Mortals (31 page)

“Well one thing he thinks is wrong is the conventional doctor-patient relationship.”

Great, Ray thought. “But tell me, was his wife unfaithful with a white guy or a black guy, what race, just out of curiosity. Just to fill the picture out.”

After a silence, she said, “That’s really all I know.”

“No it isn’t,” he said flatly, surprising himself.

“That tone. You are so certain sometimes.”

He said, “You don’t have to answer the question. That’s your prerogative. But don’t deny I’m right, that you do know.”

“You are uncanny. And you are
oppressive
. You are … And I don’t lie to you, and you know that. You rely on it. You exploit it. You want me to tell you something you know I’d rather not, and you take unfair advantage of me to get your way.”

“I don’t deny it,” he said.

They proceeded in silence. Why was this something she wanted to withhold?

“I don’t really know this for a fact,” she said. “I didn’t hear it from him. It’s from someone else, so when I said I’d told you all I know, that was actually true. This is a different quality of … of information. It’s gossip. I think his wife left him for a woman. And what her race might be I have no idea.”

Now he knew what her impulse had been. She had been trying to protect Morel’s image. It was humiliating to lose your wife to a woman. She hadn’t wanted him to know. He didn’t like it. Why should she be protecting Morel’s image? What was it to her?

“God,” he said. “No wonder he wants to overthrow Western civilization.”

“Don’t trivialize. Nobody said he wants to overthrow Western civilization. Anyway, what’s the connection?”

“Well. I can’t think of much, offhand, that would more completely
unhorse me and make me want to pull down everything within reach. I guess I’m speaking for myself, but I’d sure want to do something about my fate. I can get with that. Western civilization is our fate. So. Ergo. Look, you have at least two betrayals going on at once. You’re betrayed as a person, and your gender is being betrayed … and then add to the picture that your wife is Nigerian, you’re being betrayed by an African. That makes it worse, somehow. So you think that something cosmic has to be wrong with the world that’s doing this to you. So …”

“Listen, do you want to hear what else I have to report about the day’s events? Because there is a bit more. Or do you want to keep on psychologizing, something I thought you hated, by the way.”

He couldn’t quite let it go. “I do want to hear, but don’t tell me psychologizing isn’t in order now and then. If something like this happened to me, I … well … I might very well decide to do something … amazing … instead of slitting my wrists right away.”

She sighed hugely.

“I’m sorry I told you.”

“Iris, don’t be. It’s interesting. In a way it’s no crazier or more Promethean or whathaveyou than any other kind of missionary activity over here. It’s just a new annex on a familiar edifice, isn’t it? But it is interesting.”

“I don’t know how much of this is just talk, Ray. It’s his medical work that’s really important. I think.”

“Okay, so what else was said? And who was the audience?”

“Those children, myself, your friend the engineer, Kerekang. Toward the end there were other people coming over who wanted to exchange pleasantries with Davis. He has a following. Patients and people who’ve heard about him.”

“Now this is after his mission statement?”

“You’re getting the wrong picture. This wasn’t something he declaimed, some grandiose statement he was just waiting to unveil. You could tell he knew it was going to sound grandiose. And it was said more or less man to man, to your friend. I happened to be there. He wasn’t being portentous in any way. Okay, I would even say there was some irony in the way he said it, although at that point I was pretty much in an eavesdropping position. My point is that it wasn’t something being declared for the benefit of one and all, and certainly not for my benefit. What I think happened is that your friend …”

“Stop calling him my friend. I don’t know this man Kerekang.”

“Well, but you seem to like him. So do I …”

“And I don’t keep referring to him as
your
friend, do I?”

“No, but you obviously like him. So did Davis. He’s very appealing. You approve of him.”

“Well let’s call him Kerekang, for simplicity. I call your doctor by his last name and you and I call Kerekang by his last name. Or for even greater simplicity we could both refer to your doctor by his last name. No? Jesus, what
is
this? Everything is getting in the way.”

“I know, and it’s not coming from me. Anyway.

“Anyway, they went back and forth about Christianity for a while. I think Davis was trying to feel Kerekang out on the subject, find out where he stood. They were sizing each other up. It was fun to watch.

“I’m now, for this discussion, in a different memory palace, by the way.

“Kerekang seemed to be taking the position that even though Christianity wasn’t exactly true, Africans had some things to be grateful to certain Christians for. And he mentioned how Livingstone and Moffat had run guns to the Batswana so they could repel the Boers. And in a more general way he was saying that he didn’t see that it was so terrible for people to have in their minds a model of someone unfailingly kind, acting kindly. And then the discussion got a little miscellaneous on his part and he alluded to the role Christians had played in getting cab horses treated decently in London in the nineteenth century and also to the part they played in stopping the gladiatorial games, although I had the sense that Davis had some alternate explanation for that that he couldn’t quite lay his hands on, or didn’t, anyway. And then Kerekang went on to the work of Christians in ending the slave trade, although he did say that Christians had participated in it and profited from it from the beginning. And Kerekang also admitted that Christians in Europe had basically forced the Jews into being slave traders during the Middle Ages by making it one of the few trades Jews were allowed to engage in.

“So then Davis wanted him not to rely on single instances, but to look at the larger effects of the doctrine in Africa, and not to look at this or that good act by white Christians here and there in Africa. He wanted him to focus on what Christianity had done to Africans, to the African minds it had penetrated and was still penetrating. Wait a minute.”

She closed her eyes.

“Okay, then Davis gave as an example what Christianity had done to homosexuality in Africa, making the point that universally there was no stigma attached to being homosexual within the traditional cultures, but that Christianity had brought persecution of homosexuality with it, introduced it where it hadn’t been. Kerekang took this for a good point.”

The flagpoles of the Gaborone Sun were coming into view.

“Then, and this was very sotto voce between them, they talked about abortion and how all the churches were united against legalization, which is true. And then they came to AIDS.

“Davis is passionate about it. He hears things through the medical grapevine that other people don’t know. In the morgues in Zimbabwe they are stacking the AIDS corpses three to a tray, for example. The Catholics are against condoms and the Protestant churches are barely in favor of them and the independent African churches are bastions of insane folklore remedies for AIDS, which is galloping unbelievably. He thinks seropositivity is almost twenty percent here.

“Then Kerekang tried to take a sort of evolutionary position. This was that people would progress from animism and local gods to monotheism, the monotheisms, and then to Deism and finally out into post-religion. We would all someday be like Sweden, where nobody believed anything having to do with religion anymore. He’s visited Sweden. But Davis was absolute against that view, saying that it’s the liberal denominations that are declining into unimportance and the fundamentalist branches of religion that are gaining strength. And he wanted Kerekang to admit that this was especially true in Africa, which Kerekang did admit. Davis said Kerekang was a religious Menshevik, thinking that religion was going to turn into secularism the way the Mensheviks thought capitalism was going to evolve itself into socialism. For some reason this was a big hit with Kerekang. He has a wonderful laugh. How am I doing as a rapporteur?”

“You’re astonishing me.”

She was very pleased. He loved this flushed, sturdy creature. All this was for him, all this effort.

She said, “
Then
 … what?… I think a reprise of the question of white Christians doing good things, which Kerekang couldn’t quite escape from, ending up in this exchange … Kerekang saying Some people come to Africa to help us very much. Davis saying So did I. Kerekang saying They came to build things up. Davis saying Like me. Kerekang saying They came to create things. Davis saying Yes and the things they came to build are falling on the heads of Africans all around us.

“And then I believe this is the end of it. And I learned something I didn’t know. Davis pointed out that Kerekang, who’s a Xhosa, should appreciate that Christianity was behind the destruction of his people. In this way. In 1856 a prophetess ordered them to slaughter their entire national herd, half a million cattle, as a sacrifice, which they did
and which impoverished them, it ruined them, it’s so horrible. The prophetess …”

“Nongqawuse.”

“You see, you know everything.”

“Not quite, babe.”

“But that’s really impressive.”

“No it isn’t. It’s one of the main events in the history of the region. The Xhosas who settled here in Botswana came north after the cattle massacre. There’s a big settlement near Mahalapye, which is where Kerekang comes from, if my guess is correct.”

“Well in any case she was a Christian convert who had decided that all the cattle had to be killed because they had been reared by people who practiced witchcraft, as the Xhosas had for generations, which meant that the cattle were defiled because the Christian god hated witchcraft. They were in a period of stress at the time. I don’t know if it was drought or what. They were continually under pressure from the Zulus. So the prophetess promised that their tribulations would be over once they’d killed off all the cattle. He made the point, Davis did, that most people think of this act of destruction as something arising from primitive tribal craziness. But this was not a thing the pre-Christian tribes had ever done. It was Christianity that did it to them. Did you know that?”

He hadn’t. He hadn’t known that Nongqawuse was a Christian convert. “I may have known that, once. Maybe not. No, I don’t think I did. No, I didn’t.”

“Any last comments on my report?”

“Impeccable, my dear girl. Impeccable, Iris.”

They had reached the ring road. They turned up it. A quarter of a mile ahead of them on the far side of the road and occupying a site at the top of a long, slow rise was the Sun.

“So that was all. Davis gave Kerekang a card and invited him to a lecture he’s planning to give. And then as a last afterthought he grabbed Kerekang before he could leave and made the point that it wasn’t only Christianity he was concerned about, it was all religions, all religious belief, in case that hadn’t been emphasized enough. And I believe Kerekang invited Davis to come have a look at the gleaner camp. And now I want something cold to drink.”

He was full of gratitude toward her.

A realization he had suppressed came back to him. He had almost done something unforgivable. It had almost happened. During her recital, he had unthinkingly reached toward his shirt pocket to activate
his microrecorder. But he had caught himself. He would never tape her. The temptation to do it then was understandable. The impulse was an artifact of the intensity of his focus on his enemy, Boyle, his preposterous enemy. Someone forgive me, he thought. Priest could be his code name for Morel, if Boyle could be made to see reason.

They were in sight of the hawker strip. Their approach galvanized the hawkers, who began heaving themselves up from the ground or struggling out from their cardboard and burlap hutments. The hawkers would mob them in a minute.

A heavy, owl-faced woman with a withered leg, the hawker closest to them, was toiling painfully toward them, determined to be the first to present her goods.

“That woman is crippled,” Iris said. “Oh God.”

They had to buy something. It was distressing. Hawkers from farther up the line were racing at them, overtaking the crippled woman. He suspected that word had been passed along that Iris was wearing one of their products, which made her a serious prospect. The crippled woman was in desperate haste. As her competitors came past her, she began unfurling her goods, pitching them out toward Iris and Ray, trailing them through the dust as she forged forward.

“Buy the biggest piece she has,” Ray said. “Buy the bedspread.” It was unlike him, but he was hot with gratitude toward Iris. He was usually careful with money.

“You know how they overcharge for these,” she said.

“Get the bedspread. The tablecloth.” It was blocked gratitude speaking. Of course they overcharged, for what they gave you. But he also knew that she’d get more pleasure buying this dubious object than she would buying something for herself that she really wanted.

“You’re great,” she said.

“Not yet,” he said.

S
he was going to think he was perverse, getting into a hot bath on a hot night after a hot day … but sometimes there was a need. A scalding bath like this was for moments when everything hurts, from the soul outward, from the folds of your soul to the soles of your feet, and what the burning lake did was unify miscellaneous pains into a single physical one, briefly, which then turned into pleasure as the water temperature became bearable, something like that. Everything hurts, he thought, and there he was. But he could see the future. Iris would drift in, take note, say nothing, and convey everything by body language, as in rolling the eyes.

She would roll her eyes. And with some justification. From her viewpoint, there he would be, a Dagwood in his bathtub, but in darkest Africa. She would react, because what he was doing was odd and because if she wanted to talk more, which she did, she would be physically uncomfortable there, she would think he was deliberately creating a milieu uncongenial to conversation, which he would be hard pressed to deny, although it wasn’t true. And what was the name of the actress who had been trapped into playing Blondie film after film by her physical appropriateness for the part, a good actress but never able to escape that one role? Singleton had been her name, Penny. And there had been others in her situation, including the poor fuck who’d fallen into playing Superman forever, on television and not even in the movies, and who’d finally shot himself to death, sick of it. And then in fact hadn’t something similar happened to the actor who’d played Zorro? He thought so. Money made them do it. I do nothing for money, at least, he thought. Sometimes he wondered if his affection for the Zorro movies had any connection with his attraction to the dual life he had ended up leading and enjoying, for
the most part. He had loved Zorro. Or he had loved the Janus metaphor underneath Zorro and the others, the introvert who had an armed and dangerous alter ego who could hurt you but wouldn’t kill you, he would just tie you up and expose you to ridicule. He thought, We can never get down to the slurry of narratives we took in through our pores when we were growing up, and that sits in us, sloshing around in our foundations. Iris was coming in. She was nearby. He could sense it. And someday someone would come up with a process like psychoanalysis but devoted to ripping up the rotten subflooring of cultural junk in our depths, getting it up so it could be hawked up and spat out, genre, clichés, ads, commercials, formulas of all kinds, all of it. Women don’t spit, he thought. Men hawk and spit. Iris claimed not to know how to hawk. She suffered from postnasal drip from time to time seriously enough that he had tried to teach her how to clear out the back of her sinuses, just to help with keeping ahead of the flow, but she couldn’t do it. The process repelled her. He considered his legs, his lower self, in the faintly tawny water. If you like them lean, come to me, he thought. Iris was getting wider through the hips, fractionally, but it was happening. The water was perfect. Sweat crawled down his scalp. The concentration of chlorine in their tap water varied from day to day, and sometimes the odor could be distractingly strong, but tonight it was minimal, vaguely medicinal, like the ozone tinge produced by the electric coil in the geyser mounted high on the wall where it would crush his feet if it ever came down when he was in the tub. Every expatriate male he knew had talked about the damned menacing geysers and they all did what he did, which was to tug compulsively on the brackets that held the massive things in place whenever he was in the room.
Africa
, danger everywhere, he thought, mocking himself.