Mortals

by Norman Rush

Kerekang said, “Mokopa is from ZAPU. He fought alongside Joshua Nkomo.”

  Light breaks where no sun shines, Ray thought. A question was being answered. It would make sense for Kerekang’s weapons to have come from ZAPU caches. And it was a fact that ZAPU had buried huge quantities of arms when independence came in Zimbabwe. This was the kind of information Boyle had sent him into the bush to come up with, and Boyle would never know. Ray felt like laughing.

  Ray was thinking furiously. So were the others. He observed that everyone on the summit was visibly shivering in the cold breezes strengthening around them. No one was paying attention to the cold. They were too busy thinking. Individuals were clutching for handholds on slippery events, rapidly changing slippery events, trying to twist them to their own benefit. Morel wanted to secure a vehicle and speed home to Iris. Kevin appeared to want to be out of the fighting. And as for himself, Ray wanted to save Kerekang’s life and his own. And Ray knew that he wanted to preserve Kerekang for himself, for a friend. What Kerekang himself wanted was in flux, partly because the man had gotten high. But Ray was glimpsing the outline of an argument he could pursue with Kerekang, urging that he follow Mokopa’s advice about caching all their munitions and fading away with the idea that he might live to fight another day but in the meantime putting his talents to work in friendlier and more promising terrain, Mandelaland.

  One last thing he wanted to know was where Kerekang had gotten the motley collection of vehicles they were bucketing around the countryside in.

  He thought he knew how it had been done. It wasn’t complicated.

  “Kevin, these trucks and the bakkies, where did you get them?”

  “We took them.”

  “You mean you stopped them on the road and forced the drivers out and then just drove off in them.”

  “Ehe, it was like that. No one was hurt and we saw that they were left with water and provisions enough to keep them to the next ride. We took so many vehicles, rra, in different places. It was fun, in fact. And we used them and left them. But the word is in the air now, for sure, so we have come to the end of replenishing our transport so easily that way. No, the people will shoot us if we approach. Yah.”

  Kerekang was seeming lost. He was saying softly that he wanted to write something. And with his hand he was making a motion like the one diners use when they want the check.

  Ray understood. It was education speaking. He thought, We get into crisis and we need to write down where we are in our lives, write letters or manifestos or farewell to the troops, convert our confusion to text so we can read it and see if we can do what our words tell us we should. Kevin had felt the necessity to write a letter to Kerekang. I’m suffering from the same need myself, Ray thought. He wanted to write a masterpiece letter to Iris, but there was no time and no desk to write on. He needed a desk. He thought, When we read poetry we like, tiny muscles in our throat clench and relax, showing we’re speaking it, the lines, unconsciously. He wondered where he had read that. And then there was Dante writing letters to Beatrice Portinari he never sent, writing them for years, writing to a woman married by her parents to someone else, a woman he had been in love with since both of them were nine years old, saving up his letters and then learning that she had died. But he had written to her for years, never sending a letter, not one. And he had married, himself, but even after his own marriage he had kept writing. And then he had found out she was dead. And so on into the night. Where was Dante? Where was he, Ray Finch, right now?

  Kerekang said, “If I go to SouthWest … Jesus, I don’t know. I will have to explain. I will have to write something. Ah Jesus, I will. And I will have to send it out into the hands of people who can read it to the others. They burned our press at Toromole. How can it be done?”

  Ray said, “It can. I can work it out. I promise you it can.”

  Kerekang made a sound of disgust, self-disgust.

  Morel said, “Look, it’s good. You’ll be like who is it, plenty of people, Arthur, King Arthur, Robin Hood, they expected them to come back. Am I right?” He looked at Ray. “King Arthur is nat dede. King Arthur is not dead. It was a belief among the common people. Supposedly.”

  Ray was hating Morel at that moment, for his crude transparency. He was not helping. I want to handle this, he thought.

  Kerekang said, “Ah but they are still waiting for those heroes. They’re not coming, are they?” He was annoyed. He seemed to be getting a little clearer.

  Ray said, “Well but you know what he means. And there’s the slight difference that you wouldn’t be dead. You’d be alive and in the neighborhood.

  Things are going to change in Botswana, out in the countryside, rra. If you go now, you’ll still be alive when the time comes. This was not your moment, Kerekang. But you’ll see your moment.”

  Kevin was nodding. Ray thought, You may have to enlarge your plan to include him. That was daunting, but since he had no real plan as yet, or only the vaguest glimmer of one, maybe it didn’t matter much. He needed to have images, stronger ones, of what the future might look like. It would be in a school. Education in the Republic was going to be open to all kinds of new visionary things. Patrick van Rensburg was already sending down tentacles from his education-with-work system, the Brigades. And that was only one example. And Kerekang would be in a school where he could promote his homestead plans, backyard food self-sufficiency and part-time paid labor. It was the idea of progress he was holding out, that battered thing. And Kerekang would have a new identity. Ray knew how to manage that. And Kerekang could get his ideas into circulation through the mails and through the press. There would have to be some dissembling and subtlety about who this was who happened to be advocating ideas associated with the late lamented vanished Kerekang the Incendiary. He could pretend to be a disciple of his own dead self, or his brother. Stranger impostures had been tried and had worked. And Kerekang had the advantage of being Xhosa, from a Xhosa community that had overlapped into Botswana generations back. So he could speak Xhosa. That would be perfect for camouflage. Mandela was Xhosa. The school could be bilingual. That would be fine, just so that one of the languages was English. There was going to be money available for good works in the Republic, tons of it, foundation money, once Mandela was in power, tons of it especially for education, which foundations of every type and kind loved to fund. He was developing more and more enthusiasm for his idea as he what, fondled it.

  Kerekang said, “That fire is too bright. If they want a fire, they should make it in that cave.”

  “You mean that cave you left me in?”

  “Yes, they can make a fire there, not in the open.”

  Kevin said, “They won’t go there because of snakes.”

  Ray said, “I thought they cleaned them out. I thought we ate them for dinner.” He was feeling odd, just then.

  “Yah, but more can come.”

  “Wonderful,” Ray said.

  Kerekang said, “I have to go down. I know what this is. They want us to have indaba. Okay, we can.”

  Ray was uncomfortably cold but he didn’t want to lose the moment, go down to the fire, because he was getting ideas, here, upon a peak, et cetera. He liked the idea of an ideal school in a new country, which the Republic would be. He could burn bright to that. He hoped there was nothing pitiful in the idea he was nurturing for Kerekang and Kevin and himself.

  They were all going to go down to the fire, it seemed. A general movement had begun. And now he couldn’t wait to get to the fire and embrace it. Everything was hurting. They had put him in a cave with snakes. He wanted to lie down next to the fire and stop thinking.

  He stumbled twice, descending. He would like to be able to contemplate going to a spa and recovering there, except that he could only do that with a female companion. Men never attended spas without their wives, their girlfriends, at least that was his impression.

  He was too tired to think clearly, but he had a germ of an idea about a way out with Kerekang, which was that together he and Kerekang
would concoct a false death story. Kerekang would go off to his contacts in Namibia and get to the Republic, but the story would be that he had died in the battle for Ngami Bird Lodge. Morel would sign on if it could be made absolutely clear why he had to, although there was the man’s principle against lying. And if there was time Kerekang could compose a farewell to his troops. He would do it perfectly. And it could constitute the legend that Kerekang was going to be known by. Kerekang would need a legend.

  All the comrades around the fire got to their feet as Kerekang approached. They exchanged a word, a greeting, but not one of the standard greetings, some private thing, as Kerekang entered the zone of firelight. Ray hadn’t been able to make it out. There were twenty men there, close to the fire, and ten or so more back in the shadows. He couldn’t be sure, but most of those in the background seemed to be Basarwa. There was a mystery about Bushman metabolism. Most of the Basarwa were shirtless. They were wearing shorts, regular bush shorts and not loincloths. They seemed not to be suffering from the chill of the night. The Tswana men near the fire were wearing shirts, shirts on top of shirts in some cases, and jerseys.

  The faces of the witdoeke were still not individual to Ray, except for Mokopa and three or four others. That was explainable. He had only recently met any of them and that meeting had taken place under conditions of violent action, when the time for any kind of reasonable scrutiny was nonexistent. And then he had been conveyed along in a sleeping state broken into two periods, part one in the trunk and part two in the cave. And then when he had returned to normal it was the middle of the night. So he could be forgiven.

  Kerekang was unified with the suffering that had brought these men to his cause. It was more than a matter of pity, which was the limit of the usual feeling evoked by poverty and injustice. It was sympathy, but a different order of sympathy, it was embodied.

  Ray could aspire to it, was what he could do.

  Ray knew himself. He saw his own limits clearly. It was true he believed in fairness, social fairness. But it was probably truer to say that he believed in fairnessness, which would translate as a belief in a certain quantum of fairness existing in any society, enough fairness so that the issue wouldn’t be tormenting to people trying to get on with other things like art and scholarship and the rest of it. He was being hard on himself. He didn’t care. He couldn’t keep standing, though.

  Without ceremony, and while some sort of intense preliminaries were still in progress, all in Setswana, Ray made his way around to the far side of the fire and wedged his way in among the Tswana comrades and sat down, embracing his knees. He was the only one sitting. The fire was wonderful. He didn’t care if he was the only one sitting.

  Morel had slipped around to stand in back of him. He was showing solidarity. I am not leaving this fire, period, Ray thought. He didn’t understand concerns about the fire, the brightness and so on. Because as he understood it there had to be a fire all night, as a preventive against lions, and the bigger the fire the better. And the idea that koevoet would send helicopters, the idea that they would risk them on a night mission when all they would see would be one fire among others, normal cooking fires here and there in the desert, was not worth worrying about, in his humble opinion.

  Kerekang was directing everyone to sit down. Kevin opened Kerekang’s camp stool and got Kerekang seated and then he himself came around to sit cross-legged beside Morel, behind Ray. The three of them were becoming a team, a sort of team.

  It was hard to attend to what was going on. Now that Ray was out of the maelstrom of danger, his injuries were hurting more insistently. He wanted a bath. He wanted to be ushered into a well-appointed large bathroom and left there with the hot water running. He wanted to get into a deep tub of hot water. When his brother had been a small boy he had liked to lather his hair and twist it up into devil horns to make everybody laugh, and they had laughed, and now his brother was dead. He wanted his brother to not be dead. He wanted to get into a tub and have his back washed by Iris, with a loofah. He wanted to be able to look forward to that.

  There was a protocol to the present event. Each of the comrades was making a preliminary statement, in turn. Everything was in very rapid Setswana, but oddly accented Setswana. The language was spoken differently in the various regions of the country. The exchanges were more than usually opaque to Ray, but his fatigue was hurting his ability to concentrate.

  He turned to look at Morel. His brows were knitted. He was struggling to follow. He was having his own difficulties with the Setswana, with this rapid and dialectal Setswana with, Ray was now realizing, inclusions of a second language, Sekgalagadi, laced in.

  He was out of his element but he didn’t mind. He was in the presence of a harmonious organism, the band of fighters, operating by cues and understandings he was not part of. That was fine with him. And this organism was operating in darkness, among boulders and thorn trees and odd cries, animal cries, coming out of the darkness. He would never see it again. What he needed to do was to concentrate less on trying to understand what was being said and more on keeping himself from falling over into another bout of exhausted sleep.

  He was trying and then there was a blank moment and then he was being hauled to his feet by someone behind him, by two people, Kevin and another comrade, a Mosarwa. Clearly he had missed something.

  Morel also was standing. They were being led off into the night by Kevin, who seemed sullen. Ray resented leaving the campfire. The night was bitter.

  Ray felt better when he realized that their destination was another fire, a smaller one but still a fire, burning in the lee of a massive, slightly concave hump of a rock.

  “What is it, Kevin? Why are we … where are we going?” Ray asked.

  “Just there.” He pointed at the fire by the rock.

  Morel said, “They asked the makhoa to leave while they finished talking. They think we understand more than we do. They have a right, though, to their privacy. But I couldn’t catch a quarter of what they were saying.”

  Ray said, “But Kevin, what about you? You and this man? Go ahead, you can go back.”

  Kevin said, “Nyah, rra. I was told to stay with you.”

  Morel was annoyed. He said, “Hey, what are we going to do, creep around to spy on you? This is silly.”

  “My orders are to stay, rra.”

  Ray felt as though he were being dragged to the new fire like a dummy. The small fire was better than nothing, but he wanted to go back to the main fire, where the sleeping bags were, and go to sleep there.

  Morel said to Ray, “Stop talking. Kevin has something to tell us.”

  “By all means,” Ray said. He wasn’t aware that he had been talking. Who was it who had said, Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to myself. It had been Iris or it had been something Iris had reported her sister as saying. It was too bad that Morel couldn’t have managed to cross paths with Ellen during his peregrinations and fallen in love with her instead of Iris. That would have solved a multitude of problems. The man would have made an excellent brother-in-law.

  Kevin said, “Setime will come to tell you this himself, but we have reached a decision as to what should be.

  “First they are saying you might take the Land Cruiser and drive it south as far as you can, straight south from here …”

  Morel said, “You are saying drive overland, not go back to Route 14? I don’t see why.”

  “You have to give your word to do it just as we say. You must go straight down as far as you can, down to Mabuasehube …”

  Morel said, “The idea being to distract anybody who would be interested in finding the group.”

  Kevin said, “Yes, and then at Mabuasehube you will be below the line of control and you can find game scouts and others in the park to see you on to Gaborone. You will be tired, rra.”

  Ray said, “If you’re still worrying about helicopters coming down from Caprivi, I can tell you the odds are so”—Morel subtly nudged him—“hard to elucidate,” Ray said.
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  “Nyah, but we are listening to Mokopa on this one. And we will send two Bedfords that way, but not so far as Mabuasehube, but just to point toward that way.”

  Ray said, “So you figure all of the drivers would be taking the chance of helicopters coming after them.”

  “They would,” Kevin said.

  Morel said, “But don’t forget that the farther south anybody gets the less the chance that koevoet would risk showing up and risking their most precious equipment. I mean, this country does have an air force and it would be obligatory for them to take notice of an incursion coming anywhere near the population centers, places like Kanye or Jwaneng. Even if the BDF is turning its face away from what’s happening in the north, that would be too much. I think.”

  “What will you do, Kevin?” Ray asked.

  “I am deciding about it, rra.”

  Ray went on. “So one possibility would be that you would go with Kerekang to …?” He had to be careful with his questions, not to seem like his former self.

  Kevin hesitated before saying, “We have friends in Namibia. From Gobabis we can go where we like.” He was uncomfortable saying so much, Ray could tell.

  It was a shame. Ray’s old self would have been elated to get any shreds and pieces of information that linked Ichokela with SWAPO in Namibia, which was essentially what Kevin was saying existed. I could have gotten one of those invisible medals the agency gives, based on a report I am never going to write, about the ZAPU caches and about this new connection, he thought. He had done his greatest work, alas, in this outing.

  The cadres were going to disappear into the landscape, which would be child’s play for the Basarwa and less easy but possible for the other rural types, where they would hibernate. Setime would cross over into Namibia, to Gobabis, and then go down through Windhoek or Walvis Bay to the Republic. There were hundreds of points of entry where Kerekang would be able to get in without showing a passport.

  Ray understood part of what was going on, but he wanted it confirmed. His notion was that the shock of unexpected success, at Ngami Bird Lodge, was behind everything. They had done too well. They had bloodied the nose of a supposedly invincible enemy force. They had to let what they had done turn into a myth, a social myth. And they needed not to be caught and punished, to make the myth work. And then there would be another day.