Mating by Norman Rush

rather terrifying person and did I know that? I seemed to be a sort of monster who remembered everything—an allusion to something that happened rather often where I would quote him to himself if the situation called for it. Did I also remember lines of text, as I seemed to? But then I was also an angel. I was saying all was forgiven, but I was not projecting that. It was pro forma. He was no fool.
    I briefly considered showing him I could tell him a thing or two myself. I knew from my time in Keteng that the South Africans had spies and stooges absolutely everywhere and were behind the big abrupt movement among the Herero to go back to Namibia and take their cattle with them. They had come over with nothing after the German massacres in 1905, and they had built up their herds from scratch, being genius cattle raisers. The government was saying begone but leave your herds. But this kind of thing is what the Boers do for fun. There’s nothing surprising about it. They are breeders of strife. But I held myself in because I could tell by his expression that something new was impending.
Sekopololo
    Well, he could pass on something he would wager I hadn’t heard of. Possibly this would come under the heading of scandal. Someone rather famous was in Botswana incognito, so to speak, and had been—off and on, but now on—for some years, eight to be precise. He paused to see if this was going to be old news again and was relieved when it was clear I had no idea what he was talking about, unless he meant Elizabeth Taylor and her putative hospital project, which would have been completely risible.
    I wasn’t to think that this was by any manner of means an official secret. It was more a gentlemen’s agreement among people who had to know about this person’s presence. This person had exacted highly unusual conditions from the government of Botswana, outrageous conditions, in setting up his project, which was what he was doing in Botswana, something very avant-garde, supposedly very major and massive, a whole new village built from the ground up, in point of fact, somewhere in the north central Kalahari. Clearly he hated whoever this was. Did I still not know? He was surprised.
    Go on, I said.
    Well, what else could he add? He considered. This was an American, a difficult individual, and there was division in government vis-à-vis all the latitude granted him, particularly in the matter of oversight. His idea was that evaluators and visitors were parasites whose only function was to deform and corrupt the development process. Some unspecified day this New Jerusalem would be complete and only then would the world, including the donors who had financed it, be allowed to see what they had wrought and carry back the secret word that would put paid to poverty in Africa. There was even a Tswana code name for the project, which was Sekopololo, which no one could pronounce. I knew that Sekopololo translated as “The Key.”
    When he said Nelson Denoon I could hardly believe it. Denoon was a bête noire of mine, in an abstract way, from the first of my endless years at Stanford. Initially I associated him with earlier tribulations atBemidji State, but that was wrong. I had been tantamount to a fan of this man’s work. There were several of us. He had come to Stanford to run a colloquy on the etiology of poverty. Too bad, it was restricted to faculty and a select few students. You had to have passed your quals and or you had to know somebody. You could get in if somebody liked you. When we were noninvited we even went so far as to appeal to him directly via a fanlike note. No reply. Naturally afterward all the attendees reported a truly scrotum-tightening experience. Their worldviews had changed. One woman couldn’t get over his voice. It was a voice you could eat, she said.
    It all came back, the bathos of trying to be nonchalant about trying and failing to get at least a glimpse of the great man. He had written a classic that