"Resnick, Mike - Bibi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

He began walking through the camp, which seemed like two separate worlds to him -- or, actually, three. There was the world inhabited by the camp's employees: immaculate tents in a cluster, a spotless mess area, the infirmary -- it was too small and too easily victimized by the elements to call it a hospital; even _infirmary_ seemed to give it an unearned dignity.
Then there was the world of the Africans: they had come by the dozens, and finally the hundreds, once word got out that another crazy European was passing out free food and medicine, and a small city of mud and thatched huts now completely encircled the world of the camp attendants.
Finally there was that tiny world inhabited only by himself and Elizabeth, a pair of people who didn't fit in either of the other worlds. Jeremy, whose medical training was limited to a lifesaving badge he earned in swimming class when he was twelve, and Elizabeth, who had been born in Uganda and raised in Europe and didn't quite belong to either society.
As he passed a huge pile of folded, unused tents, he saw a troop of vervet monkeys edging closer to an extended family of Africans that were warming their banana mash breakfasts over a fire. Hunger had made the monkeys brave, bravery had made them foolish, and Jeremy knew that at least one family was going to be having meat for lunch.
At last he reached the mess tent and came to a stop before Elizabeth, who was writing meticulous notes in a journal while her tea sat, untouched and cooling, right next to the Coleman lamp on the breakfast table.
"Is that you, Jeremy?" she asked without looking up.
Dr. Elizabeth Umurungi's enunciation always sounded like an upper-class Englishwoman -- one who spoke perfect French -- rather than a convent-educated Achole who had fled to Britain with her parents when Idi Amin started decimating the countryside.
"No, it's Father Damian," he told her, wrapping his sweater about his narrow shoulders. It was strange: every evening he went to sleep sweating and wondering if he'd ever be cool again, and every morning he woke up shivering and wondering if he'd ever be warm again. That was Africa for you.
"All things considered, you'd hardly qualify as a saint," she retorted. "Pity. We could use a miracle or two."
She'd been finishing up her residency about the time he'd done his MBA: they had friends, or at least contacts, in common, and in what felt like another life, they'd skiied the same hills in Switzerland. One of the few people he had confided in, she monitored his T-cell status along with those of the Ugandans whose long defeats she fought.
She poured him a battered mug of tea that he eyed suspiciously. "So it's not that designer herbal muck you used to buy. It won't kill you. Dehydration and hunger will. Sit."
He would have liked to eat by the fire, preferring the chilly air and the smoke to the cramped, dark interior and endless medical conversation of the mess hall -- but as much as he was bored by such talk, he was even more bored with his own company, so he decided to eat at Elizabeth's table. His meal consisted not of the meticulously chosen, weighed, and cooked health foods that he had considered a matter of the merest survival, but rather of posho and banana mash which, even here, wasn't much.
"Think I ought to make a supply run?" he asked.
She shrugged.
"I got a dividend check," he volunteered. "Be nice to buy chickens. We could use the carcasses for soup." ("Money!" Raymond had spat. "It's all you ever think about! Well, let's see you try to take it with you!")
She finally looked up at him. "Homesick for Manhattan? Chicken soup isn't _that_ magic. As long as we can feed everyone in camp, fine. But I do need you to drive me somewhere."
He bowed elaborately. With him, she wouldn't have to worry about assault -- or about getting back to the compound safely.
"You want to track down the villagers that left this morning? Jabito told me about them when he woke me up."
"Jabito gossips too much. Old head; young shoulders."
"What do you expect?"
"I expect people not to slip away from doctors who are trying to help them," said Elizabeth with the hauteur acquired in a childhood spent commuting between Paris, London and Kampala. Elizabeth might have learned patience and compassion in her self-appointed mission to help rebuild the country that had exiled her family, but the airs of the _grande dame_ still clung to her. Though Jeremy had to admit that on her, even a tattered lab coat and old crew T-shirt looked chic. She'd been a model in Paris. Not the type he'd pretended to drool over as a nervous teenager reading _Sports Illustrated's_ swimsuit issue every year, but the sort of model who turned up in _Vogue_ and had designers fighting each other over who would have the privilege this season of draping thousands of dollars of silk over her arrogant, elegant bones. Once and future stars were always chucking careers and going back to school, so the story on her in _People_ -- "Supermodel Abandons Runways for Med School" -- produced a raised eyebrow or two before everyone in Jeremy's study group went back to being cool. And working their asses off.
While that might impress the locals, it also intimidated them, and they kept her at a distance that saddened her. For all the darkness of her skin, she was as much a foreigner here as Jeremy. Maybe even more of one. "I've got their medical records, such as they are," she added.
"You got a Land Rover?"
She smiled at him. "Better than that. I've got a flatbed truck with an almost-new spare tire."
"Where'd you get it?" he asked excitedly. "I thought you told me you were just about out of money."
"I am. We got it from a donor." She paused, then amended her statement. "I got it from a donor. You're not the only financial wizard around here."
"If you're a financial wizard, how did you manage to run through all those millions you made modeling?" he asked with a smile that was almost smug.
She sighed. "I bribed a lot of the wrong people when I decided to set up the camp. Then I had to go back and bribe the right ones. Our equipment cost a fortune to import. We're on our fifth Land Rover; do you know how much they cost, and how quickly they die out here?" She paused, then added ruefully: "And then there were my little blunders, like one hundred tents nobody wants to sleep in. They were more than eight hundred dollars apiece, and I can't get a single patient to spend a night in one."
He wanted to teasingly say, "Well, they're _your_ people," -- but he bit the words off just in time. They were no longer her people, and in fact distrusted this Westernized woman, this "black European", even more than they distrusted Jeremy, who in their eyes was just another well-intentioned, bumbling American, a typical Two-Year Wonder who was working out his guilt at his parents' expense.
"Of course they won't sleep in them," said Jeremy. "Tents have corners, and demons live in corners. Much better to live in nice round huts."
"Did they tell you that?"
He nodded.
"Why didn't they tell me?"
"You're a Ugandan," he said. "They probably assumed you knew."
"I left when I was a child," she said irritably. "I can't remember every little superstition they..._we_...have." She paused. "I wish I knew why they confide in you and not in me."
"Us subordinates know not to trust the big chief," he said with a smile.
For a moment he thought she would explode with anger, but finally she laughed. "Anyway," she added, "I've actually got two jerrycans of petrol and a radio. We'll travel in style."
_And with enough room to bring back the villagers, whether they want to come or not. Assuming we don't find them dead by the side of the road -- or such parts of them as the hyenas leave._
"What if they don't want to come?"
"What happens to the children?" countered Elizabeth. "The old lady can't do it all. It's sad: Two daughters-in-law, both with children. Under normal circumstances, she'd have all the makings of an easy, honored old age. The daughters-in-law would do all the work for her." She sighed deeply. "But now she'll be tending them and bringing up the children until they get sick too."
"Does she test positive?"
"She's negative. But that's not surprising. She lives a traditional lifestyle, and in her culture, women don't have sex once they reach menopause. Besides, her husband died years ago. The son must have picked it up from his circumcision group, or maybe from some whore in Kampala or Entebbe." She gestured to a beat-up flatbed truck at the far side of the compound. "Get your gear and let's get this show on the road. I'll wait for you at the truck."
He joined her a few minutes later, climbed into the driver's seat, put the vehicle in gear, and they were on their way.
The road wound in and out of the bush, passing through dozens of villages, many of them totally deserted, though it was impossible at first glance to determine whether they were empty due to war or AIDS.
"God, I hate these potholes!" muttered Jeremy, as the ride began doing painful things to his spine and kidneys.
"The locals play games, trying to figure out whose they are," said Elizabeth with a bitter smile.
"Whose _what_ are?" repeated Jeremy uncomprehendingly.
"The potholes," she explained. "They try to guess whether they were made by Amin's troops, or Nyerere's, or Obote's, or Okello's, or Musaveti's."
"What a delightful way to spend your childhood," said Jeremy wryly. "Trying to guess which homicidal monster destroyed the road through your village."
"Musaveti's a good man," said Elizabeth adamantly. "And Nyerere is a saint."