by Norman Rush
“In America the beautiful, in the mountain West, you have armed madness of just this type. They are under the odd impression that Jews … the ancient enemies of God, according to lying Christian scripture … control the federal government. Therefore government officers are limbs of Satan and therefore appropriate targets. We have already had one president of the country rambling on about the Second Coming. All these types, through the normal workings of the democratic system, are percolating up into positions of power, more and more of them.
“Listen to me, all of you! Do you love Africa? Then let me ask all of you why Africa must be the greatest nursery of fools in the entire world. They are all here, all the churches, and you say we should allow it, no matata you say. Africans fought honorably against the Christian mental slavers, and for a hundred years the external churches were wringing their hands in disappointment at how little progress they were making. But they were relentless, and now they are back in force, with their radio nonsense, their cassettes, technology taken from the science they tried for so long to strangle. Turn on the radio and turn the dial and see how hard it is to find a spot where the moruti are not droning and droning and …”
“Baruti. Baruti.” Someone was correcting Morel. He had used the singular for preacher when what he wanted was the plural.
“Baruti, I meant. Thank you. Always correct me.”
After a pause, he began again. He was losing control over the pleading note in his voice. Ray didn’t like to hear it, for some reason.
“Rra, Kerekang my man, listen to me. I think I’m failing you. I don’t want to. I need to give you the essence, again. I think. Themba, I apologize for taking the floor like this, really. But I have to give you the essence …
“The essence is … is not just the misdirection of human effort, huge huge misdirection of human effort, you get with religion. That’s a consequence of it, and you understand that. It’s everywhere. It’s going to the stadium to pray for rain instead of putting the unemployed to work digging the system of underground cisterns that would make this country droughtproof, virtually—according to the author of the scheme who is sitting right here and who cannot for the life of him get a hearing from government, you yourself, my man.”
Ray knew about that. Kerekang had tried to interest the government in some grandiose self-help project copying the ancient Persian system of linked water-harvesting underground reservoirs, qanats—Ray even remembered what they were called, to his own surprise. Kerekang had presented the scheme as something that could be scaled up or down as much as anyone pleased. He wanted these qanats dug, and he wanted every roof and threshing floor in the country reconstructed for rain capture. No question he was right about the labor for it being there, floating around unused. That Ray conceded. Unused labor power was something that drove Kerekang into frenzies. He wanted to take a megaphone and organize the idle into corvées, immediately. He had been ridiculed over it, in the government paper, caricatured in just that way. The campaign against him had been merciless. Domkrag was seeing Kerekang as an irritant, someone whose objections to social conditions meant more than the rare criticisms coming from the official opposition or the Botswana Social Front, with its discredited cadres of hacks and scoundrels and windbags.
“The essence is … it isn’t just misdirection, as I said …” Morel was struggling. He was grasping at the hope that a perfect formulation or statement of the case would salvage everything. There was desperation in his effort. He was trying to pull up and consult some inner checklist of talking points. Where had his smoothness gone? Sad business, Ray thought.
“And the essence is not … repetition. Repetition is an outcome. It’s a form of misdirection, like others. Every religion known to man prescribes repetition from birth to death … chants, mantras, hit your head on the floor seven times a day, fill up your life with repetitive acts and go into a state, same thing over and over, go to mass, burn up your mortal life with repetition. My God! Take one book, one set of texts, and read it over and over and over. Play with your beads over and over. Come to church, stand up sit down stand up, Lord’s Prayer, same prayer over and over ad infinitum. Say the Shema say Hail Marys. Somebody, not God, sent the Enlightenment, which is what I worship. No, this is the thing, that even if you manage to tear yourself free from religious belief, you come away with an appetite for repetition that may mystify you. It was taught to you, ingrained in you without your permission … Well, I won’t get into that.
“But to get to the essence, and forgive me, Themba, again … It, it’s difficult because it’s so penetrating, like a gas. We see the carnival and we flatter ourselves that we’re not part of it, but in our depths, we are. Pervasion is the word I want. It’s like, like the poison fumes coming up through the floors of the site and service houses in Old Naledi. Exactly like that.”
Ray pressed the pause button. He was vague on this, but it had something to do with a disturbance, recently, in Old Naledi, in the squatter upgrade project. He remembered. The practice of dumping a drum of DDT into the soil under the floor plates of the new rondavels going up, to discourage termites from coming into the structure, had gotten widespread. Kerekang had tried to bring the Ministry of Health into it. The cement floors were porous, despite what people believed, and the fumes came through, especially when it was damp, in the rainy season, and with the fumes came birth defects, cancer, the lot. The DDT was being purchased from suppliers with connections to one of the ministries. Kerekang and his gleaners, his scout troop, or whatever they were, had stopped and damaged a truck making a delivery of DDT.
“My friend, my friends, listen to me. The essence of it is a voice, a residuum, a voice of thunder in some and in others a whisper, saying, inwardly, This you may think and This you may not think. And this will come, this comes, to feel natural to you. Think of it as a universal affliction manifesting at the strong end as murder, and mania, and at the low end as a peculiar enfeeblement, like an undiagnosed anemia. Man, we need something better to work with, wouldn’t you say?
“You can’t strike a match on a crumbling wall. You can’t lift a cheesecake with an iron hook.
“In a way the differences between religions don’t matter, because they are all debilitating in the same fundamental way.
“Not that the differences are uninteresting. Say you’re a little girl growing up in India. You’re going to grow up incorporating into your consciousness the realization that male gods are benevolent and female gods do evil, unless they are wives or consorts of male gods. Disease, possession, the hot season, pollution … blame the feminine. Put that in your psyche and suck on it for the rest of your life. A gas is seeping through the floor beneath our feet and we breathe it day and night. Self-direction blocked everywhere. Ah, and our common tragedy, our inevitable death, pay no attention, you will be reincarnated, you will become a being of light, you will sit on a crown, I mean throne, sorry. Of course here we concentrate on the Christian faith for obvious reasons. But it’s the same infantilizing gas everywhere, in different concentrations, the same universal fucking silliness …
“Kerekang my friend, you want to change the world, so you must understand all this when you go among your Christian friends.
“And by the way, what is this going away we’re hearing about from you? We don’t want to hear it. Where will you go where you can do more than here, with us? Man. Man! Have I not spoken strongly enough? Kerekang, faith is the carrier of obedience, and obedience, ultimately, kills. Look. For Christianity it goes like this. I’ll be concise. I’ll be concise.
“One, Jesus fails to get enough emunah out of the Jews to make God act, and he dies trying, under the mistaken impression that he is in such a close relationship with Abba that his hideous suffering would do it, and it doesn’t. Fini.
“Two, his followers, bless them, convince themselves he never died, really, and one particular character among them, Paul, decides that emunah is only part of it, but that now what is needed is the added element of identificat
ion, mystical identification, with the ascended, supposedly, Jesus, who is actually about to return, Paul says!—and the point of life is to be among the elect Jesus is not going to punish. A shift. A distinct shift.
“He gets the gentiles in on it. And in Paul’s formulation what you need to do is avoid politics, forget about the Romans and slavery, just concentrate on unifying emotionally with this icon of perfect obedience, Jesus. I mean, come on!
“But then that fails too, no god descending.
“So, phase three. The church, Paul’s boys, picks itself up off the floor and stretches out the horizons and says yes, God is still coming, but the important thing is to not get into hell in the meantime by various kinds of disobedience. And then error mates with error and the progeny of error tear one another apart and here we are. Stupid cruelty, death, and terror. Just one example. Then I’ll stop. But. Just look at this.
“Communism, socialism, what have you, based on mistaken interpretations of a few lying lines in Acts of the Apostles about a common purse and so on, the common purse being in fact a mere expedient for driven people who knew, knew, the end of the world was coming and Jesus coming back and so forth, very interim, but expanded absurdly into a model for national economics, somehow. And that gets conflated into socialism, which frightens the horses of the conservative branch of Christianity into a killing rage embodied in the good Catholic, Adolf Hitler, who no one ever bothered to excommunicate, by the way. I won’t go on.
“Except to say this. This is the position. If I can just get this right.
“I have imagined a destination. A world purged of the fictitious. A place fully lit for the first time. I visit this place.
“I visit it in my mind, a place where the rude fact that we are all dying animals has transfigured every part of life, where the great lie of life eternal has been dethroned and every form of division between human beings based on that lie is a memory and nothing more. I have seen a world where the shadow of the imaginary father is lifted. It was only a shadow, but it weighed like lead.
“Don’t leave this, my man! Stay with us. Abide with me, I have no faith, my man, my brother.”
I get it, a paradise of reason, Ray thought. Was Morel insane? Was he serious? Did he have any idea of the strength of the forces against him? Did he not know what man was, churches or no churches? A cartoon of Morel’s paradise came to Ray, in which the citizens of this paradise dressed uniformly in tweed jackets with elbow patches and pipes walked around stroking their chins … taking taxis where the dashboard shrines featured The Thinker instead of the jiggling Jesuses so common in Mexico but also now in New York, too … signs saying Irony Saves.
“I have no faith, but I believe in the pledge given by brother to brother, which I thought you gave to me. Well. So I thought.
“I’m running out of ways to say this, my friend …”
A light commotion could be heard, nothing unfriendly about it.
Kerekang began to speak. The tape ended. That was all Ray had.
22. A Homecoming
He was going to be late and it was because he had been overpreparing the event, stupidly, admittedly, overgrooming himself for the moment of homecoming with the result that she was going to be standing there annoyed or worse, and exhausted from the flight.
He hurried, sucking his mint pastille, unhappy. He disliked his appearance more when she was away, deprived of the tinted mirror she was for him. Of course, he never slept as well when she was absent, and that showed.
Ray disliked the overextended new big airport and disliked in particular the absurd, oversized terminal rearing up in front of him. The runways were endless and represented so much overcapacity that Zimbabwe thought there was a military rationale underlying the facility. The Botswana Defence Force had been called in to bomb or shell certain small koppies in the surrounding plain where baboon colonies had been established since the dawn of time, according to the animal rights people who had ineffectually protested. Even as things were, the baboons had come back, to a degree, frightening or delighting airport passengers, depending on who you talked to.
The way he felt was that the grandiose airport misrepresented the country. Botswana was a modest place. And the terminal was ugly, to boot, a tall vast Corobrick building with a serpentine, pushed-out facade and a peculiar fluted-concrete roof whose turned-up eaves gave a pointlessly oriental touch to the whole. There was enough parking for an army. This airport was for the thin stratum of winners, and for expatriates and tourists and official busybodies from Washington and London. It had nothing to do with the hewers of wood and whatever the rest of the quotation was that described the overwhelming mass of the Batswana stuck out in the swamps and velds, the drawers of water, although that hardly applied because of the drought. The site was perpetually underpopulated, except when the large tour flights came in, but the whole operation was geared to run on the fiction that it was a hive of industry, with long arrays of booths and stands offering elephant-foot wastebaskets and Bushman hunting kits and packets of groundnuts and other necessities. The arcades were melancholy. Most of the stands had portcullises that were dropped during closing hours, but it was not uncommon to see dispirited stand-clerks napping inside these cages in the middle of the day, portcullises down, because there was no business. Ray liked the humble, antique airport where Victor worked. It was devoted to cargo and military exclusively.
He was inside, on the concourse. The terminal was underlit. Someone had chosen dark pink flooring, so a dark pink gloom was generated. There were tall ventilation slots in the upper walls, housing in each slot a single vertical louver permanently fixed, apparently, in the open position, which accounted for the permanently gritty condition of the floor and the endless swabbing activity the blowing sand necessitated. It made no sense that there was no mechanism to close the slots in the event of storms. But then it equally made no sense that in half the toilet stalls the door bolts were mounted well above or below the receptor slots.
Where was she?
He saw her, his darling. There she was, leaning against the wall just outside the mouth of the arrivals tunnel, her swollen carry-ons at her feet. There she was, but how was she? She was beautiful and he was seeing that again, her graphic face. She waved and he waved. He hurried toward her. They never checked baggage when they flew. Africa had traumatized them permanently in that department.
His jewel was back, his what, his pivot, his unwobbling pivot, his wife. The question was, had she come back clearer about things and more like the way she’d been at the beginning, and happier to be with him? Her sister had been an ordeal. She would be glad to be clear of that.
The house she was returning to was clean to a fault, the yard policed, food in the refrigerator, no tasks waiting for her, only his needs, lucky woman.
Was she thinner? She was wearing something new to him, elf pants, he was tempted to call them, very tight green leggings, he guessed they were, so tight they made her legs seem flocked rather than clad. That was fine, but not for Botswana, which she undoubtedly understood. She was wearing a white tee shirt, sneakers, and her travel tunic, a pretext of a garment composed entirely of pockets of different capacities, not a jacket but an undeclared third carry-on. The pockets were jammed. When he put his arms around her it would be like embracing a sack of rubble. She was wearing her hair pulled back. If there was something distant or vexed in her expression, it didn’t matter. It could be because he was late. And God willing he would obliterate it with his love.
He reached her and caught her in his arms. Her breath was perfect. He said, “Thank God to see you,” demonstrating his confusion. She didn’t take notice of it.
“Oh Ray,” was what she said, followed by nothing, not that she was so glad to be back, not that this was where she belonged, nothing like anything from his maximum dreams. He loved her. He had wanted something unalloyed and stronger.
“How late am I?” he asked into her neck. He couldn’t let go of her.
“A while. It’s a
ll right.” His embrace was harder than hers. Clasp me, delicatest machine, he thought, which was Wallace Stevens and which was what she was.
He held her. He thought, There may not be such a thing as a perfect human being, but there is such a thing as the bell curve and there is such a thing as a woman who fits into the thin part that covers only the very best.
He stepped back and bent down to gather up her carry-ons.
She said, “I have to tell you something.”
Still bent over, he froze, seized by the certainty that something ominous was about to be said that he needed to hear every nuance in.
“Don’t do that,” she said, truly irritated.
He knew what it was. It was that tic he had, which was to stop whatever he was doing in order to hear perfectly what she was saying, if for some reason or other he thought it might be something potentially significant. He might stand there not closing the refrigerator door while she completed a sentence. Between them there was a phrase for his tic, which was Caught in the Headlights of Your Love, which wasn’t quite right literarily because it was his own love, love and fear, that drove him to want to suck the marrow out of some particular statement, or else.
He straightened.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you know how it drives me crazy when you do that.”