Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He began his climb.

  “I am coming, rra, with difficulty,” he called out. He was hoping that Kerekang might be moved to come down and give him a hand up.

  The monadnock was more bell-shaped than pyramidal, much less pyramidal than it looked from ground level. He was at the top, with Kerekang. The climb had been mildly difficult, but he had found what appeared to be a pathway, although who had pioneered it and who would ever use it constituted mysteries. The pathway had circumvented the large monoliths or gone behind them winding steadily upward to the top and the stars. The night was moonless.

  Ray had to take a moment for the view. It was beautiful, he supposed, perfect in its emptiness, an endless flat surround dotted with small, isolate, gnarled trees. They must have come a good distance because there was no sign of burning or smoke from the direction of Ngami Bird Lodge, or from what he assumed was the direction it lay in, what was left of it. The smoke would be showing black against the stars unless it was all too far away, or unless the burning was over with.

  Kerekang had brought a camp stool up the monadnock with him. He had been sitting, smoking, smoking dagga. Ray didn’t like that. It was too continuous. Ray found a place to sit, on a patch of sand with a boulder to set his back against. He scratched at the sand before lowering himself onto it. The idea was to dislodge creatures like scorpions.

  The stars were distracting they were so brilliant.

  One thing in the landscape was bothersome to Ray. He could just make out another monadnock, of about the same caliber, in the distance, to the north. He was worried that he might not be able to find the right monadnock when he came back, or more likely when he sent someone out, someone hired, to retrieve Wemberg and, while they were at it, the other two bodies buried down below them.

  “What is the name of this thing we’re sitting on, this little mountain?”

  “It is a knob, Pieter’s Knob. I can mark it on a map and give it to you.”

  “And over there, then, what’s that?”

  “Oh, that one. That one is Pieter’s Other Knob.”

  Ray was puzzled, until Kerekang said, “I’m joking. I can’t tell you what it is. But I’ll find it on the map, too. I have British army maps, the best there are.”

  “Don’t let me forget to get that from you. And another thing, I would like to have the names of the two men who were buried on either side of Rra Wemberg.”

  “Gosiame, on the right it is Paphani Shagwa and on the left hand it is Mido Nthumo. I can write them down for you.”

  “I’ll forget, otherwise.”

  Kerekang had a pocket-size book in his hand and opened it and wrote the names on a blank fly. Ray knew what the book was. It was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. He had seen it before. It had been visible among Kerekang’s other books on a surveillance tape Boyle had stupidly and pointlessly ordered him to make months ago, in the stupid past. Kerekang tore the fly out of the volume and handed it to Ray folded in half.

  “These two men are from Shakawe. They were good friends, to one another and to me and to all of us. No one will know their names in Gaborone. But there you have them.”

  He proffered a hand-rolled dagga cigarette.

  “No thanks, I don’t like that stuff. And I wanted to talk to you about it, too, by the way.”

  “Please, it’s okay. I know what you want to say. Don’t say it. I use it very little. It helps me, like a drink. When this business is over I won’t be using it. When this … all this …”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that, too. Here’s the thing. Listen to me. You have to think about how to get away, get out of this. You can’t go on with it much longer.”

  “There was no killing at first.”

  “I know, but now there is. You can’t control something like this once it gets into killing.”

  “There was no killing. Not even of cattle, not one beast, at first. We were trying to teach a lesson.”

  “What lesson?”

  “The lesson was for the big men who were bringing their herds into the sandveld and pushing the people out, the Basarwa and the Bakgalagadi and everyone, rra. We talked to the people. And then we began with the boreholes, to show we were serious. We blew them up.”

  Ray said, “And some of the large owners withdrew. That’s where you should have stopped, stopped and reconsidered. You needed to bring your case to the capital …”

  Kerekang laughed. He continued, “Then we opened some kraals. We let some beasts out. And we burned some kraals …”

  “That’s when you should have stopped, before anything could be traced to you. There could have been attention paid by Gaborone. You could have stood by, blinking your eyes, saying how terrible it was, but that it was symbolic and stood for injustices still going on that needed to be taken up by government …”

  “By Domkrag, those people! Goromente!”

  “There were people who could have helped you.”

  Kerekang was swilling dagga smoke, it seemed to Ray, holding it in, expelling it, taking in more. Ray wanted him to go on, say more.

  Finally Kerekang said, “It’s bad, rra, what this has come to. I know it better than you. We knew of two cattle posts where there were great abuses of the San people working there. Terrible treatment, terrible. We went there. Beasts were killed for the first time. The word of it spread. Attacks we had no part of began. We had no control.

  “Then, when we went for the San people, that was when we were robbed. A man stayed behind, Ponatsego Mazumo. You must know him. He came to us in Toromole from St. James’s. He was the devil. He took all we had, and what was it for, to buy cattle for his lands at Pandamatenga. The love of cattle came to destroy us through Pony.”

  This was the moment Ray had dreaded. He had known it would come.

  Kerekang was lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the one he had smoked down. It was too much marijuana at once. Kerekang needed to be moderate if he was going to indulge. He wanted Kerekang to be able to understand what was being said to him.

  The moment had come to say what he could bear to about his connection to the disastrous appearance in Toromole of his associate Ponatsego. He had never generated a plan regarding how to put anything. The subject was too painful. He was tired but he had to act. He had to not incur Kerekang’s hatred forever or he would never be allowed to help him.

  Kerekang was talking. He was continuing his narrative. Ray couldn’t attend to it until he had the key to what he was going to say. He had the sense of his mind grinding away mechanically to produce an object. A small object would roll down a chute inside his head and onto the back of his tongue and he would utter it.

  Kerekang was almost declamatory in the way he was speaking. It was the marijuana, no doubt. He was explaining how things had gotten out of hand after emissaries, or agents, rather, of the cattle owners, attacked and burned Toromole, and then he was explaining how easy it had been to acquire weapons, how surprised he had been, how easy to get them from brokers reselling stocks accumulated in the Caprivi Strip after the Boers abandoned everything there. Money had come to Ichokela from sources he was not identifying once the fighting and sabotage had begun. That was interesting. In his old incarnation Ray would have been extremely interested in that. There was always somebody delighted to fan the flames. It was always in somebody’s interest. Now Kerekang was talking about an adventure. To escape pursuers they had been forced to cross Lake Lambedzi, Kerekang and his band, his original band, Lake Lambedzi being, as Ray recalled, a soda lake, a lake in name only, a depression in the earth covered with a crust of soda and with some acid hot smoking mixture underneath the crust. And the way they had crossed it was to follow exactly in the hoof- or footmarks of cattle that had made it across and avoid deviating and going near the carcasses of the drowned cattle who had gotten it wrong. The crust was uneven. And certain of their party had gotten off the track and fallen down up to their waists in smoking brine, although brine was just what he was calling it, it was acid. And they had pulled
their comrades up and continued. And they had gotten across, all of them. Kerekang was repeating himself. There was some poetic thing there, in this account. Kerekang was getting into a mythic style. I have to stop him, Ray thought. He had to stop him before he lost his strength to go into the case of Pony. And he didn’t want to stop Kerekang because there were threads or filaments between them only he was thinking about, Kerekang who loved Tennyson but was engaged in rough justice, call it, and he himself with Milton and now the hell he was in and had helped create, to be fair about it. So he wanted two things at the same time, as usual.

  He didn’t like doing it but he said, “Stop, I have to tell you something.”

  Kerekang was still talking about Lake Lambedzi. Ray touched him, shook him.

  Ray said, “I have to tell you something.” He hoped Kerekang would be ready to hear him, instead of floating in the great moments of his campaign, the top ten moments, which it looked like he was doing, thanks to the great weed, dagga. Iris had saved Ray from alcohol.

  Ray went on. “I have to tell you this, I knew Pony at my school and I have to tell you this, rra, I was his friend …”

  Kerekang was still declaiming.

  Ray was proceeding still not knowing what he was going to say.

  Ray said, “It was through me that Pony met you.”

  “I can’t remember it,” Kerekang said. He was puzzled.

  “No, you wouldn’t. Because you met him at the doctor’s place when you were attending these sessions he gave, on God and so on.”

  “But I never saw you there.”

  “No I was never there. But I sent Ponatsego there to see what these sessions were about. I was curious. I suggested he go and then report if it was interesting.”

  He wondered if he had the gall to leave it there and not tell more, let his liability stop at that, just be a consequence of innocent personal curiosity on his part.

  Kerekang flicked his cigarette, only half consumed, away, high into the air.

  Ray tried to rush on, burying his connection with Pony under apologies. “I am so sorry I sent him. I was curious, you know. I couldn’t go myself. All these seminars, whatever you call them, were restricted to Batswana, with no expatriates.”

  “So, rra, you sent Ponatsego to me.”

  “No, rra, I sent him to see what he could find out about the doctor’s seminars, what was going on there. That was all. It was not about you.”

  Kerekang looked coldly at him, it seemed to Ray.

  Kerekang said, “Why is it you would do that?”

  “I wanted to know, rra. I had personal reasons. And curiosity.”

  “And what else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “And what else? What would make you send this man, this colleague of yours? Did you tell him to do it as a favor to you, rra?”

  “Not as a favor, no. Rra, you are understanding.”

  “There was a gratuity, then? Is that right?” Kerekang’s voice was hard.

  “There was.” This is it, Ray thought.

  “Was it just you yourself providing the gratuity?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “What was the source of the gratuity then, rra?”

  Ray thought, I have to. He said, “I have to explain what I was doing then. Please listen to me.”

  “Oh I am listening.” Kerekang was suddenly very sharp.

  “First about my interest in the doctor. Rra, he has stolen my wife, who was his patient, and it had just begun. We need not say more about this. What I need to tell you is that I was working for the American government, apart from my teaching job at St. James’s, working for the American government.”

  “I am still listening. And I am sorry, rra, to hear the other.”

  “I was working for an American intelligence service.” He had to lie about his connection because he couldn’t bear to say he hadn’t yet quit, that he was still a member of the agency. He couldn’t. He had done something, some things that ought to show he was free of that, in Kerekang’s eyes.

  Kerekang was shaking his head.

  Ray said, “I am through with them, Kerekang.” He thought that was fair, and covered the situation, except for the papers he would have to sign.

  Kerekang said, “Well it is good you say all this, because it is no secret to me that you were an agent, a spy, really. That was what was said.”

  Ray didn’t know what to feel. Apparently knowledge about his status had been universal. He had been an actor in a different play than the one he had thought he was in. He wondered how much Iris had known about his nakedness. He had to believe she would have told him. He hadn’t completely believed Morel, he had thought Morel probably just had suspicions, which he had made Iris confirm. Ray had known that Boyle was generally understood to be in the agency. But he had never truly thought that he himself had been picked out. It was odd to think he wouldn’t have seen that in people’s faces.

  Kerekang was mentioning three other people he was also under the impression belonged to the agency. None of them were right. None of them had anything to do with the agency. Unless he was in the dark, in the wrong compartment. He was uncertain about everything. He wanted to say definitely that Kerekang was wrong, but he couldn’t, not with any conviction.

  “So you have left this organization,” Kerekang said.

  “I am out of it. But I have to be sure you understand. When I sent Pony to report on the doctor, it was for my own, my own personal information. This is complicated. The head of our office is Boyle, Kerekang, Chester Boyle. He wanted me to pursue you and I was opposed and I told him so. I said to him you were a patriot and an intellectual and a reformer and a good man. Of course now you are burning the countryside to ashes and I am helping you, so life is very strange. I am sorry to say that I believe the agency was behind some of your troubles in getting employment with the government. I had nothing to do with that. No, and the fact is that when Boyle said I should look more into you, more than I had, because I had done some looking, my idea was to tell him that the best way to find out more about you was through these seminars, where you would participate, at our friend Doctor Morel’s house. And you know why I wanted to know more about the doctor. I hated him then. So I thought I could appease my boss by sending Pony to bring reports on these seminars where you were a participant. But Kerekang, nothing he brought to me was ever turned over, never. I swear to this.”

  In a way he didn’t care what Kerekang said next. He was full of lightness. He would sleep well, he knew. Of course he was on the ragged edge physically, which would help. He was looking forward to sleep. Sleep would be different now. He was full of lightness.

  Kerekang interrupted. “We know him. Nyah, rra, he is well known. And the one before him, the Jew.”

  Ray recoiled. He was shocked. He wanted to protest, say something, affirm his friend Marion, use his name to show he esteemed him. He was distressed that Marion had been as readily identified as the egregious, the cack-handed, as the Brits would put it, Chester Boyle. It was unfair. Resnick had been subtle in everything. And it was unfair, calling him the Jew, identifying him that way. Ray had determined that he was going to help, or to put it another way, save Kerekang, and he needed to like him as much as he could. Kerekang was his new friend, his new friend. The man didn’t know it yet, but it was the truth. Iris had been his friend, but now she was dissolving, and Marion was gone. He had not lived a life where he could normally acquire friends.

  “You don’t have anything against Jews, do you, you’re just saying the guy who came before Boyle was Jewish.” He hadn’t put it quite right, but it was the best he could do.

  Kerekang was saying something, vigorously. “Ah, no. Even Jesus was one of them. I am not an anti-Semite, rra.”

  That was a relief. He moved on. He said, “Look I want you to consider getting out of this, how to get out of this.”

  “What do you mean? But speak quietly.”

  “Right. Because we can both of us see where this is go
ing. You know what a jacquerie is, where everybody in the countryside goes on a rampage and tears up the pea patch but not in favor of any sort of program, just to destroy the old order and then the old order or its friends come back like thunder and make it worse than before …”

  Kerekang said, “Do you know this, that some of us are taking cattle, robbing them from the Baherero, which was not what we set about. When we killed the beasts, it was to deprive the big men who had come out into the sandveld. Even so, I wanted the slaughtering part to stop once we had shown we have the power up here. Of course you can say it ran on too long and I will agree, and I have tried to stop it. But the killing was to shock the letleke, the ones with too much. And when the killing stopped, still it would hang over them, and they could see it would be useful to help Ichokela in future.”

  Ray was surprised. Because what this looked like was a sort of extortion scheme to get money or other resources from the cattle-owning elite to be put to use in Kerekang’s social program, his homestead socialism, whatever it should be called. He could see how it had happened. Kerekang had fallen into it, allowed things to happen and then taken steps based on what he had allowed to happen, trying to turn mistakes made, or accidents, to the advantage of his group, his great project. This was a confession. Kerekang was very agitated.

  Apparently Kerekang had a bottomless supply of dagga cigarettes. He was lighting up yet another one, murmuring that they were useful, the smoke was useful against dimonang, which meant mosquitoes. And the mosquitoes just at that moment were annoyingly active. It was better when there was any sort of breeze and worse when the air was still. Ray was tired of brushing at the mosquitoes, waving his hands around maniacally when the surges came. The clouds of dagga smoke did seem to discourage the mosquitoes. Ray felt a rush of temptation. Kerekang was in a state of elevation. He was speaking freely. If Ray joined him in this indulgence it might be helpful in reaching him on a certain level and convincing him it was time to save himself, to leave the scene and leave Botswana and save himself for a new life elsewhere, like someone else he could name. He was getting a more than ample sample, so to speak, of the perfume from the garden of delights Kerekang was inside. In a minute Kerekang would start mentioning pleasant things that were not relevant to the present completely fucked and unraveling situation. He would say that something was beautiful, something that really wasn’t beautiful or that if it was didn’t matter. You are psychic, Ray said to himself, because Kerekang was just then saying something about the earth being beautiful.