‘Calvin!’ Eleanor exclaimed, unable to control herself.
‘My most controversial position’, Calvin continued, his glance slicing shut up, ‘was to advocate the withdrawal of all child survival and infant mortality programmes in Africa.’
‘In English?’
‘The whole reason there are so many people here, Wendell, 196
is the missionaries trekked in vaccines for smallpox, eradicated tsetse flies, cured yellow fever and improved nutrition. Not so long ago, women had crops of children and most of them died. It was a hard life, but it worked: populations were relatively stable. I advocate going back to traditional death rates. Stop re-hydrating the five-year-old with diarrhoea. I know it sounds callous, but the alternative is he will starve or, should he live to fourteen, knife either of us in the back for a chicken sandwich. The West created a disease with a cure.
Only the West can take its nostrums away.’
‘So that’s what you’re about, getting the nurses out?’
‘I can’t tell you more than I have. I’m the head of a private organization whose intentions are drastic; even fantastic. These issues are politically sensitive. It’s not in your interests to know too much.
Your cheque will not be traceable to us. Your name will not appear in our files. Only our visit here today could implicate you, and you may claim it was social. I’m not trying to be coy, Wendell, but to protect you and my operation both.’
‘How do I know you’re not a charlatan?’
‘I am a former department head of USAID, not a ruffian with a crumpled typewritten pledge for radio-television school. I have nothing on paper; printed material could get me arrested. My cre-dentials are easy to check, but if you go looking for my organization you won’t find it. I know it sounds outlandish, and I’m asking you to take a great deal on faith. Then, look at it this way: even if this is a flim-flam, what’s going to happen to population growth? Nothing.
But what will happen if you don’t give me support? Nothing. If you fund me, something might improve; if not, everything definitely gets worse.’
BC chuckled. ‘By that reasoning, I should bankroll every confidence artist I meet.’ To Eleanor’s amazement, he took out his cheque book. ‘To whom do I make this out?’
‘The IMF will do nicely.’ When Calvin took the cheque decorously, he didn’t glance at the amount but slipped it blindly into his wallet.
‘I shall expect a report.’
‘How much we report,’ said Calvin affably, ‘will depend on 197
our report of you.’ He had successfully switched it around, who trusted whom.
‘How drastic?’ asked Wendell with a mischievous smile, as if he knew very well.
‘Drastic,’ Calvin assured him, and shook hands.
‘You won’t hurt any animals will you?’ BC called as they departed.
‘Not on four legs,’ Calvin shouted back.
As they tucked into the jeep, Calvin waved as Wendell stroked his hunt terrier on the porch. Eleanor waved, too, until they were around the bend. The man looked so forlorn. Calvin was already peeping in his wallet. ‘Two hundred thousand pounds. Not bad for a day’s work.’
‘It stretches my credulity,’ said Eleanor, ‘that the IMF is behind QUIETUS.’
‘Use your head,’ Calvin chided. ‘We just received a donation to the International Mortality Fund.’
Though their mission had been successful, on the flight back Eleanor was acidly silent.
‘You’re pouting,’ said Calvin.
‘You forewarned me about bigoted balderdash, but not that I’d have to hear it from you.’
‘More complicity,’ he assured her. ‘But the joke is on BC. He thinks the world is only over-populated with bongos. The truth is it is also over-populated with racist colonialists. After all, what are the chances that a seventy-year-old alcoholic will survive Pachyderm?’
He could not understand why his rogue sense of justice was of such limited consolation. The poor sweet old man. And what would happen to all those dogs?
Their next target, however, was an American who worked for Lon-rho, a calm, well-kept and widely read gentleman of modest appetite who early in the encounter moderated Calvin’s extreme forecasts with more complex figures of his own; something felt wrong.
The house itself had all the right markings, an opulent spread overlooking the game park, steeped in that funny emptiness that can invade interiors when they are too well done—too spare, too tasteful, with a pillow just here and that print 198
with simply the ideal frame and something in you is dying to toss toys in the corner and invite a homeless person to throw up on the sofa. It was one of those dream houses too clever for its own good, since when Eleanor imagined coming home to such a vision she saw long evenings with no company, walking bereft from one wide-windowed, ethnic-carpeted diorama to the next, the phone not ringing. No one would stop by, since the dream house was, as dream houses always are, out in the middle of nowhere, and consequently was steeped in the air of all dressed up and no place to go. After enough ambling from the game-viewing nook to the bathroom—brass fittings, plush towels so terrifyingly white you end up drying your hands on the toilet paper—she would slit her wrists in the tub, not only to make a mess but to force all this calculated architecture to experience an emotion. Something about perfection is hostile.
Thomas Eggerts shared some of the qualities of his house: he surely took regular exercise, kept his cholesterol low and ate bran cereal. His correspondence would be up to date, and he would never run out of paper-clips. His expression was terminally pleasant, his face unimportantly handsome, and it was so impossible to imagine Thomas doing anything unruly or indulging in substances we have all read are not good for us that Eleanor wondered if discipline itself could become a vice.
Her foreboding intensified when their host sipped passion fruit squash, which drove Calvin as ever into the arms of the whisky Eggerts clearly kept only for guests. Likewise the presence of American inflection drew Calvin’s nattiest British accent.
‘In famine relief camps,’ Calvin introduced after their polite statistical fencing, ‘aid workers have found that families themselves will select a child to die. The child is not only banned from his own parents’ larder, but will get shunted from the pot of porridge even if it’s provided by UNICEF. Brothers and sisters will take posho out of his hands. Eventually he becomes lack-lustre and won’t even try for food. It makes sense, of course. If the parents die, the whole family is lost. The parents come first.’
‘I was running a health clinic in Addis,’ Eleanor added. ‘A 199
family in a nearby village had a ten-year-old girl they kept in the back room. She was terribly under-nourished, and ill, but not beyond hope. She needed a blood transfusion, and both her parents were compatible. I begged them—one transfusion would save the girl’s life. They both refused. They’d already decided she should die. I know it’s a small story, but somehow that experience did something to me. I found it harder to run my clinic after that, and applied for a transfer.’
‘The little girl,’ said Thomas. ‘You were fond of her?’
‘Maybe that was it. Yes, very. She was tiny but unusually beautiful and bright. I found myself thinking, if her own parents won’t save her, what am I doing here?’
‘Africans don’t have the same relationship to death as we do,’ said Calvin.
‘They can’t afford to,’ said Thomas.
‘In the States,’ said Calvin, ‘have you noticed how bereaved relatives act indignant? Especially in the upper classes. You get the feeling that over $100,000-a-year Americans believe they’ve earned themselves out of disease.’
‘I dread the day,’ said Thomas, ‘that the rich can pay the poor to die for them,’
‘They do already,’ said Eleanor.
‘You’re quite right,’ said Thomas. ‘We eat off the curved backs of men with a life expectancy of forty-five. Our breakfast porridge is taken from the hands of those litt
le boys shut out from the UNICEF
pot.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ Calvin scoffed. ‘And I’ve never seen the point of sophomoric, mawkish self-flagellation. As you’ve said yourself, Eleanor, maldistribution is a fact of life. My point was otherwise: Africans grasp that letting some sections of the population go can be in the interests of the larger community. They are mature about death. The West, in my view, could use a bit more calamity. I watch my own culture growing bathetic and senile. When I read about millions of dollars spent to mend a single hole in some white baby’s heart, I want to gag.’
‘All the same,’ said Thomas, ‘you’re not suggesting African parents have no feelings for their children?’
‘No,’ said Calvin noncommittally.
‘And you would admit that, even if this triage you describe 200
is necessary, parents forced to select their own child for starvation are tragic?’
‘I wouldn’t call it tragic; I’d call it realistic.’
‘Can you imagine,’ he pressed, ‘in your own family, how you would feel if your mother instructed you that your baby sister, with whom you played every day, was no longer to be fed?’
‘With difficulty,’ said Calvin. ‘I was an only child.’
Thomas sat back. ‘Somehow I could have predicted that.’ He invited them to his dinner table, though his graciousness was formal for an American; chilly.
‘On the one hand,’ Thomas resumed, ‘I can see your point that up against the wall circumstances arise where some must be sacrificed for the good of all, but you will not win me from my grief should such a choice be foisted on my own family, or on anyone else’s.
Without that grief I cease to be a human being as I understand the term. I’ll grant you the obscenity of spending millions of dollars to save the life of a single American infant when in the meantime hundreds of thousands of children in Mali are dying of diarrhoea that could be cured for two or three dollars apiece. Yet were our resources sufficiently plentiful, I would spend a million dollars to save the life of any child; as they are not, we have to make painful assess-ments of how much that life is worth. The wealthy can afford to be precious, and the poor cannot—it’s not even a question of values, but economics. However, the opposite extreme of your “sentimental”
relation to death in the industrialized world I personally find more frightening: where human life no longer means anything at all. Admire African “maturity” with corpses as you will, when things go wrong on this continent that is how they corrupt: people become firewood. In fact, that is what happens by and large when things go wrong anywhere. Historically, I can’t think of a society that has collapsed or degraded itself because its people cared for one another to excess.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Calvin, knife and fork upright on the table, though no one was eating, ‘historically, that is what’s happening right now. We think more and more people is better and better, we save this lot and that lot from starving, and we can’t afford it! The whole planet can’t afford it!’
201
‘What no society can afford,’ Thomas returned through his teeth,
‘is blithely condemning whole populations of its own kind to death because their existence is inconvenient.’
‘We are not talking inconvenience, Eggerts, we are talking extinction!’
‘So you say. I am not fully persuaded. But I believe there are different kinds of extinction. It is hypothetically possible for us to persist as a species but to lose what makes us remarkable. In my mind, our distinction has everything to do with a capacity for altruism, empathy and, if you don’t mind the word in a conversation where it obviously has little place, love.’
Calvin leaned forward. ‘All right, we agree. Have you ever been to villages where there’s nothing to eat? You’re so concerned with our sinking to mindless, unfeeling animals, well, that’s what happens, Eggerts. They sit, all day, with flies in their eyes, and after a certain point nobody bothers to dig graves. They don’t sing, they don’t read, they don’t even bloody talk most of the time, much less pass on quaint anthropological tales of the ancestors. If you starve people enough they don’t care about each other any longer, all they care about is food. And that’s what all of Africa is looking at unless someone or something moves fast.’
‘So what do you propose?’
‘To begin with—’ Calvin hesitated, though it had been such a breeze with BC. ‘I would withdraw child survival programmes.’
‘You mean, pack up the vaccines? Tell the Red Cross to close shop?’
‘That’s right.’
‘That would be tantamount to murder.’
‘At this point,’ said Calvin defiantly, ‘I am not entirely opposed to murder.’
Thomas Eggerts stood up. ‘Then we have nothing more to say to one another. Perhaps we will skip dessert.’
Eleanor fumbled from her place, her face bright red. ‘Calvin—’
Calvin rose. ‘You’re a wet, fatuous tit, Eggerts. It’s people like you who cause a lot of suffering in the end, keeping everyone in sight alive one more hateful day.’
202
‘It’s your day that’s hateful, from the sound of it,’ said Thomas at the door. ‘But you wanted money, didn’t you? So here, Tin Man—’
He handed out a ten-shilling note. ‘Go buy yourself a heart.’
Back in the Land Cruiser, Calvin exploded. ‘ Who put that prat on my list? Every single name was supposed to be exhaustively vetted!
Somebody’s going to get it in the neck! Thomas Eggerts is a pious, maudlin dish-rag! Lucky for us all I kept my cards close to my chest, or we would be up one seriously brown creek! I am not making another appointment until that list is double-checked. And what is wrong with you, anyway? I’m not angry at you. It’s not your lousy homework.’
Eleanor put her hand to her cheek so he couldn’t see her face and announced quietly, ‘I have never been so embarrassed in my life.’
From a woman who had spent thirty-eight years in a state of near-permanent shame, it was an extreme statement.
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15
More Parameters
When he first proposed taking her to the Pachyderm lab, Eleanor said, ‘Where?’ She went vague. When pressed, she supposed she couldn’t see the harm, but then she hadn’t seen the harm in his whole fantasy, and that’s why she didn’t want to go. Before they left the house, she thought of phone calls to make, postcards to send, until he lifted her from the dining-room table by the nape of her neck, the way you drag cats cowering under the bed when they can hear their bath running.
Eleanor climbed heavily into Calvin’s cockpit and entertained various preconceptions. She pictured one of those grotty, fly-away Kenyan concerns, like Nyayo’s lobby: a back room in need of paint, counters scattered with half a dozen chipped test tubes, shelves of dusty jars with coloured powders like an array of ceramic glazes, a few spoons, an old hunchback with a manic gleam in his eye stirring a bowl of something brown and noxious all under the omniscient, rheumy eyes of another photograph of President Moi. Or maybe a zany palace full of scientists who would all on cue tear off their white coats to expose garters, corsets and stilettos, to high-kick down the corridors, Rocky Horror. More likely still, there was no lab. Calvin would fly to a pretty, deserted spot in Samburu, lift her from the plane and laugh. They would picnic: salmon and champagne. He had planned it in advance, on ice. Toasting, Eleanor would confess that for a little while she was taken in, that the Corpse meeting and fund-raising alike had been brilliant theatre, and QUIETUS would go down as his wittiest practical joke.
204
The trip took just over an hour, and Eleanor asked no questions.
As they entered the Northern Frontier District, she objected that the flight was making her woozy; maybe they should visit another day.
But Calvin had already decreased his altitude, looping around a neat grid of long white buildings with red crosses on top. ‘Am Ref?’
sh
e inquired faintly.
‘Camouflage. And why not? We’re flying doctors of a kind, diligently concocting a cure-all for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’
Pachyderm had its own landing strip, and Calvin explained that as air traffic control in East Africa was Wild West, it had proved easy to fly equipment and crates of rats and monkeys into the compound undetected. From overhead, he identified research prefabs, residential quarters and supply huts with mayoral pride. Pachyderm was effectively a small town, one of those self-sufficient settlements formed round a single industry, even if most of these townspeople hadn’t a clue what they manufactured.
‘Oh, they’re aware the operation is hush-hush,’ Calvin extolled.
‘The higher-ups imagine we’re on a US defence contract. The peons think we’re trying to beat Burroughs-Well-come to a cure for AIDS.
This fuels them with the fires of righteousness when cleaning cages and helps explain why our experimental populations keep dying out.’
‘Calvin, this place is huge!’
‘We’ve over 300 employees all told. No one leaves. No one is allowed to. We keep them fed, housed and entertained. We have a PX, bar. And Bunny was kidding about not having a sauna.’
‘How could you convince anyone to work out here?’
‘Salaries are high. Grants have so dried up in the US and UK that our foremost scientists are paying to publish their own papers. Besides, I not only supply them with state of the art equipment but here their experiments aren’t hogtied by nerdy restrictions from the animal rights cuddly-toy brigade. And the way you lure any good microbiologist is with interesting work. Pachyderm is the most fascinating research on the face of the earth. We are on the cutting edge of mortality. Set on stage with the elegant belladonnas you’ll see dancing down below, the atomic bomb is a cow in a ballet.’
205
Landing, Eleanor’s stomach flipped. The dust cleared to reveal their welcome wagon of one, who wailed over the dying engine,
‘Don’t tell me! More parameters!’
Calvin laughed. ‘Eleanor? Norman.’