White Dog Fell From the Sky (40 page)

“Can I pick them up at the end of the
day?” She was preparing for a pan-African conference on indigenous populations, to
be held in Gaborone the following week. Twenty-seven representatives from thirteen
Commonwealth African countries would be attending.

“No,
mma
, you must come
immediately. Otherwise, the lice will jump onto the heads of other children.”

She grabbed a bunch of papers, stuffed them
into her bag, and left the office. She found White Dog sitting under her favorite tree
outside the school. Alice called her, picked up the children, and drove to the pharmacy,
where Ari Schwartz stood behind the counter. He was a Canadian who’d come out to
Botswana after his wife died. He had no children and no other family and had wanted to
do something useful with his life. He studied Setswana every night at home; there were
few words he didn’t know, but because he was tone deaf and Setswana was a tonal
language, nothing prevented him from saying
kubu,
the word for hippopotamus,
when he meant
khubu,
the word for belly button.

“Yes, Alice, what can I do for
you?”

“The children have been sent home from
school.”

“Let me guess. Lice?” He leaned
over the counter and looked over the tops of his glasses at Moses and Lulu. His eyes
were bright, and he had big pendulous ears and a rich tenor voice.

He tried Setswana. “Lice, is
it?”

Moses grinned as though he’d won a
prize.

“Is your head itching, eh? Back of
your neck, around your ears?”

Lulu spread out her palms and held them over
her hair as though containing the lice.

“This will take care of those little
buggers.” He passed a glass bottle filled with a vile-looking brown liquid over
the counter to Alice.
“Every other day for a week, shampoo their
heads. And you’ll need to comb out the nits with this.” He held up a metal
comb. “Plastic works for European hair, but not their hair …

“Your servant’s children?”
he asked confidentially.

“No,” said Alice. She
didn’t know what to call them. “I’m looking after them.”

They got back in the truck, and
Alice’s scalp began to itch. It itched all the way home, just where Ari had
suggested: at the back of her neck, around her ears.

“Into the bathtub,” she said to
the children, helping them out of the truck.

Itumeleng was washing clothes in the tub,
her daughter sitting on the floor next to her, playing with clothespins. She looked up
from her sloshing. “Why are you here,
mma
?”

“Lice,” said Alice.

“What is this lice?”

“Little bugs in the hair.” Alice
scratched her head.

Itumeleng picked up her daughter, and ran to
the servant’s quarters.

“For Christ’s sake,”
muttered Alice. “It’s not bubonic plague.” She scooped the wet clothes
out of the tub into a large bucket and filled the tub with warm water. She slammed down
the toilet seat and sat on it. “Get in,” she said to Lulu and Moses.

They shed their clothes. Moses banged his
knee on the lip of the tub as he climbed in. “Ha!” he said, sitting down.
Lulu joined him. Her ribs jutted out against her skin. She folded her arms over her
brown chest.

After their shampoo, Alice sat Moses down in
a chair in the kitchen and shone the brightest light in the house on his head. She
pulled the metal comb through his short, curly hair. He fidgeted and whined while Lulu
watched. The comb was useless. The nits clung to each hair, and she needed to pull off
each one between two fingernails, like a mama baboon.

Lulu’s hair was thick and plaited.
Alice undid the plaits and sectioned off the hair. “
A o lapile?
”
she asked after an hour, pulling out another hard-clinging nit. Are you tired? Lulu
nodded gravely. After two hours Lulu had hardly moved. My god, she thought, this child
has a will of
iron. Afterward, she gathered sheets and towels and
clothes, filled the bathtub, and washed everything in sight.

She drove the children to school the
following day and worked nonstop on the conference. That was Wednesday. On Thursday, she
got a call from the nurse. “There is an egg on Lulu’s head.” Alice
pictured a raw egg sitting on top, the yolk a big raised polka dot. The nurse’s
voice was disapproving.

“Yes, I’m coming.”

She picked up White Dog and both children.
The shampooing and nit picking and scrubbing of every piece of fabric in the house
continued, off and on, until the day before the conference.

Will stopped by after work. “What am I
going to do if the lice cop calls tomorrow? Tell twenty-seven delegates from thirteen
Commonwealth African countries that I have to go home to deal with lice?”

“You have them too?” He took a
step backward.

“No. But I’ll throw those
urchins out on the street if they’ve given them to me.”

“You seem to have developed some
passion around this topic.”

“I wouldn’t wish this on my
worst enemy.”

“The boys got them last year. It took
us three months …”

“Don’t tell me.
Please.”

“How is Lulu doing?”

“The other day, I finished going
through her hair. She jumped off the chair and put her arms around my legs. I was so
surprised, you could have knocked me over.” On her lips she could still feel
Lulu’s damp hair, the smell of coal tar shampoo, when she bent and kissed the top
of her head.

“And Isaac?”

“Hendrik has an appointment with a
deputy minister of correctional services later in the week. He told me this guy owes him
a favor. Otherwise, no news.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t ask. And please
don’t say anything sympathetic. I can’t handle it.”

The conference lasted five days, with the
delegates housed at the
university dormitory. About a quarter of them
were members of indigenous populations. Two of the delegates were Seventh-Day
Adventists, who couldn’t drink tea or coffee during breaks. “Starch
water”—cow’s milk mixed with hot water—was what they preferred. One woman
from Seychelles was nursing a baby. Each country was responsible for a two-hour
presentation, a few with longer slots. In addition, there were anthropologists and
sociologists from Cape Town, Lusaka, Nairobi, and abroad, experts on land use,
economists holding forth about traditional economies, and one of Ian’s colleagues
talking about indigenous art. Ian would have been there.

Four nights into the conference, Alice got a
call from her boss. A Kenyan, a big vulnerable, blustery guy, had gotten drunk and was
threatening to throw himself out a third-floor window. Alice asked Itumeleng to keep an
eye on the kids and rushed to the university. C.T. was standing outside the dorm room
with about a dozen people. One moment the Kenyan was raving angry and the next moment
weeping. “Don’t go near him,” said C.T., as Alice made a move to enter
the room. “He’s violent.”

“Get them away from me!” the man
was shouting. “Stop staring!”

“Go back to your rooms, please,”
said Alice. People drifted away. C.T. went away to call campus security while Alice
stood watch.

After everyone had left, she stood at the
threshold and asked, “May I come in?” The man made a movement with his head.
She came and sat on the bed next to him. The window was open behind them.
“What’s going on?”

“She won’t pick up the
phone.”

“Your wife?”

“No.”

“Someone important to you.”

He nodded. “I hoped she would be my
wife. My friend told me he saw her with another man.”

“How long have you known
her?”

“All my life. She’s the love of
my life.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Perhaps she will still remember how much you love her.”

“No. She says she doesn’t respect
me.”

“Then you must find someone who loves
and respects you as you deserve to be loved. And when you get home, you must stop
drinking so much.”

He talked some more, and she listened.
Finally without thinking, she told him about Ian. And then she was crying. It surprised
the Kenyan, but she didn’t care. The weeks of holding back poured out of her. She
closed the window behind them. In his tender, slobbery way, he comforted her. By the
time C.T. and campus security arrived, it was all over.

The following day, the conference ended. She
fell into bed, too wound up to sleep, and lay in the dark, eyes wide open. Once
she’d seen a chart of the universe, from small to large. On one end was the tiny
neutrino. Moving up in size was the core of an electron, protons, an atom’s
nucleus, a hydrogen atom. Getting larger, a virus, a red blood cell, a grain of pollen,
a poppy seed, a fly, a hen’s egg, an ostrich egg, a human being. A lion, an
elephant, a baobab tree, the Victoria Falls, Mt. Everest, the moon, Mercury, Mars,
Earth, the sun. Then Sirius, Regulus, Pollux. Betelgeuse. The Helix Nebula. The Crab
Nebula. The whole of our local galactic group, 150,000,000 light-years across. Out to
the entire observable universe. And everything beyond that. In the middle of all that,
there she was. What is one person? Nothing. Ian had said something like this, that night
they were talking by the fire. You get the proportions wrong and think your life is all
that matters. It helped to remember, this small dot that she was.

Hendrik called to say that he’d tried
to get clearance to see Isaac without success, but he was planning to be in touch with a
few more people he thought might help. At the very least, he hoped his inquiries might
afford Isaac a measure of protection. Alice asked what she could do.

“Nothing,” said Hendrik.
“Pray.”

It turned out he was more than a lawyer.
He’d served under Vorster’s government after the assassination of Prime
Minister Verwoerd. Much of his life, he told her, he’d believed it was possible to
create change from within if you were smarter than the next guy and willing to play the
game, at least part of the time. His job had involved trying to integrate South Africa
into the international community. He’d been instrumental in winning the repeal of
legislation that prohibited multiracial sports. But finally his role sickened him,
literally. He had a heart attack, which flattened him for six months. When he got back
on his feet, he quit the government, but he still knew many people in the halls of
power, some of them friends.

“Would it help if I came
down?”

“Definitely not. We feel judged by
your country. If I can be blunt, you’d be an impediment, not a help. Pray.
That’s all you can do.” When she got off the phone, she went out to
Isaac’s garden. She’d thrown water on his vegetables when she thought of it,
but too often she hadn’t thought of it, and the sun had baked them into the
ground.

The next night over supper, Alice told Moses
and Lulu that they would light a candle every evening for Isaac. She lit a match and
said,
“For Isaac.” She shushed them for a moment and
closed her eyes. When she opened them, Lulu’s were closed too.

“Isaac
o kae?
” asked
Moses for the thousandth time.

“Isaac is in prison.” Alice
crouched down with her wrists together, as though shackled.

“
A o lwala?
” Is he
sick? Lulu asked.

“
Ga ke itse.
” I
don’t know. “Hendrik Pretorius, you know him? Mister Pretorius? Your mother
is working there?” Their faces were blank. “Pretorius. Your mother.
Mma
wa gago.
” She picked up a broom and swept the floor. “Your mother
is working for Mr. and Mrs. Pretorius.”

Moses laughed and took the broom.

“Pretoria?” Lulu asked.

“Not Pretoria. Pretorius.”

“
Ke eng?
” Lulu pointed
to the candle. What is it called?

“Candle.”

“Candle.
Molelo.
”

Moses pointed to his plate.
“
Nama.
”

“Meat,” said Alice.

Lulu to her glass.
“
Masi
.”

“Milk.”

After she’d put them to bed, Alice
turned off all the lights in the house and went into the living room and sat on the
couch in the dark. She and Lawrence had found the wooden couch frame discarded at the
dump, a lovely carved hardwood that was scarred and dinged. She’d sanded it down,
an act of faith for their lives together; they’d had the cushions made at the
prison. The bright green fabric felt cool now in the dark. All the creatures outdoors
were asleep like this green, waiting for the light of day. She felt her way in the
darkness, footstep by footstep, to the bedroom. There were no curtains on the windows.
She pressed her face to the screen and saw a few stars held in the boughs of the syringa
trees.

Isaac o kae?
She saw in her
mind’s eye a dozen more questions on Moses’s face.
Why is he not here?
When will he come? What will happen to me? When will I see my mother? Why did she
send us here? Who are you? What are you to us?

For a couple of days now, they’ve
stopped taking him out of his cell. His head throbs without end, his vision has blurred.
Each breath he takes pushes his broken ribs toward pain.

He runs a hand over his head. It is no
longer his head. There is no hair on it. And the shape is wrong. They shaved his hair
when he came to this place, and they’ve shaved it again. Lice, they said.
Dirty kaffir lice. They all have lice.
But it’s not true. He has
never had lice. Not in all his born days. His head is now the head of a skinny man.
Lumps where there were none.

He is an old man now. They have broken his
ribs, five or six, maybe more. He is older than that old sick man who dug the sunken
garden and gave him the hot pepper seeds. He is broken in more places than he can count.
His nose, pushed to one side, blood clotted underneath. Traveling under the hearse, he
thought he would die. He knows now he was not even close to death then. He can feel the
line between life and death in this place, has prayed to cross it, to be granted
peace.