Authors: Norman Rush
“Now. My mother is useless for this kind of thing, like being around for the delivery. And she disapproves of single motherhood. And she hasn’t offered. And Ellen needs to know someone is going to come. And that’s me.”
They walked in silence up to their gate. Fikile was nowhere around, so they let themselves in. They had just entered the house when the phone began to ring. He had never acclimated to the standard ring pattern in Africa, the two peremptory short burrs and a long interval.
Iris started toward the phone but stopped herself when she sensed Ray wanted to take it. He did.
It was one of his notification calls, with the information he needed coded into the wrong number or wrong resident name the caller would claim to be trying to reach. Iris had a good sense of when one of these calls was coming through. It was odd. She would hesitate. She would look at him as if she knew in advance what kind of call it was, not always, but often enough to be odd.
A voice he knew said, “Dumela, rra. Is this number 5412, 5412?”
“Dumela. Sorry, rra. No. Tsamaya sentle.”
It was good news. His man had successfully removed and unloaded the tackhead microcam Ray had taken the risk of having installed in Samuel Kerekang’s bedroom in his dismal lodgings in Bontleng. He would have the footage tomorrow, ready for reviewing. It wasn’t a good idea, but he could get hold of the footage now …
“Finally you look happy,” Iris said. “But are we through with my sister for tonight?” She didn’t like his wrong-number calls. She was showing it more than usual tonight. He did his best to keep them to a minimum. But there was only so much he could do about it.
“I don’t know, are we?”
“We are if everything is clear about my trip back. Because I definitely am …”
“We have no argument, my babe. You’ll go. Of course.”
“You’re not enthusiastic. I wish you were. I need you to be.”
He could see she meant it. She was distressed about something he’d just done, or about the call. She turned away rather abruptly and left him, heading toward her study. He assumed she wanted more enthusiasm about their separation. He started to follow her but decided against it and waited. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to see the footage. He was tempted, but it wouldn’t be right. It would wreck the night. There was a chance, a minute chance, that this might give him something that would satisfy Boyle that Kerekang was nothing to them. And that might untie his hands for the question of Morel.
Iris was back, bearing a clutch of photographs, papers, and index cards.
“May I just show you a few things from Ellen to win your heart, Ray? I’m after your heart. I need you to want me to be with my sister. This is the last thing I’ll bother you with on the subject, I promise.”
He couldn’t go out, which was what he wanted to do, and he didn’t want to go through the pictures, the miscellany she was bringing to him, because he was tired and because it was supernumerary, and because in effect he had already agreed she could go to the States, that she should go. She had won, and this was a way of gilding the lily of his defeat, it felt like to him.
He said, “Suppose we do this at breakfast instead? I’m tired. I’m flagging. I’ll get us up in time to go through your things. We won’t have to rush. That’s a promise.”
She seemed to Ray to be flattered that he was so unhappy at the
prospect of being left alone in Africa. She acceded graciously to the postponement, but then she was always gracious.
Later when he couldn’t sleep, he decided that breakfast would be the wrong time too. She had a pile of things to get through and he was agitated about the Kerekang tape, which he could handily secure and review before noon, thus getting it off his back. Then at lunch he could be himself. So now it had to be lunch.
R
ay felt triumphal over what the footage had given him. But it was subtle and he had to formulate the meaning of the captured images, the ritual, so that Boyle would grasp it. What they had was Kerekang performing a personal ritual. What he had would be the capstone of a Profile, a Life, if he were still writing them. That day could come again. At moments like this it was a curse not to be able to discuss something like how to present this to Boyle, how to phrase it with Iris. She was subtle.
Lunch was a leftover pork chop with applesauce, brown rice, and fresh peas. Iris had laughed at him when he had shown himself dutifully prepared to eat with a fork the roast garlic puree served to him in a ramekin. It was a garnish, not a dish in itself. He knew that. They had had it before. He had forgotten.
Iris said, “I think what happened is that Ellen fell in love with this darling child of her next-door neighbors in the condo. She’s very precocious. An only child. Ellen’s downfall was baby-sitting for this child, Catherine.”
Iris dealt out three Polaroid photographs of Catherine.
“Completely adorable,” Ray said.
“She is. Everyone is always suggesting she should be taken to a modeling agency, hideously enough.
“So in any case Ellen decided that Catherine was indeed adorable, and not only physically. Ellen began writing down her little bons mots. At first she just included them strewn throughout her letters and then later she began printing them sort of calligraphically on these index cards, which I now have a small archive of. The child is barely four.”
Ray pulled the stack of cards toward him. Was sampling enough? Probably not.
“Are these in chronological order?” he asked.
“I don’t think I’ve kept them in order, actually. They’re from when Catherine was two or three. Some Ellen wrote up after the fact, from stories Catherine’s mother and father told. The order doesn’t matter.”
Ray browsed. Some cards recorded brief anecdotes. Others seemed to record examples of a precocious ability to classify things.
Catherine was given an Etch A Sketch for her third birthday. She produced two jagged parallel lines right off the bat and said “I have drawn a crevasse.”
Of course you cannot drink bathwater, it is not a beverage.
Catherine’s parents note Catherine’s fixated gaze at a passing wheelchair, the first she’d ever seen, in which was seated a visibly spastic child about her own age. As the wheelchair drew abreast of them, Catherine said, “Interesting chair!” Then she said, “I feel sorry for ghosts. If I ever saw one, I wouldn’t be afraid. I would try to comfort it.”
Iris said, “They’re not complicated. And you don’t have to memorize them, either. And you don’t have to read all of them. Give them to me and I’ll try to pull out the best ones.”
He returned about half of the pack to her, but continued his own browsing.
It was friendlier to read them aloud.
“I like this.
“Catherine went to the zoo. She said of the elephants, ‘They have no knuckles.’ Later, when her parents said to Catherine that it was time to go to bed, Catherine said, ‘Unfortunately, I don’t want to.’ ”
Iris said, “Listen to this. These.
“Her mother wanted Catherine to wear her Birkenstock sandals but Catherine preferred to wear her sneakers. She pointed to the sandals and said, ‘I won’t be
nimble
in those.’ ”
Iris was looking dreamy to him. This exercise was depressing her, he could tell. It was involuntary. He was sorry.
She said, “This is the last one. I guess it’s very recent. It’s a poem Catherine wrote.
“Two people were walking down the road
They saw two insects down below
One was a flea
And one was a bee
And the flea was wearing clothes.”
Iris was very inward now. Mechanically, she squared up the packet of cards.
He tried to be brisk. “Well you can see what happened here. Of course you have to go to be with her. It’s fine with me, Iris, it really is.”
Iris said, “I should mention two other things about this. She thinks the mother is much too cavalier about this child. For example, the parents make no effort to get these gems written down. You know how precious these things are when your child gets older. I mean, we can imagine it. So she began writing these bits and pieces down and then, as a gesture, gave them to the child’s mother, who was, I gather, put off by it, basically. I guess she felt criticized. So Ellen sees her own qualities as a mother going to waste, and the rest is history. The other thing is that she thinks the father is evil because, when they were having terrible trouble with Catherine over her bedtime, he proposed the idea of having her hypnotized and giving her a posthypnotic suggestion that it was time to go to sleep. They’d snap their fingers and she’d go off. I’m sure it was completely in jest, but Ellen can’t stand him now. So there you have another thing that might incline her to leave the father out of it. There’s much more of Catherine in the letters.”
Sadness will kill you, he thought. He got up. He had to find time to rehearse what he was going to say to Boyle. He thought, It could go like this, we have three weeks of taping at Kerekang’s place, we covered two rooms, bedroom and kitchen, the only two places he could use for meetings, and we did both sampling mode and straight coverage of six through twelve every night … now this was all during the time you were convinced he was having meetings there twice a week, at least … we know from our other sources when he got home each day, all during this time, and there are no meetings going on … But what
is
going on?… He has one thing that he does before bed without fail every night, which is what?… He goes up to his bookshelf and touches his books and then he turns the light off and goes to bed early, and what books does he go up
and touch?… Not
Das Kapital
, nothing by Trotsky, no, he goes up and touches his
Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson
, Cambridge Edition, and his little Everyman
Palgrave
… He sleeps in his underwear … There is nothing for us here.
“What if I like it better there when I go back?” Iris asked softly.
He was startled.
“You won’t, my girl,” he said, and thought, She can’t.
He walked around the table to stand near her. He put his hands on her shoulders.
Down
, misery! he thought.
W
hy was this so sudden and urgent?” Iris wanted to know.
She and Ray were walking, at a good pace, to the embassy residence. They were hurrying because the invitation had come late and without much warning.
“You are verging on running, Ray. And it’s too hot to run. And it’s Sunday, it feels odd to be sprinting down the road on Sunday.
“And why is this a command performance anyway? Why is the ambassador suddenly back from Wankie after just leaving to go there, and why all these reminders about dressing appropriately for a memorial service? They emphasized it when they called the second time on the radiophone. Was that meant for me? Do I go around like a gypsy? What is all this pressure about? I know how to dress for a memorial service. I’m not an idiot.”
Ray said, “All I can tell you is this,” thinking in passing that here was a good title going to waste. A lot of good titles were going to waste …
“Will you
complete your thought
, please,” she said.
“All I know is that this is an emergency event and what the premise for it is. Walk faster. What I know is that the embassy has a problem. You know about Dwight Wemberg’s wife being killed last week, the accident. You didn’t know Dwight. He’s an older man and he was just coming to the end of his AID contract at the agricultural college when his wife was killed. They lived in Sebele, on the grounds of the college, and they never came into town much. Go faster. They stayed out in Sebele and were apparently pretty happy there. They got along with the locals. I should say that
he
wasn’t around Gabs that much, but Alice was. She was a volunteer
with a church group that works with the bobashi, I think. She was rather a saintly person, one gathers.”
“I know who she was.”
“Part of the problem is the way she died. She was stopped well over on the shoulder on the Lobatse Road and she got out of her car and a CTO truck swerved over to avoid something and killed her, smashed her to death while she was locking the car door. And then the Ministry of Transport mishandled it. The driver was taken into custody and let go without being tested for alcohol. And then there was the statement saying it’s always better to get out on the side away from traffic, which is implicitly blaming her, of course. There were many stories about what the CTO driver was prudently trying to swerve away from.
“So anyway, Dwight was out in the bush, way out, at a project the college has in Hukuntsi. Melon cultivation. He was out of reach, out of touch for three days, doing his job. The rest you know. He comes back hysterical and discovers that they’ve buried her. There were no bad motives involved. I know she was very messed up. But somebody wasn’t thinking ahead and didn’t inquire into the law here, which says you have forty-eight hours to get a body out of the country, forty-eight hours only, after which the body has to be interred. Which leads to the rub. Which is that once the body is buried you can’t get it exhumed unless you go through an impossible bureaucratic procedure that can take you years. He wants to take his wife’s body home. The government won’t make an exception. He’s griefstricken and enraged at the same time and he’s made a number of scenes at various government offices, trying to get them to let him have the body, Alice’s body. He’s insulted certain senior people directly to their respective faces, which you cannot do. So it’s a tremendous mess and to top it off his contract is up and he’s going to be out of a job. He has his passport and his visa is good for another year. The embassy wants him to go home and let them handle the exhumation application for him but he doesn’t trust them. He’s off the deep end. He doesn’t trust the embassy and he’s right. He may not know something else that’s relevant, which is that right now our relationship with the Ministry of Health, which controls the exhumation, is shall we say negative, for other reasons altogether. But that’s another story. Or maybe Dwight does know something about this, now that I think of it.”