behind some of your troubles in getting employment with the government. I had nothing to do with that. No, and the fact is that when Boyle said I should look more into you, more than I had, because I had done some looking, my idea was to tell him that the best way to find out more about you was through these seminars, where you would participate, at our friend Doctor Morel’s house. And you know why I wanted to know more about the doctor. I hated him then. So I thought I could appease my boss by sending Pony to bring reports on these seminars where you were a participant. But Kerekang, nothing he brought to me was ever turned over, never. I swear to this.”
In a way he didn’t care what Kerekang said next. He was full of lightness. He would sleep well, he knew. Of course he was on the ragged edge physically, which would help. He was looking forward to sleep. Sleep would be different now. He was full of lightness.
Kerekang interrupted. “We know him. Nyah, rra, he is well known. And the one before him, the Jew.”
Ray recoiled. He was shocked. He wanted to protest, say something, affirm his friend Marion, use his name to show he esteemed him. He was distressed that Marion had been as readily identified as the egregious, the cack-handed, as the Brits would put it, Chester Boyle. It was unfair. Resnick had been subtle in everything. And it was unfair, calling him the Jew, identifying him that way. Ray had determined that he was going to help, or to put it another way, save Kerekang, and he needed to like him as much as he could. Kerekang was his new friend, his new friend. The man didn’t know it yet, but it was the truth. Iris had been his friend, but now she was dissolving, and Marion was gone. He had not lived a life where he could normally acquire friends.
“You don’t have anything against Jews, do you, you’re just saying the guy who came before Boyle was Jewish.” He hadn’t put it quite right, but it was the best he could do.
Kerekang was saying something, vigorously. “Ah, no. Even Jesus was one of them. I am not an anti-Semite, rra.”
That was a relief. He moved on. He said, “Look I want you to consider getting out of this, how to get out of this.”
“What do you mean? But speak quietly.”
“Right. Because we can both of us see where this is going. You know what a jacquerie is, where everybody in the countryside goes on a rampage and tears up the pea patch but not in favor of any sort of program, just to destroy the old order and then the old order or its friends come back like thunder and make it worse than before…”
Kerekang said, “Do you know this, that some of us are
Ray was surprised. Because what this looked like was a sort of extortion scheme to get money or other resources from the cattle-owning elite to be put to use in Kerekang’s social program, his homestead socialism, whatever it should be called. He could see how it had happened. Kerekang had fallen into it, allowed things to happen and then taken steps based on what he had allowed to happen, trying to turn mistakes made, or accidents, to the advantage of his group, his great project. This was a confession. Kerekang was very agitated.
Apparently Kerekang had a bottomless supply of dagga cigarettes. He was lighting up yet another one, murmuring that they were useful, the smoke was useful against dimonang, which meant mosquitoes. And the mosquitoes just at that moment were annoyingly active. It was better when there was any sort of breeze and worse when the air was still. Ray was tired of brushing at the mosquitoes, waving his hands around maniacally when the surges came. The clouds of dagga smoke did seem to discourage the mosquitoes. Ray felt a rush of temptation. Kerekang was in a state of elevation. He was speaking freely. If Ray joined him in this indulgence it might be helpful in reaching him on a certain level and convincing him it was time to save himself, to leave the scene and leave Botswana and save himself for a new life elsewhere, like someone else he could name. He was getting a more than ample sample, so to speak, of the perfume from the garden of delights Kerekang was inside. In a minute Kerekang would start mentioning pleasant things that were not relevant to the present completely fucked and unraveling situation. He would say that something was beautiful, something that really wasn’t beautiful or that if it was didn’t matter. You are psychic, Ray said to himself, because Kerekang was just then saying something about the earth being beautiful.
I would love to see beauty everywhere, too, Ray thought. He would like it even briefly but it was not what he needed.
Iris, her image in his heart or wherever it was, his mind, was helping him. Because it was Iris who had saved him from the deadly synergy of getting people to drink, in his official capacity, so that they would let relevant things out, and he had used the occasions to get drunk himself, which was a thing that had led to the downfall of more than one agency character, agents and officers and top dogs and not excluding Marion Resnick. But she had rescued him and had convinced him that he could do the sordid, not to mince words, the sordid socializing he had to do without being in bondage to alcohol, and he had succeeded, despite temptations that had come up. And because of that he would live longer than he would have, and in addition to giving up drinking there was the contribution to a longer and lonelier old age he had to thank her for via his giving up tobacco.
Ray had himself in hand. It was the image of his wife, his beloved, reminding him that it was important for him to be able to say truthfully that he hadn’t used drugs if the question appeared on an application for a job in the new life that was en route to him in an age when you could be asked to take a lie detector test as routinely as you could be asked to urinate in a Dixie cup for whatever anyone wanted to know. How long the image of his beloved would burn usefully bright was something he would have to wait to find out, in the years to come. Because the truth was that it was going to fade, he could expect it to fade, because everything fades. It wasn’t her fault.
Ray said, “You know what I think, rra, I think you have to get away to South Africa. Here in this country you are always going to be Setime, the fire-thrower, and you’ll be hunted down by Domkrag. They know who you are. Listen to me. This will not be forgiven. Mandela is coming to power soon in South Africa and it is going to be a new day. It’s coming, and you could be safe there…”
“They’ll kill him first.”
“No. His time has come. They won’t.”
“They say it was you Americans who whispered to the Boers where to find him.”
“Yes, it was my agency, I know that… rra, I’m changing my life. I think I may be going to South Africa. It’s going to be a new time, and rra, I have contacts there. I mean education people, not agency contacts. I have an idea for a school. But I do have agency contacts that could help you, people who know me from the life I’m leaving. Like I’m leaving my wife.” Ray’s voice buckled. He fabricated a coughing fit. He thought, I’m expressing myself poorly.
He had to be able to say it evenly because it was going to come up and come up. He said, “Yes, I’ll be leaving my wife. That’s part of it.”
“I am sorry, rra. Truly.”
“Nothing can be done.”
What he wanted to express to Kerekang was that they could join together, he and Kerekang, leaving everything behind and doing their lives differently forever at the same time. It was notional, no doubt about it. And it was the movies. It had the feeling of the movies about it, which ought to be a warning to him about how seriously he should be taking this idea. But he was in the grip of it. He liked, in fact loved, the idea of taking his tradecraft and using it contrarily, using it to get papers or passports or whatever was needed to get Kerekang launched and circumstanced away from the mayhem and murder he was drowning in. Of course he was thinking ten or twelve steps ahead of where they were now, silent upon a peak in not Darien but Pieter’s Knob and gazing out not at the Pacific Ocean but at the inscrutable sea of life they were going to put their canoes into, a different sea.
And then there was the question of whether Kerekang was going to feel he had any reason to believe Ray was genuine in his declaration of independence from the agency and the life he’d led, the entire life. Because it could so obviously be a maneuver, a ruse, a charade designed to conceal some underlying purpose of the agency, like sticking to Kerekang like a leech and finding out everything that would turn up about him and his associates everywhere. His warrant with Kerekang was what had been done to him at Ngami Bird Lodge and then what he had done on the roof of the building, insanely. Of course once you began asking questions there was no end in sight. For example how could he form a trusting partnership with anyone who believed him so easily when he said he was
