by Damon Galgut
Almost the same words he’d used. I didn’t know what sorted out meant in all of this.
‘I’m sorry, Ruth, for the part I played. But I had no idea —’
‘No, of course not. It was his doing, he said so himself. But it almost caused a lot of trouble. It still might. He’s a very impulsive young man.’
‘What can I do to help?’
‘You could keep an eye on him for me. I’ve come to an arrangement with him. But I want to be sure that he sticks to it.’
‘What arrangement?’
‘It’s about his clinic. You know, the field-hospital thing that he did yesterday.’
My mind was scattered between so many points that this was the first time, since I’d left, that I’d thought of it.
‘Yes?’
‘It was very successful, apparently. The Santanders said... They seem very pleased.’
‘And so?’
‘I’ve told him he can have another one. To be honest, I’ve sort of indicated that we might continue with them on an ongoing basis. I don’t think it’ll come to that, of course. But I had to persuade him somehow.’
She was beaming – an unusual display of emotion for her – at her own cleverness.
‘The next one will be in a month,’ she went on. She named a village I’d never heard of. ‘Listen to this, Frank. It all fits together. The local government will be holding a function there that day. It’s a big celebration, because they’re delivering electricity for the first time. So I’ve arranged that we’ll do the clinic the same day. There’ll be lots of media, lots of speeches, lots of political attention... Good for all of us.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said. The word fell out of me dryly. ‘And he accepts this as a... as a...’
‘Trade-off? Yes. I think so. I didn’t put it to him like that, of course. I said that he had to choose. If he wanted to push the case with Tehogo, then I would have to make a case against him. For lying. And that there’d be a whole inquiry, Tehogo might lose his job, Laurence might be suspended... Considering all that, I said I couldn’t see a way for us to go on holding these clinics. On the other hand, I said, there was this opportunity...’
‘And he accepted that,’ I said again, incredulously.
‘He had to. He can’t make a case against Tehogo anyway. Only you can.’
After a short pause, in which I could hear the branches outside her window rubbing together, I said: ‘And what if I do?’
She was astounded. The beaming expression was gone, her eyes and mouth widened into circles. ‘Excuse me?’
‘What if I pressed the case against him? Because I did see the stuff. It was there.’
The silence was long this time. Then she said, ‘I don’t understand. I thought you didn’t want...’
‘I’m not sure I do. But are you just going to leave it at that? He’s stealing from you.’
‘Well, I... yes. But he’s been given a warning. He won’t do it again. It’s only bits of metal anyway. Nobody was using it. No harm done.’
‘No harm done?’ I shook my head. ‘This is your hospital, Ruth. The bits of metal are part of your hospital.’
‘I know that, Frank.’ Something in her face was hardening now. ‘Think of the alternative for a second. You’ve been waiting a long time to become head of the hospital. Things are moving now at last, it looks like it’ll happen soon. Do you want to throw that away? If you start an inquiry at the Department of Health, it’ll take months, it’ll exhaust us all. The accusations that’ll fly around, Frank, have you thought about that? The outcome is by no means clear. And at the end of the day it is, yes, it is bits of metal you’re fighting about.’
‘Surely not. Surely it’s a principle that’s at stake.’
‘What principle is that?’
I was speechless. What principle was I fighting for? It seemed too obvious to have a name. But I was getting into something now that was too deep and difficult for me, and I decided to retreat.
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘This is all theoretical. Because I don’t want to push the point.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it, Frank. There’s too much on the line. For everybody.’
‘Yes. I do see that. So what is it you want me to do?’
I was speaking lightly and quickly now, as if none of the dangerous talk had happened, and she was answering me in the same way.
‘Just make sure, if you can, that Laurence doesn’t change his mind. You’re a good influence on him, Frank. He listens to you.’
‘Sure. I’ll keep an eye on him.’
‘Thanks. It’s for your sake too.’
‘I know that.’
But when I left her office I was full of confusion and contradiction and it was with an ache in my head that I went to sit in the recreation room. Laurence was sleeping, and this was normally a quiet refuge, but today it felt crowded. It was bright and loud in there. A music cassette was blaring and the Santanders were playing table tennis together. Themba and Julius were drinking coffee and talking.
‘You want to play too, Frank?’ Jorge called.
I shook my head. The game went on without me. In my stupor it felt to me that this movement and frivolity were the normal state of things and it was only my mood that excluded me. But at some point Claudia threw down the bat and came and sat next to me, laughing and sweating amiably.
‘You come back today?’ she said.
‘Last night. Late.’
‘You miss the clinic yesterday. Very good. Oh, very good time.’
‘Yes,’ Jorge said, coming up. ‘We thought of you. We had a lot of fun.’
‘Oh, very good,’ Claudia repeated. ‘So many people! So much talking! Oh, too much.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said. No other words would come.
It was then it began to dawn on me that the light and happy mood in the room was new. The way that Claudia was sprawled there, talking easily to me – as if without rancour and resentment after our affair – was something she’d never have done just a few days before. And this fresh energy, so optimistic, so young, was connected to what had happened yesterday, while I was away.
I remembered the smile on Laurence’s face, incongruous while he was telling his story. I was to see that same smile again a few days later, at the weekly staff meeting. The only item on the agenda was the clinic. And Dr Ngema set aside her caution for the announcement. It had been a resounding success, she said; if anyone doubted it, they had only to look at the new spirit amongst the staff. Although our material resources were thin, we had achieved something significant: we had reached out and touched the community, we had let them know we were here. And she had no doubt that people who’d never heard of the hospital before would be beating a path to our door.
While Laurence sat smiling at his shoes.
‘Of course,’ Dr Ngema said, ‘that was just a try-out. The idea was to go on holding these clinics if the first one was a success. And I’m pleased to be able to tell you that there’ll be a follow-up very soon.’
She looked around at us importantly. But I couldn’t listen while she repeated the details of what she’d told me: the big government function where electricity was going to be delivered to poor people for the first time. The whole event was clear in my mind, as if it had already taken place – the mobs of people gathering, the shining face of Laurence at the centre of the audience. The talk, the long and pointless talk, most of it probably not understood; but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it happened – the symbolic value of it. What mattered was the spirit amongst the staff.
I stared at the dartboard behind the door, where a single dart, hanging by its tip, took on a luminous significance, and only came back to myself as Dr Ngema was saying, ‘... I don’t need to tell you how important this is. Outreach work, community work... it’s the kind of thing the previous regime didn’t care about. We must all commit ourselves to the new way...’
Then applause, spontaneous, in which even Dr Ngema joined. The only people who sat wat
ching were Tehogo and myself, silent and apart on opposite sides of the room.
Tehogo had always been silent, but his silence was different now. The anger, the accusation in it were palpable, and I thought they were directed at me.
I’d seen him once already since I got back from the city. But even before that I knew everything had changed. It was one chance encounter, one tiny gesture in the encounter, that showed me where I stood.
On the day that I got back, after I’d sat in the recreation room among the happy staff for a while, I went walking through the hospital grounds. Thoughts and impulses were boiling up in me, so that I couldn’t rest. I paced up and down, I stood with my fingers hooked into the bars of the gate, looking out. In the evening I decided to take a longer walk, through the town. And on my way out I passed Raymond, Tehogo’s pretty friend, the young man I’d accused of being an accomplice. He was sitting on the low, crumbling wall at the edge of the parking lot, twitching one dangling foot, waiting. The last time I’d seen him he was at the party. He was well-dressed and neat; even in the dusk he was wearing dark glasses. I nodded to him to say hello, but when I was opposite him he raised one hand and drew a finger smilingly across his throat.
Just that, just the one gesture, but all the way into town I was shaking. Not from fear, or not entirely; something else. It was a gesture Tehogo was sending to me, it was what Dr Ngema hadn’t quite spoken aloud in her office that morning: all the unsaid, undone rage transplanted into the bored hand of this stranger.
When I came back he was gone. The little sagging wall was bare.
I went looking for Tehogo. It was supper-time and I found him in the dining-hall, sitting by himself at one end of the long table. Claudia Santander was also there with Laurence, and some of the electric buzz from that morning still went on between them on the far side of the room. But around Tehogo there was an angry halo. He’d finished eating and was sitting staring at the wall, his empty plate in front of him. When he saw me he seemed to need some activity to distract him and he picked up the salt cellar and started rolling it around in his hand.
I went to sit next to him. Laurence and Claudia glanced over at us, then went on with their intense conversation. I could hear something about Havana, something about a state medical programme.
Tehogo started to toss the salt from one hand to the other. Left, right, left.
‘Tehogo.’
He said nothing. Went on throwing. I pulled my chair a bit closer to him.
‘Can we speak?’ I said. ‘I want to explain what happened.’
Left, right, left.
‘I know you’re very angry. Hurt and angry. But it wasn’t me who did this, Tehogo. If you’d just listen to me.’
He put the salt cellar down firmly and folded his arms, staring in front of him.
‘You are not my enemy, Tehogo.’
Then he turned his head and looked at me. The stare lasted only a moment, before he pulled his chair back and got up. I think I actually clutched at him, to stop him, but he was already striding away. Out of the room, not looking back.
There was a brief pause, in which I could feel Laurence and Claudia watching me across the room. Then their conversation resumed, soft and urgent. I sat with my head in my hands, trying to think through all the words and images. You are not my enemy, Tehogo. Who was my enemy then?
So I had begun to understand what Laurence meant when he told me that everything was different now. In the two days that I’d been gone, my place in the hospital had changed. Nobody was speaking to me in quite the same way any more.
The change was tiny, but huge. It had no centre, no dimensions you could pin down, but it preoccupied and troubled me like a single, definable event.
It was a few days before I found out that something outside the hospital was different too. And this change would affect me more profoundly, maybe, than everything else.
Laurence didn’t tell me at first. He let it all go by – the meeting with Dr Ngema, the talk with Tehogo, the Monday morning staff meeting. It was almost the middle of the week before he brought it up, casually, incidentally, as if it had only just occurred to him. And yet it was obvious, almost from the first syllable, that he’d been waiting to speak to me.
‘Oh, yes... Frank... can I talk to you for a minute?’
We were in the room. It was one of those indeterminate times of day, with the light through the dusty window coming in grey and filtered, without heat.
He sat down on his bed and gazed at me. Then he got up and came over to my side.
‘Is it okay if I sit here?’
‘Go ahead.’
He sat next to me on the bed and I could hear his uneasy breathing for a while.
‘How are you?’ he said at last.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look fine. Was it hard for you down in Pretoria?’
‘Whatever you want to say,’ I told him irritably, ‘I wish you’d just say it.’
His breathing sounded painful, then he said, ‘It’s about the clinic. Well, no, it isn’t. I mean, not the clinic as such. Connected with the clinic. In a way. But not the clinic itself, no.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
He took a deep breath. ‘All right. That woman.’
‘What woman?’
‘That one. You know. Your friend.’
And then I knew. ‘You mean Maria.’
‘Yes. Her. From the souvenir shop.’ His eyes were on me, but when I looked at him they dropped, slid away.
‘What about her?’
‘After the clinic. When everybody was standing around. She came to talk to me. She said she had a big problem, could I help her.’
In the silence I understood, and the word hung between us in the air, waiting to be spoken.
‘Pregnant.’
He nodded and swallowed; the sound was loud and distinct in the room.
‘She wants you to get rid of it for her.’
He nodded again.
I felt calm. I felt unnaturally calm and still. I said to him, ‘Why are you telling me this?’
He tried to speak, but no sound would come; and I saw in that moment he wasn’t able to speak the truth. Instead he whispered, ‘I want your... your advice.’
‘Abortion isn’t a crime any more, Laurence. You’re allowed to help her.’
‘She... she doesn’t want it done here.’
‘Where then?’
‘Out there. In the shack.’
‘But that’s crazy.’
‘I know. But she’s terrified of something. Or somebody. She wants me to come there late at night. It has to be a secret.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged, and all his desperation was there in the gesture. And none of his pride and confidence was left from the staff meeting a few days ago; he was just a confused young man, in need of help.
I said, ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘By when must she...?’
‘Soon. I’m not sure exactly when, but soon. Frank, isn’t it possible...?’
‘What?’
‘Can’t it... can’t you...?’ He shrugged again.
‘You’re not asking me to do it, are you?’
He smiled painfully. ‘I don’t know. It crossed my mind. You... you seem to know her.’
‘But Laurence,’ I said, ‘she came to you.’
And it was true. If he hadn’t held his little clinic, if he hadn’t gone to that particular village, he would never have seen her again. And part of me – a hard, cold place deep inside – felt satisfaction at his dilemma. He wanted to go out and make grand symbolic gestures for an audience, but the moment reality rose up he didn’t know how to cope.
Of course I wasn’t going to leave it at that. Of course I would find out what had happened, of course I would do something. But for the moment I was not without a certain grim pleasure at the hole Laurence had dug for himself.
I drove out that night
to see her. I went without knowing what I was going to say. The last time I’d been here was before I left for the city, when I told her I’d be back the following night. But I hadn’t gone back.
There was another roadblock set up on the way. When they asked me where I was going I said, ‘Just for a drive,’ but I could see that this answer perplexed the young soldier who’d pulled me over. He made me get out and open all the doors, so that he could search everywhere – under and between the seats, in the cubby-hole, in the boot, in the engine. The car was empty and he had to let me go, but it was with an obscure weight of guilt that I drove on, as if I was actually smuggling something secret and illegal.
And when I got to the shack the white car was parked outside. The white car, that might or might not have been outside the Brigadier’s house. I couldn’t stop. There was no point in waiting, but I decided to do what I’d said anyway and just go for a drive. I rode on for miles through the dark. Then at some point short of the escarpment I pulled over and got out. The night was warm, the sky crowded with stars. I sat on the hot bonnet of the car with the hissing wastes of grass around me, staring into the black.
It felt good to be there, away from everything, alone. For a little while my life felt like something separate to me, a hat or a shirt I’d dropped on the floor and could push at, meditatively, with my foot. And out of this sense of things, a strange dream came to me.
In this dream I went to Maria in her shack. She looked like she normally did, but she was wearing a shiny yellow dress, something I’d never seen. And I went to her and took her hands in a way I’d never done before. The feeling between us was warm and wordless, pushing action ahead of it like a wave.
I said to her, ‘Maria, come with me.’
She was confused. She didn’t know what I meant.
‘Everything is possible,’ I told her. ‘Come with me.’
‘But I must look after the shop.’
‘No. I mean something different. I don’t mean for a little while. I mean for ever. Come with me, away from here. We’ll leave everything behind. Your job, my job. Your place, my place. We’ll go to the city and get married and live together and everything will start again. From the beginning.’
