Norman Rush - Mating

I crept up. His legs were in three tones, pale below where his kneesocks came to, and then darker, then darker yet where a strip of shadow fell across his upper thighs. I had read a certain amount of Blake in a dutiful way in the course of things, and it had seemed clotted and recursive to me, so I had never thought much about the poetry except for the three or four short lyrics everybody likes, and certainly I had never attempted to memorize any Blake at all. What remained with me was what remains with everybody, Tyger tyger and What is it that in women men desire?/The lineaments of gratified desire. What I almost idly wished for as I crept up on Nelson was for some apposite line out of the whole blur and ruck of William Blake to come to me. That would be perfect. And lo, out of nowhere, and thanks to cryptomnesia being a real capacity, I retrieved the line He rested on the Desart wild. I felt mediumistic. Nelson rolled over in shock. It turned out that he had just been going from browsing the Four Zoas to reading the Additional Fragments and Notes section, where in fact my line came from.

This must be the right life, I thought.

The Batlodi

At the ostrich pen: two stanchions were bent far outward and the diamond mesh fencing between them had been pressed down into a chute over which our breeding pair of ostriches had decamped. Nelson suspected human agency, I knew, so I spent some time hurling my weight against one of the still-standing stanchions to prove to him that nothing I did made traces anything like what we were seeing. It was life and it was what everyone had told him: ostriches are insanely powerful beasts.

His mood wasn’t helped by Raboupi appearing out of the boskage, taking an interest. Worse was that our two newest residents, the batlodi, the bad girls, were with Raboupi. These were sisters, late adolescent, related to the minister of Local Government and Lands, and they had been inside-parties in a longterm robbery of stock from a bottle store in Mmadinare owned by a Chinese. Against his better judgment and as an unavoidable favor to the minister, Nelson had agreed to accept them as parolees. This was to be a once-only exception. The minister’s idea had been that all the batlodi needed was a spell of healthy country living away from the discos and bright lights of periurban Gabs. Patently this was a joke. The girls were very hard. And they exploited a certain ambiguity in the feelings of some of our people toward crimes committed against Chinese or Indians, I should say larcenies to be more accurate. The Batswana hate crime, especially intragroup. They will drop everything to chase down a pickpocket and surround him, yelling and imprecating until the police arrive. And they are more than swift with cattle rustlers out in the sandveld. But a lot of the Chinese in particular are disliked as bosses and shopkeepers. The batlodi had a faint feel of celebrity about them. They had been caught through their own reckless boasting. They would be with us for only six months. They had immediately attached themselves to the Raboupis and our malcontent nurse and a few others distinguished by a critical attitude toward Tsau. The batlodi were highly sporadic about regular work. Hector and the batlodi melted away toward the tannery.

I think Nelson liked being convinced that with the ostrich escape, he was at worst a victim of avian force and cunning. I could be married to you, he said, then quickly went on to praise my good sense, ask what thoughts I was having about my thesis, if any, and generally imply I was impressive and could do more things in the world than I probably thought I could.

The Basarwa

Another reason for not worrying unduly about the escape of the ostriches was that more fresh and dried meat was coming into Tsau. This had nothing to do with the Enfields, yet, which were still on order. Sekopololo was bartering for meat and for honeycomb with the Basarwa, whose encampment on the sand river had gotten very permanent-looking and populous. In the past they had camped there intermittently, the usual pattern, leaving when the lice and fleas got too bad. No one had paid much attention to them, they were so evanescent. There were eight families in the camp. Our children were also dealing independently with the Basarwa: the Basarwa were superb at locating anthills, fresh ones, which our children were bringing back chopped up in their dung carts to feed our chickens, who were suddenly doing very well, better than ever.

Denoon began to wonder about the terms of the barter deals, their fairness or lack of it. Sekopololo was importing more salt than it ever had, and for the first time quantities of pipe tobacco. These were, of course, the key trade goods the Basarwa wanted. Unequal exchange, as a general thing, disgruntled Nelson. I asked him if he knew that there were Peace Corps volunteers who saved up their worn-out shirts and jeans and then took them on the train to Francistown and when it stopped at Shashe traded their rags, actual rags, for terrific woodcarvings produced by the Basarwa destitutes living in a little colony run by the Mennonites near the rail line. We may be convinced that this is objectively wrong, I told him, but unfortunately the evidence is that the Basarwa are delighted with the deals. His ideal of exchange was for it to take place only when all parties were in surplus, hopelessly enough. His inquiries into how barter was going were a little resented. He is pressurizing us, a couple of women in Sekopololo had said to me. I passed the word to him.

I wonder what the Basarwa thought of Nelson, because he began dropping in on their camp, but in rather a moonstruck or disembodied and shy way. Sometimes he would sit in the brush on the slope above the camp and seemingly study them. He couldn’t speak their language, and the fact is he made no attempt to learn any of it, beyond the basic greetings. The camp was doing decently. Because of the rains everyone credited me with inspiring, the sand river was a good source of water, yielding more than they were used to when they dug their seep wells. The Basarwa were another universe. They were somehow too much. They fascinated him. He contrasted the strain and devising and committee meetings that went into making Tsau run with the workable planlessness he saw in the Basarwa setup. What was his responsibility to the Basarwa, however that might be construed? He was confused. He knew Tsau had some responsibility, even though the fact that the camp was becoming more dependent on Tsau was nobody’s devising. I think a problem was that he had had eight years of Tsau with only the most glancing visitations by the Basarwa. If they’d attached themselves to Tsau during the beginnings, when he was fresh, it might have been easier for him. I think inwardly he was supplicating them to be gone. When we talked about them the discussion invariably led sideways into the most absolute questions, such as how you tell that one society is genuinely superior to another, granted both are equally uncruel. We were dealing with the Basarwa on terms Nelson thought were unfair, on our side, but putting that aside, what did we owe them, medically for example, and how helpful longterm was it going to be for them to make use of what we could offer? He was just at the wrong ebb for all this, I think.

Now when he went missing I had a new place to look for him, one that was closer to home than some of the others — the pyramidon, which is what he called the summit of the koppie, or his ledge, or the glassworks. It got surreal, in that I would go to look for him and find him brooding from the brush overlooking the camp, and I might sit for a while and watch him watching.

I suppose I should fault myself for keeping my distance on this issue for as long as I did. I liked to watch the Basarwa too. It was like observing fairies, they seemed so nice with each other, so tentative and patient. And of course why would I want to disturb any connection he felt with a specimen of a society so close to his ideal in the matter of not injuring the earth? When finally I felt he was too much in the grip of a romance about the Basarwa, I tried to tell him that in fact there were more offstage killings male on male and more wife beating than he might be aware of. But good luck: he knew this wasn’t my field, which I had to admit. He didn’t really want to hear it, and he had on his side the evidence of his senses, which was that life in the encampment was so pacific it was practically treacly.