Mortals

“Yes, would you?”

“Call him and say what?”

“I’m about to tell you. Call him and say I don’t think I’m going to get much homework done on this trip.”

“What kind of homework are you talking about?”

“Well, a journal I was supposed to keep. And also a book I’m supposed to read when I have a free moment, Homo Hierarchicus, by an anthropologist. It’s something you might be interested in, but it has absolutely nothing to do with me. It’s about the caste system in India.”

“Couldn’t you send him a card? I’m sure he’d love to hear from you, not me. Or you could call him.”

“A card takes too long and I don’t want him to think I’m doing something I’m not doing. And I feel awkward calling. I don’t think this rises to the importance of a phone call, and I don’t want to spend the money for that when you can just give him a ring. This is already costing a fortune, this trip. I don’t like to think about it.”

“I will, then. Tomorrow.”

“Ray, it’s only partly that I have no time, to tell you the truth. When I start writing in my journal it turns into reams of hysterical stuff I already know and don’t want to think about, mainly regarding my mother and also Ellen, who has a sneaky side to her personality. And I write about you. I write things about you you wouldn’t mind reading. But I just don’t want to be doing this now. My job is to keep my act together. I have to cope. But I said I would do this stuff and now I’m not going to.”

She was in anxiety. Why was Morel back in this conversation, he wanted to know. It was bitter. It was bitter.

He didn’t want to talk anymore. She disliked the silence he was making. He could sense it.

She said, “What about the CODESA talks, Ray? Where the ANC walked out? Is this very bad news?”

He was a little startled. He said, “No it’s only going to be temporary. Don’t worry about it.” But he felt it was odd that she had brought it up. It just happened recently. She wasn’t getting the New York Times, there in Florida. It was big news in Botswana and the Republic, of course, but it was odd that she had heard about it, or was it? Of course she was always nervous about the chance that things would go badly in South Africa and that danger and disruption would come back across the border to Botswana. He didn’t like what he was suspecting, which was that she had in fact just been in touch with Morel and that everything she had said in that connection had been a deception, which would explain asking him to do something that was, in the circumstances, going to be unpleasant for him, calling a man she knew he had negative feelings about, contriving to show, by that, how minor a presence Morel was for both of them, how unthreatening Ray ought to find him, to desensitize, to desensitize. His thoughts were racing. He hated this.

“Where did you hear about it, Iris? Are they covering it on TV?”

“No, not really. In the paper.”

“The local paper there?”

“It must’ve been. Ray I didn’t ask about Dimakatso. You know to give her my love. But how is she doing?”

It was possible it had been in the paper, but he didn’t believe it. And now she was showing regret, showing she wanted to get off the subject and he didn’t like that. He could be wrong. He could be. He wanted to be wrong.

He had made himself too unhappy to continue.

“I haven’t eaten,” he said.

“Well for goodness’ sake go and eat. I’ll talk to you tomorrow or the next day.”

“Right, and my love to everybody. I love you. Get a name for that baby. I’ll talk to Ellen, one of these calls, tell her.”

“I love you,” she said.

He said, “And so, goodnight.”

21. The Apostles of Reason

Pony had overproduced, at first. Ray hadn’t been prepared for it and had even run low on replacement cassettes at one point. And then there had been a change. A trajectory was developing in Pony’s attitude that was making Ray uncomfortable and wary. The issue of a chartering letter, which had come up twice, sharply, after Pony had begun this work, was now gone, dropped. And information on the whereabouts of Pony’s debtor, the absconded haulier, very preliminary information at that, had been received perfunctorily. Pony had gone from tense volubility, from presenting Ray with full lists of attendees so that all the voices on the tapes could be identified, to a new mode of dreaminess and diffidence. And when it came to identifying participants Pony had gotten vaguer and vaguer, claiming forgetfulness, claiming not to have been introduced to half the group attending. Nor was Pony pressing for supplementary payments, Ray realized. He had the money for him. Something was up.

But then something was always up. Even if Pony was planning to exit the assignment, that would be manageable, because he had been so copious to date that Ray was dealing with more material than he’d had time to get decently through, much less decently assess. Critical information had come out of the tapes. Morel was creating two groups, a public group called the Apostles of Reason, and an inner, esoteric group, cadres, whose name Ray had yet to discover. Morel was recruiting cadres, which was why the tape he was going to listen to tonight, for the second time, was worth better attention than he’d been able to give it. It represented a sort of catechism session of a young fellow from Mahalapye, an assistant pharmacist, Themba Kise, someone being groomed to go out and beat the drum for irreligion in the northeast part of the country, a sort of franchise being given to him. Apparently the way it worked was that the most promising contacts, the ones considered eligible for the inner circle of proselytizers, would come and stay with Morel for a residential immersion lasting a week or so, ending in catechism.

Dark of night galvanized him. It was very late. He was at ease on the sofa, his bare feet up on the vast plain of glass that was their coffee table. The living room blinds were tightly drawn. The odor of charred garlic was heavy in the air, heavy and sweet. That evening he had cooked his third steak dinner of the week. He could get frozen fish tomorrow, hake. The best parts of his thesis had been written in the middle of the night, before he’d met Iris. Now that she was away he was being reminded how much he liked to work at night. Maybe he was regressing in a general way. He had a craving for creamed chipped beef, a dish he hadn’t had since high school, a specialty, if you could call it that, of his mother’s. At night your enemies are asleep, he thought. Working for the agency did provide him with more occasions for solitary late night work than the usual job would. He shouldn’t complain. But marriage and teaching can’t help but nail us to the light of day, he thought. He was happy tonight, he supposed. He put the earphones on.

He had to bear down on this tape, not let his mind drift. It was important. His periphery was reasonably clear. Iris was all right. It was obviously a piece of luck that her landfall in America had been Florida, which was turning out to be more floridly, so to speak, part of the Bible Belt than either of them had realized. She had reported hearing a young girl’s call to a religious radio talk program. The child had been anxious to know if it was allowed to sleep late in heaven. Ellen had settled on a name for her daughter, Mame. He didn’t care. It had been between Mame and Mitzi. It was good that Wemberg had shifted his hiding place out of the university library and to someplace unknown. That had been a relief to Ray. There was a story around that Wemberg was sleeping rough in the maize fields in Sebele.

He was ready to begin. Hearing this taped session the first time had brought home to him how little interest he had in changing anyone’s mind on any subject, any important subject. He thought about that a little more. He had been part of a war all his adult life, but he had never felt impelled to try to change the views of any of his opponents, ever. He had tried to trip them up, dismay them, undo them, but the idea of attempting to convert any one of them to his own views was embarrassing to him. So Morel, who was making a passionate vocation out of changing the minds of other adults, was what, a horse of another color altogether.

Part of the prologue was missing. They were a little way into the catechism. Morel’s voice was without much