Nine Days
I appealed to Dineo to let me have my donkey back. They could take all my credits. They could set any value on him they wanted. If my credits were short I would owe the rest and work it off nonstop. I reminded her that I had donated Baph to Sekopololo in the first place, which should have counted for something. She wanted to do it, genuinely, but now, especially, she couldn’t approve it on her own. They would have to meet on it.
What enraged me was that everything had to be so consensual, even in what I felt was a crisis. I kept saying Show me the rules that say this or that can’t be done; where is it written down? But there was very little on paper. Everything was inscribed in what people recalled.
In the midst of imploring Dineo I said something so grotesquely stupid it pains me to think of it. I said: You have no idea what you are doing — you are condemning a delightful person to death with this. I trailed off because she gave me a look of scorn I will never recover from. I was reaching the point of seeing everything in Tsau as an obstacle to my need to find and save him.
Finally it was nine days. I could find nothing better to do with my funktionslust than go up to the top of the koppie and sit there near hysteria, wondering why there was no way of bringing the Botswana Air Force into this. Why was there no person in a high place who could get me out of this, no special friend? What lack in me had produced that situation, that my only true friend was out in the thornveld with nobody helping? King James and his sister sought me out and brought me snacks, dried papaya.
The Eleventh Day
I talked to several women who had been part of the grapple plant harvest, and to some of the snake women, to see if they would consider going with me at least part of the way toward Tikwe. None was eager, except softhearted Prettyrose Chilume, a sensitive plant, fine in a group but not appropriate to go in a duo just with me. I needed a hardier companion. All my attempts at finding someone to go with were reminding me of how frightened I’d been during my crossing from Kang and how potent the residue of that fear was.
The radio was impossible. I did get a promise from Wildlife that they would attempt to contact game scouts who had passed through Tikwe sometime in the past week. This was followed by silence.
I read through my compilation on Nelson like a madwoman. It was insidious. All it did was serve to convince me that Nelson was the man, Nelson was the one I should cleave to, wherever he wanted to be. Brilliant, I told myself, how brilliant to come to this conclusion under these conditions. One thing that was absolutely certain was that this was not a man who would let someone he loved go off on an exercise supposed to last five or six days but lasting ten and then not summon up a force to go out and secure her.
However afraid I was, there was no question I had to go out, at long last, to find him. I began kitting up.
People tried to dissuade me. Dineo said an official search party would be going out soon. But she couldn’t say exactly when the party would be ready to go.
I made an abortive effort to enlist two Basarwa men. I couldn’t make myself understood. I cursed myself for not learning Sesarwa. Hector had been the local master of the language.
I got myself as ready as I could. There were no water-point maps of the area, that I knew of, except for the one I had brought with me and which Nelson had taken with him. I was ready by high noon of the eleventh day.
I was furious with Tsau, furious with the people stopping work to somberly watch me go, furious that they were letting me go off into what was undoubtedly going to be a liebestod if not a farce. Is this right? I wanted to shout at them, along with We’re only here because of you! and This is love!
It was love, but it was also, to some degree, pride. I knew this because I was thinking of my friend Anna as Tsau dropped astern. Anna went to Provincetown in the dead of winter one year in order to rusticate herself in somebody’s unused summer house so that she could finish her thesis before the deadline got her. She was working like a demon but inevitably got a little bored and went out seeking some sort of distraction, something free or cheap, because she was broke. She decided it would be a nice idea to go up the Provincetown Memorial, a thing like the Washington Monument or a minaret, on top of a hill overlooking the Atlantic. It was closed for the winter, naturally. But there was a guard or caretaker there she undertook to presume on to break the rules and let her go up. Go ahead, then, the guard said with an odd undertone in his voice, and he opened the door to the spiral staircase leading hundreds of feet up to a gallery where you could peer through slits at the sameness of the sea in all directions. The desert sea, I thought. So he opened the door for her and said This is at your own risk. She soon saw why. After the first ten or twenty steps the spiral staircase was coated with flows of solid ice, like something by Gaudí. Driven by pride, she climbed this frozen waterfall. She inched her way up in her slippery shoes, clinging to the railings every step of the way, stayed for a second at the top to let sleet blow into her nose and eyes, then inched back down to the bottom, taking forever, hours. Thanks, she said cheerily to the amazed, and by this time anxious, guard. With one misstep she could have ended up an envelope of broken bones. The muscles in her arms and legs hurt for days. This was pride at its most monumental. She had done it, she guessed, because the guard had clearly tricked her and had expected the satisfaction of seeing her do an about-face when she discovered the condition of the steps. Now there are more women working for the National Park Service. Anna didn’t make it academically. I plan to contact her.
Spikes of Alarm
I strode due north, desperate under every heading and incredulous that everything in my life, every maneuver, had combined to make it absolutely necessary that I march out directly into the jaws of death, alone, no one beside me, replicating the one experience I had learned was the one above all I should never again undergo — that is, being in a place where you were on the same footing with vicious wild animals, or rather where they are the superior power. I wanted to be out of the reach of the eyes of Tsau, not to be visible to anyone there.
At the last minute a young girl had brought me a rifle and shells, issued just as I was leaving by Dineo. The gun depressed me because it was confirmation that what I was doing was hazardous and because it was heavy. I weighed the idea of sending it back. Slung over either shoulder it was unwieldy and would slow me down. Finally I put it transversely through the top of my backpack, and that was better.
In only two or three miles it was already grueling going. The ground was softer, thanks to the rain, than during my previous expedition, at least in certain tracts it was. I was wearing the wrong kind of socks: they were Nelson’s, not mine, and they had a tendency to inch down into my boots. At least I was away from Tsau, and the world could relax into boring vistas, an occasional baobab constituting an extreme of interest.
I used my binoculars. There were too many inscrutable objects scattered around the landscape. In one case I went a long distance off my route of march to examine something that turned out to be a crumpled sheet of rotting tarpaulin. I was looking for too many different things. The remains of a fire, a body, his, or the carcass of a horse, a tent — he had taken my pop-up tent at my insistence — or some other piece of improvised shelter: these were all the kinds of things I was scanning for. I kept having spikes of alarm each time I thought I saw something. So far everything seemed to be innocent, on inspection, although inspection consisted in too many cases of simply staring harder and longer at the particular thing.