Mortals by Norman Rush

Author:Norman Rush
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307789365
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2003-03-23T08:00:00+00:00

your Annabel

o brother snake I am awake

Ah me and my I like to die he hit my eye go home

ye fly

Thy alabaster cities gleam from

she to shining she

This was his worst effort. Thy should be thine. The glints from the dim past were boring. As a child he had thought someone saying He hit my fist with his eye was funny. He had known what he was writing as he was writing. The Bic was wrong. With the Bic he had to bear down too much. A pencil required less pressure and the results had been better, although still stupid. He got up to go.

Lately his appetite was problematic. His clothes were fitting more loosely. Keletso didn’t like it and was being maternal. Keletso wanted him to eat what he had just been handed. He wasn’t sure what it was. It was a mass. He probed it and concluded that it was a concoction of two kinds of dried fruit, apricot and pear, boiled soft. He was supposed to eat it with some of the warm box milk. He couldn’t.

Keletso was eating his own portion demonstratively. Ray was touched. It was possible that he could eat some, a little. They sat in the solid heat.

It was definite that government presence in the region was withdrawing, ceasing to be, where it had existed at all, in widely separated nodes, hamlets strung along the main north-south route. They were finding government offices closed, with no explanations for the closures posted. Government vehicle traffic was down to almost nothing. They were still seeing the occasional Wildlife officer. The last one they had seen had told them that the two fishing camps between Sepopa and the Caprivi Strip, on the western edge of the Okavango, had been closed, mysteriously.

Keletso was waving a shaker of cinnamon at him. He accepted it. Keletso wanted him to sprinkle cinnamon on his compote.

It was Ray’s turn to hold the umbrella support, but Keletso was refusing to relinquish it to him and at the same time making head motions indicating that it was more important for Ray to concentrate on eating. So he ate.

Keletso said, “Rra, someway you must phone up your wife, isn’t it?”

Ah, Ray thought. This was bold of Keletso. He was picking up that their radiophone contacts with Gaborone had stopped, just about. Clearly it worried him. They had gone four days without being able to find a link. Keletso was beginning to appreciate the strangeness of the zone they were in. So far Keletso hadn’t asked for any messages to be passed along when they had managed to make calls. He mailed something once. He was a bachelor.

Ray said, “You’re not married, yourself, rra, you told me.”

“Not as yet.”

“So, still, do you have any need to send word to anyone, when we phone next? Do you, rra?”

“Yah, well, no.”

“I apologize for not asking.”

“It is fine because in any case we must be returning back soon.”

Ray nodded vaguely. Keletso wanted to be reassured that this was going to end soon.

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