White Dog Fell From the Sky (3 page)

Amen gestured for Isaac to sit down on the
stoop. At first he said nothing, then, “What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“To Kopano. I want to know the whole
story. And what you’re doing here.” One did not trifle with Amen, not years
ago when he was thirteen or fourteen back in school, less so now. His wide-set eyes were
intense, passionate, but something else was there too—an ancient injury living side by
side with an easy arrogance. Menace, the child of this union.

Isaac felt like a bird falling from the sky,
sinking into sand. He wanted just to sit in the waning sunlight and watch Kagiso
stirring the pot. He was tired, too sad to speak. He saw himself on that day, standing
in the clear winter sun on the train platform next to his friend.

“Kopano and I were waiting for a train to
Pretoria,” he said. “We had a month’s holiday from medical school.
Kopano was going home. I was going to see my mother. And then to see my granny and my
younger brothers and sister in Bophuthatswana.”

He remembered on that day the white
butterflies were migrating. Isaac had never asked anyone where they came from or where
they were going. He doubted whether anyone in the world knew. While they waited, Kopano
talked about someone he’d met, a man who was head of the Black People’s
Convention. Kopano’s voice rose and fell in the sunshine while Isaac watched the
blizzard of butterflies, hundreds of thousands pouring northward, delicate white wings
beating the air, going places he’d never go. Every now and then, one would glide
close enough for him to see the brown veins and the brown tips of the wings, the color
of a marula nut.

He felt the beat of the train in his feet
before he saw it. Then it appeared in the distance, its homely black engine engulfed in
steam, the goods and passenger cars trailing behind. A glint of metal on the front of
the locomotive flashed in the sun.

“We watched the train as it came
toward us.”

The white butterflies lifted higher into the
air, and the rumbling of the wheels filled Isaac’s body. Kopano looked upward, his
eyes following the still wings gliding on air currents. His face, normally fervent and
weighed down with responsibility, relaxed and lifted. He may even have smiled.

“Two white men, wearing the uniform of
the South African Defense Force, seized Kopano and threw him into the path of the
train.” The men seemed to hesitate, as though deciding what to do with Isaac. Then
they turned, walked down the platform in no particular hurry, and climbed into a police
van.

“Did you try to stop them?”
asked Amen.

“They came out of nowhere.”

“Afterward?”

“No.” People who saw what
happened moved away. They hurried into second- and third-class train carriages; women
held their babies close.

Isaac found a conductor on the platform. He
would not tell Amen what happened next. He’d never tell anyone. To his shame, he
went down on his knees, holding the conductor’s pant cuff.
Please, baas,
please help, I beg of you. My friend is under the train
.

Get your dirty kaffir hands off me.
The conductor glanced at the tracks.
Your friend should have been more
careful
.

He was pushed. You saw it. It was no
accident
.

The conductor kicked out with his shoe.
I tell you, boy, get away
. The train departed, and what was left of Kopano
lay between the tracks.

Sitting in the afternoon sun now, safe in
another country, Isaac closed his eyes and found nothing between him and it: the sound
of the train receding, thunder in his ears, Kopano’s body dragged down the track,
blood sprayed onto dirt and gravel. And the horror of a small gray mouse running between
the rails looking for food.

“I walked to the hospital. I got them
to fetch the body. I caught the next train to Pretoria, and I told Kopano’s mother
and his grandmother. I told you already, I’m here to save my hide.”

He rose and went behind Amen’s house,
his head bowed, unable to bear the thought of Kopano’s mother. She’d been
expecting her son. She’d cooked all day. Her hair was newly plaited. He imagined
her sitting in the shade, a neighbor braiding her hair, smoothing it with her hands,
their low voices, her joy.

Isaac sat on his haunches and looked at
nothing. The heat was stifling.

Growing up, he’d thought of himself as
ordinary, the second of six children. But others thought differently. He was “the
smart one,” encouraged to remain in school. His mother had once told him,
“Each person on Earth carries with them their own pouch. That person brings it
wherever they go, carried in their hand. Your pouch never empties, only fills and fills.
What’s on the bottom remains on the bottom and is covered over in time. You are
given things to care for. You are given things that are difficult to
understand.”

In his pouch were his mother’s white
employers in Pretoria who had no children of their own. They’d singled him out,
paid his school fees, given him books, paid for him to go to university. After
he’d graduated, Hendrik and Hester Pretorius said, Keep going. He applied to
the University of Natal Medical School, Non-White Section, and was
accepted. Until Kopano, his pouch had been filled only with good fortune.

Stephen Biko, the antiapartheid activist,
had attended the same medical school as Isaac and Kopano. If it hadn’t been for
Biko, Isaac wouldn’t have been at Kopano’s side when he was killed, and he
wouldn’t now be in Botswana. But the legacy of Biko shamed him into joining the
South African Students Organization. He hadn’t wanted to go where there was
trouble, but he attended one illegal meeting with his friend, and then another, until it
was unthinkable to stay away.

On September, 12, 1977, not long after
Kopano’s murder, Biko died in detention in the Eastern Cape province. Colonel
Pieter Goosen, the commanding officer of the Security Branch in Port Elizabeth,
suggested that Mr. Biko might have fallen on the floor during a scuffle and bumped his
head. The postmortem examination showed five lesions to the brain, a scalp wound, a cut
on his upper lip, abrasions and bruising around the ribs. After the
“scuffle,” Mr. Biko was shackled and handcuffed, left naked for a couple of
days, and finally driven twelve hours in a semiconscious state to Pretoria, where he
died from a brain hemorrhage.

Blacks were not allowed to travel to King
William’s Town where Biko’s funeral was held. Although Isaac hadn’t
been there, he’d read what Desmond Tutu had said before the crowd of fifteen
thousand: “The powers of injustice, of oppression, of exploitation, have done
their worst, and they have lost. They have lost because they are immoral and wrong, and
our God … is a God of justice and liberation and goodness.” The Reverend
Tutu was a man worthy of respect, but Isaac could not agree with him. If our God is a
God of justice and liberation and goodness, why does He not intervene?

Isaac and his oldest brother Nthusi mourned
on the streets of Pretoria with thousands of others.
Amandla!
the crowd
shouted.
Ngawethu! Power! The power is ours!
During the gathering, Isaac told
Nthusi in a low voice that the police had killed his friend, and that it was likely they
would find him next. He couldn’t bear to look at his
brother.
When he finally glanced in his direction, he saw disbelief and rage. Nthusi’s face
said,
You. The one who carried hope for our family
.

“Why aren’t you in
hiding?”

Isaac repeated the words of Biko:
You
are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t
care anyway.

“You’re a fool,” Nthusi
said. “Look what happened to Biko. And to Mohapi, hanged in his cell. And
Mazwembe. And Fenuel Mogatusi, suffocated. And Mosala, beaten to death. And Wellington
Tshazibane, hanged in his cell. And George Botha, pushed six floors down a stairwell.
And Mathews Mabelane, pushed out of a tenth-floor window …”

“Stop.”

“They’ll beat you until you have
no brains. You might not care for yourself, but if something happened to you, it would
kill our mother.” An upwelling of anger caused Nthusi to lurch to one side, away
from Isaac.

They walked along in silence, people all
around them.

Finally, under his breath, Nthusi said,
“You must go.”

“Where?”

“North. To Botswana.”

They walked back home in a sea of angry,
sorrowing people—Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho. The crowd walked slowly, a girl in a yellow
dress holding her sister’s hand, young men shaking their fists, a grandmother in a
faded blue head scarf, all singing.

Nthusi had a friend who knew an undertaker
who traveled back and forth across the northern border. This man had a special
compartment fitted under his hearse for smuggling yellow margarine out of Botswana into
South Africa, in defiance of the dairy farmers who wanted to keep margarine white so it
couldn’t be sold as butter. Every
so often, this undertaker
smuggled people in the other direction, into Botswana.

On the following Sunday, Isaac embraced his
brother and asked him to say good-bye to his mother, to Boitumelo, to his granny, and
his other brothers and sisters. He pushed the tears down into the leather shoes his
brother had given him off his feet. He climbed into the hearse and lay down in the
cavity. He was not a big man, but his body was jammed into the compartment, unable to
move. Over the top, the undertaker and his cousin slid a mahogany coffin containing the
body of a Botswana government official who’d died unexpectedly in Pretoria.

The hearse rattled north. The compartment
smelled of metal and oil—and he preferred not to think of what else. He braced his mind
the way a wildebeest braces its body against a sandstorm. His family came to his mind
one by one, first his mother, then Moses, Lulu, Tshepiso, his youngest brother, and
Lesedi, his baby sister. Then Kopano. Not his friend, no. Bloody shreds of matter
without indwelling. No recognizable head. An arm beside the tracks. A shoe in the dirt.
He heard his own voice pleading with the conductor, calling him
baas
, master, a
word he swore never to use.
Please, baas, please help, I beg of you.

Your friend should have been more careful.

Not if he lived to be a hundred would he
forget. And that conductor wouldn’t forget either. In some part of his crocodile
brain, he’d remember the day his train crushed a black man.

The compartment under the coffin seemed to
grow smaller. He imagined a jagged rock puncturing the casing of the metal container
that held him. His body couldn’t be far from the road.

After a time, the hearse slowed, the talking
between the men in the front seat stopped, and he knew they were approaching the border.
His heart beat into his ears; behind his closed eyelids, his skin prickled. He stopped
breathing, listened, took a shallow breath, stopped, listened. A man outside was walking
around the car. Then the vehicle was rolling again.

What had been a rough asphalt road became
dust and deep corrugations. Isaac fought the instinct to burst out and upward, but he
would have disturbed the dead, something more unthinkable than dying
himself. Between Lobatse and Gaborone, he lay in a fetal position, slamming into the
metal floor. He thought he wouldn’t survive the beating. Then he thought
he’d suffocate. He coughed and spat and finally lay still.

Isaac felt the weight and pull of
Amen’s passion on the other side of the house, the way he’d be dragged into
it if he didn’t resist. He moved away from the wall he’d been leaning
against. His brother’s shoes were made of hard brown leather, too small for his
feet. Already, blisters were biting his heels and the tops of his toes. Meanwhile, his
brother would be walking around in the flimsy sneakers he’d left behind in
exchange. A dove flew onto the roof, and he looked into the sky. You survived, he told
himself. Maybe it’s a good thing; maybe it’s not. His granny always said,
Don’t worry about your own well-being. Worry about the well-being of
people with less than you. If God breaks your leg, He’ll teach you how to
limp.
Nthusi’s shoes would teach him that.

Amen and Kagiso and Isaac and the others
sat outside and watched the loud red sun slip down. The dust in the air created a haze
that settled over the dying day. Their voices sounded thin.
Pula e kae?
asked
Lucky, one of the comrades. Where is the rain?
Ee, pula e kae?
said Khumo,
another comrade. Already it was April with the chances of rain nearly gone until next
year. Khumo’s wife, Kefilwe, hummed and rocked their two-year-old child. Her eyes
squinted against the sun, perspiration beading her forehead, up where the soft hair met
her face. She looked sallow-skinned, spent. Where is the rain? Where? Like a song, an
incantation to whoever made the clouds.

When Isaac’s plate was empty, Kagiso
filled it again, and then once more. “You eat like a hyena who’s lost his
kill to vultures,” she said. He laughed. When he’d finished at last, she
spooned what little remained onto the ground for the white dog. Then, with her legs
stretched out in front of her, she held her baby, Ontibile, in her lap and pulled out
her breast. The child nursed hungrily, her hand kneading and slapping at the breast.
When Kagiso changed breasts, Ontibile looked into her mother’s eyes, held the
nipple with her teeth, and smiled as milk spilled
from the corner of
her mouth. When the sky darkened and the baby’s eyes closed, Kagiso gestured for
Isaac to follow her inside.

The house was a heat sink. Inside, a door
connected one room to a second. Kagiso had hung magazine pages on the wall: a Lil-lets
tampon ad with a black woman smiling, a child holding a McVitie’s digestive
biscuit and looking up at his mother.