Mortals (107 page)

Ray said, “I thought everyone was falling asleep down below.”

“Nyah, they are awake. They are having a meeting. You can see they have built the fire high again.”

Morel said, “It’s too high. I thought we were supposed to keep the fire to a minimum.”

Kerekang sighed heavily. He got up to descend the monadnock. Morel stopped him.

Morel said, “Wait a minute. Let me understand …”

Kevin said, “They say they are freezing and the fire will be for only until they can get warm. And they are saying they want to hide I don’t know where. Hide for some days.”

Morel, speaking quickly, said to Kevin, “So they want to abandon the trucks …”

Kevin said, “Mokopa says koevoet has strong forces in Caprivi and he knows they have helicopters. And this makes them look bad, so it
will be necessary for them to come after us. He says we should do as Joshua Nkomo did when he was fighting Ian Smith in Zimbabwe and the war came to an end, with the Shonas and Mugabe coming out the top men, and Nkomo sent forth the message to his fighters to bury their weapons and come walking home, but to mark where they were, the caches.”

Kerekang said, “Mokopa is from ZAPU. He fought alongside Joshua Nkomo.”

Light breaks where no sun shines, Ray thought. A question was being answered. It would make sense for Kerekang’s weapons to have come from ZAPU caches. And it was a fact that ZAPU had buried huge quantities of arms when independence came in Zimbabwe. This was the kind of information Boyle had sent him into the bush to come up with, and Boyle would never know. Ray felt like laughing.

Ray was thinking furiously. So were the others. He observed that everyone on the summit was visibly shivering in the cold breezes strengthening around them. No one was paying attention to the cold. They were too busy thinking. Individuals were clutching for handholds on slippery events, rapidly changing slippery events, trying to twist them to their own benefit. Morel wanted to secure a vehicle and speed home to Iris. Kevin appeared to want to be out of the fighting. And as for himself, Ray wanted to save Kerekang’s life and his own. And Ray knew that he wanted to preserve Kerekang for himself, for a friend. What Kerekang himself wanted was in flux, partly because the man had gotten high. But Ray was glimpsing the outline of an argument he could pursue with Kerekang, urging that he follow Mokopa’s advice about caching all their munitions and fading away with the idea that he might live to fight another day but in the meantime putting his talents to work in friendlier and more promising terrain, Mandelaland.

One last thing he wanted to know was where Kerekang had gotten the motley collection of vehicles they were bucketing around the countryside in.

He thought he knew how it had been done. It wasn’t complicated.

“Kevin, these trucks and the bakkies, where did you get them?”

“We took them.”

“You mean you stopped them on the road and forced the drivers out and then just drove off in them.”

“Ehe, it was like that. No one was hurt and we saw that they were left with water and provisions enough to keep them to the next ride. We took so many vehicles, rra, in different places. It was fun, in fact. And we used them and left them. But the word is in the air now, for sure, so we have
come to the end of replenishing our transport so easily that way. No, the people will shoot us if we approach. Yah.”

Kerekang was seeming lost. He was saying softly that he wanted to write something. And with his hand he was making a motion like the one diners use when they want the check.

Ray understood. It was education speaking. He thought, We get into crisis and we need to write down where we are in our lives, write letters or manifestos or farewell to the troops, convert our confusion to text so we can read it and see if we can do what our words tell us we should. Kevin had felt the necessity to write a letter to Kerekang. I’m suffering from the same need myself, Ray thought. He wanted to write a masterpiece letter to Iris, but there was no time and no desk to write on. He needed a desk. He thought, When we read poetry we like, tiny muscles in our throat clench and relax, showing we’re speaking it, the lines, unconsciously. He wondered where he had read that. And then there was Dante writing letters to Beatrice Portinari he never sent, writing them for years, writing to a woman married by her parents to someone else, a woman he had been in love with since both of them were nine years old, saving up his letters and then learning that she had died. But he had written to her for years, never sending a letter, not one. And he had married, himself, but even after his own marriage he had kept writing. And then he had found out she was dead. And so on into the night. Where was Dante? Where was he, Ray Finch, right now?

Kerekang said, “If I go to SouthWest … Jesus, I don’t know. I will have to explain. I will have to write something. Ah Jesus, I will. And I will have to send it out into the hands of people who can read it to the others. They burned our press at Toromole. How can it be done?”

Ray said, “It can. I can work it out. I promise you it can.”

Kerekang made a sound of disgust, self-disgust.

Morel said, “Look, it’s good. You’ll be like who is it, plenty of people, Arthur, King Arthur, Robin Hood, they expected them to come back. Am I right?” He looked at Ray.
“King Arthur is nat dede
. King Arthur is not dead. It was a belief among the common people. Supposedly.”

Ray was hating Morel at that moment, for his crude transparency. He was not helping. I want to handle this, he thought.

Kerekang said, “Ah but they are still waiting for those heroes. They’re not coming, are they?” He was annoyed. He seemed to be getting a little clearer.

Ray said, “Well but you know what he means. And there’s the slight difference that
you wouldn’t be dead
. You’d be alive and in the neighborhood.

Things are going to change in Botswana, out in the countryside, rra. If you go now, you’ll still be alive when the time comes. This was not your moment, Kerekang. But you’ll see your moment.”

Kevin was nodding. Ray thought, You may have to enlarge your plan to include him. That was daunting, but since he had no real plan as yet, or only the vaguest glimmer of one, maybe it didn’t matter much. He needed to have images, stronger ones, of what the future might look like. It would be in a school. Education in the Republic was going to be open to all kinds of new visionary things. Patrick van Rensburg was already sending down tentacles from his education-with-work system, the Brigades. And that was only one example. And Kerekang would be in a school where he could promote his homestead plans, backyard food self-sufficiency and part-time paid labor. It was the idea of progress he was holding out, that battered thing. And Kerekang would have a new identity. Ray knew how to manage that. And Kerekang could get his ideas into circulation through the mails and through the press. There would have to be some dissembling and subtlety about who this was who happened to be advocating ideas associated with the late lamented vanished Kerekang the Incendiary. He could pretend to be a disciple of his own dead self, or his brother. Stranger impostures had been tried and had worked. And Kerekang had the advantage of being Xhosa, from a Xhosa community that had overlapped into Botswana generations back. So he could speak Xhosa. That would be perfect for camouflage. Mandela was Xhosa. The school could be bilingual. That would be fine, just so that one of the languages was English. There was going to be money available for good works in the Republic, tons of it, foundation money, once Mandela was in power, tons of it especially for education, which foundations of every type and kind loved to fund. He was developing more and more enthusiasm for his idea as he what, fondled it.

Kerekang said, “That fire is too bright. If they want a fire, they should make it in that cave.”

“You mean that cave you left me in?”

“Yes, they can make a fire there, not in the open.”

Kevin said, “They won’t go there because of snakes.”

Ray said, “I thought they cleaned them out. I thought we ate them for dinner.” He was feeling odd, just then.

“Yah, but more can come.”

“Wonderful,” Ray said.

Kerekang said, “I have to go down. I know what this is. They want us to have indaba. Okay, we can.”

Ray was uncomfortably cold but he didn’t want to lose the moment, go down to the fire, because he was getting ideas, here, upon a peak, et cetera. He liked the idea of an ideal school in a new country, which the Republic would be. He could burn bright to that. He hoped there was nothing pitiful in the idea he was nurturing for Kerekang and Kevin and himself.

They were all going to go down to the fire, it seemed. A general movement had begun. And now he couldn’t wait to get to the fire and embrace it. Everything was hurting. They had put him in a cave with snakes. He wanted to lie down next to the fire and stop thinking.

He stumbled twice, descending. He would like to be able to contemplate going to a spa and recovering there, except that he could only do that with a female companion. Men never attended spas without their wives, their girlfriends, at least that was his impression.

He was too tired to think clearly, but he had a germ of an idea about a way out with Kerekang, which was that together he and Kerekang would concoct a false death story. Kerekang would go off to his contacts in Namibia and get to the Republic, but the story would be that he had died in the battle for Ngami Bird Lodge. Morel would sign on if it could be made absolutely clear why he had to, although there was the man’s principle against lying. And if there was time Kerekang could compose a farewell to his troops. He would do it perfectly. And it could constitute the legend that Kerekang was going to be known by. Kerekang would need a legend.

All the comrades around the fire got to their feet as Kerekang approached. They exchanged a word, a greeting, but not one of the standard greetings, some private thing, as Kerekang entered the zone of firelight. Ray hadn’t been able to make it out. There were twenty men there, close to the fire, and ten or so more back in the shadows. He couldn’t be sure, but most of those in the background seemed to be Basarwa. There was a mystery about Bushman metabolism. Most of the Basarwa were shirtless. They were wearing shorts, regular bush shorts and not loincloths. They seemed not to be suffering from the chill of the night. The Tswana men near the fire were wearing shirts, shirts on top of shirts in some cases, and jerseys.

The faces of the witdoeke were still not individual to Ray, except for Mokopa and three or four others. That was explainable. He had only recently met any of them and that meeting had taken place under conditions of violent action, when the time for any kind of reasonable scrutiny was nonexistent. And then he had been conveyed along in a sleeping state
broken into two periods, part one in the trunk and part two in the cave. And then when he had returned to normal it was the middle of the night. So he could be forgiven.

Kerekang was unified with the suffering that had brought these men to his cause. It was more than a matter of pity, which was the limit of the usual feeling evoked by poverty and injustice. It was sympathy, but a different order of sympathy, it was embodied.

Ray could aspire to it, was what he could do.

Ray knew himself. He saw his own limits clearly. It was true he believed in fairness, social fairness. But it was probably truer to say that he believed in
fairnessness
, which would translate as a belief in a certain quantum of fairness existing in any society, enough fairness so that the issue wouldn’t be tormenting to people trying to get on with other things like art and scholarship and the rest of it. He was being hard on himself. He didn’t care. He couldn’t keep standing, though.

Without ceremony, and while some sort of intense preliminaries were still in progress, all in Setswana, Ray made his way around to the far side of the fire and wedged his way in among the Tswana comrades and sat down, embracing his knees. He was the only one sitting. The fire was wonderful. He didn’t care if he was the only one sitting.

Morel had slipped around to stand in back of him. He was showing solidarity. I am not leaving this fire, period, Ray thought. He didn’t understand concerns about the fire, the brightness and so on. Because as he understood it there had to be a fire all night, as a preventive against lions, and the bigger the fire the better. And the idea that koevoet would send helicopters, the idea that they would risk them on a night mission when all they would see would be one fire among others, normal cooking fires here and there in the desert, was not worth worrying about, in his humble opinion.

Kerekang was directing everyone to sit down. Kevin opened Kerekang’s camp stool and got Kerekang seated and then he himself came around to sit cross-legged beside Morel, behind Ray. The three of them were becoming a team, a sort of team.

It was hard to attend to what was going on. Now that Ray was out of the maelstrom of danger, his injuries were hurting more insistently. He wanted a bath. He wanted to be ushered into a well-appointed large bathroom and left there with the hot water running. He wanted to get into a deep tub of hot water. When his brother had been a small boy he had liked to lather his hair and twist it up into devil horns to make everybody laugh, and they had laughed, and now his brother was dead. He wanted
his brother to not be dead. He wanted to get into a tub and have his back washed by Iris, with a loofah. He wanted to be able to look forward to that.

There was a protocol to the present event. Each of the comrades was making a preliminary statement, in turn. Everything was in very rapid Setswana, but oddly accented Setswana. The language was spoken differently in the various regions of the country. The exchanges were more than usually opaque to Ray, but his fatigue was hurting his ability to concentrate.

He turned to look at Morel. His brows were knitted. He was struggling to follow. He was having his own difficulties with the Setswana, with this rapid and dialectal Setswana with, Ray was now realizing, inclusions of a second language, Sekgalagadi, laced in.