Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Petty crime was up, but mainly in the form of housebreaking. He was alert, though. No one seemed to be walking tonight but the two of them.

  “We like to do this,” Iris said, as they settled into their steady-state stride.

  He smiled. No reply was required, because the line was resurrected from their past, specifically from the prattlings of a precocious child, speaking of precocious children, they’d known. They both knew what it meant. It was a parajuvenile way of mocking what they were doing, in a gentle way.

  This was the stride they liked for strolling, aerobic but not so fast that they would slight any interesting detail in the passing parade, although in truth there was less to see now, as the formerly common wire frontage fencing was replaced with solid walls like theirs. It was more like going strolling in upper-class neighborhoods in Mexico, that is, more a tour of blank walls and gates with the tops of trees as the main points of interest. The standard wall was getting higher, too. Also, it was embarrassing to be seen overtly exercising. Sauntering was fine with the Batswana, but jogging was a thing for ridicule. The Batswana would pass comments when joggers went by. And the Batswana thought heel-and-toe walking was a hilarious form of lunacy. The one heel-and-toe walker in the extension was the deputy chief of mission at AID, and he was secretly famous for it all over the country. He was a paradigm of lunacy. Walking together was nice, but there was a practical cause for letting it lapse as they had. There had been something artificial about their constitutionals, except for the company. They both walked a great deal during the course of the day.

  “We like to do this,” she said again.

  The subject matter of her sister was en route, and this unconscious reaching back to a precocious child in their own background was the signpost. It looked as though he wasn’t going to escape. Mainly he hated it because it led back, by implication, to their own childlessness.

  “We like to do this,” he said.

  “My doctor. Weren’t we just talking about him before?”

  “Not that I recall. Unless I missed something. Maybe you were having a mental dialogue of some kind.”

  “Maybe I was. I do that.” She seemed blithe enough, saying so. Depart this subject, he said to himself.

  “So then, I take it another one of his specialties is South Africa, I mean, he is an eclectic, after all.”

  It was dark, but he could make out the familiar quizzical but good-natured look she was giving him that was meant to ask What is your problem? So far they were dealing lightly and fairly openly with his skeptical, as she read it, attitudes toward Doctor Morel.

  Ray had no problem. If he had a problem it was the oversupply of experts on South Africa that just being in the region seemed to stimulate, the superabundance of people who thought they knew everything, but knew, in actual fact, nothing … people just off the plane who had talked to one alcoholic exile in the airport bar and thought they knew the shape of the future.

  Iris said, “He knows a lot about everything. He’s a polymath. Like you. Very much like you.”

  Ray said nothing.

  “He’s very attuned to words,” Iris said.

  Ray waited. They walked in silence for a few minutes.

  She said, “He’s attuned to what we’re really saying when we talk and why we select the particular words we do.”

  “Who would this be?” Ray asked, knowing who she meant.

  She smiled, tightening their arm link, drawing his arm snugly into the side of her breast.

  It was quiet for a Friday evening. Very florid stereo music pulsing in a couple of the houses didn’t necessarily mean that any social festivity was going on, because the preferred way to listen to stereo music was at high volume, not only among the Batswana but among the younger expatriate audiophiles as well. It was universal, or becoming universal. Bringing a torch might have been a good idea. The streetlights were set at wide intervals, not all of them were functioning, and those that were delivered a weak icy blue light muffled, especially in this season, by swarming insects. Luckily they were past the peak of the termite mating season, when the melee around any available light had to be seen to be believed. He couldn’t think of a metaphor to describe the dense, shimmering, heaving fluxes the termites created as they swarmed in midair. Getting used to Africa was getting used to termites. He remembered eating dinner with Iris in a hotel in Serowe during the worst of a particularly ferocious mating season. An attempt had been made to keep the insects out of the dining room. There were screens at the windows being pummeled, was the word for it, pummeled by the insects trying to get in. And then as people went in and out, no matter how quickly they tried to manipulate the screen door, clouds of termites had come surging in to join their mates in the swarm dance already going on around the ceiling lights. He and Iris had hunched over their plates to keep the falling, shed wings from getting into their food, their plates of goat stew and samp. The floor had been treacherous with their slippery, silvery wings, which formed a cover something like the artificial snow no longer on the market that people mound up around the bases of their Christmas trees. The Serowe trip must have been a considerable time ago because he remembered it seeming exotic to them, not nightmarish, the way it would now.

  The increase in the guard dog population made walking out at night less tranquil. Many of the houses, maybe most of them, now had guard dogs and warning plaques on their front gates saying Tsaba Ntsa! Beware of the dog! Iris was trying to make herself heard above the howls of the dog they were currently irritating. She was saying something about South Africa.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it, how the South Africans cleverly got away with using the term unrest, as in unrest area—for a township that was actually going up in flames. All during apartheid an unrest area was a place that was actually in active revolt. There were lists of unrest areas in the paper.”

  This nitpicking about the term unrest annoyed him, no doubt mainly because it was the sort of aperçu he was used to having her pick up from him. “There still are unrest areas,” Ray murmured blankly, caught in himself, in a grievance he could normally keep down. He was running through the panoply of ignorant experts he had to deal with on a regular basis, while he projected his deep interest in what they had to say, which was his lot. Usually he was fine with his lot. But there was a rub, if he let himself feel it. One of the tensions he was supposed to live with unflinchingly was knowing more than he could show, just in general. His lot was to play the intelligent but naive guy always ready to receive the wonderful opinionettes and insights and whathaveyou blowing in from the permanent passing parade of blowhards and parvenu commentators on everything. That was his role and gosiame, he accepted it. That was how it worked. That was what worked. While in point of fact he knew astonishing things, he knew genuine secrets. He possessed astonishing information. It was his. Just off the top of his head, there was the way, for example, the South African Defence Force had been selling field radios, hoppers, they were called, to every army south of the Sahara, that contained a secret feature that let the South Africans listen in to everything that got transmitted by every army in every action or maneuver undertaken over the last twenty years, radios sold specifically because they were guaranteed secure with their waveband-hopping capacity, which was why they were called hoppers. Every army was an open book to them and it would be interesting to see just how quickly the ANC would decide to let everybody in on this naughty little truth when they got control of the SADF, which would be soon.

  He got sympathy over this recurrent experience now and then, but always when he needed it, from Iris. She knew what he was, who he was, and when he overdid his dumb act, she let him know it. He knew how much she would love it if he just once jumped out of his role and wiped up the floor with a member of the cretinate, just once.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  They had come to the point at which they often turned to go back home, at a crossroads, and outside a house Iris liked to con
sider mysterious. The property the house sat in was walled and gated, but the solid wooden gates were often left ajar, revealing a front drive flanked on one side by a tall, heeling hedge. The main house was small and gave only intermittent evidence of occupation. It was his lot to share in her puzzlement and speculation about the house, but in fact he knew all about it. This was a safe house paid for by the Libyans but used on a courtesy basis by an assortment of freelance thugs who did odd jobs for Zimbabwe and a couple of other countries. The house was wired. The groundsman was in the pay of the agency and provided service on the surveillance systems. There was an old story around regarding a body buried on the premises, which he doubted was true.

  They had decided, without discussion, to prolong their stroll. They crossed the main road and turned north toward the embassy compounds.

  They were being too silent. He didn’t know what to do. A thing Iris was afraid of, she had told him a number of times, was becoming part of one of the married couples you see in restaurants, saying nothing to each other the whole time they ate their dinners. The last time they had eaten out, at the Carat, he had pointed out to her that that particular fear was a good example of fearing a thing that had never shown the least sign of happening with them. They always had plenty to say. Although it was true he sort of mobilized himself when they went out to eat. In fact he would probably like to collapse into dull silence more than he was able to, in restaurants.

  “Wait,” Iris said, and he thought he could detect a trace of relief in her voice at finding a topic.

  “Wait, I bet I can tell you something amusing you don’t know about one of our neighbors. You don’t know everything. Want to bet?”

  It was utterly clear to him. Right now the main effort of his life had to be to become again what he had been to her before, although before exactly what was still a question. But everything else on his plate had to be secondary. And that was what he had to do, and would do with all he had, so they could have their life again. And anything that stood in the way of that would be leveled. He felt clear.

  She said, “A certain dispute? Heard anything about a certain dispute in a house one street up from us?”

  “I’m glad I didn’t bet,” he said.

  “A dispute between Hedda and what’s his name at DVS? I’m surprised if you don’t know about this, in certain circles it’s a famous incident. Among women, for example, if women are a circle. Are we?”

  “Hedda and Maret,” he said. “Maret is the head of the Dutch Volunteer Service, he’s the director. Yes, Maret … so?”

  “Maret, Maret, Maret. I know you disapprove of me when I forget names. Maret, yes. Anyway, Maret went to a DVS conference in Nairobi without Hedda. I think the Nordic volunteer services are rather strict about that, leaving the wives out of it on the theory evidently that the conferences shouldn’t be fun. They try to hold them in cheap hotels, too. But there was a mix-up about bookings and the conference was transferred to a very nice place on the Indian Ocean, Bamburi Beach Hotel, a very euro spot just above Mombasa, euro in that there is topless swimming going on and that sort of thing. I think there has been rather a plethora of conferences lately to which she has not been invited. So that’s the background. And while he’s away she gets a call from him informing her of his good luck about the change of venue to Bamburi Beach. He raves about the cuisine. They are having parrot fish for lunch that day. Apparently this is a true departure from the rough venues, the rundown convents out in the bush and so on, that he’s used to. So anyway while he was away she decided to do some renovating. She painted the breakfast nook or something. And Maret was always grumbling about the living room furniture, which dated back to the sixties and had probably been comfortable at one time but was becoming shall we say very ratty, so Hedda wanted to do something about that. It was regular overstuffed South African bourgeois seating. For some reason DVS doesn’t get staff furnishings from the government. They have to go out and buy it. But Hedda was in a bind because there was no money in the budget that year for amenities like decent furniture. But she got an idea. She decided to replace the living room suite with furniture made in a workshop that DVS sponsors, the one out in Mmadinare. I guess she was tired of the old furniture, too. She had to throw madras prints over the sofa and stuffed chairs, had to keep straightening them out incessantly and they still looked like hell, so she was tired of that. You know the furniture workshop they have in Mmadinare, where they teach people to make benches and refectory tables and other furniture, all out of wood? It’s very severe, very Lutheran. The sofas are more like pews than sofas but they do have these pads you can tie to them with straps, you know the place, right?”

  “I know it,” Ray said.

  “So visualize this. This is the furniture the DVS is proposing the rest of Botswana should sit on, and Hedda could get it for nothing, virtually, and she would be supporting the project and advertising it at the same time.

  “So for his homecoming she threw out all the old furniture and installed the workshop products.

  “Which produced a veritable explosion. Maret was furious because the new furniture was excruciating, in fact, and because, unbeknownst to her, he had been deeply attached to one of the armchairs, despite his constant complaints. How was she supposed to know, for God’s sake?

  “And do you know this about the Dutch, this custom of working their fury off by driving a stake into the ground? Apparently it’s a folk thing. If you’re enraged you sharpen a hefty stick or pole or something and you take a mallet and drive it into the ground. So he was reported as doing that, by the next-door maids. The DVS people don’t have maids, so we have to rely on next door!

  “But unfortunately he remained furious and his ongoing response is this … to go out and sit in their Beetle every night, evening I mean, to read Dikgang and drink his preprandial Amstel. And Hedda stands in the doorway, fuming, until she has to get his dinner, I guess. His ritual was to read the paper and sip lager in his armchair, but now he stalks out and sits in the front seat of the Volks. He claims it’s their only comfortable seating now. And of course he’s stuck. He can’t get rid of the furniture without it being a critique of his own project. Also they get evaluated by their own volunteers, staff gets evaluated, on how close to the level of the people they’re managing to live. So I suppose their incredibly uncomfortable furniture could be good for them in that way.”

  “ ‘Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust,’ ” Ray said.

  “Webster. I love that.” She was pleased with herself.

  She said, “It’s very Dutch, his reaction, somehow. I think of them as very rigid. Actually, I don’t know for a fact that driving a stake into the ground is a peasant thing. It might be from some school of therapy or other.

  “So there you have it. They’re in a feud that every woman in the extension knows about, plus one male, you yourself.”

  “I’m grateful,” Ray said. “He’ll get over it, though. But I didn’t know about it and I do find it interesting.”

  “My pleasure,” she said.

  “This is far enough,” Ray said, and she nodded.

  They turned to go back. He could sense that there was something she wanted to broach and probably would, before they got home, something not comfortable. Walks had a way of inducing things to come to the surface, repressed things. He had no theory as to why that was so, but wondered if it had something to do with sheer locomotion itself, the conjuncture of expelling something weighty or unpleasant and simultaneously leaving it behind physically. He thought, You escape your words as you go, in a certain way. He was close to bringing up Morel, the eclectic. Ask nothing about Morel, he said to himself, sternly.

  They both spoke at once.

  “Your doctor,” he began, as she said, “My sister.”

  “Sorry, what about her?” he asked.

  “No. Go ahead. What about my doctor?”

  “No, you first. It’s nothing.”

  “No, you.”

  “No you, becaus
e … because ladies first.”

  “No, you first, because the fact is you’re obsessing on him. There. So. We should get this out.”

  God I am stupid, he thought. His theory of why walks induced secrets to exfoliate had left out the most obvious explanation for why the situation would apply to him, at least. It was the fact of surveillance. Outdoors was safe, or safer.

  “So go ahead,” she said.

  “No I’m just being stupid. You go.”

  “No, because, Ray, you are obsessed with this man.” Her voice was rising.

  “I am not. You go.”

  “You are. You show it in so many ways, including your pauses. Your pauses when you wait for me to amplify something I might say about seeing him that you think should be more exhaustive. If his name comes up you turn into a kind of crouched thing, a crouched listening beast, listening for what everything I say might mean, beyond the simple thing I said itself, you know what I mean, like you are going to crush every word I speak and then treat the dust. You turn into a beast of attention. I don’t know if you think I’m in love with him or what, if it’s something as stupid as that. You know this man is helping me. Maybe that’s what you can’t stand. No, I take that back. But this man is helping me, it’s helpful, to talk to him. And you don’t even know you’re doing it. You even breathe differently, softer, so you can hear better, I guess, I don’t know, I don’t really know. This is my experience. I’m sorry, but you’re reading me. Scanning me. It feels like suction when you do this. It’s the worst thing, I love you …” She had broken their arm link.