The Altruists Page 14

  “Mr. Moyo,” he said, as the lawn began to tilt. “Excuse me, but where did these people get all this stuff?”

  Louis Sr. smiled. “What do you mean?”

  “In the south I can’t get anything. Shampoo, razors, batteries . . . even toilet paper is scarce. If I need something I can have it shipped over by my backers, but I see these villagers and I think, how can they stand it? Do they know about all this? The shrimp and the whiskey? And I thought—I thought this was a socialist country.”

  Louis Sr. laughed. “Oh, my friend,” he said, his smile suddenly despicable. “This is socialism in Africa: what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours we share.”

  Arthur excused himself to the corner of the lawn and threw up in the bushes.

  That night he dreamed he was a member of the Royal Navy, with a harem of sun-bronzed women to defend, but every time he reached for his sword, he found, to his embarrassment, that it was missing.

  He didn’t return to Chiredzi on Sunday as planned. Shaken up, he took a detour to a Trappist monastery and hospital he’d heard about in Chisumbanje, where he stayed for an entire week, helping patients where he could, assisting the monks in their production of bread and beer. He returned to the Humble Brothers’ outpost with a hangover and a renewed belief in his mission.

  “What took you so long?” asked Rafter, who was kicking a Humble Brothers–branded soccer ball with Jamroll in front of the outpost when Arthur returned.

  “I made a stop on the way back. What’d I miss?”

  Jamroll kicked the ball to Arthur. Arthur caught the ball beneath his boot. A drop of water landed on the shell toe. He looked up at the darkening sky, then back at Jamroll.

  The boy shrugged. “Rainy season,” he said, in English.

  * * *

  • • •

  By December the showers were heavy and frequent. Construction on the Alter Latrines slowed. But when the sky cleared for a week in the middle of the month, none of the young men Arthur had enlisted to help him reported for work. Jamroll, too, was nowhere to be found. He sent Rafter into town to see what was going on.

  Rafter returned to the outpost from a trip into town, his shirt pulled up over his mouth. “Sleenph niphnis!” he said.

  “What?”

  Rafter uncovered his mouth. “Sleeping sickness.” He pulled his long sleeves over his hands.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Reducing surface area. Arthur, we’ve got to protect ourselves.”

  “I left a cement mixer by the prototype. Walk with me.”

  “Arthur . . .”

  “Come on. Walk and talk.”

  “Sleeping sickness,” Rafter repeated, following Arthur and looking nervously around him. “It’s a disease. Carried by tsetse flies. It feeds on your central nervous system.”

  “And it’s going around?”

  “Chiredzi General is at capacity. They’re turning people away.”

  “Is that where our guys have been?”

  “I don’t think you understand, Arthur. It’s everywhere.”

  “Is it fatal?”

  “Can be. Depends. They ran out of beds. People are sleeping on the floor.”

  “You don’t think Jamroll . . .”

  Rafter threw his arms up. “Right now? I’m more concerned about us. About you.”

  “So what, then?”

  “I don’t know. We quarantine ourselves, I guess. We see if this blows over. I put in a call to HQ and left a message. I’ll try again tomorrow. We need to keep away from anything that could . . .”

  He trailed off as they reached the prototype. A faint buzzing sound surrounded it.

  “Arthur,” Rafter said, extending a shaking arm. “Look.”

  He followed Rafter’s finger to the top of the latrine. A cloud of black dots had settled around the superstructure.

  Rafter’s jaw slacked open. “They’re drawn to the smell,” he said. “Oh, God.”

  Arthur took a step forward.

  “What are you doing?” Rafter asked.

  “I want to look.”

  “Are you insane? It could be a breeding ground in there!”

  “I need to know,” he said flatly. “I need to know for sure.”

  “I won’t let you!” Rafter grabbed him by the collar. “I won’t let you get sick.”

  The following weeks unfolded like a horrible dream. Rumors spread throughout the region. Locals grew suspicious of the white men in the outpost. Children gathered to throw rocks at the Alter Latrines before their mothers rushed in, swept them up, and warned them never to go near one of those things again. Rafter stopped speaking, afflicted by a depression against which no amount of faith could inoculate him. His belief—in Arthur, in whatever the Humble Brothers preached—was irreversibly shaken. He must have said something to his superiors, because in late December the church sent a strongly worded letter and promptly cut Arthur’s funding.

  He needed to book a flight home, and fast. A few days after the letter from the church arrived, Arthur took the long way into town, hoping to go unnoticed. He felt gutted, carved out, hollow. He couldn’t face the Moyos. He could hardly face himself. While walking, the path looping and curving its unhurried way to the bus stop in Chiredzi, adrift in despair, Arthur stubbed his toe on a rock and fell forward, landing flat on the ground. Minutes passed. He made no effort to move. It felt right, lying there. You’re shit, he thought. The ground was where he belonged.

  But the sun was setting, and the phones in town were inaccessible at night. He sighed and picked himself up. He dusted off his elbows and wiped his hands on his jeans. That’s when he saw it.

  Up ahead, by the side of the road, was an Alter Latrine. But what was it doing here? Who had erected an outhouse on this winding road, and this close to town? He had no memory of approving this location.

  He approached it with caution. The outhouse resembled his, though the superstructure was round edged and spiraled. There was no need for a door. The walls were constructed from some kind of ferro-cement. Spiral shape aside, it was practically an Alter Latrine. But with one major difference: extending from the base on which the structure was built rose a black ventilation pipe, roughly nine feet high. And this latrine, he realized, was not new. The surface was scarred with chips and blemishes.

  It took Arthur a moment to comprehend what he was looking at. When at last he understood—that airflow from the squat hole was pushed up through the vent pipe; that flies could enter through the spiral opening but were drawn to the light at the top of the pipe; that the top of the pipe was fitted with a fly screen; that this was a vast improvement on his design; and that the outhouse had been standing in this spot for at least a few years—he realized why funding had been difficult to secure.

  His idea was not his idea. He’d proposed a solution to a problem that had already been solved. The Humble Brothers, in their ignorance, were unaware. And Arthur, in his vanity, had missed it. His knees shook and he fell, once again, to the ground.

  PART II

  EIGHT

  The Kleins were by no means the unhappiest family on Folsom Drive, but they weren’t the happiest, either, the mean of their contentment crashed by Francine’s depressed mathematician father. He slept sixteen hours each day, and even while awake he worked from bed, getting up only to make loud, tortured urinations or to sit, frowning, in his mock-leather living room chair. Whenever one of his daughters dared to ask what he was doing, sitting with that distant look on his face, he answered in his duskiest voice, “I’m working on my book.” It was like being married to a corpse, her mother complained to friends on the phone, and Francine, eavesdropping from the next room, supposed she wasn’t wrong; burly Papa Klein had the soulless stare of a dead man. Still, at eight years old, she was disturbed to hear her mother state her plight so plainly. Until then she had believed her father to be merely lo
st in thought, wrestling with some high-order theory, forever solving for X.

  There was nothing remarkable about the Kleins’ ranch home, other than its size. It was one of the smallest on the street, which irritated Mrs. Klein to no end. She compensated by meticulously managing the interior. Throughout the house, above the wall-to-wall carpeting and scratchy furniture, she hung pastel paintings of harlequins that she herself had made. She guarded the space like it was a museum, and enforced exacting rules for household decorum. Be Quiet. No Shoes in the Family Room. Don’t Breathe on the Art.

  It was Mrs. Klein you had to watch out for. A needle-thin woman with a beehive held in place by Aqua Net, she was a keen observer of social dynamics, a genius of criticism with an arsenal of backhanded compliments, given to saying things like “It’s a miracle you photograph well” or “You have the broad shoulders to pull off that blouse.” She joined every group and association for women in town with the sole intent of slagging off her fellow members. Francine, who learned to anticipate her mother’s comments and adapt herself accordingly, got off easier than Rebecca. Her younger sister, who went by Bex, was not as amenable as she was, had no gift for compromise, and fought with their mother constantly.

  Mrs. Klein’s cruelty only wavered once per week, on Shabbat, when she insisted that her husband join the family in the kitchen. She’d light the candles and then quickly shut her eyes to pray in Hebrew. When she opened them, the Sabbath inaugurated by her words, the first thing she saw was the light. She also behaved during the High Holy Days. Francine looked forward to autumn for this reason, when for ten repentant days her mother acted with the utmost kindness, making public and private displays of goodness with the aim of being inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life.

  When the girls were young, their father’s book—no tractatus, it turned out, but an undergraduate calculus textbook—was published to some acclaim, and course-adopted all across the country. This sudden windfall resulted in the purchase of the vacant house next door and a second car, a green Impala. The house was for Papa Klein’s mother, a decision that infuriated Mrs. Klein, who wanted a bigger place for herself on Folsom Drive, and who did not find her mother-in-law worthy of her charity.

  Around this time Francine became preoccupied with fairness. If she asked her mother why they had two cars while her friend Ellie’s family had only one, Mrs. Klein would say, bluntly, “Because Ellie’s father drinks his paychecks.” It was from her grandmother, who now lived next door and did more than her fair share of parenting, that Francine learned a sense of justice. “Your father has been lucky,” Grandma Ruth would say in response to that same question. “I propose this: from now on, you will give Ellie half of your cookie every day at lunch.”

  “Why?” Francine asked.

  “To make things right. To make things equal.”

  “But half a cookie doesn’t equal a car.”

  Grandma Ruth smiled, her eyes shining with the hereditary twinkle that graced all the women in her line. “You’re very bright, you know that?”

  “But the car—”

  “Yes, you’re right. Half a cookie doesn’t equal a car. But enough cookies, over time, can count for something else entirely.”

  The lessons stuck. When Bex took a beating from their father—they weren’t called beatings then, but “spankings,” which implied an open palm that Bex wasn’t fortunate enough to receive—Francine was outraged.

  “What happened?” she said, inspecting the bruise on Bex’s arm.

  Bex sobbed, her shoulders heaving. “I used the phone after six o’clock.” It was one of their mother’s rules. “I was calling Marie about homework, I swear!”

  The following evening, Francine waited until 6:01 and dialed Information. When her father lumbered to the scene, Francine hung up, shut her eyes, and extended her left arm. “Now me,” she said, with the hope that a matching bruise would cheer her sister up and restore a kind of balance to the household.

  Papa Klein’s pupils swiveled behind milky cataracts. He stood before her a moment, then returned to his study, grumbling.

  When Francine told her grandmother what had happened, Ruth’s breath cut short. She raised her hands to fix her cloud of white hair, tears precipitating below it. “Sometimes there are limits,” she said, “to what a person can mend.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The Klein girls had a thing for themed outings. Their favorite restaurant, the site of many a childhood birthday party, was a smoky, blue-lit lounge on North Main called the Tropics. The Tropics, with its thatched pagoda roof and nudie matchbooks and Polynesian-looking waitresses, was a thrill for the girls. They loved anything exotic, anything non-native to Ohio, but more than that they loved the idea of a themed restaurant—somewhere you could disappear into a conceit, somewhere with a whole new set of customs. Their house had so many rules, enforced with the erratic ferocity of a tyrant. What pleasure, then, to inhabit a different space, whose existence challenged the dominant culture of their home. When the girls were eight and ten, respectively, and got the Disneyland vacation they’d been begging for, it didn’t matter that they weren’t tall enough for the grown-up rides they’d been anticipating. They were content simply to be there, immersed in a world with its own aesthetic, currency, philosophy. They were happily immersed in theme.

  When the girls reached middle school, Mrs. Klein began the process of differentiating them. “Francine’s the smart one,” their mother bleated at anyone who’d listen. “And Rebecca’s fun.” Statements like these had the net effect of offending all involved.

  It was a false distinction. Though Bex performed “fun” in more obvious ways than Francine—makeup, invitations to parties, laughing with a suggestively open mouth—Francine was entirely content to stay inside and read. Her idea of fun was simply quieter, and solitary. And where Francine was book-smart, Bex possessed a gather-ye-rosebuds vivacity that gave her an air of worldliness and earned her the reputation of a heartbreaker long before Francine knew anything about love.

  As the girls grew up, their bodies seemed to mold to suit their mother’s conceptions of them. Bex stayed thin and conventionally attractive, shedding her freckles and doubling down on her laugh. Francine’s weight fluctuated based on her academic calendar, ballooning before exams and other periods of heightened stress.

  Despite their differences, Bex looked up to her sister. She could tell her parents valued Francine’s gifts above hers. Mrs. Klein was too misanthropic to be a socialite, and Papa Klein was an absence, living in the family blind spot. Unfortunately for Bex, charisma was not a virtue in their house. She admired Francine’s model behavior, her good grades and levelheadedness, and Francine in turn listened with a twinge of envy to her little sister’s tales of parties crashed and boys kissed.

  At sixteen, however, Francine found it difficult to model much of anything. Her mood was low enough to rival her father’s. The Kleins had been living on the textbook royalties for years now, and possessed the desperate mien of people milking previous achievements with no mind toward accomplishing anything new. Depression descended plague-like through the house. And to make matters worse, Francine’s public high school in Meadowdale had not recovered from the riot three years earlier over the murder of an unarmed black man, Lester Mitchell, by an unidentified white shooter. Relations between the black students, who comprised 70 percent of the class, and their white counterparts, were tense. Twin girls, Aida and Ida, who were bused in from less prosperous blocks than the Kleins’, stalked Francine for eight months straight because they said she looked at them funny in gym class.

  It was entirely possible that Francine had looked at them funny. She stared off into the middle distance for much of her first two years of high school, and particularly in gym. She sleepwalked through her early teens, passing her classes without effort or enthusiasm, spending long periods of time alone in her room after school. She avoided her mot
her; she avoided the twins; she avoided looking at herself in the mirror. She thought herself fat and ugly. Solitude suited her, but she had a gnawing feeling that there was something better on the other side.

  There was. Fed up with Meadowdale, she petitioned her parents to use some of the textbook money to enroll her in a prep school half an hour south of the Klein house, where she thrived. Classes were capped at twelve students and the teachers all had advanced degrees. She had a sort-of fling with a clarinet prodigy. She might have felt guilty about the opportunities afforded her (and not, for example, Aida and Ida) had she not been having all that fun. For it was then, in her junior year, 1970, that Francine fell in love with Paris.

  This was due in part to a very cute AP teacher with a master’s in French lit, but could more likely be attributed to her sense that Paris was the anti-Dayton: sophisticated, blasé, cultured. She dreamed of it often. Paris—a whole city with a theme! The theme of Paris! She took to practicing new French faces in the mirror at home, each belonging to a heretofore unrealized soul she now found inhabited her: The Bemused Critic. The Judgmental Voyeur. The Neglected Mistress. She dressed in black and picked up smoking. Her newfound interest coincided beautifully with a time of hormone-induced angst and increasing disaffection with her parents, as Francine was able to disguise her frustration with her home life in learned quotations (“L’enfer, c’est les autres”) instead of turning combative like her sister.

  She dropped the act only for her grandmother. With Grandma Ruth, Francine could express in extremely unhip, un-French terms how much she loved the language and the culture, the guttural R and feminist existentialism, even the drab paintings of gleaners from the mid-nineteenth century, which moved her in some unnamable way. “One day,” said Grandma Ruth, “you will go to Paris and send me a postcard.” Francine nodded. “I will,” she promised, “I will.”