Mortals

When they were each huddled appropriately in their places, Ray said, “One last thing. Remember to keep as low as possible.”

“What? You have to speak up. It’s getting loud out there.”

“Okay, just remember to keep as low as you can, because we could take automatic weapons ordnance through the door, or if they used heavier weapons, through the walls. It’s only cinderblock and it shatters. I’m talking about the possibility of somebody feeling frisky and sweeping this structure with gunfire out of high spirits. So, obviously, we stay as much clear of the doors as we can. And since the level of fire would normally come in waist high and up, if we were unlucky enough to be standing at the time, that would be bad.”

“So the idea is we should crawl, mostly?”

“Well, for the time being. Until it’s quiet.”

Morel was lying flat.

A little time passed.

Thin white smoke began to curl in through the vents near the tops of the north and west walls. They had smelled smoke before but now they were seeing it. The smoke was forming a stratum under the thatch and dissipating only very slowly upward through it. Morel was aghast.

Morel sat up. “I think we’re on fire.” He was frightened.

Ray said, “No. It’s not us. It’s not coming in that fast. It’s from somewhere else. Also, white smoke you don’t have to worry so much about. It’s dark or black you need to watch out for. White smoke is from fast-burning stuff like paper and wood… It’s not us. There’s no extra heat in here.”

“And thatch. Thatch would make white smoke, right?”

“Sure, but our thatch isn’t burning.” Ray was amused at his own performance of false expertise. He had to keep the man calm. What choice did he have? “And if you just watch you’ll see the layer of smoke up there get thinner. Believe me. It’s not us.”

They studied the smoke religiously, exchanging impressions about whether the inflow was strengthening or abating. It did clearly begin abating.

“You see what I mean?”

“You were right.”

A lull began. It was a waste of time, waiting to meet one’s fate. There were things he absolutely had to take care of when, if, he meant if, he got back okay to Gaborone, things he absolutely had to do in preparation for getting free, getting out, excising himself. There were certain students he had to say goodbye to, for example. There were at least five students and two or three colleagues, and Curwen in particular, at St. James’s that he absolutely had to say something to. And he had to collect various items, like his backup passports and some other papers, from various caches. He couldn’t stand to think about his students. And he had to find Keletso and say goodbye. And he had to see Victor, his coconspirator at the airport, who was a decent fellow. Victor deserved a bonus. So did some of the other assets he was going to be abandoning. He would have to do something along those lines and it was going to have to be organized fast. It was a slight shock to realize how few people there were that he had to find and say something to or do a little something for valedictorily. It was true that there were enough of them to constitute a time problem. But there really weren’t that many, given how long he and Iris had been in that part of the forest. But he had an answer for that. It was because certain people he loved had absorbed most of what he had to give. A certain subject matter had absorbed inordinate amounts of his love capacity, his leisure-time attention.

He could save Morel from the trouble of having to survive another near-death experience like the last mortar strike to propel him into his Milton lecture, which was something he had evidently devoted some time to perfecting, probably in show-off conversations with Iris, he could just invite him to get into it, since he’d mentioned it. The thought that Morel had been parading around in front of Iris delivering his show-off capsule stuff on Milton was infuriating. It was too infuriating. He had to find out about that. First he would get Morel to do his little act on Milton.

Confoundingly, it seemed that Morel had managed to doze. Ray couldn’t believe it. Things outside were not improving. There was an intermittent filtering down of petty detritus from the ceiling thatch, the result of reverberations from intensifying shooting and shelling. Hunger is the best sauce for food and a clear conscience the best sleeping pill, Ray thought. How could Morel have a clear conscience? Is taking my wife away from me a virtuous act? Ray wanted to know. The shooting was at the level of static on the radio, for God’s sake. It had risen to that! Ray’s theory of the shooting he was hearing was that a jockeying exercise was in progress, one side trying to scare the other off with heavier and heavier barrages, followed by intervals of waiting to see if somebody was going to be pulling back, quitting. But then he knew so little about combat, war, serious war.

There was a cessation in the gunfire, and Ray said, loudly, “What was it you wanted to tell me about Milton?”

Morel sat up, blinking. Ray felt guilty. He should have been man enough to let him sleep through as much of the carnage and all its corollaries as he could manage. Sleeping like that in such circumstances was unusual. It was going to be up to Iris to figure out all these aspects and pockets in her new beloved.

Ray said, “You said you wanted to tell me about your theory of Milton and me, why the connection, I think you said.”

He had really been asleep. Morel was struggling to get himself in hand. He began preambling about how Ray had to understand he had no opinions whatever about Milton’s qualities as a poet, he had no opinions on the poetics. Some lines and passages were, he acknowledged, striking. But most of it he wasn’t qualified to judge, other than to say that it seemed like a lot of the rest of classic English poetry, which he really found got interesting only in the late nineteenth century, because so much of it was crypto-Christian apology before that.

Ray thought, That’s all I need, crouching here. All he needed was an attack on English Literature, which at that moment was giving him, Ray, two useless nothings, the phrase A Great Reckoning in a Little Room, which was by somebody about Marlowe’s death, and then the other… bits of blurred recall of Beckett’s plays, many of them taking place in settings like the one he and Morel were in. And Morel was saying again that the reason he had strong feelings about Milton came from having been forced by his father to read Paradise Lost. And then there were some disparaging remarks about Thomas Traherne and about Wordsworth and it was all too much.

“Listen to me,” Ray said, trying to be commanding.

“Okay.”

“Know what, I want to jump ahead here. Just admit this. Milton came up, or her attitude to Milton did, Milton being important to me, and you realized you had an opinion and a theory and you went for it and she thought it was brilliant. It was negative. A negative take, shall we say. You had something negative in your backpack about Milton and you used it. It was part of courting. You went… Hm, Milton. You wanted her. You took a shot. Admit it.”

“It was something like that.”

“It was the equivalent of a cheap shot, but let’s hear it. It might even be right. Just give me the Reader’s Digest version of what you said. I guarantee you I can take it. And come on, do it. By the way, if you think you hear police whistles you’re right. But it doesn’t mean the police are here to save us. Guerrillas use them for signaling between units. Or it could be the villains. But it’s not the police. So just give me a diagram of what you said.”

“Okay, but I have to stand up.” He was apologetic. He knew they had agreed that the huddled-down position was optimal in the situation they were in. But he was being asked to present something of significance. He had to be standing, to deliver his thing properly. Ray understood this from teaching.

Morel began walking around.

Ray got up. There was no way he could remain huddled like a pupil while Morel stood over him. So that was it, they would both have to risk being cut in half by heavy-weapons fire until the issue was ventilated. That was life.

Morel needed to get on with it.

“Just give me a diagram,” Ray said.

“Okay, man. Yeah, here it is.” But he continued thinking, preparing.

Unless Ray was wrong, Morel was reverting to a blacker, more plebeian speech mode, the rhythm different. It was undoubtedly reflexive, a mode that offered some sort of protection. He had seen Morel do it before, but more