During these hard days and hard weeks, everybody always has it bad once in a while. You know, you have a bad time of it, and you always have a friend who says "Hey man, you ain't got it that bad. Look at that guy." And you look at that guy, and he's got it worse than you. And it makes you feel better that there's somebody that's got it worse than you.
There’s a lot of truth in that. At least in the sense that it does you good to remember that there are people out there who are having a worse time than you are. That isn’t because you’re pleased by their suffering, but because it relativises your own.
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| Pierre with my father (sitting), and a friend when they first met, during the UN mission for the Congo emergency in 1960 |
At the time of that Christmas visit, Pierre was managing a small rubber plantation way out in the sticks, some 500 km east of the capital, Kinshasa.
He told us this story.
Years before he’d been at school with a boy, Charles, a couple of years younger than him. Charles was slight, weak and not in particularly good health. Pierre remembered him as the kind of child who has trouble making friends, is often bullied and leaves little trace in the memory of the people around him.
After they left school, there had been the war and Nazi occupation, and after that Pierre had gone out to the Congo to build a career. He’d been through the horrors of the independence struggle followed by civil war. It had taken firmness of purpose and not a little strength, both physical and emotional, to stick it out.
Two or three years before he told us this story, soon after he’d been appointed to his plantation manager post, he’d been visited by a fellow Belgian from a neighbouring plantation. ‘Neighbouring’ in that context meant an hour or two’s drive away, given the dirt roads of the region, bad at the best of times, and almost impassable in wet weather. To Pierre’s surprise, his visitor was Charles who’d brought his new wife to meet Pierre.
“I’d pretty well forgotten him,” Pierre told us, “but he remembered me and soon enough my memories came back too.”
They traded reminiscences for a while, Pierre making sure he embellished his a little, so as not to offend Charles. Then they parted company, meeting only infrequently after that – communications were far too poor for regular visiting.
Then, a few weeks before our arrival, Pierre heard that Charles had been taken ill.
“Hardly surprising. When he came to see me, it was obvious his health was as delicate as ever, and this isn’t an easy place to live.”
Pierre visited him once in hospital and found him wasted and worsening.
“To me it didn’t look like he was going to last much longer. I decided I’d better go and see him again soon or I’d be too late.”
But other things intervened and he had to keep putting off his visit until, at midnight one evening, there was a knocking at his front door. His visitors were two nuns from the hospital, and he invited them in. After tea and some small talk, he felt it was time to turn to the business of so late a call.
“What can I do for you, sisters?” he asked.
It turned out it was about Charles. He’d taken a terrible turn for the worse that morning and, that evening, had died.
“Oh,” said Pierre, kicking himself for not having been to see him. “And, I suppose, you want me to break the news to his widow?”
“Oh, no,” said one of the nuns, “we can do that. We wanted to know what you thought we should do with the body.”
“The body?” he said. “Why, leave it in the mortuary.”
“That’s just it,” said the nun, “we’ve got it in the back of the jeep.”
It turned out that Charles had died while the nurse who was supposed to be supervising him had been away from the bedside. He, the nurse, had dumped the body into the back of a jeep and then bullied the two nuns to take it round to the new widow. I can’t picture to myself the scene, had she been presented with the body of her husband in the small hours of the morning.
With this auspicious start, Pierre found himself made responsible for the funeral arrangements. Bodies need to be buried fast in the tropics, and Pierre organised everything for three days later.
Unfortunately, this was the time of year when the dry season was poised to give way to the wet. In the event, the weather broke on the day of the funeral itself.
The European men in the region tended to have just one suit each. They were making their way to church for the service when the torrential rain, as it falls in Africa, began to beat down on them, leaving them struggling through a morass of mud and even having to clear fallen trees from the road ahead of them. They turned up at the church with their best clothes mud-spattered and soaked.
A funeral service is never cheerful, but the atmosphere of wet clothing, bad tempers and mud made this one particularly painful. Things became worse still when the lightning started up and knocked out the electrical power. It then added a crowning touch, by sending balls of blue flame up and down the inside of the darkened church. So the service ended by the garish light of ball lightning, providing an entirely fitting background to the sobs of the grieving widow.
That was when the gravediggers announced that they could no longer find the grave.
The mourners stepped outside into the downpour. The whole of the bottom of the graveyard, where the new grave had been dug, was now flooded. In the new temporary lake, there was no way to identify where Charles’s final resting place had been prepared for him.
I don’t think of Pierre’s story often enough. I should. It would help me realise that there are people out there having a worse time than I am. In turn, that might teach me to take my own troubles less seriously.
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