Whites

by Norman Rush

  He was getting sleep. He was taking sick days and sleeping all day. At night, if he heard the dogs they blended in with his fever dreams. They were still there. Lo was the best person to be around right now, because she distrusted doctors and loved taking care of him and would go along that way for time immemorial.

  But then he was getting too weak. It was hard to really want to get well, because of the pleasure of sleeping. But he was getting too weak, for sure. So far, Lo was just giving him aspirin, because she was all gung ho for letting nature take his or her course, so naturally she was going along with the proposition that you just take aspirin for a week or so and let the tick-bite fever burn itself out and then you’re left immune for time immemorial, instead of going for tetracycline which knocks it out in twenty-four hours but leaves you still susceptible. But now it was time to get well fast, so it was time to go for his secret weapon: Elaine’s pharmacopeia. The glands in his armpits were hurting. Elaine always got doctors to give her their free samples of every damned thing. Elaine always had everything she might need for medication because she for one would never stand for being someplace in the Third World and finding herself where some doctor could say yea or nay. Somehow her medicine collection had wound up with his effects, not hers, after the split. So now it was his, all the Valium and all the rest. Why did he end up with it? He knew she had dynamite antibiotics in there. Why did he have her medicine? She must have forgotten. If she remembered, she might get a cable out on it. But now it was his.

  He was having long dreams. It was always too hot. The walls were sliding up into the ceiling all the time. Lo was scared, he could tell. He was beyond food. Lo wanted the nurse. On the other hand, he would be all right any day because of Elaine. He was only tasting what Lo had given him—broths and so forth. It was too hot for broth. Lo was even letting there be air-conditioning. She loved him. He would be fine because of the neomycin he was taking—plenty of it. Elaine was saving him, Elaine, who got him going the first time they met by saying “Wreck me.” Neomycin saved Elaine once. It was the strongest thing there was. He was young when she said “Wreck me.” She knew what she was doing. Probably she was still doing it. Lo gave him a Compral to take. Compral was stronger than aspirin, and was from South Africa. He faked taking it. His eyes itched.

  Before he could get better the nurse came, and then she was there all the time. She was gone, right now. They knew about the scabs on his back and were asking him about them. His throat was a good excuse not to answer things. He was keeping mum. He was worried about the knitting factory, because he was supposed to remind the women about something about business taxes. It was all right, because it was written down somewhere at work. He felt his hipbones by accident. They were like knives.

  He was aware of arguments going on, but not really arguments. One thing he could tell was that Lo had been crying. It was after the nurse found his neomycin. There was telephoning to Pretoria. Now the nurse was giving him injections. Lo should be strong.

  Ione woke him up, bringing him something, money, talking too fast. She was talking so fast that powder was falling out of the lines in her throat. He had a compress on his forehead. She put the money in his nightstand drawer, and she was whispering. She felt it was her fault about the sangoma, so that was the why and wherefore of the money. She said she had to talk fast because she had used a trick on Lois to keep her out, so she could apologize—that was why she had to talk fast. Some of it he understood. The sangoma was a fake, just an actor jumping ship from a troupe from South Africa putting on plays in churches in Botswana—morality plays. He was an illegal person. She had been duped. She had gotten suspicious when he was speaking English and wouldn’t use Setswana. Later on, she had realized he had the same voice as the go-between on the telephone, when she was searching for someone. And also, she found out afterward that he had taken the whole thing out of a book—it was Shona and not Tswana. She wondered if he had felt he had to do the incisions partly because he assumed she knew more about the ritual than she had. She was saying how sorry she was. And then when Lo came, she changed the subject. He felt sorry for Ione. He kept his hands under the covers. He was better, he told her. He was understanding more. She told him he looked like a carving.

  Now he could get up all right. The world bounced when he walked, but he could walk. It was going away with the injections. People were watching wherever he went. Lo was sleeping on her exercise mat at the foot of the bed. He almost walked on her.

  • • •

  He woke up with a mystery to solve. It had to do with the night before. The dogs had been active, and he remembered that clearly. But somehow he had slept hard at intervals while—he was sure—they were doing their worst. The answer wasn’t sheer fatigue, because he was better. His tremor was fading. His appetite was back. Today he was going to read at least two back issues of Finance and Development, cover to cover.

  Something told him the nurse was in the wings. He turned onto his side. He would pretend to be asleep, in the hope that she might look in and go away. Lo wouldn’t let the nurse wake him up. He closed his eyes.

  Bacon was what he wanted, but American bacon. That was one thing to be said about going back. Because it was clear they were going to have to go back. He had to stop fighting it. It was important not to panic over it. At least in America they put the lettuce inside the sandwich, not strewn in shreds all over the outside. Money was going to be the problem. He was afraid. People would tell him to go into business, leave the agency. He was an expert on business. But the idea repelled him. Why was everything in the world for sale, exactly? In fact, he was with the government because selling things seemed repellent to him. The government gave things away.

  But nothing could be done. He was leaving Africa to her dogs. Lo would have to forgive him. Lo had worked before. She had been a cashier. She could learn bookkeeping—he would teach her. He had never taken one thing from Africa. This was too much self-pity. He had never touched an African woman, never, even when he could have. And when Elaine wanted to hide jadeite and tiger-eye in their household effects to smuggle back into the United States, he had drawn the line. He was through here. He was being destroyed.

  Somebody was coming.

  The nurse shook his shoulder. He rolled onto his back. Something was wrong.

  “I’ve been talking to you,” she said, but not impatiently. She was being kind. She had an instrument in her hand. Lo was with her.

  Making a show of fatigue, he turned back onto his side.

  He was beginning to understand something. He lifted and lowered his head slightly, blotting out her voice when he set his head down. He sat up violently, full of hope.

  Lo was saying that the nurse had something to tell him. He knew what it was. The nurse said he had been septicemic. He had self-medicated and he shouldn’t have. He had used something that was ototoxic and had made himself deaf in one ear, and she was sorry. Lo took his hand. She was weeping. The nurse was snapping her fingers to either side of his head, while he smiled. They could stay.

  ALONE IN AFRICA

  It seemed to Frank that he was adapting surprisingly nicely to life without a wife around the house. He wondered what it meant. By now, Ione was in Genoa or Venice or some other watering place in Italy. All her stops involved lakes or the beach. It was all there in the itinerary on the wall next to the phone. He could read it from where he was sitting and drinking, if he felt like it. He thought, Ione likes it overseas and she likes being here in Botswana, but the drought is wearing her down. The government was talking about cutting the water off from eight till dawn. It was going to be inconvenient for compulsive hand-washers, which he no longer was, but which a lot of other dental and medical people were. Ione felt parched, she said. So it was goodbye for three weeks. He toasted her again. There was a poet, an Italian, who had had Dante’s works printed on rubber so he could read them sitting naked in a fountain with the water running over him: that was the image of her vacation she’d said she wanted Frank to have.
So it was goodbye, because he had the dental-care design team due in from the AID office in Nairobi to praise his plans for Botswana’s dental future, or not. There it was again, the small sound in the night he was trying to ignore. It was probably animal or vegetable. He was going to keep on ignoring it.

  He’d be alone for another ten days. He was used to separations, but normally he would be the one traveling, not the one hanging around at home—which was different. Earlier in their marriage, and only for a couple of years, they had taken separate vacations. They had given it up after deciding they preferred to vacation together, all things considered. They kept each other amused. She was good at it. She was superb at it. He was missing her, especially on the sex end. He was enjoying being alone, otherwise. He was really alone, because the maid was away for a couple of days. Dimakatso’s family was rife with deaths and emergencies. Women probably disliked being alone in houses more than men did because of routine small nonspecific sounds that got them keyed up. Right now he could easily convince himself that someone was horsing around outside, scratching the flyscreens. Ione kept him busy, sexually. She was six years older than he was, but no one would guess it. She had kept her figure to a T. She was sinewy, was the word. Ione had a dirty mind. In twenty years he’d never really strayed. She was a Pandora’s box of different tricks and variations. Probably that was why he’d been so faithful. She was always coming up with something new. How could he feel deprived? Of course, the scene in Africa was nothing like Bergen County when it came to available women. Young things were leaving the villages and coming into the towns and making themselves available at the hotel bars for next to nothing, for packs of Peter Stuyvesant. It was pathetic. They wanted to get in with expatriates. They wanted to go to expatriate parties so they could latch on to someone who would buy trinkets for them or, if they were lucky, take them away to foggy Holland forever to get neuralgia. They wanted bed and breakfast for however long they could get it. The drought was making it worse, squeezing more and more people out of the villages all the time.

  One guy he was tired of was the number two at U.S. Information—Egan the blowhard and world’s foremost authority on sex in Botswana and the known world. Frank was tired of professional libertines, especially if they were on the United States Government payroll. Coming overseas had been an eye-opener on the subject of official Americans like Egan, who were less than gods, from the taxpayer standpoint. Egan was the mastermind behind the new thing of morale-building stag dinners for the men of America in Botswana. Frank had been once. No matter what you’d done, Egan had done it better. Somebody had made the mistake of using the phrase “naked broad.” So then Egan had informed him he didn’t know the meaning of the word “naked”—meaning that there was some elite whorehouse near Athens where all the women were shaved smooth as eggs. Their heads were shaved, their pubic hair, axillary hair, eyebrows. Egan had been there, naturally. The women were depilated every day. The women were oiled all over, shining, and they were different races. Only if you’d been there could you say you’d experienced lovemaking to a naked broad, had the real experience, like Egan. Egan was close with the bishop. He was a Father of the Year type. Actually, a loudmouth was the perfect choice for information service officer. What was a grown man doing showing Audie Murphy war movies to the Botswana Defense Force? Frank detested Egan, the hypocrite. Frank toasted the martyrs of science versus the church, like Giordano Bruno. There were others.

  With its big block letters, Ione’s itinerary was like a poster. You couldn’t escape it. Ione’s handwriting was showing no sign of aging. Frank wore glasses for reading and she didn’t. His signature was less of a work of art than it had been. He looked at the radio. In less than a year they’d be back home where they could follow the destruction of the world by nationalism and religion in crystal-clear broadcasts on all-news radio. In Botswana, the radio was an ordeal, partly because they had never invested in an aerial. He was tired of waltzing around the room carrying the radio, trying to find the one crux of radio waves that would allow him to pick up something intelligible. The news would be about Beirut again. Beirut was religion armed to the teeth and having fun. He was tired of Beirut. Drinking this much was a change. It was fun. He was beyond his norm. Usually they never missed trying for the eight o’clock Armed Forces Radio news. Tonight he was going to skip it. Nine-tenths of the radio band in Africa was cockney evangelists. It was a shame that the minute the Batswana got literate they were engulfed in Bibles and tracts and fundamentalism, a nightmare. But he was going to take a pass on the radio because he was listening to something much better. It had rained hard, earlier, for three minutes. Now water was ticking onto the dripstones outside, a delicious sound and not long for this world.

  He liked his worst bathrobe best, which was why he had dug it up from the bottom of the hamper. It must be after eight. Tick-tock, where was their clock? Except for Ione’s African arts and crafts collection, there was very little in the place that would have to go back to New Jersey with them when they left. They could have a jumble sale for everything else. Basically, they were camping. This was a government house and they were living in it like campers: they dealt with the huge furniture as just another exotic thing to be made use of, like a strange rock formation. The government procured the furniture in South Africa. Ione liked to call the Republic of South Africa a “taste-sink.”

  They were camping. That was partly why they had done only the bare minimum on the grounds. The other part was to get at their intolerable neighbor, Benedict Christie, or as Ione liked to call him, Imitatio Christie. They lived in Extension Six, an enclave of upper-level civil servants, Batswana and expatriate. They were at the outer edge of the extension: raw bush began outside their fence on one side. Christie wanted every expatriate yard to be a model of husbandry, like his, with row after row of cabbages to give to the poor. Christie was useful in one way, because they could tell the time by him. He went to bed at nine-thirty on the dot. In Christie’s house, only one room was ever lit at a time. He was a model of parsimony not to be believed. Even where people had fixed up their yards, Ione had never found the out-of-doors in Botswana that inviting. There were more lizards in the trees than birds. It was important to be alert about snakes. Ione had never adapted. Frank decided to open up the Cape Riesling they’d been saving. He went to get it. Coming back, he went through the house pulling the curtains shut on all the windows and pausing to listen for the sounds that had been bothering him. There was nothing much. He should check on the time. He chronically took his wristwatch off when the weekend came, locking it away. Not to secure it, but because he liked the symbolism. In the government houses, everything locked: closets, the pantry, dresser drawers, the credenza with his watch in it, all the interior doors. They had pounds of keys to deal with.

  He was holding the wine in his mouth for longer than usual before swallowing it, for no particular reason.

  Our suffering is so trivial, he thought. His thought surprised him. He wondered what suffering he was talking about, aside from being in need sexually, thanks to Ione, a minor thing and natural under the circumstances. He was in favor of her vacation. He swallowed his Riesling. Africa was suffering, but that wasn’t it. He knew that much. Because a central thing about Africans was how little they complained. Whites complained at the drop of a hat. Africans would walk around for weeks with gum abscesses before coming in for treatment, even when treatment was next to free. People were losing their cattle to the drought, and cattle were everything. But the Batswana kept voting for the ruling party and never complaining. His point eluded him. He gave up. Occasionally it hurt him to think about Susan, because in a way he had lost her to superstition, to Lutheranism. If you told anybody that, they would think you were kidding, claiming to be suffering over something trivial. They would say you were overreacting. His daughter was a deaconess, the last he’d heard. That was up to her. What was a deaconess?

  He drank directly from the bottle. He liked the sound of liquid going into him. He
thought, It’s easy to forget how remarkable it is that every member of the male race carries a pouch hung on the front of our body full of millions of living things swimming into each other. He cupped his naked scrotum to see if he could feel movement. He thought he could. The wine reminded him of Germany. Everybody should see the Rhine. But when he’d suggested it, Ione had said she hated Germany. So did the Germans, apparently, who were ceasing to reproduce—voting with their genitals, so to speak. Germany was green and beautiful. So why were the Batswana reproducing like Trojans in their hot wasteland of a country? Fecundity was everywhere. Women began reproducing when they were still children. Everywhere there were women with babies tied to their backs and other babies walking along behind them. At thirteen or fourteen they considered themselves women. Batswana schoolgirls looked like they were getting ready for sex from menarche onward. They went around with the back zippers on their school uniforms half-undone, their shoes unlaced half the time, as if they were trying to walk out of their clothes. They were always reaching into their bodices, was another thing, feeling and adjusting themselves. They were unselfconscious. He wondered if they knew what that kind of thing looked like to makhoa? Batswana men didn’t seem to notice it. He reminded himself not to judge. Women in general were a closed book, Ione excepted. And women in somebody else’s culture added up to two closed books. What could a lakhoa really know about the Batswana, especially the women? A lot of things were said about them that were probably lies—for instance, that they had enlarged labia because their mothers encouraged them to stretch them as a sign of beauty. That was in the north. Probably it was no longer done. It was called macronympha.