White Dog Fell From the Sky (45 page)

In the middle of the night, Alice woke to
Lulu crying herself out of a bad dream. Alice picked her up and held her in her arms and
sat on the bed next to Moses, who was curled into a small ball. Lulu’s body was
warm from sleep, and her cheeks where she’d been crying, left a wetness at
Alice’s breast. If this had been her own child, she would have asked what had
frightened her. But all she could offer was her own warm body. “
Ke batla
Isaac,” Lulu said over and over. I want Isaac. Where is he? “
O
kae?
”

Alice rocked her and crooned, “I know,
I know. I’m sorry. He’s coming soon.” She had no words to tell the
children why Isaac was close but they couldn’t see him. She’d asked
Itumeleng to explain, but they still didn’t understand. Sitting on the edge of the
bed with this sobbing child, she decided that she must ask their teacher to talk to
them. Lulu was as sensitive as a seismograph to tremors. Life would not be easy for her.
She couldn’t escape anything through oblivion, unlike Moses, whose life force
could blast through rock. In time, Lulu’s breath evened out, and her body relaxed.
Alice laid her gently down beside Moses and tucked the sheet around them both.

She was wide awake now. Someday she’d
get to the Tsodilo Hills, where she and Ian had planned to go. If anyplace had been home
for him, it was the hill where the First Spirit had left the imprint of his knees. Where
was home for her? She didn’t know. And she realized in the asking that she wanted
a home as much as she’d ever wanted anything. She had heard it said,
We live
by hope, but a reed never becomes a mosetlha tree by dreaming.
You make what
you want, not dream it. A home
with Ian would have been a restless,
nomadic place, like the tents the Bedouins carry on their backs. He’d said it to
her more than once. “I’m no good for you, love.”

“Who are you to say that?”
she’d shot back. He was a wild creature in the shape of a man. She’d loved
this wildness in him. Somehow they would have made a life together.

Lulu and Moses were now the center of a
small, uncertain thing. She guessed she could call it a home: a roof without walls, a
hearth with two glowing coals. Not fragile exactly, but unsteady on its feet. She heard
a clattering in the kitchen and got up. Moses was standing in a puddle of water in the
middle of the floor in his T-shirt holding the aluminum kettle, dented where he’d
dropped it.

“
Ke tsoga makuku.
” I
wake up very early. “Tea?” he asked brightly, practicing his English.

“
Ee, ke batla,
” she
said, laughing. “But the sun isn’t shining yet.”

“No problem. The sun she
comes.”

All that day and into the night, the old
gardener strained for breath. His extremities were cold to the touch. The light faded
from the sky, and Isaac sat next to him on the bed. “I’m here, old
man,” he whispered in Setswana.

“
O mang?
” the old man
whispered. Who are you? His hands reached toward the ceiling, opening and shutting,
their veins large and swollen. He muttered incomprehensible things. His breathing became
noisy. Isaac turned the man’s head to one side to keep him from choking.

He remembered the day they’d met, the
pride the old man took in the sunken garden. It was his garden, although that man with
the red face who’d yelled at Isaac would have said he owned everything and the old
man nothing. Soon this old man would be gone: bones and skin and all that was inside his
head: the names of things, the woman he’d once loved, the secrets of his heart,
the disappointments and bitterness, the sweetness of his garden.

He thought of his own father, alive or not
alive, and his mother’s anger. She would believe she’d been betrayed to her
dying day. When he was better, when they let him out of here, he would try to call her.
It made him dizzy to think of hearing her voice again.

Hours passed. The old man’s hand
twitched in his, and his breathing stopped a moment, then started again. It was quiet
now on the ward. All the men around him were sleeping, and he imagined the nurses were
asleep too, in their chairs. A dull light reflected off the linoleum in the hall. All he
could see was the old man’s profile, and his chest trying to rise and fall.

He thought of Kopano, shoved under the train.
And the man in the cell next to his, who’d never again see his children. And the
young man who’d cried out for his mother, pleaded to God. After their voices had
gone still, Isaac had not grieved for them. There was no grieving in that place. For
there to be grief, there must be love, but hate had consumed it all.

The old man tried to sit up. He got his
elbows halfway under him and collapsed. Isaac put his arm under his shoulders and lifted
him until he was half sitting. He could not hold him because of the weakness in his
arms. He laid him gently down and reached for the pillow off his bed, lifted the man
again, and laid him down on the two pillows. The old man began to breathe rapidly
through his mouth. His breath stopped abruptly, and then he began again. His lips were
becoming blue, and his eyes were closed. Isaac laid his hand lightly on the man’s
chest.

Several times more his breath started up
rapidly, then stopped. Each pause lasted longer, and each time it stopped, Isaac thought
he was gone. He waited and held his own breath. And then the old man breathed no
more.

Isaac closed his mouth for him. He felt he
had been witness to something beyond reckoning, that he was not worthy of what
he’d seen. He did not know how to pray for the dead, but he whispered,
“Modimo, I beg you to have mercy on this soul, passing from Earth to the great
beyond. Forgive him, and let him find perfect love and rest in peace.” The old
man’s jaw dropped open again. Isaac closed it gently. He was exhausted and
returned to his own bed. He thought of calling a nurse but the old man’s soul
could take its leave more peacefully if his body was not disturbed until morning. Lying
beside him with his eyes open, he realized he had never learned the old man’s
name. To him, he would always be simply the old man.

The next morning, on the slope of the old
man’s sunken garden, a flower bloomed, opening into five white petals and three
white curling stamens. The old man had planted the flower,
wahlenbergia
caledonica
, from seed. He’d been waiting to see the white petals unfold,
tinted,
as he knew they’d be, with the lightest shade of purple.
One by one, the birds in the cages began to sing. First a pair of yellow canaries, then
a lovebird, the glossy starlings and bulbuls, then the tiny zebra finches with their
orange beaks and feet. A light dew lifted from a blue spur-flower and a Chinese ground
orchid, from the gray green leaves of a mound of widow’s tears, and from a clump
of blue-eyed grass. The red-faced man who’d shouted at Isaac stood in the doorway
of his house, listening.

Two weeks after starting his medication for
tuberculosis and typhoid, they moved Isaac out of the TB ward into a general medical
ward. He was still very weak and had little appetite. Alice brought him a drawing from
Lulu and another from Moses. Lulu’s was of their school and their teacher, with
White Dog sitting outside under a tree. Moses had drawn Alice’s house, the outside
on one half of the page, their bed with the two of them in it on the other half.

Alice sat on Isaac’s bed. There was no
other place to sit. Her hair, which was usually gathered into a messy knot at the nape
of her neck, was down around her face. Her eyes were very blue and she looked at him
intently.

“How are you?” she asked. It
overwhelmed him. He felt a ridiculous and dangerous urge to touch her hair where it had
fallen around her chin, to push it back around her ear.

“I am going better,” he said, as
though he were a truck with an engine.

“Have they said when you can
leave?”

“My lungs must be clear, and also I
must be strong enough to walk around the building three times without
stopping.”

“And how many times can you walk
now?”

His face clouded. “I am not in a hurry
to go.”

“Because you have nowhere to
stay?”

“Yes, madam.”

“You can stay with me. But don’t
call me madam.”

He stopped. He could feel his ears ring, and
then he said it. “I cannot
live under the same roof as you,
Alice.” To call her by her name, he felt that the sky would tumble to Earth.

She didn’t seem to notice.
“Because you’re African and I’m European? Because you’re a man
and I’m a woman?”

“Yes.”

“Because people would talk?”

“That also.”

“Do you care what people would
say?”

He thought a moment. “No, I
don’t care what people think or what they say. I care about going to prison. I
will never go back to prison. I would kill myself first. And I care about hurting
you.”

She glanced at his face and bowed her head.
Out the window, the mourning doves on the roof called. “Do you think you’d
go to prison for living in the same house? Even with Moses and Lulu there?”

“In my mind, I think no. In my heart,
I think yes.”

She saw how easy it was for her. She could
say,
Don’t be ridiculous, you know it’s different here,
but
she’d be playing with him, with a soul so wounded.

“How are Moses and Lulu?”

“They ask after you every day. Shall I
bring them to visit?”

“Not here, no. I’ll see them
before long … And White Dog?”

“She’s waiting for
you.”

“And you?” he asked.

Unaccountably, her eyes filled with tears.
She waited a moment before she spoke. “A man I loved was killed while you were in
prison. He was caught in a buffalo stampede up near Maun.” It felt unseemly to cry
in front of him after what he’d suffered. She covered her eyes and turned away. He
sat quietly, and when she turned back, his eyes looked pained.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

They were quiet together for a while.

Finally she said, “If you can’t
live under the same roof, you can build a
rondavel
for yourself in the
garden.”

“The land belongs to the government.
It’s not possible.”

“Perhaps it is possible.” The
hospital gown hung from his thin frame.
“Would you like me to
bring some clothes for you from home? I think there’s a pair of pants there and a
shirt.”

“Yes.”

“Have you thought about later when
you’re better, what you might want to do? Do you want to go back to
school?”

He looked at her as though she were mad.
“I will never be able to return there.”

“I’m not talking about South
Africa. You could get a scholarship to study somewhere else. Zambia. Europe. The United
States. I can help you.”

He didn’t answer, and she saw that she
should shut up. He was ashen-faced, the wound on his shoulder still suppurated. His
dreams had vanished. He looked like a man waiting to die. She stood up.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. She walked out the front door of
the hospital, past a row of women in kerchiefs sitting on the low concrete wall, with
their little metal bowls of food for their loved ones.

On her way home, she thought of
Mogoditshane, a small village outside Gaborone. She’d only been there once or
twice but she loved the shade trees and chickens scratching about, the
rondavel
s with their tight thatching, the neat mud walls with decorative
patterns of contrasting mud. She could have two
rondavel
s built, one for her,
and one for Isaac and the children. Or she could stay where she was, have a house built
for them in Mogoditshane, and leave them to it. Or she could do her own washing and
cleaning, find another job for Itumeleng, and give Isaac the servant’s quarters.
Whatever occurred to her, she bumped up against his haunted face, his eyes without a
future. She had never seen a face like that.

She drove into the driveway and found the
children playing in Ian’s Land Rover, Lulu in the driver’s seat, Itumeleng
beside her, and Moses and Itumleleng’s daughter in the backseat. It gave her a
start to see all this life in that dead thing.

Alice asked Itumeleng if she would mind
watching the children a little longer. “
Ee, mma,
” she said, but her
face said, I’m tired, the day is over.
I’m sorry,
Alice mouthed as
she turned around and drove back to the hospital.

She sat down on Isaac’s bed and was
quiet a moment before saying, “Help me understand what it’s like for you
now.”

He shut his eyes and said, “It is
impossible to understand.”

“I might understand a little. I too
have lost something.”

He opened his eyes, studied her face a
moment, and seemed to make a decision. “I never knew from moment to moment,”
he said quietly, “if they would come or when they would come. And when they came,
I never knew what part of my body they would break, whether I would survive to see
another day.” His words grew more halting. “What they did
was … how can I say? Without purpose. At first I tried to discover what made
them do this, what made them do that. If I was quiet, did that make things better or
worse? What if I spoke? But never was there … what is the word? Never was any
one thing connected to another. One day they were using their fists and their boots.
Another day they were drowning me. Another day, electric cattle prod on the tongue. I
taught myself to stop trying to understand anything. I made my mind and
body …” He turned one hand palm upward and swept the other hand over it as
though erasing it. “I became blank inside. I was an animal, nothing
more.”

She remembered the snake in the garden, the
way it had tried to strike and strike, and in its dying had coiled.

“When they drove me toward the border,
they pretended they were going to kill me. They had a gun. They tied my hands behind my
back. They put a sack over my head. They took me out into the bush. And then they
laughed.”