Norman Rush - Mortals

He felt heavy. He accompanied her while she urinated and cleaned up. She was very quick about it. She took care of herself not far from the car this time. He went off by himself, further off, to urinate.

They pulled their clothes out of the car and dressed hurriedly. Before he buttoned his shirt she stopped him and reached in to touch his chest, his sides, tenderly.

He felt leaden. Because he didn’t know what the message was, the message of what they had just done together. Or he felt leaden because there was no message. She looked ravaged, tired, not the way he wanted her to look after what they had done.

When he bent down to gather up the afghan she said, “Leave it.”

They were in Johannesburg and almost downtown. They were passing through the Observatory District, an odd, middle-class residential area laid out on abrupt hills that had formerly been vast heaps of gold mine tailings. The streets were empty.

Iris said, “What are we going to do?”

He said, “I’ll tell you exactly. You’re going with Morel and I’m going to be down here, alone. I’m going to find Kerekang. And then I’m still going to be here. But that’s not what you mean. What you mean is what are we going to do once we’ve done what we’re going to do and it isn’t working out so magnificently, when we have regrets, if we do. That’s what you mean.”

There was more, but he wasn’t going to go into it. There was going to be a school connection. He would be joining the new South Africa. There was a certain heroic vagueness to his plans that he liked.

She said, “There’s a certain heroic vagueness about your plans.” He was startled. It was a cruel reminder of the way their minds followed, tracked together, unless it was telepathy, which was nonsense. He must have used the phrase in some historical situation and it must have stuck in her mind.

“We have telepathy,” he said.

“Ray, I always wanted us to be in a school, set up a school together, you know. Or open a bookshop together. I’ve had that idea.”

“Right, an idea for going bankrupt.”

“Maybe not.”

“Believe me.”

“I’m so glad you’re out of the agency. It’s what I wanted. I hated it.”

“I’m glad too.”

“We’ll be friends,” she said.

“I know. Of course. Forever.”

“We’re having a sighing contest. We should stop it.”

“Okay, my dear girl. One last sigh.”

“We’re saying goodbye.”

“Not yet. In the morning.”

He was sleeping well, better than well. It was one of the things about his life that he couldn’t help wanting Iris to know. It wasn’t the kind of information that would be of interest to anyone else he could think of. His bed was a cot with a foam rubber pad on it. His blankets were rough. His bedroom, in fact his entire domicile, was a caravan, a small one, an aluminum antique held together by ingenious repairs and wholly unlikely to survive any effort to tow it to some other site. But it was clean. It was overclean. He couldn’t stop women, mothers and sisters of students in the school that was being organized, from coming in, whenever they liked, to clean up. The tiny galley was spotless. His shelflike table was polished every day. His water containers were always kept full. It was often cold in the caravan and he had been chided by the women for not making use of his paraffin heater. He would use it when he needed to. The cold wasn’t keeping him from sleeping and he enjoyed being as frugal as he could in the circumstances. His life was like his circumstances, it occurred to him. It was poor and cold and clean. He got out of bed.

He lit his Coleman stove and put the kettle on to heat his tea and wash water. He felt like writing. In the morning he felt like writing. So, when there wasn’t too much pressure to get over to the school, that was what he did. He liked writing by candlelight, in the dark mornings, but the mornings were getting brighter day by day and he was up a little later than usual and the light admitted by the peculiar lozenge-shaped windows in the sides of the caravan was adequate for writing. He was kept supplied with candles, too, by the women.

Outside it was bright and windy. A solitary slablike cloud was sliding away. Bleak fields of stubble ran northward toward a line of stony hills. Thorn trees grew in clutches at the far edge of the field. His caravan was beached adjacent to the derelict farmhouse now under reconstruction as a schoolhouse. A toilet block had been his suggestion for one of the first improvements. It was done. He was glad. He could use it and it was a step up from the pit latrine he had had to make do with at first. To the south, across a red dirt road that carried almost no traffic, were more fields sloping down to a depression where the shanties the farmworkers occupied were laid out near a chive-green pond. Something was going to be done to cleanse or rectify in some way the pond. He wasn’t sure what.

Back at his table, cleaned up and with a mug of tea at hand, he decided not to write anything else for the time being about his brother. He had already written too much. He was going to impose an arbitrary limit on each Life, maybe even a fixed number of words for each one that no one would notice or think of counting until later, when they were looking at the Lives for a second time. He liked the idea of some analogue of haiku being imposed on these lapidary biographies he was doing, going to do.

No, he was going to write to Iris. He got out his notepad. And he would write in pen, not pencil, proving to himself that this was not going to be a draft. Drafts were his enemy. He loved them. He had to write to Iris. He had gotten one letter from her during his time in Hillbrow. And then he had had to leave Johannesburg. And now he was where no one was likely to find him and he had to write her. There wasn’t a telephone within five kilometers.

He wrote,

My Dear Woman,

This letter will be handed to you when you don’t expect it. I have worked this out. I will use a courier. I don’t want to use the regular post for a while.

And when you get this letter I want you to destroy it, silly as that may sound.

He stopped writing. He had someone picked out to be a courier. And he had yet another prospect. He would have to make a trip back to Joburg to set it up. But it would work. One of the two would be fine.

How interested in me anyone connected with the agency may be I have no idea. But I have learned to be circumspect and I am being circumspect.

Where I am. I am in a safe place. I am in the bush. It’s rural. When I can let you know exactly where I am, believe me I will. I have my ways.

I can say this much about what I am doing. You know that the farmworker children got little or no education, depending on whether or not the owners wanted to put anything into some minimal teaching scheme. Now that whole arrangement is falling apart. The Boers are cutting their costs because they think they are going to have to sell up, once Mandela comes, which will be soon. So out in the countryside, education for farmworker kids is collapsing. So ex machina there is a unit in the ANC that is thinking ahead and wants to do something preemptively and which also has some money, from the Swedes. So by devious and clever means I got in touch and found people at St. James’s to vouch for me and here I am.

Now as to my life in Joburg, Hillbrow. I only stayed in the Johannesburger Hotel for two nights, after which I descended into hell. I decided I would try to live rough for a while, find a way to live in one of the squats. Every other building in Hillbrow is being squatted. I thought it would be economical, and that it would extend the time I could devote to looking for our friend. It was easy to get into a squat if you gave any sign that you had pocket money. I got into one squat with white down-and-outers and I was taken advantage of, shall we say. And then I left Hillbrow and went to Yeoville, which was as I understood it a sort of bohemian area and got into a squat and was taken advantage of. And then I returned to Hillbrow and got into a mixed squat. I was presenting myself as an alcoholic. I was believable. The whole time I was trying to find my way into the realm of people with something to sell, information to sell that might help me in my search. I got nothing. It was a mistake.