The Fahrenheit Twins (10 page)

‘Bigger than is good for me, you mean?’

The physician’s shoulders sank with relief.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve often thought so,’ the dictator smiled. ‘But seriously, this big heart of mine: how much of a danger is it?’

‘Danger?’ The physician was nervous again, perspiring in a manner that the dictator found, frankly, irritating.

‘Friend, we have known each other a long time,’ he cautioned.‘ Can we not speak freely?’

The physician gulped, grinning like an idiot. He and the dictator had known each other for twenty-three months, or say two years. Was this a long time? Certainly it was ten times longer than some people lasted before falling out of favour with a thud. On the other hand, knowing the dictator for a
very
long time didn’t seem such a good idea, as his oldest friends and family members were mostly dead.

‘It appears from the X-rays that you … that your heart … that you have cardiac myxoma.’

There, it was said. The physician waited for consequences, blinking behind his foggy glasses.

‘Is that a cancer?’ said the dictator.

‘Yes, it’s a cancer,’ said the physician.

‘Cancers can go away by themselves, can’t they?’ The dictator sounded doubtful; the notion went against everything he knew about politics.

‘Not this one.’

‘Deadly, is it?’ said the dictator, confirming the strength of his enemy.

‘Well, actually, the myxoma itself is benign. But what it does to the heart is … ah …’

‘Fatal.’

‘Yes.’

The dictator turned and walked to the window. He peered out, hands clasped behind his back.

‘A cancer can be cut out,’ he said.

‘There are cancers of all sorts,’ squirmed the physician. ‘Some can simply be cut out. With others, the job is much more complicated.’

The dictator nodded. This distinction, too, conformed to his experience of politics.

‘How soon can this kill me?’

‘I am a humble all-rounder, no expert,’ pleaded the physician. ‘Books on the subject say that three months is usual. I don’t know how they arrive at such a statistic. If it’s an average, the figure of three months could be derived from one man surviving a week and another surviving … um … almost half a year.’ The physician grimaced: half a year didn’t sound like much. Maybe he should have taken greater liberties with arithmetic; the dictator, for all his honorary university degrees, was famously uneducated.

‘Can you do the job?’ he enquired.

The physician shook his head.

‘I haven’t the skill,’ he said.

‘Not if I gave you a fortnight off to practise and read the books thoroughly?’

The physician hugged the X-rays tightly, to keep from snickering.

‘Not if I had a year,’ he said. ‘The affected blood vessels are very, very tiny. With these big peasant’s hands of mine …’ And he lifted one hand into the air, to show how miraculous it was, that the dictator’s revolutionary regime had managed to fashion a half-decent doctor from such crude materials.

The dictator frowned, rotating his jaw. The physician began to wonder if he’d perhaps overdone the peasant stuff.

At last the dictator said,

‘But I thought the problem was that my heart was too big.’

‘Yes,’ said the physician, ‘but of course in a case like this, the problem can’t be solved by simply yanking the heart out like … like a turnip from the soil. This is a job that requires great delicacy, great … finesse.’

The dictator leaned back in his chair. There was a loud creak. He was a man of seventy-two years old, overweight and moist-eyed, with thin hair the colour of hair-oil. On the wall behind him, a portrait hung in which he was ageless, in which he looked as if he could tear men apart with no help from anyone else.

‘Find the doctor who can do the job,’ he said.

Two days later, the physician was back in the dictator’s office.

‘Have you found the doctor?’ demanded the old man.

‘I believe so,’ said the physician. ‘According to all the surgeons I’ve consulted, there is one person who could possibly do it.’

‘Excellent: what’s his name?’

‘It’s a she, actually. A Mrs Sampras. You will remember, she was one of the fourteen surgeons who shamefully defected in 1992 to America, to perform unnecessary surgery on rich Jewish women.’

‘But this is no use to me!’ exclaimed the dictator. ‘We must get her back!’

The physician bit his lip, nonplussed by the dictator’s apparent lapse of memory regarding the true circumstances of Mrs Sampras’s disappearance.

‘1992,’ he repeated helpfully. ‘You recall the incident, I’m sure, sir. Fourteen surgeons, all critical of you and your government. A cabal of Jewish businessmen organised the getaway plane …’

‘Yes, yes: filth and scum …’ hissed the dictator, fists clenched on the desk before him.

The physician had one more try at filling in the gaps.

‘… uh … there was some suggestion, made in a subversive newspaper, that the surgeons never, in fact, left the country. That they were, in fact, being secretly detained in the Milleforte Labour Camp.’

The dictator raised his shoulders in indignation, spring-loaded to refute a vicious untruth. Then abruptly he relaxed, his eyelids drooping.

‘Ah,’ he said.

Having dismissed the physician, the dictator telephoned the chief administrator of the Milleforte Labour Camp.

‘I don’t suppose,’ the dictator said after a few seconds of pleasantries, ‘you know how Mrs Sampras is getting on in America? … Mrs Sampras, the surgeon … You don’t say? That’s
good
, that’s
good
. You know, I was afraid she might have succumbed to the harsh weather of New York, or that maybe some drug-crazed nigger raped and killed her … Ye-e-es. So she’s in top form, is she? Fighting fit? Ha! Ha! Ha!’ And his chair creaked again, with the sheer verve of his relief.

The following day, the dictator received a letter which had been dashed off to him by Mrs Sampras herself, delivered by fast car and motorcycle.

Dear Mr President, it said. I understand you have been enquiring
after my health. My health is fair: how’s yours?

Well, enough small talk. I seem to be forever making confessions:
here is another. I haven’t been at all happy in America. In fact,
the experience has taken away all my zest for surgery. I wish I had
never left my husband and children for this pampered existence.

But, I suppose we must all suffer the consequences of our bad
decisions, and I am resigned to live out my life here, a traitor of no
use to man or beast.

Regretfully, Gala Sampras

Pouting thoughtfully, the dictator folded the letter into his fist. A word was eluding him, a word he had heard for the first time only yesterday, although as an honorary doctor of literature he must have known it all along.

This, he thought, is going to require … finesse.

Before the security guards allowed Gala Sampras to see the dictator, they made sure she was not concealing any weapons. Her doctor’s satchel was emptied out, even though it had been hastily supplied by the president’s own physician and contained almost nothing. The slender rubber hose of the stethoscope was tugged experimentally between two strong fists, as if it might be used in an attempt to garrotte the nation’s leader. A small disposable hypodermic was reluctantly left in its sterile wrapper, but a glass ampoule of antibiotic was confiscated, in case it contained poison.

A young man unzipped Gala’s overcoat and frisked her from armpits to ankles, his fingers gentle and thorough, as if he had read in a book that a woman’s erogenous zones could be hidden in the most unlikely places. He even lifted her skirt and passed his middle finger over her underpants, against her vulva. Perhaps he thought that one of his fellow soldiers might have absentmindedly left a sharp object in there somewhere, an electric cattle prod or a Swiss army knife, which she might whip out and attack the president with.

After a minute or two, the young man removed a ballpoint pen from the breast pocket of Gala’s jacket. He clicked the nib in and out, frowning, as if feeling himself required to make a complicated moral decision. Gala Sampras smiled despite herself, troubling the young man even more. It seemed so absurd that she’d been brought all the way here to slice the dictator’s chest open with a scalpel, but here were his bodyguards trying to make sure she didn’t stab him through the heart with a cheap plastic pen.

‘Mightier than the sword, hm?’ she mocked him as he handed the yellow Bic back.

The dictator welcomed Mrs Sampras graciously, extending his hand over the desk where he had signed the warrant for her arrest years previously. His handshake was firm but gentle. He was smiling, with lips that were ever-so-slightly cyanosed, from the cancer all around his heart. A subtle network of pale purple capillaries were showing on his nose.

‘I’m honoured to have you here,’ he said. It was true, in the sense that he’d investigated every alternative to Gala Sampras and failed to find anyone half as good. In future, more men would have to be encouraged to commit themselves to a career in medicine.

Mrs Sampras said nothing as the dictator continued to pull at her wrist. Face impassive, she extracted her hand from his – extracted it matter-of-factly, as if his hand were a tool or a swab she was finished with.

There being nowhere for visitors to sit, she remained standing, transferring her doctor’s satchel from her left hand back to her right. While he looked her up and down, she avoided his gaze, instead taking stock of his office.

She was surprised to find that it looked exactly as she’d imagined it might, as a child might draw a dictator’s office. There was a massive mahogany desk, strewn with leatherbound folders and the odd sheet of paper. There was an upholstered swivel chair for him to luxuriate in. There was an oil painting, or perhaps a giant colour photograph thinly disguised as an oil painting, of the dictator, installed on one of the walls. There was an uncurtained window looking out over the courtyard. And this was all. No other tables or chairs, no bookcases or display cabinets, no tools of any more complicated work than arbitrary approval and condemnation. Nothing to indicate any undictatorly quirks in the dictator’s personality, nothing out of place. No caddy of golf clubs, no ornaments, no posters of Western film stars, no stag heads mounted on the walls or Virgin Marys dangling from the ceiling. Nothing. In speeches, the president liked to boast that he had no interests, no pastimes, other than overseeing the welfare of his country. Now Gala could see that this was true.

‘Well, would you like to see my X-rays,’ suggested the old man.

‘Please,’ she agreed briskly.

He handed the folder of silver-grey images over to her. She studied them one by one, holding them up to the sunlight streaming through the window behind his head. Surreptitiously, she cast her eyes downwards and examined his face through the transparent sheets of film. She fancied she could detect his fear.

‘Well, what do you think?’ he said, after clearing his throat.

‘You are going to die very soon,’ she said evenly, still shielding her face behind the last of the X-rays, ‘unless you have a very complicated and risky operation.’

‘I know that,’ he sighed, with an edge of irritation to his voice. ‘Do you have the skill to do it?’

‘I have the skill,’ she replied, lowering the sunlit negative of the dictator’s cancer-speckled chest and shuffling it in with the others. ‘But these are not the photographs I was hoping to see.’

‘Those photographs are on their way. You will see them tomorrow.’

‘Of all four?’

‘Husband, two sons, daughter, yes,’ the dictator reassured her.

Mrs Sampras replaced the folder of X-rays on the desk. She had a sudden yearning to stand at the window and look out, but didn’t want to expose her back to the dictator.

‘This operation,’ said the old man, licking his blueish lips. ‘Can it be done in our country, do you think?’

‘There is no limit to what can be done in our country,’ sighed Mrs Sampras. ‘You yourself have proved that many times.’

‘Yes, yes, but if you felt that a little trip to the United States might be desirable …’

‘I’ve had my little trip to America, thank you,’ said Gala.

The dictator stared hard into her eyes.

‘You must have the best tools, you understand? Only the best.’

Gala looked down at her hands, as if checking the condition of her nails.

‘I have the best here,’ she assured the old man. ‘In our own country.’ She ignored his glare, contemplating her hands all the while. They were pale and finely-formed, with an angry scar here and there.

‘All being well,’ the dictator said at last, ‘how soon can you perform the operation?’

She looked him straight in the chest.

‘You need to lose some weight first, if possible.’

‘A tall order,’ he smirked. ‘But I will stare the devil of temptation in the face.’

Mrs Sampras took hold of the handles of her borrowed satchel and clutched them, suddenly white-knuckled with fury. She breathed deep, and counted to ten or possibly twelve before replying.

‘Which of your devils you stare in the face isn’t my affair. You need to lose a quantity of fat, in order to have a better chance of recovery afterwards.’

The dictator appraised her through her overcoat, estimating her measure.

‘As a woman, you have a favourite diet, no doubt?’

Gala flinched, white as a sheet, white as electrical flex.

‘Anxiety about one’s loved ones suppresses the appetite, I’ve found. If this is not a possibility for you, you might try being raped.’

An awful silence expanded to fill the room like methane gas, tainting every inch of air with terrifying speed. Mrs Sampras had overstepped the line; she knew it and the dictator knew it and Mrs Sampras knew the dictator knew it, and so on.

A foolish, reckless blow had been struck to a frail and delicate balance. Gala Sampras was nauseous with regret, as if she had, in a moment of hysteria, slashed a vital organ which should have been left alone at all costs. There was now a strong possibility that the dictator would have her tortured and shot, and that he himself would die under the knife of a lesser surgeon, or even give up on the idea of cure altogether, consoling himself with his revenge on her.