White Dog Fell From the Sky (19 page)

He walked straight to the Princess Marina
Hospital and through the front doors. The Sister in charge told him that she could not
give him any information, that she was under orders not to give out names. She was a
white woman, in the garb of a nun. “Are you a family member?”

He paused. “Kagiso is my sister, and
Ontibile is her child.”

“What is their surname?” she
asked.

He hesitated, trying to remember, during
which time the nun knew he was lying. “Thebe,” he said.

“I’m sorry, we’re doing
our best for the child.”

“And the mother?”

“I regret I cannot say.”

“May I see the child?”

“No, sir. I don’t believe you
are a close family member. I’m under strict instructions.”

He went away, cursing himself. He had paused
in front of that nun because in his head Kagiso and Ontibile never had a surname. They
were just Kagiso and Ontibile. It seemed that Ontibile might be alive. Kagiso, he
didn’t know. She was either at Ontibile’s bedside, or she had passed from
this world.

He turned around and reentered the hospital.
A young Motswana
Sister met him. “Can you tell me if Kagiso
Thebe is with Ontibile, her child? I am here to give her something.”

“She is not with the child.”

“Has she been here?”

The first Sister reappeared. “I am
sorry, sir. You must leave now.”

He went out into the street. The sun was so
bright and strong there was no hiding from it. In his mind the train was coming for
Kopano. He saw the two members of the South African Defense Force, their uniforms the
color of dirt, their berets worn at an angle, as though they were saying life is a joke.
He was filled with such rage and hatred he couldn’t see. The road was a white hot
light, like an electric wire humming. He cursed Modimo in the heavens, he cursed the
country of his birth. He cursed Amen for his arrogance. His fists were in his eye
sockets, his head exploding with the ruin of lives. If they have touched Kagiso or
Ontibile, his voice was roaring—what, what would he not do?

He ran toward Amen’s house, his body
disorganized, his feet hardly working, falling down the street. People moved around him,
giving him space. He felt heavy with a complicated, helpless shame. He could do nothing.
Feet running, running. The sun so hot. No shadow anywhere. He plunged down the path into
Naledi.

At the shebeen, he stopped. The old men were
sitting under trees on
kgotla
chairs sucking their gums. Red-eyed with
Chibuku
, stubble on their chins. Loud music was playing.
“
Dumelang, borra,
” he said.

“
Dumela, rra,
” one
said, as though he didn’t want to.

They stumbled through the rest of the
greeting, asking each other how they’d gotten up that morning. Fine, fine. He
stood in a pool of quiet.

“Do you know about the South African
shooting last night?” he asked.

“
Ee, rra.
”

“Was anyone hurt?” It was best
to be innocent, the young goat that bleats and knows nothing.

“
Ee, rra,
people were hurt.
Just there.” The old man pointed in the direction of Amen’s house.
“But you cannot go there. There are many police.”

“Did you know any of the people in the
house?”

“No,
rra,
we didn’t
know them.”

Another said, “We hear that it was
women and children. Family of ANC members. The South Africans fired on the house. They
didn’t care who was in there.”

“Shame,” said a younger man,
wearing a skullcap.

“I have heard they have done the same
in Lesotho,” said the most grizzled of the old men. His shoulder was bare, his
shirt ripped around a jutting bone.

“And in Angola.”

“
Ehee.
” Their voices
became a low music.

“Did you know the people in the
house?” the man with the ripped shirt asked.

“I lived in that place,” said
Isaac. It shocked him that he’d told them. Tears came to his eyes. He wanted to
sit on the ground at the knees of the grizzled man and be comforted. All these months
he’d told no one where he lived, or with whom, and now he’d told these
strangers.

The old man’s rheumy eyes overflowed.
He looked up at the leaves of the mosetlha tree as though to say we are alive by
God’s grace. “But you were not there last night.”

“No.”

“The angel of death had mercy on
you.”

“
Ee, rra.
”

Several of the old men looked at him as
though he were already dead. And then one of them said, “It’s not their
country to do with what they please. Those bastards came over the border last night.
They brought their guns into this place and killed mothers and babies.”

“We need an army,” said a
round-faced, dark-skinned man who’d said nothing up until then. “How does
the government protect its people? We need guns, we need soldiers.”

“You think that would stop
them?” the grizzled man said. He turned to Isaac. “If you go there,”
he gestured with his chin, “they will shoot you too.”

Isaac said good-bye and hurried on his way.
The closer he came to Amen’s house, the quieter it seemed to become—like being in
a lonely
place, hearing footsteps approaching from behind, you
don’t know who is coming, and you sense it is an evil thing and the hair rises up
on the back of your neck. The person uppermost in his mind was Kagiso. He pictured her
that first day he met her when her eyes sang with joy. She smiled so wide, like a girl.
Her dress stirred in the wind. Her neck was damp with the steam coming from the cooking
pot, and little hairs curled out from beneath the scarf wrapped around her head. Walking
toward Amen’s house, he feared for her the way a man fears for his wife, so
strongly that his ears boomed. He thought of the night when Amen was away and Kagiso
called out in her sleep and he went to her and held her hand.

As he came around the last corner before the
house and saw the police vehicles and a great swarming crowd of people, he could still
see nothing of the house. From where he stood, he recognized a few neighbors, but there
were many strangers too, people who’d come from far away. The police were
shouting, “Get back, get back! Go home!” But the people were not moving.
Their lips were silent, and they stood watching, solemn as a church. Isaac pushed his
way into the crowd and stood in front of the door.

To the left was the wall where Kagiso had
hung the magazine pages. The bullets from the guns had put a hole in the woman’s
smiling head and in her hand holding the box of Lil-lets tampons, and there were holes
in the boy looking up at his mother and eating a McVitie’s digestive biscuit. And
farther into the room, splashed on the wall, were dark sprays of blood.

The police closed the door. They shouted
again for the crowd to get back, get back! They pushed with their sticks turned
sideways, and people moved a little, but when the police turned their backs, the crowd
came forward again, a little closer than before. Next door was a woman he’d seen
many times. She was filling her can with water. He pushed out of the crowd and went to
this woman and greeted her softly, “
Dumela, mma
.”

She started as though he were a ghost.
“You were not there?”

“No,
mma
.”

“You are one lucky person.”

“Do you know who is alive?”

“No one,
rra,
except for one
little child.”

“The mother?”

“The mother is late.”

“You are sure?”

“I am sure. My husband is with the
police.”

“Do you know which child is
alive?”

“I do not know this,
rra
.” She was holding a cloth in her hands and twisting it until the
cloth rose up in a knot.

He walked away. The road to the Old Village
was quiet, subdued by the deaths in town. When he returned to the house, the sun was
close to setting and White Dog was waiting, her tail wagging just at the tip. He leaned
down and patted her. Where the smooth fur grew was a lump which he knew to be a tick. He
pulled it from her and squashed it in his fingers. He washed the tick blood from his
hands, drank some water from the spigot, and filled a bowl with water for White Dog. Mr.
Magoo and Horse sat watching him with their slitty eyes. Inside, he fed canned sardines
to them. His stomach was an empty cave that did not wish to be filled.

White Dog trailed him, and Isaac went to the
quiet place in the wild part of the garden and squatted by the big aloes. The sky was
light when he went there, and little by little it darkened until one and one, and ten
and ten, and a thousand and a thousand million stars came out. He looked at the stars
and planets and felt them ripped from their sockets by a wind hurled from the heavens.
To whom would he pray? In that huge, quiet, senseless darkness, he understood that he
could no longer believe in a god who let such things happen. All his life, he’d
been taught to pray, but now there was no one there. When he was younger, his favorite
book in the Bible was the book of Ezekiel
. Then the spirit took me up, and I heard
behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory of the
Lord …
At night, he’d believed he could hear the great rushing stars
and the wings of the living creatures that touched one another and the tumult of that
mighty voice. In the space between the noise of people and radios had been the great
voice, the glory that could
not be seen. The voice was gone now,
stilled like a child who turns blue before taking his last earthly breath.

That night, he dreamt that he was traveling
in a car driven by Amen. They were headed toward the border, south on the Lobatse Road.
The lights of a lorry traveling in the other direction came closer and closer, and he
shouted at Amen that they were on the wrong side of the road. It was already too late.
Amen swerved, and Isaac woke into darkness.

Lying in bed, he remembered the money under
the loose bit of concrete in the floor of Amen’s house. He’d heard people
say they would bulldoze the house. His eyes stared into the dark room, all the time
thinking about the concrete which hid the money that would buy his brother’s shoes
and help the younger ones return to school.

He knew now without a doubt that it was his
duty to get them out of South Africa. Those men who came over the border were true to
their nature. You could live in Bophuthatswana or Pretoria or Johannesburg trying to
make the best life you could, but all the while you would find white men wishing you
evil. He had an idea that whatever his life was lived for, it must be lived for getting
his sister and brothers away from there. One baby sister was already dead, a death that
would not have happened if she had been somewhere else.

He turned on the light and put on his
trousers. The darkness was close and hot. In the kitchen, he wrote a letter first to his
mother and then to his mother’s employers, Hendrik and Hester Pretorius. To both
he said that he would like to get Lulu, his seven-year-old sister, and his two brothers,
Tshepiso and Moses, out of Bophuthatswana into Botswana. He did not know how to manage
this, he told them, but if they could find a way to get the children across the border,
he would find a place for them to live and a way to care for them. They would go to good
schools and be safe every day. He believed that his mother might agree. She never saw
the children now except for a day every few months. She knew what awaited them if they
stayed in South Africa. He said in the letters that he was working for a good person and
that all would be well if the children could reach the border. He believed with every
beat of his heart that this was the right thing to do.

He wanted also to write to Nthusi, but he did
not know where to find him. When he got the money out of the floor of Amen’s
house, he would wait to hear from his mother and then send the money and ask her to buy
shoes for Nthusi. He put his head down on the table intending only to close his eyes for
a moment, but when he next opened them the sun was up, and his neck felt as though an ox
had stood on it. He fed the cats and White Dog and watered the lemon and grapefruit
trees and the vegetables in the garden. The flowers of the tomato plants had already set
into tiny tomatoes. Each small chili pepper was reaching with small hands toward the
sky.

He made
mabele
for breakfast. The
last time he’d seen Kagiso, she was making porridge. Kagiso found such pleasure in
food. How happy she was after her brother had given her the leg of the goat. He could
imagine the smell of the meat coming from the three-legged pot, see Kagiso’s legs
straight as she bent from the waist, stirring the stew. He could not believe she was
gone.

The sadness told his belly not to eat, that
it would only make him sick. He drank some water, left the pot of
mabele
on the
table for when he returned home, picked up the two letters to mail, changed to a clean
shirt, and went outdoors. He set a bowl of water on the ground for White Dog and told
her to stay. She tried to follow him, and three times he had to chase her home.

He went straight to Princess Marina
Hospital. He thought if he went early, perhaps he could listen at the windows to know
where the babies were. The road was still fairly empty and the light hazy, as though the
day was half asleep. When he reached the grounds of the hospital, he walked around the
building. At first, all was quiet. He waited. And finally, at the far corner, he heard
the sound of crying. It was not Ontibile’s voice, but the cries of the child told
him where she would be if she was still alive.

Food, he saw, was delivered through a door
to the kitchen, and instead of walking in the front, past that Sister who could smell a
lie, he decided to walk through the backdoor. If you look as though you know who you are
and why you are there, with complete confidence, people usually do not ask you
questions. He remembered what his
grandfather had told him: hold your
head high and expose your throat and chest to danger, and people will think you are not
afraid. If you hang your head low like an old donkey, people will say, “Hey, what
are you doing here? Get out!” He lifted his head and put his chest out, not puffed
out like a silly guinea fowl in mating season, but just enough, and entered.