Mating

by Norman Rush

  What Country, Friends, Is This?

  Since the job of getting up night soil from the privies takes a strong back, I was volunteering for it once or twice a week. This endeared me to some of the older aunts, which was nice. I also liked doing it because it could be seen as a concrete riposte to the question Mais qui videra le pot de chambre? which was the question, as I understood from Denoon, that had bedeviled the French anarchists in the nineteenth century whenever the reorganization of society on a voluntarist basis was proposed. The answer to the question of whether I was identifying not only with Denoon but with his Weltanschauung is yes. Complex propositions being supposedly confuted by the simplest of questions never ceased to annoy him, as when pacifists were asked by the British draft boards during both wars what they would do if someone tried to rape their sisters. Presumably the scales were supposed to fall from their eyes at the brilliant simplicity of this thing they had overlooked. I loved the answer Sir I would endeavor to place myself between them, which some notable person had given.

  I was at a house on Queen Nzinga Way, just starting to work, when two children ran past in great excitement, stopped, and came back. They were looking for Rra Puleng, but in his place I should come with them to see about two makhoa coming amongst us with a weapon.

  This was baffling. I knew that a dentist was due to fly in in two weeks, but no other visitors were authorized or expected. I knew what was in Nelson’s daybook better than he did. Tsau was a genuine forbidden city, by and large. I sent one child to look for Denoon at the gum tree lot, then went with the other to see who these intruders were. The great underlying civic fear was that one day Tsau would be attacked by Boers. The South African Defence Force came over the border to destroy houses and people with sufficient frequency that South African refugees were having difficulty finding landlords willing to rent to them in Gaborone and Ramotswa. And there were Boers raiding and killing nearby in Namibia. Mangope’s Bophutatswana agents were everywhere. The intruders had been sighted on the road from the airstrip. We took shortcuts. Along our way the consensus was that Boers were invading Tsau. The warning bell began to peal.

  There’s some misunderstanding, I thought. I was sure I was correct when we got to the road and it was blank as far as the airstrip.

  But immediately there were cries coming from our right, from a knoll outlying the koppie, where the cemetery was. A spur from the track to the airstrip led there. Whatever was going on involved shouting and flailing. We sped toward the cemetery.

  Backing down the spur toward us were a man and a woman, whites. I thought I saw the man in fact sheathing a sword, if such a thing was conceivable. They were heavily burdened with shoulder bags and valises. Some women and children were following them, not being threatening in any way obvious to me, although they were agitated and were shouting questions at them. The couple saw us. We are UK! the woman shouted. Tell them!

  Our visitors were Harold Mace and Julia Rodden. They almost clung to me. I felt I knew his name in some connection. They were actors and they were married. They wanted me to understand that they were nothing irregular: they were being sent about by the British Council to read Shakespeare at schools and whatnot. They showed me something from the British Council. The British Council had booked them. They went where they were booked. Someone here must be aware of them. Was there a district officer? The pilot had deposited them summarily because his schedule called for him to reach an airfield where it had been reported that the night lighting was down, so he’d had to hurry to arrive there before dark. He’d fairly thrust them out, they said.

  The cemetery had obviously unnerved them. They were sorry if they’d trespassed, but they had thought they were meant to go that way. Here Harold gestured at the oddly decorated baobab tree that dominated the cemetery. I could see how they might think it had some beckoning or official significance. And I could see why, coming unprepared into the cemetery, they’d been unnerved. Five women were buried there. Each plot was paved with cement in about the dimensions of an oversize ironing board. There was a flat metal box set where the headstone would normally be, and in the box was a ceramic death mask of the deceased. There was a clear glaze baked onto the masks. On the lid of each box was a two- or three-hundred-word life of the departed, on vellum and pressed between panels of glass sealed all around with some hardened waterproof tarry substance. It was strange the first time you lifted the lid and looked into the box, and saw a mask, not only because of the glistening face confronting you, but also because an anchoring staple was fixed over the mask at the brow, its shanks going deep into the cement, giving the brief impression that this was a person somehow bound down or constrained. There were no religious symbols evident on any of the boxes or the pavings, which must have resonated oddly with Harold, given that he was wearing, I noticed, a fairly major gold crucifix around his neck. Then when your gaze strayed to the baobab, you saw, on the main limb overhanging the graves, five ruby red cast-glass objects, elongate, like tears or gourds, the size of gourds, more like giant drop earrings than anything else. There were holes in the necks of these glinting red pendants through which the chains attaching them to the tree limbs were threaded. There was something ineffable in the extreme about this baobab display. You thought of teardrops, blood, Christmas tree ornaments, pawnshop signs, traffic lights. Beyond this there was the sheer arrestingness of the baobab itself, with its surface more like living gray hide than bark, and the frenzied, clutching look of the limbs concentrated at the top of the trunk. Baobabs have always looked more like monuments to me than like vegetables of any kind.

  I felt the fine Italian hand of le dieu caché in the design of the cemetery. Nelson denied it was his idea. The mother committee had evolved it, according to Nelson, and he’d merely gone along.

  It was true about the sword. Harold had drawn his rapier, which was one of the props in their act. He was very apologetic about it. He kept explaining. He seemed unable to refer to the cemetery as anything other than The Necropolis. They had been in the necropolis and had seen figures, seemingly armed, rushing toward them. In fact one woman had been carrying a hoe, was all. I’m afraid I am not longsighted, Harold said.

  Julia wanted me to know that they had no fear of remote places. They had just performed at Moeng College, did I know where that was? It was in wild mountains. The High Commission had never given them to understand there was anything particularly different about this place, Tsau. I was by then informing them bit by bit that Tsau was in fact different, that it was a closed project—which I tried to elucidate for them—but I kept reiterating that everything would be all right and that their visit would be enjoyable all around. I wanted to preshape things as much as I could before Denoon broke the surface. I knew he was going to see a plot. He was certain for some reason that the British High Commission particularly wished Tsau ill. He was always ready to cite chapter and verse on the British High Commission, more than any other embassy, working hand in glove with the South Africans. He claimed to know for a fact that among British intelligence types the paranym for Africa was the Zoo.

  I made introductions. I think they were frightened of Dirang Motsidisi, who had been in the original intercepting party. A dung cart arrived to take luggage. There was a water jug and a damp towel in it, which Harold and Julia made use of, taking off their pith helmets and tamping their necks and faces.

  Physically, these were interesting people. They were middleaged but very impressive and fit-looking. They were middleaged in the way actors are middleaged, which seems different. Harold was a fine figure of a man. He was made for tights. I loved his big, martial jaw and full head of gray hair worn leonine. It was crimped across the back where the helmet band had pressed. His eyebrows were the color of brass. He had carriage. They both did. They seemed like dancers. Julia was wiry and small, with a headstrong-looking face. She was fatigued. The flesh beneath her eyes was soft and looked crosshatched. They were both in safari kit. I knew she had no breasts to speak of, despite the brave cups
in her shirtfront. Her upper chest was bony. Her hair was gray-blond, cleverly streaked, cut shortish. Harold was not perfect, on closer scrutiny. His magnificent nose had a slightly dropped septum, which would have made no difference except that the interior of his nose was rather vermilion, so you noticed. Also there were a couple of liver spots on his forehead which hadn’t been visible before he had performed his mini-toilette just now. They must have been touched up. His eye whites were congested, but that could have been due to fatigue and nothing worse.

  As I led the way into town my personal fixation on the relationship between looks and fate revived. How old was Julia? My mother’s age, roughly? What was I going to look like in twenty or so years? What was the kind of roughing it I seemed to be committing myself to going to do to me? What was the consequence going to be of living where you kept running out of moisturizer? What was Harold’s story? Clearly his physical envelope qualified him for something loftier than being a strolling player in places like this.

  They seemed to like me. Julia’s voice was her creature. It had an adorable rasp to it. Harold had a rich, capacious voice I could tell would be capable of great projection. Then there was Nelson’s fine voice. I was assigned to be the only lakhoa in Tsau with a nondescript voice. It was true that they seemed to like me, but they were showing not the least surprise at finding someone like me in a place like Tsau. I don’t know exactly what I thought they should think, what more wonderful situation I was clearly more appropriate for, someone so youngish and smashing as myself, but I was a little undermined.

  They were especially British, which worried me. They weren’t incidentally British, like British aid workers you might encounter in Africa. They were paid exemplars. Nelson’s hostility to Britain started with the British refusal to do sanctions against South Africa and stretched backward through items like their letting Mussolini through the Suez Canal so he could invade Ethiopia, which according to Nelson wouldn’t have happened otherwise. He was encyclopedic. By 1898 Japan was the only Pacific country the British had failed to force the opium trade on. And if you mentioned anything favorable you’d be reminded that if you put it in the box with everything else and shook it all up, what you would come out with would still be the British Empire. Also he referred to himself as a birthright Fenian. This had osmosed to him through his father from an even more diehard nationalist uncle, so diehard that he had briefly been a blueshirt and gone to fight alongside the Germans, the great enemy of his enemy. Of course, for his father, that had been going too far, and when the uncle visited after the war there had been cataclysmic scenes, drink-based and violent, ultimately.

  I had a slight coup. Harold had calmed down. He said Place—the Seacoast of Illyria, and then What country, friends, is this? I said Twelfth Night. I’m not sure how I knew, since Shakespeare is a blur to me, Hamlet and Macbeth excepted. Harold noticed that I knew, nicely. I took them straight to the guest quarters at Mma Isang’s. My excuse for not taking them up to the plaza first, for formalities, was that they needed desperately to rest and get hold of themselves.

  Foreign Bodies

  An hour later I was trying to impress on Denoon that he was not dealing with evil people here, so far as I could tell. As I’d approached the octagon I’d heard the thudding of the generator and guessed correctly that Nelson was radioing Gaborone for explanations. Somebody who’d witnessed Harold and Julia’s arrival had run to him with the essentials. Nelson already knew more about the visitors than I did, viz. that Harold had played Richard the Lion-Hearted’s best friend in a BBC-TV series in the sixties. The explanation for their presence was that there was someone new running the British Council and also that the person at Local Government and Lands who should have known enough to block the visit was on holiday. The government was being apologetic. We would have Harold and Julia for four days, no more.

  He seemed to be reconciling himself to the intrusion, albeit with little side trips into grumbling about Shakespeare. The chronicle plays were royalist propaganda of the purest sort and did I know that in them only kings were allowed to speak from a seated position? Proroyalism was the secret core of the impotence of British socialism. It all came down to something as intractable as not liking it that America emerged from so unsatisfactory a culture as Britain. I feel about England the way Blake did, he said.

  He wouldn’t come to meet them right away. Dineo could meet them, and I should be in charge of them for the time being, which was what Dineo had already suggested to me. In the meantime he had an idea—something he wanted to work on, which he would tell me about later. He looked pleased with himself in a way that I’d come to perceive with a certain amount of apprehension.

  Toward three I picked up Harold and Julia and took them on a tour of Tsau. They had napped. I had them each bring a change of clothes along—my plan was to end our tour at the bathhouse, where they could clean up for the reception and dinner the mother committee had decided to put on.

  Tsau impressed them, although it was clear being impressed with Tsau made Harold unhappy. It’s so clean, Julia said, so almost Swiss. She asked good questions, and it was clear she grasped the fact that Tsau was a brilliant machine intended to reroute social power to women in a variety of ways. She was very probing on female-only inheritance. I was eloquent. I explained that the next stage of the equity system would be the setting up of satellites of Sekopololo in major villages like Maun, enclave branches, starting with the same kinds of poor and destitute women who had made Tsau, and that ultimately Tsau should ideally evolve into a training center and Vatican for the broader movement, if all went well. Here I was adumbrating on my own hook a bit. But surely something like this was going to happen. Harold was deliberately superficial in his reactions, saying, whenever some feature of the place struck him as particularly eccentric, What country, friends, is this? His remarks kept verging on the implication that Tsau was a sort of theater, artificial. I love the costume, he said. He was a little offensive—as in referring to the cart boys and girls as porters—but this came from disequilibrium. He kept wondering aloud whether the Overseas Ministry had put funds into any of this. Wherever I introduced him someone was sure to ask if this was the swordsman everyone had heard about, which he didn’t like much. Where are your churches, may I know? he asked me at one point. I told him there were no churches, although certain groups met informally. Even when he was being dismissive, there was something playful about the man that I liked.

  I took them into the bathhouse and showed them how it worked. It was reserved for them for a half hour for their exclusive use. Harold was being mysteriously funny and started to say something, but Julia took control and thanked me and led him in. When she let go of his elbow there was a white pinchmark where she’d been gripping.

  So where are the foreign bodies? Nelson asked me, later.

  Washing up, I said. He had been writing something that he put away quickly when I came in.

  In passing he accused me of already starting to sound more British. I denied it, but I know I’m susceptible, and it may have been true. I accused him of already sounding more American, or more prolish, in fact, which meant talking more like the proletariat than usual. This had turned up earlier, when he was telling me with obvious pride how many of his chums had been blue-collar-family boys. He’d denied it. But what I was accusing him of was not a canard. It was real. He was preadapting.

  Shaxpur

  At first at the reception dinner Harold was like a statue. We were gathered in the central kitchen annex, a low-ceilinged but spacious enough room that felt claustral because the ring of tables we were seated around came close to the walls of the room on three sides. These tables were brainchildren of Denoon’s, with leaves that folded out cut in such a way as to make each table wedge-shaped, so that the table ring could be smoothly and solidly effected. I once saw something like it in a King Arthur movie he claimed never to have heard of. Harold’s coldness was very unfair to the mother committee. They had outdone themselves. We had goat curr
y, coleslaw, red rice—not my favorite, but popular in Tsau, the red deriving from beetroot juice—and a sort of soda bread that was baked on special occasions only. Denoon was being quiet, too. So naturally Julia and I were, to compensate, being overgracious. It was about as I’d expected between Nelson and Harold. Sotto voce earlier Nelson had informed me that Harold was dying for a drink to the degree that he had asked a couple of mother committee members if there was to be wine or not. Also Harold was a vector of empire, he was not to be trusted, and so on.

  Julia was digging Harold to get him to participate, which led finally to his blaring out in his rich voice to the table of thirteen women and Denoon Does anyone have a question about Shakespeare the man, of humble origins dot dot dot. He had been told that most of the women understood English but that he should speak slowly, which he was doing, initially.

  The women were shy. It was leaden in the room.

  Denoon said By Shakespeare you mean Shaxpur, which he said with a flat a, then added insult to injury by spelling out.

  You could see Harold bridling.

  Denoon persisted. But tell us anything about this man, he said.

  I couldn’t believe that this was going to be about the authorship of the plays. There were ways to talk about Shakespeare that would have gradually included the women and conveyed something. It was evident that Harold was pleased at the turn things were taking. He began to eat the Jell-O he’d been ignoring.

  Do I detect a scent of Bacon in the air? Harold said, going into a sniffing routine that was ludicrous and baffling to everyone except the four whites.