Mortals (68 page)

“I want to walk a little,” Ray said.

“Rra, your knee is not strong.”

“No, but walking will be good for it.”

Ray liked to have destinations when he strolled.

He pointed out a substantial termite mound a little way into the bush just beyond the graveled stretch of road. It would do for a destination. It gleamed in the starlight. He had the idea he would like to sit on it or climb on it. Termite mounds were amazing things. This one was the size of a sedan, white, smooth. Thine alabaster cities gleam, would be an appropriate comment to make to a termite.

He started off and Keletso came with him, reluctantly, hoveringly, poised to catch him if he stumbled. One object of taking a short walk was to convince Keletso that his knee was improving enough for him not to be concerned. He put his mind to it.

Keletso’s resistance to letting him continue alone tomorrow had been prodigious. It had taken some heavy argument. The matter was closed. Apparently the cattle post scene had shaken Keletso less than it had him. Their argument had concluded with a certain amount of white lying, so to speak, about what he was planning to do next, the final stage of his mission, that is, that he would be resting up and working over his notes and sketches and maps. To start with, it was a lie that he had a mission. What he had was a trajectory and a trajectory that it was his fate to feel he
absolutely had to complete. And that was true. It was remarkable how well he and Keletso had gotten on within the shell of deception the expedition had involved. They had lived companionably within the necessary lies. Keletso was a man.

Cooking fires wagged in some of the lolwapas. Some people in this extreme part of the world were at home, just then. They were kicking their sandals off and saying “Ah.”

He had misused his time in Botswana in so many ways. He hadn’t sunk into the particularity of the place, and there was plenty of that. He hadn’t, for instance, concentrated really closely on what the Golden Wing represented, what it was … a weird relic of a fantasy time of white overlord-ship. He knew what the green-tinged irregular windowpanes of the Golden Wing reminded him of. It was a particular brook in Tilden Park, a particular run, perfect water flowing gently wrist-deep over beds of dark gold sand. And of course that was a line surviving from the part of his life he had wasted in the assault on poetry. It didn’t matter.

The termite mound was more like an inflated seal than a sedan. It had a chimney or necklike projection at its high end, which registered the height it had reached in consuming utterly the tree it had claimed, or they had claimed, the termites.

“It seems you must be forever roaming, rra,” Keletso said.

“No more tonight, though. We can turn in.”

“Yah, but I will go again for a place in that house for us. I will make a fracas and see about it.”

“You can try, I guess. But it won’t work, rra. He doesn’t like us.”

They started back.

Keletso farted softly. He said, “Ke ditiro tsa Modimo.”

He said it because it always made Ray laugh. As Keletso had explained it, he was saying God did this, or That was a deed of God’s.

“Shame on him, then,” Ray said.

Certain things had gone well. The Wildlife connection he had made had gone just right. He let himself relive it. Approaching Nokaneng, a government bakkie coming from the opposite direction had appeared and blasted right past them. But some instinct had prompted Keletso to swing perilously around and roar after it, pressing the hooter nonstop, shouting. And Ray, jolted awake, had contributed by rolling down his window and pounding on the door. And it had worked, the angelic Keletso driving like a devil from hell and the racket they had produced together had worked. The bakkie had pulled over.

Keletso had seized the moment.
Carpe diem
should be your personal motto because you carp about one thing or another every day, Iris had once said to him in a moment of joke pique. He should write down her bons mots and whatnot sometime but it would be too pathetic of him. Ideally it would be a thing they would undertake together. She would remember certain things and he would remember certain things and out of that would come his little anthology. The time to do it had passed him by.
Life is a scream
would be in it.

Keletso had explained that he had sprung into action on the hunch that this might be their only chance to make contact with some goromente employee, a chance they should not pass up, since goromente was so little in evidence around there, no police, no army, no veterinary trucks.

So then Ray had machinated smoothly with the Wildlife officers who had been going somewhere in the bakkie. He had quickly gotten out the news of the raid. They had been electrified. They knew the place. They had seemed capable. He had dealt mainly with the senior man, a tough, leathery character. Of course it had started out awkwardly with them, but he had overcome it. Striding over to greet them, he had been struggling to contain a fit of coughing caused by the volumes of dust he’d taken in during the chase. And he had tried to spit, preparatory to trying to machinate. But unfortunately his saliva was less than normal. He had tried to spit just casually and it had been an embarrassing moment because his saliva was viscous and the spittle hadn’t detached normally via its own weight and he had had to pinch it off his lip, in front of people, to get it to drop. Diet was affecting his saliva. He needed vegetables. And he needed peaches, if he could get some. That was what he thought.

But then he had worked it all out. They would come back the next day for sure and pick up Keletso and carry him down to Maun. In Maun goromente was still functioning and Keletso would be fine. He would have no trouble organizing transport down to the capital. Ray had given them an enormous deposit of fifty pula and thrown in another twenty rands and he had promised Keletso would give them the same amount when they returned for him. It was settled. They were burning to get away to inspect the raided cattle post. They were fearless, apparently. They were competent men, or seemed to be. They had yards of maps to consult. He didn’t doubt that their eagerness to get to the raid site had to do with salvage, the opportunity to field-dress the fresh carcasses, assuming the Cape vultures had been detained in arriving. But he was guessing
about that. Cape vultures had come up in their exchanges and, as he understood what they were saying, the Cape vultures were becoming very scarce, along with other carrion birds.

They had thanked him profusely for the information. Clearly they were unafraid of the people who had been responsible for the raid, but then, of course, they had armloads of rifles, Enfields, on board, a regular arsenal. They had everything they needed that he could think of. They had roof-mounted spotlights, camping gear. There was a smell of drink coming from them, which was not something so far out of the ordinary that he had to draw any conclusions, negative ones, from it, necessarily. And then he had been relieved when it had become evident that it was the junior man who had been drinking. Ray felt he had handled the negotiations well, clinching the deal by making it clear that the payment he was making for Keletso’s passage was not something that would need to be reported to anyone.

Keletso was determined to make
one
last appeal to Makoko. Ray trailed along as Keletso prowled noisily around to the back of the Golden Wing and began knocking on windows.

“You have to say who you are,” Ray said. Keletso understood why. They wanted to avoid Makoko taking it into his head to start shooting at intruders. Keletso amended his campaign of harassment immediately.

The building was voluminous. There was obviously plenty of space, corners for two people to stretch out in. Makoko was the sole occupant. They knew that. There had been reference made earlier both to sleeping rooms and to a sleeping cabin, not by Makoko but by one of the serving women. Keletso had taken the matter up with Makoko while Ray was concerned elsewhere and had been told, as Keletso reported it, that the sleeping facilities were not “functual.” And they had decided to drop it because Makoko was already acting generally so peculiarly toward them. Ray thought he knew some of the reasons why. He and Keletso might be anybody. The property Makoko was in charge of, whether it was his or belonged to someone else, deserved expanded protection while unrest was raging in the neighborhood, naturally. Ray had been unwilling to press for lodgings because the booking process could easily have required him to produce his passport. Even in remotenesses like this one, it might have been requested. And it would have made no sense to whine for lodgings while there were other things they sorely needed from Makoko outstanding. So the time to go for lodgings had passed. Essentially, Keletso was playing. It could go on for a while without doing any harm. Keletso
hadn’t been reconciled to sleeping in the vehicle one more time. This was ventilation. It could go on a little longer. Keletso would feel better.

Hissing and calling out “Koko,” Keletso was being persistent. Koko was the Tswana announcement that you were present and ready to come in, which, it occurred to Ray, Makoko might take aslant since it happened to constitute two-thirds of his surname. It might be taken as mockery. He thought he would retreat from this exercise. He was staying on his feet too much. He would retreat to the other side of the road and sit and wait and that would encourage Keletso to give this up and come to the vehicle.

In fact, it was urgent for him to get off his feet. He wanted Keletso to stop. Suddenly what Keletso was doing was seeming foolhardy, fool-hardier than it had originally. His judgment is shit, he said to himself.

“Itlhaganele,” he called over his shoulder. And he knew another way of saying to hurry up, so he said that too, “Dira ka bonako.”

He leaned against the Land Cruiser, but that was still too arduous. He found a wooden crate next to the district council building and he turned it over and sat on it, not a moment too soon, he was collapsing.

Yes, no question that he had been too cursory with Africa and had taken too instrumental an attitude toward it. He regretted it. Someone had said there was a Herero section in Nokaneng. And it hadn’t occurred to him to bother to find five minutes of time to walk around in it. It was exotic. It was a unique what, venue, but not venue, something else, milieu. Iris would have found a way to get a sense of it, scope it out, and in a way nobody would have objected to. The Herero women were something, with their stuffed bicorn headdresses, their patchwork copies of nineteenth-century gowns, their two front teeth knocked out to enable proper, as they saw it, pronunciation. It was an art to go among unusual people and see what you could and give no offense. He remembered now that Iris was interested in the Baherero. She had bought books about them from the Botswana Book Centre. Baherero were not to be found in the capital, the south, at all. He could have reported what he saw to her. It was too bad. No, he had never gotten to the marrow of Africa, and the termite mound visit of a few minutes ago was exemplary of how to be superficial about amazing Africa. No, because if you thought about it there was a kinship of sorts between manunkind and the termite nation or race in that they were the only two species whose main defining activity was producing hard hollow permanent structures. It was something to think about. Of course there were the coral reefs. He forgot whether they were created by some individual species or by congeries of fungi and bacteria
and so on. He was very tired. He had known more when he was young. There were things he should have read. He had been given, twice, by people he respected, copies of
The Soul of the White Ant
, one of them by beloved Marion Resnick, and he had been told it was the book he had to read if he wanted to know the essence of the amazing termites of southern Africa, and they, both copies, were sitting unread in his bookshelf at St. James’s.

He put his head between his knees, preemptively, for a moment. Yes, he was lightheaded, but no it was not going to be a problem. He would get strength. He looked up at the stars. They were strong. They were strong things. He felt that. There was astrology, there was Kipling, his poem, the something the something the something dum dum While the Stars in their courses / Do fight on our side. The stars were better, brighter, in Africa.

Keletso would stop his agitating about now, if he had any sense. Everything was going to unfold. I am having a feeling, he thought. It was an intense thing he had had once or twice before, to the effect that everything that was happening had already happened but that the consciousness of beings like himself who were subject to living at a certain crawling rate were only discovering what had already happened, a minute at a time, something like that. That was the notion that we, man, were advancing through something that was already
over
, in some way, like his marriage. And what went with the feeling was an image. And the image was that everything was connected by invisible lines or pulsing lines something like the sequencing lights on the top and bottom edges of movie marquees and these connections were invisible except to the occasional seer, possibly, and they ran between every kind of object not excluding himself and his friend, good friend, Keletso. Ray went faint, but he recovered before he fell off the crate.

Keletso was back, laughing.

“Wa reng Moses?” Ray said. He had more Setswana in the midden of his mind than he gave himself credit for. Keletso liked it when he was addressed by Ray in Setswana. Wa reng Moses? was a faintly irreligious slang way of asking someone what was up. He could have picked up some additional Setswana from his friend if he’d thought of doing it.

Keletso said, “I am just laughing, rra. He sayed to me, ‘Matlho me a bokaletsemy,’ two times. So then I was knocking his house even more.

“But then whilst I am knocking the most, he says out, very loud, ‘Ke otsela, Ke otsela.’ Time and again! I am asleep, I am asleep.

“Rra, we can do nothing with this donkey.”

“Yes, but what was the first thing he said to you? I didn’t get it.”