Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Ray tapped Morel on the shoulder and signaled urgently that they had to proceed. Morel was shaking his head sadly. Ray mouthed the words We must go. Morel was being irritating.

  What next? Ray thought. Because Morel was dodging around patently looking for something to cover the body with, which was a piety they had no time for. And there was nothing around they could use for the purpose except the smoldering laundry, which he was not going to mention. Everything Morel was doing was a piety and maddening when they had urgent things to do.

  He took hold of Morel’s arm and yanked on it, to stop him. They had to make use of these periods of intense fire, like the present one, for their riskier movements when they had to operate without cover. They had to exploit the distraction of their captors. That was the theory. Their task was to dash across the open ground between the sheds and the hotel and find their way into the hotel by getting lucky and opening one of the three doors or breaking one of them or by breaking in through a window and then finding the room they wanted … and getting what they needed and then splitting with it and getting back across the open ground and then up and away and out into the veld and into a ditch, that was all. He had to get this through to Morel. The deafening racket of the guns was going to be helpful if they had to smash anything noisily, too.

  Morel broke away from him and ran in the wrong direction. The man was a nightmare.

  Ray followed. Morel was up to something new. He was investigating the other sheds, planning to. He had gotten the doors open on the shed nearest theirs and was disappearing into it. Ray caught up with him.

  The shed was empty. It was identical to the one they had been kept in.

  “Good,” Morel said, walking past Ray on his way to the next shed.

  “What are we doing?” Ray asked.

  “I just realized it, but we can’t go over there until we see if there’s anybody in these other sheds. We can’t abandon them and then have something happen to us.”

  “Okay, but this wasn’t the plan.”

  “But you see why we have to do this.”

  “I see why you want to, but the fact is if they’re locked in the way we were it’s not going to be possible to help them.”

  “No, but that would suggest we ought to look for keys over in the hotel, say, or tools, an ax, a hatchet, even. We could chop them out, chop the doors down. But we need to know. Also they might join us. Help us.”

  Morel was knocking at the doors of another shed. There were only three more to check, after this one.

  The exercise was developing a French-farcelike feeling, with Morel bounding around but managing to look over his shoulder half the time, with doors being pulled open and slammed shut, Morel disappearing and reappearing. Ray stayed gamely with Morel until it was over. All the sheds were vacant and none contained anything useful to them. Ray wondered if Morel was coming up with these virtuous procrastinations because he feared going into the enemy’s citadel and was at some level hoping it would blow up or burn down before they had to go there. He dismissed the suspicion. He didn’t want to think ill of Morel, if he could help it. He was going to have dealings with Morel into eternity, it felt like. He would have to keep on top of how Morel was treating Iris, someway. He should be able to work something out with friends in Botswana. Morel was going to be in his life. He was losing a wife but he was gaining an ex-wife, was the way to look at it. And what was the correct term for his relationship to his former wife’s new husband? There should be a term for that, there were so many of them in the culture.

  They were back at their own shed, poised to sprint across the open ground to the hotel.

  Morel led. Ray decided to stop halfway, in the lee of a monumental terracotta urn set on a high pedestal. The rim of the urn came to the level of his neck. There was refuse in the urn. Dead vines trailed out of it. There were mates to the urn dotted around the grounds, five or six of them. Something made him not want to leave the spot. He didn’t know what it was.

  He knew what it was about the urn. It was an erotic memory featuring an urn and his wife. It was long ago. They had been visiting someone or using a house that had been loaned to them and there had been an urn at the center of a patio and Iris had run out of their room in the middle of the night, naked, and had posed variously, leaning against it, to tease him. And then there had been magnificent sex. Something like that would never happen to him again. That was a fact. He wondered if when people, couples, got old they stopped fucking at some point sheerly because it seemed like such a frail copy of what they had once been able to do with joy and strength, if they stopped out of homage to their earlier fucking selves. Morel was shaking him.

  He made himself run the rest of the way. He collapsed when he got to the hotel wall. He had breathed in too much smoke, in his exertions. He needed something like a bandanna, or better yet a gas mask. His feet were painful. Morel was sitting on the ground next to him. It was hopeless, but Ray wanted to convey to Iris that if they stayed together, or if they had stayed together, depending on which fork in the path he was at when he was expressing himself … he was losing the thread, but he wanted her to know that if it was up to him they would be old lovers, going on and doing it forever, however it looked, however disreputable anyone else might find them if they discovered what they were doing, the two old birds.

  Morel was trying the door. Ray was certain that this was the exterior door he had been taken through to be abused. The door was locked.

  It was a single door. Morel had his good leg up, his foot against the frame, and was jerking fiercely at the doorknob. He gave up.

  “We need an ax,” he said. He was winded. He was barely able to say anything.

  “You keep saying that.”

  Ray got up to take a turn at pulling and hauling. He was positioning himself when he thought he heard something inside, through the door. He thought he heard someone coming.

  He mouthed the words Someone is coming.

  “We need a plan,” Morel whispered.

  “Like what kind of plan?”

  “Like, you stand back when they open the door and I’ll fucking jump them before they know it. Or I’ll stand there and you jump them. Whatever you want.”

  “They could be armed.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be out of sight. They’ll be looking at you. Try to get them to step out toward you. We can do this. Try to look sick or something so they come out.”

  They poised themselves to do something. They would be swift about it. But nothing happened. There was silence.

  The door they wanted to open was painted with dark pink enamel which was scaling badly in places, revealing a bright red undercoat. It was reminiscent of afflicted flesh, to Ray. It reminded him of a plate in a medical text on skin conditions. That was where his mind was. And the wooden door was a massive, medieval piece of work, not a candidate for brute force.

  Morel seemed to be in charge of getting them inside. He was alternately feeling exquisitely along the edges of the door and looking over his shoulder at Ray with expressions that seemed to be asking Ray not to be impatient, communicating that progress was being made. The door was a dilemma because trying to break it down, assuming they could find a way to do that, ran the risk of attracting the wrong attention from the interior, with the result that they would only have succeeded in escaping back into captivity. It was a possibility he was responsible for because of his insistence on making a good-faith effort to retrieve his brother’s manuscript. He accepted that. He had to, was all. He could imagine bursting in and Quartus coming up to them saying, Hello, entrez, nice to see you again, take that. But the furor and action was on the roof, so far as they could tell. There was now some shouting mixing in with the rattle of gunfire.

  Ray turned his attention to the barricaded windows on either side of the door. They would have to pluck the fangs of broken glass out of the window frames first, then dislodge and push through the mixed barriers of planking and plywood and furniture as quietly as they could. Clear
ly some of the planking had been nailed in place, and there was some random interweaving of barbed wire throughout the different assemblages. But the whole project looked extremely improvised to Ray. But there would be noise involved there, too. How they could manage to enter like thieves in the night was the question.

  Morel was trying something new. He was knocking softly on the door, very softly, politely. It seemed ludicrous and probably it was going to lead to nothing because he was tapping so softly.

  He was knocking and then pausing and putting his ear to the door and then knocking again.

  Something was happening just behind them. Ray spun around. What he saw looked like buried clothesline being jerked up into the air. But what he was really seeing was automatic weapons fire ranging for the first time along the area between the hotel and the sheds. Dust hung in the air. Somebody was firing close to them. The way back was threatened now. Morel was not paying attention. He was still knocking politely on the door.

  The door opened a crack, and then a little wider, and Morel, beckoning wildly to Ray to follow, slipped inside. Ray was right behind him.

  It was dark. They were in a hallway and there in the semidarkness, crowded to one side, was a body of people, Africans. When his eyes adapted he would count them. Morel’s eyes were better than his, obviously, because he was already having exchanges, murmured exchanges in Setswana. These people knew him. He had visited them in the zoo cages. Morel was taking care of business, seeing to things. He seemed to be making sure that the door was securely relocked, for one thing. There were no more than a dozen people in the hallway.

  Abruptly he needed to sit down. His knee was torturing him and his boots were uncomfortable. It was odd how pain went away during periods of excitement and fear and came back when you felt safer. He had to rest while he refilled, was the way he was thinking of it, while he refilled with his solid self. Outside in the open with death in the air and no cover to speak of, he had felt light and empty, untethered, light on his feet but inwardly light too. Sitting against the wall, he felt better by the moment, heavier.

  The air was foul. Ray thought he could smell blood. The word ngaka was going around, meaning Morel was being identified as a doctor. That would make him popular. Doctors are always useful, Ray thought.

  Ray felt useless. It would be helpful if he could get the right metaphor to apply to the life he was going to lead post-Iris. That would strengthen him. So far the images he had come up with were feeble. One of them had been to see his life as the plates and glasses and cutlery that miraculously remained undisturbed when the magician jerked the tablecloth out from under everything. It was an image that had no force. He thought, This is what you’ll do: You will think of your life in panels with one panel not necessarily having anything to do with the others. What he meant was that each panel in the triptych or whatever a four-framed or five-framed set of panels should be called, would be judged totally individually. If the first panel was beautiful and was by Maxfield Parrish the point would be to have the appropriate reaction to that and pay no attention to the next panel, which happened to be by Hieronymus Bosch depicting the same subjects as in the first panel except that in this panel they were in hell and it would be fine to be horrified. And then there would be the next panel.

  He could see well enough to count the crowd. There were twelve people, men and women, no children, lined up pressed to the wall like caryatids. He thought, Hey that’s how useful I am, able to supply the right term for these poor bastards at a single bound, caryatids.

  An old woman came over to him. He said, “Dumela, mma,” and she said nothing and he said “Dumela” again and she said nothing. And then he said, “I am useless,” and again she said nothing.

  This hallway, at least, was in the hands of the victims and not the villains, so Morel had been right. Or he had been right. One of them had been right. He didn’t know which one. He should be doing more. He should get up immediately. He had the impulse to shake hands with the caryatids, do something to reassure them because they were obviously frightened. They were in terror. He could tell that much. He made himself get to his feet.

  Hell is where you don’t know anyone, he thought. Alarmingly, there was a white face floating toward him from the depths of the hallway. It was smiling. It was a face he should know.

  He did know the face. It was Dwight Wemberg the long-lost coming toward him, the man driven mad by not being able to get his wife out of the ground, dead wife out of the ground. He looked dead himself. He was emaciated and oddly dressed. He was wearing a headband, unless it was a bandage, and he was in fatigues spotted with filth. He was carrying a rifle. He was smiling inordinately.

  Ray didn’t know what to do. There was the feeling that he should be reporting to someone that Wemberg was alive. But that was easy to dismiss because it was part of the past way of doing things. Boyle had been desperate to find Wemberg.

  “Hello, man,” he said to Wemberg.

  “Nice to see you. Why are you here?” Wemberg seemed happy.

  “Well I was doing stuff for the ministry and these bastards caught me. I was doing site studies.”

  “Our boys are the best,” Wemberg said.

  “What boys?”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be okay. We got these guys trapped on the roof. We came down and you know what we did? We came in and blew their fuel pump to hell before they knew anything. Two of our boys. Anyway.”

  “Dwight, you don’t look well.”

  “Well you know what, I lost a lot of blood. But you know what, it’s good to see you. But what you better do and better do it fast is put one of these on.” He touched his headband.

  “Okay,” Ray said.

  “And the doctor too. You know why, because that’s how we know you’re with us, so we don’t shoot you.”

  Morel came over to them. He exchanged greetings with Wemberg, bemusedly.

  Ray said, “So Dwight is saying we need to put some kind of headband on, to identify us.”

  Wemberg said, “Not headband, witdoek. That’s the correct term. Witdoek.”

  Ray said, “Okay, fine.”

  “You can find something around here.”

  “You remember Dwight, don’t you, Davis?”

  “From Gaborone. Sure.”

  “Well I guess we can gather he’s joined up with Kerekang’s people, somehow. It’s pretty amazing. This is a war.”

  Wemberg was nodding vigorously. He said, “Kerekang is here. He’s leading us. This is koevoet’s main base, you know. In this country.”

  “You need to sit down,” Morel said to Wemberg.

  “There’s no chairs,” Wemberg said.

  “We’ll find something for you,” Morel said.

  Wemberg said, to both of them, “You knew my wife. You know about that. What they did to me.”

  Ray said, “I met Alice. And I think my wife knew her.”

  “Your wife is Iris. I know her. I know you love your wife. You do. So you see how I feel. They wouldn’t tell me where she was buried at first, you know. Not even that.”

  “I know,” Ray said.

  “She’s asleep,” Wemberg said.

  Ray nodded. It was disturbing. It was grotesque, too, seeing Wemberg standing there armed, injured, involved in killing. Obviously losing his wife had dislodged Wemberg from his normal life and left him exposed to violent propositions and outcomes and urgings. Pay attention to this, Ray thought. He wondered what it meant for him, if it was cautionary. He wanted to say something comforting to Wemberg but nothing was coming to him. Ray felt a tortured moment of envy. Wemberg’s love life was over, all his love-struggles, all the striving to get and keep one excellent person. All life longs for the last day was somebody’s line. That was exhaustion speaking. He would be fine.

  Cries, sounds of running feet, came from the roof.

  “What should we do to help?” Morel asked.

  Wemberg answered, “I don’t know. They sent me down here to watch the stairs, I think they said.�
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  Morel said, “Sir, I would like to examine you, if I can. Just quickly.”

  “Then you guard the stairs,” Wemberg said to Ray, handing his rifle to him. It was an Enfield, single-barreled, a .458, very heavy. There was a bullet in the chamber. Ray didn’t want the rifle, but he took it.

  “Do you have any more bullets for it?”

  “No.”

  Morel was busy. He was now looking into some of the rooms opening off the hall. He had gotten a torch somewhere. He was being decisive. His solidity had returned. He was giving orders. He wanted to examine some of the caryatids too, not only Wemberg. People were doing as they were told. Morel’s solidity had returned faster than his had.

  Morel had found the venue with the most light and was creating an examination room there out of nothing. He had chosen the rearmost room on the right and was overturning wooden crates and pushing them together to make a platform to sit on or lie on and he didn’t care about the rubbish and crockery he was spilling out and kicking aside.

  In a moment, he had Wemberg sitting down, taking his shirt off.

  Morel was moving too fast for Ray to be helpful.

  Ray stood watching. You have to be a weight lifter if you’re going to use one of these .458s, he thought.

  Morel said, “You know what you can do?”

  “What would that be?”

  “You could go look for my bag. I need it.” Morel was shining the torch into Wemberg’s mouth. Morel’s face was bright with sweat.

  “No, I can’t,” Ray said.

  “What do you mean? Why can’t you?”

  “I have to guard the stairs. I saw a stairway at the back.”

  “Oh come on.”

  “Also how can I see anything? These rooms are dark.”

  “I need my bag. It’s more urgent. There’s not much light in the room but there’s enough. If you need me I’ll run in with the torch. Just shout.”

  Someone handed Ray a burning candle.

  “Good,” Morel said. “Find the interrogation room if you can. They went through my bag in front of me there.”