—The English lady enjoys the sun.—The old man bowed to her. His wife brought tea—the fellow-woman gesture of rising to help was met with an authorative side-to-side of the head on the ample neck. The guest took no part in the conversation, either, because the old woman spoke no English and the men seemed to have much to discuss in their own language; but Roberta Blayne was accustomed to this, too, in her role as the Administrator’s side-kick, alertly at ease, speaking up only when it was indicated by the sign language between them (a certain way he shrugged a shoulder almost imperceptibly in her direction) she ought to. Papers were signed, with the Deputy-Director leaning over the old man’s shoulder as the pen moved in a hand mummified by toil—that was the biblical word that came to her as the one for subsistence farming; while the men talked she learnt with her gaze around what the old couple’s life was: a hand-pump stood crookedly, there was a small patch of maize, white-plumed close to the house, the nagging complaint of a tethered goat, some potato plants, withered cabbages like severed heads and a few plump orange pumpkins. The sun was fierce; they moved into shade. Green handgrenades hung from the branches of the avocado tree.
This was, after all, her outing; she rose, smiling.—Gladwell, I think I’m going to go for a walk. Up to that hill over there, see the view.—
He broke off what he was saying to his uncle, head vehement. —No, no. You can’t walk around out there, there can be land mines still not cleared. No.—
It was as if the queer image that had come to her—fruit in the guise of weapons had been a warning. In countries where not long ago there had been one of those civil wars supplied with such weapons for both sides by foreign countries with ‘agendas’ of their own, the violence lies shallowly buried. The Agency had had enough experience of that. So the stout rubber-soled hiking boots were not to be put to use.
As the honoured guests were about to leave, he brought the plastic bags from his car and carried them into the house. Only then. She found this unexpectedly delicate, certainly in this man; he hadn’t wanted the old couple to start insisting that the guests share what was meant for themselves. The old man and woman followed him, protesting happily. The woman came back with a knife in her hand and cut down two avocados, presented them to the woman from the aid agency.
She weighed them, heavy, one in either hand, thank you, thank you.
Now they were fruit.
In the car she placed them on the rear seat. He seemed to contemplate a moment on the suitability of the gift.—They will get ripe.—
She forgot to take them with her when he dropped her at her house. It was dark, she’d had to shout for the houseman Tomasi, who ignored the horn, to come and unlock the gates.
On Sunday she went with Flora to fetch Alan Henderson from the airport, back from New York. He was elated.—We’ve a whole new allocation of funds!—
—Tell, tell!—
—One-and-a-half million more.—
His Assistant and his wife celebrated him: you’re a wizard, a Midas, how’d you do it, what’d you tell them.—We-e-ll—this country is stable, right—by standards of the newly emergent economies, it’s ditto democratic, on the way there, anyway, and if we want to help keep it on its feet, we must do more to promote good governance, while projects must be totally co-operative, real money must be put into them, theirs and ours—
His colleague knows that ‘specific project choices’ are what they’ll have to adapt, finagle, beyond fine intentions.
—And how’d they receive our ‘well-documented’ doubts about funds for IT?—
—That was the tough one. They came up with their solution: funds to supply generators for community centres and so on where we know there’s no local power plant. How feasible that is … we’ll work on it. They still see this continent left behind to be the Dark Continent again, Mister Kurz he dead, unless IT comes first—even before houses, schools and clinics. Maybe they’re right … On line into the world and what’s missing will follow. And there’s enthusiasm over our AIDS education strategy. They’re waking up over there in AmeroEurope to see if the new Plague isn’t stopped nothing much else we do will matter … that’s what’s going to bring about a Dark Continent in our age of globalisation.—
Over lunch he asked what she’d been up to.
As if he hadn’t been kept only too well informed:—Minding the store for you. Plenty of problems I didn’t trouble you with, though.—
Flora was carving a leg of lamb.—Not now, not now, in your office on Monday.—
—But I did have a break. Out in the country yesterday. The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs turned up and took me for a drive, he had some chore and I suppose looked for useful company. Did you know there’re still land mines not cleared in the Eastern province?—
—Good grief, I’d been told it was all clear except for the frontier in the West! We’d better look into that with Safety and Security—Defence, maybe. Was he fishing again, an Agency sardine or two to dish up for his boss’s reports to the Minister? As he was doing with me, as well, when we lunched. We’ll never get these guys in Government to understand we have to keep out of political issues—or seem to. As if sinking a borehole in this village before that doesn’t become political. What does he think about IT—or does he only utter on land? If you see him again, bring it up; he must sit at all manner of closed meetings with his Director, he must have a general idea of what the Government’s prepared to do, we have to gather what we can to work on for cooperation from it. They can’t expect to leave it all to the big network donors … as you noticed, their stocks have gone wa-ay down, anyway.—
The Hendersons put Deputy-Director Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma and his wife along with the name of the Director of Land Affairs himself on the list for a cocktail party marking the Agency’s decade of service in Africa. The Director brought his wife, his Deputy came alone. As if there was no wife; but there’s always a wife, somewhere. When Roberta, co-host with the Hendersons, greeted him she was about to add as a pleasantry, I forgot the avocados, but did not. Turned with other pleasantries to a man from Home Affairs, arrived with the Minister of Welfare (rumours of another kind of affair, there) who always tried to manoeuvre her sisterly into a corner with some urgent situation of women that must be brought to the attention of the Agency.
These first weeks of Alan Henderson’s return were taken up in collaboration with the local World Health Organisation representative in meetings arranged for a senior man from WHO headquarters who was touring the continent in a campaign against HIV AIDS. There were visits to rural counselling centres set up in army surplus tents and to an old hospital still known by the name of a deceased English queen, now a hospice—euphemism for the last of the Stations of the disease. The Agency Administrator’s Assistant had had to face, and walk away from, to life—starvation in Bangladesh, in India, not just the living human head resculptured by it, but its final power manifest, wreaked upon the feet, the skeleton of feet no longer for standing, the feet, the hands, the hands the very last web-hold on existence. People deployed on the ground (as opposed to those tours of duty looking down from cloud-high windows of metropolitan headquarters) are like doctors, they must do what they have to do without the fatality of identification with sufferers. But in this red-brick relic of imperial compassion for its subjects the long-established discipline become natural to her failed; suddenly was not there. She groped for it within herself; the anguish of the bodies on beds and mats entered in its place. She could not look, she had to look, at the new-born-to-die and the rags of flesh and bone that were all that was left of the children they were to become if they did survive weeks, months, maybe a year. Food and clean water (the succour ready to be provided on other tours of duty): useless here.
Silenced by what they had seen, the official group was taken to a Holiday Inn where the Agency had arranged a private room and coffee was served. She was hearing as echoes sounding off the walls the practical responses to—what? Incurable. Something incurable in the nature of
human life itself, taking many forms of which this was the latest, arising, returning in endless eras and guises—disease, wars, racism. That’s how people come to believe—have to believe—in the existence of the Devil along with God, Capital Initials for both. How else? How else answer why. But what there was in that place was not ontologically incurable! Just that a cure was not yet discovered. Preventable. That was the succour, in the meantime! Research facilities, preventive education—that was what, under the mantra of diffused tapes repeating pop songs, the people who were doing something about these were arguing, as the coffee revived blood run cold. And that was the code she belonged to: whatever there is, the ethic is do something about it. But she couldn’t respond when her Administrator, with his usual consideration of the worth of her views, looked to see if she was going to speak.
The official car drew up at the gates just as she arrived back at the house. Dismay difficult to overcome: not this afternoon, end of this day! Draw the curtains pour yourself a whisky, no-one but the face, familiar in this delegated house, this tour of duty, of the attendant Tomasi.
Nothing for it but to blast the horn for Tomasi to come and open the gates—and dismay gave way to embarrassment, the blast sounded exasperated, she had the duty of a polite show of welcome, at least. As the gates were opened she waved a hand to signal the car to precede hers. The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs was deposited at the front door and his car proceeded once again round to the yard. She left hers and produced a smile to greet her guest.
Tomasi the sprinter was already opening the front door. Once she and Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma were in the livingroom she excused herself:—May I dump my papers and tidy myself up, we’ve been about out of the office all day. Please—be comfortable.—
He will have heard her flushing the loo, water coming from the old squeaking taps as she washed, she did not look at herself in the bathroom mirror. Hadn’t made himself comfortable. There in his parliamentary dress he was standing as if he had just entered.—Come.—She turned to the sofa; while he seated himself, she indeed drew the curtains and opened the cupboard where the hospitality bottles were.
—It’s too late for tea, don’t you agree. Gladwell. What’ll it be?—
—Whatever you are having.—
—Whisky? Soda, water?—
—I prefer soda.—
She drew up a little table for their drinks and joined him on the sofa.—We have a visitor from WHO in New York, we’ve been taking him around with people from the Ministry of Health, some from Welfare.—
—It is good when these principals come, see for themselves. Sometimes.—
—And other times?—
—They don’t understand what they see, what it means; what we are doing.—One of his pauses.—They’re seeing something else they bring along with them. What is it, the word … when I was a student at University of Virginia—a paradigm. Yes.—
Sometimes.
The curt proviso caught at her abstracted attention. The few occasions they had met, even in the opportunities of the weekend drive, he had not allowed himself any uncertainties. Now from this small indication that this official was also a man with doubts came the release coffee at the Holiday Inn had not brought her.
—I shouldn’t be doing this job.—
Spoken suddenly for herself. But as if overheard by both—the man was here so it must have been for him, too.—We were at that new water purification plant … two clinics they fund. And the old Queen Mary Hospital. You know.—
—Their AIDS programme.—
—WHO’s and ours, the Agency.—
—You have had a very busy day. Roberta.—
And she was the one who had not seen what there was to see: here was a reassuring presence seated in physical solidity, affirming her worth, the correctness of the three-piece suit a sign of order—like the gown of a judge in the discipline of the law, a surgeon in his white coat—in a shaking world. A man in command of himself. Strong perfectly articulated hands enlaced at rest on his knees.
—It was unbearable. You should go—no, don’t, don’t go, it’s what no-one’s meant to see, how can I say, the processes, what happens after death and it’s supposed to be buried away, but it’s all there—living. The babies just born and that means beginning to die, there in front of you.—
In profile she saw his mouth drawn stiffly, eyebrows contracted. That he did not look at her made it possible for her to control the stupid, useless indulgence of tears.
He picked up his glass and drank, then stirred slightly, towards her.—I told you not to walk out because of land mines still there, my uncle’s place. His youngest was home for school holidays and went with his dog to shoot a bird for his mother’s pot and he was blown up. Both legs gone. Sixteen years. He died. They can’t plant their fields.—
When the man had left she didn’t know whether he had meant to reproach her weakness, or comfort her with the proof—seen it for herself—that the old couple continues to live surrounded by the Death that had killed their son, lying in wait for them to step upon it.
The tour of the WHO representative ended. Roberta Blayne and her Administrator took up their usual activities until the next partner in development came. She was doing her job. In the social life promoted by Flora Henderson beyond official entertaining and being entertained (enough, enough aidshoptalk) the bachelor woman was always in the company of couples. She danced with other women’s husbands; no woman seemed to fear her. She couldn’t consider herself lonely, and the work was among the most fulfilling she had ever been assigned to, since Alan Henderson used her particularly in meetings where, in accordance with the Agency’s Mission Statement, local communities’ ideas of what they most needed—dams, access roads to markets, chicks and fingerlings to begin poultry- or fish-farming, roofing and desks for a new school—were to be joint projects with them. Many of those chosen by people to speak for them were women; somehow she created confidence: surely a woman would listen to them?—but the men respected her, too, an official position counters many traditional prejudices. Her Administrator would remark to Government officials, Roberta’s learning the language, you know, often she doesn’t need an interpreter! She would protest—she certainly did! But the fact that his Assistant was taking the trouble, in a tour of duty that lasts only a couple of years, to learn the main language of the country reflected well upon the Agency. Often the community would give her some small gift (no vicuna coat bribe—the Agency allowed acceptance as a token of trust)—a carved wooden spoon, woven straw bags, a clay pot; the house she’d been assigned to began to take on the signs of homely possession that come with objects which have their modest personal history.
The black car of the luxury model provided for the second echelons of Government office-bearers was in the yard—perhaps once a week, could be any day. The driver and bodyguards installed in the kitchen.
The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs was the one acquaintance among many in her job (she knew their names, faces round conference tables, gossip about them, by now) who had become a special kind of acquaintance; his presence at least claimed that. They progressed from exchanges and courteous argument about current events in the country and the continent, inevitably, as people do when such talk runs out, to link observations from the past: when I was young, when I was a kid, I remember I thought it would be, it was … and to offer experiences of childhood background. Without any confidentiality, of course. These ordinary anecdotes are common currency.
But you are what you were.
There, then, the experiences don’t meet; he began minding his father’s cattle, classic for a government career in Africa, she was at a girls’ school in an English cathedral town, the bells pealed while the basketball was aimed, the cattle lowed as they were driven under the herdboy’s whip. He had been to a mission school, then a college in some neighbouring African country from where there came his scholarship to America. He had once mentioned a university. University of Virginia, wasn’t it? Here, experienc
e could be shared; well, she had studied for a year in the USA, exchange programme with an English university. He had wanted to go on to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; it was part of the limits of contact he apparently always set himself that he did not offer the sequel to the intention. She had learnt not to fill his silences, but sometimes there was the vacuum’s pressure to continue. Out of politeness he would have to make some sort of explanation.
—I was married, at home. Away a long time, I had to come back. Children.—
—They must be grown up now? Satisfaction to you … It’s a trade-off, I suppose. I was married, but no children, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately as there was a divorce. But I wonder if you really missed much, Harvard, I mean. You’ve gone through another kind of school of government, haven’t you, right here.—
—We are all learners in the world. But academic things in a c.v., they impress people.—
—In government careers? At high level? I wouldn’t have thought so. The President hasn’t got a Harvard degree, not even a less grand university one from overseas, far as I know.—
—There are other qualifications to make up.—
He smiled at her in pride, lest she lure him to a lapse into criticism of the Head of State.—He was one of our first leaders in our war of liberation … he is a man who has not abandoned our culture the same time as he can take on the world. You know.—
—What are the children doing? Anyone interested in going into politics, like Dad?—
—Studying.—Subject closed.
One evening they had a second whisky and time had passed so unnoticed that she suggested some supper. The driver and bodyguards were already being fed maize meal and stew when she went to the kitchen to see what she and Tomasi could offer.
Over canned soup and cold chicken he told her of a farm in the Southern Province.—Your own farm?—Yes, he had a farm. (Doesn’t everyone in government acquire a farm or farms, don’t ask about how, nothing to do with the questions of land redistribution; but this was none of her business, certainly not at her own table with a guest.)
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