“You are uncanny. And you are
“I don’t deny it,” he said.
They proceeded in silence. Why was this something she wanted to withhold?
“I don’t really know this for a fact,” she said. “I didn’t hear it from him. It’s from someone else, so when I said I’d told you all I know, that was actually true. This is a different quality of… of information. It’s gossip. I think his wife left him for a woman. And what her race might be I have no idea.”
Now he knew what her impulse had been. She had been trying to protect Morel’s image. It was humiliating to lose your wife to a woman. She hadn’t wanted him to know. He didn’t like it. Why should she be protecting Morel’s image? What was it to her?
“God,” he said. “No wonder he wants to overthrow Western civilization.”
“Don’t trivialize. Nobody said he wants to overthrow Western civilization. Anyway, what’s the connection?”
“Well. I can’t think of much, offhand, that would more completely unhorse me and make me want to pull down everything within reach. I guess I’m speaking for myself, but I’d sure want to do something about my fate. I can get with that. Western civilization is our fate. So. Ergo. Look, you have at least two betrayals going on at once. You’re betrayed as a person, and your gender is being betrayed… and then add to the picture that your wife is Nigerian, you’re being betrayed by an African. That makes it worse, somehow. So you think that something cosmic has to be wrong with the world that’s doing this to you. So…”
“Listen, do you want to hear what else I have to report about the day’s events? Because there is a bit more. Or do you want to keep on psychologizing, something I thought you hated, by the way.”
He couldn’t quite let it go. “I do want to hear, but don’t tell me psychologizing isn’t in order now and then. If something like this happened to me, I… well… I might very well decide to do something… amazing… instead of slitting my wrists right away.”
She sighed hugely.
“I’m sorry I told you.”
“Iris, don’t be. It’s interesting. In a way it’s no crazier or more Promethean or whathaveyou than any other kind of missionary activity over here. It’s just a new annex on a familiar edifice, isn’t it? But it is interesting.”
“I don’t know how much of this is just talk, Ray. It’s his medical work that’s really important. I think.”
“Okay, so what else was said? And who was the audience?”
“Those children, myself, your friend the engineer, Kerekang. Toward the end there were other people coming over who wanted to exchange pleasantries with Davis. He has a following. Patients and people who’ve heard about him.”
“Now this is after his mission statement?”
“You’re getting the wrong picture. This wasn’t something he declaimed, some grandiose statement he was just waiting to unveil. You could tell he knew it was going to sound grandiose. And it was said more or less man to man, to your friend. I happened to be there. He wasn’t being portentous in any way. Okay, I would even say there was some irony in the way he said it, although at that point I was pretty much in an eavesdropping position. My point is that it wasn’t something being declared for the benefit of one and all, and certainly not for my benefit. What I think happened is that your friend…”
“Stop calling him my friend. I don’t know this man Kerekang.”
“Well, but you seem to like him. So do I…”
“And I don’t keep referring to him as
“No, but you obviously like him. So did Davis. He’s very appealing. You approve of him.”
“Well let’s call him Kerekang, for simplicity. I call your doctor by his last name and you and I call Kerekang by his last name. Or for even greater simplicity we could both refer to your doctor by his last name. No? Jesus, what
“I know, and it’s not coming from me. Anyway.
“Anyway, they went back and forth about Christianity for a while. I think Davis was trying to feel Kerekang out on the subject, find out where he stood. They were sizing each other up. It was fun to watch.
“I’m now, for this discussion, in a different memory palace, by the way.
“Kerekang seemed to be taking the position that even though Christianity wasn’t exactly true, Africans had some things to be grateful to certain Christians for. And he mentioned how Livingstone and Moffat had run guns to the Batswana so they could repel the Boers. And in a more general way he was saying that he didn’t see that it was so terrible for people to have in their minds a model of someone unfailingly kind, acting kindly. And then the discussion got a little miscellaneous on his part and he alluded to the role Christians had played in getting cab horses treated decently in London in the nineteenth century and also to the part they played in stopping the gladiatorial games, although I had the sense that Davis had some alternate explanation for that that he couldn’t quite lay his hands on, or didn’t, anyway. And then Kerekang went on to the work of Christians in ending the slave trade, although he did say that Christians had participated in it and profited from it from the beginning. And Kerekang also admitted that Christians in Europe had basically forced the Jews into being slave traders during the Middle Ages by making it one of the few trades Jews were allowed to engage in.
“So then Davis wanted him not to rely on single instances, but to look at the larger effects of the doctrine in Africa, and not to look at this or that good act by white Christians here and there in Africa. He wanted him to focus on what Christianity had done to Africans, to the African minds it had penetrated and was still penetrating. Wait a minute.”
She closed her eyes.
“Okay, then Davis gave as an example what Christianity had done to homosexuality in Africa, making the point that universally there was no stigma attached to being homosexual within the traditional cultures, but that Christianity had brought persecution of homosexuality with it, introduced it where it hadn’t been. Kerekang took this for a good point.”
The flagpoles of the Gaborone Sun were coming into view.
“Then, and this was very sotto voce between them, they talked about abortion and how all the churches were united against legalization, which is true. And then they came to AIDS.
“Davis is passionate about it. He hears things through the medical grapevine that other people don’t know. In the morgues in Zimbabwe they are stacking the AIDS corpses three to a tray, for example. The Catholics are against condoms and the Protestant churches are barely in favor of them and the independent African churches are bastions of insane folklore remedies for AIDS, which is galloping unbelievably. He thinks seropositivity is almost twenty percent here.
“Then Kerekang tried to take a sort of evolutionary position. This was that people would progress from animism and local gods to monotheism, the monotheisms, and then to Deism and finally out into post-religion. We would all someday be like Sweden, where nobody believed anything having to do with religion anymore. He’s visited Sweden. But Davis was absolute against that view, saying that it’s the liberal denominations that are declining into unimportance and the fundamentalist branches of religion that are gaining strength. And he wanted Kerekang to admit that this was especially true in Africa, which Kerekang did admit. Davis said Kerekang was a religious Menshevik, thinking that religion was going to turn into secularism the way the Mensheviks thought capitalism was going to evolve itself into socialism. For some reason this was a big hit with Kerekang. He has a wonderful laugh. How am I doing as a rapporteur?”
“You’re astonishing me.”
She was very pleased. He loved this flushed, sturdy creature. All this was for him, all this effort.
She said, “
“And then I believe this is the end of it. And I learned something I didn’t know. Davis pointed out that Kerekang, who’s a Xhosa, should appreciate that Christianity was behind the destruction of his people. In this way. In 1856 a prophetess ordered them to slaughter their entire national herd, half a million cattle, as a sacrifice, which
