paper on my desk.”
Ray said, “Yeah well here we are. You instructed me not to
“This is a debrief, not one of your essays.”
“It’s all the same. And there’s no report.”
Boyle stiffened. He looked narrowly at Ray. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he was seeing mutiny.
Ray was uncertain about what he was doing. He was going to have to discover what he was doing as he went. His tethers to the world he had gotten used to living in were being cut, or breaking on their own. He would see what he was when the last tether broke.
Boyle was still studying him. Boyle’s breathing was heavy. Ray wondered if Boyle had emphysema.
Boyle said, “I think you need to take leave, go away. You look like you need it. The both of you go, you and Iris.”
“I’m not taking leave.”
Boyle wasn’t listening. He said, “You should do it. There’s a regional conference on education in Mombasa. REDSO is running it. You should go. Beautiful beaches on the coast, Bamburi Beach Hotel. You could go after the conference. That could be worked out. It wouldn’t hurt your wife to get away from Gaborone for a while.”
Ray said, “Iris…” He didn’t want her brought into this in any way.
“It would be good for the both of you,” Boyle said.
“I’m not going, Boyle,” Ray said, slowly. He thought, He’s afraid of me.
“You should. You don’t look good. I don’t want you around looking like this. Your hands are shaking.” That was true. Ray was fidgeting with a letter opener and wondering what Kant would say if he stabbed Boyle in the neck with it. Boyle had to be thinking about his next post… or more likely his retirement. The outbreak in the north had occurred and it had gotten serious and Boyle had been oblivious and that was the kind of thing Boyle was supposed to be on top of. But he had been oblivious. He hadn’t warned the agency, hadn’t done anything, known anything.
Boyle cleared this throat. He said, “You know I don’t even want to talk to you about your trip. I don’t need to. The fact is, I don’t need a report. It’s all over up there.”
Ray said, “
“You will if I tell you to,” Boyle said very slowly.
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ll fix it at the school.”
Boyle was studiously not listening to him. It was close in the cubicle. Boyle’s cologne or aftershave or whatever male fragrance he used was asserting itself. Ventilating the cubicle had never been properly worked out. He didn’t know how Boyle could stand to do business there. He suspected that because he had insisted on having the damned thing built first thing when he arrived he felt obligated to make use of it.
Ray asked, “And what would you claim the leave was for? Medical leave? What?” He was speaking too loudly for the space and he knew it.
“Take it easy. Family situation.”
Ray was understanding everything. Boyle was afraid of him, which meant he knew that Ray had seen koevoet in all its glory, sent to crush peasants, Bushmen, university students, Kevin, the son of the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Local Government and Lands… So far nothing about koevoet had turned up in the press, not a whisper. Vandals had burned down the abandoned resort, Ngami Bird Lodge. Any nexus between the agency and koevoet would be something that if it got bruited about would have to be shot down. Boyle wanted Ray over the horizon. Life was going to be interesting for Morel, too, down the road. But the irony was that Ray was going to be out of Boyle’s hair and over the fields and far away because he needed to leave the neighborhood for his own personal reasons.
Abruptly Ray said, “I don’t want to hear the word family or my wife or my wife’s name out of your mouth again.” He felt better.
But Boyle wasn’t listening. He said, “Or you can do some courses. In the U.K. maybe. You need to get some kind of grip on ADP, just for example. You don’t know anything about ADP, do you? You need to. That’s where the world is going, ADP, ASAP.” He smiled and then prolonged his smile in an attempt to get Ray to show a little lightness.
“What’s ADP?” Ray asked, realizing that he knew what it meant as soon as he’d asked. He cursed himself.
“You see, Ray. It’s automatic data processing. You make my point.”
“I did know that.”
Boyle was silent. And then he said, “It’s all over up there. You do understand that.”
“What do you mean, it’s over? How do you define that?”
“Look. I don’t want to talk about it too much. Just let’s say the radicals stopped burning things down up there. Your friend the fire-thrower, he’s gone…”
Boyle paused, then continued. “The radicals are all gone. They’re all dust in the wind. And to just go once over lightly, everybody’s happy down here. We had some college kids mixed up with radicals until they saw the light. They’re back in school, all of them. They’re accounted for. It’s burned itself out, the whole thing, at last. The government is willing to forget a lot, and there’s going to be some community aid. I gave them some ideas, Ray. They’re going to put in some public boreholes, I guess you could call them, out in the bush. I could show you on a map.” It’s something, Ray thought. It wouldn’t have happened without Kerekang going crazy. It wasn’t much, but water was something, up there.
Everything was moving toward erasure, the way the Mexican government with a little help from its northern friends had erased the rebellions in Guerrero in the seventies, the Party of the Poor, those rebellions. And there had been another case in Nigeria, more recently. And there were other cases.
Boyle was still talking, saying, “… and what else can I tell you? I think that’s all. Everybody’s gone home.” His last sentence had been spoken with emphasis.
Ray said, “Nobody’s being punished, in other words?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Boyle said.
Ray didn’t like that response. It was a way of not lying, but that was all it was, a way of not lying directly. Ray waited.
Boyle said, “No punitive expeditions, if that’s what you’re asking. This isn’t Zimbabwe… And I think anybody the government might be really interested in is off the scene, one way or another. Kerekang’s gone. Some of them crossed over into Namibia. We know that. Nujoma can have them. But by the way we don’t have any problems with him. He doesn’t hate us. Not at all.”
Boyle was letting himself brag a little. He was proud of having made a connection with SWAPO in their early days of power. Ray had only heard whispers about it. He didn’t doubt it. And he didn’t like hearing it. He didn’t like the implication that the SWAPO government might well cooperate with the agency if an interest was expressed in the whereabouts of Kerekang’s Ichokela group that had taken refuge in Namibia. He hoped to God that Kerekang had gotten through to the Republic as easily as he’d thought he could. South Africa would be safer for him than Namibia, if only because it was bigger and more diverse and more disorganized as black rule came rolling on, and also because there were so many more entities that would have to be bribed and traduced by the agency to secure lines of information.
Ray was hungry. He was almost weak from hunger. He wasn’t eating normally. He couldn’t bear sitting down to eat with Iris because it reminded him of sitting down to eat with Iris.
Boyle was shifting into a reflective pose. That was all it was. He was pretending to proceed from an agreement that hadn’t in fact been reached, an agreement that Ray was going to go on leave.
Boyle said, “We might want you to make a report on your experiences later. You know, for historical purposes. For our files here. And we might want you to put that in writing. Who knows? When you get back. There’s no urgency about it. We talked to your driver, very nice guy. He said not much happened. We have all we need to know right now.”
Be careful, Ray said to himself. He was full of anger but it was difficult because he was angry at himself, too, himself, historically. There was Angola. It was looking better now in Angola, but he had been in Botswana when it
