White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,33

lunch and led her to the bedroom. An hour later, he was on his way back to work.

He’d taken a job as an underling in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning and had already been promoted twice. His friends were mostly economists, and their principal topic of conversation, apart from where to get good marijuana, was development. She didn’t know what they were all talking about. The word was one she’d heard before only in relation to breasts. Except for Lawrence, she was offended by these economists who talked as though Botswana had been a great emptiness before they’d arrived.

During the days he was at work, she toiled away at her thesis. It was winter in the southern hemisphere, with rainless warm days and cool nights. In the evenings, she and Lawrence read around a small electric fire. She looked up from her book at the two glowing rods and there he was. After the sun went down, the stillness in him was different from his daytime self. Occasionally they stepped outside to the little closed-in area by the clothesline and looked at the Southern Cross and he put his arm around her waist and drew her close. She didn’t ask what she was doing there, or what she was doing with him. His body was sturdy, like an answer. She looked into eyes that mirrored that wild, parched veldt and saw infinite space stretching before them that she mistook for their life together.

Lawrence and she shared a single bed, which encouraged feats of athleticism; they each slept half on and half off the mattress, like cheetahs. They woke in the cool of the night and made love, sometimes three or four times. They were young, and it cost them nothing. She remembered the dark, rushing desire in her ears, the furious fumbling out of sheets into each other’s arms.

Some days, Alice tried to speak with Dikeledi, but they knew only a few words of the other’s language. She felt awkward being waited upon and found herself smiling too much, dropping things, over-thanking. Dikeledi was short of stature and tireless; her movements were like humming—unconscious, tuneful, at peace. Her skin was dark, coffee-colored, and her eyes forceful. Her bottom lip was full and her mouth good-humored. She lived behind the flat, in the small tin-roofed servants’ quarters, and on Sundays, she put on a red polka dot dress and a white hat shaped like a pancake and walked to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the old part of Gaborone.

A few times, Alice went across the road to escape the flat, but what was out there frightened her—the blind blue sky and unrelenting sun. Thorns, tinier than the smallest hooked claws of a cat, waited under dusty leaves. They caught in her hair and plucked at her sleeves like beggars.

By the end of the summer, Lawrence and she were engaged. What did she know? Nothing. Yogi Berra once said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

13

After the water explosion, Isaac ran into the bush, afraid that the police would find him and deport him. Toward nightfall, he crept out and walked back to Amen’s house. He knew the gardening job was finished. One of the first things he’d been told was, “My husband does not like water to be wasted.” It was a misfortune that her husband should have come home and seen the water shooting into the sky. And there she was, shouting at her husband and his friend when the person she should have been shouting at was himself.

He did not respect people who ran away, and now he’d done it twice—once from his country, and once from his job. Fleeing was like lying: you do it once, and you’ll do it again. But, he told himself, I will not do it again.

Every day now, Amen was saying, “You must go for training in Angola. You are doing nothing now. Think of the country where you were born. Your country is like your mother. You would not turn your back on your mother.”

He needed to find somewhere else to live, away from Amen’s badgering, but he had nowhere to go. He did not want to train with the MK, of that he was sure. And he would not turn his back on his own mother who’d given him life and breath and suckled him and taught him what was right and wrong. He had disappointed her, he could not embrace her, maybe not for