White Dog Fell From the Sky (41 page)

Amen. Meeting Amen was where it began. If
he’d walked down that footpath a quarter of an hour earlier, a quarter of an hour
later, he would have slept somewhere else that night. Who knows where he would have
ended up? But it would not have been with Amen and Kagiso. It would not all have
unfolded.

Why are they not coming for him now? It has
been a day, perhaps two. How often has he prayed to God to let him die, a God who has
proven to be deaf, blind, criminally indifferent.

How is it that a small voice, even now, is
saying,
live!
Some stubborn,
reptilian creaking urgency wants
to draw one more breath. And after that, one more. And again and again.

Surely death will be like water merging with
water.

They have not been coming for him for
several days now. He believes his usefulness to them has ended.
What is the chaff to
the wheat? saith the Lord.
They will come with their sharp threshing
instruments and beat him small and blow him away as chaff.

Surely death will be like the earth
dissolving in the rains, running before the deluge, merging with the moving waters. Or
like letting your hands go from the branch of a tall tree and dropping, falling through
space, the fall never ending, black nothingness forever.

Workmen had been banging on the roof of the
Ministry of Local Government and Lands all morning when the phone rang.
“Hello!” Alice yelled into receiver.

It was Heavenly Mosepe. The nurse had found
an egg on Moses. “You must come get the children.”

There was silence on Alice’s end.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hello.”

“You must wash everything made of
cloth in the house, then they will stop.”

“They will never stop.”

“They will stop, madam.”

She slammed out of work and picked up the
children. “Still?” asked Ari Schwartz. He pulled out another bottle of vile
brown liquid. One of his eyes wept easily. When Alice first knew him, she thought he was
grieving for his wife. He held out the bottle, dabbed at the corner of his eye, and
shoved his handkerchief back in his pocket.

“Don’t you have anything else?
That stuff doesn’t work.”

“I have one more thing. Surefire, but
you must use it very carefully. Not a drop in the children’s eyes.” He went
behind a curtain and came back with a cork-stoppered bottle filled with black liquid.
“The instructions are written on the back. Follow them closely.”

“It won’t hurt them?”

“No, just keep it out of their eyes.
Use it every day for three days. By the end of that time, the lice will be
dispatched.”

“I’ll make you a cake if
it’s true.”

“Chocolate is my favorite,” he
said, pulling out his handkerchief again. “Looks like rain.”

“Let’s hope.” Alice paid
him, and he wished her luck.

The wind was blowing low and steady,
sweeping dust across the length of the mall. The title of the movie at the cinema was
obscured by brown haze. The dust clung to everything: windshields, foreheads, shoes, the
umbrellas under which the Mbukush women sat in their stalls. They were folding them now,
gathering their wares, taking cover. The wind seemed to increase in ferocity as they
walked back to the truck. It tossed hats. A can rolled across a flat expanse between the
electrical shop and the road. White Dog put her ears back, and Lulu covered them with
her hands.

“
Pula e kae?
” said
Alice. Where’s the rain? There’d been so little, and soon winter would come,
with no possibility of more.

“She is coming,” said Moses,
practicing his English.

Alice drove home while the wind nudged the
truck sideways. In the driveway, a few drops fell. “Hurry!” she said,
gathering her papers. A lightning bolt rent the sky, followed by a jolt of thunder. She
took Lulu’s hand and ran toward the house. Moses had already ducked inside.

White Dog refused to cross the threshold.
“Come!” but she planted herself outside, her body shaking. “Come
on!” yelled Alice, but she was too frightened to move. Another burst of thunder
shook the air. Never had Alice in her childhood been afraid of thunderstorms, but here
people actually died from lightning strikes. Often. Alice tried to pick White Dog up to
bring her in, but she ran away, then came creeping back toward the threshold.
“Don’t then.”

Alice felt the storm enter her. She ran from
room to room, furious, gathering sheets and towels and hurling them onto a mounting pile
on the living room floor. Pillows, dish towels, every stitch of clothing in the house.
The rain pelted down now, lightning blanched the sky, and the wind screamed and shrieked
and shook branches loose and threw them to the ground. The children watched wide-eyed as
she grabbed things and threw them onto the pile. After a time, she sat down on the
mound, spent. Outside it was just rain now.

“
Ke batla borotho,
” Lulu
said suddenly.

“We have no bread. Do you want to make
it?” She mimed stirring.

“
Ee, mma.
”

“You know how to make it?”

“
Ee, mma.
”

Alice got out yeast and mixed it with water,
set a five-kilo bag of flour, a large bowl, and a bread pan on the wooden table.

“Do you want me to help?” Alice
pointed to her, and then to Lulu.

Lulu pointed to herself.

Alice went to the living room and carried a
huge load of clothes to the bathtub, turned on the hot water, added soap, and filled the
tub half full. She took off her sandals and climbed into the tub and pounded the clothes
with her feet. She pulled out the plug and let the soapy water drain, replaced the plug,
and filled up the bathtub again. She rinsed the clothes, let out the water, and wrung
each item with her hands.

She went to the kitchen to find buckets for
the clothes and put on her brakes at the doorway. The large bag of flour had fallen to
the floor. Lulu and Moses were rolling in it and laughing. Flour had drifted around the
front legs of the table and the stool. Lulu’s hair snowed onto the red concrete
floor. Where Moses was wet from the rain, his skin had turned to a white paste. The two
of them looked up suddenly, and stopped. Alice laughed, threw a little flour onto their
heads, and left them to it. She grabbed a couple of buckets, thinking, If I were a real
mother, I’d stop them. But when in their lives will they ever get to do this
again?

The rain ended. She hung clothes and sheets
and towels on the line out by the crested barbet’s tree, and draped clothes over
aloe plants and bushes all over the yard while Moses and Lulu swept and scrubbed the
kitchen floor. Alice hosed them off by the backdoor, the two of them screaming and
running over the muddy ground.

That night the phone rang.
“I’ve spoken to him.” Hendrik’s voice sounded deeply exhausted,
old. It took her a moment to understand he meant the deputy minister of correctional
services. “He said he’ll look into it and get back to me. If he frees him,
Isaac will be permanently
expelled from South Africa. You would need
to find a way to secure political asylum in Botswana. That could be tricky, considering
why he was thrown out.”

“Is he safe?”

“No one’s safe where he
is.”

“You sound tired.”

“I’m an old man.” He
paused. “My wife’s been ill. I haven’t told you. She has lung cancer.
Never smoked a day in her life.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“We’ve been married fifty-three
years.”

“I’m sorry, Hendrik.”

“She went into the hospital yesterday
for treatment. I’m going there overnight. I’ll sleep on a cot in her
room.”

She was quiet a moment and then told him
she’d pray for them.

The children were in bed. Itumeleng’s
little house in back was dark. She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Perhaps
Isaac was alive, perhaps not. The deputy minister wouldn’t have known, either way.
He would have reassured Hendrik, told him what he wanted to hear. Or maybe he’d
only said he’d look into it but was lying. Someone in that role would not be
trustworthy. A superthug with blood on his hands, a great deal of blood.

A week passed, and another week. She heard
from Hendrik only once. His wife was home from the hospital, but not doing well.
He’d tried contacting the deputy minister, but the man had not returned his
calls.

The lice were vanquished, and the three of
them delivered a chocolate cake to Mr. Schwartz, who wept real tears.

Three days later, Hendrik called to say that
the deputy minister had called. Isaac would be freed and expelled from South Africa if
Botswana would permit him entry. Until that time, he would remain in prison.

“We’re only partway
there,” he said. “We don’t know what’s happened to him. The
important thing now is getting an entry permit and asylum on your end. Every day
counts.”

She realized she should have been working on
this all along, but it had seemed useless while he was in prison. “Please call me
tomorrow or the day after,” she said. “I’ll do everything I
can.”

She considered going back to the chief of
police, but he didn’t seem to be a man who could be swayed, except by a higher
authority. Directly after school, she went to speak with Heavenly Mosepe, who knew every
permanent secretary and minister in government.

“Quett Masire is the person who can
help,” Heavenly said. The vice president. “Do you know him?”

“His wife is teaching me Setswana, but
I don’t know him.” She’d met him once at a reception. She remembered
thinking at the time
that this man had been loved as a child. It was
an odd thing to have thought, but now, it gave her hope.

“I will speak with him,” said
Heavenly. “I have known him many years. Can you say without a doubt that this man
is not a danger to anyone here?”

“I would swear it on my father’s
grave.”

Quett Masire was out of town attending a
conference in Tanzania, and there was no way to contact him. When he returned, four days
later, Heavenly did what she’d promised. Several days after that, she received a
communication that Vice President Masire had spoken with the chief of police and after
reading the file on Isaac determined that there’d been insufficient evidence to
warrant a deportation. The office of the vice president would send an official all-clear
to the South African government and ask immigration authorities to grant Isaac political
asylum. Alice knew she wasn’t supposed to call Hendrik, but she did anyway. She
was beyond herself with joy, and he was cautiously optimistic.

But there ensued a holdup on the South
African side. The deputy minister of correctional services needed to confer with the
minister, who had gone on vacation. No one could say when he’d return. Another
week went by.

“Tell me this is a bad dream,”
Alice said when Hendrik told her the news. “Isaac could die because some fat
minister is sunning himself in Zanzibar.”

“I’ll make another inquiry
tomorrow,” Hendrik said. “It’s all I can do.”

Three nights later, he called. “I have
good news. He says he’ll free Isaac. I’m told he’s to be driven to the
border next Tuesday. I’m not allowed to see him. That probably means he’s in
bad shape. They don’t like showing their handiwork. You should probably arrange a
hospital bed.

“Things could still go wrong. You
could wait all day at the border and go back home without him. He might not even be
alive.”

“Why do you say that?”

“This sort of thing happens. Officials
clear a person, and he dies before he’s released. They blame it on mental
instability. I’ll be sending you duplicate documents. I want you to have a copy,
just in case. Normally, the guards carry only the one set, but I don’t want to
take any chances. I bribed an office clerk. He could lose his job.” He left it
unsaid that something equally bad, or worse, could happen to him.

“I’ve found someone traveling up
to Gaborone the day after tomorrow. He’ll carry the papers. He’s quite high
ranking, so he shouldn’t get stopped. Where can he find you?”

“At the Ministry of Local Government
and Lands.”

“His name is Diederik
Devalk.”

“D-e-v-a-l-k?”

“Correct. He has a meeting at eleven
at the Ministry of Finance. I don’t know when to tell you to expect him, before or
after that.”

She told him she’d be in her office
all day. “How is your wife, Hendrik?”

“A little better today. The news has
brightened us both.”

Devalk turned up at quarter past ten. He
was charming: an impeccably fitted gray suit, head held high, dark eyes, pale skin,
longish dark hair, combed back, long fingers that grasped hers in a cool handshake. He
passed her a large envelope, which she slid into her desk. The state of her cinder-block
office embarrassed her. She found him a cup of tea and a biscuit.

His accent was South African, but it had a
touch of British in it. She was fascinated by a small stain on the sleeve of his gray
suit. It so much didn’t belong there. He asked her nothing about her involvement
with Isaac. She was grateful. She asked him about his journey, whether he lived in
Johannesburg, what his work involved. Yes, Jo’burg was his home. He worked for the
government, and also closely with the diamond industry, principally De Beers.

His face bore the ravages of his
powerbroking role between the diamond industry and the South African government, but
still, she liked him, the boy in him close enough to the surface to be seen. She
imagined him getting out of bed in the morning, mussed from
sleep,
grumpy, before he donned his public self. When he took his leave, their eyes met, and
hers unaccountably welled up. He held her hand a little longer than necessary. Since Ian
had died, she’d felt nothing for any man and hardly recognized the brief flicker
Devalk inspired. After he’d gone, she opened the envelope he’d left.
Foolscap-sized sheets of paper, government seals, densely written Afrikaans. The only
thing she recognized was the name, Isaac Muthethe. All afternoon, she kept opening the
drawer and sliding it closed again, making sure the envelope was there. She skipped
lunch. She hardly dared go to the bathroom.