Mortals

This was the moment Ray had dreaded. He had known it would come.

Kerekang was lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the one he had smoked down. It was too much marijuana at once. Kerekang needed to be moderate if he was going to indulge. He wanted Kerekang to be able to understand what was being said to him.

The moment had come to say what he could bear to about his connection to the disastrous appearance in Toromole of his associate Ponatsego. He had never generated a plan regarding how to put anything. The subject was too painful. He was tired but he had to act. He had to not incur Kerekang’s hatred forever or he would never be allowed to help him.

Kerekang was talking. He was continuing his narrative. Ray couldn’t attend to it until he had the key to what he was going to say. He had the sense of his mind grinding away mechanically to produce an object. A small object would roll down a chute inside his head and onto the back of his tongue and he would utter it.

Kerekang was almost declamatory in the way he was speaking. It was the marijuana, no doubt. He was explaining how things had gotten out of hand after emissaries, or agents, rather, of the cattle owners, attacked and burned Toromole, and then he was explaining how easy it had been to acquire weapons, how surprised he had been, how easy to get them from brokers reselling stocks accumulated in the Caprivi Strip after the Boers abandoned everything there. Money had come to Ichokela from sources he was not identifying once the fighting and sabotage had begun. That was interesting. In his old incarnation Ray would have been extremely interested in that. There was always somebody delighted to fan the flames. It was always in somebody’s interest. Now Kerekang was talking about an adventure. To escape pursuers they had been forced to cross Lake Lambedzi, Kerekang and his band, his original band, Lake Lambedzi being, as Ray recalled, a soda lake, a lake in name only, a depression in the earth covered with a crust of soda and with some acid hot smoking mixture underneath the crust. And the way they had crossed it was to follow exactly in the hoof- or footmarks of cattle that had made it across and avoid deviating and going near the carcasses of the drowned cattle who had gotten it wrong. The crust was uneven. And certain of their party had gotten off the track and fallen down up to their waists in smoking brine, although brine was just what he was calling it, it was acid. And they had pulled their comrades up and continued. And they had gotten across, all of them. Kerekang was repeating himself. There was some poetic thing there, in this account. Kerekang was getting into a mythic style. I have to stop him, Ray thought. He had to stop him before he lost his strength to go into the case of Pony. And he didn’t want to stop Kerekang because there were threads or filaments between them only he was thinking about, Kerekang who loved Tennyson but was engaged in rough justice, call it, and he himself with Milton and now the hell he was in and had helped create, to be fair about it. So he wanted two things at the same time, as usual.

He didn’t like doing it but he said, “Stop, I have to tell you something.”

Kerekang was still talking about Lake Lambedzi. Ray touched him, shook him.

Ray said, “I have to tell you something.” He hoped Kerekang would be ready to hear him, instead of floating in the great moments of his campaign, the top ten moments, which it looked like he was doing, thanks to the great weed, dagga. Iris had saved Ray from alcohol.

Ray went on. “I have to tell you this, I knew Pony at my school and I have to tell you this, rra, I was his friend…”

Kerekang was still declaiming.

Ray was proceeding still not knowing what he was going to say.

Ray said, “It was through me that Pony met you.”

“I can’t remember it,” Kerekang said. He was puzzled.

“No, you wouldn’t. Because you met him at the doctor’s place when you were attending these sessions he gave, on God and so on.”

“But I never saw you there.”

“No I was never there. But I sent Ponatsego there to see what these sessions were about. I was curious. I suggested he go and then report if it was interesting.”

He wondered if he had the gall to leave it there and not tell more, let his liability stop at that, just be a consequence of innocent personal curiosity on his part.

Kerekang flicked his cigarette, only half consumed, away, high into the air.

Ray tried to rush on, burying his connection with Pony under apologies. “I am so sorry I sent him. I was curious, you know. I couldn’t go myself. All these seminars, whatever you call them, were restricted to Batswana, with no expatriates.”

“So, rra, you sent Ponatsego to me.”

“No, rra, I sent him to see what he could find out about the doctor’s seminars, what was going on there. That was all. It was not about you.”

Kerekang looked coldly at him, it seemed to Ray.

Kerekang said, “Why is it you would do that?”

“I wanted to know, rra. I had personal reasons. And curiosity.”

“And what else?”

“What do you mean?”

“And what else? What would make you send this man, this colleague of yours? Did you tell him to do it as a favor to you, rra?”

“Not as a favor, no. Rra, you are understanding.”

“There was a gratuity, then? Is that right?” Kerekang’s voice was hard.

“There was.” This is it, Ray thought.

“Was it just you yourself providing the gratuity?”

“No, of course not.”

“What was the source of the gratuity then, rra?”

Ray thought, I have to. He said, “I have to explain what I was doing then. Please listen to me.”

“Oh I am listening.” Kerekang was suddenly very sharp.

“First about my interest in the doctor. Rra, he has stolen my wife, who was his patient, and it had just begun. We need not say more about this. What I need to tell you is that I was working for the American government, apart from my teaching job at St. James’s, working for the American government.”

“I am still listening. And I am sorry, rra, to hear the other.”

“I was working for an American intelligence service.” He had to lie about his connection because he couldn’t bear to say he hadn’t yet quit, that he was still a member of the agency. He couldn’t. He had done something, some things that ought to show he was free of that, in Kerekang’s eyes.

Kerekang was shaking his head.

Ray said, “I am through with them, Kerekang.” He thought that was fair, and covered the situation, except for the papers he would have to sign.

Kerekang said, “Well it is good you say all this, because it is no secret to me that you were an agent, a spy, really. That was what was said.”

Ray didn’t know what to feel. Apparently knowledge about his status had been universal. He had been an actor in a different play than the one he had thought he was in. He wondered how much Iris had known about his nakedness. He had to believe she would have told him. He hadn’t completely believed Morel, he had thought Morel probably just had suspicions, which he had made Iris confirm. Ray had known that Boyle was generally understood to be in the agency. But he had never truly thought that he himself had been picked out. It was odd to think he wouldn’t have seen that in people’s faces.

Kerekang was mentioning three other people he was also under the impression belonged to the agency. None of them were right. None of them had anything to do with the agency. Unless he was in the dark, in the wrong compartment. He was uncertain about everything. He wanted to say definitely that Kerekang was wrong, but he couldn’t, not with any conviction.

“So you have left this organization,” Kerekang said.

“I am out of it. But I have to be sure you understand. When I sent Pony to report on the doctor, it was for my own, my own personal information. This is complicated. The head of our office is Boyle, Kerekang, Chester Boyle. He wanted me to pursue you and I was opposed and I told him so. I said to him you were a patriot and an intellectual and a reformer and a good man. Of course now you are burning the countryside to ashes and I am helping you, so life is very strange. I am sorry to say that I believe the agency was