Whites (9 page)

He ate a little, sticking to mainstream items like the gouda cheese cubes, she was sorry to see. Then he brought up the climate, which made her writhe. It was something to be curtailed. It led the mind homeward. It was one of the three deadly
Ws:
weather, wife, and where to eat—in this country, where not to eat. She feigned sympathy. He was saying he was from British Columbia so it was to be expected that it would take some doing for him to adjust to the dry heat and the dust. He said he had to remind himself that he’d been here only four months and that ultimately his mucous membrane system was supposed to adapt. But he said he was finding it wearing. Lately he was dreaming about rain, a lot, he said.

Good! she thought. “Would you like to see my
tokoloshi
?” she asked, crossing her legs.

He stopped chewing. She warned herself not to be reckless.

“Dream animals!” she said. “Little effigies. I collect them. The Bushmen carve them out of softwood. They use them as symbols of evil in some ceremony they do. They’re turning up along with all the other Bushman artifacts, the puberty aprons and so on, in the craft shops. Let me show you.”

She got two
tokoloshi
from a cabinet.

“They call these the evil creatures who come to you at night in dreams. There are some interesting features. What
you see when you look casually is this manlike figure with what looks like the head of a fox or rabbit or zebra at first glance. But look at the clothing. Doesn’t this look like a clerical jacket? The collar shape? They’re all like that. And look closely at the animal. It’s actually a spotted jackal, the most despised animal there is because of its taste for carrion. Now look in front at this funny little tablet that looks like a huge belt buckle with these X shapes burned into it. My theory is that it’s a Bushman version of the Union Jack. If you notice on this one, the being is wearing a funny belt. It looks like a cartridge belt to me. Some of the
tokoloshi
are smoking these removable pipes. White tourists buy these things and think they’re cute. I think each one is a carved insult to the West. And we buy loads of them. I do. The black areas like the jacket are done by charring the wood with hot nails and things.”

He handled the carvings dutifully and then gave them back to her. He murmured that they were interesting.

He took more tea. She stood the
tokoloshi
on an end table halfway across the room, facing them. He began contemplating them, sipping his tea minutely. Time was passing. She had various mottoes she used on herself. One was, Inside every suit and tie is a naked man trying to get out. She knew they were stupid, but they helped. He was still in the grip of whatever was bothering him.

“I have something that might interest you,” she said. She went to the cabinet again and returned with a jackal-fur wallet, which she set down on the coffee table in front of him. “This is a fortune-telling kit the witch doctors use. It has odd things inside it.” He merely looked at it.

“Look inside it,” she said.

He picked it up reluctantly and held it in his hand, making a face. He was thinking it was unsanitary. She was in danger of becoming impatient. The wallet actually was
slightly fetid, but so what: it was an organic thing. It was old.

She reached over and guided him to open and empty the wallet, touching his hands. He studied the array of bones and pebbles on the tabletop. Some of the pebbles were painted or stained. The bones were knucklebones, probably opossum, she told him, after he showed no interest in trying to guess what they were. She had made it her business to learn a fair amount about Tswana divination practices, but he wasn’t asking. He moved the objects around listlessly.

She lit a candle, though she felt it was technically premature. It would give him something else to stare at if he wanted to, and at least he would be staring in her direction, more or less.

The next segment was going to be taxing. The pace needed to be meditative. She was fighting impatience.

She said, “Africa is so strange. You haven’t been here long, but you’ll see. We come here as … bearers of science, the scientific attitude. Even the dependents do, always telling the help about nutrition and weaning and that kind of thing.

“Science so much defines us. One wants to be scientific, or at least not
un
scientific. Science is our religion, in a way. Or at least you begin to feel it is. I’ve been here nineteen months …”

He said something. Was she losing her hearing or was the man just unable to project? He had said something about noticing that the
tokoloshi
weren’t carrying hypodermic needles. He was making the point, she guessed, that the Batswana didn’t reject Western medicine. He said something further about their attachment to injections, how they felt you weren’t actually treating them unless they could have an injection, how they seemed to love injections. She would have to adapt to a certain lag in this man’s responses. I am tiring, she thought.

She tried again, edging her chair closer to his. “Of course, your world is different. You’re more insulated at the Ministry, where everyone is a scientist of sorts. You’re immersed in science. That world is … safer. Are you following me?”

He said that he wasn’t sure that he was.

“What I guess I mean is that one gets to want to really
uphold
science. Because the culture here is so much the opposite. So relentlessly so. You resist. But then the first thing you know, very peculiar things start happening to you. Or you talk to some of the old-settler types, whites, educated people from the Protectorate days who decided to stay on as citizens, before the government made that such an obstacle course. The white settlers are worse than your everyday Batswana. They accept everything supernatural, almost. At first you dismiss it as a pose.”

She knew it was strictly pro forma, but she offered him cigarettes from the caddy. He declined. There was no way she could smoke, then. Nothing tonight was going to be easy. Bechamel was right next door to the name she was trying to remember: Why couldn’t she get it?

“But it isn’t a pose,” she said. “Their experiences have changed them utterly. There is so much witchcraft. It’s called
muti
. It’s so routine. It wasn’t so long ago that if you were going to open a business you’d go to the witch doctor for good luck rites with human body parts as ingredients. A little something to tuck under the cornerstone of your bottle store. People are still being killed for their parts. It might be a windpipe or whatever. It’s still going on. Sometimes they dump the body onto the railroad tracks after they’ve taken what they need, for the train to grind up and disguise. Recently they caught somebody that way. The killers threw this body on the track but the train was late. They try to keep it out of the paper, I know that for a fact. But it’s still happening. An undertow.”

She worked her feet out of her sandals. Normally she would do one and let an intriguing gap fall before doing the other. She scratched an instep on an ankle.

She said, “I know a girl who’s teaching in the government secondary in Bobonong who tells me what a hard time the matron is having getting the girls to sleep with their heads out of the covers. It seems they’re afraid of
bad women
who roam around at night, who’ll scratch their faces. These are women called
baloi
, who go around naked, wearing only a little belt made out of human neckbones. Naturally, anyone would say what a fantasy this is. Childish.

“But I really did once see a naked woman dodging around near some rondavels late one night, out near Mosimane. It was only a glimpse. No doubt it was innocent. But she did have something white and shimmering around her waist. We were driving past. You begin to wonder.”

She waited. He was silent.

“Something’s bothering you,” she said.

He denied it.

She said, “At any rate, don’t you think it’s interesting that there are no women members of the so-called traditional doctors’ association? I know a member, what an oaf! I think it’s a smoke-screen association. They want you to think they’re just a benign bunch of herbalists trying out one thing or another, a lot of which ought to be in the regular pharmacopeia if only white medical people weren’t so narrow-minded. They come to seminars all jolly and humble. But if you talk to the Batswana, you know that it’s the women, the witches, who are the really potent ones.”

Still he was silent.

“Something’s happened, hasn’t it? To upset you. If it’s anything I’ve said, please tell me.” A maternal tone could be death. She was flirting with failure.

He denied that she was responsible in any way. It
seemed sincere. He was going inward again, right before her eyes. She had a code name for failures. She called them case studies. Her attitude was that every failure could be made to yield something of value for the future. And it was true. Some of her best material, anecdotes, references to things, aphrodisiana of all kinds, had come from case studies. The cave paintings at Gargas, in Spain, of mutilated hands … hand prints, not paintings … stencils of hundreds of hands with joints and fingers missing. Archaeologists were totally at odds as to what all that meant. One case study had yielded the story of fat women in Durban buying tainted meat from butchers so as to contract tapeworms for weight loss purposes. As a case study, if it came to that, tonight looked unpromising. But you could never tell. She had an image for case studies: a grave robber, weary, exhausted, reaching down into some charnel mass and pulling up a lovely ancient sword somehow miraculously still keen that had been overlooked. She could name case studies that were more precious to her than bingoes she could describe.

She had one quiver left. She meant arrow. She hated using it.

She could oppose her silence to his until he broke. It was difficult to get right. It ran counter to being a host, being a woman, and to her own nature. The silence had to be special, not wounded, receptive, with a spine to it, maternal, in fact.

She declared silence. Slow moments passed.

He stirred. His lips stirred. He got up and began pacing.

He said, “You’re right.” Then for a long time he said nothing, still pacing.

“You read my mind!” he said. “Last night I had an experience … I still … it’s still upsetting. I shouldn’t have come, I guess.”

She felt sorry for him. He had just the slightest speech defect, which showed up in noticeable hesitations. This was sad.

“Please tell me about it,” she said perfectly.

He paced more, then halted near the candle and stared at it.

“I hardly drink,” he said. “Last night was an exception. Phoning home to Vancouver started it, domestic nonsense. I won’t go into that. They don’t understand. No point in going into it. I went out. I went drinking. One of the hotel bars, where Africans go. I began drinking. I was drinking and buying drinks for some of the locals. I drank quite a bit.

“All right. These fellows are clever. Bit by bit I am being taken over by one, this one fellow, George. I can’t explain it. I didn’t like him. He took me over. That is, I notice I’m paying for drinks but this fellow’s passing them on to whomever he chooses, his friends. But I’m buying. But I have no say.

“We’re in a corner booth. It’s dark and loud, as usual. This fellow, his head was shaved, he was strong-looking. He spoke good English, though. Originally, I’d liked talking to him, I think. They flatter you. He was a combination of rough and smooth. Now he was working me. He was a refugee from South Africa, that always starts up your sympathy. Terrible breath, though. I was getting a feeling of something being off about the ratio between the number of drinks and what I was laying out. I think he was taking something in transit.

“I wanted to do the buying. I took exception. All right. Remember that they have me wedged in. That was stupid, but I was, I allowed it. Then I said I was going to stop buying. George didn’t like it. This man had a following. I realized they were forming a cordon, blocking us in. Gradually it got nasty. Why wouldn’t I keep buying drinks, didn’t
I have money, what was my job, didn’t the Ministry pay expatriates enough to buy a few drinks?—so on ad nauseam.”

His color was coming back. He picked up a cocktail napkin and touched at his forehead.

He was looking straight at her now. He said, “You don’t know what the African bars are like. Pandemonium. I was sealed off. As I say, his friends were all around.

“Then it was all about apartheid. I said I was Canadian. Then it was about Canada the lackey of America the supporter of apartheid. I’m not political. I was scared. All right. When I tell him I’m really through buying drinks he asks me how much money have I got left, exactly. I tell him again that I’m through buying drinks. He says not to worry, he’ll sell me something instead. All right. I knew I was down to about ten pula. And I had dug in on buying drinks, the way you will when you’ve had a few too many. No more buying drinks, that was decided. But he was determined to get my money, I could damned well see that.

“He said he would sell me something I’d be very glad to know. Information. All right. So then comes a long run-around on what kind of information. Remember that he’s pretty well three sheets to the wind himself. It was information I would be glad to have as a doctor, he said.

“Well, the upshot here was that this is what I proposed, so as not to seem totally stupid and taken. I would put all my money down on the table in front of me. I took out my wallet and made sure he could see that what I put down was all of it, about ten pula, change and everything. All right. And I would keep the money under the palm of my hand. And he would whisper the information to me and if I thought it was a fair trade I would just lift my hand. Of course, this was all just face-saving on my part so as not to just hand over my money to a thug. And don’t think I wasn’t well aware
it might be a good idea at this stage of things to be seen getting rid of any cash I had, just to avoid being knocked down on the way to my car.”

“This is a wonderful story,” she said spontaneously, immediately regretting it.