All we need is the Christians against us, he said. If our game deal gets out it’s not good, but the people who run this country own cattle and they know that the boys out at the cattle posts do certain similar dubious things once in a while.
I said something hotly about realpolitik. Humiliatingly, he corrected my pronunciation, but without responding to whatever my gravamen was. I realized I had never heard the word spoken. I had only seen it printed.
Do whatever you want, he said, being extraordinary and childish, I thought. But remember there are two things Gaborone right left and center never forgives — cattle rustling and abortions.
It was too much for me when he said Of course we could always expose the newborn. I knew it was sheer provocation and was well aware that he was the one who lobbied to get a street named after a woman whose main activity had been rescuing abandoned infants all over West Africa, but still it was insufferable.
I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him at that instant. Clearly the feeling was mutual. I felt I was doing him a favor by being the first to leave the house, and when I came back almost immediately in order to rummage up a torch, he was clearly getting ready to go someplace himself, lest I come back before he was ready for détente, no doubt.
I didn’t care. Nothing was good. I left again and forged my way deliberately carelessly through rough brush, all the way over the shoulder of the koppie and down to a spot where I could contemplate the night fires of the Basarwa. I got a few scratches, going. It was cold and I was underdressed for it. It felt right to sit hunched up in bitterness, looking down at the Basarwa, who had nothing except lice but were happier than we were. The fires fade steadily and then brighten when they’re replenished, when it’s coldest, toward dawn. I stayed for that. I was getting a sore throat, and that felt right too.
Foul Play
I went directly from my crow’s nest to the plaza. All I wanted was to pick a job someplace that would be warm, like the kitchen or the laundry, and simple, so I could vegetate while I worked. Something was funny, though. There were more people in the plaza than there should have been at so early an hour. And there was uneasiness. I was struck again with how true it was that a village like Tsau is an organism of sorts, and that I was becoming more and more a part of it. Something was communicating dread, something was up. I needed an interlude. I still had thorns and twigs in my hair. Just then I saw something I had never seen: Dineo running, the skirts of her gown pulled high up, her enviable thighs flashing and depressing me. She ran out of the edge of my vision and into Sekopololo.
There was a troop coming up Gladys and Ruth. I had never seen anything like this in Tsau. It was military. They were ululating and jogging in a cadenced way, a Zulu war jog. They were going to be exhausted when they got up as far as the plaza. Where am I? I thought. Other women left the plaza, rather quickly, I thought. The war jog conveyed something. Mma Isang materialized and came up to me. She said They are in a rage of fury. This was the last English I heard for a while that morning. Dorcas was leading the war party. I thanked god when Dineo came out, composed, all in black, black turban, hieratic-looking. She would do something. There were men with Dorcas, just behind the batlodi and her other regulars, but no Hector that I could see. Dineo was looking around for Dirang, asking urgently, Where is the Ox? I wanted tea. There was a mechanism supposed to get tea out about now that was not working. Tea was late and Dorcas was coming, disheveled, unlike herself.
I was thinking how theatrical we would appear to someone suspended in the middle distance and facing the plaza, with women on different levels of the upper flights of stairs, arranged like players in a student production of Antigone.
Dorcas arrived with her troop. There were thirty, at least. If this was her core group, it was growing. Immediately Dorcas began shrieking at me in particular. Where was Rra Puleng? And why was I standing there shivering — what was wrong with me?
Mma Isang said She is here for work. What are you making this turmoil about?
Dorcas then produced something I had seen Batswana women do only at funerals: she went into a violently undirected flailing and hand-fluttering fit and had to be held up for a moment before she could carry on.
My attention was divided. Some of Dorcas’s people ran over to the plaza bell. There was a scuffle. The Ox was guarding the bell for our side. Dorcas herself seemed incoherent. She was shrieking questions at me and now and then at Dineo. Where is my brother? was the main one. She seemed to think I knew where her brother was, but she also seemed to know that something terrible had happened to her brother. She was saying a vision had come to her of Hector, dead, murdered. That was her first version, as I heard. There would be others. She made a raking motion at me and said You are dirty. I assumed this was about my unkemptness of the moment, but she meant more. Her group was crowding in on me.
Under stress my Setswana isn’t what it should be. I tried to say that she shouldn’t be so excited, or that she was too excited, but I mixed up gakatsega with gakatea, which meant I was telling her she was too angry. This was inflammatory, and she began appealing to the sky and the earth to say whether or not she had cause to be angry, she of all people.
I really hate being surrounded. I pushed my way out of the circle around me, and fairly roughly, but I felt two imperatives. Ululating is one thing from a distance and something else altogether when it’s being directed at you, hatefully, up close. I had to get away from that. And also I was fixated on getting some food to eat, an egg, a scone, anything: my blood sugar was too low for what was happening to me. I ran over to get next to Dineo on the Sekopololo porch.
This was nobody’s finest hour. Dineo was going in circles, ducking into the Sekopololo office and coming out again, starting to scrawl notes on scraps of paper, waving them around and finding no one to take them, finally crushing them up.
Do you know what any of this is? I asked her. She didn’t seem to. Miraculously she had a platter of hardboiled eggs on her desk. I snatched myself one and scratched off the shell.
From the porch I could hear Dorcas giving another version of what had happened. This story was that she had heard Hector leave his rondavel, the smaller one on her plot, after someone very quietly called him to come out. She’d thought nothing of it, because he would sometimes go walking at night, to the tannery to see about chemicals and shifting hides from one bath to another. So she had gone back to sleep and slept hard because of overworking of late, and when she had heard a cry outside she made this cry a part of a dream. But now she knew it was her brother’s cry. And even if she had awakened at the cry she would have been fearful of going out because of so many enemies always hovering against Hector. But in fact she had slept on and only in the morning had she realized that the cry she had dreamed her brother made was in fact his voice, saying he was killed. And then when her brother’s men came for him as always, and he was gone, she knew now he must be found dead.
I began to be afraid in a shameful way. I wanted to say I have nothing to do with this place, I’m on my way home, my bags are packed, virtually. Dorcas was finishing in a genuine crescendo of hysteria. I was choking on my egg for a minute. It shames me, but I thought with terror that Nelson and I were the only whites within a radius of two hundred miles.
Dorcas’s group lurched and then swept confusedly offstage right, Dorcas shouting that Hector’s body had been put among the rocks and that Dineo should call out the snake women to search. They were leaving, at least. I was relieved until I realized they were making for our place. I said urgently to Dineo that we had to follow them. She was making a list. We must have a committee. But she stopped writing and said she would come. I was already running after them. Nelson slept naked and he might not be up yet.