Mortals (48 page)

“Here is a picture. You conquer a country and give the vanquished a clinic. Look around Africa and see if this seems familiar to you. No, conquer a country and then give it a clinic, and oh, also some
mission schools
, and some Christian bookstores to pump out cheap Bibles to change the children of the land into Christians. The conquerors in this continent and in South America and in my own country came pushing their crosses ahead of them.

“Look, go deep inside yourself, Kerekang. We have been tainted at the deepest levels, deep in the foundations of our minds. Say a man lives his life without regard to faith, as he thinks. But he hasn’t gone deep enough, because to his surprise, when he falters, lo, here it comes, a deathbed conversion.
I could keep us here all night with the history of deathbed conversions, amazing ones. A great poet writes
Loss of faith is growth
and the next thing you know he’s beckoning the priests to his deathbed. We are penetrated with it. It works invisibly and insensibly to direct our accommodation with the world’s evils. God help us!

“Belief is like this … It falls into three types and I ask you to tell me which kind of faith is more dangerous than the other.

“We begin with any society saturated with belief. I’m talking generically. What types of believers do you have? First, the devout, who believe everything up and down and in and out. They make us despair. In Kenya the devout bring death to the sick because the word
condom
shall not be spoken aloud, on the radio, anywhere. The same in Zimbabwe, with the fine Roman Catholic prime minister nodding yes in the corner. So let that stand as an example for us of a contribution by the devout.

“So then, the next type, the hypocrite, who believes only in himself but who pretends to believe in scripture and uses the blindness of genuine believers to satisfy his own desires. No need to say much about them and the harm they do.

“Ah but then we come to, what shall we call them, the half-believers, like the bulk of the British, the ones who say let the little ones believe that their classmate who jumped off London Bridge is in heaven and happy. Or like the half-believers who say it won’t hurt to have children mumble the Lord’s Prayer every day in school, if they do it under their breath. Which brings us to the half-believer at his most dangerous, the character who begins to feel inwardly that his beliefs are untrue but who cannot
bear
that feeling and who sets out to perform feats of loyalty to convince
himself
that he must in fact believe, like killing a doctor who gives women abortions. As their belief weakens they become terrors of the earth, mesmerizing themselves with acts that plunge them into peril, that spread ruin everywhere. They convince themselves through their transgressions that they must, in fact, be believers.

“In America the beautiful, in the mountain West, you have armed madness of just this type. They are under the odd impression that Jews … the ancient enemies of God, according to lying Christian scripture … control the federal government. Therefore government officers are limbs of Satan and therefore appropriate targets. We have already had one president of the country rambling on about the Second Coming. All these types, through the normal workings of the democratic system, are percolating up into positions of power, more and more of them.

“Listen to me, all of you! Do you love Africa? Then let me ask all of
you why Africa must be the greatest nursery of fools in the entire world. They are all here, all the churches, and you say we should allow it, no matata you say. Africans fought honorably against the Christian mental slavers, and for a hundred years the external churches were wringing their hands in disappointment at how little progress they were making. But they were relentless, and now they are back in force, with their radio nonsense, their cassettes, technology taken from the science they tried for so long to strangle. Turn on the radio and turn the dial and see how hard it is to find a spot where the moruti are not droning and droning and …”

“Baruti. Baruti.” Someone was correcting Morel. He had used the singular for preacher when what he wanted was the plural.

“Baruti, I meant. Thank you. Always correct me.”

After a pause, he began again. He was losing control over the pleading note in his voice. Ray didn’t like to hear it, for some reason.

“Rra, Kerekang my man, listen to me. I think I’m failing you. I don’t want to. I need to give you the essence, again. I think. Themba, I apologize for taking the floor like this, really. But I have to give you the essence …

“The essence is … is
not
just the misdirection of human effort, huge huge misdirection of human effort, you get with religion. That’s a
consequence
of it, and you understand that. It’s everywhere. It’s going to the stadium to pray for rain instead of putting the unemployed to work digging the system of underground cisterns that would make this country droughtproof, virtually—according to the author of the scheme who is sitting right here and who cannot for the life of him get a hearing from government, you yourself, my man.”

Ray knew about that. Kerekang had tried to interest the government in some grandiose self-help project copying the ancient Persian system of linked water-harvesting underground reservoirs, qanats—Ray even remembered what they were called, to his own surprise. Kerekang had presented the scheme as something that could be scaled up or down as much as anyone pleased. He wanted these qanats dug, and he wanted every roof and threshing floor in the country reconstructed for rain capture. No question he was right about the labor for it being there, floating around unused. That Ray conceded. Unused labor power was something that drove Kerekang into frenzies. He wanted to take a megaphone and organize the idle into corvées, immediately. He had been ridiculed over it, in the government paper, caricatured in just that way. The campaign against him had been merciless. Domkrag was seeing Kerekang as an irritant,
someone whose objections to social conditions meant more than the rare criticisms coming from the official opposition or the Botswana Social Front, with its discredited cadres of hacks and scoundrels and windbags.

“The essence is … it isn’t just misdirection, as I said …” Morel was struggling. He was grasping at the hope that a perfect formulation or statement of the case would salvage everything. There was desperation in his effort. He was trying to pull up and consult some inner checklist of talking points. Where had his smoothness gone? Sad business, Ray thought.

“And the essence is not … repetition. Repetition is an outcome. It’s a form of misdirection, like others. Every religion known to man prescribes repetition from birth to death … chants, mantras, hit your head on the floor seven times a day, fill up your life with repetitive acts and go into a state, same thing over and over, go to mass, burn up your mortal life with repetition. My God! Take one book, one set of texts, and read it
over
and
over
and
over
. Play with your beads over and over. Come to church, stand up sit down stand up, Lord’s Prayer, same prayer over and over ad infinitum. Say the Shema say Hail Marys. Somebody, not God, sent the Enlightenment, which is what I worship. No, this is the thing, that even if you manage to tear yourself free from religious belief, you come away with an appetite for repetition that may mystify you. It was taught to you, ingrained in you without your permission … Well, I won’t get into that.

“But to get to the
essence
, and forgive me, Themba, again … It, it’s difficult because it’s so penetrating, like a gas. We see the carnival and we flatter ourselves that we’re not part of it, but in our depths, we are.
Pervasion
is the word I want. It’s like, like the poison fumes coming up through the floors of the site and service houses in Old Naledi. Exactly like that.”

Ray pressed the pause button. He was vague on this, but it had something to do with a disturbance, recently, in Old Naledi, in the squatter upgrade project. He remembered. The practice of dumping a drum of DDT into the soil under the floor plates of the new rondavels going up, to discourage termites from coming into the structure, had gotten widespread. Kerekang had tried to bring the Ministry of Health into it. The cement floors were porous, despite what people believed, and the fumes came through, especially when it was damp, in the rainy season, and with the fumes came birth defects, cancer, the lot. The DDT was being purchased from suppliers with connections to one of the ministries.
Kerekang and his gleaners, his scout troop, or whatever they were, had stopped and damaged a truck making a delivery of DDT.

“My friend, my friends, listen to me. The essence of it is a voice, a residuum, a voice of thunder in some and in others a whisper, saying, inwardly, This you may think and This you may not think. And this will come, this comes, to feel natural to you. Think of it as a universal affliction manifesting at the strong end as murder, and mania, and at the low end as a peculiar enfeeblement, like an undiagnosed anemia. Man, we need something better to work with, wouldn’t you say?

“You can’t strike a match on a crumbling wall. You can’t lift a cheesecake with an iron hook.

“In a way the differences between religions don’t matter, because they are all debilitating in the same fundamental way.

“Not that the differences are uninteresting. Say you’re a little girl growing up in India. You’re going to grow up incorporating into your consciousness the realization that male gods are benevolent and female gods do evil,
unless
they are wives or consorts of male gods. Disease, possession, the hot season, pollution … blame the feminine. Put that in your psyche and suck on it for the rest of your life. A gas is seeping through the floor beneath our feet and we breathe it day and night. Self-direction blocked everywhere. Ah, and our common tragedy, our inevitable death, pay no attention, you will be reincarnated, you will become a being of light, you will sit on a crown, I mean throne, sorry. Of course here we concentrate on the Christian faith for obvious reasons. But it’s the same infantilizing gas everywhere, in different concentrations, the same universal fucking silliness …

“Kerekang my friend, you want to change the world, so you must understand all this when you go among your Christian friends.

“And by the way, what is this
going away
we’re hearing about from you? We don’t want to hear it. Where will you go where you can do more than here, with us? Man. Man! Have I not spoken strongly enough? Kerekang, faith is the carrier of obedience, and obedience, ultimately, kills. Look. For Christianity it goes like this. I’ll be concise. I’ll be concise.

“One, Jesus fails to get enough emunah out of the Jews to make God act, and he dies trying, under the mistaken impression that he is in such a close relationship with Abba that his hideous suffering would do it, and it doesn’t.
Fini
.

“Two, his followers, bless them, convince themselves he never died, really, and one particular character among them, Paul, decides that emunah
is only part of it, but that now what is needed is the added element of identification, mystical identification, with the ascended, supposedly, Jesus, who is actually about to return, Paul says!—and the point of life is to be among the elect Jesus is
not going to punish
. A shift. A distinct shift.

“He gets the gentiles in on it. And in Paul’s formulation what you need to do is avoid politics, forget about the Romans and slavery, just concentrate on unifying emotionally with this icon of perfect obedience, Jesus. I mean, come on!

“But then that fails too, no god descending.

“So, phase three. The church, Paul’s boys, picks itself up off the floor and stretches out the horizons and says yes, God is still coming, but the important thing is to not get into hell in the meantime by various kinds of disobedience. And then error mates with error and the progeny of error tear one another apart and here we are. Stupid cruelty, death, and terror. Just one example. Then I’ll stop. But.
Just look at this
.

“Communism, socialism, what have you, based on mistaken interpretations of a few lying lines in Acts of the Apostles about a common purse and so on, the common purse being in fact a mere expedient for driven people who knew,
knew
, the end of the world was coming and Jesus coming back and so forth, very interim, but expanded absurdly into a model for national economics, somehow. And
that
gets conflated into
socialism
, which frightens the horses of the conservative branch of Christianity into a killing rage embodied in the good Catholic, Adolf Hitler, who no one ever bothered to excommunicate, by the way. I won’t go on.

“Except to say this. This is the position. If I can just get this right.

“I have imagined a destination. A world purged of the
fictitious
. A place fully lit for the first time. I visit this place.

“I visit it in my mind, a place where the rude fact that
we are all dying animals
has transfigured every part of life, where the great lie of life eternal has been dethroned and every form of division between human beings
based on
that lie is a memory and nothing more. I have seen a world where the shadow of the imaginary father is lifted. It was only a shadow, but it weighed like lead.

“Don’t leave this, my man! Stay with us. Abide with me,
I have no faith
, my man, my brother.”

I get it, a paradise of reason, Ray thought. Was Morel insane? Was he serious? Did he have any
idea
of the strength of the forces against him? Did he not know what man was, churches or no churches? A cartoon of Morel’s paradise came to Ray, in which the citizens of this paradise dressed uniformly in tweed jackets with elbow patches and pipes walked
around stroking their chins … taking taxis where the dashboard shrines featured
The Thinker
instead of the jiggling Jesuses so common in Mexico but also now in New York, too … signs saying Irony Saves.

“I have no faith, but I believe in the pledge given by brother to brother, which I thought you gave to me. Well. So I thought.