by Norman Rush
I said The first time you saw me with my sleep mask you took it off me and put it on and went around crashing into the furniture and said Tonto, give me the scissors, the outlaws are escaping!
The outlaws are escaping, he said meditatively. This was a new tic also. He seemed to consider a repetition of the last clause or phrase I’d just said to be an adequate contribution to an ongoing conversation.
I said I remember it because I think it was maybe the first time you went out of your way to make me laugh by acting stupid and going beyond your urbane sort of humor. Remember we’ve discussed this?
Then he remembered. I am grasping at such straws, I thought. Which led to the epiphany that there should be some comical game going, like our The band can’t play because dot dot dot. This would turn the clock back. There was an idea for one lurking in my mind, if I could entice it out.
Do you mind if I tape us? I asked. This was mainly to gain time. I half thought he might very well say Are you insane? Why? To which my answer would be that it was celebratory, just my way of capturing something important, forget it.
Tape us? Certainly.
Certainly what?
Certainly yes, tape us.
I was slow and obtrusive about setting up to tape. I put the recorder very near him. He was sitting at our dinner table with his hands again in the nested palm-up configuration that I hated so much. Everything was more than okay with him.
One inchoate idea for a game had involved a child’s questions to mom, and mom’s clever deflective responses, such as the child saying Mom, why does Dad always sandpaper his fingertips before he goes to work at night? To which Mom has an ingenious response having to do with the better to do such and such and provide for us. But all I had was the question to mom, not mom’s brilliant collaborative-with-evil lie, and without mom’s response there was no game. But then there was another possible game, which my feeling of grasping at straws reminded me of. This game was The Intellectuals Have a Picnic. They have a picnic and play games that are their equivalents of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Grasping at Straws was one, Knocking Down Straw Men was another, or Setting Up and Knocking Down Straw Men, and Putting the Cart in Front of the Horse, and Kick the Cant. Then there was just a stray shard from The Band Can’t Play series, having the band not being able to sleep because Teutons had stolen the futons. But there was nothing good enough to insert. And I was taping mostly silence, which just in itself was unbearable, the cost.
The outlaws are escaping, he said for the second time. This I couldn’t bear, and I began to weep behind his back. He must not have heard me, although I can make it out on the tape.
I had no idea where to take hold of things. Certain traits I wanted desperately to stop in their tracks, like this repeating business. I wanted to say Are you repeating after me because you want to savor certain lines or words? But I was afraid noticing it openly would concretize it somehow, make it harder, not easier, for it to go away. Even my acid friend eventually lost interest in his shirtcuff.
We will, someday, sit down and just go through everything, won’t we?
He seemed to nod.
Doing it soon would be good, because people are making things up that are ludicrous.
They’ll stop, he said.
No they won’t, I said. Not until someone can say with some sort of authority that this is what happened and that this is a fable, such as you. Or me.
It was a mistake, he said.
What was?
Going into it. People are going to forget about it.
Do you think you’re different since Tikwe?
Do I think I’m different. Yes. I don’t know. I was different before.
This was going to lead to a paradox of some kind. I had no appetite for it.
Just tell me this, I said. Just tell me if this is right, that something momentous happened to you on the way to Tikwe, you think.
Something momentous. I think so.
It was up to him to elaborate. I could have made him do it, led him to do it. But the sense that I represented the forces of interruption was too much for me, the sense that I was keeping him from certain sessions of sweet silent thought, sweeter and more important to him than anything else on earth.
We sat in silence.
I hated life.
Conspiracies
In my attitude toward Tsau I was stuck at a paranoid level. All I did all day was revolve the permutations of the explanations for the lurid impasse I was in. There were explanations in which everything that had happened was connected, like parts in a complicated machine. There were explanations in which everything critical that had happened to me was accidental. Certain things could have been charades. Dineo’s dilatoriness about letting me organize help for Nelson could have been a result of the fact that she somehow knew he was all right someplace. Possibly all this was an ordeal designed for me, something to test how much I wanted this man. Or possibly Nelson wanted me out and gone. Or possibly I had just been a catspaw of forces that had favored my getting together with Nelson in order to move him along the path to departure, stimulating him to speed it up by my ordinariness and consumerism and need to get back to the country money comes from. Or possibly Dineo had disposed of Hector in order to break up Boso and stimulate Dorcas into going somewhere else. On it went with me. Possibly the original idea had been to use me to get Nelson’s case of founder’s disease out of the vicinity and into a project on some other continent, leaving the women of Tsau to evolve in their own way. But maybe the new revised passive Denoon was another story: maybe he was now someone who could be useful in his present form, a Prince Albert in a can for Dineo. Or was it conceivable Nelson had disposed of Hector and out of remorse dumped himself to either die or improve and come back shorn and tractable, speaking only when spoken to, being good, already up and hobblingly doing little chores, a man as good as a woman. That was conceivable. I laved myself in conspiracy and in the process felt myself closer to the central or historical Nelson, with his very patent—to me—view of the world as a place in which conspiracy is routine. I don’t mean that he was an obsessed assassinationologist of the standard kind you run into in the States. With him it was more an assumption of the mundanity of conspiracy. He was offhand about it: of course there was a conspiracy behind the John F. Kennedy assassination, he might remark, unless it makes sense that Lee Harvey Oswald would advertise himself as a marxist by having his picture taken holding up copies of the Militant and the Daily Worker at the same time, two papers whose party lines in regard to Cuba were violently opposed at a time when he was supposed to be a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and so, strictly pro-Castro. Then there was the Shakespeare conspiracy, although on that he was more of a zealot than in some other cases.
Africans have a particular way of interacting with the insane, and I thought I could feel myself drifting into that kind of regard. My best friends among the women kept treating me like a child: Rra Puleng would be fine, he was fine.
I was volatile. One day I was shaping up to work in the kraals dawn to dusk, and the next I was refusing to do something minor, something I had agreed to do in prehistoric times: I think there was a prize for the person who had taken the most books out of the library and I had agreed to do the tally, but somehow in my present state I felt it was an affront being asked to do this. I couldn’t explain why.
Dineo, I decided, was going to be the key to the exit.
Whatever hesitation there was in my mind about getting Nelson out of there and in reach of someone who could identify his condition for me was diminishing day by day. If he was improving, it was unbearably slowly.
I would go to see Dineo. First I would invoke what I felt had been an implicit friendship between us. Then I would remind her that I was formidable too and that I was ready to bring the American embassy into getting Nelson out if I had to. This would be against everybody’s will and interest, Nelson’s included, but I knew how to operate the radio and I could make it happen whether anyone like
d it or not. I could lie to the embassy if I had to. Of course by going the route of force majeure I would tear up any chance I would have of ever coming back to Tsau. I wouldn’t be forgiven. I tried to have a proposal ready for each of the likeliest objections. I wanted him x-rayed. I had to get out of a matrix that was becoming untrustworthy and impenetrable, so that I could trust my own thoughts again.
From the outset Dineo resisted so strongly that I was taken aback.
There were changes in her office. The interior had been freshly calcimined. We met in a white glow. It was midmorning. In the old office all the chairs had been uniform. Now hers had a taller back and had arms. She looked imperious. She was wearing her headscarf in a new style, with the tails brought together over one shoulder and secured with a medallion clip. Tea was served to us, which surprised me.
The first surprise was that she wanted us to speak only in Setswana. People would be coming in and out, and Setswana would be best. I don’t know why that put me off my stride so badly, but it did. It was a statement. Also I had been set for her to be warmer, or at least more silken toward me. Instead she was being rueful and direct and looking me straight in the eye. I know by having us speak Setswana she wanted to avoid any suggestion of collusion between us, but still I hated her for it. She had never been my enemy.
We talked in general about how well Nelson was coming along. This was her view. I made the distinction between physical and psychological, and she appeared to be listening to me. Then she said that although she could see Nelson was quieter than before, she wanted me to know that the nurse had told her that anything of that sort should be put down to convalescence, the aftereffects of the trauma, something that would lift. She also slipped into the stream of our talk a few hints that there could be questions of favoritism if someone with a medical condition perceived to be as minor as Nelson’s were evacuated to Gaborone. Also she made clear that she understood from Rra Puleng that he was not at all interested in being moved.
She was being clever. At no point was she refusing me. But she was resisting.
I decided to be frank. I said I had often wanted to remind her about her showing me in the bathhouse the scars that meant she could never bear children, and how I had taken that as a gesture of friendship toward me, to show that she was not a possible mate for Nelson, if that was in fact something that was crossing my mind.
She nodded. She was not embarrassed by this.
I said that then I had wondered if the reason she and others had been encouraging me to be with Rra Puleng was because perhaps an attachment to me would lead him to think more quickly about going away with me and leaving Tsau in the hands of its citizens a little sooner.
She was very precise as she denied this. She spoke so formally that I almost felt it as an invitation to read through what she was saying, not to be literal. She did deny any thought of the kind I was mentioning. She was speaking for everyone in Tsau. She was sure that no one except for some unfortunate people who in any case might not be for long in Tsau could have wanted anything other than that Rra Puleng must stay in Tsau as long as he was pleased to. All of this was in the same strangely precise delivery.
I’d already started in this direction, so I continued. I probably put this badly, but what I said was that she must see—given the idea or suspicion I’d just admitted—that it was only natural for me to wonder if, now that Nelson seemed so much changed, and so passive, there might be perfectly understandable reasons for him to be wanted in Tsau, with or without me. I had to repeat this with some changes to be sure that I was getting everything into it in Setswana that I wanted to be there. I was brave.
She was very cool here. She wanted me to understand that she could see how I would have such fears but that there was nothing true about them, any of them, about any fear like the one I had expressed. But she felt it would be the worst thing for Nelson to go off before he himself felt it was the correct time for it.
She alluded to the problems of the dead horse and the lost Enfield. This whole time, she was thinking I would have to sign a document of liability for the rifle, and if I went away with Rra Puleng we would both have to sign for the horse. Or possibly only Nelson would have to sign. She would consult with the mother committee. I thought I saw daylight coming. She said she assumed Rra Puleng and I would be leaving our things if we went off. I said eagerly Yes, yes. I had nothing to leave, essentially, that I cared about. All I wanted was my notebooks. Anything else they could have forever.
Early on in the discussion I felt I’d been successful in conveying that there were lengths I was prepared to go to that would be painful for me. I was loaded with propositions I never had to use, thank god. I was ready to tell her that I was going to marry Nelson and I was a Catholic, a lapsed Catholic who had just recently unbackslid and that of course as a Catholic we would need to be married in a real Catholic church, of which there were none in Tsau. I was gambling that Nelson was so limp that if I told him we needed to go to Gabs to get married he would do it, like that.
I felt a stab, thinking this. That was really the problem. Nelson was in some unreal state of acceptance. He was agreeing to everything, it seemed, with the one exception of requests that he go through chapter and verse of his ordeal. But anything else, at all, he would do for you. It was dangerous.
I wanted this interview to be over with before I lost my hold on myself. Why was she so beautiful and exactly how old was she anyway? What was I going to be in eight years or eleven or thirteen? I wouldn’t age the way she had. This was my physical high noon, in all probability. I knew it.
Then she dropped into English, just for a moment. It was rushed, and what she said was that she would be most concerned if certain of the donors were to visit with Nelson in Gaborone before he was fully recovered. She mentioned two names in particular. I knew who one of them was. The other she identified for me as the present representative of the Swedish International Development Agency.
I don’t know what I said, but it was what was needed. I made a circumlocutious pledge to guard Nelson, rusticate him in Gabs the way she had in the infirmary, manage his contacts until he was himself again, which, with the help of the doctors I could definitely find or summon to Gabs, wouldn’t be long. I half implied, to assuage her fears about donors prematurely stumbling on him, that Nelson might well be in Gabs for only a few days, if it was decided that he ought to see someone in Harare, say.
She would have to talk to the mother committee, of course. But I knew it was set. He was going away from Tsau with Scientiae Athena, otherwise known as me. I would restore him. And that would restore me.
The next day, strangely enough, facilitating rumors were percolating around. There was something about complications and the need for x-rays. And people had heard something suggesting that I was in trouble with Immigration and had to go to explain my long stay in Tsau and correct everything.
A Sabbatical
There was a hint of valedictory sentiment in the air during our departure, which was a little odd since this was only supposed to be a sabbatical. I was full of emotion the circumstances forbade me to express. There was a crowd at the airstrip to see us off, which included Dorcas and the batlodi, who were very contained about whatever they were feeling. They had been the objects of a special mollification process: word had been passed that a primary reason for our trip to Gabs was to deliver a packet of depositions on Hector’s disappearance to the Criminal Investigation Division, at long last.
Getting Nelson to agree to the excursion had been no problem at all. I’d deemphasized the medical side of it, although I did mention that the nurse was recommending it, which was true. I had a rather grudging referral note from her. In fact it would make sense for me to show my face at Immigration. I suggested that he had some business pending with different ministries. He agreed. I brought certain folders to him that he specified and he began stirring through them, but not in his usual way. He was so desultory that it was painful to see it.
On the plane i
t was bliss, a thunderstorm we had to pass straight through notwithstanding. I copied my indifference to the buffeting storm from Nelson. Apparently I was being a fool, because when the pilot left the control cabin and came back past us to leave, his face was chlorotic. Being with Nelson then was like being with a distracted older brother. There had been no real sex since Tikwe, and this felt almost like a kinship prohibition to me now. I began to be generally hopeful. In the plane I confessed I’d left most of his emperor of ice cream wardrobe, his vanilla vests, tops, and pants, behind, except of course for what he was wearing. Everything else was his regular gear. He smiled about it, but in fact it wouldn’t take me long to find there was some slyness afoot, because he’d packed his own supply of white raiment without telling me about it.
With us on the plane was another medical evacuee, an Indian shop-owner who’d been on holiday at Island Safari Lodge in Maun. He’d been bitten by a hippo, or rather the aluminum skiff he’d been cruising in had, and he’d been injured. He was met by a throng of family and friends, the matrons wearing the most unflattering garment ever to befall the female midriff. There was no one to meet us, which should have been a relief. I’d worked hard for it to be that way. But at the same time I felt a tremor of disgust with the world that somehow the fate of this man, my beloved man, hadn’t come to somebody’s attention in Gabs, because something was seriously wrong with him and he was important.
Time Is an Ape
I thought I should give silence and sequestration and nonconfrontation at least a week. That is, I created a vacation from everything for us.
There was only nominal pressure from Nelson for me to try to line up something for us in his old haunts in the Old Naledi squatter settlement. We spent one night in the President Hotel and by checkout time the next day I had a leave house for us for a month or maybe more. It was a big, lavish, newish walled layout assigned to the American embassy’s admin officer, who was away on a short course in Mauritius with his family. There was a cook and a yardman. The swimming pool was empty in deference to the drought, which had been ferocious in Gaborone. Tsau seemed succulent, almost, compared to Gabs. I mentioned to someone from Meteorology how well Tsau had done with rainfall, and he seemed dubious. He quoted me the figures from Maun, which were much lower. The implication was that I was telling him fairytales. Everyone around the embassy was extremely glad to see me. I had apparently done a superb job of ingratiating myself earlier on. Helpfulness toward me reigned. Of course a part of it was that the embassy wanted to get au courant with the mysterious Denoon’s activities. But they were proper. They knew all about the privacy agreements he’d extracted from the Ministry of Local Government and Lands. But the embassy was indirectly providing our housing, after all, so it was not untoward for people like the pol-econ officer or the USAID director to drift by. The yardman turned them away, according to our instructions. Nelson wasn’t ready to see anyone yet.
