The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  Feeling a little like Patti Hearst, I gave the chief his goodie bag. A few minutes earlier, he had refused to have his photo taken, but during the burst of goodwill that followed my presentation of the bag and my telling him how wonderful he looked in his uniform, he posed for a picture and even signed our guest book.

  Now came the final transaction. “So, for the groceries,” I began, “how much do we owe you?” I had a twenty dollar U.S. bill in my pocket, which was probably double or triple the value of the food we had received.

  “Oh, whatever you wish,” he answered grandly. “I only did it as a favour. You are, after all, my guests.”

  “Well, at home the food wouldn’t cost more than this,” I said, bringing out the bill. “Will this be sufficient?”

  The police chief’s face, which had, up until that point, been beaming in the glow of our mutual friendship and admiration, crumpled and fell. This was very clearly not sufficient. His disappointment hit like a slap in the face.

  “You have to understand,” he said quietly, leaning forward, his eyes glittering, “that my men and I, we have expenses. I think fifty dollars would be more appropriate.”

  Ten minutes later, fifty dollars poorer, we turned Northern Magic’s bow into the Bay of Bengal, heading for Sri Lanka at last.

  17

  Rorschach Test

  On this passage, for the first time, we gave the two older boys regular shifts on watch. They had often helped out for an hour or two when one of us was especially tired, but only when conditions were good and we were far from land. This was the perfect passage for something more regular, with mild seas and little traffic, so Jonathan began proudly taking a daily shift from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., while Michael took his own two-hour shift in the morning. The result of this was that both Herbert and I got an extra hour of sleep at the beginning and end of our night-time shifts, giving us a full and luxurious seven hours in bed. Suddenly, we both felt much more rested and comfortable, freeing up more time to be all together as a family during the day rather than blearily passing each other in a fog of fatigue like ships in the night.

  During the days, the kids occupied themselves with computer games and an orgy of book reading, with both Michael and Jon polishing off a novel each day. I instituted a game that all three boys took up with gusto, promising a chocolate bar to anyone who could find ten English words that I couldn’t define. Suddenly dictionaries were in great demand, and the boys spent hours poring through pages and excitedly coming up with words they thought would stump me.

  By the end of the passage, Christopher was in the lead with six, besting me with words like “bast,” “barm,” and “zucchetto.” Michael and Jon were tied at four, counting “rosaceous,” “sigil,” and “foxing” among their triumphs. Christopher would spend hours beside me on watch, intently studying the Oxford dictionary in hopes of claiming his prize. I was forced to end the game abruptly in Sri Lanka, when another cruiser lent the boys a dictionary dedicated to impossible and preposterous words.

  The Sri Lankan navy tied up alongside to board us even before we had finished setting our anchor in the harbour at Galle. This was a country racked with civil war, and security was stringent, with special passes and military inspections required every time we went ashore. At night, ropes were stretched across the inner harbour to prevent large vessels from entering. Small boats were put under a bright searchlight. A gunboat bristling with weapons was waiting at the pier, and men with automatic rifles and binoculars kept careful watch at several points around the harbour. Unlit boats, looking like fishing boats but for the radar, patrolled around the anchorage at night.

  Most disturbing of all were the nightly underwater explosions, detonated to deter Tamil Tiger suicide bombers equipped with scuba gear from entering the harbour. The war between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils, who were mostly concentrated in the north, had brought terrorist attacks from Tamil Tigers, including many suicide bombings and assassinations in recent years. Because the capital city of Colombo was no longer safe, much of the sensitive ammunition stores had been moved to Galle, where we were anchored. These security measures had been put in place to protect them – and us.

  Galle itself was an interesting town with relics of centuries of occupation by colonial powers – first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the British, who had left the island nation with enough of an English-speaking tradition that we had no trouble communicating with the friendly, dark-skinned people who watched and hovered curiously around us everywhere we went. Cows roamed freely everywhere, grazing incongruously beside busy streets and blocking traffic as they walked across lanes of traffic already complicated by cars, trucks, three-wheeled tuk-tuks, bicycles, pedestrians, goats, dogs, and the occasional ox-cart.

  We went on an overland expedition to central Sri Lanka, but during the trip something was weighing on my mind: I had discovered a lump in my breast. Since my melanoma, I had become acutely conscious of every change in my body, every lump, twinge, or pain that might signify the return of my cancer. I needed to have this checked out. If I didn’t put this worry to rest here, it would be ten months before I’d find a better place.

  Luckily, we had made a friend in Sri Lanka, a twenty-seven-year-old tuk-tuk driver named Ekka. We liked him enormously. He had been helping us in many ways, driving us everywhere we needed to go, saving us money on our shopping, and actually refusing payment if we offered him extra money. Ekka drove Herbert and me to a very basic little hospital. The two women who sat at the reception desk didn’t appear to understand my request and seemed afraid to even look me in the eye. We decided to try another place.

  At the second clinic, strangely deserted like the first, the routine was the same. Everyone seemed to want to avoid helping me. I felt as though I was a creature from another planet, or had a huge gob of spinach in my teeth. Ekka tried talking to them on my behalf, but with no better results.

  Frustrated, we tried a third hospital, but still without success. The receptionist behind the thick glass partition kept repeating a single sentence, something that sounded like “Doctor on loo,” by which, I assumed, she did not mean that all the surgeons were suffering from constipation. Finally, we ascertained that there were no doctors there. We gave up and returned to the boat without having accomplished a thing. Our first impression of the Sri Lankan medical system was not good.

  The next morning we returned to hospital number two, determined to find a doctor somehow. Since it still appeared to be doctorless, we trudged back to the first hospital, where at last I managed to find the house doctor sitting behind a desk in a small cluttered office. He listened to my request and without saying much scribbled the name of a surgeon on a little piece of paper and sent me back to reception, where I was told to return at 5:00 p.m. I paid 250 rupees, the equivalent of five dollars, and got a little receipt showing that I was number 19.

  We returned at five. The hospital, which had been deserted on both of my earlier visits, was now packed. There were about fifty people jostling about in the tiny waiting area outside examination room number 30. I felt overpowered by the stifling heat, the lack of air, and the pungent smell of hot human bodies.

  It was clear that I was in for a long wait. I managed to push myself into a spot leaning against the wall at the top of the open stairway; a young woman wedged herself against me, practically sitting on my lap. For an hour and a half, I observed the people who came and went. Despite the discomfort, almost everyone looked amazingly cheerful. Each family group coming out of the examination room had broad smiles on their faces.

  Finally, at ten to seven, it was my turn. I pushed my way to the front of the throng, which was as large now as it had been two hours earlier. The doctor spoke excellent English and helped dispel some of my growing uneasiness about the whole situation. He agreed the lump was worth investigating and recommended a needle biopsy, which could be done in Galle, as well as a mammogram, which would have to take place in Colombo. Although I had certain misgivings, I a
greed this did seem like the most sensible course. I don’t think, though, that there was a broad smile on my face as I left.

  That evening we ate dinner at Ekka’s house. We were served like royalty by the women, who fussed and bustled around with food prepared in the backyard kitchen. They presented us with half a dozen delicious dishes, including dhall, curried chicken, and buffalo curd with honey. Ekka was the only one who sat to eat with us; the women hung back shyly and ate in another room with their fingers, as all Sri Lankans do.

  The next day, I set off for the biopsy, which turned out to be back at hospital number three. The doctor had told me to present myself at 4:00 p.m. Although Herbert wanted to accompany me, I suggested he stay on the boat and get supper fixed so that it was ready when I returned, whenever that might be. So I set off alone on the fifteen-minute dinghy ride through the rolly swell in the harbour, followed by a dusty walk dodging trucks and cattle through the harbour zone, followed by the security check by half a dozen soldiers with machine guns, then around a few sand-bagged barricades and I was at the spot where Ekka was faithfully waiting, as always, in his battered green trishaw. By the time I reached him, it had begun to rain, the usual Galle afternoon downpour. About a block from the hospital Ekka’s vehicle stalled. I ran the rest of the way on foot.

  Dripping, I presented the note from my doctor to the girls at reception. They looked at it scornfully and thrust it back. “Doctor on loo today. Come back tomorrow.” That was all. When I asked whether I could make an appointment, they simply shook their heads. If I’d had a pack of laxatives in my pocket, I would have thrown it at them.

  I slumped out of the hospital. Luckily, Ekka was still there, wrestling with his tuk-tuk. He, too, was having a bad day. It took about twenty minutes before he finally got his little cart going and we putted off to the market, a pretty glum pair.

  At the bakery, I decided to make both of us feel better by buying a cake for Ekka to take home. When I asked him which he wanted, he modestly picked the plainest and most inexpensive one. I bought the fanciest chocolate confection in the store and my investment of a few dollars was repaid with one of Ekka’s million-rupee smiles, my best transaction of the day.

  Back at the harbour, I had trouble getting Junior to start. It took about ten minutes and thirty or forty hard pulls on the starter cable before I could get underway. While drifting farther and farther away from the dock as I struggled, I was conscious of the entire crew of an Indonesian cargo ship tittering at my efforts. By now the skies had really opened and the rain was falling in solid sheets.

  I began bailing as I drove, but the skies poured in water more quickly than Donovan Bailer, which is what we had named our speedy plastic bailing device, could toss it out. Soon the potatoes and carrots I had bought at the market had spilled out of their bags and were sloshing around in four inches of water at my feet. As I slowly drew closer to Northern Magic, I noticed a small fishing boat with two men in it, holding on to our mooring buoy and waiting out the deluge under a tiny blue tarp.

  Just as I stood up, grabbing a steel rail on Northern Magic to steady myself against the swell from the Indian Ocean, there was a blinding light and terrific thunderclap in the sky directly overhead. I realized that I was holding on to the metal rail and released it, much too late, of course. But nothing had been hit. I was still alive.

  I looked over to the nearby fishermen, who stared back at me with a look of glazed amazement before lifting their hands together to the heavens in the universal gesture of prayer. I did the same, and we grinned at each other, feeling we had all narrowly escaped the wrath of God. At last, I dragged myself and my poor drowned vegetables aboard Northern Magic. I was as wet as if I’d gone swimming in my clothes.

  While all this was going on, I hadn’t said a word to anyone at home about why we weren’t leaving. Dad kept faithfully e-mailing weather information, and we kept inexplicably missing weather windows in which we might have departed. I was hoping to handle the situation without telling them anything about it, on the assumption that this was all a false alarm. I didn’t want my mom to suffer any more than necessary.

  The next afternoon, I steeled myself and set off again. Luckily, the daily thunderstorm began only after I was already inside Ekka’s tuk-tuk. I turned down his offer to wait for me. Marching up to the desk, I presented my chit once again. The women I had come to hate looked at my paper briefly. “Doctor on loo until Friday,” one of them said. Friday was two days away.

  “No, this is not right!” I argued frantically. “You said yesterday, the doctor would be here today!”

  But the doctor was not there, and there was not a thing I could do about it. The women shoved my little paper back at me and turned away.

  To my embarrassment, tears welled up in my eyes and began rolling down my cheeks. I rushed back to the entrance of the hospital, but Ekka was already gone. I stood there for a while, leaning on a concrete pillar, sniffling and snuffling and ineffectually wiping my face, conscious that there were at least twenty people watching my distress. After so many fruitless visits to doctorless hospitals, I was beginning to feel as if I was stuck in some kind of time warp, my own weird version of the movie Groundhog Day.

  I climbed into another tuk-tuk. It was pelting now. My thoughts were a reflection of the ugly bloated clouds overhead. On slippery, potholed streets on the way back to the harbour, a cyclist unexpectedly cut right in front of our path. My driver had to veer sharply onto someone’s property in order to avoid running him down. As we came to a screeching stop just a few feet away from a building, I found I was looking directly into the eyes of a very thin, very old man.

  He was lying on his side in the mud, squeezed under a low overhang, taking what shelter he could from the rain. For those two or three seconds that we careened towards him, the beggar’s stoic dark eyes were strangely fixed on my weepy blue ones. Suddenly, I realized how ridiculous my demonstration of self-pity really was. No matter what the tests might show, no matter how many more times I was fated to take that wet boat ride to some dingy hospital to be rudely turned away from seeing a non-existent doctor, I still wouldn’t want to trade places with him.

  In a moment, we were back on the road and continuing on our way. But thanks to a wordless gift from a ragged old man, now my eyes were dry.

  There was no longer any choice but to explain to Mom and Dad the reasons for our delayed departure. My e-mail to Dad unleashed a wave of concerned action back in Canada. Dad had a friend whose brother’s brother-in-law was a prominent lawyer in Colombo. The lawyer would arrange an appointment with Colombo’s top cancer surgeon for me, and I would stay at his home while I underwent treatment.

  I insisted, against Herbert’s wishes, on going to Colombo alone. This lawyer would be my ally. There was no point in dragging the kids all that way to what was likely to be an unpleasant and dangerous city. Plus, neither of us felt comfortable inflicting the entire family on our unknown benefactor. In two days, I was on a train to the capital.

  The train deposited me in downtown Colombo before noon, so I had a lot of time to kill. My appointment at the hospital was at four in the afternoon. I spent hours wandering through a huge outdoor market, pretending the large duffle bag on my shoulder weighed significantly less than it did, shooing off the touts who tried to attach themselves to me. The market was a chaotic blur of competing vendors, selling everything from baskets of smelly dried fish smaller than discarded pencil stubs to cheap electronics.

  In mid-afternoon, I found a taxi and went to the lawyer’s house, a large, two-storey building within a walled compound, with expensive cars in the driveway and many servants. I followed the lawyer to his courtyard garden, where he asked me nothing about myself, but instead entertained me for half an hour with stories of his losing nine hundred dollars a night in poker games. He was in his seventies, spoke flawless English, and boasted about his prestige and status as a Queen’s Counsel. Then he called for a taxi, and off I went to the hospital.

  The hospital
was quite a bit larger and less congested than the ones in Galle. My new doctor – a cultured-looking woman in her forties wearing an elegant sari – boosted my confidence. Although she believed the lump was unlikely to be cancerous, considering my history she recommended I undergo a lumpectomy, which would leave me with nothing to worry about during the rest of our voyage. Although I had come only for a biopsy and mammogram, I agreed to the surgery, which would take place in two days.

  I returned to the lawyer’s house. I felt uneasy, because he hadn’t exactly been welcoming, nor had he made mention of the fact that I would be staying with him. Once again I was led to his little garden and listened to him talk some more. Inside, a servant was setting a large table for dinner, but there was no sign that I was invited.

  He didn’t introduce me to his daughter, a woman about my age, or to his wife as she passed through a nearby room. I just listened as they made small talk. Finally, the daughter asked where I was staying. “I don’t know,” I answered.

  The lawyer opened up a phone book and pointed out a five-star hotel. There was no way I was going to spend that kind of money, but nonetheless I accepted when he asked if I wanted one of his servants to drive me there. By now, I just wanted to get out of that house.

  The driver left me at the hotel, which was not only expensive but also full. The sun was dipping below the horizon as I stood outside on the street after he had gone and hailed myself a tuk-tuk. I directed the driver to a part of town my Lonely Planet travel guide said had a lot of budget tourist guesthouses. All I wanted was a safe place to sleep.

  After two unsuccessful tries, I found myself a small guesthouse. It was only after I paid my money and collapsed on the bed that I noticed the marks on the walls all around me. There were vivid dark handprints, many of them clearly showing five spread-out fingers. More surprisingly, the wall was covered with distinct black footprints as well, some of them half way up. The overall effect was reminiscent of a homicide scene.