Norman Rush - Mortals

The microphone gave a keening sound. The ambassador made a prayerful gesture, his head bent briefly, then resumed his manic smile of welcome. He couldn’t help himself. He was an odd man. He was an awkward man. Ray liked the ambassador because he sensed that the man was having fun. He was a political appointee, here for the status that having been an ambassador gave you for the rest of your life. He would go back to his former life still odd. There was something carefree about him, and it showed in his odd, abrupt, ringing, undiplomatic laugh. Ray had seen Batswana flinch at that overwhelming laugh. He was certain that Van Ness found Africa funny. And the ambassador was transactionally odd in other ways. He was a perfectly amiable character, but when he reacted to something said to him there was often a lag in his response that could be unnerving. He tended to consider you with a long stare, while he thought, and when he responded it was normally sensible or reassuring or whatever was required in the situation. But in the meantime you had been unnerved. Ray liked the idea of patently odd men holding positions of power. He was interested in trying to scope out what it was in them that allowed them to escape the marginalizing juggernauts that crush the standard odd man, the average odd man. At some point in his past Van Ness had worked with a professional to rid himself of his Texas accent. This struck Ray as a strange thing to have done, since presumably his cronies in Galveston all spoke traditionally. Yet he’d bothered. The result was a neutral, actually foreign-sounding style of speech. His wife Maeve still had her accent. They had been married since high school. So when they were together there was always an unspoken question hovering, which was If you’re both from Galveston why does one of you sound like you learned English in central Europe? Whatever the prescription was for the lenses in Van Ness’s glasses, it had the effect of magnifying his eyes, which you couldn’t help but notice when he was staring at you.

There was another balk. The ambassador was waiting now as his wife tenderly escorted Dwight Wemberg to the seat reserved for him in the front row. Ray had a proviso to his inclination to like the odd in positions of power. They had to be odd but decent. Boyle was fairly odd, but he was not a decent person. Maeve Van Ness was the reverse of odd. She was a hive of industry. She never rested. She was a rather hunched woman with a hard, intelligent face and stiff, bright blond hair. She had her hands full with Wemberg, who seemed distraught and recalcitrant.

The ambassador repeated his prayerful gesture, then startled the gathering with one of his laughs, a blasting, baffled laugh prompted by Maeve dumbfoundedly standing and sitting and standing again as Dwight Wemberg got rigidly up and left his seat to make his way around to the rear of the seated crowd and over to a place among the standees at the wall. Most of the expatriates sat frozen, watching Wemberg talking to himself, saying something over and over.

This is somebody’s fault, Ray thought. The embassy nurse began sidling along through the crowd at the wall in order to be nearer Wemberg. Iris dug her elbow into Ray’s side to make him turn back around.

It was going exactly as Ray had known it would, excruciatingly. The eulogies had been wooden albeit fulsome. The thing was lifeless. Everyone was reading from prepared texts. The order of presentation was a shambles. No one had come from Health. The choir of five young women provided by the Anglicans was being overworked in attempts to buy time for speakers or guests not yet on hand. Their repertory was small. They had sung “Ke Bona,” twice. Ray wondered what the model was for the slow, strained, nasal style that Batswana female choirs uniformly employed. Nothing was going well. The podium would stand unoccupied for disconcertingly long moments while, obviously, the ambassador was inside the residence imprecating, trying to get people to make something come out right. Twice Ray detected raised voices coming from the residence when the ambassador was away from the ceremony. Then there had been some sideplay around the discovery that the two Portosans hired for the occasion had been delivered in a locked condition and that the man with the power to unlock them was missing. Food had been brought out prematurely and then taken back, but not before a presence of hornets had been achieved. Worst of all were the cooking odors washing out toward them. What must have happened was that the crowd to be fed was larger than anyone had anticipated and so extra frozen samoosas had been scared up and these were now being deep-fat-fried. The light had gone dull. A high, milky haze was overspreading the sky.

“What’s happening?” Iris asked. A murmur was passing through the assembly.

Ray didn’t know.

There would be a substitute speaker, Doctor Kerekang, representing the gleaners, a project very close to Alice Wemberg’s heart, as the ambassador put it.

Ray started to explain more about the gleaners to Iris, not getting much beyond the basic facts — that they were destitutes who lived at and, actually, on the municipal rubbish tip, and that most of them were solitary homeless children but that there were women and a few whole families among them, too.

Kerekang incarnate was the medium-tall, spare, serious man Ray had expected him to be, but there was more to him. There was something immediate about him. And he had something else … aplomb. That would be the word for it. He was at the podium, still collecting himself after self-evidently being hustled over to perform without notice, but he was already taking control of the restive audience. Ray wondered if women would find Kerekang attractive. He thought probably yes. Kerekang’s hair was fuller than in his photograph, fuller but not to the point of bushiness, and it was grayer. His hairline was deeper at the temples, also. But there was something confident about his hairstyle, or actorly.

Ray realized that he was full of expectation, for no obvious reason. He thought, There is very little magnificence in life, at least in my life, by which I mean external magnificence such as being there when the greatest actor in the English-speaking world gives his greatest Hamlet or when Nijinsky stays so long at the top of one of his leaps that people in the audience gasp … Or being present for the Gettysburg Address, although the story is that Lincoln got almost no applause. When he thought of himself as being ready for something magnificent, he didn’t know exactly what he meant, because 1989 and 1990 had been magnificent, the Berlin Wall coming down, all of that had been magnificent, but in a generic way, and then, of course, he hadn’t been present, he had been in Africa. And Mandela’s release and everything following that, up to CODESA, all of that had been wonderful, and he had been closer, physically, to those events, but still he hadn’t been in the Republic, he’d been in Botswana, onlooking from there, from where he was, from where he still was. And of course he had Iris, had Iris and her love, but that was in a different category. It was a given. It was lifelong. It wasn’t climactic, he guessed he meant. The truth was that he didn’t know what he meant. But he knew that wherever he was, Boyle was unhappy right now. Boyle was away from his seat.

Kerekang lifted his hand, half in greeting and half as a signal that he should be given full attention. When he had that, he beckoned softly and then urgently in the direction of the gate. The hush he had created deepened. Eight ragged children, bobashi, their eyes downcast, filed in. Three of them were shirtless. Kerekang directed them to stand together to his right, a little back. Ray didn’t know what Kerekang was doing but he suspected it was brilliant. There was a phrase in Setswana that meant waking people up to the truth of a situation and it translated, if he remembered correctly, as Throwing salt in their eyes. He had invited poverty to come to the feast. Good, Ray thought. White or black, everyone present had more or less escaped poverty, except for the bobashi, and poverty was alive in Botswana, getting stronger, this was good! It had been come-as-you-are for the bobashi. There had plainly been no time for them to be gotten into proper dress, what would be considered proper dress for this, if indeed that could even have been done.