Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

by Unknown

  I’m having trouble picturing Lester out of this bar, raptor-spotting; picturing him in the backseat of a car, or the front seat, eating a sandwich or petting a dog, dressing a salad or lighting a candle. Out there, so many hooded wayfarers mine the old abandoned dumps illegally, looking for diamonds. Lester cocks his head as if listening for their sneezes, the clearing of their throats. Or perhaps Lester is envisioning himself at the chalkboard of a chemistry classroom in the same way that I see myself as a father-to-be with my ear listening for tiny hiccups at Louisa’s belly—as an ash drawing smudged with a thumb, the angles that once defined the shapes there rubbed out.

  “In spite of all these ruthless things you hear about De Beers, I actually do care, and have a high regard for human rights,” Lester says. “I’m heading up a division on voluntary principles of security in regard to human rights, and I’m even questioning our search procedures,” and he sighs, sips, “because you can’t search for a diamond by holding your hands inches away from the body. You need to touch the body. Human rights make it very difficult for security and easy for the criminals.”

  Lester hangs his head in silence, and I wonder if he’s interrogating what he just said. I feel at a loss too. I no longer know what the best route is, how it is we should get from one place to another, but I do know that the pigeons’ bones are conduits. That the air they navigate is rife with conduits. Lester’s eyes are downcast, and so soft-looking it seems as if he’s trying to call upon some wisdom that doesn’t quite belong to him but he’s inherited anyhow from some earlier version of ourselves, winged and preserved in the humid amber of the Jurassic.

  Into this, Louisa walks. I’ve never seen her walk this way—shoulders back, neck extended, careful and confident, as if over ice. She’s never looked so tall. Lester lifts his head. Louisa walks right past me, and right up to him. She towers over him. She holds up the first two fingers of her right hand, and somehow, he knows to slip a cigarette between them. She introduces herself and doesn’t allow him to reciprocate. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. She recounts to Lester the Namaqua legend of the eland, whose bones, when they run, are said to clap together like bells, the sound standing in for their bragging that they are the biggest and most beautiful of the antelopes, and therefore, they are cursed.

  “Because you can hear them,” Louisa says, her mouth not six inches from Lester’s, “a mile away.” She begins to cry, and Lester rises from his stool. He takes her in his arms, and she him, and they embrace like that for a while, and I can’t believe this.

  Eventually, as they must, they let each other go. When she can speak again, Louisa tells Lester the story I already know, of how her aunt bought a condemned hospital and turned it into her house; of how when Louisa and her brothers went to visit as children, they slept in beds in the old morgue wing. She tells Lester that against all presumptions, her nights spent there were blissfully dreamless. Lester is not confused by any of this.

  Finally, Louisa sits, takes a stool between, and a little behind, Lester and me.

  “I’m sorry,” Lester says. “I’m sorry,” he says, and retrieves his lighter, ignites her cigarette. She inhales. She exhales. She touches his leg. He calls her “my child . . .”

  Lester opens his mouth again, and for a while, nothing comes out, and this is the sort of silence—one only enlarged by this landscape’s wild infertility, and by the shutting down of the mine, and the resultant hypoperfusion that wipes out a community, and by the distance between beakers and human rights violations, sludge tests and the atom bomb, his childhood bed and tonight’s barstool, and other gulfs between here and Port Nolloth; and the gulf between this barstool and the bed back in Michigan with the green sheets we called Sea of Green or the Jelly Green Sea on which Louisa and I decided—yes, yes—to make what we believed would be a baby—this is this sort of silence that Lester seems to inhabit, white-haired and lost, a silence indicative, it seems, of many people in positions of power after you’ve gotten them alone, and after hours, in a bar.

  Without turning from Lester, Louisa takes my hand, squeezes it, and lets it go. The wind outside models the last stage of idleness before atrophy.

  “Trust me,” Lester says. He looks neither at Louisa nor at me. His lips are brandy-sheened. I want to see him out of this deserted bar, out of this light, but know I never will, and this knowledge, which Lester certainly shares, frees us to treat each other as momentary Namaqualand nighttime receptacles for the unburdening of our hearts. “If I told Johann MacDonald all that I know,” he says, “he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Such regrets. There’s a hell to what I do. I would far sooner go and plant daisies. I want to get out of this.” He briefly makes eye contact with me, then with Louisa. He picks at his thumbnails.

  “I don’t want to do this with the rest of my life,” he says. “It’s been fourteen years of hell. People know that I know these things. People don’t like me because I know these things. I don’t want people to think of me like this. Ten people killed in that mine collapse in 2012—some of them were underage, but at least one man was over sixty . . . Everything I know is intellectual property of the company, so I can’t write books about what I know. I’m looking at what I’m going to do now. And when I’m done, I don’t want to be paranoid. I don’t want pigeons, for instance, to have that [smuggling] connotation. I want them to just be birds again.”

  Bartholomew Variation #6

  THE IMPACT OF LANDING SENDS SHOCKWAVES THROUGH A PIGEON’S body.

  Here is a bird, alone with a hallucination of water. Still, Bartholomew drinks, scoops beakfuls of sand, which, in small doses, acts as an abrasive digestive aid, but, in these quantities, becomes a cement-like paste, clogs his networks. Above, the amorous altocumulus clouds couple with the loftier and aloof cirrostratus. They dance, draw all sorts of ligatures onto the sky. Soon, like the bird, the sky is too congested.

  Does Bartholomew really carry within him the longings and adventures of his progenitors, across epoch and biome? At a time like this, does he suddenly recall lily pads and damselflies, the mildew of a creaky brig-sloop, drippy seasick lamplight; the loamy lowlands of French forests, the flying over them in pain, and against pain; old storms, welding sparks jumping from skyscraper shells, cages and sequins and popcorn and jazz? The smell of every hand that feeds?

  Before the species evolved to bear hollow bones, three toes, and such a buxom figure, they flew over the earth’s quaking kimberlitic pipes as they began to disgorge their first diamonds, well before the hands of men began to stir their feed, keep them as pets, cinch these stones to their feet . . .

  Who knows what horrible and heroic lives lie ahead of these birds? Maybe they’ll even see Antarctica, adapt and fatten to build nests there, and live amid glaciers, feast on the ice-worms. Bartholomew never tasted an invertebrate so cold, fresh. But he knows what oats taste like from a child’s hands in the Kalahari, his scattered mother screaming about diamonds from the kitchen. He knows what jazz sounds like, hummed from Msizi’s mouth, that song about machetes and eel-shaped scars that swim over bellies.

  Tonight, in bars called Diamond Hunters, and bars called Fortune’s, the knife fights of the world stop short of the stabbing. No one and nothing wants any more blood, except the pigeon’s throat, and Msizi’s throat. The locusts, or something like the locusts, bounce so beautifully from Bartholomew’s body.

  But, oh, if this pigeon still had a voice, it would howl like some wolf, finally converse directly with everything magnetic and invisible by which he once navigated, and the South Atlantic would talk back in waves—white, then blue-white—itself howling in defiance tonight. Like each animal, their stories long ago carved into some crawlspace of the planet, pigeons die, a lunchbox finally closing. And if Bartholomew’s last song is the crooked announcement of our continental scars, no one will listen. No one ever listens.

  *

  “BARTHOLOMEW? HE’S SOMEWHERE IN THE DESERT, DEAD OF course,” Msizi, nonplussed, will tell me when we meet aga
in in a little park across from an unnamed cafè. We will sit on the concrete, lean against the park’s sole attraction—an elongated and rusty four-person rocking horse. As usual, he will hang his head, cough his blood, put his lame pinky to his lips and breathe warmly onto it, as if trying to reanimate it. He will use words like feathers and remains and very worried. I will wait for him to use the word love, but he will not. I will nod, and do my best to remember what he’s saying. The sky will purple, and the wind off the ocean will turn cold. He will have had a long day, unearthing diamonds for much bigger men. He will be very tired. When I will ask him if he will replace Bartholomew, he will shrug, force a smile.

  From the cafè, before leaving, I will buy him a chicken mayonnaise sandwich. He will take it from me quickly, look around as if we’re being watched. “Don’t tell my mother you bought me this,” he will say. He will hold the sandwich in his hands, leaning against the toy horse. He will assess its weight, pick nervously or impatiently at the cling wrap with his thumbnails. He will wait until I am gone to eat it.

  Epilogue

  WE WAKE THE MORNING AFTER OUR LESTER ENCOUNTER, THICK-HEADED and parched. The peacocks are arguing, and the air smells of scorched aloe. Lester’s car is gone, and Jackie is sweeping up broken glass from the courtyard. I remember dreaming something about being a parent. My knees crack as I bend. I consider the intensity and crispness of dreams in the desert—the ways in which landscape plays with the tracking on our subconscious—dated and too-bright and ingrained with something of childhood, like Technicolor.

  The doves of Die Houthoop are the last things I see as we drag our duffels through the dust to the rental car, and pull from the parking lot, traversing, it seems, the road from one underworld to another. On the side of the road, the mine dumps sprout their mutant grass. The shacks, mills, and clubs disintegrate in the middle of these dumps, their ripped-open flanks painted with messages that no longer make sense: SNOWFLAKE, says one, as if the final pleading clue of some lost colony; PLS CONTACT MR. TATA, says another. The black wattle acacia trees, feral and aggressively invasive, have found a way to grow here, choking out the other species, sucking up water. They are beautiful, though. The pigeons love them.

  To get to Louisa’s family’s home from Kleinzee, we have an eighteen-hour drive ahead of us, across South Africa, and we plan to do it straight, without spending the night on the road. We are ready to arrive someplace that’s intimate, but not-quite-home, and we are ready to drive through the dark to get there. As I drive, I try not to think about Orpheus anymore, about his turning-around head. I try not to imagine Bartholomew on his doomed flight, turning back toward Msizi and the mine. I try not to think of Louisa in pain, struggling to sit still in the passenger seat. I try not to wonder if, on their journeys, our babies are still looking back at us.

  I drive, and I know: Louisa’s parents will be happy to see us together, and will be sad to see us together. I know this is unfair, but their expressions of sympathy will be a drain. For the next week, Louisa and I will spend hours on their brown couch, climbed over by so many nieces and nephews. They will be annoying and they will be wonderful, overweight and too skinny. On medication, or perfectly healthy. They will wear glasses, or they will not, and they will sit on Louisa’s lap, and play rock–paper–scissors, and braid her hair, and interrupt her on the toilet and in the bathtub, and watch cartoons and cooking shows on TV, and eat leftovers out of the fridge, and play with cell phones, and sleep. All of this will seem to take place on one long couch-bound afternoon, and within it, and among them, I hope I will see, however briefly, some alternative future with us as parents. I hope I can feel the weather there. But for now, still driving away from the Diamond Coast, this future seems, in turn, to drive away from me, as if running downstream along with Orpheus’s stupidly still-singing head, petering out into some beach fan with the diamonds, where it joins so many other deposits into a bajada convergence, forms one big apron.

  Louisa points out the window to a grove of infamous fever trees with their powdery jaundice bark, the smell of which attracts anopheles mosquitoes, making the tree inadvertently responsible for the spread of malaria. Beneath the branches, an eland and a donkey drink from the same trough. We pass a giant church complex called Spirit World; a provisional barbershop housed in a converted telephone booth, tufts of hair marooned in the cacti; a mortuary truck with a cooling fan on its roof; a ghost town called Big Grave Water; a dying village named Hopetown.

  The sun is setting, and we’re hungry and low on fuel, and so pull over at a rest area along a meander in the Orange River. “Do not urinate here,” says the handwritten paper sign on the outside wall of the Engen gas station, just above the concrete in which a baby’s feet were commemoratively sunk when it was still soft and wet. Two pigeons—mates for life, perhaps—dip their beaks to the dirty water that has collected in the small, sole-shaped depressions.

  We purchase our supper from the gas station’s counter—sandwiches called the AK-47, limp French fries, and a Russian sausage, and eat it at the picnic table on the riverbank. Vagrant pigeons comb for crumbs. The sun goes down, and silhouettes of Brahma bulls move like phantoms in the tallgrass. The river flows under the barbed wire a butternut and cabbage farmer has strung across the water. Beyond his farm is a graveyard, the headstones tipping in the pillowy sand. And beyond that, radio towers blink to warn no planes. There is not, overhead, any kind of flight pattern besides that of the birds. I toss the last bit of bun to them.

  Fire smoke curls from the distant mountains—a wild burn, or a controlled one. We and the birds will soon be gone, as geologic time does what it does. But for now, it’s night, and we walk back to the rental car. We have a long drive ahead of us, too much to mull over. Beyond us, the cabbages, the squash. We put on our seat belts. I will use my turn signals, drive the speed limit, follow from safe distances. I will brake well in advance. Louisa takes, then releases my hand. She sighs, and gestures to the windshield—to the horizon or the darkness or the moths. To all the people out there who love us, who are waiting for us to catch up. As we pull onto the road, I can see, in the rearview mirror and red of the taillights, the seemingly weightless husks of so many dung beetles blow up from their hiding places, lift into the wind, seed the savanna. As it should be: nothing worthwhile to us will grow from them.

  Acknowledgments

  THANK YOU:

  To all those on the ground and in the air who were willing to endure my interloper presence and, sometimes even, to speak or coo to me for the sake of this book.

  To all at the archives and libraries at the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, the Niven Library at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, the National Library of Cape Verde, Durham University, the University of Paris–Nanterre, and University of Amsterdam, for your openness and access.

  To all at the Kleinzee Museum, Port Nolloth Museum, Kimberley Mine Museum, Museu Municipal Lagos, Diamond Museum Amsterdam, and South African National Pigeon Organization for your guidance.

  To Northern Michigan University, especially Rob Winn and Lynn Domina, for their generous support of this project.

  To the writers/editors who saw something in, and featured early excerpts from, this book: Dinty W. Moore, Zoë Bossiere, Lee Martin, and Leslie Jamison—in, respectively, Brevity, The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press), 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction, and The Best American Essays 2017 (as a Notable selection; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

  To Johan and Bokkie for your sweet-and-sour meatballs, your reliable vehicles, and your conversation.

  To my friends and colleagues who contributed support, feedback, and the occasional whisky to this endeavor: Elena Passarello, Ander Monson, Jenny Boully, Cynthia Hogue, Norman Dubie, Rigoberto Gonzàlez, Doug Jones, Elizabyth Hiscox, Matt Bell, Timston Johnston, Jen Howard, Russ Prather, Carol Phillips, Jaspal Singh, Mike Madonick, Rafael Naranjo, Armando Santamaria, and many others I’m probably and
regrettably forgetting at the moment . . .

  To Bob Weil and Katie Henderson-Adams for their generous support and invaluable advice.

  To the marmalade cat who kept that puff adder from biting me.

  To Kathy Daneman, Cordelia Calvert, and Nick Curley for your PR and marketing prowess and rock-stardom.

  To the continued support of my family: Mom, Noely, The Rub, Brian, Only Avery, Ella the Lizard.

  To my amazingly wonderful and wonderfully amazing agent, Rayhanè Sanders, and my brilliant editor, Gina Iaquinta. Without your essential voices, this book wouldn’t be what it is. Also, it would be 1,000 pages long.

  And to you, Louisa—goodness gracious, you.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  2 “important historical relics”: “The Big Hole Kimberley,” brochure, Kimberley Mine Museum.

  4 in 1998, a local lawmaker: Dean E. Murphy, “Pigeons Take Rap for Stolen African Diamonds,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1998 (“ ‘The law now is to shoot all pigeons on sight,’ Mandla Msomi, the chairman of the parliamentary committee that oversees Alexkor’s operations, told his fellow lawmakers after visiting the mine”); and Dean E. Murphy, “Pigeons Smuggle Gems—S. African Diamond Town Threatens to Shoot Birds,” Seattle Times, April 20, 1998. I confirmed this information when on site.

  CHAPTER 1: MSIZI AND HIS BIRD

  7 This is the dust: E. J. King, M. Yoganathan, and G. Nagelschmidt, “The Effect of Diamond Dust Alone and Mixed with Quartz on the Lungs of Rats,” British Journal of Industrial Medicine 15, no. 2 (April 1958): 92–95. This report deduced that similar symptoms would likely occur in humans.