By: Cynthia Dobbs I had placed my two years in Botswana resolutely behind me. Now ensconced in what I thought were to be the pristine hallways of the mind, I was "pursuing a Ph.D." as They say -- as if a degree were a car thief. I had, I thought, let go of a pocket of my life that now seemed anomalous and self-enclosed, like a chapter out of an entirely different novel, all its narrative threads snipped neatly. I began to feel as if that person living and working in Africa didn't share the same skin with me, as if she didn't in fact occupy any skin at all but was instead some disembodied eye, a collector of experiences that I had to remind myself were my own. It's odd, how other people's stories can seem so much closer to the bone than your own past. I hadn't thought much about Moyo or any of my other students in over a year. Then one night I began dreaming of Moyo. And even now, though the guilt and the dreams rarely visit, there's a way in which he still hasn't left me. Some idea of him hovers. The dreams have never been narratives, exactly; Moyo never does anything, and we never interact. His face, his wide, smooth forehead, and his eyes like flat brown plates just linger around the edges of dream-scenes -- like all dreams, both banal and bizarre? He's reading the newspaper at a caf* where I'm supposed to make caf* lattes but don't know how to work the espresso machine, which is ten feet tall and looks like an enormous switchboard… We pass each other in hallways that are at once my elementary school and my graduate school, with thirty-year-old graduate students cramming drafts of their dissertations into tiny, knee-high lockers… He stands at the edge of a field where my friend Diane strikes match after match over a mound of yanked-up daffodils, like a woman dropping flowers upon a grave… Only after these sideline appearances accumulated over a couple of months did I realize who the man on the edge of these dream-horizons was, is. My thoughts began to encircle him, as if he could tell me exactly what I'd lost. When I first met Moyo, I was intrigued by his impenetrability. He seemed so unflappable, so self-contained and serene, like a thick linen envelope that, if opened, would reveal a comforting emptiness, some pure and solid clarity. For months, I saw him as the Buddha of my fourth-form English class. There is a student in every class who performs much the same function for you, who acts as a touchstone. Sometimes she or he's the smartest one, the one you call on when all the other faces are blank and you can't think of a tenth way to reframe the question. But sometimes, like Moyo, the touchstone student is simply the one you think is always on your side. When I was a kid, we hated the touchstones. We called them brown-nosers, those fake, obsequious teacher's pets. And in Botswana, the endless politeness from students grated. I began to want them to rebel, to raise their hands politely one day and suddenly tell me to fuck off. Which is probably just to say, I missed America. But Moyo was different. He wasn't submissive or obedient or ingratiating; he was simply polite, apparently peaceful, and soothingly distant. I thought of our relationship as refreshingly professional, devoid of the usual familial undercurrents of the classroom. You couldn't miss the secondary school where I worked. In a sprawling village of mud huts with thatched roofs on the northern edge of the Kalahari, the "Western-style" government buildings stuck out. The tin roofs glinted in the sun like the bleached Coke cans scattering the sides of the roads, blinding you for a moment if you didn't know to peer through eyelashes. But what really slapped you in the face was the paint job on the low-slung buildings: excruciatingly bright pink, bubblegum pink, Pepto-Bismol pink. World Bank funded most of the construction, and the least expensive paint was this shocking pink. We all got used to it, just another juxtaposition in this village of donkeys and Diet coke. For months, I wasn't sure how old Moyo was. He was in the fourth form, the British/colonialist equivalent of eleventh grade, but that meant he could be anywhere from fifteen to thirty. Because all the students were required to wear uniforms, gold polyester with brown collars, stifling in the summer and too thin in the winter, their emotional ages seemed to shift towards a group average, each class with its own quirky group character. On good days, Moyo's class averaged about sixteen years old; on bad days, about four. Moyo's age, however, never changed in my mind. He remained always older and aloof, and yet, in his uniform, stuck for me in a sort of ageless, non-threatening boyhood. I knew he lived in the dorms with most of the other boys at the school, sleeping in a bunk bed, living out of a locker. Then, I never bothered to think about what living there meant for him. Most of the kids told me that sleeping in the dorms, in a bed that was all yours, was an improvement, the privacy of a lifetime, a step towards adulthood. Now I picture Moyo playing cards with the boys in the dorm, playing a game of adolescence that must have seemed unbearably ironic to him. Was it bitter for him, play-acting innocence? Or was it the relief of empty ritual after you've been emotionally gutted - the pleasant vacuity of dinner dishes rinsed clean under your hands after a day of gritty disappointment? I wonder now which seemed more unreal to Moyo: his mundane schoolboy present, or his past blown apart, its jagged edges too sharp and stiff to fold into a package of self. I got my first real sense of that past one Friday, near the end of my first year of teaching. A typical Friday, there: I knew my lover Joe would arrive sometime during the evening from Orapa, the mining town fifteen miles away where he worked as an accountant. We had been together only four months, and the fact that we could spend only three nights a week together had kept us in the fresh and dizzying honeymoon stage. I never knew what time he'd show up on Fridays, but I always knew he would. When I came back from my jog that night at seven, the sun just beginning to set, he wasn't there yet, as he usually was, sitting on the porch grinning, shaking his head in exaggerated amazement at this weird American who went running through donkeys and goats in the heat. Joe, that weird African with an exercise bike in his bedroom - a present from his ex-wife and my ammunition whenever he'd tease me about being hopelessly bourgeois. Pushing through the heat, I sprinted the last stretch into the school compound, feeling high from the run and the end of the week and actually, that day, more relieved than disappointed that Joe wasn't there yet. I wanted a leisurely cool bath and then a talk with Maren at the bar. Joe and I shared the usual things lovers share: stories of past (wrecked) relationships, stories of childhood, the initial lovely blindness to our own sentimentality. But mostly we shared a frightening desire to scrape our way into each other. Even after things began to crumble, after I could see we could do nothing but drift each alone, our bodies remained faithful to each other's. I look back, incredulous, on those few months when our bodies and our wishes fit, each to each. Now, the sheer improbability of it, not the loss of it, is what amazes me most - the way we were, for a while, carved into each other. I once read an account by one of the archaeologists who discovered Athens' Caryatid statues, whose gleaming white replica now stand outside the Parthenon. What the archaeologists found was not the elegant ivory of bone, however. The ancient carved ladies were painted in colors so bright we'd now call them neon, Technicolor. What a lovely brisk slap: to brush dirt of centuries aside to find surrealistically post-modern color! And then, in less than an hour, our luckiest and saddest of archaeologists watched, helplessly, as the color faded irreversibly in the acidic air of the twentieth century. Sometimes, I look back and see Joe and me, an archaeologist watching our love - a thing separate - slip away from us, its brightness too frail for what seemed at the time the corrosive atmosphere of external circumstance: the accident of birthplace, Botswana holding him and the U.S. pulling me back. During those last few months, as the year ended in summer, Joe and I would often sit together silently behind his house, drinking beer and watching the heat waves blur the kids |
playing soccer across the road - helplessly watching ourselves become a memory.
The main bar in the village, predictably dubbed the Oasis, was actually a general store with a generator for electricity, a large freezer full of beer, and tables and chairs under the jacaranda and acacia trees. The trees, or the shade they provided, were the bar's real draw in the daytime, the cold beer in the night. When Maren and I arrived, the bar was still fairly quiet. Our headmaster, Danny Tau, and some of the other teachers - Mbongwe, Ian, Fortune, Peter - were already there under the narrow porch. We waved but headed towards the jacaranda. Maren had told me she wanted to talk about one of her students, privately. She said I might know the girl, Gasego, because her brother was in one of my classes: Moyo. At that point, Moyo had already begun occupying a splintery place in my thoughts. For months, when I had needed uncomplicated pleasantness, integrity of purpose, I had only to greet Moyo. He answered the questions in class, handed in attendance, stood in line for bread and tea, with implacability. I could take him for granted. Then, a few days before Maren and I talked at the bar, as Moyo leaned forward to hand me the attendance sheet, I noticed a scar skirting the edge of his left eyebrow: a dash of exposure, a thin line of entry into his past. Curious, I asked his homeroom teacher Mbongwe what he knew about Moyo. All he knew was that he came from a refugee camp, one of the 500-plus Zimbabwean students the Botswana government had taken in since the civil war began. "Oh yes. Also," Mbongwe said, walking out of the staffroom, "He is Shona." It struck me that Tutume, the fifteen-year-old who sat quietly next to Moyo every day in class, would be, if they were 200 kilometers away, his enemy. I knew Tutume was from the Ndebele tribe, who had been fighting the Shona since Zimbabwe's independence from South Africa. I think about them now, two young men in gold shirts and brown pants, heads bowed side-by-side over their notebooks, writing in their meticulous handwriting the answers to the verb tense quiz I'd given them. "Complete the following sentence so that the verb in brackets is in the correct tense: 'By the time they arrived at the clinic, their grandfather [die].'" When Maren told me Gasego's story that night at the bar, I didn't at first think about Moyo. He remained at the edges, untouched. I was focused on Maren and her worry, the girl. And behind that, murky thoughts of Joe drifted, how I couldn't wait to see him that night and how I knew I'd have to make a decision soon about whether to stay in Africa. He wasn't going to leave - I knew that. "She's two months away from her diploma, but only six months away from delivery. She told me last week. Cried in my office." Maren told me. "Said she was glad she was taking home economics because at least now she knew how to let out the hem of her uniform." "Her hem, shrinking as fast as her possibilities, right?" I made a feeble attempt to joke myself away from her tunneling life. "Shit. Exactly. Well, unless I can help it. Do you think we can keep this from Tau? He'll kick her out in a second, and she's so close to finishing." I looked over at Tau, our headmaster, beer resting on his own swollen belly, smug grin settled on his face. "Yeah, if it weren't for those damn, clingy polyester uniforms. We could buy her a huge one, and get her fat, make her arms match her stomach." "The thing is, she has nowhere to go. She won't say who got her pregnant, and she's an orphan. Her parents were killed, I heard, hacked to death in the war." "Jesus. Well, we'll hide it as best we can. Tell her to lie low, and we'll see if we can get the other teachers sympathetic, so no one tells Tau. If he finds out, he'll expel her in a minute." I heard Tau laugh and remembered his leering "We thank the ladies for their contribution" every time I complained at staff meetings. "Yeah. He cannot find out. We'll keep her a good little girl for him, for her sake." Later that night, after somewhat drunken sex, Joe and I lay in bed and talked about Gasego. We joked about stomach-tumor rumors we could start, scientific theories about false pregnancies we could float. But just before sleep, the heavy words came back to me: orphaned, hacked ... But she has Moyo, I thought. And then, Who does he have? Who is he? I looked at Joe's damp, smooth face, quiet in sleep, and saw again Moyo's tiny scar, some miniature sign of his pain, of his parents' fate. I curled into Joe's body and slept. During the next couple of months, I watched Moyo even more closely. Maren and I had made the rounds of Gasego's teachers, all of whom were willing to keep quiet about her pregnancy. I watched Moyo and waited for signs of distress, at first believing I was expecting some manifestation of brotherly concern and later realizing I needed something from him, something else. When I held personal conferences with my students to discuss their final essays, I looked forward to Moyo's with a strange mix of concern, dread, and excitement. In a room that felt more sweltering than usual, we discussed organization of ideas and variety of sentence structure. He was writing about the pros and cons of a one-party political system. And he obviously didn't need much help. Then I asked him, "So, how are things going, in general? " I remember my voice as embarrassingly imploring, almost desperate, as if it were my knowledge of his loss rather than his own pain that I wanted so badly to share with him. He looked at me with impassive eyes. "Fine. Thank you." "No problems?" "No. Thank you. May I go, Mistress?" I laughed. "Of course, Moyo. Good luck with the essay." As I watched him walk away, his thin yellow shirt flush with sweat against his back, I fought an impulse to call out to him, to have him return. But I didn't know what it was I felt pressed to tell him. Then I realized, with a sudden sense of the absurdity of a child's attempt to mother an adult, that I wanted him to tell me, to tell me how you could negotiate the dropping away of the center of your life. I wanted to take something from him, a story I could enter and then pass through, a story I had no right to have. I know I still have no right to it. Still, I am always creating his story, repeatedly filling in the blanks with different details. As I lie in bed alone, my body curled into its vacant center, I try to remember something I never knew, something I did and didn't want to know. I complete and then complete again the terms of his loss, as if by filling in narrative details, I could close forever the emptiness inside me. I imagine my way in, breaking into a space where memory fails to take me. I see Moyo crouched at the edge of a cane field, yards from his house. His sister Gasego has kept running, deep into the cane, away from the men. He has to be close enough to watch, but he can't bring himself to go back in, to enter the scene of horror he just fled. He runs from his own death, but he can't force himself to run from his parents'. Screams. Flames. Men with machetes glinting red. I am with him there, shivering at the edge. I feel the thud, the crack, of the machete in his father's skull. My nightgown flames with his mother's, evaporating. She screams for her husband, her children, herself, for her life suddenly exploded in her face. Moyo waits in the cane, hearing the screams, held there by loyalty and fear. I see Moyo aiming his father's gun at a fleeing back, his father dead on the ground beside him. I see him wipe the blood from his bleeding brow, steady the gun, squint, and then ease the trigger back. I see him smile sweetly as the back bursts red and trips forward. I see Moyo's own broad back as he turns away from me, his secrets safe. |