by Damon Galgut
‘There’s nothing more?’
‘Well, what about taking a drive? We could have a look at the town.’
He had a tiny blue Volkswagen Beetle, older and more beaten up than my car. And he didn’t look out of place behind the wheel. Something came over him that was almost careless, so that he didn’t resemble any more the earnest young doctor in a white coat. ‘Where to, Frank?’ he said. ‘You tell me where to go.’
We went slowly down the main street, which was the one tarred road in town, past empty shops with empty shelves. Here and there a viable business did function: the small supermarket stood idle and almost deserted in the heat, a single bored cashier at a till. The security guard outside, fanning himself in slow motion with his cap, watched the car go past like a distant event on television. At the main intersection, presiding over the cracked and crumbling fountain and its oval of brown lawn, the statue held its resolute pose, one hand on a hip and the other pointing forward, into the future or the bushveld. The legs were turning green.
‘That’s the Brigadier again, if you’re interested.’
‘Where?’
‘I’m talking about the statue.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘I can tell you a story about that.’
But again the interest had faded in his face: the story of the statue belonged to a world he didn’t live in. So I didn’t tell him how, not long after I arrived in the town, I had gone for a walk into the countryside near by. I was full of directionless fury in those days, which took me on long, demented forays into the bush, carrying a backpack and a tent. I rarely knew where I was going and, beating my way through an overgrown ravine near the north edge of town one day, I had come upon a huge metal object half swallowed in the sand. It might have fallen from the sky. It was an old bust the size of a car, and only after I had cleared away a mess of vines and creepers did I recognize the face of the previous chief minister of the homeland. In this bronze version of himself he was wearing an expression of penetrating piety. That was before the military coup and the twenty-four charges of corruption and fraud that sent him running for his life.
It was only a few days afterwards that I realized the bust had used to stand on the plinth at the main intersection where the Brigadier’s statue was now. I could imagine the mob of cheering soldiers tearing it down with axes and chains and crowbars. I don’t know how they got it out there, into the middle of the gorge, but it resembled nothing so much as a severed iron head, the body of which must be lying somewhere close by. I didn’t go back there again.
I showed Laurence the absurd dome of the parliament building, nailed shut and disused. I showed him the library, which had never been stocked with books. The school, which had never taught a lesson. The blocks of flats, government housing for all the workers who were going to come and run the offices and services that had been planned – and some workers did come for a while. But there was no work. And then the trouble started, and in the end they trickled away again, to the cities or back where they’d come from, except the few who could still be spotted here and there, lost in their own uniforms and all this useless space.
And then the road came to the other side of town and faded away, in a short distance, into nothing. The buildings suddenly stopped along a line. In front of us the bush took over again: brown wastes of grass, with anthills and thorn trees rising out of it. In the distance, a dark stripe of forest.
He sat behind the wheel, staring into the simmering heat. His face had some of the same dismay it had worn in the hospital. ‘What shall we do now?’ he said. I thought I could detect a note of desperation.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘But where?’
‘There is one place in town.’
‘Really?’
He was glaring at me; perhaps he suspected a joke. But in fact Mama Mthembu’s place was very pleasant, and always incongruously crowded. Every bored civil servant and off-duty worker headed straight for it. And today, when we were sitting in the little courtyard under the bougainvillaea, with the emptiness and isolation sealed away outside, we could have been anywhere, in any happy country town. The dirty plastic tables and the sad faces at the bar didn’t matter; we were surrounded by voices and movement, the illusion of community.
Mama Mthembu herself was an enormously fat old lady, always wearing the same floral print dress and slip-slops, and the same gap-toothed smile. She had a lot to smile about: she ran the one flourishing business in town. When she’d started the place was a hotel, but for obvious reasons this side of things had failed dismally. The two floors of rooms stood as empty as the hospital, and the focus of activity had moved downstairs and out, to the courtyard and bar.
She came over now, sweating and smiling amiably, to wipe the table with a filthy cloth. ‘How are you today, Mr Doctor?’ In all the time I’d been here, and despite the fact that I’d stayed in her hotel for two weeks when I’d first arrived, she had never learned my name.
‘I’m good, Mama. How about you?’
‘The same, the same. Who is your friend?’
‘His name is Laurence Waters. He’s a new doctor at the hospital.’
‘Welcome, welcome. I can get you a beer?’
When she’d gone he asked, ‘Why do you call her Mama?’
‘That’s what everybody calls her.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know. It’s a term of affection or something. Respect. I don’t know.’
He looked around at the other people in the courtyard and I could see him relax visibly. It was nice here in the half-sun, entwined in other conversations. When Mama had brought our beers and we’d both taken a long cold drink, he sighed and said: ‘In the hospital, you asked me why I wanted to come here.’
‘Yes.’
‘I want to explain it to you. But I’m not sure if you’ll understand. All the others, the students, I mean, they just wanted the most comfortable posting. None of them wanted to do it anyway, they were angry. But if they had to go, they wanted it to be convenient, you know, a good hospital, close to home. They didn’t care about it.’
‘And you?’
‘I thought: let me be different to them. Let me find the tiniest place, the furthest away from anything. Let me make it hard on myself.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t want to be like the rest.’ He studied me uneasily through his spectacles, then dropped his eyes. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m a fool?’
‘No. But it’s a big symbolic gesture. What do you achieve?’
He said carefully, ‘I want to do work that means something.’
‘But you do want to work/ I said. ‘You’ve come to a place where that doesn’t always happen.’
He thought about this for a long time, biting his lip. ‘Is it always like this?’ he said at last. ‘I mean, it can’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Then it can change.’
‘How?’
‘People change things,’ he said. ‘People make things, they can change them.’
‘You’re idealistic,’ I said.
I wanted to say, you’re very young. I wanted to tell him, you won’t last.
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding happily; he didn’t detect any criticism. He sipped his beer and became serious again. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I like you, Frank.’
I didn’t answer, the declaration made me uncomfortable, but the truth was that I liked him too. The feeling wasn’t based on anything except the few hours we’d spent in each other’s company, but already I was finding it difficult to resent him completely.
Which, in another way, made me resent him more.
5
Right from the beginning, Laurence was like two separate people to me. On the one hand he was my shadow, waiting for me when I opened my eyes, following me to meals and work, an unwanted usurper crowding me in my own room. And on the other hand he was a companion and confidant, who leavened the flat days with feeling and talk.
The last time I’d shared a room with anybody was with Karen, my wife – but that wasn’t the same sort of sharing. Male company: two beds in a confined space: it was like the army again. But there was no code of discipline imposed on us from outside; there weren’t even any rules. It was just two different natures thrown into a box.
He was messy and untidy. His habits from the first day didn’t change – the clothes left lying around, the water on the bathroom floor. I cleaned up behind him, but he didn’t seem to notice. When I bought an ashtray from the supermarket and left it conspicuously on the table, he went on throwing his cigarettes out of the window. It drove me crazy.
But he was also orderly and controlled, in a different sort of way. He would suddenly take it into his head to sweep some arbitrary corner, or clean some piece of wall. Then he scrubbed and scoured with peculiar intensity until he was satisfied, and could lean back with a cigarette to relax, dropping ash on the carpet.
One day I came in to find him rearranging the furniture in the room. He’d dragged the coffee table and cupboard and lamp around into new positions. It didn’t matter, it didn’t affect anything, but I felt a flash of personal outrage, as if he’d violated my home.
‘You mustn’t get too settled in here,’ I told him. ‘This is just temporary.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You’re not going to be staying here for too long. Dr Ngema’s putting you into the Santanders’ room next door, when they
go-’
‘Oh,’ he said, looking stunned. ‘I didn’t know.’
But the furniture stayed where it was, in the new arrangement, and in a few days it seemed natural and normal to me. Not long after that he replaced the curtains and put up a couple of posters on the wall. I felt that same flash of outrage again, but more dimly this time, less deep. And when he set up a little shrine to his girlfriend on the windowsill above his bed, I felt almost nothing at all.
There were a few photographs, showing a small black woman with short hair. Around the photographs he’d arranged a little pile of stones, a dried leaf and a bracelet. These things had some kind of personal significance for him.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Zanele.’
‘Where did you meet her?’
‘In the Sudan.’
‘The Sudan?’
He was pleased at how amazed I was. ‘Sure. I spent a year after school travelling around Africa. I landed up in Sudan for a while.’
‘And what was she doing there?’
‘Volunteer work. With a famine relief programme. She’s dedicated her life to that sort of work.’
He said all this with an offhand air, but I could see how seriously he took it. He intrigued me at moments like these. He seemed so simple and straightforward, and then he showed you he was not.
‘And where is she now, your girlfriend?’
‘Lesotho. She came down to South Africa to be closer to me, but then she got involved with this other aid organization, and then...’ He trailed off, looking happy. ‘That’s just how she is.’
He was proud of her, of his relationship with her, but something about it was odd. It was almost as if he was relieved that she was far away and that all their intimacy had to be conducted ritually, through photographs and letters. They wrote regularly to each other, once a week. I looked at her handwriting on the envelopes that arrived: strong, upright, clear. It didn’t resemble his spidery uncertain hand. But somehow their whole relationship consisted in this back-and-forth of envelopes, or the formal gesture of the shrine above his bed.
Not all of the photographs over the bed were of his girlfriend. One was of an older woman, dark, thin, her hair tied back. She was smile-scowling for the camera.
‘Your mother?’
He shook his head quickly. ‘Sister.’
‘Your sister? But she looks so much...’
‘Older? I know. There’s a big gap between us. In a way she’s really like my mother. She raised me when my parents were killed.’
‘I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, that’s okay. It was long ago.’ He told me how his mother and father had died in a car accident twenty-five years before. ‘I was a baby still, I don’t remember them.’ And how his sister, who was twenty then, had taken him over and brought him up. He’d lived with her in a poor neighbourhood of a depressed coastal town, the name of which I’d never heard before. The first time he’d ever left home was when he’d won a scholarship to study medicine.
He told me all these details in a light, quick voice, as if none of it was important. But I could see that it did matter very much to him.
I said, ‘I lost my mother too, when I was small.’
‘Really?’
‘I was ten. So I do remember. She died of leukaemia.’
‘That’s why you became a doctor,’ he said.
It was a declaration, not a question; it startled me.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘When was the moment when you knew, you really knewj that you wanted to be a doctor?’
‘I don’t think I had a moment like that.’
‘Never?’
‘No.’
‘But why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t.’
He smiled. ‘I know when mine was. Exactly.’
He was like that. A grand design ran through everything. The moment of his realization was a story he’d told himself over and over.
‘I was twelve years old. My parents were buried in the cemetery near our house and my sister always said that one day she would take me to visit them. But she never took me. So I decided to go by myself.
‘I used to pass there every day, all those crosses in the ground. So this one day I just turned in at the gate and started looking. I walked and walked. It was a hot day. I’d never seen so many dead people. Just rows and rows of them. I went up and down, up and down, looking. But I couldn’t find them.
‘I started crying. It was too much. But then this old black guy found me. He was working there, he was wearing a uniform, a sort of white coat, he had a list of the people who were buried there. He had a map. But he couldn’t find my parents.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I told him my father’s name – Richard. But he said there wasn’t a Richard Waters on the map. I just cried and cried.
‘He was very kind to me. He took me to his little office, he gave me tea and bread. He talked to me for a bit. Then I felt better and I went home. My sister was there.’
‘Did you tell her?’
His eyes dropped. ‘Ja. And that was the moment. I can’t explain. She was also very good, hugging me and everything, telling me that one day we would go to the graves together. But it all got mixed up in me – her kindness, the old black guy...’
‘His white coat,’ I said. Two could play at this pseudo-psychology of his.
‘The white coat,’ he said musingly. ‘Yes. You may be right about that, Frank. The idea came to me right then.’
‘That you should be a doctor.’
‘Yes. It wasn’t clear like that, you know, but... the seed was there. From that moment.’
‘Because of your parents.’
‘That’s how I knew it must be the same for you. Your mother’s death. Mine was because of my parents too. I think we’re very similar, Frank.’
‘But I never had a moment like that,’ I said.
‘Maybe you don’t remember it,’ he said. ‘But you did.’
He was very insistent about it, but I knew there’d never been a clear moment like that for me. I’d never had a burning sense of vocation – just uneasy ambition and a need to impress my father. But the question he’d put to me stayed in my mind, bothering me. I felt that I should have had a moment of truth
like his. It was only long afterwards that I wondered whether his revelation from the graveyard had ever actually happened at all.
He never mentioned it again. He was too busy asking other questions. When he wanted to know something, he had no sense of delicacy or restraint. Sometimes he alarmed me, but I also found myself telling him things I’d never discussed before.
My marriage, for instance. This wasn’t a subject on which I felt inclined to open up to anybody. Not that it was charged with a lot of pain any more – the nerves were dead – but it was still private and unexposed. But a week or two after he came, Laurence plunged right in.
‘I notice you still wear your wedding ring.’
‘That’s because I’m still married.’
‘Really? But where’s your wife?’
And in a moment I was telling him all sorts of delicate details – how Karen had run off with Mike, my best friend from army days and one-time partner in practice. How they were living together now and how my retreat up here had somehow stalled the divorce process so that we were still technically man-and-wife.
‘And when will it all be over?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Some time in the next six months. She’s got the whole divorce process moving along again lately. I think they’re in a hurry to leave the country.’
‘Is she getting married again?’
‘I think that’s the idea.’
‘To this guy? Your friend from the army?’
‘Mike? J a, she’s still with him. She says he’s the great love of her life.’
‘He was never your friend, Frank,’ he told me solemnly. ‘No true friend would ever do that to you.’
‘I am aware of that, Laurence.’
‘I would never do that. Never, never, never.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I wouldn’t wear that ring any more,’ he said. ‘Why do you wear it, Frank?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Habit.’ But the golden glint on my finger was more a symbol than a habit. I closed my hand into a fist to hide it.
When he said, ‘I would never do that to you,’ he was telling me that he was a true friend. I think he felt that way almost from the first day. Yet the feeling wasn’t mutual. He was a room-mate to me, a temporary presence who was disturbing my life.
