Читать книгу Phobos & Deimos - John Moehl - Страница 9

His Mother had warned him: “don’t get sick”. As a small boy Henri had been worried about getting sick. Like many of the children in the village, he was slight of build and, when he saw pictures of European kids in the old newspapers wrapping the meat from the market, he felt like he was really so puny that the risk of illness was all too real. This is not to say he was a blooming hypochondriac, forever watching where he stepped, what he ate, or with whom he associated; his Aunt was well enough obsessed with these characteristics for the whole family. No, he was a regular child who climbed trees, swam in the creek, and chased lizards when he was not in school or the fields. But, like the cicada buzzing on a hot afternoon, his Mother’s words were a tiny but omnipresent hum in his mind.

As the years passed, the hum dulled to the point he did not notice it unless he really listened for it. Nothing had happened to amplify the warning. In spite of his sparse frame, he had shown himself to be resilient. He had overcome several bouts with malaria and diarrhea; weakened but more resistant afterward.

This was fortunate because, as his Mother had known so well, had he had serious health problems, the only option would have been the village dispensary or the local healer. The former was a disheveled building with a tiny cadre of disheveled staff; the building and the staff long forgotten by the provincial health authorities. The head nurse was a native from the village who had worked in the city decades ago, with who-knows-what training. She had one assistant and one cleaner, both with equal education and skill. If the clinic received any supplies, and it rarely did, these were bandages, antiseptic, and aspirin.

The village healer was attributed with several miraculous healings and was reputed to have an impressive knowledge of the use of local plants, herbs, and minerals to heal man’s afflictions, as well as more than a passing acquaintance with the darker side of traditional healing methods. Any hesitancy, however, in seeking treatment from this gentleman would not be due to skepticism as to the efficacy of the treatments, but rather due to the cost of receiving them. The good shaman enjoined equally good remuneration for his services, which exceeded the means of his family in all cases save those of very noticeable life-threatening conditions; certainly not simple affairs like malaria or diarrhea.

Henri recalled his Aunt had found a third alternative, but it remained to be seen if this was truly an option for health. On her regular visits to the district Big Market she would come back with a small plastic bag filled with pills and capsules of the colors of the rainbow. Her baggy was a rather good sub-sample of the bags of pharmaceuticals sold by young boys in the taxi park. They would reach in and randomly pull out a tablet or ampule, proudly proclaiming its powers at fighting fever, chills, and the flux. Henri’s Aunt had swallowed all variety of concoctions provided by the taxi park boys. Loudly praising their effectiveness until another strange maladie found a home in her scraggly body.

With the passing of his youth, having completed his first five years of primary school and adding some meat to his bones, Henri took a taxi to the nearest city to find employment and a more invigorating lifestyle.

In surprisingly short time, perhaps due to his enthusiasm and winning smile, he found a job as a moto-boy with a local trucker. While being a driver’s gofer did not pay well, it had several advantages. The truck was on the road nearly constantly, meaning he did not have to worry about accommodation in the city; he slept under the truck on his mat, even when in town. More importantly, he was a de facto apprentice driver, most truckers starting as moto-boys, learning the trade, and making the contacts.

Henri passed his weeks and months in the hot cab of the Mercedes truck, the howling of the engine completely drowning out the hum in his mind. He would change the flats and change the oil. He would clean the cab and the windscreen. He would seek men, looking for a few francs, to help him load and unload the cargo ranging from coffee and cement to cattle and telephone poles.

The vagabond lifestyle excluded his establishing close friendships and even his finding a candidate for a wife. His main social distractions came at truck-stops where he would move about with the other moto-boys his age, spending a few francs for roasted meat or plantains, having some cups of arki, the cheap locally distilled high-octane alcohol, or an occasional beer. As he grew older and his hormones began to take more control, he began also to include a stop at any of the many bordellos for a “quickie” with an older hooker; all a poor moto-boy could afford.

Henri’s life had now taken a new routine, distant and removed from the village and its bucolic life. He rarely went home. It was not that he felt it beneath him, far from it. However, when someone went back to the village from the city, they had to go back with gifts and offerings for the family; and the extended family in the village was large. The pittance paid a moto-boy would not allow him to return home often with the largess he felt he needed to compensate for those youthful years growing up which had been truly joyous.

He managed to get home for either Christmas or Easter, and would generally find himself there for at least one additional visit a year, for the important wedding or funeral; the later becoming more and more frequent as the years passed.

His life now was concentrated in the hot, shaking cab of the truck with the perfume of sweat mixed with diesel. The newness of this wore off as the rigors took their toll. Constant noise and vibration combined with sleeping on the cold, often wet ground, added to poor diet began to accelerate the aging process and at thirty-five, as he was now looking for a new job as a driver, he looked nearly twice his age.

Fortunately, his smile had not aged with his body and he had been able to make some very promising contacts that seemed highly likely to lead to a driver position with the corresponding increase in salary; nearly a ten-fold gain to be anticipated. Only the final discussions remained, and it seemed likely he would soon be behind the wheel of his own rig, with his own moto-boy to boss about.

As the details were being sorted out, he continued to suffer in what he now saw as a beat-up carcass of a lorry compared to what he hoped would be his new charge. He begrudgingly spread his mat under the chassis every night, thinking of the day in the not too distant future when he might be able to get a room of his own with a real bed and maybe even running water and electricity, if he were very, very lucky.

He sullenly unloaded the sacks and bails, regretting the continuous pain in his lower back and longing to feel the gearshift of a big rig in his hand, instead of the wheelbarrow handle to which he was harnessed to unload a mountain of sand. He was a short-timer now and he felt it.

When all the arrangements had been made and he had given his current boss his notice, the day came when he was ready to make his last run as a moto-boy. This final venture involved going to the port city to pick up a load of soap from the factory. On the outward leg, they would pick up vegetables along the road to sell in the port and then return the next day with boxes and boxes of block soap.

All went as planned and they slowly climbed the hills from the coastal plain to the highland savannah when it happened. The brakes went out on a down-hill-bound truck loaded with beer from the nearby brewery. The beer truck teetered to the left and to the right before it careened head-on into the cab of Henri’s truck. The momentum from the final impact shifted the beer crates to the front, crashing through the wall separating the bed and the cab, mincing the brewery truck’s driver and moto-boy in a flurry of broken glass. This same impact threw Henri’s boss through the windscreen and on to the pulp that had been the inhabitants of the beer truck’s cab. Henri was saved from this same fate by the fact that his leg was wedged between the seat and the door, preventing him from becoming air-born at the time of the concussion.

Henri awoke, immediately aware of the sting of antiseptic in his eyes and nose and the ring of crying in his ears. As luck would have it, if one could even use the term in the context of such a grotesque accident, the lorries had collided not ten kilometers from a mission hospital.

The main road to the port was well-travelled and the accident itself was witnessed by many people in many vehicles; passenger cars, taxis, buses, trucks. The taxi that had been immediately behind Henri’s truck as it climbed the hill, narrowly missed smashing into the back of the truck as the driver hit the brakes.

The taxi driver was a big man with great strength, both physical and emotional. He first pulled his vehicle well away from the trucks for fear of fire and then offloaded all his passengers as he went to inspect the terrible wreckage. As the first on the scene, he saw Henri hanging out of the space where the windscreen had once been. When he opened the passenger door he saw Henri’s horribly mangled leg, the leg that had prevented him from being immediately killed, but which was now a twisted stick of sinew and macerated flesh. The leg was, in fact, so loosely connected to the rest of the body that the taxi driver could quite easily turn the booted foot to dislodge it and carefully remove Henri’s body from the dash.

He carried the limp form to his taxi and spread it out on the back seat before dashing at top speed to the mission hospital. He slid to a stop at the hospital entrance, gently lifting Henri into his arms and carrying him to the reception as he screamed for a doctor and urgent help.

His screams were met with supreme indifference as the matron averted her eyes from the mutilated limb and asked the taxi-man for the patient’s hospital card. There was, of course, no card and there was also no running to help; no gurney, no doctor, not even a nurse, only the stoic matron. The taxi-man called her a nincompoop in six languages and yelled for help at the top of his lungs. When there was still no reaction, he charged into the interior of the hospital, Henri in his arms, barging into each room until he finally found someone in a white coat and stethoscope, someone at whom he too yelled to come and save this poor man’s life. The grit in the driver’s voice seemed to stir the stethoscope man to life; his eyes became less glazed and he actually took in the full gravity of the circumstances. Like someone coming out of a dream, he half led, half pushed the driver into a sordid operating room, whereupon he shoved the driver out as he too began yelling for nurses, instruments, and medications.

Henri was aware of none of this and the taxi-man had long since gone back to his passengers. Henri had practically no memory of anything. In the deep recesses of his mind, where the cicada had stayed, he seemed to recall a man in a white coat saying, “I hope you are a hero”. And then, there was blackness.

The blackness was now replaced by fuzzy grey as Henri looked about. He was in a metal bed, apparently with springs and a mattress underneath him, almost like the bed he had dreamed of getting once he had his own truck. The grubby sheets were covered with a grey, frayed blanket that matched the gun-metal grey walls, painted with oil paint that could be scrubbed from all the afflictions that lived in the ward. The ceiling had apparently been white but was now fly-specked, dusty, and grey. The beds in the ward next to his were occupied by people who looked grey. His world was grey.

With great difficulty he raised his head slightly, quickly noting only one hump under his blanket. Although he could clearly feel his right foot, when he painfully moved his hand to where his right thigh should be, there was nothing. He had lost his leg.

The drugs, the shock, and the fatigue blissfully took him away from the grayness into the cloudless skies of his mind where the cicadas were silent and the air smelt of fresh fallen rain.

When he awoke again he found his Mother sleeping on a mat next to his bed; next to her a worn vinyl bag and some chipped enamel pots. As was typical of that place and time, hospitals provided medical care, such as it was, and, if possible, a roof over the patient’s head. All else was up to the malade (the sufferer) and the family. Families fed, bathed, and sometimes changed bandages for their loved ones.

Henri’s ward was like a small village with each bed having its own “household”, sometimes including children and the aged. The caregivers, generally mothers, wives, or sisters, prepared food on the open hearths outside the compound. They assisted their family members to the latrines in the back. They bathed them with sponge baths if they were too weak, or in small mat-covered spaces near the latrines if the patients had the strength to stand for a dousing of cold and often defiled water. They would hound the nurses and nurses aids, cajoling or even bribing them to make sure their family member had some modicum of care.

This task was no easy matter for the families. The “nurses”, many of whom had no real formal training, wore white smocks that covered smart dresses ballooning above shiny high-heeled shoes. They looked and acted more like someone out on the town than someone set at healing the afflicted. These sisters of mercy would haughtily pass the ill with their noses in the air, paying no mind to empty IVs, soiled bandages, and even the unfortunate women in labor who could no longer wait their turn in the queue, but gave birth in crowded and filthy corridors. The same corridors down which the nurses glided.

So it was that Henri’s Mother set about her task of shepherding her son to better health. Truly he could never again aspire to good health, but he was lucky to be alive. He could regain his strength and be strong enough to leave this place of sadness on his one good leg. She cooked and bathed. She coaxed and soothed. She even learned to effectively spend the few coins she had to ensure her son received the medications actually prescribed, as the staff were prone to sell real medications on a gravely undersupplied black market, giving the patients whatever they found, regardless of the implications.

Like the proverb, little by little a bird makes its nest, little by little Henri regained his physical strength, if not his mental resilience. With his Mother’s help he began to hobble around the ward on crutches; first for a few minutes a day and ultimately for hours at a time. While his afflictions were terrible and life-changing, they were not terminal like so many others in the ward. During the weeks it took for him to be able to reach an acceptable level of hopping with crutches, scores of men and women had come and gone from the ward. Many going to the grave and not back to the village.

The day came when Henri and his Mother took a taxi back to their village, where he was warmly welcomed by all. After the initial fires of welcome for the nearly-dead son of the community waned, Henri exercised and practiced until he was very proficient at getting around and taking care of himself. But, as good as he got, he was not able to do man’s work. He could not go to the fields, build a house, or even tend the goats. He could sit in the sun with the elders, as they warmed themselves and commiserated. And sit he did, for hours and days on end. These tedious periods were only made bearable by the fact that he was able to learn a great deal from the aged as they talked of times gone by, tradition, mystery, and the way things were.

His mind absorbed the history and culture, the knowledge a salve for his mind almost as though it were rubbed on the nub where his leg should have been. He listened and learned. He questioned and understood. Quite by chance, he became the memory of his community; the repository for its culture and past. These mental stretches and calisthenics completed the healing process and, after months sitting on a bamboo stool in the sun, he was finally ready to accept himself as he was and no longer as he had been.

However, as his mind began to tune into his new reality, he realized he could not stay forever in the village. He was a burden to his family. While he now had a status of prominence because of his brush with death and, more recently, because of his great understanding of the village’s history, he was an additional mouth to feed—a mouth connected to a body that made no productive contribution.

The following dry season, after good rains and the signs that the harvest would be good, Henri decided to go back to the city and see what he could do for himself; his selfless proclamations reinforced by feelings that he really needed to get back to the real world before he came totally imbedded in the village.

On the day of his departure, his Mother accompanied him to nearby main road where he flagged down a taxi to start his travels back to the past. His Mother carried his small vinyl satchel as he hobbled along beside her. She had no idea of what would now become of her son. She only knew this was another of those thresholds from which there was no going back. Whatever would happen, good or bad, barring a catastrophe such as his past accident, Henri had left.

When the driver had thrown his bag and crutches on the luggage rack, Henri pushed and was pushed into a seat in the back of the minibus. As the taxi pulled back onto the road, he looked back through the dust-covered window at his Mother standing lonely on the red laterite shoulder, and he too wondered what was in store? And, he too knew he was not likely to come back, at least not to stay.

After a rough-and-tumble trip, made all the more rough-and-tumble due to his handicap, he arrived back in the city in early evening after most of the traffic had subsided and the roll through the suburbs and slums was reasonably quick and still lit by a nearly setting sun.

The city seemed to have changed greatly during his absence; new buildings, new roads, and whole new neighborhoods. But when he finally set his good leg on the ground, he found that really nothing had changed. It was the same old city with the same old problems and the same old people. With his bag slung across his back and his weight on his crutches, he hopped out of the taxi park, but had no idea of where to go.

He still had his winning smile and a good knowledge of the by-ways of town. So, he migrated back to his old haunts, shuffled past the lorry park where he had spent many, many hours; moving past the chop houses now bustling with evening customers and, almost by chance, found himself at the Catholic Mission where, in other times, he had never set foot—or at those occasions, feet. Given the late hour and his lost state, both mentally and socially, this now seemed like he right place to put his foot and he hopped up the stars of the priory and rang the bell.

The brothers at the mission were not overly apt to accept uninvited guests, although they were called the Brothers of Charity. They felt, and perhaps rightfully so, that, once the door was opened, they would be overrun. There would be no turning back the flood nor any way to keep all the souls that would come to them for help.

Nevertheless, whether it was seeing the beaming smile or the missing leg, the elderly brother who opened the door did not drive Henri away as he had done to so many so often, but, after astutely assessing his needs, offered him a mattress in the workers’ quarters that came with a plate of porridge to be repaid by helping in the kitchen.

Henri managed to stay for few weeks at the mission to figuratively “get his feet under himself”. However, the brothers made it clear from the onset that this was not a limitless gesture, for which they would pay an endless price. This was a very special and unique display of compassion for a young man who was willing to work hard in spite of his infirmity.

So it was that Henri had by chance arranged for himself a bit of a breathing space to try and see how a man with one leg could survive in the city; having been unable to survive mentally in the village. He had had to promise the brothers that he would work in the kitchen three times a day to pay for his humble board and room, but he still had quite some time to hobble around the city to see what his options were. He went back to the lorry and taxi parks, to the big market and the smaller trading centers, to the major shopping area, and several hotels, restaurants, and even construction sites.

His locomotion by crutches had greatly developed his torso and Henri had tremendous strength in his arms that he thought could perhaps be used in some way or other: washing, ironing, cooking, cleaning, almost anything that did not require one to move around very much. He also could read and had some basic arithmetic; skills which, he had hoped, might be a consideration to get a job as a clerk or some other type of simple desk work. However, as his stay with the brothers came to an end, he was no closer than when he started to finding a way to stay alive in the city.

In his searches about town, he would frequently pass in front of the main grocery stores and pharmacies frequented by the town’s elite; the expatriates, high-level functionaries, and businessmen. Stuck outside the entrances and exits from these establishments were coveys of the handicapped with all shape and form of deformity and incapacity. They were amassed nearly like flies on offal; an amorphous mass of humanity that had, in fact, a hidden structure. There was a leadership structure and a pecking order to determine who actually sat, squatted, or lay in the prime spots where the targets had to literally stumble over the oppressed, and hence they were more likely to throw some coins at them, just to get out of the way. It was even rumored that the chiefs of these tribes of the forgotten were so rich some were brought to their begging stations by chauffeured Mercedes limousines.

Every time Henri passed these spots, he saw himself as one of those thrusting a begging bowl or leprosy-ridden hand in the faces of the wealthy, awaiting their crumbs, while under the thumb of the beggars’ chief, who would extort a toll on every penny scratched from the scarred pavement upon which they perched. There was no way he could become one of them, but there appeared to be few options.

His mind and his situation were in such a great state of flux and uncertainty that he swallowed what little pride he had left and begged the brothers to let him stay a few more months. Perhaps it was pity or perhaps it was really needing an extra pair of hands in the kitchen, but Henri got his reprieve and was given, with the beneficence of those with the luxury of having more than they needed, the exceptional gift of six more months at the mission. Henri was late to learn that this benevolence was much more practical management than empathy for his predicament. It was now approaching Christmas, a most busy time for the mission. Moreover, several of the older brothers would be returning to Europe in summer when the vacation season started; the mission needed short-term help and the devil you knew was the lowest risk.

Through the Holidays Henri had great hopes that the festive time of man loving man would translate into his chance for some means to become self-sufficient and start a new life on his own, if not on his own two feet. But, alas the new year arrived with no change. Easter came and went as Henri came and went around town, leaving no stone unturned, looking everywhere but finding an opportunity nowhere.

On his way back to the mission from the suburbs where he had been job hunting, he noticed his bus surrounded by vendors as it waited at the traffic light. Like this light, another light went off in his head. He saw people in wheelchairs and on crutches selling chewing gum, bon-bons, matches, and soap along with the horde of young children and women. This group had been so much a part of the scenery that he had not seen it; the trees for the forest syndrome. These people seemingly were able to make a living by selling the commonest of items to an imprisoned audience of customers; passengers and drivers of motor vehicles having no change to avoid the deluge of vendors, and many finding this a convenient time to purchase the small snacks and items they would have ordinarily bought at roadside kiosks.

Back in the mission kitchen, he asked the other workers what they knew about the sellers in the go-slow; those who benefited most from the traffic lights and jams around the city. He learned the group moved up and down the main thoroughfares; hitting in-coming avenues in the morning when traffic was heading into the city, and the main arteries going out when the business day closed. This group, too, had its chiefs and structures, but there was not the stigma of being a beggar at the pharmacy.

Overlords bought the small items sold on the streets in bulk and then resold them to those who attacked the cars and buses. These entrepreneurs not only made a profit on the re-sales to the street vendors, but also required a small percentage off the top. Nevertheless, and surprisingly to Henri, the vendors were able to do quite all right. This was why there were so many children and women. They could make more money selling toilet rolls or batteries under the unforgiving sun and in the dangerous traffic than they could make if they had stayed in the village. They could actually make a living doing this.

Henri now had a plan. He spent his time among the street vendors until he had made friends with several. Slowly he was able to get the needed details and contacts, to have a supplier, and a space to share with the others with whom he shared the street. The summer came and Henri finally left the mission with no real sorrow. He now had a place to go, a job to do, somewhere to sleep, and even the possibility of saving a few coins to take back to the village next Christmas.

As he deftly dodged cars when the lights changed or the jams became unplugged, the cicadas sang again and he remembered his Mother’s words. He would not get sick. He would get well.