A Burnt Out Case (3 page)

Patient after patient exposed his body to him; in all the years he had never become quite accustomed to the sweet gangrenous smell of certain leprous skins, and it had become to him the smell of Africa. He ran his fingers over the diseased surface and made his notes almost mechanically. The notes had small value, but his fingers, he knew, gave the patients comfort: they realized that they were not untouchable. Now that a cure had been found for the physical disease, he had always to remember that leprosy remained a psychological problem.

From the river Doctor Colin heard the sound of a ship’s bell. The Superior passed by the dispensary on his bicycle, riding towards the beach. He waved, and the doctor raised his hand in answer. It was probably the day for the Otraco boat which was long overdue. It was supposed to call once a fortnight with mail, but they could never depend on it, for it was delayed more often than not by unexpected cargo or by a faulty pipe.

A baby began to cry and immediately like dogs all the babies around the dispensary started to howl together. ‘Henri,’ Doctor Colin called; his young African dispenser rapped out a phrase in his native tongue – ‘Babies to the breast’ and instantaneously peace returned. At twelve-thirty the doctor broke off for the day. In the little hot office he wiped his hands with spirit.

He walked down towards the beach. He had been expecting a book to be sent him from Europe: a Japanese Atlas of Leprosy, and perhaps it had come with the mail. The long street of the leper village led towards the river: small two-roomed houses built of brick with mud huts in the yards behind. When he had arrived fifteen years ago there had been only the mud huts – now they served as kitchens, and yet still when anyone was about to die, he would retire into the yard. He couldn’t die peacefully in a room furnished with a radio-set and a picture of the latest Pope; he was prepared to die only where his ancestors had died, in the darkness surrounded by the smell of dry mud and leaves. In the third yard on the left an old man was dying now, sitting in a battered deck-chair, inside the shadow of the kitchen door.

Beyond the village, just before the river came into sight, the ground was being cleared for what would one day be the new hospital block. A gang of lepers was pounding the last square yards supervised by Father Joseph, who worked beside them, beating away himself at the ground in his old khaki pants and a soft hat which looked as though it had been washed up on the beach many years ago.

‘Otraco?’ Doctor Colin called out to him.

‘No, the Bishop’s boat,’ Father Joseph replied, and he paced away, feeling the ground with his feet. He had long ago caught the African habit of speaking as he moved, with his back turned, and his voice had the high African inflexion. ‘They say there’s a passenger on board.’

‘A passenger?’

Doctor Colin came into sight of the funnel where it stuck up between the long avenue of logs that had been cut ready for fuel. A man was walking up the avenue towards him. He raised his hat, a man of his own age, in the late fifties with a grizzled morning stubble, wearing a crumpled tropical suit. ‘My name is Querry,’ he introduced himself, speaking in an accent which Colin could not quite place as French or Flemish any more than he could immediately identify the nationality of the name.

‘Doctor Colin,’ he said. ‘Are you stopping here?’

‘The boat goes no farther,’ the man answered, as if that were indeed the only explanation.

II

Once a month Doctor Colin and the Superior went into a confidential huddle over figures. The support of the leproserie was the responsibility of the Order; the doctor’s salary and the cost of medicine were paid by the State. The State was the richer and the more unwilling partner, and the doctor made every effort to shift what burden he could from the Order. In the struggle with the common enemy the two of them had become close friends – Doctor Colin was even known occasionally to attend Mass, though he had long ago, before he had come to this continent of misery and heat, lost faith in any god that a priest would have recognized. The only trouble the Superior ever caused him was with the cheroot which the priest was never without, except when saying Mass and in sleep; the cheroots were strong and Doctor Colin’s quarters cramped, and the ash always found a way between his pamphlets and reports. Now he had to shake the ash off the accounts he had prepared for the chief medical officer in Luc; in them he had deftly and unobtrusively transferred to the State the price of a new clock and three mosquito-nets for the mission.

‘I am sorry,’ the Superior apologized, dropping yet more ash on to an open page of the Atlas of Leprosy. The thick bright colours and the swirling designs resembled the reproduction of a Van Gogh landscape, and the doctor had been turning the pages with a purely aesthetic pleasure before the Superior joined him. ‘Really I am impossible,’ the Superior said, brushing at the page. ‘Worse than usual, but then I’ve had a visit from M. Rycker. The man upsets me.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Oh, he wanted to find out about our visitor. And of course he was very ready to drink our visitor’s whisky.’

‘Was it worth three days’ journey?’

‘Well, at least he got the whisky. He said the road had been impossible for four weeks and he had been starved of intellectual conversation.’

‘How is his wife – and the plantation?’

‘Rycker seeks information. He never gives it. And he was anxious to discuss his spiritual problems.’

‘I would never have guessed he had any.’

‘When a man has nothing else to be proud of,’ the Superior said, ‘he is proud of his spiritual problems. After two whiskies he began to talk to me about Grace.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I lent him a book. He won’t read it, of course. He knows all the answers – six years wasted in a seminary can do a lot of harm. What he really wanted was to discover who Querry might be, where he came from, and how long he was going to stay. I would have been tempted to tell him if I had known the answer myself. Luckily Rycker is afraid of lepers, and Querry’s boy happened to come in. Why did you give Querry Deo Gratias?’

‘He’s cured, but he’s a burnt-out case, and I don’t want to send him away. He can sweep a floor and make a bed without fingers or toes.’

‘Our visitors are sometimes fastidious.’

‘I assure you Querry doesn’t mind. In fact he asked for him. Deo Gratias was the first leper whom he saw when he came off the boat. Of course I told him the man was cured.’

‘Deo Gratias brought me a note. I don’t think Rycker liked me touching it. I noticed that he didn’t shake hands with me when he said good-bye. What strange ideas people have about leprosy, doctor.’

‘They learn it from the Bible. Like sex.’

‘It’s a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible,’ the Superior said, trying to knock the end of his cheroot into the ashtray. But he was always doomed to miss.

‘What do you think of Querry, father? Why do you think he’s here?’

‘I’m too busy to pry into a man’s motives. I’ve given him a room and a bed. One more mouth to feed is not an embarrassment. And to do him justice he seemed very ready to help – if there were any help that he was capable of giving. Perhaps he is only looking for somewhere quiet to rest in.’

‘Few people would choose a leproserie as a holiday resort. When he asked me for Deo Gratias I was afraid for a moment that we might have a leprophil on our hands.’

‘A leprophil? Am I a leprophil?’

‘No, father. You are here under obedience. But you know very well that leprophils exist, though I daresay they are more often women than men. Schweitzer seems to attract them. They would rather wash the feet with their hair like the woman in the gospel than clean them with something more antiseptic. Sometimes I wonder whether Damien was a leprophil. There was no need for him to become a leper in order to serve them well. A few elementary precautions – I wouldn’t be a better doctor without my fingers, would I?’

‘I don’t find it very rewarding looking for motives. Querry does no harm.’

‘The second day he was here, I took him to the hospital. I wanted to test his reactions. They were quite normal ones – nausea not attraction. I had to give him a whiff of ether.’

‘I’m not as suspicious of leprophils as you are, doctor. There are people who love and embrace poverty. Is that so bad? Do we have to invent a word ending in phil for them?’

‘The leprophil makes a bad nurse and ends by joining the patients.’

‘But all the same, doctor, you’ve said it yourself, leprosy is a psychological problem. It may be very valuable for the leper to feel loved.’

‘A patient can always detect whether he is loved or whether it is only his leprosy which is loved. I don’t want leprosy loved. I want it eliminated. There are fifteen million cases in the world. We don’t want to waste time with neurotics, father.’

‘I wish you had a little time to waste. You work too hard.’

But Doctor Colin was not listening. He said, ‘You remember that little leproserie in the bush that the nuns ran. When D.D.S. was discovered to be a cure, they were soon reduced to half a dozen patients. Do you know what one of the nuns said to me? “It’s terrible, doctor. Soon we’ll have no lepers at all.” There surely was a leprophil.’

‘Poor woman,’ the Superior said. ‘You don’t see the other side.’

‘What other side?’

‘An old maid, without imagination, anxious to do good, to be of use. There aren’t so many places in the world for people like that. And the practice of her vocation is being taken away from her by the weekly doses of D.D.S. tablets.’

‘I thought you didn’t look for motives.’

‘Oh, mine’s a very superficial reading like your own diagnosis, doctor. But it would be a good thing for all of us if we were even more superficial. There’s no real harm in a superficial judgement, but if I begin to probe into what lies behind that desire to be of use, oh well, I might find some terrible things, and we are all tempted to stop when we reach that point. Yet if we dug farther, who knows? – the terrible too might be only a few skins deep. Anyway it’s safer to make superficial judgements. They can always be shrugged off. Even by the victims.’

‘And Querry? What of him? Superficially speaking, of course.’

PART TWO

CHAPTER 1

I

In an unfamiliar region it is always necessary for the stranger to begin at once to construct the familiar, with a photograph perhaps or a row of books if they are all that he has brought with him from the past. Querry had no photographs and no books except his diary. The first morning when he was woken at six by the sound of prayers from the chapel next door, he felt the panic of complete abandonment. He lay on his back listening to the pious chant, and if there had been some magic power in his signet ring, he would have twisted it and asked whatever djinn answered him to be transferred again to that place which for want of a better name he called his home. But magic, if such a thing existed at all, was more likely to lie in the rhythmical and incomprehensible chant next door. It reminded him, like the smell of a medicine, of an illness from which he had long recovered. He blamed himself for not realizing that the area of leprosy was also the area of this other sickness. He had expected doctors and nurses: he had forgotten that he would find priests and nuns.

Deo Gratias was knocking on the door. Querry heard the scrape of his stump as it attempted to raise the latch. A pail of water hung on his wrist like a coat on a cloakroom-knob. Querry had asked Doctor Colin before engaging him whether he suffered pain, and the doctor had reassured him, answering that mutilation was the alternative to pain. It was the palsied with their stiffened fingers and strangled nerves who suffered – suffered almost beyond bearing (you heard them sometimes crying in the night), but the suffering was in some sort a protection against mutilation. Querry did not suffer, lying on his back in bed, flexing his fingers.

And so from the first morning he set himself to build a routine, the familiar within the unfamiliar. It was the condition of survival. Every morning at seven he breakfasted with the fathers. They drifted into their common-room from whatever task they had been engaged on for the last hour, since the chanting had ceased. Father Paul with Brother Philippe was in charge of the dynamo which supplied electricity to the Mission and the leper village; Father Jean had been saying Mass at the nuns’ house; Father Joseph had already started the labourers to work on clearing the ground for the new hospital; Father Thomas, with eyes sunk like stones in the pale clay of his face, swallowed his coffee in a hurry, like a nauseating medicine, and was off to superintend the two schools. Brother Philippe sat silent, taking no part in any conversation: he was older than the fathers, he could speak nothing but Flemish and he had the kind of face which seems worn away by weather and patience. As the faces began to develop features as negatives do in a hypo-bath, Querry separated himself all the more from their company. He was afraid of the questions they might ask, until he began to realize that, like the priests in the seminary on the river, they were going to ask none of any importance. Even the questions they found necessary were phrased like statements – ‘On Sundays a bus calls here at six-thirty if you wish to go to Mass’ – and Querry was not required to answer that he had given up attending Mass more than twenty years before. His absence was never remarked.

After breakfast he would take a book he had borrowed from the doctor’s small library and go down to the bank of the river. It had widened out in this reach and was nearly a mile across. An old tin barge, rusty with long disuse, enabled him to avoid the ants; and he sat there until the sun, soon after nine, became too high for comfort. Sometimes he read, sometimes he simply watched the steady khaki flow of the stream, which carried little islands of grass and water jacinth endlessly down at the pace of crawling taxis, out of the heart of Africa, towards the far-off sea.