Norman Rush - Mating

Two Feints

He came in glum. I was rehearsed.

I saturated the first half hour with protestations that I repented the whole thing, that I had been incredibly jejune, that the little nips of Mainstay I had taken while I was massaging him had been part of the problem, that I was distraught. I looked the part thanks to my dark night of the soul. My plea was that we forget it. It was just that when he had said Please let me do something for you it had been the equivalent of someone inviting you to make a wish, no more. Also I didn’t want things to end uglily because I had to start thinking about getting home and I wanted to not leave a stain behind.

Also, I said, I know you can’t help but worry this is something that however circuitously could endanger your job. I want you to know I’m not cavalier about jobs. You can fall into a fissure between jobs and never be seen again, because of your age, for instance. My antecedents are one hundred percent working class, I said, by which I mean just barely arrived there and glad of it. Here I was exploiting my having gotten him to let slip that he was Labour, which people at his level in the ministry he was in are supposed to reveal only on pain of death, I gathered.

I forget what I made for dinner, but I remember he toyed with the entrée. Not the bread, though. He could never keep his hands off my baking.

We sat in the heat. I was supposed to pick up that he’d made some brave decision that rendered all the preambling I was doing irrelevant.

Might we talk as friends, or family? he finally asked. He was going into a role.

I know what you’re doing, I said: You have an instinct for the avuncular. But go ahead anyway. He smiled.

Well, there are so many things of interest, aren’t there? The Bushmen. Let us say you were concerned with the Bushmen — everyone here is, it seems. The fate of the Bushmen. Sad, isn’t it, that the South Africans are turning them into trackers to hunt down guerrillas in Ovamboland?

This annoyed me no end, because it was such common knowledge. But I just said that I knew about this because it had been in the Rand Daily Mail, and it was more than sad. Patronize me at your peril, my attitude said, and he got it.

So sorry, he murmured. I could feel him punching the reset button.

Then, Um, did I think there was anything to the stories that the South Africans were bribing certain Kwena chiefs to get them interested in joining up with the five million Kwenas the Boers already controlled through their thug Mangope across the border in Bophuthatswana, thusly threatening to partition and wreck Botswana for being so uncooperative? Mangope’s agents were working everywhere. I am summarizing. Halfway through this I started finishing his sentences for him. I read the Economist too, I said. But I didn’t need to read the Economist to know about Mangope. I reprised how serious I was about forgetting the whole thing, how embarrassed I was that I had ever said anything, especially if this was the outcome.

Next I got a disorganized series of asides, essentially, to the effect that I was really a rather terrifying person and did I know that? I seemed to be a sort of monster who remembered everything — an allusion to something that happened rather often where I would quote him to himself if the situation called for it. Did I also remember lines of text, as I seemed to? But then I was also an angel. I was saying all was forgiven, but I was not projecting that. It was pro forma. He was no fool.

I briefly considered showing him I could tell him a thing or two myself. I knew from my time in Keteng that the South Africans had spies and stooges absolutely everywhere and were behind the big abrupt movement among the Herero to go back to Namibia and take their cattle with them. They had come over with nothing after the German massacres in 1905, and they had built up their herds from scratch, being genius cattle raisers. The government was saying begone but leave your herds. But this kind of thing is what the Boers do for fun. There’s nothing surprising about it. They are breeders of strife. But I held myself in because I could tell by his expression that something new was impending.

Sekopololo

Well, he could pass on something he would wager I hadn’t heard of. Possibly this would come under the heading of scandal. Someone rather famous was in Botswana incognito, so to speak, and had been — off and on, but now on — for some years, eight to be precise. He paused to see if this was going to be old news again and was relieved when it was clear I had no idea what he was talking about, unless he meant Elizabeth Taylor and her putative hospital project, which would have been completely risible.

I wasn’t to think that this was by any manner of means an official secret. It was more a gentlemen’s agreement among people who had to know about this person’s presence. This person had exacted highly unusual conditions from the government of Botswana, outrageous conditions, in setting up his project, which was what he was doing in Botswana, something very avant-garde, supposedly very major and massive, a whole new village built from the ground up, in point of fact, somewhere in the north central Kalahari. Clearly he hated whoever this was. Did I still not know? He was surprised.

Go on, I said.

Well, what else could he add? He considered. This was an American, a difficult individual, and there was division in government vis-à-vis all the latitude granted him, particularly in the matter of oversight. His idea was that evaluators and visitors were parasites whose only function was to deform and corrupt the development process. Some unspecified day this New Jerusalem would be complete and only then would the world, including the donors who had financed it, be allowed to see what they had wrought and carry back the secret word that would put paid to poverty in Africa. There was even a Tswana code name for the project, which was Sekopololo, which no one could pronounce. I knew that Sekopololo translated as “The Key.”

When he said Nelson Denoon I could hardly believe it. Denoon was a bête noire of mine, in an abstract way, from the first of my endless years at Stanford. Initially I associated him with earlier tribulations at Bemidji State, but that was wrong. I had been tantamount to a fan of this man’s work. There were several of us. He had come to Stanford to run a colloquy on the etiology of poverty. Too bad, it was restricted to faculty and a select few students. You had to have passed your quals and or you had to know somebody. You could get in if somebody liked you. When we were noninvited we even went so far as to appeal to him directly via a fanlike note. No reply. Naturally afterward all the attendees reported a truly scrotum-tightening experience. Their worldviews had changed. One woman couldn’t get over his voice. It was a voice you could eat, she said.

It all came back, the bathos of trying to be nonchalant about trying and failing to get at least a glimpse of the great man. He had written a classic that undergraduates loved and most of the professoriat hated: Development as the Death of Villages, with its jacket portrait of someone reminiscent of the white actors they use to play the Indian chief’s headstrong eldest son in westerns. You couldn’t tell in the photograph because it was full face, but he had his sleek black hair in an actual ponytail. He was wearing it that way when he came to Stanford, as I learned from one of my female colleagues who attended the audience and whose name I forget but whom I think of for some reason as Whoreen, which is close. Whoreen is at the University of South Dakota, but on tenure track. Colleague is of course a misnomer: you only have colleagues once you get hired. As of early 1981, Denoon would be mid — late forties, I calculated.