bringing a smooth naked thigh across his and draping a cold arm across his chest, Ike felt the weight of damnation. In disguising himself as dead, he let
go part of his soul. Fully sane, he gave up all aspects of his life in order to preserve it. His one anchor to believing this was happening to him was that he could not believe it was happening to him. 'Dear God,' he whispered.
The sounds became louder.
There was only one last choice to make: to keep open or to close his eyes to sights he could not see anyway. He closed them.
Kora's smell reached him upon that subterranean breeze. He heard her groan.
Ike held his breath. He'd never been afraid like this, and his cowardice was a revelation.
They – Kora and her captor – came around the corner. Her breathing was tortured. She was dying. Her pain was epic, beyond words.
Ike felt tears running down his face. He was weeping for her. Weeping for her pain. Weeping, too, for his lost courage. To lie unmoving and not give aid. He was no different from those climbers who had left him for dead once upon a mountain. Even as he inhaled and exhaled in tiny beadlike drops and listened to his heart's hammering pump and felt the dead close him in their embrace, he was giving Kora up for himself. Moment by moment he was forsaking her. Damned, he was damned.
Ike blinked at his tears, despised them, reviled his self-pity. Then he opened his eyes to take it like a man. And almost choked on his surprise.
The blackness was full, but no longer infinite. There were words written in the darkness. They were fluorescent and coiled like snakes and they moved.
It was him.
Isaac had resurrected.
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore... and you waited with beating heart for something to happen?
– HELEN KELLER, The Story of My Life
2
ALI
North of Askam, the Kalahari Desert, South Africa
1995
'Mother?'
The girl's voice entered Ali's hut softly.
Here was how ghosts must sing, thought Ali, this Bantu lilt, the melody searching melody. She looked up from her suitcase.
In the doorway stood a Zulu girl with the frozen, wide-eyed grin of advanced leprosy: lips, eyelids, and nose eaten away.
'Kokie,' said Ali. Kokie Madiba. Fourteen years old. She was called a witch.
Over the girl's shoulder, Ali caught sight of herself and Kokie in a small mirror on the wall. The contrast did not please her. Ali had let her hair grow out over the past year. Next to the black girl's ruined flesh, her golden hair looked like harvest wheat beside a salted field. Her beauty was obscene to her. Ali moved to one side to erase her own image. For a while she had even tried taking the small mirror off her wall. Finally she'd hung it back on the nail, despairing that abnegation could be more vain than vanity.
'We've talked about this many times,' she said. 'I am Sister, not Mother.'
'We have talked about this, ya'as, mum,' the orphan said. 'Sister, Mother.'
Some of them thought she was a holy woman, or a queen. Or a witch. The concept of a single woman, much less a nun, was very odd out here in the bush. For once the offbeat had served her well. Deciding she must be in exile like them, the colony had taken her in.
'Did you want something, Kokie?'
'I bring you this.' The girl held out a necklace with a small shrunken pouch embroidered with beadwork. The leather looked fresh, hastily tanned, with small hairs still attached. Clearly they had been in a hurry to finish this for her. 'Wear this. The evil stays away.'
Ali lifted it from Kokie's dusty palm and admired the geometric designs formed by red, white, and green beads. 'Here,' she said, setting it back in Kokie's grip, 'you put it on me.'
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
