Mortals Read Free Page A

love Africa, but not like the idiots who come over here and say Boy! Women with mountains of sticks on their heads. Look, an ostrich crossing the road!
    Nothing is more useless than dwelling on grievances, he reminded himself, feeling himself about to twitch in that direction. He’d earned the right to some satisfaction. The easy part of his life had begun unannounced like a dream two years ago and he had a right to enjoy it. No one could know about it, obviously, but he was living in a state of triumph, and had been ever since Russia and all its works blew apart overnight. Before that he had been part of a war. What he was in now was more like a parade. Of course nobody knew who he was, except for Iris who had to know generally. She had no details. But when somebody wrote
The Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire and Everything Connected with It
he would be there between the lines. He couldn’t generate the right metaphor for amazing 1989. He had an image of something like a metal claw sunk into half the planet suddenly disarticulating, but that was a weak image. Or it could be like this, he thought: You have a goliath of an enemy dressed in armor about to smite you who sits down suddenly and looks faint and when you open up his armor you find only his face is normal, the rest is sickly, mummified, and then he dies in front of you and it’s all over.
    This moment was what Iris was suddenly taking away.
    The event was too huge for any image he had been able to come up with. It would take someone as great as Milton to come up with the appropriate image right off the bat. He felt he had no time to think, lately. Iris was full of mental homework for him to do that he didn’t want to do, such as answering the question of why they had been so attracted to one another when they met—but it had to be
aside from
the purely physical reasons she knew he was going to overemphasize.
    He stood in the foyer. No one was around. He heard the kitchen door close. That was Dimakatso leaving for the day.
    He entered the chill bronze gloom of the living room, where the airconditioner was laboring for his benefit, obviously, since no one else was on hand and the room looked as though no one had made use of it that day. He walked over to the main double window. The louvers of the blinds were tilted downward, almost to the closed position. All the windows in the house were barred and tightly screened. He was fanatical about the screens. There was malaria nearby. He was the force behind both of them continuing to take chloroquine. Iris got worse headaches from the chloroquine than he did, so he understood why she resisted him. There was still no one.
    But I’m fine, he thought, trying not to relive a moment from the walk home that had made him feel fragile. Near the school was a rundown property whose occupants kept a goat. The goat had run up purposively to the fence as Ray came by and for an instant Ray had thought something monstrous was happening, because the goat’s tongue seemed to be a foot long. He’d been frightened until he’d realized that it was only a goat eating a kneesock. Iris could be asleep. He would look for her, softly.

2.  Iris
    R ay moved silently through the house, coming to the shut door of Iris’s workroom, her study. He knew everything about her study, every detail. He kept silent.
    She was in there, at her worktable, doing something with papers, airletters, probably. Three times recently he had come to the door in silence and been privileged to hear her reading aloud to herself from letters sent by her sister or, once, his brother. Privileged was the only word for the way he had felt. Obviously, reading aloud was a sign of loneliness. He couldn’t deny that. She animated her correspondents when she read aloud, bringing them to her. She read with feeling, theatricality, even. The transom over the door was always in the open position. He wanted to hear her read aloud again. There was something rare about