The Constant Gardener (49 page)

“So you are a man of the pen, Mr. Atkinson,” says Arthur, in faultless archaic English, when McKenzie has made the introductions.

“That's correct, sir.”

“What journal or publication, if I may make so bold, is fortunate enough to retain your services?”

“The Telegraph of London.”

“Sunday Telegraph?”

“Mostly the daily.”

“Both are excellent newspapers,” Arthur declares.

“Arthur was a sergeant in the Sudanese Defense Force during the British mandate,” McKenzie explains.

“Tell me, sir. Would I be correct in saying you are here to nourish your mind?”

“And the minds of my readers, too, I hope,” says Justin, with diplomatic unction, as out of the corner of his eye he sees Lorbeer and his delegation advancing across the runway.

“Then, sir, I pray that you may also nourish the minds of my people by sending us English books. The United Nations provides for our bodies but too seldom for our minds. Our preferred authors are the English master storytellers of the nineteenth century. Perhaps your newspaper would consider subsidizing such a venture.”

“I'll certainly propose it to them,” says Justin. Over his right shoulder, Lorbeer and his group are approaching the mound.

“You are most welcome, sir. For how long shall we have the pleasure of your distinguished company?”

McKenzie answers on Justin's behalf. Below them, Lorbeer and his group have come to a halt at the foot of the mound and are waiting for McKenzie and Justin to descend.

“Until this time tomorrow, Arthur,” says McKenzie.

“But no longer, please,” says Arthur, with a sideways glance at his courtiers. “Do not forget us when you leave here, Mr. Atkinson. We shall be waiting for your books.”

“Hot day,” McKenzie observes as they descend the mound. “Must be around forty-two and rising. Still, that's the Garden of Eden for you. Same time tomorrow, OK? Hi, Brandt. Here's your hotshot.”

•      •      •

Justin has not reckoned with such overwhelming good nature. The gingery eyes that in the Uhuru Hospital refused to see him radiate spontaneous delight. The baby face, scalded by the daily sun, is one broad, infectious grin. The guttural voice that sent its nervous mutterings into the rafters of Tessa's ward is vibrant and commanding. The two men are shaking hands while Lorbeer speaks, Justin's one hand to Lorbeer's two. His grasp is friendly and confiding.

“Did they brief you down there in Loki, Mr. Atkinson, or did they leave the hard work to me?”

“I'm afraid I didn't have much time for briefings,” Justin replies, smiling in return.

“Why are journalists always in such a hurry, Mr. Atkinson?” Lorbeer complains cheerfully, releasing Justin's hand only to clap him on the shoulder as he guides him back toward the airstrip. “Does the truth change so fast these days? My father always taught me: if something is true, it is eternal.”

“I wish he'd tell my editor that,” says Justin.

“But maybe your editor does not believe in eternity,” Lorbeer warns, swinging round on Justin and raising a finger in his face.

“Maybe he doesn't,” Justin concedes.

“Do you?” The clown's eyebrows are hooped in priestly inquisition.

Justin's brain is for a moment numb. What am I pretending to be? This is Markus Lorbeer, your betrayer.

“I think I'll live awhile before I answer that one,” he replies awkwardly, at which Lorbeer lets out a roar of honest laughter.

“But not too long, man! Otherwise eternity come and get you! You ever see a food drop before?” A sudden lowering of the voice as he grabs Justin's arm.

“I'm afraid not.”

“Then I show you one, man. And then you will believe in eternity, I promise. We get four drops a day here and it's God's miracle every time.”

“You're very kind.”

Lorbeer is about to deliver a set piece. The diplomat in Justin, the fellow sophist, hears it coming.

“We try to be efficient here, Mr. Atkinson. We try to get food into the right mouths. Maybe we oversupply. When customers are starving, I never saw that as a crime. Maybe they lie to us a little, how many they got in their villages, how many are dying. Maybe we make a few millionaires in the black market in Aweil. Too bad, I say. OK?”

“OK.”

Jamie has appeared at Lorbeer's shoulder, accompanied by a group of African women bearing clipboards.

“Maybe the food-stall keepers don't love us too much for screwing up their trade. Maybe the poor spearmen and witch doctors in the bush say we do them out of business with our Western medicines. Maybe with our food drops we create a dependency. OK?”

“OK.”

A gigantic smile dismisses all these imperfections. “Listen, Mr. Atkinson. Tell this to your readers. Tell it to the U.n. fat-arses in Geneva and Nairobi. Every time my food station gets one spoonful of our porridge into the mouth of one starving kid, I've done my job. I sleep in God's bosom that night. I earned my reason to be born. You tell them that?”

“I'll try.”

“You got a first name?”

“Peter.”

“Brandt.”

They shake hands again, for longer than before.

“Ask anything you want, OK, Peter? I got no secrets from God. You got something special you want to ask me?”

“Not yet. Maybe later, when I've had a chance to get the hang of things.”

“That's good. You take your time. What's true is eternal, OK?”

“OK.”

•      •      •

It is prayer time.

It is Holy Communion time.

It is miracle time.

It is time to share the Host with all mankind.

Or so Lorbeer is pronouncing, and so Justin affects to write in his notebook, in a vain effort to escape the oppressive good spirits of his guide. It is time to watch “the mystery of man's humanity correcting the effects of man's evil,” which is another of Lorbeer's disconcerting sound bites, delivered while his gingery eyes squint devoutly into the burning heaven, and the great smile beckons down God's benison, and Justin feels the shoulder of his wife's betrayer nudge affectionately against his own. A line of spectators is drawn up. Jamie the Zimbabwean and Arthur the Commissioner and his courtiers are the closest. Dogs, groups of tribesmen in red robes and a subdued crowd of naked children arrange themselves around the airstrip's edge.

“Four hundred and sixteen families we feed today, Peter. For a family you got to multiply by six. The Commissioner over there, I give him five percent of everything we drop. That's off the record. You're a decent guy so I tell you. Listen to the Commissioner, you'd think the population of Sudan was a hundred million. Another problem we got, that's rumor. Takes one guy to say he saw a horseman with a gun and ten thousand people run like hell, leave their crops and villages.”

He stops dead. At his side, Jamie is pointing one arm to heaven while her spare hand discovers Lorbeer's and gives it a covert squeeze. The Commissioner and his retinue have also heard it, and their response is to raise their heads, half close their eyes and stretch their lips in tense and sunny smiles. Justin catches the far rumble of an engine and makes out a black spot lost in a burnished sky. Slowly the spot becomes another Buffalo like the one that flew him here, white and brave and solitary as God's own cavalry, clearing the treetops by a hand's breadth, flickering and bobbing as it jockeys for line and height. Then vanishes, never to return. But Lorbeer's congregation does not lose faith. Heads remain lifted, willing it back. And here it comes again, low and straight and purposeful. A lump rises in Justin's throat and tears start to his eyes as the first white shower of food bags, like a trail of soap flakes, issues from the plane's tail. At first they drift playfully, then gather speed and spatter onto the drop zone in a wet tattoo of machine-gun fire. The plane circles to repeat the maneuver.

“You see that, man?” Lorbeer is whispering. There are tears in his eyes also. Does he weep four times a day? Or only when he has an audience?

“I saw it,” Justin confirms. As you saw it and like me, no doubt, became an instant member of his church.

“Listen, man. We need more airstrips. You put that in your article. More airstrips and closer to the villages. The walk's too long for them, too dangerous. They get raped, they get their throats cut. Their kids get stolen while they're away. And when they get here, they find they've screwed up. It's not the day for their village. So they go home again, and they're confused. A lot of them, they die of the confusion. Their kids too. You gonna write that?”

“I'll try.”

“Loki says more airstrips means more monitoring. I say, OK, we have more monitoring. Loki says, where's the money? I say, spend it first, then find it. What the hell?”

A different silence grips the airstrip. It is the silence of apprehension. Are marauders lurking in the woods, waiting to steal God's gift and run? Lorbeer's great hand is again clutching Justin's upper arm.

“We got no guns here, man,” he is explaining, in answer to the unspoken question in Justin's mind. “In the villages they've got Armalites and Kalashnikovs. Arthur the Commissioner over there, he buys them with his five percent and gives them to his people. But here in the food station, all we got is a radio and prayer.”

The moment of crisis is judged to have passed. The first porters advance shyly onto the strip to stack the bags. Clipboards in hand, Jamie and the other assistants take up their positions among them, one to each heap. Some bags have burst. Women with brushes zealously sweep up the loose grain. Lorbeer clutches Justin's arm while he acquaints him with “the culture of the food bag.” After God invented the food drop, he says with a rich laugh, he invented the food bag. Broken or whole, these white synthetic-fiber bags stamped with the initials of the World Food Program are as much a staple commodity of South Sudan as the food they bring.

“See that wind sock?—see that fellow's moccasins?—see his head scarf?—I tell you, man, if ever I get married, I'm gonna dress my bride in food bags!”

From his other side Jamie lets out a hoot of laughter, which is quickly shared by those next along from her. The laughter is still running high as three columns of women emerge from different points along the treeline on the other side of the airstrip. They are Dinka tall—six feet is not exceptional. They have the stately African stride that is the impossible dream of every fashionable catwalk. Most are bare-breasted, others are in copper cotton dresses drawn strictly across the bosom. Their impassive gaze is fixed on the stacks of bags ahead of them. Their talk is soft and private to themselves. Each column knows its destination. Each assistant knows her customers. Justin steals a glance at Lorbeer as one by one each woman gives her name, grasps a bag by the throat, chucks it in the air and settles it delicately on her head. And he sees that Lorbeer's eyes are now filled with tragic disbelief, as if he were the author of the women's plight, not of their salvation.

“Is something wrong?” Justin asks.

“The women, they're the only hope of Africa, man,” Lorbeer replies, still in a whisper while he continues to stare at them. Does he see Wanza among them? And all the other Wanzas? His small, pale eyes peer so guiltily from the black shadow of his homburg hat. “You write that down, man. We give food only to the women. The men, we don't trust those idiots across a road. No sir. They sell our porridge in the markets. They have their women make strong drink with it. They buy cigarettes, guns, girls. The men are bums. The women make the homes, the men make the wars. The whole of Africa, that's one big gender fight, man. Only the women do God's work around here. You write that down.”

Justin obediently writes as he is asked. Needlessly, because he has heard the same message from Tessa every day. The women file silently back into the trees. Guilty dogs lick up the uncollected grains.

•      •      •

Jamie and the assistants have dispersed. Paddling himself on his tall staff, Lorbeer in his brown homburg has the authority of a spiritual teacher as he leads Justin across the airstrip, away from the hamlet of tukuls toward a blue line of forest. A dozen children vie with one another to stay on his heels. They tweak at the great man's hand. They take a finger each and swing on it, utter loud growls, kick their feet in the air like dancing elves.

“These kids think they're lions,” Lorbeer confides to Justin indulgently as they pull and roar at him. “Last Sunday we are having Bible school and the lions gobble up Daniel so fast that God got no chance to save him. I tell the kids: no, no, you gotta let God save Daniel! That's in the Bible! But they say the lions are too damn hungry to wait. Let them eat up Daniel first, and afterward God can do his magic! They say otherwise, those lions die.”

They are approaching a line of rectangular sheds at the far end of the airstrip. To each shed a rudimentary enclosure like a paddock. To each enclosure a miniature Hades of the desperately sick, the parched, crippled and dehydrated. Stooped women hunching stoically upon themselves in silent torment. Fly-laden babies too sick to cry. Old men comatose with vomiting and diarrhea. Battle-weary paramedics and doctors doing their best to cajole and gentle them into a crude assembly line. Nervous girls standing in a long queue, whispering and giggling to each other. Teenaged boys locked in frenzied combat while an elder whacks at them with a stick.

•      •      •

Followed at a distance by Arthur and his court, Lorbeer and Justin have reached a thatched dispensary like a country cricket pavilion. Tenderly pushing his way through clamorous patients, Lorbeer leads Justin to a steel screen guarded by two stalwart African men in Medecins Sans Frontieres T-shirts. The screen is pulled open, Lorbeer darts inside, removes his homburg hat and hauls Justin after him. A white paramedic and three helpers are mixing and measuring behind a wooden counter. The atmosphere is of controlled but constant emergency. Seeing Lorbeer enter, the paramedic looks up quickly and grins.

“Hi, Brandt. Who's your handsome friend?” she asks, in a brisk Scots accent.

“Helen, meet Peter. He's a journalist and he's going to tell the world you're a lot of lazy layabouts.”

“Hi, Peter.”

“Hi.”

“Helen's a nurse from Glasgow.”

On the shelves, many-colored cartons and glass jars are packed roof high. Justin scans them, affecting a general curiosity, hunting for the familiar red and black box with its happy logo of three gold bees, not finding one. Lorbeer has placed himself before the display, assuming once more the role of lecturer. The paramedic and her assistants exchange raw smiles. Here we go again. Lorbeer is holding up an industrial jar of green pills.

“Peter,” he intones gravely. “Now I show you the other lifeline of Africa.”

Does he say this every day? To every visitor? Is this his daily act of contrition? Did he say it to Tessa too?

“Africa has eighty percent of the world's AIDS sufferers, Peter. That's a conservative estimate. Three-quarters of them receive no medication. For this we must thank the pharmaceutical companies and their servants, the U.s. State Department, who threaten with sanctions any country that dares produce its own cheap version of American-patented medicines. OK? Have you written that down?”

Justin gives Lorbeer a reassuring nod. “Keep going.”

“The pills in this jar cost twenty U.s. dollars apiece in Nairobi, six in New York, eighteen in Manila. Any day now, India's going to manufacture the generic version and the same pill will cost sixty cents. Don't talk to me about the research and development costs. The pharmaceutical boys wrote them off ten years ago and a lot of their money comes from governments in the first place, so they're talking crap. What we got here is an amoral monopoly that costs human lives every day. OK?”

Lorbeer knows his exhibits so well he doesn't need to search for them. He replaces the jar in the shelves and grabs a large black and white box.

“These bastards have been peddling this same compound for thirty years already. What's it for? Malaria. Know why it's thirty years old, Peter? Maybe a few people in New York should get malaria one day, then you see if they don't find a cure pretty damn quick!” He selects another box. His hands, like his voice, are trembling with honest indignation. “This generous and philanthropic pharma in New Jersey made a donation of its product to the poor starving nations of the world, OK? The pharmas, they need to be loved. If they're not loved, they get scared and miserable.”

And dangerous, Justin thinks, but not aloud.

“Why did the pharma donate this drug? I'll tell you. Because they have produced a better one. The old one is superfluous to stock. So they give Africa the old one with six months of life left in it, and they get a few million dollars' tax break for their generosity. Plus they are saving themselves a few more millions of warehousing costs and the costs of destroying old drugs they can't sell. Plus everybody says, look at them, what nice guys they are. Even the shareholders are saying it.” He turns the box over and scowls contemptuously at its base. “This consignment sat in a customs house in Nairobi for three months while the customs guys waited for somebody to bribe them. A couple of years back the same pharma sent Africa hair restorer, smoking cures and cures for obesity, and collected a multimillion-dollar tax break for their philanthropy. Those bastards got no feeling for anything but the fat god Profit, and that's the truth.”

But the full heat of his righteous anger is reserved for his own masters—those lazy bums in the aid community in Geneva who roll over for the big pharmas every time.

“Those guys who call themselves humanitarians!” he protests, amid more grins from the assistants, as he unconsciously evokes Tessa's hated H-word. “With their safe jobs and tax-free salaries, their pensions, nice cars, free international schools for their kids! Traveling all the time so they never get to spend their money! I seen them, man! In the fine Swiss restaurants, eating big meals with the pretty-boy lobbyists from the pharmas. Why should they stick their necks out for humanity? Geneva's got a spare few billion dollars to spend? Great! Spend it on the big pharmas and keep America happy!”

In the lull that follows this outburst, Justin ventures a question.

“In what capacity did you see them exactly, Brandt?”

Heads lift. All but Justin's. Nobody before, apparently, has thought to challenge the prophet in his wilderness. Lorbeer's gingery eyes widen. A hurt frown creases his reddened forehead.

“I seen them, man, I tell you. With my eyes.”

“I don't doubt you've seen them, Brandt. But my readers may. They'll be asking themselves, ”Who was Brandt when he saw them?“' were you in the U.n.? were you a diner in the restaurant?” A small laugh to signal the unlikely circumstance. “Or were you working for the Forces of Darkness?”

Does Lorbeer sense the presence of an enemy? Do the Forces of Darkness sound threateningly familiar to him? Is the blur that was Justin in the hospital less of a blur? Lorbeer's face has become pitiful. The child light drains out of it, leaving a hurt old man without his hat. Don't do this to me, his expression is saying. You're my pal. But the conscientious journalist is too busy taking notes to be of assistance.

“You want to turn to God, you gotta be a sinner first,” Lorbeer says huskily. “Everybody in this place is a convert to God's pity, man, believe me.”

But the hurt has not left Lorbeer's face. Nor has the unease. It has settled over him like an intimation of bad news he is trying not to hear. On the walk back across the airstrip he ostentatiously prefers the company of Arthur the Commissioner. The two men walk Dinka-style, hand in hand, big Lorbeer in his homburg and Arthur a spindly scarecrow in a Paris hat.

•      •      •

A wooden stockade with a log boom for a gateway defines the domain of Brandt the food monitor and his assistants. The children fall away. Arthur and Lorbeer alone escort the distinguished visitor on a mandatory tour of the camp's facilities. The improvised shower cubicle has an overhead bucket with a string attached to tilt it. A rainwater tank is supplemented by a stone-age pump powered by a stone-age generator. All are the invention of the great Brandt.

“One day, I apply for the patent on this one!” Lorbeer vows, with a too-heavy wink that Arthur dutifully returns.

A solar panel lies on the ground at the center of a chicken run. The chickens use it as a trampoline.

“Lights the whole compound, just with the day's heat!” Lorbeer boasts. But the zest has gone out of his monologue.

The latrines are at the edge of the stockade, one for men, one for women. Lorbeer beats on the men's door, then flings it open to reveal a foul-smelling hole in the ground.

“The flies up here, they develop resistance for every disinfectant we throw at them!” he complains.

“Multiresistant flies?” Justin suggests, smiling, and Lorbeer casts him a wild glance before he too manages a pained smile.

They cross the compound, pausing on their way to peer into a freshly dug grave twelve feet by four. A family of green and yellow snakes lies coiled in the red mud at its base.

“That's our air-raid shelter, man. The snakes in this camp, they got bites worse than the bombs,” Lorbeer protests, continuing his lament against the cruelties of nature.

Receiving no reaction from Justin, he turns to share the joke with Arthur. But Arthur has gone back to his own kind. Like a man desperate for friendship, Lorbeer flings an arm round Justin's shoulder and keeps it there while he marches him at light-infantry speed toward the central tukul.

“Now you gonna try our goat stew,” he announces determinedly. “That old cook, he makes stew better than the restaurants in Geneva! Listen, you're a good fellow, OK, Peter? You're my friend!”

Who did you see down there in the grave among the snakes? he is asking Lorbeer. Was it Wanza again? Or did Tessa's cold hand reach out and touch you?

•      •      •

The floor space inside the tukul is no more than sixteen feet across. A family table has been banged together from wooden pallets. For seats there are unopened cases of beer and cooking oil. A rackety electric fan spins uselessly from the rush ceiling, the air stinks of soya and mosquito spray. Only Lorbeer the head of the family has a chair, which has been wrested from its place in front of the radio that sits in stacked units under a bookmaker's umbrella next to the gas stove. He perches in it very upright in his homburg hat, with Justin on one side of him and on the other Jamie, who seems to occupy this place by right. To Justin's other side is a ponytailed young male doctor from Florence; next to him sits Scottish Helen from the dispensary, and across from Helen a Nigerian nurse named Salvation.

Other members of Lorbeer's extended family have no time to linger. They help themselves to stew and eat it standing, or sit only long enough to gulp it down and leave again. Lorbeer spoons his stew voraciously, eyes flicking round the table as he eats and talks and talks. And though occasionally he targets a particular member of his audience, nobody doubts that the principal beneficiary of his wisdom is the journalist from London. Lorbeer's first topic of conversation is war. Not the tribal skirmishes raging all around them, but “this damn big war” that is raging in the Bentiu oil fields of the north and spreading daily southwards.