Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Kepu was full of poetry. Kerekang was mad for it. His taste was for nineteenth-century English poetry in general, but he restricted himself to social protest verse in Kepu, with a heavy reliance on William Morris. Every selection was presented bilingually. When had the man had time to do all this translation work? What Kerekang felt about poetry, Ray thought he understood. It was a bond between them. I am an adolescent, he thought. He didn’t want to be in a situation where he couldn’t lay his hand on poetry. He realized that he always assumed poetry would be in his vicinity, somewhere, in the normal course of life. And now he had no choice but to destroy his copies of Kepu. You are being a child, he thought. He couldn’t remember who it was who’d said that poetry was as essential to civilization as hot water. With poetry it could be one poem one couplet one line, even, and you were immortal forever. For just one poem it would be Chidiock Tichborne, to name just one. It could come down to that, one little line of letters saving your name forever. People would want to know what you looked like, forever. That was what his brother was straining to do, generate just one sentence, one paragraph, one glorious thing. He wasn’t close. He would fail. He said to Keletso, “Rra, do you like poetry at all?”

  “Ehe, the most when it is from the Bible.”

  Ray looked for something to read aloud to Keletso. He paged through Volume One, Number Three, of Kepu. There was a William Morris verse.

  He would read it to himself first.

  A Death Song

  What cometh here from west to east awending?

  And who are these, the marchers stern and slow?

  We bear the message that the rich are sending

  Aback to those who bade them wake and know.

  Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,

  But one and all if they would dusk the day.

  There was more of the same. This was not the ticket for cheering Keletso up. It was grim. It was hard to believe this was the same William Morris he associated with big improvements in wallpaper design.

  He found something that looked lighter, by a poet unknown to him, Robert Brough. A note described Brough as a famous republican who had died of drink at the age of thirty. Kerekang was teetotal, Ray remembered.

  “Would you like me to read you a poem?”

  “Ehe, to pass the time.”

  “I have the poem in Setswana and English. Dintsha le dilebodi le diPeba le dikatse. I’ll try it in Setswana.”

  “It is to do with animals, then, rra?”

  “Yes. Well, listen. Here I go.”

  But after two stanzas in attempted Setswana, Ray concluded it was no-go. Keletso was laughing, and there was nothing that amusing in the verses he’d read to him, so it was his performance that was funny.

  He began again, in English.

  “The title is The Terriers and the Rats and the Mice and the Cats: A Fable. And this was written in England long ago, written against the king and the nobility that supported the king, at that time. And you’ll see, the dogs, the terriers he talks about, stand for the ruling system, Domkrag, with the king at the top. And under the dogs are the cats. The dogs are ruling the cats and the rats are ruling the mice. Anyway …

  “Once on a time—no matter how,

  (By force of teeth, or mere ‘Bow-wow,’

  Let studious minds determine)—

  The Terriers upon Rat-land, seiz’d,

  Its natives hunted, worried, teas’d,

  In short—exactly what they pleas’d

  Did, with the whisker’d vermin.”

  He was going to have to skip. Looking ahead, Ray saw the piece was endless, all the verses showing that the mice were on the verge of revolt. He continued reading.

  At last he was at the end. The revolt had been frustrated.

  “ ‘We beckon out the biggest rat,

  And ask him, with a friendly pat,

  To join our side the merrier—

  We teach him how to bark: with shears,

  We dock his tail, and trim his ears,

  Give him some bones, to calm his fears,

  And tell him he’s a Terrier.’ ”

  Keletso seemed unsure of what to say. Ray had read the piece, the bulk of it, partly in the spirit of experiment. He was curious about what a Motswana would make of this antique republican agitprop.

  An awkward silence began.

  “Rra, who are these cats and uprisen mice? What nation is that?”

  “Well, it’s no particular country, it’s an imaginary country, a country made up so the poet can tell a story about how the terriers, who are the kings, the nobility, the big men, rule the rats in Britain. The cats are the ones in another country who are inquiring, to learn how they can dominate the mice in their country the way the terriers dominate the rats. But in any case now this poem is being reprinted and translated for the Batswana of today.”

  Keletso was silent.

  Ray said, “So, rra, if you were applying this fable, fable is what it is, to Botswana at this moment today, what would it mean?”

  Keletso, giving Ray a sidelong glance, said, “Rra, what is your opinion?”

  “Well, could we say that in Botswana the terriers are the big men and the chiefs and, well, Domkrag?”

  “Ehe, you mean as when they can pinch away leaders from BoSo to make it weak? As we had in Gaborone when BoSo elected their man mayor, and then he switched across to Domkrag, like a flash …”

  “Yes, right. That kind of thing.”

  “Nyah, rra.”

  “You say no?”

  “Your eyes are too small, rra.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Because if you would say who are the big dogs today in Botswana, it is the makhoa. Sorry.”

  “White people, the white man, Europeans, you mean …”

  “Ehe. When you put the question, I say the makhoa.”

  “So we are the dogs, still, you feel?”

  “Such is what you can take from this poem, rra.”

  “And it is what you take from it?”

  “Rra, it is.”

  “You say it without hesitation.”

  This was the wrong tack to take, and Ray knew it. But he couldn’t help himself.

  He said, “So, is your view, then, that despite independence … and you’ve been independent since 1966, isn’t it?… that still the white man is … is maneuvering at the top?”

  “He is, yes. You cannot always see him.”

  “Ah well,” Ray said.

  “Yah.”

  “So it is, then.”

  I’m hurt, stupidly enough, he thought.

  Twice during the afternoon they had noticed lines of black smoke, like scratches, rising from distant fires far to the north. No discussion had come out of it. This was the wrong time of year for the veld fires the Bushmen employed to drive game into traps, if they were even still doing that. The Bushmen were operating under restrictions. He had no idea what they were still allowed to do. Their hunting was controlled. That had to be a joke, though. How could anything in the Kalahari be administered, that was the question. He didn’t know. He did know he should always say Basarwa and not Bushmen. And he did know that they were facing extinction. He knew that. Did they?

  He wasn’t looking forward to turning in tonight. His pillow and to a lesser extent his sleeping bag had a consommé smell, rank. He had beaten his pillow and his pillowcase against a tree trunk. He had flicked aftershave on the pillowcase. The odor was in the pillow itself. Drifting off, he had to smell himself, as he fell … there was no escape.

  They were nowhere, still. And they would sleep in another section of nowhere, beside the road, again. They were inching. There had been rain in the area. The road was viscous in spots and Keletso was being exquisite with his driving, as he should be doing. There was a movie with Yves Montand driving a load of dynamite over roads like this that had nothing to do with their situation that he could think of. Ah yes, atopia is where we are, he thought. Black cotton soil was the name fo
r the treacherous sort of surface that showed up in places along the spoors after heavy rainfall. The guidebooks warned about it. He was studying Keletso’s technique. He had to get it down.

  The silence of the desert was entering them. It was hard to talk, to converse, harder all the time. The stupid silence was conquering them. The desert was ruled by stupid life, except for the quick-witted Basarwa, geniuses of staying alive through their thirties, dancing away from death from the time they could toddle. All the things that could kill you in the desert were stupider than you, or they were automatic. Inanimate, he meant.

  A couple of days back they had stopped at a Basarwa encampment set up at a crossroads. The inhabitants had come out of their huts and into the road to make them halt. There had been no more than five or so huts, dome-shaped, plastic sakkies mixed in with the leaves and sticks they used in constructing their shelters. The people had been dressed, half-dressed, many of them, in assemblages of rags and skins. It had been a beggar settlement, essentially, not a functioning hunting and gathering community. Old women lived there, mainly, with only a few younger women and three or four children in evidence. The community was an organism devoted to begging. The Basarwa had formed a cordon with the children directly in front of the vehicle. They had begged for salt and sugar and tobacco and tee shirts. They knew the word, tee shirt. He had given them a tee shirt and he had given them a box of salt and they had accepted two containers of cooking oil, Royl, disappointedly, he’d thought. There had been no tobacco to give them. They had refused canned goods. That was a mystery, unless it was something as elementary as their not owning a can opener, which hadn’t occurred to him at the time. Their poverty had been as bad as anything he’d seen, worse than anything in Old Naledi. He hadn’t given them the right things. Keletso had been eager to push on. He hadn’t had time to be creative with what they had on board that they could afford to give away. Keletso had been ashamed of those people. That had been it, he knew. If there had been more time, they could have done better by them. If it happened again when he was by himself he would do better. Not that he could ever find that place again on his own, but he might come across others. And he would do better next time.

  He wanted to sing something. That was odd. He felt like singing. He didn’t know what it was he wanted to sing, but he definitely did want to. After he released Keletso he’d be able to sing all day. The Desert Song was a musical. He had seen the movie version. It had nothing to do with any of this.

  Covertly Ray felt his sides through his shirt. He was losing weight, judging by the prominence of his ribs. Iris was funny. She had once said to him lewdly that she liked him to be thin because it made his penis look big. That was the sort of thing she was likely to come up with. She was unlike other women. She was.

  It was night again. Ray had his fire. He had complained that he felt cold and Keletso had collected firewood for him, going to some trouble to search out a particular kind of wood that produced what he’d called sour smoke, a smoke that flying insects disliked. The fire had smoked copiously at first but now it was fine. The smoke had been something to endure. The wood was obviously saturated with resins, like greasewood, that made it flare and spit. He had forgotten what it was called. He should probably find out, for the future. Although knowing the name would be pointless if he was by himself. So forget that, he thought.

  Keletso could be insistent. Once he realized that Ray had meant it about sitting out in the open for a while after dark tonight, he had crafted the ridiculous thing Ray was ensconced in. Keletso had taken the tea-break umbrella and taped and pinned drapings of mosquito netting to it. To make steadying the staff easier, Keletso had driven it pretty deeply into the sand, which imposed a certain degree of hunching on Ray as he sat on his camp stool. But he appreciated the thought and the effort and it was doing its job.

  Keletso was in the vehicle doing what? He was monitoring Ray from time to time, Ray supposed. There had been a delicate discussion between them. From now on at night they would urinate in jars rather than leaving the vehicle for relief. It was the shadow of the snake event over them. Keletso was even more fixated on danger than before. He had walked around the perimeter of their encampment sprinkling petrol like holy water because the larger predators were understood to hate the odor. Ray was going to write a letter of commendation for the dear fellow that would knock his socks off.

  Finally he had done it, burned all the incriminating papers, his Kerekang material, leaf by leaf, taking his time. That was it, adieu, up in smoke, they were gone, all the testimonials to simple living, to the glorious sunrise at Toromole, all the early to rise, garden work, study, out to talk to the grateful locals, all those stories, all the bean recipes, the other vegetariana, all the raised-bed gardening advice, all the paeans to loving one another and cooperation. All of it was gone, and also gone were the telex flimsies and the memoranda and savingrams from the various arms of government crying havoc, and good riddance to them.

  At every meal at Toromole someone had read poetry, he gathered. He felt he understood Kerekang to the marrow. He was a victim of poetry. All the poetry-reading and the public chanting of poetry at the poor devils he was trying to convert showed it. He wanted life to be Tennyson for everybody, or some other highminded worthy. He was stuck in the nineteenth century. I could help him, he thought. He knew what the idea was, in the heart of his mind, he knew. First, it was to shed attachments, burn them away via poetry, and this would be for the privileged, the jeunesse dorée he was attracting as cadres, that would be step one. But then the larger step was to live at the level of poetry, everybody. Kerekang had felt himself rise, in poetry, to a certain stratum of what? benevolent feeling, universal benevolence, what?… what? To where it is beautiful … not ugly, and where poverty is is ugly, clearly ugly, was that it? Here is where you can live, he was saying, Kerekang. Every poem is a cry, Ray thought. And of course that was the paradox. It was a cry of agony or pleasure, joy, but mostly agony fixed up in one way or another, his friend wanted to utter, his friend Kerekang, intellectual friend. Milton is all agony, he thought. He wanted something he couldn’t have, a cucumber and tomato sandwich on whole wheat toast, with aioli in a little tub on the side. So the poetry was gone but it had been doggerel, really, underdoggerel, to coin a term. Rex would like that. And Marxism could be underdogma, why not? His brother was on his mind because only a mystery paperback sans cover lay between him and the thick block of pages from Rex’s Strange News.

  That was it also for Kerekang’s unfortunate manifesto, The White Ants. The copy he had burned had belonged to Boyle, and Boyle’s hysterical underlinings and annotations had been as alarming as they had been amusing. Only the first six pages, out of twenty, had been marked up, demonstrating the depth of his address to the piece. He had misunderstood everything, taking the manifesto as directed against whites in Africa, expatriates, when in fact White Ants was simply the translation of the Setswana word for termites, and the termites in question weren’t expatriates but the national gentry, the large cattle owners. Briefly Ray had entertained the idea that the pamphlet was a forgery coming out of South African intelligence and intended to stir up divisions between certain constituencies of the Botswana Social Front, which had been maneuvering to accommodate bits and pieces of the aristocracies of the minor tribes, large cattle owners all of them. But then he had decided it was genuine. It was heated. It was poetic. It was Kerekang. And it was what had earned him the title Kerekang Setime, Kerekang the Torch Thrower. The Boers made trouble all over the region, for their own reasons. They hated the Botswana Social Front because it was friendly to the exiles of the Pan Africanist Congress, which they hated more than they hated the African National Congress. The White Ants was Kerekang denouncing in an almost biblical style the folly of embodying human labor in herds of cattle which periodic drought and disease could be counted on to lay waste to. The termites were the gentry. That was his obsession.

  He parted the netting and put his head out into the night. He
gazed up at the stars. He loved the conceit, conceit being the wrong word, the Bushmen had for the stars … campfires of the dead. He couldn’t get it out of his head. The Milky Way was like a broad stripe of paste. He had been somewhere outdoors with Iris at night and she had said in some connection, “I don’t need to stare up into the firmament in order to be convinced of my own insignificance.” Probably she had been reacting to some dumb musing of his own. My girl, he thought. Saying anything with girl in it, when it came to her, had mostly fallen out of their household discourse in the last few years. But she was his girl, his beloved girl. He would be able to shout it out if he felt like it, after he released Keletso. He felt like shouting it out. He felt like shouting it at Morel.

  The fire was on its last legs. While there was still some illumination coming from it, he should grasp the nettle of the mystery paperback. He had to know what he had to look forward to, or not, whatever the case was. He thought, Hell is just another word for nothing left to read. Rex would like that. Or it could be Hell is just another word for nothing good to read.

  The book was Madame Bovary.

  He felt dead immediately. Or he felt killed, struck, killed by a blow to the face. Why had she done this? Why this book?

  In a state of developing shock, he examined the paperback. It was the 1943 Pocket Book Eleanor Marx Aveling translation. The translator had been a suicide, Marx’s daughter, one of his daughters. Where was his Modern Library Milton? Why had Iris left that out and why had she put this, this, this bomb in his net bag?

  Iris was not cruel. She lacked the capacity for it. So why this book, now, lying in wait for him?