we have to drive by night, go now, drive tonight, I’m sorry. I’m too tired. I can’t.”
“Sure we can. I can,” Morel said. He stood up and strode around a little, showing his readiness, Ray supposed. It was a little amusing.
Ray said, “We can’t do it in the dark, I don’t think. You have to find these tracks that barely exist. I know. I’ve been out in the bush more than you. It takes two people, one to navigate and one to drive, even during the daylight. I am telling you. Even then you barely creep along, unless you hit a well-defined stretch. I mean, we are going to be on rough terrain. You have to go around things. You have to keep getting out to set the front hubs for four-wheel drive. When I had a driver, one of us was always doing that. You can’t stay in four-wheel drive all the time because it uses up gas too fast. Listen to me, man. You never got off government roads when you came up here, so you don’t know.”
Morel wanted him to be quiet. Ray understood why. Morel wanted to seize the moment because the situation could change in a second, for any reason. Ray could imagine a dozen things that could happen to kill this particular plan. Morel wanted to go while he could. He wanted to get to Iris. He was blocking out any possibility that the comrades who were certain that helicopters would come for them were right. Morel was looking past that. That was fine. Ray considered it as unlikely as Morel did. But if a helicopter did show up in the air above them and started firing at them it would be over in the blink of an eye, they would inhabit a fireball and turn into smoke and bits of bone and that would be the end of the affair.
“Do you think he wants us to go tonight?” Ray asked Kevin.
“He will tell you himself.”
What Ray wanted was an impossibility, to stay in the desert, to stay indefinitely there. He liked the people he was with, the comrades, and now he was having to prepare himself to go back to Gaborone to be with people he didn’t like or with people, a person, he loved but who didn’t like him, or, to be fair, liked somebody else a lot more. He had crafted a life in which something was always happening somewhere, in one department or another of his life, the academic, the agency, or the personal part. It was quiet in the desert.
Morel was pushing too hard, saying to Kevin, “Can’t you get Kerekang, or let us go over there? The night isn’t going to last all day.” Morel was tired. He looked at Ray to see if Ray had noticed his misspeaking. Ray gave no sign.
Ray had thought it was okay for the domestic panel of his life to be placid, the placid panel. It was the realm in which he had been attentive toward Iris, supporting her in her interests, but it was hardly a realm in which he had tried separately to make himself admirable to her, if that was what he meant. Anyway, he thought. It was too late. It was an irony, but now he was on the verge of doing something she would genuinely admire, if she knew anything about it. There was no way she could be kept up to date on his new life that he could think of. Unless he decided to send out one of those yearly-chronicle-type Christmas cards.
No, he had used the domestic realm as an asylum from the franticness of the work panels, a haven. That hadn’t been right. It was what everyone did, but in his case, what he had been using her as a haven from was something she hated.
He was liking the quiet, the stillness of the desert. He had never particularly understood about early Christian ascetics choosing to go out into the desert because, after all, you could be an ascetic anywhere. But now he felt he had a taste or hint of why. The desert was humbling and calming. He felt calm.
It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to leave the desert, because he was going to have to. He turned his attention to tightening up his manuscript bundle as well as he could. He had seen a tough-looking creeping vine in the vicinity. He went off with his torch to see if he could find it and tear off a few lengths of it and tie them around
Morel called after him to come back. One of the things Morel didn’t understand was that Ray needed to get someplace where he could let go of his bundle, put it in a secure place and forget about its existence, for a change.
He found the vine. It was as tough as anyone could hope for. The Mosarwa turned up beside him carrying an alarming knife. They worked together, pulling and jerking and then shaving off the sharp little spines the vine bore. He thanked the man, who seemed to know everything there was to know about this piece of flora. It was clear that Ray was not the first man to figure out some of the uses this plant might be put to. He had two six-foot lengths of the vine.
Everything was irritating Morel, who was trying to discourage Kevin from adding any more wood to the remnant of the fire. And when Ray began artfully binding his parcel up, even devising a handle of sorts for ease of carrying, Morel showed growing impatience.
“We have to get this settled,” Morel said.
“I think it is settled. Act normal or they’ll change their mind about this.”
Something was under way in the darkness, something having to do with the vehicles. Loads were being shifted around. He couldn’t believe that people who had been through violent battle could still manage to carry out heavy physical tasks in the middle of the night. We should all be ordered to lie down and sleep, he thought.
Kerekang whistled. They were being summoned.
Morel said, “We’re going to be on our way.” He was having difficulty containing his anxiety. He was full of adrenaline. Probably that was good. It would keep him awake at the wheel. I know what my mission is going to be in the Cruiser, Ray thought. It was going to be to keep himself awake to be sure that Morel kept awake at the wheel. And he was going to insist that they pull over and park and go no farther and sleep, both of them, if he saw the slightest sign of fatigue making Morel nod off. Ray had no intention of having this experience come to an end due to poor driving.
Kerekang was whistling and so was someone else. There was a sort of harmony between the two different streams of sound. He had to go.
Kerekang was coming toward them, clasping maps under one arm, beckoning them to the fire, the main fire. Everyone at the fire was standing. It was going to be ceremonial, Ray could tell. That was not what he wanted. What he wanted was to talk separately and concretely to Kerekang about linking up in the Republic, assuming each of them managed their escapes decently. He was assuming they would. He didn’t know why.
What was going to happen was that he and Morel would be said goodbye to and instructed to get directly into the Cruiser and get out of there. And that was going to be too bad, in a couple of ways, for him. Because it was going to be a tense thing, a race to get to Iris first, between the two of them. And he would have to never sleep or seriously rest in any situation where Morel could jump out and duck out of sight and get to a phone to warn Iris about the storm to come. Ray was determined not to let that happen. He was wondering whether a handshake agreement would mean anything, a promise from Morel to say nothing to Iris for a couple of days when they got back to Gaborone, staying off the scene. He doubted that an agreement would mean anything. It was the kind of situation in which the temptation would be to agree, make the deal, and then yield to a second temptation to break it. If he put himself in Morel’s place he could see himself breaking that kind of agreement, out of weakness. Morel would want to protect her from the shock of learning that he had let the truth out, which had never been the plan.
Morel was holding up much better than he was. He had taken less punishment, of course. And was three years younger and of course got exercise and had never smoked, he claimed. Iris had always been more enamored of exercise than Ray had. So it was fine, she could join Morel forever after doing heel-and-toe walking or whatever was on the menu of the day.
Morel was hurrying ahead, with Kevin, Morel the human dynamo.
And Iris had always wanted to argue for the fun of arguing more than he had, except in the earliest days of their love. But then certain areas of argument had gotten tender, because one way or another they connected with the agency, even if only by implication. And then she had stopped initiating recreational argument. Their last memorable recreational argument had been over one of the Pinter plays,
It was a little awkward, taking leave of the comrades. There was a round of handshaking, but the handshake was a particular kind of handshake, involving a mutual grasping of wrists after the initial standard handshake. And then with each handshake an exchange of words was in order. Some of the comrades said a good deal more than Tsamaya sentle, which was the only thing it was occurring to him to say, and which, he realized, was incorrect for him to say, because that was the leave-taking formulation for the speaker who was remaining, to be said to the one
