The man equivocated.
I said, ‘How do you interpret chapter ten in the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter has the vision of the unclean animals in the house of Cornelius?’
‘I asked you a simple question and you are asking me ones that are not simple.’
‘Here is a simple one,’ I said. ‘Jesus was born 2000 years ago. What happened to the millions of people who were born before Jesus? Were they saved?’
‘They are damned for worshiping false idols,’ he said.
‘I see. What is your name?’
‘Washington,’ he said.
‘Washington, what is your tribe?’
‘I am Shona.’
‘Excellent.’ I said that since the Minister of Tourism had given me to believe that a person was enlightened and calmed by consulting a traditional healer, a mondhoro, what did Washington, as a Shona, think of that?
‘Spirit worship is pagan and mondhoros are responsible for the deaths of many children.’
He explained that the mondhoro could diagnose a problem but often the solution required sacrificing a young boy or girl. Ritual slaughter was as common as brewing beer or finding a certain herb to undo a curse.
‘The child is then strangled.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘Many people in your government, including your president, believe that mondhoros must be consulted.’
‘Then they are wrong,’ he said. ‘If you trust in Almighty God you will be saved.’
‘And if Almighty God had been an immense duck capable of emitting an eternal quack, we would all have been born web-footed, each as infallible as the pope. And we would never have had to learn to swim,’ I said, somewhat misquoting Henry James’s father.
But it did the trick. Washington saw that he was wasting his time with me. He went back to his devotions and I wrote a bit more of my story. Then I looked out the window at the regular rocks like ruins, like tumbled temples on the summits of small rounded hills, the litter of boulders resembling broken-apart foundations, reminiscent of the monumental boulders on the plains near Mwanza in far-off Tanzania by the lakeshore. But these rocks were even more forcible reminders of the stately piled-up stones in Great Zimbabwe, which was just over the next hill, near the town of Masvingo.
When we came to Masvingo I thought of lingering here and visiting the ruins. But it was against my temperament to go sightseeing, and Washington got off the bus here, which was an inducement for me to stay on.
Masvingo was a lovely country town. I thought: I could live here, and quickly realized that I actually did live in a small country town just like it. Masvingo had been Fort Victoria, the site of the first white settlers’ fort and then a farming town. The name had changed but the town had not, for here was the Victoria Hotel and the dry-goods shop and the Indian clothing store, Zubair for Flair, and the bottle store and the ironmongers. The street, like all old main streets in Zimbabwe, was wide enough to allow an ox-wagon to make a U-turn.
The scheduled stop in Masvingo turned into a delay, but that was fine with me. I was able to see that the other passengers on the bus were all sorts — white families, black families, Indian women in a group, six white girls in gym slips traveling as part of a school soccer team, African men in suits and ties, others dressed like me. But even though the vehicle resembled a Greyhound Bus and the passengers looked like the people you might find on a long-distance Greyhound, the decent, the hard-pressed, the marginalized, the weird, the aromatic; yet I still felt that I was on another planet, one that bore a striking similarity to the planet earth but was in fact a dark star.
We spent a good part of the afternoon in Masvingo. I went for a walk up the main street, wondering at its emptiness until I remembered it was Sunday. We set off again into the stillness and the green hills of Matabeleland and were at Beitbridge at dusk, another river marking the border, this one the Limpopo, South Africa’s border.
In the darkness, after all the slow lines and the fussing with passports and interrogations, the trip became hallucinatory. Beyond the Limpopo was a tall steel fence topped with razor wire, and the bright spotlights playing on it gave it the look of an armed camp or a prison we were being bused into along a fortified bridge. No other border crossing in Africa was as menacing or efficient as this — like a nightmare of being whisked into prison, dreary and dark except for the occasional blinding lights, many sentry posts and roadblocks on a short stretch of road. At the last roadblock a white soldier boarded the bus and re-examined every passenger’s entry stamp — politely, but strangely goose-eyed and carrying an automatic rifle.
At the town of Messina a young African girl got on and sat beside me, jostling the notebook on my knee.
‘What are you writing?’
‘Just a letter,’ I said, but it was my erotic story. ‘How long to Jo’burg?’
‘Twelve hours,’ she said. ‘But more for me. I am going to Maseru.’
Lesotho was her home. Her name was Thulo, she was a Suthu. She said, ‘My country makes nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’
She went to sleep, briefly and when she woke we talked a little about Lesotho, how it sometimes snowed there.
‘I want to leave Lesotho — leave South Africa,’ she said. ‘Not emigrate, just get away. You know? Just get away from the Third World for a while.’
After that, flashes of light indicated settlements — no other place I had seen on my trip was so well lit at night as this introduction to South Africa. No other country had been so electrified. The light was interruptive and disturbing, for it gave bright not-quite-right glimpses of prosperity — tall power lines and large houses and used-car lots with shiny vehicles and the sinister order of urbanization, more lights, more fences, illuminated windows. So much electric light seemed nightmarish after the darkness I had accustomed my eyes to, for the glare conveyed a sense of distortion and bigness. And, really, there was not much modernity here at all, for this Northern Transvaal was lightly settled, the market towns of Louis Trichardt and Bandelierkop, and the hills of Soutpansberg — all of it farming country
Around midnight, at a long delay in the town of Pietersburg, I walked around in the cold and still saw some people in the street, and women selling bananas and oranges, much as their counterparts did in rural Malawi. But these women were selling them in front of the Big Bite convenience store, which was still open and smelling of warm meat pies and carbolic soap and disinfectant. People in this town were swathed in all sorts of sweaters and shawls and leggings and aprons and turbans, which they peeled off, unlayering themselves as the day grew warmer. But in the dark, plumped up and wrapped in all these woolens, they also looked like creatures in a dream, especially the ones wandering into the bright empty main street.
I was lulled to sleep on the highway across Springbok Flats and the hundreds of miles of booming Afrikaner place names — Potgietersrus, Vanalphensvlei, Naboomspruit, Warmbad and Nylstroom. That last place, with its ‘Nile’ prefix, was significantly named by the trekking Boers in the 1840s who were guided by the Holy Bible. The river they encountered here, the Mokalakwena, flowed north, which could mean only one thing. It had to be the Nile flowing into the unmapped heart of Africa and through Egypt; thus their logical name for the village on its banks, ‘Nile Stream.’
Now and then I woke in my seat and through glazed eyes saw bright raised-up motorway signs — Day’s Inn, IBM, Xerox, DHL — and after so many months of bush the very look of these signs spooked me, for in a dream the scariest things are the most familiar.