Problems With People: Stories Read online

  “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?

  Politics

  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 r
oom, returned to the lobby with these things in hand, and, waving at the concierge, left.

  His map, he soon found, was misleading. He wanted, first, to get to the Ring Road—a straight shot, according to Google—but in truth the indicated route, beyond the immediate pale of his hotel, was a maze of muddy alleys full of flies, dog shit, mangy curs, garbage, and—most immediate of all—poor people. The area was called Boudhanath, and according to his guidebook it was full of Buddhist monasteries. Sure enough, he saw monks walking around. The big point of interest in Boudhanath was its gargantuan stupa, which, according to the guidebook, contained relics of the Buddha. That explained the many shops—right now, all with metal roll-doors down—under signs indicating that they sold things for tourists, like Buddha figurines, prayer rugs, prayer flags, incense, postcards, and thangka paintings. At the moment, though, they sold nothing, because of the strike. Instead of selling goods and wares, the merchants were sitting around, and so was everybody else, except for a few kids playing cricket in the street because—for once, he realized—there were no cars and trucks to stop them, except that on occasion someone blasted through on a motorcycle, taking, he supposed, a political chance. Young guys, reckless and cavalier, always with a passenger, sometimes two. As soon as they passed, things fell quiet again. It was a hot morning in early May—dogs asleep in the shade, garbage reeking. And beggars everywhere. Some were lame and sickly, immobile and imploring, but most were urchins who trotted along next to him, trying to look and sound more pathetic than they were. Not that they weren’t pathetic. Half naked, unwashed, they naturally and inevitably plucked at his heartstrings. But, still, he wished they wouldn’t tap his hip eight thousand times in a row while saying, “Sir, sir, money, money,” or otherwise, in their half-intelligible ways, pleading their insistent cases. He decided to pretend that these child-beggars didn’t exist, that he didn’t hear or see them, but this was even more infuriating, because it embroiled him now in self-examination, and in pondering the conclusion he was rapidly coming to—that you couldn’t win in a case like this. That, no matter what you did, you were wrong.

  Beset this way, he came to the Ring Road. The Maoists had taken control of it, he could see, by clogging the intersection. In red shirts and bandannas, they milled with restless zeal, listening to a speaker exhort them through a bullhorn. Except for a few motorcycles, some oxcarts, bicyclists, water trucks, and a couple of ambulances, the Ring Road was, for the moment, pedestrians only. In a way, that was lucky: he wouldn’t have to dodge traffic. Trying to look full of confidence, bold, he crossed it and pressed on toward the hospital. Now his way felt unimpeded. He’d left the tourist zone of Boudhanath behind, which meant fewer beggars, con men, and touts. Once, he saw an air-conditioned bus coming at him with a large sign on its windshield reading TOURIST ONLY, as if that were a talisman that could thwart tossed rocks. As far as he could tell, the sign was working. The bus seemed to have carte blanche, despite the strike. But then he saw that, behind the bus, there were two jeeps full of soldiers in blue camo fatigues. They had weapons in their hands and slung across their shoulders. On he walked, with sweaty duress, bulling past the frowns of red-shirted teen-agers, some of whom brandished long, thick staves. Troops had taken up positions. Some kept watch behind sandbagged outposts, while others stood or crouched in the shade, or bounced past in fast-moving, canopied carriers. Well, it wasn’t his business, whatever was going on. None of this had to do with him. But then he came to what his map called a river—mud, plastic bags, garbage, shit—and the road he was on became a bridge blocked by Maoists. Fortunately, they were letting pedestrians cross, except that, when he tried to cross, a caramel-skinned and gaunt, tense teen put a hand on his chest to check his progress. They stood like that, facing each other, the Maoist with his imposing stave, he with his sunscreen, water bottle, and hat. While other pedestrians passed in droves, the reality of his circumstances soon became clear to him: he had to go back, he couldn’t cross.

  He retreated, but only by fifty yards—back to the first patch of shade he could find—and stood there, wondering if he should get out his wallet, produce a wad of Nepalese rupees, and try, again, to cross the bridge. He was considering this when someone tapped his hip—a boy a little older than the average child-beggar, whose English was coherent but far from perfect. “America,” he said. “Have a nice day?”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” said the boy. “Not as nice. And now, I clean your shoe.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, yes, please,” said the boy. “I clean.”

  He looked at his shoes. Sure enough, as the boy had sought to suggest, there was copious dog shit on one of them. Yellow-brown, shiny, slick, and fresh, and smearing both the sole and the leather below the laces. “Great,” he said. “Dog shit.”

  “I clean,” replied the boy. “Please.”

  They were in front of a shop where, among other things, you could have gotten a vacuum cleaner repaired if there was no strike. It was closed, or nearly closed; the metal roll-door was open about two feet at the bottom to let air in on someone who, he could tell by the clink of tools, was working today. Here the boy pulled two plastic bags from his pocket. With one he made a clean place for his client to sit, spreading and smoothing the plastic fastidiously. Then, just as carefully, he removed the offensive shoe and, holding the shoeless foot up, set the other bag under it, and set the shoeless foot down on that. And so, via two bits of plastic produced from the boy’s pocket, his pants seat and sock were buffered from contact with Kathmandu.

  He watched. The boy appeared neither humiliated nor disgusted. With the point of a stick, he worked steadily on the dog shit while squatting with an enviable comfort and flexibility that, ubiquitous here, were rare in America. He also had an incredible head of hair, glossy, black, thick, neatly cut. And an unwrinkled, clean, short-sleeved rayon shirt. And clean shoes. And patience. And deft technique with a worn brush and a rag. And he was so thorough about cleaning the shoe that when he was finished there was absolutely no sign of dog shit. Not only that, the shoe looked better than it had for a long time—about the way it had when it came out of the box. Lacing it up, inspecting it, he was impressed by what this boy had accomplished with so little in the way of equipment or tools, impressed enough that he unlaced his other shoe and asked the boy to clean it, too. A deferential waggle of the head; two hands, as if the shoe were made of glass; the boy took the shoe with these signs of subservience and then, silently, moved his plastic protector under the newly shoeless foot. And so the second shoe was cleaned as well, with the same polish, efficiency, attentiveness to detail, and pride as the first. “How much do I owe you?” he asked the boy, who answered, while cleaning his hands by rubbing them together, “Twenty-five rupee.”

  Twenty-five rupees—a little over thirty cents. “That’s a steal,” he said, and doled out a hundred. Strangely, the boy looked at it with graphic consternation—the way someone at home might look at a parking ticket. “Please,” said the boy. “I am taking one hundred rupee and I am bringing seventy-five rupee. Please,” he said again. “You are waiting.”

  “No, no, no. At home that’s called a ‘tip.’ You get to keep the extra.”

  The boy didn’t argue, but he didn’t go away, either. Instead, he began asking personal questions. What city? Bellevue, Washington. Is it near New York? No. What work? LASIK surgery. Lay-sa-lick sur-jur-ee? Helping people see better. How many childrens? Three children, all grown. What are their years? Twenty-six, twenty-four, and twenty-one—no grandchildren. Your wife, you have a peek-chur? No picture of my wife. The boy ran out of queries in this vein and began, instead, to float proper nouns—hopeful points of reference—terse utterances that were meant to provoke, from his American interlocutor, just what response? What was he supposed to say to someone who said to him, simply, “Michael Jackson”? Or “Liberty Statue”? Not knowing what to say, he asked the boy what he did when he wasn’t cleaning shoes. Answer: the shoe boy was a student of English, math,
and computer programming, but there was no school today, because of the strike. The teachers were either supporters or intimidated. This morning they were either thwarting students who tried to attend or letting them in furtively. A teacher had let the shoe boy through the door, so that he might make solitary use of a computer. But then the teacher had gotten nervous and kicked him out.

  “Okay,” he said. “So now what?”

  “Now,” said the boy, “I help you walk.”

  “What?”

  “We go,” said the boy. “This way.”

  They used alleys that weren’t shown on his map and, around two bends, crossed the “river” on a footbridge of well-traveled pallets planted in a wallow. Then, having detoured, they returned to the main road, well out of sight of the Maoist blockade. “Good one,” he told the boy. “Great.”

  He thought about doling out another hundred rupees. Two hundred rupees? He was in the midst of such deliberations when the boy touched his arm and called his attention to a man with a rag around his head. “Shoe man,” the boy said. “He have? He have the shoe box.”

  “Shoe box?”

  “Everything shoe box.”

  He looked. The man with the rag around his head had in front of him a rather elaborate-looking shoe-cleaning kit full of brushes, sticks, wires, polishes, rubs, rags, waxes, and oils. It was built like a large suitcase, foldable, with a strap. A clever contraption that made his business portable. He could easily purvey services and take it home with him each night.

  “Looks convenient,” he said to the boy. “But you’re better than he is without any ‘shoe box.’ You’re a shoe-shining fool, man, when it comes right down to it.” This seemed the right time to reach for his wallet, and as he did so he added, feeling a little jaunty, “It’s early and you don’t have school today. What will you do with your temporary freedom? Shine shoes? Homework? What’s up?”