Mortals (86 page)

Morel said, “The pan here isn’t the biggest one in the Kalahari. This is a small one, less than half a kilometer I would say, measured longwise. It’s an oval-shaped thing.”

Morel was speaking more rapidly as he went on. Ray wanted to slow him up a little, not stop him.

Ray said, “The pan used to fill with water every rainy season and stay full most of the year. They say it was beautiful. It was shoulder-to-shoulder marabou storks and fish eagles, Cape vultures, rare birds. That’s why they chose to build this monstrosity out here. Of course then the drought came.”

In Morel’s eagerness to proceed, he interrupted Ray. “Man, you should see it now. I saw it. Christ, it’s an eyesore.

“You wouldn’t go near it. It’s a boneyard. You see cow skeletons stuck halfway in the mud. You see skulls sitting there. The floor of it is checkered and you can tell that what happens is that when you step on these individual slabs they tilt up and dump you into this white mire, muck.

“There are a couple of abandoned trucks in there, just the roofs showing. It’s blinding to look at, it’s so white, pure burning white, white as snow.

“I couldn’t see much, though. That is, I couldn’t look at the thing for very long without my sunglasses. That’s another thing I want back. My bag I have to get first, first thing. People are going to be hurt.”

Morel was neatening himself up, beating dust out of his hair and off his shoulders. Ray was doing the same.

“That last explosion, what was that?” Morel asked.

“That’s what I’m thinking about,” Ray answered. He didn’t want to alarm Morel. And even if somebody was firing a mortar or mortars, they might not have many shells, maybe even only two, even only one.

“Is there anything we could make a white flag out of?” Morel asked.

“Your shorts, perhaps,” Ray said, regretting saying it. Morel looked at him closely.

“That was an attempt at levity. And also a recognition of the fact that my shorts are khaki-colored and in fact the only white sort of thing around is your shorts. I’m not suggesting it’s practical. My socks are white, or they were, it occurs to me. I don’t see how I could give them up. They’re all I’ve got to protect my feet. But none of this amounts to a flaglike item, if you know what I mean. I imagine if we started waving socks and shorts around, people would take it for an insult, and
bingo …
It was just a thought.”

“I understand. But if we want to surrender, that is surrender even
more
than we have already surrendered … we just put our hands way up. I think that would do it.”

“Be quiet for a minute,”
Ray said fiercely to Morel. They had to be alert. Ray realized for the first time in his life that he sounded like his mother when he used the imperative mode, not his father. There was a whistling sound he didn’t like.

“What is it?”

“Just
listen
.”

Somebody had a mortar. Mortar shells whistled in flight and something was coming toward them and whistling. The whistling was getting stronger, so this was incoming. Now the possibility of getting pushed into death by one or the other of these ignorant armies was up a notch. Because mortars were not weapons that could be
aimed
in any real sense of the term. Or they could be aimed only in the sense that a shell would be fired and the people firing it would try to see where it had landed and then they would move their mortar around a little and try again. What that meant was that it was true they could be sitting ducks, by accident, and die. They could actually die. Either or both of them could turn into a terrible bloom, bloodmist, gobbets of flesh, shards of bone.

A violent detonation, close by, jarred them.

“Prosit,” Ray said, for no reason. Morel had to be told what was happening.

Ray said, “They have mortars, at least one.”

“That’s dangerous,” Morel said.

“Oh yes.”

“We could die in here.”

“We could.”

“I never got a chance to talk to you about Milton.”

“What’s that? What are you talking about?”

“You’re a partisan of Milton and I hate Milton and I’ve thought a lot about why you would like Milton so much. My father forced me to study Milton, memorize parts he liked. Well, forced is too strong a word, but …”

“Look, right now we need to figure out the safest place to stand in here, while this is going on. We want to be out of the middle area. I think we should stand in opposite corners. I’m not even sure it makes any difference. It would be better to be in the corner if the roof came down, those beams. And I think it makes sense to crouch down, contract the amount of flesh you’re making available for injury. And let’s each pull one of these pallets over us, which might help in case flaming fragments of shit come our way. It’s all nonsense, but let’s do it.” Morel was agreeable.

When they were each huddled appropriately in their places, Ray said, “One last thing. Remember to keep as low as possible.”

“What? You have to speak up. It’s getting loud out there.”

“Okay, just remember to keep as low as you can, because we could take automatic weapons ordnance through the door, or if they used heavier
weapons, through the walls. It’s only cinderblock and it shatters. I’m talking about the possibility of somebody feeling frisky and sweeping this structure with gunfire out of high spirits. So, obviously, we stay as much clear of the doors as we can. And since the level of fire would normally come in waist high and up, if we were unlucky enough to be standing at the time, that would be bad.”

“So the idea is we should crawl, mostly?”

“Well, for the time being. Until it’s quiet.”

Morel was lying flat.

A little time passed.

Thin white smoke began to curl in through the vents near the tops of the north and west walls. They had smelled smoke before but now they were seeing it. The smoke was forming a stratum under the thatch and dissipating only very slowly upward through it. Morel was aghast.

Morel sat up. “I think we’re on fire.” He was frightened.

Ray said, “No. It’s not us. It’s not coming in that fast. It’s from somewhere else. Also, white smoke you don’t have to worry so much about. It’s dark or black you need to watch out for. White smoke is from fast-burning stuff like paper and wood … It’s not us. There’s no extra heat in here.”

“And thatch. Thatch would make white smoke, right?”

“Sure, but our thatch isn’t burning.” Ray was amused at his own performance of false expertise. He had to keep the man calm. What choice did he have? “And if you just watch you’ll see the layer of smoke up there get thinner. Believe me. It’s not us.”

They studied the smoke religiously, exchanging impressions about whether the inflow was strengthening or abating. It did clearly begin abating.

“You see what I mean?”

“You were right.”

A lull began. It was a waste of time, waiting to meet one’s fate. There were things he absolutely had to take care of when,
if
, he meant
if
, he got back okay to Gaborone, things he absolutely had to do in preparation for getting free, getting out, excising himself. There were certain students he had to say goodbye to, for example. There were at least five students and two or three colleagues, and Curwen in particular, at St. James’s that he absolutely had to say something to. And he had to collect various items, like his backup passports and some other papers, from various caches. He couldn’t stand to think about his students. And he had to find Keletso and say goodbye. And he had to see Victor, his coconspirator at the airport,
who was a decent fellow. Victor deserved a bonus. So did some of the other assets he was going to be abandoning. He would have to do something along those lines and it was going to have to be organized fast. It was a slight shock to realize how few people there were that he had to find and say something to or do a little something for valedictorily. It was true that there were enough of them to constitute a time problem. But there really weren’t that many, given how long he and Iris had been in that part of the forest. But he had an answer for that. It was because certain people he loved had absorbed most of what he had to give. A certain subject matter had absorbed inordinate amounts of his love capacity, his leisure-time attention.

He could save Morel from the trouble of having to survive another near-death experience like the last mortar strike to propel him into his Milton lecture, which was something he had evidently devoted some time to perfecting, probably in show-off conversations with Iris, he could just invite him to get into it, since he’d mentioned it. The thought that Morel had been parading around in front of Iris delivering his show-off capsule stuff on Milton was infuriating. It was too infuriating. He had to find out about that. First he would get Morel to do his little act on Milton.

Confoundingly, it seemed that Morel had managed to doze. Ray couldn’t believe it. Things outside were not improving. There was an intermittent filtering down of petty detritus from the ceiling thatch, the result of reverberations from intensifying shooting and shelling. Hunger is the best sauce for food and a clear conscience the best sleeping pill, Ray thought. How could Morel have a clear conscience? Is taking my wife away from me a virtuous act? Ray wanted to know. The shooting was at the level of static on the radio, for God’s sake. It had risen to that! Ray’s theory of the shooting he was hearing was that a jockeying exercise was in progress, one side trying to scare the other off with heavier and heavier barrages, followed by intervals of waiting to see if somebody was going to be pulling back, quitting. But then he knew so little about combat, war, serious war.

There was a cessation in the gunfire, and Ray said, loudly, “What was it you wanted to tell me about Milton?”

Morel sat up, blinking. Ray felt guilty. He should have been man enough to let him sleep through as much of the carnage and all its corollaries as he could manage. Sleeping like that in such circumstances was unusual. It was going to be up to Iris to figure out all these aspects and pockets in her new beloved.

Ray said, “You said you wanted to tell me about your theory of Milton and me, why the connection, I think you said.”

He had really been asleep. Morel was struggling to get himself in hand. He began preambling about how Ray had to understand he had no opinions whatever about Milton’s qualities as a poet, he had no opinions on the poetics. Some lines and passages were, he acknowledged, striking. But most of it he wasn’t qualified to judge, other than to say that it seemed like a lot of the rest of classic English poetry, which he really found got interesting only in the late nineteenth century, because so much of it was crypto-Christian apology before that.

Ray thought, That’s all I need, crouching here. All he needed was an attack on English Literature, which at that moment was giving him, Ray, two useless nothings, the phrase A Great Reckoning in a Little Room, which was by somebody about Marlowe’s death, and then the other … bits of blurred recall of Beckett’s plays, many of them taking place in settings like the one he and Morel were in. And Morel was saying again that the reason he had strong feelings about Milton came from having been forced by his father to read
Paradise Lost
. And then there were some disparaging remarks about Thomas Traherne and about Wordsworth and it was all too much.

“Listen to me,”
Ray said, trying to be commanding.

“Okay.”

“Know what, I want to jump ahead here. Just admit this. Milton came up, or her attitude to Milton did, Milton being important to me, and you realized you had an opinion and a theory and you went for it and she thought it was brilliant. It was negative. A negative take, shall we say. You had something negative in your backpack about Milton and you used it. It was part of courting. You went … 
Hm
, Milton. You wanted her. You took a shot. Admit it.”

“It was something like that.”

“It was the equivalent of a cheap shot, but let’s hear it. It might even be right. Just give me the
Reader’s Digest
version of what you said. I guarantee you I can take it. And come on, do it. By the way, if you think you hear police whistles you’re right. But it doesn’t mean the police are here to save us. Guerrillas use them for signaling between units. Or it could be the villains. But it’s not the police. So just give me a diagram of what you said.”

“Okay, but I have to stand up.” He was apologetic. He knew they had agreed that the huddled-down position was optimal in the situation they were in. But he was being asked to present something of significance. He
had to be standing, to deliver his thing properly. Ray understood this from teaching.

Morel began walking around.

Ray got up. There was no way he could remain huddled like a pupil while Morel stood over him. So that was it, they would both have to risk being cut in half by heavy-weapons fire until the issue was ventilated. That was life.

Morel needed to get on with it.

“Just give me a diagram,” Ray said.

“Okay, man. Yeah, here it is.” But he continued thinking, preparing.

Unless Ray was wrong, Morel was reverting to a blacker, more plebeian speech mode, the rhythm different. It was undoubtedly reflexive, a mode that offered some sort of protection. He had seen Morel do it before, but more subtly.

Morel said, “Okay, but, man, I can’t hardly remember the whole thing, you know? Let’s see …” Ray knew Morel was ashamed of the lurid
can’t hardly
because he had half swallowed it to the point where it had been hard for Ray to pick up. Morel had to be embarrassed by the blunt black thing he was doing. But distress was behind it, it should be remembered. It did raise the question of who Morel was and the question of false pretenses … which, Ray realized, was a classic redundancy. And generations of linguistic professionals had looked at it and not seen it and it was exactly like rapid eye movements being discovered by a graduate student after generations of sleep experts and theorists had droned on and on, not seeing it. Typically of life he didn’t know the name of the graduate student who had finally seen it, discovered it. He should be famous. His name was Jewish, he knew that much. But that was all he knew, except that he Ray himself had used
false pretenses
all his life up to that moment.