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 attache – 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 predated 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.
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'.'
