White Dog Fell from the Sky

3



Close to dawn, he felt a tugging at his shirt and opened his eyes. Ontibile had crawled toward him, half asleep, and lay down next to him. On the other side of the room, Amen’s arm was thrown carelessly over Kagiso, his face vulnerable, his fists open, not remembering what they’d done to the man behind the rubber door.

Isaac got up quietly and sat on a rock outside the house. Ontibile followed him, laid her head against his lap and sucked her thumb. His palm touched the curve of her back and rested there. The white dog stood and wagged her tail uncertainly and sat down with her nose against Isaac’s foot. Her coat was dull, and every one of her ribs stuck out. “I have nothing for you,” Isaac said, “you must go find someone else.”

Today, he needed to search for a job.

But people would ask where he was from, and it would be unsafe to tell them. He wished that his great grandfather were sitting here beside him. He would have known how to proceed. He’d known monna mogolo, the old man, only a few weeks, but he counted him as one of the wisest people he’d ever met. Monna mogolo was short, light-skinned, and had many wrinkles. He laughed easily, and his eyes crinkled shut with good humor. To protect his head from the rays of the sun, he wore an old Easter bonnet, the veil in tatters, the hat squashed almost flat.

Isaac hadn’t left his side for the three weeks he’d visited. Great grandfather preferred to sleep outdoors. It was August, and the nights were cool and the moon full bright. The Hunger Moon, the old man had called it, the one before the rains. When the rains came, if they came, the moon would turn the color of an ostrich egg, he said—no, even whiter, like the white of a cattle egret’s feathers.

During his mother’s time and his mother’s mother’s time, monna mogolo said, his people’s lands were taken by white men who hunted animals for sport and left the meat of the kudu and springbok to rot in the sun. Those people chased ostrich from their horses until the great birds could run no more and dropped to the ground. They laid claim to the water holes, muddying them with the hooves of their sheep and cows until you could no longer see the faces of ancestors in the clear water. His people were pushed into smaller and smaller spaces, and when they had no game to hunt, they began to hunt the white man’s cattle on the nights when the moon was a sliver and the Earth was dark. They destroyed the fences and took the cattle. White men pursued them, killed some, seized others and put them in prison in Cape Town. Many in prison died from grief, locked away from their wives and children. Great grandfather had gone to that prison, and his son was taken away while he was there and put in a school where he was made to forget his own language. When you forget your own words, he said, you are like a tree without roots, a son with no father.

He told Isaac other things. He said there are two places on the body which other men read like a map. One is at the throat and one is at the solar plexus. He put his knuckle-heavy hand on Isaac’s head. If you hold your head high and expose your throat and chest to danger, this says to others, I am not afraid. But if you are sunken-chested and hang your head like an old mule, people will know you are weak and fearful and they will slip in behind your weakness. This was what monna mogolo taught him, to carry himself like a proud, fearless man.

After his great grandfather went away, Isaac waited for him to return. One morning he woke with a strange tapping in his chest, like the beak of a bird tapping from the inside. He rose and said to his mother, “Monna mogolo is dead.”

“Why do you say such a thing?” she said.

He went to school, he came back home, he ate porridge that night. The next day, he went to school, and when he returned home, his mother said, “My brother has told me our grandfather is dead.”

Ontibile shifted in Isaac’s lap and opened her eyes onto his face. A warm wind brushed his cheek, and mist rose from the dawn-damp earth. The moon was setting on one side of the sky as the sun was rising on the other side, huge and fiery red like a drunkard’s eye. The white dog stretched her paws in front of her and got to her feet. The sun rose into the lowest branches of the trees, beating its slow steady beat. An uneasiness lay over the house.

His impulse was to leave now—walk out and find his way to town, but still he sat. A plane flew over. Ontibile got up and toddled behind the house. The dog followed her and then came back and sat near Isaac. Soon after, Amen came and sat on the threshold next to him. “Ontibile o kae?” he asked.

“She went around that side.”

“Why did you not watch her? … Tla kwano!” he yelled. Soon after, she wobbled back and went inside.

Isaac picked up a small stick and twirled it between his palms. The sun was hotter now. The tin roof began to pop, expanding with the heat. Two doves called from a roof next door, the sound of death in their throats.

Isaac and Amen were quiet next to each other, listening to the sounds of the day waking. At last Amen spoke. “Do you remember my sister?”

“I never met her.”

“She died on the sixteenth of June, in the Soweto uprising. My only sister. I quit school and joined the MK, Umkhonto we Sizwe. They gave me training in Angola. Six months the first time.”

“I’m sorry about your sister. I didn’t know.”

“I received training in pistol shooting, hand grenades, the AK-47, explosives, and land mines. And also the building of secret cells, which Murphy Morobe and I have carried out in Soweto. Now, for these last nine months, I am in Botswana, participating in certain necessary raids back home. I am not at liberty to say more. But I can tell you that without work such as this, apartheid will never end.” He paused. “You are a smart one,” he said. “You would rise fast.”

“It is not my way,” said Isaac, standing.

“She was my only sister,” Amen said again. “She did no one any harm. She was only asking to speak her own language in school. When the police shot her, she lived only a few hours. If I’d been beside her, perhaps I would have taken the bullet for her.”

“Is that what you wish?”

“I would never wish to die.”

Along the road, many people were walking, most of them in one direction. Isaac passed a young woman who was strong and handsome. A baby slept on her back, cinched close with a muslin wrap, then a plaid blanket wrapped over the woman’s breasts and around her waist. Her hands were busy knitting. “Dumela, mma,” he said. “A go khakala kwa motsing?” Is it far to town?

“Nnyaa, rra,” she said.

She carried a sack, draped over one elbow, which he offered to carry for her. She slid it off and handed it to him. They walked together in silence, connected by a string of green knitting yarn.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“From South Africa.” And then he remembered it was not safe to say this.

“My brother works in the mines,” she said.

“My father too, if he’s alive.” They walked along without speaking. “I’m looking for work,” he said.

“Are you a good worker, or lazy?”

He laughed. “Do you think I would say lazy if I’m looking for work?”

She smiled, the same smile her baby had, sleeping against her back. Her fingers went very fast, knitting. “Is this your dog?”

“No, mma, she is only following me.”

“Maybe she will find you work.” She laughed. “Do you know how to garden?”

“No.”

“When they ask, you mustn’t say no. Say you’ve worked in many gardens. Do you have a letter of reference?”

“No.”

“Then you must tell them that you have lost the letters, but you are a very good worker, very dependable. But even so, you will not get the job.”

“Why not?”

“Aiyee! Too many people looking. Everywhere, looking looking.”

“Where do you work?”

“In the Old Village. But the new village is better. I will tell you one thing: on Lippe’s Loop, a gardener was sacked yesterday.”

“Lippe’s Loop, where is that?”

She pointed.

They walked along in silence again until he felt a tug on the bag. The woman said good-bye, turned toward a narrow path, and paused. “Go that way, up beyond a distance. At the third house on Lippe’s Loop, you must ask.” He stood at the side of the road and watched the baby’s head bob gently against her mother’s back.

As he set out, he felt a kind of happiness. The white dog walked by his left heel. He passed a house where a woman swept a threshold with a bundle of grass tied together. Her legs were straight and her bottom stuck out. Two goats walked, single file, into the bush. The sun shone bright and brighter.

You can’t ever know what the next hour will bring, he thought. It can bring happiness or sadness, life or death. Hadn’t this been true ever since he was born? Perhaps the police would come and take your mother away. Perhaps white people would offer to pay your school fees. Perhaps a spark from the cookstove would ignite the cardboard covering a window and your aunt’s house would burn. Perhaps your brother would fall and cut his foot or your father’s sister would die from tuberculosis. All these things had happened, but you couldn’t know them beforehand.

He thought of Nthusi, how when he was young he’d heard about the Flying Wallendas who traveled all over the world, stretching ropes from the top of one high building to another, between one bank of the river and the other, over waterfalls and chasms. His brother had stitched together a place in his mind that let him fly over the tops of trees, across the world with a suitcase full of tightropes and bright, sparkly costumes. One day he found a rope, or stole one, and stretched it from the bumper of a rusted-out car to the hands of Isaac—all the trees had been cut down for firewood. “Hold it tight,” he said, but when Nthusi tried to climb onto the rope with his bare feet, he dragged Isaac across the dirt. Then it was Isaac and his sister Lulu holding one end, pulled across the dirt toward the car bumper, then Moses and Tshepiso, with their feet braced in the sand, and Nthusi trying to get up on the rope. They held him, but he fell and fell. And then Isaac tried and he fell, and his sister Lulu tumbled onto the ground before she even tried because her laughter made her eyes close.

Before Isaac left, his brother told him that Karl Wallenda, the greatest tightrope walker in the world, had fallen to his death. It had happened in March, several months before. The rope had been stretched between two hotels in Puerto Rico. A high wind blew, and Karl Wallenda’s wife begged him to wait, but he said no, he’d be all right, not to worry. When he got out between the two buildings, a gust hit him and at first it looked as though he’d regain his balance, but then he fell. He fell and fell, and the Earth that we call sweet became his executioner.

When Nthusi told Isaac that Wallenda had died, the light vanished from his brother’s eyes and turned dead as ash, as though the suitcase that lived in his head had fallen with Karl Wallenda. And when Nthusi said good-bye to Isaac, it was as though Nthusi knew now that he’d never go anywhere, that he’d forever be the oldest son who cared for his mother—the one to comfort her, the one who’d do his best to earn enough money to send the little ones to school when he was too large and ignorant to ever go himself. Nthusi’s eyes became dark smudges of light, like smoke that rises from a fire that hasn’t enough wood.

Of all the members of his family, Nthusi’s heart was the bravest. But in the case of his brother, it would have been better not to have been born for all the joy that his life would bring him. What was God thinking, to punish his brother like that? Sometimes it felt that He didn’t think at all, that humans—especially black ones—were his playthings. It seemed that white people were the ones who believed in divine justice. That was because long ago, they’d come with their guns and greed and taken what they wanted. They’d long since forgotten what they’d done, and now they thought the land had always been theirs.

The bitter heart eats its owner. It was necessary to forget certain things but not his brother who gave him his own leather shoes for the journey. He walked along, listening to the way the soles of his brother’s shoes thumped the sand softly, like guinea fowls landing in dust. Someday, he’d do something for Nthusi, ten times over. But that time was not now, maybe not for many years.

A man was approaching from the opposite direction, carrying a sack of sugar over his shoulder. Isaac crossed the road and waited. “Excuse me, rra,” he said, “where is Lippe’s Loop?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, walking on.

He passed several more streets. The trees were gone. Everywhere, the houses looked the same. White with blue trim. He wondered who lived in them. He’d never been inside houses like these. From outside they looked strongly built. But the trouble was, they were so much the same, you could be drunk and walk into your neighbor’s house and never know the difference until you lay down with his wife.

The white dog was limping, and he stopped and lifted her paw. There was blood, but he couldn’t see what caused it. He spit on his thumb and rubbed the spit over the pad. She leaped away from him. “White Dog,” he said, “come here.” And then he realized what he’d done: when you name an animal, she becomes yours forever. He went down on his haunches and looked at her. “You’re unfortunate to have ever chosen me,” he said. “I have nothing to give you.” She returned to his side. He took her paw again, and she held very still, shaking. A thorn was lodged deep. He talked to her and told her that it would hurt to pull it out. He tried to grasp the thorn but it broke. He pinched and squeezed and brought it to the surface while the dog stood patiently, her eyes pained. The thorn was from the tree that grabs you and won’t let go. Now, it had the pad of her paw, but finally—out! She danced and leapt off her four feet in gladness.

When he wasn’t expecting it, he found Lippe’s Loop and turned down the road. It was an empty road, without people. The woman said the third house, but there were three houses on the right and three on the left. He chose right. A dog came barking up to a gate, a Doberman who could rip your throat out. White Dog sat at a distance, her ears pointed, hackles raised. Isaac tried talking to the barking dog. “Please, rra, let me pass. I need a job.” But the dog barked furiously and leapt at the fence.

A servant woman came out. “What do you want?”

“Ke batla tiro.”

“There is no work.”

He turned and crossed the road. There was another gate, but no dog. He told White Dog to wait, entered the gate with his head down, and closed it behind him

“Koko?” he called, rapping on the door.

A white woman came out of the house. She had a blue dress and short white hair and an expression of distaste on her face.

I’m not a thief, he wanted to tell her. “I’m looking for work,” he said.

“I have no work,” she said.

He pointed next door. “In this house, do they have work?”

“I don’t know. You have to ask yourself.” She turned her back on him and went into her house. He went out the gate and closed it behind him. White Dog was waiting. The Doberman barked crazily.

He tried next door. “Koko?” He waited. And then he saw a gardener slopping water out of a hose onto hard-packed earth and moved on. At the next house, he knocked again. No one came, but he felt eyes looking at him from behind shiny, blank windows. Those eyes made the back of his neck prickle, and even though a lilac-breasted roller flew over his head in a flash of brilliant blue wings and turquoise head, he only half saw it.

When he finished walking Lippe’s Loop, he left that street and went down the next one that said “loop.” He could see the pattern—there were loops and a cul-de-sac in between. On this street, there was also nothing. Shame sat heavy on his head, that he should need to beg like this. He turned back to the main road. Everywhere, it was the same. The people living on the other side of the walls, with their courtyards spilling bougainvillea—red, fuchsia, white, purple—their servants hanging their sheets and pillowcases and shirts on the line, their gardeners laboring in the sun, what did those people know? Had they ever seen a police dog go after a child? Seen their mother dragged off to jail? He began to feel anger at the peace he found here and the complacency of the blue sky and quiet roads, the watchdogs that made sure nothing would change. It was peaceful, yes, but what was the measure of this peace? It seemed that just under the surface was a familiar order—a few people owned everything. Aristotle said that it was unbecoming for a young man to utter maxims. But how could you resist Aristotle’s maxims? In a democracy, Aristotle said, the poor will have more power than the rich because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. In time, Aristotle’s wisdom would be borne out. It was necessary to believe this. Otherwise, where was the hope?

He called White Dog and went back toward the main road and down another cul-de-sac with houses on either side. They looked unused. You wouldn’t want to enter them. The earth was scuffed and swept clean as concrete. Flowers were planted in tight little formations. He knew why people got rid of everything green. They were frightened of snakes. They wanted the ground clear so they could see a black mamba from a long way off.

He knocked on gates all day, eighty, a hundred, he lost count. At last, he turned toward Naledi. White Dog trailed, her tail down, ears back, as though she’d heard each “no” and needed to lie down and put her head between her paws. A truck passed on the road heading north, and a cloud of dust fell over their heads. Isaac left the road and sat on his haunches in the bush near where a footpath branched three ways. Flies buzzed around a pile of goat droppings. A Toyota truck passed on the road, and then a Peugeot. “What shall we do?” he asked White Dog. Small pouches of fatigue bagged under her eyes. She wagged her tail at the tip. Neither of them had had food or water all day.

When he reached Amen’s house, the sun had nearly set. He poured water for White Dog and drank from a tin cup. Khumo, Amen, and Lucky were away. Kagiso said they were working.

“When will they be back?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her face sorrowing.

“Where have they gone?”

“This also I don’t know.”

She dished up a plate of mealie meal and beans and gave Ontibile her breast while Isaac ate. When he’d finished half the plate, he gave the rest to White Dog. Music from the neighborhood shebeen floated through the air. A bat flitted here and there after mosquitoes. In the waning light, Kagiso’s nipples were erect and plump with milk. As Ontibile began to nurse, a small pool of darkness widened across Kagiso’s dress as her other breast leaked in sympathy.

She seemed very unhappy. “Are you frightened?” he asked softly.

“Of course. One day he won’t return, and then what will I do?”

You will marry me, he thought, and I’ll be Ontibile’s father. “I don’t know,” he said. The sky was almost completely dark now, and night was beginning: the sound of barking dogs, the relief of shadow, the earth giving off its faint moisture. “Where were you born?” he asked.

“Here in Botswana.”

“You have family in Gaborone?”

“In Mochudi. Sometimes I think of going back to them … But please,” she said hurriedly, “you won’t tell him.”

“No.” You are very beautiful, he thought. Her face was meant for joy.

“Did you find a job?” she asked.

“There was nothing.”

“Tomorrow maybe you will find something.”

“Perhaps.”

“If you pray, then you will have more luck.”

“I don’t pray for myself.”

“Then I will pray for you.”

He smiled at her. She was like a child. He was touched that she’d do this for him. He believed in something larger than himself, but there was no evidence to point to someone or something listening to a man with brown leather shoes and a sweaty shirt. He didn’t find this unusual or disturbing. Why should he be noticed when there were so many others to notice? It was like the dry blades of grass at his feet. Every blade was different, reaching for the sky in its own humble way, but from a goat’s perspective, they were all the same: something to eat.

“What was he like back then?” she asked, only her eyes and mouth visible in the darkness.

“Amen?”

“Yes, when you knew him in school.”

“Pretty much the same.” Brash, overbearing, reckless was what came to mind. “He was good at sports. Sometimes he pushed people around. He told funny stories, played tricks on people. He was someone you noticed.”

“Did you like him?”

“Not very much, no.”

“Why?”

“We were different.” He saw himself back then, shy with others, a serious student. Serious in all things. He had to be. He knew this by the time he was eight years old.

“Yes, I see.” Her body was swaying, rocking Ontibile. “Sometimes he pushes me around too. But I don’t mind. I’m different from you.”

How could she not mind? One day, she’d have a mind of her own, but now, she was young. She rose with Ontibile and went inside. White Dog sat down, groaning a little, and rested her cheek against his foot. The skin of her forehead was wrinkled; her cheek was also wrinkled where it pressed against him. He wished again that he could call upon monna mogolo and ask him what to do. He owed part of his being to this old man who’d given him love for the stars and the moon and the trees and the wide silent sky and the summer thunder, who made him proud to be a human being with the same blood in his veins. His great grandfather was what some people call a Bushman, but he thought this was not as respectful as calling him one of the San people. Back then, he didn’t know what his grandfather’s kind were called, or care. He only learned later, when his mother taught him a few words of the click language, the language stolen from his son while the old man was in prison. He didn’t know how his mother had learned those words, only that they were precious to him now. His mother said that all the peoples on Earth come from the first San people. There was no one alive who did not have their beginnings in Africa. For thousands and thousands of years, the San people lived in the Kalahari, where they gathered food and hunted. What would the world be like now if it were peopled by them rather than the ones who’d stolen their land, killed their wildlife, stolen away their children and wives, and made them into slaves?

He thought, if they were like his great grandfather, there would be laughter falling from the sky. These days, people live in the world as though they are precious vessels, separate, each holding something that must be guarded. But his grandfather taught him something different. We are doorways, openings into something greater than ourselves, something that we don’t understand and will never understand. We have nothing precious in and of ourselves. We are only precious in that we are part of something that is too big to know.