Mortals (57 page)

Kerekang’s commune had been more a training center than anything else. It wasn’t clear how long participants were supposed to stay there, but it was clear that Ichokela wasn’t meant to be a permanent residence for any of them. Things had been thought through. There had been a mechanism for getting at least part of your capital back if you decided to quit the movement. Kerekang had been expected to be in and out, employing Ichokela as a base, a site for demonstrating his courtyard horticulture concept and promoting a miniature sorghum mill run by pedal power, one of various inventions of his. The commune had been established on Tawana land near Toromole, a tiny village between Etsha and Sepopa out in the savanna west of the Okavango swamp, about seventy-five kilometers south of the Caprivi Strip. What else was there? One point of interest, for him anyway, was the role poetry played in Kerekang’s agitprop exertions.
The Mattock
was busy with snippets of Victorian social
poetry, doggerel most of it, bilingually presented, and when the reading circles Kerekang was hectoring the locals to join met in the kgotlas, a centerpiece of the proceedings had been poetry-shouting performances by a commune troupe, the Songsters, Dimoopedi. Kerekang’s general taste in nomenclature was on the poetic side, too. The name of the commune, the full name, Ichokela Bokhutlon, translated as Endure to the End. Isa, the verb meaning to make happen, was what Kerekang had decided to call his movement. It meant something about Ray that never in his life had he felt a twinge of attraction to the idea of submerging himself in the romance of any sort of communal existence. No doubt it was his rigidity that was behind that, his lack of imagination, some defect. He was an idiot, after all. Keletso was slowing. They were about to stop. There were many stops, with Keletso, many for setting the hubs for four-wheel drive, which was the drill whenever the road ahead even hinted at difficulty, many stops for tire-pressure checks, for piss breaks, and for meals, which were separate from the tea breaks. Twice Keletso had stopped in order to suck grass seeds out of the radiator grille with a drinking straw, a preventive against the engine overheating and seizing up. Keletso could be anywhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Ray felt inferior to this spare, angular, steady man whose personal hygiene practices put him to shame, his scrupulous toothbrushing in particular.

He had misread Pony, deeply. On that he stood convicted. And four, step four, had been Pony discovering that he was not made for the simple life, if he ever had been, and deciding to finance his future after his departure from Endure to the End by an act of embezzlement. He had taken not only the petty cash but another large sum lying around that had been destined for purchases of agricultural equipment and building materials, a loan. Kerekang had torn up the vicinity looking for Pony, without luck, because Pony had taken the money for the all-consuming central purpose of life in Botswana, cattle acquisition, and split to the opposite side of the country and in fact beyond, to his own cattle post at Pandamatenga, half of which overlapped into Zimbabwe, where he was unreachable. Pony was in fact Ndebele. He had misrepresented himself at St. James’s. A crash audit of the bursar’s office was in progress. The crime had crystallized Kerekang’s hatred of the national passion for cattle. He saw the drive to convert money into flesh in the form of cattle as violently deformative and out of control in Botswana, a position he had belabored in all his publications but with special intensity in his latest pamphlet,
The White Ants
, which Ray, after realizing Kerekang was its author, had read
closely. If you had money, in Botswana, you turned it into cattle and cattle would multiply your money biologically, through sheer reproduction, and you could just watch it happen and watch your prestige grow at the same time. It was the herder mentality so utterly opposed to the townsman’s idea that you took money and put it out at interest or bought a machine to make products to sell. Of course the townsman ideology was in need of correction too, according to Kerekang, but it was not flatly insane, socially and otherwise, like cattlemania, where the decision to sink everything into beasts ran crashing against the facts of recurrent drought, disease, and the ecological unsuitability of most of the land area of Botswana for cattle raising.

So Kerekang had briefly turned Ichokela into a posse to hunt Pony down, and that had failed and the commune had failed. Earlier, Kerekang struck out at the passion for cattle through attacks on two ranches near Toromole, fenced ranches with titles widely considered bogus, owned by big men, absentees.

It was conceivable that Kerekang had meant his actions to be symbolic or at worst cautionary, gesticulations against the continuing spread of illegal commercial ranches in his area, where they had been late to arrive. His raids had involved some property destruction, but nothing major, and no injury to anyone. But a fire had been lit. There was tinder everywhere. It had been the wrong act at the right time. Mimic attacks, arson attacks, had occurred, radiating outward from Toromole. Three boreholes had been dynamited.

The ground was layered with the receptive aggrieved, in fact. Bushmen being paid for their labor with salt and tobacco, smallholders finding traditionally common waterpoints being closed to them, incorporated into the commercial spreads.

They had stopped, in full sun as usual, up on the shoulder of the road, tilting moderately. Next Keletso would get out his parasol.

The fifth step had been Boyle going into a raging panic at the first reports of disturbances in the northeast and immediately taking Toromole as Kerekang’s Yenan and the springing of arson attacks as the beginning of an unstoppable jacquerie, expecting to see the safari camps in flames next, whites driven out, Armageddon, the governing party overthrown and Botswana propelled into an Anschluss with South Africa by radical forces, a South Africa by then in the hands of the African National Congress, itself in the hands of the South African Communist Party, and seeing Mugabe in Zimbabwe joining the new union, and presto, a new
race-based world communism emerging with its Vatican in Johannnesburg and gold, diamonds, and palladium piling up in its treasury—and all of it getting started on Boyle’s watch, the end of the world on his watch.

Step five had led instantly to step six, this excursion.

Ray had been sent out because Boyle had needed above all to be seen as acting, machinating, furiously taking steps. He wondered how many other contract officers, stringers, assets of all types and kinds, had been hurled into notional missions like the one he was on. Step six was this, the present, himself in the lap of nowhere, bearing a false identity as a school sites assessor, which was an invented job description that would presumably justify his poking around anywhere in the bush. His letter of authorization, jointly signed by the Ministries of Education and of Local Government and Lands, commanded all district council and school staff to accord him “all support in his endeavors to examine all about every place as to school building and placing of schools at some time.”

Getting him launched had been a miracle of speedy improvisation … the requisitioning and equipping of the Land Cruiser, arranging temporary duty for Keletso, concocting the stupid code terminology he was supposed to use when he reported back through the radiophone links he was expected to locate and get access to through a district council or police facilities. And his task was, well,
merely
to find out what was behind everything, really behind everything, and right away. He felt leaden. He felt like a projectile aimed at nothing. And Boyle had insisted on issuing him a stupid damned Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver and two boxes of bullets, no matter what he’d said. Nothing had been thought through, but here he was. It didn’t matter. Kerekang was doomed … he had performed in the flesh the act that the local wretched of the earth had until then only allowed themselves to imagine. That was the way things came apart. Kindness was on the cross, where they were going. And the heaviest and stupidest injunction he was carrying was,
whatever he did
, to help this eruption disappear without becoming public knowledge, no less.

There were some historical models for making that happen, making insurgencies disappear silently and tracelessly, that he knew of. Guerrero in the seventies was a case in point, and there had been two lesser cases in Nigeria. So far nothing was showing in the press or on Radio Botswana about the unrest in the northeast. The feat to be accomplished was stopping the trouble and erasing the news about it at the same time.

Certain measures were already being taken. The army and the police were being deployed very delicately, if at all. In fact they were probably being pulled back all through the Nokaneng-Mohembo corridor, where
he and Keletso were bound, because soldiers talked. So did police. Something subtler might be on order, obscure forces, if it got bad. These would be identified as “bandits,” and they would strike and it would be hellmouth and they would be gone in the morning and it would all end in mystery and confusion and forgetting. Cupping, it was called.

The bandits would be mercenaries from Namibia. It was something the authorities knew very well how to arrange, in extreme circumstances. The authorities, the hired security people, were brilliant. He felt like a fool, but of course he did because he was an idiot. He was still an idiot. He had never in his career been anywhere near a cupping exercise. Cupping had nothing to do with him. Tonight the moon would arise and drag into erect states millions of penises worldwide, but that was idiotic because it was simply the shadow line coming over mankind night after night that did it, darkness, not the moon itself, unless it was the stars, but
what ees the stars?
The stars burn, he thought. The Bushmen thought the stars were the campfires of the dead.

They always had to stop in the open because Keletso was afraid of the trees, such as they were. For shade, Keletso had sawed the handle off a large parasol and jammed a long metal rod, sharpened at both ends, into the hollow shank. The resulting item, stabbed into the sand, was impossibly top-heavy when the canopy was opened up and had to be firmly held on to by someone to keep it from keeling over. But it served. They took turns keeping it upright. The parasol fabric was bright pink. They took their refreshment while they sat on camp stools. Keletso was in charge. Tea was sun tea. Every morning Keletso sealed up four Joko tea bags in a jar of water, which he then secured under the ropes binding the load in the truckbed, on top, where it would be exposed to the sun. A square of canvas, with a hole at its center for the umbrella support, was always laid down to sit on. The formality of it was bemusing. It was domestic. He had no attitude about it. It was fine. The trees were objects of fear because the soil in their shade was often infested with populations of a large, flat, violently aggressive tick. Tampans, they were called, and when any warmblooded animal trod the soil under the trees the vibrations would alert the tampans and then the effluvium of the beast would electrify them and they would shoot up out of the ground and fasten themselves on the hapless intruder, sucking viciously. Their modus operandi was to extract as much blood as they could from the animal before it could shuffle back into the sun, where the temperature was inimical to the ticks and they would have to drop off and stagger back to their cool underground burrows. Typically they attacked in volleys, in the
hundreds at a time. They could leap. Supposedly they could get so much blood in their first volley that the animal would faint. It was possible. This was Africa. He thought, O Africa, beware the sun, beware the shade … Be careful.

In any case, that was the whole story. He was through with himself. He was definitely through with himself. The thing now was to proceed, do no harm, and get back home in one piece to face the bitter music playing there, sinfonia domestica playing just for him. It was urgent to proceed
without thinking about Iris
. He could do it. He ought to be able to treat this business as a vacation, given that people came from all over the world, paying thousands of dollars to be up in this wilderness, although the thousands were paid for vacations well to his right, in the Okavango swamp, the delta, the only succulent part of Botswana, not for this dryness stretching without relief all the way to the Atlantic. Ahead of him was a beheaded river, which is what the delta truly was, and to his left, if you went far enough, was the Skeleton Coast, with its decor of shipwrecks. It was possible to make out the swamp, if you used binoculars and got on top of the Land Cruiser’s cab, as a green line to the east. That was where the giraffes et cetera were.

He was through with himself, and with the fantasy conviction that if he could just find Kerekang and reintroduce himself and speak man to man he could talk him out of what he was doing, on some basis or other, on past acquaintance and their love of poetry and on an extensive apology about Pony, his part in that, something like Stanley and Livingstone. That kind of fantasy could go away now. Life is what? he thought. In all his years in Africa Livingstone had converted exactly one African to Christianity, one.

But he was through with himself. It was pointless to envy people like Keletso their simpler existences and pointless to go to the ultimate question of whether the world would be better off, net, once the main effort of your life had been added up, and especially pointless in his case because the main effort of his life had been to collaborate with others in preventing certain events from transpiring, so that his work product consisted of a null set, a sequence of zeros, unevents, very difficult to judge to say the least. His life was like the medals the agency gave its heroes and put into a vault and told nobody outside the agency about. Of course the true main effort of his adult life was and always had been to have Iris’s love, which sounded selfish put in that way, selfishly concentrating on his well-being, in essence, and not hers. But this subject was outside the realm of things he could deal with now, in the desert. And then there was
poetry, Milton, where he had done
something
 … a little something. But that was enough about him. He was through.