by SJ Naudé
‘What are you doing here?’
Apart from the television, the room is almost unfurnished. There is a small soft hide (hare?) on the floor.
It’s Brenda who answers from behind Sandrien: ‘She has come to give medicine.’
Sandrien turns around.
‘Who gives you the right to bring a sangoma here? What do you want to do to my mother?’
‘Not your mother.’
‘What do you mean? She’s still my mother, even though you’re caring for her, and irrespective of how often I come here.’
‘What I’m saying, is that she’s here for my mother. She’s here for Grace.’
Sandrien’s eyes flash. Now, only now, the fury is causing blotches to spread on her neck.
‘If you so much as touch Grace, if you give her anything …’
Brenda steps right in front of Sandrien, looking her fiercely in the eye. ‘She is not yours. What are you doing for anyone anyway? Everyone you visit dies. They die like animals, one after the other.’
They stare at each other.
‘She doesn’t belong to you,’ Brenda says again. But without conviction. She shrinks back.
‘So, when are you coming for a visit? Port Elizabeth is waiting for you.’
There is static on the line. As if a sparrow were sitting on the line, somewhere between Sandrien and the sea. She closes her eyes, imagines the little bird drying out and being scorched clean. In her mind’s eye she blows off the skeleton with a single breath.
‘I’m calling because I need something. Painkillers. Something stronger than the aspirin I get from the municipal authorities. Much stronger.’
Or perhaps an insect on the line, the feet of a gnat.
‘Tell you what. Send a photo. We can always deliver something to your seniors over in Aliwal. Let’s start with that. View it as a small investment. When you come to visit, we’ll continue the conversation.’
‘I want to have it in Venterstad, couriered to me directly. I know how influential you are after all, Walter. You are at the helm over there, aren’t you?’
The line is rustling with the secret language of the most insignificant creatures, the little insects that are scattered by the wind.
‘Hmm, it’s tough. Medical protocol, legal implications … you know.’
‘Do you want a picture or not, Walter?’
‘Yes, yes, send it. I’ll do what I can.’
‘Give me your email address.’
She scans an old family photograph, taken from Helpmekaar’s veranda. She trims it, cuts off Kobus, her mother and the two young daughters (not yet steady on their feet). Only she remains. She is young and her shoulders are bare. Her hair is glowing in the sun. Behind her the landscape is dry and bright. She enlarges the picture until her laughing features start disintegrating into pixels and then she sends it off.
Late afternoon she drives to Twilight Lodge, the new hunting farm north-east of Smithfield. It is a warm winter’s day, even more scorching here than at Dorrebult. She remembers this place, she realises when she enters the farm through newly built stone gates. She remembers a picnic here with her school friends decades ago, in a lush gorge, when the farm was still called Twyfelsand. Twilight Lodge lies outside Sandrien’s territory, but Xoliswe conveyed the message through Brenda that her sister lived there and was gravely ill.
The corrugated-iron shack stands on its own, away from the labourers’ cottages. When Sandrien stops, a dusty child points wordlessly to the shack and disappears. No other sign of life. Not a tree or blade of grass in sight. She has to crouch to enter, a fluffy Glo-fibre blanket hanging over her arm. The heat is hanging thick in the gloom. The woman, she knows instantly, is not from here, nor is she Xoliswe’s sister. She is painfully thin, with long bones and taut skin. Ethiopian, perhaps. Sandrien has difficulty breathing. The walls are black, the ceiling is black. Coal is burning ceaselessly in a drum. The bedding is black, the cast-iron pot on the floor is black. The water in the pot is black, so too the hessian hanging in the door opening. Apart from the bed and the pot, there is nothing. There has been no food here for ages, nor another human being. And the flies: the flies are the blackest of all.
All night the woman keeps making little animal noises. Sometimes Sandrien thinks there is a melody and sleepily hums along. At three o’clock the woman sits upright. A cold fire lights her up from inside. She laughs and hits Sandrien with the back of her hand, smack on the brow. When she falls back, she is dead. So it seems. But then she sucks her lungs full of air and starts singing or groaning until Sandrien dozes off.
A popping sound wakes Sandrien, a gunshot. Near enough to make the shack zing like a tuning fork in the dark. She looks at the black door opening in the black corrugated iron. Her heart races. An unambiguous warning.
Sandrien keeps her eye on the door until daybreak. She lays her hand on the woman’s sternum. Where there used to be breasts, there are now ribs. The woman is still breathing, but her feet are cool. It will not be long now. Sandrien must be in Venterstad for the morning clinic. On her way back, she passes a man. He is waiting next to his Land Rover, sunburned arms folded (the landowner?). She lifts a hand in a greeting, but he just stares at her. She looks in the mirror. Her hair is tangled. Next to her eye, there is dry blood.
Before reaching the stone gates, she looks down into the picnic gorge. She catches a glimpse of the new lodge with its complex angles: glass and steel, decks overhanging the gorge; the silver water, above the treetops, of a floating swimming pool. A further memory of Twyfelsand, of that school picnic of her youth, comes to her. After the picnic, she remembers, the children went hiking with the farmer. From the gorge, they wandered to a huge flat rock formation in the hills.
‘What would you say happened here?’ the farmer asked. The black rock was scattered with bones. Sandrien deciphered the zigzag patterns of the bones and put up her hand.
‘Is this where Bantus are fed to the vultures?’
‘No, girl,’ the farmer laughed, ‘where do you get that from? Years ago, lightning struck the iron stone and killed a whole herd of zebras at once. It is their skeletons you’re still seeing here.’
When the van exits the gates, Sandrien looks back fleetingly. A thin trail of smoke is trickling upwards. She could not say from where; she has lost her direction.
She has difficulty staying awake on the thundering dirt roads. She is not thinking of the nocturnal gunshot. She is pondering the riddle of the throw under which the coal woman was lying. It was drenched with smoke, but unmistakeable. It comes from the bed in which she herself slept as a child, in the Helpmekaar homestead. Ma Karlien used to come and tuck her in under this throw on winter evenings.
When she arrives in Venterstad, a little box is lying in the sun outside her office. She opens it and blinks in surprise. Ampoules of morphine. If only she had had them the previous night. The uninstalled basin has gone.
After her morning clinic in Venterstad, she drives to Colesberg. She sees the bank manager. It does not take long to increase their credit facility. Without fail, her parents repaid their debts to this bank over the years. So did she and Kobus. Two forms in triplicate and the money is available. She stops at their GP. She explains. He is reluctant. He has not seen any of the patients.
‘I’ve seen them. I know their histories by heart.’ His face does not change. She goes on. ‘My father was your patient,’ she says. ‘My mother still is. Kobus and I are your patients. And my daughters. We have a history. And this is a matter of life and death.’
The doctor looks at her. She knows she smells. She can no longer get rid of the dust, no matter how often she showers, how she scrubs.
He relents. She gets a prescription on the condition that he would need to see the patients before the first month of treatment is over. She goes to the pharmacy and purchases antiretrovirals for all twenty-seven of her patients for three months. Then she goes home and sleeps.
Her cellphone wakes her. It is the first time ever that Lerat
o has phoned her. Lerato is overly friendly.
‘What are you hearing from Walter?’ she wants to know. ‘Mrs Nyathi tells me the two of you are talking.’
Sandrien tries to wake up properly. It is as if Lerato is talking to her through a cloud of dust.
‘He is the driving force behind the provincialisation,’ Lerato continues. ‘We have a big fight on our hands, meisie, a big fight.’
‘I don’t think it’s my fight, Lerato.’
‘No, no,’ she says, ‘you must help! The health of our people is important. You know that better than anyone.’
‘What are you talking about, Lerato? You’re unable – or unwilling – to even install one basin so that I could sterilise my hands—’
‘Walter has laid a charge against Shirley. It’s about money, lots of it. The government’s money. He’s got influence. The police are investigating it.’
‘What does that have to do with you, Lerato?’
‘Shirley Kgope is my cousin, surely you know that. And Walter ran to the police, telling them that she and I are in cahoots. She’s going to disappear to the US. And yours truly will stay behind to face the music.’
‘No, I didn’t know you were family, Lerato. All these connections make me dizzy. And I don’t know what my involvement is supposed to be.’
‘Wait, I’ll make you a deal.’
‘I have to go, Lerato, my patients are waiting. I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘It’s ARVs you want, isn’t it? Well, I’ll get them for you. As many as you want. It’s government policy, after all.’
At first, Sandrien is too stunned to utter a word.
‘What do you believe I can do for you, Lerato?’
‘You have to talk to Walter. You must go to him in PE, go spend a weekend with him. He’s got a nice, nice place. You know he fancies you rotten. Give him what he wants. And you have to convince him to let go of the corruption investigation. He’ll listen to you.’
‘By the way,’ Lerato says when Sandrien does not respond, her voice now as light as a breeze, ‘I hear you’re going outside your jurisdiction. And you’ve caused a patient to die there. You were told your area, you know the boundaries. There are grounds for disciplinary, even criminal, charges.’ She waits, lets it sink in. ‘Let me know what happens in Port Elizabeth.’
When she enters the house at dawn the next morning, Kobus is waiting for her. He is standing on the slate floor in the entrance hall, a bank letter in his hand. With her body and one of the last remaining Glo-fibre blankets she had kept another patient warm through the night. There was a moment, just before sunrise, when she considered helping herself to the morphine. She smells of vomit and ash.
‘You’re getting us into serious debt, Sandrien. You’re taking food from our children’s mouths. What about their school fees, what about the farm? What about our lives, yours and mine?’
She ignores the wateriness in his eyes. ‘If we take a second mortgage on the farm,’ she says, ‘we can pull my patients through until the government can take over.’ Her voice is clear, her eyes fiercely blue.
‘Your eyes have changed colour,’ he says. ‘They’re now the colour of water.’
He leads her to bed, lets her lie against his chest until she falls asleep.
When she wakes up, a letter is waiting on the sideboard, her name in Kobus’s writing on the front.
My dearest,
It is not impossible for me to understand something of the powers that have grabbed you by the heart. I too have a heart. The deaths in the hills around us touch me also. But the degree of your self-sacrifice scares me. And the obstinacy. Somewhere, the light of reason must shine through.
Let me ask you – devil’s advocate – whether you’re starting to take a certain delight in the misery? I ask myself: could the dogged tenacity of a Mother Teresa and a henchman look the same? Seems to me you want to collapse the pain and stench into one blinding truth. Where do you make the people behind the truth disappear to? And do they understand your abstract manner of saving them?
I don’t want to make you choose between your patients and me. But we can’t both collapse under the weight of the despair. Why join the ranks of the departing? Is the anguish awaiting us, you and me, invalid? Minor sorrow, you call it, parochial, but is it nothing? And when you’ve been extinguished, who will be doing the caring then?
Do you know, Sandrien, where I find the truth? In the silence of our bedroom, the flashes of lightning passing between our skins. In the moments when you and I are lying here, under this roof, searching for breath. It is small here, yes, but when I stick out my fingers, I am touching real flesh. And for me that is enough.
What you could do, assuming you wanted to save us, you and me, would be to choose one, one of those under your care, to save. You’ll have to let go of the rest. Even that is more than the teetering formal structures could do. Those structures are locked churches. Outside the doors, the sufferers will be scorched to death after devouring the last blade of grass.
Choose one now, Sandrien, or let me go.
Kobus
It is Grace, on foot from Helpmekaar, who is bringing the news on a Tuesday afternoon. Ma Karlien has died.
‘Grace, how far have you walked? You can hardly stand up!’
‘I saw the house was looking cold,’ she says. ‘So I went to see. And then she was lying there.’
Grace is looking cold herself; she opens her mouth again, but then forgets to speak, or is unable to. She closes her mouth and waits.
Sandrien takes Grace back in the pickup truck, puts her back to bed. They search in vain for Brenda. Hours later Sandrien finds her where she is squatting behind the dam wall.
‘As she was dying, she grabbed me with a mad power. Like this.’ Brenda locks her hands around Sandrien’s wrists. ‘As if she wanted to drag me with her. As if she wanted to have a maid with her in hell.’
Sandrien sees the fear, sees a chance.
‘Brenda, that woman you sent me to, she wasn’t Xoliswe’s sister. And tell me, how did she get the throw from the Helpmekaar homestead?’
Brenda turns away, her mouth like a prune. Sandrien takes Brenda’s chin in her hand, forces the face towards her.
‘Tell me what’s going on here!’ She has Brenda by the upper arm.
‘They wanted her dead.’
‘Who wanted who dead?’
‘Everyone. Everyone wanted the black witch dead. The one on the game farm. The sangoma said, “Give her something from the one who kills everyone.” So we give the throw. But still she does not die. She lies there in that black cage, breathing, she just keeps breathing. Then the sangoma says, “Send the white witch to the black witch, let the one who brings the plague go and touch her.” And so it happened. You went. And you killed her. And my mother? You will do the same to her.’
Brenda tears herself from Sandrien’s grip. She runs away over hard ground.
Early that evening, the logistics of death settled, Kobus gets into his pickup truck. The ambulance took hours to reach Helpmekaar. By the time it arrived, the body had become stiff. He returns late from the bar in Venterstad, mildly drunk.
‘Ramotle bought drinks,’ Kobus says apologetically. ‘Only he and I were there.’
He is sitting across from Sandrien, looking down at the table. The alcohol, so it seems, makes him want to drown the words of his letter in a torrent of other words.
‘Ramotle has all kinds of news. Blurted out big secrets after a few. You remember I attended the launch of Twilight Lodge a few months ago, and was so surprised they’d managed to get all the planning and environmental approvals? And what a place! Right through to the presidential suite with glass floors above a waterfall. Anyhow. Big story. Believe it or not, after the soccer World Cup, the winning team will be coming to Twilight Lodge to relax for two weeks. All hush-hush. Well, not that discreet. The guys here are arranging parties to which everyone will be invited – municipal and provincial officials, cabinet members, bu
siness types, pop singers, you name it. There are even rumours the president will be here, but all low profile.
‘The funds are almost unlimited, it seems. They’re all getting contracts, the local officials, the lot of them – supply of game vehicles, catering, luxury transport, entertainment, the whole lot. There’ll be dancers, acrobats, fire-eaters, a veritable circus here in the hills. They’re even importing some grand boat from Austria for a function on the Gariep dam. Originally built to navigate the Rhine. And it all keeps getting bigger. Ramotle was here today to inspect more game farms, looking at the quality of accommodation. The famous people apparently all have a huge entourage. Everyone has to get here, sleep somewhere, eat somewhere … And everyone, so it seems, has to party.
‘Arrangements have been in process for months. You can imagine how elated Ramotle is about the prospect of so many celebrities and politicians here in his sphere. A real coup, as he refers to it …’
He stops, looking swiftly up at her, shy like a schoolboy.
Sandrien remembers Mayor Ramotle with his round head. She saw him at a petrol station in Aliwal. She says nothing of her night at the Twilight Lodge or the warning shot. Her mind is working rapidly, even though her eyes are clouding over with exhaustion.
‘Come to bed, Sandrien.’
But she walks into the dark guest room. She does not switch on the light, falls asleep in her clothes.
On Wednesday morning Sandrien leaves for her rounds later than usual. Even in the early morning it is warm. Approaching Helpmekaar around a bend, she notices a car in front of Grace’s little house. She stops and gets out the binoculars she inherited with the van. Three figures are trembling in the heat. Brenda is one of them. Next to her is the woman with the goatskin wristband. The third figure, she is convinced, is Lerato. The face is hazy, but the shape unmistakeable. Lerato is handing something to the other two.
