Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “And this man from God says we must not fall into fighting and we must love our neighbors.

  “And so forth, rra, and so forth. This man says to be merciful, and says you are most blessed if you seek after justice.

  “You can see how I am differing, rra.”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “And so this same man, you can find him at table with the poor …”

  “Wait wait wait. Okay, just to be accurate, it’s not specifically the poor he seeks out to have meals with. No, it was with tax collectors, who were in fact agents of the Roman state, whose hospitality he accepted. There is no evidence in scripture that he ever sought out the poor to eat with! He fixed them up with loaves and fishes, miracle meals, when they came out to hear him and dinnertime came. A small point. I don’t mean to interrupt. I want you to object. We are going to get a lot of objection.”

  “So but let me go on, rra. Right, he was eating with sinners at the table. Right. So the people can say this man is pushing no one to the side if they will only listen to his message. And you have said this man was making an experiment in mass psychology, and that it failed. But how can you say it failed, rra, with so many Christians abounding? The experiment produced the kindly ditlhamane, did it not?

  “And in these ditlhamane, which, okay, say we know them to be untrue, we have been told Jesus is going forth and healing without charge, healing the sick like a nyanga. But he asks nothing for this service.

  “Go to the dingaka in Broadhurst and Bontleng and see if you must pay them. It is the way it is. You yourself, if I may dare to say this, you do not give your injections without charge …”

  Morel was aggrieved. “Ah but I do. I do. So much of my practice here is charitable, my brother. In fact you know this.”

  “For the most part, is what I am saying. Look, man, I am your friend. I am not criticizing. It is the way it must be done. If you go to hospital, in many cases you must take your own food. And you as a doctor must replenish when your stocks of medication are low, and you must pay out sums for that. Gosiame.

  “And so in the ditlhamane, this man Jesus says that he knows the heart of God and God wishes the Batswana to live in peace and be kind to enemies, which if I may say, our great Botswana Defence Force, they are very Christian when it comes to the Boers pushing over into our country and killing and killing. But I am just joking about it. They are turning the other cheek. Nah, I am joking.

  “Nah, I think I am saying that in these tales you see this man Jesus never to be surcharging for any act of his—although it is true you can take him to dinner at times!

  “So … this man says there is a God who is watching you and wants you to be kind, be pleasant all round, stay from the courts and judges, give with your left hand and right to the beggars and if someone asks can you lend me something you should agree. In fact, you must forget that you have made such a loan. You must give him your coat, in fact.

  “And when you marry, remain with your wife.

  “So, right. So these stories are saying to behave in these ways and if you fail you are going to burn up in hell.

  “And so we see this man … but I forgot about the children. He says to bless them. Which is very good for Batswana to be told. Because we are working these children all day, making them fetch like dogs and sending them off to watch cattle, whatever we wish.

  “Ehe, and I forgot as well about adultery. This is also good advice for the Batswana, else these sex games in the schools will go on and on with more young girls falling pregnant as they do now every year in every school. It is true here in the capital and it is worse in Mahalapye. So there is not just one tribe to blame. And the fathers of these babies, who are they? Teachers, often enough, or men who just come creeping …

  “So if we could do one tenth of what Jesus is saying, Botswana would be a very much better country. And …”

  “Okay I think your point is made, Keregang. And I would like to answer it, if I may.” Morel was being curt.

  “I must finish, rra. Because I know these are thoughts that many are having amongst those who are here tonight and who love you, as I do, as you know.

  “And yes, he says, Jesus, if you give to charity, do so privately not making a show, which, I point out, is how you do it, so you must be a Christian of some kind. No, I am fooling. But at these fêtes and benefit doings it is very different, with great displays as to who is most generous. But I was fooling, rra. You are no Christian.

  “So. And don’t lay up gold. Take the log from your eye. Beware false prophets. So that is the man, ecce homo, as they put it. That is the man in the tale.

  “And so the story comes to its end … And what is its end?

  “Domkrag hates him and puts him on a cross to die in pain. Rome is Domkrag.

  “So Domkrag kills this man who is the friend of the poor people.

  “Sha!”

  Ray knew what Kerekang was doing. Sha was a strong expression, meaning shame, and it was accompanied by a sharp wagging of the right hand.

  “Sha! But … But he rises from the cross, this man, and is not dead, he is seen rising up, walking about, you can see his wounds, you can put your hand in his right side to test if this is the man. So he rises to be with God … and what does he leave the Batswana?

  “I can tell you that many of them will say this man is still hereabout, like a mist, or the wind. And he has left his words of what you must do and it is this … it is this, rra …

  “That you must try to please God by good action and kindness. In the church they will help you to be like God’s son.

  “So, and now are some people arriving who say all this is mere lies, and very mistaken.

  “But I am saying to you, wait, sir. Sir, wait.

  “Because if you will admit they are making a hell in Botswana for the poor, the ones without cattle or with cattle but no borehole, if you wish to admit this, why shall you cast off these stories that can help us to gather up these poor, these selahtliwa, these outcasts, and make them an army against this hell? Hell is amongst us tonight, nearby to this house, in Old Naledi and Bontleng, and in the bush we can walk into hell, straight into it, like that. Where I stay is hell, in Bontleng. I want to extinguish this hell, my friend. I shall do it. I tell you so tonight.

  “Now soon I will be finished … Rra … Rra, these tales are with us already, here. They are in the minds of the people and they are as stones, hard things, and you are facing a battle to unearth them. You can see it when the people flood in rivers to the stadium to pray to God and Christ Jesus for rain. You may wish to look aside from this. You may say they are wasting their time, to do so. But I say you will be wasting your time if you oppose it, and wasting more, it may be. Because rra, even as I tell you the tales about Jesus, I feel in my heart that if such a man could join us, we could carry the day.

  “Because. Because if we are to clear this hell that we have made with the help of the makhoa, all the people must come with us. We must have every man! We must have men of every kind, from those who are wise, very wise, like yourself, because you do oppose this hell, down to the fools if need be. Every man! We must have the women, too. And we must have these people as they are, believing these tales or not.

  “Rra, I say these tales of Jesus can help us. Think of Germany, the Peasant Wars, and the destruction of the princes. And you can go to Aiyetoro, in Nigeria, and see many people living and working as one, with no one rich, and they are all Christian, there, at Aiyetoro.

  “Rra, this is what I must say … I have said it …

  “What I say is, let everyone come who will, to join hands to cast hell from us. I will take every Christian, I will take all good people. But I will take bad people, devils, too, if I can find them and I can tell them a story to make them stay alongside me. My friend, you are casting down a sword before you go to battle.

  “And am I sorry to be saying these things to you. I have learned many things here, coming to these teas and evenings of yours, and I have got from you
reading I shall keep by me always, and I shall think of you. I have books enough and lists of books enough to keep my eyes open until I die. E. P. Sanders, Mr. Vermes. Robert Ingersoll, great thinker. I like him. And this fine book The Ghost Dance that shows the foolishness of man so truly you must choose whether to weep or laugh. I am reading it now.

  “Rra, for a long time I have wished to say this to you, that I thank you. You have fed me. So I am saying all this now because I will be going away at some time, I think soon. Yes. But I want to say something to clear my heart. It is a small thing.

  “I know what you say about the Roman church very well and it is true. But I held myself from saying what I think, at times. So, rra … I think it is very good to have saints. I like it. Perhaps not those saints they recommend. But to raise up some one or two people or more, singled out to be praised for a good life, for honor, is a thing I like. I think we should have saints of our own kind, when the world is more what it should be. I cannot bring my heart against this church, as you would say I must. And as well I think we must see this church as very clever, not only for saints but for saying they can take so many homosexualists and have them work to build the church and since they have no heirs their work will benefit the church alone. And this is a point, that the church is not saying see how in the Bible it says you are evil, get away from this place, oh my no. No, it says abide here, and do not express yourself toward boys, and all will be well. And they have benefited greatly from homosexualism, a thing their scriptures tell them to hate and abjure.

  “So this is what I wish to say to you. I know your heart, my brother.

  “Your heart is for a world far better than this one, of course. We are brothers. Your heart is for a world where every mind is set free. And your heart is for what minds set free at last might do together, with all these … these chains and curbs and dodges struck away. You see in your heart a world made by minds standing straight up at all times, where in past times most were stooping or trammeled down. You see a beautiful place, differing in all ways to this place.

  “Ehe, yes, perhaps such can be … when we have done away with all this that you see, begging of children, this suffering whilst the rich are opening their hands the wider to clutch more and more of this country. Soon they will have all the cattle, and the villages will be roofless places, and then sand and dust. And there will be even more of the poor than at present pushing in from those villages to fill up Old Naledi until it is a solid ring of suffering around us. And … sha! Yes, it is a shame, what you see about you here, but in Sehitwa, in Shorobe, you can see worse. Come with me once to Shorobe. Well, I have said everything.”

  The silence that followed was difficult, Ray could tell. It would have to be.

  When Morel spoke, his voice was cold and loud, but there was a fine tremor in it at first.

  “You are wrong, Kerekang.”

  There was another silence, until Morel began again. “Kerekang, listen to me please.

  “You remember when we began to discuss these things for the first time and I told you that faith was a terrible poison and you laughed because you thought I was making too much of it because in your experience it was a weak thing. You had been living in the U.K. where the established church is indeed in a rather etiolated condition. You found it hard to see the church as a live part of anything that people were deciding to do or not to do. This is what you compared it to. You told me that when you first ate in a good restaurant in England, the first couple of times, I believe, you said that when the proprietor came to the table to ask how you’d liked the meal, you’d been truthful, praised a couple of things but criticized others. And you’d seen a certain reaction among your friends and in the proprietor, of shock. And from that you had realized that obviously the custom was quickly to praise everything that had been served, whether you had liked it or not. And you proposed to me that religion was like that. Religion was like the protocol of saying everything was delicious, with the proprietor knowing it was unlikely or untrue and your companions knowing it was untrue … because they had complained during the meal … and you yourself knowing it was untrue. Nobody really believes, you said. Most people say they are Church of England, if you press them, you said, but nobody believes. The priests, many of them, certainly don’t, you said, and the priests know that nobody sitting in front of them believes. But people keep going at Easter and Christmas and saying they are C of E the rest of the time. Oh, and I think you also compared it to makeup on women, am I right? They all do it, you look at them, women, wearing makeup, and you incorporate it into your assessment of them without being aware you’re doing it, even though the woman knows and you know that you aren’t seeing the truth and she isn’t showing you the truth. So you proceed anyway. It’s minor, you said, and doesn’t hurt.

  “And then what else did you say? I’m trying to recall. Oh yes, that the church was a useful thing if only for the fact that, just by stopping in irregularly, you would have a chance at getting a few people to turn up for your funeral who otherwise wouldn’t have, which was, you said, a comforting prospect.

  “So, okay. England misled you. I showed you that in the world at large faith was expanding, credulism was expanding, and that the particular types of religious belief that were expanding the fastest were the purest, most primitive, the dumbest ones. And this is true in England now too, though it’s early days yet for the Muslims and others.

  “And then we went country by country over a map of the world, my brother Kerekang. And I demonstrated to you that where the older sects and denominations that had in one way or another made certain accommodations to scientific reality were declining, these fiercer, simpler strains of faith were coming back. And we counted the actual theocracies existing in the world and you were surprised, weren’t you? And I gave you the statistics on beliefs in the United States of America, and you found them hard to believe.

  “And then you hardly seemed pleased about the situation in Africa, where the rate of conversion is the highest in the world and going up all the time and more than making up for the denominational declines in Europe, and where two beasts, the Christian beast and the Muslim beast, are fighting to see which can eat the most Africans before dark. Because the darkness is coming. Is coming.

  “And I explained how faith is a toxin, a peculiar and dangerous toxin because even in dilution it waits in the blood to blaze back into madness under the right conditions of fear and trembling. In its most virulent forms, it prevents the host from knowing that it is going to die, to die forever, that the host is a dying animal, that we are merely mortals, and that death is our common fate, the fact of life that should make brothers and sisters of us all. And I tried to show you how even in dilution religion addles and undoes our ability to see death, how even in dilution it sweetens death, allows it to be denied, allows the deaths of others to be made casual.”

  Morel paused. “Our task is to do everything, in a way. Too bad, but we may just have to do everything. Too bad for us, but unless we bring free minds to the work of renewing the world, keeping our minds fixed on death and the disguises death puts on, we will raise up a new hell, like Russia where they closed the churches and made the state their god. We must say no gods. None.

  “And be sure to remember that the great architects of injustice in Russia were products of centuries of Christian processing, beginning with the seminarian Joseph Stalin. Hitler always considered himself a good Catholic, despite the superficial pagan paraphernalia he held up in front of the German people for a while, and the good soldiers who did his filthy work were as Christian as you could ask for.

  “And before you or anyone begins about the mission schools and hospitals … and they are worthy, okay, and you may want to say, well, these people are good, they are saving our lives, how can you argue? Which would mean that we should be quiet on this subject. But I am telling you to see the matter whole.

  “Here is a picture. You conquer a country and give the vanquished a clinic. Look around Africa and se
e if this seems familiar to you. No, conquer a country and then give it a clinic, and oh, also some mission schools, and some Christian bookstores to pump out cheap Bibles to change the children of the land into Christians. The conquerors in this continent and in South America and in my own country came pushing their crosses ahead of them.

  “Look, go deep inside yourself, Kerekang. We have been tainted at the deepest levels, deep in the foundations of our minds. Say a man lives his life without regard to faith, as he thinks. But he hasn’t gone deep enough, because to his surprise, when he falters, lo, here it comes, a deathbed conversion. I could keep us here all night with the history of deathbed conversions, amazing ones. A great poet writes Loss of faith is growth and the next thing you know he’s beckoning the priests to his deathbed. We are penetrated with it. It works invisibly and insensibly to direct our accommodation with the world’s evils. God help us!

  “Belief is like this … It falls into three types and I ask you to tell me which kind of faith is more dangerous than the other.

  “We begin with any society saturated with belief. I’m talking generically. What types of believers do you have? First, the devout, who believe everything up and down and in and out. They make us despair. In Kenya the devout bring death to the sick because the word condom shall not be spoken aloud, on the radio, anywhere. The same in Zimbabwe, with the fine Roman Catholic prime minister nodding yes in the corner. So let that stand as an example for us of a contribution by the devout.

  “So then, the next type, the hypocrite, who believes only in himself but who pretends to believe in scripture and uses the blindness of genuine believers to satisfy his own desires. No need to say much about them and the harm they do.

  “Ah but then we come to, what shall we call them, the half-believers, like the bulk of the British, the ones who say let the little ones believe that their classmate who jumped off London Bridge is in heaven and happy. Or like the half-believers who say it won’t hurt to have children mumble the Lord’s Prayer every day in school, if they do it under their breath. Which brings us to the half-believer at his most dangerous, the character who begins to feel inwardly that his beliefs are untrue but who cannot bear that feeling and who sets out to perform feats of loyalty to convince himself that he must in fact believe, like killing a doctor who gives women abortions. As their belief weakens they become terrors of the earth, mesmerizing themselves with acts that plunge them into peril, that spread ruin everywhere. They convince themselves through their transgressions that they must, in fact, be believers.