by Damon Galgut
But I knew that it wasn’t the soldiers. And now my own fear was compelling me to action. I went down to Mama’s place on the night following the second robbery. That wasn’t unusual, I was frequently there, but I confess that I went with an intention that was already half-formed.
I don’t know what would have happened if there hadn’t been an opportunity, a moment. Maybe I wanted the usual chaos and confusion, so that I could continue to dither on the edge of doing something. But the opportunity did come. When I first arrived there was no sign of Colonel Moller. A few of the soldiers were around, but that was all. Then, after a few hours and drinks had passed, and the place was a lot fuller than earlier, a break in the crowd showed his long figure to me.
He was sitting in a chair close to the pool table, watching a game. His back was to me. I could see his neck and the straight line of his haircut. He wasn’t in uniform tonight. He was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt, with some kind of smiling cartoon face on the back. I watched the blond hairs on his arm change colour in the light as he lifted his drink and set it down, lifted it and set it down. Otherwise he didn’t move.
It was a while before I talked to him. I was trying to work up the courage. There was a perverse comfort in being so close to him, close enough to study the sunburn on his ears, while he seemed unaware of me. But then the crowd started to thin out again and I thought he might move away and the moment would be lost.
I went up close and spoke into his ear. ‘I know something,’ I said.
He turned quickly to look at me. ‘What was that?’
‘If you want to find what you’re looking for,’ I told him, ‘go to the old army camp outside town.’
Then I left, walking fast. It was easy, in that crowd, to disappear from view in a moment. And that was what I wanted: a rapid exit, after a mysterious pronouncement.
I thought he wouldn’t know me. Why would he, in a bar full of colourful characters and transients? I thought of myself as invisible, nondescript. But as I turned in through the hospital gates a pair of headlamps swung in behind me and his jeep slewed to a stop near by.
Now I was embarrassed and afraid. This was the conversation I didn’t want, in the last place I would have chosen. I got out of my car and strode up to him, trying to recover some lost power through confrontation.
But he only seemed amused. He didn’t climb down from his seat, but sat swaggeringly above me, a faint smile on his lips.
‘What did you say to me, Doctor? I didn’t quite catch it.’
‘How do you know who I am?’
‘I’ve seen you around. Not a lot of whiteys in this place. I asked about you.’
I looked up at him, but I couldn’t hold his stare and dropped my eyes. It was like being transported backwards, to that lost little camp on the border. I was instantly afraid of him, as if all the intervening years hadn’t happened. He was older and baggier than before; some of the clean, hard lines were blurred. But it was something else in him, something deeper than his face, that scared me. He was drawn in on a hard, tiny centre of himself, in the way of people who live in devotion to a single idea. In a monk this can be beautiful, but in him it was not.
I said, ‘You are looking for the Brigadier.’
‘The Brigadier?’
‘Come on. You know who I’m talking about.’
He shook his head, looking puzzled. ‘If you mean the darkie who used to run the show here...’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘But he’s long gone, Doctor. Why would I be looking for him?’
‘I thought you were here to plug up the border. I thought you were trying to stop people crossing over.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, he’s your man. The Brigadier is your man. He runs the operation. Illegal traffic from the other side. Ivory, drugs, people. Everybody knows that. And I’ll tell you something else. It’s his guys that have pulled the two numbers here in town. The supermarket and the garage. And I know where they are.’
I’d been drinking for a while and the words, now that they’d started, were flowing loosely out of me. But there was no change of expression in his face. He was watching me with the same wary alertness, his blue eyes unblinking.
‘Who told you this, Doctor?’
‘Everybody knows.’
He gave a little smirk. ‘And you think I’ll find him in the old army camp.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see him there, Doctor?’
‘No, I didn’t see him. But I know he’s there.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can’t explain, Commandant. But I know.’
He corrected me softly. ‘Colonel.’
This little slip made me blush. But I could see that he wasn’t interested. He’d followed me here out of curiosity, but he’d decided that I was a crank, somebody he could dismiss with a sigh and a shrug.
I said, ‘Will you go and check it out?’
‘Maybe.’
‘There is something else...’
‘Ja?’
‘There might be a woman there. With them. She mustn’t be hurt, Colonel. She isn’t part of it all.’
‘A woman?’
‘With a man in a white car.’
He stared at me and nodded, but even through the icy colouring of his eyes I could feel his disdain. He had left the warm inside of the bar for a mad conversation in a car park. He turned the keys in the ignition.
I clutched his arm. ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Go and see.’
‘The Brigadier is dead. There is no brigadier. Except me – in a few years, Doctor, I will be a brigadier.’
‘He isn’t dead,’ I cried, and I leaned towards him, pushed by the force of everything I knew. It all threatened to spill out of me. But his arm was wrenched suddenly out of my grip as he put the jeep in gear and pulled away. I watched his headlamps float and fade, with the stirred dust dry in my mouth.
And maybe he was right. In this moment of vacancy I didn’t feel sure of anything any more – even whether I’d actually been to the camp last night. Maybe I wanted it to be full of ghosts. Maybe I needed to believe in the Brigadier, with the past pinned to his chest, clinking faintly when he moved. Tending his midnight flowers. Using my bones for fertilizer.
16
Tehogo came in the next day. I wasn’t there; in the late afternoon I went back to the village behind Maria’s shack to find out if there was any word of her. There wasn’t, and in a melancholic frame of mind I took a drive all the way to the escarpment. I got back to the hospital in the evening, when it was already dark. All the lights were burning in the main wing, so that the building was very bright, and I could see figures moving in the windows.
I hurried in. The office was empty. I could hear activity next door, in the surgery, but when I started down the passage they were already coming out – Dr Ngema, the Santanders, and Laurence.
Nobody spoke to me. There was an air of distraction and wildness, everything out of control. But in a little while the frenzy seemed to settle. The Santanders were babbling together in Spanish, Dr Ngema was writing out clerking notes in the office. For a few minutes Laurence was floating, like me, in the lurid void of the corridor.
He said to me, ‘What’s going on?’
‘I was hoping you could tell me.’
‘I don’t know, I don’t understand it.’
‘But what’s happening?’
‘He’s down there. He’s been shot in the chest. I don’t think he’s going to make it. Dr Ngema tried to operate, but it’s too close to his lungs. I think —’
‘Who? Who are you talking about?’
He stared incredulously at me, as if I was the inexplicable element in the scene. ‘Tehogo,’ he said at last. ‘Where have you been?’
Even then I didn’t understand. And then I did.
I went down the corridor. In the middle of the surgery, under the blue sepulchral glow of the night-lights, Tehogo lay on his back, a sheet up to his waist. He was on the ventilato
r, with an intravenous drip in his arm. His torso was bare, except for bandages and padding. And his face, when I bent over him, was collapsed inwards on its bones, as if he was already dead.
I went back up the passage. I said to Laurence, ‘Who brought him in?’
‘That other guy. That friend of his. I think.’
‘You think?’
‘I wasn’t looking. It happened so quickly.’ He put a hand to his head and I could see that he was on the edge of tears. I’d never seen Laurence cry before. ‘I was on duty in the office and I heard a car come in outside. Very fast. Then the hooter went – over and over. I ran out. And the guy, whoever he was, the driver, was pulling Tehogo out the back.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘Sorry?’
‘What kind of car was it?’
‘I don’t know, Frank, I wasn’t looking, I’m sorry.’ Now a tear did break free and run down, but his voice stayed steady. ‘I took hold of Tehogo and started pulling him too, just to help, you know. But next thing the guy had got back into the car and was driving off hell for leather. I don’t know, Frank, I think it was his friend, but I can’t be sure. Why has this happened? What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. But I did know, as certainly as if I’d seen it.
I drove to Mama’s place. It was still early and the bar was almost deserted. Mama was at the bar, counting stacks of small change into plastic bags. She smiled when she saw me.
‘I’m looking for Colonel Moller.’
The smile faded; she’d seen something in my face. ‘He’s upstairs. In his room.’
‘What number?’
She told me, and I climbed the stairs. It was the last door in the passage, on the corner of the building. He answered almost immediately when I knocked, as if he’d been waiting. But his wooden face betrayed a tiny tremor when he saw me; just for a second, then it was gone.
He was in uniform today. Camouflage pants, brown boots. But he’d taken off his shirt and the upper half of his body, smooth and almost hairless, seemed unrelated to the uniform below. Behind him I caught a glimpse of the room, like the one Zanele had stayed in down the passage. But the nude austerity of it had been hardened, if that was possible, by his presence. In the cupboard I saw his clothes piled up in rigorous vertical stacks. There was a disassembled rifle lying on the table, all its component parts laid out in neat, gleaming rows.
‘Could I come in for a second, Colonel?’
He shook his head. ‘If you don’t mind, Doctor, I’m busy now. You’ll have to talk to me at the door.’
Very polite, very distant. And I have no doubt that he used the same level tones with the people he’d tortured and killed. There was nothing personal in it for him.
‘Colonel,’ I said. ‘We have a wounded man at the hospital. I think you know who he is.’
He gazed calmly at me, waiting.
‘I want to know what happened to him.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He shook his head again. ‘I wish I could help you, Doctor.’
He was still polite and opaque, but his attitude to me today was different. Last night I was just a loon, someone who could be brushed off with contempt. But now he was wary. His detachment had an element of power, a guarded watchfulness that was part of a game. He took me seriously now, though he was giving nothing away.
I said, ‘Let me talk plainly. You don’t have to tell me anything. But I know. I know you shot that man – you or your men. You went to the army camp, because I told you to go. You didn’t think you’d find anything, but you did. And something happened, somebody ran, or fired a shot – and this is where it’s ended up.’
He kept on staring at me, looking politely interested.
‘Colonel,’ I said, and the note of anguish was audible to us both. ‘Can you not understand that I feel responsible? I am not here to blame you, or make trouble. I only want to understand. I told you where to go. I didn’t think anything would happen, but now it has happened. I am the reason for this. I know that. Not you, me. It will help me to know what happened. That’s all I’m asking. Please help me, Colonel. Please.’
‘I’m sorry, Doctor.’
‘All right. Tell me this, then – just this one thing. Was anybody else hurt? What happened to the others? Did they get away? Did you arrest them?’
‘I can’t answer your question.’
‘All right then. Forget about them – forget all of them. Just one person: the woman. The woman I told you about last night. Was she there? Is she safe?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Just one word, Colonel. Yes or no. Not even a word – just nod or shake your head. Is she alive or is she dead? That’s all I ask.’
He stepped back and closed the door. All the dialogue came down to the finality of this single gesture. I rested my forehead against the wall for a while, then went back down the passage.
The hospital had gone still and quiet again, but somehow the air of commotion hung over it like a fog. Laurence and the San-tanders were still sitting around in the office. The talk was all about Tehogo. The general opinion was that he would die.
I went to see him again. He was still in the surgery, still hooked up to the machinery that was keeping him going. He seemed to be half-made from synthetic materials and the human half was inert and passive.
I said his name. But there was not the slightest response. So I stood and looked at him, at his face. I noticed a birthmark, a slightly darkened patch, on one cheek. A tiny crescent scar on his forehead. These were details I had never seen before, until this moment. And though I had lived and worked for years of my life close to him, I think I can say that this was the first time that my life felt connected to his.
17
Through the next day, although I wasn’t on duty, I found myself going over several times to the main block to check on him. I wasn’t doing this as a doctor, but out of some more personal need that couldn’t be expressed in words. Each time it was the same: I stood at the bottom of the bed, staring and staring at him. Even now I don’t know what I was looking for.
On a couple of occasions Dr Ngema was also there. As agitated and disturbed as I was, she was fussing around the bed, checking his pulse, his pupils, his blood pressure. No other patient had ever got so much attention from her.
‘Shouldn’t we move him?’ I asked. ‘He’d be better off at the other hospital.’
‘Maybe. Maybe. But we can’t move him now. His condition is too serious.’
‘You do realize,’ I said, ‘that they might come back for him.’
It was the first time I’d realized it myself.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘His... people,’ I said. ‘The people he was with.’
She looked at me in startled amazement. She didn’t know what people I meant or why they would want to take him. But she didn’t ask me more; in a moment she was back at her fussing. But the thought stayed with me for the rest of the day. Why would they leave him here if he knew all their secrets?
This had obviously occurred to Colonel Moller too, because the next morning Tehogo was chained to the bed and one of the soldiers was on guard in the corner.
I was on duty that day. When Dr Ngema came to do ward rounds she was astounded at the new security arrangements which had taken place without her. She rattled the silver handcuffs on Tehogo’s wrist and glared at the soldier.
‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’
He was a young white man, just out of adolescence, with a feathery moustache and a sardonic smile. Amused at her shock.
‘I am on guard,’ he said.
‘Guard? Guarding who?’
Maybe he thought this was too obvious to answer.
‘He’s under intensive care,’ Dr Ngema said severely. ‘Only medical staff are allowed in here.’
‘You must talk to my colonel.’
‘You can’t chain him like this. This isn’t a police state any more. Why are you doing this?’
‘Dange
r.’
‘Danger?’ And she looked around the room, as if it might have taken on form: danger, a measurable quantity, hiding under the bed. ‘I will complain. You can’t do this. I will protest.’
But if she did complain or protest, nothing happened; the silver bracelet and the soldier stayed in place. Though he – the guard – moved at some point into the office with me. It was more companionable for him there, maybe, and he had the coffee and dartboard to distract him. And the truth was that I was glad to have him there. Not for company: it was the gun that consoled me. Since my talk with Dr Ngema the day before, I felt afraid.
But the soldier looked bored. He didn’t seem to believe in the danger he’d mentioned. He didn’t come with me when I went up and down the passage to the ward. Perhaps he thought this anxiety and attention were the normal state of things, whereas, in reality, no medical problem had ever preoccupied me so entirely.
At first Tehogo was completely still, like a corpse laid out for viewing. His position only changed when he was moved. I had to turn him every couple of hours because of bedsores. When I slid my hands under him to do this, my face came down close to his, so that I could smell his sour breath, coming up from the depths of an empty stomach. He was hot and limp and sweaty in my hands.
I had to do everything for him. Food and air were going into him through plastic tubes. I had to monitor the ventilator and keep an eye on the IV drip. Inject him with morphine every couple of hours. A urinary catheter had been inserted and the bag had to be emptied a couple of times. Later in the day he soiled himself and I had to change the sheets and wash him. All of these necessary labours were chores that Tehogo himself used to carry out. It was new to me. I had never touched Tehogo in my life before, and now I found myself caught in this essential intimacy. If this was an allegory I would be learning humility; but it was only real life, unsettling and tacky and strange, and the emotions it stirred in me were not entirely humble.
But as the day went on his condition improved. By noon his heartbeat and blood pressure were almost normal. And later I came in to turn him and found that he had moved by himself. A slight shift, a change in the placement of hands and feet, but an unmistakable sign of life rising up to the surface.
