Whites (16 page)

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.

It might be a good idea to eat. He was getting that feeling of elevation in the top of his head, from the wine. The top of his head felt like it was made out of something lighter than bone, something like pumice. He went to the window. Christie was having dinner. His kitchen light was on.

What were Christie’s secrets? He was an elderly Brit, a bachelor or widower. It was no fun living next door to Christie, with only a wire fence between them and both houses on narrow plots. Frank thought of the time he and Ione had gotten into a mood, acting stupid, slamming doors on each other. One of them had slammed a door on the other by accident. Then the other had taken the next opportunity to slam a door back. It had escalated into slamming doors all over the house, a contest, and both of them laughing like crazy. So it had been slightly hysterical. It had been leading to sex. But then, naturally, the next thing they knew Christie had come out of his house to stand at the fence and stare in their direction, a gaze as blank and pitiless as the Sphinx, or as the sun, rather. Christie was left over from the days when Botswana was Bechuanaland. He was with the railway. He had applied for Botswana citizenship, which was tough to get these days. Probably Christie hated the idea of leaving the perfect medium for inflicting his religion on people to his last gasp. Christie’s religion was restriction: no drinking, no smoking, no sex, no dancing. That was the real business of
the Scripture Union, which Christie was upper echelon in. Christie was at home too much, was part of the problem. He even held prayer meetings at home, endless events. Christie seemed to hate Ione and vice versa. There was serious bad blood there. Christie had his work cut out for him if he thought he was going to make a dent in whoring. Whoring was poor little bush babies coming to town to work as domestics and lining up outside the Holiday Inn at night to better themselves. It was upward mobility. Visiting Boers were good customers. Ione liked to use the stereo. When he’d mentioned lately that when she played it she seemed to be keeping it very low, they’d both realized it was an unconscious adaptation to Christie, their monitor.

Frank could eat or he could take aspirin and drink some more. He drifted toward the kitchen. Tomorrow was Saturday. The sound was back. There was really someone at the kitchen door. There was deliberate tapping, very soft. Sometimes Batswana came to the door selling soapstone carvings or asking for odd jobs, and their knock was so tentative you’d think it was your imagination.

Frank moved quietly through the dark kitchen. He lifted the curtain on the window over the sink. By leaning close to the glass he should be able to make out who it was on the back stoop, once his eyes adjusted.

It was a woman, a young woman. He could see the whole outline of her skull, so she was African. She stood out against the white mass of the big cistern at the corner of the house. Her breasts were developed. She was standing close to the door in a furtive way. He reached for the outdoor-light switch, but checked himself. What was happening?

The key to the kitchen door was in a saucer in the cupboard. If he put the outdoor light on it would advertise her presence to all and sundry. She didn’t want that, was his guess. This could turn out to be innocent. He was ashamed.
There was no key. He calmed down. Was she still there? She must have seen his face at the window. He was feeling for the key on the wrong shelf. The keys should be kept on a hook so this would never happen again. He had the key. He set it down. He could still stop. He retied the sash of his bathrobe.

It was science the way he got the key into the lock in the dark and swung the door open silently, lifting it on its hinges. Before he could say anything, she had slipped into the kitchen, holding one hand open behind her to catch the screen door as it came shut. He closed the door. This was all so fast. He was having misgivings. They stood facing one another. He could hear that her breathing was agitated. He needed a good look at her. He pressed his hair down behind his ears. He was overheated. So was she. Somebody had to say something.

He turned the ceiling light on. For once, he was grateful that only one of the two fluorescent tubes was working. The less light and sound the better. She was beautiful. He studied her in the grayish light. She was beautiful.