Kerekang, who had made the mistake of abandoning his reading long enough to go and empty his bladder. At the side of Ray’s mind had been the shadow of an intention to see, at the same time, if he could look up any of Marianne Wormser’s early papers on Milton, to reassure himself that he had been right that she was unpromising. So he had gone there, following his whim or whatever it should be called. He had never gotten to Wormser.
Boyle had agreed to see him, in the consular office, this time. Ray was in one of the holding cubicles, in a box, essentially, in a tan wood-veneer-over-chipboard box, sitting in an Eames chair, with the fine hum of the fluorescent lighting for entertainment. When Boyle was ready for him a buzzer on the door would sound and a red light set in the wall would begin flashing, a light concealing a CCTV minicam and an audio ear. The miking of these cubicles had always struck Ray as pointless. The surveillance in the cubicles was being imposed on people who had already passed through two metal detectors, so what could anyone possibly be expected to detect?
For the record he was there on school business, carrying his permanently pending file of names to be proposed for Phelps-Stokes fellowships. It was time to redo the file. Some of the candidates on it were dead. That file and the exhibit he had especially prepared for Boyle on the Kerekang matter were contained in the red rope portfolio on his lap, and he noticed, now, that his palms were sweating enough to leave marks on the portfolio. He dried his hands in his pockets, irritated at himself, because the sweat marks were just the kind of small thing Boyle might pick up on. The fact was that Kerekang was not a communist, not a socialist, not a follower of Karl Marx. He was a follower, if that was the word, of someone else altogether, Karl Marlo, a thinker of a different kidney completely. Ray had the proof in his hands.
My life is taking forever, he thought. At the university library he had found bound volumes of the
At that point, he had found Wemberg’s hiding place. A smell, a faint rankness, had arrested his attention. On three sides, the space between the top of the main worktable and the floor had been walled with stacked books, the walling partially masked by the drifts and dumps of spilled books lying against it. On the fourth side, the space was closed with a sheet of cardboard, which he shifted to the side. He’d had to strike matches to see inside the cave. He had cursed the Lion matches for the flimsy, sputtering, unreliable product they were. Inside the cave he had found a pallet, a sakkie containing soiled clothing, a water bottle, and a framed photograph of Alice Wemberg. On impulse he’d taken all the bills he had in his wallet, about fifty pula, and tucked them under the frame of the photograph, obscuring Alice Wemberg’s face so that Wemberg, in his distraction, wouldn’t miss seeing the money. Then Ray had left. Thinking now about Wemberg was upsetting him, again. There was nothing he could do for the man without too much danger to himself. He felt for Wemberg. He identified with him, another poor bastard going mad over a beloved woman. With Iris away, he was feeling more of a bond with Wemberg than before. He was worried that leaving the money had been stupid, that it might startle and unnerve Wemberg and lead him to abandon his hideout, which was a sensible hideout, well located because that end of the library building faced rough, blank bushveld, so that Wemberg would be able to duck in and out without being observed, especially at night. He had to turn his thoughts away from this. There was nothing he could do.
Boyle was taking his time, per usual. Ray took out his exhibit and shuffled through it. If he did say so himself, it was conclusive against the idea that Kerekang was any kind of socialist or revolutionary. The whole misreading had begun with the sloppy job of copying the article’s title, slashing across it to yield
Karl Mar
Socialism
Revolution of 1848
when the correct full title was “Karl Marlo, Guild Socialism, and the Revolution of 1848.” In Marxian terms, Karl Marlo had been a reactionary. He had been a defender of the guilds. He had been an opponent of industrialism. He had wanted the extension of the guild system, with its masters and apprentices and its slow, merit-based upward mobility and employment stability.
The whole thing was interesting. And Marlo had hated the liberals, who were for the industrial system, more than anything, which ought to recommend him to the liberal-hating Boyle, except that the historical context was so wildly different. What Kerekang wanted in Botswana was something like what Marlo had wanted. He had been influenced by Marlo and by an American named Borsodi. He wanted households to raise their own food and have fruit trees and raise small stock and sell any surplus on the open market. What was so terrible about that? There was a cosmic joke going on here. The reason Marlo had hated liberals was because they wanted to open everything up to the market, which he knew would mean doom for the guilds, and he had been right. Kerekang was an individualist, rightly judged. He wanted every family to be allocated an equal plot and house and access to water and he had schemes for raising a variety of agricultural products and taking the surplus for sale, which would sustain the family. You would have a base and you couldn’t be turned out into the street, like the homeless, but you could do wage work on the side, to the degree you chose. It was yeoman democracy, more than anything. It was Jeffersonian. It was innocent.
Ray had photocopied the entire twenty-page article. And he had made a separate presentation sheet consisting of excerpts, highlighted, because he knew Boyle would never read the original piece. Ray was doing this out of principle. It would be against his best interest if Boyle paid attention, because of the scheme he had going with Pony. But if Boyle decided to forget Kerekang, Ray would send Pony for a couple of visits to Morel without authorization. Ray would have what he wanted, Morel au naturel, talking the talk.
Of course there was an unusable aspect of Marlo that might endear him to Boyle if he ever looked into it. The great expanded guild system Marlo had proposed was for everybody but Jews. It wasn’t that Marlo had been anti-Semitic, but he had been a man of his time. Boyle had no excuse for his own attitudes and he had no idea how much Ray knew about them thanks to the beloved Marion Resnick. Boyle was Jew-fixated. He blamed the Jew Kissinger for leading Nixon to break the wall around China, which had led them to go capitalist enough to become an enormous economic as well as military threat. The idea was that they should have been left alone to doldrum along with their inefficient communist system. Boyle was an ultra. Ray thought, If you’re politically insane, things will leak out no matter who you are: and Marion can’t be blamed for talking about Boyle. Boyle hated the African National Congress not because blacks were going to come to power through it but because Jews, some of the greatest stars of the ANC, were, and of course communism was the invention of a Jew and Jews had been prominent in getting it going in Russia, and Lenin was a Jew, or half-Jew… That was Boyle. He had to live with him.
The waiting he was being put through was deliberate. He decided to read through his exhibit, sampling it.
“If the guilds were to play an important part in Germany’s future they would have to stand for more than simply the selfish demands of their class… the road back was closed; the future demanded more than nostalgia; it would not accept mere selfishness… the guildsmen were aware of the need for a more general appeal and a wider vision; that they were was largely due to the efforts of one Karl Marlo—the social theorist of the German guild movement during the years of revolution.”
Learn something new every day was Resnick’s line. Socrates, when he was about to drink the hemlock, made everybody in the room shut up so he could hear the end of a song, new to him, being sung in the street. Ray knew the name of the singer, if he could remember it… Stesichorus.
“Marlo was not a guildsman; he was a chemistry teacher in a trade school in Kassel, Kurhessen.” He had been a technician, like Kerekang.
“Marlo’s native province was a land of small villages surrounded by carefully cultivated fields and inhabited by peasants and the master tailors, smiths, bakers, carpenters, and shoemakers of the guilds, who, with their journeymen and apprentices, formed a comprehensive guild system as yet undisturbed by free enterprise and still
