Was the place empty?
Is there nobody here?
The wait filled with a silence neither could recognize; the presence of unconscious people.
The sister in charge came out of one of the doorways pulling a mask away from nostrils pink as the scrubbed skin pleated on her knuckles. —Ward Three? We’re pleased with him today, gave us a smile this morning.— The nurse was signalled to take the packet of fruit from Lazar. —Nothing by mouth.— They robed themselves in the gowns.
On a high bed a man lay naked except for a cloth between the thighs, a body black against the sheets. Tubes connected this body to machines and plastic bags, one amber with urine, another dark with blood. The sister checked the flow of a saline drip as if twitching a displaced flower back into place in a vase; the man had his back to them, they moved slowly round to the other side of the bed to find him.
Oupa. A naked man is always another man, known only to a lover or the team under the shower after a match. Friendship, an office coterie, identifies only by heads and hands. The body is for after hours. Even in the intimacy of the injured, on the road, bodies retain their secrecy. Oupa. His fuzzy lashes on closed eyes, the particular settle of his scooped round nostrils against his cheek; his mouth, the dominant feature in a black face, recognized as such in this race as in no other with an aesthetic emphasis created by highly developed function, since we speak and sing through the mouth as well as kiss and ingest by it—his mouth, bold lips parted, fluttering slightly with uneven breaths.
—He’s asleep, we’ll come back later.—
The sister stood displaying him.
—No. Unconscious. It’s the high fever we’re trying to get down. Speak to him, maybe if he knows your voices they’ll rouse him. Sometimes it works. Go on. Speak to him.—
With these gentle calls you bring a child back from a nightmare or wake a lover who has overslept.
Oupa, Oupa, it’s Lazar.
Oupa, it’s Lazar and Vera, here. Oupa, it’s Vera.
She took the hand that was resting near his face. It felt to the touch like a rubber glove filled to bursting point with hot air. His eyelids showed the movement of the orbs beneath the skin. They talked at him chivvyingly, what do you think you’re doing here, who said you could take leave, man, my desk’s a mess, we need you … Oupa, it’s Lazar, it’s Vera … And his head stirred or they imagined it, under the concentration they held on his face.
—There, he hears you. You see? Now nurse’s going to give him a nice cool sponge-down.—
In the reception area Vera waylaid the woman as she strode away. —Why is he in a fever like this—what’s the reason for the high temperature?—
—Septicaemia … the blood leaked into the body’s cavity, you see.— The lowered tone of confidential gossip. —Of course, he should have had himself admitted the moment he had symptoms. Dosed himself with brandy instead … But I’m telling you, at least he hasn’t gone down, he’s fighting, we’re pleased with him.—
The nurse came to Lazar with the packet of fruit. It was become evidence of their foolish ignorance, his and Mrs Stark’s, of the nature of the ante-room in life to which they had been directed; of this retreat for those upon whom violence has been done, where their colleague had entered as one enters an order under vows of silence and submission. By contrast, the uninitiated are clumsy and intrusive and have only the useless to offer. —Oh no, keep it, won’t you.—
A giggle of pleasure. —Oh thanks, aih. Lovely grapes!—
There was an official roster of Foundation colleagues taking turns to visit the hospital every working day. At weekends others felt they had a right to disappear into their private lives; Mrs Stark was older, there were surely no urgencies of family demands, love entanglements, waiting to be taken up, for a woman like her. She joined the trooping crowds of relatives and friends who filled the hospital on Saturday and Sunday. Out-of-works, beggars and staggering meths drinkers officiously directed cars and minibuses searching for parking, sleeping children were slung round the necks of fathers, there were girls adorned and made up to remind male patients of their sexuality, Afrikaner aunts in church-going hats, bored young men gathered outside for a smoke, Indian grandmothers sitting in their wide-swathed bulk like buddhas, popcorn packets and soft-drink cartons stuck behind the pots of snake plant and philodendron intended to distract people from bleak asepsis, the smells and sights of suffering, the same plants that stand about in banks to distract queues from their anxiety, in the power of money.
The first Saturday and Sunday, and the second. Oupa, the body that was Oupa identified by the mute face, lay as he was placed, on this side or that, sometimes on his back. And that was something to stop the intruder where she stood, entering the cell that was always open. No privacy for that body. On his back, totally exposed. Once she asked if there could be a sheet to cover him and was dismissed with impatience at ignorant interference: he was kept naked because every bodily change, every function had to be monitored all the time, nurses coming in to observe him every fifteen minutes; he was kept naked to fan away the heat of infection raging in there, see the flush in his face, the purplish red mounting under the black. When she was alone—with him but alone—she carefully (he must never know, even if he were to be aware of the need for the small gesture it would humiliate him) drew the piece of cloth between his legs over the genitals that lolled out, ignored by nurses. Sometimes he seemed asleep as well as unconscious. The breathing changed; the men she had slept with breathed like that deep in the night. She wanted to tell him she—at least someone—was there yet it was a violation to touch him when he seemed so doubly, utterly removed. At other times she stood with her hand over his; it was the gesture she knew from other circumstances. She fell back on it for want of any other because nobody knew what he might need or want, they believed he had no thirst because salt water dripped into his veins, they believed he did not feel vulnerable in his nakedness because fever glowed in him like coal. Whether or not the people he shared One-Twenty-One with came to see him she did not know. And moving away from the black townships he had lost touch with neighbours and friends there, most did not know where he lived, now, in a building among whites. Very likely they would not have been allowed in to see him if they had come; the sister in charge made it clear that visits were to be restricted to his employer since it seemed he had no family.
Of course he has a family—but who knew how to get in touch with the plump young woman sitting among all the women who are left behind in veld houses put together as igloos are constructed from what the environment affords, snow or mud. No one had an address; as an employee and as a patient Oupa had given his permanent residence as One-Twenty-One Delville Wood. The Only way to reach her was to retrace the journey from the turn-off at the eucalyptus trees—could someone from the Foundation be spared to drive there? Mrs Stark knew the way but her husband, supported by her son out from London on a visit, absolutely forbade her to revive the trauma of the attack in this way.
During the week Lazar Feldman and others tiptoed in and stood a few minutes, afraid of closeness to what the familiar young-man-about-the-office had become, the grotesque miracle of his metamorphosis. One of the clerks who had meekly suffered because she was too plain to attract him, wept. They went away and some found excuses not to come again; what did visits help a man, said to be Oupa, who did not know there was anyone present, did not know that he himself was present.
Vera glanced at her watch and set herself the endurance of twenty minutes. But she forgot to look at the dial again. What was a presence? Must consciousness be receptive, cognitive, responsive, for there to be a presence? Didn’t the flesh have a consciousness of its own, the body signalling its presence through the lungs struggling to breathe with the help of some machine, the kidneys producing urine trickling into a bag, the stool forming in the bowels.
An insect settles on a leaf and slowly moves its wings.
She sat and watched.
The Fat Nurse and the
Thin One, the Chinese and the Black (nurses are known by rank and the most obvious features, they seem to have no names) came and went, marking the passing of time ritually as the tongue of a church bell striking against its palate where traffic is not yet heavy enough to break the sound waves. How ignorant, how far away from this, she had been curious: what’s it like. This is what it’s like; an anatomical demonstration that spares nothing. When, in church between her mother and father, she heard about that moral division, the soul and the body, and grew up unable to believe in the invisible, what the priest really was talking about and didn’t know it, was this: what he called soul was absence, the body was presence. It was swollen now, not only the hands: one day when she walked in there was the young man’s flat belly blown up, the skin taut and shiny, a version in a fun-fair distorting mirror. To look for identity in the face was to be confronted by an oxygen mask. The Chinese gave it a touch to make it what she judged would be more comfortable, if one could feel. The Black used a little blood-sucking device to draw specimens from a huge toe pierced again and again. The Fat One cleaned the leaking anus. If one could feel? The dumb creature that is the body cannot tell. It is an effigy of life ritually, meticulously attended. Outside, in between times, the acolytes eat grapes, arrange on the counter flowers left behind by dead patients, and whisper forbidden telephone calls to children home from school and boy-friends at work.
Vera no longer imagined the plump young woman down the turn-off from the eucalyptus trees and phrased what she ought to be saying to her. Ivan, back at the house where he was conceived, disappeared from her awareness as if he were still in England. The wheeze and click of machines that now breathed for the body and eliminated its waste chattered over its silence. Remote from her, within that awe, a final contemplation was taking place—isn’t that what it is—what it’s like?—the years on the Island, night study to be a lawyer in what the politicians promise to be a new day, freedom the dimensions of a flat in a white suburb, a box-cart pulled through the dust by children— who knew what the final contemplation must be? In that silence she saw that the certainty she had had of death, Zeph Rapulana’s death among nine at Odensville, when he was, in fact, to appear before her alive, was merely a mis-sort in time, a letter first delivered to the wrong address: the certainty belonged to her where it reached her now, in this place, in this presence.
Among the casualties of violence listed in the newspaper is a clerk in the employ of the Legal Foundation, Oupa Sejake, who has died of complications resulting from an injury received when the Foundation’s vehicle was hijacked.
Chapter 17
It was only decent that the Foundation be represented at the funeral. Because the poor young man had been more or less her assistant, Mrs Stark would be the obvious choice. Lazar Feldman volunteered to accompany her and do the driving, since muscles torn by the bullet’s passage through her calf felt the strain of depressing a brake pedal. But the day before they were to leave he developed that perfect alibi for opting out of anything and everything, virus flu. While other colleagues were avoiding one another’s eyes and suggesting someone ought to take his place, she said—without having any idea of whom she might have in mind—no need to worry, she would not have to go alone. Perhaps she had been thinking Ivan might come with her; it would give them a chance to talk, reopen the secret passages between intimates that have to be unsealed each time after absence. The first week of his visit had belonged entirely to him and Ben—between meetings at the Foundation with major funders from Sweden and Holland and running to the hospital, she barely had had time for a meal with her son. Ah—but she remembered Ben mentioning, with pride that drew down the corners of his mouth, that Ivan was so well thought of internationally in the banking world that the Development Bank had invited him as a special guest to participate in talks with a representative of the IMF, to take place next day.
Another claim of life while the process of dying was moving to its close was the hearing in the Supreme Court of the farmer Tertius Odendaal’s appeal against a judgment allowing an informal housing settlement to be established on the land known as Odensville acquired from him by the Provincial Administration. Zeph Rapulana was present when the judges dismissed the appeal; one of the Foundation’s lawyers who had accompanied him while she was preoccupied with the Swedes and the Hollanders brought a note: ‘Vera, we’ve won, this time we’ve shut the door in his face.’
This other conclusion, of a process that had seemed to have little chance of success, bubbled a clear spring through her preoccupations. Zeph Rapulana had a base in the city, now, backyard cottage in a suburb—his success with the Odensville affair had brought him to the attention of a housing research project which employed him as adviser. On the telephone they both talked at once: Vera wanted to know exactly what the judge had said, how Odendaal reacted—and it became quite natural for her to go on to suggest, look, why don’t you come with me tomorrow, we could talk. He knew about the death of the young man who had been shot, as she was, on the road: —If it’ll be any help to you.—
The stand of eucalyptus. Then approaching, a face awaiting, demanding recognition: it happened, it happened, it happened here, the death began here—the place on the road where Oupa, sitting beside her as this other man, Zeph, sits beside her now, drew up and called through the window, Brother.
—This is where they were.—
Pointing out a landmark, that’s all. The only being with whom what happened there is shared has disappeared. But there is a counter-balance in the presence beside her; with him is shared something else, living, that could not be shared with anyone else. From the day Odendaal had closed the door in their faces; from the statement, the threat (never to be discussed between them) Don’t be afraid, Meneer Odendaal, you won’t be harmed, your wife, your children—to the nine dead, to the judge’s words dismissing Odendaal’s appeal, the door shut in Odendaal’s face—this single return of land to its people was their right, Rapulana’s and hers, to quiet elation. Like the feeling between lovers continuing in the presence of the pain of others, it showed no disrespect to the dead. Out of companionable silences she let her thoughts rise aloud now and then. —Why is it that more can be done for the dead than the living? I’m on my way to his home, his wife, now, but neither I nor anyone else went to fetch her while he was at least still alive, although he might not have known she was there. There was no proper address to send a message, a telegram, no telephone, no one knew how to get in touch with her short of driving there, but once he died—suddenly someone at the office knew someone else who was a friend of his, the Soweto grape-vine was followed, there was a way found to get a message to her: Oupa dead. Just that.—
—You don’t think he’d let her know about the attack.— —I don’t know. And would she read the papers? Unlikely. Of course, someone might have heard from the driver of the cattle truck and passed the news on to her. Who can say? It’s hard for someone like me to imagine the feelings of a woman like her—living as she has to. You’ve known so many … I suppose it doesn’t strike you … She gets his body back. And that seems so important. The dead body? She didn’t show much enthusiasm when he walked in that day. But someone came specially—from her—to arrange the transport, the money for the funeral. All the things that distance and poverty and … I don’t know— acquiescence in the state of things?—couldn’t manage before become possible when there’s so little purpose left. But I suppose it’s your custom.—
He watched the mealie fields approach and turn away, cleaved by the road. —We have too many graves and too few houses for the living.—
Vera followed the ritual of the funeral without understanding any comfort it could bring to the wife. She was dressed in a polka-dot skirt and jacket that she endured like a tight pair of shoes (an outfit bought by her husband from a street vender in the city?), the skin of her stunned face peeled raw by tears. The children were wearing white socks and polished school shoes. The gangling boy who (that day, that day) hadn’t returned fro
m school held the hand of a two- or three-year-old who stared down curiously into the pit of dank-smelling earth ready to receive his father. There was singing, of great beauty, from these women left behind, and when they wept one of them took Vera’s arm because with the bullet that passed through her leg she was part of the son they mourned and she wept, with them, for the horrible metamorphosis revealed by Intensive Care.
The company trooped back to the house. She felt impatient with herself, confused. —Oupa. Why was he named that? Grandfather, old man, and he’s dead before thirty. Why do you name children ‘old man’ for god’s sake?— Zeph smiled down at her. —Something to do with authority. You take the Afrikaans word for a respected man and it gives—wha’d’you say—confers power on the child. You give him the strength of a baas.—
At the Washing of the Hands in tin basins set out by women he told her she was expected to say a few words to the wife and company. But apart from their own language they understood only Afrikaans, the language of the whites they worked for in that district, and hers was court-room Afrikaans; she did not have the right words for this occasion. —You speak to them.—
A mild reproach. —How do I know what you want to say?—
—I want to say I don’t know what to say.—
—No, come on.—
—Really.—
—They want to know how he died, of what sickness, what happened at the attack, that he was a soldier in Umkhonto, that he was well-thought-of at work, that he was a good man who cared only about his family although he was far away—
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