Mortals

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.”

“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.”