Mortals

they did and which impoverished them, it ruined them, it’s so horrible. The prophetess…”

“Nongqawuse.”

“You see, you know everything.”

“Not quite, babe.”

“But that’s really impressive.”

“No it isn’t. It’s one of the main events in the history of the region. The Xhosas who settled here in Botswana came north after the cattle massacre. There’s a big settlement near Mahalapye, which is where Kerekang comes from, if my guess is correct.”

“Well in any case she was a Christian convert who had decided that all the cattle had to be killed because they had been reared by people who practiced witchcraft, as the Xhosas had for generations, which meant that the cattle were defiled because the Christian god hated witchcraft. They were in a period of stress at the time. I don’t know if it was drought or what. They were continually under pressure from the Zulus. So the prophetess promised that their tribulations would be over once they’d killed off all the cattle. He made the point, Davis did, that most people think of this act of destruction as something arising from primitive tribal craziness. But this was not a thing the pre-Christian tribes had ever done. It was Christianity that did it to them. Did you know that?”

He hadn’t. He hadn’t known that Nongqawuse was a Christian convert. “I may have known that, once. Maybe not. No, I don’t think I did. No, I didn’t.”

“Any last comments on my report?”

“Impeccable, my dear girl. Impeccable, Iris.”

They had reached the ring road. They turned up it. A quarter of a mile ahead of them on the far side of the road and occupying a site at the top of a long, slow rise was the Sun.

“So that was all. Davis gave Kerekang a card and invited him to a lecture he’s planning to give. And then as a last afterthought he grabbed Kerekang before he could leave and made the point that it wasn’t only Christianity he was concerned about, it was all religions, all religious belief, in case that hadn’t been emphasized enough. And I believe Kerekang invited Davis to come have a look at the gleaner camp. And now I want something cold to drink.”

He was full of gratitude toward her.

A realization he had suppressed came back to him. He had almost done something unforgivable. It had almost happened. During her recital, he had unthinkingly reached toward his shirt pocket to activate his microrecorder. But he had caught himself. He would never tape her. The temptation to do it then was understandable. The impulse was an artifact of the intensity of his focus on his enemy, Boyle, his preposterous enemy. Someone forgive me, he thought. Priest could be his code name for Morel, if Boyle could be made to see reason.

They were in sight of the hawker strip. Their approach galvanized the hawkers, who began heaving themselves up from the ground or struggling out from their cardboard and burlap hutments. The hawkers would mob them in a minute.

A heavy, owl-faced woman with a withered leg, the hawker closest to them, was toiling painfully toward them, determined to be the first to present her goods.

“That woman is crippled,” Iris said. “Oh God.”

They had to buy something. It was distressing. Hawkers from farther up the line were racing at them, overtaking the crippled woman. He suspected that word had been passed along that Iris was wearing one of their products, which made her a serious prospect. The crippled woman was in desperate haste. As her competitors came past her, she began unfurling her goods, pitching them out toward Iris and Ray, trailing them through the dust as she forged forward.

“Buy the biggest piece she has,” Ray said. “Buy the bedspread.” It was unlike him, but he was hot with gratitude toward Iris. He was usually careful with money.

“You know how they overcharge for these,” she said.

“Get the bedspread. The tablecloth.” It was blocked gratitude speaking. Of course they overcharged, for what they gave you. But he also knew that she’d get more pleasure buying this dubious object than she would buying something for herself that she really wanted.

“You’re great,” she said.

“Not yet,” he said.

15. I Would Like to Reassure You About My Penis

She was going to think he was perverse, getting into a hot bath on a hot night after a hot day… but sometimes there was a need. A scalding bath like this was for moments when everything hurts, from the soul outward, from the folds of your soul to the soles of your feet, and what the burning lake did was unify miscellaneous pains into a single physical one, briefly, which then turned into pleasure as the water temperature became bearable, something like that. Everything hurts, he thought, and there he was. But he could see the future. Iris would drift in, take note, say nothing, and convey everything by body language, as in rolling the eyes.

She would roll her eyes. And with some justification. From her viewpoint, there he would be, a Dagwood in his bathtub, but in darkest Africa. She would react, because what he was doing was odd and because if she wanted to talk more, which she did, she would be physically uncomfortable there, she would think he was deliberately creating a milieu uncongenial to conversation, which he would be hard pressed to deny, although it wasn’t true. And what was the name of the actress who had been trapped into playing Blondie film after film by her physical appropriateness for the part, a good actress but never able to escape that one role? Singleton had been her name, Penny. And there had been others in her situation, including the poor fuck who’d fallen into playing Superman forever, on television and not even in the movies, and who’d finally shot himself to death, sick of it. And then in fact hadn’t something similar happened to the actor who’d played Zorro? He thought so. Money made them do it. I do nothing for money, at least, he thought. Sometimes he wondered if his affection for the Zorro movies had any connection with his attraction to the dual life he had ended up leading and enjoying, for the most part. He had loved Zorro. Or he had loved the Janus metaphor underneath Zorro and the others, the introvert who had an armed and dangerous alter ego who could hurt you but wouldn’t kill you, he would just tie you up and expose you to ridicule. He thought, We can never get down to the slurry of narratives we took in through our pores when we were growing up, and that sits in us, sloshing around in our foundations. Iris was coming in. She was nearby. He could sense it. And someday someone would come up with a process like psychoanalysis but devoted to ripping up the rotten subflooring of cultural junk in our depths, getting it up so it could be hawked up and spat out, genre, cliches, ads, commercials, formulas of all kinds, all of it. Women don’t spit, he thought. Men hawk and spit. Iris claimed not to know how to hawk. She suffered from postnasal drip from time to time seriously enough that he had tried to teach her how to clear out the back of her sinuses, just to help with keeping ahead of the flow, but she couldn’t do it. The process repelled her. He considered his legs, his lower self, in the faintly tawny water. If you like them lean, come to me, he thought. Iris was getting wider through the hips, fractionally, but it was happening. The water was perfect. Sweat crawled down his scalp. The concentration of chlorine in their tap water varied from day to day, and sometimes the odor could be distractingly strong, but tonight it was minimal, vaguely medicinal, like the ozone tinge produced by the electric coil in the geyser mounted high on the wall where it would crush his feet if it ever came down when he was in the tub. Every expatriate male he knew had talked about the damned menacing geysers and they all did what he did, which was to tug compulsively on the brackets that held the massive things in place whenever he was in the room. Africa, danger everywhere, he thought, mocking himself.

“Aren’t you suffering in there?” Iris asked from the hall.

“In a good way,” he answered. “I like it.”

“It can’t be good for you.”

But she didn’t pursue it when he didn’t reply. He heard her withdraw… toward the bedroom, he thought.

If she wanted to join him in the tub room, there was a problem. There was no place for her to sit, except the uncomfortable rim of the tub. There was nothing in this cubicle but the tub and the washbasin. The toilet sat in its