The Hospital in Buwambo

by Anne Vinton

“First I’ll supply some reading matter,” he told her “and you’ll read every sentence. Understand? You’ve impressed me so far or I wouldn’t be bothered with you. And you’ve aroused my interest too. What’s wrong with life to drive you like this—and to drive you here? Now pander a little to my curiosity, eh, Dr. Phillips?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  During the weeks that followed, Sylvia often doubted her sanity in having openly expressed a desire to learn more than she knew already about ophthalmic surgery. Was there not already more than enough work for six surgeons in Buwambo? That two pairs of hands could get through so much made her marvel as it was. The sick and injured arrived daily. Sylvia had her fill of abscesses, stomach ulcers and such commonplaces, and was soon accepting the removal of guinea worms, locally known as jiggers, and crab lice as part of the daily round. Carroll did most of the heavy operations, and those requiring the greater physical strength, such as the plating of a split femur or an amputation. Sylvia automatically stitched after him, however, a task of which he seemed glad to be relieved. He admired her scars and told her they were neat jobs, which made her glow inwardly and remember afterward in the privacy of her quarters, where she could live the moment of praise over again.

  One evening Carroll requested that she should hurry over dinner and join him in the theater as soon as possible. Thinking there was to be an emergency operation, Sylvia rushed her meal and hastened back into the hospital. The night staff looked at her askance as she hurried toward the theater. There was no sign of Sister Kineton or Dr. Kalengo on the premises, which struck Sylvia as odd.

  Scrubbed-up and gowned, Sylvia entered the theater, then stopped short and stared. On the operating table lay a grotesque little figure, its long, hairy arms the length of its limp body and bandy legs. It was a baby chimpanzee.

  “What?” asked Sylvia in some annoyance. “Is this a joke, sir?”

  “I am not in the habit of joking Dr. Phillips,” returned Carroll coldly. “And if I were this is hardly the place I’d choose for pranks. This is one of God’s creatures, as you are, and it happens to be afflicted in a way that interests me. It is without sight.”

  “Oh?” queried Sylvia nervously, beginning to see what the unusual summons was all about.

  “I think it’s time you started,” Carroll went on. “Of course it’s impossible to do a complicated job with a patient deeply anesthetized, as you know, but one can’t keep an animal still enough, so I’ve given him a sedative and a spinal injection as well as a local for the op itself. There’s nothing much he can do about anything at the moment. I hope he won’t mind being your guinea pig. Now this is what I want you to do...”

  For a solid hour Sylvia listened, incised with instruments of such delicacy that they were like bladed needles, and kept her own true eyes trained achingly on the job, through the magnifying medium of an ophthalmoscope. While Carroll watched and rapped out instructions, she removed worthless tissue and implanted the living cornea of a dead monkey’s eye into one of the sightless orbs before her. The chimp was conscious during this process, as he had to be, but the spinal injection made his lower half incapable of movement. The long, spidery arms stirred futilely in protest, but under the drowsy spell of the sedative the creature was not unduly worried.

  The operation was finally completed and the eyes bandaged firmly with an adhesive dressing. “Bimbo,” as Sylvia had christened him, was then placed on clean straw in a cage and taken off to have his sleep out in a hut behind the hospital.

  Sylvia scrubbed up, and all signs of monkey business were removed from the theater.

  “Well?” Carroll asked, almost too casually, as they left the hospital together.

  “Fascinating,” gasped Sylvia, feeling strangely exhilarated. “I suppose it’s the way a clockmaker feels when he’s given a miniature watch to repair. Everything’s so tiny and—involved. But there’s an essence of satisfaction in it. I—like it.”

  “I rather thought you would,” said Carroll, looking pleased. “You have an inquiring mind and a good interpretive technique. You might do in opthalmics.”

  “But will Bimbo be any good?” she demanded.

  He dismissed her peremptorily. “Put it down to experience.”

  As it turned out, Sylvia’s first essay into ophthalmic surgery was not botched. Bimbo responded to light when his bandages were removed, and after a few days he was definitely seeing as could be witnessed by a shuddering, dreadful fear that beset him when the world became an alien place, as opposed to the friendly darkness he had known since his birth.

  “I suppose you mean to have a go at that boy of yours, some day?” Carroll asked unexpectedly.

  “Oh—I—” she was caught unawares.

  “Oh, come now, Dr. Phillips,” he smiled. “I give you a blind steward and you immediately show an interest in ophthalmology. Don’t you even know yourself?” He shook his head at her.

  “Please don’t rush me,” she begged sincerely. “I don’t think I could tackle a human being with his sight at stake, sir.”

  “We all have to break hearts at some time or other,” he said gently. “Maybe it hasn’t happened to you, yet. You’re young and you haven’t been on your own. But I’ll bet MacAlpine could describe the way they look at you when you tell them the leg or the arm has to come off, that the beloved child is going to die despite your surgery, that only a miracle can save someone’s sight, and that you, personally, did not get your degree in performing miracles. Yes,” he sighed, “they look, and then they plead again and again. To them every operation has the potential of a miracle. I often wish I had worked in a bank!” he exploded.

  “But you could, have worked in a bank after your accident,” she reminded him slyly.

  “You have a way, Dr. Phillips,” he said thoughtfully, “of getting to know one disconcertingly well. That is an accomplishment I would expect only in my wife.”

  Leaving her to digest this, he swept away about his business.

  As the rains were turning the roads into miniature rivers on occasion, Carroll suggested that Sylvia take her five days’ leave a week ahead of time. Actually she would have preferred her leave to take the form of a languid sojourn either in, or in close proximity to, her bed, where she could have caught up with neglected letter-writing and determinedly non-professional literature. But the superintendent seemed to expect that she would be going south to Lagos, and accordingly arranged for the supply truck to transport her. Dr. Kalengo was acting as escort on the outward journey, as he was detailed to collect Taki’s artificial limb, expected on the mailboat, and also to interview a pathologist at present working at the African hospital in the coastal city, with a view to the man’s transferring to Buwambo, where he could prove himself extremely useful.

  Sylvia intended to make the return journey in her own small car, having decided that on its low fuel consumption she could travel back to Buwambo in one long day, rather than spend another night at that dubious rest house on the way. She did not speak of this to Carroll, and he fully believed the truck would be bringing her back again. To secure his own peace of mind, he told Kadiri to make the trip down the coast and visit his father, who had sought occupation in Lagos in recent years. He knew the blind boy was devoted to his mistress, and sightless as he was, would still defend her—if need be—to the death.

  All unaware of this rather touching concern for her well-being, Sylvia appeared on duty the day prior to her leave feeling none too happy. She thought the day abnormally hot; the thick vapor rising in a yellow fog from the earth was particularly enervating and unpleasant. It would be good to cleanse one’s being at the sea.

  In the morning, Sylvia complained to Kadiri of the cold. She was shivering and a headache oppressed her.

  “I bring you hot coffee,” Kadiri promised, “then we must hurry away in truck. Must travel far today.”

  Like all of her kind, Sylvia was least qualified to diagnose for herself when she ailed, and at this moment it was her own high temperature that had a
pparently cooled the African day. She had become infected with malaria, having omitted to take her dose of paludrine with any regularity and being averse to the mosquito netting while she slept each night.

  When the truck left the compound, however, Sylvia was with it, ensconced in a deep chair Carroll had fixed for her in the rear, as comfortable as one could be on such a journey. Having seen her settled, Dr. Kalengo got up in front beside the driver and his mate. Kadiri huddled beside the secured tailboard of the truck, delightedly gulping in the dust along with the steaming air.

  They had been traveling for some time when Sylvia’s headache lifted a little, leaving her feeling somewhat dazed and with a sensation of unreality about the day’s events. When Kadiri suddenly rose, grinned hideously at her and then disappeared over the tailboard, she gave a small scream. The lad was immediately at her side, startled.

  “What is it?” he asked sharply.

  “Oh”—she took shaking hands away from her eyes—“so you didn’t fall out! You’re here all the time...” It began to dawn on her that the borderline between sanity and macabre nightmare was not far away. Holding on to her senses by sheer willpower, she reassured the steward.

  “It’s all right, Kadiri, go back to your place. Careful, now!”

  Her mental processes slowing down, she still acted with precision and discipline. Now she knew she had a fever. She doubted that she had the strength to knock on the cab partition hard enough to attract Kalengo’s attention. If she told Kadiri she was unwell, he might, in his excitement, cause an accident. He hadn’t sight, which she still had, though she longed to close her eyes and surrender. Remembering the superintendent’s period of violence, she decided to guard against the danger of harming herself and others. Fumbling heavily for the Red Cross kit box close by, she withdrew some tabloids of mepacrine, swallowed two with difficulty and then struggled with the hypodermic syringe and a small bottle of morphine. Making the jab in her own arm was difficult, so overpowering was the ague that possessed her, but as she withdrew the needle the blessed peace the injection afforded began to spread through her being.

  CHAPTER NINE

  During this time Martin Shale had not allowed the grass to grow under his feet. While he stayed on at St. Augustine’s he was the first to admit that his notoriously happy personality had undergone metamorphosis and become a somewhat gray and somber thing which had lost the knack of wresting enjoyment out of living.

  For this gloomy fact Sylvia was to blame. He was now completely convinced of her guilt on this point. She had no right to go out of his life the way she had done, having burned there, a steady flame, for all of six years. If he had failed to play the gallant with her, as she might have wished, she should know a fellow had to be cautious about such things. He had given Sylvia a thing of more value than the odd spot of necking; he had given her his friendship. They had been friends while mere romances bloomed briefly and died all around them. Even his big romance had died, rather painfully, and it was to be expected that Sylvia would still be there to console him during the period of mourning as she always had been. But Sylvia was not there any more; she had taken some huff about Kay and practically told him to run away out of her life and play. This treatment he could not countenance. The facts were there staring him in the face, but he was not prepared to accept them with any grace or finality.

  But nothing is impossible if the will—or the grudge—be strong enough. Martin would lie in his bed and dwell lovingly on his reunion with Sylvia, out in the African bush. He saw her hair lank with sweat, her complexion cracked and poor, but how touchingly glad she always was to see him—in his pipe dream.

  Bob Carnoustie worked alongside him in the pathology lab, but Bob was Martin’s senior by one examination successfully negotiated. So when both men submitted their names for consideration in staffing a traveling unit preparing to tour Sierra Leone, Bob was accepted and Martin was not.

  Martin was galled by this. Nothing seemed to be going right for him. Of course Sierra Leone was not Nigeria, exactly, but at least it was within a thousand miles of Sylvia, and there would always be a leave period sooner or later.

  Martin was petulant and sulky when Bob Carnoustie approached him one day just before the unit was due to leave.

  “I’ve got most of my kit,” Bob said uneasily.

  “Have you?” Martin studied a slide in front of him intently and pointedly.

  “Yes. It’s a damned nuisance.”

  “Why should it be? You’ll need it out there, won’t you?” Having rammed home this shaft of ironic humor, Martin went back to his slide.

  “I would have done. But I blinkin’ well can’t go now! Women are the devil!”

  “Can’t go? Women...? What the hell are you binding about?” Martin demanded.

  “It’s Cora.” Carnoustie was engaged to be married to a rather luscious Wren. “She won’t wait six months for me. She says couples break up no matter how hard they try to remember one another, and that absence always makes the heart grow fonder—of somebody else. Anyway, she’s not prepared to risk it, and I get the ring back tonight if the trip’s still on.”

  “So it’s off?” Martin asked hopefully.

  “Rather! If I can get someone to take my place. The Unit S.M.O.’s a bit of a tartar, and he says he has been messed about enough already without chasing around for a replacement in pathology. But where in Christendom will I find a pathologist at forty-eight hours’ notice?”

  “I’ll go,” Martin said promptly.

  It was quiet for a while at the bush hospital, which was fortunate as Sylvia and Dr. Kalengo were both temporarily absent from duty. It could be that the time was not ripe for pestilence. That would come in the season after the rains. It always did. Floods would wash out the very bowels of the earth, and flies and fleas would travel into the homes of the people, contaminating their food and poisoning their blood.

  But whatever the reason, there were actually empty beds in Buwambo hospital, and Sister Kineton was glad to see the superintendent occasionally relax in one of the long porch chairs, his unlit pipe drooping from his mouth.

  “Would they be worth a penny, sir?” she asked him on the second day, teasingly. She repeated the question, this time with a slight frown. After all, he was looking at her, or was it through her?

  “Oh—Sister,”—he actually looked disconcerted for a moment— “I was miles away.”

  “I gathered that. Why not? It’s quiet.”

  “Yes—too quiet!” He answered vehemently, and actually clenched his hands, all relaxation gone from him. “Too damned quiet!”

  A horrible suspicion dawned on Sister Kineton that he was not referring to lack of work in the hospital, and that he was, in fact, missing somebody from the scene. Obviously that person was not Dr. Kalengo, necessary as his presence might be.

  Sylvia awoke in an Arcadia of peace and happiness. Her eyes, seeing clearly now that the curtain of pain was lifted, rested on the marbled floor of the hotel bedroom. Only one needle of sunlight pierced the cooled air; this came through a hole in the candy-striped blind outside the window, and was a rendezvous for the dancing motes of otherwise invisible dust in the atmosphere. A fan hummed constantly overhead, but there was a breeze, too, from the window. Sylvia had already noted, and appreciated, the breeze off the sea. It started to blow at seven-thirty in the morning and dropped as suddenly at seven-thirty each evening, without fail. One could set one’s watch by it and not be more than two minutes out either way.

  Now Sylvia was gazing rather ruefully at a large plateful of sausages, potatoes and bacon when the doctor came in to take her pulse, then her temperature.

  “I can’t believe you are so well, Dr. Phillips! I am so very relieved!”

  He took out a large white handkerchief and mopped his brow.

  “You worry too much, Dr. Kalengo,” she said easily. “I have a wonderful constitution.”

  “A good constitution is not always proof against a new infection,” the man said seriousl
y. “I am so glad you did have that slight malaria on your holiday visit to Morocco, as you told me. At the time I have no doubt you were not happy about it. Nevertheless, it was probably the means of saving your life on this occasion.”

  Sylvia did not argue. She had once given him credit for knowing his tropical medicine, so obviously that knowledge must equally apply to her own case.

  “My train goes in an hour,” he went on worriedly. “I don’t know what to do!”

  “You must go back as expected,” she told him. “I shall be all right now. I’ll take things easily, don’t fear, and return as planned.”

  “You are sure, Dr. Phillips?” he asked.

  “Certain. I want to enjoy a bit of my leave, but I won’t do anything strenuous.”

  “Good! Then discontinue the mepacrine after today. I must go now. I have to get a taxi to take me to the station. It’s about three miles out, over the Carter Bridge at a place called Ebute Metta. A beautiful tongue, the Yoruba, don’t you think?”

  “Musical,” Sylvia agreed. “By the way, Dr. Kalengo, I don’t think you need report all this back to the hospital, do you? It might cause some unnecessary—er—anxiety. After all, I am no worse.”

  Dr. Kalengo saluted her and left.

  Sylvia tried out her legs, finding them a little shaky but adequate. She recoiled when she saw herself in the dressing-table mirror.

  Sylvia caused some eyebrow raising when, after luncheon, she had a visitor. A young man was brought to her in the visitors’ lounge where she was reading a newspaper only a week old. It was exciting to read of thunderstorms breaking up the ideal holiday weather on the west coast of Britain.

  The young man announced himself flamboyantly, almost with a heel-clicking, as Dr. Wilstrop of Liverpool, England. He was working, he said, in a temporary capacity at the hospital on the marina. Had she seen it?

  “How did you know of me?” Sylvia asked.