Mortals

“My doctor. Weren’t we just talking about him before?”

“Not that I recall. Unless I missed something. Maybe you were having a mental dialogue of some kind.”

“Maybe I was. I do that.” She seemed blithe enough, saying so. Depart this subject, he said to himself.

“So then, I take it another one of his specialties is South Africa, I mean, he is an eclectic, after all.”

It was dark, but he could make out the familiar quizzical but good-natured look she was giving him that was meant to ask What is your problem? So far they were dealing lightly and fairly openly with his skeptical, as she read it, attitudes toward Doctor Morel.

Ray had no problem. If he had a problem it was the oversupply of experts on South Africa that just being in the region seemed to stimulate, the superabundance of people who thought they knew everything, but knew, in actual fact, nothing… people just off the plane who had talked to one alcoholic exile in the airport bar and thought they knew the shape of the future.

Iris said, “He knows a lot about everything. He’s a polymath. Like you. Very much like you.”

Ray said nothing.

“He’s very attuned to words,” Iris said.

Ray waited. They walked in silence for a few minutes.

She said, “He’s attuned to what we’re really saying when we talk and why we select the particular words we do.”

“Who would this be?” Ray asked, knowing who she meant.

She smiled, tightening their arm link, drawing his arm snugly into the side of her breast.

It was quiet for a Friday evening. Very florid stereo music pulsing in a couple of the houses didn’t necessarily mean that any social festivity was going on, because the preferred way to listen to stereo music was at high volume, not only among the Batswana but among the younger expatriate audiophiles as well. It was universal, or becoming universal. Bringing a torch might have been a good idea. The streetlights were set at wide intervals, not all of them were functioning, and those that were delivered a weak icy blue light muffled, especially in this season, by swarming insects. Luckily they were past the peak of the termite mating season, when the melee around any available light had to be seen to be believed. He couldn’t think of a metaphor to describe the dense, shimmering, heaving fluxes the termites created as they swarmed in midair. Getting used to Africa was getting used to termites. He remembered eating dinner with Iris in a hotel in Serowe during the worst of a particularly ferocious mating season. An attempt had been made to keep the insects out of the dining room. There were screens at the windows being pummeled, was the word for it, pummeled by the insects trying to get in. And then as people went in and out, no matter how quickly they tried to manipulate the screen door, clouds of termites had come surging in to join their mates in the swarm dance already going on around the ceiling lights. He and Iris had hunched over their plates to keep the falling, shed wings from getting into their food, their plates of goat stew and samp. The floor had been treacherous with their slippery, silvery wings, which formed a cover something like the artificial snow no longer on the market that people mound up around the bases of their Christmas trees. The Serowe trip must have been a considerable time ago because he remembered it seeming exotic to them, not nightmarish, the way it would now.

The increase in the guard dog population made walking out at night less tranquil. Many of the houses, maybe most of them, now had guard dogs and warning plaques on their front gates saying Tsaba Ntsa! Beware of the dog! Iris was trying to make herself heard above the howls of the dog they were currently irritating. She was saying something about South Africa.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, how the South Africans cleverly got away with using the term unrest, as in unrest area—for a township that was actually going up in flames. All during apartheid an unrest area was a place that was actually in active revolt. There were lists of unrest areas in the paper.”

This nitpicking about the term unrest annoyed him, no doubt mainly because it was the sort of apercu he was used to having her pick up from him. “There still are unrest areas,” Ray murmured blankly, caught in himself, in a grievance he could normally keep down. He was running through the panoply of ignorant experts he had to deal with on a regular basis, while he projected his deep interest in what they had to say, which was his lot. Usually he was fine with his lot. But there was a rub, if he let himself feel it. One of the tensions he was supposed to live with unflinchingly was knowing more than he could show, just in general. His lot was to play the intelligent but naive guy always ready to receive the wonderful opinionettes and insights and whathaveyou blowing in from the permanent passing parade of blowhards and parvenu commentators on everything. That was his role and gosiame, he accepted it. That was how it worked. That was what worked. While in point of fact he knew astonishing things, he knew genuine secrets. He possessed astonishing information. It was his. Just off the top of his head, there was the way, for example, the South African Defence Force had been selling field radios, hoppers, they were called, to every army south of the Sahara, that contained a secret feature that let the South Africans listen in to everything that got transmitted by every army in every action or maneuver undertaken over the last twenty years, radios sold specifically because they were guaranteed secure with their waveband-hopping capacity, which was why they were called hoppers. Every army was an open book to them and it would be interesting to see just how quickly the ANC would decide to let everybody in on this naughty little truth when they got control of the SADF, which would be soon.

He got sympathy over this recurrent experience now and then, but always when he needed it, from Iris. She knew what he was, who he was, and when he overdid his dumb act, she let him know it. He knew how much she would love it if he just once jumped out of his role and wiped up the floor with a member of the cretinate, just once.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

They had come to the point at which they often turned to go back home, at a crossroads, and outside a house Iris liked to consider mysterious. The property the house sat in was walled and gated, but the solid wooden gates were often left ajar, revealing a front drive flanked on one side by a tall, heeling hedge. The main house was small and gave only intermittent evidence of occupation. It was his lot to share in her puzzlement and speculation about the house, but in fact he knew all about it. This was a safe house paid for by the Libyans but used on a courtesy basis by an assortment of freelance thugs who did odd jobs for Zimbabwe and a couple of other countries. The house was wired. The groundsman was in the pay of the agency and provided service on the surveillance systems. There was an old story around regarding a body buried on the premises, which he doubted was true.

They had decided, without discussion, to prolong their stroll. They crossed the main road and turned north toward the embassy compounds.

They were being too silent. He didn’t know what to do. A thing Iris was afraid of, she had told him a number of times, was becoming part of one of the married couples you see in restaurants, saying nothing to each other the whole time they ate their dinners. The last time they had eaten out, at the Carat, he had pointed out to her that that particular fear was a good example of fearing a thing that had never shown the least sign of happening with them. They always had plenty to say. Although it was true he sort of mobilized himself when they went out to eat. In fact he would probably like to collapse into dull silence more than he was able to, in restaurants.

“Wait,” Iris said, and he thought he could detect a trace of relief in her voice at finding a topic.

“Wait, I bet I can tell you something amusing you don’t know about one of our neighbors. You don’t know everything. Want to bet?”

It was utterly clear to him. Right now the main effort of his life had to be to become again what he had been to her before, although before exactly what was still a question. But everything else on his plate had to be secondary. And that was what he had to do, and would do with all he had, so they could have their life again. And anything that stood in the way of that would be leveled. He felt clear.

She said, “A certain dispute? Heard anything about a certain dispute in a house one street up from us?”

“I’m glad I didn’t bet,” he said.

“A dispute between Hedda and what’s his name at DVS? I’m surprised if you don’t know about this, in certain circles it’s a famous incident. Among women, for example, if women are a circle. Are we?”

“Hedda and Maret,” he said. “Maret is the head of the Dutch Volunteer Service, he’s the director. Yes, Maret… so?”

“Maret, Maret, Maret. I know you disapprove of me when I forget names.