“Then he asked me, if he could tell me such a plan would it be worth the ten pula. Would I agree that it would? I said yes.”
“This is extraordinary!” she said. Duhamel! she thought, triumphant. The name had come back to her: Georges Duhamel. She could almost see the print. She was so grateful.
“Exciting!” she said, gratitude in her voice.
He was sweating. “Well, this is what he says. He leans over, whispers. The plan is simple. The plan is to assemble a shock force, he called it. Black people who are willing to give their lives. And this is all they do: they kill doctors. That’s it! They start off with a large first wave, before the government can do anything to protect doctors. They simply kill doctors, as many as they can. They kill them at home, in their offices, in hospitals, in the street. You can get the name of every doctor in South Africa through the phone book. Whites need doctors, without doctors they think they are already dying, he says. Blacks in South Africa have no doctors to speak of anyway, especially in the homelands where they are all being herded to die in droves. Blacks are dying of the system every day regardless, he says. But whites would scream. They would rush like cattle to the airports, screaming. They would stream out of the country. The planes from Smuts would be jammed full. After the first strike, you would continue, taking them by ones and twos. The doctors would leave, the ones who were still alive. No new ones would come, not even Indians. He said it was like taking away water from people in a desert. The government would capitulate. That was the plan.
“I lifted my hand and let him take the money. He said I was paying the soldiery, and he thanked me in the name of the revolution. Then I was free to go.”
He looked around dazedly for something, she wasn’t clear what. Her glass was still one third full. Remarkably, he picked it up and drained it, eating the remnants of ice.
She stood up. She was content. The story was a brilliant thing, a gem.
He was moving about. It was hard to say, but possibly he was leaving. He could go or stay.
They stood together in the living room archway. Without prelude, he reached for her, awkwardly pulled her side against his chest, kissed her absurdly on the eye, and with his free hand began squeezing her breasts.
OFFICIAL AMERICANS
It was the next day.
Not a moment too soon, Carl thought, exhausted. He watched the corona brighten around the drawn curtains. Hot light was flooding Africa one more time. His days were like nights and his nights were like days, because of the dogs. He got his rest during the day — in increments, in stolen naps at his desk or in the car, or at lunchtime at home. His days were dim, like dreams. His nights were war. The dogs began barking every night at seven, or when he went to bed, whichever came first. There were eleven dogs in the yard next door. The furor kept up until daybreak, except for weekends, when — he’d be willing to swear — it went on even later. When he came home for lunch, the dogs were laid out around Letsamao’s yard like slugs or duffel bags, sleeping in the sun — filling up with sleep.
He inched himself up into a sitting position and looked down at his sleeping darling. They had been married less than a year. Sometimes she smiled in her sleep. He loved her teeth, small and white, like mints. He had all his teeth, knock wood. Lois was twenty-eight and he was fifty-six. She was his second wife, and she was perfect. Her skin was perfect for Africa — the way she tanned beautifully. She loved Botswana’s dry climate, and in fact that reminded him to remind her to be sensitive about the drought when she was enthusing about the climate in front of people. He loved her all the time. She was grateful for everything. He had saved her from Oregon, she liked to say. She meant the climate and what it had done to her sinuses. She meant her job as a cashier in a hotel restaurant in Medford, where they had met when he was on vacation recuperating from his breakup with Elaine. Lois was unmarried when he met her, because she had been waiting for two key things in one: a man she could respect, who was also someone not fated to live in Oregon forever because of his work or family ties. She thought that his job with the Agency for International Development was wonderful, because it kept him in sunny countries and it helped the poor. She thought of AID as something like the Red Cross. She was a wonderful specimen. She was improving his life in so many ways that he couldn’t keep up with it. His salt intake was down, due to her tricks with lemon juice and so on. Also, he had always thought of hair spray as effeminate and had preferred to duck out and comb his hair nineteen times a day, with water if need be, rather than use it. But then she had shown him that the hair sprays he had tried were too strong and made his hair look like icing, and she had gotten him one that was the right strength and now his hair was fine all day and could be forgotten about. She was a helpmeet: his first. She could be an ad for health food, she looked so well. She could sleep almost at will, it seemed to him. She invariably slept through the dogs. They couldn’t keep her awake. He kept her awake, if he was restless, but not the dogs themselves.
He lowered one foot to the floor. It was amazing to him how much he wanted to be fit, these days. Of course, anyone with a young wife would want to be fit, to some extent. That was why the thing with the dogs had to be brought to an end. But his attitude toward being in shape was a hundred per cent the reverse of what it had been under Elaine, if that was the right way to put it. His attitude toward jogging was a case in point. Jogging had been invented while his back was turned — while he was in Malawi or Togo, probably. He could remember that the first time he had seen joggers, when he and Elaine had been back in New York on home leave — in an expensive hotel, naturally, on Central Park South — it was already a mass movement. Elaine had been a genius at choosing the most expensive city or country for rest and recreation. If there were two countries, one where the dollar was high and the other where it was really low, there would always be a compelling reason to go where it was most expensive. It had to be France because the springs under the Fontaine de Vaucluse were drying up, or it had to be Italy because the Villa d’Este was closing down its most unique fountains because a tire factory was polluting the water. So, there he had been, looking out the window down into beautiful, green Central Park and seeing joggers everywhere. Now he saw the point of it — he himself was walking everywhere he could — but at the time he had been able to see the joggers only as something interrupting his pleasure in looking at the park, something agitating, something that marred the beauty of the vegetation, like aphids. Lo had information about health. People were amazed when she proved to them that some salt companies were adding sugar, or some form of it, to salt.
He was up. He felt fragile, because of the dogs. By rights, he should be feeling reborn, almost. He was hardly drinking. There was Lo. He was basically through with smoking. But he felt fragile. Botswana felt dangerous to him. For instance, the floor beneath his feet. The Batswana kept waxing, no matter what was said to them. Lo was too soft. Overwaxing was still going on. At work, the cleaners waxed directly on bare concrete, on stoops, on steps. The floors blazed everywhere. They could kill you. Barefoot was safest. Thongs were dangerous on these floors.