Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “The local paper there?”

  “It must’ve been. Ray I didn’t ask about Dimakatso. You know to give her my love. But how is she doing?”

  It was possible it had been in the paper, but he didn’t believe it. And now she was showing regret, showing she wanted to get off the subject and he didn’t like that. He could be wrong. He could be. He wanted to be wrong.

  He had made himself too unhappy to continue.

  “I haven’t eaten,” he said.

  “Well for goodness’ sake go and eat. I’ll talk to you tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Right, and my love to everybody. I love you. Get a name for that baby. I’ll talk to Ellen, one of these calls, tell her.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  He said, “And so, goodnight.”

  21. The Apostles of Reason

  Pony had overproduced, at first. Ray hadn’t been prepared for it and had even run low on replacement cassettes at one point. And then there had been a change. A trajectory was developing in Pony’s attitude that was making Ray uncomfortable and wary. The issue of a chartering letter, which had come up twice, sharply, after Pony had begun this work, was now gone, dropped. And information on the whereabouts of Pony’s debtor, the absconded haulier, very preliminary information at that, had been received perfunctorily. Pony had gone from tense volubility, from presenting Ray with full lists of attendees so that all the voices on the tapes could be identified, to a new mode of dreaminess and diffidence. And when it came to identifying participants Pony had gotten vaguer and vaguer, claiming forgetfulness, claiming not to have been introduced to half the group attending. Nor was Pony pressing for supplementary payments, Ray realized. He had the money for him. Something was up.

  But then something was always up. Even if Pony was planning to exit the assignment, that would be manageable, because he had been so copious to date that Ray was dealing with more material than he’d had time to get decently through, much less decently assess. Critical information had come out of the tapes. Morel was creating two groups, a public group called the Apostles of Reason, and an inner, esoteric group, cadres, whose name Ray had yet to discover. Morel was recruiting cadres, which was why the tape he was going to listen to tonight, for the second time, was worth better attention than he’d been able to give it. It represented a sort of catechism session of a young fellow from Mahalapye, an assistant pharmacist, Themba Kise, someone being groomed to go out and beat the drum for irreligion in the northeast part of the country, a sort of franchise being given to him. Apparently the way it worked was that the most promising contacts, the ones considered eligible for the inner circle of proselytizers, would come and stay with Morel for a residential immersion lasting a week or so, ending in catechism.

  Dark of night galvanized him. It was very late. He was at ease on the sofa, his bare feet up on the vast plain of glass that was their coffee table. The living room blinds were tightly drawn. The odor of charred garlic was heavy in the air, heavy and sweet. That evening he had cooked his third steak dinner of the week. He could get frozen fish tomorrow, hake. The best parts of his thesis had been written in the middle of the night, before he’d met Iris. Now that she was away he was being reminded how much he liked to work at night. Maybe he was regressing in a general way. He had a craving for creamed chipped beef, a dish he hadn’t had since high school, a specialty, if you could call it that, of his mother’s. At night your enemies are asleep, he thought. Working for the agency did provide him with more occasions for solitary late night work than the usual job would. He shouldn’t complain. But marriage and teaching can’t help but nail us to the light of day, he thought. He was happy tonight, he supposed. He put the earphones on.

  He had to bear down on this tape, not let his mind drift. It was important. His periphery was reasonably clear. Iris was all right. It was obviously a piece of luck that her landfall in America had been Florida, which was turning out to be more floridly, so to speak, part of the Bible Belt than either of them had realized. She had reported hearing a young girl’s call to a religious radio talk program. The child had been anxious to know if it was allowed to sleep late in heaven. Ellen had settled on a name for her daughter, Mame. He didn’t care. It had been between Mame and Mitzi. It was good that Wemberg had shifted his hiding place out of the university library and to someplace unknown. That had been a relief to Ray. There was a story around that Wemberg was sleeping rough in the maize fields in Sebele.

  He was ready to begin. Hearing this taped session the first time had brought home to him how little interest he had in changing anyone’s mind on any subject, any important subject. He thought about that a little more. He had been part of a war all his adult life, but he had never felt impelled to try to change the views of any of his opponents, ever. He had tried to trip them up, dismay them, undo them, but the idea of attempting to convert any one of them to his own views was embarrassing to him. So Morel, who was making a passionate vocation out of changing the minds of other adults, was what, a horse of another color altogether.

  Part of the prologue was missing. They were a little way into the catechism. Morel’s voice was without much color. He was tense. His voice was high. He was working to keep himself at the right level for his listeners. He was conforming his speech pattern to what he thought was appropriate for his English-as-a-second-language Batswana audience, speaking more slowly and formally. We all do the same thing, he thought.

  “So, then, what do we say to the question, Who was this man Jesus? We accept that he was real, unlike Moses, he was real, and he walked the earth of ancient Palestine.

  “A Jew. Always a Jew. Up to the end, a Jew. And is there anything about his name that might be mentioned?”

  “I forgot. His name in truth was Jeshua, which is saying in Hebrew that Yahweh is soon to come back. Yahweh the God of the Jews.”

  “So go on with more. How else do we know he was still a Jew?”

  “Rra, because he wore the boxes on his body …”

  “Yes, those are called phylacteries. It’s good to use the correct name if you can remember. And what are phylacteries?”

  “Rra, they are foolish small boxes with Jewish writing on little scraps.”

  “But remember, Themba, we try never to mock … as we go. We describe … And what else shows that this Jesus was a Jew?”

  “He said go to the temple many times if you have done something wrong, and give taxes …”

  “Let me interrupt, rra. The tax, which he agreed all Jews should pay, was one thing. It supported the temple, maintained it. But he also said that Jews should be dutiful and pay the fees for atonement for particular sins. You might purchase a dove to sacrifice, to make up for some wrong you may have done. And of course it would have to be a dove that was perfect, which we are coming to.”

  “Ehe, and he wore earlocks, although we are not sure. Yet we think so.”

  “These earlocks, they are called …?”

  “I forget what.”

  “Just a minor thing. Peyot. They are called peyot.”

  “Peyot, ehe. And fringes to his sleeves.”

  “Good. And they are called …?”

  “Tzitzit.” But he had hesitated over the last syllable.

  “Themba, if you are unsure as to pronouncing a word, a foreign word, it’s best not to try, because there may be someone who will catch you on it to destroy your greater message. But tzitzit is correct. Now, and what is it that is recorded that Jesus said, that shows him to be a faithful Jew?”

  “What he said? As when he taught in synagogues? Synagogue is not the same as temple, it is smaller, but we know he went because it is set down as to his being in synagogue on a Sabbath, at which time a man presented him his withered hand to heal. As well we know he himself paid the temple tax because of a coin found in a fish caught by Peter that was the right amount for both of them. But as to what he said at those times, I am not sure.”

  “No, I wasn’t asking about what he may have said inside the syn
agogue or temple, no. What is it reported he said generally about the Law of Moses?”

  “Ehe, he says he is among them to fulfill the law and that no one must change it by a jot.”

  “Tittle or jot, is the whole phrase. And do you remember he says, ‘I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and to them alone.’ Which is Matthew 15:24. And this is one chapter and verse you will need to remember. The same statement is in Mark. In Mark. Now you remember I said that when you quote scripture you can start just by being sure you have the chapter right, so you might say only Matthew 15. But then as you speak more often, the verse number will come to be fixed in your mind. But there are some statements you will want to have by both chapter and verse. This is one of them, because it shows that even when the followers, later followers of Jesus, were trying to make it seem that his message was for the gentiles across the world, they were forced to admit, because it was so well known even then, that he was speaking purely and solely to the Jews. And do we have some other proofs of this, in his own words?”

  “Ehe.”

  “So … well how else do we know that his message was meant solely for his fellow Jews?”

  “It is because when it comes up to gentiles they are mere dogs or swine, as he calls them. And when he sends his disciples off to carry his message about, he says Oh do not go, please, among the gentiles, and never among the Samaritans. And this is strange because the Samaritans were believers in Moses and his books but not some other books and scriptures. But he said to shun even these people.”

  “Good. Great, Themba.”

  “And once when a Roman soldier asks to have his servant healed and Jesus does so, we believe now that the servant was in fact a Jew. Except for a Syrian woman he called a dog, all the healing and casting out demons were done for Jews, only.”

  “Good. Now, so he was a Jew, and what else would we say about him?”

  “As to his … his lepele …?”

  There was a moment of laughter, and someone said “Ncucu,” and there was more laughter.

  Finally, Morel understood. “Ah lepele—his penis, you mean. Oh you mean his circumcision. Yes, that he was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. That can be mentioned. No, I was asking a different question. When I said he was a Jew, but what else would we say to describe him … Do you see where I’m going?”

  “Nyah, rra.”

  “He was a special kind of Jew …?”

  “Ah. Oh. Ah because he says emunah is everything we must do?”

  “Nonono. Yes, in a way, but that comes later. No. He is a mad Jew, setsenwa, a mad person. We would say he is delusional, a doctor would say. And we have to be very careful when we say this. But why would we have the right to say it?”

  There was no answer given.

  When he was tired of waiting for it, Morel said, “All right, just think about it for a minute. I’ll come back to it. I want to stress something for us. We establish that Jesus was wholly a Jew who is stolen and refashioned by the Christians after his death. But it has to be shown that not only Jesus was stolen from the Jews but everything else, every piece of furniture in the new church. What did the Christians steal from the Jews? Oh … well … angels, devils and demons, the Devil himself—who was in the Jewish belief a character named Mastema who was a, a, forensic officer, a kind of inspector general sent out by God to see how well individual believers were holding up under temptation … Of course, those who failed the test would be condemned to eternal damnation, but it was nothing personal with Mastema. He was an employee of God, a civil servant.

  “What else did the Christians steal from the people they then decided to torment for two thousand years? How about monotheism, or rather, as we talked about, henotheism, which says, okay, there may be more than one God but you only worship the best one. In this case, Yahweh. What else did the Christians steal from the Jews? Well, heaven … hell … eternal torment … virgin birth—except that in the Jewish scriptures the most God did was make barren and over-the-hill women able to conceive miraculously by their very own flesh-and-blood husbands … but it’s close, I think … The Christians improved the idea by making an actual virgin give birth. What else? Baptism, copying the conversion-baptism of the Jews. The Eucharist came from the Passover meal, probably. The resurrection of the body, women as a source of pollution, and sex as a source of pollution. The end of the world and the replacement of all human institutions by a supernatural regime of endless perfection. The Incarnation, the Ascension, the Holy Spirit, except that it was called Sophia by the Jews. The Trinity also comes from the Jews, but it would take too long to explain that right now. The Book of Life. The only thing the Christians contributed to Christianity was priestly celibacy—or so it was thought, until the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light and it turned out that they had some celibate priests, too. Faith healing, also.

  “So you can see that Christianity, so called, is nothing but a heresy of Judaism, a Jewish heresy whose most striking peculiarity is that it commands its followers to hate the Jews! Hate its authors, its inventors! …”

  There was something off about Morel’s intervention. It was like a striptease stuck into an opera …

  He thought he knew what it was. It was Morel showing off, in all likelihood showing off for Kerekang, trying to keep his attention if the catechism was proving to be a little slow for him.

  Here was Morel again. “Before we go back to our question, very important to remember about the beliefs of Jesus is that his brother James, who succeeded Jesus as the head of the group, which was called the Jerusalem Church, was also completely a Jew, always present at the temple in Jerusalem, observant in all ways, he had knees so callused from kneeling and praying that they were compared to the knees of a camel. Yes, James seemed to believe that his brother might return when the messianic age came. But the outcome he expected was the same as what Jesus expected, and that was that the Jews would be the teachers of the world. Under Yahweh. And what they would be teaching was their religion, of course. Judaism. Okay … So. Themba …”

  “Ehe. We are saying now why can we call this man mad?”

  “Good. Right.”

  “It is because of the kingdom, what he was saying as to the Kingdom of God coming definitely very fast, at any time.”

  “That’s right. You can say it like this. Jesus was convinced that in his lifetime he would see God come downstairs and establish a physical kingdom upon the earth. It would be a Jewish kingdom, brought about exclusively by the devotional activity of Jews. All the tribes of Israel would be reassembled and the twelve apostles of Jesus would sit in judgment on them. You remember that the name we gave to his belief that the Kingdom of God was coming almost at once was imminentism? And it, imminentism, is in fact supposed to be the main belief, the basic belief, of Christians, if they understand their own scriptures—and not only of the evangelicals, who are galloping in their numbers in many places in the world, a mighty horde, really.

  “And it is entirely mad to think that at any minute a giant fatherly presence is going to bring history to an end and set up his kingdom. Jesus was mad.”

  “So these evangelical men who say they are born again are becoming born again as Jews, rra. It makes me laugh that they don’t know this,” Themba said.

  “Right, and how do we know that this mad belief in the imminent end was held by Jesus?… aside from the clues given in his statements and acts, which are turned around and softened by certain people today who say there will be no Second Coming, no physical kingdom, because in their view Jesus was catering for a spiritual change only … We call them immanentists, not the same word, the ones who say that the Kingdom of Heaven was already present in the world in Jesus’ time and forever, and that it consisted of human beings acting charitably toward one another, and nothing more supernatural than that.”

  “Em, ah, rra, we say Jesus is mad and expects the end of the world because of what he says and because his teacher John the Baptist tells that this is to come, and Jesus be
comes John’s follower. Yes, and as well, Jesus’ closest followers, Paul and James, say this is to come, the end of the world, ordered by God, is to come—although they disagreed on other items. And next in time to follow Jesus came Mark and Matthew and Luke. And in all they wrote is the belief that the end of time is coming soon, as Jesus said.”

  “Perfect!”

  “Ke itumela, rra.”

  “Now, under this kingdom … no, first, what was the name for all the other people of the world?”

  “The nations. The goyin.”

  “No, goyim, with m at the end.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s nothing. And what did Jesus say would become of these goyim, the nations, when God came down?”

  “They will bend their knees to Yahweh. For some very long time, up to a thousand years whilst being judged. And some people from among the goyim nations would be fine as to entering heaven when there is heaven. You see, there is not yet heaven, at that time, though there is hell. Some must be pushed into hell, even from amongst the Jews.”

  “Who is likely to be cast into hell?”

  “Rra, it is confusing to me, very much. Some we can say with ease will be pushed, such as those who offended Jesus in time past. And if once you have eaten meat with blood, you will be pushed, we can be sure. But as to the gentiles, most of them will find themselves in hell. I can study more as to these rules, rra. These rules of Noah by which some gentiles could pass through into heaven after all the judgment is finished.”

  “No, you are right to be confused, because in the Bible the text is confused. And it is confused because the original question had to do with Jews, first and foremost. And very little thought was given to the gentiles.

  “Now, what else can we say about this age, the age when Yahweh has created his kingdom on earth, the messianic age?”

  “Em, well … still yet we do not see Yahweh ruling, I believe. The Christians began to say that in this time it would be Jesus ruling over the world for God. They were the followers of Paul.