There was nothing I could do. On Hector, he wouldn’t go beyond saying he was certain that the disappearance was something Hector had staged, with help, and that the truth would out. We would have to wait for the next act. He was very tired. I had to relent. It wasn’t enough for me to feel convinced of his innocence: I wanted him to show he felt as strongly as I did that if there had been a crime, it was critical, to say the least, to find out who was responsible. But of course he was staying with the position that this was all an illusion. He wouldn’t speculate. I could, if I wanted, was the best I could get.
My ignoblest hope I managed to keep to myself, which was that after this was over, the prospect of disengaging himself, ourselves, from Tsau might be brighter.
Duplicrats and Replicans
Tsau oscillated for another week. The mother committee offered a five hundred pula reward for the body of Hector Raboupi. Everything was disrupted. Children and teachers left school to go on searches. Even the Basarwa were brought into it. When all this led to nothing, it was time for hearings before the justice committee.
Written statements had been taken from a dozen of us, describing everything about our movements and observations the night of Hector’s disappearance. I was essentially no help to Nelson in terms of an alibi. He had been out that night. At the time when he was presumably back, I was out. We had had difficult words. Great interest was shown in all this, naturally. The justice committee was extremely thorough. The permutations in Dorcas’s account were noted. There had been a careful physical examination of Denoon at Sekopololo just after his removal from the bathing tent: although he had various minor scratches and bruises on his arms and trunk, all were consistent with the accidents the kind of physical work he was doing might have resulted in. The conclusion was that no one could say what had happened to Hector. Two possibilities were that he had gone off for some reason to Tikwe, a flyspeck of a settlement forty-five miles north of us, or to the Herero trek route thirty miles east of us, which was in use at this time of the year. In any case his disappearance had been reported to the district commissioner at Maun for him to proceed with. It seemed to be over. Dorcas and her friends were admonished to stop repeating accusations. This was received darkly by them. They were especially unhappy when it was pointed out that Raboupi had been away from Tsau without notice to anyone for up to three days at a time in the past. Dorcas vehemently denied this, but it did seem to be the case.
Adelah miscarried. I have my own opinion as to how genuine this was. Dineo loved her too. So did Dirang. We all did. Now she could go to school. I gave her a locket. She said she would write to me. The weather was beyond perfect. It must really be over, I said to him when I heard he’d been requested to come to Sekopololo to help with accounts.
His drive for it to be over was so strong and pathetic that I fell into line. Now we can go, I said. Your work is done and Tsau is a normal place: it has beggars, prostitution, and crime. The Basarwa were the beggars, the night men were the prostitutes, and I was for the moment taking the stance that Raboupi’s evanition might in fact be a crime. He bridled hugely. I apologized for being flippant.
I knew what was happening. He was trying to take asylum in professionalism. Tsau, after all, was his profession. The message was that I should stick to my lares and penates while he got on with his work. A brain surgeon doesn’t consult with his wife on how to attack a tumor just because he loves her and she’s a lovely person. Also the message was that it was time for me to see myself not so unqualifiedly as a colleague.
That was it for then. Never mind that I could see him filling up with sadness like a shirtcuff inadvertently dipping into an inkwell. One way he had of reminding me of how much older than I he was was by recalling that when he was in grammar school they had had inkwells set into each desk, and ink monitors to fill them. You had to be careful not to dip your sleeve into them. I was post-inkwell. So much of my imagery comes from stories and asides of Nelson’s it shocks me. I don’t want it. It isn’t as though my own life hasn’t been fairly vivid in its own way.
Cues not to entertain the idea of getting Nelson back to America rained on me. I forget what the issue was, unless it was neither the Democrats nor the Republicans having anything to say against South Africa going back into Angola and murdering hundreds at Xangongo that August, but I was getting bitter references to the hopelessness of American political life, the two parties should be called the Duplicrats and the Replicans, and so on. I was tempted to say Then why don’t you go back to the U.S., the flagship of the thing you see destroying the world, be a man, jump into the fiery furnace, run for Congress or start a movement or something. And I felt like adding that that’s what I’d do if I were a man with all his attributes and felt as strongly as he seemed to.
Clay-Shuttered Doors
Denoon’s response to even my feeblest attempts at asking burning questions reminded me of one of my favorite adolescent reading experiences. He was like the mother in Clay-Shuttered Doors. A mother gets terminally ill and is on her deathbed. But her family gathers around her and somehow their love and need for her are so kinetic that although she actually dies this love force somehow reanimates her. She’s not fully alive and there are oddities about her that prove it, such as her breath being ice cold. She manages to drag around the house for a week or so, responding to simple questions and the like, making scrambled eggs but nothing more complicated. Then it’s all too much and she dies all the way. This was Nelson in that period. We had two or three very nice passages of rain. In normal times this would have elevated him enormously. But he was pro forma toward it.
He answered my questions in good faith, I thought, but in a labored and not fully engaged way. It seemed like such an effort for him that I thought I might precipitate something untoward if I kept it up, so I fell back on my all-purpose recourse of scriptomania and made a list of all the questions that I might someday ask, when he was himself again and we could solve things according to the dictates of reason, the right questions to ask to elucidate the matter of leaving Tsau versus staying forever. These were questions like Would you be planning to stay if you had children to raise? That would have been a disastrous question, I realize in retrospect, because it suggested that he had created something second rate but good enough for other people’s children, or it suggested I might think so, if he and I had children together, or a child. It would also have struck him that I might, through this question, be subtly asking him to get me pregnant, asking please to be allowed to define myself in the world by offspring of his and their no doubt similarly worldshaking accomplishments to come. I have no idea if I’m maternal or not, but this wasn’t the way to find out. Another question might have been Would this be happening between us if we were legally married?
Since the questions I was entertaining were for my eyes only and could always be triaged, I felt free to get ultra vires if I felt like it. Some were what he hated most, pop psychological, as in Is there anything that might be helpful to you in deciding about this if you looked at your parental constellation, id est the idea that you might be carrying out a paternal mission, converting his philoradicalism into the real thing, and at the same time creating a society your saintly mother would be proud of, in which women are supposedly never harmed by men and where temperance is queen, which also retroactively rules the cause of your father’s downfall out of existence? I’m not quite the deadly enemy of pop psychology I’m afraid I let Nelson assume I was. I’m a true eclectic. In fact I once even vaguely thought about becoming a Transactional Analyst, because they had wonderfully simple certification procedures and I don’t think you can argue with the idea that internalized family dynamics are to some degree or other critical in what we are. This was during my continual search for economic fallbacks. Nelson never fully appreciated how determined I was not to fall into poverty in America, into debt in particular. I knew what that was. Even when I went ultra vires there were limits. In none of my questions do the words midlife crisis appear, for instance.