Mortals

by Norman Rush

“So then is what happened in India that he was setting a trap, setting up to video an attempted wife-burning and planning to jump in and stop it after he had his footage, and the plan went wrong?”

  “It went way wrong. The wife got out okay but the fire got out of control, there was a conflagration, and for a while they thought Denoon was caught in it and incinerated. But, as God wills, he survived. Somehow he curled up in a niche. They have it on tape, Denoon emerging from the ashes like a phoenix. They may show it tonight, although I don’t see any monitor … well, maybe one is coming. But he came out of it with damaged lungs. He can’t speak above a whisper. Even then, he talks in bursts and not for extended periods, they say. But they’re still campaigning. She hauls him around with her. He’s pretty much an invalid, apparently. It’s done wonders for the movement. You could see him as a burnt offering that worked.”

  “Oh, dear. Thank God he didn’t get burns, externally I mean.”

  Denoon gets into trouble, Ray thought. Before hooking up with the dowry murder people, Denoon had made efforts to get into the campaign against indentured labor in Madras. He had been unwelcome. The campaign had been totally in the hands of orthodox Marxist groups and his heterodox leftism had been found more than annoying. He had been beaten up, at one point, in a confrontation, but whether it had been a confrontation with the authorities or with organizers of the campaign, Ray couldn’t remember. Martyrdom was a proof of virtue, of course. Clearly it was for Iris. He wondered if unconsciously that was what she wanted for him, if she would secretly prefer him to be hurling himself against the brick wall of the world, like Denoon or like her doctor, instead of being the what, the fierce champion of the inevitable she undoubtedly saw him as. But that was life. He was her lot. Or he was her lot for as long as she would accept it, which was the problem rising in the sky over them, a new orb. Morel would have a theory of Nelson Denoon, no doubt seeing him as reflexively aping the Christ myth, blindly mimicking the martyr archetype that’s buried alive and twitching in the soul of every member of the West, the Christian West. But in fact Denoon’s feints at martyrdom could just as easily constitute a creative way of dealing with depression, say, when the only other option for dealing with it was to pay somebody to paw through the leaves of the book of your soul, some cretin who thought your problem was that you never got over your mother and who meted out wisdom in commercial units of time when in fact you were bleeding all over the place and the protocol was to stop when the timer went ding, no thank you. Iris was squeezing his hand.

  “We haven’t really suffered,” Iris said.

  “Speak for yourself,” he answered, trying for lightness.

  He was suffering because he had to go away from her. He had just gotten the order. It was the worst timing. She was barely home from the States. He was being ordered into the field, urgently. He would tell her tonight. He couldn’t stand the prospect. But there was real trouble in the north and in a complex way he could be considered partly to blame for it, which he couldn’t tell her about, not yet, although someday he would have to, if he still had her. His connection to the trouble in the north was an impossible subject for contemplation. It was de facto. He had to avoid that aspect of this misery. He hated going into the field not because he was possibly a little old for it and not just because he felt he had been around long enough to earn enough consideration to keep him from being sent, no. No the fact was that he worked well in cities. He was built for cities. He had learned all his moves in cities, towns, cities and large towns. In the bush he would be improvising. He would be raw. His Setswana was weaker than Boyle realized. Much weaker. But resentment was his enemy. He had to go, imminently. And it could be for a month or more, depending. Iris was looking around the room for someone. He knew who. But he didn’t know why a country would choose the protea for its national flower, as the South Africans had. It looked peculiar, like a giant artichoke, not really attractive. The room was filling up.

  A show of organization at last, he thought. A few supporters, Batswana men and women of college age, none of them known to him, had appeared with the necessary paraphernalia of movements, packets of literature, a banner, collection baskets, bottled water for the speaker.

  “Here they are,” Iris said. She was tense.

  “Don’t stare,” she said. But she was the one staring.

  It was dramatic. The Denoons made their way up the side of the room, Denoon moving haltingly, assisted by his wife. Just behind them came a woman maneuvering an oxygen tank on a wheeled stand, and behind her a man pushing a wheelchair. The crowd was still. The wheelchair was parked in a corner in reserve. The oxygen tank was placed just behind the table on the left of the lectern, and the breathing tube and mask the tank was equipped with were laid on the tabletop for easy access. Stiffly, Denoon seated himself. Karen wanted him closer to the lectern and proceeded to drag the seated man in his chair, to a point that allowed her to reach down and take his hand. She was clearly physically powerful. She arranged herself at the lectern but broke off to provide Denoon with a pad of folded tissues. She touched the corner of her mouth, obviously to indicate to him that he needed to touch away something objectionable in the corner of his own mouth.

  They’re a success already, visually, Ray thought. Together they communicated valiancy, if there was such a word, that and an impression of worthiness and splendid weariness, aided of course by what the viewer knew about them, but still. Denoon was a gaunt but improved version of the persona Ray was familiar with from the photographic records. Adversity and weight loss had rescued the strong, hard face he had been meant to live behind. He would be in his late fifties. He was leonine, with long, almost completely white wavy hair pulled back loosely and finished in a neat pigtail, not elaborate, but it showed that somebody loved him, no question about it. The effect of the pigtail wasn’t feminine. His gaze was piercing. Iris was enthralled, Ray could tell. As to defects, the linings of his nostrils were inflamed and he had an inordinately large Adam’s apple, although whether women considered that unattractive, Ray was unsure. Probably not, Ray thought. Denoon was unsmiling, but then why wouldn’t he be? Denoon seemed costumed, rather than dressed, to Ray. He was clad in a white dhoti over a black tee shirt and stovepipe black jeans. He was wearing sandals with white gym socks. Did he represent a subtle orchestration of pallors and darknesses, with his bloodless cheeks and his black eyebrows, and all the rest of the chiaroscuro? If it was chiaroscuro. It was always hard to know what was deliberate and he had to be fair. They had glamour, this pair. They really did.

  Karen Denoon was in her early forties. She was square-shouldered, moderately tall, very attractive, he thought, but fighting it. He had seen the phenomenon in other particularly goodlooking women in leadership positions with cause organizations. The olive drab tunic she was wearing was useful in obscuring what was obviously a good figure. She was a sturdy specimen, athletic. He liked her. Her fine, bold face was innocent of any makeup he could detect. He liked her type. She wore her very abundant auburn hair drawn severely back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and she was ignoring the gray streaking showing up in her hair that, if she chose to, could be wiped out with a touch of color, but no. And of course she was without adornment, jewelry of any kind, and was wearing a man’s ponderous wristwatch, a diver’s watch in fact. There was something fiery about her he liked, and he liked her sexually. It was natural to wonder what her love life must be with Denoon, considering the shape he was in. Ray was having more sex thoughts about the passing parade of women than usual. It was since Morel, he was sure of it.

  They were past the preliminaries, which had been uncomfortable. Denoon had mouthed some sort of greeting to the crowd. Karen had opened her presentation with a few minutes in Setswana, a piety, given that the attendance was overwhelmingly English-speaking. The crowd was less than a third Batswana, he estimated, and that third was a young, mostly female, educated-looking group. Indians made up the bulk of the audience, men and women about equal among them, an older gr
oup overall. And the remainder were Anglo-Canadians and Americans from different development organizations predominating, again men and women about equally represented.

  Iris was transfixed. She wanted his hand, again.

  Karen Denoon was a practiced speaker. She was not employing the microphone. Her voice was clear and light, with a singing quality showing in it now that the summary matter was done with. And he was learning something tonight. Dowry murder was getting worse in India, not better. He had assumed otherwise. The most recent figures were triple the figures for 1980. It had been his impression that India was sliding toward reason and light. He had read something in the International Herald Tribune suggesting that managing the wandering cow population had gotten more humane there. Ray thought that a problem with causes, and public meetings on their behalf, was that if you were reasonably au courant you already knew about the evil being protested and already agreed that it was wrong and what you were doomed to was normally a presentation of the facts so simplified for ease of understanding that it was boring. He particularly didn’t like attending cause events relating to Botswana. They tended to stir up all his subterranean foreboding about where the country was going, plenty of foreign exchange in the bank but poverty not improving that much, squatters like a thickening noose around the capital, and the virus spreading relentlessly. Living as an outsider in these painful parts of the world was an art. But tonight he was learning something. Karen Denoon had provided a vivid picture of dowry crime, which, as he understood it, involved a woman marrying on the basis of a promise of money payments to the groom’s family in cases where the whole sum couldn’t be paid up front, which was increasingly the case since dowry payments were spreading downward into the poorer castes where people were less able to come up with the wherewithal than were the richer castes they were trying to emulate. That was the problem. At first when payments were not forthcoming women had been harassed to pressure their families, and then it had gone to torture, and then it had gone to murder, which left the groom free to make off with the amount paid to date and to marry again. The most common form of murder was burning, stage-managed kitchen accidents, and a criminal cottage industry had sprung up, murder specialists for hire, that the Denoons had gotten into trouble for exposing. There were thousands of murders annually, thousands. There had been two thousand two hundred in 1988 and five thousand in 1990 and these were only the ones actually proved to be murders. Thousands more had gone unpunished, mischaracterized as accidents or suicides. It was estimated that only five percent of the total of murders were ever identified as such. The room had filled up. There were standees. Unfriendly murmurs were coming from somewhere.

  A voice cried out, “You are of Lal Nishan. You are communist. Lal Nishan is red flag. That is its meaning …”

  Denoon was shaking his head. He seemed to want to get to his feet.

  “You are completely wrong,” Karen said.

  The objector was Mrs. Mukerji, a leading person in Hindu charitable organizations in Gaborone.

  “My dear, we have passed laws against this as from 1961, if you don’t know,” Mrs. Mukerji said.

  “I do indeed. The 1961 law is ineffective. And let me tell you that we have nothing to do with Lal Nishan. That is a lie. But please wait if you wish to attack me.”

  “But we see you are providing us copies of Manushi, just as Lal Nishan does at home. We know you.”

  “Can you just wait for the question period? Manushi is a journal for all women. It has no affiliation with Lal Nishan or with any other party in India. You should know this. And Lal Nishan is in Maharashtra. We are our own organization. Our base is Poona. Or was in Poona, since we have been expelled by your country. Look at our banner. We are called Shree Shakti, which means woman’s power or power of woman. We are a member of the All India Woman’s Conference, our group is. I think it is rude to remain standing but you must please yourself …

  “Yes, this terrible thing is spreading, despite the laws. And these lives that are being taken are the lives of women fully grown and developed. I know that some of you in this room stand with the churches here against allowing women to choose abortion if they must, if they feel they must. But here we are speaking of women, human beings with all the thoughts and feelings of human beings. Not fetuses, women, and we need the churches, and you, to stand with them.”

  Mistake, Ray thought. The Indians were very conservative on this, and so were a fair proportion of educated Batswana women.

  “So here is what is happening. The upper castes, where dowry reigns, are now the model for the lower ones, where in the past, bride-price the opposite of dowry, was paid. The groom would pay moneys to the family of the bride, as is done here in Botswana with lobola payments. And never was there a question, then, of killing the groom, the husband, if there were difficulties with the payments or if retroactively someone decided the payment was not sufficient or needed implementing, sorry, I mean supplementing, adding to, I meant to say. No, if an Indian man was in default in some way he was never in physical danger, then, because even if the bride’s father was upset, the object of his rage was a man, or a man’s family …”

  Mrs. Mukerji said, “You are just saying Oh this way in Botswana, it is more advanced. You are making trouble here. You are no one. We live very well together here and yet you have come praising one way over against another. You are criticizing.”

  Ray had an excuse to turn around and have a good look at the crowd. There was no sign of Morel, which was something.

  Karen said, “No. I am here to speak to you about a matter in India. But, all right, in this question of marriage payments, where have you heard of men dying over it? No, if there is a problem with payments that come from the man, or the man’s family, something is worked out, isn’t it? There is a council, a cup of tea, a clan meeting, the men consider, something is worked out …”

  But her remarks drew objection, actual ululations, in fact, from a new quarter, from a group of young Batswana women.

  “Lobola, nyah! It must not be!”

  Iris was distressed. So was Karen Denoon.

  Karen said, “No, my sisters. I am not here to praise lobola. What I have said about it is only that defaulting grooms are not murdered in Botswana as many defaulting brides are in India …”

  “Lobola, nyah!”

  “And of course surely in the future world of women there will be no need for lobola, no need for impediments to the choices women make as to whom they shall marry …”

  “I must speak, my sister.” This woman’s last name was Nteta, he couldn’t think of her first name, and she was a traditionalist. She was married to a chief.

  “Yes, please.”

  “I am happy to call you my sister but I must say on this … about lobola. Because with lobola you can see what kind of man is coming after your daughter, if he is sound or what-what. Because if you say no to lobola, your child can just go wherever about and say Oh this chap is fine but in fact he is a sham, a stick, a fine face with nothing behind. And there is nothing behind and he goes off and she is left with his children. We see this in every town …”

  Ululating and hissing rose in intensity.

  “Now you are putting sister against sister, as you see,” Mrs. Mukerji said, triumphally.

  Denoon said something to Karen, who beckoned for a display easel to be brought up, which happened. A packet of photographic blowups was placed on the easel tray. The top photo, in color, showed a burned body in cruel detail. The room quieted.

  “Ah me,” she said. It was heartfelt. She was fatigued.

  “I’m not here to set sister against sister. We can disagree among ourselves on anything, and why should we not? I am here to say we have to look around us and when we see things drifting toward evil, drifting and drifting … we have to do something. What are we if we refuse?”

  A lull followed. She could proceed. It went on. He had to look away from the exhibits, the worst ones. Iris was squeezing his hand to numbness. Karen Denoon w
as more than competent as a presenter. In passing she let it be known that this was not the presentation as it was usually given, because certain items of audiovisual equipment, including an overhead projector of theirs, had gone missing. Still, she managed to build a cathedral of pain for the audience, pain and shame. When it was over the crowd was pretty uniformly where she wanted it to be, he thought.

  The Denoons were on their way to Zimbabwe the next day, and because her husband was in need of rest they would only take questions informally, and say hello to old friends, as they prepared to depart, at the front of the room. Ray wanted to stay put while the event dissolved. There were a few people present that he knew he should probably greet, but he wasn’t going to. The air in the room was thick, until someone opened a door to the outside and began fanning it back and forth. Ray knew Iris was seeing something in the Denoons, something not helpful to him. The Denoons were living a grueling life. After Zimbabwe, they were going to Kenya. If the Indian communities in East Africa were as organized against them on the dowry murder issue as the Gaborone community was, they were headed for trouble. They were doing good things, but he hoped Iris could at least see there was stress involved, and a certain lack of glamour. He wished them well.

  Iris wanted to join the modest throng around the Denoons. He would wait, in his seat, but he urged her to get going before the Denoons disappeared. His problem, his assignment, revived, hard, as she left, beating in him like a second heart. It was the worst time for him to be away from her that anyone could devise, with Morel machinating, her feelings for Morel, her sister showing only the slightest signs of better coping … but at least they were at a point of rest with Rex, rest or standstill. It was impossible to know how long it would last. For the moment, there was nothing he or Iris could think of to do. They had called Rex three times, inconclusively. In their first two calls they had run up against an unhelpful Joel claiming that Rex was away and unreachable and promising that a callback would come when Rex returned. They had waited and there had been no return call and then they had tried again and gotten Rex and found him evasive, insisting that he was fine, his delivery breathless and oddly deliberate. Rex had declined to speak directly with Ray. Iris had attributed Rex’s unforthcomingness to discomfort over Ray’s presence in the vicinity of the call. And it had all concluded with Rex announcing that he preferred communicating by mail and that he would write soon. At the very end he had betrayed some agitation in asking if his manuscript had been put in Ray’s hands. When he had been told yes, the call had abruptly ended. In the body of the call, Rex had backed up Joel’s earlier story that he had been away, but without any details given, and he had added that he would be traveling again in the near future. Iris had seen Rex’s performance as more extreme than Ray had. She and Rex shared at least a little history of private phone calls, so she did have a basis for comparison. In any case, they were nowhere, they’d been pushed back. Iris had poised the receiver to enable Ray to overhear a good deal of what Rex was saying, which had been a painful experience. They were connected beings, he and Rex, and there was a baffled residue of what, abused affection, that the call had stirred up. His brother had, after all, made him laugh, growing up, when he wasn’t contriving to enrage him. That was it. They were being held off. There was a reason and Ray thought it was as simple as Rex wanting to preserve secrecy about his condition, if their darkest fears were right, and they were going to be.