Mortals (26 page)

This is somebody’s fault, Ray thought. The embassy nurse began sidling along through the crowd at the wall in order to be nearer Wemberg. Iris dug her elbow into Ray’s side to make him turn back around.

It was going exactly as Ray had known it would, excruciatingly. The eulogies had been wooden albeit fulsome. The thing was lifeless. Everyone was reading from prepared texts. The order of presentation was a shambles. No one had come from Health. The choir of five young women provided by the Anglicans was being overworked in attempts to buy time for speakers or guests not yet on hand. Their repertory was small. They had sung “Ke Bona,” twice. Ray wondered what the model was for the slow, strained, nasal style that Batswana female choirs uniformly employed. Nothing was going well. The podium would stand unoccupied for disconcertingly long moments while, obviously, the
ambassador was inside the residence imprecating, trying to get people to make something come out right. Twice Ray detected raised voices coming from the residence when the ambassador was away from the ceremony. Then there had been some sideplay around the discovery that the two Portosans hired for the occasion had been delivered in a locked condition and that the man with the power to unlock them was missing. Food had been brought out prematurely and then taken back, but not before a presence of hornets had been achieved. Worst of all were the cooking odors washing out toward them. What must have happened was that the crowd to be fed was larger than anyone had anticipated and so extra frozen samoosas had been scared up and these were now being deep-fat-fried. The light had gone dull. A high, milky haze was overspreading the sky.

“What’s happening?” Iris asked. A murmur was passing through the assembly.

Ray didn’t know.

There would be a substitute speaker, Doctor Kerekang, representing the gleaners, a project very close to Alice Wemberg’s heart, as the ambassador put it.

Ray started to explain more about the gleaners to Iris, not getting much beyond the basic facts—that they were destitutes who lived at and, actually, on the municipal rubbish tip, and that most of them were solitary homeless children but that there were women and a few whole families among them, too.

Kerekang incarnate was the medium-tall, spare, serious man Ray had expected him to be, but there was more to him. There was something immediate about him. And he had something else … aplomb. That would be the word for it. He was at the podium, still collecting himself after self-evidently being hustled over to perform without notice, but he was already taking control of the restive audience. Ray wondered if women would find Kerekang attractive. He thought probably yes. Kerekang’s hair was fuller than in his photograph, fuller but not to the point of bushiness, and it was grayer. His hairline was deeper at the temples, also. But there was something confident about his hairstyle, or actorly.

Ray realized that he was full of expectation, for no obvious reason. He thought, There is very little magnificence in life, at least in my life, by which I mean external magnificence such as being there when the greatest actor in the English-speaking world gives his greatest Hamlet or
when Nijinsky stays so long at the top of one of his leaps that people in the audience gasp … Or being present for the Gettysburg Address, although the story is that Lincoln got almost no applause. When he thought of himself as being ready for something magnificent, he didn’t know exactly what he meant, because 1989 and 1990 had been magnificent, the Berlin Wall coming down, all of that had been magnificent, but in a generic way, and then, of course, he hadn’t been present, he had been in Africa. And Mandela’s release and everything following that, up to CODESA, all of that had been wonderful, and he had been closer, physically, to those events, but still he hadn’t been in the Republic, he’d been in Botswana, onlooking from there, from where he was, from where he still was. And of course he had Iris, had Iris and her love, but that was in a different category. It was a given. It was lifelong. It wasn’t climactic, he guessed he meant. The truth was that he didn’t know what he meant. But he knew that wherever he was, Boyle was unhappy right now. Boyle was away from his seat.

Kerekang lifted his hand, half in greeting and half as a signal that he should be given full attention. When he had that, he beckoned softly and then urgently in the direction of the gate. The hush he had created deepened. Eight ragged children, bobashi, their eyes downcast, filed in. Three of them were shirtless. Kerekang directed them to stand together to his right, a little back. Ray didn’t know what Kerekang was doing but he suspected it was brilliant. There was a phrase in Setswana that meant waking people up to the truth of a situation and it translated, if he remembered correctly, as Throwing salt in their eyes. He had invited poverty to come to the feast. Good, Ray thought. White or black, everyone present had more or less escaped poverty, except for the bobashi, and poverty was alive in Botswana, getting stronger, this was good! It had been come-as-you-are for the bobashi. There had plainly been no time for them to be gotten into proper dress, what would be considered proper dress for this, if indeed that could even have been done.

“Who
is
he?” Iris whispered. “Do you know?”

“Not really,” he answered.

She wanted to know why the children’s heads were shaved.

“Lice,” he said. There were two girls in the group. They were wearing headscarves, but their heads, too, had been shaved. The children looked clean enough. And they were thin, but not emaciated, not the worst off. There was a feeding scheme for the gleaners that was doing something, at least.

Ray looked in Wemberg’s direction. Someone had put a chair under him and he appeared to be asleep. The embassy nurse was shielding him from the sun with a placemat.

Kerekang introduced himself and identified the children by name. In terms of type, where did Kerekang fall? Ray let himself free-associate about Kerekang. He could be the reliable uncle in a family, doing some sober job, the one to go to for school fees, emergencies, unmarried, too wounded in an affair of the heart to try again, someone like that, or he could be the one decent teacher in a boys’ school, unflamboyant, meek, a coward even, the one who turns heroic when the Germans occupy and the gym coach is revealed as a shit and a collaborator. What would we do without literature? Ray asked himself, feeling a little dumb.

Ray could see that Kerekang was unhappy with the microphone. He didn’t like being mediated by it, that was Ray’s guess. Certain men, or people, rather, had a sort of presence that made itself felt almost in a vibratory way. What Kerekang had, Ray had seen the counterfeit of a thousand times. People said that D. H. Lawrence had been that way. He was getting ahead of himself here, of course. He was trying to remember the description of Gandhi giving
darshan
, if that was the word, in something by Vincent Sheean that had made a gigantic impression on him when he was young and stupid. In the scene he remembered there had been a silent gathering and Gandhi had just been there, sitting or standing, raying out something that people felt in their bodies, their nervous systems, their fillings, maybe. Or it could be called glamour, not in the modern sense, but in the sense in which Malory used it. You’re still stupid, he thought.

Kerekang bent the microphone, on its stalk, away from him and out of play. His eyes were moist. In fact, as he began speaking, two tear tracks showed on his cheeks. But his voice, an enviable, strong, low baritone, was unaffected. Immediately Ray wondered if Kerekang had voice training in his past. It sounded like it, training either for singing or the stage. There was nothing in his dossier to suggest it. They were always arresting, small men with voices larger and richer than they were supposed to have. Not that Kerekang was small. For a Motswana, he was on the tall side. But he was shorter than Ray. A small man is any man smaller than you, Ray thought.

He looked at Iris. She was transfixed, he would say. She sought out Ray’s hand and squeezed it.

When Kerekang’s eulogy was over, Ray felt vindication. He had been
right. It would be too strong to say he’d been rapt, but what he’d felt had been close to it. He could tell it had been the same with Iris.

“Amazing,” he said to her. She was still dabbing at her eyes with sodden wads of tissue.

It had been artful, and not only in transmitting feeling. Kerekang had also covered the waterfront in terms of essential information. Ray had learned certain things he hadn’t known. Apparently Alice Wemberg had worked faithfully on her own in a vegetable gardening project for the gleaners,
the
vegetable gardening project, rather. She had been a principal.
This fountain brings up both bitter and sweet
was from Jonson and could be about the West bringing wealth and poverty at the same time, wealth for the swift, and so on. And she had given significant time to this even up to, as he had put it, annoying her husband. Who was another very very good man. So he had learned today that Kerekang was also significantly connected to the gleaners, not just casually.

The assemblage as a whole had responded about as he had. Not that they had been able to get everything, for example, Kerekang’s bravery in bringing up Dwight’s rebellion within the Agency for International Development over the hybrid maize seeds the agency was pushing. He could imagine the AID people saying that this was not what they needed to have shoved down their throats at a memorial service. Dwight had changed his mind about the hybrid maize seed. The hybrid seeds had to be bought new each season and couldn’t be saved over. But some people, in desperation, following custom, had saved them and then done what they always had when they were desperate, eaten them instead of saving them, and then, because the hybrid seeds were treated with mercury, had died, poisoned. It still happened, in bad years. So when Dwight had understood this, he had turned against the hybrids, which was not what AID had sent him to Africa to do, which meant that AID had its own separate reasons for wanting to wave goodbye to him. Kerekang had praised Dwight and Alice equally, as examples of whites who had come to Africa to be of genuine assistance, in contradistinction to many other whites who came to Africa and, in the guise of helping, took more than they ever gave. They were not to be classified with the white ants. That had gotten Ray’s attention.
The White Ants
was a pamphlet in which the agency was interested, very. It was an inflammatory parable comparing whites in Africa to termites, but the truth was that literarily it had a certain grace and force, which was not an observation Ray could share with Boyle.
The White Ants
seemed to be everywhere.

And all this had been packed around a splendid thing, a virtuoso reading, not a reading, a rendition, because the performance had been from memory, of a poem by Tennyson, a fairly long one, “The Golden Year.” Tennyson was not a poet Ray considered interesting, but during the rendition he’d kept thinking
Bravo
. Somehow Kerekang had penetrated Tennyson and found something splendid there. And although the Tennyson had been just one ingredient in the eulogy, it had been the heart of it, for Ray. It was what had rapt him away. He was sorry to say that this didn’t happen to him much anymore. It could still happen with Milton, if he got rolling, reading late, alone, on an empty stomach, oddly enough. Or if he was tired. Then it could happen. It had happened the first time he’d touched Milton. It was the whole point of literature, or one of them, anyway.
Absent awhile from my designs
was a line from somewhere that described that feeling of being extricated from yourself in a flash, in a liquid way, without struggle. Movies lacked the power to do it for him, certainly never movies on tape. He felt in his breast pocket for a handkerchief and in the process switched off the microcassette recorder he carried there. Kerekang was on tape, if he wanted to hear this again. The quality would be poor, probably, due to distance, although this was a new machine and the damned things were getting more miraculous all the time. Gerard Manley Hopkins had been a revelation, a jolt, the first time through. But Hopkins was too rich, unlike Milton, who was just rich enough, just bejeweled enough. Knowing how to distribute his effects was a great secret Milton had, one of many.

“What was that thing he read?” Iris asked. Ray wanted to keep thinking about it, not talk about it.

“Tennyson,” he answered, “ ‘The Golden Year,’ ” letting her see that he didn’t want to talk.

She didn’t see it. “Get me some Tennyson, then. That was wonderful.”

“You won’t like it,” he said.

“Well, what if I do? I think I might.”

“I don’t think you will. What we just heard was exceptional because of the performance part of it.”

“I liked Milton and you were certain I wouldn’t.”

“Well, I was selective. Also I don’t think you liked Milton a lot, did you?”

“I did. I loved
Areopagitica
.”

“That isn’t poetry, of course.”

“It’s Milton.”

“Okay! I’ll get Tennyson for you, I will, I will.”

“If I wasn’t up to Milton, I wonder if there was anybody around qualified to remedy that pathetic situation.”

“You mean I should have been your tutor.”

“Who better?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. We could try again, I guess.”

“Please don’t overwhelm me with your enthusiasm.”

He didn’t want to get into the vexed question of her literary education and what, exactly, his responsibilities in this area were. The ideal observer would say that since he taught Milton at work, he had a right not to have to teach it again when he got home. Or was it that, in not bringing Milton to Iris, he was trying to protect himself from a declaration from Iris that Milton was … less than she expected?

Also, he didn’t like the way one thing led to another when the subject came up of what she should be reading. For example, since he claimed to love the novel, why didn’t he read more of them, and why, when he did read them, did it seem he read so few novels by women? Did his interest end with Jane Austen? The problem was that they had a fundamental difference over reading, revolving around the proposition, her proposition, implicit, that whatever you read should be discussed and dissected with your mate, which created a certain pressure to read works of a certain caliber and to read with a certain mindfulness you might be in the mood to escape from. Right now he didn’t want to think about it.