“But I really did once see a naked woman dodging around near some rondavels late one night, out near Mosimane. It was only a glimpse. No doubt it was innocent. But she did have something white and shimmering around her waist. We were driving past. You begin to wonder.”
She waited. He was silent.
“Something’s bothering you,” she said.
He denied it.
She said, “At any rate, don’t you think it’s interesting that there are no women members of the so-called traditional doctors’ association? I know a member, what an oaf! I think it’s a smoke-screen association. They want you to think they’re just a benign bunch of herbalists trying out one thing or another, a lot of which ought to be in the regular pharmacopeia if only white medical people weren’t so narrow-minded. They come to seminars all jolly and humble. But if you talk to the Batswana, you know that it’s the women, the witches, who are the really potent ones.”
Still he was silent.
“Something’s happened, hasn’t it? To upset you. If it’s anything I’ve said, please tell me.” A maternal tone could be death. She was flirting with failure.
He denied that she was responsible in any way. It seemed sincere. He was going inward again, right before her eyes. She had a code name for failures. She called them case studies. Her attitude was that every failure could be made to yield something of value for the future. And it was true. Some of her best material, anecdotes, references to things, aphrodisiana of all kinds, had come from case studies. The cave paintings at Gargas, in Spain, of mutilated hands … hand prints, not paintings … stencils of hundreds of hands with joints and fingers missing. Archaeologists were totally at odds as to what all that meant. One case study had yielded the story of fat women in Durban buying tainted meat from butchers so as to contract tapeworms for weight loss purposes. As a case study, if it came to that, tonight looked unpromising. But you could never tell. She had an image for case studies: a grave robber, weary, exhausted, reaching down into some charnel mass and pulling up a lovely ancient sword somehow miraculously still keen that had been overlooked. She could name case studies that were more precious to her than bingoes she could describe.
She had one quiver left. She meant arrow. She hated using it.
She could oppose her silence to his until he broke. It was difficult to get right. It ran counter to being a host, being a woman, and to her own nature. The silence had to be special, not wounded, receptive, with a spine to it, maternal, in fact.
She declared silence. Slow moments passed.
He stirred. His lips stirred. He got up and began pacing.
He said, “You’re right.” Then for a long time he said nothing, still pacing.
“You read my mind!” he said. “Last night I had an experience … I still … it’s still upsetting. I shouldn’t have come, I guess.”
She felt sorry for him. He had just the slightest speech defect, which showed up in noticeable hesitations. This was sad.
“Please tell me about it,” she said perfectly.
He paced more, then halted near the candle and stared at it.
“I hardly drink,” he said. “Last night was an exception. Phoning home to Vancouver started it, domestic nonsense. I won’t go into that. They don’t understand. No point in going into it. I went out. I went drinking. One of the hotel bars, where Africans go. I began drinking. I was drinking and buying drinks for some of the locals. I drank quite a bit.
“All right. These fellows are clever. Bit by bit I am being taken over by one, this one fellow, George. I can’t explain it. I didn’t like him. He took me over. That is, I notice I’m paying for drinks but this fellow’s passing them on to whomever he chooses, his friends. But I’m buying. But I have no say.
“We’re in a corner booth. It’s dark and loud, as usual. This fellow, his head was shaved, he was strong-looking. He spoke good English, though. Originally, I’d liked talking to him, I think. They flatter you. He was a combination of rough and smooth. Now he was working me. He was a refugee from South Africa, that always starts up your sympathy. Terrible breath, though. I was getting a feeling of something being off about the ratio between the number of drinks and what I was laying out. I think he was taking something in transit.
“I wanted to do the buying. I took exception. All right. Remember that they have me wedged in. That was stupid, but I was, I allowed it. Then I said I was going to stop buying. George didn’t like it. This man had a following. I realized they were forming a cordon, blocking us in. Gradually it got nasty. Why wouldn’t I keep buying drinks, didn’t I have money, what was my job, didn’t the Ministry pay expatriates enough to buy a few drinks? — so on ad nauseam.”
His color was coming back. He picked up a cocktail napkin and touched at his forehead.
He was looking straight at her now. He said, “You don’t know what the African bars are like. Pandemonium. I was sealed off. As I say, his friends were all around.
“Then it was all about apartheid. I said I was Canadian. Then it was about Canada the lackey of America the supporter of apartheid. I’m not political. I was scared. All right. When I tell him I’m really through buying drinks he asks me how much money have I got left, exactly. I tell him again that I’m through buying drinks. He says not to worry, he’ll sell me something instead. All right. I knew I was down to about ten pula. And I had dug in on buying drinks, the way you will when you’ve had a few too many. No more buying drinks, that was decided. But he was determined to get my money, I could damned well see that.
“He said he would sell me something I’d be very glad to know. Information. All right. So then comes a long run-around on what kind of information. Remember that he’s pretty well three sheets to the wind himself. It was information I would be glad to have as a doctor, he said.
“Well, the upshot here was that this is what I proposed, so as not to seem totally stupid and taken. I would put all my money down on the table in front of me. I took out my wallet and made sure he could see that what I put down was all of it, about ten pula, change and everything. All right. And I would keep the money under the palm of my hand. And he would whisper the information to me and if I thought it was a fair trade I would just lift my hand. Of course, this was all just face-saving on my part so as not to just hand over my money to a thug. And don’t think I wasn’t well aware it might be a good idea at this stage of things to be seen getting rid of any cash I had, just to avoid being knocked down on the way to my car.”
“This is a wonderful story,” she said spontaneously, immediately regretting it.
“It isn’t a story,” he said.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “I mean, since I see you standing here safe and sound I can assume the ending isn’t a tragedy. But please continue. Really.”
“In any event. There we are. There was more back and forth over what kind of information this was. Finally he says it’s not only something a doctor would be glad of. He is going to tell me the secret of how they are going to make the revolution in South Africa, a secret plan. An actual plan.
“God knows I have no brief for white South Africans. I know a few professionally, doctors. Medicine down there is basically about up to 1950, in my opinion, despite all this veneer of the heart transplants. But the doctors I know seem to be decent. Some of them hate the system and will say so.
“I go along. Empty my wallet, cover the money with my hand.
“Here’s what he says. They had a sure way to drive out the whites. It was a new plan and was sure to succeed. It would succeed because they, meaning the blacks, could bring it about with only a handful of men. He said that the Boers had won for all time if the revolution meant waiting for small groups to grow into bands and then into units, battalions and so on, into armies that would fight the Boers. The Boers were too intelligent and had too much power. They had corrupted too many of the blacks. The blacks were divided. There were too many spies for the Boers among them. The plan he would tell me would take less than a hundred men.