The Good Doctor

by Damon Galgut

  And the movement continued. A little twitch here, a flicker there – until by evening he was starting to twist and gesture in his sleep.

  To keep him from tearing out the tubes, I tied him to the bed with pieces of soft cloth. But these restraining bonds – on his legs and free arm – mimicked and mocked the real chain on his wrist. He was a patient and a captive at the same time; just as I was a doctor and the cause of his condition.

  Guilt, guilt; and I paced up and down the passage, unable to sit for long. The other doctors also came by from time to time to check on him. The Santanders and Dr Ngema – also worried and afraid. But their anxiety came from not understanding, while I understood too well.

  The only one who didn’t come by was Laurence. I expected him the whole day, if only because duty was a virtuous reflex with him. But he only arrived in the evening, when it was time for his shift. He’d been in the room, he said, trying to plan for the clinic.

  I’d forgotten until this moment that the clinic was happening. But surely, under the circumstances, it would be cancelled.

  ‘No, no,’ Laurence said intensely. ‘I spoke to Dr Ngema today. She said we must go ahead.’

  ‘But what about Tehogo?’

  ‘Well, it’s serious, of course... but life goes on, Frank. I don’t need to tell you that.’

  And I saw that – for the first time – there was a patient in the hospital Laurence didn’t care about. He was perturbed and upset, but he wished Tehogo away: this was a setback to his own, more glorious project.

  What had we come to at last? The familiar world was turned on its head. The nurse had become a patient. The dedicated and caring young doctor had eyes only for himself, while I, the bitter unbeliever, would have prayed if I thought it would help.

  There might be a lesson in all this, if I could only find it.

  Meanwhile I hovered nervously in the office, though my duty was over and weariness had set in.

  ‘Why don’t you get some sleep?’ Laurence said eventually. ‘You look worn out.’

  ‘I’ll go in a moment. I’m just waiting.’

  ‘Waiting for what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He studied me, appraising me. ‘I thought you didn’t like Tehogo,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t. But I don’t want him to die.’

  ‘Remember what you told me once. Symbols have got nothing to do with medicine.’

  ‘What do you mean? Tehogo’s not a symbol for me.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  In the morning Tehogo was awake. His gaze rested on me, cool and liquid, unblinking. I could see myself reflected there, a double image, before his eyes slid away on to the floor.

  Claudia Santander was on duty that day, but I told her that I would fill in for her. She was confused. ‘No, no,’ she kept saying. ‘Clinic is tomorrow. I no want work tomorrow.’

  ‘You don’t have to. I’m not swapping duties with you. I just want to work today, no exchange, no strings attached.’

  She didn’t understand, but eventually she left me to it. So through that next day too I waited on Tehogo. Dr Ngema came by and took out the IV drip and disconnected him from the ventilator. These were signs of his rapid recovery. But the bullet was still in him and would have to be removed.

  ‘We’ll wait a day or two before we operate,’ Dr Ngema said. ‘Let him stabilize first. What do you think, Frank?’

  ‘I think he should be moved to the other hospital.’

  ‘But I’m sure we can take care of it here... He’s much better now.’

  She wanted my agreement, but I wanted him gone. I wanted him far from here, where they couldn’t get him. ‘I feel very strongly about it,’ I said. ‘Let me move him.’

  ‘Well... All right.’ She blinked uncertainly. ‘But he’s too weak at the moment.’

  ‘Tomorrow then. I’ll do it first thing.’

  ‘It’s the clinic tomorrow.’

  I stared at her. ‘But surely you’re not going ahead with that? Surely it should be cancelled? Under the circumstances.’

  ‘Oh, no. No, that isn’t possible, Frank.’ She looked troubled. ‘It’s too important for us, the minister is expecting it... Not at this late stage.’

  ‘Well, I’ll skip it,’ I said angrily. ‘I’ll take him through.’

  I wasn’t asking; she could hear the vehemence in my voice. She was too bewildered to resist.

  Tehogo listened to all this without a word. He was still too weak and sore to speak, but when Dr Ngema talked to him he nodded or shook his head. Yes, he was comfortable. Yes, he had a headache. No, he didn’t need the bedpan.

  ‘When he’s a bit stronger, later, try to get him to talk,’ Dr Ngema said. This was by way of a whispered aside in the office. ‘Try to find out what happened to him.’

  She said this with anxiety, but I could see she didn’t want to question him herself. She was happy to leave this delicate task to me. But Tehogo wouldn’t speak to me. Even through the weakness and the morphine, some memory of his rancour still persisted: when I talked to him his eyes made that same show of looking, then sliding away.

  It didn’t stop me. He was still my captive patient, chained to his bed. The cloths had been untied from his feet and one hand, but the handcuff was there, rattling whenever he moved. He saw it, and he saw the soldier in the corner.

  There was a new man on duty today, a nervous-looking type who sat stolidly, rifle between his knees, watching. This one took his job seriously; he wasn’t tempted by the office, with its coffee and darts. He watched me come in and out, in and out, on my various little missions.

  Tehogo could eat now, only liquid food because the tubes had left his throat raw. So twice that day I carried soup in to him on a tray and fed it to him carefully, spoon by spoon. His mouth opened and accepted, but his eyes avoided me. He underwent all my other attentions with the same burning passivity. He was meek, but I could feel his real feelings, buried and secret, coming off him like a heat.

  I had to help him to urinate too. Sitting side by side like old friends, my one arm draped across his shoulders to support him. He closed his eyes to cover the humiliation, and he did that again later when I washed him. I cleaned his body section by section, as if both of us were machines – though we had never been less mechanical.

  I didn’t talk to him. Not even the questions Dr Ngema wanted me to ask, though I wanted the answers too. Only once did a few words escape me; I leaned close to him and whispered into his ear.

  ‘I told you you’re not my enemy, Tehogo,’ I said. ‘Would I treat my enemy like this?’

  The soldier looked up sharply: what subversive information was being exchanged so softly? But Tehogo’s face stayed sealed. He wasn’t going to give me anything.

  I think of that evening as the last one, the final night; though at the time it felt ordinary. There was no weight of destiny on anything, so that it is hard now to remember any particular detail. It was like so many other nights – like all the other nights I’d spent at the hospital, whittling my life away. I was very tired, I do remember that, as if I’d used up my energy out of all proportion to the work. So that when Laurence arrived for his duty, I didn’t feel like hanging around any more. There was nothing to be anxious about, after all. In the morning I would be taking Tehogo away.

  ‘Are you all set for tomorrow, Frank?’ Laurence said cheerfully.

  ‘For what? Oh, Laurence, I can’t make the clinic. I have to move Tehogo.’

  ‘But why tomorrow? Can’t he wait another day?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. It’s not possible.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Of course. No problem. I didn’t really think you’d come anyway.’

  Was all this actually said, did we even have this conversation? I don’t know; I may have added to the memory afterwards. It seems wrong – after all the important words – that the final words should be lost in banality.

  So I remember, or I imagine, that the last time I saw Laurence his face had a trace
of petulance in it. He pretended it didn’t matter, but he was hurt all over again. I was letting him down one more time, just as he’d half-expected me to. I called out to say goodbye, but he occupied himself by rummaging about in the supply cupboard. My own voice, calling out his name, set up little shivery echoes in the empty passage.

  And in the morning he was gone. So was the soldier, so was Tehogo. And to get around the little problem of the handcuffs, they had taken the bed too.

  18

  I had set the alarm to wake up early. As I crossed the open ground between the buildings, it was just past dawn. In the pale light I could see people at the main wing, coming and going.

  Dr Ngema met me at the door. Her face was wooden; it took her a while to get her words out.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ she said. ‘Gone.’

  ‘Who? What do you mean?’

  But I knew already, though I had to go down the passage to the deserted ward to understand. And even then I stared at the bare patch on the floor, slightly cleaner than the area around it, as if it contained a message that I might decipher in time.

  And in a few minutes I became one of those aimless people who were coming and going, coming and going. There was no frenzy or focus to the movement. Everybody was in shock. It seemed astonishing that three human beings and a hospital bed could have vanished in the night. So silently, so completely without trace. As if a huge hand had reached down to sweep them all away.

  How did it happen? How many of them were there, what weapons did they have? Did they drive in through the main gate, like visitors, or did they slip in over the wall like assassins? I didn’t know; I could never know the answers to these questions, because it happened in another country, while I slept.

  And Laurence – why had they taken him, what did he do to make his disappearance necessary? I could almost guess at this, although I hadn’t seen it: he would have stood in their way, he would have inserted himself between Tehogo and the enemy. I’m sorry, you can’t take him, he is my patient. I have a duty to protect him. Duty, honour, obligation – Laurence lived for words like these, and in the end he died for them too.

  It could just as easily have been one of the other doctors doing their shift of duty that night; it could even have been me. And then it might have turned out differently. I didn’t live for words like duty. Not many people do. It turned out, for example, that the soldier hadn’t been taken. He’d run for his life when he saw them coming. Hours later he would return from the bush, trailing his shame and his rifle. The bed would also be recovered, disassembled and broken into pieces in the grass; only one end of it, the part where Tehogo had been chained, never came back.

  But all of this was later, in the logical stage of explanation and reason. There was no logic or reason that morning. There was only the long lonely passage, and that blank space in the ward, like a pulled tooth.

  Dr Ngema was one of the aimless bodies. She turned to me later with obvious desperation.

  ‘It’s unbelievable. I can’t believe it. Frank, what shall we do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said dully. ‘Report it.’

  ‘I have. I spoke to that man, that army man. He said he’d do everything in his power...’

  ‘Then there’s nothing more you can do.’

  ‘He said I should write everything up in a report. All the facts. I’ll have to do that later. After the clinic.’

  ‘You’re still going to the clinic?’

  ‘What can we do?’ she cried. ‘It’s all arranged!’

  And soon afterwards they disappeared – the three of them that were left, the Santanders and Dr Ngema. They were going to do their duty at the gathering where electricity was being connected for the first time. I think they thought I would be following them in my own car, but I didn’t follow. I wandered up and down the passage, and then up and down the upstairs passage too, and then outside, in the grass.

  It felt to me that he was still out there somewhere, close by, alive. Laurence – with his ideals and his sense of duty. Of course maybe he wasn’t; he may already have been lying in a ditch or a shallow grave, with his throat cut or a bullet in his head – whatever happened to him in the end. I have tried, since then, to imagine it – his final moments, the climax of his story – but on that day the pictures wouldn’t come. Being murdered and thrown away like a piece of rubbish: that was something that happened to other people, people one didn’t know, not to Laurence. No, he was out there, not too far away, keeping his outrage and hope alive. Waiting for somebody to help him – because that was what people did: they helped each other.

  And so it was coming to me at last: my moment, if not of truth, then at least of action. Too late, all the connections missed. But my life was finally yielding up an instant of real courage. I didn’t know it yet; I could only sense a gathering power, which felt as yet somewhere outside of me, and even when I got into my car and drove out of the gate I had no clear idea of where I was going.

  This time I took the turning and lurched and bumped down the rutted dirt road. I knew by then, of course; in the way that you might deduce a man’s intentions by watching what he was doing. The occasion was rising in me and I could already see my arrival: driving at speed through the front gate, wheels churning up a cloud of dust and valour and high drama around me. But down at the bottom of the little dip my car hit a rock and stalled and it wouldn’t start again. My momentum was dissipating and before it could leave me completely I got out and staggered at a half-run up the slope. I saw how I would go in amongst all the amazed faces to the one face that mattered and fall on my knees in front of him.

  I am here, I would say, to offer myself in exchange. Not for Tehogo – he’s one of you, take him. For the other one. He is nothing to you, I know that, but to me he has become everything. Everything, at least, that I am not. Character is fate, it is my fate to have done nothing with my life, except to watch and judge and find everything wanting, so allow me in my final moment to transform myself. I beg you, take me in his place, give me a death that will make sense of my life, do what you want with me, but let him go.

  I would have. I would have said it all. In that moment I wasn’t afraid to die.

  But of course they weren’t there; I don’t know why I thought they would be. They must have left the camp for good when Tehogo was shot, and there was no reason ever to come back. It was only in my mind that they were fixed in one place, like a target at which I had aimed my life like an arrow. But I had missed again. I couldn’t even summon up a proper tragedy from all the promising raw material of my life.

  So there was nothing to face up to in the end, except the ridiculous figure that was myself. Heavy, long past his prime, gasping for breath. Standing doubled-over in the centre of this deserted theatre, watched only by rotten canvas and rusted barbed wire.

  And him. After a few minutes he appeared, looking calm and a bit bored, strolling over from the far side of the camp, where I only now saw the top of his jeep sticking up.

  He was wearing his uniform again. But his bearing today was casual, more civilian than military. He had his hands in his pockets and he was whistling through his teeth.

  ‘Good morning, Doctor,’ he said.

  He didn’t seem surprised to see me there. Only a little amused at how sweaty I was.

  ‘You need some basic training,’ he said. ‘That’ll get you into shape.’

  ‘I came...’ I said. ‘I came... to look...’

  ‘Me too. Your boss, that doctor lady, told me what happened. So I thought it was time to check out your story. See if there was anything here. But...’

  He gestured at the decay around us, the brown weeds pushing through the ground.

  ‘It’s not true,’ I said. ‘You’ve been here before. Why do you go on denying it?’

  He smiled thinly; he was in a good mood today. ‘But there’s nobody here. Except us. And it’s a kak place.’

  ‘What will happen now?’

  ‘Nothing. They’ve gone. I don’t
think we’ll be seeing them again.’

  ‘I meant... what will happen to him? To my friend.’

  ‘I was talking about your friend,’ he said.

  And then there was nothing more to say. It had all run out here, in the unlikeliest of places, on an ordinary day.

  ‘How did you get here?’ he said. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

  ‘My car’s down there. It’s stuck.’

  ‘I’ll come and give you a hand. Let me just get my jeep.’

  He started to turn away, whistling again, but I said, ‘Commandant.’

  I don’t know where it came from, this pointless need to tell the truth.

  ‘You mean Colonel,’ he said.

  ‘I know you from before. Do you remember?’

  It was extraordinary how his face changed. He was instantly alert. Something in him contracted to that hard core, tiny and closed and impregnable. He was watching me as if from a long way off.

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Up on the border.’ I named the camp and the year. I saw his mind fix on that time in his head, then on my face, trying to fit the two together.

  ‘I was working as a medic,’ I said. ‘You used to call on the captain sometimes to help you. But one night the captain wasn’t there and you called me instead.’

  ‘You helped me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He stared at me for a moment longer and then he lost interest. I could see it happen. There was no danger to him; I was just a piece of flotsam after all.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘But we spoke to each other.’

  ‘Maybe so. I spoke to a lot of people up there. I’m sorry.’

  His tone was brisk and detached. He wasn’t interested any more. I had made my little confession, but he couldn’t give me absolution. Acting on an impulse that I didn’t understand, I took two steps towards him and held out my hand. He shook it. The gesture was nothing, an empty formality; the real transaction had happened a long time ago.