Norman Rush - Mortals

Cries, sounds of running feet, came from the roof.

“What should we do to help?” Morel asked.

Wemberg answered, “I don’t know. They sent me down here to watch the stairs, I think they said.”

Morel said, “Sir, I would like to examine you, if I can. Just quickly.”

“Then you guard the stairs,” Wemberg said to Ray, handing his rifle to him. It was an Enfield, single-barreled, a.458, very heavy. There was a bullet in the chamber. Ray didn’t want the rifle, but he took it.

“Do you have any more bullets for it?”

“No.”

Morel was busy. He was now looking into some of the rooms opening off the hall. He had gotten a torch somewhere. He was being decisive. His solidity had returned. He was giving orders. He wanted to examine some of the caryatids too, not only Wemberg. People were doing as they were told. Morel’s solidity had returned faster than his had.

Morel had found the venue with the most light and was creating an examination room there out of nothing. He had chosen the rearmost room on the right and was overturning wooden crates and pushing them together to make a platform to sit on or lie on and he didn’t care about the rubbish and crockery he was spilling out and kicking aside.

In a moment, he had Wemberg sitting down, taking his shirt off.

Morel was moving too fast for Ray to be helpful.

Ray stood watching. You have to be a weight lifter if you’re going to use one of these.458s, he thought.

Morel said, “You know what you can do?”

“What would that be?”

“You could go look for my bag. I need it.” Morel was shining the torch into Wemberg’s mouth. Morel’s face was bright with sweat.

“No, I can’t,” Ray said.

“What do you mean? Why can’t you?”

“I have to guard the stairs. I saw a stairway at the back.”

“Oh come on.”

“Also how can I see anything? These rooms are dark.”

“I need my bag. It’s more urgent. There’s not much light in the room but there’s enough. If you need me I’ll run in with the torch. Just shout.”

Someone handed Ray a burning candle.

“Good,” Morel said. “Find the interrogation room if you can. They went through my bag in front of me there.”

Ray felt like an idiot. He had an urgent mission, finding Strange News , and that coincided with looking for Morel’s bag, and he had been standing around witlessly objecting to things.

“I’m going,” Ray said. Morel was picking at cumbersome bandaging fixed across Wemberg’s upper chest. The strips were cut from towels. The inner strips were bloodsoaked. As he left the room, Ray heard Wemberg saying something about fainting, about Morel not worrying if that happened because it had happened before and he was all right. It was Ray who felt faint.

Ray decided that the first room on the left, as you entered the building, would be the interrogation chamber, based on his reckonings when he had been blindfolded, counting his steps. The door wasn’t locked, but it would only open so far, a few inches. He butted against it first with his shoulder and then with his rump. Obviously he was accumulating bruises without even knowing it. Everything felt tender. His strength was going. Two caryatids were watching, not helping. He beckoned to them and they all pushed together and the way was clear. Gum tree poles and furled carpets inexpertly placed against the wall on the side of the door had been the culprits. They had fallen over. He was in.

And this was the place. There was the table, Quartus’s chair, his own chair.

He felt proud of himself, being there again, looking around. He had to guard the candle and keep it from flickering out. He had to proceed slowly.

He was making out features of the chamber new to him, like the two iron hooks screwed into a ceiling beam directly above the chair he had been abused in. He approached the chair with the idea of sitting in it valedictorily. He couldn’t see why he shouldn’t. But the chair seat and the floor immediate to it reeked of urine. Someone had been beaten into incontinence there, someone else. He recoiled.

The floor was a debris field, a display of cigarette butts and empty soda cans and, here and there, roses. He was amazed, but only until he realized that the roses were wads of bloodstained tissue.

He felt like destroying something. He could at least kick Quartus’s table over.

But first he had to dispose of the hunting knife lying on the table. He didn’t want to touch it. He motioned for one of the two Africans who had entered the room with him to take it.

The old man came forward reluctantly. Ray pointed at the knife, more than once, but the old man remained hesitant, not taking it.

Ray introduced himself hurriedly. He didn’t catch the man’s name. He bowed and waved in the direction of the woman caryatid who was there, hanging back, but ready to help. He had been afraid when the old man had thrown himself against the door, imagining him shattering like a rickety character in a cartoon.

There was a correct way to touch hands, which was what the standard greetings gesture came down to. The most you ever got in greetings was a soft, the softest and briefest, handshake. You were supposed to hold the fingers of your left hand, slightly cupped, against the wrist of your right hand as you reached forward. He was overburdened. How could he give proper greetings? He had to drag the Enfield around with him and his right hand was out of action. It was being slowly entombed in melted wax.

He let go of the gun, for a start. He had to free his hands. He supposed that he could ask the old man to take charge of the gun for him, as well as the knife, although there was something odd about the idea. Now he knew why the great white hunters had always had gun bearers. Guns were encumbrances and they were heavy.

He didn’t like the idea of asking the woman to be his candle bearer, either. It was an unpleasant job. The wax was hot and annoying. He needed to move around with the candle so he could look into corners and there was something uncomfortable about the prospect of directing the woman to do that for him.

The gun was on the floor. He was stuck. The few small things he had to do seemed mountainous.

The woman came to his rescue. Her name was Dirang. She pried the burning candle out of his hand and set it securely in the middle of the floor, pressing it down into its own bed of soft wax.

Ray scraped the wax from his fingers as well as he could. Dirang was not a young woman. She was wearing a headscarf and a faded wash dress and she was barefoot. The old man was her father, Ray gathered. The old man was barefoot too.

He had more respect for the ability to go barefoot without complaining continuously than he had had previously. Because he had tried it lately and it hadn’t even been full-bore barefootedness because his feet had been protected by his socks. You stopped appreciating people being barefoot and what they were undergoing when you saw it so regularly every day, even in the towns, even in Gaborone. He remembered the first time he and Iris had seen barefoot white people, underclass white people, going barefoot like rural Africans, in some of the decayed areas of Johannesburg.

In any case, he was going to be more sensitive about it. Not that he had any idea what being sensitive about it would entail, unless he was going to pass out shoes and sandals, carry them around in a satchel. He would see. He had to remember that the naked sole of the foot would toughen up over time.

He was finding it hard to get moving, even though he had gotten away from his burdens for the moment at least. He wondered what it would be like in the world if enough people decided all at the same time to do nothing, not even be parasites, not even be mendicants. But then there was the question of why India didn’t collapse under the weight of its nonachievers, its gurus and beggars. But then he was thinking of an even more complete withdrawal than that. He was thinking of “Bartleby the Scrivener” becoming some kind of creedal text, the story of somebody who refuses to do anything. But he did know what he was going to do next.