Mortals (54 page)

They took seats in the second row directly in front of the lectern. A small table and a chair had been set to the left of the lectern, and a chrome steel utility cart had been pushed up against it on the right. The cart bore a display of bouquets obviously recycled from the hospital wards. The centerpiece was a protea in a pot, drooping in a gold foil calyx. A gooseneck microphone was mounted on the lectern, needlessly, considering the dimensions of the room.

“These chairs always make me want to write,” he said. He made writing motions.

“Then we should get you one.”

He left it there. He was going to decline to pick up the invitation to reopen the question of the glorious, or at least better than this, life he was going to lead someday post-agency. She wanted him to go back to poetry, be what he had tried and failed definitively to be. That was what she
seemed to want. She had all his ancient efforts somewhere in her files and boxes, her archives. She wanted a vocation for him that she liked better. He understood it. He wouldn’t mind living a life closer to what she might consider ideal. For the Denoons it had worked out rather oddly and bitterly, it had to be said, although they were living a life that by Iris’s standards had at least started out ideally. They were full-time against injustice wherever they could find it, and they had been lucky enough to find supporters who were living less than ideal lives and who were delighted to pay them for their efforts. So Nelson Denoon had founded a city of women in the heart of the Kalahari, where women ran the show and were ennobled and so on and where
they
inherited, as against the standard Tswana pattern, and all he had to say was bully for all concerned. Who wouldn’t love to found an actual city, given the opportunity and the resources, running according to one’s own notions and preferences? What human luck to be able to do that, found the most celebrated development project of the 1980s, place it in the hands of the beneficiaries, derive a splendid mate out of it, and go hand in hand off to some new venue of injustice, trailing clouds of glory, go to India, as they had done, India, constituting a buffet of injustices for them, a perfect place to go, castes, bonded labor, purdah or other woman’s problems, all of that. Iris adored them because they were wearing out their souls in the service of man. And she wanted to wear out
her
soul in the service of man, if it could be arranged, before it was too late, and she wanted him to do the same, if only obliquely, by for example writing poetry, an
improving
thing to do, something she could accept. He was being unfair.

He said, “You didn’t bring your book for him to sign.” She owned a copy of Denoon’s
Development as the Death of Villages
.

“That’s not why I’m here,” she said.

“I know.”

“I have her book, too.”

“I know.”

“I’d be embarrassed.”

“I understand that.”

Iris wondered aloud why the meeting was being held in such an inadequate setting and he told her that the Denoons were in bad odor with goromente for reasons not entirely clear to him. The government had put certain obstacles in their path. For example, they had been given a stingy, five-day-only visa. She wanted to know why. She was under the impression that the women’s colony he had established was a success, something the government was proud of.

“Well, yes, a success, but it’s a success as a German plantation. That’s what it’s turned into, in effect. It’s true that a sort of female elite runs it for the Germans, but it’s not the same place it was. Grapple plant grows wild in the Kalahari and the Germans were buying all they could get to put in some aphrodisiac concoction. The biggest health food chain in Europe got involved. There was a boom. And then a collapse in all the growing areas except the one around Tsau. It’s a tuber and you have to leave half of it in the ground if you want it to regenerate, which is the way Denoon had taught the women at Tsau to proceed. The other foragers had just ripped the whole thing out of the ground. Anyway, so the Germans moved in on Tsau, gave them contracts … and paid plenty because devil’s claw, which is the other thing they call it, had gotten so scarce. Now it’s like gold. So Tsau is a little like a company town on the order of Hershey, Pennsylvania. The women are doing quite well. Some of them are married to Germans who’ve settled there. There’s a long waiting list to get in, and the female-line inheritance deal Denoon got the government to allow is a big draw, but it hasn’t spread anywhere else and it’s breaking down informally at Tsau. It’s very gentrified, compared to what it was. And the Denoons are unhappy with the way things have turned out and they are letting everyone know how they feel. So they won’t be making a visit to Tsau on this trip.”

She said, “Hm. That’s sad. But why is the government being so unfriendly to them?”

“Well, goromente is perfectly happy with the way Tsau is going. So that’s one thing. But it’s not mainly that. I think it’s because of what happened in India. Botswana wants to keep the Indian community here happy. They’re well off and they have a lot of influence. And the Denoons made trouble in India. They’re persona non grata there. They got kicked out of Poona. So—”

“Yes, and kicked out when he was still convalescing. After what happened. And he’s still convalescing. I think it’s a scandal.” She looked at him. “You’re a cornucopia of information on almost any subject I raise, Ray. That’s lucky for me. I’m serious.”

“I try, my dear girl.” He lowered his voice to say that the file on the Denoons was huge.

“I hope more people come, Ray.”

“We’ll see. But anyway, I don’t know a lot about what happened in India. Essentially, he was invited out of Tsau because it was time for the women it had been meant for all along to take over. So she, Karen, came back from the States and took him by the hand and married him and
when he told her he wanted to go to India she said fine, they would find something useful to do there. And so they did. You know what I know. They got into the movement against dowry murder. They plunged into it. She learned Hindi …”

She said, “I wonder why she took his name, though. For a feminist, and one so prominent, it seems slightly strange. Do you have any idea why?”

“Oddly enough, I do. Her true maiden name wasn’t the one she grew up with, Karen Ann Hoyt. That was the name her mother gave her, but it was an invention chosen because her mother thought it sounded classy, better than Dooley in any case. You may think it’s amazing I know all this, and it is, it is. Karen Ann hated her name, and that was because her mother, a simple person, at some point confessed to her that she had chosen Hoyt because it sounded like ‘hoity-toity.’ And the name Karen Ann had been copied from some local subdeb in the area who was always in the local news.”

“What’s a subdeb?”

“Subdebutante. I guess that term is out of use now. So she had reason to hate all her names. Her birth certificate reads Baby Girl Dooley. She dropped the Ann part of her name when she married Denoon. So now we have Karen Denoon and your question is answered.”

“I understand the feeling of wanting to change your name. I don’t love my name. And I know what you’re going to say, Ray, so don’t bother. Also, thank you for telling me interesting things.”

“What I was going to say was that I love your name. And I do.”

“So then is what happened in India that he was setting a trap, setting up to video an attempted wife-burning and planning to jump in and stop it after he had his footage, and the plan went wrong?”

“It went way wrong. The wife got out okay but the fire got out of control, there was a conflagration, and for a while they thought Denoon was caught in it and incinerated. But, as God wills, he survived. Somehow he curled up in a niche. They have it on tape, Denoon emerging from the ashes like a phoenix. They may show it tonight, although I don’t see any monitor … well, maybe one is coming. But he came out of it with damaged lungs. He can’t speak above a whisper. Even then, he talks in bursts and not for extended periods, they say. But they’re still campaigning. She hauls him around with her. He’s pretty much an invalid, apparently. It’s done wonders for the movement. You could see him as a burnt offering that worked.”

“Oh, dear. Thank God he didn’t get burns, externally I mean.”

Denoon gets into trouble, Ray thought. Before hooking up with the dowry murder people, Denoon had made efforts to get into the campaign against indentured labor in Madras. He had been unwelcome. The campaign had been totally in the hands of orthodox Marxist groups and his heterodox leftism had been found more than annoying. He had been beaten up, at one point, in a confrontation, but whether it had been a confrontation with the authorities or with organizers of the campaign, Ray couldn’t remember. Martyrdom was a proof of virtue, of course. Clearly it was for Iris. He wondered if unconsciously that was what she wanted for him, if she would secretly prefer him to be hurling himself against the brick wall of the world, like Denoon or like her doctor, instead of being the what, the fierce champion of the inevitable she undoubtedly saw him as. But that was life. He was her lot. Or he was her lot for as long as she would accept it, which was the problem rising in the sky over them, a new orb. Morel would have a theory of Nelson Denoon, no doubt seeing him as reflexively aping the Christ myth, blindly mimicking the martyr archetype that’s buried alive and twitching in the soul of every member of the West, the Christian West. But in fact Denoon’s feints at martyrdom could just as easily constitute a creative way of dealing with depression, say, when the only other option for dealing with it was to pay somebody to paw through the leaves of the book of your soul, some cretin who thought your problem was that you never got over your mother and who meted out wisdom in commercial units of time when in fact you were bleeding all over the place and the protocol was to stop when the timer went ding, no thank you. Iris was squeezing his hand.

“We haven’t really suffered,” Iris said.

“Speak for yourself,” he answered, trying for lightness.

He was suffering because he had to go away from her. He had just gotten the order. It was the worst timing. She was barely home from the States. He was being ordered into the field, urgently. He would tell her tonight. He couldn’t stand the prospect. But there was real trouble in the north and in a complex way he could be considered partly to blame for it, which he couldn’t tell her about, not yet, although someday he would have to, if he still had her. His connection to the trouble in the north was an impossible subject for contemplation. It was de facto. He had to avoid that aspect of this misery. He hated going into the field not because he was possibly a little old for it and not just because he felt he had been
around long enough to earn enough consideration to keep him from being sent, no. No the fact was that he worked well in cities. He was built for cities. He had learned all his moves in cities, towns, cities and large towns. In the bush he would be improvising. He would be raw. His Setswana was weaker than Boyle realized. Much weaker. But resentment was his enemy. He had to go, imminently. And it could be for a month or more, depending. Iris was looking around the room for someone. He knew who. But he didn’t know why a country would choose the protea for its national flower, as the South Africans had. It looked peculiar, like a giant artichoke, not really attractive. The room was filling up.

A show of organization at last, he thought. A few supporters, Batswana men and women of college age, none of them known to him, had appeared with the necessary paraphernalia of movements, packets of literature, a banner, collection baskets, bottled water for the speaker.

“Here they are,” Iris said. She was tense.

“Don’t stare,” she said. But she was the one staring.

It was dramatic. The Denoons made their way up the side of the room, Denoon moving haltingly, assisted by his wife. Just behind them came a woman maneuvering an oxygen tank on a wheeled stand, and behind her a man pushing a wheelchair. The crowd was still. The wheelchair was parked in a corner in reserve. The oxygen tank was placed just behind the table on the left of the lectern, and the breathing tube and mask the tank was equipped with were laid on the tabletop for easy access. Stiffly, Denoon seated himself. Karen wanted him closer to the lectern and proceeded to drag the seated man in his chair, to a point that allowed her to reach down and take his hand. She was clearly physically powerful. She arranged herself at the lectern but broke off to provide Denoon with a pad of folded tissues. She touched the corner of her mouth, obviously to indicate to him that he needed to touch away something objectionable in the corner of his own mouth.

They’re a success already, visually, Ray thought. Together they communicated valiancy, if there was such a word, that and an impression of worthiness and splendid weariness, aided of course by what the viewer knew about them, but still. Denoon was a gaunt but improved version of the persona Ray was familiar with from the photographic records. Adversity and weight loss had rescued the strong, hard face he had been meant to live behind. He would be in his late fifties. He was leonine, with long, almost completely white wavy hair pulled back loosely and finished in a neat pigtail, not elaborate, but it showed that somebody loved him, no question about it. The effect of the pigtail wasn’t feminine. His gaze was
piercing. Iris was enthralled, Ray could tell. As to defects, the linings of his nostrils were inflamed and he had an inordinately large Adam’s apple, although whether women considered that unattractive, Ray was unsure. Probably not, Ray thought. Denoon was unsmiling, but then why wouldn’t he be? Denoon seemed costumed, rather than dressed, to Ray. He was clad in a white dhoti over a black tee shirt and stovepipe black jeans. He was wearing sandals with white gym socks. Did he represent a subtle orchestration of pallors and darknesses, with his bloodless cheeks and his black eyebrows, and all the rest of the chiaroscuro? If it was chiaroscuro. It was always hard to know what was deliberate and he had to be fair. They had glamour, this pair. They really did.