Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He was ready to go. But he was seeing something wrong. He was picking up a shudder in the arras, the brown and acid-green tapestry the bush on the far side of the donga represented. Something was moving, possibly hiding, moving in fits and starts. Now it was not moving. Nothing was. Whatever was moving was light in color. He might be in danger. There was something to attend to. He knew what the possibilities were. There could be a wounded survivor in hiding, or a raider not wounded at all. Now he couldn’t go. He was exhausted and he couldn’t go. He was profoundly exhausted.

  Black drifts of smoke were masking the part of the terrain he had to understand. When they weakened and he could see again he was ready. He knew he needed to continue looking as happenstantial as he could, given his butcherous appearance. He had to be unthreatening. He took off his sunglasses.

  He proceeded to shout “Wapenduka” first, which was the Herero greeting. There were Baherero herders, although very few if any of them worked for Tswana cattle owners. But he happened to know the greeting.

  He switched to Setswana, shouting “O tsogile,” a request to know how a respondent was doing, actually how a respondent was standing, oddly enough.

  He needed the Bushman greeting. He didn’t know what it was. It was normal to find Bushmen working at the most casual level of labor at the cattle posts, coming and going, working for salt, sugar, and tobacco and room and board, coming and going like phantoms. They had to be managed gently because they could waltz out and live comfortably in hell, getting water out of tubers, dancing through hell.

  He was waiting.

  He definitely saw something white shuffling around in the brush. He needed to sit down and concentrate, because standing, suddenly, was too hard. He sat on the ground, closer to the donga.

  He addressed the landscape, loudly, again in Setswana, “Ga ke na sepe,” which meant I have nothing, which he hoped would convey associatively that he was saying he had no weapons. But then he wondered what he had said, because he knew “Ga ke na madi” meant I have no money. How many times had he said it to panhandlers? So it was possible that his statement had been a double negative, a piece of nonsense. So he would try something else.

  “Ke sepe,” he called out, which he was fairly sure meant I am nothing, plain and simple, and which he hoped someone with any reason to be dubious about him would take as an assertion that he was nothing to be concerned about. He was having no effect.

  He wanted everyone to speak English, everyone in the world, for Christ’s sake and for the greatest good of the greatest number. Someday the world’s business would get taken care of with such ease no one would believe it, in English. Situations like the one he was in would dissolve, go away, allowing people to go home. Disputes would still occur, of course, but it would be different. He could hardly wait.

  “Reveal yourself,” he said rather than shouted. It was getting more difficult to shout.

  He would promise to help anyone who needed it. “Ke thusa,” he made himself shout with reasonable force.

  He continued to wait while nothing happened and warned himself not to relax beyond a certain point, not to take a nap to refresh himself. He wanted a nap. He would be joining the dead if he succumbed. He wondered what his audience was thinking about his performance. Nobody could miss the fact that he was the one who needed help. That was all right. He was doing his best.

  “I am ashamed,” he announced. He didn’t know what he meant but he could figure it out because he was intelligent. All he needed was a rest. In fact, as he got to his feet again, he figured out why he had said what he’d said. It was private. What he was ashamed of was that ever since he had come down into this burning place the bottom half of his mind had been converted into a prayer rug. He had been playing a constant Muzak of appeals to God, thanks to God for this and that. He visualized his brain sitting in a thick syrup like cough medicine. He began coughing just then and asked God to help him stop. He stopped. He thanked God. He couldn’t not, it seemed.

  He had a pretty clear notion of what he was going to find in the kraal. There were unlikely to be any surprises. But he realized that he had to look first into the donga, a deep donga, beyond the rondavels, at the edge of the clearing. It would be the refuse dump for this facility. It could hold horrors. He prayed to God not.

  The crevasse was about twenty feet across and a hundred or so feet long, slightly curving, deepest at its east end. Ray walked around to the high end of the sloping burden of refuse the donga held. He knew how it worked, a pit like this. Everything would end up in it, cow bones, human waste, mealie cobs, ashes, slops, melon rinds, Fanta cans, chibuku cartons, broken tools, and when the stench got too evident paraffin would be pitched into it and set alight. Any horror would be down at the deep end. It had been a while, obviously, since the collation had been treated with fire. The stench was fierce.

  There was nothing untoward there and he had to back away from it. The thing was not to die and end up in that particular flaw in the landscape, in the donga.

  Next was the kraal. But first he had to take care of the body and it had come to him how he could do that. There was a zinc drinking trough he could drag over and upend over the corpse. He would be steadier if he could accomplish that.

  It was easier than he’d expected. The trough was sizable, ten or twelve feet long. It was heavy, but he would be able to move it. It was kept in place by a low surround of stakes driven into the earth. It was near the kraal and not linked up by piping to the borehole unit. It had been filled by hand, Ray supposed. He heaved it free and slowly slid it over to the forecourt of the rondavel, in two long, sustained pushes. It would have been less work to move the body in the direction of the trough, but he hadn’t been up for it.

  There was no time for ceremony. He got the body under the overturned trough. He was getting blood on himself. He wanted to say something from Milton but all he could think of was To be weak is miserable, which was true but not what he’d had in mind to say. He said it anyway. Next was the kraal.

  There should be a dog around. Every cattle post had one, at least one. Some posts had many, multitudes. So there was something amiss. He didn’t know what it meant, unless the dog or dogs had been killed, which would have been a feat if the dog happened to be a ridgeback, which was overwhelmingly the commonest breed over in the bush. Ridgebacks were smart, vicious, quick, paranoid creatures. You can’t get near them quietly, he thought. So there was something to keep his mind on.

  The kraal gate lay on the ground. It was a standard pipe-and-wire crossing gate. It had been wrenched from its hinges. The classic kraals relied on clever maze entries, whose construction was yet another dying art.

  There were four dead beasts, as he’d calculated from a distance, three heifers and a bull. They were distributed in a line against the kraal fence, the heifers closer together, the bull alone. The bull was a Charolais, although how he knew that escaped him. Like the heifers, the bull had been shot multiple times behind the ear. The bull had been running and had collapsed forward. His head was turned under, his neck undoubtedly broken. There was thick yellow foam in the nostrils of the bull. The bull was a black and white, the heifers were black and tan. The largest of the heifers had been shot in the haunch as well as the head. He had collected a sampling of cartridges. That was enough. He was not going to dig slugs out of cows.

  Anyway, he didn’t want to contribute to whatever prosecution of those who’d raided this cattle post might finally result. Unless that man’s death had been intentional. That would make everything different. He ought to collect a slug or two. There was no way he could believe that Kerekang would approve the shape this raid had taken. It had to be that this was the handiwork of the movement he’d generated. Yes Kerekang wanted the absentee cattle owners punished, burned out, driven out of the northwest quadrant of the country. And he was willing to massacre cattle to arrive at that. But he had never killed the herders. There could be parasites on the movement, uncontrollable elements. That was the trouble with mov
ements. And so far he hadn’t found ISA written or scratched on anything. The movement had a name. To Make Happen was its name. ISA. ISA was a political signature and he hadn’t found it anywhere, so this could be a piggyback situation, rough elements getting in on the action. He wanted to entertain that. It was hard, though.

  He needed to wash. He needed a towel, at least. There was no water. There had been a relic of water, the only water he had come across in the compound, a couple of gallons of it in the drinking trough, and he had poured it out on the ground, stupidly. What was plentiful was fire, not water. The individual fires were flagging, thank God, and the gap between the burning structures and the dry thornveld beyond hadn’t been crossed, that he could see. So thank God, he thought. But in fact he didn’t care if it all burned away, burned to the horizon, leaving nothing.

  His right hand and his right sleeve were red. He didn’t like it. He had an idea. Someone had kicked a drum of powdered milk over and hacked at it and Ray went to the lean- to where he had seen it and rolled his arm and hand around in the whiteness of the spilled powder. It made no sense. There were two storage lean-tos and they had been dealt with in a cursory way. Sacks of World Food Organization rice had been slashed open. Someone was not thinking. These were supplies. They could have been taken and used. He patted more milk powder on his arm. It looked odd but better. It would look odd to Keletso when he got back to him, but not as frightening as the alternative.

  One last task was to find heavy things he could heap on the drinking trough to keep it secure until the authorities could come. There were no heavy things. He needed the drinking trough to be in place over its contents, its contents … Because the Cape vultures would be coming soon, dropping down through the smoke. He had been creative. There was no time to do a burial. What he could do was cap one end of the trough with the tipped-over three-legged pot sitting in ashes next to the second rondavel. It was a heavy item, very heavy, a cauldron. It was iron. It would do.

  He rolled the pot into place and tipped it over and got the mouth solidly over one end of the drinking trough. But then for the foot of the trough he had nothing, unless he made a collection of less heavy items stand for something truly heavy like the three-legged pot. That was all he could do. He brought fire-blackened rocks from the ring around the cooking space the pot had been in the center of. And he found a sledgehammer head, solitary, detached from its shaft, that would add something. And then he dragged the kraal gate over and laid it on top of the rocks. And that was as much as was possible. He began coughing again and again asked God to help him stop. He stopped. He thanked God.

  Whatever was twitching in the landscape across the donga was not being aggressive. He could see more of the shape than before and it was low to the ground. He had to proceed around to that side and get close enough to what he was seeing to determine what it was and help it or kill it or run or do whatever God might suggest at that point. He was nowhere nearer believing in God than he had ever been in his adult life, and yet he doubted he could have gotten through this excursion without the God-talk. No doubt someone like Morel would sneer at him. He wouldn’t mind discussing it with Morel someday. His wife liked to talk to Morel. She found him interesting. But the God-talk was like an addiction, like needing to chew gum. God-talk assuaged something and got people through extreme situations without turning them devout, so what was the problem? It was a puzzle for people like Morel.

  He got around to the far side of the donga and advanced delicately toward the object of his attention, which was inert, not moving at all. It was a white low lump, a long white low lump half obscured in the wreckage of a rough trellis that had once supported granadilla vines. Now the trellis was destroyed, pulled down, the vines uprooted. Someone had taken the trouble to dump diesel oil into a pathetic melon patch in the same area. He could see now that the white bundle was only partly white. He was seeing white fabric, a bedspread, stained red in places, swaddled or caught around an unknown thing. He wanted to leave it alone but knew he couldn’t. He was afraid. It was impossible not to think it might be a child, a small child, or an infant, swaddled up there, dead. Hello I must be going, he thought. God would keep it from being a child.

  He pulled at the fabric. It was fixed to whatever it contained. A metal spindle or sharpened rod had been driven through it and into the body within, because it was going to be a body. Blood had welled up from the wound the rod had inflicted.

  He unfurled the bedspread. He thanked God for his goodness, because the bedspread had been wrapped around a dog, a dead dog, newly dead. It was a ridgeback, gaunt, as they always seemed to be, wolflike, gray, with its coarse coat of hair tufting peculiarly along the spine. This must have been the camp watchdog. It was an old animal. And it was clear what had happened. The dog had a dart in its throat, a flimsy metal thing, a Bushman dart. So a Bushman had gotten close enough to blow a dart into it, to shut it up, and the dart would have had one of their paralyzing poisons on it, and then to completely neutralize the dog someone had muffled it up in a bedspread and jabbed a skewer into it for good measure. And what Ray had seen was the dog dragging his shroud feebly around, unable to bark, obviously, giving his last kicks and twitches. The dart proved that Bushmen were involved in this. He would have preferred not knowing that for a certainty.

  A washtub caught his eye. He could use it. He pressed the dog bundle into it and overturned it and placed it next to the drinking trough tomb, under the kraal gate. It was pointless. Nothing could stop the legions of carrion eaters for long. Everything is a gesture, he thought.

  Now it would be interesting to see if he had the strength to get back to the Land Cruiser. He was filling up with hollowness, if such a thing was possible. It was his right knee that was problematical. If he could go slowly enough he was sure he could manage, but if he went slowly he ran the risk of getting back to the road just in time to see Keletso driving off toward Nokaneng. He had twenty minutes, he calculated. He had to start off immediately. There was no time to do more than he had. He retrieved his knobkerrie. He could go.

  A terrible cry alarmed him. There was more happening. Someone was screaming somewhere. He had to hide, but he had to go as well. It was too much. His knee was bad, hurting.

  Another berserk cry came, as a figure appeared on the crest of the ridge he had to cross to get back to safety, a figure waving an ax. But then it was fine, a fine thing.

  It was Keletso, disobedient man, angelic man, trying to terrify any antagonists there might be.

  27. Nokaneng

  They were in Nokaneng. They had made it by early dusk. They were in Nokaneng, eating.

  Nothing is perfect, Ray thought. They were under pressure to finish eating with dispatch. There was a bathing shed attached to the Golden Wing Restaurant and General Dealer and he and Keletso had booked hot baths and the donkey boiler was heating up as they ate, but the proprietor, Rra Makoko, wanted them to eat and bathe and begone, so that he could close shop on time. Closing on the dot was a ritual in Botswana. Ray wanted to relax over his food and in fact dine for a change. His meal seemed delicious. It was rice with chicken gizzards in powerful peri-peri sauce, with bread rolls and Pine Nut soda. And tea was coming. Nothing was bothering him much, not even the outrageous five-pula charge for the load of cow chips and kindling that would be consumed in heating their bathwater. The help wanted him to finish. An elderly woman, barefoot, in a blue housecoat and white headscarf, was circling their table, at a distance, it was true, but still it was unnerving, as it was meant to be. Iris knew how to stop that when they did it. She would make a scene if she had to. She was bold. He loved her.

  He sent Keletso off to bathe. Ray’s exhaustion, which had abated during the drive from the cattle post, was back, toweringly back. He wanted to put his head down on the table for a few beats, but that would give the impression he was drunk. The proprietor was a severe sort. He watched his plate being taken away. He had almost been finished. He held tight to his half-full tumbler of soda.

  He
liked the dim light in this room. He liked the Golden Wing. He found it interesting. It consisted of an old colonial residence much repaired and added to and attended by huts and outbuildings and derelict vehicles and parts of vehicles. The residence was a low, rambling wooden structure whose exterior was covered with green-painted panels of metal stamped with geometric designs and whose corrugated iron roof was painted rouge red, in mimicry of terracotta roofing, Ray supposed. There were numerous windows, all heavily barred, and some of the windowpanes clearly dated from the turn of the century or earlier, if that was what the thickness and irregularity in those panes meant. There was a broad veranda and there was a cactus garden flourishing, if that was the word, on three sides of the place. The store or dealership took up what had been the front parlor and dining room of the colonial house. It was aromatic because the wooden shelving, the wide plank floors, the wainscoting were all kept in a state of high polish. The grounds of the place looked like a cyclone had tossed things around. There was no external upkeep. But indoors there were armadas of women constantly mopping and oiling and dusting. He knew the pattern. And probably it made sense to concentrate on the struggle for interior cleanliness and amenity against the ceaseless intrusions of dust and sand and whatnot the Kalahari could be counted on to deliver. Nothing could be done about the Kalahari, the outdoors. This was a desolation, after all. Nokaneng had been founded in a particularly bleak part of the desolation. Trees of any kind were scarce thereabouts.

  They had been served in the main room of the store, at a refectory table placed near the front. Three gas refrigerators, industrial-size units, took up most of one wall. The shelves were well stocked, but the selection was, he would say, on the limited side, featuring the usual staples, sacks of mealie and sorghum and rice, tinned pilchards and beef tongue and beetroot, cooking oil, boxes of Joko tea, containers of paraffin, packets of fruit salts. Four candles were burning on the counter near the baroque, gleaming, antique cash register. A woman, a different woman than the one waiting on them, emerged and pinched out two of the candles and retreated into the back, smartly. It was as though pinching out candles made up her particular work assignment. The other woman could have taken care of it, since she was mainly occupied in waiting for him to down his scalding tea, which yet another woman had just set before him. Ludicrous overstaffing was normal in rural outfits like this one because labor was so cheap and because nobody was checking. He would be willing to bet that most of the Golden Wing staff worked for rations. And the very casual meal service the Golden Wing provided was without question a derivative of the staff’s morning, noon, and night preparation of food for itself, an overflow from that. There was no menu. He hoped the five-pula note he was leaving in payment was right. It would be. It was a lot.