Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Ray went to the door of his office to reassure himself that he was locked in. The curtains were secure across both windows. He returned to his desk.

  He turned on the tensor lamp and again sorted through the contents of the packet Victor had so goddamned recklessly gotten a courier to bring to him, paid a courier to bring to him, a mobashi. Probably that was the dumbest part of a dumb maneuver. The courier had been one of the ragged street children, the bobashi, one of them, a mobashi, than which or whom or whatever nothing could be more conspicuous standing next to the main gate into St. James as the students in their neat uniforms streamed past on their way to first period. And the packet itself had been absurd, an outer mailing envelope overlarge for what it had to contain, and a flat sweets box wrapped in two layers of kraft paper and that parcel tied with string and the knots sealed with crimson candle wax. And Ray’s name was on it in pencil, presumably so it could be erased and the paper reused at some point. His name had been printed on the envelope and the inner parcel, both, in block letters.

  He was calming down. Ray felt a kind of joy, handling the exhibits. Victor had been right to think that they meant something arresting about Davis Morel, although what they meant, exactly, it was difficult to say. They were at the very least suggestive of Ray’s idea that Morel was planning to set himself up as a part-time Antichrist of some kind.

  There were four exhibits. Three were printed cards. Victor had noted on each one that it was a sample taken from a quantity of the same card. There were several hundred of each kind. Ray was relieved that Victor hadn’t gone on to make an exact count, which was the kind of thing he might well have done, for which Ray would have been obliged to praise him a lot.

  The cards were four by six, on heavyish white stock, and professionally printed. Ray supposed that they were for handing out, primarily, although the typeface was large enough to permit display in the privacy of your own catacomb, say on your bedside table, or stuck into your shaving mirror. The cards bore free-thought slogans loosely speaking.

  One read The Creator, A Comedian Whose Audience Is Afraid to Laugh, H. L. Mencken.

  The next read WHAT YOU MUST LEARN ABOVE ALL ELSE IS WHY YOU SAY YES, Der Jasager, Bertolt Brecht.

  The last one was, to Ray, weird. It read SYSTEMS UNEQUAL TO THEIR WASTES ARE EQUAL TO ONE ANOTHER. There was no attribution line. Ray felt that this was probably Morel’s own creation.

  The remaining exhibit was different. It was a listing. It was for display, but probably for personal display, for Morel’s own personal display needs. The listing was, according to Victor’s note, in careful—probably meaning calligraphic—handwriting. Victor hadn’t, thank God, felt free to send the original, so he had recopied it in his own peculiar hand.

  Piacocas, Punaxicas, Quibuquicas, Quimecas, Guapacas, Baurecas, Payconecas, Guarayos, Anaporecas, Bohococas, Tubacicas, Zibacas, Quimomecas, Yurucaricas, Cucicas, Tapacuracas, Paunacacas, Quitemocas, Napecas, Pizocas, Tanipicas, Xuberecas, Parisicas, Xamanucas, Tapuricas, Taos, Bazorocas, Pequicas, Parabacas, Otuques, Ecorabecas, Curacanecas, Batasicas, Meriponecas, Quidabonecas, Cupiecas, Ubisonecas, Zarabecas, Curiminacas, Chamaros, Penoquicas, Boros, Mataucas, Otures, Veripones, Maramoricas, Morotocas, Caypotorades, Guaycurus.

  This is a pure mystery, Ray thought. He read the list again. It related to nothing he could think of. It seemed vaguely Latin American, but that told him nothing. A job, he thought. He was pleased. He locked everything away in the top drawer of his desk. His top drawer locked frontally and also from the left via a special bolt arrangement activated through a side drawer. It was his own arrangement. The top drawer was lined with galvanized iron, which he had fitted himself.

  The mobashi had asked for him by name. The boy, not more than ten years old or so, had been pathetic, with an injured hand in a filthy improvised dressing, a train of scabs along one leg, arms like laths.

  It had been unwise but he had given the boy money, which had prolonged the exchange between them and exposed Ray to more attention than had been necessary. It was certain that Victor had already paid the boy.

  Sending the boy had been an error and being prodigal with him had probably been an error. He had given him a five-pula note and the boy had been stunned. Ray hoped he wouldn’t start hanging around.

  But enough pity and terror for one day, he thought.

  He wanted to know who was responsible for doing something for the bobashi. Someone had to be. It was terrible. There was something wonderful on poverty, in Herrick, but he couldn’t remember the whole thing. There were better quotations Morel could have used. Come to me next time, he thought. What was English Literature for, if not to constitute a midden of thought-gems so acute, so beautiful, so apt … But you needed a guide to get the best ones. On every side of every issue there were gems. He thought, Take Herrick: Poverty the greatest pack: To mortal men, great loads allotted be, but of all packs, no pack like poverty. Marxists don’t even know that it’s there. He should look it up. That also would calm him down, his books, sometimes just touching his books.

  10. Facing Boyle

  Well here I am at the foot of the cross again, Ray thought as he entered the mall at its lower end, from the west. The phrase was a tic he was tired of but that was evidently going to be with him forever. He had once given directions to somebody re how to find the American embassy, describing it as being near the foot of the cross, which was to say that it was at the foot of the cross-shaped layout of large buildings enclosing the pedestrian mall that constituted Gaborone’s semblance of a downtown civic center and embassy row all in one. The mall was in the form of the Latin cross but with the arms three-quarters of the way up the shaft shortened to stubs. The transection of the shaft and the arms constituted the main plaza.

  Today he had to deal with Boyle.

  He proceeded up the shaft of the cross, away from his destination, the American Library annex of the American embassy. He was early, and since he was agitated, he thought that keeping in motion was a good idea and that he would head on up to the plaza, look around, and be back for his appointment in plenty of time.

  He knew something about crosses, now that he came to think of it. During training one of his exercises had been to study, for three minutes, the twenty main historical variants of the cross, and their names. He could probably still put most of the names and shapes together, if not all of them. Some were easy. Lorraine, Greek, Maltese, Tau. Anyway, here I go, he thought: The twenty are … Latin, Calvary, Patriarchal, Papal, Lorraine, Greek, Celtic, Maltese, St. Andrew’s, Tau, Pommée, Botonée, Pattée … Avellan … Moline … Formée, Fourchée … Crosslet, Quadrate … Jerusalem. He supposed he could still match shapes and names. They had been pretty amazed. I perform, he thought. Whether Boyle appreciated his performance was another matter.

  He had twenty minutes.

  Every meeting with Boyle felt urgent. They didn’t know how to approach each other. Boyle liked to be called Chet, not by his whole first name, Chester. Ray couldn’t make himself address Boyle as Chet. His whole being wanted to call Boyle Boyle, but since Boyle was his superior he couldn’t. Boyle called him Finch, however, or occasionally Doctor Finch or Doctor. He had called him Doctor Finch only once. It had been hostile. Ray’s solution to the problem of what to call Boyle was to call him Chief, just once at the onset of each meeting, and then to use You throughout the balance of their meeting. A meeting could be quite long.

  Ray’s mouth got dry just thinking about all this. Chief was a substitute for sir, which was impossible. He could manage Chief probably because Chief contained a slight hint of burlesque, very slight, in fact, almost nonexistent the way he said it, in fact probably nonexistent. Ray suspected that he was being called Finch because he was only contract and not staff.

  Noon was approaching. The sun was intense and he slowed his pace as he passed through the bars of shade cast by the intermittent arcading. The crowds were as usual. Students from the nearby secondaries would be arriving any minute now, bound for the take
aways and the porridge and sweet reed vendors in the central plaza. The crowds were about twenty percent non-Tswana … whites, Indians, Chinese. The Batswana were on the slighter side, physically, which was a fact never mentioned.

  Passing the Notwane Pharmacy, he was reminded of another coup coming out of his training period. This had been another flash memorizing exercise. They had given him two minutes to look into a medicine cabinet and study the contents, a typical medicine cabinet. And he had gotten all the prescription medications right, twenty of them, or fifteen, something he would still be able to do.

  He hated Boyle, but not really. Boyle was new. Boyle was Boyle and not his predecessor, the beloved, to Ray, Marion Resnick, which was Boyle’s fault. Besides, Ray had survived other substandard chiefs of station. Marion had been the kind of person other people spontaneously referred to as a lovely man, which was indicative. Where had Marion gone? It was a peculiarity of his vocation that it would be held against him if he inquired at all searchingly about it. But the fact was that he felt he wanted to know where Marion was, now, in the world. He couldn’t ask Boyle, God knows. Marion was too young for retirement, so he was undoubtedly still out in the field somewhere.

  Ray had reached the paved part of the mall. Like the development process itself writ small, the paving of the mall was a process of improvement that never seemed to get finished. Progress in extending the pavement from the plaza outward was slow and would halt for months at a time while parts of the already paved section were redone. The cement flagstones they were using tended to fracture. But worse was the problem of soil subsidence, which, combined with subterranean ant and termite activity, lent a funhouse aspect to walking on the flagstones as one or another of them would sink or tilt underfoot. Something seemed to find the grouting between the flags delicious, since it was always being sucked down and replaced by little tumuli of red silt. The paving was like The Tower of Babel by Brueghel, where half the edifice, the front and upper half of it, is solid or under construction, and the bottom part of the edifice, toward the rear, is falling into ruin as fast as the top tiers are being completed. The image of the Tower of Babel was fresh in his mind because Morel had a framed reproduction of it in his effects, which Ray had taken note of during his second canvass of Morel’s things, out at Customs.

  To someone like Marion he could have pitched Morel’s taste in art as, in a certain way, a subject of interest. There was a theme. Another framed reproduction was of a blown-up detail from Signorelli’s The End of the World, with Renaissance Italian men in the street staring up at the sky in terror. What was that? There was no feeling that the individual pictures had been chosen one at a time just because Morel liked them, the way he or rather Iris chose their pictures, since that was her province. A true collection of art, the sign of its being a true personal collection, would be that it was motley. Theirs was. Not that they had a collection. They had an assemblage. Iris was very catholic in her taste. She liked Van Eyck. She liked an American landscape painter named John Beerman and had nicely framed a cover reproduction from a catalog of one of his shows, and she tore out anything of his she found reproduced in ARTnews, to which she subscribed. She liked Persian miniatures. They had some on postcards from the Metropolitan and she currently had three of them taped up on the wall above her side of the bed. Iris had stopped buying things for their walls, now that he thought of it. But there was no reason it had to mean anything. There was already a sufficiency of items to worry about. For a while Iris had been interested in the reed baskets produced by the Bushmen or rather Bushwomen in the north, and she had studied the meaning of the symbols in the designs, Tears of the Giraffe, Knees of the Tortoise, Urine Trail of the Bull, and so on woven into baskets. But she’d lost interest, synchronous with the Germans seizing commercial control of basketmaking and stamping all the art and individuality out of the baskets by making the basketweavers stick to the handful of templates the Germans knew would sell best. It was hard to stop thinking of the Germans in Botswana as West Germans. Reunification was still unbelievable to him. Already German external intelligence was getting more active in southern Africa, as befits a country getting back into the saddle as a major power. He knew who three of the main German agents in Botswana were. One claimed to be Dutch. German marketing was hoping to do to Botswana baskets what they had done to soapstone carving in Kenya. He thought, But that’s the way the world wags, long may it wave. The Germans simplify the baskets and more sell and more money comes into the villages hence more mabele and more chibuku so three cheers. Some of my best friends are krauts, or they were, when I could still have friends.

  If he let it, the mall could bring out a certain cultural feeling in him that was fairly standard, to the effect that the mall, the buildings, the technology involved, the infrastructure generally, the whole business was a gift from the white West and that what was being done with this gift was dubious. That was the image. Here was sanitation and technology and the buildings in which people were hanging around in order to get paychecks. All this had been provided to Africans who were only one generation away from herding cattle and chasing witches and going broke raising mealie on patches the size of tennis courts. The question of what was ultimately going to be done with all this by the Batswana was always just under the surface, and the question was kept hot by the steady fixation the Batswana seemed to have on beating back the white tide and getting expatriates down to reasonable numbers preparatory to, some fine day, getting them out en masse. Because as of now the white presence was going up, not down. In the meantime it led to a certain unpleasant amount of Schadenfreude among the representatives of the donor countries and the businesspeople in regard to the Batswana and their shortcomings as clerks and tellers and as functionaries in general. He thought, If the Batswana could understand that in our culture impatience is almost a virtue it might help, and it would help if there could be more jobs, any kind of jobs, almost, because unemployment kills and is humiliating and it won’t stop, or we don’t know how to make it stop—and the Tswana know we don’t.

  The mall hardly represented his idea of the West at its best, so to speak. The mall buildings were standard commercial modern, poured-concrete shoeboxes stood on end, with brick cladding or grooved or fluted or stippled or pebbled plaster facades, all or most of them about the same color as the sand they were built on. Only three or four of the buildings rose to the level of requiring elevators. The British High Commission did, at the head of the cross, and so did the President Hotel, dominating the whole left side of the plaza, looming. And there were three other buildings that did, actually. The mall buildings were less than magnificent. Now he was sounding like an asshole. And the buildings were not wearing well internally. Because people were expected to run up and down five or six flights of stairs routinely, and because doing that rapidly was some kind of fun for a lot of people, there were streams and blotches of handprints and hand grime on the walls of the stairwells at each landing, where people checked themselves on the downward race.

  Nor was there anything magnificent about the street-level shops with their oceanic windows and their displays featuring pinspots, half-scrolled sheets of Mylar, and, in the clothing stores, the new faceless and raceless manikins. They were peculiar. Their heads were like grapes. It was the units of the South African chains that were pioneering them and they were now virtually universal. The heads on the manikins modeling women’s clothes seemed to be slightly narrower than the heads on the manikins modeling menswear. Most of the manikins were beige. Some were gray. Some were clear Lucite.

  All this could be hell for some and not others, he thought. It would be hell standing up all day in a bank and leafing endlessly through carbon copies of unalphabetized deposit slips. He was passing Barclays.

  He felt sorry for the Chinese and Indian bazaars wedged between and fighting and losing against the chains. The bazaars had been there first. They had been all there was, with their bins and racks of merchandise shoved out into the right of way, their helli
sh repetitive reggae ambiences bulging out over the sidewalks as well, and with their supremely incoherent inventories. The one next to the American Library seemed to specialize, as best he could make out, in sandalwood room dividers, sporting goods, chutneys, and marital aids. Boyle hated Sirdar Varieties and Goods and wanted them out, away from the library, so Ray guessed that they were probably doomed. But Ray thought Sirdar Varieties and Goods added color. The owner’s wife was a heavily scented matron who wore her hair swept back except for a fringe of oily fishhook curls across her forehead. Her husband was obese. He was bearded and when his fat cheeks bunched up in a smile it was like seeing cue balls rising out of a sack. Boyle liked or needed to project terribilità off and on. Ray thought that the habit of doing it might have gotten ingrained in Boyle in his last couple of posts, places where heavy events were more standard than here. Boyle had been in Guatemala and liked it, was the story. And he had been in Kinshasa. Boyle would sometimes allude to Kinshasa, but to Guatemala, never.

  He had reached the central plaza, which was about as far as he had time to walk before turning back. In the plaza you were, to a degree, back in village Botswana. A few big cloud trees original to the place had been allowed to remain standing, and under them were tracts of reed mats each one occupied by a vendor presiding over mounds of pigeon peas or groundnuts or pots of fried mopane worms, which he had taken for pots of tiny pretzels the first time he’d seen them. There were vendors selling mealie porridge from washtubs, two vendors today, doing okay. The crowds were thickening. There were beggars around, more these days than before. Some informal system of regulation kept them confined to the forecourt of the main post office and the sinister alleys that pierced the mall rampart at intervals, connecting that mall to the parking strip that ran between the outer face of the mall buildings and the surrounding arterial roads. Beggars in Gaborone weren’t aggressive. They didn’t trail along after their targets or cluster around them the way beggars did in West Africa. They stayed put, looking piteous, which they were, holding out their cupped hands. They were orderly.