by Damon Galgut
But I found myself spending a lot of time with Laurence. In some respects I didn’t have a choice: in the room, at work, he’d been assigned to me. Yet outside of that, and almost imperceptibly, we started to keep each other company. It became something of a ritual, for instance, to play table tennis in the recreation room. I’d never spent much time there before; it was a sad room. But somehow it was not unpleasant to bat the plastic ball back and forth across the table, talking in a desultory way. Most of our conversations were like that: weightless, aimless, passing the time.
And we went on a few walks together. It had been years since I’d gone off on those long hikes of mine; now we started again. I don’t remember who first suggested it, him or me, but he’d got hold of a large map from somewhere of the surrounding countryside. Most of the time he kept it stuck to the wall above his bed, but once a week at least he took it down and planned routes for us to try on our days off. We packed sandwiches and beer and set off on various trails through the bush. I took him on some of the old walks, too, that I remembered, some of them with spectacular views. These outings were mostly happy and relaxed, though he was never quite at home out there, in the wild.
We also went down, more and more often, to Mama Mthembu’s place in the evenings. This wasn’t new to me, of course; I had been there many times before. But it had been my habit to drop by in the late afternoon occasionally; I didn’t enjoy the crowded and smoky atmosphere that took over at night. All the off-duty staff from the hospital were usually there, and the enforced intimacy over glasses of alcohol could be oppressive. But now, with Laurence in tow, it felt somehow more inviting.
At Mama’s place, after-hours, none of the divisions and hierarchy of the work situation applied. Themba and Julius, the two kitchen workers, were on a level with Jorge and Claudia. Sometimes Dr Ngema even joined these gatherings as an uneasy equal. And though I never relaxed completely, some of Laurence’s equanimity in these situations transferred itself to me, so that I became less distant and aloof.
One morning, after one of these late-night sessions, I found myself alone with Jorge at the breakfast table. He sucked benignly on his moustache and said, ‘The young man. Your friend. He is a good young man.’
‘Who? Laurence? He isn’t my friend.’
‘No? But you are everywhere together.’
‘Dr Ngema put us in the same room. But I don’t know him well.’
‘He is a good young man.’
‘I’m sure he is. But he’s not my friend yet.’
It was strange, but I felt uncomfortable at being linked with Laurence in this way. The word ‘friend’ had associations for me. Mike had been my friend, until he ran off with my wife. Since then I hadn’t made any friends. I didn’t want anyone getting too close to me.
But the word kept coming up. Your friend did this. Your friend was there. How is your friend? And every time I heard it, the term became a little more worn with use, so that it didn’t have that sharp edge any more.
‘Did you have your talk with our new friend?’ Dr Ngema asked me one day, as we walked back to the residential block together.
‘What talk?’
It was an indication, perhaps, of how much had changed that I had no idea what she meant.
‘You know. You were going to show him around... discuss the possibility of transferring him somewhere else.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, I did. But he’s happy here. He doesn’t want to
go-’
‘Well, that’s a first,’ she said. Our feet crunched companion-ably through the gravel together. ‘Maybe,’ she said after a while, ‘you could pressure him a bit.’
‘Actually, I don’t mind having him around.’
‘Yes? So can I take it that you’re happy to share your room?’
This was a different question, separate to what had gone before.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Ruth, if anything comes up... The Santanders’ room, any other room, I’d appreciate it.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ she told me.
But I knew from that moment that nothing was going to change: Laurence would stay in my room.
‘They’re not going,’ he announced one day, while we sat on duty together.
‘Who?’
‘The Santanders. You told me they were leaving and I was moving to their room. But I was talking to them yesterday and they said they’re staying here.’
As it happened, I had overheard part of the same conversation, so I knew that he didn’t have the whole picture. I was sitting at the table when he was in the recreation room with them, locked in earnest debate, and I hung back to listen.
‘But why South Africa?’ Laurence was saying.
‘Opportunity,’ Jorge said.
‘Exactly. Opportunity. The chance to make a difference. There can’t be a lot of places in the world where that’s possible right now.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Jorge intoned solemnly.
‘Better money,’ Claudia said. ‘Good house.’
‘Yes, well, that too. But I’m talking about something different.’
‘You are talking about what?’
‘I believe it’s only the beginning. Of this country. The old history doesn’t count. It’s all starting now. From the bottom up. So I want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere else in the world, where it doesn’t matter if I’m there or not. It matters that I’m here.’
The Santanders were a middle-aged couple from Havana. They’d been sent out a couple of years before as part of a large group of doctors imported by the Health Department to help with the staffing crisis. He was a plump, affable man with a big moustache and a genial intelligence. His wife was slightly hysterical, a good-looking older woman with not much English. My brief affair with Claudia a year before had left her permanently embittered towards me. They had the room next door to mine and there had been many nights, more and more of them lately, when their voices carried in strident Spanish argument through the wall. It was an open secret that she wanted to go home, she didn’t want to stay, while he wanted to make a future here. Their marriage was cracked down the middle.
‘This country depends,’ Laurence said fervently, ‘on people like you. Committed people, who want to make a difference.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Jorge said.
‘They tell us, good house, good car,’ Claudia said. ‘But they don’t tell us, Soweto. Ooh, Soweto!’ I could picture her shudder.
‘I wouldn’t mind being in Soweto,’ Laurence said. ‘But this is better. This is really nowhere.’
I knew a little bit about how the Santanders felt towards Soweto. Claudia had told me during the throes of our affair. It was their first posting in the country, the place they wanted to go to. Maybe, like Laurence, they wanted to make a difference. But they couldn’t handle the cases that came in all the time. The violence, the extremity of it, was something they’d never seen. On Saturday nights in the emergency room it was knife-wounds and shotgun blasts and maimings and gougings with broken bottles. ‘Like war,’ Claudia wailed, ‘like big war outside all the time!’ And this was on top of the usual load of illnesses and accidents that the hospital could barely deal with. After six months or so they asked for a transfer and landed up here.
In a certain sense it was her time in Soweto that led to my affair with Claudia. In the first few weeks after she’d arrived here a woman was rushed in one night. She’d been attacked by a lynch mob in her village that had stabbed and beaten her and tried to burn her to death for being a witch. Her condition was critical. It was clear that she would die, but we all ran around madly, trying to do what we could. In the end she did die. An ambulance came from the nearest hospital to take the body away and then afterwards, in the empty anticlimax of the small hours of the night, Claudia and I were left alone in the office. And suddenly her neutral mask cracked and fell. She started to cry and shake uncontrollably and what was present in the room was all the pent-up months of horror at what she’d seen in this country for the first time in her
life. ‘How can people do like this?’ she cried, ‘how, how?’
I put my arms around her to comfort her, while she sobbed like a little child. I knew, I could feel, where this was coming from. Something in this country had gone too far, something had snapped. It was like a fury so strong that it had come loose from its moorings. I could only hold her to console her, but then consolation turned to something else. It was very powerful – lust fuelled by grief. We were like animals that first night. But it went on for weeks, meeting each other in deserted wards or the corners of dark passages. It was in the long empty time after I’d stopped seeing Maria, and it filled up a lack for me. I had nothing to lose. But she had a lot to lose, and the danger of what we were doing was crazy. We could be caught at any time. At least we never met in my room, because it was only one wall away from her husband.
But I think he knew. Since that time there had always been an uneasy tension between us, which may of course have been merely my guilt. It was only lately, now that Laurence was around, that some of this tension had eased.
‘But they are leaving,’ I told him now. ‘That’s definite. It’s just a matter of when.’
‘I don’t think so. They’re a lovely, committed couple.’
‘Committed to what?’
‘Well, you know. The country. The future. All that.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘They don’t tell anyone, but it’s an open secret. Everyone knows it.’
‘Jorge told me Cuba is a hole.’
‘Ja, all right,’ I said. ‘It’s complicated. Jorge doesn’t want to go back, but she does. They fight about it all the time.’
‘You assume that she’ll win.’
‘She will win.’
‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘Anyway, they don’t fight.’
‘Haven’t you heard them through the wall?’
‘No. Definitely not.’
‘Anyway,’ I said irritably, ‘it’s not the Santanders’ room you’ll be moving to. It’s Tehogo’s room.’
‘Tehogo’s room?’
I don’t know where this came from. I just suddenly said it, but the minute the words were out they took on the vehemence of truth.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tehogo’s room. He’s not supposed to be there in any case. He’ll be moving out soon.’
‘Where’s he going to?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Tehogo’s room – the last one in our corridor, on the left – was meant to be occupied by a doctor. But Tehogo wasn’t a doctor. He was a nurse. Strictly speaking, in terms of qualifications, he wasn’t even that. But he did the work at the hospital that a nurse was supposed to do.
He had been here longer than me. When I arrived he was already installed in the room. How he had come to be there was never fully explained to me, but it was all tied up with troubles in the homeland from years before. What was certain was that his family – mother and father, brother and uncle – had been killed in one or another act of political violence. It seemed there was some kind of tie by marriage to the Brigadier himself, and the killings were meant as revenge.
All that was murky. The only clear element to emerge was Tehogo himself, orphaned and alone, with nowhere to go. At that time he was working at the hospital as an enrolled nurse, but he kept failing his exams; he was kept on for want of any other candidates. He’d been living out, staying with his family and coming in each day to work. It was only because he was at the hospital that he’d escaped being murdered himself. But now he couldn’t go back to his home.
Dr Ngema gave him the room. It seems it was meant as an interim measure, just until he found his feet again. But he had stayed. The other nursing staff had gone and he’d gradually taken over their work, till now he was the only person left who could or would do the countless little petty labours involved – being a porter, washing and feeding patients, cleaning floors, taking messages. He was, if not on duty, at least on permanent call, so it made sense for him to be living there, in the grounds. But there may have been more to it than that. This part was also hearsay and rumour, but there was a story that the Brigadier had made a personal appeal to Dr Ngema to allow his young relative to stay.
This was told to me by the other white doctor who’d worked here until a few years ago. He was bitter and burnt-out, and I didn’t attach too much importance to his gossip. But it was obvious that Dr Ngema had an interest in Tehogo that went deeper than the professional side of things. She was solicitous and concerned. At staff meetings she went out of her way to draw him into discussions, she called him into her office for personal chats, and once she’d asked me if I would keep an eye on him.
I tried to do what she asked. But it was hard to get near to Tehogo. He was sullen and sour, continually drawn in on some dark core in himself. He seemed to have no friends, except for one young man from outside the hospital who was frequently hanging around. I tried not to blame him; of course he must be embattled with the terrible loss of his family. But the truth was that he didn’t look like much of a victim. He was young and good-looking, and he was always dressed in natty new clothes. He had an earring in one ear and a silver chain around his neck. There was money coming to him from somewhere, but this was never mentioned by anybody. We had to treat him as poor Tehogo, dispossessed and damaged, and it was curious how powerful his powerlessness could be. He wouldn’t talk, except in grudging syllables, and even those were always given in reply to something he’d been asked. He never showed any interest in my life, and so it was difficult to be interested in his. For a long time now he had been a silent presence at the dark end of the passage, or sitting at the edge of staff meetings, saying nothing. I hardly noticed him.
But now Laurence Waters had come, and I had to notice Tehogo. I noticed him because he was in the doctor’s room where Laurence should be. But what I’d said to Laurence was untrue: Tehogo wasn’t moving anywhere. There was no space and nowhere for him to go.
‘Oh. Well,’ Laurence said. ‘He’s a strange person, Tehogo. I try to talk to him, but he’s very...’
‘I know what you mean.’
After a pause he said forlornly, ‘I like sharing with you, Frank.’
‘Do you?’ I felt bad now, for my irritation as well as the lie. ‘Maybe it won’t happen.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘It’s possible we’ll all just stay where we are.’
6
Laurence couldn’t sit still in one place for very long. He had a restless, angular energy that burned him up. If he wasn’t pacing and smoking, he was stalking around the grounds, looking at things, asking questions. Why are the walls painted pink? Why is the food so bad? Why hasn’t all this wasted space been used? Why, why, why – there was something childlike about it. But he also had an adult resourcefulness that wanted things to be different.
One afternoon I came back to the room to find him struggling with the door at the end of the passage.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Come and give me a hand.’
He was trying to put a chain and padlock around the handle of the door. There was no bolt in the wall, so he had to loop one end around a metal bracket for a fire extinguisher, which had either been stolen or had never been supplied.
‘It would be much easier just to get a key for the door,’ I told him.
‘There isn’t one. I’ve been looking. Dr Ngema let me search through all the spares.’
‘What do you want to lock it for anyway?’
He blinked in surprise. ‘You should know. You saw what’s going on in there.’
I had to think about it before I realized that he was talking about all the stripping and stealing that had taken place in the deserted wing.
‘But that’s old. And what difference does it make anyway?’
‘What difference?’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘Are you being serious? It shouldn’t happen.’
‘Laurence, Laurence.’
‘What?�
�
I helped him fasten the chain around the wall bracket and lock it. But you could see at a glance that the padlock was cheap and weak. You could break it with a blow.
That was the sort of thing he did. On one of the days that followed I found him cutting the grass in the open plot between our bedroom and the main wing. In all the years I’d been there nobody had ever touched that grass. There was no mower, so he’d got hold of an old rusty scythe from somewhere. He was red in the face and sweating, and the work was slow. On the back step of the recreation room, Themba and Julius, the kitchen staff, were watching him with baffled amusement.
‘Your friend is crazy,’ Julius said to me.
‘Well, it’ll look better afterwards,’ I said.
I supposed that was the point. And when the brown heaps of dense, dead grass had been carried off behind the kitchen to the new compost heap that Laurence had started there, the ground between the two buildings was bare and clean. It did look good.
But Laurence only frowned at it and stood, panting.
‘What’s the matter? That’s a big job you did.’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘Aren’t you satisfied with yourself?’
‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘I am.’
But he didn’t look satisfied to me.
And the next day he was up on the roof, pulling out the weeds and grass that were growing there. The sun was hot and in the middle of the day his tall figure waxed and waned in laborious isolation. I took him a bottle of water and stood up there with him while he drank it.
‘Nobody’s going to thank you for this,’ I said.
‘Thank me? How do you mean?’
‘I don’t understand why you’re bothering.’
‘The roof should be clean.’
‘Maybe. But it makes no difference. And the stuff will only grow back.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said stubbornly. ‘It looks better when it’s done.’ And the roof did look clean afterwards, like the ground he’d cleared down below. From where we were standing we had a view out over the town and the rolling hills near by, and the high expansiveness made me feel satisfied and complete, as if I too had been working the whole day.
