Norman Rush - Mortals

Dimakatso was at his shoulder, carrying the tray with his breakfast on it. She stood there while his meal cooled. He knew what she wanted. He got to his feet.

He said “Dumela, mma. O tsogile?”

“Dumela, rra. Ke tsogile sentle. Wena o tsogile?”

“Ke tsogile sentle.”

“Gosiame.”

“Gosiame.” He could sit down. The Batswana were so exacting about etiquette. Maybe it was admirable. It was better than the reverse, which Iris was going to not enjoy in the land of the free soon enough.

His breakfast was royal. There was streaky bacon, the only cut in that part of the world at all like normal American bacon, two strips of it cooked as crisp as it could ever be gotten to be. There was an egg over easy, and two heated buns. He had switched from sunnyside up to over easy earlier during their time in Botswana as a way of lessening the starkness of the daily encounter with the unnatural amber color of the yolks of the local eggs. There was a ramekin of chopped parsley he was expected to strew on his eggs. That was Iris’s idea. She admitted it was notional. She’d awakened from a dream with the absolute conviction that eating parsley at every meal would guarantee extreme longevity. They had laughed over it together. But parsley was making suspiciously frequent appearances as a garnish. There was a tumbler of pear nectar, not chilled. There was a lump of leftover potato rissole. There was brewed coffee.

He ate for a while, then reached for the paper. He was meant to read a review of a new book on Milton. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt was the reviewer and the author was a woman, Marianne Wormser, whose work he remembered seeing and dismissing years ago. Now apparently she had produced the book that would change forever the way Milton should be read. He steeled himself. The word magisterial would no doubt show up. So, Milton was the laureate of obedience, generic obedience. He had to get through this rapidly, because it was going to be painful in every way possible. At the heart of Western culture was this unfortunate epic of obedience deified, disobedience condemned. Milton was the subjugator of women in his own family, which no one disagreed with, although some allowance for the demands of a disabled genius frantic to complete his masterpieces might have been granted. Reading on, he thought: The old refrain: Milton says, “Service to God is perfect freedom,” and since God is male, need we say more … Women hate Milton because of Eve, the portrait of Eve, which they misunderstand, especially where her first thought on biting the apple is that she might someday be Adam’s equal and her second is that she might be his actual superior. What they fail to see in Milton would fill a book … Ah here it is, of course … Women are to blame for both sin and death, because a female, Sin, was born from Satan’s brain in the thought of rebelling against God, and seductive Sin was raped by Satan, and she gave birth to Death, so women are to blame for both Sin and Death … Ah she thinks Death is also a daughter, a female?… This has to be wrong … It’s absurd, a reading so tortured. Could Wormser be right that Death was female? He would have to check. It was something he should know like the back of his hand. How could he not love Iris, who was trying to arm him against his colleagues in case he had missed this? But he had no colleagues. Their minds were elsewhere. Little did she know.

He read more. Wormser restating the obvious … It was Satan’s rebellion against God’s appointing his Son as his vice-regent that had started the whole human ball of doom rolling. That was the premise, of course. He thought, Regurgito Ergo Sum, we have heard it before, goodbye. Next it will be the angel Raphael lecturing Adam and Eve against speculative thought … and here it is! The book had won prizes. The pillars of Milton studies were being shaken. Paradise Lost was reduced to symbolic recantation for Milton’s participation in regicide and republicanism plus fear and hatred and vilification of the female. Christian civilization was a galley ship, poor blind Milton was beating the drum for the galley slaves. Calumny never sleeps, he thought.

It was intolerable and it was wrong and, worst of all, it was shallow. Where had Marianne Wormser been publishing? What he would give to have time to rebut this shit! It was important that Iris not accept this cartoon as having anything to be said for it. He had to find time for that before she left. He had to. He could see where she thought Lehmann-Haupt had placed him in yet another category of error.

He thought, There are two Miltons, they only see one … Empson saw them both … The true man, the suffering man, is both rebellion and obedience, the ecstasy of apostasy and the hell of inevitable compliance … We are all of us Milton, rebelling and complying and rebelling and complying until we die exhausted.

I saw this thing , he wrote across the top of the review.

He got up. Milton, we are surrounded, he thought. Sometime he wanted to write a short story beginning with the sentence Day fell .

He was in awe over Marion doing this for him, with some awe left over for himself, his temerity in reaching out to Marion and asking for this help, his own ingenuity in setting up everything on the technical side of this secure connection. It was going to happen.

If he was tense, it was understandable. He was in a vacant house, crouched over the phone he was going to use, trying not to worry about the phone accoutrements he had put together. There was a certain amount of jury-rigging involved. It was twilight, which meant it was still morning where Resnick would be calling from, Washington or thereabouts. In a minute he would hear the voice of a civilized man.

He was sure he was safe. He was in an empty house for rent, in Broadhurst, which was a quiet district. He was showing no light. He was in the pantry off the kitchen and he could close himself in if there was some difficulty with the volume control on his descrambler unit, which was the only possible weak point in the work of art his technical setup constituted, in truth. Where he was positioned, he was out of sight. In the unlikely event of anyone noticing him in the house, he was a prospective renter sent there by an estate agent. He had some paperwork to justify his presence. He had the house key with the estate agent’s tag on it. All the utilities were on, but he had a torch in case the electricity went out, which could always happen. Explaining why a long extension had been spliced into the house-phone cord would be a little tricky in the event anyone made note of it. He would claim ignorance, be puzzled himself. Splicing in the extension had been the only way he could get the phone into the pantry where he needed to be. By the time anyone could get physically into the house he would have all his accoutrements and tools out of sight, packed away in his knapsack. He heard a crackle in the descrambler.

He could get mournful at the drop of a hat, thinking about Marion’s downfall, but he knew very little about why it had happened. He had been an imbiber, which in the agency was part of the culture, a little like the use of chewing tobacco in professional baseball. People were cautioned or sent off to dry out, and their careers continued. Marion. Marion was a red wine maven, a Bordeaux maven. He called his glass of wine red joy . Why had Marion fallen? Marion was in the agency, whereas he was of the agency, which was perfect because it meant he had nothing to fear from the wars of the ins and the outs back in Langley, the fights between the Brahmin liberals and the papist ultras like Casey, which he didn’t care about. And now he was hearing about a Mormon beachhead in Clandestine Services. Marion had run the station well, as far as Ray knew. And how could anyone hate a man who was a Scrabble master and a collector of ancient Roman brothel tokens, sprintriae , they were called. But someone had hated him and now he was spending his mortal life running a Magic Marker through sensitive passages in documents going out under FOIA. He was a clerk.