He got off me like a shot then and slid over and sat up against the wall next to me, half on the bed.
You should be an assassin, I told him.
Even a low voice was too loud. He wanted us to whisper.
First there were more apologies. Secondly, was I all right? meaning all right after my expedition, which he couldn’t believe I had attempted myself. He was not going to ask me to say why I had come to Tsau or how I had found out where it was, but he wanted me to know — and here he became halting — that he was impressed, he was flattered, if that was the right word, and he was glad I was there. We were both uncomfortable during this stanza, but I was also triumphant. As I read it, I was being admitted into a game neither of us could bear to be explicit about, and I had been right that the game had begun at Tutwane’s. I was controlling joy.
There was a situation at Tsau I had to understand, was next. I no doubt knew that Tsau was a project for women. That is, he had started the project with women, destitute women from all over Botswana but mostly from the northwest, women cut off from their families for any one of a number of reasons and subsisting on one sack of mealie a month from the government. So they had been the ones gathered together to make Tsau. I am making this more compressed temporally than it was, because he was pausing throughout to get his breath and to listen to see if there was any sign that we might be being intruded on. But I am not misrepresenting what it was intellectually. What he conveyed in the dark in the time he had was a feat.
So these ablebodied destitute women had been gathered together to make Tsau. All the homesteads in Tsau were vested in women, meaning that the charter women owned the individual homesteads, and he had even worked it out with the government that in Tsau inheritance of the homestead would be restricted to female offspring and female collaterals or designees. Of course I would see men in Tsau, mostly relatives who had turned up miraculously after the fact, but they were a minority. But I should know all this. And there would be more men in the population down the road, of course. But the vesting of the homestead as an asset, and the entitlements that went with it, would always be in the female line. And of course the idea behind that was to demonstrate that at least here something could be done about the economic disenfranchisement of women that was taking place in the society at large as it modernized. Women were being impoverished wholesale because cattle herds, the main productive asset in Botswana, were being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, all of them male, something he knew I had seen for myself in Tswapong and Keteng.
I love a concise mind.
So he wanted to be sure I grasped that there was a certain sensitivity about the presence of mates, since most women in Tsau either lacked them and were unlikely to get them or were beyond them and had strong feelings about those women still unhappy about the problem. As a matter of fairness he had been living alone in Tsau. He was not going to be seen as inviting special company for himself in the form of women or whites of his particular background. It was imperative that there be no suggestion of a prior connection to him and imperative that it be believed that I had gotten to Tsau sheerly by accident. It was an important source of strength to him that tourists and evaluators had been kept out of the project, and I must not seem to be either one of those things. He disliked dissembling, he said, but a great deal was at stake.
He paused. I was thinking that of course the spiritus rector of a female community would need to be a sexual solitary, at least during the foundational period. But such periods needn’t last forever, it was my humble opinion. I wondered if this situation was the analog of western series on television where the female watchership shrank to nothing when the producers let the marshal get married.
He wouldn’t describe the situation re the shortage of men as a split, exactly. On the whole the younger women were the more critical ones, unsurprisingly but not uniformly, and the older women were solidly on his side. If I could convincingly appear to be a lost traveler everything could evolve. He had no choice but to imply he’d never known me.
The sense of assumed collaboration was thrilling to me. The whole unstated side of our exchange was delicious. I felt brilliant.
I think men hate to whisper, because I noticed he found it necessary every so often to let his natural deep man’s voice show itself for a moment or two before going back into hiding.
Be a lost traveler, he said. Do you have some story?
I told him. He thought ornithology was good and liked my lost donkey and lost scientific impedimenta flourishes. It worried him that I knew nothing — as I confessed — about birds. He would get a field guide to me, he said, posthaste.
Are we a conspiracy? I asked.
He circumvented with They don’t know it, but the reason people are so pro bird is because ninety-five percent of bird species are monogamous.
I’m not, I said. I can do this but I have to overcome a sort of mocking feeling I have about birdwatchers. I figure Let the birds watch me. Of course this is me speaking as a higher life form.
Are your hands all right now? he asked. He felt my forehead and said Good. So he had been looking in.
Jesus, what am I doing? he said, I think with genuine feeling and apropos of nothing, to which I said Same here, and we laughed.
This place is going to generate wealth, he said. And men will be welcome, but by then the women will be where they should. You’ll see. I think you deserve to be here.
This isn’t exactly it, but he finished with something like I’m delighted you’re here and now I have to crawl out of here on my belly like a reptile.
There was a brief, whispered exchange with someone, probably Mma Isang, who, I sensed correctly, was a confederate, outside the door.
I was already trying to recollect what little I knew about African birds and reflecting on how perverse it was for me to choose ornithology to misrepresent myself in. After all, I am the daughter of a mother whose humiliating favorite radio program was a thing called the Canary Chorus, wherein a Hammond organ droned for hours on end in a roomful of trilling canaries. She would recommend this program indiscriminately.
Mysteries Fall Away
In the morning I made a production of being concerned about my binoculars, digging fixedly through my goods until I came up with them — as any shipwrecked ornithologist would.
Mma Isang seemed to like me. It was mutual. She was in her fifties, built very blockily, with an unfortunate face. The root of her nose was sharply indented, her eyes were deep-sunk, and there were marked crowsfeet extending from her eyes around the sides of her face. Her face looked as though it had been crimped. I never learned if this was a congenital defect or just an unlucky but normal featural concatenation. There were residues of a Serowe accent in her Setswana, which I noted and which she acknowledged, impressed with me. All my clothes had been laundered.
I felt absurdly recovered but decided it would be prudent to conduct myself convalescently for the time being. I got dressed in my bush gear: longsleeved army shirt, jeans, boots. There was a mirror to use. I looked fairly banged up. I did a cursory toilette, which was all any toilette would be until I could get my hair clean. I borrowed a headscarf. At some point in the intervals in my sleepfest, I remembered vaguely I had been promised I could bathe.
We would be having breakfast with some women, Mma Isang said, surprising me by speaking in English. We would be speaking in English also when the delegation came. They would be bringing our food behind them, she said.