Mortals

by Norman Rush

  I would love to see beauty everywhere, too, Ray thought. He would like it even briefly but it was not what he needed.

  Iris, her image in his heart or wherever it was, his mind, was helping him. Because it was Iris who had saved him from the deadly synergy of getting people to drink, in his official capacity, so that they would let relevant things out, and he had used the occasions to get drunk himself, which was a thing that had led to the downfall of more than one agency character, agents and officers and top dogs and not excluding Marion Resnick. But she had rescued him and had convinced him that he could do the sordid, not to mince words, the sordid socializing he had to do without being in bondage to alcohol, and he had succeeded, despite temptations that had come up. And because of that he would live longer than he would have, and in addition to giving up drinking there was the contribution to a longer and lonelier old age he had to thank her for via his giving up tobacco.

  Ray had himself in hand. It was the image of his wife, his beloved, reminding him that it was important for him to be able to say truthfully that he hadn’t used drugs if the question appeared on an application for a job in the new life that was en route to him in an age when you could be asked to take a lie detector test as routinely as you could be asked to urinate in a Dixie cup for whatever anyone wanted to know. How long the image of his beloved would burn usefully bright was something he would have to wait to find out, in the years to come. Because the truth was that it was going to fade, he could expect it to fade, because everything fades. It wasn’t her fault.

  Ray said, “You know what I think, rra, I think you have to get away to South Africa. Here in this country you are always going to be Setime, the fire-thrower, and you’ll be hunted down by Domkrag. They know who you are. Listen to me. This will not be forgiven. Mandela is coming to power soon in South Africa and it is going to be a new day. It’s coming, and you could be safe there …”

  “They’ll kill him first.”

  “No. His time has come. They won’t.”

  “They say it was you Americans who whispered to the Boers where to find him.”

  “Yes, it was my agency, I know that … rra, I’m changing my life. I think I may be going to South Africa. It’s going to be a new time, and rra, I have contacts there. I mean education people, not agency contacts. I have an idea for a school. But I do have agency contacts that could help you, people who know me from the life I’m leaving. Like I’m leaving my wife.” Ray’s voice buckled. He fabricated a coughing fit. He thought, I’m expressing myself poorly.

  He had to be able to say it evenly because it was going to come up and come up. He said, “Yes, I’ll be leaving my wife. That’s part of it.”

  “I am sorry, rra. Truly.”

  “Nothing can be done.”

  What he wanted to express to Kerekang was that they could join together, he and Kerekang, leaving everything behind and doing their lives differently forever at the same time. It was notional, no doubt about it. And it was the movies. It had the feeling of the movies about it, which ought to be a warning to him about how seriously he should be taking this idea. But he was in the grip of it. He liked, in fact loved, the idea of taking his tradecraft and using it contrarily, using it to get papers or passports or whatever was needed to get Kerekang launched and circumstanced away from the mayhem and murder he was drowning in. Of course he was thinking ten or twelve steps ahead of where they were now, silent upon a peak in not Darien but Pieter’s Knob and gazing out not at the Pacific Ocean but at the inscrutable sea of life they were going to put their canoes into, a different sea.

  And then there was the question of whether Kerekang was going to feel he had any reason to believe Ray was genuine in his declaration of independence from the agency and the life he’d led, the entire life. Because it could so obviously be a maneuver, a ruse, a charade designed to conceal some underlying purpose of the agency, like sticking to Kerekang like a leech and finding out everything that would turn up about him and his associates everywhere. His warrant with Kerekang was what had been done to him at Ngami Bird Lodge and then what he had done on the roof of the building, insanely. Of course once you began asking questions there was no end in sight. For example how could he form a trusting partnership with anyone who believed him so easily when he said he was transforming himself so absolutely yet so abruptly? Your questions are non sequiturs, one non sequitur following another, he thought. He was paralyzing himself with questions.

  On impulse Ray reached out and seized Kerekang’s wrist, and then his hand.

  He said, “This is serious, what I’m saying. I want you to think. Stop smoking dagga, why don’t you. You’ve had plenty.”

  Kerekang seemed surprised but not annoyed.

  He said, “That’s right.” He spat out the burning cigarette. There was something almost jaunty or jocular about the way he did it. That’s the marijuana showing. It made people compliant with whatever was going on. Ray didn’t want Kerekang to come around to this view because he was being helped there by the dagga. No, what he wanted was for Kerekang to come around because he had spoken to him from his heart, there was no other phrase for it, spoken from his heart to the man Kerekang, and had been understood, had been received man to man, Ray speaking from his situation, dying animal to dying animal, he couldn’t express it exactly.

  Kerekang was being agreeable. He was standing up and stretching.

  “I had a wife, as well,” Kerekang said.

  “Ah. You did?” Ray was surprised. This was a lacuna. There had been nothing in Kerekang’s dossier to suggest it.

  “You were married?”

  “Nyah, she was waiting for me, to marry. She was my betrothed.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Well, perhaps you can tell me, because she surprised me after six years when I was abroad, studying, as we agreed I should do, while she worked in Gaborone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rra, I had one more year to be in Scotland. We were writing, we were telephoning. I had home visits, and they were just what you would hope. All the time I was abroad I was sending her poetry, this and that.”

  “So you had no sign?”

  “Nyah, not one, rra.”

  Ray was amused that the agency had missed this information. It was an example of how defective the apparatus he was leaving was, how incompetent in so many ways.

  “I’m sorry to hear about this.” But he was and he wasn’t, because if he was understanding correctly there was a bond glimmering between them that he hadn’t known would be there.

  Kerekang was walking around the narrow summit. He was holding his fists against the top of his head. He came back to Ray.

  He said, “Do you know Thomas Lodge?”

  Ray felt incompetent. He knew it was English Literature, but that was all he knew. It was not his period.

  “I know the name.” English Literature was the Pacific Ocean.

  Kerekang said, “I know every word of his ode,

  “Of thine eyes I made my mirror,

  From thy beauty came mine error;

  All thy words I counted witty,

  All thy smiles I deemèd pity;

  Thy false tears that me aggrieved

  First of all my trust deceived.

  “Siren pleasant, foe to reason,

  Cupid plague thee for this treason!”

  It was a consummate performance. Kerekang could take dead text into his chest and mind and heart and make it live, just as he had done with Tennyson at the ambassador’s residence. Kerekang was putting his sorrow away in poetry. He was standing up stanced in an artificial way as he declaimed. He was meant to be a performer. It was obvious. He was speaking blindly and brilliantly to the stars the air and to his one-man audience the English professor. “Bravo,” Ray said.

  “Thank you. I sent that to Eunice when she broke it off with me. And do you know she was married in two weeks afterward?”

  “Eunice … not Eunice Kamphodza?”

  “Yes it
is. You know her?”

  “Well her husband I know, Kamphodza, at the Ministry of Education. He is an obstacle to progress, mainly. He’s number four, or three, maybe three, by now. He should retire. And I see her. I think she works at Tourism and comes out to get food at King’s Takeaway in the mall for her office mates. At least I assume the food is for others. She’s quite a heavy woman, if I’m thinking of the right person.”

  “Yah, it is. She is very fat now. She is an elephant. Tlou, we say. She wasn’t so fat when she was younger.”

  It was probably the wrong thing to say but Ray felt impelled to say it. “So then do you … well, do you feel you escaped something, in a way? I mean, does it make you feel a little better about what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Kerekang answered.

  Ray wished he hadn’t said what he said. He knew what was behind it. He was feeling envy that Kerekang’s missed prize had so quickly tarnished itself in the eyes of the world. That wouldn’t happen with Iris. It was not something he could wish for, not something he should wish for. She was more of a prize as time went on and she held steady and rose in the eyes of the world and he became a drier and lesser version of himself, withering into the unpleasant truth of what he was, or not the unpleasant truth but the unimpressive truth. There were ten years between them. He was a dry person. He would long precede her into dryness, terminal dryness. But she was flourishing. In every period of her life she had been the ideal representative of what a woman could be in that span, her pretty youth, her beautiful young womanhood. She was still not a matron. She was flourishing, with her glossy hair, sweet dark eyes, good flesh, her lean face. Her breath was always sweet. She had perfect breasts, lower than when she had been young but appropriately lower and still full, perfect handfuls for the lucky man who could get into her bower. She knew everything there was to know about nutrition, what was good for the skin. She had avoided the sun, managed to do that in Africa, and without calling attention to it, being subtle about it. She had been in advance of the news that the sun was our enemy. She was a disciplined eater. God had given her teeth as white as cotton. His own hair was hanging on but it was less thick than it had been and across the crown there was a glow rather than a solid presence of hair. He might find someone if he could keep Iris’s admonitions in mind, like remembering to sit up straight at the table because alphas always sit up straight. And there were her silky nipples, so delicate. Her voice had gotten a little huskier with age, but men liked that. He did himself.

  Ray said, “Well then do you see her, do you encounter one another?”

  “We did for a time.”

  “And what was that like?”

  “Ah, rra. The truth is that she is rude to me. She moves away if she sees me, very fast, slick.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Well it is because she knows what I feel about Kamphodza. He is powerful in Domkrag, do you know that? You must. In Ghanzi he is a tautona, with the lands he owns. She will inherit a lot when he goes. It was the dream of getting beasts that pushed her into his old-man arms, I am sure. Because the law is changing so that women can inherit lands. And he has no sons, or any children at all.”

  “Well okay, but what are your feelings toward her? I have no right to ask you, I know, but what are they?” He couldn’t stop himself. He was taking everything as a rehearsal for what was coming with him. He wanted information.

  “You see, rra. I still love her. Even today, I do.”

  “I understand it.”

  “Yah, but she is too fat now.”

  “We still love them,” Ray said.

  “Yah, we still love them.” Kerekang seemed to be laughing.

  “What can we do?” Ray said. The woman was obese and this good man still loved her, loved her soul or her previous envelope, younger envelope.

  It was amazing how much light the stars gave. He could see everything he needed to see in the face of this tough, small, wiry man. He liked him. He liked him more all the time.

  Kerekang was seeming sympathetic to the project of departure together that Ray was proposing. Of course what choices did he have?

  Ray said, “What about the students, like Kevin, who came north with you to Toromole, what about them, where are they?”

  Ray was uneasy with his own question and he knew why. It implied he felt a special obligation to do something to save the educated, bypassing the question of everybody else caught up in the insurgency, the rural people, the proles, all those who had swung in behind Kerekang just as solidly as the jeunesse dorée had. What was wrong with him? On the other hand, what was wrong with everything?

  He couldn’t help pursuing it. He said, “I see Kevin with you, but what about the others from the university?”

  Kerekang said, “Ah, you see, he is very disobedient. He wouldn’t listen. He is disobedient. The others, I sent them back. I sent them back one by one as they came in from hunting Pony, and not finding him anywhere. I said to them that they could come back at some later time. Kevin said no. It was a fight. Well. So he is with us.”

  He was going to help Kerekang, if he could, but there was going to be an absence of justice in the way it worked out, because it was a fantasy that Kerekang could gather up all his forces and make a speech to them saying they had done as much as they could and then urging them to follow him like Moses across the border into Namibia, assuming there was a way to do that, an army wending its way through the desert into another part of the desert, a safer part, without being destroyed on the way.

  He had to narrow it down. He had to save himself and he had to save Kerekang and he had to save Morel and he had to save Kevin. And he had to save his brother’s manuscript, which had been out of his sight and care for too long.

  Someone was whistling, someone close by, someone approaching.

  It was Kevin, and Ray was annoyed. He had been getting somewhere with Kerekang.

  Kevin appeared.

  “You must come and sleep, Setime,” he said.

  Now Morel was climbing up to join them. There were going to be too many cooks.

  Morel was carrying Ray’s Strange News bundle. “Here, take it,” he said to Ray, arriving at the summit.

  “Thanks, but what made you think of it?” Ray asked.

  “I don’t know. Some of the guys were looking around for paper. You can imagine why. They wanted to know if I had any tissues, papiri. I don’t know if any of them understood clearly that what you were carrying around was a treasure of toilet paper, but I thought I would just preemptively get it. So thank me again.” Everyone was feeling better, slightly better, slightly stronger. That was evident.

  “We are having a summit meeting,” Morel said. No one said otherwise. There was silence.

  “It is,” Kerekang said. His mind was still in a floating state, thanks to dagga, still half there, still showing a tendency toward compliance with the world as it was developing, the real world.

  Kevin said, “I … I … rra, I want to be home. If I can. I have written a letter to you.” He handed a folded sheet of paper to Kerekang, who stuck it to his waistband, nonchalantly, not receiving it in the correct manner, Ray felt.

  They were becoming a conspiracy, it felt like, a sauve qui peut thing, and his hat was off to the French for their beautiful precisions, especially when it came to treachery.

  Kevin was speaking. He was reporting that there was fear being expressed among comrades about staying too long there. It wasn’t fear of being tracked to the spot by koevoet foot soldiers, it was fear of helicopters seeking them out from bases in Caprivi, once the news was out about what had been accomplished at Ngami Bird Lodge.

  Kevin was saying, “We shall paint you with fire, is what koevoet says, when they threaten you. This is what they did in SouthWest.”

  Kevin was hugging himself. It was cold.

  “You must come and talk to Mokopa, Setime,” Kevin said.

  “Why must I?”

  “Because he is afraid about the vehicles. He says
they can track them and find us. That koevoet will come seeking us because we’ve struck them in their pride.”

  Ray said, “I thought everyone was falling asleep down below.”

  “Nyah, they are awake. They are having a meeting. You can see they have built the fire high again.”

  Morel said, “It’s too high. I thought we were supposed to keep the fire to a minimum.”

  Kerekang sighed heavily. He got up to descend the monadnock. Morel stopped him.

  Morel said, “Wait a minute. Let me understand …”

  Kevin said, “They say they are freezing and the fire will be for only until they can get warm. And they are saying they want to hide I don’t know where. Hide for some days.”

  Morel, speaking quickly, said to Kevin, “So they want to abandon the trucks …”

  Kevin said, “Mokopa says koevoet has strong forces in Caprivi and he knows they have helicopters. And this makes them look bad, so it will be necessary for them to come after us. He says we should do as Joshua Nkomo did when he was fighting Ian Smith in Zimbabwe and the war came to an end, with the Shonas and Mugabe coming out the top men, and Nkomo sent forth the message to his fighters to bury their weapons and come walking home, but to mark where they were, the caches.”