Ali lifted it from Kokie's dusty palm and admired the geometric designs formed by red, white, and green beads. 'Here,' she said, setting it back in Kokie's grip, 'you put it on me.'
Ali bent and held her hair up so that the leper girl could get the necklace placed. She copied Kokie's solemnity. This was no tourist trinket. It was part of Kokie's beliefs. If anyone knew about evil, it had to be this poor child.
With the spread of post-apartheid chaos and a surge in AIDS brought south by Zimbabweans and Mozambiquans imported to work the gold and diamond mines, hysteria had been unleashed among the poor. Old superstitions had risen up. It was no longer news that sexual organs and fingers and ears – even handfuls of human fat
– were being stolen from morgues and used for fetishes, or that corpses lay unburied because family members were convinced the bodies would come to life again.
The worst of it by far was the witch-hunting. People said that evil was coming up from the earth. So far as Ali was concerned, people had been saying such things since the beginning of man. Every generation had its terrors. She was convinced this one had been started by diamond miners seeking to deflect public hatred away from themselves. They spoke of reaching depths in the earth where strange beings lurked. The populace had turned this nonsense into a campaign against witches. Hundreds of innocent people had been necklaced, macheted, or stoned by superstitious mobs throughout the country.
'Have you taken your vitamin pill?' Ali asked.
'Oh, ya'as.'
'And you will continue taking your vitamins after I'm gone?'
Kokie's eyes shifted to the dirt floor. Ali's departure was a terrible pain for her. Again, Ali could not believe the suddenness of what was happening. It was only two days ago that she had received the letter informing her of the change.
'The vitamins are important for the baby, Kokie.'
The leper girl touched her belly. 'Ya'as, the baby,' she whispered joyfully. 'Every day. Sun come up. The vitamin pill.'
Ali loved this girl, because God's mystery was so profound in its cruelty toward her.
Twice Kokie had attempted suicide and both times Ali had saved her. Eight months ago the suicide attempts had stopped. That was when Kokie had learned she was pregnant.
It still surprised Ali when the sounds of lovers wafted to her in the night. The lessons were simple and yet profound. These lepers were not horrible in one another's sight. They were blessed, beautiful, even dressed in their poor skin.
With the new life growing inside her, Kokie's bones had taken on flesh. She had begun talking again. Mornings, Ali heard her murmuring tunes in a hybrid dialect of Siswati and Zulu, more beautiful than birdsong.
Ali, too, felt reborn. She wondered if this, perhaps, was why she'd ended up in Africa. It was as if God were speaking to her through Kokie and all the other lepers and refugees. For months now, she had been anticipating the birth of Kokie's child. On a rare trip to Jo'burg, she'd purchased Kokie's vitamins with her own allowance and borrowed several books on midwifery. A hospital was out of the question for Kokie, and Ali wanted to be ready.
Lately, Ali had begun dreaming about it. The delivery would be in a hut with a tin roof surrounded by thorn brush, maybe this hut, this bed. Into her hands a healthy infant would emerge to nullify the world's corruption and sorrows. In one act, innocence would triumph.
But this morning Ali's realization was bitter. I will never see the child of this child. For Ali was being transferred. Thrown back into the wind. Yet again. It didn't matter that she had not finished here, that she had actually begun drawing close to the truth. Bastards. That was in the masculine, as in bishoprick.
Ali folded a white blouse and laid it in her suitcase. Excuse my French, O Lord. But they were beginning to make her feel like a letter with no address.
From the moment she'd taken her vows, this powder blue Samsonite suitcase had been her faithful companion. First to Baltimore for some ghetto work, then to Taos for a little monastic 'airing out,' then to Columbia University to blitzkrieg her dissertation. After that, Winnipeg for more street-angel work. Then a year of postdoc at the Vatican Archives, 'the memory of the Church.' Then the plum assignment, nine months in Europe as an attaché – an addetti di nunziatura – assisting the papal diplomatic delegation at NATO nuclear nonproliferation talks. For a twenty-seven-year-old country girl from west Texas, it was heady stuff. She'd been selected as much for her longtime connection with U.S. Senator Cordelia January as for her training in linguistics. They'd played her like a pawn, of course. 'Get used to it,' January had counseled her one evening. 'You're going places.' That was for sure, Ali thought, looking around the hut.
Very obviously the Church had been grooming her – formation, it was called – though for what she couldn't precisely say. Until a year ago, her CV had showed nothing but steady ascent. Blue sky, right up to her fall from grace. Abruptly, no explanations offered, no second chances offered, they'd sent her to this refugee colony tucked in the wilds of San – or Bushman – country. From the glittering capitals of Western civilization straight into the Stone Age, they had drop-kicked her to the rump of the planet, to cool her heels in the Kalahari desert with a bogus mission.
Being Ali, she had made the most of it. It had been a terrible year, in truth. But she was tough. She'd coped. Adapted. Flourished, by God. She'd even started to peel away the folklore of an 'elder' tribe said to be hiding in the backcountry.
At first, like everyone else, Ali had dismissed the notion of an undiscovered Neolithic tribe existing on the cusp of the twenty-first century. The region was wild, all right, but these days it was crisscrossed by farmers, truckers, bush planes, and field scientists – people who would have spied evidence before now. It had been three months before Ali had started taking the native rumors seriously.
What was most exciting to her was that such a tribe did seem to exist, and that its
evidence was mostly linguistic. Wherever this strange tribe was hiding, there seemed to be a protolanguage alive in the bush! And day by day she was closing in on it.
For the most part, her hunt had to do with the Khoisan, or Click, language spoken by the San. She had no illusions about ever mastering their language herself, especially the system of clicks that could be dental, palatal, or labial, voiced, voiceless, or nasal. But with the help of a San ¡Kung translator, she'd begun assembling a set of words and sounds they only expressed in a certain tone. The tone was deferential and religious and ancient, and the words and sounds were different from anything else in Khoisan. They hinted at a reality that was both old and new. Someone was out there, or had been long ago. Or had recently returned. And whoever they were, they spoke a language that predated the prehistoric language of the San.