White Dog Fell from the Sky

52



A week passed, and another week. She heard from Hendrik only once. His wife was home from the hospital, but not doing well. He’d tried contacting the deputy minister, but the man had not returned his calls.

The lice were vanquished, and the three of them delivered a chocolate cake to Mr. Schwartz, who wept real tears.

Three days later, Hendrik called to say that the deputy minister had called. Isaac would be freed and expelled from South Africa if Botswana would permit him entry. Until that time, he would remain in prison.

“We’re only partway there,” he said. “We don’t know what’s happened to him. The important thing now is getting an entry permit and asylum on your end. Every day counts.”

She realized she should have been working on this all along, but it had seemed useless while he was in prison. “Please call me tomorrow or the day after,” she said. “I’ll do everything I can.”

She considered going back to the chief of police, but he didn’t seem to be a man who could be swayed, except by a higher authority. Directly after school, she went to speak with Heavenly Mosepe, who knew every permanent secretary and minister in government.

“Quett Masire is the person who can help,” Heavenly said. The vice president. “Do you know him?”

“His wife is teaching me Setswana, but I don’t know him.” She’d met him once at a reception. She remembered thinking at the time that this man had been loved as a child. It was an odd thing to have thought, but now, it gave her hope.

“I will speak with him,” said Heavenly. “I have known him many years. Can you say without a doubt that this man is not a danger to anyone here?”

“I would swear it on my father’s grave.”

Quett Masire was out of town attending a conference in Tanzania, and there was no way to contact him. When he returned, four days later, Heavenly did what she’d promised. Several days after that, she received a communication that Vice President Masire had spoken with the chief of police and after reading the file on Isaac determined that there’d been insufficient evidence to warrant a deportation. The office of the vice president would send an official all-clear to the South African government and ask immigration authorities to grant Isaac political asylum. Alice knew she wasn’t supposed to call Hendrik, but she did anyway. She was beyond herself with joy, and he was cautiously optimistic.

But there ensued a holdup on the South African side. The deputy minister of correctional services needed to confer with the minister, who had gone on vacation. No one could say when he’d return. Another week went by.

“Tell me this is a bad dream,” Alice said when Hendrik told her the news. “Isaac could die because some fat minister is sunning himself in Zanzibar.”

“I’ll make another inquiry tomorrow,” Hendrik said. “It’s all I can do.”

Three nights later, he called. “I have good news. He says he’ll free Isaac. I’m told he’s to be driven to the border next Tuesday. I’m not allowed to see him. That probably means he’s in bad shape. They don’t like showing their handiwork. You should probably arrange a hospital bed.

“Things could still go wrong. You could wait all day at the border and go back home without him. He might not even be alive.”

“Why do you say that?”

“This sort of thing happens. Officials clear a person, and he dies before he’s released. They blame it on mental instability. I’ll be sending you duplicate documents. I want you to have a copy, just in case. Normally, the guards carry only the one set, but I don’t want to take any chances. I bribed an office clerk. He could lose his job.” He left it unsaid that something equally bad, or worse, could happen to him.

“I’ve found someone traveling up to Gaborone the day after tomorrow. He’ll carry the papers. He’s quite high ranking, so he shouldn’t get stopped. Where can he find you?”

“At the Ministry of Local Government and Lands.”

“His name is Diederik Devalk.”

“D-e-v-a-l-k?”

“Correct. He has a meeting at eleven at the Ministry of Finance. I don’t know when to tell you to expect him, before or after that.”

She told him she’d be in her office all day. “How is your wife, Hendrik?”

“A little better today. The news has brightened us both.”

Devalk turned up at quarter past ten. He was charming: an impeccably fitted gray suit, head held high, dark eyes, pale skin, longish dark hair, combed back, long fingers that grasped hers in a cool handshake. He passed her a large envelope, which she slid into her desk. The state of her cinder-block office embarrassed her. She found him a cup of tea and a biscuit.

His accent was South African, but it had a touch of British in it. She was fascinated by a small stain on the sleeve of his gray suit. It so much didn’t belong there. He asked her nothing about her involvement with Isaac. She was grateful. She asked him about his journey, whether he lived in Johannesburg, what his work involved. Yes, Jo’burg was his home. He worked for the government, and also closely with the diamond industry, principally De Beers.

His face bore the ravages of his powerbroking role between the diamond industry and the South African government, but still, she liked him, the boy in him close enough to the surface to be seen. She imagined him getting out of bed in the morning, mussed from sleep, grumpy, before he donned his public self. When he took his leave, their eyes met, and hers unaccountably welled up. He held her hand a little longer than necessary. Since Ian had died, she’d felt nothing for any man and hardly recognized the brief flicker Devalk inspired. After he’d gone, she opened the envelope he’d left. Foolscap-sized sheets of paper, government seals, densely written Afrikaans. The only thing she recognized was the name, Isaac Muthethe. All afternoon, she kept opening the drawer and sliding it closed again, making sure the envelope was there. She skipped lunch. She hardly dared go to the bathroom.

When she picked up Moses and Lulu after school, she thought of telling them where she’d be going Tuesday, but she couldn’t bear to disappoint them. She turned to look at them sitting side by side on the seat of the truck. Lulu had ripped her uniform and scraped her knee. A white gauze pad, already dusty, covered the scrape. Moses said in broken English that someone had pushed her and he’d pushed that someone. Alice turned to Lulu. “I’m sorry someone was mean to you.”

She smiled crookedly. “Mma?” She didn’t understand.

Tuesday morning, Alice drove the children to school and started south toward the Ramatlabama border gate. There was almost no traffic, and no dust. Every rock on Kgale Hill stood out. She saw a boy out early with two goats, and two schoolgirls with bows in their hair. Her hands on the wheel shook with the deep corrugations in the road. By sunset, it would be all over, one way or the other, when the border gate closed for the night.

She passed through Lobatse, and on toward the border. From a distance, she could smell the Botswana Meat Commission’s abattoir, stinking of blood and fire. Some of those poor beasts trekked hundreds of kilometers to get here, with no idea where they were going.

She made her way south of Lobatse, and far away, she saw the border. At the Botswana gate, she told the guard that she would not be passing through to South Africa, that she was waiting for a South African who’d been granted political asylum. She pulled the documents out of the envelope, together with a copy of a document from Quett Masire’s office. The guard looked over the pages and passed them back to her. “Go siame, mma.” Okay.

Driving toward the South African side, she spotted two white guards standing sentinel in the shade of an ugly building, one just inside, one outside. They wore khaki uniforms—shorts and kneesocks, crisp, short-sleeved shirts. Both had guns in shoulder holsters. A third man, a black African, worked at a distance from them, washing an official car with a rag and a bucket. He was in the open, the sun so hot it was shouting now, moving his rag slowly over the bumper, and back again, then over the curve of the fender.

Alice parked the truck and walked toward the two guards. The one closest to her watched her, shifting uneasily. He reminded her of an animal in the wild. Approach them in a truck, and they’re calm enough, but out of your vehicle, you’re to be feared. She carried her purse over one shoulder, the large envelope between her elbow and side. Instinctively, she put her palms out so they’d see she was unarmed and harmless.

She greeted them in English. “Good morning to you,” and got an unenthusiastic greeting back. “Do you know English?” she asked. One nodded. “I won’t be crossing the border. I’m waiting for someone who has received political asylum.” She gave them Isaac’s name. “I have some documents.” She held out the envelope to them. The tall guard looked at the contents briefly and asked, “When’s he coming?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll have to wait over there.” The tall man pointed to a patch of open ground near where the man was washing the truck. Bastards. There was shade elsewhere but not a scrap of shade where he’d indicated. A pickup traveling fast from the South African side approached the gate. It stopped, and the shorter guard left the shade of the building to talk to the driver. There was a brief conversation, and the gate lifted. Alice went to move her truck, facing it toward the South African gate. It was too hot in the cab of the truck, even with both doors open. She got out, and a tiny, almost imperceptible breeze stirred her blue dress as she stood. A dove sat on the roof of the fortresslike building where the guards stood. Alice loved the song of nearly every bird in the world, including the sarcastic go-away bird. But not this dove. From the moment she’d first heard it, she’d found its call depressing and oddly claustrophobic. Hearing it was like being on a long bus ride, sitting next to someone who complained incessantly. She thought, I can ignore it, just pay no attention. But before long, she wanted to hurl stones at it. Shut up! Shut up! It went on and on.

She’d told Will and Greta where she was going and asked if they’d pick up the children if she wasn’t back by three. Will had offered to drive down with her, but she said she thought it best to go on her own, there was no telling whether Isaac would even make it. Her stomach turned over. She felt the evil smell from here, through those gates, felt it in the starched complacence of the guard’s khaki uniforms, in the short-cropped hair, in the pathetic eagerness of the black man washing the car in the sun. She took a swig of water from a gallon jug she’d brought with her.

A large truck roared up to the gate from the Botswana side, sounding like a bull in rut, something wrong with its gear-shifting mechanism. She began to count vehicles. Four from the South African side. Seven from the Botswana side, six more from South Africa, three more from Botswana.

Isaac heard the key in the metal door and the creak of the hinge. Light poured in, and his hand went over his eyes. It was a different guard. Never before had he seen this person. He had a neck as big as a bull’s, bulging out of his collar.

“Get up,” the man said.

Isaac got slowly to his feet.

“Fok, kaffir, you stink.”

He could no longer smell himself.

The guard attached shackles to his ankles. As though he could run.

“Get going.”

He clambered to his feet and shuffled out the door. He was too numb to feel the sun on his face. It was the first time he’d been outdoors since they’d brought him in; he could now see that his cell was part of a long tunnel of cells that stretched along a desolate scrape of ground.

“Where am I going?”

In Afrikaans, “You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Please tell me where you’re taking me.”

“Hou jou bek.” Shut your mouth.

He felt a stick prod him from behind. He slowed his steps. He would, damn it all, die in dignity, not prodded like a f*cking ox. One of his knees no longer bent. He rounded the corner and limped along a path leading to a road. A car waited there, its motor idling. He imagined they would take him to police headquarters where they’d push him out a high window and call it suicide. He thought of his mother. It grieved him terribly to think of her. He stumbled, felt the stick in his back.

The bitter heart eats its owner, she’d told him. To be bitter, he knew now, one must feel something personal in the hatred that comes at you. He didn’t feel anything like that. The ugliness around him flailed like a goat drowning in a flooded river. If a leg of that goat happened to strike you, it has just struck, that’s all. The Earth had a habit of begetting monsters, hatched from ignorance and greed. They had schooled him in hatred these months, and it now lived in him, like a fact you can’t forget. Perhaps it was as well for him to die. The world did not need more hate. He thought of Boitumelo—her beauty, her goodness, her skin so perfect you could lap it like milk. Tears came to his eyes, the first he’d felt in weeks.

“Get in,” the guard told him.

His legs wanted to run, but they had no running in them. He climbed into the back of the car. There was a man behind the steering wheel. The first guard opened the front door on the passenger’s side and sat down as heavily as a sack of mealie meal. The car started. He felt his bowels loosen, prayed not to shit his pants. “Where are you taking me?”

“Keep quiet, jou lae donner.” Dirty bastard.

“Fok,” the driver said, “it’ll be past nightfall before we’re back.”

The guard grunted. Instead of winding through city streets toward police headquarters, the car headed out of town. Soon they were on open roads. Isaac saw signs to Krugersdorp. “Let me out,” he said. “I need to shit.”

“You’ll shit when we say shit,” said the driver.

The sun was so bright his eyes watered. He felt a numbness in his soul. He remembered in school his teacher telling him about Socrates drinking the cup of poison hemlock. At first the poison went to his ankles, then his calves. As the numbness reached his waist, Socrates said to his friend, “We owe a cock to Asclepius. Don’t forget to pay it.” That was a true man, to remember even as he was dying what was owed.

Isaac’s body heaved. “I’ll have to shit in the car if you don’t stop.” He no longer cared. He’d shit in their damned car. The two men spoke to each other. The driver slammed on the brakes. “Get out,” he said.

Isaac limped out of the car, hurried behind a low shrub, and let fly all the noxious poison in him. He was disgusted to the marrow of his bones. He didn’t care how they killed him. He would never eat another morsel of food from the hands of men like these. He pulled up his trousers and got back into the car. His hatred was pure, flowing through him cleanly.

They passed through the outskirts of Krugersdorp. On the other side of the city, he shaded his eyes and saw a small sign to Olifants Nek and behind it, small rondavels like his grandmother’s. A rooster, three hens, children crouched in the dust. He thought of his younger brothers and sister. The eagerness in Moses’s eyes, his small body in sleep.

He nodded into a stupor and woke as the car was pulling to a stop. Terror flooded his legs and arms. Halfway inside a dream, he suddenly pictured a snub-nosed revolver, arms dragging him out to a desolate spot filled with low mopane scrub and the droppings of wild goats, the last sweet, pure sound of a bush shrike before he was reduced to nothing. But the car had stopped at a shack for food. He could smell the fat popping out of the boerewors, the rancid smell of oil. His guts churned. He was starving, and he would eat nothing at the hands of these men. Not that he’d be offered anything. The fat-necked guard ate two sausage sandwiches, stuffing them into his mouth. They swilled a beer each, the fat man farted, and they got back into the car.

“Where are you taking me?” Isaac asked.

“We told you, shut your trap.” The driver slowed down and speeded up again. For a few heady moments, he thought they might dump him out on the side of the road. But why would they go to all the trouble of driving so far? They skirted Rustenberg, Swartruggens, Groot Marico. The rains had greened the landscape. He remembered once feeling gladness at this sight, but that old feeling was frozen inside him, like a postcard sent long ago, faded beyond recognition.

She was terrified for him. Say he made it out alive. How would they have broken him? Coo, coo, ca-koo, cu-coo, went the dove. Coo, coo, ca-koo, cu-coo.

Last night her mother had called and asked Alice where she saw herself next year. Alice had snapped back, “You sound like a job interviewer, Mom. I don’t know. I don’t know about next week.” Her mother had gone quiet. Alice imagined her standing in the hallway, gripping the phone in her left hand, a shaft of light from the window halfway up the stairs striking her hair. She pictured the slight stoop of her shoulders, her vulnerability and love.

I’m sorry, she wanted to tell her now. She’d been hunting for the electric bill just before the phone rang. She’d opened a dresser drawer, thinking she might have stuck it in there for safekeeping, and found the Bushman piano Ian had given her. She’d picked it up, plucked a few tinny notes, and found herself kneeling on the floor, her knees buckled under her.

Coo, coo, ca-koo, cu-coo. She counted forty iterations before it stopped. She stared down the road on the South African side. The heat shimmered on its surface. Any car coming that way would look as though it were swimming toward the border. The sun was directly overhead now. She searched the ground for a stone, picked it up, and weighted down one end of a towel on the roof of the truck and draped it over the open doorway to create shade. Her eyes burned and her thoughts melted and ran here and there.

Her heart went out to Isaac’s mother. One by one, she’d lost her children. Isaac, Nthusi, Moses, Lulu. If they ever let him out of prison, he’d never again be allowed back over the border to visit her. And she’d never legally make it to Botswana.

The two men in the front of the vehicle were holding a conversation in Afrikaans that Isaac couldn’t understand. He gathered that it had to do with him, but he felt nothing but a vast indifference. “This side of Zeerust,” the one with the thick neck said.

He had seen a signpost not far back: 27 kilometers to Zeerust. Whatever was going to happen to him would happen within twenty-seven kilometers. Something fluttered inside him, a bird trying to rise, and sank back down. About fifteen kilometers out of Zeerust, the driver said, “This will do.” The car turned off the main road, took another side road, until they were alone on a stretch of track so sparsely traveled as to hardly be a track. Low, rounded hills overlapped at a distance. A small herd of cattle and goats grazed in the middle distance.

“Get out,” said the driver.

The large-necked man held a gun.

Isaac tried to take a deep breath to steady himself, but his broken ribs stopped him. “Please,” he said, “I need to take another shit.”

They seemed to consider this for a moment, and the driver said, “Go on then,” not unkindly. And then, “Don’t try anything.”

He staggered behind a thorn bush, his stomach roiling. He thought of running, but it was useless. They’d overtake him in two strides. He squatted and let loose, too scared to be disgusted. He checked the ground for a rock, anything that might serve as a weapon, and found nothing.

He stood.

“Get over here,” the driver said. The thick-necked man tied his hands behind his back and put a canvas bag over his head. It smelled of dust and the unpleasant sweetness of nitrogen fertilizer. They led him a short way from the road and told him to kneel. He felt the muzzle of the gun pressed to the side of his head and shut his eyes under the darkness of the bag.

He stopped breathing and waited.

Instead of an explosion, he heard laughter. They left him kneeling while they laughed and laughed. He heard them slapping their thighs, imagined them elbowing each other, their necks swollen with laughter. The driver ripped off the bag and untied his hands. Hahahaha, guffawed the large-necked man. The man couldn’t get hold of himself. He took a piss behind a shrub and came back, still laughing.

“Let’s get moving,” said the driver, finished with the joke.

Isaac climbed back into the car. The fat-necked man chuckled and muttered to himself: “… like a scared bloody rock rabbit.”

Dully, he understood that what they’d done was as cruel as anything a man can do to another man, but he knew it only through a great numbness, as though his rage was unhinged from his heart, perched on a hillside. He was neither relieved to be alive nor wishing to be dead. An Earth he had once loved floated before him like an inert picture of an Earth. He looked out the window and saw nothing.

He closed his eyes as the car moved. The road became more rutted and bumpy. He heard traffic passing, large trucks and a few cars, but he didn’t open his eyes until the car slowed. Instinctively, he hunkered down low in the seat. In front of them was a large metal gate, and on either side of it, barbed wire stretching as far as the eye could see. Inside, an ugly concrete building stood like a stockade on a narrow stretch of ground. Beyond it lay another gate and more barbed wire. He’d not heard of a prison north of Zeerust. Something woke in him. He’d fight with everything he had before they got him in there, die before they put him in another rathole.

“End of the road,” said the driver, opening the rear door.

“I’m not going in there.”

“Where do you think you’re going then?”

“Kill me first.”

A man in uniform came to the window and looked in on Isaac. He seemed shocked at what he saw. A conversation took place between him and the driver. A woman was standing beyond the stockade-type building, at least he thought it was a woman. Her dress was blue. It moved slightly in the breeze.