A Burnt Out Case (10 page)

‘Where is M. Querry now?’

‘Oh, I expect he’s working in his room, unless he’s with the doctor.’

‘Everybody was talking about him at the Governor’s two weeks ago.’

‘Poor M. Querry.’

A small black child hardly more than two feet high walked into the room without knocking, coming in like a scrap of shadow from the noonday glare outside. He was quite naked and his little tassel hung like a bean-pod below the pot-belly. He opened a drawer in the Superior’s desk and pulled out a sweet. Then he walked out again.

‘They were being quite complimentary,’ Mme Rycker said. ‘Is it true – about his boy getting lost . . . ?’

‘Something of the sort happened. I don’t know what
they
are saying.’

‘That he stayed all night and prayed . . .’

‘M. Querry is hardly a praying man.’

‘My husband thinks a lot of him. There are so few people my husband can talk to. He asked me to come here and invite . . .’

‘We are very grateful for the two drums of oil. What you have saved with those, we can spend . . .’ He turned the photograph of the bidet a little farther towards Mme Rycker.

‘Do you think I could speak to him?’

‘The trouble is, Mme Rycker, this is his hour for work.’

She said imploringly, ‘I only want to be able to tell my husband that I’ve asked him,’ but her small toneless voice contained no obvious appeal and the Superior was looking elsewhere, at a feature of the foot-bath which he did not fully understand. ‘What do you think of that?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘This foot-bath. I want to get three dozen for the hospital.’

He looked up because of her silence and was surprised to see her blushing. It occurred to him that she was a very pretty child. He said, ‘Do you think . . . ?’

She was confused, remembering the ambiguous jokes of her more dashing companions at the convent. ‘It’s not really a foot-bath, father.’

‘What else could it be for then?’

She said with the beginnings of humour, ‘You’d better ask the doctor – or M. Querry.’ She moved a little in her chair, and the Superior took it for a sign of departure.

‘It’s a long ride back to the Perrins’, my dear. Can I offer you a cup of coffee, or a glass of beer?’

‘No. No thank you.’

‘Or a little whisky?’ In all the long years of his abstinence the Superior had never learnt that whisky was too strong for the midday sun.

‘No thank you. Please, father, I know you are busy. I don’t want to be a nuisance, but if I could just see M. Querry and ask him . . .’

‘I will give him your message, my dear. I promise I won’t forget. See, I am writing it down.’ He hesitated which sum to disfigure with the memo – ‘Querry-Rycker’. It was impossible for him to tell her that he had given his promise to Querry to leave him undisturbed, ‘particularly by that pious imbecile, Rycker’.

‘It won’t do, father. It won’t do. I promised I’d see him myself. He won’t believe I’ve tried.’ She broke off and the Superior thought later, ‘I really believe she was going to ask me for a note, the kind of note children take to school, saying that they have been genuinely ill.’

‘I’m not even sure where he is,’ the Superior said, emphasizing the word ‘sure’ to avoid a lie.

‘If I could just look for him.’

‘We can’t have you wandering around in this sun. What would your husband say?’

‘That’s what I am afraid of. He’ll never believe that I did my best.’ She was obviously close to tears and this made her look younger, so that it was easy to discount the tears as the facile meaningless grief of childhood.

‘I tell you what,’ the Superior said, ‘I will get him to telephone – when the line is in order.’

‘I know that he doesn’t like my husband,’ she said with sad frankness.

‘My dear child, it’s all in your imagination.’ He was at his wit’s end. He said, ‘Querry’s a strange fellow. None of us really know him. Perhaps he likes none of us.’

‘He stays with you. He doesn’t avoid you.’

The Superior felt a stab of anger against Querry. These people had sent him two drums of oil. Surely they deserved in return a little civility. He said, ‘Stay here. I’ll see if Querry’s in his room. We can’t have you looking all over the leproserie . . .’

He left his study and turning the corner of the veranda made for Querry’s room. He passed the rooms of Father Thomas and Father Paul which were distinguished from each other by nothing more personal than an individual choice of crucifix and a differing degree of untidiness: then the chapel: then Querry’s room. It was the only one in the place completely bare of symbols, bare indeed of almost everything. No photographs of a community or a parent. The room struck the Superior even in the heat of the day as cold and hard, like a grave without a cross. Querry was sitting at his table, a letter before him, when the Superior entered. He didn’t look up.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ the Superior said.

‘Sit down, father. Just a moment while I finish this.’ He turned the page and said, ‘How do you end your letters, father?’

‘It depends. Your brother in Christ perhaps?’

‘
Toute à toi
. I remember I used to put that phrase too. How false it sounds now.’

‘You have a visitor. I’ve kept my word and defended you to the last ditch. I can do no more. I wouldn’t have disturbed you otherwise.’

‘I’m glad you came. I don’t relish being alone with this. You see – the mail has caught up with me. How did anyone know I was here? Does that damned local
Journal
in Luc circulate even in Europe?’

‘Mme Rycker is here, asking for you.’

‘Oh well, at least it’s not her husband.’

He picked up the envelope. ‘Do you see, she’s even got the post box number right. What patience. She must have written to the Order.’

‘Who is she?’

‘She was once my mistress. I left her three months ago, poor woman – and that’s hypocrisy. I feel no pity. I’m sorry, father. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.’

‘You haven’t. It’s Mme Rycker who has done that. She brought us two drums of oil and she wants to speak to you.’

‘Am I worth that much?’

‘Her husband sent her.’

‘Is that the custom here? Tell him I’m not interested.’

‘She’s only brought you an invitation, poor young woman. Can’t you see her and thank her and say no? She seems half afraid to go back unless she can say that she has talked to you. You aren’t afraid of her, are you?’

‘Perhaps. In a way.’

‘Forgive me for saying it, M. Querry, but you don’t strike me as a man who is afraid of women.’

‘Have you never come across a leper, father, who is afraid of striking his fingers because he knows they won’t hurt any more?’

‘I’ve known men rejoice when the feeling returns – even pain. But you have to give pain a chance.’

‘One can have a mirage of pain. Ask the amputated. All right, father, bring her in. It’s a great deal better than seeing her wretched husband anyway.’

The Superior opened the door, and there the girl was on the threshold, in the glare of sun, caught with her mouth open, like someone surprised by a camera in a night-club, looking up in the flash, with an ungainly grimace of pain. She turned sharply round and walked away to where her car was parked and they heard her inefficient attempts at starting. The Superior followed her. A line of women returning from the market delayed him. He scampered a little way after the car, the cheroot still in his mouth and his white sun-helmet tip-tilted, but she drove away under the big arch which bore the name of the leproserie, her boy watching his antics curiously through the side-window. He came limping back because he had stubbed a toe.

‘Silly child,’ he said, ‘why didn’t she stay in my room? She could have spent the night with the nuns. She’ll never get to the Perrins’ by dark. I only hope her boy’s reliable.’

‘Do you suppose she heard?’

‘Of course she heard. You didn’t exactly lower your voice when you spoke of Rycker. If you love a man it can’t be very pleasant to hear how unwelcome . . .’

‘And it’s far worse, father, when you don’t love him at all.’

‘Of course she loves him. He’s her husband.’

‘Love isn’t one of the commonest characteristics of marriage, father.’

‘They’re both Catholics.’

‘Nor is it of Catholics.’

‘She’s a very good young woman,’ the Superior said obstinately.

‘Yes, father. And what a desert she must live in out there alone with that man.’ He looked at the letter which lay on his desk and that phrase of immolation which everyone used and some people meant – ‘
toute à toi
’. It occurred to him that one could still feel the reflection of another’s pain when one had ceased to feel one’s own. He put the letter in his pocket: it was fair at least that he should feel the friction of the paper. ‘She’s been taken a long way from “Pendélé”,’ he said.

‘What’s “Pendélé”?’

‘I don’t know – a dance at a friend’s house, a young man with a shiny simple face, going to Mass on Sunday with the family, falling asleep in a single bed perhaps.’

‘People have to grow up. We are called to more complicated things than that.’

‘Are we?’

‘“When we are a child we think as a child”.’

‘I can’t match quotations from the Bible with you, father, but surely there’s also something about having to be as little children if we are to inherit . . . We’ve grown up rather badly. The complications have become too complex – we should have stopped with the amoeba – no, long before that with the silicates. If your god wanted an adult world he should have given us an adult brain.’

‘We most of us make our own complications, M. Querry.’

‘Why did he give us genitals then if he wanted us to think clearly? A doctor doesn’t prescribe marijuana for clear thought.’

‘I thought you said you had no interest in anything.’

‘I haven’t. I’ve come through to the other side, to nothing. All the same I don’t like looking back,’ he said and the letter crackled softly as he shifted.

‘Remorse is a kind of belief.’

‘Oh no, it isn’t. You try to draw everything into the net of your faith, father, but you can’t steal all the virtues. Gentleness isn’t Christian, self-sacrifice isn’t Christian, charity isn’t, remorse isn’t. I expect the caveman wept to see another’s tears. Haven’t you even seen a dog weep? In the last cooling of the world, when the emptiness of your belief is finally exposed, there’ll always be some bemused fool who’ll cover another’s body with his own to give it warmth for an hour more of life.’

‘You believe that? But once I remember you saying you were incapable of love.’

‘I am. The awful thing is I know it would be my body someone would cover. Almost certainly a woman. They have a passion for the dead. Their missals are stuffed with memorial cards.’

The Superior stubbed out his cheroot and then lit another as he moved towards the door. Querry called after him, ‘I’ve come far enough, haven’t I? Keep that girl away and her bloody tears.’ He struck his hand furiously on the table because it seemed to him that he had used a phrase applicable only to the stigmata.

When the Superior had gone Querry called to Deo Gratias. The man came in propped on his three toeless feet. He looked to see if the wash-basin needed emptying.

‘It’s not that,’ Querry said. ‘Sit down. I want to ask you something.’

The man put down his staff and squatted on the ground. Even the act of sitting was awkward without toes or fingers. Querry lit a cigarette and put it in the man’s mouth. He said, ‘Next time you try to leave here, will you take me with you?’

The man made no answer. Querry said, ‘No, you needn’t answer. Of course you won’t. Tell me, Deo Gratias, what was the water like? Like the big river out there?’

The man shook his head.

‘Like the lake at Bikoro?’

‘No.’

‘What was it like, Deo Gratias?’

‘It fell from the sky.’

‘A waterfall?’ But the word had no meaning to Deo Gratias in this flat region of river and deep bush.

‘You were a child in those days on your mother’s back. Were there many other children?’

He shook his head.

‘Tell me what happened?’

‘
Nous étions heureux
,’ Deo Gratias said.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 1

I

Querry and Doctor Colin sat on the steps of the hospital in the cool of the early day. Every pillar had its shadow and every shadow its crouching patient. Across the road the Superior stood at the altar saying Mass, for it was a Sunday morning. The church had open sides, except for a lattice of bricks to break the sun, so that Querry and Colin were able to watch the congregation cut into shapes like a jigsaw pattern, the nuns on chairs in the front row and behind them the lepers sitting on long benches raised a foot from the ground, built of stone because stone could be disinfected more thoroughly and quickly than wood. At this distance it was a gay scene with the broken sun spangled on the white nuns’ robes and the bright mammy cloths of the women. The rings which the women wore round their thighs jingled like rosaries when they knelt to pray, and all the mutilations were healed by distance and by the brickwork which hid their feet. Beyond the doctor on the top step sat the old man with elephantiasis, his scrotum supported on the step below. They talked in a whisper, so that their voices would not disturb the Mass which went on across the way – a whisper, a tinkle, a jingle, a shuffle, private movements of which they had almost forgotten the meaning, it was so long since they had taken any part.

‘Is it really impossible to operate?’ Querry asked.

‘Too risky. His heart mightn’t stand the anaesthetic.’

‘Has he got to carry that thing around then till death?’

‘Yes. It doesn’t weigh as much as you would think. But it seems unfair, doesn’t it, to suffer all that and leprosy too.’