Mortals (110 page)

It was too sad. She was carrying a present for him, something wrapped up, with a ribbon on it, a book probably, a birthday present because he had turned forty-nine while he was away. And under her arm she had a stack of papers,
Times Literary Supplements
probably, and copies of the
International Herald Tribune
, also tied up festively in a ribbon. It was nice, but it was too late. On impulse he reached in and turned the headlights back on. He felt petty doing it. He knew why he had done it. It was to blind her, make it difficult for her to see Morel in the cab, see anything he might be trying to get away with in gestures, facial expressions. She flinched as she came forward. He regretted turning the headlights on and he reached in and turned them off, murmuring something that meant it had been an error.

Fikile came between them. Ray saluted him. Fikile wanted to welcome him back and he wanted to be acknowledged himself, in a more definite way. They shook hands and Fikile slid away. He liked Fikile.

Iris, trembling, embraced him, awkwardly because she was still holding his birthday presents. The papers she had set down on the stoop. Ray didn’t want Morel to be observing this, but there was nothing that could be done about it. He would go in a minute and the fun would begin.

Iris released Ray and stepped back.

“You’re all right, you’re fine. You look terrible. But you’re all right. He found you …” Her voice was artificial except for the genuine stress showing in it.

“I’m okay.”

“You found him,” she said to the Land Cruiser. She was afraid to go up to it and touch Morel, which was what she wanted to do, Ray knew in his heart.

She said, imploringly, again in the direction of the Land Cruiser, “Come in and eat something. Come in. Please. You have to tell me everything …”

There was silence from the Land Cruiser.

“He has a cook,” Ray said.

“Of course. But I could make you both an omelette. We could talk. I know you both need to rest, but you could give me just the outline. And you could have a drink.”

Dimakatso appeared. Ray had to be decent to her. She was a decent person. They exchanged greetings.

She said, “There is chicken all cooked up. There is plenty to eat. There is mince, for sandwiches. I have some buns …”

Ray said, “No, mma. I just want to lie down.”

“Gosiame,” she said, and then she too vanished, around the side of the house.

Morel was backing out of the drive, slowly. The man was being scrupulous, so far. Ray had no complaint against him.

“You’ll call us tomorrow,” Iris shouted after him, trying not to shout. She called out a second time, more softly, saying the same thing.

They went into the house, which struck him as very clean inside. The floors were brilliant. He hadn’t been in a really clean place in weeks.

She led him into the living room and then, studying him, obviously decided that he should lie down, so she led him to the bedroom. He would do whatever she wanted. He sat on the bed and rolled over onto his side. She picked his feet up and took off his boots, grimacing. The room was dim. Everything was clean. Waves of weakness were sweeping over him. He wanted to surrender to them, but it was too soon.

He wondered if she would volunteer something on her own. He had the option of saying nothing, like a psychoanalyst, just nodding and waiting for the great confession to work its way up and out of her beautiful mouth, except that he lacked the strength for it. What he would appreciate most would be something voluntary. That would be the only event he could think of that would lead to his forgiving her, that moment arriving, his forgiving her in a fundamental way. His face felt metallic, especially around his mouth. His smile would be unnatural, if he had to smile. His eyelids felt metallic or stiff, like the eyelids in a ventriloquist’s dummy.

He would love to forgive her, not that forgiving her would mean they could go on together, it wouldn’t. But it would make the next phase of ending everything easier for him to bear, or so he thought. He could just sink his silence in a demonstration of utter fatigue and keep waiting, waiting for her to go first. And then if she did she could be forgiven in a flash, or not exactly in a flash but rapidly, pretty rapidly.

She said, “Do you want to open your present? I’ll open it for you. It isn’t anything. I got it at a jumble sale. Do you want me to open it?”

“No,” he said.

“Because you’re tired. You’re just too tired right now?”

“Right.” He laid his arm across his eyes.

“Do you want me to let you sleep?”

“No,”
he said more violently than he’d intended. He wanted her to be in his presence. The phone could ring. If it did it would be Morel. Or she could make a call and whisper.

“You have to tell me everything, how you are, what happened to you.
I’m so glad to have you safe, Ray. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll do anything you need.”

He said, “I want you to tell me everything too.”

“What do you mean? You mean since you left, what I’ve been doing? It’s nothing. It’s not interesting.”

“To me it is.”

She said, “I know you’ve been through something terrible. You have to tell me about it.” She was being careful. She wanted to know everything, but she wanted to be dutiful, too, and not ask about anything having to do with the agency that he wouldn’t be comfortable telling her about. She was still trying to be his good wife. She had some feeling for him still. He couldn’t stand it much longer.

“Tell me
something
,” she said.

He sat up. He had to be at least sitting up for what was coming next. He should be on his feet for it but right then it was too much to ask.

He said, “I’ll tell you something. You have a lover.”

She had been sitting near him on the bed, but she jumped to her feet, looking indignant, but feebly.

“Are you insane?” she said.

“No, not yet. Just admit it.”

“This is wrong,” she said.

“Yes, it is. Yes, it is. But you have a lover.”

“I don’t. I don’t. I don’t know who told you that.”

She was suffering. He didn’t want that.

She was pacing up and down, manically. He had never seen her in such a state and he was in pain seeing it.

Now her tears were coming.

“I don’t want this,” she said.

“I don’t either, but you have a lover and that’s what we have to work with.” Tears were coming to his eyes too.

“It isn’t true.”

He got to his feet and caught her to him. She had to hold him up. They sat down on the bed, side by side, in misery.

“It’s Morel. Come on.”

She was silent.

“Look, tell me the truth. I’ve already done most of my suffering over it. You were lucky not to be around for that. Just admit it and then I’ll let you make me an omelette. I’m ravenous, suddenly. So just admit it. We’ve known each other a long time. Just say it.”

“Okay, then. It’s true.”

“Life is unbearable,” he said.

Each day since his return had been worse than the one before it, and there had been eight of them. Today it was the prospect of sitting down with Chester Boyle that was weighing on him as the moment approached. Otherwise he would say the day had been about equal in sadness and what, leadenness, to the seven preceding. But now the day was worse. He was sitting and waiting and reading in the American Library. The librarian knew him. When she felt the coast was clear she would admit him to the workroom and buzz him on through to Boyle’s ridiculous tiny secret chamber.

Nothing was good. He was reading the
Weekly Mail
of January 18 to 21, 1993, the current issue. He was back in the present. The lead front-page story had to do with far-right groups in South Africa making secret deals with Frelimo to set up all-white colonies in Mozambique. It would never happen. Clinton, the new president of the United States, was apparently allowing the dictator Saddam Hussein to use helicopters against the Marsh Arabs, who had been encouraged by the United States to rise against Saddam. If there was good news in this issue of the
Weekly Mail
he wasn’t finding it.

At home, with Iris, it was bad. Things were static. They weren’t speaking much and she was coming and going again. For the first couple of days she had shadowed him anxiously, staying around him. But she had given that up and was coming and going again and not necessarily letting him know where she was going. At times he felt dead, but most of the time he felt himself dying, in the process, dying of sadness. Feeling dead was a respite, strangely enough. They were sleeping in the same bed but still not speaking except on mundane matters. She was still making some effort to talk to him. She was in distress. He wasn’t trying not to talk to her, he couldn’t talk to her. And he was being tormented by lust. It made it worse that she had stopped reaching out to touch him during the night. Their bed was too vast. It had been a luxury to them, in the past. Now he wanted the bed to be narrower. He was being tormented by lust and sexual memory, sexual memories. He remembered her saying, at some point not too long in the past, Celibacy I find very sexy in the person engaging in it. It wasn’t doing anything for her lately.

He had managed to take care of a lot of housekeeping matters in the last few days, mostly housekeeping connected with St. James’s. He hadn’t
told them he was leaving, yet. No one had seemed unduly interested in what he was doing there, why he was carrying his stuff out.

Now the librarian was crooking her finger at him and now she was jerking her thumb in the direction of the workroom.

Boyle was in place when Ray entered the secret chamber. Ray liked to keep thinking of it as that. It was claustral in there. He supposed Boyle liked that because some people would say anything to get out of an environment like that, agree to anything. There was a new banker’s green-shaded lamp on Boyle’s table with the shell of the shade tilted a little away from Boyle, toward himself. It would have been friendly of Boyle to adjust the shade so the light fell straight down. Of course it was intentional.

Boyle looked rather haggard. He was still obese, and he looked bad, haggard and blotchy. He was wearing a dress shirt and tie, a black tie. Somehow he looked like a mourner. Boyle was slow to reach for Ray’s hand. The handshake was not warm. Boyle was studying him.

Boyle said, “Good to see you, Ray. I’m just back. I gather you’re okay. You’re all right? You’ve been to the embassy nurse. You’re taking care of your knee. You’re okay.” It was a statement. There was no inquiry in any of it.

“I’m all right,” Ray said. Boyle had gone to some trouble to check on his condition. That was interesting.

Boyle said, “You turned the Cruiser in. I saw the vouchers.”

“It’s all right too, the Cruiser.”

“Good. I don’t have a report from you. Unless I missed it. I’ve been in the field. You know. I have a ton of paper on my desk.”

Ray said, “Yeah well here we are. You instructed me not to
write
my reports …”

“This is a debrief, not one of your essays.”

“It’s all the same. And there’s no report.”

Boyle stiffened. He looked narrowly at Ray. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he was seeing mutiny.

Ray was uncertain about what he was doing. He was going to have to discover what he was doing as he went. His tethers to the world he had gotten used to living in were being cut, or breaking on their own. He would see what he was when the last tether broke.

Boyle was still studying him. Boyle’s breathing was heavy. Ray wondered if Boyle had emphysema.

Boyle said, “I think you need to take leave, go away. You look like you need it. The both of you go, you and Iris.”

“I’m not taking leave.”

Boyle wasn’t listening. He said, “You should do it. There’s a regional conference on education in Mombasa. REDSO is running it. You should go. Beautiful beaches on the coast, Bamburi Beach Hotel. You could go after the conference. That could be worked out. It wouldn’t hurt your wife to get away from Gaborone for a while.”

Ray said, “Iris …” He didn’t want her brought into this in any way.

“It would be good for the both of you,” Boyle said.

“I’m not going, Boyle,” Ray said, slowly. He thought, He’s afraid of me.

“You should. You don’t look good. I don’t want you around looking like this. Your hands are shaking.” That was true. Ray was fidgeting with a letter opener and wondering what Kant would say if he stabbed Boyle in the neck with it. Boyle had to be thinking about his next post … or more likely his retirement. The outbreak in the north had occurred and it had gotten serious and Boyle had been oblivious and that was the kind of thing Boyle was supposed to be on top of. But he had been oblivious. He hadn’t warned the agency, hadn’t done anything, known anything.

Boyle cleared this throat. He said, “You know I don’t even want to talk to you about your trip. I don’t need to. The fact is, I don’t need a report. It’s all over up there.”

Ray said, “
You
fucked with Kerekang. You drove him into the bush, you. And I’m not going to the beach.”

“You will if I tell you to,” Boyle said very slowly.

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll fix it at the school.”

Boyle was studiously not listening to him. It was close in the cubicle. Boyle’s cologne or aftershave or whatever male fragrance he used was asserting itself. Ventilating the cubicle had never been properly worked out. He didn’t know how Boyle could stand to do business there. He suspected that because he had insisted on having the damned thing built first thing when he arrived he felt obligated to make use of it.

Ray asked, “And what would you claim the leave was for? Medical leave? What?” He was speaking too loudly for the space and he knew it.

“Take it easy. Family situation.”

Ray was understanding everything. Boyle was afraid of him, which meant he knew that Ray had seen koevoet in all its glory, sent to crush
peasants, Bushmen, university students, Kevin, the son of the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Local Government and Lands … So far nothing about koevoet had turned up in the press, not a whisper. Vandals had burned down the abandoned resort, Ngami Bird Lodge. Any nexus between the agency and koevoet would be something that if it got bruited about would have to be shot down. Boyle wanted Ray over the horizon. Life was going to be interesting for Morel, too, down the road. But the irony was that Ray was going to be out of Boyle’s hair and over the fields and far away because he needed to leave the neighborhood for his own personal reasons.