Mortals (69 page)

“He sayed, My eyes are heavy with sleep.”

“Oh, right.” He wanted to finish up with more Setswana, but he was fading and sinking.

Keletso held his hand down to him and he took it and rose out of himself, his weakness. Deep breaths would help. He considered the pinpricks of firelight strewn thinly through the dark. Some of them represented happy marriages, some fraction of them. How many, though, was a question only an anthropologist could answer. Some should be invited to take up the question, get out there and find the answer. He would like to know. It was germane to a feeling he was having, a sort of swelling desire to give some advice to Keletso. Tomorrow his opportunity to advise the man would be gone.

He was not entirely himself, which he knew. But if he could deliver some advice he would feel better and sleep better. It was a generic desire to give advice that he was suffering from, but he could narrow it down. And he had to be careful to be sure that what he said was all right, not unusual. It was some consolation if the mistakes that added up to a particular life could be crushed to yield a vial or two of advice.

He was going to concentrate on advice henceforth. That was an idea. He would find Kerekang and give him advice too, if he could find him. We should be kind. The world is a terrible machine, he thought.

Wait, he thought. Because he wanted to shout something before he began advising, to the effect that he was older. He had turned forty-nine. Two days ago he had turned forty-nine and not noticed. There had always been a strain with Iris over birthdays, which she loved and that was fine, but which he considered celebrations of what, sheer duration. She had always prevailed on the question of doing something, a little something, dinner with what, he couldn’t remember what, something extra, some wine they had had at someone’s house that he had said was delicious and that she had remembered and gotten for him, always something. And then always, no matter what he said, some sort of giftlet, always. Or a real gift, a book he wanted, something.

Ray said, “Rra, I want to give you some advice before you go, which is tomorrow.”

“I am listening, rra.”

“It’s about a wife, when you come to find a wife, what you should do. One and number one, you should be true to her. Yes, be true, but that is not enough. Okay,
I
was true, and … But nevertheless it is number one.”

Keletso groaned, Ray thought.

He said, “What is it?”

“Nowhere
am I finding my wife, I …”

Ray interrupted. “But you will, my friend, and let me tell you what you must do, according to me, you see, when you do. Number one you must forget this testing of women by taking only one who can make a child. No, my friend. I know all about this.”

“I am old, rra,” Keletso said.

“No you’re not, Keletso.”

“Yah, I am forty years. So I must find a young woman for a wife. You can see.”

“Well, I understand. You want children. I understand. But you have to think of other things, too, when you look at women … and you have time, in your life. Do you know how old I am?”

“Nyah, rra.”

“I am forty-nine, just.”

“
Is it?
As from what day, rra.”

“Sunday, it was.”

“
Ai
. You sayed nothing. Yah, cheers. Cheers, rra.”

“Cheers. Thanks.”

“So we are two monna mogolo.”

“No, I am. You’re not.”

“You have a wife. I cannot catch you up.”

“You can. And you can keep her.

“You will find someone and, Keletso, listen, when you touch her with love the first time, you must find words to say how you love to touch her, how much. Say, This is heaven, to touch you. If you see what I’m saying. You find some way to make her feel your love like a knife going in, so it is different from any touch before. You can say anything, Your flesh is God, strong words, anything you like. And every day hold her hard against you. And say the same thing or anything similar, but strong. Your breath is like water, and so on.

“Because, rra … women are very decent. They can drown us with sweetness and love, if we let them …”

“Ehe,” Keletso said, uneasily, Ray sensed.

I’m saying too much but I have to, Ray thought.

“And you must be willing to seem a fool, when you tell your feelings. You must be extreme. You must be what they say in West Africa, fou. I don’t know what the Setswana is … mad is what it is in English …”

“Setsenwa,” Keletso said.

“Good. You want her to think this chap is setsenwa. And you want her
to say to herself, No other man will feel like this toward me. He does not exist.

“And as to finding a wife and having children, it will happen.”

He was finding it impossible to get out the image that was filling him, to release it and plant it. He wanted Keletso to have it. It was that women are what, that the right woman is a locket or not a locket a jewel box, a jewel box full of something so beautiful and rich and rare, and yet men fixate on opening the catch, the lock, the word wedlock was wrong, but opening the lid and leaving the lid just open, failing to throw back the lid, turning to something else, satisfied. It was poesy and it was true, wasn’t it? But it was useless. It was too ornate. It was too ornate.

“You are right,” Keletso said.

“About what?”

“I am too much with chasing up these young girls.”

“Yes, if that’s what you’re doing. There are fine women, widows, women with children already. No, it’s a question of finding that
one
, that one, the correct one.”

“And rra, what do you say as to presents, because I am always too soon with presents, it seems. And I see I have just put my money to burn away to smoke. They are looking for presents, rra.”

“Well, you have to be careful about that, I would say.”

It was time to stop. He had gotten out as much of the essence of his great conclusion as he could. On the details of courting, he had nothing to offer, he was ignorant, a self-taught ignoramus as Iris had described herself in one of her modes, funnily self-deprecating modes. And he was an ignoramus on the subject because he had only seriously ever courted one woman in his entire life. Now she was turning to smoke.

Ray wanted to be useful. He would try.

“Keletso, I know you want to have children. But I can tell you something about it.

“I would not put it first. You see me. I can swear to you before God that I am the happiest husband in the world. I have no children with my wife. No man was ever happier with a woman.”

It was all true, but he felt he should have gotten at least the shadow of the past tense into it.

He got to his feet. He was sorry for the unmarried. He was as sorry for the unmarried as he was for himself, in his situation.

Keletso said, “You are happy in your home, rra. So you must ask God for nothing more.”

Ray’s eyes were filling up. He doubted Keletso could see that they were, but he turned his face away.

“Keletso, do you know where the aspirin is?”

“Ehe, rra. But is it your knee?”

“A headache.”

He needed to sleep. It was urgent.

H
e was driving cautiously and so far successfully. He was keeping himself hydrated. He had two water bottles. He had Weetabix crackers to munch. He was going to keep his blood sugar up and compensate for the fact that it had been Keletso who had reminded them it was time to snack, have a meal, not go too long without eating.

The sky was overcast, a burning white. The landscape was flat and blank and yellow tending to white on the left, also burning. And the landscape was the same but then dark green in the near distance to the right, where the delta was. The road had swung closer to the delta. The road was more sinuous. He wondered if he would ever see the delta, where it was exotic, exotic Africa. He was uninterested in tourism except as a form of shared fun. He had done too little of it during his wifetime. He had to smile. His accidents were amusing and that had been one.

He bit into a cracker. He had learned things from Keletso he needed to remember. Driving at night, if you felt sleepy, a good thing to do was to take an apple and make yourself eat the entire thing, chew it slowly, down to the bitter seeds. It would keep you awake. He might need to.

He estimated that he had covered twenty of the fifty kilometers between Nokaneng and the next even smaller and more negligible hamlet, Gumare, which he would transit hoping to reach Etsha by nightfall. The road surface was passable, a little grittier, the grit consisting of bits of ancient shells from the time when all this had been deep underwater. He knew about the shell bits from someone in Gaborone, a geologist.

He would overnight in Etsha and the next day creep along Route 14 and somehow find the spur road that led off to Toromole, the Jerusalem of ISA, the site of Ichokela Bokhutlon or what was left of it. He liked
Endure to the End as a motto or name for something. It was a good motto for what he was doing. And when he got there he might find nothing or he might find a mound of ashes. He thought, The past is a bucket of ashes but so is the near future sometimes. The past is a bucket of fishhooks, would be more like it. His mind was tending to aphorism because he was dipping into
Strange News
from time to time, during stops to pee or stretch, and he was extending his breaks for the purpose of meeting his obligation to finish reading his brother’s last will and testament. It was important for him to get through
Strange News
and it had been right of Rex to struggle to get it to him. He seemed to be saying to him something like I hope you like this better than you liked me. It was something like that. He could endure that, liking his brother’s best efforts. Rex was supplying entertainment, in this solitude he was being propelled through, or dragged through.

There was something wrong ahead. He had just come around a sharp curve and there was something black in the straight stretch of road directly ahead. The road was sinuous above Nokaneng because it moved over to follow the irregular perimeter of the floodplain of the Okavango River, snaking its way around salients of saw grass and reeds, beds of dry reeds, patches of elephant grass. The road straightened out and then curved east just beyond the black thing in the road. He wondered when the last time was that floodwater had come this far inland. It had been many years. These days the Okavango River was a shriveled thing. When the wind went through the grasses and reeds it made a sound more like clattering than something normal and sibilant.

There was a person in the road. And something was doing in the field of elephant grass. The grass was very high. Something about the texture of the scene was wrong. There could be tents or netting half showing. He would know soon enough.

The figure in the road was a man, just one, a black man standing blocking the way with his arms held out at his sides like Christ on the cross. He was certain that that was what he was seeing, but of course in Botswana you could see in the middle distance or on the skyline what was clearly a bush twitch and strut away, becoming an ostrich. But the imitation of Christ he was seeing was a man. He looked civilian enough. Ray needed to get closer. This assignment had been hard on his eyesight, the constant brightness had. His sunglasses were dark as night. He thought his night vision was a little worse than it had been when he started out. It had been helpful to have Keletso handle night driving. And now his distance vision was seeming a little lacking. Glasses were coming in the next
segment of his life. He had gotten Iris when his face had been naked and unencumbered. Even so, he had always been amazed that someone so much beyond his reach had wanted him. In the future any search to be made for a new companion would be undertaken by a bespectacled man, not that that should make a giant difference. But still it was interesting. The design of glasses had improved. Iris always said that when the subject of his possibly needing glasses came up. He would get the best glasses he could. But how would he know which ones were the best? He would figure it out. Morel was a little younger, of course, but as he remembered it, Morel needed reading glasses. We all need glasses, ultimately, he thought, feeling stupid. Because obviously what he was doing was trying to tally up ways, however trivial, in which he was the better man than Gunga Din. It was as though he was preparing for an event, a debate or argument that would decide who Iris would cleave to on the basis of one of them getting a higher score in enumerated qualities.

There was still time to stop, reverse, and turn back to Nokaneng, if he acted immediately. He had been driving with great circumspection and deliberation, out of consideration for his knee. Reversing and swinging around and getting the hell out of there would demand some vigorous moves. And it would conflict with what he thought of as his Trajectory. It would truncate everything. He would discover one of three things, up ahead, or of four things. One would be that this was lifti lifti, a random hitchhiker, innocent. One would be that the person blocking the road was goromente, legitimate. Another was that the man was one of the counterinsurgency specialists from koevoet over in SouthWest. They were killers. He knew that they were present and operating against his friend Kerekang and Kerekang’s friends. And he knew in his bones that Boyle was involved with bringing these teams on board. It would be their job to do the cupping. Mercenaries were scum. They would be setting up cups where they were the only power. Of course the final discovery possible would be that this would be someone from ISA he could communicate with and who would get him to Kerekang. The odds on that were small. But that was what he wanted more than life because he had advice for Kerekang. He was full of important advice. It was keeping him awake at night. He drove forward, at a crawl. You are in the rapids, he thought.

The man in the road wasn’t police, not in any kind of uniform, which might mean he was a hitchhiker. He did look civilian. He was wearing cargo pants, sandals and not boots, a workshirt whose sleeves had been torn off at the shoulder, revealing arms on the huge side, intimidatingly huge arms, in fact. Let me call you Nemesis, Ray thought.