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FIG TREE
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PENGUIN BOOKS

FIG TREE

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2013
First published in Great Britain by Fig Tree 2013

Excerpt from ‘The Layers’ from The Collected Poems by Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1978 by Stanley Kunitz.
Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The hearse pulled onto a scrubby track, traveled several hundred feet, and stopped. The passenger door opened, followed by the driver’s door. Two men stepped out. They walked to the rear door, and together the men slid out a coffin and laid it carefully on the ground. They returned to the car, struggled with something inside, and dragged out a limp body. It was so covered with road dust, its face was gone.

The driver splashed a bucket of water over it, nudged it with a toe. Rivulets ran down the side of one cheek, water etching through dust to walnut-colored skin.

The eyelids fluttered, and the driver said, “See, you are wrong.” They stood a moment and watched the man on the ground. Then they loaded the coffin back into the hearse and fled. There would be trouble when the man came to. Or if he didn’t, there would also be trouble.

The sun was risen above the first line of scrub when Isaac opened an eye. The light hurt. The hearse was gone, and with it the small cardboard suitcase his brother Nthusi had given him. A wind blew close to the ground, kicking up a fine dust, covering over the tracks. The dust would cover him too, he thought without interest, if he lay there long enough.

A thin white dog sat next to him, like a ghost. It frightened him when he turned his head and saw her. He was not expecting a dog, especially not a dog of that sort. Normally he would have chased a strange dog away. But there was no strength in his body. He could only lie on the ground. I am already dead, he thought, and this is my companion. When you die, you are given a brother or a sister for your journey, and this creature is white so it can be seen in the land of the dead. The white dog’s nose pointed away from him. From time to time, her eyes looked sideways in his direction and looked away. Her ears were back, her paws folded one over the other. She was a stately dog, a proper-acting dog.

A cigarette wrapper tumbled across the ground, stopped a moment, and blew on. A cream soda can lay under a stunted acacia, its orange label faded almost to white. Seeing those things, he thought, I am not dead. You would not be finding trash in the realm of the dead.

He heard a voice nearby, a woman calling to a child, scolding. He sat up. No part of his body was unbruised. Which country was he in? Had he made it over the border?

He called to the woman, but she didn’t appear to hear him. She stood with a child near a makeshift dwelling made of cardboard, propped up with a couple of wooden posts, with a roof of rusted iron and blue plastic sheeting. She gripped her child tight around his upper arm, and with the other hand splashed water from a large coffee tin. Her boy struggled and broke free, running so fast that tiny droplets of water fell out behind him. “Moemedi!” she cried.

“Dumela, mma,” Isaac said in greeting, getting to his feet and wobbling toward her.

She eyed him. Clouds of dust rose as he struck his pants with his hands. “Where am I? Which country am I in?”

His palm traveled down the length of his face, as though opening a curtain. His eyes filled with relief and with the fear of the kilometers between him and his mother and brothers and sisters and all he’d known and understood and embraced and finally escaped.

The woman must have seen the boy inside the man, lost like a young goat in the desert. “Where is your mother?” she asked.

“Ee, mma.” He took a step toward her and fell backward onto the dog. As he was going down, his eye caught the soda can in the bushes. The sky had been blue, the dog white, but now the dog was blue and the sky white.

“My husband is a jealous man. You cannot stay here,” she said. Her body was already bent, even though her boy was young, running, running with his friends among thorns and discarded tin cans. She disappeared into the cardboard shack while Isaac sat on the ground with the white dog. Long ago before he’d gone to school, he remembered his mother telling him that there were oceans on Earth. She said that the water was so big, you could not see to the land on the other side. She’d heard that the water threads connected to the moon, so when the moon grew larger, the waters also grew larger, like an older brother sharing food with a younger brother. But she didn’t know where the big water came from and went back to. Maybe to the center of the Earth, she told him, where it can’t be seen, flowing underneath. His head felt like that water, with the moon pulling on it, the waters going back and forth.

The woman came back out of her house, with a tin mug. She brought a small stool for him to sit on. He stretched out his hand respectfully, right one reaching, left touching the right elbow. He bowed his head in thanks.

She rose again and came back with a bowl of sorghum porridge. She poured reconstituted powdered milk on it and gave him a spoon. “Who hurt you?” she asked.

“The journey hurt me. No one person. I traveled out of South Africa in a compartment under a casket.”

“Surely not. But I did see a large car travel up that track. I saw the men pull you out and throw you on the ground. When you spoke to me, I thought if I do not speak, if I pretend I don’t see it, that thing will return to the dead.”

“The train was not possible.” His friend Kopano passed in front of his eyes. Two men, wearing the uniform of the South African Defense Force, walking toward a van, no hurry. The train disgorging steam beside the platform. The conductor: Get your dirty kaffir hands off.

It did not matter whether she believed him or not. Now, the problem was not the journey that brought him here, but where to sleep tonight and the night after. In the darkness, it is said that you must hold on to one another by the robe. But where was the robe? He would need to leave here. He would thank this woman and be gone.

“What is this place called?” he asked the woman. Makeshift dwellings stretched as far as you could see.

From what can you not make a house? Oil drums, grass, mud, sheets of torn plastic, tires, wooden vegetable crates, banged-up doors ripped from cars and trucks. Each place was called home by someone, maybe ten people, sleeping side by side on the floor, crawling out in daylight, when the sun is drying the blades of short grass that the goats have not yet eaten, drying the leaves of the acacia trees with its heat. For a few moments only, this Naledi would be wreathed in morning mist. Would he be here tomorrow to see it? He put his hand out without thinking and touched the fur of the dog.

“It doesn’t matter when I came. The government says they are going to knock down all the houses.”

“Ga ke itse.” She shrugged. I don’t know. “They’ll bring the bulldozers and knock the houses down, and then the people will come back and build the houses again.” She looked as though he should know these things. He watched her as she disappeared around the other side of the house.

Outside Pretoria, where he’d lived, the police came after the sun had set. You could hear people crying that they were coming. In the darkness they ran. They jumped over fences and disappeared into the night. There were no maps for where they went. They rose from their beds and climbed out their windows, and each moment was a place they didn’t know and had never been. With the sound of the police vans, thousands departed under the rags of darkness. His mother didn’t have legal papers. She barricaded the door and hid under the bed and told the children to be as still as stones. But the baby cried and the police knocked the door down and they put his mother in prison for seventeen days. When she was gone, there was no food except grass and stolen mealie meal. Their stomachs heaved and sorrowed with emptiness. The bitter heart eats its owner, his mother said when she returned. He didn’t know whether she was telling him that her heart had been eaten, or that he must be careful not to let himself be eaten. After that, she sent her young children, all but the baby, to live with her mother in the place the whites called the homeland, which was nobody’s homeland, only a desolate place no one else wanted. His mother had to stay in Pretoria, where there was work for her. She’d told Isaac, as the second oldest, that he was not to cry for her, but sometimes when she was gone and the wind had blown across the empty ground and drowned the sounds of the night, he couldn’t help the feelings that rose in his throat and spilled out of his eyes.

He wanted to tell the woman in the cardboard house these things, but he couldn’t; his silence was the silence of an old lion that’s been left behind. And then he thought, no one has left you behind. You are the one who’s left everyone behind.

“Enough.” He didn’t tell her he’d finished four years of university back home and started medical school. What was the point? He had no papers, no one would believe he had anything to offer but the strength of his back.

“Then you must go into the town and ask for gardening work at each house. Do you know how to say this in English?”

“But they won’t hire you,” she said. “You are too dirty. Take off your shirt and give it to me.” She went around the side of her house and poured water out of a five-gallon oil can into the coffee tin she’d used when she’d tried to wash her boy.

Isaac felt light-headed from the sweet tea and porridge. He couldn’t see properly. He went to push up his glasses, but he found now that they were lost, probably in the bottom of the compartment under the casket. A single crease of worry marked the skin between his eyes, as though a thumbnail had carved it. He ran his hands over what remained of his hair, which, in his doubt and fear about leaving, he’d shaved, as though the straight razor moving over his head had been a holiness, the marking of an end, a kind of benediction. He was a solidly built man, eyes a deep well of intelligence, eyebrows like a bush. His ears were at a slight angle from his head, as though curious. His bottom lip was full, his top lip not. In his face was a kindness mixed with a certain ferocity.

The woman slapped Isaac’s shirt against a rock, dipped it in the coffee can and slapped it again. She must have been pretty once. Her breasts were large and her bottom was firm. He thought her husband was a lucky man. She was a brightness in this place called Naledi.

He stood shakily and went around the back of the house to relieve himself. The white dog followed and stood by his side. High above his head, a black-shouldered kite circled. The bird did a great arc in the sky, turning its head with small jerks. Isaac peed into the hot dirt. His head felt wooly, his thoughts scraped down to bone.

When he returned, his shirt was draped over a post, and the woman had disappeared.

He went back and sat on the stool, and she crept up behind him and poured the shirt water over his head. He leapt up in anger, and then his anger trickled down his breast and onto his belly as laughter. The woman fetched more water and told him to wash. She gave him a stick to brush his teeth, and when he’d finished he smiled into her face, and she smiled too, and then she looked away and banged the coffee tin with the heel of her hand and yelled for her son. But the boy was gone, running wild over the goat paths with his friends.

“Luscious Moatlhaping,” she said. “That is my name.” She didn’t ask his.

“When it dries,” she said, pointing her chin at his shirt, “you will go.” But he couldn’t think about that yet, could hardly keep his chin from falling onto his chest.

He lay down in the sun and dreamt troubled dreams, of pursuit, of open veldt that gave no cover or shelter. When he woke, sweating and confused, there was no sign of the woman, only the dog keeping watch. His head hurt. The wind had blown his shirt off the post. As he put it on, he faintly smelled the woman. It gave him strength. He wanted to give her something before he left, but he had nothing. In the suitcase, his brother had packed three shirts, a pair of pants, mhago for the journey—oranges and sweet biscuits. The undertaker who transported the dead would be eating the food and wearing his brother’s shirts.

His feet were unsteady when he set out. From a distance came the sound of shebeen music. He pictured cartons of Chibuku strewn about, the taste of sorghum beer, raw and sour with the haste of brewing, old men with red eyes. The music grew louder. He felt someone following him, turned around, and there was the white dog, trotting behind, just close enough to keep him in sight.

“Tsamaya!” he said, flinging his arms in the air. The dog cowered and crouched down.

“Tsamaya!” he yelled again. Go away! He stooped down and pretended to pick up a rock, and she slunk away, looking over her shoulder. He set forth again, but when he turned, there she was, trotting the same distance behind him.

The shebeen was close now. Then he saw them: sitting on their rickety kgotla chairs in the shade of an acacia were the same sorts of old men he’d seen a hundred times at home in South Africa.

“Dumelang, borra,” he greeted them. They stared suspiciously. “Lo tsogile jang?” How are you?

He pulled up a three-legged stool and sat a little distance from a man with grizzled salt and pepper stubble on his chin. On the radio, a new group was singing, a woman wailing. Her voice sounded like the yelping of a wild dog. So much animal. You’d want to know that woman. You’d also want to keep your distance.

“Go that way,” said the oldest man. “Follow the path, and there is the road. Northward is the town.” He waited for Isaac to say where he came from and where he was going but was met with silence. The less people knew about where he’d come from, the safer for everyone. Isaac rose to his feet, thanked them, and was gone.

The path was strewn with goat droppings and cans. Behind him, the music grew fainter. He heard a rumble in the distance, and as he emerged from the bush he was enveloped in the dust of a three-ton truck traveling south in the direction of Lobatse, sliding through the sand like a wounded beast. With every step, he shed parts of himself—friends he’d never see again, debts of kindness he’d never repay, empty hopes, his biochemistry notebook, his anatomy and physiology book as thick as a fist. He was surprised how fast that life was dropping from him. He thought how soon he’d be unable to imagine himself walking on the streets that had been his home, how even the memories would fade to ghosts and then to nothing. He wanted to chase after them, but he would be running backward.

The future was blank. Only two days ago, it had been inhabited with obligations and dreams, by soft-eyed Boitumelo, by his mother, and by Moses and his other brothers and sisters; it had been pointing the way to sweetness like a honey badger running toward a hive. He pictured his little brother Moses sitting on the ground, his hands fashioning a car from bits of tin can and wire he’d found here and there. You hold the future for others, not only for yourself.

His mind swirled, became confused, remembered things he didn’t want to remember. Back home, a few months before he left, he’d walked out one late afternoon to buy a half loaf of bread, and he’d seen a crowd catch a middle-aged man suspected of complicity with the South African Defense Force. They took that man, and they beat him with sticks and tire irons; they kicked him in the belly, and when he was unable to stand, they sat him in the middle of the road, forced a tire over his head, drenched it with gasoline, and lit it. There was nothing to do but turn away.

The sun was becoming hotter now. The path scrubbed along beside the main road, a road for feet. A group of men were coming his way, kicking up sand. He sensed trouble, but there was no time to get out of their way. He walked slowly to one side to let them by, dropping his eyes. He saw two large, flat feet pass by, then smaller dark feet in flip-flops. The third set of feet, wearing black leather shoes without socks, stopped in front of him.

He broke into a run, but the hunger made his legs sluggish. He tried to push his body forward but it refused, and then he felt his shirt pulled backward.

No one knew him here, he knew no one. How did the police get his name? He chopped at the hand holding him.

“You beggar,” Amen laughed, “do we look like police?” He picked up Isaac’s hand and held it. “This is my friend,” he said to the others.

Isaac looked into Amen’s face, which had changed, hardened. He’d had no idea he was here and suspected he was doing ANC work. He’d grown a beard, a scraggly “O” around his mouth which crept from his chin to his ears, partly covering a dimple in his right cheek—a feature that had made him look mock-innocent in school but now looked mistaken.

“Kopano is dead,” Isaac said. “I was beside him when they killed him. It’s no longer safe to stay back home.”

Isaac stopped. “What does that mean to avenge a death—kill once, twice, three times more? Where does it end?”

Amen’s eyes were set wide, one looking left while the other looked straight ahead so that it was impossible to escape his gaze.

“If you’re saying you’re a coward, Isaac Muthethe, you’re not the Isaac I once knew. Where are you staying?”

“Come to my house. I have a wife now. And a little girl. Also with us are three comrades, and another woman and her child. What’s one more?” He looked at the white dog. “Did you bring this one with you?”

“No.” The dog moved back a few paces and hunched beside a bush. The word “comrades” meant that it was true: Amen was working with MK, the military wing of the ANC. Botswana was the staging area for violent acts against the South African Defense Force across the border. It was not work he himself could do. Not because he was afraid to die. Was that true? Maybe he couldn’t spare his own precious life for something bigger. Why else had he fled? “Yes, I’ll come with you,” said Isaac. Later, he’d look back and see that this moment led to another that led all the way down a road he’d never meant to travel.

The group walked back into the twisted paths of Naledi. Again, the white dog trailed at a distance. The music of the shebeen grew louder again. The same men still sat under the tree.

Beyond the packed dirt where the old men drank, Amen took a path to the right. After five minutes, they turned left, and then right, and then right again. Then down a smaller path, a single rut, finally stopping in front of a door—really a piece of rubber from a truck bed that was tacked over an opening. “Wait here,” said Amen to Isaac while the rest went inside.

Isaac sat in the dust, looking in the direction of Kgale Hill. There was talk, low in the throats of the men inside, and the sound of one man speaking, first contemptuously, then pleading. It seemed he owed them something. His voice reminded Isaac of the way people back home implored a policeman: a voice stripped of its manhood, a faltering don’t-hurt-me sound, an eating-dirt, empty ragman voice. He thought about lifting the piece of rubber to see what was happening. And then the sounds grew worse. If it had been one man to one man … but that wasn’t what it was. Meno a diphiri. The teeth of hyenas.

“O a lwala,” he told her. He’s sick, that man in there. “Soon he’ll be better …” A fist or shoe bore down. The man groaned. He’d heard that Botswana was a peace-loving country, that you could sleep safely in your bed at night. Now things had gone quiet, and he felt afraid.

The rubber door trembled. “Pah!” said Amen, slapping out. “He shat his pants!”

Isaac turned away. That meant he was alive, he supposed. The others moved away from the door.

Amen spat and started down the path. “He’ll go home,” he said over his shoulder.

“It does matter,” said Isaac. “You won’t live to be thirty if you keep using your fists.”

Amen stopped and turned to face him. “This isn’t what I choose either, understand? But you like what’s happening back home? You like it? Then go back there, man. Ha! Go back and enjoy the life they’ve carved out for you. Live in a little rotting box. Scuttle out onto the street like a cockroach.”

Kagiso was cooking when they reached the house. “My wife,” said Amen. She smiled shyly, bent her knees a little, and clasped her two hands together. When she looked up, her mouth was open in a wide smile, as though she were saying WAH! Her face was still girlish, her mouth plump, her teeth very white. She wore a light cotton dress made from navy blue material and a scarf tied over her head, knotted behind her neck. As she stirred beans over a fire, straight-legged, bent at the waist, thumping the sides of a three-legged pot with a big wooden spoon, the breeze stirred her dress. The moment filled him with desire, not just the smell of beans and goat trotters coming from the pot, but also—Isaac had to look away—the smooth skin at the back of her legs, the hair curling out from under her scarf at the nape of her neck.

Amen gestured for Isaac to sit down on the stoop. At first he said nothing, then, “What happened?”

“To Kopano. I want to know the whole story. And what you’re doing here.” One did not trifle with Amen, not years ago when he was thirteen or fourteen back in school, less so now. His wide-set eyes were intense, passionate, but something else was there too—an ancient injury living side by side with an easy arrogance. Menace, the child of this union.

Isaac felt like a bird falling from the sky, sinking into sand. He wanted just to sit in the waning sunlight and watch Kagiso stirring the pot. He was tired, too sad to speak. He saw himself on that day, standing in the clear winter sun on the train platform next to his friend.

“Kopano and I were waiting for a train to Pretoria,” he said. “We had a month’s holiday from medical school. Kopano was going home. I was going to see my mother. And then to see my granny and my younger brothers and sister in Bophuthatswana.”

He remembered on that day the white butterflies were migrating. Isaac had never asked anyone where they came from or where they were going. He doubted whether anyone in the world knew. While they waited, Kopano talked about someone he’d met, a man who was head of the Black People’s Convention. Kopano’s voice rose and fell in the sunshine while Isaac watched the blizzard of butterflies, hundreds of thousands pouring northward, delicate white wings beating the air, going places he’d never go. Every now and then, one would glide close enough for him to see the brown veins and the brown tips of the wings, the color of a marula nut.

He felt the beat of the train in his feet before he saw it. Then it appeared in the distance, its homely black engine engulfed in steam, the goods and passenger cars trailing behind. A glint of metal on the front of the locomotive flashed in the sun.

The white butterflies lifted higher into the air, and the rumbling of the wheels filled Isaac’s body. Kopano looked upward, his eyes following the still wings gliding on air currents. His face, normally fervent and weighed down with responsibility, relaxed and lifted. He may even have smiled.

“Two white men, wearing the uniform of the South African Defense Force, seized Kopano and threw him into the path of the train.” The men seemed to hesitate, as though deciding what to do with Isaac. Then they turned, walked down the platform in no particular hurry, and climbed into a police van.

“No.” People who saw what happened moved away. They hurried into second- and third-class train carriages; women held their babies close.

Isaac found a conductor on the platform. He would not tell Amen what happened next. He’d never tell anyone. To his shame, he went down on his knees, holding the conductor’s pant cuff. Please, baas, please help, I beg of you. My friend is under the train.

Get your dirty kaffir hands off me. The conductor glanced at the tracks. Your friend should have been more careful.

The conductor kicked out with his shoe. I tell you, boy, get away. The train departed, and what was left of Kopano lay between the tracks.

Sitting in the afternoon sun now, safe in another country, Isaac closed his eyes and found nothing between him and it: the sound of the train receding, thunder in his ears, Kopano’s body dragged down the track, blood sprayed onto dirt and gravel. And the horror of a small gray mouse running between the rails looking for food.

“I walked to the hospital. I got them to fetch the body. I caught the next train to Pretoria, and I told Kopano’s mother and his grandmother. I told you already, I’m here to save my hide.”

He rose and went behind Amen’s house, his head bowed, unable to bear the thought of Kopano’s mother. She’d been expecting her son. She’d cooked all day. Her hair was newly plaited. He imagined her sitting in the shade, a neighbor braiding her hair, smoothing it with her hands, their low voices, her joy.

Growing up, he’d thought of himself as ordinary, the second of six children. But others thought differently. He was “the smart one,” encouraged to remain in school. His mother had once told him, “Each person on Earth carries with them their own pouch. That person brings it wherever they go, carried in their hand. Your pouch never empties, only fills and fills. What’s on the bottom remains on the bottom and is covered over in time. You are given things to care for. You are given things that are difficult to understand.”

In his pouch were his mother’s white employers in Pretoria who had no children of their own. They’d singled him out, paid his school fees, given him books, paid for him to go to university. After he’d graduated, Hendrik and Hester Pretorius said, Keep going. He applied to the University of Natal Medical School, Non-White Section, and was accepted. Until Kopano, his pouch had been filled only with good fortune.

Stephen Biko, the antiapartheid activist, had attended the same medical school as Isaac and Kopano. If it hadn’t been for Biko, Isaac wouldn’t have been at Kopano’s side when he was killed, and he wouldn’t now be in Botswana. But the legacy of Biko shamed him into joining the South African Students Organization. He hadn’t wanted to go where there was trouble, but he attended one illegal meeting with his friend, and then another, until it was unthinkable to stay away.

On September, 12, 1977, not long after Kopano’s murder, Biko died in detention in the Eastern Cape province. Colonel Pieter Goosen, the commanding officer of the Security Branch in Port Elizabeth, suggested that Mr. Biko might have fallen on the floor during a scuffle and bumped his head. The postmortem examination showed five lesions to the brain, a scalp wound, a cut on his upper lip, abrasions and bruising around the ribs. After the “scuffle,” Mr. Biko was shackled and handcuffed, left naked for a couple of days, and finally driven twelve hours in a semiconscious state to Pretoria, where he died from a brain hemorrhage.

Blacks were not allowed to travel to King William’s Town where Biko’s funeral was held. Although Isaac hadn’t been there, he’d read what Desmond Tutu had said before the crowd of fifteen thousand: “The powers of injustice, of oppression, of exploitation, have done their worst, and they have lost. They have lost because they are immoral and wrong, and our God … is a God of justice and liberation and goodness.” The Reverend Tutu was a man worthy of respect, but Isaac could not agree with him. If our God is a God of justice and liberation and goodness, why does He not intervene?

Isaac and his oldest brother Nthusi mourned on the streets of Pretoria with thousands of others. Amandla! the crowd shouted. Ngawethu! Power! The power is ours! During the gathering, Isaac told Nthusi in a low voice that the police had killed his friend, and that it was likely they would find him next. He couldn’t bear to look at his brother. When he finally glanced in his direction, he saw disbelief and rage. Nthusi’s face said, You. The one who carried hope for our family.

Isaac repeated the words of Biko: You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway.

“You’re a fool,” Nthusi said. “Look what happened to Biko. And to Mohapi, hanged in his cell. And Mazwembe. And Fenuel Mogatusi, suffocated. And Mosala, beaten to death. And Wellington Tshazibane, hanged in his cell. And George Botha, pushed six floors down a stairwell. And Mathews Mabelane, pushed out of a tenth-floor window …”

“They’ll beat you until you have no brains. You might not care for yourself, but if something happened to you, it would kill our mother.” An upwelling of anger caused Nthusi to lurch to one side, away from Isaac.

They walked back home in a sea of angry, sorrowing people—Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho. The crowd walked slowly, a girl in a yellow dress holding her sister’s hand, young men shaking their fists, a grandmother in a faded blue head scarf, all singing.

Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika

Maluphakamis’upondo lwayo

Yizwa imithandazo yethu

Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapholwayo

Nthusi had a friend who knew an undertaker who traveled back and forth across the northern border. This man had a special compartment fitted under his hearse for smuggling yellow margarine out of Botswana into South Africa, in defiance of the dairy farmers who wanted to keep margarine white so it couldn’t be sold as butter. Every so often, this undertaker smuggled people in the other direction, into Botswana.

On the following Sunday, Isaac embraced his brother and asked him to say good-bye to his mother, to Boitumelo, to his granny, and his other brothers and sisters. He pushed the tears down into the leather shoes his brother had given him off his feet. He climbed into the hearse and lay down in the cavity. He was not a big man, but his body was jammed into the compartment, unable to move. Over the top, the undertaker and his cousin slid a mahogany coffin containing the body of a Botswana government official who’d died unexpectedly in Pretoria.

The hearse rattled north. The compartment smelled of metal and oil—and he preferred not to think of what else. He braced his mind the way a wildebeest braces its body against a sandstorm. His family came to his mind one by one, first his mother, then Moses, Lulu, Tshepiso, his youngest brother, and Lesedi, his baby sister. Then Kopano. Not his friend, no. Bloody shreds of matter without indwelling. No recognizable head. An arm beside the tracks. A shoe in the dirt. He heard his own voice pleading with the conductor, calling him baas, master, a word he swore never to use. Please, baas, please help, I beg of you.

Not if he lived to be a hundred would he forget. And that conductor wouldn’t forget either. In some part of his crocodile brain, he’d remember the day his train crushed a black man.

The compartment under the coffin seemed to grow smaller. He imagined a jagged rock puncturing the casing of the metal container that held him. His body couldn’t be far from the road.

After a time, the hearse slowed, the talking between the men in the front seat stopped, and he knew they were approaching the border. His heart beat into his ears; behind his closed eyelids, his skin prickled. He stopped breathing, listened, took a shallow breath, stopped, listened. A man outside was walking around the car. Then the vehicle was rolling again.

What had been a rough asphalt road became dust and deep corrugations. Isaac fought the instinct to burst out and upward, but he would have disturbed the dead, something more unthinkable than dying himself. Between Lobatse and Gaborone, he lay in a fetal position, slamming into the metal floor. He thought he wouldn’t survive the beating. Then he thought he’d suffocate. He coughed and spat and finally lay still.

Isaac felt the weight and pull of Amen’s passion on the other side of the house, the way he’d be dragged into it if he didn’t resist. He moved away from the wall he’d been leaning against. His brother’s shoes were made of hard brown leather, too small for his feet. Already, blisters were biting his heels and the tops of his toes. Meanwhile, his brother would be walking around in the flimsy sneakers he’d left behind in exchange. A dove flew onto the roof, and he looked into the sky. You survived, he told himself. Maybe it’s a good thing; maybe it’s not. His granny always said, Don’t worry about your own well-being. Worry about the well-being of people with less than you. If God breaks your leg, He’ll teach you how to limp. Nthusi’s shoes would teach him that.

Amen and Kagiso and Isaac and the others sat outside and watched the loud red sun slip down. The dust in the air created a haze that settled over the dying day. Their voices sounded thin. Pula e kae? asked Lucky, one of the comrades. Where is the rain? Ee, pula e kae? said Khumo, another comrade. Already it was April with the chances of rain nearly gone until next year. Khumo’s wife, Kefilwe, hummed and rocked their two-year-old child. Her eyes squinted against the sun, perspiration beading her forehead, up where the soft hair met her face. She looked sallow-skinned, spent. Where is the rain? Where? Like a song, an incantation to whoever made the clouds.

When Isaac’s plate was empty, Kagiso filled it again, and then once more. “You eat like a hyena who’s lost his kill to vultures,” she said. He laughed. When he’d finished at last, she spooned what little remained onto the ground for the white dog. Then, with her legs stretched out in front of her, she held her baby, Ontibile, in her lap and pulled out her breast. The child nursed hungrily, her hand kneading and slapping at the breast. When Kagiso changed breasts, Ontibile looked into her mother’s eyes, held the nipple with her teeth, and smiled as milk spilled from the corner of her mouth. When the sky darkened and the baby’s eyes closed, Kagiso gestured for Isaac to follow her inside.

The house was a heat sink. Inside, a door connected one room to a second. Kagiso had hung magazine pages on the wall: a Lil-lets tampon ad with a black woman smiling, a child holding a McVitie’s digestive biscuit and looking up at his mother.

While Amen held forth outside, Kagiso spread out two mats on the floor, one for her and Amen and their baby and one for Isaac on the other side of the room. He lay down, and strangeness overtook him. He didn’t belong here. These were not his people. The child’s sleeping breath took him back to his brother Moses, who had tangled around him in sleep all the years before Isaac had left for university. His youngest brother, Tshepiso, had slept near them like a solitary old ostrich, sometimes on the mat, sometimes on the floor.

Isaac dreamt he was standing on a stretch of ground towering over a vast pit. His father’s tiny figure labored far below. Hundreds of black men worked with picks around him. From one side, a small stream flowed into the pit. As Isaac watched, the stream widened, and water poured in. Men swarmed toward it, trying to stop the onrush. There seemed to be no path out of the hole. Still, his father stood. Just stupidly, as though someone had told him to stay in one place until he died.

Then Isaac was in a rattletrap truck with his uncle, his father’s brother. They were hungry, and his uncle swerved this way and that, trying to run down a guinea fowl. The birds flew up, flew up, and still they could not pin one under a tire.

He woke. The night was very dark. A low, hot wind blew. He saw his father again: a loose slung bravado inside a ruined body. After Isaac had been born, his father had worked for many years in the mines. When he finally returned home, the babies began again. When money ran out, his father had returned to the mines and sent money each month. After a time, the money stopped coming. His mother had tried to get in touch with the mine to find out whether he was dead or alive, but her letters went unanswered. She thought he’d abandoned them. She wanted Isaac to share her anger, but the anger was in her heart, not his. He missed his father, the way he missed his mother now.

Differently from how he missed Boitumelo, her fragrant mouth, her warm breath against his neck. He’d told Nthusi to tell her he was gone for good, not to wait for him. They would have been married. Her hip bone jutted out like the rump of an eland. Her black eyes. Her teeth nipped his flesh, here, here. Now she’d marry someone else.

He woke again when the dogs of Naledi began to bark. Farther out, beyond the place where people were sleeping, he heard the wild dogs answering. The sound made a circle of wildness, enfolding and holding the world of people, like the darkness that surrounds the light of a lamp. It felt safe to him. The dogs were speaking to each other, passing their dog words between them. Outside, the white dog made a low noise in her throat.

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.”

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.”

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.

“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?”

“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.”

ELEANOR MORSE

White Dog Fell from the Sky

Table of Contents

FIG TREE

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