QB VII (7 page)

“What I mean,” Lambert soothed, “is that there is nothing here that we chaps can’t bandy about a bit and simply overcome.”

“That depends on Dr. Kelno.”

“Let’s take a look here,” Lambert said. “First, there’s the matter of the okra fields proposed for the Ulus on the lower Lemanak.”

“What about the okra fields?” Adam asked.

“According to this, it seems you recommended the planting of okra fields at the fifteen long houses under Chief Bintang, and you brought seeds and pods to them for that purpose.”

“Guilty as charged,” Adam said.

L. Clifton-Meek smirked and rattled his skinny fingers on Lambert’s desk. “Okra is a malvaceous shrub, a planted crop that falls quite clearly under the agricultural commissioner. It has nothing to do with health or medicine,” he bureaucrated.

“Do you believe that okra as an augment to their present diet would be good for their health or bad for their health?” Adam asked.

“I shall not be entrapped with your word games, Doctor. Land usage is clearly in my department, sir, clearly. Right here on page seven hundred and two of the regulations,” and he read the long rule as Jack Lambert stifled a smile. Clifton-Meek temporarily closed the book filled with handy markers. “I am, sir, making a survey for the Sarawak-Orient Company for proper land use in the Second Division for the possibility of rubber plantations.”

“In the first place,” Adam said, “the Ulus can’t eat rubber. In the second place I don’t know how you can make a survey if you haven’t once traveled the Lemanak River.”

“I have maps and other methods.”

“Is it your recommendation then that okra fields should not be planted?” Adam asked.

“Yes, Lionel,” Lambert interjected, “just what do you propose?”

“I am only saying,” he retorted, with voice rising, “the book clearly defines the duties of both our offices. If the medical officer just pops about taking matters into his own hands chaos will result.”

“May I say candidly that if you were to take a trip down the Lemanak, as I have proposed to you on numerous occasions, common sense would show you there is no land available for rubber plantations. What you would know is that there is universal malnutrition due to insufficient farm land. And as for the rest of your ridiculous report only an ass would protest my purchase of water buffalos and recommending new fishing methods.”

“The regulations clearly state that the agricultural officer is the sole judge in these matters,” Clifton-Meek screamed with veins popping in his neck and his ruddy cheeks becoming crimson.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Lambert said, “we are all officers of the crown here.”

“The crime I seem to have committed,” Adam Kelno said, “is to try to better the lives of my patients and see them live longer. Why don’t you take your report, Clifton-Meek, and shit all over it.”

Clifton-Meek sprung up. “I demand this report be sent to the capital, Mr. Lambert. It is a pity we have to put up with certain foreign elements who do not understand the meaning of orderly administration. Good day, sir.”

A disgusted silence followed Clifton-Meek’s departure. “Never mind, don’t say it,” Lambert said filling a glass with water from his carafe.

“I will make a collection of native omens, taboos, gods, spirits, rituals, and rules of His Majesty’s Foreign Office regulations, and I’ll call it
Handbook for Idiots.
The Meeks shall inherit the Empire.”

“For some strange reason we’ve managed to muddle through for almost four centuries,” Lambert said.

“Down the river they fish with spears, hunt with blow-guns, and plow their fields with sticks. Once you get an idea through their savage skulls there is always a Lionel Clifton-Meek to bury it in his paper heap.”

“Well now, Kelno, you’ve only been out here awhile. You ought to know things go slowly. No use of all this tugging and hauling. Besides, most of the Ibans are nice chaps once you get on to the idea they have their own way of doing things.”

“Savages, damned savages.”

“Do you really think they’re savages?”

“Well, what else is there to think?”

“That’s rather strange coming from you, Kelno.”

“What do you mean, Lambert?”

“We don’t pry into a man’s past here but you were a prisoner in the Jadwiga Concentration Camp. What I mean to say is, having gone through all that in Poland, done by an allegedly civilized people, it is rather difficult to really say just who are the savages in this world.”

10

F
OR THE MOST PART
, Adam Kelno remained aloof of the small, stifling, repetitious, and dull clique of British civil servants at Fort Bobang.

His one meaningful friendship was with Ian Campbell, a craggy Scotsman who supervised a cooperative of small rubber plantations with headquarters at Fort Bobang to oversee the warehousing and shipping operation. Campbell was an unpretentious man, yet steeped in the classics and literature nourished during long, lonely seasons. He was a drinking man, a chess-playing man, a man with terse words and no nonsense for the pale colonials and of wisdom of the jungle and the natives.

A widower, once married to a French plantation owner’s daughter, he was left with four small children who were cared for by a Chinese couple. He, himself, was cared for by a striking Eurasian girl in her late teens.

Campbell personally tutored his children with studies beyond their years inflicted with the zeal of a Baptist missionary. His own friendship with Kelno came into being when his children enrolled in the informal classes Angela taught the children of Fort Bobang.

His youngest son was Terrence, a year older than Stephan Kelno, who in short order formed a friendship that was destined to span their lifetimes.

Both Stephan and Terrence made remarkable adaptations to this remote place and both seemed capable of overcoming the disadvantages of their removal from civilization. The boys were like brothers, together most of the time and dreaming aloud of places beyond the sea.

And during those periods when Adam Kelno skidded into a tropical depression, it was always Ian Campbell whom Angela called upon to bring her husband around.

The monsoon season came. The rivers raged to impassability. And with it, MacAlister’s prophecy of doom unfolded. In that second year, Angela had a third miscarriage and they had to go about the business of seeing to it that she could not become pregnant again.

Wilted by the heat and turned soggy by the rain and caged in Fort Bobang Adam Kelno took to heavy drinking. His nights were filled with a kind of madness, the recurring dreams of the concentration camp. And that nightmare he had known since boyhood. It always took the form of a large animal, a bear or a gorilla or an unidentifiable monster chasing him, entrapping him, and then crushing him. The spear or weapon he carried or his own strength was totally impotent in stopping the attack. As he was powerless to move, breathing became more and more difficult and always on the brink of death by suffocation he awakened sweating, heart pounding, gasping and at times crying out in terror. And the parade of the dead at the Jadwiga Concentration Camp and the blood of the surgery never stopped.

The relentless rain showed no pity.

Each morning he took longer to lift his head from the pillow from the effects of alcohol and quaking after another night of horror.

A lizard flitted across the floor. Adam picked at his food listlessly. He was in the usual bleary-eyed state of this time of evening and his face showed a six day growth of stubble.

“Please eat, Adam.”

He grunted an indistinguishable answer.

Angela dismissed the servants with a nod of her head. Stephan Kelno was still a child, but he knew the reek of liquor from his father’s breath and turned his cheek as Adam kissed him when he left the table.

Adam blinked and narrowed his eyes to get them into focus. Angela, poor Angela, sat in sallow sorrow. There were gray hairs in her head now. He had put them there with his own paint brush of misery.

“I really think you ought to shave and bathe and make an effort to come over to the Lamberts’ and welcome the new missionaries,” she said.

“Lord God, will you stop trying to pawn off your only begotten son on these cannibals? Missionaries. Do you really think Jesus comes to places like this? Jesus avoids places like this ... concentration camps ... British prisons. Jesus knows how to stay out of trouble. Tell the missionaries ... I hope the head-hunters get them.”

“Adam.”

“Go sing your hymns with Mercy Meek. What a friend we have in Jeeeeesus. Hail Mary. Mother of God. Keep your nose out of Sarawak.”

Angela pushed back from the table angrily.

“Get me a drink first. No lectures. Just a drink. Even the goddam British gin will do. Aha, says the temperate and long suffering wife, the one thing you don’t need is another drink.”

“Adam!”

“Subject of the next lecture. My husband hasn’t made love to me for over a month. My husband is impotent.”

“Adam, listen to me. There is talk going around of dismissing you.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Clifton-Meek was very happy to slap me with that news,” she said. “When I heard it I wrote to MacAlister in Kuching. They are gravely concerned.”

“Hurray. I’m sick of cannibals and Englishmen.”

“Where do you think you can go after this?”

“So long as I have these,” he said thrusting his hands before her face, “I’ll find a place.”

“They aren’t as steady as they used to be.”

“Where’s my damned drink?”

“All right, Adam, you might as well hear the rest of it. I’ve reached the saturation point. If they sack you here ... if you don’t pull yourself together, Stephan and I will not go on with you.”

He stared.

“We’ve taken all of this in silence and we’ve not complained about Sarawak. Adam, the one thing you’ve never had to question is my loyalty, and I’ll stay here forever if need be. But I shall not go on living with a drunk who has completely given up on life.”

“You mean that, don’t you.”

“Yes, I do.” She turned and left for the Lamberts’.

Adam Kelno grunted and held his face in his hands. The sheets of rain plunged the place into darkness until the servants bathed it in swaying lamplight. He continued to sit to force rationality back to his fuzzed brain, then staggered to his feet and shuffled to a mirror. “You stupid bastard,” he said to himself.

Adam went to Stephan’s room. The boy looked from his bed half asleep and apprehensive.

Oh my God, he thought. What have I done? He is my life, this child.

When Angela returned she found Adam asleep in a chair in Stephan’s room with the boy asleep in his lap. A storybook, worn from rereading, had fallen to the floor. Angela smiled. Adam’s face was clean-shaven. He awakened to her kiss and silently and gently put Stephan in his bed. He placed the mosquito netting around him and put his arm about his wife and led her to the bedroom.

Ian Campbell returned from an extended stay in Singapore at a sorely needed time. He gave himself to his friend to bring him through a soggy brained monsoon rot. It came over long chess games, with children scrambling underfoot. After all, Adam came to realize, Campbell had done it as a widower with four children. And he found the iron.

“It’s never so bad, Adam, that it’s worth turning one of your children into a drunk or leading them to a life of darkness. After all, man, they didn’t bargain for this place,”

Adam Kelno decided he owed Ian Campbell very much and the way to pay it came through young Terrence. Often as not Terrence Campbell’s curious brown eyes peered over the window sill of the dispensary, mouth agape.

“Come on in, Terry. Don’t stand there like a Lampur monkey.”

The boy would ease into the room and watch for hours as Dr. Adam, the magic Dr. Adam, made people well. As Terry’s reward, Dr. Adam would ask him to fetch something or assist in some small way. And he dreamed of being a doctor.

When Dr. Adam was in a good mood, and Terry knew them all, he would ask a never-ending stream of questions about medicine. More than once Adam wished it were his own son, Stephan. But Stephan was outside doing something with a hammer and nails ... a raft, a tree house.

“God works in strange ways,” Adam thought, accepting but not accepting.

One thing was obvious and that was if Terrence Campbell had half a chance, he would be a doctor.

11

T
HE MONSOON SEASON ENDED
. Adam Kelno had returned to life.

A small surgery was installed with a capability of minor operations. MacAlister came from Kuching to attend the dedication and remained for several days. What he saw in the operating theater was a revelation. With Angela assisting, Adam performed a number of operations. MacAlister witnessed a complete change in Kelno with the surgeon’s knife in his hands. Extraordinary skill, exquisite movements, command and concentration.

A short time thereafter the police station radio received a request from the capital at Kuching to have Dr. Kelno come to perform an emergency surgery. A light plane was dispatched to Fort Bobang for him. It soon became fashionable for the British colony in Kuching to have Adam Kelno as their surgeon instead of traveling to Singapore.

As soon as the river was passable, Adam headed up the Lemanak. This time his son, Stephan, traveled with him. He came upon the Ulu long houses to find that disaster had struck during the monsoon season in the form of raging cholera.

Bintang was in mortal grief over the death of his two eldest sons. Pirak had used water from sacred jars, magic oil, specially prepared pepper, and ordered gongs and drums beaten for days to drive away the evil spirits. But it came. Diarrhea followed by unbearable cramps and vomiting, dehydration, and the sunken eyes and fever and the leg pains and the apathetic wait for death. As the epidemic mounted, Bintang and those who were not stricken fled to the hills and left the sick to die.

The twenty families of the tribe who had taken Dr. Adam’s medicine lived in six different long houses, and none of them fell to the sickness. Out of his own great sorrow, Bintang began to change his attitude. Although he still disliked the terse, cold doctor he now had to respect his medicine. Bintang called his Turahs together and with the disaster still fresh in their minds, they agreed to make changes.