The Crystal World (2 page)

"Is it contagious?"

After a pause to examine this white-suited figure with his bearded skull-like face-something about him reminded Sanders that the world was not without those who, for their own reasons, wished to _catch_ the disease-Dr. Sanders said: "The disease is contagious, as you ask, yes, but years of exposure and contact are necessary for its transmission. The period of incubation may be twenty or thirty years."

"Like death. Good." With a gleam of a smile, Ventress stepped into the cabin. He extended a bony hand, and clasped Sanders's firmly, his strong fingers feeling for the doctor's grip. "What our timorous fellow passengers fail to realize, Doctor, is that outside your colony there is merely another larger one."

Later, as he looked down at Ventress lounging in the speedboat on the afterdeck, Dr. Sanders pondered on this cryptic introduction. The faltering light still hung over the estuary, but Ventress's white suit seemed to focus all its intense hidden brilliancy, just as Father Balthus's clerical garb had reflected the darker tones. The steerage passengers milled around the speedboat, but Ventress appeared to be uninterested in them, or in the approaching jetty with its waiting throng of customs and police. Instead, he was looking out across the deserted starboard rail into the mouth of the river, and at the distant forest stretching away into the haze. His small eyes were half-closed, as if he were deliberately merging the view in front of him with some inner landscape within his mind.

Sanders had seen little of Ventress during the voyage up-coast, but one evening in the cabin, searching through the wrong suitcase in the dark, he had felt the butt of a heavy-caliber automatic pistol wrapped in the harness of a shoulder holster. The presence of this weapon had immediately resolved some of the enigmas that surrounded Ventress's small brittle figure.

"Doctor..." Ventress called up to him, waving one hand lightly, as if reminding Sanders that he was daydreaming. "A drink, Sanders, before the bar closes?" Dr. Sanders began to refuse but Ventress had halfturned his shoulder, veering off on another tack. "Look for the sun, Doctor, it's there. You can't walk through these forests with your head between your heels."

"I shan't try to. Are you going ashore?"

"Of course. There's no hurry here, Doctor. This is a landscape without time."

Leaving him, Dr. Sanders made his way to the cabin. The three suitcases, Ventress's expensive one in polished crocodile skin, and his own scuffed workaday bags, were already packed and waiting beside the door. Sanders took off his jacket, and then bathed his hands in the washbasin, drying them lightly in the hope that the soap's pungent scent might make him seem less of a pariah to the examining officials.

However, Sanders realized only too well that by now, after fifteen years in Africa, ten of them at the Fort Isabelle hospital, any chance he may once have had of altering the outward aspect of himself, his image to the world at large, had long since gone. The work-stained cotton suit, slightly too small for his broad shoulders, the striped blue shirt and black tie, the strong head with its gray uncut hair and trace of beard-all these were the involuntary signatures of the physician to the lepers, as unmistakable as Sanders's own scarred but firm mouth and critical eye.

Opening the passport, Sanders compared the photograph taken eight years earlier with the reflection in the mirror. At a glance, the two men seemed barely recognizable-the first, with his straight, earnest face, his patent moral commitment to the lepers, all too obviously on top of his work at the hospital, looked more like the dedicated younger brother of the other, some remote and rather idiosyncratic country doctor.

Sanders looked down at his faded jacket and calloused hands, knowing how misleading this impression was, and how much better he understood, if not his present motives, at least those of his younger self, and the real reasons that had sent him to Fort Isabelle. Reminded by the birth date in the passport that he had now reached the age of forty, Sanders tried to visualize himself ten years ahead, but already the latent elements that had emerged in his face during the previous years seemed to have lost momentum. Ventress had referred to the Matarre forests as a landscape without time, and perhaps part of its appeal for Sanders was that here at last he might be free from the questions of motive and identity that were bound up with his sense of time and the past.

The steamer was now barely twenty feet from the jetty, and through the porthole Dr. Sanders could see the khaki-clad legs of the reception party. From his pocket he took out a well-thumbed envelope and drew from it a letter written in pale-blue ink that had almost penetrated the soft tissue. Both envelope and letter were franked with a censor's stamp, and panels which Sanders assumed contained the address had been Cut out.

As the steamer bumped against the jetty, Dr. Sanders read through the letter for the last time on board.

Thursday, January 5th

My dear Edward,

At last we are here. The forest is the most beautiful in Africa, a house of jewels. I can barely find words to describe our wonder each morning as we look out across the slopes, still half-hidden by the mist but glistening like St. Sophia, each bough a jeweled semi-dome. Indeed, Max says I am becoming excessively Byzantine-I wear my hair to my waist even at the clinic, and affect a melancholy expression, although in fact for the first time in many years my heart sings! Both of us wish you were here. The clinic is small, with about twenty patients. Fortunately the people of these forest slopes move through life with a kind of dreamlike patience, and regard our work for them as more social than therapeutic. They walk through the dark forest with crowns of light on their heads.

Max sends his best wishes to you, as I do. We remember you often.

The light touches everything with diamonds and sapphires.

My love,

Suzanne

As the metal heels of the boarding party rang out across the deck over his head, Dr. Sanders read again the last line of the letter. But for the unofficial but firm assurances he had been given by the prefecture in Libreville, he would not have believed that Suzanne Clair and her husband had come to Port Matarre, so unlike the somber light of the river and jungle were her descriptions of the forest near the clinic. Their exact whereabouts no one had been able to tell him, or for that matter why a sudden censorship should have been imposed on mail leaving the province. When Sanders became too persistent, he was reminded that the correspondence of people under a criminal charge was liable to censorship, but as far as Suzanne and Max Clair were concerned, the suggestion was grotesque.

Thinking of the small, intelligent microbiologist and his wife, tall and dark-haired, with her high forehead and calm eyes, Dr. Sanders remembered their sudden departure from Fort Isabelle three months earlier. Sanders's affair with Suzanne had lasted for two years, kept going only by his inability to resolve it in any way. His failure to commit himself fully to her made it plain that she had become the focus of all his uncertainties at Fort Isabelle. For some time he had suspected that his reasons for serving at the leper hospital were not altogether humanitarian, and that he might be more attracted by the idea of leprosy, and whatever it unconsciously represented, than he imagined. Suzanne's somber beauty had become identified in his mind with this dark side of the psyche, and their affair was an attempt to come to terms with himself and his own ambiguous motives.

On second thought, Sanders recognized that a far more sinister explanation for their departure from the hospital was at hand. When Suzanne's letter arrived with its strange and ecstatic vision of the forest-in maculoanesthetic leprosy there was an involvement of nervous tissue-he had decided to follow them. Forgoing his inquiries about the censored letter, in order not to warn Suzanne of his arrival, he took a month's leave from the hospital and set off for Port Matarre.

From Suzanne's description of the forest slopes he guessed the clinic to be somewhere near Mont Royal, possibly attached to one of the French-owned mining settlements, with their overzealous security men. However, the activity on the jetty outside-there were half a dozen soldiers moving about near a parked staff car- indicated that something more was afoot.

As he began to fold Suzanne's letter, smoothing the petal-like tissue, the cabin door opened sharply, jarring his elbow. With an apology Ventress stepped in, nodding to Sanders.

"I beg your pardon, Doctor. My bag." He added: "The customs people are here."

Annoyed to be caught reading the letter again by Ventress, Dr. Sanders stuffed envelope and letter into his pocket. For once Ventress appeared not to notice this. His hand rested on the handle of his suitcase, one ear cocked to listen to the sounds from the deck above. No doubt he was wondering what to do with the pistol. A thorough baggage search was the last thing any of them had expected.

Deciding to leave Ventress alone so that he could slip the weapon through the porthole, Dr. Sanders picked up his two suitcases.

"Well, goodbye, Doctor." Ventress was smiling, his face even more skull-like behind the beard. He held the door open. "It's been very interesting, a great pleasure to share a cabin with you."

Dr. Sanders nodded. "And perhaps something of a challenge too, M. Ventress? I hope all your victories come as easily."

"Touche, Doctor!" Ventress saluted him, then waved as Sanders made his way down the corridor. "But I gladly leave you with the last laugh-the old man with the scythe, eh?"

Without looking back, Dr. Sanders climbed the companionway to the saloon, aware of Ventress watching him from the door of the cabin. The other passengers were sitting in the chairs by the bar, Father Balthus among them, as a prolonged harangue took place between the first officer, two customs officials and a police sergeant. They were consulting the passenger list, scrutinizing everyone in turn as if searching for some missing passenger.

As Dr. Sanders lowered his two bags to the floor he caught the phrase: "No journalists allowed..." and then one of the customs men beckoned him over.

"Dr. Sanders?" he asked, putting a particular emphasis into the name as if he half hoped it might be an alias. "From Libreville University...?" He lowered his voice. "The Physics Department...? May I see your papers?"

Dr. Sanders pulled out his passport. A few feet to his left, Father Balthus was watching him with a sharp eye. "My name is Sanders, of the Fort Isabelle _leproserie_."

After apologizing for their mistake, the customs men glanced at each other and then cleared Dr. Sanders, chalking up his suitcases without bothering to open them. A few moments later he walked down the gangway. On the jetty the native soldiers lounged around the staff car. The rear seat remained vacant, presumably for the missing physicist from Libreville University.

As he handed his suitcases to a porter with _Hotel d'Europe_ stenciled across his peaked cap, Dr. Sanders noticed that a far more thorough inspection was being made of the baggage of those leaving Port Matarre. A group of thirty to forty steerage passengers was herded together at the far end of the jetty, and the police and customs men were searching them one by one. Most of the natives carried bedrolls with them, and the police were unwinding these and squeezing the padding.

By contrast with this activity, the town was nearly deserted. The arcades on either side of the main street were empty, and the windows of the Hotel d'Europe hung listlessly in the dark air, the narrow shutters like coffin lids. Here, in the center of the town, the faded white facades made the somber light of the jungle seem even more pervasive. Looking back at the river as it turned like an immense snake into the forest, Dr. Sanders felt that it had sucked away all but a bare residue of life.

As he followed the porter up the steps into the hotel, he saw the black-robed figure of Father Balthus farther down the arcade. The priest was walking swiftly, his small traveling bag held in one hand. He turned between two columns, then crossed the road and disappeared among the shadows in the arcade facing the hotel. At intervals Sanders saw him again, his dark figure lit by the sunlight, the white columns of the arcade framing him like the shutter of a defective stroboscopic device. Then, for no apparent reason, he crossed the Street again, the skirt of his black robe whipping the dust around his heels. His high face passed Sanders without turning, like the pale, half-remembered profile of someone glimpsed in a nightmare.

Sanders pointed after him. "Where's he off to?" he asked the porter: "The priest-he was on the steamer with me."

"To the seminary. The Jesuits are still there."

"Still? -what do you mean?"

Sanders moved toward the swinging doors, but at that moment a dark-haired young Frenchwoman stepped out. As her face was reflected in the moving panes, Sanders had a sudden glimpse of Suzanne Clair. Although the young woman was in her early twenties, at least ten years younger than Suzanne, she had the same wide hips and sauntering stride, the same observant gray eyes. As she passed Sanders, she murmured, "Pardon..." Then, returning his stare with a faint smile, she set off in the direction of an army lorry that was reversing down a side road. Sanders watched her go. Her trim white suit and metropolitan chic seemed out of place in the dingy light of Port Matarre.

"What's going on here?" Sanders said. "Have they found a new diamond field?"

The explanation seemed to make sense of the censorship and the customs search, but something about the porter's studied shrug made him doubt it. Besides, the references in Suzanne's letter to diamonds and sapphires would have been construed by the censor as an open invitation to join in the harvest.

The clerk at the reception desk was equally evasive. To Sanders's annoyance, the clerk insisted on showing him the weekly tariff, despite his assurances that he would be setting off for Mont Royal the following day.