Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “We have no argument, my babe. You’ll go. Of course.”

  “You’re not enthusiastic. I wish you were. I need you to be.”

  He could see she meant it. She was distressed about something he’d just done, or about the call. She turned away rather abruptly and left him, heading toward her study. He assumed she wanted more enthusiasm about their separation. He started to follow her but decided against it and waited. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to see the footage. He was tempted, but it wouldn’t be right. It would wreck the night. There was a chance, a minute chance, that this might give him something that would satisfy Boyle that Kerekang was nothing to them. And that might untie his hands for the question of Morel.

  Iris was back, bearing a clutch of photographs, papers, and index cards.

  “May I just show you a few things from Ellen to win your heart, Ray? I’m after your heart. I need you to want me to be with my sister. This is the last thing I’ll bother you with on the subject, I promise.”

  He couldn’t go out, which was what he wanted to do, and he didn’t want to go through the pictures, the miscellany she was bringing to him, because he was tired and because it was supernumerary, and because in effect he had already agreed she could go to the States, that she should go. She had won, and this was a way of gilding the lily of his defeat, it felt like to him.

  He said, “Suppose we do this at breakfast instead? I’m tired. I’m flagging. I’ll get us up in time to go through your things. We won’t have to rush. That’s a promise.”

  She seemed to Ray to be flattered that he was so unhappy at the prospect of being left alone in Africa. She acceded graciously to the postponement, but then she was always gracious.

  Later when he couldn’t sleep, he decided that breakfast would be the wrong time too. She had a pile of things to get through and he was agitated about the Kerekang tape, which he could handily secure and review before noon, thus getting it off his back. Then at lunch he could be himself. So now it had to be lunch.

  13. A Personal Ritual

  Ray felt triumphal over what the footage had given him. But it was subtle and he had to formulate the meaning of the captured images, the ritual, so that Boyle would grasp it. What they had was Kerekang performing a personal ritual. What he had would be the capstone of a Profile, a Life, if he were still writing them. That day could come again. At moments like this it was a curse not to be able to discuss something like how to present this to Boyle, how to phrase it with Iris. She was subtle.

  Lunch was a leftover pork chop with applesauce, brown rice, and fresh peas. Iris had laughed at him when he had shown himself dutifully prepared to eat with a fork the roast garlic puree served to him in a ramekin. It was a garnish, not a dish in itself. He knew that. They had had it before. He had forgotten.

  Iris said, “I think what happened is that Ellen fell in love with this darling child of her next-door neighbors in the condo. She’s very precocious. An only child. Ellen’s downfall was baby-sitting for this child, Catherine.”

  Iris dealt out three Polaroid photographs of Catherine.

  “Completely adorable,” Ray said.

  “She is. Everyone is always suggesting she should be taken to a modeling agency, hideously enough.

  “So in any case Ellen decided that Catherine was indeed adorable, and not only physically. Ellen began writing down her little bons mots. At first she just included them strewn throughout her letters and then later she began printing them sort of calligraphically on these index cards, which I now have a small archive of. The child is barely four.”

  Ray pulled the stack of cards toward him. Was sampling enough? Probably not.

  “Are these in chronological order?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I’ve kept them in order, actually. They’re from when Catherine was two or three. Some Ellen wrote up after the fact, from stories Catherine’s mother and father told. The order doesn’t matter.”

  Ray browsed. Some cards recorded brief anecdotes. Others seemed to record examples of a precocious ability to classify things.

  Catherine was given an Etch A Sketch for her third birthday. She produced two jagged parallel lines right off the bat and said “I have drawn a crevasse.”

  Of course you cannot drink bathwater, it is not a beverage.

  Catherine’s parents note Catherine’s fixated gaze at a passing wheelchair, the first she’d ever seen, in which was seated a visibly spastic child about her own age. As the wheelchair drew abreast of them, Catherine said, “Interesting chair!” Then she said, “I feel sorry for ghosts. If I ever saw one, I wouldn’t be afraid. I would try to comfort it.”

  Iris said, “They’re not complicated. And you don’t have to memorize them, either. And you don’t have to read all of them. Give them to me and I’ll try to pull out the best ones.”

  He returned about half of the pack to her, but continued his own browsing.

  It was friendlier to read them aloud.

  “I like this.

  “Catherine went to the zoo. She said of the elephants, ‘They have no knuckles.’ Later, when her parents said to Catherine that it was time to go to bed, Catherine said, ‘Unfortunately, I don’t want to.’ ”

  Iris said, “Listen to this. These.

  “Her mother wanted Catherine to wear her Birkenstock sandals but Catherine preferred to wear her sneakers. She pointed to the sandals and said, ‘I won’t be nimble in those.’ ”

  Iris was looking dreamy to him. This exercise was depressing her, he could tell. It was involuntary. He was sorry.

  She said, “This is the last one. I guess it’s very recent. It’s a poem Catherine wrote.

  “Two people were walking down the road

  They saw two insects down below

  One was a flea

  And one was a bee

  And the flea was wearing clothes.”

  Iris was very inward now. Mechanically, she squared up the packet of cards.

  He tried to be brisk. “Well you can see what happened here. Of course you have to go to be with her. It’s fine with me, Iris, it really is.”

  Iris said, “I should mention two other things about this. She thinks the mother is much too cavalier about this child. For example, the parents make no effort to get these gems written down. You know how precious these things are when your child gets older. I mean, we can imagine it. So she began writing these bits and pieces down and then, as a gesture, gave them to the child’s mother, who was, I gather, put off by it, basically. I guess she felt criticized. So Ellen sees her own qualities as a mother going to waste, and the rest is history. The other thing is that she thinks the father is evil because, when they were having terrible trouble with Catherine over her bedtime, he proposed the idea of having her hypnotized and giving her a posthypnotic suggestion that it was time to go to sleep. They’d snap their fingers and she’d go off. I’m sure it was completely in jest, but Ellen can’t stand him now. So there you have another thing that might incline her to leave the father out of it. There’s much more of Catherine in the letters.”

  Sadness will kill you, he thought. He got up. He had to find time to rehearse what he was going to say to Boyle. He thought, It could go like this, we have three weeks of taping at Kerekang’s place, we covered two rooms, bedroom and kitchen, the only two places he could use for meetings, and we did both sampling mode and straight coverage of six through twelve every night … now this was all during the time you were convinced he was having meetings there twice a week, at least … we know from our other sources when he got home each day, all during this time, and there are no meetings going on … But what is going on?… He has one thing that he does before bed without fail every night, which is what?… He goes up to his bookshelf and touches his books and then he turns the light off and goes to bed early, and what books does he go up and touch?… Not Das Kapital, nothing by Trotsky, no, he goes up and touches his Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson, Cambridge Edition, and his little Everyman Palgrave … He sleeps
in his underwear … There is nothing for us here.

  “What if I like it better there when I go back?” Iris asked softly.

  He was startled.

  “You won’t, my girl,” he said, and thought, She can’t.

  He walked around the table to stand near her. He put his hands on her shoulders. Down, misery! he thought.

  14. You’re a Better Man Than I Am, Kerekang, So Bravo, That’s All

  Why was this so sudden and urgent?” Iris wanted to know.

  She and Ray were walking, at a good pace, to the embassy residence. They were hurrying because the invitation had come late and without much warning.

  “You are verging on running, Ray. And it’s too hot to run. And it’s Sunday, it feels odd to be sprinting down the road on Sunday.

  “And why is this a command performance anyway? Why is the ambassador suddenly back from Wankie after just leaving to go there, and why all these reminders about dressing appropriately for a memorial service? They emphasized it when they called the second time on the radiophone. Was that meant for me? Do I go around like a gypsy? What is all this pressure about? I know how to dress for a memorial service. I’m not an idiot.”

  Ray said, “All I can tell you is this,” thinking in passing that here was a good title going to waste. A lot of good titles were going to waste …

  “Will you complete your thought, please,” she said.

  “All I know is that this is an emergency event and what the premise for it is. Walk faster. What I know is that the embassy has a problem. You know about Dwight Wemberg’s wife being killed last week, the accident. You didn’t know Dwight. He’s an older man and he was just coming to the end of his AID contract at the agricultural college when his wife was killed. They lived in Sebele, on the grounds of the college, and they never came into town much. Go faster. They stayed out in Sebele and were apparently pretty happy there. They got along with the locals. I should say that he wasn’t around Gabs that much, but Alice was. She was a volunteer with a church group that works with the bobashi, I think. She was rather a saintly person, one gathers.”

  “I know who she was.”

  “Part of the problem is the way she died. She was stopped well over on the shoulder on the Lobatse Road and she got out of her car and a CTO truck swerved over to avoid something and killed her, smashed her to death while she was locking the car door. And then the Ministry of Transport mishandled it. The driver was taken into custody and let go without being tested for alcohol. And then there was the statement saying it’s always better to get out on the side away from traffic, which is implicitly blaming her, of course. There were many stories about what the CTO driver was prudently trying to swerve away from.

  “So anyway, Dwight was out in the bush, way out, at a project the college has in Hukuntsi. Melon cultivation. He was out of reach, out of touch for three days, doing his job. The rest you know. He comes back hysterical and discovers that they’ve buried her. There were no bad motives involved. I know she was very messed up. But somebody wasn’t thinking ahead and didn’t inquire into the law here, which says you have forty-eight hours to get a body out of the country, forty-eight hours only, after which the body has to be interred. Which leads to the rub. Which is that once the body is buried you can’t get it exhumed unless you go through an impossible bureaucratic procedure that can take you years. He wants to take his wife’s body home. The government won’t make an exception. He’s griefstricken and enraged at the same time and he’s made a number of scenes at various government offices, trying to get them to let him have the body, Alice’s body. He’s insulted certain senior people directly to their respective faces, which you cannot do. So it’s a tremendous mess and to top it off his contract is up and he’s going to be out of a job. He has his passport and his visa is good for another year. The embassy wants him to go home and let them handle the exhumation application for him but he doesn’t trust them. He’s off the deep end. He doesn’t trust the embassy and he’s right. He may not know something else that’s relevant, which is that right now our relationship with the Ministry of Health, which controls the exhumation, is shall we say negative, for other reasons altogether. But that’s another story. Or maybe Dwight does know something about this, now that I think of it.”

  “How terrible this is. And he’s not young.”

  “So, anyway, the event. It’s not exactly a memorial service. I think they’re calling it a remembrance. I knew they were going to do something, but they hadn’t decided anything the last I heard. This event is a psychological operation to convince Dwight to go home. You hear them talking about closure. It’s supposed to produce closure and get him the hell on the plane.”

  “I wonder if I should’ve worn black. I don’t think so. I think this is fine.” She was wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress with a full pleated skirt. She had tried and rejected several sun hats as not right. Over her shoulders she wore a white lace shawl, rather sprung in places. She had a number of tortoiseshell clips in her hair.

  “Everything black I have is in the party category. I think this is all right.” She had very little interest in clothes, which he loved in her. He was wearing one of the few safari kits he owned that had full-length pants, a rust-colored outfit he hated.

  She was wearing half-heels, which she was unused to. They were now almost jogging. Somehow her sunglasses hopped off her face and he was able to catch them as they fell.

  “Are we a team?” he asked her.

  “We are,” she said. “A track team.”

  They had reached the residence compound. They could slow up. There was a backup of stragglers ahead of them at the gate.

  Iris said, “I put too much sunblock on. My face is slippery. These things happen when I’m pressed. I never want to be rushed like this again. I turn into a fool.”

  “You never do,” he said.

  They got seats in the next to last row of chairs protected from the sun by the canopy erected over the ceremonial area on the side lawn.

  “This is an outpouring,” Ray whispered to Iris. “The idea was to get everyone so that Dwight can see how seriously his situation is being taken. They have shaken the sack. There’s a buffet after.” Even the seats behind them that were exposed to the sun were filling up.

  Ray sat back. He liked the moment. There was nothing for him to do until this was over, in fact nothing he could do while they were there, waiting for the event to begin and end. Probably he would have liked being a commuter, if he liked this.

  He counted the crowd. He estimated two hundred and ten, so far. There were tricks to crowd-counting. He would say that the attendance was about fifty-fifty black and white, which was excellent. The overflow crowd of standees was irregularly distributed among the gum trees and silver oaks lining the compound wall, wherever there was a chance of shade.

  Last-minute improvisations were under way. The podium needed to be moved forward so that the speakers would be in shade as well as the listeners, so the first two rows were being emptied, chairs were being taken away, and a complex process of negotiated reseating had begun. They themselves were not going to be affected, so it was interesting to watch the negotiations. He could see Maeve, the ambassador’s wife, showing distress about the lawn, which was not robust in the best of times and which was taking a beating today. Iris had taken to referring to the lawns in their neighborhood as brownswards.

  Almost all of the final arrivals were Batswana. Almost all the people who had gotten seats in the shade were white and almost all the standees were black. That hardly looked good. There were no more than nine or ten Batswana in the seated crowd, not enough.

  He turned around to see if it was really as bad as he thought. It was. The news photographs of the event would be strange, showing black people standing back in flowerbeds, the glass shards set into the top of the wall behind them glittering in the sun. The grounds here were in worse shape than his. The empty swimming pool was carpeted with dead oak leaves. There should be a photographer, or at
least someone on staff detailed to take pictures for Dwight, as part of the operation, something for poor Dwight to take away with him. I should have been an ambassador, he thought.

  The ambassador hadn’t appeared among them yet. Ray thought, You become an ambassador and you think Great, and then they send you to a place like this, a desert …

  They waited. Iris took his hand. He closed his eyes. I envy no one, he thought.

  “My hips are out of control,” Iris murmured.

  “I certainly hope so,” he said lewdly. He knew what it was. She was noticing someone whose hips were too big. Lately she would ask him if she resembled overweight women her age that they passed in the street, asking if her upper arms were as far gone, if her waist was as thick.

  He looked to see who it was she was comparing herself to. She was fixing on the DCM’s secretary in the row ahead.

  “Not even close,” he whispered to Iris. “You’re a ridiculous woman.”

  “You see nothing, you know nothing, and you lie,” Iris said.

  “If you say so.” He closed his eyes again. But I see everything, he thought, I am a camera … The worst image for a life has to be the one bad poets love the most, a candle, burning for what? giving off light for what?… There is no image for life. Life is a sexually transmitted disease, according to my brother. That aphorism had made Rex a bit well known, briefly. People used it. It would get into anthologies of bright sayings.

  Iris nudged him. “Open your eyes. It doesn’t look good to seize this opportunity for a nap.”

  Programs were being distributed. One reached them.

  “There’s going to be music,” Iris said.

  “Oh yes. Of sorts. They were trying to get hold of a woman in Molepolole who plays the zither, a Peace Corps volunteer. And there’s a choir group from the Anglicans. They probably have something on tape, too. The big speakers are hooked up over there.”