Mortals

“So we are two monna mogolo.”

“No, I am. You’re not.”

“You have a wife. I cannot catch you up.”

“You can. And you can keep her.

“You will find someone and, Keletso, listen, when you touch her with love the first time, you must find words to say how you love to touch her, how much. Say, This is heaven, to touch you. If you see what I’m saying. You find some way to make her feel your love like a knife going in, so it is different from any touch before. You can say anything, Your flesh is God, strong words, anything you like. And every day hold her hard against you. And say the same thing or anything similar, but strong. Your breath is like water, and so on.

“Because, rra… women are very decent. They can drown us with sweetness and love, if we let them…”

“Ehe,” Keletso said, uneasily, Ray sensed.

I’m saying too much but I have to, Ray thought.

“And you must be willing to seem a fool, when you tell your feelings. You must be extreme. You must be what they say in West Africa, fou. I don’t know what the Setswana is… mad is what it is in English…”

“Setsenwa,” Keletso said.

“Good. You want her to think this chap is setsenwa. And you want her to say to herself, No other man will feel like this toward me. He does not exist.

“And as to finding a wife and having children, it will happen.”

He was finding it impossible to get out the image that was filling him, to release it and plant it. He wanted Keletso to have it. It was that women are what, that the right woman is a locket or not a locket a jewel box, a jewel box full of something so beautiful and rich and rare, and yet men fixate on opening the catch, the lock, the word wedlock was wrong, but opening the lid and leaving the lid just open, failing to throw back the lid, turning to something else, satisfied. It was poesy and it was true, wasn’t it? But it was useless. It was too ornate. It was too ornate.

“You are right,” Keletso said.

“About what?”

“I am too much with chasing up these young girls.”

“Yes, if that’s what you’re doing. There are fine women, widows, women with children already. No, it’s a question of finding that one, that one, the correct one.”

“And rra, what do you say as to presents, because I am always too soon with presents, it seems. And I see I have just put my money to burn away to smoke. They are looking for presents, rra.”

“Well, you have to be careful about that, I would say.”

It was time to stop. He had gotten out as much of the essence of his great conclusion as he could. On the details of courting, he had nothing to offer, he was ignorant, a self-taught ignoramus as Iris had described herself in one of her modes, funnily self-deprecating modes. And he was an ignoramus on the subject because he had only seriously ever courted one woman in his entire life. Now she was turning to smoke.

Ray wanted to be useful. He would try.

“Keletso, I know you want to have children. But I can tell you something about it.

“I would not put it first. You see me. I can swear to you before God that I am the happiest husband in the world. I have no children with my wife. No man was ever happier with a woman.”

It was all true, but he felt he should have gotten at least the shadow of the past tense into it.

He got to his feet. He was sorry for the unmarried. He was as sorry for the unmarried as he was for himself, in his situation.

Keletso said, “You are happy in your home, rra. So you must ask God for nothing more.”

Ray’s eyes were filling up. He doubted Keletso could see that they were, but he turned his face away.

“Keletso, do you know where the aspirin is?”

“Ehe, rra. But is it your knee?”

“A headache.”

He needed to sleep. It was urgent.

28. He Was Not Going to Be Allowed to Remain in the Shade

He was driving cautiously and so far successfully. He was keeping himself hydrated. He had two water bottles. He had Weetabix crackers to munch. He was going to keep his blood sugar up and compensate for the fact that it had been Keletso who had reminded them it was time to snack, have a meal, not go too long without eating.

The sky was overcast, a burning white. The landscape was flat and blank and yellow tending to white on the left, also burning. And the landscape was the same but then dark green in the near distance to the right, where the delta was. The road had swung closer to the delta. The road was more sinuous. He wondered if he would ever see the delta, where it was exotic, exotic Africa. He was uninterested in tourism except as a form of shared fun. He had done too little of it during his wifetime. He had to smile. His accidents were amusing and that had been one.

He bit into a cracker. He had learned things from Keletso he needed to remember. Driving at night, if you felt sleepy, a good thing to do was to take an apple and make yourself eat the entire thing, chew it slowly, down to the bitter seeds. It would keep you awake. He might need to.

He estimated that he had covered twenty of the fifty kilometers between Nokaneng and the next even smaller and more negligible hamlet, Gumare, which he would transit hoping to reach Etsha by nightfall. The road surface was passable, a little grittier, the grit consisting of bits of ancient shells from the time when all this had been deep underwater. He knew about the shell bits from someone in Gaborone, a geologist.

He would overnight in Etsha and the next day creep along Route 14 and somehow find the spur road that led off to Toromole, the Jerusalem of ISA, the site of Ichokela Bokhutlon or what was left of it. He liked Endure to the End as a motto or name for something. It was a good motto for what he was doing. And when he got there he might find nothing or he might find a mound of ashes. He thought, The past is a bucket of ashes but so is the near future sometimes. The past is a bucket of fishhooks, would be more like it. His mind was tending to aphorism because he was dipping into Strange News from time to time, during stops to pee or stretch, and he was extending his breaks for the purpose of meeting his obligation to finish reading his brother’s last will and testament. It was important for him to get through Strange News and it had been right of Rex to struggle to get it to him. He seemed to be saying to him something like I hope you like this better than you liked me. It was something like that. He could endure that, liking his brother’s best efforts. Rex was supplying entertainment, in this solitude he was being propelled through, or dragged through.

There was something wrong ahead. He had just come around a sharp curve and there was something black in the straight stretch of road directly ahead. The road was sinuous above Nokaneng because it moved over to follow the irregular perimeter of the floodplain of the Okavango River, snaking its way around salients of saw grass and reeds, beds of dry reeds, patches of elephant grass. The road straightened out and then curved east just beyond the black thing in the road. He wondered when the last time was that floodwater had come this far inland. It had been many years. These days the Okavango River was a shriveled thing. When the wind went through the grasses and reeds it made a sound more like clattering than something normal and sibilant.

There was a person in the road. And something was doing in the field of elephant grass. The grass was very high. Something about the texture of the scene was wrong. There could be tents or netting half showing. He would know soon enough.

The figure in the road was a man, just one, a black man standing blocking the way with his arms held out at his sides like Christ on the cross. He was certain that that was what he was seeing, but of course in Botswana you could see in the middle distance or on the skyline what was clearly a bush twitch and strut away, becoming an ostrich. But the imitation of Christ he was seeing was a man. He looked civilian enough. Ray needed to get closer. This assignment had been hard on his eyesight, the constant brightness had. His sunglasses were dark as night. He thought his night vision was a little worse than it had been when he started out. It had been helpful to have Keletso handle night driving. And now his distance vision was seeming a little lacking. Glasses were coming in the next segment of his life. He had gotten Iris when his face had been naked and unencumbered. Even so, he had always