Mortals

essential to life and locomotion topped up. Ray was minutely studying Keletso’s moves and routines to be certain he could take over on his own if he had to, depending on how things uncoiled, not a prospect he relished. Keletso was nothing like an idiot. They were on a lumpy stretch of gravel road, passing through a sea of high dead yellow grass. Since Ghanzi, the land had been interminably flat. Trees here were so occasional that the rare specimens possessed, for Ray, an exclamatory quality. That there were trees present at all was surprising, the poor crabbed things, thorn trees exclusively, with brittle-looking black-green crowns. It was hot, but this wasn’t the worst time for travel in the western Kalahari. Winter was ending. It was mid-September. The night frosts were over with.

He had to stop feeling like an idiot. It was serious. So he would one last time go back through the steps on the path that had led him to this nonsense. It had gone like this. One. One, he had sent Pony to tape Morel. Two, Pony had abandoned the assignment almost immediately after he had attached himself, become a follower, or so it had seemed, of Samuel Kerekang during Kerekang’s brief period of participation in Morel’s educational soirees or whatever it was they should be called. Ray had received exactly two tapes and then nothing. Pony’s conversion, to dignify it with the term, had been unanticipated. In fact it had been unanticipatable. So right there any responsibility Ray might be adjudged to have… thinned, truly, to the breaking point. Except for his having commissioned Pony in the first place, of course. Sending in a live asset had been rational, granted that he had been in an irrational state himself over Morel. He had been in a frenzy to find out all he could about him, because of what was happening with Iris. When he thought of her, here where he was, he couldn’t stand it. It was like hearing a supreme piece of music for the first time, as a child… he couldn’t have been more than four or five… and he even knew which piece it was, Pavane for a Dead Princess, listening to that for the first time and trying to draw the melody in more richly, get more of it into his ears, willing it to come through his skin, even, his mother staring at him from the record player. Ray had never reported anything to Boyle about the tapes he’d received from Pony. He had told Boyle only that he was still searching for a suitable asset for use in connection with Kerekang, for which he thanked God. He had been able to be astonished over developments, with Boyle, and get away with it. So. Pony had become an apparent convert to Kerekang’s silly homestead populism.

Then what? He couldn’t bear to think about Iris. He had to not lose the thread.

So then Kerekang had decamped, pulled up stakes, gone to the wilderness, gone to the people, gone north, taking a dozen or so followers with him, young people from the university, Pony included. Kerekang had left Gaborone because he was being blocked and messed with by the government, denied employment, messed with in a number of ways Ray could imagine. But that hadn’t been Ray’s doing. He had liked Kerekang, and had tried to protect him, argue for him, as much as he could, anyway. It was possible Boyle had concluded that he was being stalled by Ray and that Boyle had gone around him to give a little extra push to the government’s anti-Kerekang tricks and games.

So three, then, was Kerekang turning his face away from the capital and retreating to a piece of land allocated under some tribal arrangement to one of his followers, the deal being to establish a cooperative of some kind and use it as a base, that is, build strength in the countryside and work back to the towns instead of vice versa. Kerekang had been laying the foundations of the colony for over a year, unbeknownst to anybody in government, apparently.

Keletso touched Ray’s wristwatch. It was three-thirty, which meant they were going to pull over for tea. Wherever they were, Keletso took the civil service tea breaks he was entitled to at ten-thirty in the morning and three-thirty in the afternoon, without fail.

As communes go, Ichokela had been standard, not only in its structure but in the brevity of its heyday, that is, a couple of months of florescence and then disaster. There was some comfort for Ray in the idea that Kerekang had been preparing the commune for a while, popping in and out to check on the progress of things, because that meant he hadn’t been suddenly driven to creating it as a desperate recourse by anything the agency might have been part of. That was probably an idiotic thought. But then he was a complete idiot. Ichokela had been the standard commune mixture, meaning simple living, early to bed, turning over your capital when you joined, a common purse and honor-system access to it. The day had been divided in three parts, one-third for collective labor like construction or gardening or farmwork, one-third for study and relaxation, and one-third for extension work, pestering the local peasantry with good ideas. From all he could gather, it had been a straightforward sort of experiment, lacking any demeaning psychological nastinesses like self-criticism sessions. They had published a bilingual paper, Kepu/The Mattock. He had copies.

Kerekang’s commune had been more a training center than anything else. It wasn’t clear how long participants were supposed to stay there, but it was clear that Ichokela wasn’t meant to be a permanent residence for any of them. Things had been thought through. There had been a mechanism for getting at least part of your capital back if you decided to quit the movement. Kerekang had been expected to be in and out, employing Ichokela as a base, a site for demonstrating his courtyard horticulture concept and promoting a miniature sorghum mill run by pedal power, one of various inventions of his. The commune had been established on Tawana land near Toromole, a tiny village between Etsha and Sepopa out in the savanna west of the Okavango swamp, about seventy-five kilometers south of the Caprivi Strip. What else was there? One point of interest, for him anyway, was the role poetry played in Kerekang’s agitprop exertions. The Mattock was busy with snippets of Victorian social poetry, doggerel most of it, bilingually presented, and when the reading circles Kerekang was hectoring the locals to join met in the kgotlas, a centerpiece of the proceedings had been poetry-shouting performances by a commune troupe, the Songsters, Dimoopedi. Kerekang’s general taste in nomenclature was on the poetic side, too. The name of the commune, the full name, Ichokela Bokhutlon, translated as Endure to the End. Isa, the verb meaning to make happen, was what Kerekang had decided to call his movement. It meant something about Ray that never in his life had he felt a twinge of attraction to the idea of submerging himself in the romance of any sort of communal existence. No doubt it was his rigidity that was behind that, his lack of imagination, some defect. He was an idiot, after all. Keletso was slowing. They were about to stop. There were many stops, with Keletso, many for setting the hubs for four-wheel drive, which was the drill whenever the road ahead even hinted at difficulty, many stops for tire-pressure checks, for piss breaks, and for meals, which were separate from the tea breaks. Twice Keletso had stopped in order to suck grass seeds out of the radiator grille with a drinking straw, a preventive against the engine overheating and seizing up. Keletso could be anywhere between thirty-five and forty- five. Ray felt inferior to this spare, angular, steady man whose personal hygiene practices put him to shame, his scrupulous toothbrushing in particular.

He had misread Pony, deeply. On that he stood convicted. And four, step four, had been Pony discovering that he was not made for the simple life, if he ever had been, and deciding to finance his future after his departure from Endure to the End by an act of embezzlement. He had taken not only the petty cash but another large sum lying around that had been destined for purchases of agricultural equipment and building materials, a loan. Kerekang had torn up the vicinity looking for Pony, without luck, because Pony had taken the money for the all- consuming central purpose of life in Botswana, cattle acquisition, and split to the opposite side of the country and in fact beyond, to his own cattle post at Pandamatenga, half of which overlapped into Zimbabwe, where he was unreachable. Pony was in fact Ndebele. He had misrepresented himself at St. James’s. A crash audit of the bursar’s office was in progress. The crime had crystallized Kerekang’s hatred of the national passion for cattle. He saw the drive to convert money into flesh in the form of cattle as violently deformative and out of control in Botswana, a position he had belabored in all his publications but with special intensity in his latest pamphlet, The White Ants, which Ray, after realizing Kerekang was its author, had read closely. If you had money, in Botswana, you turned it into cattle and cattle would multiply your money biologically, through sheer reproduction, and you could just watch it happen and watch your prestige grow at the same time. It was the herder mentality so utterly opposed to the townsman’s idea that you took money and put it out at interest or bought a machine to make products to sell. Of course the townsman ideology was in need of correction too, according to Kerekang, but it was not flatly insane, socially and otherwise, like cattlemania, where the decision to sink everything into beasts ran crashing against the facts of recurrent drought, disease, and the ecological unsuitability of most of the land area of Botswana for cattle raising.

So Kerekang had briefly turned Ichokela into a posse to hunt Pony down, and that had failed and the commune had failed. Earlier, Kerekang struck out at the passion for cattle through attacks on two ranches near Toromole, fenced ranches with titles widely considered bogus, owned by big men, absentees.

It was conceivable that Kerekang had meant his actions to be symbolic or at worst cautionary, gesticulations against the continuing spread of illegal commercial ranches in his area, where they had been late to arrive. His raids