The Descent Read online

  Ali bent and held her hair up so that the leper girl could get the necklace placed. She copied Kokie’s solemnity. This was no tourist trinket. It was part of Kokie’s beliefs. If anyone knew about evil, it had to be this poor child.

  With the spread of post-apartheid chaos and a surge in AIDS brought south by Zimbabweans and Mozambiquans imported to work the gold and diamond mines, hysteria had been unleashed among the poor. Old superstitions had risen up. It was no longer news that sexual organs and fingers and ears—even handfuls of human fat—were being stolen from morgues and used for fetishes, or that corpses lay unburied because family members were convinced the bodies would come to life again.

  The worst of it by far was the witch-hunting. People said that evil was coming up from the earth. So far as Ali was concerned, people had been saying such things since the beginning of man. Every generation had its terrors. She was convinced this one had been started by diamond miners seeking to deflect public hatred away from themselves. They spoke of reaching depths in the earth where strange beings lurked. The populace had turned this nonsense into a campaign against witches. Hundreds of innocent people had been necklaced, macheted, or stoned by superstitious mobs throughout the country.

  “Have you taken your vitamin pill?” Ali asked.

  “Oh, ya’as.”

  “And you will continue taking your vitamins after I’m gone?”

  Kokie’s eyes shifted to the dirt floor. Ali’s departure was a terrible pain for her. Again, Ali could not believe the suddenness of what was happening. It was only two days ago that she had received the letter informing her of the change.

  “The vitamins are important for the baby, Kokie.”

  The leper girl touched her belly. “Ya’as, the baby,” she whispered joyfully. “Every day. Sun come up. The vitamin pill.”

  Ali loved this girl, because God’s mystery was so profound in its cruelty toward her. Twice Kokie had attempted suicide and both times Ali had saved her. Eight months ago the suicide attempts had stopped. That was when Kokie had learned she was pregnant.

  It still surprised Ali when the sounds of lovers wafted to her in the night. The lessons were simple and yet profound. These lepers were not horrible in one another’s sight. They were blessed, beautiful, even dressed in their poor skin.

  With the new life growing inside her, Kokie’s bones had taken on flesh. She had begun talking again. Mornings, Ali heard her murmuring tunes in a hybrid dialect of Siswati and Zulu, more beautiful than birdsong.

  Ali, too, felt reborn. She wondered if this, perhaps, was why she’d ended up in Africa. It was as if God were speaking to her through Kokie and all the other lepers and refugees. For months now, she had been anticipating the birth of Kokie’s child. On a rare trip to Jo’burg, she’d purchased Kokie’s vitamins with her own allowance and borrowed several books on midwifery. A hospital was out of the question for Kokie, and Ali wanted to be ready.

  Lately, Ali had begun dreaming about it. The delivery would be in a hut with a tin roof surrounded by thorn brush, maybe this hut, this bed. Into her hands a healthy infant would emerge to nullify the world’s corruption and sorrows. In one act, innocence would triumph.

  But this morning Ali’s realization was bitter. I will never see the child of this child.

  For Ali was being transferred. Thrown back into the wind. Yet again. It didn’t matter that she had not finished here, that she had actually begun drawing close to the truth. Bastards. That was in the masculine, as in bishoprick.

  Ali folded a white blouse and laid it in her suitcase. Excuse my French, O Lord. But they were beginning to make her feel like a letter with no address.

  From the moment she’d taken her vows, this powder blue Samsonite suitcase had been her faithful companion. First to Baltimore for some ghetto work, then to Taos for a little monastic “airing out,” then to Columbia University to blitzkrieg her dissertation. After that, Winnipeg for more street-angel work. Then a year of postdoc at the Vatican Archives, “the memory of the Church.” Then the plum assignment, nine months in Europe as an attaché—an addetti di nunziatura—assisting the papal diplomatic delegation at NATO nuclear nonproliferation talks. For a twenty-seven-year-old country girl from west Texas, it was heady stuff. She’d been selected as much for her longtime connection with U.S. Senator Cordelia January as for her training in linguistics. They’d played her like a pawn, of course. “Get used to it,” January had counseled her one evening. “You’re going places.” That was for sure, Ali thought, looking around the hut.

  Very obviously the Church had been grooming her—formation, it was called—though for what she couldn’t precisely say. Until a year ago, her CV had showed nothing but steady ascent. Blue sky, right up to her fall from grace. Abruptly, no explanations offered, no second chances offered, they’d sent her to this refugee colony tucked in the wilds of San—or Bushman—country. From the glittering capitals of Western civilization straight into the Stone Age, they had drop-kicked her to the rump of the planet, to cool her heels in the Kalahari desert with a bogus mission.

  Being Ali, she had made the most of it. It had been a terrible year, in truth. But she was tough. She’d coped. Adapted. Flourished, by God. She’d even started to peel away the folklore of an “elder” tribe said to be hiding in the backcountry.

  At first, like everyone else, Ali had dismissed the notion of an undiscovered Neolithic tribe existing on the cusp of the twenty-first century. The region was wild, all right, but these days it was crisscrossed by farmers, truckers, bush planes, and field scientists—people who would have spied evidence before now. It had been three months before Ali had started taking the native rumors seriously.

  What was most exciting to her was that such a tribe did seem to exist, and that its evidence was mostly linguistic. Wherever this strange tribe was hiding, there seemed to be a protolanguage alive in the bush! And day by day she was closing in on it.

  For the most part, her hunt had to do with the Khoisan, or Click, language spoken by the San. She had no illusions about ever mastering their language herself, especially the system of clicks that could be dental, palatal, or labial, voiced, voiceless, or nasal. But with the help of a San ¢Kung translator, she’d begun assembling a set of words and sounds they only expressed in a certain tone. The tone was deferential and religious and ancient, and the words and sounds were different from anything else in Khoisan. They hinted at a reality that was both old and new. Someone was out there, or had been long ago. Or had recently returned. And whoever they were, they spoke a language that pre-dated the prehistoric language of the San.

  But now—like that—the midsummer night’s dream was over. They were taking her away from her monsters. Her refugees. Her evidence.

  Kokie had begun singing softly to herself. Ali returned to her packing, using the suitcase to shield her expression from the girl. Who would watch out for them now? What would they do without her in their daily lives? What would she do without them?

  “… uphondo lwayo/yizwa imithandazo yethu/Nkosi sikelela/Thina lusapho iwayo …”

  The words crowded through Ali’s frustration. Over the past year, she had dipped hard into the stew of languages spoken in South Africa, especially Nguni, which included Zulu. Parts of Kokie’s song opened to her: Lord bless us children / Come spirit, come holy spirit / Lord bless us children.

  “O feditse dintwa/Le matswenyecho.…”Do away with wars and troubles.…

  Ali sighed. All these people wanted was peace and a little happiness. When she first showed up, they had looked like the morning after a hurricane, sleeping in the open, drinking fouled water, waiting to die. With her help, they now had rudimentary shelter and a well for water and the start of a cottage industry that used towering anthills as forges for making simple farm tools like hoes and shovels. They had not welcomed her coming; that had taken some time. But her departure was causing real anguish, for she had brought a little light into their darkness, or at least a little medicine and diversion.

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nbsp; It wasn’t fair. Her coming had meant good things for them. And now they were being punished for her sins. There was no possible way to explain that. They would not have understood that this was the Church’s way of breaking her down.

  It made her mad. Maybe she was a bit too proud. And profane at times. With a temper, yes. And indiscreet, certainly. She’d made a few mistakes. Who hadn’t? She was sure her transfer out of Africa had to do with some problem she’d caused somebody somewhere. Or maybe her past was catching up with her again.

  Fingers trembling, Ali smoothed out a pair of khaki bush shorts and the old monologue rolled around in her head. It was like a broken record, her mea culpas. The fact was, when she dove, she dove deep. Controversy be damned. She was forever running ahead of the pack.

  Maybe she should have thought twice before writing that op-ed piece for the Times suggesting the Pope recuse himself from all matters relating to abortion, birth control, and the female body. Or writing her essay on Agatha of Aragon, the mystic virgin who wrote love poems and preached tolerance: never a popular subject among the good old boys. And it had been sheer folly to get caught practicing Mass in the Taos chapel four years ago. Even empty, even at three in the morning, church walls had eyes and ears. She’d been more foolish still, once caught, to defy her Mother Superior—in front of the archbishop—by insisting women had a liturgical right to consecrate the Host. To serve as priests. Bishops. Cardinals. And she would have gone on to include the Pope in her litany, too, but the archbishop had frozen her with a word.

  Ali had come within a hair of official censure. But close calls seemed a perpetual state for her. Controversy followed her like a starving dog. After the Taos incident, she’d tried to “go orthodox.” But that was before the Manhattans. Sometimes a girl just lost control.

  It had been just a little over a year ago, a grand cocktail gathering with generals and diplomats from a dozen nations in the historic part of The Hague. The occasion was the signing of some obscure NATO document, and the Papal nuncio was there. There was no forgetting the place, a wing of the thirteenth-century Binnerhoef Palace known as the Hall of Knights, a room loaded with delicious Renaissance goodies, even a Rembrandt. Just as vividly she recalled the Manhattans that a handsome colonel, urged on by her wicked mentor January, kept bringing to her.

  Ali had never tasted such a concoction, and it had been years since such chivalry had laid siege to her. The net effect had been a loose tongue. She’d strayed badly in a discussion about Spinoza and somehow ended up sermonizing passionately about glass ceilings in patriarchal institutions and the ballistic throw-weight of a humble chunk of rock. Ali blushed at the memory, the dead silence through the entire room. Luckily January had been there to rescue her, laughing that deep laugh, sweeping her off first to the ladies’ room, then to the hotel and a cold shower. Maybe God had forgiven her, but the Vatican had not. Within days, Ali had been delivered a one-way air ticket to Pretoria and the bush.

  “They coming, look, Mother, see.” With a lack of self-consciousness that was a miracle in itself, Kokie was pointing out the window with the remains of her hand.

  Ali glanced up, then finished closing the suitcase. “Peter’s bakkie?” she asked. Peter was a Boer widower who liked to do favors for her. It was always he who drove her to town in his tiny van, what locals called a bakkie.

  “No, mum.” Her voice got very small. “Casper’s comin’.”

  Ali joined Kokie at the window. It was indeed an armored troop carrier at the head of a long rooster tail of red dust. Casspirs were feared by the black populace as juggernauts that brought destruction. She had no idea why they had sent military transport to fetch her, and chalked it up to more mindless intimidation. “Never mind,” she said to the frightened girl.

  The Casspir churned across the plain. It was still miles away and the road got more corrugated on this side of the dry lakebed. Ali guessed there were still ten minutes or so before it got here.

  “Is everyone ready?” she asked Kokie.

  “They ready, mum.”

  “Let’s see about our picture, then.”

  Ali lifted her small camera from the cot, praying the winter heat had not spoiled her one roll of Fuji Velvia. Kokie eyed the camera with delight. She’d never seen a photograph of herself.

  Despite her sadness about leaving, there were reasons to be thankful she was getting transferred. It made her feel selfish, but Ali was not going to miss the tick fever and poison snakes and walls of mud mixed with dung. She was not going to miss the crushing ignorance of these dying peasants, or the pig-eyed hatreds of the Afrikaaners with their fire-engine-red Nazi flag and their brutal, man-eating Calvinism. And she was not going to miss the heat.

  Ali ducked through the low doorway into the morning light. The scent surged across to her even before the colors. She drew the air deep into her lungs, tasting the wild riot of blue hues on her tongue.

  She raised her eyes.

  Acres of bluebonnets spread in a blanket around the village.

  This was her doing. Maybe she was no priest. But here was a sacrament she could give. Shortly after the camp well was drilled, Ali had ordered a special mix of wildflower seed and planted it herself. The fields had bloomed. The harvest was joy. And pride, rare among these outcasts. The bluebonnets had become a small legend. Farmers—Boer and English both—had driven with their families for hundreds of kilometers to see this sea of flowers. A tiny band of primeval Bushmen had visited and reacted with shock and whispers, wondering if a piece of sky had landed here. A minister with the Zionist Christian Church had conducted an outdoor ceremony. Soon enough, the flowers would die off. The legend was fixed, though. In a way, Ali had exorcised what was grotesque and established these lepers’ claim to humanity.

  The refugees were waiting for her at the irrigation ditch that led from the well and watered their crop of maize and vegetables. When she first mentioned a group photo, they immediately agreed that this was where it should be taken. Here was their garden, their food, their future.

  “Good morning,” Ali greeted them.

  “Goot morgan, Fundi,” a woman solemnly returned. Fundi was an abbreviation of umfundisi. It meant “teacher” and was, for Ali’s tastes, the highest compliment.

  Sticklike children raced out from the group and Ali knelt to embrace them. They smelled good to her, particularly this morning, fresh, washed by their mothers.

  “Look at you,” she said to them, “so pretty. So handsome. Now who wants to help me?”

  “Me, me. I am, mum.”

  Ali employed all the children in putting a few rocks together and tying some sticks into a crude tripod. “Now step back or it will fall,” she said.

  She worked quickly now. The Casspir’s approach was beginning to alarm the adults, and she wanted the picture to show them happy. She balanced the camera atop her tripod and looked through the viewfinder.

  “Closer,” she gestured to them, “get closer together.”

  The light was just right, angling sidelong and slightly diffuse. It would be a kind picture. There was no way to hide the ravages of disease and ostracism, but this would highlight their smiles and eyes at least.

  As she focused, she counted. Then recounted. They were missing someone.

  For a while after first coming here, it had not occurred to her to count them from day to day. She had been too busy teaching hygiene and caring for the ill and distributing food and arranging the drill for a well and the tin sheeting for roofs. But after a couple of months she had grown more sensitive to the dwindling numbers. When she asked, it was explained with a shrug that people came and people went.

  It was not until she had caught them red-handed that the terrible truth surfaced.

  When she first had come upon them in the bush one day, Ali had thought it was hyenas working over a springbok. Perhaps she should have guessed before. Certainly it seemed that someone else could have told her.

  Without thinking, Ali had pulled the two skeletal men away from
the old woman they were strangling. She had struck one with a stick and driven them away. She had misunderstood everything, the men’s motive, the old lady’s tears.

  This was a colony of very sick and miserable human beings. But even reduced to desperation, they were not without mercy.

  The fact was, the lepers practiced euthanasia.

  It was one of the hardest things Ali had ever wrestled with. It had nothing to do with justice, for they did have the luxury of justice. These lepers—hunted, hounded, tortured, terrorized—were living out their days on the edge of a wasteland. With little left to do but die off, there were few ways left to show love or grant dignity. Murder, she had finally accepted, was one of them.

  They only terminated a person who was already dying and who asked. It was always done away from camp, and it was always carried out by two or more people, as quickly as possible. Ali had crafted a sort of truce with the practice. She tried not to see the exhausted souls walking off into the bush, never to return. She tried not to count their numbers. But disappearance had a way of pronouncing a person, even the silent ones you barely noticed otherwise.

  She went through the faces again. It was Jimmy Shako, the elder, they were missing. Ali hadn’t realized Jimmy Shako was so ill or so generous as to unburden the community of his presence. “Mr. Shako is gone,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “He gone,” Kokie readily agreed.

  “May he rest in peace,” Ali said, mostly for her own benefit.

  “Don’t t’ink so, Mother. No rest for him. We trade him off.”

  “You what?” This was a new one. “This for that. We give him away.”

  Suddenly Ali wasn’t sure she wanted to know what Kokie meant. There were times when it seemed Africa had opened to her and she knew its secrets. Then times like this, when the secrets had no bottom. She asked just the same: “What are you talking about, Kokie?”