Denoon seemed satisfied not to answer each thing: these were patently such mock objections, I suppose he felt, that he could let the derision most of the complaints provoked answer for him. In fact he seemed almost beatific, probably because everything seemed so civic to him. But I knew better. I decided to creep near my enemies, the Raboupis. Why not? Dorcas could slide around anywhere she pleased.
I got close enough to hear an exchange between them, Hector hissing that someone must say about the streets made too small for cars to ever go, and with steps up to interrupt, to which Dorcas made a motion that said No. I got closer still. Hector said Say about the mokete. Mokete means big party. Again Dorcas silenced him. He was working to keep himself in hand. Mokete rang a bell with me. People had been talking about wanting to have a big celebration for Tsau. After all, eight years had passed since the founding. Denoon was in favor in principle but he was always arguing postponement until the right time, when Tsau would be ineffably more complete, better. People had deferred to his feelings, but less readily, lately, it seemed to me.
I wanted there to be more support for my beamish man. What was going on was caviling. Women were doing it, by and large. Why weren’t the loyalists louder in defense? What was this place, I was thinking, if people were unable to see Nelson for what he was, someone pure?
Thank god, I thought, when two children spoke up to defend Nelson — King James and a younger boy, whose name I’ve lost. I was remiss about recording the names of the children thinking that because proportionately there were so few of them and because they were all so vivid to me at the time, I would always remember them. I remember King James said that because of Rra Puleng, Tsau was the village in Botswana with the most less of snakes. This was in English. We were speaking mostly Setswana but jumping back and forth between it and English hors protocol now. King James’s heart was in the right place, but this tribute was received mixedly, since it may have been Denoon’s idea to organize the snake women, but it was the women who caught the snakes. Then again it may not have been Denoon’s idea at all. I realized I had just been making that assumption.
Hector tried to start a wavelet of sneering at this, but again Dorcas stopped him, to his evident unhappiness. Children are so popular in Tsau that treating them with whatever is the equivalent for children of uxoriousness for wives was the rule. Hector’s desire to stimulate a contagion of complaints was being thwarted. I had the distinct feeling that the crest of whatever he might have expected had passed.
We were almost in the clear. The dais was proceeding with the next act of the program. This was a good choice, I thought, because it was boring: we were having something very much like a book report on the monastery period in the Middle Ages, mostly in England. The point was being made, not subtly, that the monasteries were good examples of church edifices being permitted for one purpose and then accruing power and becoming quite something else. Mma Sithebe was reading this report from sheets of paper, and she was a perfect choice for the job, with her strong, clear delivery. Dineo ran this presentation well, with some interpolations and questions of her own. We were in Setswana. One reason this exercise was calming was because it was history and not something anyone could argue with. Also lists are calming, and we were presented with long lists of taxes and penalties imposed by the monasteries on their serf populations. A few injustices were particular hits: the heriot was one, in which the monastery gets the second-best animal owned by a dead serf, after the lord of the manor takes the best beast. An intervention established that, yes, even if a serf left only two beasts, the church would still take the second, plunging families back into destitution. This was perfect information, considering how the Tswana feel about their cattle. They hissed the merchet, which was the tax you had to pay if you married someone not chosen for you by the priest. I knew it was the Catholic Church in particular that Denoon wanted never to stain the premises of Tsau, if he had anything to say about it. The Church was his favorite infernal device, and he hated everything about it, with particular emphasis on Catholic population policy in the context of African poverty. He claimed to know for a fact that the archdiocese was already looking for ways to sidle in.
Also calming was the malty odor of bogobe arriving in a tub from the kitchen. Its place in the program had been moved up by an aside from Dineo. For the Tswana, bogobe is the real right food. I even wondered if the bream snack had been a feint, giving people a food item they knew they were supposed to like but weren’t actually enamored of and which, if it did anything, would only whet the social appetite for something as counterexotic as bogobe.
Mma Sithebe kept on with it. Probably owing to the overlap in my painkillers, to which I’m abnormally sensitive, I began to feel rather exquisite. My ears were ringing. Usury came up, and how the priests preached against it and practiced it at the same time. There was something about only priests and lords being allowed to keep rabbits, the rabbits having the run of the fields and gardens of the serfs, snaring being forbidden. Somewhere in this bricolage was a reminder that because women were barred from choir service in those days, the idea of procuring sopranos in perpetuity by castrating boys and then training and keeping them had been adopted by the Church and had spread from there throughout the Holy Roman Empire, even as far as the people putting on operas. The event was seeming brilliant to me, Dineo brilliant, Nelson brilliant, with his wonderful patience. This was not a thing to be ashamed to be auxiliary to. Have faith in the mind that thought of this, was the dazed sort of injunction I was giving myself in my elevated state.
We broke for porridge. Since it was getting dark, hurricane lamps were lit and placed here and there throughout the crowd, giving a sort of family campfire ambience to the event as we reassembled for what ought to have been an amiable conclusion to things. I was mellow. Appreciate the absence of pain, I was telling myself. I reminded myself how struck I’d been when Martin Wade said that once you’d been in prison you never forgot it and that the feeling of day-to-day life, however hard, once you were not under restraint, was always sweet. That was the kind of thing that should be kept in mind. Another hint that I was overmedicated was that I had no appetite whatever, even though I’d eaten very little all day.
Denoon was the chair as we resumed. There had been a reshuffling among the opposition. Dorcas and the batlodi and their other cadre women were settled in a ring around Hector and his male cadres, four or five of them. They had moved up en bloc and were only eight or so feet from the dais mat. I was certain this meant something disagreeable, some new thrust in embryo.
The last subject was apparently to be the afterlife. Three or four questions had been sent up from the crowd. I remember thinking the questions were good, even the ones defending the afterlife, and that Denoon had his work cut out for him.
He began with a virtuoso overview of the paradoxes involved in fitting the main hells and paradises and limbos of the leading religions into any single continuum. This was good for closure because it allowed him to be both encyclopedic and funny. En passant he displayed facts such as that in the Muslim paradise the beautiful houris who wait on the heroic dead pogromists are specially created beings who have no genitalia. There was always something fresh. I knew that there was a Jewish hell but not that it’s actually physically next door to paradise and that the saved can look forward to peering over the wall to watch the damned in their sufferings, if they like. Tackling the afterlife was clever also because by not attacking a particular religion but instead juxtaposing the incompatibilities in all the different lives to come, all religions were made to appear childish and wishful.