Mortals

by Norman Rush

  For the record he was there on school business, carrying his permanently pending file of names to be proposed for Phelps-Stokes fellowships. It was time to redo the file. Some of the candidates on it were dead. That file and the exhibit he had especially prepared for Boyle on the Kerekang matter were contained in the red rope portfolio on his lap, and he noticed, now, that his palms were sweating enough to leave marks on the portfolio. He dried his hands in his pockets, irritated at himself, because the sweat marks were just the kind of small thing Boyle might pick up on. The fact was that Kerekang was not a communist, not a socialist, not a follower of Karl Marx. He was a follower, if that was the word, of someone else altogether, Karl Marlo, a thinker of a different kidney completely. Ray had the proof in his hands.

  My life is taking forever, he thought. At the university library he had found bound volumes of the International Review of Social History in the stacks, but only from 1980 onward. The card catalog entry was partly illegible, but seemed to say that the earlier years of the journal were in one of the storage areas. He knew the library and was known there. He had made his way to the box rooms, as the storage rooms were called. In the first one he entered, he’d found what he’d come for. The box room was in chaos, with slopes of vandalized, hurt, and deaccessioned books reaching from the overburdened worktable surfaces to the edges of the room. He had had to walk on books to get to the wall shelving, where, displayed at eye level, he found the back issues, unbound, of the International Review of Social History. The lot was tagged as scheduled for microfilming, but the order was dated May 1981. Nothing was happening with these periodicals, he’d decided. He’d slipped the number he wanted into the waistband of his bush shorts, under his shirt.

  At that point, he had found Wemberg’s hiding place. A smell, a faint rankness, had arrested his attention. On three sides, the space between the top of the main worktable and the floor had been walled with stacked books, the walling partially masked by the drifts and dumps of spilled books lying against it. On the fourth side, the space was closed with a sheet of cardboard, which he shifted to the side. He’d had to strike matches to see inside the cave. He had cursed the Lion matches for the flimsy, sputtering, unreliable product they were. Inside the cave he had found a pallet, a sakkie containing soiled clothing, a water bottle, and a framed photograph of Alice Wemberg. On impulse he’d taken all the bills he had in his wallet, about fifty pula, and tucked them under the frame of the photograph, obscuring Alice Wemberg’s face so that Wemberg, in his distraction, wouldn’t miss seeing the money. Then Ray had left. Thinking now about Wemberg was upsetting him, again. There was nothing he could do for the man without too much danger to himself. He felt for Wemberg. He identified with him, another poor bastard going mad over a beloved woman. With Iris away, he was feeling more of a bond with Wemberg than before. He was worried that leaving the money had been stupid, that it might startle and unnerve Wemberg and lead him to abandon his hideout, which was a sensible hideout, well located because that end of the library building faced rough, blank bushveld, so that Wemberg would be able to duck in and out without being observed, especially at night. He had to turn his thoughts away from this. There was nothing he could do.

  Boyle was taking his time, per usual. Ray took out his exhibit and shuffled through it. If he did say so himself, it was conclusive against the idea that Kerekang was any kind of socialist or revolutionary. The whole misreading had begun with the sloppy job of copying the article’s title, slashing across it to yield

  Karl Mar

  Socialism

  Revolution of 1848

  when the correct full title was “Karl Marlo, Guild Socialism, and the Revolution of 1848.” In Marxian terms, Karl Marlo had been a reactionary. He had been a defender of the guilds. He had been an opponent of industrialism. He had wanted the extension of the guild system, with its masters and apprentices and its slow, merit-based upward mobility and employment stability.

  The whole thing was interesting. And Marlo had hated the liberals, who were for the industrial system, more than anything, which ought to recommend him to the liberal-hating Boyle, except that the historical context was so wildly different. What Kerekang wanted in Botswana was something like what Marlo had wanted. He had been influenced by Marlo and by an American named Borsodi. He wanted households to raise their own food and have fruit trees and raise small stock and sell any surplus on the open market. What was so terrible about that? There was a cosmic joke going on here. The reason Marlo had hated liberals was because they wanted to open everything up to the market, which he knew would mean doom for the guilds, and he had been right. Kerekang was an individualist, rightly judged. He wanted every family to be allocated an equal plot and house and access to water and he had schemes for raising a variety of agricultural products and taking the surplus for sale, which would sustain the family. You would have a base and you couldn’t be turned out into the street, like the homeless, but you could do wage work on the side, to the degree you chose. It was yeoman democracy, more than anything. It was Jeffersonian. It was innocent.

  Ray had photocopied the entire twenty-page article. And he had made a separate presentation sheet consisting of excerpts, highlighted, because he knew Boyle would never read the original piece. Ray was doing this out of principle. It would be against his best interest if Boyle paid attention, because of the scheme he had going with Pony. But if Boyle decided to forget Kerekang, Ray would send Pony for a couple of visits to Morel without authorization. Ray would have what he wanted, Morel au naturel, talking the talk.

  Of course there was an unusable aspect of Marlo that might endear him to Boyle if he ever looked into it. The great expanded guild system Marlo had proposed was for everybody but Jews. It wasn’t that Marlo had been anti-Semitic, but he had been a man of his time. Boyle had no excuse for his own attitudes and he had no idea how much Ray knew about them thanks to the beloved Marion Resnick. Boyle was Jew-fixated. He blamed the Jew Kissinger for leading Nixon to break the wall around China, which had led them to go capitalist enough to become an enormous economic as well as military threat. The idea was that they should have been left alone to doldrum along with their inefficient communist system. Boyle was an ultra. Ray thought, If you’re politically insane, things will leak out no matter who you are: and Marion can’t be blamed for talking about Boyle. Boyle hated the African National Congress not because blacks were going to come to power through it but because Jews, some of the greatest stars of the ANC, were, and of course communism was the invention of a Jew and Jews had been prominent in getting it going in Russia, and Lenin was a Jew, or half-Jew … That was Boyle. He had to live with him.

  The waiting he was being put through was deliberate. He decided to read through his exhibit, sampling it.

  “If the guilds were to play an important part in Germany’s future they would have to stand for more than simply the selfish demands of their class … the road back was closed; the future demanded more than nostalgia; it would not accept mere selfishness … the guildsmen were aware of the need for a more general appeal and a wider vision; that they were was largely due to the efforts of one Karl Marlo—the social theorist of the German guild movement during the years of revolution.”

  Learn something new every day was Resnick’s line. Socrates, when he was about to drink the hemlock, made everybody in the room shut up so he could hear the end of a song, new to him, being sung in the street. Ray knew the name of the singer, if he could remember it … Stesichorus.

  “Marlo was not a guildsman; he was a chemistry teacher in a trade school in Kassel, Kurhessen.” He had been a technician, like Kerekang.

  “Marlo’s native province was a land of small villages surrounded by carefully cultivated fields and inhabited by peasants and the master tailors, smiths, bakers, carpenters, and shoemakers of the guilds, who, with their journeymen and apprentices, formed a comprehensive guild system as yet undisturbed by free enterprise and still protected by ancient monopolies and a determined insistence
on prerogatives and precedent. It was here that Marlo carried on his social research and here that he found an ‘organization of labor’ whose principles he hoped to see embodied in an economic order which would protect Germany from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.”

  And here was Marlo himself speaking despairingly. “Nothing remains for even the most intelligent to do, but to surrender his social independence and put himself in the service of the capital-rich entrepreneurs, and leave to them the greater part of the fruit of his labor.” Ray could see clearly why Marlo appealed to Kerekang.

  Here was the core of it. “Industrial and agricultural enterprises would be limited to a certain number of workers, and each merchandising firm would be given a monopoly over a part of the national market … Those who amass more capital than is needed for their enterprise will be able to lend it to those who lack the money but not the competence to exploit their share of the national market. The state must keep interest rates low, and must also assure to each citizen ‘a sphere of activity’ equivalent to his abilities. Would not, Marlo asked, such a state be able to ward off the wild struggle for markets and capital, the destructive competition, and the dangerous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few which have transformed modern societies into vast arenas in which occur chaotic struggles for survival?… Every citizen will be expected to contribute to health, old age, and life insurance programs …”

  It sounded to Ray like Sweden in the fifties. And the outcome for Marlo was that his advanced ideas had enraged the liberal revolutionaries who wanted to break the guilds, and the socialists who wanted to vest ownership of everything in the state, and he had been tried for treason when the reactionaries came back to power after the crushing of the revolution.

  Ray thought, Outcomes are funny: Imagine that somehow Marlo and this renovated guild system had won out in Germany, what might have been next? Well, for one thing, no German Marxism burgeoning up enough to drive the ruling classes crazy and no ruling classes putting Lenin on a train to Russia and no Russian Revolution and no Stalin and no Red Army carrying fire and blood and doom to what was left of the crazy old regime, thank you very much: We outsmart ourselves! … How can I possibly get this across? We destroy moderates at our own peril, something like that: He won’t get it, he’s Boyle.

  When it came to Kerekang’s political life in Britain, reading it correctly took only the smallest amount of sophistication and goodwill. Kerekang had never taken out physical membership in anything. He had been sampling this and that in the nonparty left, over there. He was a pilgrim. There was no evidence of anything more. Yes, at the very beginning of his time in the U.K. he had fellow-traveled with a couple of Trotskyist sectlets or groupustules, Boyle’s tweaking of the standard derogatory term for miniature left groups, groupuscules, but Kerekang had clearly found them wanting. He had rejected them and gone elsewhere, which ought to count in his favor. He had been a sympathizer with something called the Commonwealth Party, now defunct, a precursor to the Green Party. The man was a seeker, and where he had come out was, if looked at without jaundice, innocuous. But Boyle was Boyle. He remained Boyle. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with the world?

  It occurred to Ray that a prime reason people want power is so they can say no, have that pleasure, exercise the power to prohibit. It was how some people made the world simpler, people who hated the confusion of the world. It was primitive.

  The buzzer sounded, the red light flashed, he rose up wearily.

  20. He Didn’t Like What He Was Suspecting

  With Iris gone Ray could eat anything he wanted, and he had planned a transgressive meal for himself for tonight, which, now that he was sitting down to it, he didn’t have much appetite for. He had to get past Boyle’s No, Boyle’s brevity with him on top of it, Boyle’s expression when he had examined Ray’s case for making Morel a POI and his attempt to show what effort it was taking to keep disbelief from turning into a horse laugh.

  He had a fine clod of fried steak before him, with baked potato and salad, flageolets dressed with oil and vinegar, a salad by British standards only. It was a thick steak, silverside. Cliffs of beef, he thought. The garnish of sautéed garlic and onions was less thoroughly caramelized than he liked. Iris would have done them perfectly. As a cook, his weakness was impatience. He was doing his own cooking. Dimakatso had offered to take over, but she was a rotten cook and he would have had to praise everything.

  He was on his second Ringnes beer. The brand was just lately available in Gaborone and it was wonderful, and strong, which was why he liked it, of course.

  He missed Iris cruelly. She would call tonight. He was hoping for a call less consumed by the detail of what was going on with Ellen and her new baby girl than the previous calls had been.

  He should be happier right now. He was set up to read and eat, a combination he liked, a pleasure in itself that a happily married man generally experienced only when he was eating away from home. He had two Times Literary Supplements still in their glassine sleeves. He didn’t mind eating in the kitchen, despite the too-bright overhead light, because everything he might have forgotten to put on the table was close at hand.

  The phone was on the table. It rang and he picked up the receiver. It was her voice. He wanted her back home. He wanted to kiss her mouth, feel her open it under his kiss. He pushed his plate aside.

  “Oh God I can hear you,” he said, which was not how he had meant to begin. Somewhere he had a list of things he wanted to mention. It must be at work. There were key things on the list. The point was to attract, to attract, for want of a better word. One item was that they had fennel now, at the Chinese greengrocer’s in White City. But that was the least interesting item on the list.

  She thought he was referring to the phone connection, obviously.

  “I can hear you too,” she said, twice.

  He wanted to do something, talk French to her, something, attract her, remind her of how much he loved her but without just saying it over and over.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I do too,” she said. He knew what she meant. It was fine. He didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted something stronger.

  She was proceeding with the news about the baby, still unnamed, fully recovered from the mild case of jaundice she’d suffered from when she was born. Iris was keeping Ellen as calm as possible. The baby was at home with them now. It was good that she had come. Did he have any suggestions for a name for a girl, keeping in mind that it had to go well with Gunther.

  “Not right now,” he said, realizing that he wanted urgently to escape the subject. The last time he’d been engaged in baby-naming exercises was during one of Iris’s false pregnancies, long ago.

  “But please help us, Ray. Think about it. You have good suggestions. Anything with a little literary feeling to it would be welcome to Ellen. She’s getting the most absurd suggestions from her friends here. I hate them. That’s another subject. I’ll tell you later. Just rebarbative is what I’d call the whole bunch of them. But there seems to be a trend going to find a name that’s got trashy associations like Lulu or Lola or Ruby. I don’t understand it. Or she’ll be enthusiastic over a name that’s just plain weird, like Merle. Of course there was Merle Oberon … But the worst is that she keeps muttering that if black people can make up any sort of name they want for their children, then why can’t she? Who knows what she might come up with. Ladeeda or Ladido or something.”

  “I think the father should have some say in it, Iris.”

  “The father. No.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “Ray, he knows about the baby, she told him, he just doesn’t know she’s been born yet.”

  “Shouldn’t somebody inform him, Iris?”

  “Of course! But this is the way Ellen wants it. He’s in another state. He got married. I don’t know how this is going to work out, but she wants me to help with an insane letter she wants him to sign. He’s getting his mail at a post o
ffice box. It’s all a mess. He works in a bookstore. He has nothing. He’s in terror of his wife finding out. He always calls, when he calls, from a pay phone. And he always whispers. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I might call your brother …”

  “Now why in hell would you do that?”

  “For advice.”

  “What in the name of hell does he know about legal … the legal realm?”

  “There’s no reason to be upset. He might know someone I could talk to. He knows amazing people. Did you read the sort of joke guidebook for returning to the States he sent me? I was going to show it to you. It turned out to be useful, really. He seems to know people in high places, gay people. The number of people you would never think of being gay that he can identify is pretty staggering. He reminds me of that diabetic woman at the embassy who named all the secret diabetics she knew about in Washington. Your brother can be very helpful.”

  “Call him, then.”

  “I did, once. But not to talk about this. Just to say hello.”

  “How is he?”

  “I think he’s all right. I couldn’t tell. He’s so funny. He has a new motto for the CIA. Do you want to know what it is?”

  He was silent. If he kept silent long enough it might remind her that there was a rule. He hadn’t been able to tell her about Dictionary Echelon but he thought he impressed a general rule of caution about certain references.

  She sighed. “I know what I did, Ray. I’m sorry. But don’t you want to know?”

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “Peek and ye shall find.”

  “Very amusing.”

  “Anyway these names she likes are, this is a guess, from movies we haven’t seen, with cheap women as heroines. Arva is another one she likes, and Thelma. My sister is excitable right now. I think it’s stress and postpartum and I think she’ll be better. My mother can’t come. She’s in a wheelchair with gout. Also she’s so out of it. She’s not leaving Michigan. Since she heard there’s no father on the scene or even in the wings, she really has nothing to say to Ellen. I am overwhelmed here. It would be heaven if you could be with us, but you can’t, I know that. If I didn’t give you the tourist reentry thing your brother wrote, go and look on the second shelf of my nightstand. It’s brilliant …