He was holding the wine in his mouth for longer than usual before swallowing it, for no particular reason.
Our suffering is so trivial, he thought. His thought surprised him. He wondered what suffering he was talking about, aside from being in need sexually, thanks to Ione, a minor thing and natural under the circumstances. He was in favor of her vacation. He swallowed his Riesling. Africa was suffering, but that wasn’t it. He knew that much. Because a central thing about Africans was how little they complained. Whites complained at the drop of a hat. Africans would walk around for weeks with gum abscesses before coming in for treatment, even when treatment was next to free. People were losing their cattle to the drought, and cattle were everything. But the Batswana kept voting for the ruling party and never complaining. His point eluded him. He gave up. Occasionally it hurt him to think about Susan, because in a way he had lost her to superstition, to Lutheranism. If you told anybody that, they would think you were kidding, claiming to be suffering over something trivial. They would say you were overreacting. His daughter was a deaconess, the last he’d heard. That was up to her. What was a deaconess?
He drank directly from the bottle. He liked the sound of liquid going into him. He thought, It’s easy to forget how remarkable it is that every member of the male race carries a pouch hung on the front of our body full of millions of living things swimming into each other. He cupped his naked scrotum to see if he could feel movement. He thought he could. The wine reminded him of Germany. Everybody should see the Rhine. But when he’d suggested it, Ione had said she hated Germany. So did the Germans, apparently, who were ceasing to reproduce — voting with their genitals, so to speak. Germany was green and beautiful. So why were the Batswana reproducing like Trojans in their hot wasteland of a country? Fecundity was everywhere. Women began reproducing when they were still children. Everywhere there were women with babies tied to their backs and other babies walking along behind them. At thirteen or fourteen they considered themselves women. Batswana schoolgirls looked like they were getting ready for sex from menarche onward. They went around with the back zippers on their school uniforms half-undone, their shoes unlaced half the time, as if they were trying to walk out of their clothes. They were always reaching into their bodices, was another thing, feeling and adjusting themselves. They were unselfconscious. He wondered if they knew what that kind of thing looked like to makhoa? Batswana men didn’t seem to notice it. He reminded himself not to judge. Women in general were a closed book, Ione excepted. And women in somebody else’s culture added up to two closed books. What could a lakhoa really know about the Batswana, especially the women? A lot of things were said about them that were probably lies — for instance, that they had enlarged labia because their mothers encouraged them to stretch them as a sign of beauty. That was in the north. Probably it was no longer done. It was called macronympha.
It might be a good idea to eat. He was getting that feeling of elevation in the top of his head, from the wine. The top of his head felt like it was made out of something lighter than bone, something like pumice. He went to the window. Christie was having dinner. His kitchen light was on.
What were Christie’s secrets? He was an elderly Brit, a bachelor or widower. It was no fun living next door to Christie, with only a wire fence between them and both houses on narrow plots. Frank thought of the time he and Ione had gotten into a mood, acting stupid, slamming doors on each other. One of them had slammed a door on the other by accident. Then the other had taken the next opportunity to slam a door back. It had escalated into slamming doors all over the house, a contest, and both of them laughing like crazy. So it had been slightly hysterical. It had been leading to sex. But then, naturally, the next thing they knew Christie had come out of his house to stand at the fence and stare in their direction, a gaze as blank and pitiless as the Sphinx, or as the sun, rather. Christie was left over from the days when Botswana was Bechuanaland. He was with the railway. He had applied for Botswana citizenship, which was tough to get these days. Probably Christie hated the idea of leaving the perfect medium for inflicting his religion on people to his last gasp. Christie’s religion was restriction: no drinking, no smoking, no sex, no dancing. That was the real business of the Scripture Union, which Christie was upper echelon in. Christie was at home too much, was part of the problem. He even held prayer meetings at home, endless events. Christie seemed to hate Ione and vice versa. There was serious bad blood there. Christie had his work cut out for him if he thought he was going to make a dent in whoring. Whoring was poor little bush babies coming to town to work as domestics and lining up outside the Holiday Inn at night to better themselves. It was upward mobility. Visiting Boers were good customers. Ione liked to use the stereo. When he’d mentioned lately that when she played it she seemed to be keeping it very low, they’d both realized it was an unconscious adaptation to Christie, their monitor.
Frank could eat or he could take aspirin and drink some more. He drifted toward the kitchen. Tomorrow was Saturday. The sound was back. There was really someone at the kitchen door. There was deliberate tapping, very soft. Sometimes Batswana came to the door selling soapstone carvings or asking for odd jobs, and their knock was so tentative you’d think it was your imagination.
Frank moved quietly through the dark kitchen. He lifted the curtain on the window over the sink. By leaning close to the glass he should be able to make out who it was on the back stoop, once his eyes adjusted.
It was a woman, a young woman. He could see the whole outline of her skull, so she was African. She stood out against the white mass of the big cistern at the corner of the house. Her breasts were developed. She was standing close to the door in a furtive way. He reached for the outdoor-light switch, but checked himself. What was happening?
The key to the kitchen door was in a saucer in the cupboard. If he put the outdoor light on it would advertise her presence to all and sundry. She didn’t want that, was his guess. This could turn out to be innocent. He was ashamed. There was no key. He calmed down. Was she still there? She must have seen his face at the window. He was feeling for the key on the wrong shelf. The keys should be kept on a hook so this would never happen again. He had the key. He set it down. He could still stop. He retied the sash of his bathrobe.