by Norman Rush
One night I looked at my right hand and noticed a callus like a little knob just above the first joint on my middle finger, and a padlike thickening on the tip of my index finger that I’d been unconsciously picking at lately, all due to incessant writing. This has to end, I said to myself.
A Branch of Tsau Is Needed
One morning he was up before light. He was gathering things together and putting them in a pack. I’m leaving, I thought I heard him say.
Naturally I was electrified. He looked altered. He was purposive. If he was packing, I should be packing too, n’est-ce pas? I was afraid to say or do anything that would threaten the construction I was placing on things.
But he undeceived me in a flash. He knew what he was going to do vis-à-vis Tsau. He was going to go, now, at once, to the minuscule hamlet of Tikwe. Tikwe was forty-five miles to the north of us. In the stretch of desert between us and Tikwe, there were no settlements whatever. He, singular, was going. He was looking for my water-points map.
He would be going to Tikwe for a specific purpose. It was time for Tsau to have a sister colony, an affine of some concrete sort. The lack of a sister or daughter colony was at the root of what was wrong in Tsau. People had to be confronted with the need to spread the idea of Tsau rather than merely reposing comfortably in it. There needed to be exchange. Exchange would concentrate the public consciousness in Tsau on what Tsau truly was. People in Tsau had gotten too casual and spent too much time writing letters to poor relations elsewhere, essentially lording it over them. In Tikwe he would see about setting up a branch of Tsau, or at a minimum explore bringing back a couple of women as interns. Tsau had the wealth to begin to expand modestly, and this was modest. Also he would be able to see if there was any news of Hector in Tikwe.
Sit down while we eat something, I said. I could smell danger all over this project, commencing with his mode of conveyance. He was going to borrow—this was his word—a horse. Tsau owned two horses. I knew this was something that had to go through a committee, and he was not planning to go through a committee. He was departing immediately. He was speaking in short sentences and sentence fragments, I pointed out to him. I said Being this terse is proof this whole thing is precipitate, isn’t it?
I was frank with him. This is action for the sake of action, I told him. There was no risk, he claimed, and if there was, it was a fraction of what I had faced in coming to Tsau. He knew this patch of the Kalahari inside out, whether I believed that or not. In any case he wasn’t going to argue the central proposition, because that would be time-consuming and he was definitely determined to go. If he was wrong, so be it, it would cost him a week and then he would be back to rejoin the waltz and I would have been proven right about something yet again.
I could stop you, I said. I could notify people. I love you, which you’re exploiting: you know I won’t stop this. But I should. I should, just to stop you from talking to me in this particular way ever again. I am not your audience. Remember that. I’m dead against this and I love you, but nothing I say can have the slightest effect on you, can it? We both know it. This is patter you’re giving me, and you’re the supposed proclaimed enemy of the idea that women are just pontoons for the various male enterprises coming down the pike, but look at this. What would be wrong with going tomorrow or the next day? The problem is that the women would make difficulties for you. They are not going to love your absconding with one of our horses. This is going to be left for me to handle. In fact you need me to be here, which is why I can’t go along if you have to leave without notice like this. Isn’t this right? If we took both horses without a by your leave, there would be hysteria to the skies. But with me left behind I can rationalize, I can explain, I can invent the reasons why this had to be done without notice, and so on, right?
I made him let me check on his food choices, which were adequate. But he had forgotten both the first aid and the snakebite kits. He found them.
I am trying to save this place, he said.
But you don’t deny anything I’m saying, do you? I asked.
No, he said.
This is wrong, I said.
Why Was He Doing This?
I talked to myself after he left. He wasn’t a fool, so why was he doing this, or why did he feel so absolutely that he had to do it? I was full of staircase wisdom. Maybe the conviction was establishing itself that people wanted him to go, actively in some cases, clearly, and more passively in others. So that by this action he would reverse everything and create a new role for himself it would take them awhile to fathom and object to. So that he could stay. I could have raised this possibility with him. I could have raised the possibility that all the approval for and orchestration of our getting together as a ménage had been directed at the same thing, something permitted to happen premised on the prescient idea that I was younger and would be likely to have an agenda that would pull us both away sooner rather than later. I could have found some way to get under the closed surface of his patter. I could have made him argue, somehow.
I even ran a little way out with the idea of catching him and telling him to take Baphomey instead of one of the horses, because people would be less upset about it, even though Baph was technically Sekopololo property, like the horses. I had given Baph to Sekopololo. But I realized there was no way he was going to be willing to arrive back in Tsau riding on an ass, with or without Tikwe in the palm of his hand. He would want to look equestrian. I went back to bed. I think now that I still might have been able to catch up with him and make him reconsider, but there was also the fact that the idea of Tsau’s becoming more a model and propagator of the equity system sooner rather than later was itself respectable. It was something that had been talked about. So I went back to bed.
A Heresy
The uproar began at noon, when the absence of one of the horses was noticed. I made mistakes immediately. I got down to the plaza after the fact. I was on my way to see Dineo to tell her what had happened, but timing now suggested this was a bad idea and that I should dissemble.
Dorcas was there, infuriated, sensationalizing the missing horse and saying Denoon was out in the desert taking Hector’s body with him to hide there.
I was afraid. Fear made me say I had been asleep and knew as little as anyone else.
These people are always asleep when crime is going forthwards, Dorcas said, screamed, rather.
Dineo pulled me in, and I told her the truth immediately. I emphasized how I had argued with Nelson but that he had been immovable. I had to write a statement. I felt for her. She was upset.
The weather was peculiar, a white low sky with wispy black under-clouds like ink dispersing in water. That night it rained. I thought of Nelson in the desert, thinking it would probably take at least two days for the journey. I slept badly, waking up when the perfect phrase came to me for what Nelson had done, the phrase I could have used to stop him, maybe: On s’engage et puis on voit. That might have stopped him. Being classified was one of the few things that ever did. Or maybe it would only have encouraged him. I found his main sunglasses on the desk. He had others, but why would these be here?
In the morning I walked down to the kraals to see Baph. There was an ostentatious guard, men and women, posted. I suppose the idea was to keep me from helping myself to either Baph or the remaining horse. I probably shouldn’t have made that visit.
The justice committee was convened again.
I thought to myself I am in danger of going crazy if this goes on for very long. I had been dropped out of two discourses, one with Denoon because in a crisis we were not really collegial and also because of not being a man, I am convinced. And I was being dropped out of discourse with the women of Tsau because of not being an African and also because of my connection with the increasingly suspect Nelson.
I tried to be internally militant and to disdain the present circumstances of my life because they were boring and I was not born to be bored. Of course in Setswana there is no word for boring or bored, which
Nelson had pointed out to me as an example of Tswana soundness. But then where was Nelson, my friend, whatever his weaknesses, now that I needed him?
You are boring to me, was the heresy I wanted to shout into the faces of the squinting rabble who were following Dorcas around. You bore me to tears. You are consigning me to a boring position. You are interesting only from the standpoint of someone interested in boring people. You are less than uninteresting. You are boring in the way you interact. I am not asking you to be characters in Proust, but I am mentally asking you not to surveil me, which is the most boring thing you can either do or be subject to. All over the world in the privacy of their huts anthropologists are turning up their hands and saying This is boring. Life should not be boring. There is a person here who is not boring, Nelson Denoon, and you together have driven him into a state where he is out in the desert, and the desert is always dangerous if you go out into it alone. I also am not boring. You may think you aren’t boring because you’re courteous a lot, when you feel like it. In my humble opinion courtesy is the ancien régime everywhere if it goes off and on like a traffic light. I made my own discourse.
Where Was He?
He was supposed to be gone a week at most. A week can mean five days or seven days. And when seven days had passed I was frantically telling myself that he had probably said About a week.
After the fifth day I was frozen with anxiety. I was convinced something terrible had happened to him. My writing project seemed pointless, worse than pointless if something had happened. I should be doing something physical or practical. The effort it took to keep my handwriting from looking atypical was frightening me. I signed up at Sekopololo to distribute seeds around town for the spring planting in the kitchen gardens. At certain houses they closed the door to me when they saw who was calling. I persisted anyway.
The weather had been irregular, some days bright and some ominous, with a little rain. I went up the koppie every morning and evening to see where it had rained, where the dark patches were that would turn green first. Also I was looking for Nelson. I tried to remember what he had told me about a Frenchman in the seventeenth century who had had one and only one occult power, which was to be able to predict accurately when ships would be arriving at Toulon. He couldn’t predict or prophesy in any other way. Nelson’s favorite mystics were individuals who had one freakish talent that was fairly pointless. In the fifties there was a character who seemed to be able to get little fragments of scenes onto photographic plates by sheer concentration. Usually Nelson’s heroes ended in poverty and ignominy. The Frenchman who could see ships around the curvature of the earth, which was what he claimed he could do, never attempted to make money from his gift. One of Nelson’s major qualities, all of which I was appreciating strongly in my present state, was that if he knew something you didn’t know, he would tell you all there was, and there was no part of it he would shade or leave out because it fit badly into his own belief system. Why did he know these things? He believed in aleatory reading. Through his academic friends he had stack privileges in all the great libraries—this must be a slight exaggeration—and often when he was back in what I would never dare to his face to call civilization he would go straight to the nearest university library and stand up for eight hours, wandering and reading until he had it out of his system. Now where was he?
I had been twice to Dineo to try to get her to authorize a party to search for him. She said that they knew him better than I did and that they were aware of many times when he had gone off like this to one of the pans or along the sand river. She was sure he would be back in good time, and in any case there was the complicating matter of his taking the horse. There really was no excuse for it. I spent an entire day on the koppie, with my binoculars. There was nothing to do. Maun and Kang had been radioed. I was the only one who was distraught.
Nine Days
I appealed to Dineo to let me have my donkey back. They could take all my credits. They could set any value on him they wanted. If my credits were short I would owe the rest and work it off nonstop. I reminded her that I had donated Baph to Sekopololo in the first place, which should have counted for something. She wanted to do it, genuinely, but now, especially, she couldn’t approve it on her own. They would have to meet on it.
What enraged me was that everything had to be so consensual, even in what I felt was a crisis. I kept saying Show me the rules that say this or that can’t be done; where is it written down? But there was very little on paper. Everything was inscribed in what people recalled.
In the midst of imploring Dineo I said something so grotesquely stupid it pains me to think of it. I said: You have no idea what you are doing—you are condemning a delightful person to death with this. I trailed off because she gave me a look of scorn I will never recover from. I was reaching the point of seeing everything in Tsau as an obstacle to my need to find and save him.
Finally it was nine days. I could find nothing better to do with my funktionslust than go up to the top of the koppie and sit there near hysteria, wondering why there was no way of bringing the Botswana Air Force into this. Why was there no person in a high place who could get me out of this, no special friend? What lack in me had produced that situation, that my only true friend was out in the thornveld with nobody helping? King James and his sister sought me out and brought me snacks, dried papaya.
The Eleventh Day
I talked to several women who had been part of the grapple plant harvest, and to some of the snake women, to see if they would consider going with me at least part of the way toward Tikwe. None was eager, except softhearted Prettyrose Chilume, a sensitive plant, fine in a group but not appropriate to go in a duo just with me. I needed a hardier companion. All my attempts at finding someone to go with were reminding me of how frightened I’d been during my crossing from Kang and how potent the residue of that fear was.
The radio was impossible. I did get a promise from Wildlife that they would attempt to contact game scouts who had passed through Tikwe sometime in the past week. This was followed by silence.
I read through my compilation on Nelson like a madwoman. It was insidious. All it did was serve to convince me that Nelson was the man, Nelson was the one I should cleave to, wherever he wanted to be. Brilliant, I told myself, how brilliant to come to this conclusion under these conditions. One thing that was absolutely certain was that this was not a man who would let someone he loved go off on an exercise supposed to last five or six days but lasting ten and then not summon up a force to go out and secure her.
However afraid I was, there was no question I had to go out, at long last, to find him. I began kitting up.
People tried to dissuade me. Dineo said an official search party would be going out soon. But she couldn’t say exactly when the party would be ready to go.
I made an abortive effort to enlist two Basarwa men. I couldn’t make myself understood. I cursed myself for not learning Sesarwa. Hector had been the local master of the language.
I got myself as ready as I could. There were no water-point maps of the area, that I knew of, except for the one I had brought with me and which Nelson had taken with him. I was ready by high noon of the eleventh day.
I was furious with Tsau, furious with the people stopping work to somberly watch me go, furious that they were letting me go off into what was undoubtedly going to be a liebestod if not a farce. Is this right? I wanted to shout at them, along with We’re only here because of you! and This is love!
It was love, but it was also, to some degree, pride. I knew this because I was thinking of my friend Anna as Tsau dropped astern. Anna went to Provincetown in the dead of winter one year in order to rusticate herself in somebody’s unused summer house so that she could finish her thesis before the deadline got her. She was working like a demon but inevitably got a little bored and went out seeking some sort of distraction, something free or cheap, because she was broke. She decided it would be a nice idea to go up the Provincetown Memorial, a thing like
the Washington Monument or a minaret, on top of a hill overlooking the Atlantic. It was closed for the winter, naturally. But there was a guard or caretaker there she undertook to presume on to break the rules and let her go up. Go ahead, then, the guard said with an odd undertone in his voice, and he opened the door to the spiral staircase leading hundreds of feet up to a gallery where you could peer through slits at the sameness of the sea in all directions. The desert sea, I thought. So he opened the door for her and said This is at your own risk. She soon saw why. After the first ten or twenty steps the spiral staircase was coated with flows of solid ice, like something by Gaudí. Driven by pride, she climbed this frozen waterfall. She inched her way up in her slippery shoes, clinging to the railings every step of the way, stayed for a second at the top to let sleet blow into her nose and eyes, then inched back down to the bottom, taking forever, hours. Thanks, she said cheerily to the amazed, and by this time anxious, guard. With one misstep she could have ended up an envelope of broken bones. The muscles in her arms and legs hurt for days. This was pride at its most monumental. She had done it, she guessed, because the guard had clearly tricked her and had expected the satisfaction of seeing her do an about-face when she discovered the condition of the steps. Now there are more women working for the National Park Service. Anna didn’t make it academically. I plan to contact her.
