Information about the book
The hearse pulled onto a scrubby track, traveled several hundred feet, and stopped. The passenger door opened, followed by the driver’s door. Two men stepped out. They walked to the rear door, and to- gether the men slid out a coffin and laid it carefully on the ground. They returned to the car, struggled with something inside, and dragged out a limp body. It was so covered with road dust, its face was gone.
The driver splashed a bucket of water over it, nudged it with a toe. Rivulets ran down the side of one cheek, water etching through dust to walnut-colored skin.
“He’s late, no more in this world,” the passenger said.
The eyelids fluttered, and the driver said,“See, you are wrong.” They stood a moment and watched the man on the ground. Then they loaded the coffin back into the hearse and fled. There would be trou- ble when the man came to. Or if he didn’t, there would also be trouble.
The sun was risen above the first line of scrub when Isaac opened an eye. The light hurt. The hearse was gone, and with it the small card- board suitcase his brother Nthusi had given him. A wind blew close to the ground, kicking up a fine dust, covering over the tracks. The dust would cover him too, he thought without interest, if he lay there long enough.
A thin white dog sat next to him, like a ghost. It frightened him when he turned his head and saw her. He was not expecting a dog, es- pecially not a dog of that sort. Normally he would have chased a strange dog away. But there was no strength in his body. He could only
lie on the ground. I am already dead, he thought, and this is my companion. When you die, you are given a brother or a sister for your journey, and this creature is white so it can be seen in the land of the dead. The white dog’s nose pointed away from him. From time to time, her eyes looked sideways in his direction and looked away. Her ears were back, her paws folded one over the other. She was a stately dog, a proper-acting dog.
A cigarette wrapper tumbled across the ground, stopped a moment, and blew on. A cream soda can lay under a stunted acacia, its orange la- bel faded almost to white. Seeing those things, he thought, I am not dead. You would not be finding trash in the realm of the dead.
He heard a voice nearby, a woman calling to a child, scolding. He sat up. No part of his body was unbruised. Which country was he in? Had he made it over the border?
He called to the woman, but she didn’t appear to hear him. She stood with a child near a makeshift dwelling made of cardboard, propped up with a couple of wooden posts, with a roof of rusted iron and blue plastic sheeting. She gripped her child tight around his upper arm, and with the other hand splashed water from a large coffee tin. Her boy struggled and broke free, running so fast that tiny droplets of water fell out behind him.“Moemedi!” she cried.
“Dumela, mma,” Isaac said in greeting, getting to his feet and wob- bling toward her.
She eyed him. Clouds of dust rose as he struck his pants with his hands.“Where am I? Which country am I in?”
She didn’t answer.
He stood silently, and then said,“Please, mma, am I in Botswana?” “Ee, rra.” Yes, sir.
His palm traveled down the length of his face, as though opening a curtain. His eyes filled with relief and with the fear of the kilometers between him and his mother and brothers and sisters and all he’d known and understood and embraced and finally escaped.
The woman must have seen the boy inside the man, lost like a young goat in the desert.“Where is your mother?” she asked.
“Pretoria.”
“Your father?” “Johannesburg.”
“What are you doing here?” He was unable to speak.
“Do you want tea?”
“Ee, mma.” He took a step toward her and fell backward onto the dog. As he was going down, his eye caught the soda can in the bushes. The sky had been blue, the dog white, but now the dog was blue and the sky white.
“You are drunk.”
“No, mma, I’ve had nothing to drink.”
“My husband is a jealous man. You cannot stay here,” she said. Her body was already bent, even though her boy was young, running, run- ning with his friends among thorns and discarded tin cans. She disap- peared into the cardboard shack while Isaac sat on the ground with the white dog. Long ago before he’d gone to school, he remembered his mother telling him that there were oceans on Earth. She said that the water was so big, you could not see to the land on the other side. She’d heard that the water threads connected to the moon, so when the moon grew larger, the waters also grew larger, like an older brother sharing food with a younger brother. But she didn’t know where the big water came from and went back to. Maybe to the center of the Earth, she told him, where it can’t be seen, flowing underneath. His head felt like that water, with the moon pulling on it, the waters going back and forth.
The woman came back out of her house, with a tin mug. She brought a small stool for him to sit on. He stretched out his hand re- spectfully, right one reaching, left touching the right elbow. He bowed his head in thanks.
She sat on a rock near him and studied his face. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.” “Are you hungry?” “Ee, mma.”
She rose again and came back with a bowl of sorghum porridge. She poured reconstituted powdered milk on it and gave him a spoon. “Who hurt you?” she asked.
“No one.”
“Why are you not telling the truth?”
“The journey hurt me. No one person. I traveled out of South Af- rica in a compartment under a casket.”
“Surely not. But I did see a large car travel up that track. I saw the men pull you out and throw you on the ground. When you spoke to me, I thought if I do not speak, if I pretend I don’t see it, that thing will return to the dead.”
He smiled.
“You did not have money for the train?”
“The train was not possible.” His friend Kopano passed in front of his eyes. Two men, wearing the uniform of the South African Defense Force, walking toward a van, no hurry. The train disgorging steam be- side the platform. The conductor: Get your dirty kaffir hands ojJ.
It did not matter whether she believed him or not. Now, the prob- lem was not the journey that brought him here, but where to sleep to- night and the night after. In the darkness, it is said that you must hold on to one another by the robe. But where was the robe? He would need to leave here. He would thank this woman and be gone.
“What is this place called?” he asked the woman. Makeshift dwell- ings stretched as far as you could see.
“Naledi.”
From what can you not make a house? Oil drums, grass, mud, sheets of torn plastic, tires, wooden vegetable crates, banged-up doors ripped from cars and trucks. Each place was called home by someone, maybe ten people, sleeping side by side on the floor, crawling out in daylight, when the sun is drying the blades of short grass that the goats have not yet eaten, drying the leaves of the acacia trees with its heat. For a few moments only, this Naledi would be wreathed in morning mist. Would he be here tomorrow to see it? He put his hand out without thinking and touched the fur of the dog.
“When did you come here?” he asked the woman.
“It doesn’t matter when I came. The government says they are go- ing to knock down all the houses.”
“What will you do then?”
“Ga ke itse.” She shrugged. I don’t know.“They’ll bring the bulldoz- ers and knock the houses down, and then the people will come back and build the houses again.” She looked as though he should know these things. He watched her as she disappeared around the other side of the house.
Outside Pretoria, where he’d lived, the police came after the sun had set. You could hear people crying that they were coming. In the dark- ness they ran. They jumped over fences and disappeared into the night. There were no maps for where they went. They rose from their beds and climbed out their windows, and each moment was a place they didn’t know and had never been. With the sound of the police vans, thousands departed under the rags of darkness. His mother didn’t have legal papers. She barricaded the door and hid under the bed and told the children to be as still as stones. But the baby cried and the police knocked the door down and they put his mother in prison for seven- teen days. When she was gone, there was no food except grass and sto- len mealie meal. Their stomachs heaved and sorrowed with emptiness. The bitter heart eats its owner, his mother said when she returned. He didn’t know whether she was telling him that her heart had been eaten, or that he must be careful not to let himself be eaten. After that, she sent her young children, all but the baby, to live with her mother in the place the whites called the homeland, which was nobody’s homeland, only a desolate place no one else wanted. His mother had to stay in Pretoria, where there was work for her. She’d told Isaac, as the second oldest, that he was not to cry for her, but sometimes when she was gone and the wind had blown across the empty ground and drowned the sounds of the night, he couldn’t help the feelings that rose in his throat and spilled out of his eyes.
He wanted to tell the woman in the cardboard house these things, but he couldn’t; his silence was the silence of an old lion that’s been left behind. And then he thought, no one has left you behind. You are the one who’s left everyone behind.
The woman returned, and he told her, “Ke batla tiro.” I must find work.
“Do you know English?”
“Enough.” He didn’t tell her he’d finished four years of university back home and started medical school. What was the point? He had no papers, no one would believe he had anything to offer but the strength of his back.
“Then you must go into the town and ask for gardening work at each house. Do you know how to say this in English?”
“I can say it.”
“But they won’t hire you,” she said.“You are too dirty. Take off your shirt and give it to me.” She went around the side of her house and poured water out of a five-gallon oil can into the coffee tin she’d used when she’d tried to wash her boy.
Isaac felt light-headed from the sweet tea and porridge. He couldn’t see properly. He went to push up his glasses, but he found now that they were lost, probably in the bottom of the compartment under the casket. A single crease of worry marked the skin between his eyes, as though a thumbnail had carved it. He ran his hands over what re- mained of his hair, which, in his doubt and fear about leaving, he’d shaved, as though the straight razor moving over his head had been a holiness, the marking of an end, a kind of benediction. He was a solidly built man, eyes a deep well of intelligence, eyebrows like a bush. His ears were at a slight angle from his head, as though curious. His bottom lip was full, his top lip not. In his face was a kindness mixed with a cer- tain ferocity.
The woman slapped Isaac’s shirt against a rock, dipped it in the cof- fee can and slapped it again. She must have been pretty once. Her breasts were large and her bottom was firm. He thought her husband was a lucky man. She was a brightness in this place called Naledi.
He stood shakily and went around the back of the house to relieve himself. The white dog followed and stood by his side. High above his head, a black-shouldered kite circled. The bird did a great arc in the sky, turning its head with small jerks. Isaac peed into the hot dirt. His head felt wooly, his thoughts scraped down to bone.
When he returned, his shirt was draped over a post, and the woman had disappeared.
He went back and sat on the stool, and she crept up behind him and poured the shirt water over his head. He leapt up in anger, and then his anger trickled down his breast and onto his belly as laughter. The woman fetched more water and told him to wash. She gave him a stick to brush his teeth, and when he’d finished he smiled into her face, and she smiled too, and then she looked away and banged the coffee tin with the heel of her hand and yelled for her son. But the boy was gone, running wild over the goat paths with his friends.
“Leina la gago ke mang?” he asked her.
“Luscious Moatlhaping,” she said. “That is my name.” She didn’t ask his.
“When it dries,” she said, pointing her chin at his shirt,“you will go.” But he couldn’t think about that yet, could hardly keep his chin from falling onto his chest.
He lay down in the sun and dreamt troubled dreams, of pursuit, of open veldt that gave no cover or shelter. When he woke, sweating and confused, there was no sign of the woman, only the dog keeping watch. His head hurt. The wind had blown his shirt off the post. As he put it on, he faintly smelled the woman. It gave him strength. He wanted to give her something before he left, but he had nothing. In the suitcase, his brother had packed three shirts, a pair of pants, mhago for the journey—oranges and sweet biscuits. The undertaker who transported the dead would be eating the food and wearing his brother’s shirts.
His feet were unsteady when he set out. From a distance came the sound of shebeen music. He pictured cartons of Chibuku strewn about, the taste of sorghum beer, raw and sour with the haste of brewing, old men with red eyes. The music grew louder. He felt someone follow- ing him, turned around, and there was the white dog, trotting behind, just close enough to keep him in sight.
“Tsamaya! ” he said, flinging his arms in the air. The dog cowered and crouched down.
“Tsamaya! ” he yelled again. Go away! He stooped down and pre- tended to pick up a rock, and she slunk away, looking over her
shoulder. He set forth again, but when he turned, there she was, trot- ting the same distance behind him.
The shebeen was close now. Then he saw them: sitting on their rick- ety kgotla chairs in the shade of an acacia were the same sorts of old men he’d seen a hundred times at home in South Africa.
“Dumelang, borra,” he greeted them. They stared suspiciously. “Lo tsogile jang?” How are you?
“Re tsogile,” said the oldest, continuing the greeting.
He pulled up a three-legged stool and sat a little distance from a man with grizzled salt and pepper stubble on his chin. On the radio, a new group was singing, a woman wailing. Her voice sounded like the yelp- ing of a wild dog. So much animal. You’d want to know that woman. You’d also want to keep your distance.
“Which way to town?”
“Go that way,” said the oldest man.“Follow the path, and there is the road. Northward is the town.” He waited for Isaac to say where he came from and where he was going but was met with silence. The less people knew about where he’d come from, the safer for everyone. Isaac rose to his feet, thanked them, and was gone.
The path was strewn with goat droppings and cans. Behind him, the music grew fainter. He heard a rumble in the distance, and as he emerged from the bush he was enveloped in the dust of a three-ton truck traveling south in the direction of Lobatse, sliding through the sand like a wounded beast. With every step, he shed parts of himself— friends he’d never see again, debts of kindness he’d never repay, empty hopes, his biochemistry notebook, his anatomy and physiology book as thick as a fist. He was surprised how fast that life was dropping from him. He thought how soon he’d be unable to imagine himself walking on the streets that had been his home, how even the memories would fade to ghosts and then to nothing. He wanted to chase after them, but he would be running backward.
The future was blank. Only two days ago, it had been inhabited with obligations and dreams, by soft-eyed Boitumelo, by his mother, and by Moses and his other brothers and sisters; it had been pointing the way to sweetness like a honey badger running toward a hive. He pictured his little brother Moses sitting on the ground, his hands fashioning a car from bits of tin can and wire he’d found here and there. You hold the future for others, not only for yourself.
His mind swirled, became confused, remembered things he didn’t want to remember. Back home, a few months before he left, he’d walked out one late afternoon to buy a half loaf of bread, and he’d seen a crowd catch a middle-aged man suspected of complicity with the South African Defense Force. They took that man, and they beat him with sticks and tire irons; they kicked him in the belly, and when he was unable to stand, they sat him in the middle of the road, forced a tire over his head, drenched it with gasoline, and lit it. There was noth- ing to do but turn away.
The sun was becoming hotter now. The path scrubbed along beside the main road, a road for feet. A group of men were coming his way, kicking up sand. He sensed trouble, but there was no time to get out of their way. He walked slowly to one side to let them by, dropping his eyes. He saw two large, flat feet pass by, then smaller dark feet in flip- flops. The third set of feet, wearing black leather shoes without socks, stopped in front of him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Isaac pushed past.
“Stop!” said the voice.
He broke into a run, but the hunger made his legs sluggish. He tried to push his body forward but it refused, and then he felt his shirt pulled backward.
“Isaac Muthethe!”
No one knew him here, he knew no one. How did the police get his name? He chopped at the hand holding him.
“What the fuck,” said a voice, half laughing.
He turned to find Amen, an old classmate from secondary school. “I thought you were the police.”
“You beggar,” Amen laughed, “do we look like police?” He picked up Isaac’s hand and held it.“This is my friend,” he said to the others.
Isaac looked into Amen’s face, which had changed, hardened. He’d had no idea he was here and suspected he was doing ANC work. He’d grown a beard, a scraggly “O” around his mouth which crept from his chin to his ears, partly covering a dimple in his right cheek—a feature that had made him look mock-innocent in school but now looked mistaken.
“Kopano is dead,” Isaac said. “I was beside him when they killed him. It’s no longer safe to stay back home.”
“I didn’t know.”
They walked a few steps.“So you will avenge his death.”
Isaac stopped. “What does that mean to avenge a death—kill once, twice, three times more? Where does it end?”
Amen’s eyes were set wide, one looking left while the other looked straight ahead so that it was impossible to escape his gaze.
“I’m saving my own life, that’s all.”
“If you’re saying you’re a coward, Isaac Muthethe, you’re not the
Isaac I once knew. Where are you staying?” “I have no place.”
“Where did you stay last night?” “I was over the border last night.”
“Come to my house. I have a wife now. And a little girl. Also with us are three comrades, and another woman and her child. What’s one more?” He looked at the white dog. “Did you bring this one with you?”
“No.” The dog moved back a few paces and hunched beside a bush. The word “comrades” meant that it was true: Amen was working with MK, the military wing of the ANC. Botswana was the staging area for violent acts against the South African Defense Force across the border. It was not work he himself could do. Not because he was afraid to die. Was that true? Maybe he couldn’t spare his own precious life for some- thing bigger. Why else had he fled? “Yes, I’ll come with you,” said Isaac. Later, he’d look back and see that this moment led to another that led all the way down a road he’d never meant to travel.
“First we must see someone,” said Amen.
The group walked back into the twisted paths of Naledi. Again, the white dog trailed at a distance. The music of the shebeen grew louder again. The same men still sat under the tree.
Beyond the packed dirt where the old men drank,Amen took a path to the right. After five minutes, they turned left, and then right, and then right again. Then down a smaller path, a single rut, finally stop- ping in front of a door—really a piece of rubber from a truck bed that was tacked over an opening. “Wait here,” said Amen to Isaac while the rest went inside.
Isaac sat in the dust, looking in the direction of Kgale Hill. There was talk, low in the throats of the men inside, and the sound of one man speaking, first contemptuously, then pleading. It seemed he owed them something. His voice reminded Isaac of the way people back home implored a policeman: a voice stripped of its manhood, a faltering don’t-hurt-me sound, an eating-dirt, empty ragman voice. He thought about lifting the piece of rubber to see what was happening. And then the sounds grew worse. If it had been one man to one man . . . but that wasn’t what it was. Meno a diphiri. The teeth of hyenas.
The dog whined.
“O a lwala,” he told her. He’s sick, that man in there. “Soon he’ll be better . . .”A fist or shoe bore down. The man groaned. He’d heard that Botswana was a peace-loving country, that you could sleep safely in your bed at night. Now things had gone quiet, and he felt afraid.
The rubber door trembled.“Pah!” said Amen, slapping out.“He shat his pants!”
Isaac turned away. That meant he was alive, he supposed. The others moved away from the door.
He looked at Amen.“What did you do it for?” “He was one of us, and he tried to turn his back.” “So what will happen?”
Amen spat and started down the path.“He’ll go home,” he said over his shoulder.
“And be arrested,” Isaac said. “Maybe not, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” said Isaac. “You won’t live to be thirty if you keep using your fists.”
Amen stopped and turned to face him.“This isn’t what I choose ei- ther, understand? But you like what’s happening back home? You like it? Then go back there, man. Ha! Go back and enjoy the life they’ve carved out for you. Live in a little rotting box. Scuttle out onto the street like a cockroach.”
I’ll stay with him for a few days, Isaac thought. Only a few days.
