‘I didn’t like that story,’ said Eleanor. ‘About the retarded people.’
‘Nor did I. That’s why I told it.’
‘But you enjoyed telling it.’
‘It illustrates something. After all, we’ve both seen and read worse.’
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‘I wonder.’
‘You find a story like that and you think, it should’t be possible.
Why, ask Basengi some day what happened to his parents. So if you think it shouldn’t be possible, there is clearly something wrong with the way you think. It’s attractive to imagine there’s a separate class of human being that’s depraved, so we need only identify them and put them away. But that version is too transparently self-serving.
So you have to look in the mirror and confess, I, too, could tie up my retarded sister in a closet and suffocate her boyfriend and throw a party until he begins to smell.’
‘You would never do any such thing.’
‘Eleanor. Look at what I am planning to do. Isn’t QUIETUS far more nefarious?’
Eleanor twisted in her seat. ‘You sit at your computer and play with numbers. It’s not the same. I’ve never seen you step on a spider.’
Calvin laughed. ‘Women are miraculous. I can’t imagine any greater test of devotion than I put you through yesterday. Why, I was dead sure you’d rung the police. And still you can cling to this myth of Calvin the Nice Person. I’m impressed.’
‘To be willing to trade two billion people for one man; it’s not very admirable, is it?’
‘It is, in a way. Panga would trade, of course—with pleasure. But Panga is merciless. You’re not.’
Eleanor stared out at the dark game park, oppressed with the helplessness that characterized her life. Now it was just the two of them, the intimacy of a common foe fell way, and she was left with the drone of that fan unsuccessfully wafting the smell of putrefying flesh out the window. She felt soiled. Eleanor searched for redemption. Whom did Calvin care about? One drowned Kamba. What did Calvin love that people made or people did? Music, cheap science fiction and population studies. What a surprisingly narrow man.
Eleanor combed through her own life for antidotes to the fan. The lamest tale would do so long as it illustrated qualities of bravery, honesty and affection that her race must conceal in at least small quantities. But was it a spell Calvin cast? The harder she tried to remember acts of kindness and sacrifice, the more memories of malice and avarice came back to her,
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clippings from her own private B-section: Edward in DC; the lies; the letter:… that Eleanor doormat. Andrew, who after living with her for eight months in Addis Ababa, had left her with a hug at the airport, off to the States for a three-week vacation that turned into the rest of his life. He didn’t write. Or that whirlwind with Mwema in Arusha, when it transpired she was merely a ticket to America…
And in the Third World aid biz, you might allow that your motives weren’t as sterling as you first pretended; you might project yourself into the victims of your generosity and see through their eyes the resentment of being given some microscopic portion of what you have, or even their casual acceptance of what they never asked for in the first place, none of which prevents you from expecting they’ll feel appreciative—which they do not. Didn’t Eleanor travel with that single carry-on because anything she owned of value had been stolen? Florence, Peter, her parking boy shuffled her mind, a tatty, dirty deck. Eleanor was not, like Calvin, repelled by other people; yet she had found them thoroughly disappointing.
What did people do or make that Eleanor loved? She didn’t mind music, but she could live without it, whereas Calvin claimed when the stereo was down it was like spending too long in the dark. Literature? It was more for filling time. Should she ever consider suicide, she could not imagine any novel tipping the scales towards staying alive. Art? Museums had never lost the atmosphere of a grade school field trip. She did, she recalled, love light: the hour between six and seven on the Equator when the colours went insane, what those poor painters could never seem to imitate quite. But people didn’t make light. And she adored a comfortable chair. It embraced you without expecting anything back; it couldn’t make you feel bad. People designed chairs…This was precious little salvation from someone who considered herself a humanist.
One memory rose, however. She’d been twelve years old. Her mother was in hospital again. Eleanor was staying with Ray and Jane, and they took her for a walk. One held each hand. They stooped towards her in the park. ‘Would you like
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it very much,’ asked Jane, ‘if you stayed with us? Not just for a little while, like before, but always?’
The child had exhaled. ‘Yes,’ said Eleanor. It was the sweetest moment of her life.
They needn’t have done that, she realized over and over, with an incredulity that almost destroyed the generosity in the end. She was just their loony friend’s daughter, a strange child and an added burden to a large family. A maggot wouldn’t do such a thing, would it? A maggot didn’t adopt lonely little girls.
Yet the last time she’d seen Ray and Jane they were busy, if kind; they were always so kind she couldn’t trust them, and Eleanor had been away too long. All the people she mentioned they’d never heard of. Andrew had left her, and he was just a name. She could only tell floating, disassociated stories that drifted separately off, helium balloons. More, her mother, an outpatient once again, had been a witch the week before, screaming outside their house that Jane had stolen her daughter. Eleanor had kept apologizing, perfectly aware that when she apologized she was at her most irksome.
Here she was, childless and thirty-eight, on this brutal continent with a job that seemed increasingly futile and nothing much to return to in the States. What did she have left, what or whom did she care for herself?
Eleanor sighed. The dark car was cosy, their silence comfortable.
Admit it: Calvin. Calvin the Psychopath.
She turned to stare at him as he swerved around an oncoming matatu as it swayed over the centre line with one working headlight.
His face was arguing: she wondered who was winning. She tried to hold QUIETUS in her mind and could not. The premise was so extreme and abstract that she still could not be taken aback. The project was so like him she was charmed. But what kind of poor enslaved dwarf could find mass murder adorable?
Then, something did not line up. Tone of voice. When Calvin talked of death, he sounded festive. How he spoke belied what he said, and when you sing, do the words matter? Isn’t the spirit of a song almost always in the tune? How then could she interpret the tousled, boyish abandon of his hatred?
Cynics are spoiled romantics. They are always the ones who 172
had the highest expectations at the start. They were once so naïve themselves that they despise naïvety more than any other quality.
Alchemists, they turn grief to gold. They take quinine in their tonic, Campari with their soda—bitterness is an acquired taste. Cynics have learned to drink poison and like it. They are resourceful people, though the sad thing is, they know what’s happened to them. They remember what they wanted to be when they grew up, and not a single one of them dreamt of becoming a cynic.
But studying Calvin’s over-active face, recalling the jubilance with which he foretold apocalypse, Eleanor could see his complement, the past. She remembered that look in his eyes in the photograph from Murchison Falls, the cocky hat. For Calvin to be so disgusted with humanity, there had necessarily to have been a time he had the highest hopes for it. Eleanor felt a little less demented. Because that was attractive, old girl. That was attractive as could be.
Wallace had said she could save the man. Must you persist in being a cynic if your aspirations, however belatedly, come to pass?
‘Isn’t there anyone,’ she asked when they were almost home,
‘whose death you would regret?’
Calvin didn’t answer at first, and seemed to entertain the notion of one name,
but then to think better of it. ‘No.’
Eleanor slumped against the car door.
She couldn’t sleep.
‘Calvin,’ said Eleanor at last, for he was wide awake—Opah Sanders must have mewled for more orange juice in his head. ‘If Panga were still alive, would you expose her to Pachyderm, too?
Just to get population down to size?’
‘It is only her absence that makes Pachyderm possible. With Panga, I’d plant forsythia.’
Injured silence. He seemed mystified.
‘What is the problem?’
‘Well…’ She didn’t want to cry. ‘What about me?’
‘What about you?’
‘Am I included, too?’
‘Of course. We both are.’
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Her chest shuddered. ‘I’m not enough for you to plant forsythia.’
‘Eleanor.’ He was trying to be patient. ‘I am not the same man. I couldn’t garden for the Queen of Sheba. Please stop taking everything so personally. Try to get some sleep.’ He put his hand on hers, with effort.
‘I simply don’t understand—how you feel about me.’
‘I’m quite fond of you.’
‘It’s just—’ Even in that nasal, quivering voice she herself despised, she had to get this out. ‘If you believe all human beings are slimy crawly things, well, it’s your privilege to regard yourself that way, but don’t expect me to see you as a worm, and sometimes I wonder if you say you’re a swine or a slug for someone to complain it’s not true, you’re lovely…I object as often as I’m allowed, which isn’t often.
If I say I love you, I’m undermining you somehow, because you don’t, or no longer, believe in it, and I join the enemy, the soppy, sappy enemy, and you’ll push me to the other side of your bed. You seemed positively crushed when I didn’t call you a reprobate last night…I mean, if we’re maggots, Calvin, am I one? To you?’
He squeezed her hand. ‘We’re both maggots.’
It was his idea of romance. ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘The way you claim to feel about the human race, you can include yourself and you enjoy that. But you have to include me, too. That makes me sad.’
‘I cannot—’ His voice was hesitant, and Calvin was rarely inarticulate. ‘I cannot feel beyond a certain point for you or I betray something.’
‘Panga?’
‘At one time, but no longer. Myself, I suppose.’
‘You claim to have a distaste for yourself.’
‘I have no love for myself. But something lasts beyond self-love.
A feeling of obligation. Of having started something and having to finish. Thoroughness.’
‘Is thoroughness an emotion?’
‘It can be. In my case it is overriding.’
‘ Your work,’ she said mournfully, for to get on the other side of Calvin’s work was to join the fifth column for good. He could say his persistence had nothing to do with love, but it 174
was love; QUIETUS was all he loved, and in this way his plan to wipe two billion people off the face of the earth was the healthiest thing in his life.
‘If I fall head over heels for you, my darling, I cannot finish what I started.’
Eleanor was startled to find herself thinking, for once, in bed, about population—she felt like Calvin. There was a cold, hard logic to his proposal that we throw our excess over the keel to save the boat. It struck her, however, that the forces of hardness and coldness already had the upper hand; that the very arrangement whereby species success could about-face to species failure was heartless and unfair; that Nature herself was sufficiently abusive to speak for heedlessness, disdain, the impassive. Misanthropy was programmed into the character of the universe, and what was there left in a place which they did not control and which would ultimately defeat them but to hold one another on a cool Nairobi night? She tried to say what she was thinking, but it came out small and trite.
‘But I, too,’ said Calvin, ‘am a force of Nature.’
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13
The Diet of Worms
‘That was a good point you made at Threadgill’s. About inequity, that it’s a given.’ Solastina poured Calvin’s coffee and rushed off for toast.
Eleanor was uncomfortable with servants. Pathfinder had hired a housegirl for the laminate palace, from whom Eleanor hid her laundry in order to wash it herself. She rinsed her own glasses and swept up her own crumbs until there was patently nothing for Beatrice to do. Eleanor knew the old argument that they needed the work; you did no one any favours here scrubbing your own tub.
Very well, but she couldn’t stand it. And now on rare visits home she found Beatrice smoking and laughing with friends, and crept about the bedroom trying not to interrupt, stuffing some extra underwear in her bag, to skulk out again, leaving Beatrice with her overly generous salary and cash to take care of ‘expenses’ (more cigarettes). She had allowed what most white Kenyans abhorred: the staff had become uppity and taken over, and those were the ones you sacked. Eleanor was grateful, however, to pay those stray shillings every week to escape the role of foreign master in a country where she was only a guest. She was aware that Beatrice did not consider Eleanor a noble, fair-minded benefactor of the Third World, but a fool. Go ahead, take advantage of me, the American thought.
I have taken advantage of more than you will ever. Eleanor was stuck with a crude good fortune she couldn’t shed—luck can be a curse, for it prevented her from feeling sorry for herself much as she would sometimes appreciate the pity.
‘Solastina, this butter is hard, and the toast is cold,’ Calvin 176
carped. ‘Bring fresh toast, upesi.’ Calvin felt natural in the role of master. ‘I thought we made a good team back there. I was wondering if you’d consider working with me.’
‘You mean for you.’
‘Mmm.’
‘That would be strategic, of course. If I’m involved, I’m less likely to be a problem.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And the complicity. If I refuse to play my part, indignation.
Complicity’s the next best thing.’
‘Quite.’
‘You tend to forget I have a job.’
‘What I have in mind sorts right into your job. Though why you insist on keeping that position with Pathfinder when it’s obvious it has no impact on population is beyond me.’
‘ Your work is more important.’
‘It will make more difference.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
‘Have you decided what you think of it yet?’
‘No. It’s not real to me.’
‘It’s real to Threadgill.’
‘He’s as looped as you are.’
‘More. But would you? Work for me?’
Though the fresh toast had now arrived, Eleanor took a piece of the old, cold batch (not wanting to waste it) and balanced squares of icy butter on top, trailing blackcurrant jam in little streets between the butter houses with childlike concentration. The jam was from one of the tiny airline jars Eleanor compulsively saved. Calvin scowled, took the hot toast and disdained her silly salvage for the bit pot of marmalade.
‘What have you in mind?’ asked Eleanor. ‘I’m no fundi of fatality, you know. I wouldn’t have a clue how to go about giving the over-populated a bad case of psoriasis.’
‘I could use some help fund-raising, for one. QUIETUS is expensive.’
‘Would it involve much of my time?’
‘Weekends. We’ve targeted some wealthy right-wing Brits right here in Kenya as likely donors. Flights to the highlands? Drinks on verandas? As long as you could tolerate the
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company, you might enjoy it. Since I’ll warn you, the marks I’ve identified you won’t like.’
‘What does that say about us? About QUIETUS?’
‘Nothing.’
Eleanor stared into the garden with a crooked smile. ‘All this talk of death. And it’s so beautiful here.’
They were breakfasting out at the back, and it was one more of those flawless Equatorial mornings that became a plague, one after the other, pretty and sunny, until you prayed it would rain. For the purpose of this discussion, Eleanor could use a downpour, since the shining pinks and peaches of this garden made QUIETUS the more surreal. After so much talk of having exceeded the carrying capacity of the land, the foliage was thriving, and she wondered if both she and Calvin were deranged, fund-raising for viruses while wrapped in papery bougainvillaea, its leaves the translucent pastels of Monet’s, while jasmine laughed down trellises behind their backs. Ten-foot trees of poinsettia spangled the walkway and mocked the failing potted blooms Jane nursed for the centrepiece at Christmas. Elephantine mother-in-law’s tongue lashed on either side, sturdy and intim-idating. Amid these, birds flickered everywhere, bright, quick and clever. The only mournful note in the whole yard was struck by the weeping gums, whose leafy tears dripped from the upper branches, crying for the wazungu who, nested in the blowsy, blushing flora of East Africa, could only contemplate holocaust. What are we doing?
she wanted to ask. What are you talking about?
‘It won’t stay beautiful,’ Calvin was opining. ‘Even this property will be bought up and tik-tak-toed.’
‘Maybe it should be.’
‘Some day I would like you to admit, for once, that social justice is one value of several. Not that it has no value. Just that it doesn’t supersede every other. And you can’t have an infinite number of people with their fair ration of space and food and motokaris and still have flowers. Africans, you know, don’t give a frig for callililies; you can’t eat them.’
‘All right. I like flowers.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Doesn’t it bother you, a colleague who can’t take QUIETUS seriously?’