Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Thank you, ensembles, then. So for less complicated ensembles I have another one that works very well, even better. I use it all the time. It’s dynamite.”

  Ray was used to acting as her spare brain, her spare memory. He remembered the titles of books she’d read, and their authors, for example. She had relied on him, deferred to him, when a question of authorship came up, or the question of the title of a movie she could remember the basic plot of, and not much else. He might know who wrote the background music, not that anyone ever plumbed him for that. Amazing things from the tail end of movie credits would stick with him. Directors, he always knew. His remembering one thing or another for her had never been the occasion of any sort of fireworks or notice. It was just that he remembered the passing world better than she did, in more detail than she did, and so what?

  He asked, “So what is the other template you use?”

  “Hm,” was all she said.

  “Oh come on.”

  “I’m having second thoughts, I think.”

  “Now I’m interested. Come on.”

  “Hm,” she said again. She was being coy.

  He said, “To my coy mistress, please tell me.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I use yow.”

  “In what sense?”

  “Yow. I use your body. You naked.”

  “Good God.”

  “If I dress you up, say, and put things in different pockets and so on, it doesn’t have the same power.”

  Eros, he thought … Oh my.

  She said, “I tack different items to different body parts.”

  “My naked body.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this was your own idea, not something the good doctor suggested.”

  “No, my very own.”

  “Using my body as a sort of bulletin board. I guess I’m flattered. And so where on my body would you tack say the most important thing in an ensemble that you wanted to remember?”

  “Try and guess. Where would I put the seminal item?”

  “Shame on you. Ahem. Well. You were going to give me your doctor’s mission statement.”

  “Don’t call it that again, if you don’t mind.

  “It wasn’t something he was eager to talk about. It wasn’t an announcement. And how would you like it if someone was being so bold as to ask you why you were in Africa, you yourself, why? You wouldn’t like it. You’d be taken aback. But of course it’s a legitimate question to ask any non-African who’s hanging around in Africa. It’s just that it doesn’t normally get asked, people are too polite. The answer to the question of why people turn up in Africa is never simple. Look at us. But he was asked, so he answered.”

  “Don’t be defensive.”

  “I’m not. And one other thing, just refer to him as Doctor Morel or just Morel if you can’t stand to call him Davis. You’ve met him now. He introduced himself to you as Davis. I don’t particularly want to hear good doctor or your doctor anymore. So call him Morel, which is probably what he is to you. Call him that. Calling him Morel has a slight touch of hostility to it, which you have toward him, so be up front. It’s fine with me.”

  “Done,” he said.

  “Pointless hostility I might add.”

  Say nothing, he thought.

  “So. What he said. There are three gifts, donations was his actual term, three donations the white world has given Africa, three poisoned gifts that have wrecked or distorted Africa’s own course of development, however that might have come out if Africa had just been left alone a little longer. These are perduring, his word, donations, things persisting long after the physical occupation of Africa ended, persisting long after independence.

  “The three donations are, one, plantation agriculture … two, the nation-state … and three, the Christian religion.

  “There was a parenthesis on slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, which would normally be included among the main poisoned gifts. He leaves it out because, even though it stimulated local slave-trading into something much more monstrous than it already was, it’s over with. And there were even worse sponsors, like the Muslims. The Arabs, that is.

  “This he sort of rushed through. He sees himself in some ways, at least, as a beneficiary of white or Western civilization, an African beneficiary to boot. And he feels an obligation to do something about what the West has done to Africa.”

  Ray contained himself.

  “And he thinks Africa is dying.

  “Obviously nothing can be done about the nation-state system.

  “And nothing can be done about plantation agriculture. And here there was a little exchange with Kerekang, who wanted to know if Davis was including extractive industries, like mining and timbering, in the category of things that nothing can be done about, to which the answer was yes. I would say also that Samuel Kerekang was reserving his position on whether or not something could be done about agriculture, if somehow or other export agriculture couldn’t be supplanted by something else, but he agreed that it was a titanic problem.

  “But something can be done about Christianity, which Davis thinks has had the worst effects of the three. So the major thing he is pledged to do … in addition to his medical work … is to lift the yoke of Christianity from the neck of Africa, help to. I don’t exactly see who he’s going to be helping, since nobody else is doing it that I know of. But that was his formulation.

  “Also, I know from things he’s said at other times, not today, that he probably should have included the standard Western urban diet as another one of the poisoned gifts, and also one of the things he wants to do something about, in a lesser way. But I know what he thinks of the town diet the Batswana are adopting, the Simba chips and the orange Fanta, the grease and sugar way of life, the reduced food palette …”

  Ray said, “It’s funny to think of bush diet as a palette. People desperately scrabbling through the landscape for tubers and insects …”

  “Yes, but you know what he means. In the bush the diet has hundreds of vegetable items that disappear in the town diet. You don’t disagree with this. People move to town and in old age they become obese, they gain mass, instead of getting leaner, which is healthier, and which is the norm in the countryside.”

  “But he didn’t bring that up today, you said.”

  “Right, he didn’t. Anyway, he laid some stress on his deciding to come to Africa and do this work particularly because he’s black, which brought a smile to Kerekang’s face because Davis is pretty light. His mother was white. I think he saw it wasn’t going down especially well, so he dropped it. But he has a perfect right to mention it. His background is Caribbean and everybody who’s black in the Caribbean was once a slave, even if his family somehow did very well in Montserrat and then when they came to the United States.

  “His father was black. It’s an interesting family. His father taught at Harvard Divinity School for many years. Davis refers to him as a Protestant divine. His father also owned the company that produces the prewritten sermons Protestant ministers use when they don’t have time to write their own. It was enormously lucrative, I understand.

  “I knew you’d find this interesting. His mother was an actual Boston Brahmin. Davis was close to her, but not to his father.”

  “I wonder why not.”

  “I don’t know, but this brings me close to the end of what I know about Davis. He trained for the ministry but not for very long. He switched to medicine.”

  “Thus overthrowing his father.”

  “I suppose. And then in medical school he fell in love with a Nigerian exchange student and married her and that didn’t work out …”

  “What went wrong?”

  “There was a divorce.”

  “But over what?”

  “His wife betrayed him, which almost killed him. There was a bitter divorce. There were no children, thank God. So then he finished medical school and went through a process of disillusion with conventional medicine, and he developed his own ideas of what goes o
n in healing …”

  “Eclectic medicine.”

  “Right. And that’s the story up to the present. He had his practice and he met these people from Botswana, government people, and he decided to come here.”

  Ray said, “He tells you everything.”

  “No he doesn’t. He tells me what I get out of him. You know how I am.”

  “Well pardon me if I find this unusual. He could resist your curiosity if he wanted to, great force that it is. I would think. He could draw lines, right? He’s the doctor, you’re the patient.” Contain yourself, he thought.

  “Well one thing he thinks is wrong is the conventional doctor-patient relationship.”

  Great, Ray thought. “But tell me, was his wife unfaithful with a white guy or a black guy, what race, just out of curiosity. Just to fill the picture out.”

  After a silence, she said, “That’s really all I know.”

  “No it isn’t,” he said flatly, surprising himself.

  “That tone. You are so certain sometimes.”

  He said, “You don’t have to answer the question. That’s your prerogative. But don’t deny I’m right, that you do know.”

  “You are uncanny. And you are oppressive. You are … And I don’t lie to you, and you know that. You rely on it. You exploit it. You want me to tell you something you know I’d rather not, and you take unfair advantage of me to get your way.”

  “I don’t deny it,” he said.

  They proceeded in silence. Why was this something she wanted to withhold?

  “I don’t really know this for a fact,” she said. “I didn’t hear it from him. It’s from someone else, so when I said I’d told you all I know, that was actually true. This is a different quality of … of information. It’s gossip. I think his wife left him for a woman. And what her race might be I have no idea.”

  Now he knew what her impulse had been. She had been trying to protect Morel’s image. It was humiliating to lose your wife to a woman. She hadn’t wanted him to know. He didn’t like it. Why should she be protecting Morel’s image? What was it to her?

  “God,” he said. “No wonder he wants to overthrow Western civilization.”

  “Don’t trivialize. Nobody said he wants to overthrow Western civilization. Anyway, what’s the connection?”

  “Well. I can’t think of much, offhand, that would more completely unhorse me and make me want to pull down everything within reach. I guess I’m speaking for myself, but I’d sure want to do something about my fate. I can get with that. Western civilization is our fate. So. Ergo. Look, you have at least two betrayals going on at once. You’re betrayed as a person, and your gender is being betrayed … and then add to the picture that your wife is Nigerian, you’re being betrayed by an African. That makes it worse, somehow. So you think that something cosmic has to be wrong with the world that’s doing this to you. So …”

  “Listen, do you want to hear what else I have to report about the day’s events? Because there is a bit more. Or do you want to keep on psychologizing, something I thought you hated, by the way.”

  He couldn’t quite let it go. “I do want to hear, but don’t tell me psychologizing isn’t in order now and then. If something like this happened to me, I … well … I might very well decide to do something … amazing … instead of slitting my wrists right away.”

  She sighed hugely.

  “I’m sorry I told you.”

  “Iris, don’t be. It’s interesting. In a way it’s no crazier or more Promethean or whathaveyou than any other kind of missionary activity over here. It’s just a new annex on a familiar edifice, isn’t it? But it is interesting.”

  “I don’t know how much of this is just talk, Ray. It’s his medical work that’s really important. I think.”

  “Okay, so what else was said? And who was the audience?”

  “Those children, myself, your friend the engineer, Kerekang. Toward the end there were other people coming over who wanted to exchange pleasantries with Davis. He has a following. Patients and people who’ve heard about him.”

  “Now this is after his mission statement?”

  “You’re getting the wrong picture. This wasn’t something he declaimed, some grandiose statement he was just waiting to unveil. You could tell he knew it was going to sound grandiose. And it was said more or less man to man, to your friend. I happened to be there. He wasn’t being portentous in any way. Okay, I would even say there was some irony in the way he said it, although at that point I was pretty much in an eavesdropping position. My point is that it wasn’t something being declared for the benefit of one and all, and certainly not for my benefit. What I think happened is that your friend …”

  “Stop calling him my friend. I don’t know this man Kerekang.”

  “Well, but you seem to like him. So do I …”

  “And I don’t keep referring to him as your friend, do I?”

  “No, but you obviously like him. So did Davis. He’s very appealing. You approve of him.”

  “Well let’s call him Kerekang, for simplicity. I call your doctor by his last name and you and I call Kerekang by his last name. Or for even greater simplicity we could both refer to your doctor by his last name. No? Jesus, what is this? Everything is getting in the way.”

  “I know, and it’s not coming from me. Anyway.

  “Anyway, they went back and forth about Christianity for a while. I think Davis was trying to feel Kerekang out on the subject, find out where he stood. They were sizing each other up. It was fun to watch.

  “I’m now, for this discussion, in a different memory palace, by the way.

  “Kerekang seemed to be taking the position that even though Christianity wasn’t exactly true, Africans had some things to be grateful to certain Christians for. And he mentioned how Livingstone and Moffat had run guns to the Batswana so they could repel the Boers. And in a more general way he was saying that he didn’t see that it was so terrible for people to have in their minds a model of someone unfailingly kind, acting kindly. And then the discussion got a little miscellaneous on his part and he alluded to the role Christians had played in getting cab horses treated decently in London in the nineteenth century and also to the part they played in stopping the gladiatorial games, although I had the sense that Davis had some alternate explanation for that that he couldn’t quite lay his hands on, or didn’t, anyway. And then Kerekang went on to the work of Christians in ending the slave trade, although he did say that Christians had participated in it and profited from it from the beginning. And Kerekang also admitted that Christians in Europe had basically forced the Jews into being slave traders during the Middle Ages by making it one of the few trades Jews were allowed to engage in.

  “So then Davis wanted him not to rely on single instances, but to look at the larger effects of the doctrine in Africa, and not to look at this or that good act by white Christians here and there in Africa. He wanted him to focus on what Christianity had done to Africans, to the African minds it had penetrated and was still penetrating. Wait a minute.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “Okay, then Davis gave as an example what Christianity had done to homosexuality in Africa, making the point that universally there was no stigma attached to being homosexual within the traditional cultures, but that Christianity had brought persecution of homosexuality with it, introduced it where it hadn’t been. Kerekang took this for a good point.”

  The flagpoles of the Gaborone Sun were coming into view.

  “Then, and this was very sotto voce between them, they talked about abortion and how all the churches were united against legalization, which is true. And then they came to AIDS.

  “Davis is passionate about it. He hears things through the medical grapevine that other people don’t know. In the morgues in Zimbabwe they are stacking the AIDS corpses three to a tray, for example. The Catholics are against condoms and the Protestant churches are barely in favor of them and the independent African churches are bastions of insane folklore
remedies for AIDS, which is galloping unbelievably. He thinks seropositivity is almost twenty percent here.

  “Then Kerekang tried to take a sort of evolutionary position. This was that people would progress from animism and local gods to monotheism, the monotheisms, and then to Deism and finally out into post-religion. We would all someday be like Sweden, where nobody believed anything having to do with religion anymore. He’s visited Sweden. But Davis was absolute against that view, saying that it’s the liberal denominations that are declining into unimportance and the fundamentalist branches of religion that are gaining strength. And he wanted Kerekang to admit that this was especially true in Africa, which Kerekang did admit. Davis said Kerekang was a religious Menshevik, thinking that religion was going to turn into secularism the way the Mensheviks thought capitalism was going to evolve itself into socialism. For some reason this was a big hit with Kerekang. He has a wonderful laugh. How am I doing as a rapporteur?”

  “You’re astonishing me.”

  She was very pleased. He loved this flushed, sturdy creature. All this was for him, all this effort.

  She said, “Then … what?… I think a reprise of the question of white Christians doing good things, which Kerekang couldn’t quite escape from, ending up in this exchange … Kerekang saying Some people come to Africa to help us very much. Davis saying So did I. Kerekang saying They came to build things up. Davis saying Like me. Kerekang saying They came to create things. Davis saying Yes and the things they came to build are falling on the heads of Africans all around us.

  “And then I believe this is the end of it. And I learned something I didn’t know. Davis pointed out that Kerekang, who’s a Xhosa, should appreciate that Christianity was behind the destruction of his people. In this way. In 1856 a prophetess ordered them to slaughter their entire national herd, half a million cattle, as a sacrifice, which they did and which impoverished them, it ruined them, it’s so horrible. The prophetess …”

  “Nongqawuse.”

  “You see, you know everything.”

  “Not quite, babe.”

  “But that’s really impressive.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s one of the main events in the history of the region. The Xhosas who settled here in Botswana came north after the cattle massacre. There’s a big settlement near Mahalapye, which is where Kerekang comes from, if my guess is correct.”