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“You’re focused on the wrong level, Eleanor,” he said impatiently. “Prawns to beggars. Your sensation of unfairness doesn’t help anyone, does it?”
“I’m still ashamed,” she said staunchly.
“But it is not white, well-off Eleanor who feels ashamed, it is Eleanor. If you were Number Two wife grinding maize, you would feel ashamed—of your shabby clothes, of the woeful prospects for your ten malnourished children, of the fact you could not read. By what, really, are you so mortified?”
She shrugged. “Being here, I guess. Not Africa, anywhere. In some regards I’ve chosen perfectly the wrong field, though I doubt by accident. We all talk about over-population, but most of us don’t regard the problem as applying to ourselves. We think that means there are too many of them. I don’t. I think it includes me. I feel unnecessary. I feel a burden. I think that’s my biggest fear, too, being a burden. I’m constantly trying to make up for something, to lighten the load of my existence. I never quite do enough. I use non-returnable containers and non-biodegradable plastic and non-renewable petroleum for my car. I cost too much. I’m not worth the price.”
“Is this what they mean by low self-esteem?”
Eleanor laughed.
“Why not jump off a bridge?”
“That would hurt my parents. I’m trapped.”
“You can’t possibly have persuaded yourself this shame of yours has the least thing to do with environmental degradation and African poverty?”
“Some,” she defended. “I know that sounds pretentious. At any rate they make it worse.”
“So you have not remained passionate. You realize what you do for a living doesn’t make a hair’s dent in population growth, which is the only thing that would pull this continent’s fate out of the fire. You refuse to become jaded. So what has happened to you? I haven’t seen you in sixteen years.”
She smiled wanly. “I think it’s called ordinary depression. And,” she groped, “I get angry, a little. Instead of helping the oppressed, I seem to have joined them: they oppress me. And after all these years in Africa, I’ve grown a little resentful. OK, I’m white, but I didn’t colonize this place and I was never a slave trader and I didn’t fashion a world where some people eat caviare and the rest eat corn. It’s not my fault. It’s not my personal fault. Anger may be too strong a word, but I am getting annoyed.”
“You are finished, madam?” He had been waiting for her to conclude for five minutes.
“Yes, it was very good. I’m sorry I couldn’t eat it all, perhaps you could—”
“Don’t even think about it,” Calvin interrupted.
It was true that a doggie bag back at her hotel would only rot. “Never mind,” she added. “But thank you. The food was lovely. Asante sana, bwana.” The waiter shot her a smile that suggested he was not used to being thanked, though she couldn’t tell if he thought she was especially nice or especially barmy.
“If you want my advice,” Calvin continued. “You’re not married, are you?”
He might have asked earlier. “No.”
“You could use some small, private happiness.”
“Right,” Eleanor muttered, “mail order.”
“At least buy yourself a new dress.”
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“It’s too long and dark and the neck is much too high. And at your age, should you still be wearing bangs?”
“I’ve always worn bangs!”
“Exactly. And do you realize that you do not have to look at the world the way you have been taught? There are perspectives from which starving people in Africa do not matter a toss. Because your dowdy sympathy is not helping them, and it is certainly not helping you.”
They ordered coffee and Calvin cheerfully popped chocolates. “I am advising that you don’t merely have to get married,” he pursued. “There are intellectual avenues at your disposal. You can allow yourself to think abominations. There are a few ineffectual restraints put on what you may do, but so far no one can arrest you for what goes on in your head.”
“I don’t see what kind of solution that is, to get nasty.”
“This is a short life, Eleanor—thank God.” He spanked cocoa from his hands. “And what happens in it is play. Rules are for the breaking. If you knew what I thought about, you’d never speak to me again.”
She ran her thumb along her knife. “Are you trying to frighten me?”
“I hope so. You’re better off avoiding my company. It has even occurred to me—this we share—that I should no longer be here myself.”
“You mean Africa?”
“I do not mean Africa.”
“What are all these atrocities in your head you think would put me off?”
“For starters, I’m no longer persuaded by good and evil.”
“That’s impossible. You can’t live without morality.”
“It’s quite possible, and most people do. They manipulate morality to their advantage, but that is a process distinct from being guided by its principles. Moreover—” His fingers sprang against each other and his eyes were shining—“I don’t like human beings.”
“Thanks.”
“Astute of you to take it personally. Most people imagine I mean everyone but them.”
“You’re trying awfully hard to ensure I don’t dine with you again. Why isn’t it working?”
“Because you agree with me on much of what I’ve said, and especially on what I haven’t. All these dangers you skirt, Eleanor—cynicism, apathy, fatigue: the pits in which you fear you’ll stumble—they are all yourself. You are an entirely different person than you pretend, Ms Merritt, and I suppose that is frightening. Though my advice would be, of course: jump in the pit.
“Alternatively, you can claim, no Dr. Piper, I really am a prim, right-thinking spinster, and I will die of malaria in the bush helping improve maternal health. As well you may.”
The waiter brought the bill, folded in leather and presented on a silver tray like an extra treat. Eleanor asked, “How do you make a living now?”
“Spite.”
“I don’t know that paid.”
“It doesn’t pay for one’s victims, that’s definite.”
She considered fighting over the bill, or suggesting they split it, but somehow, with Calvin, she’d let him pay. For how many bills had she grabbed, how many had she divided painfully to the penny? She felt a rebellion from a funny place, one she did not know very well, but about which she was curious.
“Good,” he commended, signing his name. “You didn’t. That,” he announced, “was from the pit.”
“You said you don’t like people. Do you include yourself?”
“First and foremost. I know what I am. I told you, I shouldn’t be here. But that kind of mistake, it’s been made all through history.” He helped her with her jacket. “Sometimes, however, I remember what I was. I can get wistful. It’s disgusting.”
“You mean you were different before USAID kicked you out?”
“Once I was division head, my friend, I was already an error. No, before that. Perhaps another time.”
“I thought I was supposed to avoid you.”
“You won’t. I can rescue you, which you require. But my airlift will cost you, cost you everything you presently are. You can content yourself that means losing little enough.”
“You’re being unkind, Calvin.”
“I am being sumptuously kind, Ms Merritt.”
Eleanor considered abandoning the sticky carving under the table, but couldn’t saddle the staff with its disposal. Dutifully, she hauled it out, as if the heavy dark lump inside her had become so tangible that it sat by her feet at dinner.
Calvin gave her a ride to town. Eleanor mentioned there was a good chance Pathfinder would transfer her to Nairobi.
“I know,” said Calvin. “They are going to put you in charge of Anglophone Africa. Otherwise I might not have bothered to see you tonight.”
“What a lovely thought.”
“It was. You don’t tend to notice when you’re being flattered.”
He dropped her at the Intercontinental. In parting, he was a perfect gentleman—regrettably.
chapter two (#u7541799c-d361-5779-aa50-13b95d158c32)
Family Planning from the Tar Pits (#u7541799c-d361-5779-aa50-13b95d158c32)
It was nearly a year before Eleanor was transferred to Nairobi, and not a very good one. She neglected to visit her clinics with her former regularity, and spent many an afternoon with a wet towel around her neck rather than drive to Morogoro to deliver pills that clients persistently took all at once.
Furthermore, Tanzanian villages, and Dar itself, were beginning to waft with the gaunt, empty-eyed spectre of widespread HIV. Weak, matchstick mothers would arrive at Pathfinder’s clinics and there was absolutely nothing to do. The irony of trying to prevent more births in towns where up to half the adult population was dying was not lost on Eleanor, nor was it lost on her patients. Contraception in these circumstances transformed from a perverse Western practice to flagrant insanity. And it shattered Eleanor to watch families bankrupt themselves on bogus witchdoctor therapies, even if she conceded that her own people’s medicines were no more effective.
Through the long, white days with little to distract her, she did think of Calvin. She abjured herself to expect little, despite his mystical talk. So many wazungu, after a steady newspaper diet of possessed grandmothers, curses of impotence and whole villages running riot from the spirits of the ancestors, began to talk a pidgin witchcraft of their own.
She pondered the contradiction between the icy things he said and the warmth she felt in his presence, as if Calvin’s coldness calloused the same helpless sympathy she fell prey to herself. There are people who find it easy to be generous in theory but can’t be bothered by the real problems of anyone who smells bad; there are others attracted to being hard in theory but who will involve themselves, impulsively, in finding you a house. That, if she didn’t miss her guess, was Calvin.
Eleanor employed a mental exercise—with that car, not always hypothetical—that sorted her friends out in a hurry: it is past midnight, she is driving back to her prefab, she is still miles out. The Land Rover stalls; the battery is old, scummy and shorting out. She has a radio, but you do not call the AAA in Tanzania. Whom does she raise on shortwave? And whom, even if it means curling up in the seat till morning, does she not? Oddly, she knew she could call Calvin, who would arrive jolly as you please with a crate of beer, to make a night of it. She thought he was a nice man. To the very end, she would maintain he was a nice man.
“Duplicitous” as her organization had so recently been described, the idea of family planning as a means of population control in a country where contraceptive prevalence remained below 5 per cent was absurd, so Eleanor didn’t think in terms of demographics any more. She regarded herself as providing an everyday service, even if Pathfinder did get its support from agencies with bolder designs. She consoled herself there were times in her own life that she was grateful for the Pill, and to extend this opportunity for pleasure without consequences seemed a reputable calling, if not very glamorous. For she no longer imagined she was preventing worldwide famine or raising the standard of living for the poor. In lowering the sights of her work, she found it duller, but no longer ridiculous. She had helped a few unmarried girls escape the wrath of their families; a handful of already overworked mothers—and in this country women did everything—find a contraceptive they could hide from their husbands, whose precious manhood would be insulted if they discovered their wives used birth control.
In Eleanor’s case, the pills had worked a bit too well. As she drew into her late thirties, the age at which many of her clients became grandmothers, even her own workers felt sorry for her. Among some tribes of East Africa a childless woman was a contagion, isolated in a separate hut outside the village, not allowed to touch pregnant wives, and sometimes stoned for being hexed. In Eleanor’s darker moods the word barren would take on an interior complexion as she scanned the hot, dead landscape, unsure why she was here, her face so dry—she was out of moisturizer again. She submitted good-naturedly to nurses’ teasing about visiting gentlemen from USAID or Ford, but the men never stayed longer than a few days and were odiously well behaved (or simply odious). It was when the teasing stopped that the situation got under her skin, the downcast shaking heads when one more prospect had fled. These were the times, in private, when she snapped pens that didn’t write, threw the phone to the floor and pulled maliciously at condoms, stretching them at her desk and burning holes in the rubber with smoking matches.
It’s funny how you just assume you will get married.
No, if you were born when Eleanor was, you don’t say married; you say, or something like it, since the word is sullied from too many wiped hands. But still you have a picture in your mind of a time when everything will be different; when there are no more days you simply haven’t a taste for; when something is settled. In a furry, indistinct form Eleanor had always seen a whole other life beginning at about thirty-five; she was now thirty-seven. Pole-pole, she was admitting to herself, like cracking open a door, that all women did not get married—or something like it—and though she was an independent, successful Career Girl, the grey shaft of her future that slatted through that crack split down her head like the slice of an axe.
Eleanor looked forward to Nairobi, at least a city where she could buy face cream; all that shops in Dar stocked was curling shelf-paper. And she was ready for the extra remove of a higher position. While Eleanor had been pressuring Pathfinder to integrate contraceptive services with broader health care, in the interim her clinics were barraged with cases of young children with ringworm and TB, and the nurses could only offer depo-provera. Mothers would come in for vitamins and walk out with spermicide, a little dazed, not sure what had happened. It was painful and impolitic. Eleanor didn’t want to watch any more; she was ready for one giant step back from suffering, and she was nagged by the insipid mystery of what anyone was suffering for.
She even considered declining the post and returning to the States, but while like any astute Westerner she knew she would never belong in Africa, she no longer fitted in the US either. When she returned for meetings in Boston, she found conversation banal. These days all that the women talked about was aerobic dancing, calories consumed per lap while running circles in tiny shorts, while on the other side of the world their counterparts kept in shape by trudging ten miles for water and carting fifty pounds of firewood. Most Americans assumed a blank, tolerant expression as she described the food dependency created by Third World cash crops; they saved their own indignation for passive smoking. She wondered if she would ever be able to return to a country that was sinking millions of dollars into research on fat and sugar substitutes that had no food value at all.
The night before Eleanor left, her staff threw her a party, driving in from clinics all over Tanzania with beans and curried goat. As nurses corked the basin in her prefab and filled it with vodka and passion fruit squash, they traded the latest rumours on side-effects. The usual fear that an IUD could lance a man’s penis had become so elaborated that it was now commonly accepted that the device could stick a man and woman together permanently until they were surgically separated in hospital. Eleanor remarked that any contraceptive which would stick a man and woman together permanently might fetch a pretty penny in the States.
For all the jollity and risqué repartee, Eleanor went to bed depressed, feeling she had gone into a line of work for which she was no longer qualified. Staring one more night up at the mosquito netting draping to the sides of her bed, with its taunting resemblance to a bridal canopy, Eleanor felt presumptuous advising any other woman about making love when she herself had forgotten what it was like.
That morning her secretary’s tap on her office door was unusually timid. “Yes?”
“Excuse me, memsahib,” said Mary, who would ordinarily call her Eleanor and speak in Swahili. “I have trouble.” Her boyfriend, she went on to explain, had beaten her because she refused to give him all her Pathfinder salary, and she was sure he would only spend the money on beer. She had to look out for her children. She had been to the police before, and they had arrested him, but he had bribed his way out of custody and returned last week to beat her again. Indeed, Eleanor knew this story, for Mary had shown up for work with a swelling on her temple from a spanner, and the wound had still not healed.
“So you see,” she concluded, touching the bandage, “if he is to be locked away for good I must pay the police myself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I am afraid … Soon I will be unable to leave my house and go to work for the fear he is waiting …”
Eleanor, absorbed in packing the last bits of her office away and checking her watch for how much time there was before the plane, was taking a while to get the message. “Mary, I have to—”
“My money for this month—” She looked to her hands. “It is finished.”
Eleanor was a soft touch anyway, and the party the night before had melted her all the more. Besides, she had been raised on the importance of empowering battered women. She peeled off some notes from her small remaining roll of Tanzanian currency.
Mary had no sooner thanked her and departed than the knocking began again. One of the driver’s children needed glasses—without them the boy was falling badly behind in school. The roll got smaller.
By the time the tapping resumed a sixth time, however, Eleanor was at her wits’ end. She needed to put finishing touches on the project reports for her successor, the electricity was off again, the low-battery light was winking on the computer and in an hour she had to leave for the airport. When she opened the door, Eleanor was sick with disappointment. The little nurse who stood there, Nomsa, had never said much but had been unusually sweet and competent, with a shy, fragile smile, always willing to stay late in the day. She did immaculate work and had never asked for anything before and Eleanor had thought she was special. But there she stood like the rest, hands guiltily clutched behind her back, all dressed up as if she were on her way to church.
“I don’t have any more!” Eleanor cried.
Nomsa backed out of the doorway with wide eyes, nimbly stooped at the step and ran away. Only when Eleanor was locking up her office for the last time did she spot the little package in crumpled, resmoothed Christmas wrapping paper and a banana-leaf bow.
Perhaps it was that picture of being rescued in the scrub at midnight that inspired her to ring Calvin to meet her flight, for the dark plain, in her head, was where she found herself, even as the wheels touched down in the unremitting good weather of daytime Kenya.
“Your people took their time. While your promotion was coming through,” he announced as he took her bag, “eighty-three million bawling babies have bounced on to the planet from nowhere.”
He installed her in a new Land Cruiser. “Spite must be paying mighty well,” she observed.
“Fantastically,” said Calvin.
Something about Calvin discouraged empty chat, so they sat in silence much of the way, Calvin closed off in dark glasses. She had so looked forward to seeing him, always a mistake, and slumped an extra inch lower in the seat, confessing to herself that he was a stranger. Having heard about him for seventeen years had created a sensation of false intimacy. For all the gossip, she would not recall anyone who knew him personally well. Even at their dinner last year, he had used opinion to protect his life. She’d known enough such people, and stared out of the window at the wide, dry fields, not so different from Tanzania, thinking, another African city, the same set of problems from higher up, why was this improvement? What was ever going to change in her life? And what was wrong with it that demanded Calvin’s promised salvation? How could she turn to this man she barely knew and assert, I see it’s bright out, but I am in the dark; I am broken down in the savannah, and the stars are mean; my battery is full of tar?
As they drew into town, the verges thickened with herds of pedestrians in plastic shoes and polyester plaids. Where were all these people going? From where had they come? As the population density multiplied, the muscles visibly tightened on Calvin’s arms.
“Most of the arable land in this country,” said Calvin, “has been subdivided already down to tracts the size of a postage stamp. Farmers grow their mingy patch of maize and still have eight kids. That’s real child abuse. What are those children to do? So they all head for the city. Nairobi is growing at 8 per cent a year. No jobs. I don’t know how any of these hard-lucks eat. Meanwhile their people back in the village expect them to send money. From where? They should never have come here. They should have stayed home.”
“But I thought you said there was no work for them in the countryside.”
“I mean real home. The big, happy, careless world of nonexistence. Where the rent is low and the corn grows high.”
Eleanor never knew what to say when he talked this way.
“Nothing,” Calvin growled on, “rankles me like these pink-spectacled tulip-tiptoers who claim technological advance is going to sort everything out pretty. You should hear Wallace Threadgill gibber about hybrid crops and the exciting future of intensive agriculture: multiple storeys of artificially lit fields like high-rise car-parks. How likely is that, in a country where just a dial tone is an act of God? I assure you, Africans are not the only ones who believe in magic.”
They were passing Wilson Airport, where several dozen Kenyans gripped the chain-link, transfixed by take-offs. Later she’d discover they could gawk at banking two-seaters all day. She admired their sense of wonder, but how many of those men on the wrong side of the fence would ever board an aeroplane?
