A Burnt Out Case Read Online Free PDF

offerings.
    ‘Is this the path to the Perrins?’
    The man said yes, but Querry guessed it was what Africans always replied to a question couched like that. He went back to the truck and lay down on the camp-bed. He could hear Deo Gratias settling himself for the night under the belly of the truck, and he lay on his back, staring up at where the stars ought to have been visible, but the gauze of the mosquito-net obscured them. As usual there was no silence. Silence belonged to cities. He dreamt of a girl whom he had once known and thought he loved. She came to him in tears because she had broken a vase which she valued, and she became angry with him because he didn’t share her suffering. She struck him in the face, but he felt the blow no more than a dab of butter against his cheek. He said, ‘I am sorry, I am too far gone, I can’t feel at all, I am a leper.’ As he explained his sickness to her he awoke.
    This was a specimen of his days and nights. He had no trouble beyond the boredom of the bush. The ferries worked; the rivers were not in flood, in spite of the rain which came torrentially down on their last night. Deo Gratias made a tent over the back of the truck with a ground-sheet and lay down himself as he had done every night in the shelter of the chassis. Then the sun was out again and the track became a road a few miles out of Luc.
    III
    They searched a long time for the doctor’s apparatus before they found a clue. The cargo department of Otraco knew nothing of it and suggested the customs, which was no more than a wooden hut by a jetty in the tiny river port, where bat-eared dogs yapped and ran. The customs were uninterested and uncooperative, so that Querry had to dig out the European controller who was having an after-lunch siesta in a block of blue and pink modern flats by a little public garden where no one sat on the hot cement benches. The door of the apartment was opened by an African woman, tousled and sleepy, who looked as though she had been sharing the controller’s siesta. The controller was an elderly Fleming who spoke very little French. The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life. Querry had already become so accustomed to the bush-life that this man seemed to belong to another age and race than his own. The commercial calendar on the wall with a coloured reproduction of a painting by Vermeer, the triptych of wife and children on the locked piano, and a portrait of the man himself in a uniform of antique cut belonging to an antique war were like the deposits of a dead culture. They could be dated accurately, but no research would disclose the emotions that had once been attached to them.
    The controller was very cordial and confused, as though he were anxious to hide with hospitality some secret of his siesta; he had forgotten to do up his flies. He invited Querry to sit down and take a glass, but when he heard that Querry had come from the leproserie he became restless and anxious, eyeing the chair on which Querry sat. Perhaps he expected to see the bacilli of leprosy burrowing into the upholstery. He knew nothing, he said, of any apparatus and suggested that it might be at the cathedral. When Querry stopped on the landing outside he could hear the tap running in the bathroom. The controller was obviously disinfecting his hands.
    True enough the apparatus some time ago had been lodged at the cathedral, although the priest in charge, who had assumed the crates contained a holy statue or books for the fathers’ library, at first denied all knowledge. They had gone off by the last Otraco boat and were somewhere stuck on the river. Querry drove to the cold storage. The hour of siesta was over, and he had to queue for string-beans.
    The high vexed colonial voices, each angry about something different, rose around him, competing for attention. It seemed to him for a moment that he was back in Europe, and his shoulders instinctively