by Katie Crouch
“So they would fly to Africa and babysit rhinos?”
“No. Their money would go toward protection,” Amanda said. “Carried out by a reputable security organization. We don’t want to get involved with hiring guards. But we could piggyback onto the World Wildlife Fund, or something like that. We could hire a local consultant to help with that part. So the fact that you would be sitting out there—”
“Oh no.” Persephone jabbed her soapy, gloved finger at Amanda. “Not just me. You’re coming. You’re the one who got me into this.”
Amanda paused as if to argue, but then shrugged instead. “I mean … okay. Sure, for one night or two. Anyway, our sitting out there would hopefully motivate people to dig into their wallets.”
“All right.” Persphone relented, reaching for more dirty plates. “I can see how this would work. But … does it have to be the Shilongos? She’ll probably train her rhino to gore me.”
“Look. I don’t know where else to find an accessible, photogenic rhinoceros. Do you?”
“Hmmmph.” Her new friend certainly did have an annoying habit of being right. “And what if we actually see a poacher?”
“I can’t imagine that we would,” Amanda said.
“It might be okay if we did,” Persephone allowed. “I know how to shoot, you know. I grew up on a farm. Well, it was really sort of a Southern plantation. My dad used to take me hunting. I was actually pretty good.”
“What? More, please.”
Persephone shut the water off. “Well … last month I went on a hunting safari—very big around here, you know. And all the men were so excited about shooting zebras and such. As if it’s hard to shoot a zebra! I mean, the stripes are practically shouting at you!”
“Totally,” Amanda said, looking quizzical.
“So, out of nowhere this leopard came out and started growling at us. Adam wanted to shoot it, but it was most definitely not on our kill list. You can’t just shoot things not on the kill list. You’ll get into all sorts of trouble. Plus it’s inhumane.”
“You had me at kill list, doll.”
Persephone paused, testing the air for ridicule, then ventured on. “Anyway, before he could say boo, I shot her in the little toe. Just a graze. So she got away.”
“Hold on.” Amanda slapped the counter. “You caught a real live leopard by its toe?”
“I’m just saying,” Persephone said, delicately removing her gloves in order to enjoy one last croissant, “I happen to be very good with a gun.”
/ 8 /
The truth was, Frida Nepembe did think Miss Persephone was a bit dim. Or if not dim, then … troubled. For one thing, the poor woman was worried, all of the time. Every meal was a trial. She fretted about what to eat, what not to eat, how to serve it, and on and on. Who ever heard of almost fainting over a breakfast! Frida had her family over after church every single Sunday. People brought rolls, or a boiled goat’s head, or rice, and then put it on the old plank table. If there was more food than usual, they praised Jesus. If there was less, they prayed.
Frida and Miss Persephone were exactly the same age. Miss Persephone had said so when she had taken pictures of Frida’s ID on her first day of work. “One month apart!” she had said, squeezing Frida’s wrist. “Imagine.”
Frida could not imagine. She could not picture at all where Miss Persephone had been born. It must have been in a shining mansion, in a bed covered with silk and filled with feathers. Frida was born on her grandfather’s farm in Otji. Her mother had been walking back and forth on the veld with her husband and sister, waiting for the pain of labor to cease. Then, without a word, her mother had stopped and looked at the sky, and her father had caught baby Frida in a bucket filled with rice. Frida always smiled when she thought of that story. She’d had good parents. She wished they were still alive.
And then there were Frida’s children. Miss Persephone’s were still small, because she had them when she was very old. Frida had babies when you were supposed to, so they were all grown. All three studying at the University of Namibia. They would not be domestic workers. No. Her youngest, Tonata, was already so full of herself, Frida could barely have her in the house.
As Frida walked down the hill toward Nelson Mandela Avenue, she could see the line for the transport to Katutura swelling already. Each time a taxi stopped, it was mobbed by men in blue work suits and the larger, stronger women who muscled in with their bags of food. Frida didn’t mind waiting until the crowd thinned. She would get a ride eventually, and it was very fine here in Klein Windhoek, the air far better than at her house, what with the neighbors burning all sorts of what-what-what and their latrine that didn’t drain.
And so she stood on the curb next to Aletta, an auntie she saw often who worked at a house down the street. As usual, Aletta started pumping her for information about the Americans. What did they eat? How many times a day? Did they have a television in every room? And a telephone? And was it true Americans let you take naps? Frida liked the old woman, but she kept her answers short. She had seen Aletta’s bosses on the street. The man was a Boer; he had revved his engine when he drove past, just to scare her. The wife was a fat thing with squinty little eyes. She’d probably wanted information on Miss Persephone, and had asked Aletta to spy for her. Too bad for Aletta. She wasn’t going to get anything.
Since Frida had started working for the Wilders, many of her friends in the transport line had either acted strangely toward her or stopped talking to her altogether. She was sorry the other women were so petty, but Frida was a busy woman. She didn’t have time for jealousy. Everyone knew what a post in an American house was worth. There was no domestic job as valuable. Afrikaans houses were the worst; those people got involved in your life and criticized your house and children; they might yell or even beat you, but you had to pretend to like them, because the kinder you made them feel, the more they would slip you on the side. Germans were fair and would never touch you or ask anything about how you lived. Yet they were notoriously cheap, and so tiresome with their rules and “standards.” Frida’s friend Lollie had even worked in a Chinese house—there were more and more of them in Windhoek now, and they were getting richer and richer. Her Chinese boss was very generous, Lollie said. They were only allowed one child by their government, and the girl they had was so precious the mother paid top dollar for her care. But Lollie said she could never understand a word, and she told horrific stories of foul things boiling in pots. No, everyone wanted to work for the Americans, but there weren’t many of them, and they didn’t stay forever, so the posts were bartered over fiercely, either with cash or meat or what-what-what.
Frida had purchased the job from her cousin Elifas. One of the houses he gardened for had a new family, he’d told her. They needed a nanny, and he would give her the name, for two chickens. Elifas had always been a little in love with Frida. He was also a fool, it turned out. The post was worth five chickens, maybe even ten. Because who had ever seen such a house! The only downside was that it was very big for cleaning, but her new boss was nothing like the German lady who would follow her around with a white glove. Miss Persephone was every bit as nice as people said Americans were, and as foolish. She had heard that Americans were silly to work for, but she hadn’t been prepared for the money constantly left around the house—five-dollar coins, fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, even, showering from their pockets and drifting in bowls and baskets. At first Frida had thought she was being tested for thievery, but after a year she knew the Wilder family saw Namibian bills and coins as playthings. Each time she gave the money back to Miss Persephone, the woman blushed or stuttered out of sheer embarrassment and guilt. She was hardly clever enough to test Frida; nor did she have the stomach for it. And she was always giving her things, if Frida so much as looked at her in an odd way.
The husband, Mr. Adam. That was a different story. Frida did not like him. She wished she did, because that would have made things nice for Miss Persephone. But there was something about the way he lo
oked at you, or didn’t, after a brief glance to size you up. As if he knew you already, so that was enough. Who knows someone after looking at them for just one moment? She didn’t think it was just that he didn’t see Blacks, like so many of the whites. It wasn’t that he was pretending she wasn’t there. His manner was more disturbing than that, more chilling.
On her first day, Miss Persephone had brought Frida to meet Mr. Adam in the back garden, where he was scowling into his laptop. At first Frida thought he was an actor she’d seen in a movie once, about a man who kept shooting people and hanging off buildings. His black hair glistened like a starling’s wing, and his wrists, peeking out from his shirtsleeves, were tanned and muscular. He wore sunglasses with mirrors on them—Frida could see her curvy form in the reflection—which he removed without getting up to look her over from tip to toe, as if he were her doctor at Central Hospital. It made Frida feel cold, right down to her feet. Finally he rose and shook her hand, then abruptly sat back down.
Later, she was pleased to find out that his hair was fake. She found the Miss Clairol packet in Miss Persephone’s trash, wrapped in newspaper. Ink, the color was. It was a secret even Miss Persephone seemed not to know. When you worked in a house, you knew all the secrets. Who was leaking piss. Who was having sex out of the house. Who dyed their hair, who hoarded old love letters, who hid bottles of vodka behind the cleaning products. Well, the Wilders had problems. Not drinking, maybe, but vanity. The man, especially, was vain.
“You’ve checked her references, of course,” he’d said to Miss Persephone. She was standing next to him in a white dress that was very pretty, but that Frida longed to iron. Together they looked like an advertisement for Grove Mall, the ones where the white people laugh and hold kittens.
“Of course,” she said to him, winking, and then hooked her arm into Frida’s to lead her away. Mr. Adam never looked at Frida after that, really. And when he spoke to her, it was as if she were a ghost.
The transport line was finally thinning out. Frida pushed into a cab with Aletta, because they lived on the same side of the settlement and always walked home together. There were no streetlights in her part of Katutura, and the bad boys, just little boys, most of them, would come out of the shadows and try to beat you and take your purse if you walked alone. They had tried to tug Aletta’s bag off her just last week, but Aletta had beaten the little boy with a stick. He had yelped like a lost puppy as he trotted away, blood running down his face. Aletta was a good walking partner. Still, she started in again with her questions as soon as the taxi started speeding toward Katutura, this time with six other bodies packed in.
“So you won’t tell me about the lady in white,” Aletta said, settling her round body and her bags next to Frida. “Hold this, will you? Soup bones. For once Miss Tessie threw something away.” Aletta’s bosses were not only nosy, but notoriously cheap. No one in that house would tell you not to call them Miss. Although it was so ingrained in Frida to do so after twenty years working in German and Afrikaans houses, she knew she’d never be able to remember not to anyway.
It was confusing, though, with Americans, when you got down to it. Sometimes Miss Persephone could get very grand with her ideas and desires to change things. Of course, Frida wanted more food and more rest and a bigger house that was not made of tin that did not have to be readjusted after every rain. But not everything needed changing.
“You work in two houses now?” asked Josie, another lady who worked near them, on Olof Palme Street. “Two jobs?”
Frida was quick to quash this notion. No one wanted to be seen as greedy.
“Just once a week, for two hours, I go over to Miss Persephone’s friend’s house. Miss Amanda.”
“Nice?”
“Quiet.”
“Good pay?”
“Fine.”
“And the meneer?”
Frida thought for a moment. Mr. Mark, he was different from Mr. Adam. He was very tall and very thin. He needed feeding. He was old but had boyish hair, the kind that fell into the eye. He did not dye it; the brown was marked by rivers of gray. Mr. Mark, he saw all of you. And he liked to talk. Sometimes he asked so many questions, Frida had to go in another room to finish her cleaning. He was very curious, for instance, about Oshakati and who she knew there.
“Oh, he is a good man. They are good people. But Miss Amanda has trouble coming.”
“Why?”
“The meneer has another woman, I think.”
“Why do you say?”
“He is on his phone all of the time, talking to someone. I heard her voice.”
The other women in the transport clucked their tongues.
“I am sorry for her,” Aletta said. “I will pray. And I am sorry for you. You will lose your extra job.”
“God will provide,” Frida said. She did not like this gossip and had said too much already. They were coming to the Engen station in Katutura now. She loved coming back to Katutura, with its familiar sounds of friends laughing and rich smells of cooking. She often felt in the white neighborhoods that she could not breathe; the air there seemed stale with years of loveless fear. Now she and Aletta had to hop out and convince another taxi to take them to the north side, a place most transports did not like to go. It was already getting dark, so she and Aletta hurried to get off the path before the young thieves came out.
At home, it was soup with a bit of bacon from Miss Persephone. Frida hadn’t felt badly about taking it; the family had so much food, it was forever rotting in the refrigerator. Tonata was home from her classes, so they sat together at the table, listening to Elemotho, Tonata’s favorite, and reading the newspaper and magazines. It was time for bed soon, as Frida’s day started at 4:00 and ended at 9:00. She knew she should go in and bolt the door, as they’d been broken into one night last month, but she liked to sit in the yard with a glass of beer and listen to the chickens before sleep. Their neighborhood bordered the veld, so that on windy nights she could hear the rustling of the grasses and the shepherd’s trees, just like at her father’s farm.
Tonight, as she sat, she thought again of Mr. Adam and Mr. Mark, of Miss Persephone and Miss Amanda and their unhappiness and all the things they didn’t tell each other.
She refilled her glass one more time. They were all getting there. God would provide.
/ 9 /
Hello?
Hi!
Does it work?
Hi!
Hi!
Hi!
What r u doing?
Stuffies.
I’m listening to a CD.
What’s that?
It’s a circle that plays music. You put it in the mouth of a machine.
Cool.
I found it in my Mom’s things. It’s fintastic
OK!
U r my only friend with a phone!
Well u gave it to me
Good thing my mom has so many.
How many
She has like ten iphones.
U are pretty rich
Yes, we are because my father is in govornment
It’s not like that in US
No it is your ruler is the richest in the world I think I saw it in the news. He seems to scream lots. So yor country is like Africa now!!!
okay
Did you see Susie’s sunhat today? It had little trolls on it. My word.
It was nice I think
Meg. It was not nice it was horridness
Gotta go my mom is coming if she finds this fon she wil kil me.
See u at school I have a good idea to talk to u about byeeeeee
Biiiiiiiiiiiii
/ 10 /
During Mark’s three-hour drive to Swakopmund—first through the brown hills of the lower Erongo, then through blistering veld that graduated eerily into seven-hundred-foot mountains of pure desert sand—he ran over the story he’d made up for Amanda. He was going, he’d told her, to write a report on a vandalized German monument in the main square. This was true, actually … though
it was only a tiny part of why he was making the trip. As expected, Amanda had been as interested as she usually was when he talked about his work. As in, not at all. He’d given her the name of the hotel and said he’d be back in three days, knowing he was thoroughly off the hook. Still, as he drove closer, he grew more and more tense. He hadn’t been to Swakop since—
Where are the girls? Fuck you, man. Listen to me! Where are the girls?
He shook his head, switched on the radio, kept driving.
It was only when he got away from his family’s unhappiness (whether actually voiced or beamed silently through their ever-changing moods) that he was able to truly revel in his unbridled love of Namibia. The way he could observe shadows as large as skyscrapers meandering across an entire range of mountains; the fact that he could see for three hundred miles around him with no strip malls or houses marring the landscape. So vivid were the colors—the watery pale sky, the burnt red sand scarred with yellow and green weeds, the white sun, always relentless until mercifully shrouded by angry, blue-green storm clouds—they exhausted his vision. The lonely roads, where the slabs of granite rose out of swirling desert sands, made his chest swell with a sort of longing. Amanda found all this emptiness bleak, but it was the very absence of humanity that Mark loved the best.
After three and a half hours, the veld was completely gone. Just mountains of sand now, left and right. This was where the winds of the coast were born. The heat rose with such force that the cool air from the ocean rushed forth to fill the vacuum. Air and fog shot inland, pushing swirling walls of sand and battling even the heaviest of bakkies on the road. As he came down from the rise toward the beach his car rattled and swerved. He could see a hundred miles ahead of him, where the highway petered out to a thin black ribbon on the horizon.
Finally, as if a miracle, some candy-colored dots of buildings emerged against the mist, followed by the blue glow of the sea. Mark drove directly into town, which was much the same as he remembered, with its strange mix of bunkers and run-down German buildings that looked like melting gingerbread houses. Sand blew in every direction, forming mini-dunes in the street.
