And the signature? Justin, like Rob before him, struggled to decipher it. The style of the letter, as Rob’s minute pointed out, suggested an Arabic hand, the writing being long and low with well-completed roundels. The signature, done with a flourish, appeared to possess a consonant at either end and a vowel between: Pip? Pet? Pat? Dot? It was useless to guess. For all anyone could tell, it was actually an Arabic signature.
But was the writer a woman or a man? Would an uneducated Arab woman from Lamu really write so boldly? Would she ride a motorbike?
Crossing the room to the pine desk Justin placed himself in front of the laptop but, instead of calling up Arnold again, sat staring at the blank screen.
“So who does Arnold love, actually?” he is asking her, with feigned casualness, as they lie side by side on the bed one hot Sunday evening in Nairobi. Arnold and Tessa have returned the same morning from their first field trip together. Tessa has declared it one of the experiences of her life.
“Arnold loves the whole human race,” she replies languidly. “Bar none.”
“Does he sleep with the whole human race?”
“He may. I haven’t asked him. Do you want me to?”
“No. I don’t think so. I thought I might ask him myself.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Sure?”
“Certain sure.”
And kisses him. And kisses him again. Till she kisses him back to life.
“And don’t ever ask me that question again,” she tells him, as an afterthought, as she lies with her face in the angle of his shoulder, and her limbs sprawled across his. “Let’s just say Arnold lost his heart in Mombasa.” And she draws herself into him, head down and shoulders rigid.
In Mombasa?
Or in Lamu, a hundred and fifty miles up the coast?
Returning to the counting table, Justin selected this time Lesley’s background report on “Bluhm, Arnold Moise, MD, missing victim or suspect.” No scandal, no marriage, no known companion, no common-law wife recorded. In Algiers, Subject had lived in a hostel for young doctors of both sexes, occupying single accommodation. No Significant Other recorded with his NGO. Subject’s next of kin given as his adoptive Belgian half-sister, resident in Bruges. Arnold had never claimed travel or living expenses for a companion, and never required anything other than bachelor accommodation. Subject’s trashed apartment in Nairobi was described by Lesley as “monkish with a strong air of abstinence.” Subject lived there alone and had no servant. “In his private life, Subject appears to do without creature comforts, including hot water.”
“The entire Muthaiga Club has convinced itself that our baby was put there by Arnold,” Justin is informing Tessa, perfectly amiably, as they eat their fish in an Indian restaurant on the edge of town. She is four months pregnant and though their conversation might not suggest it, Justin is more besotted with her than ever.
“Who’s the entire Muthaiga Club?” she demands.
“Elena the Greek, I suspect. Conveyed to Gloria, conveyed to Woodrow,” he goes on cheerfully. “What I’m supposed to do about it I don’t quite know. Drive you up there and make love to you on the billiards table might be a solution, if you’re game.”
“Then it’s double jeopardy, isn’t it?” she says thoughtfully. “And double prejudice.”
“Double? Why?”
She breaks off, lowers her eyes, and gently shakes her head. “They’re a prejudiced bunch of bastards—leave it at that.”
And at the time, he had done as she commanded. But no longer.
Why double? he asked himself, still staring at the screen.
Single jeopardy means Arnold’s adultery. But double? Double is for what? For his race? Arnold is discriminated against for his supposed adultery and his race? Ergo a double discrimination?
Maybe.
Unless.
Unless the cold-eyed lawyer in her is speaking again: the same lawyer who decided to ignore a death threat rather than imperil her quest for justice.
Unless the first perceived prejudice was not directed against a black man who was supposedly sleeping with a married white woman, but against homosexuals at large, of whom Bluhm—though his detractors didn’t know it—was one.
In such a case the cold-eyed, hot-hearted lawyer’s reasoning would work this way:
Jeopardy the first: Arnold is homosexual but local prejudice does not allow him to admit it. If he admitted it, he would be unable to continue his relief work since Moi detests NGOs as much as he hates homosexuals, and at the very least he would have Arnold flung out of the country.
Jeopardy the second: Arnold is forced to live in a state of deceit (see unfinished press article by ?). Instead of declaring his sexuality, he is driven to adopt the pose of playboy, thus attracting the criticism reserved for trans-racial adulterers.
Ergo: a double jeopardy.
And why, finally, does Tessa once more not confide this secret to her beloved husband, instead of leaving him with dishonourable suspicions that he will not, must not, cannot admit to, even to himself? he demanded of the screen.
He remembered the name of the Indian restaurant she was so fond of. Haandi.
The tides of jealousy that Justin had for so long held at bay suddenly broke banks and engulfed him. But it was jealousy of a new kind: jealousy that Tessa and Arnold had kept even this secret from him, together with all the others that they shared; that they had deliberately excluded him from their precious circle of two, leaving him to peer after them like a distraught voyeur, never knowing, for all her assurances, that there was nothing to see and never would be; that as Ghita had wanted to explain to Rob and Lesley before she shied away, no spark would ever fly; that the only relationship between them was precisely the brother-and-sister friendship of the sort Justin had described to Ham without, in his deepest heart, totally believing himself.
A perfect man, Tessa had called Bluhm once. Even Justin the sceptic had never thought of him in any other way. A man to touch the homoerotic nerve in all of us, he had once remarked to her in his innocence. Beautiful and soft-spoken. Courteous to friends and strangers. Beautiful from his husky voice to his rounded iron-grey beard, to his long-lidded, plump African eyes that never strayed from you while he spoke or listened. Beautiful in the rare but timely gestures that punctuated his lucid, beautifully delivered, intelligent opinions. Beautiful from his sculpted knuckles to his feather-light, graceful body, trim and lithe as a dancer’s and as disciplined in its withholding. Never brash, never unknowing, never cruel, although at every party and conference he encountered Western people so ignorant that Justin felt embarrassed for him. Even the old ones at the Muthaiga said it: that fellow Bluhm, my God, they didn’t make blacks like him in our day, no wonder Justin’s child-bride has fallen for him.
So why in the name of all that’s holy didn’t you put me out of my misery? he demanded furiously of her, or the screen.
Because I trusted you and expected the same trust in return.
If you trusted me why didn’t you tell me?
Because I do not betray the confidence of friends and I require you to respect that fact and admire me for it. Enormously and all the time.
Because I am a lawyer and where secrets are concerned—as she used to say—compared with me, the grave is a chatterbox.
14
And tuberculosis is mega-bucks: ask Karel Vita Hudson. Any day now the richest nations will be facing a tubercular pandemic, and Dypraxa will become the multi-billion-dollar earner that all good shareholders dream of; The White Plague, the Great Stalker, the Great Imitator, the Captain of Death is no longer confining himself to the wretched of the earth. He is doing what he did a hundred years ago. He is hovering like a filthy cloud of pollution over the West’s own horizon, even if it is still their poor who are his victims.
— One third of the world’s population infected with the bacillus,
Tessa is telling her computer, highlighting and underlining as she goes.
— In
the United States incidence has increased by twenty per cent in seven years . . .
— One untreated sufferer transmits the disease on average to between ten and fifteen people a year . . .
— Health authorities in New York City have given themselves powers to incarcerate TB victims who do not willingly submit to isolation . . .
— Thirty per cent of all known TB cases are now drug-resistant . . .
The White Plague is not born in us, Justin reads. It is forced upon us by foul breath, foul living conditions, foul hygiene, foul water and foul administrative neglect.
Rich countries hate it because it is a slur on their good housekeeping, poor countries because in many of them it is synonymous with Aids. Some countries refuse to admit they have it at all, preferring to live in denial rather than confess the mark of shame.
And in Kenya, as in other African countries, the incidence of tuberculosis has increased fourfold since the onset of the HIV virus.
A chatty e-mail from Arnold lists the practical difficulties of treating the disease in the field:
— Diagnosis demanding and prolonged. Patients must bring sputum samples on consecutive days.
— Lab work essential but microscopes often bust or stolen.
— No dye available to detect bacilli. Dye sold, drunk, run out, not replaced.
— Treatment takes eight months. Patients who feel better after a month abandon treatment or sell pills. Disease then returns in drug-resistant form.
— TB pills are traded on African black markets as cures for STD (sexually transmitted diseases). The World Health Organization insists that a patient taking a tablet should be watched while he or she swallows it. Result: a black market pill is sold “wet” or “dry” according to whether it’s been in someone’s mouth . . .
A bald postscript continues:
TB kills more mothers than any other disease. In Africa, women always pay the price. Wanza was a guinea pig, and became a victim.
As whole villages of Wanzas were guinea pigs.
Extracts from a page-four article in the International Herald Tribune:
“West Warned it, too, is Vulnerable to Drug-Resistant Strains of TB” by Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times Service,
some passages highlighted by Tessa.
AMSTERDAM—Deadly strains of drugresistant tuberculosis are increasing not just in poor countries but in wealthy Western ones, according to a report from the World Health Organization and other anti-TB groups.
“It’s a message: Watch out, guys, this is serious,” said Dr Marcos Espinal, the lead author of the report. “It’s a potential major crisis in the future” . . .
But the most powerful weapon that the international medical community has for raising money is the specter that the unchecked explosion of cases in the Third World will let divergent strains merge into something incurable and highly contagious that will attack the West.
Footnote by Tessa, written in a mysteriously restrained hand, as if she is deliberately holding herself back from sensation:
“Arnold says: Russian immigrants to US, particularly those coming straight from the camps, carry all sorts of multi-resistant strains of TB—actually in a higher proportion to Kenya, where multiresistant is NOT synonymous with HIV positive. A friend of his is treating very bad cases in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge area, and numbers are already frightening, he says. Incidence throughout US, amid crowded urban minority groups, said to be constantly increasing.”
Or, put into the language that stock exchanges the world over understand: if the TB market performs as forecast, billions and billions of dollars are waiting to be earned, and the boy to earn them is Dypraxa—always provided, of course, that the preliminary canter over the course in Africa has not thrown up any disturbing side-effects.
It is this thought that prompts Justin to return, as a matter of urgency, to the Uhuru Hospital in Nairobi. Hastening to the counting table, he again rummages in the police files and unearths six photocopied pages covered in Tessa’s fever-driven scrawl as she struggles to record Wanza’s case history in the language of a child.
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 centre five miles away. Wanza did not want to use the same medical centre 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.”
“More.”
“Laurel. Crown. Caesar. Emperor. Athlete. Victor.
“More.”
“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 any more,” 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 towards 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, ten-acre 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.