by Lucie Wilk
*
As Dr. Bryce approaches, as the wind swept by the doctor’s long, white coat—stale, rotten from the wards—moves into him, Jakob turns away from him to the open window. He busies himself with the corner between the floor and the wall which he sweeps back and forth, moving the dirt here then there, until the doctor is long past. Then he turns and watches the doctor stride away. From here Jakob can study his posture, the way he holds his shoulders, the tautness of the muscles of his neck. Then Jakob lifts his shoulders the same way, feels the tension, feels it all the way up to his head where he imagines so much information is stored, information that he can use any which way he pleases: to remove pain or let it linger, to end disease or allow it to fester and progress, to ward off death or to invite it into a body where it can wiggle and worm its way into all the hidden areas, all the unseen secrets exposed in the moments before death moves in. He has seen this so many times now, when an orderly is called to shift another of death’s many residences to the morgue, away from the searching eyes of the living. Jakob wants, like the doctor, to use what fills his head to make these sorts of decisions, to decide the fate of another. As it is, despite his head being filled with thoughts, ideas, plans, he cannot decide anyone’s fate. Beyond whether he gets up in the morning off the pallet on the floor beside his mother’s cot, whether he shows up for work or whether he gives up altogether, he cannot even decide his own.
And this is perhaps where it came from. That feeling that bound him, in that moment, to the boy under the tree. He knows the boy’s need to shatter fate, to take control. The need to snatch just one decision from the doctor’s hands. The need to be important. And the boy’s actions stirred a wretched and bilious sense of injustice within Jakob. This doctor makes so many decisions—several decisions a minute, thousands an hour, a million a day, all affecting others—a flick of his fingers and a family grieves or does not. And he, Jakob, is left deciding nothing. He knows, logically, that it is not as simple as that. They were not all present at the table when the pie was cut. But he is beginning to understand that his own buried anger is what brought them here to the hospital, what saved his mother, what got him this job. The shame he felt that day has now been replaced with something harder, more adult and certain. He is done with being a boy. He is ready to take on the harsher things, the ugly things, and he is in the right place to do it.
*
Henry leans over the patient who has just been wheeled in. The man breathes with difficulty, and there are a lot of secretions: his lungs are wet, his mouth is wet, his skin is wet. He thinks it might be OP poisoning, just like the case he’d seen with Kumwembe when he first arrived. He is trying to wrap a blood pressure cuff around the man’s arm and he is having little success so far—the arm is slippery and the man writhes. Henry feels a grip on his own arm now and the man’s clutch is tight. Henry drops the cuff and works at prying the man’s fingers off his forearm but they won’t budge. The patient’s gaze and hand are fixed on him and Henry is beginning to feel a rising panic. He looks at the man’s bloodshot eyes and sees the boy, or rather what the boy had in him when he looked at Henry that day under the tree, which was hate. It was a hate that had a maturity about it, as though it had been fed a steady diet of something merciless that would enable it to flourish in the hidden recesses of the boy for years. Not just years, but lifetimes, generations, all of the depraved and deprived and depressed history—all this was packed into that boy’s narrowed eyes. And here it is again seeping out of this man as he fixes him with that stare.
Henry plucks at the man’s fingers uselessly, feels his own fingers grow numb. The man needs medical attention or he will die gripping Henry’s arm and gripping Henry’s mind with that look. And now the man is hissing something at him: “sss .. ayyy .. fff.” It is drowned in all the saliva, he can’t make it out. The man spits on the floor and repeats it: “Save my life.”
Henry stops. For a moment, it is a threat, what he has said. Save my life or I’ll take yours with mine. But then Henry sees what is in the man’s eyes. It is not hate at all. It is fear. He says to the patient: “Yes, I will. I will.” And the man lets go of him and closes his eyes.
Henry gets the blood pressure cuff on the man’s arm now, and compresses the pump until the cuff is squeezing his arm tightly enough to stop the blood from flowing. The cuff deflates as he slowly releases the air and allows the blood to flow past the cuff and back into the man’s hand, as he listens for his pulse to break through and thump in his ears. He looks at the red finger marks on his own arm and feels his own blood throb there as he listens to the rush through the patient’s brachial artery.
They have the same pulse.
It is a shared beat of hope and fear, fear and hope. Two sides of the same coin. Emotions spent on possibility, never certainty. He wonders how many times he has confused them.
The man turned around remarkably fast. A single dose of atropine and the secretions stopped, the confusion improved and soon he was standing and walking and talking and the next day he left the hospital. Henry watched him go, his eyes now hardened again, the fear tucked back inside. He’d flashed Henry a quick look as he gathered his sandals before leaving the ward. Hate, or anger, or at least dislike.
Now Henry is finding it everywhere. What was in the boy’s eyes has been appearing like a phantom, a flicker behind every other pair of eyes, buried beneath smiles and kind words. And it is there in the mirror when he is brushing his teeth, or splashing water on his face. His whole face is contorted with it.
Part II
There is a field
Chapter 10
Iris sits in the back seat of Dr. Ellison’s car, along with a bag of medical equipment. They are on their way to the Mlela outreach clinic. Dr. Bryce sits in the passenger seat in front of her, and she can see the back of his neck, where his red-gold hair narrows to a soft, fuzzy peak that points downwards to his spine. She can see Dr. Ellison’s hands as they casually grip the steering wheel. She can see Dr. Bryce’s face, just a piece of it, in the side-view mirror. He is gazing out the window, his brow tight and dark.
Iris told her mother over dinner the night before they were to leave. She told her mother she was going to Mlela, that one of the doctors had asked for her. That she was needed to assist the doctors in their work. That to say no would be to turn away from her position as a carer, turn away from her Education, turn away an opportunity to help close to home. Maybe she would even be able to help people from their village. Imagine that! Helping their own villagers, their own family.
Her mother had squeezed her eyes closed. You won’t come back, she said. You will be lost.
Iris left early the next morning while her mother lay curled up on her side of the mat, pretending to sleep. She kissed her mother’s shoulder and whispered ndapita. Goodbye.
Iris has imagined the reunion with her villagers many times. She imagines that when they appear, her head will be bent over a patient in the clinic, perhaps applying a bandage, and she will hear her name, pronounced in the thick tongue of her people, pronounced with amazement and joy. It will be a homecoming, with laughter and hugs, and she will finally feel that her longing, that constant hunger, is fed. No one will say anything about matsenga, or bad luck, they will only say that she has been dearly missed, that they, too, have dreamed of this reunion, that the village has been incomplete without her.
As Iris imagines this again, as she tries to conjure the faces of the people of her village in the shrubs and grass of the fields that float by beyond the window, she feels the car slow. Dr. Ellison gears down and jerks the car sideways, over to the edge of the road and half on the grass beside it. He pulls the car to a stop. Iris now sees the man—a local man but not a villager, a medical man—outside the vehicle, running alongside the road toward them, arms waving high above his head. Ellison cranks down his window and leans his arm and head out.
“There is a child,” says the man as he c
omes up to the car. He leans on the car with both arms, heaves a few more breathes before continuing. “He fell and broke his leg. Very sick.” He chops at his femur with the side of his hand. “Broken.” He says. “Terrible.”
Dr. Ellison, very calm, asks where he is.
The man has caught his breath and stands straight. He points down the road. Toward the late morning sun. “A mile or two further, then right on the first road you come to. In a village there. You will see.”
Ellison nods again and says thank you. He rolls up his window and the man steps back. Thank you Dr. Ellison, he says as the window moves up, closes the gap. He wears a blue surgical cap, and a clean, white shirt. She wonders what he does at the clinic, what sorts of minor procedures does this man perform, what does he treat, what does he cure, how many ill does he see in a day? Someday she will run a clinic like this, near her village, saving her people from things that the sing’anga cannot. Then she is ashamed by her ambition.
Dr. Ellison turns to Dr. Bryce. “A fractured femur, from the sounds of it. If that’s the case, we’ll probably have to return to Blantyre.” He starts the car and they move off the grass, back onto the road where they pick up speed and leave the man far behind.
Iris tries to stifle the disappointment that rises. It is no use and the tears come. Her dreams of reunion with her villagers dissolve in an instant; they were held together by mere threads of hope, anyway. Of the fifty or so villages near the clinic, what were the chances someone from her own village would seek western medical aid?
The road unwinds in front of the car. Grasslands stretch to the right and left, ahead and behind. There is a diagram in her nursing textbook that shows how an image passes through the lens of the eye and becomes inverted on the retina. Right now half of a blue sky illuminates the bottom of her retina, and the dry grasses brush overtop of it. Then it flips back upright as it passes deeper, into the rear of her brain where her visual cortex is coiled like layers of fat sausages. This swinging, spinning, half-blue, half-yellow image sweeps through her mind, brushing away the last 25 years, clearing the dust in her cortex, waking it up. A memory now shines as clear as the day it occurred—that final day in Mapiri. The day they left the village.
We are leaving.
Her mother came into the khumbi and said it. She was sweaty from carrying the water from the well. Two miles she had walked with so many litres of water balanced on her head. Her older sister Grace used to help her, carrying her own smaller jug. Then her mother went alone.
All the children were there when she said this. All looked up at her, not really understanding what leaving meant. This khumbi? They will have a new one? A bigger one, perhaps? A child’s mind always leaps to the hopeful possibilities. It was her brother who asked: When?
Soon.
Just an hour later the group of them walked down the main path of the village. The whole of Mapiri village came to watch them leave.
During that walk her mother gripped her hand and her younger sister Hope’s (her brother followed them carrying their only bag of belongings) and looked forward—proud and determined—like they were going toward something, not leaving anything behind. Iris spent most of the final walk out of Mapiri village looking at her mother, at the firm, half-smile on her face. And once they were through the field and on the long red road that would take them to their new home, her mother filled their heads with stories of their future. What they would do, where they would live, who they would meet. A wondrous life awaited them, just down the road, just around the next bend.
And now she has a thought: not new, it has lived in those coiled, fatty sausages of her cortex for years, just now setting off a string of neuronal firings to a sudden awareness, a truth. This new life was not a choice. Those faces, lined up along the path as they walked, they weren’t the faces of well-wishers. And the way her mother held her head that day—
stubborn—like a proud walk to the gaol. The village wanted her family to leave, and to take their darkness with them. Three consecutive deaths and an injury could only be a terrible
sorcery. Matsenga, matsenga. How could she have forgotten the whispers, the accusations? Their village was stricken by evil, and the nest from which the darkness roamed was within her family. Of course this nest needed to be expelled, for the greater good, for the safety of the village.
Iris’s eyes flick back and forth, back and forth they move across the landscape that flings by outside the vehicle. She is a spirit, fleeing at inhuman speeds through air. She flies past fields, past baobab trees with their heads buried in the earth, their feet frozen in the sky, past villagers swathed in chitenjes, balancing baskets of food or firewood or water on their heads, past flocks of chickens, stray dogs, goats and cattle. She, in the flesh and bone body she still inhabits, was not meant to return to this. The world out here, the village life, the life that engages with magic. Her villagers never meant for her to come back here, and the ritual that escorted them out of the village saw to that.
Iris dries her tears and stares out the window. It is more blurred now, a whirl of yellow. Like Dr. Bryce’s walls. They are both trapped, she and the doctor, walls around them closing in.
Iris sees something out the window, miles beyond the glass that traps her. She moves back and forth, up and down to get a better view, to get the glare and dust of the window out of the way so she can see it better. A grey hump in the distance. A small, benign lump of land from this view; a meaningless, nameless mole on the smooth skin of the land, with no sign of its power and danger. But Iris knows it is much more than this. It is Mulanje Mountain.
She watches as they hurtle down the road toward it. They move toward it so quickly, so recklessly, and she worries. The mountain should never be approached in this manner—so directly, so wickedly fast. She watches as Mulanje grows in size. It is now no longer just a blemish on the horizon; it rises and gains height and mass as if drawing on the land itself, pulling the land up its haunches, adding to its bulk so that it soon towers over them, darkening the sky, blocking the sun entirely. They are now in its shadow. She hears Ellison and Bryce murmur in the front seat. “It’s beautiful,” they say, as though they have no idea, as though it were a piece of art, a sculpture to be admired, nothing more. She cannot understand how two intelligent men can be so oblivious to what is so clear. How can they not notice that the mountain smoulders? How can they not feel its rising heat, its anger collecting above it in the steaming, roiling clouds? Instead they chat happily about their last trip to Mulanje, their hike, how they climbed up and slept on it as though it were a hotel. How do they not know that this is further enraging the spirits who are surely listening to this mindless banter?
Iris sits in the back seat and tries to breathe—long, deep breaths—and she watches what is happening outside the vehicle. People are waving to them, shouting, gesturing. Iris has had her eyes fixed on the mountain for so long that she hasn’t been paying attention to their immediate surroundings. She now looks at the road and the trees and the fields nearby. The landscape collides, smashes together in her mind, an ocean wave crashing to the shore. She is at Mapiri village. She is home.
The crowd outside the vehicle comes closer and Dr. Ellison is forced to slow his speed until he eventually comes to a complete stop in the middle of the road. He cuts the engine. People surround them. Many are children, curiosity getting the better of them. They kick the tires, touch the hood and jump back, laughing, surprised at the heat. They peer in the windows, cupping hands around their eyes to see inside. The adults stand farther back, look stern.
“I guess this is the place,” says Dr. Ellison and he reaches into the back seat, grabs at the bag of supplies beside Iris. Iris shrinks away, tucks her head down. Dr. Bryce peers back at her, frowns. “You okay?”
“I’ll just stay here,” she says. “I’ll look after the car.”
“We’ll need your help to translate,” says Ellison. “The car will be fin
e.” They both look at her. “Come on, then.” Ellison is anxious and impatient. Iris can see the crowd milling outside, Ellison’s large shape between her and them. The glare off her window prevents her from seeing much beyond the shadowed faces of the children who press their noses to the glass. She does not recognize the children. They are too young. It would be the adults she would recognize, and who might recognize her. She presses herself back into the seat, makes herself small, shakes her head at the doctors. “I’ll stay.”
Sighing, Ellison reaches around to the handle of the back door and pushes it open. In the sudden bright sunlight, over the heads of the children, Iris sees a woman. Her face—round, dark, gentle—is familiar. The woman sees her. As Iris tries to recall her name, pulls back into the mind of her childhood, searches for a name, she sees the woman’s face change. Her eyes widen, her mouth draws open into an oval, but then her lips peel back, spread across her teeth. Her eyes tighten in fear. Iris hears the sound coming from the woman, who she now knows is her aunt, her father’s sister: first a moan, low but slowly rising, gaining pitch until it is a scream and someone, another villager, a man, pulls her aunt into him, buries her face and Iris hides her own. She folds forward into herself, covers her face with her hands, and allows the wrenching emptiness to split her open.
Chapter 11
Iris is sitting with the women and Henry feels sorry for her, so uncomfortable and stiff and silent in her dress while the women talk and laugh and sway and hum some tune as they work. Her movements are quick and rough while theirs are smooth and fluid. Even though she seems to know them, she doesn’t belong. She is like a duck squatting among swans.
There was confusion when they arrived. People running, people shouting, even screaming—a woman in the crowd wailing that frightening sound as though someone had died. The sound that always accompanies a white sheet, a red cross, a body beneath and Henry immediately worried that they were too late. But there was no such tragedy. There was Iris, huddled strangely in the back seat of the car, and the injured boy still lay with a fractured femur not far from the road in the village.
