At last, having convinced himself that he had landed, the African pilot shut down the engine. The noise faded, and the co-pilot’s window opened to the air. A blond-haired man in a safari jacket, with a deep sun-tan that was more electric than solar, leaned from the window and gave a series of encouraging waves, apparently returning the cheers of a huge welcoming party. He repeated the performance as Miss Matsuoka, face pressed to the eyepiece of the hand-held camera, ducked under the starboard wing. She crept along the fuselage, her lens taking in every capped tooth in the man’s confident and wolflike smile.
Already the cargo doors had opened, and two crew men lowered a metal step to the ground. Their overall pockets carried a distinctive emblem that seemed to be both a religious symbol and the logo of a television station.
‘Who are these people?’ I asked Captain Kagwa as we stepped from the jeep and shook the dust from our clothes. ‘Are they evangelists? Or some sort of missionary group?’
‘Our saviour, certainly.’ Kagwa saluted the aircraft with an ironic flourish. ‘Professor Sanger brings hope to our doorstep, salvation for the poor and hungry of Lake Kotto, comfort for the bush doctor …’
The blond-haired man stood in the doorway of the cargo hold. He was in his mid-forties, and had the reassuring but devious manner of a casino operator turned revivalist preacher. He bent down and greeted Captain Kagwa with a generous handshake, while giving his real attention to the Japanese photographer, who was reloading her camera beneath the starboard wing tip. When she was ready he ruffled his hair and then brought his hands together in a snapping gesture which I first assumed was a stylized religious greeting, but in fact was a clapperboard signal. As the camera turned, he posed beside two large sacks which the flight crew had manhandled into the hatchway. He composed his features into a tired but pensive gaze, and allowed a quirky smile, at once vulnerable but determined, to cross his sharp mouth. This well-rehearsed grimace, a tic I had seen before somewhere, cleverly erased all traces of his quick intelligence from his face. Only his eyes remained evasive, looking out at the indifferent forest wall with a curious blankness, like those of an unrecognized celebrity forced to return the stares of a foreign crowd. When Miss Matsuoka called to him, he quickly slipped on a large pair of sunglasses.
‘Right, Professor Sanger – I will wait for the poor people to receive your gifts …’
The Japanese woman had completed her shot, and was thanking Captain Kagwa, who had clearly relished the attentions of her lens. I left the jeep and walked to the wingtip of the Dakota, running my hand against the weather-worn trailing edge of this elderly aircraft. I now remembered Professor Sanger, a sometime biologist turned television popularizer. He had enjoyed a brief celebrity ten years earlier with a series of programmes that sought to demonstrate the existence of psychic phenomena in the animal world. The migration of birds, the social behaviour of ants and bees, the salmon’s immense journey to its spawning grounds, were all attributed to the presence of extra-sensory powers distributed throughout the biological kingdom, but repressed in Homo sapiens. As a newly qualified houseman doing my year on the wards in a London hospital, I would see him on the television set in the junior doctors’ common room. Of mixed Australian and German ancestry, Sanger had perfected the rootless international style of an airline advertisement, which his audiences took for objectivity. After a day spent in the emergency unit, treating road accident casualties and the victims of strokes and heart attacks, I would sit exhausted in the debris of the common room and watch this scientific smiler holding forth from a rockpool in the Great Barrier Reef or an anthill in the Kalahari.
Fortunately, his success was short-lived. He soon exposed himself to ridicule when he claimed that plants, too, could communicate with one another and appeared in a televised experiment in which the gardeners of Britain rose at dawn and urged their hollyhocks and lupins to deny the sun. After this fiasco Sanger began a second career in Australian television, but he soon became involved with dubious video and publishing ventures, popup books and filmed histories of the Yeti and Bigfoot.
‘Dr Mallory …’ Captain Kagwa signalled to me. I was being summoned to meet the great man, who was already in conference with his production staff – a small team of European engineers, and a scholarly young Indian frowning over his pocket calculator, whom I took to be Sanger’s scientific researcher. Behind them were two African journalists from the government information office, gazing sceptically at the weed-grown airstrip and the silent forest.
‘Doctor …’ Sanger clasped my injured hand in a strong grip, greeting me with deep respect as if I were Livingstone himself or even, conceivably, that ultimate marvel, a member of the ordinary public. ‘Doctor, Captain Kagwa tells me that I have saved your life.’
I was unable to think of an adequate reply to this – it occurred to me that if I knelt at Sanger’s feet he would have been unaware of any irony. All the more annoying was the fact that the statement was literally true.
To add to my irritation, Captain Kagwa interjected: ‘The guerilla attack, doctor – it was fortunate for you that the television plane arrived on time.’
Sanger modestly dismissed this. ‘We have so many lives to save. There are mouths to feed, Africa is still starving, the world is starting to forget. The selfless work of people like yourself, Dr Mallory, needs to be brought into every living-room.’ Sanger pointed to the cargo hold of the aircraft, where I could see the sections of a small satellite dish among the grain sacks. Electronic equipment, lights and reels of wire were stowed between the seats. ‘We have complete studio facilities here. Africa Green, the television charity to which I have donated my time, has satellite links with the major Japanese networks. In fact, doctor, we thought of using you in our film.’
‘You would bring me into every Japanese living-room?’
‘Your work here, doctor, and your escape from death.’ Sanger paused, looking me up and down in a shrewd but not unfriendly assessment. I was certain that he saw me as little more than a scruffy bush doctor, in my dusty cotton shorts, lumpy army boots and blood-stained shirt, the backwoods physician stuck in my ways and unable to accept the opportunities of the media landscape. Yet he may have grasped that he needed me. ‘But the important task is to feed the mouth of Africa. We have five tons of rice here, bought with funds donated by West German television viewers. It’s only a small start … Will you help us, doctor?’
‘I’d like to – it’s very generous, and the charities have done enormous good. But one problem is that the people here don’t eat rice. Their diet is sorghum and manioc. The second is that there aren’t any people – they fled months ago, as Captain Kagwa should have told you.’
‘Well, they may be brought back.’ Kagwa gestured to the empty forest, uncomfortable with my churlish response, ‘It would be good for the Lake Kotto project, doctor.’
‘Fair enough. We’ll bring them back. I’m sure they would like to go on Japanese television – perhaps you should starve them a little first?’
‘Professor—!’ The Indian assistant shouted in anger. Bookish and trembling, he stepped protectively between us, his eyes searching wildly for the Dakota’s pilot and an instant take-off to a more welcoming site. ‘Such a remark betrays Dr Mallory’s profession. In the context –’
‘It’s all right, Mr Pal. The doctor is naturally bitter. He was brutally mistreated …’
I liked this earnest young Indian, and tried to pacify him. ‘That wasn’t sacrilege – not everyone in Africa is starving. The people of Lake Kotto have always been well-nourished. The problem here is the shortage of water. And the Sahara. I’m afraid you’ve lengthened the wrong runway.’
Captain Kagwa was about to intercede – I assumed he had been thinking of his future political career when he invited this small mercy mission to Port-la-Nouvelle – but Sanger suddenly took my arm. In a gesture of surprising intimacy, he steered me along the wing, unconcerned that the blood from my hand was marking his jacket. He was well-groomed, but I n
oticed that his teeth were riddled with caries, a surprising defect in a television performer. At close quarters his blond hair and deep suntan failed to mask an underlying seediness, and the look of immanent failure that his recent face-lift would never disguise. The subcutaneous fat had been cut away beneath the lines of his cheekbones, and his gaunt jaw was carried in a set of muscular slings. Whenever he switched off his spectral smile his handsome face seemed to die a little.
‘You must help me, doctor, as long as you are here. Captain Kagwa tells me you are leaving. Stay a few more days. You and I can deal with the Sahara later. Just now I need to show the people in Europe that I am trying.’
‘I understand. Why not go to Chad or the Sudan? You could do real good there.’
‘It’s not so easy – these regimes are choosy. Oxfam, UNICEF, the other big agencies are there. This was all I could find. I know – even my disaster area is a disaster.’
He wiped his forehead on his jacket sleeve, transferring a smear of my blood to his right temple. The first sections of a miniature television studio were being unloaded from the plane – lights, monitor screens like pickled egg yolks, sections of the satellite dish, consoles of switches, and a trio of cameras of various sizes. Only the sight of this electronic equipment seemed to calm Sanger.
‘Look, doctor, perhaps they don’t eat rice here – thousands of people in Düsseldorf and Hamburg paid for these sacks with small donations. This plane charter, I have to rent microwave links, millions of yen per kilometre, a lot of expense from my own pocket. But it’s a big chance for me … Perhaps my last chance. I have only Mr Pal and Miss Matsuoka to help me – they’re my ears and my eyes. All I need is a few pictures for the evening television news …’
This display of frankness and concern was so bogus that I almost believed it. Sanger had spent so long in the worlds of publicity and self-promotion that only the calculated gesture was sincere. A spontaneous insincerity was as close as one could come to the truth. Mere honesty would have seemed contrived and dubious to him, a surrender to brute feelings. The bad teeth, the antique aircraft, the fifty sacks of rice, suggested that the chief recipient of any aid was Sanger himself. It was his television career he hoped to rescue with this threadbare mercy mission. His choice of Port-la-Nouvelle marked only his own despair. The prime sites – Ethiopia, Chad, the Sudan – had been allocated to the most powerful television interests, the huge American networks and the British record companies. At the same time, I felt a certain concern for him. In many ways he was more in need of help than the vanished inhabitants of Port-la-Nouvelle. In practical terms, I had already made a small contribution to Sanger’s effort. It was my tractor which had helped to clear the forest and extend the runway.
‘Professor Sanger, take care!’ Mr Pal, the Indian adviser, pushed me aside and placed an arm around Sanger’s head, as if to shield his eyes from an unpleasant spectacle. Soldiers were running across the airstrip, some taking shelter behind the control tower, others shouting to each other as they crouched beneath the engines of the aircraft.
A single rifle shot sounded from the eastern end of the runway, its harsh report magnified by the forest wall. Hundreds of cuckoo-shrikes rose from the canopy, colliding with each other in their panic as they circled the lake.
Had Harare and his men returned? I knelt behind the sacks of rice, as the pilot and Mr Pal hauled Sanger into the cargo hold. The soldiers guarding the perimeter of the airstrip waved across the runway, pointing to the undergrowth that surrounded the tractor. They aimed their rifles at the deep grass, as if about to flush out a forest boar, or one of the released residents of Mrs Warrender’s breeding station, unable to cope with the rigours of life in the wild and pining for the peace and freedom of captivity.
I followed Captain Kagwa as he strode down the runway. The soldiers had found their prey in the undergrowth. Rifles raised like spears, they jabbed and prodded a small, bloodied mammal that scuffled at their feet in the long grass.
‘Doctor, they’ve caught a guerilla!’ Camera at the ready, Miss Matsuoka ran past me, almost twisting her ankle in the dusty ruts left by the Dakota.
The soldiers stepped back as Kagwa reached them, lowered their rifles and gesticulated at the figure beside their feet. Kneeling in the long grass, whose blades were wet with the blood from her nose and mouth, was the twelve-year-old girl who had guarded me on the beach. Unable to keep up with Harare and his escaping force, she had been abandoned in the tract of forest that separated the airstrip from the shores of Lake Kotto. She had thrown away both the Lee-Enfield rifle and her camouflage jacket, and wore only her ragged shorts and a green singlet. She sat on the ground as the rifle barrels bruised her cheeks and forehead. Wiping the blood from her nose, she tied and untied the bandage around her infected foot. When she saw me approach she looked up with the same hostile eyes that had steered me on to the beach two hours earlier. Small and hungry, fidgeting nervously with her filthy bandage, she made it clear that the reversal of our fates in no way altered her judgement of me, even though a rifle stock would crush her skull in a matter of seconds.
‘Dr Mallory – come with me.’ Captain Kagwa pushed through his men. He bent down and slapped the girl, stunning her with a blow. He held her cropped head in a huge hand and tilted it back. ‘You recognize her? She was with Harare?’
Miss Matsuoka brushed past me. ‘Yes, Captain – she tried to kill the doctor.’
‘Well, doctor?’
The bandage flicked to and fro as a pair of small eyes watched me from between Kagwa’s fingers.
‘I haven’t seen her before.’ I tapped Kagwa’s elbow, hoping that he would order the soldiers away before they began their sport. ‘This is a different girl.’
‘But, Captain—!’ Miss Matsuoka began to protest, and then noticed the satellite dish being erected beside the Dakota. Her attention veering away, she beckoned to us both. ‘Back to the plane – Professor Sanger is setting up the interviews, Captain.’
The girl shook her head free from Kagwa’s grip. He reached down and threw her backwards into the grass, where one of the soldiers kicked her with his rubber boot. She scuffled away through the undergrowth, dragging her unravelling bandage like a snakeskin.
I watched her vanish into the trees and said: ‘I’ll take my tractor, Captain. Perhaps your sergeant would drive it for me.’
‘Of course.’ He seemed glad that at last I had something to distance me from my hostility to Professor Sanger. ‘May you find just one gallon of water before you leave, doctor. Enough to wash away all memories of Port-la-Nouvelle.’
6
The Oak and the Spring
As smoke pumped from its exhaust funnel, the tractor laboured through the soft soil beside the runway extension. I stood a dozen yards in front of the unsteady vehicle, trying to attract the driver’s attention. Confused by the steering levers and by the slow but powerful response of the engine, the sergeant had barely mastered the heavy clutch. The tractor slewed in the soft mud, the metal scoop swinging from side to side. Its scarred blade cut fillets of damp soil from the sloping ground. They curled back beneath the treads and were stamped into the ground by the metal links.
I walked along these rectilinear grids, a trace of the passing imprint of western technology on the African land, as the tractor reversed down the slope. On either side of the runway the army engineers had cleared the forest for a hundred yards, and the uneven ground was a forgotten terrain of mud-filled gulleys, hillocks of pulverized earth, and dumps of flourishing underbrush.
The tractor blundered across this no-man’s land, the driver straining his arms to hold the machine on its course towards the forest road that ran from the eastern end of the airstrip to the shores of Lake Kotto. He climbed the last of the hillocks, and then faced a ramp of compacted earth which the engineers had erected for their supply vehicles. The sergeant throttled up his engine, lowered the scoop and thundered forward in a roar of smoke and oil. The metal blade sank into the ramp, and cut away a hug
e block of compressed gravel mounted on a section of underlying soil that contained the root-tree of a forest oak.
This immense black core lay partly exposed, like the petrified heart of an extinct bull, or the crown of an underworld deity ripped from the ceiling of a subterranean palace whose arches supported the airstrip, a submerged cathedral of mud. The soil wept through its roots and fell into the dark maw of the cavern below, an open mouth wide enough to swallow a small car.
The sergeant reversed his gears, and briefly cut back his engine. He looked up at me, as I watched from the edge of the runway, clearly expecting me to order him to ignore this obstacle and make a sensible detour around it. But I waved him forward, curious to see how large this root-system might be – clearly the felled tree had been one of the tallest oaks in the forest, sitting for hundreds of years at the water table of Lake Kotto, until cut down to make way for Sanger’s runway extension and his preposterous mission. I felt the ground under my feet, hoping to hear a rumble of subsidence – with luck, the removal of this ancient root would undermine the runway and the Dakota would crash on take-off …
The sergeant worked up his engine, smoke pumping from the exhaust stack behind his head. He engaged the gears and drove forward, gradually forcing the root-crown from the cavity where it rested. To my disappointment, it failed to put up any great fight, but lay passively against the tractor’s scoop, a gnarled mass of dead roots some six feet in diameter. Forced on to its back, it rolled soundlessly into a hollow between two nearby hillocks and expired there in a cloud of sandy dust, a long-dead god of the earth.
The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 4