by Damon Galgut
After half an hour we reached the escarpment, where the road lifted and climbed. This marked the edge of what had used to be the homeland, and the beginning of viable industry: the land was dark with pine trees, planted in rows. From the top there was a brief view of the plain we’d left behind, an undulating sheet of mildewed bronze, before the grasslands started.
The town that we were going to, with its busy hospital, wasn’t far on the other side of the escarpment: a turn-off, a short side road, and we were there. Even in the midday heat, when the surrounding streets were torpid and sun-struck, there was a quiet commotion of activity around the hospital entrance – cars and people coming and going. Although the patient wasn’t quite an emergency case I delivered her to the emergency section. There was a doctor I’d often dealt with, a cocky young man not much older than Laurence, called du Toit. He was working today; I’d spoken to him earlier on the phone. He’d got all the forms ready to be signed and came to meet me with an insolent grin.
‘Another one for us to take over,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter, haven’t you managed to kill her properly yet?’
‘I thought I’d leave it to you.’
‘Any time you want a real job, you know where to come. How long are you going to keep yourself buried in the backwoods down there?’
‘As long as it takes,’ I said, signing my name for the hundredth time on the same official form, watching the woman being wheeled away. Every time I came to make a delivery there was a variation on this dark exchange of banter between du Toit and me.
He was looking at Laurence with interest. ‘You’re new,’ he said. ‘I thought they were getting rid of people, not taking them on.’
‘I’m here for community service,’ Laurence said. ‘One year.’
Du Toit snorted. ‘Bad luck. You drew the short straw, hey?’
‘No, no. I wanted to come.’
‘Sure. Sure. Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon.’ He slapped Laurence on the shoulder and said to me, ‘Want some lunch?’
‘Got to go back, thanks. I’m on duty. Next time.’
When we were outside again Laurence said, ‘I don’t like him.’
‘He’s all right.’
‘He’s spoilt. He’s full of himself. He’s not a real doctor, you can see that.’
Near the top of the escarpment I pulled over at a roadside restaurant I knew.
‘What now?’ Laurence said.
‘I’m stopping for some lunch. Aren’t you hungry?’
‘I thought we were on duty. You see,’ he said knowingly, ‘you didn’t want to have lunch with that guy. You don’t like him much either.’
We sat at a table and had our lunch while we watched the other customers come and go. Most of the traffic on this road consisted of trucks on their way to and from the border, and the drivers often stopped here to eat and drink. I liked the look of these men. They had none of the harried introspection that doctors carried around with them. Their lives unravelled in the long lines of the road.
‘So that’s it,’ Laurence said suddenly. ‘The other hospital. The one where everybody goes.’
I nodded heavily. ‘That’s it.’
‘That’s where all the funding’s going, the equipment, the staff, all that?’
‘That’s it.’
‘But why?’
‘Why? An accident of history. A few years ago there was a line on a map, somewhere around where we’re sitting now. On one side was the homeland where everything was a token imitation. On the other side was the white dream, where all the money —’
‘Yes, yes, I understand that,’ he said impatiently. ‘But the line on the map’s gone now. So why aren’t we the same as them?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Laurence. There isn’t enough money to go round. They have to prioritize.’
‘They’re high priority, we’re nothing.’
‘That’s about it. They’d like to close us down.’
‘But. But.’ The frown on his forehead was deep and vexed. ‘That’s all politics again, isn’t it.’
‘Everything is politics, Laurence. The moment you put two people in a room together, politics enters in. That’s how it is.’
This thought seemed to quieten him; he didn’t talk again until we were leaving. Then he suddenly announced that he wanted to drive.
‘What?’
‘I feel like it. Come on, Frank, let me have a turn. I want to see how it feels.’
I threw the keys to him. Before we were out of the parking lot I could feel what a careful driver he was, slow and controlled, quite contrary to the feverish way he talked and behaved. But this was just one of the contradictions in Laurence, the little flaws and gaps that didn’t add up.
It was the middle of the afternoon by now. The bottom of the escarpment was dark with shadow; when we broke out into sun again the shadows of objects were stretched long and narrow on the ground. The road went straight as a dart towards the horizon and the border. After twenty minutes of driving I said to him, ‘Pull over.’
The impulse seemed to come from nowhere, but I realized now that it had been rising in me all day, from early that morning. Even maybe from before.
‘Hey?’
‘Here, by the trees.’
There was a small clump of bluegums at the edge of the road, with a tiny wooden shack set a little way back. Behind that again, over the top of a small rise, the roofs of a village were just visible.
‘But what for?’
‘Let’s just take a look.’
Then he saw the sign and read it aloud. ‘“Souvenirs and handicrafts“.’
‘Let’s see what they’ve got.’
There was another car parked outside the door. An American couple, loud and studiously friendly, was leaving, carrying two carved wooden giraffes. Behind them the woman who ran this little informal shop was standing at the door, smiling. When she saw me the smile vanished, then came tightly back again.
To the Americans she called, ‘Have a good holiday.’
She was in her early thirties. Small-boned but strong, with a wide, open face. Barefoot, in a ragged red dress.
We went past her into the dim inside of the shack. There were rough shelves carrying handicrafts – animal figures carved out of wood, beadwork, woven mats and baskets, toys made out of wire. Potted Africa, endlessly replicated and served up for the tourists. A hand-painted sign full of misspellings told us that this work was made by people from all the villages in the district. We wandered around, looking over the shelves. It was very hot in there.
Laurence said, ‘It’s so...’
‘So what?’
‘So poor.’
The car drove off outside and she came back in, rubbing her arms. ‘Hello, how are you?’ she said, speaking to nobody in particular.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And you?’
‘You want to buy something?’
‘We’re just having a look.’
Laurence was staring around with a pained expression. ‘Is this your shop?’ he said.
‘No. I’m just working here.’
‘Who does it belong to?’
She waved a hand at the door. Someone out there.
‘Very nice.’
She smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘Welcome.’
‘I’m going to get something for you, Frank,’ he said. He held up a crude wooden carving of a fish.
‘Twenty-five rand,’ she told him.
‘To thank you for taking me around today. I’ve had a very good time.’
‘That’s all right. You don’t have to do that. It’s all right.’
‘I want to.’
‘Twenty,’ she said.
‘I’m giving you twenty-five.’ He counted the money into her hand. ‘Thank you. You have a very nice shop. What is your name?’
‘Maria.’
‘You have a nice shop, Maria.’
‘I think so too,’ I said.
She looked directly at me then, for the fir
st time since I’d come in, and said, ‘You have been too much busy.’
It wasn’t a question, but I answered as if it was. ‘Um, ja, ja, I have.’
I held the blunt shape of the fish in my lap as we drove out of the bluegums. Against the late light the escarpment was a dark wave, poised to break.
‘You’ve been there before,’ he said.
‘Yes, I stopped on my first day. On my way to the hospital.’
‘But that was years ago.’
‘Yes.’
He rolled down his window and the warm air went over us. We were speeding through the end of the afternoon and it felt as if all the places we’d visited today were strewn haphazardly behind us, like points on a map that only we could read. It had been a good day, weightless somehow, so it came with the heaviness of a blow when he suddenly asked in a conversational voice, ‘Have you slept with that woman?’
‘What?’
‘That woman in the shop. Have you —’
‘Yes, I heard you. No. No. What gave you that idea?’
‘I don’t know, something in the air.’
‘Well, I haven’t.’
‘Are you offended?’
‘No, I’m just... surprised.’
‘Sorry. When I think something I just say it. I can’t help it.’
We didn’t speak again for the rest of the drive. It was almost twilight by the time we got back – the whole day gone, the end of my shift of duty. I didn’t return to the office, but I didn’t want to sit in the room either. There was nothing to do and I felt restless, uncontained.
Laurence didn’t want to go for supper, he said he wasn’t hungry, so I went alone to the dining room. But I wasn’t hungry either, and I found myself sitting in the recreation room in front of the television, the sound turned off, empty images flickering, throwing a table-tennis ball from hand to hand. A discontent was stirring in me. Old questions I had learned not to ask were back with me again. Old yearnings and needs. It was hard to sit still and after an hour or two I dropped the ball and let it roll. I went out to the car park. The light in my room was on, but it was turned off suddenly as I watched.
I drove slowly at first, but then with gathering speed. It felt as if I had a mission to be discharged with urgency and purpose, when the truth was all aimlessness, unease. I parked in the usual place and walked back to the shack. She’d heard the car and was waiting for me. She took me by the hand and led me in and turned her back briefly while she latched the door – a lock a child could break, a piece of string wound on a nail.
3
I hadn’t lied about everything to Laurence: I did stop at the little shack that first day on my way to the town. I was looking at things; this was one more thing to look at. And Maria was there. Wearing that same red dress, maybe, her feet bare. She said hello as I cast my dazed eye over the shelves of carved animals.
‘You want elephant,’ she said.
‘No, no, I’m just looking.’
‘Looking is free.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Or maybe none of this was said, maybe her dress was black. I don’t remember any of it. I don’t even have an image of her face from that first day; I only know that I went there and that I certainly saw her, because the next time I went back some old recognition stirred in me. And she knew me immediately; she smiled and asked me how I was.
This was almost two years later. I was driving back from taking a patient to that other, better hospital, and I saw the sign tied to a tree next to the road. It was something about the sign – the pathos of the rough lettering, the misspelling – that made me stop.
Then her face, the wide smile. ‘How are you today?’ she said. ‘You are not sad?’
‘Not sad?’
‘Last time you are too much sad.’
She was wearing a dark blue cotton dress that had been rubbed down almost to transparency in places. Her wrists and ankles were heavy with beads.
‘What’s your name?’
‘I am Maria.’
‘No, what’s your real name? Your African name.’
But something closed over in her face; she dropped her eyes. ‘Maria,’ she repeated. ‘Maria.’
I left it like that. The name was wrong on her, it didn’t fit into her mouth, but I liked the demure determination with which she’d set up this little barrier. She seemed suddenly mysterious to me.
I sat on a wooden crate in the corner for maybe two hours, talking to her. It wasn’t a conversation; I was asking her questions and she answered. Who are you? Where do you come from? How old are you? I wanted to know everything.
She’d been working there for three years. She did everything in the tiny shack – ate, slept, washed. When I asked her where all her things were she pointed to a battered suitcase of clothes under one of the shelves. She showed me her bed: a ragged blanket, folded up neatly into a square. A rusty bucket in the corner was her bath. She got water, she said, from the village just behind. Somebody there also came to bring food for her.
Was it her village? No, it wasn’t. Her place was far from here. Why did she live here? Because of the shop. But why was the shop here? Because her husband built it here. It was his idea, he had brought her to work. It was he who got all the curios and carvings from the other villages and brought them here for her to sell. Did he stay with her in the shop? No, somewhere else. In the village at the back? No, in some other place, she was not sure where. He came sometimes, sometimes. When did she last see him? She held up six fingers. Hours, days, weeks?
She talked in half-words and mime, smiling the whole time. Once or twice she laughed at herself. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was fascinated by this language of signals and signs, with its obscure calligraphy of gestures, that seemed to have been invented by us alone. I had never been anywhere before that was like this tiny square of sand with its shelves of wooden animals. Long before it got too dark in there to see properly I had the impulse to do what I eventually did: lean over and touch my fingers to her neck. She went very still.
‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘Let’s go somewhere.’
‘Where?’
‘My room.’ I felt reckless.
She shook her head and pulled away from my hand.
‘Why not?’
‘Not possible,’ she said. ‘Not possible.’
I had gone too far; she was tense and distant with me now; I had read the whole situation wrongly. But when I had gathered myself together and stood up to leave, she said suddenly:
‘Later.’
‘Later?’
‘You come after. After, when the shop is...’ She gestured to indicate closed, shut down.
‘What time?’
‘Eight. When it is dark.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back later.’
I went back to the hospital and showered and shaved and changed my clothes. I was charged with a voltage of yearning and dread. The assignation seemed to have arisen from a place in me I’d never known till then. What did I want? Why was I doing this? It occurred to me that the whole thing could be a set-up; other people could be lying in wait; murder, abduction, blackmail ringed me round. I knew clearly that I should not go back.
But I went back. I was very afraid. She was waiting for me. She told me to move the car away from the shack, further down, behind a line of bushes. I walked back through darkness, my heart tolling like a bell. She was also frightened, looking around her, holding her breath. The lamp was out. She led me in by the hand, to a space of dead time in which memory has no hold.
It was always the same. The pattern that we laid down that first night was repeated, over and over, on the nights that followed – the furtive parking of the car, the walk back to the door where she was waiting. Then she tied the door closed behind us and we lay down on the ragged blanket on the ground.
The sex was quick and urgent, half-clothed, always with an element of fear. I didn’t know what we were afraid of, till one night she gave it a name: I mustn’t come
tomorrow, she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Danger, danger.’
‘What danger?’
‘My husband.’
Obviously I had to conceal myself from him, for her sake. But something in her also gave me to understand that he might harm me. She didn’t want to talk more about it. On the next night I drove past to look and there was a car parked outside. A white car, what make I didn’t know. Parked outside the door, in full view.
From that night he registered as a presence, standing behind her somewhere, face unclear. I waited a week before I went back to her. I said, ‘Is he really your husband?’
She nodded solemnly.
‘But really?’ I said. ‘Isn’t he just your boyfriend? Did you actually get married? Married?’
‘Married,’ she said, nodding vigorously. It was impossible to tell if she had understood the question.
She didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything. In a life as stripped-down and bare as hers, none of the usual things applied. She might anyway have married in some ceremony or ritual that didn’t involve a ring. There was no way to know. I liked that; I liked not knowing much about her. This wasn’t a relationship in any normal sense of the word. I had never in my life had anything like this wordless obsession, with so many meanings implied or understood. Of course there had been other women since my marriage had crashed; I’d had a short affair with Claudia Santander at the hospital, there were a couple of brief encounters in passing, but none of those liaisons were as silent or so disturbingly powerful as this. All I had to go on was what I came to there at night: the poor inside of the shack, the hard dirt floor, the smell of her sweat – sometimes vaguely repellent – when I opened her dress. And the hot, blind embrace in the dark.
We weren’t tender with each other. Or only sometimes, in particular ways. I touched her and stroked her, but she never touched me like that. And we weren’t allowed to kiss – when I tried she turned her head sharply away and said, ‘No, no.’ I asked why, but it was never explained, and the silence suited me. It suited me too that we weren’t able to talk in any real way. We came together for the primal, intimate act, while keeping a huge distance open between us.
