What weapons were there in the arsenals of mercy to equal the simple effectiveness of explosive, fuse, detonator, much less the complex electronics that guided a missile or fired a gunship’s rockets? Did mercy’s armies possess a bomb capable of restoring a village incinerated by napalm? Could they ever be anything but outnumbered and outgunned by the armies with howitzers and tanks?
“Too much for you?”
Manfred came down the path, the bright coin of his stethoscope’s gauge bouncing against his stomach.
Fitzhugh lit a cigarette, held out the pack to the doctor.
He took one and bowed to the proffered lighter. “I try to look at it as the mother does. She told us that her ancestors’ spirits had decreed that the one should be sacrificed so she and the other could live. Some truth in that, you know. Had its body not absorbed the fragment, the mother’s kidney would have been pierced and all three would have died.”
“And it helps you to look at it that way?”
“Provided I don’t think about certain things.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as what the Nuba was like the first time I came here, twenty-two years ago. I have worked also in Rwanda and the Balkans, and when I returned here, I never expected to see the things I saw in those places. But I think you have perhaps heard enough from me? You would wish a word with Franco?”
“I could use a nap first.”
“Yes! Of course! There is a spare bedroom in my house. You are welcome to it. I’ll have someone wake you . . . When?”
“A couple of hours.” He glanced at his watch. “Two o’clock, since you like precision.”
Franco was a lean man with a saturnine face perfectly suited to his surly disposition; he was, however, as exacting as advertised, and within an hour of waking from his nap, Fitzhugh had filled several pages of his notebook with a wish list of needed items and their quantities. All through the conversation, a jangling melody of squawks, bleeps, and what sounded like birdcalls came from the cottage next door to Franco’s. Ulrika, the nurse, a broad-boned woman on the frontier of middle age, was addicted to computer games and played them whenever she had a spare moment. Franco said it drove him half nuts. “Basta! Basta!” he’d shouted through the window, adding suggestions that Ulrika take up reading or meditation, anything that didn’t cause so much noise.
“Go to hell, you sorrowful pus!” she called back in a thickly accented English.
“Sourpuss, that’s the correct phrase, cretina!”
There was in this exchange a note of lovers who’d had a falling out. The racket went on.
Around five he, Franco, and the nurse convened for drinks on Manfred’s mustaba, a raised platform of sun-baked mud behind his house, overlooking the lemon grove and vegetable garden: a pleasing view, Fitzhugh thought, sitting in a canvas chair with a cold beer from the refrigerator where the plasma was stored. He sensed that the cocktail hour was a daily affair at the hospital, one of those rituals whites followed faithfully in the bush as a prophylaxis against going crazy. Ulrika was delighted with his presence: someone new to talk to, a visitor from the outer world. He found her interest flattering. She peppered him with questions about himself and Douglas, asked how things were these days in Loki and Nairobi, and about Barrett and Diana, and would he please tell them when he got back to please send her some decent shampoo. “This dust! This goddamned dust!” she said, tugging at her long, pinned-up hair. She shot a questioning glance at Manfred, who nodded.
“Herr Doktor does not wish luxury things to take up space in the airplanes that could be used for the medical things,” she explained. “But the shampoo is okay. So you will please ask John to send?”
He took out his notebook and jotted a reminder, pleased to perform this little service for her.
“Speaking of John, there is one thing about his plans I don’t understand,” Manfred said. A table had been set for dinner on the mustaba, and he sat at its head, the pater of this small, isolate familia. “This notion he has to rebuild the mission. What is the sense of that? As you have now seen, we have more urgent needs than churches.”
They were joined for dinner by the rest of the staff—the X-ray technician, the lab technician, and Ulrika’s assistant, a light-skinned woman from an Arab part of the Nuba—and finally by Michael. Good diplomacy demanded that