Mortals

was making a motion like the one diners use when they want the check.

Ray understood. It was education speaking. He thought, We get into crisis and we need to write down where we are in our lives, write letters or manifestos or farewell to the troops, convert our confusion to text so we can read it and see if we can do what our words tell us we should. Kevin had felt the necessity to write a letter to Kerekang. I’m suffering from the same need myself, Ray thought. He wanted to write a masterpiece letter to Iris, but there was no time and no desk to write on. He needed a desk. He thought, When we read poetry we like, tiny muscles in our throat clench and relax, showing we’re speaking it, the lines, unconsciously. He wondered where he had read that. And then there was Dante writing letters to Beatrice Portinari he never sent, writing them for years, writing to a woman married by her parents to someone else, a woman he had been in love with since both of them were nine years old, saving up his letters and then learning that she had died. But he had written to her for years, never sending a letter, not one. And he had married, himself, but even after his own marriage he had kept writing. And then he had found out she was dead. And so on into the night. Where was Dante? Where was he, Ray Finch, right now?

Kerekang said, “If I go to SouthWest… Jesus, I don’t know. I will have to explain. I will have to write something. Ah Jesus, I will. And I will have to send it out into the hands of people who can read it to the others. They burned our press at Toromole. How can it be done?”

Ray said, “It can. I can work it out. I promise you it can.”

Kerekang made a sound of disgust, self-disgust.

Morel said, “Look, it’s good. You’ll be like who is it, plenty of people, Arthur, King Arthur, Robin Hood, they expected them to come back. Am I right?” He looked at Ray. “King Arthur is nat dede. King Arthur is not dead. It was a belief among the common people. Supposedly.”

Ray was hating Morel at that moment, for his crude transparency. He was not helping. I want to handle this, he thought.

Kerekang said, “Ah but they are still waiting for those heroes. They’re not coming, are they?” He was annoyed. He seemed to be getting a little clearer.

Ray said, “Well but you know what he means. And there’s the slight difference that you wouldn’t be dead. You’d be alive and in the neighborhood.

Things are going to change in Botswana, out in the countryside, rra. If you go now, you’ll still be alive when the time comes. This was not your moment, Kerekang. But you’ll see your moment.”

Kevin was nodding. Ray thought, You may have to enlarge your plan to include him. That was daunting, but since he had no real plan as yet, or only the vaguest glimmer of one, maybe it didn’t matter much. He needed to have images, stronger ones, of what the future might look like. It would be in a school. Education in the Republic was going to be open to all kinds of new visionary things. Patrick van Rensburg was already sending down tentacles from his education-with-work system, the Brigades. And that was only one example. And Kerekang would be in a school where he could promote his homestead plans, backyard food self-sufficiency and part-time paid labor. It was the idea of progress he was holding out, that battered thing. And Kerekang would have a new identity. Ray knew how to manage that. And Kerekang could get his ideas into circulation through the mails and through the press. There would have to be some dissembling and subtlety about who this was who happened to be advocating ideas associated with the late lamented vanished Kerekang the Incendiary. He could pretend to be a disciple of his own dead self, or his brother. Stranger impostures had been tried and had worked. And Kerekang had the advantage of being Xhosa, from a Xhosa community that had overlapped into Botswana generations back. So he could speak Xhosa. That would be perfect for camouflage. Mandela was Xhosa. The school could be bilingual. That would be fine, just so that one of the languages was English. There was going to be money available for good works in the Republic, tons of it, foundation money, once Mandela was in power, tons of it especially for education, which foundations of every type and kind loved to fund. He was developing more and more enthusiasm for his idea as he what, fondled it.

Kerekang said, “That fire is too bright. If they want a fire, they should make it in that cave.”

“You mean that cave you left me in?”

“Yes, they can make a fire there, not in the open.”

Kevin said, “They won’t go there because of snakes.”

Ray said, “I thought they cleaned them out. I thought we ate them for dinner.” He was feeling odd, just then.

“Yah, but more can come.”

“Wonderful,” Ray said.

Kerekang said, “I have to go down. I know what this is. They want us to have indaba. Okay, we can.”

Ray was uncomfortably cold but he didn’t want to lose the moment, go down to the fire, because he was getting ideas, here, upon a peak, et cetera. He liked the idea of an ideal school in a new country, which the Republic would be. He could burn bright to that. He hoped there was nothing pitiful in the idea he was nurturing for Kerekang and Kevin and himself.

They were all going to go down to the fire, it seemed. A general movement had begun. And now he couldn’t wait to get to the fire and embrace it. Everything was hurting. They had put him in a cave with snakes. He wanted to lie down next to the fire and stop thinking.

He stumbled twice, descending. He would like to be able to contemplate going to a spa and recovering there, except that he could only do that with a female companion. Men never attended spas without their wives, their girlfriends, at least that was his impression.

He was too tired to think clearly, but he had a germ of an idea about a way out with Kerekang, which was that together he and Kerekang would concoct a false death story. Kerekang would go off to his contacts in Namibia and get to the Republic, but the story would be that he had died in the battle for Ngami Bird Lodge. Morel would sign on if it could be made absolutely clear why he had to, although there was the man’s principle against lying. And if there was time Kerekang could compose a farewell to his troops. He would do it perfectly. And it could constitute the legend that Kerekang was going to be known by. Kerekang would need a legend.

All the comrades around the fire got to their feet as Kerekang approached. They exchanged a word, a greeting, but not one of the standard greetings, some private thing, as Kerekang entered the zone of firelight. Ray hadn’t been able to make it out. There were twenty men there, close to the fire, and ten or so more back in the shadows. He couldn’t be sure, but most of those in the background seemed to be Basarwa. There was a mystery about Bushman metabolism. Most of the Basarwa were shirtless. They were wearing shorts, regular bush shorts and not loincloths. They seemed not to be suffering from the chill of the night. The Tswana men near the fire were wearing shirts, shirts on top of shirts in some cases, and jerseys.

The faces of the witdoeke were still not individual to Ray, except for Mokopa and three or four others. That was explainable. He had only recently met any of them and that meeting had taken place under conditions of violent action, when the time for any kind of reasonable scrutiny was nonexistent. And then he had been conveyed along in a sleeping state broken into two periods, part one in the trunk and part two in the cave. And then when he had returned to normal it was the middle of the night. So he could be forgiven.

Kerekang was unified with the suffering that had brought these men to his cause. It was more than a matter of pity, which was the limit of the usual feeling evoked by poverty and injustice. It was sympathy, but a different order of sympathy, it was embodied.

Ray could aspire to it, was what he could do.

Ray knew himself. He saw his own limits clearly. It was true he believed in fairness, social fairness. But it was probably truer to say that he believed in fairnessness, which would translate as a belief in a certain quantum of fairness existing in any society, enough fairness so that the issue wouldn’t be tormenting to people trying to get on with other things like art and scholarship and the rest of it. He was being hard on himself. He didn’t care. He couldn’t keep standing, though.

Without ceremony, and while some sort of intense preliminaries were still in progress, all in Setswana, Ray made his way around to the far side of the fire and wedged his way in among the Tswana comrades and sat down, embracing his knees. He was the only one sitting. The fire was wonderful. He didn’t care if he was the only one sitting.

Morel had slipped around to stand in back of him. He was showing solidarity. I am not leaving this fire, period, Ray thought. He didn’t understand concerns about the fire, the brightness and so on. Because as he understood it there had to be a fire all night, as a preventive against lions, and the bigger the fire the better. And