Here they had everything. He looked around. There were two discs of grayish struggling lawn flanking the flagstone path to the house where it diverged from the driveway leading to the garage. They were being kept alive by hand-watering. Someday the drought would be over and they could use the hosepipe again. Except for flowerbeds and the grass areas, the yard was bare red sand textured like a Holland rusk. The sand was raked every day in deliberate, sinuous patterns. He liked that. There were five palm trees spaced around the house, which he liked except when dead fronds dropped and banged on the roof at all hours. He loved his neighbors, and especially his immediate neighbors, for their lack of interest in him. One was the widow of the leader of an out-of-power Zambian political faction the Botswana government was partial to. Mrs. Timono was an actively furtive person. His other immediate neighbor, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education, was never at home. It was nice that no one had ever wondered, at least in his presence, why someone who was supposed to only be the head of the English Department at St. James College had been assigned housing in Kgari Close. He thought that was because the housing allocation process was known to be mysterious, and also simply because they’d been there so long. And he had been careful to let it be understood around that they were paying a serious premium for the house, which they could manage because Iris had received a small inheritance, lalala.
It was fun to put one of their uncomfortable metal lawn chairs in the center of one of the microlawns and sit there in the imperfect, lacy shade of the thorn trees. The trunks of the trees in the yard were properly lime-washed to protect them from termites, except for the palms, which had some natural resistance. There was a crate by the wall to stand on in the event something interesting seemed to be going on in the street. His wall was pink. He even liked the street itself. He liked the broad, clean, faintly convex roadway and the astringent odor given off by the gum trees planted along it. If he’d kept on teaching in the U.S. they might well have ended up in a university town someplace in the Southwest that looked pretty much like this part of Gaborone.
It always made him happy when the gate clicked shut behind him. Paradise was from the Persian for walled garden, probably the first fact anybody tackling Milton learns.
He thought, I ask them, What do you think the word
Nothing is more useless than dwelling on grievances, he reminded himself, feeling himself about to twitch in that direction. He’d earned the right to some satisfaction. The easy part of his life had begun unannounced like a dream two years ago and he had a right to enjoy it. No one could know about it, obviously, but he was living in a state of triumph, and had been ever since Russia and all its works blew apart overnight. Before that he had been part of a war. What he was in now was more like a parade. Of course nobody knew who he was, except for Iris who had to know generally. She had no details. But when somebody wrote
This moment was what Iris was suddenly taking away.
The event was too huge for any image he had been able to come up with. It would take someone as great as Milton to come up with the appropriate image right off the bat. He felt he had no time to think, lately. Iris was full of mental homework for him to do that he didn’t want to do, such as answering the question of why they had been so attracted to one another when they met—but it had to be
He stood in the foyer. No one was around. He heard the kitchen door close. That was Dimakatso leaving for the day.
He entered the chill bronze gloom of the living room, where the airconditioner was laboring for his benefit, obviously, since no one else was on hand and the room looked as though no one had made use of it that day. He walked over to the main double window. The louvers of the blinds were tilted downward, almost to the closed position. All the windows in the house were barred and tightly screened. He was fanatical about the screens. There was malaria nearby. He was the force behind both of them continuing to take chloroquine. Iris got worse headaches from the chloroquine than he did, so he understood why she resisted him. There was still no one.
But I’m fine, he thought, trying not to relive a moment from the walk home that had made him feel fragile. Near the school was a rundown property whose occupants kept a goat. The goat had run up purposively to the fence as Ray came by and for an instant Ray had thought something monstrous was happening, because the goat’s tongue seemed to be a foot long. He’d been frightened until he’d realized that it was only a goat eating a kneesock. Iris could be asleep. He would look for her, softly.
Ray moved silently through the house, coming to the shut door of Iris’s workroom, her study. He knew everything about her study, every detail. He kept silent.
She was in there, at her worktable, doing something with papers, airletters, probably. Three times recently he had come to the door in silence and been privileged to hear her reading aloud to herself from letters sent by her sister or, once, his brother. Privileged was the only word for the way he had felt. Obviously, reading aloud was a sign of loneliness. He couldn’t deny that. She animated her correspondents when she read aloud, bringing them to her. She read with feeling, theatricality, even. The transom over the door was always in the open position. He wanted to hear her read aloud again. There was something rare about it.
Yesterday she had gotten sunburned. He could hear that she was intermittently picking up a sponge or cloth from a bowl of ice, wringing it out, and touching it to her face.
Storage dominated the small room. Metal filing cabinets came to chest height along three walls and were topped with a double tier of uniform cardboard cartons, each carton marked with a code number. The one break in the tiers of boxes was utilized to house a portable phonograph and behind it a tight rank of longplaying record albums. A postal scale stood on top of the block of albums. There was no decoration on the exposed white upper walls or anywhere in the room, and no rug or mat on the maroon linoleum tiles of the floor. A copy of the
Her room was hot and dim. There was no table lamp. If Iris found something she wanted to read closely in a letter, she would slant the sheet to catch the dying light from outside. There was one double window, and the short