Chapter 6

Twelve pairs of eyes followed the guest of honour’s chop-sticks as he leaned forward to take a piece of whatever it was that steamed on the plate. As his sticks made contact, he caught the eye of the bald man next to him and feigned a smile before returning his concentration to the task before him. The dark blob that he managed to pick up was not as solid as it looked; it felt almost like jelly between the ends of his two sticks. But at least he had got hold of it and he let out the breath he’d been holding. As he moved it back towards his rice-bowl, however, its gooey surface overcame the limited resistance afforded by the wood of his eating utensils and the blob dropped down onto the red tablecloth. The twelve mouths beneath those twelve pairs of eyes dropped open—most revealing semi-masticated white rice and green broccoli (the last dish). Somebody even gasped.

Fortunately for the man with poor chop-stick skills, his host, the bald man with the sauce-spotted tie, swiftly picked up the dropped food and with great dexterity put it back on the side of the steaming dish. He took another piece for his embarrassed guest.

‘Never mind, Docta, sea cucumber very difficult to eat,’ The host laughed. Everybody laughed. And they all resumed their noisy meal.

The doctor’s next problem was that he didn’t really want to eat the sea cucumber (or some part of a sea cucumber?) that now sat on the top of his bowl of rice. It might have been better if Dr. Yap hadn’t told him what it was; but he had, and there it sat waiting to be put into his mouth. He looked around at his fellow diners, who, after obeying their superior’s command to wait for their guest, had attacked the plate of blobs with their sharp sticks and were now busy slurping them down with mouthfuls of sticky white rice.

‘Oh well,’ he thought to himself, lifting the bowl off the tablecloth, ‘I might as well; one last time.’ But before he could make good on his resolve, Dr. Yap put down his own bowl and hit him with a question.

‘Well, Docta Kreega, you have enjoyed your time here with us, yes?’

It wasn’t really a question; it was another opportunity given to him in which he was supposed to flatter his host in front of his subordinates. It had usually been a simple thing for him to do—smile and say the obvious; all the same, he didn’t want to attempt two things at once so he put down his bowl and lied again to his host.

‘Yes, absolutely, Doctor Yap. My work here has been most enjoyable.’

‘Good,’ replied Dr. Yap, smiling to his appreciative audience.

That was easy; but it hadn’t been so easy when they were in the lab or the autopsy room, working. Kreeger had not been so accommodating there. Yap would have all of his trainees memorise the relevant chapters from the textbooks and the pages from the numerous handouts, which they would accomplish admirably. But when it came to applying the learned knowledge in a practical situation, where everything alters, they were far from admirable. And Yap was the shoddiest of them all; Kreeger had actually caught the man on two occasions faking results to make himself look intelligent in front of his subordinates.

Doctor Kreeger had been warned about this trait among the locals. He had also been warned against exposing a laggard in front of the others—let them keep their face and they’ll stay on your side. But had usually ignored the advice—he thought that if he could humiliate them a little it would wake them up, make them try harder. But when it came to their superior, Yap, he had always showed more discretion. He would take him aside and ask him why he had taken a blood sample from an artery instead of a vein or why he had used a food sample from the victim’s stomach instead of the large intestine. ‘It’s okay, it’s ok,’ Yap would say, waving him away, ‘this is not the real thing is it? It’s good enough.’ Always that phrase, tagged on to their sloppy work—‘it’s good enough’.

‘So glad, so glad,’ Yap was saying, raising his small glass to Kreeger.

Kreeger lifted his glass and this time remembered correctly how to receive the invitation to drink: raise your glass with the person offering you the toast (left hand supporting the glass from beneath), sip first, wait until he has drunk, show a sign of gratitude (including eye contact if possible) while raising the glass slightly towards him, then lower the glasses together. He performed the ritual perfectly but at the end he forgot who was supposed to thank whom. That was his sixth or seventh glass and he somehow did not care any more about the details—this was the last time and he would be home in a few days.

Yap held up his glass triumphantly after he had drained its contents; a drip trickled down his chin, but he seemed not to notice. He was old, even older than Kreeger, and had been a doctor all his working life. His body showed it. He still had most of his teeth but when he smiled, which he did as a kind of nervous reaction to everything, he showed them all to be either filled with gold or cracked and stained (anywhere from light yellow to charcoal grey). The two at the front, the fissured ones that protruded over his bottom lip, he tried to keep clean. His teeth rooted in glistening, red gums, which also flashed out with every nervous smile; the gums, however, looked healthier than the teeth. He had likewise kept a lot of his hair but not enough to cover the expanding bald patch centring on his crown, a circle so perfect that if you swept a radius through a full three hundred and sixty degrees, its length would not alter by more than a millimetre. At the beginning of a day strands of lacquered, dyed-black hair, scraped rigidly from the left and plastered across the circle would hide the leathery skin of his scalp. By the end of the day, however, despite the doctor’s best efforts to keep them in place, the strands lay ragged and the hole gaped. His bad breath, which after three months Kreeger had diagnosed chronic, could have been caused by the teeth, or, more likely, in Kreeger’s opinion, was the result of a bad diet that included pickled cabbage for breakfast almost every day.

Yap spoke good English but it was stilted, classroom English. It was as if all his sentences came from British medical textbooks, written in the thirties and forties. He would use that kind of language for his everyday life, saying things like ‘This procedure calls for a firm resolve,’ before crossing the road. or ‘One of my daughter’s offspring has just gone down with an inflammation of the larynx,’ when he meant that his grandchild had caught a cold.

Dr. Yap tapped the side of his empty glass with his chopstick, calling the table to attention. He filled the glass from a jug as carefully as he could before standing. He unbuttoned his jacket and his food-stained tie flopped out over his rice belly. ‘Doctor Kreeger,’ he began, swaying on his short, unsteady legs. Red gums. ‘We have all enjoyed your teaching very much. We have learned many, many things from you and we want to thank you very much.’ He stopped and waited for the words of agreement to die down. Then he raised his voice and said, ‘It has been like showering in the Spring breeze.’ He stopped and beamed, before realising that nobody had understood his climactic remark. He quickly translated it back into the local language and the table erupted in applause. ‘Yes, yes, like showering in the Spring breeze,’ Yap repeated, overcome with excitement. He turned his electrified face towards Kreeger, who was trying to hide his confusion under a makeshift grin.

‘Thanks,’ Kreeger offered.

Yap drank in as much flattery as he could stomach then sat. The noise subsided and Kreeger braced himself, waiting for his host to start bragging about the food or the literature of his country, as he could always be relied upon to do in these situations. ‘Doctor Kreeger, you are so lucky to have the opportunity to taste the finest cuisine in the world. Everybody says so,’ he would say; or ‘Doctor Kreeger, one of our pre-eminent poets, so-and-so, has evoked the moon in such wonderful four-word lines of verse; I wish you could speak our beautiful language so that you could appreciate his poetry.’ At first Kreeger had been polite and replied with flattery; but Yap’s chauvinism had waxed under such conditions and as time passed Kreeger had turned his flattery into veiled sarcasm—not that it stopped Yap (mostly it went right over his bald little head), it was just a lot more fun. Only when Yap boasted about his country’s scientific achievements did Kreeger take exception and challenge him; but Yap had quickly learned to avoid this topic in his aggressive patriotism.

Tonight, Kreeger was not in the mood for either flattery, irony, or argument. He’d had enough. ‘Please get me out of here,’ he muttered under his breath.

And the next moment, as if Providence had caught his wish, his mobile phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He excused himself from the table, leaving the glowing Dr. Yap to the praise of his acolytes and the blob of sea cucumber to its undecided fate.