him he must come out every day. His mind said, Why? Why bother? A shadow passed overhead, and Isaac looked into the sky. Thousands of quelea birds were migrating, in huge flocks. They landed here and there with their red bills, red feet, dun-colored bodies, black masks, and flew on, black against the sky, surging and turning like paper chains.
56
In the middle of the night, Alice woke to Lulu crying herself out of a bad dream. Alice picked her up and held her in her arms and sat on the bed next to Moses, who was curled into a small ball. Lulu’s body was warm from sleep, and her cheeks where she’d been crying, left a wetness at Alice’s breast. If this had been her own child, she would have asked what had frightened her. But all she could offer was her own warm body. “Ke batla Isaac,” Lulu said over and over. I want Isaac. Where is he? “O kae?”
Alice rocked her and crooned, “I know, I know. I’m sorry. He’s coming soon.” She had no words to tell the children why Isaac was close but they couldn’t see him. She’d asked Itumeleng to explain, but they still didn’t understand. Sitting on the edge of the bed with this sobbing child, she decided that she must ask their teacher to talk to them. Lulu was as sensitive as a seismograph to tremors. Life would not be easy for her. She couldn’t escape anything through oblivion, unlike Moses, whose life force could blast through rock. In time, Lulu’s breath evened out, and her body relaxed. Alice laid her gently down beside Moses and tucked the sheet around them both.
She was wide awake now. Someday she’d get to the Tsodilo Hills, where she and Ian had planned to go. If anyplace had been home for him, it was the hill where the First Spirit had left the imprint of his knees. Where was home for her? She didn’t know. And she realized in the asking that she wanted a home as much as she’d ever wanted anything. She had heard it said, We live by hope, but a reed never becomes a mosetlha tree by dreaming. You make what you want, not dream it. A home with Ian would have been a restless, nomadic place, like the tents the Bedouins carry on their backs. He’d said it to her more than once. “I’m no good for you, love.”
“Who are you to say that?” she’d shot back. He was a wild creature in the shape of a man. She’d loved this wildness in him. Somehow they would have made a life together.
Lulu and Moses were now the center of a small, uncertain thing. She guessed she could call it a home: a roof without walls, a hearth with two glowing coals. Not fragile exactly, but unsteady on its feet. She heard a clattering in the kitchen and got up. Moses was standing in a puddle of water in the middle of the floor in his T-shirt holding the aluminum kettle, dented where he’d dropped it.
“Ke tsoga makuku.” I wake up very early. “Tea?” he asked brightly, practicing his English.
“Ee, ke batla,” she said, laughing. “But the sun isn’t shining yet.”
“No problem. The sun she comes.”
57
All that day and into the night, the old gardener strained for breath. His extremities were cold to the touch. The light faded from the sky, and Isaac sat next to him on the bed. “I’m here, old man,” he whispered in Setswana.
“O mang?” the old man whispered. Who are you? His hands reached toward the ceiling, opening and shutting, their veins large and swollen. He muttered incomprehensible things. His breathing became noisy. Isaac turned the man’s head to one side to keep him from choking.
He remembered the day they’d met, the pride the old man took in the sunken garden. It was his garden, although that man with the red face who’d yelled at Isaac would have said he owned everything and the old man nothing. Soon this old man would be gone: bones and skin and all that was inside his head: the names of things, the woman he’d once loved, the secrets of his heart, the disappointments and bitterness, the sweetness of his garden.
He thought of his own father, alive or not alive, and his mother’s anger. She would believe she’d been betrayed to her dying day. When he was better, when they let him out of here, he would try to call her. It