Norman Rush - Mortals

“What is the name of this thing we’re sitting on, this little mountain?”

“It is a knob, Pieter’s Knob. I can mark it on a map and give it to you.”

“And over there, then, what’s that?”

“Oh, that one. That one is Pieter’s Other Knob.”

Ray was puzzled, until Kerekang said, “I’m joking. I can’t tell you what it is. But I’ll find it on the map, too. I have British army maps, the best there are.”

“Don’t let me forget to get that from you. And another thing, I would like to have the names of the two men who were buried on either side of Rra Wemberg.”

“Gosiame, on the right it is Paphani Shagwa and on the left hand it is Mido Nthumo. I can write them down for you.”

“I’ll forget, otherwise.”

Kerekang had a pocket-size book in his hand and opened it and wrote the names on a blank fly. Ray knew what the book was. It was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury . He had seen it before. It had been visible among Kerekang’s other books on a surveillance tape Boyle had stupidly and pointlessly ordered him to make months ago, in the stupid past. Kerekang tore the fly out of the volume and handed it to Ray folded in half.

“These two men are from Shakawe. They were good friends, to one another and to me and to all of us. No one will know their names in Gaborone. But there you have them.”

He proffered a hand-rolled dagga cigarette.

“No thanks, I don’t like that stuff. And I wanted to talk to you about it, too, by the way.”

“Please, it’s okay. I know what you want to say. Don’t say it. I use it very little. It helps me, like a drink. When this business is over I won’t be using it. When this … all this …”

“I wanted to talk to you about that, too. Here’s the thing. Listen to me. You have to think about how to get away, get out of this. You can’t go on with it much longer.”

“There was no killing at first.”

“I know, but now there is. You can’t control something like this once it gets into killing.”

“There was no killing. Not even of cattle, not one beast, at first. We were trying to teach a lesson.”

“What lesson?”

“The lesson was for the big men who were bringing their herds into the sandveld and pushing the people out, the Basarwa and the Bakgalagadi and everyone, rra. We talked to the people. And then we began with the boreholes, to show we were serious. We blew them up.”

Ray said, “And some of the large owners withdrew. That’s where you should have stopped, stopped and reconsidered. You needed to bring your case to the capital …”

Kerekang laughed. He continued, “Then we opened some kraals. We let some beasts out. And we burned some kraals …”

“That’s when you should have stopped, before anything could be traced to you. There could have been attention paid by Gaborone. You could have stood by, blinking your eyes, saying how terrible it was, but that it was symbolic and stood for injustices still going on that needed to be taken up by government …”

“By Domkrag, those people! Goromente!”

“There were people who could have helped you.”

Kerekang was swilling dagga smoke, it seemed to Ray, holding it in, expelling it, taking in more. Ray wanted him to go on, say more.

Finally Kerekang said, “It’s bad, rra, what this has come to. I know it better than you. We knew of two cattle posts where there were great abuses of the San people working there. Terrible treatment, terrible. We went there. Beasts were killed for the first time. The word of it spread. Attacks we had no part of began. We had no control.

“Then, when we went for the San people, that was when we were robbed. A man stayed behind, Ponatsego Mazumo. You must know him. He came to us in Toromole from St. James’s. He was the devil. He took all we had, and what was it for, to buy cattle for his lands at Pandamatenga. The love of cattle came to destroy us through Pony.”

This was the moment Ray had dreaded. He had known it would come.

Kerekang was lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the one he had smoked down. It was too much marijuana at once. Kerekang needed to be moderate if he was going to indulge. He wanted Kerekang to be able to understand what was being said to him.

The moment had come to say what he could bear to about his connection to the disastrous appearance in Toromole of his associate Ponatsego. He had never generated a plan regarding how to put anything. The subject was too painful. He was tired but he had to act. He had to not incur Kerekang’s hatred forever or he would never be allowed to help him.

Kerekang was talking. He was continuing his narrative. Ray couldn’t attend to it until he had the key to what he was going to say. He had the sense of his mind grinding away mechanically to produce an object. A small object would roll down a chute inside his head and onto the back of his tongue and he would utter it.

Kerekang was almost declamatory in the way he was speaking. It was the marijuana, no doubt. He was explaining how things had gotten out of hand after emissaries, or agents, rather, of the cattle owners, attacked and burned Toromole, and then he was explaining how easy it had been to acquire weapons, how surprised he had been, how easy to get them from brokers reselling stocks accumulated in the Caprivi Strip after the Boers abandoned everything there. Money had come to Ichokela from sources he was not identifying once the fighting and sabotage had begun. That was interesting. In his old incarnation Ray would have been extremely interested in that. There was always somebody delighted to fan the flames. It was always in somebody’s interest. Now Kerekang was talking about an adventure. To escape pursuers they had been forced to cross Lake Lambedzi, Kerekang and his band, his original band, Lake Lambedzi being, as Ray recalled, a soda lake, a lake in name only, a depression in the earth covered with a crust of soda and with some acid hot smoking mixture underneath the crust. And the way they had crossed it was to follow exactly in the hoof- or footmarks of cattle that had made it across and avoid deviating and going near the carcasses of the drowned cattle who had gotten it wrong. The crust was uneven. And certain of their party had gotten off the track and fallen down up to their waists in smoking brine, although brine was just what he was calling it, it was acid. And they had pulled their comrades up and continued. And they had gotten across, all of them. Kerekang was repeating himself. There was some poetic thing there, in this account. Kerekang was getting into a mythic style. I have to stop him, Ray thought. He had to stop him before he lost his strength to go into the case of Pony. And he didn’t want to stop Kerekang because there were threads or filaments between them only he was thinking about, Kerekang who loved Tennyson but was engaged in rough justice, call it, and he himself with Milton and now the hell he was in and had helped create, to be fair about it. So he wanted two things at the same time, as usual.

He didn’t like doing it but he said, “Stop, I have to tell you something.”

Kerekang was still talking about Lake Lambedzi. Ray touched him, shook him.

Ray said, “I have to tell you something.” He hoped Kerekang would be ready to hear him, instead of floating in the great moments of his campaign, the top ten moments, which it looked like he was doing, thanks to the great weed, dagga. Iris had saved Ray from alcohol.

Ray went on. “I have to tell you this, I knew Pony at my school and I have to tell you this, rra, I was his friend …”

Kerekang was still declaiming.

Ray was proceeding still not knowing what he was going to say.

Ray said, “It was through me that Pony met you.”

“I can’t remember it,” Kerekang said. He was puzzled.