We smiled but refused her offer. She frowned but did not seem angry. Maybe she thought it was because she was white. If so, she was wrong; accept gifts, and we might forget the ones Kalahari gives us. “Well, at least go for a ride in the trucks,” she said, beaming. Tuka laughed and, taking Kuara by the hand, scrambled for the two Land Rovers. I shook my head. “You really should go,” Doctor Morse said. “It’ll be good for you.”

  “That is something for men to do,” I told her. “Women do not understand such things.”

  “All they’re going to do is ride in the back!”

  “Trucks. Hunting. Fire. Those are men’s things,” I said.

  Only one of the trucks came back. Everyone but Tuka, Kuara, and some of the Bantu returned. “The truck’s stuck in the sand; the Whites decided to wait until dawn to pull it out,” Gai said. “Tuka said he’d sleep beside it. You know how he is about trucks!” Everyone laughed. Except me. An empty space throbbed in my heart; that I wanted him home angered me.

  Then rain came. It was ga go—male rain. It poured down strong and sudden, not even and gentle, the female rain that fills the land with water. Rain, during ga! Everyone shouted and danced for joy. Even the Whites danced. A miracle! people said. I thought about the honey badger caught during kuma, and was afraid. I felt alone. In spite of my fear, perhaps because of it, I did a foolish thing. I slept away from the others.

  In the night, the quiet again touched me. Num uncurled in my belly. I did not beckon it forth. I swear I didn’t. I wasn’t even thinking about it. As I slept, I felt my body clench tight. In my dreams I could hear my breathing—shallow and rapid. Fear seized me and shook me like the twig of a ni-ni bush. I sank into the earth. Tuka and Kuara were standing slump-shouldered at the water hole where we had danced. Kuara was wearing the head of a wildebeest; the eyes had been carved out and replaced with smoldering coals. “Run away, Mother.” he kept saying.

  I awoke to shadows. A fleeting darkness came upon me before I could move. I glimpsed Gai grinning beneath the moon. Then a hand was clapped over my mouth.

  Doctor Stefanko returns after I’ve finished the hut. She and Gai bring warthog and kudu hides, porcupine quills, tortoise shells, ostrich eggs, a sharpening stone, an awl, two assagai blades, pots of Bantu clay. Many things. Gai grins as he sets them down. Doctor Stefanko watches him. “Back on Earth, he might not have remained a bachelor if your people hadn’t kept thinking of him as one,” she tells me as he walks away. Then she also leaves.

  Later, she brings Kuara.

  He comes sprinting, gangly, the grass nearly to his chin. “Mama,” he shouts, “Mama, Mama,” and I take him in my arms, whirling and laughing. I put my hands upon his cheeks; his arms are around my waist. Real. Oh, yes, so very real, my Kuara! Tears roll down my face. He looks hollow-eyed, and his hair has been shaved. But I do not let concern stop my heart. I weep from joy, not pain.

  Doctor Stefanko again reminds me he’s here on a trial basis only. Then she leaves, and Kuara and I talk. He babbles about a strange sleep, and Doctor Stefanko, and Gai, as I show him the camp. We play with the knobs Doctor Stefanko showed me; one of them makes a line of small windows blink on in the slight angle between wall-sky and ceiling-sky. The windows look like square beads. There, faces pause and peer. Children. Old men. Women with smiles like springhares. People of many races. I tell him not to smile or acknowledge their presence. Not even that of the children. Especially not the children. The faces are surely ghosts, I warn. Ghosts dreaming of becoming Gwi.

  We listen to the voice Doctor Stefanko calls the monitor. It is singsong, lulling. A woman’s voice, I think. “U and Kuara, the latest additions to Carnival, members of the last Gwi tribal group, will soon become accustomed to our excellent accommodations,” the voice says. The voice floats with us as we go to gather roots and wood.

  A leguaan pokes its head from the rocky kranze, listening. Silently I put down my wood. Then my hand moves slowly. So slowly it is almost not movement. I grab. Caught! Kuara shrieks and claps his hands. “Notice the scarification across the cheeks and upper legs,” the voice is saying. “The same is true of the buttocks, though like any self-respecting Gwi, U will not remove her kaross in the presence of others except during the Eland Dance.” I carry the leguaan wiggling to the hut. “Were she to disrobe, you would notice tremendous fatty deposits in the buttocks, a phenomenon known as steat-opygia. Unique to Bushmen (or ‘Bushworn en,’ we should say), this anatomical feature aids in food storage. It was once believed that…”

  After breaking the leguaan’s neck, I take off the kaross of genuine gemsbok and, using gui fiber, tie it in front of my hut. It makes a wonderful door. I have never had a door. Tuka and I slept outside, using the tshushi for storage. Kuara will have a door. A door between him and the watchers.

  He will have fire. Fire for warmth and food and U to sing beside. I gather kane and ore sticks and carve male and female, then use galli grass for tinder. Like Tuka did. “The Gwi are marked by a low, flattened skull, tiny mastoid processes, peppercorn hair, a nonprognathous face…“ I twirl the sticks between my palms. It seems to take forever. My arms grow sore. I am ready to give up when smoke suddenly curls. Gibbering, Kuara leaps about the camp. I gaze at the fire and grin with delight. But it is frightened delight. I will make warmth fires and food fires, I decide as I blow the smoke into flame. Not ritual fires. Not without Tuka.

  I roast the leguaan with eru berries and tsha-cucumber, which seems plentiful. But I am not Tuka, quick with fire and laughter; the fire-making has taken too long. Halfway through the cooking, Kuara seizes the lizard and, bouncing it in his hands as though it were hot dough, tears it apart. “Kuara!” I blurt in pretended anger. He giggles as, the intestines dangling, he holds up the lizard to eat. I smile sadly. Kuara’s laughing eyes and ostrich legs… so much like Tuka!

  “The Gwi sing no praises of battles or warriors,” the voice sing-says. I help Kuara finish the leguaan. “They have no history of warfare; ironically, it was last century’s South African War, in which the Gwi did not take part, that assured their extinction. Petty arguments are common (even a nonviolent society cannot keep husbands and wives from scrapping), but fighting is considered dishonorable. To fight is to have failed to…” When I gaze up, my mouth full of lizard, there are no faces in the windows.

  ‘ At last, dusk dapples the grass. Kuara finds a guinea-fowl feather and a reed; leaning against my legs, he busies himself making a zani. The temperature begins to drop. I decide the door would fit better around my shoulders than across the tshushi.

  A figure strides out of the setting sun. I shield my eyes with my arm. Doctor Stefanko. She smiles and nods at Kuara, now tying a nut onto his toy for a weight, and sits on a log. Her smile remains, though it is drained of joy. She looks at me seriously.

  “I do hope Kuara’s presence will dissuade you from any more displays such as you exhibited this afternoon,” she tells me. “Surely you realize that if… well, if problems arise, we may have to take the boy back to the prep rooms until… until you become more accustomed to your surroundings.” She taps her forefinger against her palm. “This impetuousness of yours has got to cease.” Another tap. “And cease now.”

  Head cocked, I gaze at her, not understanding.

  “Taking off your kaross simply because the monitor said you do not.” She nods knowingly. “Oh, yes, we’re aware when you’re listening. And that frightful display with the lizard!” She makes a face and appears to shudder. “Then there’s the matter with the fire.” She points toward the embers. “You’re supposed to be living here like you did back on Earth. At least during the day. Men always started the fires.”

  “Men were always present.” I shrug.

  “Yes. Well, arrangements are being made. For the time being, stick to foods you don’t need to cook. And use the heating system.” She goes to the rock and, on hands and knees, turns one of the knobs. A humming sounds. Smiling and rubbing her hands over the fire, she reseats herself on the log, pulls a photograph from her hip pocket, and hands it to me. I turn the picture right side up. Doctor Morse is standing with her arm across Gai’s shoulders. His left arm is around her waist. The Land Rovers are in the background.

  “Impetuous,” Doctor Stefanko says, leaning over and clicking her fingernail against the photograph. “That’s exactly what Doctor Morse wrote about you in her notebooks. She considered it a virtue.” Again she lifts her brow. “We do not.” Then she adds proudly, “She was my grandmother, you know. As you can imagine, I have more than simply a professional interest in our Southwest African section here at Carnival.”

  I start to hand back the photograph. She raises her hand, halting me. “Keep it,” she says. “Think of it as a wedding present. The first of many.”

  That night, wrapped in the kaross, Kuara and I sleep in each other’s arms, in the tshushi. He is still clutching the zani, though he has not once thrown it into the air to watch it spin down. Perhaps he will tomorrow. Tomorrow. An ugly word. I lie staring at the dark ground, sand clenched in my fists. I wonder if, somehow using devices to see in the dark, the ghosts in the sky-windows are watching me sleep. I wonder if they will watch the night Gai climbs upon my back and grunts throughout the marrying thing.

  Sleep comes. A tortured sleep. I can feel myself hugging Kuara. He squirms against the embrace but does not awaken. In my dreams I slide out of myself and, stirring up the fire, dance the Eland Dance. My body is slick with eland fat. My eyes stare rigidly into the darkness and my head is held high and stiff. Chanting, I lift and put down my feet, moving around and around the fire. Other women clap and sing the kia-healing songs. Men play the gwashi and musical bows. The music lifts and lilts and throbs. Rhythm thrums within me. Each muscle knows the song. Tears squeeze from my eyes. Pain leadens my legs. And still I dance.

  Then, at last, num rises. It uncurls in my belly and breathes fire-breath up my spine. I fight the fear. I dance against the dread. I tremble with fire. My eyes slit with agony. I do not watch the women clapping and singing. My breaths come in shallow, heated gasps. My breasts bounce. I dance. Num continues to rise. It tingles against the base of my brain. It fills my head. My entire body is alive, burning. Thorns are sticking everywhere in my flesh. My breasts are fiery coals. I can feel ghosts, hot ghosts, ghosts of the past, crowding into my skull. I stagger for the hut; Kuara and U, my old self, await me. I slide into her flesh like someone slipping beneath the cool, mudslicked waters of a year-round pan. I slide in among her fear and sorrow and the anguished joy of Kuara beside her.

  She stirs. A movement of a sleeping head. A small groan; denial. I slide in further. I become her once again. My head is aflame with num and ghosts. “U,” I whisper. “I bring the ghosts of all your former selves, and of your people.” Again she groans, though weaker; the pleasure-moan of a woman making love. Her body stretches, stiffens. Her nails rake Kuara’s back. She accepts me, then; accepts her self. I fill her flesh.

  And bring the quiet, for the third time in her life. Down and down into the sand she seeps, like ga go rain soaking into parched earth, leaving nothing of her self behind, her hands around Kuara’s wrists as she pulls him after her, the zani’s guinea-fowl feather whipping behind him as if in a wind. She passes through sand, Carnival’s concrete base, moon-rock, moving ever downward, badger-burrowing, She breaks through into a darkness streaked with silver light; into the core of the moon, where live the ancestral dead, the ghosts of kia. She tumbles downward, crying her dismay and joy, her kaross fluttering. In the center of the hollow, where water shines like cold silver, awaits Tuka, arms outstretched. He is laughing—a shrill, forced cackle. Such is the only laughter a ghost can know whose sleep has been disturbed. They will dance this night, the three of them: U, Tuka, Kuara.

  Then Tuka will teach her the secret of oa, the poison squeezed from the female larvae of the dung beetle. Poison for arrows he will teach her to make. Poison for which Bushmen know no antidote.

  She will hunt when she returns to Gai and to Doctor Stefanko.

  She will not hunt animals.

  ABSENT THEE FELICITY AWHILE

  Somtow Sudiarifkul

  You remember silence, don't you?

  There were many silences once: silence for a great speech, silence before an outburst of thunderous applause, silence after laughter. Silence is gone forever, now. When you listen to the places where the silence used to be, you hear the soft insidious buzzing, like a swarm of distant flies, that proclaims the end of man's solitude....

  For me, it happened like this: It was opening night, and Hamlet was just dying, and I was watching from the wings, being already dead, of course, as Guildenstern. I wanted to stay for curtain call anyway, even though I knew the audience wouldn't notice. It hadn't been too long since my first job, and I was new in New York. But here everything revolved around Sir Francis FitzHenry, brought over from England at ridiculous expense with his new title clinging to him like wrapping paper.

  Everything else was as low-budget as possible, including me. They did a stark, empty staging, ostensibly as a sop to modernism, but really because the backers were penniless after paying FitzHenry's advance, and so Sir Francis was laid out on a barren proscenium with nothing but an old leather armchair for Claudius's throne and a garish green spot on him. Not that there was any of that Joseph Papp4ype avant-garde rubbish. Everything was straight. Me, I didn't know what people saw in Sir Francis FitzHenry till I saw him live—I'd only seen him in that ridiculous Fellini remake of Ben Hur—but he was dynamite, just the right thing for the old Jewish ladies.

  There he was, then, making his final scene so heartrending I could have drowned in an ocean of molasses; arranging himself into elaborate poses that could have been plucked from the Acropolis; and uttering each iambic pentameter as though he were the New York Philharmonic and the Mor-'• mon Tabernacle Choir all rolled into one. And they were lapping it up, what with the swing away from the really modern interpretations. He was a triumph of the old school, there on that stage turning the other actors into ornamental papier-mache all around him. He had just gotten, you know, to that line: Absent thee from felicity awhile ... To tell my story.

  and was just about to fall, with consummate grace, into Horatio's arms. You could feel the collective catch of breath, the palpable silence, and I was thinking, What could ever top that, my God? . . . and I had that good feeling you get when you know you're going to be drawing your paycheck for at least another year or so. And maybe Gail would come back, even. Then—

  Buzzj buzz, buzz, buzz. "What's wrong?" I turned to the little stage manager, who was wildly pushing buttons. The buzzing came, louder and louder. You couldn't hear a word Horatio was saying. The buzzing kept coming, from every direction now, hurting my ears. Sir Francis sat up in mid-tumble and glared balefully at the wings, then the first scream could be heard above the racket, and I finally had the nerve to poke my head out and saw the tumult in the audience. . . .

  "For Chrissakes, why doesn't someone turn on the house lights?" Claudius had risen from where he was sprawled dead and was stomping around the stage. The buzzing became more and more intense, and now there were scattered shrieks of terror and the thunder of an incipient stampede mixed into the buzzing, and I cursed loudly about the one dim spotlight. The screaming came continuously. People were trooping all over the stage and were tripping on swords and shields, a lady-in-waiting hurtled into me and squished makeup onto my cloak, corpses were groping around in the dark, and finally I found the right switch where the stage manager had run away and all the lights came on and the leather armchair went whizzing into the flies.

  I caught one word amid all this commotion—

  Aliens.

  A few minutes later everybody knew everything. Messages were being piped into our minds somehow. At first they just said don't panic, don't panic and were hypnotically soothing, but then it all became more bewildering as the enormity of it all sank In. I noticed that the audience were sitting down again, and the buzzing had died down to an insistent whisper. Everything was returning to a surface normal, but stiff, somehow; artificial. They were all sitting, a row of glassy-eyed mannequins in expensive clothes, under the glare of the house lights, and we knew we were all hearing the same thing in ouf minds.

  They were bringing us the gift of immortality, they said. They were some kind of galactic federation. No, we wouldn't really be able to understand what they were, but they would not harm us. In return for their gift, they were exacting one small favor from us. They would try to explain it in our terms. Apparently something like a sort of hyperspatial junior high school was doing a project on uncivilized planets, something like "one day in the life of a barbarian world." The solar system was now in some kind of time loop, and would we be kind enough to repeat the same day over and over again for a while, with two hours off from 6 to 8 every morning, while their kids came over and studied everything in detail. We were very lucky, they added; it was an excellent deal. No, there wasn't anything we could do about it.

  I wondered to myself, how long is "over and over again for a while"?

  They answered it for me. "Oh, nothing much. About seven million of your years." I felt rather short-changed, though I realized that it was nothing in comparison with immortality.

  And, standing there stock-still 'and not knowing what to think, I saw the most amazing sight. We all saw the aliens as gossamer veils of light that drifted and danced across the field of vision, almost imperceptible, miniature auroras that sparkled and vanished. ... I saw Sir Francis's face through a gauze of shimmering blue lights. I wanted to touch them so badly; I reached out and my hand passed right through one without feeling a thing. Then they were gone.

  We turned off the house lights—we had until midnight— and went on with the play. The buzzing subsided almost completely, but was very obviously there all the time, so everybody gabbled their lines and tried to cut in quickly between speeches to cover up the noise. The applause was perfunctory, and Sir Francis seemed considerably distressed that he had been so easily upstaged.

 

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