Mortals

by Norman Rush

  The man in the road wasn’t police, not in any kind of uniform, which might mean he was a hitchhiker. He did look civilian. He was wearing cargo pants, sandals and not boots, a workshirt whose sleeves had been torn off at the shoulder, revealing arms on the huge side, intimidatingly huge arms, in fact. Let me call you Nemesis, Ray thought.

  Nemesis was trying to look amiable. He was smiling broadly. And he was doing something clever. He was wearing a baseball cap with the bill pulled sharply down. His big smile was in evidence but the rest of his face was innocently, supposedly, obscure. He was showing himself to be demonstrably unarmed, his hands empty. But he did have a bandanna loosely tied around his neck. If things got critical, it could be pulled up. Mercenaries hated to have their faces seen.

  Ray came to a halt. The tone of the encounter was changing already. Ray was receiving peremptory beckoning signals from his nemesis. This was the cup, the edge of the cup.

  There was definitely an encampment off in the saw grass. He could make out the tops of tents. There were vehicles under camouflage netting, olive drab bakkies and a jeep. They had selected a good spot to bivouac. The saw grass was thick and the elephant grass was very high. You had to be on top of them to know anyone was there.

  The question was whether they would want to take him for questioning or send him back to Nokaneng, kick him out.

  The smiling man approached. He was a young fellow. He was keeping his head down, making a show of studying something on the ground. He came to the driver’s side and motioned to Ray that it should be cranked open. Ray hesitated, until he noted in the rearview mirror that a bakkie had come from nowhere and edged into the road behind him, closing it. Ray opened the window.

  “Can you step down to me, rra?” the smiling man asked.

  There had been no greetings, no dumelas, no entshwarele.

  “Dumela, rra,” Ray said. It would be an interesting datum if his nemesis knew English but not Setswana. He could be Ovambo, in that case.

  “You must step down, rra.”

  “What is it about? You aren’t BDF. I am going to Etsha, so what is this?” He sounded obstreperous to himself, more obstreperous than was exactly wise.

  “The road is closed from here, rra, for safety.”

  “By whose order, rra?”

  “It is goromente, rra. Can you please step to me.”

  Ray sat unmoving, seized by an anxiety he knew was irrelevant. He had a thick section of Strange News in a clipboard on the seat beside him. He had to guard it. He didn’t know how much of the manuscript Iris had managed to photocopy before she’d thrust it on him. Maybe none of it. The whole process of getting it into his hands had been frenzied, here, and, as he understood it, back in the States. He needed to get it out of sight before he opened the doors of the cab. He had to do it deftly. He thought he could. It felt urgent. There were ink notations in his brother’s own maddening minuscule hand on the pages. His brother was dying, or dead. That was news he was going to receive. He had to get the manuscript under the seat and he could do it now while the smiling was still going on and his nemesis was still bothering to deal coyly with him, his gaze off-center. The Land Cruiser cab sat high, meaning that sight lines were in his favor if he tried to bury the act of ditching the manuscript within the business of bending and reaching to unlock the passenger-side door. He would have to move like lightning.

  He hesitated. He didn’t know what he wanted to happen. He wanted to escape this in the easiest way he could, but he wanted to know what it was, too. He wanted that more. People experienced this who had never asked for it, never deserved it. At the far end of every avenue twisting off from each of his mundane exercises undertaken for the agency, at the extreme far end, was the possibility of something like this for someone who, unlike himself, had never volunteered for it, roadblocks and worse, roadblocks that were gateways to the unimaginable. But now he had to safeguard Strange News.

  He said, “Gosiame, rra. I will come out.”

  He unlocked the door on his side and then proceeded to stretch over to accomplish his little trick. He got hold of the clipboard and was spiriting it under the seat when he was caught. He had miscalculated and the smiling man, no longer smiling, in fact with his lower face covered by the bandanna, was on him, having jerked the driver’s-side door open without further ado. It was war, then. He felt like a fool. Nemesis pulled him out of the cab, swung him out of the way, and clambered up into the cab himself, emerging clutching Strange News.

  Nemesis had associates and here they were, wearing balaclavas despite the impossible heat. There were four of them. They were in camouflage outfits. One was carrying an assault rifle, an Uzi.

  The thing to do was to look indignant and baffled for as long as he could. He had to hold down his impulse to beg his nemesis to be careful with the manuscript. That would be idiotic. He wanted to. His knee was bad again. It had been improving. But he had nearly fallen when he’d been pulled out of the vehicle and he hadn’t been able to protect his knee.

  He was not going to be allowed to remain in the shade, narrow and minimal as it was, of the Land Cruiser. Nemesis beckoned him out into the road, into full sun. An associate ran forward with a camp stool, but it was for Nemesis. Ray would have to sit on the hot ground. The arrangement was that he would sit with his back to whatever was going on with the vehicle. He would be able to hear the rough interrogation his vehicle was undergoing at the hands of the associates, but not see it. Nemesis would be able to see it, direct it.

  The questioning was about to begin. Nemesis tucked the hanging point of his bandanna up under the material binding his cheeks and nose, so that his mouth would be free to shout clearly, to imprecate, whatever his plan was. Ray was having a moment of strength. It was strange. Nemesis kept his cap on, but he raised the bill just enough to let him see Ray without impediment.

  A sheaf of papers, Ray’s documents, taken from the glove box, was handed to Nemesis, who went tediously through them.

  Nemesis said, “Your passport, rra. I must see it.”

  “It should be there.”

  “Nyah. Where is it?”

  “It should be there. You are alarming me. It must be there.”

  “Nyah, I have some things. I have your driver’s license, your third-party certificate papers, and these Letters of Reference, one, two, three. That is all.”

  “Let me go and search. It was there.”

  “Nyah. Give me your hat, rra.”

  “Why?”

  That was wrong. Nemesis reached over and plucked Ray’s hat off, made a cursory examination of its interior and threw the hat aside. Ray knew he would now be asked to stand and turn his pockets out.

  That happened. Afterward, he was allowed to sit again. His hat was not returned. There had been nothing of interest in his pockets. He should be pleased with himself, since the point of tearing his passport to bits and burning it had surely been to court something just like this, the scene he was in, or entering. Or at least not to be under its protection during it.

  Nemesis was leafing through Strange News.

  The man was superior in rank to his associates. Ray decided to rename him Uno. What he had seen of Uno’s mouth and chin and his eyes would be enough to identify him whenever, if ever, he saw him unmasked. I have my skills, Ray thought.

  And Uno’s immense arms would help identify him, although overmusculature was not in short supply in this milieu, from what he could judge of Uno’s associates. And the degree of physical development they displayed meant some formal training regimen, with weights, and that led back to koevoet and to the South African Defence Force’s special units division. Lips were more individual than teeth, often. He would know Uno. And voices were absolutely individual, miraculously.

  Uno shouted something and made a slashing gesture and Ray knew what was coming and he was right. The engine went silent. That was fateful. A corner had been turned. They were not going to send him on his way. He was ready.

  The sun was beginning to hu
rt. He was drying up. His lips felt like balsa.

  Perversely, it had been a relief when the engine was shut off. It made his path clearer. He was in the cup. For how long, he couldn’t guess. He was feeling better, definitely. He had an image for his sense of improvement. It was that there was an outline around his body, invisible but real, and that now he was expanding, his self was, to fit it, snugly.

  “You are not BDF,” Ray said. He felt he needed to be more resistant. He needed to sow a few pips that would grow up to give pause, hints, hints of threats.

  He went on. “I want you to understand something, rra. I am expected in Maun this week. If I am not back there soon there will be an alarm. I am performing a mission for the Ministry of Education …”

  Uno cut him short. “Yah, I see your Letter of Remit. It is a lie. It is nothing. Why would you be carrying on with this mission whilst you are in the midst of bandits? Why shall you come out in the midst of burning and fighting? They are burning everything hereabout. They think it is SouthWest coming again.”

  That was interesting. Ray was seeing something in the shape of events that he had missed before. The Boers were finished in SouthWest. In fact, there was no SouthWest. It was Namibia. SWAPO had won. The Boer death squads that had been in action there, like koevoet, had been pushed out but had reconstituted themselves as mercenary veteran outfits operating out of floating camps in eastern Angola, where Savimbi was in charge, or up in Zaire. They had numerous sponsors. Some of the nicest governments in the world were sponsoring them, off the books of course. He could imagine Boyle imagining the possibility of a linkup between SWAPO and ISA. He could imagine Boyle selling his paranoia to goromente and/or vice versa. Things were going haywire in Zimbabwe, but Boyle was fixating strictly on Namibia and its discontents, on a country one-twelfth as significant as Zimbabwe. God save us from the geopolitical mind, he thought. Boyle understood nothing when it came to ISA. Ray had done what he could to make him understand. It had been pointless, useless. I know Kerekang, Ray thought. He had a moment of agony caused by the feeling that he himself could sort everything out, given a modicum of power, he could. But he had no power.

  “Oh God,” he said, unintentionally. He hated himself for it. It had been fervent.

  Uno looked at him with interest. He wondered if Uno was religious and if some specious bond had been accidentally forged between them by his outcry. He wondered if something could be done with the impression, which he could amplify, that they were cobelievers, if one had been created. There was no conflict between being a murderous thug and being a believer, being a pious thug. They were everywhere. His intuition was that there was something here to work with. But he was tired. What he wanted was to get out of the sun.

  A drumfire of unintelligible exclamations was coming from the associates as they rummaged through everything in the Land Cruiser. Uno seemed not to be attending much to them, though.

  “Oh God,” Ray said again inadvertently.

  Uno regarded him oddly.

  “Yah, God sees us.” Uno’s tone was interesting.

  “He sure does,” Ray said. It wasn’t what he’d wanted to say. What he wanted to say on the subject of theology was something more like If God existed he would turn every scene of impending violence into electrifying tableau, he would drench every scene of impending murder with X rays that would show all parties that they were gesturing skeletons, brothers under the skin, pathetic. He could imagine it, imagine something like a phosphorus shell going off and making everything transparent and leaving all concerned too bemused to kill each other. He wanted to express something like that, but it would take more energy than he had to spare.

  “Jesus must come,” Uno said.

  Ray couldn’t think of how to play this intelligently. He wanted his hat back. His other nemeses, who were manhandling his goods in the Land Cruiser, had evidently found something exciting. They were Ovambo, definitely. They were unintelligible to him. He was missing some opening with Uno. His mind was everywhere. Far away to his right off in the haze he could see tiny white objects he believed were marabou storks, four of them. People traveled long distances to see marabou storks. The storks were moving around fitfully. They were carrying out their mission in life.

  Ray said, “Yes, Jesus is coming soon, they say. And it will be judgment for all.”

  Uno was nodding vigorously. He seemed mournful. He stood up. He was being summoned to the Land Cruiser.

  “Come right back,” Ray said. He was reaching the point of being nonsensical. It was the sun doing it. It was torture, pure and simple. He could probably amble over to retrieve his hat and get away with it, but he wouldn’t do it. Obedience was the ticket, for the moment anyway. And there was another consideration arising. He had to think of Iris. It would be impossible for her if anything really terrible happened to him. She didn’t need that. He hadn’t really thought clearly enough before about what it would do to her if anything genuinely terrible came to pass with him. His thinking was too volatile. He was leaving things out. One way you could tell if baldness was starting to pluck at you was if you noticed that for the first time when you happened to pat your head after you’d been out in the sun it was tender, or if your wife happened to pat your head affectionately then.

  Uno trotted past, not looking his way, clutching to his chest the consolidated Strange News manuscript. They had the whole thing now.

  Sol Invictus was the Roman name for the sun, which they’d worshiped. He could understand worshiping something powerful and inexorable that there was nothing you could do about, he supposed.

  The storks were gone. He had been right, they were storks. It was important to be right.

  Uno had disappeared around the curve of the road. Ray waited.

  Finally Uno reappeared. Another figure, a stocky man in regular military kit but wearing a kepi, came out into the road. He was holding Strange News. He was Caucasian. His face was ruddy. He was too far away to make out clearly. You’ll see him again, closer up, don’t worry, Ray thought.

  Uno returned, trotting again, carrying a blindfold and plastic handcuffs.

  29. Riding on Events

  He was a bundle in a bakkie. He was being conveyed somewhere. He was blindfolded, his hands were cuffed behind him, he was a bundle bouncing on the naked metal bed of a bakkie. He could sit up, just. The cap affixed over the bakkie bed was low-rise. It was work trying to keep himself braced into one corner so that the bouncing around would be less violent. It was difficult. He hated his trick knee. His captors were driving at speeds that made him love Keletso all over again, love his moderation.

  But if he was right, this wouldn’t go on for very long. He had a good idea of where they were taking him. Time would tell.

  It should never be said that there’s no progress, he thought. Clearly, restraint technology was marching on. The cuffs were of a design new to him. His hands were bound under notched plastic strips secured in a keyless ratchet locking mechanism. The cuffs were firmly but not painfully cinched.

  And his blindfold was also a novelty to him. It was a standardized manufactured product, obviously, made out of a hybrid fabric more like neoprene than cloth that had a propensity to cleave to human skin. Foam rubber pods were sewn into the eye-socket-covering segments of the blindfold. It was a successful design. He could see nothing down the sides of his nose. Someone had shaken the hand of the designer of the damned thing and said Well done!

  What would it have taken for one of his captors to throw a blanket into the back, for cushioning? He was bruising up, with the jolting he was taking. They were brutes and he wasn’t. He thought, Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, by the living God that made you, I’m a better man than they are Gunga Din. What was it about Kipling? He had more Kipling than he did Milton. Kipling was in the pores of his mind.

  And while he was on the subject, how in hell could belted you and flayed you, by the living God that made you, et cetera, but flayed you, get into a poem taught in junior high schools all over
the world? Flaying, for God’s sake, meant lifting strips of living skin off a living body. Was the narrator of the poem flaying somebody? Apparently so.

  He had to remember that they were being gingerly with him so far, inflicting their indignities in a mannerly way. Someone had pitched his hat into the bakkie after him before locking him in. There was that. They had given him a little water to drink and they had invited him to urinate before cuffing him. And he had done that.

  They had stowed him briefly in a hot tent, where he had devoted himself to listening heroically, or at least with heroic concentration, for leakages of information, anything. He hadn’t extracted much. He had counted voices as well as he could. He estimated that there were seven malefactors active in his aural vicinity. There was one Boer, who was addressed as Kaptein by the rank and file but as Quartus, twice, by Uno, when the two of them were presumably alone together. Quartus could be a nom de guerre, maybe having some reference to ranking position. It sounded numerical. But he did know that Quartus was an actual Boer Christian name, like Fanie or Bastiaan. In any case, it was a nugget.

  They had broken into the weapons compartment in the Cruiser and Uno had come into the tent shouting questions about licenses, where might they be? In Botswana it was a serious offense to be found in possession of unlicensed weapons. It could get you eighty-sixed in a flash, gone, out of the country. Uno made that point. Ray had protested his ignorance about guns and licenses, both. He was improvising.