The Constant Gardener (30 page)

Wanza is a single mother.

She can't read or write.

I met her in her village and again in Kibera slum. She got pregnant by her uncle who raped her and then claimed she had seduced him. This is her first pregnancy. Wanza left the village in order not to be raped again by her uncle, and also by another man who was molesting her.

Wanza says many people in her village were sick with bad coughs. Many of the men had AIDS, women too. Two pregnant women had recently died. Like Wanza, they had been visiting a medical center five miles away. Wanza did not want to use the same medical center any more. She was afraid their pills were bad. This shows that Wanza is intelligent since most native women have a blind faith in doctors, though they respect injections above pills.

In Kibera, a white man and a white woman came to see her. They wore white coats so she assumed they were doctors. They knew which village she had come from. They gave her some pills, the same pills she is taking in hospital.

Wanza says the man's name was Law-bear. I get her to say it many times. Lor-bear? Lor-beer? Lohrbear? The white woman who came with him did not speak her name but examined Wanza and took samples of her blood, urine and sputum.

They came to see her in Kibera twice more. They were not interested in other people in her hut. They told her she would be having her baby in the hospital because she was sick. Wanza was uneasy about this. Many pregnant women in Kibera are sick but they did not have their babies in hospital.

Lawbear said there would be no charges, all of the charges would be paid on her behalf. She did not ask who by. She says the man and woman were very worried. She did not like them to be so worried. She made a joke of this but they did not laugh.

Next day a car came for her. She was close to full term. It was the first time she had ridden in a car. Two days later Kioko her brother arrived at the hospital to be with her. He had heard she was in the hospital. Kioko can read and write and is very intelligent. Brother and sister love each other very much. Wanza is fifteen years old.

Kioko says that when another pregnant woman in the village was dying, the same white couple came to see her and took samples from her just as they had done with Wanza. While they were visiting the village they heard that Wanza had run away to Kibera. Kioko says they were very curious about her and asked him how to find her and wrote his instructions in a notebook. That is how the white couple found Wanza in Kibera slum and had her confined in the Uhuru for observation. Wanza is an African guinea pig, one of many who have not survived Dypraxa.

•      •      •

Tessa is talking to him across the breakfast table. She is seven months pregnant. Mustafa is standing where he always insists on standing, just inside the kitchen but listening at the partly opened door so that he knows exactly when to make more toast, pour more tea. Mornings are a happy time. So are evenings. But it is in the morning that conversation flows most easily.

“Justin.”

“Tessa.”

“Ready?”

“All attention.”

“If I yelled Lorbeer at you—pow, just like that—what would you say to me?”

“Laurel.”

“M.”

“Laurel. Crown. Caesar. Emperor. Athlete. Victor.”

“M.”

“Crowned with—bay—bay leaves—laurel berry—rest on one's laurels—bloody laurels, victory won by violent war—why aren't you laughing?”

“So German?” she insists.

“German. Noun. Masculine.”

“Spell it.”

He did.

“Could it be Dutch?”

“I should think so. Nearly. Not the same but close, probably. Have you taken up crosswords or something?”

“Not anymore,” she replies thoughtfully. And that, as quite often with Tessa the lawyer, is that. Compared with me, the grave is a chatterbox.

•      •      •

No J, no G, no A, her notes continue. She means: Justin, Ghita and Arnold are none of them present. She is alone in the ward with Wanza.

15:23 Enter beef-faced white man and tall

Slav-looking woman in white coats,

Slav's open at the neck. Three other

males in attendance. All wear white

coats. Stolen Napoleonic bees on

pockets. They go to Wanza's bedside,

gawp at her. Self: Who are you? What are you doing to her?

Are you doctors? They ignore me, stare at Wanza, listen to her

breathing, check heart, pulse, temp, eyes,

call “Wanza.” No response. Self: Are you Lorbeer? Who are you all?

What are your names? Slav woman: It is no concern of yours. Exeunt.

Slav woman one tough bitch. Dyed black hair, long legs, wiggles hips, can't help it.

Like a guilty man caught in a felonious act, Justin swiftly slides Tessa's notes beneath the nearest pile of paper, springs to his feet and turns in horrified disbelief toward the oil room door. Somebody is beating on it very hard. He can see it trembling to the rhythm of the blows, and hear above the din the hectoring, horribly familiar, tenacre voice of an Englishman of the imperious class.

“Justin! Come out, dear boy! Don't hide! We know you're there! Two dear friends bring gifts and comfort!”

Frozen, Justin remains incapable of response.

“You're skulking, dear boy! You're doing a Garbo! There's no need! It's us! Beth and Adrian! Your friends!”

Justin grabs the keys from the sideboard and, like a man facing execution, steps blindly into the sunlight, to be faced by Beth and Adrian Tupper, the Greatest Writing Duo of their Age, the world famous Tuppers of Tuscany.

“Beth. Adrian. How lovely,” he declares, slamming the door behind him.

Adrian seizes him by the shoulders and drops his voice dramatically. “Dear boy. Justin. Whom the gods love. Mmh? Mmh? Manliness. Only thing,” he intones, all on one confiding note of commiseration. “You're alone. Don't tell me. Terribly alone.” Submitting to his embraces, Justin sees his two tiny, deep-set eyes searching greedily past his shoulder.

“Oh Justin, we really did love her so,” Beth mews, stretching her tiny mouth into a pitiful downward curve, then straightening it up again to kiss him.

“Where's your man Luigi?” Adrian demands.

“In Naples. With his fiancee. They're getting married. In June,” Justin adds uselessly.

“Should be here supporting you. World today, dear boy. No loyalty. No servant classes.”

“The big one is for darting Tessa in memory, and the little one's for poor Garth, to be beside her,” Beth explains in a tinny little voice that has somehow lost its echo. “I thought we'd plant them in remembrance, didn't I, Adrian?”

In the courtyard stands their pickup, its back ostentatiously laden with rustic logs for the benefit of Adrian's readers, who are invited to believe he cuts them for himself. Tied across them lie two young peach trees with plastic bags round their roots.

“Beth has these marvelous vibes,” Tupper booms confidingly. “Wavelength, dear boy. Tuned in all the time, aren't you, darling? ”We must take him trees,“ she said. Knows, you see. Knows.”

“We could plant them now, then they'd be done, wouldn't they?” says Beth.

“After lunch,” says Adrian firmly.

And one simple peasants' picnic—Beth's care package, as she calls it, consisting of a loaf of bread, olives and a trout each from our smokery, darling, just the three of us, over a bottle of your nice Manzini wine.

Courteous unto death, Justin leads them to the villa.

•      •      •

“Can't mourn forever, dear boy. Jews don't. Seven days is all they get. After that, they're back on their feet, rarin' to go. Their law, you see, darling,” Adrian explains, addressing his wife as if she were an imbecile.

They are sitting in the salon under the cherubs, eating trout off their laps in order to satisfy Beth's vision of a picnic.

“All written down for them. What to do, who does it, how long for. After that, get on with the job. Justin should do the same. No good mooching, Justin. You must never mooch in life. Too negative.”

“Oh, I'm not mooching,” Justin objects, cursing himself for opening a second bottle of wine.

“What are you doing then?” Tupper demands as his small round eyes drill into Justin.

“Well, Tessa left a lot of unfinished business, you see,” Justin explains lamely. “Well—there's her estate, obviously. And the charitable trust she had set up. Plus odds and ends.”

“Got a computer?”

You saw it! thought Justin, secretly aghast. You can't have done! I was too quick for you, I know I was!

“Most important invention since the printing press, dear boy. Isn't it, Beth? No secretary, no wife, nothing. What do you use? We resisted it to begin with, didn't you, Beth? Mistake.”

“We didn't realize,” Beth explains, taking a very big pull of wine for such a small woman.

“Oh, I just grabbed whatever they have here,” Justin replies, recovering his balance. “Tessa's lawyers shoved a bunch of disks at me. I commandeered the estate machine and plowed through them as best I could.”

“So you've finished. Time to go home. Don't dither. G. Your country needs you.”

“Well, not quite finished, actually, Adrian. I've still got a few days to go.”

“Foreign Office know you're here?”

“Probably,” said Justin. How does Adrian do this to me? Rob me of my defenses? Pry into the private places in my life where he has absolutely no business, and I stand by and let him?

A moratorium, during which, to his immense relief, Justin is subjected to an extraordinarily boring account of how the Greatest Writing Couple in the World was converted against all natural inclination to the Net—a dress rehearsal, no doubt, for another riveting chapter of Tuscan Tales, and another free machine from the manufacturers.

“You're running away, dear boy,” Adrian warns severely as the two men untie the peach trees from the truck and cart them to the cantina for Justin to plant later. “Something called duty. Old-fashioned word these days. Longer you put it off, harder it'll be. Go home. They'll welcome you with open arms.”

“Why can't we plant them now?” Beth asks.

“Too emotional, darling. Let him do it on his own. God bless you, dear boy. Wavelength. Most important thing in the world.”

So what were you? Justin demanded of Tupper as he stared after their departing pickup: a fluke or a conspiracy? Did you jump or were you pushed? Did the smell of blood bring you—or did Pellegrin? At various stages of Tupper's overpublicized life, he had graced the BBC and a vile British newspaper. But he had also worked in the large back rooms of secret Whitehall. Justin remembered Tessa at her naughtiest. “What do you think Adrian does with all the intelligence he doesn't put into his books?”

•      •      •

He returned to Wanza, only to discover that Tessa's six-page diary of her ward companion's illness petered to an unsatisfying end. Lorbeer and his team visit the ward three more times. Arnold twice challenges them, but Tessa does not hear what is said. It is not Lorbeer but the sexy Slav woman who physically examines Wanza, while Lorbeer and his acolytes look uselessly on. What happens after that happens at night while Tessa is asleep. Tessa wakes, screams and yells but no nurses come. They are too frightened. Only with the greatest difficulty does Tessa find them and force them to admit that Wanza is dead and her baby has gone back to her village.

Replacing the pages among the police papers, Justin once more addressed the computer. He felt bilious. He had drunk too much wine. His trout, which must have escaped the smoker at halftime, sat like rubber in his belly. He dabbed at a few keys, thought of going back to the villa and drinking a liter of mineral water. Suddenly he was staring at the screen in horrified disbelief. He stared away, shook his head to clear it, resumed his staring. He buried his face in his hands to wipe away the fuzziness. But when he looked again the message was still there.

THIS PROGRAM HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION. YOU MAY LOSE ANY UNSAVED DATA IN ALL WINDOWS THAT ARE RUNNING.

And below the death sentence, a row of boxes set out like coffins for a mass funeral: click the one you would most like to be buried in. He hung his hands at his sides, rolled his head around, then with his heels cautiously backed his chair away from the computer.

“Damn you, Tupper!” he whispered. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.” But he meant: damn me.

It's something I did, or didn't. I should have put the wretched brute to sleep.

Guido. Get me Guido.

He looked at his watch. School ends in twenty minutes but Guido has refused to be picked up. He prefers to take the school bus like all other normal boys, thank you, and he'll ask the driver to hoot when he drops him at the gates—at which point, Justin is graciously permitted to fetch him in the jeep. There was nothing for it but to wait. If he made a dash to beat the bus, chances were he would reach the school too late and have to dash back. Leaving the computer to sulk he returned to the counting table in an attempt to restore his spirits with the hard paper he so vastly preferred to the screen.

PANA WIRE SERVICE (09-24-97) In 1995, sub-Saharan Africa had the highest number of new tuberculosis cases of any global region, as well as a high rate of TB and HIV coinfection, according to the World Health Organization …

I knew that already, thank you.

TROPICAL MEGACITIES WILL BE HELLS ON EARTH As illegal logging, water and land pollution and unbridled oil extraction destroy the Third World's ecosystem, more and more Third World rural communities are forced to migrate to cities in search of work and survival. Experts predict the rise of tens and perhaps hundreds of tropical megacities attracting vast new slum populations of lowest-paid labor, and producing unprecedented rates of killer diseases such as tuberculosis …

He heard the honking of a distant bus.

•      •      •

“So you screwed up,” Guido said with satisfaction, when Justin led him to the scene of the disaster. “Did you go into her mailbox?” He was already tapping the keys.

“Of course not. I wouldn't know how to. What are you doing?”

“Did you add any material and forget to save it?”

“Absolutely no. Neither, nor. I wouldn't.”