A Burnt Out Case (14 page)

When he first came to this country, there was an old Greek shopkeeper living in Luc – a man in his late seventies who was famous for his reticence. A few years before he had married a young African woman who could neither read nor write. People wondered what kind of contact they could have, at his age, with his reticence and her ignorance. One day he saw his African clerk bedding her down at the back of the warehouse behind some sacks of coffee. He said nothing at all, but next day he went to the bank and took out his savings. Most of the savings he put in an envelope and posted in at the door of the local orphanage which was always chock-a-block with unwanted half-castes. The rest he took with him up the hill behind the courthouse to a garage which sold ancient cars, and there he bought the cheapest car they could sell him. It was so old and so cheap that even the manager, perhaps because he too was a Greek, had scruples. The car could only be trusted to start on top of a hill, but the old man said that didn’t matter. It was his ambition to drive a car once before he died – his whim if you liked to call it that. So they showed him how to put it into gear and how to accelerate, and shoving behind they gave him a good running start. He rode down to the square in Luc where his store was situated and began hooting as soon as he got there. People stopped to look at the strange sight of the old man driving his first car, and as he passed the store his clerk came out to see the fun. The old man drove all round the square a second time – he couldn’t have stopped the car anyway because it would not start on the flat. Round he came with his clerk waving in the doorway to encourage him, then he twisted the wheel, trod down on the accelerator and drove straight over his clerk into the store, where the car came to the final halt of all time up against the cash register. Then he got out of the car, and leaving it just as it was, he went into his parlour and waited for the police to arrive. The clerk was not dead, but both his legs were crushed and the pelvis was broken and he wouldn’t be any good for a woman ever again. Presently the Commissioner of Police walked in. He was a young man and this was his first case and the Greek was highly respected in Luc. ‘What have you done?’ he demanded when he came into the parlour. ‘It is not a case of what have I done,’ the old man said, ‘but of what I am going to do,’ and he took a gun from under the cushion and shot himself through the head. Doctor Colin since those days had often found comfort in the careful sentence of the old Greek storekeeper.

He called again, ‘Next.’ It was a day of extreme heat and humidity and the patients were languid and few. It had never ceased to surprise the doctor how human beings never became acclimatized to their own country; an African suffered from the heat like any European, just as a Swede he once knew suffered from the long winter night as though she had been born in a southern land. The man who now came to stand before the doctor would not meet his eyes. On the chart he was given the name of Attention, but now any attention he had was certainly elsewhere.

‘Trouble again like the other night?’ the doctor asked.

The man looked over the doctor’s shoulder as if someone he feared were approaching and said, ‘Yes.’ His eyes were heavy and bloodshot; he pushed his shoulders forward on either side of his sunken chest as though they were the corners of a book he was trying to close.

‘It will be over soon,’ the doctor said. ‘You must be patient.’

‘I am afraid,’ the man said in his own tongue. ‘Please when night comes let them bind my hands.’

‘Is it as bad as that?’

‘Yes. I am afraid for my boy. He sleeps beside me.’

The D.D.S. tablets were not a simple cure. Reactions from the drug were sometimes terrible. When it was only a question of pain in the nerves you could treat a patient with cortisone, but in a few cases a kind of madness came over the mind in the hours of darkness. The man said, ‘I am afraid of killing my boy.’

The doctor said, ‘This will pass. One more night, that’s all. Remember you have just to hold on. Can you read the time?’

‘Yes.’

‘I will give you a clock that shines so that you can read it in the dark. The trouble will start at eight o’clock. At eleven o’clock you will feel worse. Don’t struggle. If we tie your hands you will struggle. Just look at the clock. At one you will feel very bad, but then it will begin to pass. At three you will feel no worse than you do now, and after that less and less – the madness will go. Just look at the clock and remember what I say. Will you do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Before dark I will bring you the clock.’

‘My child . . .’

‘Don’t worry about your child. I will tell the sisters to look after him till the madness has gone. You must just watch the clock. As the hands move the madness will move too. And at five the clock will ring a bell. You can sleep then. Your madness will have gone. It won’t come back.’

He tried to speak with conviction, but he felt the heat blurring his intonation. When the man had gone he felt that something had been dragged out of him and thrown away. He said to the dispenser, ‘I can’t see anybody today.’

‘There are only six more.’

‘Am I the only one who must not feel the heat?’ But he felt some of the shame of a deserter as he walked away from his tiny segment of the world’s battlefield.

Perhaps it was shame that led his steps towards another patient. As he passed Querry’s room he saw him busied at his drawing-board; he went on and came to Father Thomas’s room. Father Thomas too had taken the morning off – his schools like the dispensary would have been all but emptied by the heat. Parkinson sat on the only chair, wearing the bottom of his pyjamas: the cord looked as if it were tied insecurely round an egg. Father Thomas was talking excitedly, as Colin entered, in what even the doctor recognized to be very odd English. He heard the name ‘Querry’. There was hardly space to stand between the two beds.

‘Well,’ Colin said, ‘you see, M. Parkinson, you are not dead. One doesn’t die of a small fever.’

‘What’s he saying?’ Parkinson asked Father Thomas. ‘I’m tired of not understanding. What was the good of the Norman Conquest if we don’t speak the same language now?’

‘Why has he come here, Father Thomas? Have you found that out?’

‘He is asking me a great many questions about Querry.’

‘Why? What business is it of his?’

‘He told me that he had come here specially to talk to him.’

‘Then he would have done better to have gone back with the boat because Querry won’t talk.’

‘Querry, that’s right, Querry,’ Parkinson said. ‘It’s stupid of him to pretend to hide away. No one really wants to hide from Montagu Parkinson. Aren’t I the end of every man’s desire? Quote. Swinburne.’

‘What have you told him, father?’

Father Thomas said defensively, ‘I’ve done no more than confirm what Rycker told him.’

‘Rycker! Then he’s been listening to a pack of lies.’

‘Is the story of Deo Gratias a lie? Is the new hospital a lie? I hope that I have been able to put the story in the right context, that’s all.’

‘What is the right context?’

‘The Catholic context,’ Father Thomas replied.

The Remington portable had been set up on Father Thomas’s table beside the crucifix. On the other side of the crucifix, like the second thief, the Rolleiflex hung by its strap from a nail. Doctor Colin looked at the typewritten sheet upon the table. He could read English more easily than he could speak it. He read the heading: ‘The Recluse of the Great River,’ then looked accusingly at Father Thomas. ‘Do you know what this is about?’

‘It is the story of Querry,’ Father Thomas said.

‘This nonsense!’

Colin looked again at the typewritten sheet. ‘That is the name which the natives have given to a strange newcomer in the heart of darkest Africa.’ Colin said, ‘
Qui êtes-vous
?’

‘Parkinson,’ the man said. ‘I’ve told you already. Montagu Parkinson.’ He added with disappointment, ‘Doesn’t the name mean anything at all to you?’

Lower down the page Colin read,

three weeks by boat to reach this wild territory. Struck down after seven days by the bites of tsetse flies and mosquitoes I was carried ashore unconscious. Where once Stanley battled his way with Maxim guns, another fight is being waged – this time in the cause of the African – against the deadly infection of leprosy . . . woke from my fever to find myself a patient in a leper hospital. . . .

‘But these are lies,’ Colin said to Father Thomas.

‘What’s he grousing about?’ Parkinson asked.

‘He says that what you have written there is – not altogether true.’

‘Tell him it’s more than the truth,’ Parkinson said. ‘It’s a page of modern history. Do you really believe Caesar said “
Et tu, Brute
”? It’s what he ought to have said and someone on the spot – old Herodotus, no, he was the Greek, wasn’t he, it must have been someone else, Suetonius perhaps, spotted what was needed. The truth is always forgotten. Pitt on his deathbed asked for Bellamy’s Pork Pies, but history altered that.’ Even Father Thomas could not follow the convolutions of Parkinson’s thoughts. ‘My articles have to be remembered like history. At least from one Sunday to another. Next Sunday’s instalment. “The Saint with a Past”.’

‘Do you understand a word of all this, father?’ Colin asked.

‘Not very much,’ Father Thomas admitted.

‘Has he come here to make trouble?’

‘No, no. Nothing like that. Apparently his paper sent him to Africa to write about some disturbances in British territory. He arrived too late, but by that time we had our own trouble in the capital, so he came on.’

‘Not even knowing French?’

‘He had a first-class return ticket to Nairobi. He told me that his paper could not afford two star writers in Africa, so they cabled him to move on into our territory. He was too late again, but then he heard some rumours of Querry. He said that he had to bring
something
back. When he got to Luc he happened at the Governor’s to meet Rycker.’

‘What does he know of Querry’s past? Even we . . .’

Parkinson was watching the discussion closely; his eyes travelled from one face to another. Here and there a word must have meant something to him and he drew his rapid, agile, erroneous conclusions.

‘It appears,’ Father Thomas said, ‘that the British newspapers have what they call a
morgue
. He has only to cable them and they will send him a précis of all that has ever been published about Querry.’

‘It’s like a police persecution.’

‘Oh, I’m convinced they’ll find nothing to his discredit.’

‘Have neither of you,’ Parkinson asked sorrowfully, ‘heard my name Montagu Parkinson? Surely it’s memorable enough.’ It was impossible to tell whether he was laughing at himself.

Father Thomas began to answer him. ‘To be quite truthful until you came . . .’

‘My name is writ in water. Quote. Shelley,’ Parkinson said.

‘Does Querry know what it’s all about?’ Colin asked Father Thomas.

‘Not yet.’

‘He was beginning to be happy here.’

‘You mustn’t be hasty,’ Father Thomas said. ‘There is another side to all of this. Our leproserie may become famous – as famous as Schweitzer’s hospital, and the British, one has heard, are a generous people.’

Perhaps the name Schweitzer enabled Parkinson to catch at Father Thomas’s meaning. He brought quickly out, ‘My articles are syndicated in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, and South America. No other living journalist . . .’

‘We have managed without publicity until now, father,’ Colin said.

‘Publicity is only another name for propaganda. And we have a college for that in Rome.’

‘Perhaps it is more fitted for Rome, father, than Central Africa.’

‘Publicity can be an acid test for virtue. Personally I am convinced that Querry . . .’

‘I have never enjoyed blood-sports, father. And a man-hunt least of all.’

‘You exaggerate, doctor. A great deal of good can come from all of this. You know how you have always lacked money. The mission can’t provide it. The State will not. Your patients deserve to be considered.’

‘Perhaps Querry is also a patient,’ Colin said.

‘That’s nonsense. I was thinking of the lepers – you have always dreamt of a school for rehabilitation, haven’t you, if you could get the funds. For those poor burnt-out cases of yours.’

‘Querry may be also a burnt-out case,’ the doctor said. He looked at the fat man in the chair. ‘Where now will he be able to find
his
therapy? Limelight is not very good for the mutilated.’

The heat of the day and the anger they momentarily felt for each other made them careless, and it was only Parkinson who saw that the man they were discussing was already over the threshold of Father Thomas’s room.

‘How are you, Querry?’ Parkinson said. ‘I didn’t recognize you when I met you on the boat.’

Querry said, ‘Nor I you.’

‘Thank God,’ Parkinson said, ‘you aren’t finished like the riots were. I’ve caught up with one story anyway. We’ve got to have a talk, you and I.’

II

‘So that’s the new hospital,’ Parkinson said. ‘Of course I don’t know about these things, but there seems to me nothing very original . . .’ He bent over the plans and said with the obvious intention of provoking. ‘It reminds me of something in one of our new satellite towns. Hemel Hempstead perhaps. Or Stevenage.’

‘This is not architecture,’ Querry said. ‘It’s a cheap building job. Nothing more. The cheaper the better, so long as it stands up to heat, rain, and humidity.’

‘Do they require a man like you for that?’

‘Yes. They have no builder here.’

‘Are you going to stay till it’s finished?’

‘Longer than that.’

‘Then what Rycker told me must be partly true.’

‘I doubt if anything that man says could ever be true.’