The Constant Gardener

How long he remained there, alone, trapped like some insect at the triptych's base, he had no notion then or later. Sometimes it seemed to him that the building's wings were closing in to crush him. Sometimes they were toppling down on him. His knees gave way and he discovered he was sitting on a bench, on some bit of beaten ground where cautious women walked their dogs. He noticed a faint but pervasive smell and was for a moment returned to the mortuary in Nairobi. How long do I have to live here, he wondered, before I stop noticing the smell? Evening must have fallen because the coppered windows lightened. He made out moving silhouettes and winking pinpoints of computer blue. Why do I sit here? he asked her as he went on watching. What am I thinking of, except you?

She was sitting beside him, but for once she had no answer ready. I am thinking about your courage, he replied for her. I am thinking, it was you and Arnold against all this, while dear old Justin worried about keeping his flower beds sandy enough to grow your yellow freesias. I am thinking I don't believe in me anymore, and all I stood for. That there was a time when, like the people in this building, your Justin took pride in submitting himself to the harsher judgments of a collective will — which he happened to call Country, or the Doctrine of the Reasonable Man or, with some misgiving, the Higher Cause. There was a time when I believed it was expedient that one man — or woman — should die for the benefit of many. I called it sacrifice, or duty, or necessity. There was a time when I could stand outside the Foreign Office at night and stare up at its lighted windows and think: Good evening, it's me your humble servant, Justin. I'm a piece of the great wise engine, and proud of it. I serve, therefore I feel. Whereas all I feel now is: it was you against the whole pack of them and, unsurprisingly, they won.

* * *

From Main Street of the little town Justin turned left and northwest onto Dawes Boulevard, taking the full blast of the prairie wind on his darkened face as he continued his wary examination of his surroundings. His three years as Economic Attache in Ottawa had not been wasted. Though he had never been here in his life, everything he saw was familiar to him. Snow from Halloween to Easter, he remembered. Plant after the first moon in June and harvest before the first hard frost in September. It would be several weeks yet before scared crocuses started appearing in the tufts of dead grass and on the bald prairie. Across the road from him stood the synagogue, feisty and functional, built by settlers dumped at the railroad station with their bad memories, cardboard suitcases and promises of free land. A hundred yards on rose the Ukrainian church and along from it the Roman Catholics, the Presbyterians, Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists. Their car parks were got up like electrified horse pens so that the engines of the faithful could be warmed while their owners prayed. A line of Montesquieu drifted through his head: there have never been so many civil wars as in the kingdom of Christ.

Behind the houses of God stood the houses of Mammon, the industrial sector of the town. Beef prices must be through the floor, he reckoned. Why else would he be looking at Guy Poitier's spanking-new Delectable Porkmeat factory? And grain was faring no better by the looks of things — or what was a Sunflower Seed Pressing Company doing in the middle of a wheat field? And that cluster of timid folk standing around the old tenements down in the station square, they must be Sioux or Cree. The towpath turned a bend and led him north through a short tunnel. He emerged in a different country of boathouses and mansions with river frontage. This is where the rich Anglos mow their lawns and wash their cars and varnish their boats and fume about the Yids, the Ukies and those darned Indians on welfare, he decided. And up there on the hill, or as near to a hill as you get round here, stood his goal, the pride of the town, the jewel of eastern Saskatchewan, its academic Camelot, Dawes University, an organized medley of medieval sandstone, colonial redbrick and glass domes. Reaching a fork in the towpath, Justin scaled the short rise and by way of a 1920's Ponte Vecchio arrived at a crenellated gatehouse surmounted with a gilded coat of arms. Through its archway he was able to admire the immaculate medieval campus and its bronze founder, George Eamon Dawes Jr. himself, mine owner, railroad baron, lecher, land thief, Indian shooter and local saint resplendent on a granite plinth.