by Norman Rush
ACCLAIM FOR NORMAN RUSH’S
MORTALS
“Brilliant.… Mortals is a deeply serious, deeply ambitious, deeply successful book.… Its central achievement has to be the fidelity with which it represents consciousness, the way in which it tracks the mind’s own language.… The two hundred or so pages in which Rush describes what is in effect a small African civil war seem to me some of the most extraordinary pages written by a contemporary American novelist.”
—James Wood, The New Republic
“Remarkable.… Rush [is] as challenging and surprising and uncompromising as ever.”
—Time
“It’s no small feat to write engagingly about love, religion, philosophy, and war, and it’s no small feat to end up with something that dances on the line between earthy and stately. Each of [Mortals’] 715 pages is ripe with more ideas and insights than most authors try to get into a chapter. Mating was magnificent. Mortals, as hard as it is to believe, is even better.”
—Fortune
“Psychologically acute, meticulously written [and] ambitious.… Should help console those still unreconciled to Graham Greene’s death.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Rush’s political wisdom, honed by the years he spent working in Africa, is enhanced by an acutely moral literary sensibility and his core humanity; together, the traits … imbue his work with depth and grace.”
—The Boston Globe
“Complex and accomplished.… In both its wry-yet-forceful narrative style and its generous conceptual research, it is a worthy successor to [Mating].”
—The Washington Post
“Few other books so powerfully convey the uneasy connection between intimacy and absurdity, the way that the minutiae of everyday domestic life can become so loaded with meaning.… Read it if you care at all about some very old, very vexed questions—about matters such as the knowledge of good and evil, or the nature of human wisdom and human folly.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Broadens the scope of [Rush’s] fiction while going deeper into the human dynamic of a country in the midst of profound upheaval. Mortals envelops the reader in a manner that modern fiction too rarely attempts … no one caught in its sweep will want the experience to end.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Bitterly funny. Mr. Rush has a canny understanding for Africa, a profound appreciation for the fine points of romantic love, a muscular style of description, and an eye for character so frighteningly sharp that it argues against running across the man at parties.”
—The Economist
“The great joy in reading [Rush’s] work is that it seems to proceed from an unshakable belief in the capacity of the novel to embrace everything: global politics, the nature of love, race relations, philosophy, religion, literature, the exact feeling of the dust in Botswana.… There is no denying its intellectual meatiness and its moments of intensity.”
—Newsday
“A novel as ambitious and spell-binding as his first.… Rush weaves an astonishing array of subjects into his story, from Freud, religion and politics to life, death and Africa. Rush is a master of his characters’ minds.… Within [their] intense internal dialogues are thought-provoking, smart and often hilarious nuggets.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“The sheer energy and ambition of Mortals seems to mock its creator’s earthbound status.… Reader[s] will be justly rewarded for persisting to the explosive climax that rips this novel’s civilized veneer wide open.”
—The News & Observer (Raleigh)
“Breathtakingly ambitious. By the book’s end, Rush has given us masterful slices both of Africa’s indelible beauty and of its ongoing chaos. Rush is a real seer, and he captivates us with his audacious fictional vision.”
—Elle
“A serious work that calls attention to the indissoluble link between the public and the private.… You’ll find it hard not to be impressed with the scope of Rush’s vision.”
—The Miami Herald
“[Rush] is economical with language, choosing the best words to distill ideas and express them in gems.… [He] has real affection for Botswana and its people. His rendering of the cadences of their speech is just right.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A masterwork of literary art.… Mortals is a beautifully written, well-executed novel. It is written with passion, grace and flair.… Rush has a rare and beautiful gift of making readers feel true empathy for his characters.… A triumphant follow-up to Rush’s Mating.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Full of situations that range from subtly humorous to near slapstick that reveal an unusually keen human insight.”
—The Denver Post
“Mortals is brilliant in its presentation of milieu, the heat, the squalor and the human misery of Botswana. The reader is immersed in an exotic culture and its political and social history rendered vivid by Rush’s prose.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Well worth the wait.… Rush’s prose, wit and insight provide so many delights.… Mortals should solidify his reputation and win him new readers.”
—The Oregonian
“Wild and wonderful.… Rush inhabits the restless syncopative rhythms and associative bedlam of a male mind consumed by jealousy, disillusion and fading altruistic dreams. His observations are brutally accurate and funny.”
—The Charlotte Observer
“[An] absorbing and variegated novel … effortless and riddled with surprises.… For readers hankering after a novel of ideas, it doesn’t get much better than this.”
—The New York Observer
“The ideas are a brilliant bonus. The writing itself is intensely readable: not dry but juicy. It is rare for a novel of consciousness to be also a novel of action, but it is one of the distinctions of this book to be both.”
—The Village Voice
“Lucid, luminous, proudly literary prose.… Makes the erudition of Rushdie or Franzen seem show-off frippery by comparison.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
ALSO BY NORMAN RUSH
Mating
Whites
NORMAN RUSH
MORTALS
Norman Rush was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer and a college instructor, and, with his wife, Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983.
His stories, essays, and reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and other periodicals. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His first novel, Mating, was published in 1991 and was the recipient of the National Book Award. Mortals is his second novel.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2004
Copyright © 2003 by Norman Rush
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Universal Music Corp. on behalf of Volta Music Corp. for permission to print an excerpt from the song lyric “Town Without Pity,” words and music by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington. Copyright © by Universal Music Corp. on behalf of Volta Music Corp. (A
SCAP). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Universal Music Corp. on behalf of Volta Music Corp.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Rush, Norman.
Mortals: a novel / Norman Rush.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Americans—Botswana—Fiction. 2. African American physicians—Fiction. 3. Government investigators—Fiction. 4. Revolutionaries—Fiction. 5. Botswana—Fiction. 1. Title.
PS3568.U727M67 2003
813′.54—dc21 2002043289
eISBN: 978-0-307-78936-5
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
For my Muse and Critic, with
gratitude for the last ten
years of extraordinary forbearance,
creative impatience, unfailing love.
Elsa, you are unique.
And for Isis, Angus, Monica, and Jason,
beloved people.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
I. Unrest
1 Paradise
2 Iris
3 Iris and Rex
4 Thank God This Isn’t the Only Thing I Do
5 Crimes by This Family of Finch
6 The Codukukwane Hotel
7 Doctor Morel
8 The List
9 The Mobashi
10 Facing Boyle
11 They Played Games
12 He Knew Astonishing Things
13 A Personal Ritual
14 You’re a Better Man Than I Am, Kerekang, So Bravo, That’s All
15 I Would Like to Reassure You About My Penis
16 Milton, We Are Surrounded
17 So, My Boy, Now You Have Him
18 The Piggery Had Its Uses
19 Two Pieces of Intelligence
20 He Didn’t Like What He Was Suspecting
21 The Apostles of Reason
22 A Homecoming
23 The Denoons
II. In the Cup
24 Kerekang the Incendiary
25 Cries and Chants for Sale
26 This Dead, Thin Person
27 Nokaneng
28 He Was Not Going to Be Allowed to Remain in the Shade
29 Riding on Events
30 Tomorrow It Would Be Combat
31 Beware Me
32 The Subject Matter
33 The Truth Shall Set You Free, All That
34 Escaping from the Enemy’s Hand into the Enemy’s Vast Domain
35 A Different Sea
III. This Is the Day
36 They’re All Dust in the Wind
37 I Want to Go Up There
38 At the Beginning
Glossary
Acknowledgments
I
Unrest
1. Paradise
At least whatever was wrong was recent, Ray kept telling himself, he realized. Because he’d just done it again, turning in to Kgari Close, seeing his house ahead of him, their house. Whatever was going on with Iris was different from what had gone on in earlier episodes, minor episodes coming under the heading of adjusting to Africa. This was worse because what was going on was so hard to read. He needed to keep in mind that knowing something was going wrong at an early point was always half the battle. And he knew how to stop things in their tracks. In fact that was his field, or one of them. Anyway, he was home. He loved this house.
He paused at his gate. All the houses on the close, in fact all the houses in the extension, were identical, but, for Africa, sumptuous. They were Type III houses built by the government for allocation to the upper civil service and significant expatriates like agency heads and chiefs of mission. The rooms were giant, as Iris had put it when they moved in. Throughout the extension the properties were walled and gated on the street side and separated internally from one another by wire-mesh perimeter fencing that had to be constantly monitored and kept in repair because there was a network of footpaths through the area that the Batswana insisted on using to get from Bontleng or the squatter settlements to their day jobs or for visits with friends or family living in the servants’ quarters each Type III house came with. The quarters were cubicles set well apart from the main houses, which had possibly been a mistake because it made monitoring the flux of lodgers and visitors that much harder. If the quarters had been connected to the main houses there might be less thousand clowns activity in them, although you’d lose yet another piece of your own privacy. The perimeter fences were constantly developing holes so that the paths could keep functioning as they had before the extension was built, and it was a fact that their African neighbors were consistently more lax than the expatriates who lived there about keeping the wire fences fixed up.
The houses stood on generous plots and there was nothing wrong with a Type III house. They were single-story cinderblock oblongs faced with cement stucco. Their house was salt-white inside and out. Every third house in the extension was painted tan. The floors were poured concrete. He’d had to push Iris into the house the first time they inspected it because she thought the floors were wet, they were waxed and buffed to such an insane lustre. They had the best plot on Kgari Close, the largest, at the apex of the horseshoe the close made. They had six rooms.
He would admit that their moderne type furniture was on the ungainly and garish side. It was from South Africa. It seemed to be made for very large human beings. On the other hand it was provided free by the government of Botswana. Their bed was firm, and was vast. The corrugated iron roof, painted red to suggest terracotta tile, was a mistake, but only in the hottest part of the year, like now, when it converted the unshaded parts of the house into ovens, to which the answer was the airconditioners they had in their bedroom and living room, at least, at opposite ends of the house, except that unfortunately Iris saw herself as acquiring virtue by abstaining from using them exactly when the justification for using them was greatest. She always denied her attitude had anything to do with solidarity with Dimakatso and the other servants in the neighborhood out in their hot cubicles or with the un-airconditioned population in general, but he thought otherwise. She claimed it was because the airconditioners made too much noise for her. She was very sensitive to noise. Also she could be willful. For example, everything in the house could be locked up—regular closets, linen closets, cupboards, cabinets. The assumption was that you were going to be stolen from. The drill everywhere else was that the maid came to you to get the key when something had to be procured, and brought the key back to you afterward. But Iris kept everything unlocked even though their first maid had complained about it because she was worried that if anything went missing she’d be blamed. So nothing was locked, which was fine, she always did what she wanted. What was wrong now? He was tired of it.
Sometimes the yardman opened the gate, but usually it was the watchman, who came on duty at five. He overlapped the yardman’s tour by half an hour or so, but the yardman could be anywhere, doing anything, including napping someplace. The watchman would normally be at his post under the thorn tree to the right of the gate, sitting on a camp stool and having a cup of Joko tea and eating the very decent leftovers Iris provided—a chop, chicken thighs, and the sweets without which no meal is complete, to a Motswana. On weekends it could happen that there wasn’t much for lunch and he would think about the procession of chops and drumsticks that had gone out the kitchen door to Fikile that week, but he’d never complained about it. The watchman was coming. Ray liked Fikile, a short, energetic man in his forties. He wore the military jacket and service cap the Waygard Company supplied, but with them he wore heavy black woolen dress slacks too long for him and rolled up into tubes at his ankles. His ankles were bare. He was wearing shoes so cheap the leather of the vamp gathered up like the neck of a sack where the laces were drawn tight. They exchanged greetings and Fikile opene
d the gate. Ray walked into the yard. It was possible Fikile was illiterate. When he’d first come to work for them he’d always seemed to have reading matter with him, and then Ray had noticed that it was the same worn copy of Dikgang that they were seeing day after day. Then he had stopped bringing anything at all to read. Ray’s theory was that having the newspaper with him had been for the purpose of making a good impression and that now that Fikile knew they liked him and were going to keep him he was excused from having to pretend he could read. His English was minimal. Naturally Iris wanted to do something, but she felt blocked because to ask him if in fact he could read or not, after he’d clearly gone out of his way to give the impression he could, might insult him. Ray suspected that behind her agitation over Fikile was a short story she’d broken her heart reading in which one of the wretched of the earth is tricked into thinking he can learn to read by staring at a mystical diagram and repeating a nonsense mantra he has paid some charlatan his last nickel for. And to hand Fikile some piece of reading matter of their own, in Setswana or English, would seem like a test. Iris seemed to want her fiction to be excruciating. But that was the way she was and he was sorry he’d asked, when she’d given up right away on something light he’d recommended, probably Tom Sharpe, Isn’t it excruciating enough for you? He was always on the lookout for decent books for her, but being in Africa made it difficult and she made it difficult because she was cursed with good literary taste. She knew good writing from bad.
Here they had everything. He looked around. There were two discs of grayish struggling lawn flanking the flagstone path to the house where it diverged from the driveway leading to the garage. They were being kept alive by hand-watering. Someday the drought would be over and they could use the hosepipe again. Except for flowerbeds and the grass areas, the yard was bare red sand textured like a Holland rusk. The sand was raked every day in deliberate, sinuous patterns. He liked that. There were five palm trees spaced around the house, which he liked except when dead fronds dropped and banged on the roof at all hours. He loved his neighbors, and especially his immediate neighbors, for their lack of interest in him. One was the widow of the leader of an out-of-power Zambian political faction the Botswana government was partial to. Mrs. Timono was an actively furtive person. His other immediate neighbor, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education, was never at home. It was nice that no one had ever wondered, at least in his presence, why someone who was supposed to only be the head of the English Department at St. James College had been assigned housing in Kgari Close. He thought that was because the housing allocation process was known to be mysterious, and also simply because they’d been there so long. And he had been careful to let it be understood around that they were paying a serious premium for the house, which they could manage because Iris had received a small inheritance, lalala.