White Dog Fell From the Sky (25 page)

“Do you know when he’ll
return?”

“No,
rra,
I have not been
told.”

“Is there someone else I can speak
with? It concerns a missing person.”

“You can speak with me,
rra.
I am the officer on duty.” M. Molosi, his nametag said, pinned to a well-nourished
chest. Will told him the story. When he was finished, M. Molosi said, “This is
quite common,
rra
, for a gardener to disappear. Perhaps he was dissatisfied
with the madam.”

“That was not the case,” said
Will, who wanted to tell him he’d been
in the country for twenty
years and didn’t need to be told the kind of thing that made gardeners disappear.
“He left all of his personal effects, as well as his dog. He was very devoted to
his dog and would not have left her behind.”

“I see,
rra.
Then perhaps it
was a matter of thinking that she was eating more than he could afford. He might have
left her with a sad heart. There have been cases like this.”

“This is true,” said Will,
mastering his impatience. “But why would he have left everything else behind,
including a clean shirt and a clean pair of pants? Not only that, he left
mabele
on the table, untouched.”

This made an impression. “Where is the
house?”

“In the Old Village.”

“When I am free, you will take me
there.”

They agreed that M. Molosi would call him at
work when another officer could relieve him.

Later, Will accompanied him to Alice’s
house, showed him through it room by room, introduced Isaac’s dog, but he could
find no explanation for the disappearance. When he learned that Isaac had been put in
charge while madam was away, he hypothesized that he might have fled with something
valuable, but this would not explain the porridge.

The metal door had a small peephole and a
slot for food. Above it were four metal slats, the only source of air or light. In the
dimness, the scuttle of insects. A filthy bucket for slops. One blanket. A concrete
floor.

A door clanged up the row from his cell. The
smells around him were raw, animal. The brute stink of suffering. He felt along the
floor with his feet, where to sleep, where to defecate.

The walls were rough, sticky with the
respiration of caged men. He listened for the sound of breath on either side of him,
heard nothing to his left and thought he could hear a rhythmic scraping to his
right.

Before dark, a guard went down the row,
clanking as he shoved a bowl of mealie porridge in each slot. Fear rose as the footsteps
approached. The slot opened. He took the bowl and spoon, followed by a cup of water. He
drank the water quickly—as likely as not to contain a death sentence. Typhoid,
gastroenteritis. The porridge was a weak slurry.

After dark fell, he thought he heard a
snatch of song somewhere at a distance.

A light bounced against the wall as
footsteps came closer. They stopped outside his door, and the beam of a flashlight
sliced through the peephole and hit him in the face. The feet shuffled, the light moved
away for a second and went back into his eyes.

“What do you want?” His heart
pounded.

The footsteps receded, the light faded into
blackness.

He lay his head on the floor farthest from
the door and wrapped himself in the blanket. Three times during the night, the beam of
light
hit him. He knew what it meant. There are thousands of ways to
break a man.

When do you stop being human?

When the body is so befouled, when you have
groveled so deeply, when bitterness eats your bones?

There was a room located at the end of the
row of cells where they took people. Every day, and often into the night, he heard
moaning, sometimes worse, far worse. He knew that one day, they would take him
there.

I will fear no evil: for thou art with
me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
He no longer believed in that kind
of rod or staff. Or that he could master fear. God had forsaken that man crying out,
asking for mercy. If there was a God, he was indifferent to whether his people lived or
died, callous to the manner of their deaths.

If anything were to save him, it would be
the strength of his heart and mind, what had been given him in this life. The face of
his mother and granny, his father, his sister and brothers. All that he’d seen and
understood. They could erase his dreams, they could erase his belief that goodness and
mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. They were greedy for every part of a man
they could swallow. But unless they bashed his head senseless, they couldn’t take
the memories that dwelt in him, they couldn’t take what he knew. What remains
after those precious things are gone is a wild dog chasing in circles, jaws clamped to
its tail, a monument to defilement.

Once he’d dreamt of marrying
Boitumelo. Don’t wait for me, he told Nthusi to tell her. Her warm breath against
his neck. Her teeth nipped his flesh, here, here. Her lovely mouth. Her black eyes. Her
rump jutting out proudly. How she moved! Like a young giraffe.

That night, he whispered to the person in
the cell next to him. He listened for footsteps, whispered again. The man’s voice
was ruined. Isaac could understand only half his words. He had been kicked in the
throat. He could no longer keep food down. He said he had three children. “They
are two boys and a girl. The girl’s name is Neo, the boys Tebo …” The
guard was coming. The light shone into Isaac’s cell, blinded him, disappeared. The
voice next door went silent.

He was grateful he did not have children. He
thought about his brother Moses. The game of
mpha,
when Moses was a small boy.
He would give Moses a sweet, then say
mpha
and hold out his hand.
Mpha.
Give it to me.
To teach that nothing belonged to Moses and Moses alone, all was
to be given, to be shared. The sweet would go back into his brother’s hand. And
again,
mpha. Give it to me.

Perhaps it had been his fate to return to
that house. The money, while important, had not been what mattered. It was going back
and facing what had happened.

He had been put on Earth to be of use to
others. It had gone wrong from the moment he met Amen. There had been danger there, and
he hadn’t faced it squarely, had only half stood up to Amen to say that violence
was not his way. He had felt the uneasiness in that house from the beginning. White Dog
had felt it too.

The chief of police had sent him back across
the border because the shootings had scared him. He would not have been sent otherwise.
He thought about the land of his birth, here all around him, denied to him now. In the
dry season, the land was like an old man, skin of leather, eyes crinkled against sun.
After the rains, like a young woman, with curves and silks of green. Would he ever see
it again?

Behind the old hotel, Alice and Ian sat at a
small table, looking out at the moon, one night away from full.

“You look far away,” he
said.

“I feel worried about home, as though
I’d forgotten to turn off the stove.”

“There’s someone looking after
things, right?”

“Yes, but he didn’t know
I’d be gone this long.”

“Will it matter to him?”

“I don’t think so. Will is
checking on things.”

He searched her face. “If you’ve
changed your mind, it’s all right.”

“Don’t keep urging me to go. I
would have gone back with the group if I’d wanted to. Have
you
changed
your mind?”

“No.” He took hold of her hand.
“But I need to tell you something. I nearly told you when we met, but I
didn’t. Then there didn’t seem to be an opportunity, and then there was no
point because I was never going to see you again.

“I’m married. Gwyneth lives in
Gaborone. We were students in Bristol when we met years ago.”

“You haven’t been living
together?”

“No. The marriage is over.”

“Does she think it’s
over?”

“She says she does.”

“What’s she doing in
Gaborone?”

“Working as a secretary for De Beers.
She’s seeing another bloke—Alec …”

She looked at Ian. His glasses were askew,
rising on one side, which gave him a disorganized, imploring look. “It’s not
Gwyneth L’Angley.”

“You know her?”

“I met her at a dinner party. I have
to admit …”

“What?”

“She struck me as not all that curious
about anything beyond herself. She drank too much.”

“She fights depression. I was never
really there for her the way she needed me to be.”

“Could anyone have been there in that
way?”

“I don’t know, but I still
don’t feel that I’ve been fair to her.”

“She could see who you were from the
beginning.”

“Maybe she couldn’t.” His
hands were shaking. “Are you shocked?”

“A little. You might have told me
sooner. But from what you’re saying, it’s over. You’re married, but
not really.”

“Do you feel I’ve lied to
you?”

“You didn’t tell me the whole
story, but I can see why you didn’t.”

“Heedless” was the word that
came to her later. But at that moment, the decision to love him seemed already to have
been made. The waiter turned up with coffee, poured two cups, and left. Ian took a swig.
“Tastes like weasel piss.”

She laughed. Underneath the laughter,
though, was a small whiff of uneasiness, even fear. By now, she knew better than to give
her life over to a man. It had been a kind of recurring illness, brief respites from her
own uncertainties, tethering herself to this one and that one. “I don’t
doubt you,” she said. “I doubt me. I’ve made little out of my life so
far. You’ve probably never had a day in yours when you’ve doubted
yourself.”

“What gave you that daft
notion?”

“You seem to know what you’re
doing, why you’re doing it, happy with your work, supremely confident.”

“I look like that to you?”

“Of course you do. In contrast, I
think why would I be respected for anything I’ve ever done? I never finished my
PhD. I missed a chance to do research in the plateau area of central-northern Nigeria.
And then I
missed a second chance to study the Romani people in
southern Europe. I got married to Lawrence and came out here. There are so many things
I’d have been interested in doing. Now I’m a paper pusher.”

“You’re worthy of respect
because of who you are, Alice Mendelssohn. I can’t imagine not respecting you.
You’ve lived your life honorably.”

Hasse flashed through her head, his pink
cock lying contentedly on the surface of the bath water. “Not entirely.”

“And you won’t be a paper pusher
for the rest of your life. You can finish your PhD if that’s what you want. Or you
can do something else.” He looked straight at her. “You can do whatever you
want. And of course I have doubts, like anyone. Doubts about how I’ve chosen to
live. I’ve hurt people. Not just Gwyneth. I’m beginning to want things I
never thought I wanted before. I’m not saying I’d ever have these
things—roots, a home—or be able to stand them if I did. I’m saying I see them
differently.”

“What’s changed?”

“You, for one.”

“You hardly know me.”

He picked up her hand, turned it over the
way a palm reader might. “It doesn’t matter that I hardly know
you … You looked like a girl just then. Did you have a nickname as a
kid?”

“Quackers.” She laughed.
“I loved ducks.”

“My mum called me Nummy. I don’t
know where the name came from. She’s the only one in the world who ever called me
that.”

“Were you close?”

“Yes. To both my parents. I remember
when I figured out they’d die someday and leave me behind. I sat under the stairs
mourning like a pope. It took me a bit longer to figure out I was going to die too. I
worry about the San the way I used to worry about my mum and dad.”

The wind was up, the Southern Cross tilted,
shining halfway up the sky. “It’ll be a full moon tomorrow on the
Pan,” he said. He took her hand and walked her back to her room. He kissed her and
left quickly.

After he was gone, she came back outdoors
and stood in the shadows. In the wind, the story of everything could be heard: time
stretching in all directions, singing through the river of souls
who’d carried breath over thousands of years.

That night, she dreamt of a dog running down
an empty thruway. She’d never seen a dog run so fast. Golden and streaking. It
kept veering into the lane, and she was scared she’d hit it with her car. At one
point, it disappeared. She looked through the rearview mirror, and it was on the ground,
thrashing. She stopped, opened the door of the car, and it got up, a golden retriever
with no collar and no tag. She wanted to bring it with her but she wasn’t able to.
Her life wasn’t right. She left the golden dog in the middle of the road. He sat
there, not running, just watching as she drove away.

Ian had already loaded the Land Rover with
tents and food and tools and supplies before Alice was up. They left for the Ntwetwe Pan
at five in the morning. The moon was gone, but a couple of stars still shone
overhead.

“You look wonderful,” he said,
taking her hand and touching the back of it to his cheek.

“Last night,” she said, “I
bathed from stem to stern.”

“That makes two of us. You should have
seen the drain. Like a mud bath. In about an hour, we’ll be as grubby as
before.” He sounded happy at the prospect.

He climbed into the vehicle after her.
“I thought we’d go to Kube Island and camp there, if you agree,” he
said. “It’s between Ntwetwe and Sowa, on the southern end. We’ll drive
across the pan as we did before, but we’ll go farther in. I think there’s
still a track from near the island to Mopipi and Lake Xau. I brought two tents—the
bigger one’s for you.”