The first part of the message is straightforward enough. Where it takes me is not. G’s being pronounced as H’s, Manhope has to mean Mangope, the dictator of the bantustan across the border that would someday like to engulf Botswana because they’re all Tswana after all, and there are five million of them under Mangope and only one million in Botswana. The Boers love Mangope’s irredentism and keep it pumped up. So this news, that Hector is a police agent working out of Mafikeng, leads in many strange surprising directions. It makes his amazing vanishment out of Tsau something that could have been arranged quite easily by the South Africans. A helicopter could have come down from the Caprivi Strip, for instance, and picked him up out at one of the pans. So it could have been meant to get Nelson ejected so that the South Africans through Mangope through Boso — and no doubt ultimately through a born-again Hector — could carry out some geopolitical maneuver for which they wanted Tsau as a base.
An interesting synergy is that the arrival of the message coincided with my decision not to go on with my Denoonian lifetime reading plan, which followed my strange surprising discoveries in the Tao Te Ching. I had never touched the Tao Te Ching until lately. This is an instance of the patchiness of my education. If I ever had touched it, that might have made a difference. I wonder. But then I haven’t read the Rig-Veda yet, either. My attitude to the East is out of The Lotus and the Robot, from my youth. What I thought when I got into the Tao was that I had the explanation of Nelson’s fall. He had made an intellectual mistake! In a moment of vertigo he had embraced something that in his right mind he would have recognized as propaganda, imperial propaganda, a noxious thing albeit very poetical. Halt! cria-t-elle, I thought, when XXXIV hit me: The way is broad, reaching left as well as right / The myriad creatures depend on it for life yet it claims no authority. / It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit. / It clothes and feeds the myriad creatures yet lays no claim to being their master. / Forever free of desire, it can be called small; yet, as it lays no claim to being master when the myriad creatures turn to it, it can be called great. / It is because it never attempts itself to be great that it succeeds in becoming great. That sent me back through the whole text. Halt! I kept thinking. Another gem was This is called subtle discernment: The submissive and weak will overcome the hard and strong. Then there was I shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block. / The nameless uncarved block is but freedom from desire, / And if I cease to desire and remain still, / The empire will be at peace of its own accord. Which I put together with something earlier: When the uncarved block shatters it becomes vessels: / The sage makes use of these and becomes the lord / Over the officials. Halt! There was more of the same, Take XLIII: The most submissive thing in the world can ride roughshod over the hardest in the world — that which is without substance entering that which has no crevices. For a day or so it was clear to me that all Nelson needed was Scientiae Athena to come back and illuminate what he had become on a dark night. He had become an impostor. The Tao Te Ching was a textbook on how to be one, and what kind to be. Or had Denoon always been an impostor without my noticing it, starting with so eloquently leading the world to expect Tsau was going to be some liberating municipal bromeliad running on sun and sweet breezes when in fact although the place was bristling and glittering with solar hardware how much did it do? A little water heating, some cooling, some grain drying? There was his marvelous personal solar crucible, but that was a toy. People had solar cookers but barely used them. And what was Tsau to him, really? Who was Tsau for?
Something had happened in the desert. Had he decided to prolong that thing for his own reasons, such as putting me to some impossible test, which I had failed, making me obsolete, and then had he prolonged his state in order to get rid of me or so he could relax into Tsau in some whole new mode involving dressing in white? So now was he sorry about it? Was this message from him: had he made the call or had it made? This was where my mind was. I’ve been over and over the list of candidates for secret caller so often it makes me sick. Could Dineo have organized the call? Would the idea be to tell me that all’s well at Tsau and I could come back, or more likely that I should descend and take away the increasingly irrelevant Nelson? Or on the other hand was it a genuine nervous breakdown thanks to his own whole particular foregoing, his mother, his father, the Tao, the events that precipitated the trip to Tikwe, the horror of his experience in the desert? But then I thought: you left to leave. Staying in his ambience like this is stupid and it is lacerative. I told myself I am hardly going to save him via a marxist interpretation of the Tao, although stranger things have probably happened. Who else could have sent the message? Could? have? And what had lustrous Bronwen been about? Irritation this intense is intolerable.
The Bronwen part of the message reads Bronwen sent from Tsau after one week. That means Bronwen is no more.
And of course what finally enrages me is that it feels highly possible to me that I have been maneuvered by a liar somewhere in all this. And the thing is that Nelson knows that you lie to me at your peril. I will not have it. He had ample warning. What is to be done?
Je viens.
Why not?
GLOSSARY
S: Setswana A: Afrikaans ANC African National Congress Baherero members of the Herero tribal group bana children (S) basadi women (S) Basarwa members of the San, or Bushman tribal group batlodi bad people, spies (S) Batswana inhabitants of Botswana. A single inhabitant: Motswana (S) biltong air-dried game meats (A) BNP Botswana National Party, the (fictional) governing party in 1980–81 Boso familiar abbreviation for Botswana Social Front braai barbecue (A) chibuku commercial maize beer (S) colgrad college graduate, abbreviated in speedwriting ads cooperants development volunteers CTO Central Transport Organisation CUSO Canadian University Services Overseas Diamond Police special police branch devoted to diamond-smuggling suppression expat expatriate worker gosiame all-purpose term meaning variously: I agree; Okay; Everything’s fine (S) graywater rinsewater karosse mat or rug of pieced furs or hide kgosigadi a queen or chieftainess (S) kgotla traditional village council of (male) elders and representatives of the chief (S) klang as in “klang association”: the first thing that comes to mind when the analyst directs the patient to unmediatedly associate with a particular word or image koko knock, knock. Said to announce oneself on arrival (S) koppie island-mountain. Isolated stony hill kraal corral (A) lakhoa European (any foreigner). Pluraclass="underline" makhoa (S) lefatshe la madi country of money, country money comes from (S) lolwapa courtyard of traditional homestead (S) Mainstay South African cane liquor mealie cornmeal (A) memcon memorandum of conversation (U.S. diplomatic usage) mma mother, senior woman (S) mmamogolo old woman (S) mme my mother (S) nethouse open structure of shade-netting over beds of plants pan craterlike depression (in the Kalahari desert) paraffin kerosene permsec Permanent Secretary pula the national unit of currency; rain (S) rondavel traditional round, thatched hut (squaredavel, ovaldavel — contemporary variants) (A) rra sir, father (S) SADF South African Defence Force sakkie plastic sack (A) Selous Scouts elite counterinsurgency group in Rhodesian Army during the war of independence Setswana the national language SWAPO Southwest Africa Peoples’ Organization UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence (regime under which Rhodesia prosecuted its civil war) UNDP United Nations Development Program Waygard commercial security guards Wits University of the Witwatersrand yakuta Japanese bathrobe Zed CC Zionist Christian Church