Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Iris had managed to say something to each of the Denoons. It had been fleeting and she would be disappointed. The Denoons were in motion, Nelson via wheelchair now. The speed with which the couple felt they had to leave was adding to the telescoped, unclear tone of the ending. Their flight to Zimbabwe was a very early one, and Nelson was clearly tired. Karen Denoon loved her husband. She kissed the top of his head a couple of times as she drove him forward, into the night, toward the next battle. Ray closed his eyes briefly.

  A young man obscurely familiar to Ray emerged from the crush around the Denoons. Who was he? He was a distinctive character, tall for a Motswana, willowy, with regular, handsome features and a discordant, aggressively meek, hunched presentation of self. Who was this character? He was wearing a vaguely sacerdotal metallic-looking black band-collar shirt with not one but two Shree Shakti buttons pinned to it, front and center. Who was he? He had a collection basket and he was the one who had gotten Iris’s donation. He was jittering around, hurrying, why? He was in signaling contact with two associates. He was wearing tight-fitting designer jeans with the price tags still fluttering, which Ray had heard was a current fashion trick obviously intended to show that the garment being worn was brand new. There was a market for stolen price tags. It was something that was going on. The collection team was gone, suddenly. It would come to him who they were. Iris returned to him, withdrawn.

  The room was still emptying when the lights were snapped off, which prompted an outcry. The lights came on again for a moment. The room cleared instantly.

  Outside, the scattered lighting in the adjacent grounds was also going off prematurely. This was harassment. Matches were struck. Ray always carried a custom penlight, agency issue, with an astonishing beam. He got it into use. Iris asked for it. She was concerned for the Denoons. She wandered around with the penlight looking for them and then gave up. A group collected around his penlight and Iris led the way to the car park, where, shortly, someone had the presence of mind to get headlight beams aimed back along the route from the administrative block. Everything was in order. They could make for home.

  He had it, the name of the character with the collection basket. He knew who he was. Admittedly it was inferential. But he knew he was right. The character was a thief, he was the thieving Paul Ojang, and Iris had given her donation to him. Good God, he thought. This Ojang was an asset of Boyle’s, someone he had bragged about, a prize catch in Boyle’s recruitment exercises among the more dubious elements of society, to be euphemistic. Ojang had, as a boy, done yard work for expatriates in Gaborone, and then moved on to church robberies, one or two of them pretty spectacular, and he was the ringleader of a band of pickpockets, shoplifters, and housebreakers, but one of his specialties was tapping public solicitation events, any occasion where cash was being publicly collected. He was a pest, a parasite. He had been caught infiltrating Rag Day activities, sending his underlings out costumed to blend in with the University of Botswana students in their academic robes running around the streets and rattling canisters of coins in the faces of the public as they collected for charity. And Ojang was suspected of working diversion schemes at open-air political rallies in various places, rallies run by the opposition party and not the governing party, it went without saying. And Boyle had used Ojang in instances where an investigative entry needed to be camouflaged as a routine house job. Ray wondered how this rather impressive-looking fellow had come to this vile calling. He had never met Ojang, who was out of Ray’s bailiwick, but he was sure he had his man. Boyle was so proud of Ojang. Ray had heard him lovingly described. Yes, and Ojang had a cover name … Curate. Remarkable, Ray thought.

  They continued in silence all the way home. At their gate, he stopped and pulled her against him. He had to bring his news out before they went inside. He felt that urgently, he didn’t know why. He had been clumsy, pulling her to him. She was alarmed. He was clumsy.

  So he rushed it out, all of it, the emergency, his lack of choice about going, and that he would be gone for three weeks, which she should be able to deal with, and that he was sorry about not having been able to give decent notice but that she had to realize he was in the same boat. He heard himself say both that the emergency was deadly serious and that it was essentially bullshit, not to be worried about. Too much of his own fear and dismay was coming through. Because he was clumsy.

  She was saying nothing. He couldn’t read her. Clumsily, because he was miserable and she was saying nothing, he brought up something entirely different.

  “Love, how much did you contribute this evening, out of curiosity?”

  “All I had on me, a hundred pula. I know it’s a lot.”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  “I felt … I don’t know. These are people I admire. And I doubt I’ll ever see them again.”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine.”

  “Now you have to go away.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s a situation. I’m sorry.”

  “God but I hate it. You know how I feel. I couldn’t tag along with you, of course.”

  “Not possible. It’s not that kind of thing.”

  “Yes and that’s what’s so frightening. I don’t know what it is, what you have to do, how dangerous it is, if it is …”

  “Forget that one. It’s … I’ll be reporting.”

  “This comes exactly when we don’t need it. You’re saying three weeks.”

  “About. It could be under and it could be a little over.”

  “It’s too long.”

  “I know. But don’t think you have to worry. I can’t tell you anything about what’s going on but the phrase opéra bouffe is a phrase orbiting around my mind right now.”

  “Nothing is resolved about my sister. And we need to resolve it, we have to.”

  “I know that.”

  “You cannot conceive how I hate this, Ray. Oh and yes, of course, I’ll have some sort of drill to go through when people ask, some lying lying thing about where you are. You’ll give me the script.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Something has to change,” she said, her tone grievous.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I mean, it really has to change.”

  “I agree,” he said.

  “You do? Truly, do you?”

  “Yes,” he said, as hard as he could. She wanted everything to be different and she was probably right and that was what was needed, or something close to it. He was planless. He was planless. She wanted him out of the agency. He understood it. But was that going to be the necessary and also a sufficient condition for going on together?

  “I want to believe this.”

  “Do believe it.”

  “Okay then, but you’re going. So what should I do? I have to think. I have to do something …”

  She hated being alone, generically. He knew that and was sorry.

  “I know what,” she said.

  Good, she had thought of something. Why was he afraid?

  “You know what I could do? This just occurs to me. I could do an intensive with Davis. I could use your absence for that.”

  “Do an intensive. What is an intensive?” He thought he knew.

  “It’s a residential period you spend with Davis. It’s the equivalent of the immersion method in language learning. You get everything … diet, body work, counseling, healthy cooking, and you detoxify …”

  She said more, promotionally. It was difficult to listen. He was barely hearing her. He was hearing as through a wall, poorly, which was a funny line of hers from better days. What he did understand clearly was that intensives were sleepaway propositions. And that Morel offered intensives so infrequently that this had to be looked at as a rare opportunity. And that indeed she did need to detoxify, everybody did, she did even though he was right that she was in basic good health. She was overselling, but that was natural. She wanted to do it. She was nervous, presenting this as just another good idea. He could tell.

  “So you sleep over th
e whole time.” He hadn’t intended to make her say so again, but there it was, he had.

  “Well that’s part of it, the immersion. I know I could walk home every night, we live so close by. It’s possible I could arrange it with him …”

  “Nonono. No need, my girl. It’s the mystique. It’s a concept. I understand it. Things work a certain way.” Let her go, he thought. She wanted this. There was feeling behind it. Palpable. Whether she had wanted to do it before it had unexpectedly become possible for her to do, he didn’t know, but she wanted it now. Show trust or die, he said to himself, sternly. He looked up at the African sky. She wanted to do it and he could taste it. She was his light in this world, his one light. She gave out something no one else did. The stars over southern Africa were thick and florid, a feast of stars they were neglecting to enjoy. What ees the stars? he thought, the line spoken by the old fart in the O’Casey play the Brits had put on, the line they had reused comically ever since. What ees the stars? The constellations were different, over Africa. It was the laggard pace of progress that made the stars in their African majesty available, and the two of them were being oblivious, she as much as he. Attention must be paid, he thought.

  “You go when?” she asked.

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  So she would do something and he would do something. He had to show trust in her, be absolute in that. So she would do something and he would do something and what he would do might not be the terror of the earth but it would be something. She would see.

  “On we go,” he said.

  II

  In the Cup

  24. Kerekang the Incendiary

  Ray had been feeling like an idiot more or less continuously for the last six days. They were long past the easy part of the excursion, the reasonably civilized stopovers in Kanye, then Kang, then Ghanzi. They were well north now, deep into the sandveld, the tarred road two days behind them. There were aspects of this journey that he ought to be enjoying, like the spectacular emptiness of the land, the sheer extremity of the desolation, the occasional glimpses of exotic wildlife, ostriches mainly, so far. But unfortunately he was an idiot. He should enjoy having a driver, enjoy being essentially a passenger, enjoy having a driver he liked. Keletso was a taciturn man but pleasant, a scrupulous driver healthily fixated on the absolute primacy of keeping the Land Cruiser moving through a terrain no sane human would want to break down in. The Land Cruiser was their cottage, their fortress. Keletso was decent company, just communicative enough, and a demon about keeping all the fluids essential to life and locomotion topped up. Ray was minutely studying Keletso’s moves and routines to be certain he could take over on his own if he had to, depending on how things uncoiled, not a prospect he relished. Keletso was nothing like an idiot. They were on a lumpy stretch of gravel road, passing through a sea of high dead yellow grass. Since Ghanzi, the land had been interminably flat. Trees here were so occasional that the rare specimens possessed, for Ray, an exclamatory quality. That there were trees present at all was surprising, the poor crabbed things, thorn trees exclusively, with brittle-looking black-green crowns. It was hot, but this wasn’t the worst time for travel in the western Kalahari. Winter was ending. It was mid-September. The night frosts were over with.

  He had to stop feeling like an idiot. It was serious. So he would one last time go back through the steps on the path that had led him to this nonsense. It had gone like this. One. One, he had sent Pony to tape Morel. Two, Pony had abandoned the assignment almost immediately after he had attached himself, become a follower, or so it had seemed, of Samuel Kerekang during Kerekang’s brief period of participation in Morel’s educational soirees or whatever it was they should be called. Ray had received exactly two tapes and then nothing. Pony’s conversion, to dignify it with the term, had been unanticipated. In fact it had been unanticipatable. So right there any responsibility Ray might be adjudged to have … thinned, truly, to the breaking point. Except for his having commissioned Pony in the first place, of course. Sending in a live asset had been rational, granted that he had been in an irrational state himself over Morel. He had been in a frenzy to find out all he could about him, because of what was happening with Iris. When he thought of her, here where he was, he couldn’t stand it. It was like hearing a supreme piece of music for the first time, as a child … he couldn’t have been more than four or five … and he even knew which piece it was, Pavane for a Dead Princess, listening to that for the first time and trying to draw the melody in more richly, get more of it into his ears, willing it to come through his skin, even, his mother staring at him from the record player. Ray had never reported anything to Boyle about the tapes he’d received from Pony. He had told Boyle only that he was still searching for a suitable asset for use in connection with Kerekang, for which he thanked God. He had been able to be astonished over developments, with Boyle, and get away with it. So. Pony had become an apparent convert to Kerekang’s silly homestead populism.

  Then what? He couldn’t bear to think about Iris. He had to not lose the thread.

  So then Kerekang had decamped, pulled up stakes, gone to the wilderness, gone to the people, gone north, taking a dozen or so followers with him, young people from the university, Pony included. Kerekang had left Gaborone because he was being blocked and messed with by the government, denied employment, messed with in a number of ways Ray could imagine. But that hadn’t been Ray’s doing. He had liked Kerekang, and had tried to protect him, argue for him, as much as he could, anyway. It was possible Boyle had concluded that he was being stalled by Ray and that Boyle had gone around him to give a little extra push to the government’s anti-Kerekang tricks and games.

  So three, then, was Kerekang turning his face away from the capital and retreating to a piece of land allocated under some tribal arrangement to one of his followers, the deal being to establish a cooperative of some kind and use it as a base, that is, build strength in the countryside and work back to the towns instead of vice versa. Kerekang had been laying the foundations of the colony for over a year, unbeknownst to anybody in government, apparently.

  Keletso touched Ray’s wristwatch. It was three-thirty, which meant they were going to pull over for tea. Wherever they were, Keletso took the civil service tea breaks he was entitled to at ten-thirty in the morning and three-thirty in the afternoon, without fail.

  As communes go, Ichokela had been standard, not only in its structure but in the brevity of its heyday, that is, a couple of months of florescence and then disaster. There was some comfort for Ray in the idea that Kerekang had been preparing the commune for a while, popping in and out to check on the progress of things, because that meant he hadn’t been suddenly driven to creating it as a desperate recourse by anything the agency might have been part of. That was probably an idiotic thought. But then he was a complete idiot. Ichokela had been the standard commune mixture, meaning simple living, early to bed, turning over your capital when you joined, a common purse and honor-system access to it. The day had been divided in three parts, one-third for collective labor like construction or gardening or farmwork, one-third for study and relaxation, and one-third for extension work, pestering the local peasantry with good ideas. From all he could gather, it had been a straightforward sort of experiment, lacking any demeaning psychological nastinesses like self-criticism sessions. They had published a bilingual paper, Kepu/The Mattock. He had copies.

  Kerekang’s commune had been more a training center than anything else. It wasn’t clear how long participants were supposed to stay there, but it was clear that Ichokela wasn’t meant to be a permanent residence for any of them. Things had been thought through. There had been a mechanism for getting at least part of your capital back if you decided to quit the movement. Kerekang had been expected to be in and out, employing Ichokela as a base, a site for demonstrating his courtyard horticulture concept and promoting a miniature sorghum mill run by pedal power, one of various inventions of his. The commune had been established on Tawana land near T
oromole, a tiny village between Etsha and Sepopa out in the savanna west of the Okavango swamp, about seventy-five kilometers south of the Caprivi Strip. What else was there? One point of interest, for him anyway, was the role poetry played in Kerekang’s agitprop exertions. The Mattock was busy with snippets of Victorian social poetry, doggerel most of it, bilingually presented, and when the reading circles Kerekang was hectoring the locals to join met in the kgotlas, a centerpiece of the proceedings had been poetry-shouting performances by a commune troupe, the Songsters, Dimoopedi. Kerekang’s general taste in nomenclature was on the poetic side, too. The name of the commune, the full name, Ichokela Bokhutlon, translated as Endure to the End. Isa, the verb meaning to make happen, was what Kerekang had decided to call his movement. It meant something about Ray that never in his life had he felt a twinge of attraction to the idea of submerging himself in the romance of any sort of communal existence. No doubt it was his rigidity that was behind that, his lack of imagination, some defect. He was an idiot, after all. Keletso was slowing. They were about to stop. There were many stops, with Keletso, many for setting the hubs for four-wheel drive, which was the drill whenever the road ahead even hinted at difficulty, many stops for tire-pressure checks, for piss breaks, and for meals, which were separate from the tea breaks. Twice Keletso had stopped in order to suck grass seeds out of the radiator grille with a drinking straw, a preventive against the engine overheating and seizing up. Keletso could be anywhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Ray felt inferior to this spare, angular, steady man whose personal hygiene practices put him to shame, his scrupulous toothbrushing in particular.