Norman Rush - Mortals

But her remarks drew objection, actual ululations, in fact, from a new quarter, from a group of young Batswana women.

“Lobola, nyah! It must not be!”

Iris was distressed. So was Karen Denoon.

Karen said, “No, my sisters. I am not here to praise lobola. What I have said about it is only that defaulting grooms are not murdered in Botswana as many defaulting brides are in India …”

“Lobola, nyah!”

“And of course surely in the future world of women there will be no need for lobola, no need for impediments to the choices women make as to whom they shall marry …”

“I must speak, my sister.” This woman’s last name was Nteta, he couldn’t think of her first name, and she was a traditionalist. She was married to a chief.

“Yes, please.”

“I am happy to call you my sister but I must say on this … about lobola. Because with lobola you can see what kind of man is coming after your daughter, if he is sound or what-what. Because if you say no to lobola, your child can just go wherever about and say Oh this chap is fine but in fact he is a sham, a stick, a fine face with nothing behind. And there is nothing behind and he goes off and she is left with his children. We see this in every town …”

Ululating and hissing rose in intensity.

“Now you are putting sister against sister, as you see,” Mrs. Mukerji said, triumphally.

Denoon said something to Karen, who beckoned for a display easel to be brought up, which happened. A packet of photographic blowups was placed on the easel tray. The top photo, in color, showed a burned body in cruel detail. The room quieted.

“Ah me,” she said. It was heartfelt. She was fatigued.

“I’m not here to set sister against sister. We can disagree among ourselves on anything, and why should we not? I am here to say we have to look around us and when we see things drifting toward evil , drifting and drifting … we have to do something. What are we if we refuse?”

A lull followed. She could proceed. It went on. He had to look away from the exhibits, the worst ones. Iris was squeezing his hand to numbness. Karen Denoon was more than competent as a presenter. In passing she let it be known that this was not the presentation as it was usually given, because certain items of audiovisual equipment, including an overhead projector of theirs, had gone missing. Still, she managed to build a cathedral of pain for the audience, pain and shame. When it was over the crowd was pretty uniformly where she wanted it to be, he thought.

The Denoons were on their way to Zimbabwe the next day, and because her husband was in need of rest they would only take questions informally, and say hello to old friends, as they prepared to depart, at the front of the room. Ray wanted to stay put while the event dissolved. There were a few people present that he knew he should probably greet, but he wasn’t going to. The air in the room was thick, until someone opened a door to the outside and began fanning it back and forth. Ray knew Iris was seeing something in the Denoons, something not helpful to him. The Denoons were living a grueling life. After Zimbabwe, they were going to Kenya. If the Indian communities in East Africa were as organized against them on the dowry murder issue as the Gaborone community was, they were headed for trouble. They were doing good things, but he hoped Iris could at least see there was stress involved, and a certain lack of glamour. He wished them well.

Iris wanted to join the modest throng around the Denoons. He would wait, in his seat, but he urged her to get going before the Denoons disappeared. His problem, his assignment, revived, hard, as she left, beating in him like a second heart. It was the worst time for him to be away from her that anyone could devise, with Morel machinating, her feelings for Morel, her sister showing only the slightest signs of better coping … but at least they were at a point of rest with Rex, rest or standstill. It was impossible to know how long it would last. For the moment, there was nothing he or Iris could think of to do. They had called Rex three times, inconclusively. In their first two calls they had run up against an unhelpful Joel claiming that Rex was away and unreachable and promising that a callback would come when Rex returned. They had waited and there had been no return call and then they had tried again and gotten Rex and found him evasive, insisting that he was fine, his delivery breathless and oddly deliberate. Rex had declined to speak directly with Ray. Iris had attributed Rex’s unforthcomingness to discomfort over Ray’s presence in the vicinity of the call. And it had all concluded with Rex announcing that he preferred communicating by mail and that he would write soon. At the very end he had betrayed some agitation in asking if his manuscript had been put in Ray’s hands. When he had been told yes, the call had abruptly ended. In the body of the call, Rex had backed up Joel’s earlier story that he had been away, but without any details given, and he had added that he would be traveling again in the near future. Iris had seen Rex’s performance as more extreme than Ray had. She and Rex shared at least a little history of private phone calls, so she did have a basis for comparison. In any case, they were nowhere, they’d been pushed back. Iris had poised the receiver to enable Ray to overhear a good deal of what Rex was saying, which had been a painful experience. They were connected beings, he and Rex, and there was a baffled residue of what, abused affection, that the call had stirred up. His brother had, after all, made him laugh, growing up, when he wasn’t contriving to enrage him. That was it. They were being held off. There was a reason and Ray thought it was as simple as Rex wanting to preserve secrecy about his condition, if their darkest fears were right, and they were going to be.

Iris had managed to say something to each of the Denoons. It had been fleeting and she would be disappointed. The Denoons were in motion, Nelson via wheelchair now. The speed with which the couple felt they had to leave was adding to the telescoped, unclear tone of the ending. Their flight to Zimbabwe was a very early one, and Nelson was clearly tired. Karen Denoon loved her husband. She kissed the top of his head a couple of times as she drove him forward, into the night, toward the next battle. Ray closed his eyes briefly.

A young man obscurely familiar to Ray emerged from the crush around the Denoons. Who was he? He was a distinctive character, tall for a Motswana, willowy, with regular, handsome features and a discordant, aggressively meek, hunched presentation of self. Who was this character? He was wearing a vaguely sacerdotal metallic-looking black band-collar shirt with not one but two Shree Shakti buttons pinned to it, front and center. Who was he? He had a collection basket and he was the one who had gotten Iris’s donation. He was jittering around, hurrying, why? He was in signaling contact with two associates. He was wearing tight-fitting designer jeans with the price tags still fluttering, which Ray had heard was a current fashion trick obviously intended to show that the garment being worn was brand new. There was a market for stolen price tags. It was something that was going on. The collection team was gone, suddenly. It would come to him who they were. Iris returned to him, withdrawn.

The room was still emptying when the lights were snapped off, which prompted an outcry. The lights came on again for a moment. The room cleared instantly.

Outside, the scattered lighting in the adjacent grounds was also going off prematurely. This was harassment. Matches were struck. Ray always carried a custom penlight, agency issue, with an astonishing beam. He got it into use. Iris asked for it. She was concerned for the Denoons. She wandered around with the penlight looking for them and then gave up. A group collected around his penlight and Iris led the way to the car park, where, shortly, someone had the presence of mind to get headlight beams aimed back along the route from the administrative block. Everything was in order. They could make for home.