Whites (10 page)

“It isn’t a story,” he said.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “I mean, since I see you standing here safe and sound I can assume the ending isn’t a tragedy. But please continue. Really.”

“In any event. There we are. There was more back and forth over what kind of information this was. Finally he says it’s not only something a doctor would be glad of. He is going to tell me the secret of how they are going to make the revolution in South Africa, a secret plan. An actual plan.

“God knows I have no brief for white South Africans. I know a few professionally, doctors. Medicine down there is basically about up to 1950, in my opinion, despite all this veneer of the heart transplants. But the doctors I know seem to be decent. Some of them hate the system and will say so.

“I go along. Empty my wallet, cover the money with my hand.

“Here’s what he says. They had a sure way to drive out the whites. It was a new plan and was sure to succeed. It would succeed because they, meaning the blacks, could bring it about with only a handful of men. He said that the Boers had won for all time if the revolution meant waiting for small groups to grow into bands and then into units, battalions and so on, into armies that would fight the Boers. The Boers were too intelligent and had too much power. They had corrupted too many of the blacks. The blacks were divided. There were too many spies for the Boers among them. The plan he would tell me would take less than a hundred men.

“Then he asked me, if he could tell me such a plan
would it be worth the ten pula. Would I agree that it would? I said yes.”

“This is extraordinary!” she said.
Duhamel!
she thought, triumphant. The name had come back to her:
Georges Duhamel
. She could almost see the print. She was so grateful.

“Exciting!” she said, gratitude in her voice.

He was sweating. “Well, this is what he says. He leans over, whispers. The plan is simple. The plan is to assemble a shock force, he called it. Black people who are willing to give their lives. And this is all they do:
they kill doctors
. That’s it! They start off with a large first wave, before the government can do anything to protect doctors. They simply kill doctors, as many as they can. They kill them at home, in their offices, in hospitals, in the street. You can get the name of every doctor in South Africa through the phone book. Whites need doctors, without doctors they think they are already dying, he says. Blacks in South Africa have no doctors to speak of anyway, especially in the homelands where they are all being herded to die in droves. Blacks are dying of the system every day regardless, he says. But whites would scream. They would rush like cattle to the airports, screaming. They would stream out of the country. The planes from Smuts would be jammed full. After the first strike, you would continue, taking them by ones and twos. The doctors would leave, the ones who were still alive. No new ones would come, not even Indians. He said it was like taking away water from people in a desert. The government would capitulate. That was the plan.

“I lifted my hand and let him take the money. He said I was paying the soldiery, and he thanked me in the name of the revolution. Then I was free to go.”

He looked around dazedly for something, she wasn’t clear what. Her glass was still one third full. Remarkably,
he picked it up and drained it, eating the remnants of ice.

She stood up. She was content. The story was a brilliant thing, a gem.

He was moving about. It was hard to say, but possibly he was leaving. He could go or stay.

They stood together in the living room archway. Without prelude, he reached for her, awkwardly pulled her side against his chest, kissed her absurdly on the eye, and with his free hand began squeezing her breasts.

It was the next day.

Not a moment too soon, Carl thought, exhausted. He watched the corona brighten around the drawn curtains. Hot light was flooding Africa one more time. His days were like nights and his nights were like days, because of the dogs. He got his rest during the day—in increments, in stolen naps at his desk or in the car, or at lunchtime at home. His days were dim, like dreams. His nights were war. The dogs began barking every night at seven, or when he went to bed, whichever came first. There were eleven dogs in the yard next door. The furor kept up until daybreak, except for weekends, when—he’d be willing to swear—it went on even later. When he came home for lunch, the dogs were laid out around Letsamao’s yard like slugs or duffel bags, sleeping in the sun—filling up with sleep.

He inched himself up into a sitting position and looked down at his sleeping darling. They had been married less than a year. Sometimes she smiled in her sleep. He loved her teeth, small and white, like mints. He had all his teeth, knock wood. Lois was twenty-eight and he was fifty-six. She was his second wife, and she was perfect. Her skin was perfect for Africa—the way she tanned beautifully. She loved Botswana’s dry climate, and in fact that reminded him to remind her to be sensitive about the drought when she was enthusing about the climate in front of people. He loved
her all the time. She was grateful for everything. He had saved her from Oregon, she liked to say. She meant the climate and what it had done to her sinuses. She meant her job as a cashier in a hotel restaurant in Medford, where they had met when he was on vacation recuperating from his breakup with Elaine. Lois was unmarried when he met her, because she had been waiting for two key things in one: a man she could respect, who was also someone not fated to live in Oregon forever because of his work or family ties. She thought that his job with the Agency for International Development was wonderful, because it kept him in sunny countries and it helped the poor. She thought of AID as something like the Red Cross. She was a wonderful specimen. She was improving his life in so many ways that he couldn’t keep up with it. His salt intake was down, due to her tricks with lemon juice and so on. Also, he had always thought of hair spray as effeminate and had preferred to duck out and comb his hair nineteen times a day, with water if need be, rather than use it. But then she had shown him that the hair sprays he had tried were too strong and made his hair look like icing, and she had gotten him one that was the right strength and now his hair was fine all day and could be forgotten about. She was a helpmeet: his first. She could be an ad for health food, she looked so well. She could sleep almost at will, it seemed to him. She invariably slept through the dogs. They couldn’t keep her awake. He kept her awake, if he was restless, but not the dogs themselves.

He lowered one foot to the floor. It was amazing to him how much he wanted to be fit, these days. Of course, anyone with a young wife would want to be fit, to some extent. That was why the thing with the dogs had to be brought to an end. But his attitude toward being in shape was a hundred per cent the reverse of what it had been under Elaine, if that was the right way to put it. His attitude toward jogging was a
case in point. Jogging had been invented while his back was turned—while he was in Malawi or Togo, probably. He could remember that the first time he had seen joggers, when he and Elaine had been back in New York on home leave—in an expensive hotel, naturally, on Central Park South—it was already a mass movement. Elaine had been a genius at choosing the most expensive city or country for rest and recreation. If there were two countries, one where the dollar was high and the other where it was really low, there would always be a compelling reason to go where it was most expensive. It had to be France because the springs under the Fontaine de Vaucluse were drying up, or it had to be Italy because the Villa d’Este was closing down its most unique fountains because a tire factory was polluting the water. So, there he had been, looking out the window down into beautiful, green Central Park and seeing joggers everywhere. Now he saw the point of it—he himself was walking everywhere he could—but at the time he had been able to see the joggers only as something interrupting his pleasure in looking at the park, something agitating, something that marred the beauty of the vegetation, like aphids. Lo had information about health. People were amazed when she proved to them that some salt companies were adding sugar, or some form of it, to salt.

He was up. He felt fragile, because of the dogs. By rights, he should be feeling reborn, almost. He was hardly drinking. There was Lo. He was basically through with smoking. But he felt fragile. Botswana felt dangerous to him. For instance, the floor beneath his feet. The Batswana kept waxing, no matter what was said to them. Lo was too soft. Overwaxing was still going on. At work, the cleaners waxed directly on bare concrete, on stoops, on steps. The floors blazed everywhere. They could kill you. Barefoot was safest. Thongs were dangerous on these floors.

There was one other thing that not sleeping was making him irrational on: the geyser. He tried not to be. But the hot water for the tub and shower came from a gigantic cylinder bolted to the wall above the bathtub, with electric coils in a collar at its base. It would crush anyone in the tub if it ever came loose from its moorings. And Lo took baths, exclusively. He was always obsessively inspecting the geyser, pulling at the mountings and feeling at the same time that he might be weakening the thing with all his testing. Hot baths were therapy for Lo. The giant tubs the British had established as normal all over Africa were a revelation to her. The shower stall was separate and safe.

He set the shower to spray just enough to get him rinsed but not enough to bother Lo. He was expert at showering quietly. He was used to the African workday starting when it did—ungodly early. She was still adapting. He liked her to sleep late. Small things about her made him emotional, like lying about her age to make herself older and more appropriate for him when they were courting. That was the kind of thing he loved. Or, recently, when he’d said he felt like Prometheus having his liver torn out every night and regenerating each day so it could be torn out again the next night, and she’d asked who Prometheus was. The hot water directly on his scalp was helping.

Walking was calming, and Carl liked the half-mile walk from his office to the medical unit. The embassy nurse wanted to see him. He knew he was overdue for his gamma globulin, but there was something more she wanted to discuss. He was going to plead with her for a state-of-the-art sleeping pill. He wouldn’t get it: she was to the right of medically conservative. The regular pills were no help. They would knock him out but not keep him out. Lo’s prescription for him was more exercise, as in jogging. The thought was torture. He was too
tired for exercise. In any case, the problem wasn’t falling asleep, it was getting back to sleep once the Minister of Labor’s dogs started their demented crooning and baying and snarling and fighting or mating or tunneling under the fence to come skulking around the house, rifling his trash cans.

In Gaborone, when he walked, he used the network of dirt paths behind the houses—the “people’s paths.” Africa was humanity walking, or rather Africans walking. Whites rode. He was almost the only white ambulating along with the Batswana. People looked at him. It would be fair to say they stared. They were staring now, a little. He thought, They can’t get over my uncanny resemblance to Samuel Beckett. Immediately, he felt guilty. He did look like Beckett, but the thought was bad—the kind of thing Elaine would have broken up over. There were plenty of reasons to stare at him. He was tall and so forth. He remembered about his posture and straightened up. This part of Gaborone was like a university town someplace in the American Southwest, except for the walls and fences around the house plots. He had been in Africa so long that residential neighborhoods in America looked utopian—no property-line fencing to speak of, people’s lawns intermingling.

He should enjoy nature more. There were a lot of gum trees on this route. There were other trees whose blooms looked like scrambled eggs. Lo noticed everything. The first time she’d seen him naked she’d noticed that his right arm was permanently darkened by the sun, from the elbow down, from having it out the window as he drove around Africa on site visits. Sometimes Lo said his name in her sleep. It moved him enormously. It was proof of something. He doubted Elaine had ever talked in her sleep. But how would he know, because in those days he slept at night, and Elaine was on her guard to the roots of her being. Lo wanted him to show more interest in the local birdlife. He thought, When
it comes to bird-watching, I say let the birds watch
me
. A colony of Cape vultures had a nesting ground in the cliffs near Ootse. There was supposedly a trail up the cliffs, so that interested parties could get close enough to look directly at the vultures or even interfere with them. Lo wanted to go. He might be able to manage that.

Just ahead, at the edge of the path, was a fruit stand—two upended cartons. The vendor was a Motswana matron wearing a housedress and a blanket over it like an apron. He was going to be irritated, he could tell. He stopped to look over the display of bananas and green apples. The fruit was less than fresh—probably it had been four or five days on the street already. Batswana merchants absolutely would not bargain. This woman needed to clear her stock. She should lower her prices drastically, for the bananas at least. But she had her unit price figured and would stick to it unto death. She knew what the other street vendors were getting and would consider she was being made a fool of if she took less. If he offered a lower price, she would think he was trying to take advantage of her. He had been through this. The fruit came from South Africa and was substandard to begin with—
ondergraad
. The Batswana wholesalers were stuck with long-term contracts for fruit the South Africans wouldn’t touch. He knew all about it. It was a scandal.

The vendor waited for him to say something. She decided to eat an apple. He predicted that she would take one of the best ones, not one of the least salable, and she did. Sometimes he thought southern Africa was specially designed to try the souls of small-business experts. He had had his difficulties persuading Africans elsewhere in the continent to be serious about business, but southern Africa was the sharpest thorn in his crown so far. He had to give himself mixed reviews at best for his performance to date—for his career—so he had to succeed in Botswana. This was not the
best subject vis-à-vis his blood pressure. Botswana was probably his last chance to stay overseas. He ought to be able to succeed, because his main project was foolproof: it was all women, very tractable, making school uniforms for a guaranteed market—the state.