for a white woman, but still, hope is hope. It was only when he stopped playing and opened his eyes that she saw he was blind.
Lying in bed that night, she thought again of Isaac. She didn’t believe the South Africans would have set him free when he crossed the border. She knew what they did to people in those prisons. Tortured, thrown from high windows. Suicide they called it. He was bright enough and educated enough that a couple of ruffians would be only too happy to humiliate him, beat him down, punish him to the very limits of what one man can do to another. She got out of bed and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.
Standing by the sink, she recalled a place she and her mother had once been in Hawaii, the only long trip the two of them had ever taken together. They’d been told about the ruins of a temple, located near the birthplace of King Kamehameha. The road there was heavily gullied and impassable, and they set out on foot as the wind roared down a twenty-five-mile-wide corridor between Maui and the Big Island. They had no idea what they were looking for, and then they saw it, Pu’ukoholā Heiau, on a bare hillside. A wild desolation. You could feel the power of the place even from a distance, fierce and implacable as a god.
They climbed the hill and entered a rock enclosure. Inside was a great stone, cupped to hold a human body, a channel cut at heart level for the letting of blood. Above, the sky was blue, without end.
She stood next to her mother, seeing the high priests waiting with their knives, a young man or woman being led there, bound at the wrists. Was it her imagination, or was the brutality of the world deepening, growing more rapacious, the means of torture more elaborate than those ancient times when they’d killed one man to save many? Isaac’s death, if they killed him, would go unnoticed and save no one.
37
Near the Kuke veterinary fence on the boundary of Ngamiland and the Ghanzi District, an old woman from the /Xai/Xai community was out alone digging hu’uru tubers from the ground. It was early morning, just after sunrise. Over her shoulder was slung a rough bag, made from the hide of a duiker. The bag held two small tubers and a hollow shell of an ostrich egg. In her left hand was a digging stick. Her feet were bare, her belly wrinkled with age. As she dug, her small breasts swung in rhythm with her stick. Her skin was deep bronze, her hair a rusty black, shot through with gray. If she’d been with her family at night sitting around a fire, she would have smiled easily. Now, her face was without expression except for a taut intensity around the mouth.
It was February, and no rain had fallen. Perhaps there would be none this year. Food would soon become scarce, and water more hidden. Next to a shrub she began to dig with her stick until she was crouched next to a hole as deep as the length of her arm. At the end of a reed, she wrapped grass and placed it upright in the hole. She pushed the sand back into the hole and pressed it down around the edges of the standing reed. She sat patiently. When she sucked the reed, a vacuum was created, and the water was forced up into her mouth. She swallowed a small amount and dribbled the rest into the ostrich egg shell. When there was no more water coming up the reed, she plugged the hole of the ostrich egg with grass and placed it back in her traveling sack. The wind was coming up. She moved to another shrub and repeated the process, although this time she took no water for herself.
Nearby, but out of sight and earshot, Ian worked. The day had not yet heated up. Wisps of mist rose from the earth. A dove called from a tree with its mournful, repetitive song. He’d walked about half a kilometer from his vehicle and was making his way back, cutting cable as he went. It went faster than it had at the beginning, but he was also seeing fewer live animals. As he wielded the huge wire cutter in the heat, he thought that rarely in his life had he been able to answer what exactly he was