Jimfish felt he would be the next to faint, but managed a question: ‘What has made you so thin and so ill? You who always swore that revolutionary anger was the antidote to sickness, cynicism and doubt, and that struggle forged sinews of steel?’
Now Soviet Malala looked desperately sad and Jimfish had to bend closer to hear his whisper. ‘Love. This is what love did to me.’
Jimfish remembered love and he had to agree that his own experience had not been altogether happy. ‘I remember a barrage of blows from Sergeant Arlow’s truncheon.’
‘Painful, yet nothing compared with what I have suffered,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘Do you remember that plump young maid Fidelia, employed to paint the fingernails of Mrs Arlow’s left hand? Well it was Fidelia, a sexual siren, who made love like one possessed and sent me into ecstasies of joy, who infected me with this deadly plague, which some call the ‘slimmer’s sickness’. She herself picked up this pox from a white farmer who used to visit her secretly, who got it from his black housekeeper, who got it from a Dutch Reformed pastor, who got it from the whore he visited every night, except on Sundays, who got it from a traveller in Central Africa, who, it is suspected, got it by transmission from gorillas or chimpanzees, eaten as bushmeat by people on the west coast of Africa. Or perhaps the route of this plague began in the European settler colonies, which imported reservoirs of cheap labour to build their railways and ports and roads. The Europeans worked their African labourers to death, but when replacements got too expensive they kept workers alive by inoculating them, often with unclean needles, against leprosy, yaws, syphilis and smallpox. Diseases which otherwise, and most mercifully, would have ended the miserable lives of their semi-slaves. However it started, the plague passed to me by the delightful Fidelia is beginning to rage across much of Southern Africa and it is yet another crime I lay at the door of the colonialists and imperialists.’
‘A crime, certainly,’ Jimfish agreed. ‘But surely this disease must be fought or it will lay low the very militants who feel anger rising in them and turning to rage that fuels revolution. If the illness spreads it will kill the very structures, cadres and formations which you count on to expel the colonialists, imperialists and the settler entity.’
‘Not at all,’ said the philosopher of the lumpenproletariat. ‘If we give our minds to the hidden agenda behind this slimmer’s disease, we hear it said that the cause is a mysterious virus. It is the policy of our liberation movement to expose this assertion as a lie. It is further averred that the virus causes a syndrome that kills people. What nonsense! It is the very real diseases of Africa: TB, malaria, leprosy, malnutrition — these kill people. Not some fancy invention of western imperialists. This plague is a foreign plot, concocted in western laboratories for the express purpose of decimating the African continent, and South Africa in particular. Having first manufactured the illness, foreign drug companies offer drugs which will poison our people. It’s a strategy aimed at the reconquest of Africa.’
‘But if you don’t seek treatment for this new plague, won’t lots more people die?’ asked Jimfish.
‘Then dying will be our form of resistance,’ Soviet Malala vowed. ‘And as we do so, we will take comfort from the fact that the syndrome spreading across our continent will soon become our terrible export to our former colonizers. I predict they will soon begin dying in satisfactorily large numbers right across Western Europe and the United States. Let them take their new drugs. But we will resist to the end.’
Jimfish was very confused: ‘Then Africa is to be left with no defence against this sickness?’
‘But, yes!’ The philosopher reached beneath the bedclothes and pulled out the dried beetroot he had been cradling when they met. ‘If what I have is an African illness, then we must find traditional African remedies. The Central Committee of our movement has decreed that lemon juice, the African potato and beetroot will do the job far better than the poison of our enemies. Unfortunately, I had run out of money for food, I had sold even my old Lenin cap, sucked the lemon dry and polished off the potato and I was very close to finishing off the beetroot when you rescued me.’
Jimfish pointed out gently that although this treatment for his illness might have won Central Committee approval it had not helped him much.
‘It may look that way to a non-Party member,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘But the beetroot-and-potato treatment is Party policy. And anyway, the new experimental drugs for treating the virus can be bought only from the United States and cost thousands of dollars and I am a poor man.’
That was enough for Jimfish, who went immediately to Jagdish and explained the matter to him. The good man picked up the phone and placed the order. ‘What is the point of money if I don’t help others?’
And so it was that the new drugs were flown at great expense from the United States, although Jimfish and Jagdish agreed that they would not mention this to Soviet Malala. Once on the treatment, his viral load stabilized, he began to gain weight and he was in the happy position of claiming that he had been saved by the cocktail of beetroot, lemon juice and the native sweet potato. Now that he was well again his ambition to travel to the Soviet Union was keener than ever.
But Jagdish, who had travelled in Eastern Europe, was puzzled by this and quizzed Soviet Malala about his loyalty to Soviet Communism.
‘I suppose you know that the USSR has some strange customs: there are separate schools for Party apparatchiks, separate lanes for their cars and separate privileges for the ruling caste. That sounds to me very like South Africa. Moreover, Soviet citizens are not well fed. The USSR and all its satellites never have enough bread to go around, nor shoes, socks, bathplugs or even toilet paper. And if its citizens are so fortunate, why do so many of them dream of running away?’
The philosopher was not to be budged. ‘If there is a small degree of discomfort, it’s so that citizens are always alert, pricked into the anger that fuels lumpenproletarian progress. If it were not so they might become so happy and peace-loving that their enemies would sweep over them.’
Jagdish agreed to buy air tickets and this turned out to be surprisingly easy because the new strong man of Uganda, who had just replaced Milton Obote, had decided that, after years of indigenous despotism, it was time to give the Soviet system free rein, and there were Russians all over Kampala selling arms and handing out the collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Air tickets were soon bought and the three friends found themselves on a Soviet Aeroflot flight, bound for Moscow.
After the plane had left African airspace and begun its passage over Europe, Jagdish mused on the odd fact that, for a peace-loving people, the Soviets owned very many rockets capable of destroying the world.
Soviet Malala was quick to set him right: ‘The missiles of the USSR are strictly for defence, unlike the arms of western imperialistic powers, which are intended to obliterate peace-loving people.’
As their plane crossed the Ukraine and they were nearing Kiev the sky darkened and far below they saw what looked like a sickly sun, pulsing among thick grey clouds. This was odd because it was long past midnight and the sun seemed very far below them. What could there be on the ground that might shine as brightly as the sun? Then the pilots of the plane announced to the passengers that they had been ordered to land. When Jagdish protested that they had paid to be flown to Moscow, the pilots retorted that it was from Moscow itself that the order had come.
CHAPTER 5
Chernobyl, Ukraine, 1986