Read on. A gap, a pause at the word processor before a new start to this letter. Mrs Bannerman (again, though surely thought of as Lyndsay, embarrassment, guilt at the appropriation of retirement or late assurance that this title of marriage would never have been usurped) Mrs Bannerman, I have made all the enquiries, I will do it immediately you give me details where he must be received. My telephone number and email is at the top of the page. I can arrange it. I will send his body.
Smiling.
How else. In the grief she also must feel.
They walk into early evening light in the garden of Paul 's house, to which he returned from that other garden. Up and down, slowly, legs move even if mind doesn't. To the shrubs and the acacia where the children's swings hang twinned, one's been strung up for Klara too; and back. Lyndsay trips over an abandoned toy in the rapid rise of darkness in Africa and he steadies her; also himself, to speak. Silence is only for the dead. Adrian.
Let's go in.
It's no-one else's decision, only theirs, as the conditions of another state of existence were finally between them alone in quarantine. He doesn't dutifully indicate, it's yours to decide, you, his lover, that indefinable relation dubbed by law and church, wife. Do you want him back; if dead. Did he ever express that primeval urge, to be buried in his natal soil. The idea that his death in the logical sequence of events after retirement would happen elsewhere never occurred. He could have had a heart attack and died in the Arctic under the aurora borealis, that retirement venture with Lyndsay that didn't come off. Preserved in ice ready to be flown home.
Home. From Stavanger. Begin over again, from the grave. Or the ashes of the crematorium. There are new beginnings, in place. This's not home you left to follow so late, in archaeological digs, your avocation.
Smiling.
Found it.
They didn't tell other members of the family, not Jacqueline, not Susan, not Emma in Brazil, of the offer. An email was sent thanking the guide and declining. His mother asked Paul to place his name alongside hers. He had his sense of loss carried with him in the wilderness that still needed him and his team, Derek, Thapelo, always new threats to which there must be human solutions (if your father dies do you now exist in his place, nature's solution). If there's a possibility for the dune mining project or the pebble-bed nuclear reactor to be outlawed that's proof that what is a vocation and an avocation may be worth pursuing in the limited span of one individual's minuscule existence, not seen from Space.
What she – Lyndsay – does with sorrow – it must be? – cannot be asked and must not be pried at or spied upon. The life of parents is a mystery even when you are paired off with someone in a version of the state, yourself. She has her successes, as the defeat of destruction of the Pondoland dunes, if achieved, would be a success at least partly attributable to Derek, Thapelo and himself. She's been appointed to serve on the Constitutional Court, and this is no Gender Affirmative post, that's certain.
Adrian is not a taboo subject. Paul does not know that she has on her desk in her office at the Constitutional Court a photograph of Adrian she took when they were together at an archaeological site in Mexico. They speak of Adrian when a context comes up to remember something he might have remarked, laughed at with them, and when listening to music together, talking of his depth of understanding from which she profited and, yes, Paul's evidently growing enjoyment must have come, even of those composers she's never learnt to listen to without a sense of psychic disruption, Stockhausen, Penderecki etcetera. Perhaps the only way to break the silence is to have passed on something. Impalpable.
A well-secured box addressed in the same unfamiliar hand eventually was delivered, containing a few small archaeological artifacts, a reproduction feather headdress of the kind seen being made with delicate ancestral skill by vendors outside the Museum of Anthropology, and what was evidently a draft of thoughts on the experience of seeing unearthed accomplishments of the ancient past when you belong to an era where there are wars going on over who possesses weapons that could destroy all trace of it. She gave the artifacts, headdress, and the manuscript to the Department of Archaeology at a university where one of the academics was a friend. She asked, maybe the university press would publish the draft in some form.
EDEN OF AFRICA FACING THREAT OF BEING SUBMERGED BY FLOODS
This is the kind of lyrical drama a newspaper headline makes of the waters Noah must have seen. But not from Outer Space. Not from a helicopter. The team has come back from a second survey of Okavango to map-covered walls, spread aerial photographs and half-drunk cups of instant coffee. Which is the reality? Here or there. It's not normal to live in two environments, every traveller knows the disorientation, disbelief, that is the brief consequence of leaving home and walking out into a foreign country ten hours later. But this consequence of being back among domestic objects and four walls, from wilderness, earth or water is a condition of living, not jet lag.
As they go over in their minds and talk what was seen down below, the observations shouted, half-heard, to one another against the racket of the helicopter, there is another question of which is the reality: the 'Eden' treasure feared threatened or the people of the central delta there, told they must abandon their homes before the rising waters. What's going to happen to them anyway, if ten dams that will alter the cosmic picture of the world as seen from Space are built?
Shouldn't be thinking about this, like this. The practice of conservation, boots in the mud, Thapelo's occasional addition of beers to basic supplies, concentrates on one issue at a time, some sort of sequence in activity while the commissions keep sitting, for or against. What is in the others' minds – about these people.
Derek's glance moves down a newspaper cutting that had reported interviews with the Delta people about the dams. – No-one will evict us from our ancestral lands. It is a gift from God, and our forefathers' soil. -
How does this emotional stuff, no doubt genuine as many (hopeless) defences are (isn't that the principle of rousing the Amadiba over the effects of the toll highway), strike Thapelo? He's one of those all over Africa who were long ago evicted from the forefathers' soil. And even what was left to them was 'a gift from God', the white man's God, not the ancestral ones? 'God': the first colonial civilising dispensation, a token something of a whole country dispossessed.
Thapelo needs none of his white mates' tact; seventeen months in solitary detention in the bad old days and none of the Gods did anything about it. He smiles and lifts his fingers softly up, down, from where his hands rest on the table, saluting respect to the ancestors but in acceptance of realities. His people have had to abandon their homes so many times and not for reasons of their safety before a flood.
– Safari guides report animals have drowned; we didn't see any bodies floating. -
– Didn't fly low enough and they might be caught in the submerged reeds and stuff. -
– An elephant? Submerged? -
– Doesn't mention the big guys. -
There's a season of flood, at expected levels, part of the ecological balance dealing with the salts, every year. But such extensive and unusual waters; a great inundation. Copies of background documents are handed round. An expert geoscientist, McCarthy, has found – predicts? – that after about 150 years toxic salts will destroy all plants (Derek starts to read aloud and the other two shush him as they read for themselves)… and at this point the floodwaters should erode the islands and release salts into the swamp. But with perfect timing papyrus and hippo grass upstream will have encroached into channels, causing sand levels to rise and blocking their flow. (Silenced Derek glances up: Man, we know all that. The others won't be distracted: Chief, you never know it all.) The water is diverted elsewhere and the old islands dry out. Then in that mysterious way it does, the peat in these dry areas catches fire (somebody's god strikes a match?) creating a mosaic of burning forests up to fifteen centimetres deep… these wild fires can burn for decades, destroying all life growing above them. After the fires have died, summer rains flush saline poisons deep below ground. Nutrients from the fires combine to form fertile soils… in this way the flow of water and creation of islands is constantly changing… the entire organism named Okavango renews itself.