J. Ballard – The Day of Creation (страница 10)

Three months later I joined the World Health Organization, and by a roundabout route – Toronto, Puerto Rico, Lagos – I found myself in central Africa. After six months in northern Nigeria, trying to isolate a suspected outbreak of smallpox – a disease which WHO had eliminated from the world – I began to forget my uneasy life in London, although it seemed ironic that I should find fulfilment in an unnecessary struggle against an imaginary disease. But I was then transferred to the Central African Republic, still devastated after the rule of Bokassa, and finally sent across the border to the former French East Africa. Yet even in Port-la-Nouvelle I was never happier than when I embarked on the futile drilling project. Lying in my derelict trailer, I knew that it was time to return to England before I could discover why.

When Captain Kagwa called to see me soon after daybreak, I told him that I was closing the clinic and would leave Port-la-Nouvelle whenever he could provide me with transport.

‘My regrets, doctor.’ He gazed at the shambles in the dispensary, and at the blood stains on my hand and legs. With only a few bottles of drinking water, there had been no means of cleaning myself. Clearly he was relieved to see me go. ‘Six months at Port-la-Nouvelle, and so little achieved. You cannot even play your national anthem. However, I can arrange your flight with Air Centrafrique. The Dakota returns today.’

‘So soon? Hope comes and goes. That doesn’t say much for Professor Sanger’s concern for the starving.’

‘The journalists are restless – perhaps they feel disappointed here.’

‘I can understand. Now about the plane. Thank you, Captain, but no – I don’t trust that Dakota. The thought of being incinerated at the end of a runway my tractor helped to build is bad enough, but being strapped into the seat next to Sanger when it happens …’

‘Charity, doctor – or, if you prefer, self-interest – besides, Professor Sanger is not leaving with you. He is to stay here and make me famous. This very morning he will interview me on our local television station.’

‘Our local what …?’ I stared with wonder at Kagwa, aware now of the source of his good humour. Cool and confident, he was resplendent in a freshly pressed uniform, as if about to be promoted to General of Police by the President himself. ‘This is obviously an important interview. To whom will it be transmitted?’

‘To Port-la-Nouvelle and the Lake Kotto area, doctor. Professor Sanger has all the latest equipment – he isn’t drilling for water in a desert. A large part of Lake Kotto is within range of his station. His local antenna has a ten-mile radius.’

‘A new career for you, Captain.’ I could see that the absence of an audience mattered nothing to Captain Kagwa. No doubt he had his own reasons for keeping Sanger in Port-la-Nouvelle, probably to publicize his bush war against the guerillas. ‘This means that Sanger will be staying on at Lake Kotto?’

‘Of course – he has his mission to perform.’

‘His fifty sacks of rice? Do you think that’s his real reason for being here?’

‘You’ve become too suspicious living with us. What else?’

‘He could be working for French Intelligence – or even Harare …’

‘That’s dangerous talk, doctor. It’s small-minded of you. I think it’s time for you to go.’

‘All right. I’ll take that mercy flight after all.’

‘Be at the airstrip by twelve noon. It’s a shame, doctor. Professor Sanger tells me that the world is hungry for a new Schweitzer … All those keyboard exercises will have gone to waste.’ Kagwa gazed at the strange light over the lake, and shook the powdered milk from his boots. ‘What will you do when you return to England, doctor? You won’t be happy there.’

‘I dare say I’ll find some dry wells to drill … See you at the plane, Captain.’

An opal light lay over the lake, and transformed the surface of white sand and fish bone into a faint mother-of-pearl. As I stood outside the clinic with my two suitcases I saw a fleeting mirage, a second forest that hung below the first. The undergrowth and the canopies of the shabby oaks were more vibrant, perhaps bathed in the televised aura of Captain Kagwa being transmitted at that very moment from the airstrip antenna, preparing the local flora and fauna for the electronic world order to come. Perhaps Sanger had stumbled upon a method of reviving the flagging agriculture, a new fertility rite for the television age. Along the borders of Chad and the Sudan, the images of provincial leaders and local police chiefs would be broadcast to the arid sand. Already I could see the colossal spectre of Captain Kagwa beamed out like the electronic statue of a new Ozymandias …

A cloud of grit swept against my legs as one of the police trucks stopped outside the barracks before returning to the airstrip. A suitcase in each hand, I walked between the bullet-riddled fuel pumps on the Toyota forecourt. Swinging my cases on to the tailgate of the truck, I told the teenage driver that I would walk to the airfield.

Beyond the garage was a looted appliance store. Captain Kagwa’s sergeant emerged from its office with two soldiers. Between them they carried a large video-recorder, which they handled with the respect due to an ancient tabernacle, and bore swiftly into the barracks.

When they had gone the town returned to its silence. The cooperative factory which had once produced cotton textiles, soap and beer, and the small assembly plant for cheap motor cycles and radios stood dustily in the heat. The streets were empty, as if the entire population were indoors watching television, and reminded me of those English suburbs which I had fled, where on a summer’s afternoon everyone would sit behind drawn blinds watching a tennis final or a royal wedding. Captain Kagwa had made the ultimate leap forward, dispensing even with the need for an audience.

But I was searching for a different kind of magic. I stepped on to the beach below the wharf of the tobacco warehouse. Again I saw the mirage along the shore, the same illusory forest that hung among the clouds of mother-of-pearl. Then, as I touched the lake-bed, I realized its source.

The lake was damp. My cleated boots left firm imprints as sharp as those scored into the forest trail by the tractor. The fire at the cigarette factory had been put out by Kagwa’s soldiers, and now that the smoke had faded the vivid light over the lake was undimmed. The surface gleamed like a salt flat still moist after a few minutes of rain.

As for the mirage, I could see the inverted forest even more clearly, the high canopies of the jungle oaks reflected in a shallow pool of water, two hundred feet in length and some thirty wide, that lay along the beach. Even now this narrow crescent had attracted a few birds. Parties of jacanas and plovers stood in the water, pecking at their reflections.

Had my wells at last reached the water-bearing strata below the lake, tapping the giant aquifer that would carry a third Nile into the Sahara? I ran through the damp sand towards the nearest of the drilling rigs.

The footsteps behind me were already filling with a clear fluid. I reached the rig and rested against the wooden frame. Looking down into the bore, I felt a curious relief that the well was still dry. I pressed my head against the fire-scarred platform, staring at the charred timbers that had fallen from the derrick. The water which had moistened a small corner of Lake Kotto had come from the spring beside the airstrip, whose mouth the tractor had opened the previous afternoon.

Why did I feel so strong a sense of relief? In part, it would have been galling to leave Port-la-Nouvelle and then find that Captain Kagwa or, even worse, Professor Sanger, was taking credit for the successful drilling operation. When I reached the crescent pool I stopped within a few feet of the water’s edge. It seemed an alien element, with its clear geometry conforming so agreeably to the contours of the shore-line, containing nothing in its shallows but concealing everything, like the eyes of the adolescent Chinese girls I had pursued so keenly in Hong Kong.

A jacana waded past me on its overlarge claws, leaving ripples like the spoor of submarine flight in the forest canopy that loomed from the reflection. Fifty feet away, the mouth of the stream emerged from the forest. Little more than a small drain, it leaked a trickle of clear water into a shallow gutter that crossed the road and flowed down to the lake.

I stepped into the pool and washed the dust from my boots, then knelt down and bathed my face and hair, aware that this might be the last useful task to be performed by the small reservoir before it evaporated. Days had passed since I had taken my last shower, and the white dust shed itself from my arms and chest, revealing a second, darker skin. Looking down at the surface, I was surprised to see that it teemed with life – water-spiders flickered to and fro, fishing for the swarms of hydra and infusoria. Microscopic creatures glimmered in the turbid water, as if generated from the sweat and dust of my skin. I seemed to have sloughed away the older, desert version of the up-country physician I had become for a younger, riverine self. Seeing my slim face and shoulders – the product of a poor diet and intermittent dysentery – I remembered the boy of eighteen who had taken a last eccentric sail trip to the mouth of the Canton River, before reluctantly agreeing to my father’s wish that I study medicine, and had spent three days marooned on a rocky headland with several hundred screaming gulls for company.