A Burnt Out Case (6 page)

‘None – except occasionally, from habit, in a moment of danger.’ He added sadly, ‘Then I pray for a brown teddy bear.’

‘You are joking, I know that, but this is very serious. Have another Cointreau?’

‘What’s really worrying you, Rycker? A man?’

The girl came back into the light of the lamp which hung at the corner of the veranda. She was carrying a
roman policier
in the
Série Noire
. She gave a whistle that was scarcely audible, but Rycker heard it. ‘That damn puppy,’ he said. ‘She loves her puppy more than she loves me – or God.’ Perhaps the Van Der Hum affected the logic of his transitions. He said, ‘I’m not jealous. It’s not a man I worry about. She hasn’t enough feeling for that. Sometimes she even refuses her duties.’

‘What duties?’

‘Her duties to me. Her married duties.’

‘I’ve never thought of those as duties.’

‘You know very well the Church does. No one has any right to abstain except by mutual consent.’

‘I suppose there may be times when she doesn’t want you.’

‘Then what am I supposed to do? Have I given up the priesthood for nothing at all?’

‘I wouldn’t talk to her too much, if I were you, about loving God,’ Querry said with reluctance. ‘She mightn’t see a parallel between that and your bed.’

‘There’s a close parallel for a Catholic,’ Rycker said rapidly. He put up his hand as though he were answering a question before his fellow novices. The bristles of hair between the knuckles were like a row of little moustaches.

‘You seem to be very well up in the subject,’ Querry said.

‘At the seminary I always came out well in moral theology.’

‘I don’t fancy you need me then – or the fathers either. You have obviously thought everything out satisfactorily yourself.’

‘That goes without saying. But sometimes one needs confirmation and encouragement. You can’t imagine, Querry, what a relief it is to go over these problems with an educated Catholic.’

‘I don’t know that I would call myself a Catholic.’

Rycker laughed. ‘What?
The
Querry? You can’t fool me. You are being too modest. I wonder they haven’t made you a count of the Holy Roman Empire – like that Irish singer, what was his name?’

‘I don’t know. I am not musical.’

‘You should read what they say about you in
Time
.’

‘On matters like that
Time
isn’t necessarily well informed. Would you mind if I went to bed? I’ll have to be up early in the morning if I’m to reach the next ferry before dark.’

‘Of course. Though I doubt if you’ll be able to cross the river tomorrow.’

Rycker followed him along the veranda to his room. The darkness was noisy with frogs, and for a long while after his host had said good night and gone, they seemed to croak with Rycker’s hollow phrases: grace: sacrament: duty: love, love, love.

CHAPTER 3

I

‘You want to be of use, don’t you?’ the doctor asked sharply. ‘You don’t want menial jobs just for the sake of menial jobs? You aren’t either a masochist or a saint.’

‘Rycker promised me that he would tell no one.’

‘He kept his word for nearly a month. That’s quite an achievement for Rycker. When he came here the other day he only told the Superior in confidence.’

‘What did the Superior say?’

‘That he would listen to nothing in confidence outside the confessional.’

The doctor continued to unpack the crate of heavy electrical apparatus which had arrived at last by the Otraco boat. The lock on the dispensary door was too insecure for him to trust the apparatus there, so he unpacked it on the floor of his living-room. One could never be certain of the African’s reaction to anything unfamiliar. In Leopoldville six months before, when the first riots broke out, the attack had been directed at the new glass-and-steel hospital intended for African patients. The most monstrous rumours were easily planted and often believed. It was a land where Messiahs died in prison and rose again from the dead: where walls were said to fall at the touch of fingernails sanctified by a little holy dust. A man whom the doctor had cured of leprosy wrote him a threatening letter once a month; he really believed that he had been turned out of the leproserie, not because he was cured, but because the doctor had personal designs on the half acre of ground on which he used to grow bananas. It only needed someone, in malice or ignorance, to suggest that the new machines were intended to torture the patients and some fools would break into the dispensary and destroy them. Yet in our century you could hardly call them fools. Hola Camp, Sharpeville, and Algiers had justified all possible belief in European cruelty.

So it was better, the doctor explained, to keep the machines out of sight at home until the new hospital was finished. The floor of his sitting-room was covered with straw from the crates.

‘The position of the power-plugs will have to be decided now.’ The doctor asked, ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve wanted it for so long,’ the doctor said, touching the metal shape tenderly as a man might stroke the female flank of one of Rodin’s bronzes. ‘Sometimes I despaired. The papers I have had to fill in, the lies I’ve told. And here at last it
is
.’

‘What does it do?’

‘It measures to one twenty-thousandth of a second the reaction of the nerves. One day we are going to be proud of this leproserie. Of you too and the part you will have played.’

‘I told you I’ve retired.’

‘One never retires from a vocation.’

‘Oh yes, make no mistake, one does. One comes to an end.’

‘What are you here for then? To make love to a black woman?’

‘No. One comes to an end of that too. Possibly sex and a vocation are born and die together. Let me roll bandages or carry buckets. All I want is to pass the time.’

‘I thought you wanted to be of use.’

‘Listen,’ Querry said and then fell silent.

‘I
am
listening.’

‘I don’t deny my profession once meant a lot to me. So have women. But the use of what I made was never important to me. I wasn’t a builder of council houses or factories. When I made something I made it for my own pleasure.’

‘Is that the way you loved women?’ the doctor asked, but Querry hardly heard him. He was talking as a hungry man eats.

‘Your vocation is quite a different one, doctor. You are concerned with people. I wasn’t concerned with the people who occupied my space – only with the space.’

‘I wouldn’t have trusted your plumbing then.’

‘A writer doesn’t write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same to make them comfortable. My interest was in space, light, proportion. New materials interested me only in the effect they might have on those three. Wood, brick, steel, concrete, glass – space seems to alter with what you use to enclose it. Materials are the architect’s plot. They are not his motive for work. Only the space and the light and the proportion. The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rubempré in the end?’

‘Two of your churches are famous. Didn’t you care what happened inside them – to people?’

‘The acoustics had to be good of course. The high altar had to be visible to all. But people hated them. They said they weren’t designed for prayer. They meant that they were not Roman or Gothic or Byzantine. And in a year they had cluttered them up with their cheap plaster saints; they took out my plain windows and put in stained glass dedicated to dead pork-packers who had contributed to diocesan funds, and when they had destroyed my space and my light, they were able to pray again, and they even became proud of what they had spoilt. I became what they called a great Catholic architect, but I built no more churches, doctor.’

‘I am not a religious man, I don’t know much about these things, but I suppose they had a right to believe their prayers were more important than a work of art.’

‘Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It’s only the middle-classes who demand to pray in suitable surroundings. Sometimes I feel sickened by the word prayer. Rycker used it a great deal. Do you pray, doctor?’

‘I think the last time I prayed was before my final medical exam. And you?’

‘I gave it up a long time ago. Even in the days when I believed, I seldom prayed. It would have got in the way of work. Before I went to sleep, even if I was with a woman, the last thing I had always to think about was work. Problems which seemed insoluble would often solve themselves in sleep. I had my bedroom next to my office, so that I could spend two minutes in front of the drawing-board the last thing of all. The bed, the bidet, the drawing-board, and then sleep.’

‘It sounds a little hard on the woman.’

‘Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven’t even got a self to express. I have no interest in anything any more, doctor. I don’t want to sleep with a woman nor design a building.’

‘Have you no children?’

‘I once had, but they disappeared into the world a long time ago. We haven’t kept in touch. Self-expression eats the father in you too.’

‘So you thought you could just come and die here?’

‘Yes. That
was
in my mind. But chiefly I wanted to be in an empty place, where no new building or woman would remind me that there was a time when I was alive, with a vocation and a capacity to love – if it was love. The palsied suffer, their nerves feel, but I am one of the mutilated, doctor.’

‘Twenty years ago we might have been able to offer you your death, but now we deal only in cures. D.D.S. costs three shillings a year. It’s much cheaper than a coffin.’

‘Can you cure me?’

‘Perhaps your mutilations haven’t gone far enough yet. When a man comes here too late the disease has to burn itself out.’ The doctor laid a cloth tenderly over his machine. ‘The other patients are waiting. Do you want to come or would you like to sit here thinking of your own case? It’s often the way with the mutilated – they want to retire too, out of sight.’

The air in the hospital lay heavily and sweetly upon them: it was never moved by a fan or a breeze. Querry was conscious of the squalor of the bedding – cleanliness was not important to the leper, only to the healthy. The patients brought their own mattresses which they had probably possessed for a lifetime – rough sacking from which the straw had escaped. The bandaged feet lay in the straw like ill-wrapped packages of meat. On the veranda the walking cases sat out of the sun – if you could call a walking case a man who, when he moved, had to support his huge swollen testicles with both hands. A woman with palsied eyelids who could not close her eyes or even blink sat in a patch of shade out of the merciless light. A man without fingers nursed a baby on his knee, and another man lay flat on the veranda with one breast long and drooping and teated like a woman’s. There was little the doctor could do for any of these; the man with elephantiasis had too weak a heart for an operation, and though he could have sewn up the woman’s eyelids, she had refused to have it done from fear, and as for the baby it would be a leper too in time. Nor could he help those in the first ward who were dying of tuberculosis or the woman who dragged herself between the beds, her legs withered with polio. It had always seemed to the doctor unfair that leprosy did not preclude all other diseases (leprosy was enough for one human being to bear), and yet it was from the other diseases that most of his patients died. He passed on and Querry tagged at his heels, saying nothing.

In the mud kitchen at the back of one of the lepers’ houses an old man sat in the dark on an ancient deck-chair. He made an effort to rise when the doctor crossed the yard, but his legs wouldn’t support him and he made a gesture of courteous apology. ‘High blood pressure,’ the doctor said softly. ‘No hope. He has come to his kitchen to die.’ His legs were as thin as a child’s and he wore a clout like a baby’s napkin round the waist for decency. Querry had seen where his clothes had been left neatly folded in the new brick cottage under the Pope’s portrait. A holy medal lay in the hollow of his breast among the scarce grey hairs. He had a face of great kindness and dignity, a face that must have always accepted life without complaint, the face of a saint. Now he inquired after the doctor’s health as though it were the doctor who was sick, not he.

‘Is there anything that I can fetch you?’ the doctor asked, and no, the old man replied, he had everything he needed. He wanted to know whether the doctor had heard recently from his family and he made inquiries after the health of the doctor’s mother.

‘She has been in Switzerland, in the mountains. A holiday in the snow.’

‘Snow?’

‘I forgot. You have never seen snow. It is frozen vapour, frozen mist. The air is so cold that it never melts and it lies on the ground white and soft like the feathers of a
piquebœuf
, and the lakes are covered with ice.’

‘I know what ice is,’ the old man said proudly. ‘I have seen ice in a refrigerator. Is your mother old like me?’

‘Older.’

‘Then she ought not to travel far away from her home. One should die in one’s own village if it is possible.’ He looked sadly at his own thin legs. ‘They will not carry me or I should walk to mine.’

‘I would arrange for a lorry to take you,’ the doctor said, ‘but I don’t think you would stand the journey.’

‘It would be too much trouble for you,’ the old man said, ‘and in any case there is no time because I am going to die tomorrow.’

‘I will tell the Superior to come and see you as soon as he can.’

‘I do not wish to be any trouble to him. He has many duties. I will not be dead till the evening.’

By the old deck-chair stood a bottle with a Johnny Walker label. It contained a brown liquid and some withered plants tied together with a loop of beads. ‘What has he got there,’ Querry asked after they left him, ‘in the bottle?’