Mortals (108 page)

He was out of his element but he didn’t mind. He was in the presence of a harmonious organism, the band of fighters, operating by cues and understandings he was not part of. That was fine with him. And this organism was operating in darkness, among boulders and thorn trees and odd cries, animal cries, coming out of the darkness. He would never see it again. What he needed to do was to concentrate less on trying to understand what was being said and more on keeping himself from falling over into another bout of exhausted sleep.

He was trying and then there was a blank moment and then he was being hauled to his feet by someone behind him, by two people, Kevin and another comrade, a Mosarwa. Clearly he had missed something.

Morel also was standing. They were being led off into the night by Kevin, who seemed sullen. Ray resented leaving the campfire. The night was bitter.

Ray felt better when he realized that their destination was another fire, a smaller one but still a fire, burning in the lee of a massive, slightly concave hump of a rock.

“What is it, Kevin? Why are we … where are we going?” Ray asked.

“Just there.” He pointed at the fire by the rock.

Morel said, “They asked the makhoa to leave while they finished talking. They think we understand more than we do. They have a right, though, to their privacy. But I couldn’t catch a quarter of what they were saying.”

Ray said, “But Kevin, what about you? You and this man? Go ahead, you can go back.”

Kevin said, “Nyah, rra. I was told to stay with you.”

Morel was annoyed. He said, “Hey, what are we going to do, creep around to spy on you? This is silly.”

“My orders are to stay, rra.”

Ray felt as though he were being dragged to the new fire like a dummy. The small fire was better than nothing, but he wanted to go back to the main fire, where the sleeping bags were, and go to sleep there.

Morel said to Ray, “Stop talking. Kevin has something to tell us.”

“By all means,” Ray said. He wasn’t aware that he had been talking. Who was it who had said, Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to myself. It had been Iris or it had been something Iris had reported her sister as saying. It was too bad that Morel couldn’t have managed to cross paths with Ellen during his peregrinations and fallen in love with her instead of Iris. That would have solved a multitude of problems. The man would have made an excellent brother-in-law.

Kevin said, “Setime will come to tell you this himself, but we have reached a decision as to what should be.

“First they are saying you might take the Land Cruiser and drive it south as far as you can, straight south from here …”

Morel said, “You are saying drive overland, not go back to Route 14? I don’t see why.”

“You have to give your word to do it just as we say. You must go straight down as far as you can, down to Mabuasehube …”

Morel said, “The idea being to distract anybody who would be interested in finding the group.”

Kevin said, “Yes, and then at Mabuasehube you will be below the line of control and you can find game scouts and others in the park to see you on to Gaborone. You will be tired, rra.”

Ray said, “If you’re still worrying about helicopters coming down from Caprivi, I can tell you the odds are so”—Morel subtly nudged him—“hard to elucidate,” Ray said.

“Nyah, but we are listening to Mokopa on this one. And we will send two Bedfords that way, but not so far as Mabuasehube, but just to point toward that way.”

Ray said, “So you figure all of the drivers would be taking the chance of helicopters coming after them.”

“They would,” Kevin said.

Morel said, “But don’t forget that the farther south anybody gets the less the chance that koevoet would risk showing up and risking their most precious equipment. I mean, this country does have an air force and it
would be obligatory for them to take notice of an incursion coming anywhere near the population centers, places like Kanye or Jwaneng. Even if the BDF is turning its face away from what’s happening in the north, that would be too much. I think.”

“What will you do, Kevin?” Ray asked.

“I am deciding about it, rra.”

Ray went on. “So one possibility would be that you would go with Kerekang to …?” He had to be careful with his questions, not to seem like his former self.

Kevin hesitated before saying, “We have friends in Namibia. From Gobabis we can go where we like.” He was uncomfortable saying so much, Ray could tell.

It was a shame. Ray’s old self would have been elated to get any shreds and pieces of information that linked Ichokela with SWAPO in Namibia, which was essentially what Kevin was saying existed. I could have gotten one of those invisible medals the agency gives, based on a report I am never going to write, about the ZAPU caches and about this new connection, he thought. He had done his greatest work, alas, in this outing.

The cadres were going to disappear into the landscape, which would be child’s play for the Basarwa and less easy but possible for the other rural types, where they would hibernate. Setime would cross over into Namibia, to Gobabis, and then go down through Windhoek or Walvis Bay to the Republic. There were hundreds of points of entry where Kerekang would be able to get in without showing a passport.

Ray understood part of what was going on, but he wanted it confirmed. His notion was that the shock of unexpected success, at Ngami Bird Lodge, was behind everything. They had done too well. They had bloodied the nose of a supposedly invincible enemy force. They had to let what they had done turn into a myth, a social myth. And they needed not to be caught and punished, to make the myth work. And then there would be another day.

There were a couple of things he had to know about. He said to Kevin, “Tell me about the staff at Ngami Bird Lodge, what happened to them?” He needed to know. Because they hadn’t come out into the bush with the witdoeke.

“They are fine. We sent them back to Route 14. We took them there. They were slaves, rra, in that place. We saw that they were picked up. We waited to see that they had transport. Phalatse was in hiding, watching, and so he tells us it went.”

“That’s good,” Ray said. He forgot what the other thing he wanted to know about was.

Morel, full of eagerness but trying to be delicate, measured, said, “And the idea is definitely that Ray and I would be the ones to take the Land Cruiser down to the south, to Mabuasehube?”

“He will tell you when he comes to talk to you, Setime will.”

“When would we leave?” Ray asked.

Ray repeated his question. “When would we have to leave? Because I want to tell you something. If they say we have to drive by night, go now, drive tonight, I’m sorry. I’m too tired. I can’t.”

“Sure we can. I can,” Morel said. He stood up and strode around a little, showing his readiness, Ray supposed. It was a little amusing.

Ray said, “We can’t do it in the dark, I don’t think. You have to find these tracks that barely exist. I know. I’ve been out in the bush more than you. It takes two people, one to navigate and one to drive, even during the daylight. I am telling you. Even then you barely creep along, unless you hit a well-defined stretch. I mean, we are going to be on rough terrain. You have to go around things. You have to keep getting out to set the front hubs for four-wheel drive. When I had a driver, one of us was always doing that. You can’t stay in four-wheel drive all the time because it uses up gas too fast. Listen to me, man. You never got off government roads when you came up here, so you don’t know.”

Morel wanted him to be quiet. Ray understood why. Morel wanted to seize the moment because the situation could change in a second, for any reason. Ray could imagine a dozen things that could happen to kill this particular plan. Morel wanted to go while he could. He wanted to get to Iris. He was blocking out any possibility that the comrades who were certain that helicopters would come for them were right. Morel was looking past that. That was fine. Ray considered it as unlikely as Morel did. But if a helicopter did show up in the air above them and started firing at them it would be over in the blink of an eye, they would inhabit a fireball and turn into smoke and bits of bone and that would be the end of the affair.

“Do you think he wants us to go tonight?” Ray asked Kevin.

“He will tell you himself.”

What Ray wanted was an impossibility, to stay in the desert, to stay indefinitely there. He liked the people he was with, the comrades, and now he was having to prepare himself to go back to Gaborone to be with people he didn’t like or with people, a person, he loved but who didn’t like him, or, to be fair, liked somebody else a lot more. He had crafted a life in which something was always happening somewhere, in one department
or another of his life, the academic, the agency, or the personal part. It was quiet in the desert.

Morel was pushing too hard, saying to Kevin, “Can’t you get Kerekang, or let us go over there? The night isn’t going to last all day.” Morel was tired. He looked at Ray to see if Ray had noticed his misspeaking. Ray gave no sign.

Ray had thought it was okay for the domestic panel of his life to be placid, the placid panel. It was the realm in which he had been attentive toward Iris, supporting her in her interests, but it was hardly a realm in which he had tried separately to make himself admirable to her, if that was what he meant. Anyway, he thought. It was too late. It was an irony, but now he was on the verge of doing something she would genuinely admire, if she knew anything about it. There was no way she could be kept up to date on his new life that he could think of. Unless he decided to send out one of those yearly-chronicle-type Christmas cards.

No, he had used the domestic realm as an asylum from the franticness of the work panels, a haven. That hadn’t been right. It was what everyone did, but in his case, what he had been using her as a haven from was something she hated.

He was liking the quiet, the stillness of the desert. He had never particularly understood about early Christian ascetics choosing to go out into the desert because, after all, you could be an ascetic anywhere. But now he felt he had a taste or hint of why. The desert was humbling and calming. He felt calm.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to leave the desert, because he was going to have to. He turned his attention to tightening up his manuscript bundle as well as he could. He had seen a tough-looking creeping vine in the vicinity. He went off with his torch to see if he could find it and tear off a few lengths of it and tie them around
Strange News
.

Morel called after him to come back. One of the things Morel didn’t understand was that Ray needed to get someplace where he could let go of his bundle, put it in a secure place and forget about its existence, for a change.

He found the vine. It was as tough as anyone could hope for. The Mosarwa turned up beside him carrying an alarming knife. They worked together, pulling and jerking and then shaving off the sharp little spines the vine bore. He thanked the man, who seemed to know everything there was to know about this piece of flora. It was clear that Ray was not the first man to figure out some of the uses this plant might be put to. He had two six-foot lengths of the vine.

Everything was irritating Morel, who was trying to discourage Kevin from adding any more wood to the remnant of the fire. And when Ray began artfully binding his parcel up, even devising a handle of sorts for ease of carrying, Morel showed growing impatience.

“We have to get this settled,” Morel said.

“I think it is settled. Act normal or they’ll change their mind about this.”

Something was under way in the darkness, something having to do with the vehicles. Loads were being shifted around. He couldn’t believe that people who had been through violent battle could still manage to carry out heavy physical tasks in the middle of the night. We should all be ordered to lie down and sleep, he thought.

Kerekang whistled. They were being summoned.

Morel said, “We’re going to be on our way.” He was having difficulty containing his anxiety. He was full of adrenaline. Probably that was good. It would keep him awake at the wheel. I know what my mission is going to be in the Cruiser, Ray thought. It was going to be to keep himself awake to be sure that Morel kept awake at the wheel. And he was going to insist that they pull over and park and go no farther and sleep, both of them, if he saw the slightest sign of fatigue making Morel nod off. Ray had no intention of having this experience come to an end due to poor driving.

Kerekang was whistling and so was someone else. There was a sort of harmony between the two different streams of sound. He had to go.

Kerekang was coming toward them, clasping maps under one arm, beckoning them to the fire, the main fire. Everyone at the fire was standing. It was going to be ceremonial, Ray could tell. That was not what he wanted. What he wanted was to talk separately and concretely to Kerekang about linking up in the Republic, assuming each of them managed their escapes decently. He was assuming they would. He didn’t know why.

What was going to happen was that he and Morel would be said goodbye to and instructed to get directly into the Cruiser and get out of there. And that was going to be too bad, in a couple of ways, for him. Because it was going to be a tense thing, a race to get to Iris first, between the two of them. And he would have to never sleep or seriously rest in any situation where Morel could jump out and duck out of sight and get to a phone to warn Iris about the storm to come. Ray was determined not to let that happen. He was wondering whether a handshake agreement would mean anything, a promise from Morel to say nothing to Iris for a couple of days
when they got back to Gaborone, staying off the scene. He doubted that an agreement would mean anything. It was the kind of situation in which the temptation would be to agree, make the deal, and then yield to a second temptation to break it. If he put himself in Morel’s place he could see himself breaking that kind of agreement, out of weakness. Morel would want to protect her from the shock of learning that he had let the truth out, which had never been the plan.