Mortals (105 page)

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 going. 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.

I would love to see beauty everywhere, too, Ray thought. He would like it even briefly but it was not what he needed.

Iris, her image in his heart or wherever it was, his mind, was helping him. Because it was Iris who had saved him from the deadly synergy of getting people to drink, in his official capacity, so that they would let relevant things out, and he had used the occasions to get drunk himself, which was a thing that had led to the downfall of more than one agency character, agents and officers and top dogs and not excluding Marion Resnick. But she had rescued him and had convinced him that he could
do the sordid, not to mince words, the sordid socializing he had to do without being in bondage to alcohol, and he had succeeded, despite temptations that had come up. And because of that he would live longer than he would have, and in addition to giving up drinking there was the contribution to a longer and lonelier old age he had to thank her for via his giving up tobacco.

Ray had himself in hand. It was the image of his wife, his beloved, reminding him that it was important for him to be able to say truthfully that he hadn’t used drugs if the question appeared on an application for a job in the new life that was en route to him in an age when you could be asked to take a lie detector test as routinely as you could be asked to urinate in a Dixie cup for whatever anyone wanted to know. How long the image of his beloved would burn usefully bright was something he would have to wait to find out, in the years to come. Because the truth was that it was going to fade, he could expect it to fade, because everything fades. It wasn’t her fault.

Ray said, “You know what I think, rra, I think you have to get away to South Africa. Here in this country you are always going to be Setime, the fire-thrower, and you’ll be hunted down by Domkrag. They know who you are. Listen to me. This will not be forgiven. Mandela is coming to power soon in South Africa and it is going to be a new day. It’s coming, and you could be safe there …”