Thirst (17 page)

Leslie and I sat on two straw mats while the peasant couple stood behind us a few meters away like the waiters at Tour d’Argent. Sana’s face was hard as she stared beyond me at the still figure on the pallet. The children and their grandmother watched us from near the tiny fire. The family was quiet, stricken by anxiety, and not only because of the ill child.

My wife was undisturbed by this native scrutiny. When she visited the capital’s outdoor food market near the docks, refusing the company of our servants, she was always followed by several small, startled boys at about fifteen paces. She would pretend not to notice them.

“Very good,” Leslie complimented the peasants in their native tongue.

Krik stared. A stranger’s benediction was usually a thrill for our peasants, but hearing our language spoken by this curly-haired enigma was completely numbing. My people were no more accustomed to hearing a white person speak our language than they were to conversing with a giraffe; perhaps they were even less accustomed.

Our meal ended with a series of tiny, painful coughs from behind us. Sana hurried to the pallet, where the child had spit up. Leslie quietly joined her. The spit, I noticed with vague encouragement, was clear. Sana lifted the child and wiped his face with a cloth pulled from a fold in her wrap. I pushed away my dish and one of the girls picked it up. She did not look at me.

“Now will you help my child?” Krik asked.

“I told you, I can’t. I’m not a doctor.”

“Please, your honor,” he said, using a feudal term that had been outlawed for more than thirty years.

I turned away.

Leslie offered the woman a sympathetic but helpless smile. The woman stared back at her, waiting for something more. The child stirred unhappily in his mother’s arms and opened his mouth as if he wanted to cry. My country’s infant mortality rate, as measured by the
World Health Organization, was 130.4 deaths within one year per thousand live births.

“Milk?” Leslie suggested, desperate to tell Sana something, but not quite pronouncing the word correctly.

Herself desperate to understand, the mother continued to stare. Of course, I could have explained Leslie’s meaning to her, but at the time did not think of it. I had already decided that there was nothing we could do and was reflecting on the idea that Americans always thought there
was
something they could do, if only by the virtue of their being Americans. This was one reason why they had built a great industrial society, yet also why at that moment the society was bedeviled by the consequences of what shouldn’t have been done, the half-assed solutions for problems—such as foreign Communist insurgencies and empty deposit bottles of Coke—that it shouldn’t have attempted to solve.

Leslie repeated what she had said, this time cupping her own breasts. Sana at last understood and picked up a nursing bottle from beside the pallet. Four kids at twenty-two—well, I could see why she used a bottle. And Leslie thought sex was fun.

The child, however, refused the milk. He would not suck. Sana repeatedly pushed the latex nipple into his mouth, but the thin, pale lips ignored it.

“Please,” Sana begged the boy.

A little milk dripped from the bottle, but he immediately coughed it up. The woman shot my wife a glance of reproach.

“We’ve got to help him,” Leslie said.

“Try a real breast.”

“That’s not the problem. He won’t take anything.”

“It probably was the problem. Or at least a problem. They can’t get fresh milk here, or even any liquid formula in bulk, and the only running water is what’s pouring down now out of the Vault of Menasha. I know this district. It’s like twenty others in this province. They’re working the hell out of a single stream or some goddam hole in the ground that was dug fifty years ago. You’ll have the trots in the morning, I promise you.”

“He’s burning up. He might die.”

“I see.”

“What should we do?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” I really was. Outside my office window there was a billboard the size of an ocean liner, the third side of the triangular plaza bordered by the government administration building and the national assembly. A mother rapturously gazed at the child in her arms, both oblivious to the traffic below them, an Asian pietà except that the child was alive and his fat little hands were about to seize a plastic bottle. The powdered formula was not only cheap at the dock, it was cheap to transport into the far provinces. I knew the figures well. The woman painted on the billboard was of some vague Eastern ethnicity, perhaps Thai, but her teeth and optimism were clearly imported from the West. It was the optimism that was really for sale.

Leslie asked Sana if there was medicine of any kind in the house. The woman sadly shook her head.

“He’s dehydrated,” Leslie murmured to me. “If we
can get some water in him, even to wet his lips . . . how about if we heat a bath and try to break the fever?”

“A bath?”

“We’ll just keep wetting him to cool his body. My mother did it for me when I had the mumps.”

“They wouldn’t have nearly enough water, not in that drum.”

“How much water would we need? Anyway, we can use rainwater.”

The peasants witnessed this incomprehensible exchange with due solemnity. It was the closest they’d come to a medical consultation. They had an almost blind faith in Western and Western-trained doctors despite the fact, unknown to hardly anyone but a few historians, that my people were practicing an advanced and humane indigenous medicine when Europeans were still letting blood. We had no shamans; taking care of our own health was as natural as making our own breakfasts. Nowadays, with the infusion of Western medical practices and values, it was virtually against the law.

When I started to explain about the bath to Krik, however, his eyes narrowed. The old woman growled. The peasants would not trust me, even though I was dedicated to improving their lives. It was the accent, the urban posture, the styling I had gotten at the Hilton barbershop in the capital three months earlier . . . meanwhile, Leslie was holding their ill son, and had now begun singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” The other kids overcame their shyness, approached her, and were enormously pleased when she allowed them to touch
her hair. My people had always been like that. Warily parochial in our judgment of each other, we had opened our arms to our conquerors: the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the British, and now the UN, IMF, and Comecon bureaucrats.

“No,” Krik stammered.

“What?

“Please, your honor. I have made a vow. My child’s soul, no
baptême.”

Well, now I just had to laugh. The one goddam word he knew in French.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Your honor, I beg you.”

“Just listen to me. I’m not a Christian.”

“I promised my father I wouldn’t allow it.”

“Your boy is sick. He has too much heat inside him. The heat is part of the sickness. The water will draw it out.”

“No.”

“It’s just a bath. You’ve taken baths before, haven’t you?”

“I can’t break my vow,” he said sorrowfully. “Don’t you understand?”

Sana suddenly stepped in front of him, her eyes glowing.

“Do it,” she said. “I don’t care. Just save my boy.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I protested.

“Don’t talk to us like children. Just save him.”

“This is going to help him, I swear.”

“I told you that you can do it,” she said evenly. “Go ahead then. Make him well.”

For a moment, I thought of saying no. But that would have been of no use, it was a done deal. Under my direction, Krik and the older children placed some buckets, a tightly woven basket, and even an automobile hubcap at the doorway. In tremendous spiritual torment, Krik stared into the demon-ridden night. The storm blew in his face and past him into the shack. As the containers filled he passed them in, where the water was transferred to a pot, warmed over the fire, and then emptied into a basin by the grandmother’s seat. Leslie occasionally tested the temperature of the water with her hand while Sana held the baby in her arms, slowly rocking him and gently singing a lullaby that I had never known. It took us a while to adequately fill the basin and get it properly lukewarm. Krik returned from the doorway not only soaked, but exhausted, as if the water clinging to his body were his own sweat.

Sana deferred to my wife, allowing her to place the naked child into the bath. The boy did not even blink as he was immersed. Leslie gently held him by the back, with one hand cradling his head. The entire family, save for the crone muttering to herself in another corner, intently watched the child and the white woman.

Leslie bobbed the boy in the water, splashing him and caressing his body with her wet hands. I paced, too nervous to stand around the basin. I wondered if Krik had any dry tobacco, but I did not ask. I was afraid of Sana. I was stirred as well. Her body was bent and wasted and her hair was the texture of straw, yet the blood fiercely rushing to her haggard face a moment ago had briefly recalled her recent youth. One could see
what she had been like before she had four children. She leaned forward to watch Leslie and her thighs tensed against her housedress. Give her some teeth and a week at Club Med and she’d be okay. I could have married her.

The infant suddenly cried, startling us. It was a short bawl, but the clearest sound he had made all evening. “I think that’s a good sign,” Leslie said.

I hunkered to the basin and felt the child’s forehead. As I did so, I thought perhaps he watched my hand. “But he’s still hot.”

“Well, it takes time.”

“He’s very hot.”

“I know,” Leslie admitted. “But let’s keep on doing it. If we can get his fever down a degree or two and get him to drink something, I think he’ll make it until the doctor arrives.”

I was silent for a moment as she ladled more water onto the boy’s flat, tawny chest.

“Doctor? There’s not going to be any doctor.”

“But you said—”

“There’s not going to be any doctor,” I repeated furiously.

Her face stiffened. “You said they sent for one.”

“Sure, but they won’t get him. Not in this weather. They probably wouldn’t get him anyway. I thought that was obvious. You think the army has so many doctors to spare? Or so many jeeps?”

“But hell,” she said. “How far is Sempril anyway?”

“It’s just down the mountain.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Still holding the child, she turned to Krik and asked, “Why is it that your father-in-law went to Pat’in?”

“The postmaster has a radio there,” Krik explained earnestly. “He can call to Sempril for a doctor.”

“But don’t you understand, citizen?” I interrupted, reasserting my military, political, and social authority by the introduction of this salutation. “The army cannot dispatch a doctor every time someone’s child falls ill. And nothing can move out in that storm. You don’t even know if the old man made it to Pat’in.”

“My son,” he began helplessly as the rest of the family looked on.

Damn these peasants.

“Sempril’s only thirty kilometers away. And the road isn’t quite that bad. You could have bundled up the child and sent him there. If the old man had left with him yesterday morning, they could have made it to the camp by midday and missed the brunt of the storm.”

“My son,” the peasant began again.

“Your son,” I said sarcastically. “Why didn’t you send your son to Sempril?”

Very quietly Krik said, “There is no grace on the road.”

Meaning: if a person dies while traveling, his spirit must first journey through the bush and find its way home before ascending to what is, roughly, my people’s idea of heaven. For the soul of an infant, such a difficult passage might well prove impossible. I blew up.

“You jackass,” I said in English before finding the proper epithets of my own language.

“You’re an idiot! How can medicine help you if you continue to think like a savage? How can science, how can technology, how can
anything
help you?”

“Honey, we’re guests—”

“It’s your fault if your child dies,” I told Krik. “You could have saved him.”

My anger made me dizzy. I stalked away from the basin. The nails of my clenched fists dug into my palms.

After a while, Leslie resumed bathing the infant while Sana watched anxiously, glancing up from time to time at me and her husband, who had been humiliated in his own home. The entire family had been shocked by my outburst, even the old woman. The eldest girl had tears in her eyes. I leaned against a damp plasterboard wall and stared at the cold concrete floor. I refused to pity these people, my country, or myself.

Did the hours tick away? No, there was no clock. The rain falling—that is, crashing, drumming, rattling, popping, hissing, and, if you will, ringing like a spill of coins—on the tin-paneled section of the roof marked the only passage of time. It was a time that could not be represented by the even sweep of a second hand, nor that of an hour hand, nor by the publication of calendars nor by the magnetic resonance of cesium. It came in floods. In a roar. First a second, then a century. History was only a sequence of events and if nothing happened—as nothing here ever did—no time has passed at all. Krik and Sana could have been as old as the temple at Mukrent, but mere infants compared to the Citicorp Building.

Two of the small children slept together on a piece of foam insulation, the head of one against the shoulder of the other. A third child watched them. Krik sat against a wall, his arms around his twisted knees. Sana and Leslie took turns bathing the child and did not attempt conversation. Sana’s mother stared into the fire while sitting in the backseat of an automobile whose front could have been thousands of miles away. I found a rag and cleaned my pistol.