charge the Swedes with dumping? He decided not to. He saluted the ambassador from a distance. Lois was around somewhere. She should be seen, too. He went to find her.

  The Anglicans had set up their tombola stand in a grove of dying silver oaks. The trees were shedding: the fallen leaves were crisp, like fish bones underfoot. It was the drought. Improvised shelving, braced against a row of trees, held the tombola prizes: canned goods, sundries, Bibles, cheap plastic toys in blisterpacks, five-kilo sacks of mealie and sorghum. There was a crush around the tombola, with Lois at its heart.

  Carl made his way to her side. She was a hit. Poor devils were cheering her on, like extras in a gambling movie cheering the heroine at roulette. He loved her. He touched her shoulder. She was damp. He wanted to get her over to the American pavilion, but she was too engrossed. She had won a mountain of things, mostly canned. She hated canned goods, as he recalled. He glanced at a few of the cans. Some of the brands were extinct, he was sure. Storekeepers donated their dead stock to the fête, but some of her prizes looked as though they should have been destroyed instead. That was a merchant for you. But getting rid of old stock was the right thing to do. Lo had won a lifetime supply of pocket combs for him. He let her know that he had to find someplace to sit down. She nodded, preoccupied just then with trying to convey what chutney was to a Herero woman who had won a jar of it. Glum Anglican Auxiliary women were churning up the chances, probably in reaction to Lo’s run of luck. He told Lo to come to the American pavilion as soon as she could, and to find a kid to carry her prizes to the car. Carl said he was going to America, and left.