White Dog Fell from the Sky

43



That night, a letter addressed to Isaac sat in one of three bulging canvas mail bags in the Mafeking train station. The bags were slumped, secured with heavy metal buckles at the top, each with a hole for a tag, sitting beneath a painted tin sign:

VIR GEBRUIK DEUR BLANKES

FOR USE BY WHITE PERSONS

THESE PUBLIC PREMISES AND THE AMENITIES

THEREOF HAVE BEEN RESERVED FOR THE

EXCLUSIVE USE OF WHITE PERSONS.

By Order Provincial Secretary

Inside the bags, letters from white and nonwhite persons were jumbled together, pressed against each other. Words from courts of law, lovers, mothers, car dealers, ministers, swindlers. Outside on the train platform, three lightbulbs shone at a distance from one another. The air was moist, the lights ringed with fog.

Nowhere can he find the man he once knew inside him. He’s nothing now, less than a bug. His lips are cracked, they’ve broken his thumbs. When he eats the food they slop into a bowl, he must hold his spoon between two fingers. Often it is too dark to see. He thinks, there is nothing that a man will not do to another man. Every moment, he is afraid. It is what they’ve wanted all along.

Fear is the mystery. If he can conquer that, he is no longer theirs. But he is unable to make his mind bend away from the place where a small animal inside him is cornered and terrified.

Sometimes he remembers his brothers and sisters. He remembers caring for them when his mother was taken away for the passbook violations, how he looked for food day and night, until he had turned into a sniffing dog-boy, food-hunting machine.

He has nearly forgotten the letter he wrote to his mother and her employers before he was deported, saying that he would care for his sister and two brothers. Those he loves have all but disappeared, squashed thin and hard and cold as glass in the small place he has managed to keep alive inside. It will not be possible much longer. Soon the hyena men will have all of him.

Something in his head hums ceaselessly, low in pitch. He feels the terror like a pit inside him. He forces his mind to crawl out of it.

He turns the pages of his medical textbook over in his mind, reviewing the bones of the hand. The wrist: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate, arrayed in two rows of four, nestled in a bowl created by the hollow between the ulna and the radius. The five metacarpals of the palm. The fourteen digital bones, or phalanges, three on each finger (digitus secundus manus, digitus tertius, digitus annularis, digitus minimus manus), two on each thumb.

A small shaft of light comes in through the slit in the door. He looks at his right hand in the dimness. His thumb is swollen and blue. His other fingers also are swollen. He looks away.

Then the intrinsic muscle groups: the hypothenar and thenar muscles, the interossei muscles, and the lumbricals. The abductor pollicis brevis, opponens pollicis, flexor pollicis brevis, adductor pollicis brevis and opponens digiti minimi brevis, flexor digiti minimi brevis, abductor digiti minimi …

He hears footsteps, a metallic click. “Get up,” a voice says. “They want you.”