A Burnt Out Case (4 page)

On the other shore the great trees, with roots above the ground like the ribs of a half-built ship, stood out over the green jungle wall, brown at the top like stale cauliflowers. The cold grey trunks, unbroken by branches, curved a little this way and a little that, giving them a kind of reptilian life. Porcelain-white birds stood on the backs of coffee-coloured cows, and once for a whole hour he watched a family who sat in a pirogue by the bank doing nothing; the mother wore a bright yellow dress, the man, wrinkled like bark, sat bent over a paddle he never used, and a girl with a baby on her lap smiled and smiled like an open piano. When it was too hot to sit any longer in the sunlight he joined the doctor at the hospital or the dispensary, and when that was over half the day had safely gone. He no longer felt nausea from anything he saw, and the bottle of ether was not required. After a month he spoke to the doctor.

‘You are very short-handed, aren’t you, for dealing with eight hundred people?’

‘Yes.’

‘If I could be of any use to you – I know I am not trained . . .’

‘You will be leaving soon, won’t you?’

‘I have no plans.’

‘Have you any knowledge of electro-therapy?’

‘No.’

‘You could be trained, if you were interested. Six months in Europe.’

‘I don’t want to return to Europe,’ Querry said.

‘Never?’

‘Never. I am afraid to return.’ The phrase sounded in his own ears melodramatic and he tried to withdraw it. ‘I don’t mean afraid. Just for this reason and that.’

The doctor ran his fingers over the patches on a child’s back. To the unpractised eye the child looked perfectly healthy. ‘This is going to be a bad case,’ Doctor Colin said. ‘Feel this.’

Querry’s hesitation was no more perceptible than the leprosy. At first his fingers detected nothing, but then they stumbled on places where the child’s skin seemed to have grown an extra layer. ‘Have you no kind of electrical knowledge?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Because I’m expecting some apparatus from Europe. It’s long overdue. With it I will be able to take the temperature of the skin simultaneously in twenty places. You can’t detect it with your fingers, but this nodule here is warmer than the skin around it. I hope one day to be able to forestall a patch. They are trying that in India now.’

‘You are suggesting things too complicated for me,’ Querry said. ‘I’m a man of one trade, one talent.’

‘What trade is that?’ the doctor asked. ‘We are a city in miniature here, and there are few trades for which we could not find a place.’ He looked at Querry with sudden suspicion. ‘You are not a writer, are you? There’s no room for a writer here. We want to work in peace. We don’t want the press of the world discovering us as they discovered Schweitzer.’

‘I’m not a writer.’

‘Or a photographer? The lepers here are not going to be exhibits in any horror museum.’

‘I’m not a photographer. Believe me I want peace as much as you do. If the boat had gone any farther, I would not have landed here.’

‘Then tell me what your trade is, and we will fit you in.’

‘I have abandoned it,’ Querry said. A sister passed on a bicycle busy about something. ‘Is there nothing simple I can do to earn my keep?’ he asked. ‘Bandaging? I’ve had no training there either, but it can’t be difficult to learn. Surely there has to be someone who washes the bandages. I could release a more valuable worker.’

‘That is the sisters’ province. My life here would not be worth living if I interfered with their arrangements. Are you feeling restless? Perhaps next time the boat calls you could go back to the capital. There are plenty of opportunities in Luc.’

‘I am never going to return,’ Querry said.

‘In that case you had better warn the fathers,’ the doctor said with irony. He called to the dispenser, ‘That’s enough. No more this morning.’ While he washed his hands in spirits he took a look at Querry over his shoulder. The dispenser was shepherding the lepers out and they were alone. He said, ‘Are you wanted by the police? You needn’t be afraid of telling me – or any of us. You’ll find a leproserie just as safe as the Foreign Legion.’

‘No. I’ve committed no crime. I assure you there’s nothing of interest in my case. I have retired, that’s all. If the fathers don’t want me here, I can always go on.’

‘You’ve said it yourself – the boat goes no farther.’

‘There’s the road.’

‘Yes. In one direction. The way you came. It’s not often open though. This is the season of rains.’

‘There are always my feet,’ Querry said.

Colin looked for a smile, but there was none on Querry’s face. He said, ‘If you really want to help me and you don’t mind a rough journey you might take the second truck to Luc. The boat may not be back for weeks. My new apparatus should have arrived by now in the town. It will take you about eight days there and back – if you are lucky. Will you go? It will mean sleeping in the bush, and if the ferries are not working you’ll have to return. You can hardly call it a road,’ he went on; he was determined that the Superior should not accuse him of persuading Querry to go. ‘It’s only if you want to help . . . you can see how impossible it is for any of us. We can’t be spared.’

‘Of course. I’ll start right away.’

It occurred to the doctor that perhaps here too was a man under obedience, but not to any divine or civil authority, only to whatever wind might blow. He said, ‘You could pick up some frozen vegetables too and some steak. The fathers and I could do with a change of diet. There’s a cold storage at Luc. Tell Deo Gratias to fetch a camp-bed from my place. If you put a bicycle in the back you could spend the first night at the Perrins’, but you can’t reach them by truck. They are down by the river. Then there are the Chantins about eight hours farther on – unless they’ve gone home, I can’t remember. And last of all there’s always Rycker at the second ferry, about six hours from Luc. You’d get a warm welcome from him, I’m sure of that.’

‘I’d rather sleep in the lorry,’ Querry said. ‘I’m not a sociable man.’

‘I warn you, it’s not an easy journey. And we could always wait for the boat.’

He paused a while for Querry to answer, but all that Querry found to say was, ‘I shall be glad to be of use.’ The distrust between them deadened intercourse; it seemed to the doctor that the only sentences he could find to speak with any safety had been preserved for a long time in a jar in the dispensary and smelt of formaldehyde.

II

The river drew a great bow through the bush, and generations of administrators, who had tried to cut across the arc with a road from the regional capital of Luc, had been defeated by the forest and the rain. The rain formed quagmires and swelled the tributary streams until the ferries were unusable, while at long intervals, spaced like a layer of geological time, the forest dropped trees across the way. In the deep bush trees grew unnoticeably old through centuries and here and there one presently died, lying half collapsed for a while in the ropy arms of the lianas until sooner or later they gently lowered the corpse into the only space large enough to receive it, and that was the road, narrow like a coffin or a grave. There were no hearses to drag the corpse away; if it was to be removed at all it could only be by fire.

During the rains no one ever tried to use the road; a few
colons
in the forest would then be completely isolated unless, by bicycle, they could reach the river and camp there in a fisherman’s village until a boat came. Then, when the rains were over, weeks had still to pass before the local government could spare the men to build the necessary fires and clear the road. After a few years of complete neglect the road would have disappeared completely and forever. The forest would soon convert it to a surface crawl, like the first scratches on a wall of early man, and there would remain then reptiles, insects, a few birds and primates, and perhaps the pygmoids – the only human beings in the forest who had the capacity to survive without a road.

The first night Querry stopped the truck at a turn in the road where a track led off towards the Perrins’ plantation. He opened a tin of soup and a tin of Frankfurters, while Deo Gratias put up a bed for him in the back of the truck and lit the paraffin cooker. He offered to share his food with Deo Gratias, but the man had some mess of his own ready prepared in a pot wrapped in an old rag, and the two of them sat in silence with the truck between them as though they were in separate rooms. When the meal was over Querry moved round the bonnet with the intention of saying something to Deo Gratias, but the ‘boy’ by rising to his feet made the occasion as formal as though Querry had entered his hut in the village, and the words, whatever they were, died before they had been spoken. If the boy had possessed an ordinary name, Pierre, Jean, Marc, it might have been possible to begin some simple sentence in French, but Deo Gratias – the absurd name stuck on Querry’s tongue.

He walked a little way from the truck, because he knew how far he was from sleep, up the path which led eventually to the river or to the Perrins, and he heard the thud of Deo Gratias’s feet behind him. Perhaps he had followed with the idea of protecting him or perhaps because he feared to be left alone in the dark beside the truck. Querry turned with impatience because he had no wish for company, and there the man stood on his two rounded toeless feet, supported on his staff, like something which had grown on that spot ages ago and to which people on one special day made offerings.

‘Is this the path to the Perrins?’

The man said yes, but Querry guessed it was what Africans always replied to a question couched like that. He went back to the truck and lay down on the camp-bed. He could hear Deo Gratias settling himself for the night under the belly of the truck, and he lay on his back, staring up at where the stars ought to have been visible, but the gauze of the mosquito-net obscured them. As usual there was no silence. Silence belonged to cities. He dreamt of a girl whom he had once known and thought he loved. She came to him in tears because she had broken a vase which she valued, and she became angry with him because he didn’t share her suffering. She struck him in the face, but he felt the blow no more than a dab of butter against his cheek. He said, ‘I am sorry, I am too far gone, I can’t feel at all, I am a leper.’ As he explained his sickness to her he awoke.

This was a specimen of his days and nights. He had no trouble beyond the boredom of the bush. The ferries worked; the rivers were not in flood, in spite of the rain which came torrentially down on their last night. Deo Gratias made a tent over the back of the truck with a ground-sheet and lay down himself as he had done every night in the shelter of the chassis. Then the sun was out again and the track became a road a few miles out of Luc.

III

They searched a long time for the doctor’s apparatus before they found a clue. The cargo department of Otraco knew nothing of it and suggested the customs, which was no more than a wooden hut by a jetty in the tiny river port, where bat-eared dogs yapped and ran. The customs were uninterested and uncooperative, so that Querry had to dig out the European controller who was having an after-lunch siesta in a block of blue and pink modern flats by a little public garden where no one sat on the hot cement benches. The door of the apartment was opened by an African woman, tousled and sleepy, who looked as though she had been sharing the controller’s siesta. The controller was an elderly Fleming who spoke very little French. The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life. Querry had already become so accustomed to the bush-life that this man seemed to belong to another age and race than his own. The commercial calendar on the wall with a coloured reproduction of a painting by Vermeer, the triptych of wife and children on the locked piano, and a portrait of the man himself in a uniform of antique cut belonging to an antique war were like the deposits of a dead culture. They could be dated accurately, but no research would disclose the emotions that had once been attached to them.

The controller was very cordial and confused, as though he were anxious to hide with hospitality some secret of his siesta; he had forgotten to do up his flies. He invited Querry to sit down and take a glass, but when he heard that Querry had come from the leproserie he became restless and anxious, eyeing the chair on which Querry sat. Perhaps he expected to see the bacilli of leprosy burrowing into the upholstery. He knew nothing, he said, of any apparatus and suggested that it might be at the cathedral. When Querry stopped on the landing outside he could hear the tap running in the bathroom. The controller was obviously disinfecting his hands.

True enough the apparatus some time ago had been lodged at the cathedral, although the priest in charge, who had assumed the crates contained a holy statue or books for the fathers’ library, at first denied all knowledge. They had gone off by the last Otraco boat and were somewhere stuck on the river. Querry drove to the cold storage. The hour of siesta was over, and he had to queue for string-beans.

The high vexed colonial voices, each angry about something different, rose around him, competing for attention. It seemed to him for a moment that he was back in Europe, and his shoulders instinctively hunched through fear of recognition. In the crowded store he realized how on the river and in the streets of the leproserie there had been a measure of peace. ‘But you simply must have potatoes,’ a woman’s voice was saying. ‘How dare you deny it? They came in on yesterday’s plane. The pilot told me.’ She was obviously playing her last card, when she appealed to the European manager. ‘I’m expecting the Governor to dinner.’ Surreptitiously the potatoes emerged, ready wrapped in cellophane.

A voice said, ‘You are Querry, aren’t you?’

He turned. The man who spoke to him was tall, stooping, and overgrown. He was like the kind of plant people put in bathrooms, reared on humidity, shooting too high. He had a small black moustache like a smear of city soot and his face was narrow and flat and endless, like an illustration of the law that two parallel lines never meet. He put a hot restless hand on Querry’s arm. ‘My name is Rycker. I missed you the other day when I called at the leproserie. How did you get over here? Is a boat in?’