The Constant Gardener

A perfect man, Tessa had called Bluhm once. Even Justin the skeptic had never thought of him in any other way. A man to touch the homoerotic nerve in all of us, he had once remarked to her in his innocence. Beautiful and soft-spoken. Courteous to friends and strangers. Beautiful from his husky voice to his rounded iron gray beard, to his long-lidded, plump African eyes that never strayed from you while he spoke or listened. Beautiful in the rare but timely gestures that punctuated his lucid, beautifully delivered, intelligent opinions. Beautiful from his sculpted knuckles to his feather-light, graceful body, trim and lithe as a dancer's and as disciplined in its withholding. Never brash, never unknowing, never cruel, although at every party and conference he encountered Western people so ignorant that Justin felt embarrassed for him. Even the old ones at the Muthaiga said it: that fellow Bluhm, my God, they didn't make blacks like him in our day, no wonder Justin's child bride has fallen for him.

So why in the name of all that's holy didn't you put me out of my misery? He demanded furiously of her, or the screen.

Because I trusted you and expected the same trust in return.

If you trusted me why didn't you tell me?

Because I do not betray the confidence of friends and I require you to respect that fact and admire me for it. Enormously and all the time.

Because I am a lawyer and where secrets are concerned — as she used to say — compared with me, the grave is a chatterbox.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

And tuberculosis is megabucks: ask Karel Vita Hudson. Any day now the richest nations will be facing a tubercular pandemic, and Dypraxa will become the multibilliondollar earner that all good shareholders dream of. The White Plague, the Great Stalker, the Great Imitator, the Captain of Death is no longer confining himself to the wretched of the earth. He is doing what he did a hundred years ago. He is hovering like a filthy cloud of pollution over the West's own horizon, even if it is still their poor who are his victims.

Tessa is telling her computer, highlighting and underlining as she goes:

— One third of the world's population infected with the bacillus

— In the United States incidence has increased by 20 percent in seven years…

— One untreated sufferer transmits the disease on average to between ten and fifteen people a year…

— Health authorities in New York City have given themselves powers to incarcerate TB victims who do not willingly submit to isolation…

— 30 percent of all known TB cases are now drug-resistant…

The White Plague is not born in us, Justin reads. It is forced upon us by foul breath, foul living conditions, foul hygiene, foul water and foul administrative neglect.

Rich countries hate it because it is a slur on their good housekeeping, poor countries because in many of them it is synonymous with AIDS. Some countries refuse to admit they have it at all, preferring to live in denial rather than confess the mark of shame.

And in Kenya, as in other African countries, the incidence of tuberculosis has increased fourfold since the onset of the HIV virus.

A chatty e-mail from Arnold lists the practical difficulties of treating the disease in the field:

— Diagnosis demanding and prolonged. Patients must bring sputum samples on consecutive days.

— Lab work essential but microscopes often busted or stolen.

— No dye available to detect bacilli. Dye sold, drunk, run out, not replaced.

— Treatment takes eight months. Patients who feel better after a month abandon treatment or sell pills. Disease then returns in drug-resistant form.

— TB pills are traded on African black markets as cures for STD'S (sexually transmitted diseases). The World Health Organization insists that a patient taking a tablet should be watched while he or she swallows it. Result: a black market pill is sold "wet" or "dry" according to whether it's been in someone's mouth…

A bald postscript continues:

TB kills more mothers than any other disease. In Africa, women always pay the price. Wanza was a guinea pig, and became a victim.

As whole villages of Wanzas were guinea pigs.

* * *

Extracts from a page-four article in the International Herald Tribune:

"West Warned it, too, is Vulnerable to Drug-Resistant Strains of TB" by Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times Service,

some passages highlighted by Tessa.

AMSTERDAM — DEADLY strains of drugresistant tuberculosis are increasing not just in poor countries but in wealthy Western ones, according to a report from the World Health Organization and other anti-Tb groups.

"It's a message: Watch out, guys, this is serious," said Dr. Marcos Espinal, the lead author of the report. "It's a potential major crisis in the future"…