QB VII (8 page)

The cemetery, a chief cause of contamination, was moved. It was a brazen step. Then, the long debated okra fields were planted and bullocks brought to plow the fields. The buffalo were able to turn the earth much deeper than their own crude hand plows and the crops of yams and vegetables became larger and finer in taste. Dr. Adam brought a fishing expert from Kuching who was able to replace the spear with netting methods. The chickens and pigs were fenced and the place to make human refuse was moved away from each long house. Much new medicine was given through Dr. Adam’s needle.

And as the year wore on, Bintang noticed a change in Dr. Adam himself. In one way he was like the Ulu in his love for his child. With the young son and Terrence Campbell traveling with him, the doctor seemed much more kind. And on the second trip, Dr. Adam brought his wife, who also knew much of medicine and did much to take away the shyness of many of the women.

On the fourth and final trip to the Ulus before the monsoon, Dr. Adam’s boat turned the bend to Bintang’s long house and tied ashore just before nightfall. Something seemed strange. For the first time there was an absence of the greeting of gongs and a gathering of the villagers. Mudich, the translator, alone awaited him.

“Quick, Dr. Adam. Bintang’s little son very sick. Crocodile bite.”

They raced the path to the long house, climbed the notched steps, and as they reached the veranda he could hear low, rhythmic chanting. Adam shoved his way through the crowd to where the child lay groaning on the floor. The leg wound was covered with wet herbs and sacred healing stones. Pirak had chanted himself into a trance waving a pole topped with beads and feathers over the child.

Adam knelt and abruptly uncovered the wound. Fortunately he had been bitten in the fleshy part of the thigh. Some of the flesh had been torn away, the teeth marks went deep. Pulse, weak but steady. He flashed a light into the child’s eyes. No serious hemorrhaging but the wound was dirty and debridement and drainage were needed along with surgery on a severed muscle. Temperature ...very hot, a hundred and four degrees.

“How long has he been lying there?”

Mudich could not answer properly because the Ulus had no sense of hourly time. Adam fished through his bag and prepared a penicillin shot “Have him removed to my hut, immediately.”

Suddenly Pirak emerged from his communion with the spirits. As Dr. Adam gave the boy an injection he screamed in anger.

“Get him the hell out of here,” Adam snapped.

“He say you are breaking the magic spell.”

“I hope so. He’s twice as sick as he need be.”

The Manang Bali picked up his bag of magic potions, magic stones, tusks, roots, herbs, ginger, pepper and he rattled it over the child yelling that he was not finished with his treatment

Adam snatched the bag and flung it over the veranda.

Pirak, who had been already disgraced by the cholera epidemic and with his power in the village slipping, realized he had to make a bold stand. He grabbed Adam’s bag off the floor and flung it away.

Everyone backed away as Adam came to his feet and hovered over the old fakir. He controlled the impulse to strangle Pirak. “Tell Bintang,” he said in an uneven voice, “the boy is becoming very sick. Bintang has already lost two of his sons. This child will not live unless he is given to me immediately.”

Pirak jumped up and down and screamed. “He is breaking my spell. He will bring back evil spirits!”

“Tell Bintang that Pirak is a fraud. Tell him that now. I want him ordered away from this child.”

“I cannot tell that,” Mudich said. “The chief cannot throw out his own magician.”

“This child’s life is in the balance.”

Pirak argued with Bintang heatedly. The chief looked from one to the other in confusion. Centuries of his society and culture weighed on him, and he was afraid of either decision. The Turahs would never understand such a thing as casting out his Manang. But the child. He will die, Dr. Adam say. Ulus have uncommon love for their children. When his own two sons died of the fever he adopted two little Chinese girls as his own for the Chinamen often gave away the unwanted females.

“Bintang say, Manang must heal son in the way of our people.”

Pirak thrust out his chest arrogantly and beat it with his fist and strutted as someone returned his bag of sticks and stones to him.

Adam Kelno turned and walked off.

Adam sat in naked futility under the waterfall below the river. He could hear the gongs and chanting from the long house. On the bank, Mudich and his boatmen kept guard for crocodiles and cobras. Poor Dr. Adam, Mudich thought. He will never understand.

He dragged himself, with weighted weariness, to a small separate hut that housed his clinic, and his own private room, which held a low palleted bed over the matted floor. He uncorked a bottle of gin and went at it until the sound of gongs and drums faded under the beat of evening rain, and then he stretched on his pallet and groaned to semi-sleep.

“Dr. Adam! Dr. Adam! Wake! Wake!” Mudich said.

With years of medical training he came awake instantly. Mudich stood over his pallet with a torch.

“Come,” he said urgently.

Adam was on his feet, buttoning his shirt and tucking it into his trousers. In the next room Bintang stood with the child in his arms.

“Save my son,” Bintang cried.

Adam took the boy and laid him on a crude examination table. The fever raged. It’s bad, Adam thought, it’s very bad. “Hold the torch closer.”

As he set the thermometer into the child’s rectum the boy went into a convulsion.

“How long has he been doing this. Before or after the sun?”

“When sun fall boy jerk around crazy.”

That would mean three or more hours. He withdrew the thermometer. One hundred and nine degrees. The child frothed and writhed. Brain damage! Irreparable brain damage! Even if he could pull the child through he would be an imbecile.

The little olive-skinned man looked up to the doctor with begging eyes. How to explain that the chief’s son would be a hopeless idiot?

“Tell Bintang there is very little hope. He must wait outside. Mudich, set the torch in the holder and wait outside also. I will work alone.”

There was no choice but to let the child go off to sleep.

Adam Kelno was back in Jadwiga Concentration Camp. The surgery ... Barrack V. He leaned down close to the child and was compelled to untie the string that held in place a tiny cloth covering the boy’s genitals.

IF THESE OPERATIONS ARE NECESSARY, I WILL DO THEM. DO YOU THINK I ENJOY IT?

Adam fondled the tiny pair of testicles, kneaded them in his fingers, ran his hand up the scrotum.

IF THEY MUST COME OFF FOR THE LIFE OF THE PATIENT.

He backed away suddenly and went into a violent trembling, looking somewhat mad, as the boy went into another agonized spasm.

An hour later, Adam emerged from the clinic and faced the anxious father and a dozen waiting tribesmen.

“He went to sleep peacefully.”

When a primitive, as Bintang, emits the sounds of grief it is the cry of a wounded animal. He screamed and threw himself on the ground and beat upon himself in a tantrum of exquisite torment. And he wailed his hurt until exhaustion overcame him and found him face down in the mud bleeding from self-inflicted fury. Only then was Adam able to render him unconscious.

12

T
HE POLICE RADIO ADVISED
Kuching that the flying weather was marginal so MacAlister came to Fort Bobang by boat. He tied up to the main pier amid a small forest of dugouts, where Chinese and Malayans and Muruts and Ibans jabbered in a multitude of tongues in furious barter. Along the shore, women beat their wash clean and others drew water, carrying it in cans hanging from ox-like yokes.

MacAlister jumped ashore and walked up the dock past the main corrugated tin warehouse, where his nostril was pelted with the odor of slabs of freshly pressed rubber, pepper, and sacks of bat dung collected from the caves by the ingenious Chinese and sold as fertilizer.

The old Asian hand marched stiffly up the dirt road, past the Chinese shops and thatched huts of the Malays and into the British compound. MacAlister grumbled through a gargantuan mustache, as he slowed for his umbrella-bearing servant, who raced to keep the sun from his master’s head. Knee-length stockings were met by long khaki shorts, and his cane popped in cadence to the crisp step.

Adam stood up from the chess game to greet him. MacAlister studied the board, then looked to Adam’s opponent, his seven-year-old son, who was giving his father a trimming. The boy shook MacAlister’s hand and Adam shooed him off.

“The lad plays quite a game.”

Adam could scarcely conceal his pride in Stephan, who at this early age could read and speak English, Polish, and a smattering of Chinese and Malay.

After a time they settled on the screened veranda with the ever constant green view of the flowing rivers of Borneo. Their drinks came and soon the new sounds and smells of dusk invaded along with the blessed relief from the heat. Out on the lawn, Stephan played with Terrence Campbell.

“Cheers,” said MacAlister.

“Well, Dr. MacAlister, what’s the occasion?” Adam asked with his usual abruptness.

He laughed vaguely. “Well, Kelno, seems that you’ve made quite a success in Kuching. Governor’s wife’s tonsils, Commissioner of Native Affairs’ hernia, to say nothing of our leading Chinese citizen’s gallstones.”

Adam waited through the trivia. “Well now, why am I in Bobang, eh?”

“Yes, why?”

“To come right out with it, Sir Edgar,” he said in reference to the governor, “and I have charted out an entirely new medical facility for the future of Sarawak. We want to move some of the newer men into meaningful positions as quickly as we are able to put the old-timers out to pasture. We’d like you to transfer to Kuching and take over as chief surgeon of the hospital. I think you’ll agree it’s becoming quite a good facility.”

Adam drank slowly these days. He took it all in deliberately.

“Traditionally,” MacAlister continued, “whoever is the chief surgeon is automatically assistant chief medical officer of Sarawak. I say, Kelno, you don’t seem too pleased by all of this.”

“It sounds very political, and I’m not one much for administrative work.”

“Don’t be so modest. You were the C.M.O. at the Polish army hospital at Tunbridge Wells.”

“I never got used to filling out reports and playing politics.”

“What about Jadwiga?”

Adam paled a bit

“We’re not pushing you up past a dozen men in the dark. Nor are we bringing up a past you want to forget, but your responsibilities were for hundreds of thousands of people there. Sir Edgar and I think you’re the best man.”

“It has taken me five years to get the trust of the Ulus,” Adam said. “With Bintang and his Turahs I have been able to get many projects started and just now we are able to draw comparative results. I have become quite caught up in the problem of malnutrition. A surgeon you can get in Kuching, and the British will never be short of administrators, but I feel that eventually something important may come to light out of my work. You see, Dr. MacAlister, in Jadwiga we had to depend entirely on what the Germans provided us to support life. Here, no matter how bad the land is and no matter how primitive the society, one can always better one’s self, and we are coming close to proving it.”

“Ummmm, I see. I suppose you’ve considered the fact that Mrs. Kelno would be more comfortable in Kuching. She could pop over to Singapore a few more times a year.”

“I must say, in all candor, that Angela is as excited about my work as I am.”

“And the boy? His education?”

“Angela teaches him daily. I will put him against any boy his age in Kuching.”

“Then you are quite definite about turning this down.”

“Shall we let our hair down,” MacAlister said.

“Of course.”

“How much of all this is your fear of leaving the jungle?”

Adam set his drink down and sighed deeply, as MacAlister found him at his source.

“Kuching is not the middle of London. No one is going to find you there.”

“The Jews are everywhere. Every one of them is a potential enemy.”

“Are you going to keep yourself locked up in the jungle for the rest of your life?”

“I don’t wish to talk about it anymore.” Adam Kelno answered with tiny beads of perspiration breaking out all over his face.

13

S
TEPHAN
K
ELNO WAS THE
apple of his father’s eye and an unusually gifted boy. Perhaps no single thing impressed the natives more than the presence of Dr. Adam’s son on the river trips.

Adam stood on the wharf, steeped in sorrow as the ferry to Kuching pulled away, and Angela and his son waved to him until they were out of sight. From Kuching they would take a steamer to Singapore and then on to Australia, where Stephan would begin his formal education in a boarding school.

Adam was filled with more than the usual parental fear that something might happen to his child. For the first time in years he prayed. He prayed for the boy’s safety.

To fill the terrible void, the relationship with young Terrence broadened. From an early age Terry spoke in medical terms and assisted in minor surgery. There could be no doubt that he would make an extraordinary doctor and to make this possible became Adam’s goal. Ian Campbell was for it, though he doubted that a boy from the jungle could compete in the outside world.

Kelno turned his enormous energy to a series of new programs. Adam asked Bintang and the other Turahs of the tribe to send a promising boy or girl in his teens from each long house to Fort Bobang. This took a bit of convincing, for the elders, who had always lived communally, did not wish to give up any manpower. Ultimately Adam was able to convince them that with special training they would be of more value.

He started with fifteen youngsters who built a miniature long house. The first programs were kept very simple. The reading of time, basic first aid, and sanitation programs for each long house. Out of the first group two of the boys were sent to the Batu Lintang Training School in Kuching for more sophisticated schooling.