Norman Rush - Mortals

He walked around the table to stand near her. He put his hands on her shoulders. Down , misery! he thought.

Why was this so sudden and urgent?” Iris wanted to know.

She and Ray were walking, at a good pace, to the embassy residence. They were hurrying because the invitation had come late and without much warning.

“You are verging on running, Ray. And it’s too hot to run. And it’s Sunday, it feels odd to be sprinting down the road on Sunday.

“And why is this a command performance anyway? Why is the ambassador suddenly back from Wankie after just leaving to go there, and why all these reminders about dressing appropriately for a memorial service? They emphasized it when they called the second time on the radiophone. Was that meant for me? Do I go around like a gypsy? What is all this pressure about? I know how to dress for a memorial service. I’m not an idiot.”

Ray said, “All I can tell you is this,” thinking in passing that here was a good title going to waste. A lot of good titles were going to waste …

“Will you complete your thought , please,” she said.

“All I know is that this is an emergency event and what the premise for it is. Walk faster. What I know is that the embassy has a problem. You know about Dwight Wemberg’s wife being killed last week, the accident. You didn’t know Dwight. He’s an older man and he was just coming to the end of his AID contract at the agricultural college when his wife was killed. They lived in Sebele, on the grounds of the college, and they never came into town much. Go faster. They stayed out in Sebele and were apparently pretty happy there. They got along with the locals. I should say that he wasn’t around Gabs that much, but Alice was. She was a volunteer with a church group that works with the bobashi, I think. She was rather a saintly person, one gathers.”

“I know who she was.”

“Part of the problem is the way she died. She was stopped well over on the shoulder on the Lobatse Road and she got out of her car and a CTO truck swerved over to avoid something and killed her, smashed her to death while she was locking the car door. And then the Ministry of Transport mishandled it. The driver was taken into custody and let go without being tested for alcohol. And then there was the statement saying it’s always better to get out on the side away from traffic, which is implicitly blaming her, of course. There were many stories about what the CTO driver was prudently trying to swerve away from.

“So anyway, Dwight was out in the bush, way out, at a project the college has in Hukuntsi. Melon cultivation. He was out of reach, out of touch for three days, doing his job. The rest you know. He comes back hysterical and discovers that they’ve buried her. There were no bad motives involved. I know she was very messed up. But somebody wasn’t thinking ahead and didn’t inquire into the law here, which says you have forty-eight hours to get a body out of the country, forty-eight hours only, after which the body has to be interred. Which leads to the rub. Which is that once the body is buried you can’t get it exhumed unless you go through an impossible bureaucratic procedure that can take you years. He wants to take his wife’s body home. The government won’t make an exception. He’s griefstricken and enraged at the same time and he’s made a number of scenes at various government offices, trying to get them to let him have the body, Alice’s body. He’s insulted certain senior people directly to their respective faces, which you cannot do. So it’s a tremendous mess and to top it off his contract is up and he’s going to be out of a job. He has his passport and his visa is good for another year. The embassy wants him to go home and let them handle the exhumation application for him but he doesn’t trust them. He’s off the deep end. He doesn’t trust the embassy and he’s right. He may not know something else that’s relevant, which is that right now our relationship with the Ministry of Health, which controls the exhumation, is shall we say negative, for other reasons altogether. But that’s another story. Or maybe Dwight does know something about this, now that I think of it.”

“How terrible this is. And he’s not young.”

“So, anyway, the event. It’s not exactly a memorial service. I think they’re calling it a remembrance. I knew they were going to do something, but they hadn’t decided anything the last I heard. This event is a psychological operation to convince Dwight to go home. You hear them talking about closure. It’s supposed to produce closure and get him the hell on the plane.”

“I wonder if I should’ve worn black. I don’t think so. I think this is fine.” She was wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress with a full pleated skirt. She had tried and rejected several sun hats as not right. Over her shoulders she wore a white lace shawl, rather sprung in places. She had a number of tortoiseshell clips in her hair.

“Everything black I have is in the party category. I think this is all right.” She had very little interest in clothes, which he loved in her. He was wearing one of the few safari kits he owned that had full-length pants, a rust-colored outfit he hated.

She was wearing half-heels, which she was unused to. They were now almost jogging. Somehow her sunglasses hopped off her face and he was able to catch them as they fell.

“Are we a team?” he asked her.

“We are,” she said. “A track team.”

They had reached the residence compound. They could slow up. There was a backup of stragglers ahead of them at the gate.

Iris said, “I put too much sunblock on. My face is slippery. These things happen when I’m pressed. I never want to be rushed like this again. I turn into a fool.”

“You never do,” he said.

They got seats in the next to last row of chairs protected from the sun by the canopy erected over the ceremonial area on the side lawn.

“This is an outpouring,” Ray whispered to Iris. “The idea was to get everyone so that Dwight can see how seriously his situation is being taken. They have shaken the sack. There’s a buffet after.” Even the seats behind them that were exposed to the sun were filling up.

Ray sat back. He liked the moment. There was nothing for him to do until this was over, in fact nothing he could do while they were there, waiting for the event to begin and end. Probably he would have liked being a commuter, if he liked this.

He counted the crowd. He estimated two hundred and ten, so far. There were tricks to crowd-counting. He would say that the attendance was about fifty-fifty black and white, which was excellent. The overflow crowd of standees was irregularly distributed among the gum trees and silver oaks lining the compound wall, wherever there was a chance of shade.

Last-minute improvisations were under way. The podium needed to be moved forward so that the speakers would be in shade as well as the listeners, so the first two rows were being emptied, chairs were being taken away, and a complex process of negotiated reseating had begun. They themselves were not going to be affected, so it was interesting to watch the negotiations. He could see Maeve, the ambassador’s wife, showing distress about the lawn, which was not robust in the best of times and which was taking a beating today. Iris had taken to referring to the lawns in their neighborhood as brownswards.

Almost all of the final arrivals were Batswana. Almost all the people who had gotten seats in the shade were white and almost all the standees were black. That hardly looked good. There were no more than nine or ten Batswana in the seated crowd, not enough.