Norman Rush - Whites

Before he could get better the nurse came, and then she was there all the time. She was gone, right now. They knew about the scabs on his back and were asking him about them. His throat was a good excuse not to answer things. He was keeping mum. He was worried about the knitting factory, because he was supposed to remind the women about something about business taxes. It was all right, because it was written down somewhere at work. He felt his hipbones by accident. They were like knives.

He was aware of arguments going on, but not really arguments. One thing he could tell was that Lo had been crying. It was after the nurse found his neomycin. There was telephoning to Pretoria. Now the nurse was giving him injections. Lo should be strong.

Ione woke him up, bringing him something, money, talking too fast. She was talking so fast that powder was falling out of the lines in her throat. He had a compress on his forehead. She put the money in his nightstand drawer, and she was whispering. She felt it was her fault about the sangoma , so that was the why and wherefore of the money. She said she had to talk fast because she had used a trick on Lois to keep her out, so she could apologize — that was why she had to talk fast. Some of it he understood. The sangoma was a fake, just an actor jumping ship from a troupe from South Africa putting on plays in churches in Botswana — morality plays. He was an illegal person. She had been duped. She had gotten suspicious when he was speaking English and wouldn’t use Setswana. Later on, she had realized he had the same voice as the go-between on the telephone, when she was searching for someone. And also, she found out afterward that he had taken the whole thing out of a book — it was Shona and not Tswana. She wondered if he had felt he had to do the incisions partly because he assumed she knew more about the ritual than she had. She was saying how sorry she was. And then when Lo came, she changed the subject. He felt sorry for Ione. He kept his hands under the covers. He was better, he told her. He was understanding more. She told him he looked like a carving.

Now he could get up all right. The world bounced when he walked, but he could walk. It was going away with the injections. People were watching wherever he went. Lo was sleeping on her exercise mat at the foot of the bed. He almost walked on her.

• • •

He woke up with a mystery to solve. It had to do with the night before. The dogs had been active, and he remembered that clearly. But somehow he had slept hard at intervals while — he was sure — they were doing their worst. The answer wasn’t sheer fatigue, because he was better. His tremor was fading. His appetite was back. Today he was going to read at least two back issues of Finance and Development , cover to cover.

Something told him the nurse was in the wings. He turned onto his side. He would pretend to be asleep, in the hope that she might look in and go away. Lo wouldn’t let the nurse wake him up. He closed his eyes.

Bacon was what he wanted, but American bacon. That was one thing to be said about going back. Because it was clear they were going to have to go back. He had to stop fighting it. It was important not to panic over it. At least in America they put the lettuce inside the sandwich, not strewn in shreds all over the outside. Money was going to be the problem. He was afraid. People would tell him to go into business, leave the agency. He was an expert on business. But the idea repelled him. Why was everything in the world for sale, exactly? In fact, he was with the government because selling things seemed repellent to him. The government gave things away.

But nothing could be done. He was leaving Africa to her dogs. Lo would have to forgive him. Lo had worked before. She had been a cashier. She could learn bookkeeping — he would teach her. He had never taken one thing from Africa. This was too much self-pity. He had never touched an African woman, never, even when he could have. And when Elaine wanted to hide jadeite and tiger-eye in their household effects to smuggle back into the United States, he had drawn the line. He was through here. He was being destroyed.

Somebody was coming.

The nurse shook his shoulder. He rolled onto his back. Something was wrong.

“I’ve been talking to you,” she said, but not impatiently. She was being kind. She had an instrument in her hand. Lo was with her.

Making a show of fatigue, he turned back onto his side.

He was beginning to understand something. He lifted and lowered his head slightly, blotting out her voice when he set his head down. He sat up violently, full of hope.

Lo was saying that the nurse had something to tell him. He knew what it was . The nurse said he had been septicemic. He had self-medicated and he shouldn’t have. He had used something that was ototoxic and had made himself deaf in one ear, and she was sorry. Lo took his hand. She was weeping. The nurse was snapping her fingers to either side of his head, while he smiled. They could stay.

It seemed to Frank that he was adapting surprisingly nicely to life without a wife around the house. He wondered what it meant. By now, Ione was in Genoa or Venice or some other watering place in Italy. All her stops involved lakes or the beach. It was all there in the itinerary on the wall next to the phone. He could read it from where he was sitting and drinking, if he felt like it. He thought, Ione likes it overseas and she likes being here in Botswana, but the drought is wearing her down. The government was talking about cutting the water off from eight till dawn. It was going to be inconvenient for compulsive hand-washers, which he no longer was, but which a lot of other dental and medical people were. Ione felt parched, she said. So it was goodbye for three weeks. He toasted her again. There was a poet, an Italian, who had had Dante’s works printed on rubber so he could read them sitting naked in a fountain with the water running over him: that was the image of her vacation she’d said she wanted Frank to have. So it was goodbye, because he had the dental-care design team due in from the AID office in Nairobi to praise his plans for Botswana’s dental future, or not. There it was again, the small sound in the night he was trying to ignore. It was probably animal or vegetable. He was going to keep on ignoring it.

He’d be alone for another ten days. He was used to separations, but normally he would be the one traveling, not the one hanging around at home — which was different. Earlier in their marriage, and only for a couple of years, they had taken separate vacations. They had given it up after deciding they preferred to vacation together, all things considered. They kept each other amused. She was good at it. She was superb at it. He was missing her, especially on the sex end. He was enjoying being alone, otherwise. He was really alone, because the maid was away for a couple of days. Dimakatso’s family was rife with deaths and emergencies. Women probably disliked being alone in houses more than men did because of routine small nonspecific sounds that got them keyed up. Right now he could easily convince himself that someone was horsing around outside, scratching the flyscreens. Ione kept him busy, sexually. She was six years older than he was, but no one would guess it. She had kept her figure to a T. She was sinewy, was the word. Ione had a dirty mind. In twenty years he’d never really strayed. She was a Pandora’s box of different tricks and variations. Probably that was why he’d been so faithful. She was always coming up with something new. How could he feel deprived? Of course, the scene in Africa was nothing like Bergen County when it came to available women. Young things were leaving the villages and coming into the towns and making themselves available at the hotel bars for next to nothing, for packs of Peter Stuyvesant. It was pathetic. They wanted to get in with expatriates. They wanted to go to expatriate parties so they could latch on to someone who would buy trinkets for them or, if they were lucky, take them away to foggy Holland forever to get neuralgia. They wanted bed and breakfast for however long they could get it. The drought was making it worse, squeezing more and more people out of the villages all the time.