A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene

his scrotum supported on the step below. They talked in a whisper, so that their voices would not disturb the Mass which went on across the way – a whisper, a tinkle, a jingle, a shuffle, private movements of which they had almost forgotten the meaning, it was so long since they had taken any part.
    ‘Is it really impossible to operate?’ Querry asked.
    ‘Too risky. His heart mightn’t stand the anaesthetic.’
    ‘Has he got to carry that thing around then till death?’
    ‘Yes. It doesn’t weigh as much as you would think. But it seems unfair, doesn’t it, to suffer all that and leprosy too.’
    In the church there was a sigh and a shuffle as the congregation sat. The doctor said, ‘One day I’ll screw some money out of someone and have a few wheel-chairs made for the worst cases. He would need a special one, of course. Could a famous ecclesiastical architect design a chair for swollen balls?’
    ‘I’ll get you a blueprint,’ Querry said.
    The voice of the Superior reached them from across the road. He was preaching in a mixture of French and Creole; even a Flemish phrase crept in here and there, and a word or two that Querry assumed to be Mongo or some other tongue of the river tribes.
    ‘And I tell you truth I was ashamed when this man he said to me, “You Klistians are all big thieves – you steal this, you steal that, you steal all the time. Oh, I know you don’t steal money. You don’t creep into Thomas Olo’s hut and take his new radio-set, but you are thieves all the same. Worse thieves than that. You see a man who lives with one wife and doesn’t beat her and looks after her when she gets a bad pain from medicines at the hospital, and you say that’s Klistian love. You go to the courthouse and you hear a good judge, who say to the piccin that stole sugar from the white man’s cupboard, ‘You’re a very sorry piccin. I not punish you, and you, you will not come here again. No more sugar palaver,’ and you say that’s Klistian mercy. But you are a mighty big thief when you say that – for you steal this man’s love and that man’s mercy. Why do you not say when you see man with knife in his back bleeding and dying, ‘There’s Klistian anger’?”’
    ‘I really believe he’s answering something I said to him,’ Querry said with a twitch of the mouth that Colin was beginning to recognize as a rudimentary smile, ‘but I didn’t put it quite like that.’
    ‘Why not say when Henry Okapa got a new bicycle and someone came and tore his brake, “There’s Klistian envy?” You are like a man who steals only the good fruit and leaves the bad fruit rotting on the tree.
    ‘All right. You tell me I’m number one thief, but I say you make big mistake. Any man may defend himself before his judge. All of you in this church, you are my judges now, and this is my defence.’
    ‘It’s a long time since I listened to a sermon,’ Doctor Colin said. ‘It brings back the long tedious hours of childhood, doesn’t it?’
    ‘You pray to Yezu,’ the Superior was saying. He twisted his mouth from habit as though he were dispatching a cheroot from one side to the other. ‘But Yezu is not just a holy man. Yezu is God and Yezu made the world. When you make a song you are in the song, when you bake bread you are in the bread, when you make a baby you are in the baby, and because Yezu made you, he is in you. When you love it is Yezu who loves, when you are merciful it is Yezu who is merciful. But when you hate or envy it is not Yezu, for everything that Yezu made is good. Bad things are not there – they are nothing. Hate means no love. Envy means no justice. They are just empty spaces, where Yezu ought to be.’
    ‘He begs a lot of questions,’ Doctor Colin said.
    ‘Now I tell you that when a man loves, he must be Klistian. When a man is merciful he must be Klistian. In this village do you think you are the only Klistians – you who come to church? There is a doctor who lives near the well