taken off an open shelf. Some pest tracking Kerekang had dashed over when Kerekang left his reading momentarily to go to the lavatory or out for a smoke. Not for a smoke. Kerekang was not a smoker. In any case, it had been a hurried take, diagonal, picking up only a part of the title and a swatch of text below it.
KARL MAR
AND THE REVO
I
German liberals of 1848 failed
hence incapable of managing the
come dogma. We tend to suspect
because it fits the “practical re
euvering safely among existing f
ideals and hope. In his recent a
Theodore S. Hamerow has shown th
liberals of 1848 failed not becau
It was a botch, actually. It annoyed Ray to find it there. It was more nothing, or it was nothing much, although, since it was dated to 1991, it was clear Boyle was going to take it as proof that Kerekang was a closet Bolshevik at heart. There was an additional note stating that Kerekang had been observed taking copious notes as he read this particular article. And that was everything, except for the photograph.
He had saved the photograph for last for a reason. Faces influence us unduly, was the problem.
“That’s him,” Boyle said.
Ray picked up the identification photograph. It was a passport photo, very clear, blown up to eight by ten. Letting a photograph speak to you was an art, of sorts. You had to let whatever was in it flow out to you in the first seconds you handled it. You could call the moment metaphysical. The point was to give in to the impulse to have the image utter something. Ray thought of it as a feminine mode of perception.
He studied the photo, not getting much. Being watched made it difficult.
Boyle muttered something Ray made himself ignore.
Ray received Kerekang as a person of force and intelligence.
He looked judicious and he looked intelligent. But judiciousness he should set aside as a possible artifact, a bleed-over from his knowledge that Kerekang was an engineer and thus presumably someone with a practical intelligence. Intelligence was there, in the eyes, somehow. How you could determine intelligence by looking at the naked meat of the eye was a deep part of the mystery of faces. Its presence seemed to have nothing to do with any relationship between the eyes and the rest of the face.
Boyle was murmuring and doing something.
Kerekang looked less than forty in the photograph. He had good, symmetrical features but was probably not particularly vain, since there were two or three white hairs at either end of his toothbrush mustache that he might easily have plucked. He had a good, unlined brow. The whites of his eyes were very clear, which could mean clean living. The bridge of his nose was higher than standard for a Motswana and it looked beveled or carved, the result of a repaired break, was Ray’s guess. The cut of his eyes was interesting. There was a very slight epicanthic valencing visible. The lip-line of his mustache was a little ragged, which also told against vanity. His ears were small and almost flat to the skull, the lobes curved under toward the head. There were very faint initiation scars, like cat scratches, three on each side, fanning out from the ends of his eyes. He had a good, dense head of hair, recessed over the temples about standardly for his age. There was no vanity in the haircut, no shaping—it was just evenly cropped, top and sides. Kerekang was wearing a cheap tweed jacket and a dress shirt with long collar-points, one of which was a little scrolled. The shirt was an antique. The dark knit tie he was wearing was far from new. The knot was shiny. Kerekang’s skin color, Ray decided, was what he thought of as medium black. It was funny how hit or miss the description of skin color still was, although possibly in some byway of physical anthropology some crank or other had proposed some scheme for descriptive standardization. Every paint company had different proprietary names for the identical colors, whereas you would think it would be in some general commercial interest for everybody to work from the same palette, but no.
Ray closed the file and was astounded that Boyle pulled it back instantly and swept it away to one side of the table. They were about to go on to something else, immediately.
They were not going to discuss it. If Ray wanted to demur he could fuck himself, was what Boyle was demonstrating.
Ray was breathless. He thought, You come here, you cocksucker, and you do this to me: You cocksucker: You don’t know me: You do this like you’re doing some minor thing, some
Boyle was going to pay him now. He had taken out an envelope and was extracting rand and pula notes from it. Today was payday.
Boyle was laying out too much in one of the two piles he was making. The buy-money pile looked correct, the usual five hundred pula and two hundred rands, but unless he was getting more small-denomination bills this time, there was too much in the pay pile.
“You get a raise,” Boyle said. He slipped a rubber band around the stack of buy money, but set another rubber band down next to the pay stack, so that Ray could count it and be delighted and band it up himself.
Boyle pushed two receipts over to Ray for him to sign, which Ray did without looking at them, pretending to be in the midst of thought. Boyle would never see him count his money.
“I got you a raise,” Boyle said.
Ray took out his wallet and put the buy money into it.
“You’re up a notch,” Boyle said.
“I am?”
“You do a lot. You give us a lot. I don’t like to be cheap.”
“I try.”
“Yeah. We appreciate it.” Boyle’s yeah was turning into the Boer yah you heard everywhere in Gaborone, unless Ray was wrong. He wanted to believe it. He banded his pay stack without counting it and set it in front of him. Boyle was showing nothing, no reaction to Ray’s refusal to count the money. He was keeping his face dead.
Ray thought, It’s genius to injure and reward, or demote and promote, in the same stroke… I am dealing with a genius.
Ray put the money into his wallet, uncounted.
He thought, This is adolescent.
What he was facing was the certainty that, under Boyle, the way it had been for him with the agency was completely over. He was a writer they were turning into a clerk. He was being mechanized. Now what they wanted from him was his notes, not his finished work, but not even his notes, really. They wanted what he knew and what he could find out, but in a checklist. Boyle was grotesque. Just now, waiting for Ray to say something appropriate, to succumb nicely, Boyle had found a piece of lint on his cuff and was scrutinizing it as though it were filth and in a second he would flick it away, in disgust. I
Ray sat there. It was essential not to beg.
He couldn’t help it. He said, “I’ve never, never once, the whole time I’ve been working, never once lost control of any material, of my material. It just couldn’t happen and it never has happened. I’ve never had a question on security from any quarter, not one. I have my drill down. And they know my stuff at Registry.” This was begging.
“They’ll miss me at Registry,” Ray said.
Boyle said, “They’ll get over it.” He eased his chair back from the table. That was the signal for Ray to go.
He felt incapable of moving. He had to get home. But she can’t know, he thought, she can’t, this is killing me and she can’t know: Also I can hear it, I can hear it when she says it’s perfect. It’s perfect, you
