Norman Rush - Mortals

Poor Iris. Her lot had been to wait and watch patiently while he came and went, circulated, self-evidently doing nothing. She had known roughly what was going on. She had waited, abandoned, sitting in the horseshoe pitch on an upturned wastebasket, feigning interest in a fashion magazine, which had probably been for his benefit. There was no subject she hated more than fashion. Morel had gone. Kerekang and his urchins had gone.

He collected her.

“I am dying,” she said. “You abandon me.” They were walking home, although dragging themselves home would be closer to it.

She went on. “You abandon me. You aren’t supposed to.”

“I know,” he said.

“I should be used to it. I guess it hasn’t happened for a while because it hit me this time with a sort of shock, like the old days when it happened all the time. Which led to an understanding, you may recall. You would not let this happen to me unless it was an absolute emergency.”

“Which this was. Well, it classified as an emergency.”

“I won’t ask you what it was. You know I was out there in suspended animation for a whole hour. I considered holding the magazine upside down as a distress signal, would you have noticed? I won’t ask you what the emergency was because I know you can’t tell me.”

He considered violating the house rules. She would appreciate it if he did. And this situation was something she had undoubtedly put together for herself already.

He said, “I’ll tell you what it was. But please tell me you won’t ever do anything like that magazine trick. People notice things. Say you won’t.”

“I never have, I wouldn’t, but I wanted to. I wanted to hold the thing upside down, and wave it in the air every time you passed.”

“Good Lord.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Anyway, you noticed how Dwight was nowhere to be seen. Well, they have him set up for a flight home tomorrow at noon. He was supposed to go back to get his bags, which Maeve had packed for him, and then come back and stay the night at the DCM’s.

“He’s a missing person. And he didn’t just wander off somewhere.

“The theory is that he prevailed on somebody to hide him out so he can continue his campaign. He kept saying he wouldn’t leave Africa without Alice’s body, and he meant it, apparently.

“So now we don’t know where he is. He has a wide circle of friends, Batswana friends, and so did Alice. They need to find him right away, so I had to go and check some license plates. They know he left in a car. I had to check on which cars had been parked in a certain place and no longer were, if you see what I mean. I had no choice. There was nobody else to do it. Everybody else was tasked up.”

She was listening closely. She looked at him with an expression distinctly combining gratitude and surprise.

“Thank you,” she said. “I mean it.”

He thought, If she thinks this is the thin end of the wedge, she’s wrong …

“And all the wandering around mysteriously, what was that?”

“It was part of the deal.”

“I know, but it seemed so strange and protracted …”

“It wasn’t very strange.”

After a silence, she said, “I know who you report to, by the way.”

This didn’t surprise Ray very much. He shrugged.

“And I’m sorry for you. I knew before today, so don’t worry that it’s anything you did this afternoon. Anyway it’s the new consular officer and I pity you, I do.”

“Are you saying that because it’s always the consular officer? Because it isn’t always the consular officer.”

“No, everybody knows. He’s awful. All the people I know, know. I just look interested. I play dumb, don’t worry. Also if your previous boss was that very nice Marion Resnick, I’m sorry for you. What a contrast. You can confirm my guess by pulling your earlobe if you want to.”

“I can’t say anything about this.”

“But you do understand that everybody knows.”

“Maybe they only think they know.”

“Oh I don’t think so. But that’s all right.”

She stopped, spun against him, and locked her arms around him in a hard embrace, there on the street. Immediately he felt calmer.

He noticed that he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.

On impulse, he said, “Should we go someplace for coffee?”

She said, “I like the idea, but it’s Sunday. One of the hotels would be about it. I don’t want to get caught in the braai at the Sun, but we could go to the coffee shop. Everything else is closed, the regular places.”

The hotel they were nearest to was the Sun, but she didn’t love going there. She disliked it because the tone of the place was corrupted by the casino, the types it attracted. The Sun was off his normal beat, for obvious reasons. He was a schoolteacher. But when he had a plausible reason to go there, he went. He liked it for the same reasons that Iris didn’t. It was a sink of vice, so you saw temptation winning or losing, loss of composure, certain extremes.

They decided it would be a good idea. He was touched that she was agreeable to going. They changed their route.

She was splendid, fundamentally. They were going to the Sun for his sake. There were plenty of reasons she would usually prefer to avoid the Sun, the gauntlet of prostitutes you had to run in order to get in the door being one of them, but that was usually only a nighttime problem. There were the beggars who assumed that everybody leaving the Sun had broken the bank. There were the Boers who had come up for black sex where nobody they knew would see them. But it was the hawkers, the lace sellers, who upset her the most. There was a vendor encampment extending along the road paralleling the Sun’s frontage. The lace sellers dominated the encampment and completely controlled the choice area directly across from the entrance gate. Their lace goods were displayed along fences or on makeshift racks, or carried out into the traffic by the hawkers, hardlooking matrons, and unfurled for pedestrians and slower-moving cars. For occasional shelter from the sun the hawkers would repair to lean-tos crafted from sticks, cardboard, and burlap sacking. The encampment was a hell of dust, shouting, and carbon monoxide pumped out by the idling engines of vehicles pulled up on the shoulder of the road for the purpose of browsing. The ratio of sales to stopped cars was pitifully low.

Iris had a history with these people. She had tried to help them. The bedspreads and tablecloths and mantillas and runners being sold were items that united incredible craftsmanship with appallingly cheap materials. That was the problem. The shawl Iris was wearing constituted a case in point. She was forever fiddling with it, gluing up broken threads, tightening it up in one way or another. Iris had spoken to several of the lace-makers about the mismatch, and they had seemed to understand. As he remembered it, she had gone so far as to locate a source for better linen thread for them, and they had seemed interested. What was the point of constructing these intricate and potentially beautiful objects out of what amounted to packing twine? But there had been no outcome.

It occurred to him that Iris had spoken to the wrong people. There was a hidden government among the hawkers. There always is, he thought. He could delve. There was a top woman, who occupied the prime spot in the encampment and whose lace stand was shaded by golf umbrellas, new ones. She was probably the one to speak to, not that it would do any good. He could find out, if Iris wanted to pursue it. She liked to correct things. She thought the world was more pliable than it is. Every time she saw the cordon of prostitutes around the entrance to the Sun, her mind ran in the direction of what could be done for them. She had a general impulse toward social helpfulness that somehow never resulted in organized action, like working with the gleaners the way Alice Wemberg had, actually getting out of the house and going to the site of the iniquity. He knew what she would say about that. She would say, if they were ever able to discuss it honestly, that he discouraged it, in part because it would raise their profile, which was always to be avoided, and in part because … he needed her so inordinately. For example, he always wanted to know where she was and that wherever she was it was a reasonable place to be, a safe place. Because the fact was that without her the world would be unintelligible to him. That much was true.