White Dog Fell from the Sky

2



Kagiso was cooking when they reached the house. “My wife,” said Amen. She smiled shyly, bent her knees a little, and clasped her two hands together. When she looked up, her mouth was open in a wide smile, as though she were saying WAH! Her face was still girlish, her mouth plump, her teeth very white. She wore a light cotton dress made from navy blue material and a scarf tied over her head, knotted behind her neck. As she stirred beans over a fire, straight-legged, bent at the waist, thumping the sides of a three-legged pot with a big wooden spoon, the breeze stirred her dress. The moment filled him with desire, not just the smell of beans and goat trotters coming from the pot, but also—Isaac had to look away—the smooth skin at the back of her legs, the hair curling out from under her scarf at the nape of her neck.

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.

Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika

Maluphakamis’upondo lwayo

Yizwa imithandazo yethu

Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapholwayo

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.

While Amen held forth outside, Kagiso spread out two mats on the floor, one for her and Amen and their baby and one for Isaac on the other side of the room. He lay down, and strangeness overtook him. He didn’t belong here. These were not his people. The child’s sleeping breath took him back to his brother Moses, who had tangled around him in sleep all the years before Isaac had left for university. His youngest brother, Tshepiso, had slept near them like a solitary old ostrich, sometimes on the mat, sometimes on the floor.

Night deepened. Amen came in and lay beside Kagiso.

Isaac dreamt he was standing on a stretch of ground towering over a vast pit. His father’s tiny figure labored far below. Hundreds of black men worked with picks around him. From one side, a small stream flowed into the pit. As Isaac watched, the stream widened, and water poured in. Men swarmed toward it, trying to stop the onrush. There seemed to be no path out of the hole. Still, his father stood. Just stupidly, as though someone had told him to stay in one place until he died.

Then Isaac was in a rattletrap truck with his uncle, his father’s brother. They were hungry, and his uncle swerved this way and that, trying to run down a guinea fowl. The birds flew up, flew up, and still they could not pin one under a tire.

He woke. The night was very dark. A low, hot wind blew. He saw his father again: a loose slung bravado inside a ruined body. After Isaac had been born, his father had worked for many years in the mines. When he finally returned home, the babies began again. When money ran out, his father had returned to the mines and sent money each month. After a time, the money stopped coming. His mother had tried to get in touch with the mine to find out whether he was dead or alive, but her letters went unanswered. She thought he’d abandoned them. She wanted Isaac to share her anger, but the anger was in her heart, not his. He missed his father, the way he missed his mother now.

Differently from how he missed Boitumelo, her fragrant mouth, her warm breath against his neck. He’d told Nthusi to tell her he was gone for good, not to wait for him. They would have been married. Her hip bone jutted out like the rump of an eland. Her black eyes. Her teeth nipped his flesh, here, here. Now she’d marry someone else.

He woke again when the dogs of Naledi began to bark. Farther out, beyond the place where people were sleeping, he heard the wild dogs answering. The sound made a circle of wildness, enfolding and holding the world of people, like the darkness that surrounds the light of a lamp. It felt safe to him. The dogs were speaking to each other, passing their dog words between them. Outside, the white dog made a low noise in her throat.