White Dog Fell from the Sky

21



Isaac went to the small grocery store in the Old Village to buy bread one morning, and read the news on the front page of the paper.

South African security forces attacked two houses in a poor neighborhood of Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, early today, killing seven people and wounding three. A car with South African registration plates was seen in the neighborhood of one of the houses shortly before gunfire interrupted the predawn quiet.

According to government officials, two men were killed by gunfire at one site, while at the other site, two men, two women, and a child lost their lives. The incursion touched off fears of a renewal of cross-border attacks by South African forces against African National Congress guerrillas. The Botswana government has deplored the attacks against its citizens and called upon the United Nations for condemnation.

The couple who ran the store were South African, talking to a white customer when he came in. “They used loudspeakers,” the wife said, “and told people to stay in their houses. The South Africans had no choice really. They have to take care of this violent fringe before they kill any more innocent people.”

The white customer said, “What about the two women and the child?”

“Those women were connected to the ANC. They were connected. The child couldn’t be helped.”

Isaac bought a paper and went outside. A dove sat in a tree on the corner, singing her song. He didn’t buy bread. He would never buy from those people again. He intended to read the rest of the story, but he knew in his knees, in his gut what had happened and where it had happened. White Dog followed him, her tail low. Isaac took her back to the house, gave her food and a bowl of water, told her to stay, and walked up the road toward town. He was not sure, but he remembered that Amen was going to teach a training course in Angola. He had not spoken ten words to him since they’d fought. Unless Kagiso was visiting her family, she’d have been there last night. Ontibile had been next to her, lying on the mat on her back with her arms outstretched and her mouth open, dreaming the dreams of a child.

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.

“Dumela, rra,” he said to a man stirring a large pot on a stove. “O kae?”

“Ke teng.” I am well.

“Sister is waiting for me.”

“Ee hee.” Ah, yes.

He passed out of the kitchen into the hall, and from there, he quickly turned in the direction from where he’d heard the child’s cry. There was no one in the hall outside the kitchen, but directly he came to a place where mothers were crouched in the hall with special food for their little ones. Worry lined their faces. He greeted them and said quietly that he was visiting his niece. A young nurse came to him inside the room and still with his head high, he greeted her and said, “Sister at the front desk said that I could find my niece here, Ontibile Thebe.”

“She is over there, sir.”

“How is she doing?”

“You are … ?”

“Ee, mma, I am her uncle. I have traveled here from Mochudi.” Meanwhile he was searching searching for her, and then he saw her sitting on a little cot in the corner. She was quite still, but her eyes were watching.

“She is ready to be released but we have no family member.”

Amen had not been here. Either he was dead, or alive in Angola, or staying somewhere nearby, knowing that he would be picked up if he came for his daughter. “I’m here to take her to her grandmother. I will be returning to Mochudi this evening.”

“Ee hee,” said the nurse. She was fresh-faced, and young enough not to know the rules. Ontibile put out her hands to him. He picked her up and held her close, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her cheek against his ear.

“She was not wounded,” said the nurse. “She was found under her mother. The police brought her here because they didn’t know where else to take her. She has been asking for her mother. I am very sorry for your loss.”

His eyes filled.

“Where did you say her granny is?”

“Ee, mma. She is in Mochudi.” He was lying and lying. He knew nothing about the granny except that Kagiso went to see her now and then.

The nurse brought a discharge paper, and he signed it, using a name that he thought up while he was writing. The nurse gathered up Ontibile’s blanket and gave it to him along with a bottle of milk and some biscuits, and he walked out the side door, which was locked from the outside but open on the inside.

When they were out under the open sky, he felt Ontibile’s body relax into his. She could not understand anything. She thought he was taking her to Kagiso. He wished with all his heart that his breasts could pour out milk for her. He didn’t know what to do, where he would go. His legs took him to the post office to mail the letters he had written, and then toward Naledi. Ontibile seemed to sense that she was headed toward home. Her throat made a little humming sound, and by and by her head fell onto his shoulder, and she slept as they walked. He took her on a route around the she-been so the loud music wouldn’t wake her. By then, the sun was already hot. He put his hand over the top of her head to give her shade, but still, little beads of sweat formed along her hairline and on her upper lip, and her springy hair felt moist in the palm of his hand.

A policeman was standing guard outside Amen’s house, and a few people were watching to see what would happen. Nothing was happening. It felt like a cursed place. He asked an old woman staring at the house if she knew Ditsego, a friend of Kagiso’s who had a baby about the same age as Ontibile. The woman shook her head and moved away from him. He was sure that Ditsego lived not too far distant. From what he remembered Kagiso saying, she had known her friend before coming to Naledi.

He went next door. “No, rra,” the woman there said, “I do not know Ditsego, but you could ask Grace Moatihaping who lives just there.” She pointed to a shack made of tin. “She knows everyone.”

Grace was not home, and he sat on her stoop to wait. Ontibile was still sleeping and growing heavier in his arms. He looked into her face, so peaceful in her dreaming. Grace did not come. Ontibile woke and was hungry. He fed her the biscuits the nurse had given him and gave her the bottle of milk to suck. He asked other people whether they knew Ditsego, and he asked them when Grace would be coming. By then it was afternoon. No one knew anything, or perhaps because of the shooting, they were afraid of him, a stranger.

At the end of the afternoon, Grace returned. She was a large woman who smiled easily. Her complexion was ash colored like the side of a cooking pot, and her teeth were very white. He told her the story, all of it. She had known Kagiso. She reached for Ontibile and took her onto her lap.

“You know Ditsego?”

“I will take you there,” she said. But first she offered him tea and bread, which he refused. They set off toward Ditsego’s house as the sun was setting. Dust from the day’s labors had risen all over Gaborone and caused the sun to glow huge and orange. And then the day’s furnace was gone in a blur, and the sky turned a fury of red. Ditsego’s house was not far distant from Grace’s but it was difficult to get there, the paths twisting this way and that. They found her sitting outside with her baby, who was nursing drowsily. The baby’s mouth moved a little, and then it was still for some time until she remembered the breast and sucked once or twice more.

Ditsego listened and wept, her tears falling into her baby’s hair. She rose, took the baby inside, and came out without her. When she lifted Ontibile from Isaac’s arms, it was as though she’d been born for that moment. She sat back down on the stoop and offered her breast, and Ontibile took it and sucked eagerly.

It became dark before she took Ontibile inside and laid her down on the mat beside the other baby. As the half moon rose with its ragged edge, Isaac talked with Grace and Ditsego about what to do. Yes, Ditsego knew Kagiso’s family in Mochudi. She did not know whether they yet knew about their daughter’s death. But she said she would take Ontibile there by bus tomorrow or the next day. Isaac offered to go with her, but she said her husband would be returning from Francistown on the morning train and he would come.

She said she would offer to the family to nurse Ontibile until she was not needing the breast any longer, and then Ontibile could live with her granny in Mochudi. Or if living with her granny was not possible, Ditsego would raise her as her own child.

“Go,” she told Isaac. “Don’t worry.” Isaac went inside and watched Ontibile sleeping. He went down on his hands and knees and kissed her cheek and whispered, “Sala sentle, ngwanyana.” Stay well, little one.

He walked a little way with Grace and asked her the way back to Amen’s house; he was turned around and had no idea where he was. He felt sick from hunger, and his head swam with sorrow. When at last he knew where he was, he thanked Grace, and they parted ways.

Later, he understood that he should have returned to the Old Village. He might have considered that the house would not be guarded forever. In a week or two weeks, he could have walked in. Because what was there to guard? No one would want anything there: the blood-stained sleeping mats, the few clothes, the cooking pots filled with ghosts. But he imagined the bulldozers coming. The more his head swam, the less he could forget the money that was sitting under the chunk of concrete in the floor of that house.

He found his way to the main path and doubled back. His thought was to wait until the guard left, or at least to wait until he went to sleep. He had never met any all-night guard who did not sleep. While he slept, he would slip into the house, take the money, and be on his way.