Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Ray asked, “And what would you claim the leave was for? Medical leave? What?” He was speaking too loudly for the space and he knew it.

  “Take it easy. Family situation.”

  Ray was understanding everything. Boyle was afraid of him, which meant he knew that Ray had seen koevoet in all its glory, sent to crush peasants, Bushmen, university students, Kevin, the son of the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Local Government and Lands … So far nothing about koevoet had turned up in the press, not a whisper. Vandals had burned down the abandoned resort, Ngami Bird Lodge. Any nexus between the agency and koevoet would be something that if it got bruited about would have to be shot down. Boyle wanted Ray over the horizon. Life was going to be interesting for Morel, too, down the road. But the irony was that Ray was going to be out of Boyle’s hair and over the fields and far away because he needed to leave the neighborhood for his own personal reasons.

  Abruptly Ray said, “I don’t want to hear the word family or my wife or my wife’s name out of your mouth again.” He felt better.

  But Boyle wasn’t listening. He said, “Or you can do some courses. In the U.K. maybe. You need to get some kind of grip on ADP, just for example. You don’t know anything about ADP, do you? You need to. That’s where the world is going, ADP, ASAP.” He smiled and then prolonged his smile in an attempt to get Ray to show a little lightness.

  “What’s ADP?” Ray asked, realizing that he knew what it meant as soon as he’d asked. He cursed himself.

  “You see, Ray. It’s automatic data processing. You make my point.”

  “I did know that.”

  Boyle was silent. And then he said, “It’s all over up there. You do understand that.”

  “What do you mean, it’s over? How do you define that?”

  “Look. I don’t want to talk about it too much. Just let’s say the radicals stopped burning things down up there. Your friend the fire-thrower, he’s gone …”

  Boyle paused, then continued. “The radicals are all gone. They’re all dust in the wind. And to just go once over lightly, everybody’s happy down here. We had some college kids mixed up with radicals until they saw the light. They’re back in school, all of them. They’re accounted for. It’s burned itself out, the whole thing, at last. The government is willing to forget a lot, and there’s going to be some community aid. I gave them some ideas, Ray. They’re going to put in some public boreholes, I guess you could call them, out in the bush. I could show you on a map.” It’s something, Ray thought. It wouldn’t have happened without Kerekang going crazy. It wasn’t much, but water was something, up there.

  Everything was moving toward erasure, the way the Mexican government with a little help from its northern friends had erased the rebellions in Guerrero in the seventies, the Party of the Poor, those rebellions. And there had been another case in Nigeria, more recently. And there were other cases.

  Boyle was still talking, saying, “… and what else can I tell you? I think that’s all. Everybody’s gone home.” His last sentence had been spoken with emphasis.

  Ray said, “Nobody’s being punished, in other words?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Boyle said.

  Ray didn’t like that response. It was a way of not lying, but that was all it was, a way of not lying directly. Ray waited.

  Boyle said, “No punitive expeditions, if that’s what you’re asking. This isn’t Zimbabwe … And I think anybody the government might be really interested in is off the scene, one way or another. Kerekang’s gone. Some of them crossed over into Namibia. We know that. Nujoma can have them. But by the way we don’t have any problems with him. He doesn’t hate us. Not at all.”

  Boyle was letting himself brag a little. He was proud of having made a connection with SWAPO in their early days of power. Ray had only heard whispers about it. He didn’t doubt it. And he didn’t like hearing it. He didn’t like the implication that the SWAPO government might well cooperate with the agency if an interest was expressed in the whereabouts of Kerekang’s Ichokela group that had taken refuge in Namibia. He hoped to God that Kerekang had gotten through to the Republic as easily as he’d thought he could. South Africa would be safer for him than Namibia, if only because it was bigger and more diverse and more disorganized as black rule came rolling on, and also because there were so many more entities that would have to be bribed and traduced by the agency to secure lines of information.

  Ray was hungry. He was almost weak from hunger. He wasn’t eating normally. He couldn’t bear sitting down to eat with Iris because it reminded him of sitting down to eat with Iris.

  Boyle was shifting into a reflective pose. That was all it was. He was pretending to proceed from an agreement that hadn’t in fact been reached, an agreement that Ray was going to go on leave.

  Boyle said, “We might want you to make a report on your experiences later. You know, for historical purposes. For our files here. And we might want you to put that in writing. Who knows? When you get back. There’s no urgency about it. We talked to your driver, very nice guy. He said not much happened. We have all we need to know right now.”

  Be careful, Ray said to himself. He was full of anger but it was difficult because he was angry at himself, too, himself, historically. There was Angola. It was looking better now in Angola, but he had been in Botswana when it had been hideous in Angola, with the agency supporting Savimbi and holding hands with the Chinese and the fucking Boers but with the whole thing being run, thank God, out of Kinshasa, so he had been able to look at it as something happening in a different compartment. His role had been tightly held to keeping Botswana clean and tidy, as the tee shirt said, the decent rational country Botswana. There was no defense for what the agency had done in Guatemala, Boyle’s longest posting. That had to be said, sometime.

  He wanted to hurt Boyle, but he wanted to protect himself when he did.

  Ray said, “Well if I write a report, for myself, I might put it aside, just put it aside in case anything happened to me. Safeguard it.” He was afraid he had been stupid, saying that. He wanted to rush past it, leave it as a seed, a germ, but rush past it.

  Boyle seemed astonished. He leaned forward menacingly.

  Ray rushed on, saying, “You brought koevoet in …”

  “What’s that? What’s koevoet?”

  “Don’t do that. You know what it is.”

  “I know what it was. It doesn’t exist anymore. SWAPO kicked them out. So I understand.”

  It was infuriating. Ray was seeing what had happened more and more clearly. He had been sent out under conditions of panic on a reconnaissance that became supernumerary thanks to his brilliant foot-dragging through the Kalahari with Keletso. And in the meantime other sources of information had opened up to Boyle and the services of koevoet had been arranged for without reference to anything Ray had been doing.

  Ray’s face was hot. He said, “Have you got anything to drink?”

  Boyle said, “You’re not supposed to drink, are you?” That was unkind. Boyle knew that that was an ancient problem. It meant he had been reading his file all the way back to the beginning, in preparation for this.

  Boyle reached down and brought up a liter bottle of club soda. He pushed it across the table. And he produced a paper cup. Ray filled the cup and drank, using the interval to get himself under better control.

  Ray said, “Listen to me. You know what you did and I know what you did. You fucking panicked. You didn’t want anybody to figure out that you had Kerekang here in Gaborone looking all over the government for any kind of job and you screwed that up for him and he took off for the bush and then he turns into Kerekang the Incendiary. That’s one thing. And then when the trouble started up north you panicked again. It should have been a police matter. You had crimes against property going on. If you had left the man alone he would have been running boys’ clubs, for Christ’s sake. You wouldn’t listen.”

  Boyle was tense. “They were killing cattle. You can call it property if you want
but that’s not how the culture feels about it. It’s like religion, the cattle. It’s not my religion but it’s their religion.”

  Ray went on. “It could have been handled by the police, by the police, although maybe not as fast as you might’ve wanted. And then when you found out some of the sons and daughters of the top men in Domkrag were involved you panicked again. And look, I’m stupid too. Somebody I thought I could use to get the stuff on Kerekang you wanted turned out to be a hustler and a thief and that didn’t help. It made everything impossible. I know that. Everything would have been placid if nobody had done anything, for a change. But anyway. So it didn’t look good, the unrest up north, and you overreached like crazy. You got money on the side for koevoet. I know you. You got a lot of people killed. Including Kerekang. It didn’t have to be.”

  Boyle was going to suffer. Ray would see to it. Stories would appear in the local press, and that would do it … and if that wasn’t enough, Morel would work on it, too.

  “Keep your voice down,” Boyle said.

  “Why? I thought this place was soundproof …”

  “Keep it down,” Boyle shouted.

  “Go ahead, shout. You’re incompetent. You think this is Guatemala and it isn’t. You could do anything you wanted in Guatemala. Man, you’re in danger. If it comes out about koevoet you’ll look like a monkey in Washington. It’s all over for your white pals in South Africa, too, and I can tell you it’s going to be new times when the Bureau of State Security is run by black guys. And think how they would just love to hear about you and koevoet, how they’d like that, you fuck.”

  Ray got to his feet, breathing furiously. He picked up the soda water bottle and the paper cup and poured himself another drink. He swallowed the drink, then threw the bottle and cup on the floor. He wanted to do more. He swept the letter opener and the banker’s lamp off the table. They were in darkness. He laughed.

  He said, “You think you can hide this? Go ahead. But I tell you … you leave me alone. I’m through here. I’m getting out of this business and I’m getting out of this country and I won’t think about you. But you’re fucked, Boyle. Do you think they’ll keep you in the field, you fuckup?”

  Boyle began coughing. Ray found the door and pounded on it.

  The librarian, alarmed, let him out. He gave her a particularly friendly smile. There were many people he would be unlikely to see again, and she was one of them. He would have to see Boyle again, of course, to finish everything up legally, but it would be upstairs, never again in the secret chamber, which was nice.

  37. I Want to Go Up There

  This is the day, Ray thought. He had been allowing himself to cooperate, without acknowledging it, with Iris’s various stratagems of delay. But that was over. It had gone on for days and it was making him feel like a fool. It was making her look like a fool, or pathetic, but she apparently didn’t care. She didn’t want him to go. He assumed it was because she wanted to prolong his presence until she could determine what it was that she really wanted, and what she could get to happen following from that. But it could be anything. It could be that she was trying to stall his departure in the hope that when he left he would take with him a more positive picture of her in his mind than he currently had. Aside from the delays she was contriving, she was being lovely to him. Or it could be that what was acting on her was her sheer unreadiness for the gulf, the dangling problems, that coming apart as abruptly as they were doing would generate. He was doing his level best to clear up problems in advance. But there would be more to come. That couldn’t be helped. And there were problems that they would have to dispose of together by long distance, by phone and letters. They would have to be in touch.

  He was mastering his sadness. He had stopped describing his sadness to himself, stopped saying This is killing me. And that had been a help. His sadness was going to be a permanent possession, but he had to reduce it, compress it, so that other less sad items could fit in around it. And he had gone through a few days of routine depressed nihilism and come out of it. That was taken care of. What is humanity for?… except more of Itself, had been a pseudo-aphorism that had come to him. And that had been accompanied by images of himself, a childless man, using up his life in the service of the increase in numbers of all the others. And then there had been grim ruminations about literature, ruminations questioning why, if he had truly lost interest in humanity, he was concerning himself with understanding the pathetic signs and scratchings, which was what literature amounted to, the signs and scratchings of the uninteresting entity mankind, and teaching was handing the signs and the scratches on. And then he had indulged in fantasies of some essential monastic existence separated from books in every way. Every city is a necropolis was another dark observation from his lapse into nihilism. A more pointless truism would be hard to think up. Its only function was to inspire gloom. But he had come through.

  They were working together, ostensibly, to get through the last of the papers he might want to take with him. She was the family archivist. He was considerately and as usual not demanding access to her aerie, her room of her own, so that he could get the job done with dispatch. He was describing what he wanted to look at and she would go in to find it and it would take her forever but she would finally come out with what he had asked for. She was always apologetic about how long it was taking. And she was keeping him supplied, in his place on the sofa, at the vast glass coffee table he would shortly never see again, with tea and delectables, like the sandwich, teewurst on a sesame seed bun, he was just finishing. Some things that had taken her too long to find had been genuinely misplaced, like his brother’s death certificate. It was possible that her filing system was less of a marvel than he had been led to believe it was. But still it was taking too long. Today she was doing something more than just finding sets of papers for him. She was completing some other task. That was what he was picking up. According to the death certificate, his brother had died of cryptococcal meningitis. He wanted to have the death certificate, take it with him. He knew she wanted it too, but she had made no objection when he claimed it.

  Sorting out which books to take, which to leave for her to forward to him when he got settled and which to discard, had been an odd experience. He was taking a handful of books, all poetry. He was taking his Milton, his Blake, his Yeats. He was abandoning Gerard Manley Hopkins, which before he had always had with him, for a funny reason. He had been riffling through the Collected Poems, stopping at I remember a house where all were good / To me and then looking through the late poems and finding one in which Jesus cried out that he wanted to return to earth incarnated as a British soldier, which he hadn’t read before and which had struck him as the ultimate incarnation of Christianity in Empire. That had been enough. He had put Hopkins first into discard and then into save for forwarding and then back into discard. He wondered if Morel’s ideas were having an effect on him, because he loved Hopkins but he had dumped him. He was surprised, but it felt all right. And the job was done. He could hold all the books he was taking under one arm.

  She was taking too long. He was at the end of his list of what he wanted to see. He wanted to look at some limericks she had written. He had collaborated with her on some of them. He had only remembered them at the last minute. It was a reminder of better times, the limericks were.

  She was being dilatory. His taste for language was coming back. Not that it had gone away entirely during the last hellish period of his life, but coming out of hell, he had seen his words and speech suffer. They had been instruments to get from one moment to the next as safely as possible. He was getting it back piecemeal. How many times had he wanted to say to her Hello I must be going, with his heart cracking? Trying to be light, that would have been, with his heart cracking, trying to be Irish in a pub, all the Irish manqué people letting it out in pubs.

  He got up and went into the bedroom to look at himself in her mirror, the full-length mirror on the closet door. Because he was going to be himself elsewhere. She c
ouldn’t have missed that he was dressed for travel. He had decided to look more professorial. He had purchased some low-magnification glasses at the Notwane Pharmacy. He put them on and took them off, checking both images. He was wearing his black safari suit still sharply radiating the chemicals they used, not carbon monoxide but the other one, fresh from the cleaners. It was looser on him. His arms were thin. It was practically impossible to get safari suits with longsleeved jackets in Gaborone, but in South Africa it would be easier. Or he could work on his arms. He did so then a little, standing there, tensing them. Iris was looking for him. His bags were packed.

  She had his folder, the limericks. He wanted to say, Hello I must be going. She would appreciate it, normally. But this was the wrong moment. He sat down and opened the file folder.

  “I don’t know why you want to look at these,” she said.

  “I don’t know either,” he said.

  They were hers. When it had come to letters, she had been willing to give up only a few of his letters to her, and none of hers to him, saying she simply couldn’t. So, after a lot of pointless agonizing rereading of the past, he had let her keep everything. He hadn’t wanted his letters to her. The whole thing had been a mistake. There would have to be a photocopying session sometime. The imbroglio had taken too much time.

  He read one of hers.

  A man with no sense of direction

  Once, seized with an urgent erection

  Attempted to screw

  A Young Lady he knew

  Contusing her neck and midsection.

  Then there was one she had written on a visit to Dublin.

  A man from the States had a query

  To put to his Gaelic League dearie:

  Er, Maeve is it fair

  To write down Dun Loghaire

  Then insist I pronounce it Dun Leary?

  That was about street signs in Dublin, place names. It was very personal and parochial. He wanted it.