May We Be Forgiven

the house in his undershorts and wearing my mother’s bra while my mother chases after him, hitting him again and again with a dish towel saying, “Just fix the air conditioner.”
    I get up and stagger out to find the children. I have no idea how long I’ve been sleeping and am now having a paranoid anxiety attack—thinking they drugged me so they could take the children.
    I find everyone not far from where I left them: Nate on a ladder, working with the villagers to fix a water heater; Ricardo playing with a group of boys; Ashley helping to cook dinner. It is about as wholesome and bucolic as you can imagine.
    “You’re sweating,” Ashley says, and it is then that I see I am drenched in sweat, that during my nap I have soaked through my clothing.
    I nod and retreat without saying anything. I return to the school, to our rooms, and take a shower. Londisizwe finds me there. “How is it going? Has my umuthi begun its work?”
    I nod.
    “Are you okay?”
    I nod again.
    For dinner, everyone else eats a beautiful feast. I am given a bowl of porridge and another cup of tea. This time it is a greener, grassier tea. I drink it quickly and almost immediately throw up.
    “I must have been allergic to something in it,” I say, apologizing to Londisizwe.
    He shakes his head. “That tea makes everyone throw up.”
    I look at him as if to ask, then why would you give it to people to drink?
    “If I told you you’d throw up after drinking the tea, would you have drunk it? In a little while, I will bring you another tea, and I promise it will not make you vomit.”
    After dinner, there are fireworks. Sofia has hired a pyrotechnic team to put on a show. The children’s faces are filled with delight. Even the older people have rarely if ever seen fireworks. Londisizwe brings me a new cup of tea, and this one tastes sweet and pleasant, and I drink it quickly, in part because I am distracted and just want to get on with things.
    Explosions fill the sky. Red peonies, blue rings, golden dome-shaped weeping willows, fire-hot chrysanthemums, spiders, heavy golden glittering Kamuros fire up into the night, like snowflakes, like a bouquet of fine flowers, like gems or shooting stars. I wonder how far away they can be seen, and even though it seems against the grain of the celebration, I wonder what it costs.
    As the fireworks whistle and hum, crackle and bang, my stomach begins to rumble, flatus starring ancient archetypical gases, primitive evolutionary elements—carbon dioxide sulphur, methane, ammonia. Enormous bilious clouds that I imagine are colored blue and green and look like gigantic, unevenly formed iridescent soap bubbles rise up out of me, wobbling, expanding—exploding. Never as scatologically invested as some, I am impressed by what is coming out of me; at one point it feels timed to the fireworks.

    T he show ends with the traditional bright-white salute of fireworks, low to the ground, with an enormously loud report echoing off the hills. As the white smoke billows away, each child is given a fiery-hot sparkler to wave through the air. I watch vigilantly.
    And then there is ice cream—enormous cardboard bins brought from Durban of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, which spent the night on dry ice. There are children here who have never had ice cream before, and again it is just an amazing thing to see children and adults enjoying themselves so much.
    That night when we return to our quarters the children complain they can’t bear to be around me: I smell disgusting. I drag my bed into the hallway of the school and debate going outside, and would except that I am afraid of the dark.
    The next day after breakfast we give out the backpacks and pencils and all the things Sofia ordered as gifts. The children are polite, grateful, trained to curtsy to the white people. They are gentle, a little fragile, as though their right to life is still precarious. One of the boys gives Ricardo a tin truck he’s made out of soda cans; the girls give Ashley a beaded necklace and a small basket; Sakhile gives Nate an old tribal headdress made of animal skin and beads; and then he hands me a small pouch that contains an old piece of rhino horn filled with a magical ingredient that gives warriors invincibility. “It is mixed with animal fat and rubbed into the wrists. It is good for sex, gives dogs a hard-on.”
    “Thank you,” I say.

    L ondisizwe brings me a kit containing the supplies I will need for the next three