Problems with People (6 page)

They came to a place where there were a lot of elephants, and because of that, a lot of Land Rovers and safari vehicles of the sort he was familiar with from television—open-air four-wheeling one-ton trucks with canvas tops and bolstered bumpers, driven by guides in ranger uniforms, and seated behind them, or standing up, passengers viewing the Pilanesberg elephants through binoculars and camera lenses. The herd milled on a plain of acacias, and as he and his sister idled in her car, elephants moved in front and behind, left and right, slowly, unconcerned, while all around the diesel engines of safari vehicles were shut off, the better to hear the noises elephants made—snorting, trammeling, trumpeting, thumping—as they cracked branches, ate grass, forced their way through brush, and dusted themselves. It was so arresting, so much what they’d come for, that they stayed for a long time,
watching elephants and talking, while he took pictures. And then, since it was beginning to get dark, they drove toward the Manyane Gate.

The gate was closed. They idled in front of it with the entirely reasonable expectation that it would open automatically in the next moment and let them through, but nothing happened for such a long time that eventually they got out and stood in the headlights, talking about what to do next. It’s widely known, he had been told, that, one, darkness falls quickly in Africa, and two, that African darkness seems exceptionally dark to foreign tourists. Already, at Manyane, it was dark in this way, except for the headlights, the stars, and a light on in the squat, modest guardhouse on the other side of the gate. “This is upsetting,” his sister said. “The gate won’t open.”

The guard finally emerged from the guardhouse, walked toward them, put his hands on the gate, and explained to them that Manyane, like all the gates in the park, closed at 7 p.m., and that it was now—he looked at his watch—7:04 p.m.

What were they to do? His sister pressed the guard about this. “Obviously you have a key,” she said, “so go get it and open the gate.”

The guard pulled on the trouser fabric at his thigh, raised his leg, and set his boot on the gate’s bottom rail. He grimaced and shook his head—no. He was a young black man, polite, apologetic, in a clean and pressed uniform and with a pistol on his hip, speaking in a quiet tone: “No, but I don’t have a key,” he said. “I have no key.” He shrugged.

“No key,” said his sister. “Okay, I get it.” She went to her
car, which was idling still, retrieved her handbag, and brought it to the gate. In the headlights again, she opened her wallet, removed some bills, and held them where the guard could take them through the bars. Her hand was shaking. “What’s your name?” she said.

“Nelson.”

“Well, Nelson,” said his sister, “this is wrong of you, what you’re doing here, you know. You have to open the gate right now. You don’t have a choice—you have to open the gate. You can’t just trap people in the park indefinitely. Come on now, Nelson, open the gate.” She shook the money enticingly.

Nelson shrugged again and kept his distance from the bills. “It’s true, truly, I have no key,” he said. “There is no way for me to open the gate. Seven o’clock,” he added.

“At seven you close and lock the gate,” said his sister. “And you close it and lock it with what, Nelson?”

“Key.”

“So you have a key.”

“No.”

“Then how did you lock the gate?”

“A woman comes walking,” Nelson said. “She lives there.” He pointed down the road. “She comes with the key to lock the gate, and then she goes away.”

“Five minutes ago.”

“Yes.”

“So she’s five minutes down the road, walking. That’s all. Five minutes. So go after her in your jeep and get the key.” Again, his sister shook the money and pushed the bills farther through the gate.

“No,” said Nelson. “There’s nothing I can do.” Then he smiled and laughed in a way that might have meant that they were invited to smile and laugh, too.

“Not funny, Nelson,” said his sister.

She made suggestions, and he couldn’t tell if the way she was speaking to Nelson—as if he were a child, or someone who could be ordered around, badgered, and belittled—was something that had become natural to her after living in South Africa for thirty-three years, or an exception to her ongoing rules of behavior, goaded by exasperation, weariness, and cancer. “Do you have a phone, Nelson?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. So why didn’t he call the woman with the key? What about calling the park administration, or some kind of dispatcher, who could then call a ranger, who could then show up with the key? Wasn’t that obvious? Surely they couldn’t be the first park visitors who’d come late to the gate but still needed to get out, who couldn’t spend the night camped in their car waiting for morning. This same problem must have happened before. There must be, at Pilanesberg—a major park, heavily visited—provisions for late exits. “Okay,” said Nelson. “I can phone.”

He went back into the guardhouse. Under the stars, by the gate, his sister sighed bitterly. “Typical,” she said. “Everything’s mismanaged, a mess, in South Africa. Nobody knows what they’re doing.”

There was a damp, night smell now, alongside the smell of the veldt he’d gotten familiar with that afternoon. He suggested his sister shut off her headlights and kill her car engine; she said no, that probably wasn’t a good idea, because of the
lions. He didn’t believe lions, or any other predator, would attack them by the gate, but since shutting off the car engine wasn’t his decision he didn’t argue with her about it. Instead, they passed the time talking about Nelson until he returned and said, “Okay, it’s better now.”

“What does that mean?” his sister asked. “What did they say? Who did you talk to?”

“Someone is coming with a key.”

“When?”

“A person is coming,” said Nelson.

“When?”

Nelson shrugged apologetically.

They waited for half an hour. There was nothing to do. He took pictures of Nelson—loud flashes—who posed for him, beyond the mesh of the gate, with martial gravity. His sister asked Nelson how old he was—twenty-eight—where he was from—Venda—if he was married—yes, to a woman in Venda—if he had children—four—if he liked his work—no, but it was better than nothing, which is what he’d done in Venda. “I would like to talk to you about a job,” said Nelson, out of the blue. “Is there a job I could have, where you live, something I could do, to make more money?”

“Aha,” said his sister. “Can you type at a keyboard?” The answer was no. “Can you read English?” A little. “How far did you go in school?” Just a little. “What skills do you have?” None, said Nelson. “So why don’t you go to school to learn computers? That would be a valuable skill to have, Nelson.” Because school cost money. “Okay,” said his sister, pushing her handful of bills again. “You call a second time and get whoever
has a key to come here right now, and then I’ll help you with your problem, Nelson. We’ll deal with your employment situation.”

“There is nothing I can do.” Nelson looked exasperated. “I said to you before, you have to wait.”

His sister sighed. “Nelson,” she said, “this is no way to act. This is unacceptable. You’re going to pay for this.” She turned a circle in the headlights, turned back to the gate, pressed against it, and again shoved the money through. “Take it,” she said. “You have to. I’m telling you to.”

“No money.”

“What a bad job you have here, Nelson,” his sister said. “Don’t you want something better paying? Aren’t you scared out here, all alone?”

“This is why I have no key,” said Nelson. “Trust. There is no trust of me.”

“But aren’t you scared of robbers? They’ll cut your throat, robbers. For two rand.”

“No,” answered Nelson. “I’m scared of lions. Because when the power is gone, there is no electric fence to stop them from coming right here.” He pointed at his feet.

“Great,” his sister said. “Where does that leave us?”

Nelson explained that behind them, right behind them, twenty meters wide, was an electric grate. “Don’t go there,” he added. “It’s very bad.”

“Now you tell us,” his sister said. “Nelson,” she added. “You should be fired from your job. I’m going to see to it that you’re fired.”

But Nelson didn’t answer. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully,
then his neck, then his forehead. “Okay,” he said. “You wait here.” He marched into the guardhouse, shut the door, and didn’t come back.

They sat in the car for an hour with the sunroof open, the headlights and the motor off, looking at the Southern Hemisphere stars, and he didn’t feel impatient. If they weren’t here, they’d be somewhere else, so what difference did it make? Here or back at their little chalet, looking at stars from there? “You know what?” he said. “I think we’re trapped here. I think we have to make the best of it.”

His sister adjusted her seat back farther, the better to take in the stars. This caused her wig to unseat a little, and now, while she spoke, she readjusted it. “Make the best of it,” she said, as though it were a novel idea.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll make the best of it, then, because what choice do we have? We have none.”

At nine, a convoy of open-air minibuses rumbled up behind them, each full of guests who had paid extra for nocturnal sightseeing, through night-vision binoculars, of wildlife. He took pictures of a man wearing complicated goggles with straps and a chin buckle. This was the kind of subject he liked, and he snapped away at it with interest. Then the ranger in the lead minibus leapt out and unlocked the gate, and everybody drove through, including them, while Nelson saluted each driver. When they were abreast of him, his sister opened her window and said, “Sorry, Nelson!” before following the convoy to the Golden Leopard. In their chalet, they freshened up, then went for a celebratory late dinner—celebratory
of their liberation from Pilanesberg—on the resort’s terrace, which was lit by kerosene torches. But his sister couldn’t eat anything and drank water and watched with a hand against her gut while he tucked into a carpaccio of impala served with sliced melon and chilled cottage cheese, followed by an impala T-bone steak, rare, with mushrooms, onions, carrots, and courgettes, and, for dessert, two scones with cream, jam, and a snifter of port. This meal tired him out so completely that in the thatch-roofed hut he could do nothing but sit while his sister lay with a damp towel across her forehead and her wig on a side table.

At dawn, he went out onto the porch with his camera. He liked dawn now, in the middle of his life. There were strange noises in the distance, reverberating thuds that turned out to be baboons knocking over rubbish bins. He watched through his telephoto lens while they drank from a swimming pool. Soon they were nearer, sitting on bins and picking through them with careful fingers, or parked on their asses and licking salt from foil bags. The troop kept coming, the adults deliberate, the young ones gadding in and out, circling. They cruised between the chalets, turning over every bin they found, so close now that he had to retreat inside and watch through a window. One came to the pane and looked at him impassively; he took a dozen pictures of its intricate face as it assessed him with detachment colored by disdain. He wanted to call to his sister to come see, but it was better to let her rest for now, because the good part of her life, at this stage, was rest; everything else left her worn out and agitated. Then the baboons were gone, followed by a pair of meerkats interested in leftovers, and
after that by employees of the Golden Leopard, black men in uniforms with name tags on their shirts and plastic bags in hand, who silently—so as not to awaken the tourists in the chalets—righted the bins and picked up the rubbish. He took pictures of them, too, because what else could he do in his situation? What should he do, beyond that?

The strike began. He went to the lobby with the intention of arranging a taxi to Patan Hospital, but none, said the concierge, were available. Literally, none. So thoroughly unavailable that, if you wanted to leave the country, you had to walk to the airport. And, in fact, a lot of people were doing that, with hired porters carrying their luggage. Nepal was shut down—no banks, shops, cars, trucks, no goods coming in or out of Kathmandu, nothing happening, nothing moving. “How long is this going to last?” he asked the concierge. “I have somewhere I have to go this morning.” But the concierge just shrugged and smoothed his eyebrows. “Outside is not good,” he warned.

He took matters into his own hands. His ex-wife, a journalist—technically she was still his wife, because they hadn’t signed divorce papers yet—had been traveling in the remote east when the car she was a passenger in veered into a bus, killing three people and injuring sixteen, and now she had twenty screws in her pelvis. Her spleen had been removed, but
there was concern about tetanus. Erring on the side of caution, he was going to have her transferred to a Level One Trauma Center in Delhi, and that was why he had to get to Patan this morning. Strike or no strike, he was headed there to fill out paperwork and start things moving. In other words, unlike a lot of the Hyatt Regency’s guests, he wasn’t in Nepal for a trek in the mountains, a rhododendron tour, or a bird-watching expedition—but there was no point in telling the concierge this. So instead he found the “business center”—three battered Dells around a corner from the reception desk—and Google Mapped the shortest walking route to Patan. Seven point eight kilometers—not quite five miles. Two hours at most. With a bottle of water, a hat, and sunscreen, walking would be his answer to this strike. He printed out the map, got his water bottle, hat, and sunscreen from his room, returned to the lobby with these things in hand, and, waving at the concierge, left.