no food except grass and stolen mealie meal. Their stomachs heaved and sorrowed with emptiness. The bitter heart eats its owner, his mother said when she returned. He didn’t know whether she was telling him that her heart had been eaten, or that he must be careful not to let himself be eaten. After that, she sent her young children, all but the baby, to live with her mother in the place the whites called the homeland, which was nobody’s homeland, only a desolate place no one else wanted. His mother had to stay in Pretoria, where there was work for her. She’d told Isaac, as the second oldest, that he was not to cry for her, but sometimes when she was gone and the wind had blown across the empty ground and drowned the sounds of the night, he couldn’t help the feelings that rose in his throat and spilled out of his eyes.
He wanted to tell the woman in the cardboard house these things, but he couldn’t; his silence was the silence of an old lion that’s been left behind. And then he thought, no one has left you behind. You are the one who’s left everyone behind.
The woman returned, and he told her, “Ke batla tiro.” I must find work.
“Do you know English?”
“Enough.” He didn’t tell her he’d finished four years of university back home and started medical school. What was the point? He had no papers, no one would believe he had anything to offer but the strength of his back.
“Then you must go into the town and ask for gardening work at each house. Do you know how to say this in English?”
“I can say it.”
“But they won’t hire you,” she said. “You are too dirty. Take off your shirt and give it to me.” She went around the side of her house and poured water out of a five-gallon oil can into the coffee tin she’d used when she’d tried to wash her boy.
Isaac felt light-headed from the sweet tea and porridge. He couldn’t see properly. He went to push up his glasses, but he found now that they were lost, probably in the bottom of the compartment under the casket. A single crease of worry marked the skin between his eyes, as though a thumbnail had carved it. He ran his hands over what remained of his hair, which, in his doubt and fear about leaving, he’d shaved, as though the straight razor moving over his head had been a holiness, the marking of an end, a kind of benediction. He was a solidly built man, eyes a deep well of intelligence, eyebrows like a bush. His ears were at a slight angle from his head, as though curious. His bottom lip was full, his top lip not. In his face was a kindness mixed with a certain ferocity.
The woman slapped Isaac’s shirt against a rock, dipped it in the coffee can and slapped it again. She must have been pretty once. Her breasts were large and her bottom was firm. He thought her husband was a lucky man. She was a brightness in this place called Naledi.
He stood shakily and went around the back of the house to relieve himself. The white dog followed and stood by his side. High above his head, a black-shouldered kite circled. The bird did a great arc in the sky, turning its head with small jerks. Isaac peed into the hot dirt. His head felt wooly, his thoughts scraped down to bone.
When he returned, his shirt was draped over a post, and the woman had disappeared.
He went back and sat on the stool, and she crept up behind him and poured the shirt water over his head. He leapt up in anger, and then his anger trickled down his breast and onto his belly as laughter. The woman fetched more water and told him to wash. She gave him a stick to brush his teeth, and when he’d finished he smiled into her face, and she smiled too, and then she looked away and banged the coffee tin with the heel of her hand and yelled for her son. But the boy was gone, running wild over the goat paths with his friends.
“Leina la gago ke mang?” he asked her.
“Luscious Moatlhaping,” she said. “That is my name.” She didn’t ask his.
“When it dries,” she said, pointing her chin at his shirt, “you will go.” But he couldn’t think about that yet, could hardly keep his chin