Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  “They’ll pick you up here just now—in thirty or forty minutes,” he says. “You’ll love this.”

  As he pulls out of the lot, he reaches his arm out the window and, with one of the goofiest grins I’ve ever seen, gives me a cartoonish thumbs-up. His two bumper stickers read, “No Fish In Lambert’s Bay Today” and “Only Dogs And Isuzu Bakkies Get Stuck.”

  *

  AFTER MY LUNCH WITH NICO, AND BEFORE MY DATE WITH THE pigeon shooters, I walk Port Nolloth’s shoreline again. At the end of the beach, anchored into the sand, stands a crooked white crucifix, cobbled together of picket-fence posts. The sand is loose, shallow, picked clean of its diamonds. The cross is marking something, but it can’t possibly be a body. I’m unnerved, and try to calm myself by invoking happier times. I think of how, in 2001, Louisa told me, after our first kiss—the one that was to lead to marriage—that she kept mopane silkworms as pets when she was a girl growing up on the outskirts of Johannesburg. How she fed them beet greens so they would spin red, her favorite color. How she could never feed them enough beet greens. How the red would spin out, leave their systems. How they are not worms forever. How they morph. I think about how red is no longer Louisa’s favorite color.

  At about the same time the Islamic expansion brought date palms to South Africa, Muslim warriors attempted to launch sericulture there, exploiting the preponderance of native silkworms. They descended on many indigenous Nama villages, including !Gami‡nun, or (loosely translated) “Celestial Constellation,” which, according to one local legend, the Nama decided to settle because of a rotund stone they discovered there, split exactly in half. This stone—this split sphere—served as an idol of sorts, evidence of the gods’ visitation to earth in the form of doves dragging a ribbon of stars in their mouths, which they smuggled into our universe from one more holy. In the shadow of this stone, the Nama raised their oxen, built huts from whalebone and sedge, and sewed cloaks of penguin skin. For water, they constructed collection pods for dew and fog and the mist. When they were forced from their land by wave after wave of invaders who claimed the Namas’ communal water sources and pastures as their own, legend has it that, upon crossing the Orange River, the dispossessed were infected with a homesickness so profound that they had to turn back for one last glimpse of their homeland, and were (like Orpheus and Lot’s wife) subsequently punished, turned into the tall, thorny, northward-facing plants we today call halfmens, or “half-person.”

  While the Nama engaged in sericulture and silk-weaving, the cochineal—a sessile parasitic insect—was introduced into South Africa to feed on invasive cacti. From this insect, the weavers extracted the brilliant red dye carmine. According to A History of the Materia Medica, carmine was used “externally, ground with Vinegar, for Wounds, especially those in nervous Parts. It is also in great Esteem among the Midwives as a Cordial, and Strengthener for lying-in-Women, and as a Preventer of Abortion.”

  “The Pigeons,” says the Materia Medica, “are very fond of the [cochineal], but they prove hurtful to them; they throw them into a distempered State of Body, in which they void a great Quantity of thin Stools of a Blood red; they also sometimes kill their young ones by feeding them with [it] . . . We know very well that things may be fatal to Birds . . . and yet harmless in Regard to us.” Sericulture in South Africa eventually petered out, reportedly due to a silkworm plague—a cosmic revenge, perhaps, for the damage done to those holy doves in the name of lovely red thread, while all those worms, believed to be extinct, anticipated their revival, faithful moths waiting in the dark for some light to turn on.

  Bartholomew Variation #2

  LIKE SO MANY PIGEONS, BARTHOLOMEW IS BROUGHT INTO THE light, transferred from the lunchbox into the loose folds of Msizi’s overalls. The bird’s eyes adjust quickly, recognize this expanse of muck as the pit mine. From under his tongue, with his good pinky, Msizi picks out the rough diamonds he earlier dug out from the sludge. He packs them into the four little bags he’s fashioned and binds one to each of the bird’s slim feet and one beneath each wing, with ligatures sewn of gemsbok hide. He looks around. The other diggers keep their heads down, their backs bent. If they’ve seen what he’s done, they’re pretending not to notice. They may be hatching similar plans. It’s never good to call attention to oneself here, for any reason, to fall under the scrutiny of the guards.

  Msizi’s head eclipses the sun, and Bartholomew coos softly to him. The child opens his hands and the bird lifts off. Msizi bends to the earth again, resumes his digging. He cannot afford to watch Bartholomew fly, though he would love to.

  From the sky, the mine looks like a terrible network, cogs and gears made of boys and men. Even the gun-toting guards become mere pulleys from this vantage. Somewhere, faraway and faceless, Mr. Lester pulls their strings. Again—such fortune!—they haven’t seen the bird, fixed as they are on the intricate expanse at their feet, the sucking and whirring of this labyrinthine hive.

  Bartholomew flies over columns of hand-dug gravel that line the edges of the pit, and earth-bridges that connect bank to bank. This is coliseum in hell, big business. Beyond the mine, fields of green and orange lichen whirl into the hills—hypnotic patterns of it, a fertile galaxy amid the beige blankness.

  Bartholomew flies above the wall of overburden—the spoiled waste rock, soil, and entire ecosystem, really, that lies above the mine—all 33 million cubic meters of it. At its base, one team of workers exhumes piles of soil from beneath dead lichen, shovels it into rickety wooden troughs lined with mesh sieves. Sometimes, the handles break from their shovels in the effort, and they’re made to continue digging with the blade alone, the edge of it cutting their hands. Msizi has spoken of this. Sometimes, if he has the energy, he tells the bird about his day. His mother and brother never want to hear about it. They’re interested only in the diamonds.

  Below, the sifting crew sifts. The overburden towers above them. The muscles in their forearms jump. Another team takes this sifted rubble and passes it through smaller drum-head-sized sieves, separating the pebbles and, ideally, diamonds, from the oatmeal. Some are shirtless and some wear wet shirts. Some keep their blood inside them, and some bleed.

  The men with the giant guns patrol the property, the mine’s lateral and medial recti, walking the overburden. They orbit, the guns cradled in their arms. The bird holds his sounds within. His body sloshes as he flies hard beyond the mine’s borders, still whole and unshot and full of romance and dyspepsia, if not quite home free.

  Chapter 5

  Riding with the Faceless

  THE OPEN-TOPPED WHITE LAND ROVER PULLS UP IN FRONT OF VESPETTI’S, driven by a friend of a friend of Nico’s, and this seems like a new dream starting, the truck stripped of its shell, filled with four blond white men with identical crew cuts, barrel chests, and boyishly fat faces, all in their mid-thirties. They nod, and I climb in the back, and these men, perhaps because they refuse to be named, quickly lose their individual features, personalities. I remember them as if identical pillars fronting some official building—a post office or a courthouse. As if pancakes, they are faceless, and their voices sound the same—monotone and kazoo-ish.

  One of them says something about a pair of marked terns who landed on the outskirts of Port Nolloth a few years back. The bands around their feet were marked Museum of Zoology: Helsinki, Finland. Apparently, they had flown off course and were trying to find their way back to their flock, rejoin the great migration. A local amateur bird enthusiast (who was suspect in the area due to his contextually subversive enthusiasms) planned to copy the reference numbers from the bands and send them to the museum, so they could further trace the nuances of the migration, but the birds, after having been discovered, were dead by nightfall. It was later rumored that De Beers officials, believing them to be potential friends to smugglers, put a bounty on their black-banded heads.

  The men laugh and touch one another in that slappy way. They are dressed in yellow overalls, their hands on steering wheels or brandy bottles or the
butts of leg-long guns. I sit on the flatbed’s metal bench between two of the overalled men, and I don’t like the way their hips peck at mine. It’s still afternoon and they’re drunk, driving too fast on these forbidden roads, and we’re cocooned in the dust and I’m surprised at how cold I feel. They drink from the bottle and pass it to me in lieu of introducing themselves, and I sip, and their saliva on the bottleneck tastes vile and bubblegummy. They are playing with their guns, taking things apart and fitting things together, filling chambers and blowing things clean. Their knuckles are tomato-red. The driver flattens a patch of dead gladioli and I watch a tortoise lumber over the orange sand toward some new cover.

  The men shout to one another—in English, for my benefit—their voices metallically Kavalierbariton and staticky, struggling to assert themselves over the truck’s engine and the wind, pressed as if through the gaskets and dustcaps of an airport loudspeaker, determined but muffled, imparting some urgent information I can’t quite make out but upon which the status of my flight depends. I try to wake up, but it seems that I am awake, and the fabric of this desert and this Land Rover threading us through it seems metataxonomic.

  Broken oyster shells shoulder the road. A tall man in blue overalls walks into the desert, carrying a wriggling white puppy by its foreleg. The driver shouts something to him that sounds mean, taunting. The tall man doesn’t turn, keeps walking toward the old Angler’s Club, its roof caved in, now a shelter for those who have nowhere else to sleep, their bodies carefully angled on the floor amid rusting kitchen supplies and treble hooks, too-green taxidermied fish mounted on the walls above them, the dust piling up in their aghast mouths. The wind is too loud to tell whether the puppy is making a sound or not.

  The road dips and crests, and at red apogees, the ocean reveals itself like an eyelid in the distance before disappearing again. A seagull stands amid a field of rotten seaweed and mussel shells, hangs its head, coughs like a person.

  We pass a silver trailer desiccating between two dunes. Here, someone once tried to cultivate a row of palm trees, but they have failed, pathetic and scrubby, their overgrown fronds having turned gray and drooped all the way to the sand, taken into the wind like the beards of petrified wizards. A flock of flamingos flies away. One of the men points to a mosquito-shaped helicopter in the distance, says something about how rich poachers rent them to flush herds of gemsbok from Namibia over the border into South Africa so they can shoot them here, where it’s easier to pay off the authorities.

  I’m not sure how these men fit together with the beach toward which we’re driving, and the distant Orange River estuary and its seventy-five species of water birds that one small town council is trying and failing to conserve; I’m not sure what the flagless flagpole at the end of the beach parking lot can tell me about the shards of plastic bags caught on the barbed wire fence, themselves whipping like the emaciated flags of the doomed. I’m not sure how the me on the back of this Land Rover amid these anonymous human canaries gels with the me that is partner to Louisa; how the picture of Louisa in my head (napping beneath the turquoise blanket of yet another desert motel bed) gels with the real her—her real body in that real room with the real pain inside of her.

  The driver parks the truck and the men leap out with their guns, one of them kind enough to offer me a chapped hand. Single file, we walk off onto the beach, the sun reflecting from the ocean turning everything graphite and gauzy, each thing rendered to its silhouette. The beach is huge—the ocean seems unreachable—some Venusian pan striated, some pink-flooded caldera.

  Though not officially sanctioned by De Beers, small anti-pigeon militias, like the one I’m with, still thrive here, kidnapping people’s pets right from their coops on nighttime stealth runs, rounding up lost birds, baiting those misguided enough to roost in the eaves of defunct buildings or build their nests in the crevices of the shipwrecks, and bringing them here, to this spot on the beach hidden in the labyrinth of dunes. These purloined birds are kept in stacked cages. These men are bored. What with nearly every recreational outlet in the small towns along the Diamond Coast having been shuttered, this is what they do, in part, for fun.

  In one cage, I convince myself I spot eggs. They seem less white than other eggs, dismal and matte, just another component in this flock of inverses: the pigeon’s eggs and the sun, the sun and the ocean as a downed sun gone splat.

  Illicit pigeon shoots still take place throughout Europe and the Americas, and at these, sanitary issues are paramount; concerns over the safe disposal of the corpses demand a cleanup crew armed with trash bags and pickup trucks bound for the landfill. Here, there is no such need. This shoot takes place in the land of disposal, this beach long practiced at hastening decomposition and blanketing the remains. In many shoots, there are separate rings, so the marksmen can compete simultaneously; there is a trap operator (oftentimes a boy, the son of one of the shooters) who, from a safe distance, pulls a rope attached to the cage doors, opening them concurrently at the call of “Pull!”; there is a forefield strewn with spent shells, scraps of feather, splinters of beak and blobs of organ, waiting for sunset and the arrival of the cleanup crew.

  Here, things are not so organized. When one of the men opens the cages, the birds look confused, but not frantic. They bob their heads, muster their bearings, and the ocean crashes, and the seaweed stinks. They do not fly away, so used to trusting us, and I know that it is in vain that I root for their safe escape. The men sound as I’d imagine the bedchamber of an orphanage sounding—full of breaths. They put on their shooting hats. Light cigarettes. Call birds as if corner pockets. One of the guys brags about having once shot a rare Eastern bronze-naped pigeon—member of a threatened and protected species, possessor of the most golden hindcollar, amethyst nape, and dusky breast—which was clearly the pet of a fancier and not a diamond smuggler. One of the guys passes me a bottle of Castle beer. Lone strands of beachgrass angle away from the ocean.

  The shooting begins, and it’s softer than I expected, dampened by dune and ocean. Over the pops, the men posture and cheer. They keep saying something-something-American, something-something-American, and are clearly performing for what they believe is my benefit. I don’t know. Maybe it is. Most of the birds are dead, and some are twitching, their beaks wrestling with the air, but no sound is coming out. I wait impatiently for the men to plant their gun butts and bottles in the sand, walk over to them, and wring their necks. They do, and rinse the blood from their hands in the seafoam.

  From the back of the truck, they take jars of beetroot salad from paper bags, and we eat our snack with our fingers, the tips purpling. One of the men talks about keeping a CB radio on his nightstand, by which pigeon spotters communicate their reports. He speaks of working in the conveyor belt business.

  Two dying pigeons, slumped against a dune, turn to each other like lovers on a mattress, and, I swear to God, they make eye contact—their waning ciliary muscles resembling those of reptiles, their four color receptors going crazy, confusing, in the face of imminent death, the ultraviolet spectrum with polarized light, the coming mist with the magnetic fields—and open their beaks to proclaim, I’d like to think, their final expressions of love.

  I listen to these men overuse and misapply the word love (“I’d love another brandy,” etc.), as we all do in order to simultaneously demystify its spell and convince ourselves that we’re under it. Love, love, love, the men say, as they make a beach fire with brush. They bring a pot of seawater to steam and plunge the bird carcasses into it, scalding them, which loosens the attachment of feather to skin. I drink more brandy, and they invite me to help with the plucking. The feathers come easily loose. One of the men stains his jumpsuit as he relieves the pigeons of their heads and feet, makes his scalene incisions along their naked torsos, cleans them of their insides.

  As we skewer their bodies onto bamboo spears and roast them like marshmallows, the mist thickens, and every so often I see a disembodied yellow arm reach through it, the hand filthy wi
th pigeon blood and beach grit, offering me another swig of brandy, which I accept again and again, because it feels good to say, “Yes.” Time and temperature compress. I feel drunk and hungover at the same time. Hot and cold.

  I’m desperate to stylize this whole scene, even as I’m part of it, turn it into some unholy and displaced landscape by Canaletto, that sad, lonely Venetian painter who would set up his easel along the canals in the mid-1700s and work his brushes against the canvas, ignored by passersby. He was ignored by friends and lovers too, spent his life in solitude. Though he was a master at rendering the sky (he favored the most expensive Prussian blue—the first modern synthetic pigment, dependent on ultraviolet rays for what Marie Curie might have called its seemingly “spontaneous luminosity”), he ornamented his skies with Venice’s famed pigeons in only three early paintings (of a lifetime’s total of 585), and then, inexplicably, refused to render them ever again. Here, on this wreck of a beach, it seems, all of those birds missing from those 582 skies have been returned—across century and continent—lifeless as splotches of dyed acrylic and insoluble ferric ferrocyanide. This is only a painting, I tell myself, as if one of Canaletto’s capricci, a fantasy cityscape stretching itself toward believability.

  The men are standing at the border of something, the point at which good dream turns bad. They flavor the meat with shakes of barbecue spice. We eat without plates, and burn our fingers. In eating these pigeons, and in thinking that they are delicious, I can’t help but feel a little blasphemous. Maybe I’m eating a retired smuggler. Maybe, as I teethe on the sail-thin meat that once connected rib to rib, my tongue buzzing with paprika and anti-caking agent, someone’s still waiting for it to come home.