Buch lesen: «Game Control»

Not on the list,” the askari declared grandly.

“Perhaps …” the other voice oiled, deceptively polite, “one of the organizers … Dr. Kendrick?” Exaggerated patience made a mockery of good manners.

With the bad luck that would characterize the next five days, Aaron Spring was just passing the entranceway. Swell. The last thing any population conference needed was Calvin Piper.

The Director bustled brusquely to the door. “It’s quite all right,” he assured the African with a sticky smile. “This is Dr. Piper. Is there some problem with his registration?”

“This man is not on my list,” the askari insisted.

“There must have been some oversight.” Spring scanned the clipboard. “Let’s enter him in, so this doesn’t happen again.”

The Kikuyu glared. “Not with that animal.”

Reluctantly, the Director forced himself to look up. Wonderful. A green monkey was gooning on Calvin’s shoulder, teeth bared. Spring slipped the askari twenty shillings. That was not even a dollar, but the price of this visit was just beginning.

The interloper looked interestedly around the foyer, as if pointing out that he had not been here for some time and things might have changed.

“So good to see you.” Spring shook his predecessor’s limp hand.

“Is it?”

“You’re just in time to catch the opening reception. What happened with your registration, man?”

“Not a thing. What registration?”

“There must have been some mistake.”

“Not a-tall. I wasn’t invited.”

Spring winced. Piper had a slight British accent, though his mother was American and he’d spent years in DC. The nattiness of Piper’s tidy sentences made Spring’s voice sound twangy and crass.

The Director led his ward through the sterile lobby. The Kenyatta International Conference Centre was spacious but lacked flair—wooden slatted with the odd acute angle whose determination to seem modern had guaranteed that the architecture would date in a matter of months. Kenyans were proud of the building, the way, Spring reflected, they were so reliably delighted by anything Western, anything they didn’t make. All the world’s enlightened élite seemed enthralled with African culture except the Africans themselves, who would trade quaint thatch for condos at the drop of a hat.

“Couldn’t you at least have left the monkey home?” he appealed.

“Come, Malthus is a good prop, don’t you think? Like Margaret Meade’s stick.”

God rest her soul, Spring had always abhorred Meade’s silly stick. “Just like it.”

Spring hurried ahead. Having assumed the leadership of USAID’s Population Division six long, fatiguing years before, surely by now he might be spared the pawing deference the Director Emeritus still, confound the man, inspired in him. He reminded himself that much of his own work that five years had been repairing the damage Piper had done to the reputation of population assistance worldwide. And by now Spring was well weary of his own staff’s nostalgic stories of Piper’s offensive mouthing off to African presidents. Why, you would never guess from their fond reminiscences that many of those same staff members had ratted on this glorified game-show host at their first opportunity. All right, Spring was aware he wasn’t colourful—he did not travel with a green monkey, he did not gratuitously insult statesmen, he did not detest the very people he was employed to assist, and his pockets did not spill black, red and yellow condoms every time he reached for his handkerchief.

Behind his back Spring vilified Piper, but perhaps to compensate for going all gooey face to face. Here was a character whose politics, having veered so far left they had ended on the far right instead, Spring deplored as uncompassionate and irresponsible. Spring aspired to despise Piper, but he would never get that far. He would only be free to dislike the urbane, unruffleable, horribly wry has-been once sure that Piper adored and respected him first—that is, never.

And Piper made him feel fat. Piper was the older although he didn’t look it, and was surely one of those careless types who never gave a thought to what they ate, while Spring jogged four joyless miles a day, and had given up ice-cream.

“You ruined that Kuke’s day, you know,” Calvin was commenting about the askari. “He loved barring my way. You get a lot of wazungu rolling their eyes about Africans and bureaucracy, how they revel in its petty power—but how they don’t understand it, wielding stamps and forms like children playing office. I’ve come to believe they understand bureaucracy perfectly well. After all, most petty power isn’t petty a-tall, is it? These tiny people can stick you back on your plane, impound your whisky, cut off your electricity and keep you out of conferences you so desperately wish to attend. Bureaucracy is a weapon. And there is no pleasure greater than turning artillery on just the people who taught you to use it.”

“Calvin,” implored the Director, “do keep your theories quiet this week. I’m off for some wine.”

Leaving the man toothpicking pineapple to his ill-tempered monkey, Spring felt sheepish for having let the rogue inside. He was haunted by childhood fairy-tales in which the aggrieved, uninvited relative arrives at the christening anyway, to curse the child.

It was a mistake to exhort Calvin to keep his mouth shut. Had Spring encouraged enthusiastic participation in the interchange of controversial ideas, Piper might have loitered listlessly in the back, thumbing abstracts. Instead Calvin perched with his pet in the front row of a session on infant mortality, making just the kind of scandal sure to see its way into the Nairobi papers the next day.

“Why are we still trying to reduce infant mortality,” Piper inquired, “when it is precisely our drastic reduction of the death rate that created uncontrolled population growth in the first place? Why not leave it alone? Why not even let it go up a little?” He did not say “a lot”, but might as well have.

The room stirred. Coughs. Heads in hands.

The moderator interceded. “It is well established by now, Dr. Piper, that reduction of infant mortality must precede a drop in fertility. Families have extra children as an insurance factor, and once they find most of those children surviving they adjust their family size accordingly, etc. This is kindergarten demography, Dr. Piper. We can dispense with this level of discussion. Ms Davis—”

“On the contrary,” Calvin pursued. “All of Africa illustrates that fallacy. Death rates have been plummeting since 1950, and birth rates remain high. So we keep more children alive to suffer and starve. I would propose instead that this conference pass a resolution to retract all immunization programmes in countries with growth rates of higher than 2 per cent—”

The session went into an uproar. “Moderator!” cried a woman from the Population Reference Bureau. “Can we please have it on record that this conference does not support the death of babies?”

The next day the headline in Nairobi’s Daily Nation read, “Pop Council Conference: Let Children Die”.

Like everyone else, she had heard he was there, caught the flash of defiant black hair, the screech of his sidekick, and had craned across the rows to find that at least at a distance he hadn’t changed much. When dinners roiled with the infant mortality affair, she found herself sticking up for him: “He just likes to be outrageous. It’s a sport.”

“At our expense,” the woman from the Population Crisis Committee had snapped, and Eleanor got a whiff of what even passing association with Calvin Piper had come to cost you.

His arrival changed the whole conference for her. She found herself drifting off with an obscure secretive smile as if she were still the girl she had been then. Yet she never sought him out. She conceded as the conference convened for its final address that she was afraid to introduce herself in case he drew a blank, which would irremediably damage a memory she still held dear. There weren’t many of those left.

Eleanor knew copious conferees, but not beyond the level of talking shop, so while many parties would take advantage of free air fare to bask for a week in Malindi, Eleanor had not joined up. She was beyond Africa as entertainment. Besides, had she bundled off to the coast, she could picture the evenings all too well: the men getting sozzled at a cheap veranda bar, telling Third World snafu stories; Eleanor increasingly chagrined as they dared one another to be a little bit racist, until they were actually using the word “wogs”. She would have to decide whether to object and make a scene and tighten everyone up but at least defend her principles, or to slip off to her room to pick the flaking skin from the back of her neck, worrying into the mirror, her nose gone hard.

As the rest scattered officiously with planes to catch, Eleanor wandered down the steps with nothing to do. It was too early for dinner and her own flight back to Dar es Salaam was not until the next day She could stroll back to her hotel and pack, but she travelled so lightly now that she was fooling herself—it would take five minutes.

So she dandered down to Kaunda, listlessly scanning shops, most of whose proprietors were Asian, and hardly appreciated by Kenyans for their enterprise. The goods for sale—film, antique colonial silver and the endless taka-taka of soapstone wart-hogs, banana-leaf elephants, and ebony rhinoceroses—did not cater to residents but to the scattering of travellers down the walk, unselfconsciously trussed in khaki safari gear and dopey little hats. Along with the encrusted, sun-scorched backpackers who lay knackered on curbs, Eleanor wondered how the tourists could bear their own cliché, though there was surely some trite niche into which she herself fitted all too neatly. The well-meaning aid worker on a junket. Eleanor sighed.

Everywhere, animals. With the T-shirts covered in zebra stripes, lions’ manes and cheetah spots, you would never imagine that Kenya had a population problem of a human variety. Stifled by the tinny, tacky shame of it all, Eleanor veered from the town centre towards River Road, where the giraffe batiks gave way to jikos, sufurias and mounds of second-hand clothes, among which she was more at home. Touts beat the sides of matatus for still more fares when their passengers were already bulging out of the windows. These privately run minibuses formed the core transport system of Kenya, painted in jubilant zigzags, with names like “Sombo Rider and Road Missile” or “Spirit of Jesus Sex Mashine”, “I Luv Retreads” and “See Me After Job” on the bumpers. Oh, River Road was as tasteless as downtown really, but with a jostling, exuberant trashiness that Eleanor relished. Everyone hustling for a bob, no one in this part of town would fritter their shillings on soapstone wart-hogs in a million years.

Gradually, however, she grew nervous. While the eyes of pedlars and pedestrians just a few blocks away were beseeching or veiled, here they glared, unmistakably hostile. Children pointed at Eleanor, shouting, “Mzungu!” Tall, muscular men knocked her shoulders on purpose. Matatus side-swiped her path as she tried to cross the street. Much as she marvelled at the energy and ingenuity of the neighbourhood, this was their part of town and she didn’t belong here. Everywhere on this continent her complexion blinked like an airstrip light. The one relief of trips to Boston was to walk down the streets and blend in.

She retreated back to Trattoria for tea, tired from her meagre foray, feeling after the feeble excursion that she had been a terribly long way.

Yet when she bent dutifully over papers from the conference, the print blurred, “The Cultural Context of High Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa” having no apparent bearing on the dusty villages to which she bounced her Land Rover monthly. This persistent malaise had been wheedling its way into odd moments over tea with increasing frequency. Perhaps she had malaria again.

She kicked herself for not saying hello to Calvin Piper. If he hadn’t remembered her she could have reminded him. Surely there was no great risk to her precious hope chest of girlhood adventures. Eleanor realized she’d just turned 37 and she was still shy.

She discovered that she had left a scarf on the back of her chair in the last assembly, and hurried to retrieve it before the building closed. She was relieved by mission, however mundane.

The conference centre was still open, though cleared out. In the main hall pages splayed the aisles like wings of dead white birds. On the way to her chair she picked up papers. Eleanor was like that—she tidied. In hotels, she made her own bed and rinsed her own water glasses and hung her towels so neatly they looked unused. Her insistence on being no trouble often got other people into it, with the suggestion they were not doing their job. Today was no exception. A girl in a green uniform came rushing up and waved at Eleanor’s armful. “No, no.” The girl took the pile firmly from the white woman’s hands.

“It seemed such a chore,” Eleanor said in Swahili, flustered and pinkening. She pointed towards her seat, thinking she had to explain (Eleanor always thought she had to explain, when no one wanted to hear really), nodding and smiling too much.

Of course the scarf was gone—what continent did she think she was on? Looking lamely about, Eleanor was about to scuttle out, for the empty hall disturbed her. The party-being-over sensation reminded her too keenly of her recent life lately—so much purpose and opinion suddenly gone slack.

Laughter caught her unawares. In the stripe of chairs, the far rows were rearranged around a familiar gleam of hair, and a monkey.

She drew closer to find Calvin sitting with several other lingerers from the Population Council Conference, none of whom she knew. Their laughter was of a seditious sort, as at something you were not supposed to say.

“Eleanor Merritt.” He did remember.

“I’m sorry to intrude, but—”

“You were forever sorry.” He pulled up a chair for her between him and an older woman, who shot her an icy smile. “Eleanor works for Pathfinder: opulent funding, international profile and well run—” he paused—“for a waste of time. But Ms Merritt has risen high. From hard work, no doubt. She cares about humanity. Ms Merritt,” he submitted to the group, “is a good person.”

“Not always,” she defended. “Sometimes I’m a shrew.”

Calvin laughed. “I would love to see it. Promise me.”

He had called her bluff. She could hardly remember being a shrew; not because she was gracious but because she was a coward. Eleanor vented her temper exclusively on objects—pens that wouldn’t write, cars that wouldn’t start, the telephones-cum-doorstops that littered any Third World posting. The more peaceable her relations with people, the more the inanimate teemed with malevolence.

“The Pathfinder Fund,” Calvin explained, “belongs to that dogged IUD-in-the-dyke school, flogging the odd condom while the population happily doubles every eighteen years. When the fertility rate plummets from 6.9 to 6.87, they take credit, and Ford slips them a cheque.”

“It is incredibly arrogant,” said Eleanor, “to march into someone else’s culture and tell them how many children to have. Raising the status of women and giving them power over their own reproduction is the best way to reduce the birth rate—”

“There is nothing wrong with arrogance,” said Calvin, “so long as you are right.”

“Besides,” interjected the upright, withered woman at Eleanor’s side, “improving the status of women is not pursued as an end in itself, but with an eye to a declining birth rate. You do not get your funding from Ford by promising to give women control over their lives, but by claiming you can reduce population growth. It’s duplicitous. If they were no guiding hand of population control, you wouldn’t pull in any money, would you?”

“All that matters,” Calvin dismissed, “is that family planning does not work. I am reminded of those women in Delhi employed by the city to mow metropolitan lawns. They use scissors. I picture those tiny clinics pitched in the middle of oblivious, fecund hordes much like Eleanor sent to mow the whole of Tsavo game park with her Swiss Army knife.”

Eleanor hugged her elbows. Calvin put a hand on her knee. “You think I’m criticizing you. No, I’m agog you keep snipping away. It’s bloody marvellous.”

“Can you suggest what else there is to do?”

“We sorted things out for India not ten minutes ago,” he noted brightly. “Institute free amniocentesis. As soon as the mother finds out it’s a girl, the foetus mysteriously disappears. Produce an entire generation of sons. In sixty, seventy years 840 million Asians would die out completely. Neat, don’t you agree?”

Eleanor was acutely sensitive to when people were waiting for her to leave. Calvin stopped her. “Dinner?”

He’d ridiculed her work. He’d abused her in front of his friends. Eleanor said she’d be delighted, and worried what to wear.

Described in guidebooks as “a restaurant that wouldn’t look out of place in Bavaria or rural England”, The Horseman was in the heart of Karen, if Karen could be said to have one. Named after Karen Blixen, the suburb was one of the last white enclaves of Kenya, museumed with mummified women who got too much sun when they were young, women who never carried their own groceries. They were the last of the English to say frightfully. Yet they still gave their change to little boys outside the dukas, and Karen’s beggars were flush.

Aware that ladies are advised to arrive at engagements a tad late, Eleanor took a taxi to Karen early.

“Madam! Please, madam!”

In the car-park she was accosted by a hawker carrying some heavy black—thing. It took her a moment to discern the object, at which point she was hooked into a dialogue that would cost her. “Only 150, I work very hard, madam! You see, msuri sana. Please, madam! I have six children and they are so hungry …”

The kempt and ingenuous young man held before her a carving of an enormous African family. The carving was awful enough to start with, but had been mucked over with tar. Eleanor was reluctant to touch it.

“I don’t—” she fumbled. “I’m travelling, I can’t—”

“Please, madam!”

The please-madams were not going to stop. She could not claim to have no money, she could not simply walk away from a man who was speaking to her, and some forms of freedom must be bought.

Consequently, she met Calvin in the lounge of The Horseman trying to keep the big dark monster from her dress.

“For me? You shouldn’t have.”

“I shouldn’t have,” she confessed woefully. “He wouldn’t go away.”

“There’s the most miraculous word in the English language: no. Most children learn it before the age of two.”

“This is just what I need,” she said, as the head waiter led them to their table, glancing at her souvenir with disapproval. “A carving of the happy twelve-child family for my clinic.”

“You haven’t changed,” Calvin lamented.

Eleanor could no more focus on the menu than on conference papers at Trattoria. The prospect of food was mildly revolting: a warning sign. In the company of men she’d no interest in she was voracious.

Calvin decided for them both. “The game,” he announced, “is delectable.” His smile implied a double entendre that went right past her.

“So,” he began. “You’re still so passionate?”

She blushed. “In what regard?”

“About your work,” he amended. “The underprivileged and oppressed and that.”

“If you mean have I become jaded—”

“Like me.”

“I didn’t say—”

“I said. But it’s hard to picture you jaded.”

“I could learn. I see it happen in aid workers every day. You keep working and it doesn’t make any difference until eventually you find your efforts comic. But when you start finding all sympathy maudlin and all goodwill suspect, you think you’ve gotten wise, that you’ve caught the world on, when really you’ve just gotten mean.”

“You think I’m mean?”

“You were, a little,” she admitted. “At the KICC this afternoon. This is Eleanor, Exhibit A: the hopeless family planning worker, beavering away in her little clinics among the—‘fecund hordes’?”

He smiled and said as gently as one can say such a thing, “You still don’t have a sense of humour.”

“I don’t see why it’s always so hilarious to believe in something.”

“Why didn’t you tell me to sod off?”

“Because when people are wicked to me, I don’t get angry, I get confused. Why should anyone pick on Eleanor? I’m harmless.”

“It’s harmless people who always get it in the neck. Why can’t you learn to fight back?”

“I hate fighting. I’d rather go away.”

They talked, as expatriates did incessantly, about Africa, though Eleanor suspected this was the definition of being a stranger here. Real Africans, she supposed, never sat around at dinner talking about Africa.

“I should feel lucky,” said Calvin. “Not everyone gets to witness the destruction of an entire continent in his lifetime. Of course, if I had my way I would kick every sunburnt white boy off this continent. But not without putting mortality back where we found it, so these witless bastards don’t reproduce themselves into spontaneous cannibalism. Import a few tsetse fly, sprinkle the Ngongs with tubercle bacillus, unpack the smallpox virus the WHO keeps in cold storage in Geneva. Did you know that we preserve diseases? The eagles are endangered, but the germs are safe.”

“What about development?”

“Develop into what, mind you? Pizza Hut? No, what Africa could use is some good old-fashioned regression.”

“It’s seen plenty of that.” Her smoked trout starter was exquisite, and only made her ill.

“Not enough. I’d remove every felt-tip, digestive biscuit and gas-guzzling pick-up from Algiers to Cape Town.” Calvin disposed of his boar pâté in a few bites. “Go back to Homo sapiens as pack animals, huddled around fires, cowering in trees and getting shredded by lions to keep the numbers down. No campaigns for multiparty democracy, no crummy tabloids, no Norwegian water projects. Just life, birth and death in the raw, busy enough and awful enough that you never have a chance to think about it before a hyena bites off your leg.”

“Back to the garden,” Eleanor mused.

“You never saw it, Eleanor, but when I first came to Kenya in 1960 this country was paradise.” He gestured to the tarry horror that would not quite fit under her chair. “No watu with their hands out every time you tie your shoe.”

“Don’t you imagine any twenty-year-old here for the first time is just as knocked out?”

“What knocks them out is it’s grotty and crowded and nothing works. And all right, so the Africans should get their Walkmans like everyone else. So Africa isn’t special. But when I came here it was. So there’s nowhere to go, nowhere special. So it’s every man’s right to be garish, filthy and completely lacking in foresight. Terrific.”

Eleanor glanced warily at their waiter as he brought her main course; he spoke English. “You sound like a child who’s had his playground closed.”

“Don’t imagine I’m reminiscing about how smoothly the country ran under colonial rule. No, when there was no telephone system not to work, no electricity to go off, no water piping to over-extend—now, that is working smoothly.”

“Well,” ventured Eleanor cautiously, “Africans do have a right to telephones, electricity and running water—don’t they?”

Calvin withered her with a look of excruciating weariness.

“Then, you should be happy,” Eleanor backed off, relieved the waiter was no longer listening. “Most Africans have no such amenities, do they? Of which I’m painfully, and constantly, aware. In shops, I put a chocolate bar on the counter, next to a woman with two kilos of posho and a little fermented milk with which she has to feed the whole family for a week—I put the candy back. Everywhere I go on this continent I feel ashamed. I’m tired of it, Calvin. I am dying, dying of shame.”

“They like posho. Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.”

“Hogwash. They want cars and I have one. Try and tell me they don’t resent that.”

“Give your flipping car away, then.”

“That won’t change anything.”

“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said. And at least—” he pointed to her hartebeest—“you now eat your dinner.”

In 1972 they had both attended a Population and Environment conference in Nairobi, when the KICC was brand-new and conferences had seemed better than junkets; at least to Eleanor, who was only twenty-one, an intern with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and fresh from the Peace Corps. Calvin had just joined USAID himself, and asked her to dine at the Hilton. His fourteen-year seniority had daunted her then, and maybe that’s why she’d felt compelled to make a fool of herself: because he was so much older and more important and she had no idea why he would go out with her. She was only aware in later years, once her looks had begun to slip, that she had once been rather pretty.

Half-way through dinner at the luxury hotel, she had been overcome by nausea. Calvin had done most of the talking; she was sure he would pick up the bill and could not see how her company had earned so much as a hard roll. She was gripped by anxiety that she had no personality at all, and concluded that if she had failed to concoct it by twenty-one it was time to make one up.

“I can’t eat this,” she announced, fists on the cloth. “I’m sorry. The idea of our sitting here paying hundreds of shillings for shellfish while people right outside the door starve—it makes me sick.”

Calvin nimbly kept eating. “If you truly have ambitions to work in the Third World, young lady, you’ll have to develop a less delicate stomach.”

“How can you!” she exclaimed, exasperated as he started on another prawn. “After we’ve spent all day forecasting worldwide famine by the year 2000!”

“That’s just the kind of talk that whets my appetite.”

“Well, it kills mine.”

“If you feel so strongly about it,” he suggested, “go feed them your dinner.”

Eleanor had picked up her plate and left the restaurant. One of the waiters came running after her, since she’d marched off with their china. Eleanor looked left and right and had to walk a couple of blocks to find a beggar, and was promptly confronted with the logistical problem of delivering her food aid and returning the plate. So she stood dumbly by the cripple with elephantiasis, whose eyes were either uncomprehending or insulted. He rattled his tin, where she could hardly muck shrimp, now could she? It struck her, as saffron sauce dripped from the gilt-edged porcelain, that just because you could not walk did not mean you had no standards of behaviour, which parading about Nairobi with a half-eaten hotel entrée after dark clearly did not meet. She groped in her jeans for the coins she knew were not there; her notes were back in her purse. Shrugging, she turned under the stern, disparaging gaze of the dispossessed and shuffled back to the Hilton, where the waiter stood outside with hands on hips. Eleanor ducked around the corner and scraped the rest of her dinner into the gutter.