Mortals

by Norman Rush

  KARL MAR

  AND THE REVO

  I

  German liberals of 1848 failed

  hence incapable of managing the

  come dogma. We tend to suspect

  because it fits the “practical re

  euvering safely among existing f

  ideals and hope. In his recent a

  Theodore S. Hamerow has shown th

  liberals of 1848 failed not becau

  It was a botch, actually. It annoyed Ray to find it there. It was more nothing, or it was nothing much, although, since it was dated to 1991, it was clear Boyle was going to take it as proof that Kerekang was a closet Bolshevik at heart. There was an additional note stating that Kerekang had been observed taking copious notes as he read this particular article. And that was everything, except for the photograph.

  He had saved the photograph for last for a reason. Faces influence us unduly, was the problem.

  “That’s him,” Boyle said.

  Ray picked up the identification photograph. It was a passport photo, very clear, blown up to eight by ten. Letting a photograph speak to you was an art, of sorts. You had to let whatever was in it flow out to you in the first seconds you handled it. You could call the moment metaphysical. The point was to give in to the impulse to have the image utter something. Ray thought of it as a feminine mode of perception.

  He studied the photo, not getting much. Being watched made it difficult.

  Boyle muttered something Ray made himself ignore.

  Ray received Kerekang as a person of force and intelligence.

  He looked judicious and he looked intelligent. But judiciousness he should set aside as a possible artifact, a bleed-over from his knowledge that Kerekang was an engineer and thus presumably someone with a practical intelligence. Intelligence was there, in the eyes, somehow. How you could determine intelligence by looking at the naked meat of the eye was a deep part of the mystery of faces. Its presence seemed to have nothing to do with any relationship between the eyes and the rest of the face.

  Boyle was murmuring and doing something.

  Kerekang looked less than forty in the photograph. He had good, symmetrical features but was probably not particularly vain, since there were two or three white hairs at either end of his toothbrush mustache that he might easily have plucked. He had a good, unlined brow. The whites of his eyes were very clear, which could mean clean living. The bridge of his nose was higher than standard for a Motswana and it looked beveled or carved, the result of a repaired break, was Ray’s guess. The cut of his eyes was interesting. There was a very slight epicanthic valencing visible. The lip-line of his mustache was a little ragged, which also told against vanity. His ears were small and almost flat to the skull, the lobes curved under toward the head. There were very faint initiation scars, like cat scratches, three on each side, fanning out from the ends of his eyes. He had a good, dense head of hair, recessed over the temples about standardly for his age. There was no vanity in the haircut, no shaping—it was just evenly cropped, top and sides. Kerekang was wearing a cheap tweed jacket and a dress shirt with long collar-points, one of which was a little scrolled. The shirt was an antique. The dark knit tie he was wearing was far from new. The knot was shiny. Kerekang’s skin color, Ray decided, was what he thought of as medium black. It was funny how hit or miss the description of skin color still was, although possibly in some byway of physical anthropology some crank or other had proposed some scheme for descriptive standardization. Every paint company had different proprietary names for the identical colors, whereas you would think it would be in some general commercial interest for everybody to work from the same palette, but no.

  Ray closed the file and was astounded that Boyle pulled it back instantly and swept it away to one side of the table. They were about to go on to something else, immediately.

  They were not going to discuss it. If Ray wanted to demur he could fuck himself, was what Boyle was demonstrating.

  Ray was breathless. He thought, You come here, you cocksucker, and you do this to me: You cocksucker: You don’t know me: You do this like you’re doing some minor thing, some nothing, but I will get you, I will fuck you, because this is you trying to kill me, you fuck, this is what I do in my life and you don’t even know me: This is stupid, you stupid fuck.

  Boyle was going to pay him now. He had taken out an envelope and was extracting rand and pula notes from it. Today was payday.

  Boyle was laying out too much in one of the two piles he was making. The buy-money pile looked correct, the usual five hundred pula and two hundred rands, but unless he was getting more small-denomination bills this time, there was too much in the pay pile.

  “You get a raise,” Boyle said. He slipped a rubber band around the stack of buy money, but set another rubber band down next to the pay stack, so that Ray could count it and be delighted and band it up himself.

  Boyle pushed two receipts over to Ray for him to sign, which Ray did without looking at them, pretending to be in the midst of thought. Boyle would never see him count his money.

  “I got you a raise,” Boyle said.

  Ray took out his wallet and put the buy money into it.

  “You’re up a notch,” Boyle said.

  “I am?”

  “You do a lot. You give us a lot. I don’t like to be cheap.”

  “I try.”

  “Yeah. We appreciate it.” Boyle’s yeah was turning into the Boer yah you heard everywhere in Gaborone, unless Ray was wrong. He wanted to believe it. He banded his pay stack without counting it and set it in front of him. Boyle was showing nothing, no reaction to Ray’s refusal to count the money. He was keeping his face dead.

  Ray thought, It’s genius to injure and reward, or demote and promote, in the same stroke … I am dealing with a genius.

  Ray put the money into his wallet, uncounted.

  He thought, This is adolescent.

  What he was facing was the certainty that, under Boyle, the way it had been for him with the agency was completely over. He was a writer they were turning into a clerk. He was being mechanized. Now what they wanted from him was his notes, not his finished work, but not even his notes, really. They wanted what he knew and what he could find out, but in a checklist. Boyle was grotesque. Just now, waiting for Ray to say something appropriate, to succumb nicely, Boyle had found a piece of lint on his cuff and was scrutinizing it as though it were filth and in a second he would flick it away, in disgust. I create, Ray thought. Boyle wanted him to go now.

  Ray sat there. It was essential not to beg.

  He couldn’t help it. He said, “I’ve never, never once, the whole time I’ve been working, never once lost control of any material, of my material. It just couldn’t happen and it never has happened. I’ve never had a question on security from any quarter, not one. I have my drill down. And they know my stuff at Registry.” This was begging.

  “They’ll miss me at Registry,” Ray said.

  Boyle said, “They’ll get over it.” He eased his chair back from the table. That was the signal for Ray to go.

  He felt incapable of moving. He had to get home. But she can’t know, he thought, she can’t, this is killing me and she can’t know: Also I can hear it, I can hear it when she says it’s perfect. It’s perfect, you quit … You quit, we leave, it’s perfect, we go: But I can’t. He wanted to tell her.

  Ray got to his feet. By way of acknowledging the raise, since he had to do something adult, he patted his hip pocket.

  The library proper was still unpopulated, so he sat down at a corner table, with his back to the room, and opened whatever magazine he had pulled off the rack as he passed it. It was Car and Driver.

  What he was facing came in two parts. Part one was the vocational part, so to speak, which was bad enough. Part one said he was through doing any significant writing and that targets would be assigned to him like to a clerk. He would have nothing to say about who was of interest, nothing. As for the case of the great enigma Davis M
orel constituted, he could forget it, the best enigma of his career, but he had to do nothing, find out nothing, and be quiet. That was the vocational part.

  Part two was larger and, in a way, worse. No Quarter would be a name for it. It was a dark thing, if it was true. But it was going to be true because it would explain, among other things, assigning Boyle, someone like Boyle, as chief of station in Gaborone.

  Part two was a premonition or presentiment. Ray thought, Part one is my clerkship, Part two is why I can’t have Morel, but it goes beyond that and it explains why they do care about Kerekang and don’t care about Morel. It says we don’t get to relax, now that the Russians are down, it says Never Again! this is our Never Again campaign and it says we, the agency, but not only the agency, beyond it, above it, something is saying this is the task, whatever is left of the red menace you uproot, hit them while they’re down, get them out of here, fuck them, never darken our door again. The moment of relaxing and enjoying the spectacle of this ancient enemy disintegrating practically unaided would never come. He felt he knew what had to be going on in the collective mind of the victorious West. This is what they think, he thought, we look at everything that went wrong in the world, since socialism became a serious proposition, as a gigantic bloody detour forced on capital and entrepreneurship and the reality principle and the parliamentary system by these red bastards, because without socialism getting hold of first one sovereign state and then a bloc of them, there would never have been, one, fascism, which was a reaction against socialism, fear of it, and, two, there would never have been the long huge waste of resources the countries of the West had had to bear once the socialist states turned into military monsters like us: This is the way they see it, the sane forces of the world plunged into distraction for almost a hundred years, one distraction after another before normal history could begin again … First we were stuck to fight fascism, and that was close, and there never would have been any fascism without the goddamned socialist states we had to deal with and fuck next, because they were fucking with us from the start, that would be the history. Certain bastards had distracted the world with their system that didn’t work on its own anyway.

  So Never Again made sense. He could see Boyle as a perfect vector of this view of things. Boyle was almost a lens to him, through which he could see this imperative articulating, swelling up. All Boyle wanted was a new heaven and a new earth, someplace all clean and nice.

  Where was it the Greeks had sown the earth with salt after killing everybody there who annoyed them? It was like that. Pulling up root-stocks, pouring boiling water down ant holes, grinding the earth clean, cautery … This was what was going on. His head ached. He felt unsteady. He had the hopeless idea of going back in and talking to Boyle again, trying to. He might still be there. Boyle always stayed sitting until Ray left the room. You mainly saw him sitting, like Roosevelt. There was something wrong with one of his knees. Of course Boyle made sense being in this part of the forest, of course. Because somebody had to do something about the last real pocket of popular Marxism in the entire world, South Africa, where the South African Communist Party was recruiting like crazy and pulled plenty of strings in the ANC, which was going to govern, no question about it. Of course he had to be around here in case a black majority communism got going in a country loaded with diamonds and platinum and gold, in case Johannesburg turned into the Vatican of a new race-communism. Of course Boyle would see it differently than beloved Marion Resnick, who thought the South African Communist Party would wither away once the struggle-elite in the African National Congress turned its attention to getting rich. He didn’t know why Boyle hadn’t been sent straight to the Republic of South Africa, although there was plenty of work for him here. Botswana had been a main rear area for the ANC and there were still plenty of live connections to the ANC on the ground and under it. There were rumors of oil under the Kalahari. And Botswana was stable, but how stable?

  He needed to be with Iris. He had to tell her about Boyle, but there was no way he could. But he had to see her. He could go home. He could tell Curwen he was sick, tell Curwen something, Curwen loved him, for some reason. He’d have to tell Iris he was coming down with something. Maybe he could stand to return to St. James.

  He left the library and went unseeingly out into the alleyway and then into the main concourse of the mall, where nothing had changed. He looked up at the sky. A string of clouds like bloated checkmarks was passing overhead, north to south. It was a short string, amounting to nothing, not part of a system. He thought, You feel hope when something dims the sun, you hope for clouds, for rain, because you become part of the thirst when the drought goes on as long as this one. His throat was dry, but water seemed irrelevant.

  He had to get home.

  He was not calm. He felt like marching, oddly enough.

  He would go home, but Boyle would regret this. Because the fact was, he realized, that he was not going to obey. He would show Boyle what Morel was whether he liked it or not, and he would write his best Life, and it could be done. He had power—he had his powers.

  He stood on the curb, waiting for the traffic on Queens Road to slacken. Normally he was patient enough with the unrelenting traffic that flowed in the streets surrounding the mall and accepted the necessity of being poised to dart through any plausible opening, since the etiquette of the drivers, especially of the government vehicles, was a little intermittent when it came to the pedestrian right of way. But today it was intolerable, the racket, the diesel fumes, the jammed minivans blasting reggae and socca. That people wanted to take the mufflers off their cars in order to let the true power of their engines be heard was something he could understand, but he could not understand why nothing was ever done about it by the police. It was hardly a violation that required deep subtlety to detect. And there were police in the area who did intervene occasionally in traffic incidents and snarls if they were severe enough. He had to get through. No break occurred.

  He wanted to part the traffic with his hands, with a sweeping motion of his hands, irrationally. It was taking too long. Finally the flow of traffic did abate a little, but still he stood there. He then stepped off, and plunged through. What had finally made him move was a seizure of vivid, unasked-for images from his early life, images linked with succulence and moisture, himself standing in some garden after a rain and staring at nasturtiums with leaves as big as soup plates, and then once standing in an East Coast snowscape, listening, after heavy wet snow had fallen, for the rare sound wet snow makes falling in clots into new soft snow beneath. He was parched but not thirsty.

  Okay, it was definite. He was going to Kgari Close, and Iris. He could call Curwen to report in, or Iris could, although that would magnify things, which he didn’t want. He disliked lying to Curwen.

  Walking was helping. He was deciding something enormous as he walked and he knew that when he got to Iris it would be final.

  He was in revolt. It was simple. How it would work was hard to say. No one could know, but he was. He would unmask Morel, one. It would help if when he got home he took off these shorts and this shirt and these socks. In Africa we’re all in costume, look at us, he thought.

  This felt right. It was strange. Things he had had to put up with in the past without understanding why felt better now, in retrospect, certain painful things. He could feel a sort of, what, concordance, taking place inside him. I am rising, he thought.

  He had a faint ringing in his ears, he noticed, now that he was in the quieter streets near his house. And then that passed. He felt clear.

  But when he got home and let himself in he found the house empty. There was no one on hand, anywhere. And there was no note evident saying where Iris was. No note meant he could assume she had been expecting him home at his usual ETA. He could hunt up Dimakatso and ask if she knew anything, of course. But he wouldn’t. He was aware that Dimakatso had a tendency to decamp and attend to her own business whenever the coast was clear, which was just about what anybody in her
situation would do, because the struggle for personal free time was a universal, besides which she was a hard worker when she worked. One part of why he didn’t like the idea of bothering her in her quarters was that he had guilt feelings over how modest the accommodations provided her were, not that there was anything that could be done about it. The other part of his reluctance came from not wanting to advertise that he had no idea where his wife might be, the implications of which, the man-in-the-street implications of which, he had no interest in unleashing. Also Dimakatso had been clearing her throat obtrusively lately. She smoked dagga for her chronic upper respiratory complaints. Often when she came in after lunch her eyes would be like rubies or little taillights, and he didn’t relish impinging on Dimakatso while she was at it, smoking away, in her cloud of unknowing.

  He went through the pantry and into the garage. The VW was there, so Iris had walked wherever she’d gone. They were in walking distance of ninety percent of everything of interest, and she believed in walking, so she could be roughly anywhere.