Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “What about the refreshments. I’m starving.”

  “You go from being stuffed to being starving so rapidly it’s pathological, do you know that?”

  “I know.”

  “I believe the collation is going to be fairly deluxe this time, not just samoosas being waved about by fleet-footed servers. Samoosas yes, but piled up in platters in one place so you can get at them. Many many salads. Chicken salad.”

  He opened the photocopied program and flinched.

  “What?”

  “The notables, the Batswana. They shouldn’t have put this in print. Two of them won’t come, no matter what they said. The Health permsec will not come. Not a chance. Matsila may or may not, or he may come so late it amounts to the same thing. They hate us at Health. This thing should have started by now. I can tell you exactly what’s going on inside the residence. The ambassador is arguing with somebody about whether to start now or wait until everybody they have on the program is on the premises. I could write the script. But Segoko won’t come. If he does, I will kiss your introitus numerous times.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “You obsess me.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Nobody can hear me. Besides, nobody around here knows what introitus means. You can ask them.”

  She crossed her eyes at him. She should have let him rest. During the reception part of this, there would be work to do. Everybody was here. Boyle was, radically misdressed in a white linen suit and wearing a red bow tie and, apparently, a leather baseball cap, and holding a handkerchief folded into a pad in one hand, at the ready to tamp away any offending fluids he might produce. The menthol cigarettes Boyle favored came from some outlaw manufacturer in India, probably the last source in the world for these lethal products.

  Iris was saying something. She was asking him so softly that he could barely hear her why, by the way, was kissing a certain area of hers a penalty of some kind.

  “I’ll explain later,” he said. They were both playing. But actually she had a point. He had to think about it.

  This event had to be about to begin. The amount of life you wasted in waiting for things to get under way was enormous. In one of his letters to Iris, Rex had written on the subject of starter tabs on toilet rolls, an innovation in the States. Now they invent these things, referencing his lost hours picking at toilet rolls to get them started.

  What had been in his mind was to impose on himself a penalty that was in fact a pleasure, in saying Kiss your introitus. But of course the fact was that she would know very well that he had been doing rather less of that than when they were younger. Although she was as forthcoming in that way as ever, she liked it. He was forty-eight. She was thirty-eight. He wished he had never mentioned it. She would come back to it. But there were other sexual, what? festivities of theirs that had dropped away, like her purposely giving him erections in potentially embarrassing public circumstances. She could do it in a second without touching him any time she wanted, still. I came out of the shower and we were late for breakfast, he thought, remembering … It was at her friends’ place in Carmel and they were waiting for breakfast and she got me hot the way she does, whore that she is, and then I said Now how am I going to go out there? and she said Backwards? She liked to be called a whore during sex. You have the heart of a whore, he would say.

  She was waving at someone behind them. It was the man, undoubtedly.

  “Is that your doctor?” he asked.

  “Yes, it is,” she said, her voice betraying something, some extra lightness. He wasn’t going to swivel around to look at the man. She wanted him to.

  Their huge ambassador was at the podium, giving his usual broad initiatory smile but then quickly thinking better of it. He was six foot five and enjoyed his toweringness in this country of small men enough to add to it by routinely wearing cowboy boots with significant heels. He was a man who had been reckless about his exposure to the sun all his life and was now paying for it. He looked dappled. His jaw and cheeks were marked with the sites of excised basal skin cell carcinomas. It was a continuing thing. The last tranche of cancers had been removed by a South African surgeon, who, out of some misplaced aesthetic impulse, had scoured out the sites in the shape of perfect circles. Ned Van Ness had spent too much time in the sun first as a developer and builder and then as a yachtsman, and now he was out in the sun too much here. His big bald pate bore spots of another kind, liver spots, probably. Van Ness had to be missing Galveston, where he was said to be the maximum leader of the city elite, and where you could go yachting. His face was pear-shaped, with full, soft jowls.

  Because of his age, Van Ness couldn’t be blamed for being reckless about sun exposure, since the bad news about photodamage had only started getting around in the last five years or so. Ray himself had always been, by instinct, sun-averse. But he had been the only one in his family. His impression was that Rex still went regularly to tanning salons. The explanation there was that having a nice tan would give him his only good feature, physically, so he blocked out the bad news about ultraviolet. His brother was not attractive. He deserved credit for persisting with things as he had, coming on to people, looking for boyfriends despite everything. But why, now, Van Ness couldn’t seem to adapt to the African sun was puzzling. He wouldn’t wear hats. The consequence of it all was that his head looked increasingly like a decorated thing.

  The microphone gave a keening sound. The ambassador made a prayerful gesture, his head bent briefly, then resumed his manic smile of welcome. He couldn’t help himself. He was an odd man. He was an awkward man. Ray liked the ambassador because he sensed that the man was having fun. He was a political appointee, here for the status that having been an ambassador gave you for the rest of your life. He would go back to his former life still odd. There was something carefree about him, and it showed in his odd, abrupt, ringing, undiplomatic laugh. Ray had seen Batswana flinch at that overwhelming laugh. He was certain that Van Ness found Africa funny. And the ambassador was transactionally odd in other ways. He was a perfectly amiable character, but when he reacted to something said to him there was often a lag in his response that could be unnerving. He tended to consider you with a long stare, while he thought, and when he responded it was normally sensible or reassuring or whatever was required in the situation. But in the meantime you had been unnerved. Ray liked the idea of patently odd men holding positions of power. He was interested in trying to scope out what it was in them that allowed them to escape the marginalizing juggernauts that crush the standard odd man, the average odd man. At some point in his past Van Ness had worked with a professional to rid himself of his Texas accent. This struck Ray as a strange thing to have done, since presumably his cronies in Galveston all spoke traditionally. Yet he’d bothered. The result was a neutral, actually foreign-sounding style of speech. His wife Maeve still had her accent. They had been married since high school. So when they were together there was always an unspoken question hovering, which was If you’re both from Galveston why does one of you sound like you learned English in central Europe? Whatever the prescription was for the lenses in Van Ness’s glasses, it had the effect of magnifying his eyes, which you couldn’t help but notice when he was staring at you.

  There was another balk. The ambassador was waiting now as his wife tenderly escorted Dwight Wemberg to the seat reserved for him in the front row. Ray had a proviso to his inclination to like the odd in positions of power. They had to be odd but decent. Boyle was fairly odd, but he was not a decent person. Maeve Van Ness was the reverse of odd. She was a hive of industry. She never rested. She was a rather hunched woman with a hard, intelligent face and stiff, bright blond hair. She had her hands full with Wemberg, who seemed distraught and recalcitrant.

  The ambassador repeated his prayerful gesture, then startled the gathering with one of his laughs, a blasting, baffled laugh prompted by Maeve dumbfoundedly standing and sitting and standing again as Dwight Wemberg got rigidly up and left his seat to make his way a
round to the rear of the seated crowd and over to a place among the standees at the wall. Most of the expatriates sat frozen, watching Wemberg talking to himself, saying something over and over.

  This is somebody’s fault, Ray thought. The embassy nurse began sidling along through the crowd at the wall in order to be nearer Wemberg. Iris dug her elbow into Ray’s side to make him turn back around.

  It was going exactly as Ray had known it would, excruciatingly. The eulogies had been wooden albeit fulsome. The thing was lifeless. Everyone was reading from prepared texts. The order of presentation was a shambles. No one had come from Health. The choir of five young women provided by the Anglicans was being overworked in attempts to buy time for speakers or guests not yet on hand. Their repertory was small. They had sung “Ke Bona,” twice. Ray wondered what the model was for the slow, strained, nasal style that Batswana female choirs uniformly employed. Nothing was going well. The podium would stand unoccupied for disconcertingly long moments while, obviously, the ambassador was inside the residence imprecating, trying to get people to make something come out right. Twice Ray detected raised voices coming from the residence when the ambassador was away from the ceremony. Then there had been some sideplay around the discovery that the two Portosans hired for the occasion had been delivered in a locked condition and that the man with the power to unlock them was missing. Food had been brought out prematurely and then taken back, but not before a presence of hornets had been achieved. Worst of all were the cooking odors washing out toward them. What must have happened was that the crowd to be fed was larger than anyone had anticipated and so extra frozen samoosas had been scared up and these were now being deep-fat-fried. The light had gone dull. A high, milky haze was overspreading the sky.

  “What’s happening?” Iris asked. A murmur was passing through the assembly.

  Ray didn’t know.

  There would be a substitute speaker, Doctor Kerekang, representing the gleaners, a project very close to Alice Wemberg’s heart, as the ambassador put it.

  Ray started to explain more about the gleaners to Iris, not getting much beyond the basic facts—that they were destitutes who lived at and, actually, on the municipal rubbish tip, and that most of them were solitary homeless children but that there were women and a few whole families among them, too.

  Kerekang incarnate was the medium-tall, spare, serious man Ray had expected him to be, but there was more to him. There was something immediate about him. And he had something else … aplomb. That would be the word for it. He was at the podium, still collecting himself after self-evidently being hustled over to perform without notice, but he was already taking control of the restive audience. Ray wondered if women would find Kerekang attractive. He thought probably yes. Kerekang’s hair was fuller than in his photograph, fuller but not to the point of bushiness, and it was grayer. His hairline was deeper at the temples, also. But there was something confident about his hairstyle, or actorly.

  Ray realized that he was full of expectation, for no obvious reason. He thought, There is very little magnificence in life, at least in my life, by which I mean external magnificence such as being there when the greatest actor in the English-speaking world gives his greatest Hamlet or when Nijinsky stays so long at the top of one of his leaps that people in the audience gasp … Or being present for the Gettysburg Address, although the story is that Lincoln got almost no applause. When he thought of himself as being ready for something magnificent, he didn’t know exactly what he meant, because 1989 and 1990 had been magnificent, the Berlin Wall coming down, all of that had been magnificent, but in a generic way, and then, of course, he hadn’t been present, he had been in Africa. And Mandela’s release and everything following that, up to CODESA, all of that had been wonderful, and he had been closer, physically, to those events, but still he hadn’t been in the Republic, he’d been in Botswana, onlooking from there, from where he was, from where he still was. And of course he had Iris, had Iris and her love, but that was in a different category. It was a given. It was lifelong. It wasn’t climactic, he guessed he meant. The truth was that he didn’t know what he meant. But he knew that wherever he was, Boyle was unhappy right now. Boyle was away from his seat.

  Kerekang lifted his hand, half in greeting and half as a signal that he should be given full attention. When he had that, he beckoned softly and then urgently in the direction of the gate. The hush he had created deepened. Eight ragged children, bobashi, their eyes downcast, filed in. Three of them were shirtless. Kerekang directed them to stand together to his right, a little back. Ray didn’t know what Kerekang was doing but he suspected it was brilliant. There was a phrase in Setswana that meant waking people up to the truth of a situation and it translated, if he remembered correctly, as Throwing salt in their eyes. He had invited poverty to come to the feast. Good, Ray thought. White or black, everyone present had more or less escaped poverty, except for the bobashi, and poverty was alive in Botswana, getting stronger, this was good! It had been come-as-you-are for the bobashi. There had plainly been no time for them to be gotten into proper dress, what would be considered proper dress for this, if indeed that could even have been done.

  “Who is he?” Iris whispered. “Do you know?”

  “Not really,” he answered.

  She wanted to know why the children’s heads were shaved.

  “Lice,” he said. There were two girls in the group. They were wearing headscarves, but their heads, too, had been shaved. The children looked clean enough. And they were thin, but not emaciated, not the worst off. There was a feeding scheme for the gleaners that was doing something, at least.

  Ray looked in Wemberg’s direction. Someone had put a chair under him and he appeared to be asleep. The embassy nurse was shielding him from the sun with a placemat.

  Kerekang introduced himself and identified the children by name. In terms of type, where did Kerekang fall? Ray let himself free-associate about Kerekang. He could be the reliable uncle in a family, doing some sober job, the one to go to for school fees, emergencies, unmarried, too wounded in an affair of the heart to try again, someone like that, or he could be the one decent teacher in a boys’ school, unflamboyant, meek, a coward even, the one who turns heroic when the Germans occupy and the gym coach is revealed as a shit and a collaborator. What would we do without literature? Ray asked himself, feeling a little dumb.

  Ray could see that Kerekang was unhappy with the microphone. He didn’t like being mediated by it, that was Ray’s guess. Certain men, or people, rather, had a sort of presence that made itself felt almost in a vibratory way. What Kerekang had, Ray had seen the counterfeit of a thousand times. People said that D. H. Lawrence had been that way. He was getting ahead of himself here, of course. He was trying to remember the description of Gandhi giving darshan, if that was the word, in something by Vincent Sheean that had made a gigantic impression on him when he was young and stupid. In the scene he remembered there had been a silent gathering and Gandhi had just been there, sitting or standing, raying out something that people felt in their bodies, their nervous systems, their fillings, maybe. Or it could be called glamour, not in the modern sense, but in the sense in which Malory used it. You’re still stupid, he thought.

  Kerekang bent the microphone, on its stalk, away from him and out of play. His eyes were moist. In fact, as he began speaking, two tear tracks showed on his cheeks. But his voice, an enviable, strong, low baritone, was unaffected. Immediately Ray wondered if Kerekang had voice training in his past. It sounded like it, training either for singing or the stage. There was nothing in his dossier to suggest it. They were always arresting, small men with voices larger and richer than they were supposed to have. Not that Kerekang was small. For a Motswana, he was on the tall side. But he was shorter than Ray. A small man is any man smaller than you, Ray thought.

  He looked at Iris. She was transfixed, he would say. She sought out Ray’s hand and squeezed it.

  When Kerekang’s eulogy was over, Ray felt vindication. He had
been right. It would be too strong to say he’d been rapt, but what he’d felt had been close to it. He could tell it had been the same with Iris.

  “Amazing,” he said to her. She was still dabbing at her eyes with sodden wads of tissue.

  It had been artful, and not only in transmitting feeling. Kerekang had also covered the waterfront in terms of essential information. Ray had learned certain things he hadn’t known. Apparently Alice Wemberg had worked faithfully on her own in a vegetable gardening project for the gleaners, the vegetable gardening project, rather. She had been a principal. This fountain brings up both bitter and sweet was from Jonson and could be about the West bringing wealth and poverty at the same time, wealth for the swift, and so on. And she had given significant time to this even up to, as he had put it, annoying her husband. Who was another very very good man. So he had learned today that Kerekang was also significantly connected to the gleaners, not just casually.

  The assemblage as a whole had responded about as he had. Not that they had been able to get everything, for example, Kerekang’s bravery in bringing up Dwight’s rebellion within the Agency for International Development over the hybrid maize seeds the agency was pushing. He could imagine the AID people saying that this was not what they needed to have shoved down their throats at a memorial service. Dwight had changed his mind about the hybrid maize seed. The hybrid seeds had to be bought new each season and couldn’t be saved over. But some people, in desperation, following custom, had saved them and then done what they always had when they were desperate, eaten them instead of saving them, and then, because the hybrid seeds were treated with mercury, had died, poisoned. It still happened, in bad years. So when Dwight had understood this, he had turned against the hybrids, which was not what AID had sent him to Africa to do, which meant that AID had its own separate reasons for wanting to wave goodbye to him. Kerekang had praised Dwight and Alice equally, as examples of whites who had come to Africa to be of genuine assistance, in contradistinction to many other whites who came to Africa and, in the guise of helping, took more than they ever gave. They were not to be classified with the white ants. That had gotten Ray’s attention. The White Ants was a pamphlet in which the agency was interested, very. It was an inflammatory parable comparing whites in Africa to termites, but the truth was that literarily it had a certain grace and force, which was not an observation Ray could share with Boyle. The White Ants seemed to be everywhere.