‘I’m afraid you’re too late for the good old days.’ The first words from the large sweating man who seemed to lean over her as he took her hand to help her down from the jeep. ‘No leprosy. No smallpox.’ His own hand plump and damp. ‘Lucky to see syphilis once in six months.’ A man of fifty, sixty. As if his age mattered, yet curiously he bothered her. A long white robe that at least she knew from reading was called a soutane. Grey stubbled hair, the back of his neck pushed in a thick fold above the collar of the white shirt that showed above the gown. A quiet smile it was impossible to read. After the shock, the silliness, of his first remarks, his then telling her more formally, ‘You’re welcome, Doctor Ross. You must know you are very welcome.’
The young man in the promised jeep had picked her up, smiling at her after the bus had brought her several hours from a scrappy but busy town, to where she now stood. The bus driver had called ‘Station One’. Or had she misheard? She had asked him and was still unsure, until the tall man tapped at her window and placed his two pink palms against the glass. He threw away a partly smoked cigarette which a boy dashed forward to retrieve. The heat and dazzle struck her, the strong smell of earth, the raw odours of drainage and the drift of cooking from a row of stalls beneath a spread canvas.
He sized her up, politely but directly. ‘Doctor?’ he said. Doctor woman, she understood. She knew how short she must seem among the people who gathered to look at her, but again politely was the word that came to her, their smiling yet standing at a distance. A small white woman with her frizzed hair that must surely have amused them. She was self-conscious as she had not been for a long time. In her tiredness, an absurd quick memory from so long before, a morning in her new white tennis frock at the club in West End Road, standing with a group of girls, while several boys on the edge of the clubhouse took them in, one of them especially looking at her, the warmth at the back of her neck as though a hand had been laid there. Her first moments in the part of a country where she had come as a scientist, as a doctor, and reverting to a teenager!
‘I’m afraid I am,’ she smiled at him, at those others who watched. How could she not disappoint them?
‘Luke,’ the young man introduced himself. He placed her suitcases in the back seat of the jeep, and the two cartons of medical supplies she had been advised to bring as a gift, although the hospital she came to was known to be a good one. ‘Post office,’ he said, patting one of the packages.
A joke was it, she was not alert to? But before he walked to his side of the vehicle, ‘You would like tea?’ he asked. A woman indicated a space behind her where tables were placed beneath a strip of red cloth, and an array of plates, of cooking pots. ‘I’m fine,’ Lisa said.
‘Tea?’ he asked again. To be quite certain, was it? She wondered should she have accepted, was her refusal an unkindness? A rudeness, even?
She mimed her tiredness, her face against her opened hand. ‘Thank you, no.’ Smiling at the woman, at the others who looked at her with open curiosity. She took the handle at the side of the jeep and raised herself to the high front seat, Luke waiting until she was seated, closing her door and taking his place behind the wheel. Before he turned the jeep, the woman in the red gown who stood by the tables took a bottle she had lifted from a tub of water and handed it up to the doctor. Luke thanked the woman. ‘Very good water,’ he told Lisa, who thought, as she would continue to do for the months ahead, how does one ever break through, break down, this barrier that always seems to exist between ourselves and even those we like and care for? Away from the confining narrowness of ourselves, towards something more—not even sure what that ‘more’ might be. She felt the muddle in her thinking, but for the moment only her deep weariness compelling her, the grittiness of her eyelids, the effort to say so much as a few sentences to the man who drove her. Her fists clenched on her pale linen trousers. When she opened and moved her hands, she saw the dampness of where they had lain. Then as they took to the road people called out and waved. Luke laughed and said in English as good as her own, ‘We like to stare at people. If we look at you we like you.’
The jeep picked up speed on an unsealed road. The dust rose and the road’s corrugations swayed and knocked her against the driver, but it was easy to laugh with him. She grasped the bar running along the door. She looked out to the country they drove through, the vivid flatness, the lean of its trees, the gathering of huts, but little else came in on her from this fragment of the country she must try to make something of. ‘Although one never does,’ a new friend will say to her, months from now, ‘not at least as we might hope.’ He will tell her too that it will not be long before they won’t need the likes of us. ‘Which comes as an enormous surprise for us but not at all for them. We’re not always too smart at seeing the obvious.’
There was a long stretch of road, more turbulent than the first half dozen miles. That wasn’t the word, she knew, her exhaustion now a physical weight she had to force herself against, the accumulation of the long flights, the delays between them, the bus, now Luke talking to her in the leaping swaying jeep. Her mind ran with confused images, sudden starts. She closed her eyes. For several minutes she was back in a plane with its insistent humming in her ears. The jeep juddered again across the pitted road, her head jerking her awake, her mouth feeling as though it were packed with dust, and Luke assuring her, ‘Fifteen minutes,’ and surely teasing, even mocking her a little, grinning across at her, ‘Fifteen minutes to civilisation.’ But all that mattered to her was the desperate craving to have water falling across her from a shower, to be free of the clothes that stuck against her in the afternoon glare, to sleep no matter for how long. And then they were there. The fat man with a sweetish odour stepping close to her, surely some kind of sickness? His speaking through her tiredness as if drawing back veils, his stepping from the long low building to the side of the jeep and holding his hand towards her to help her down. ‘You are welcome,’ his saying the phrase Luke already had used, saying it over again, and the silly remarks that he supposed may have amused her but that she resented. About lepers. About what else was it?
‘I must sleep,’ she told him. ‘Thank you.’ Everything else could wait. Then for three days her temperature ran high and she was not sure when she slept and when she was awake, in the white room with nothing but a table and a carved figure on a kind of pedestal above the bed she lay in, and through the crumpling of time and troubling heat and the one sheet that covered her, into a massed and billowing confusion, a dark woman who spoke to her softly, and bathed her with wet towels, and the running and tangle of memories that came at her more vividly than her awareness of where she was.
At times she would open her eyes and imagine Eva sitting on the side of her bed, as if her not being there would have been the surprise; her mother close to her yet strangely distant, as she occasionally had been in dreams when Lisa lived near the Gloucester Road station, that would come again to her further on and, finally, in the confines of the truck, before fear set in. These quick and unsought images of the pale quiet woman with her hair almost to her waist, the hair the child so wanted to raise her hand to and run across the lovely fall of it. Her mother’s face calm as it had always been against the shaded light from the lamp in the hallway outside her room at home, ‘plum-coloured’ as was written on the tiny piece of paper glued beneath the base of the lamp, but ‘rose’ the young girl had thought, that should be the name of the colour, the rose-coloured shade. Her mother’s hair so smooth it must have been brushed that minute, the girl used to think. And then asleep, and then awake. And now Babcia moving about the house before anyone else, and when Eva heard the old lady she would walk through to the kitchen in her black dressing gown with a yellow dragon on one sleeve. The women would say a few words and the aunt hand her tea, which Eva held on her lap. The mug was bright blue and made of tin, which later on the child knew was called enamel. Each morning was the same as the one before and after, although the light would alter at the kitchen windows as the seasons
turned. When her mother had finished her tea and placed the mug on the table, Babcia stood behind her and ran the brush across her hair in long rhythmic sweeps. Her mother’s head was tilted forward like the head of the woman in so many pictures Lisa would become familiar with at the Mission. The radio on the kitchen window sill on a station that played music and told the news, although neither woman seemed especially to listen. The brush moved on and on and Eva took little interest in the newspaper that Babcia brought in from the tin cylinder at the side of the letter box, as she did each morning, even before she took the dark cloth from the two canaries in their cage on the back porch in summer, in the wash-house from Easter on, until the winter months were run. Then once the brush had been placed back on a shelf beneath the telephone, Eva stood and called to the children from the doorway to their rooms. Or those rare days when she went and sat on her daughter’s bed, and the girl woke to see her, as she did now through her fever.
‘You never come into my room like that,’ David complained to her. And his mother telling him, as she put her hands on his shoulders and explained what he knew was meant to be a joke, and yet for real as well, ‘If my hair was touched any more the shine would wear off.’ None of this strange to them as children, because that is what life was like. As it must be for any child, Lisa will think, watching the children at the Mission, every one of them thinking this is how things are meant to be. Then this first lucid morning after her brief illness, the blind raised and the sudden sense of clarity, as though the air was a kind of marvellous glass one took into oneself.
She sees for the first time with this same vivid perception the woman who had cared for her and bathed her and fed her broth with a spoon as though she were a child, a dark much older woman than herself, with hands as large as a man’s, and dressed in a gown and veil and the sleeves of her tunic cut off at the elbow. Each smiled at the other before they spoke.
‘Bernard,’ the woman said, in an accent that was European. Each hour of the day would carry its surprise.
‘A man’s name?’ Lisa said.
‘A saint’s name,’ the nun said. And then, ‘Sit here on the veranda and I will bring you tea. Before you meet them. The people you have come for.’
She sat in a cane chair that reminded her of the one Babcia for years claimed as her own in the glass conservatory at the side of the house. The old lady would sit for hours and look at the small backyard and the patch of vegetables Stephen took pride in. Look at the drab sparrows and the piece of lawn, the rose bushes that followed the line of the driveway to the garage and never did well, and the grey boards of the neighbour’s fence. The fingers on her good hand snipping at loose strands of cane in a constant monotonous click. Lisa remembering as she watched a brilliant bird flick through the branches of a tree a dozen yards from where she sat. The intense dreams, half-dreams, imaginings, of the past days now paling to the hard reality of what she looked at. And the strangeness of it coming to her yet again, how ‘Eva’ was how she thought of her almost always, more than ‘Mother’. Eva. The certainty as she had wanted to reach out through her fever, through the silence of the imagined room at home, and touch again, touch over and over, the fall of shining hair, hoping the woman who sat in profile would turn towards her.
1979
The Compound. That was what a continent, a country, came down to, the buildings inside the cleared area between a slight elevation in the table-smooth land and the perhaps forty-foot rise that was grandly called ‘The Hill’; the schoolrooms and the school’s long low dormitories, the hospital with its wooden verandas, the house for the teachers and the priests, the blue-painted convent, each building with a name that meant nothing to her but something important to anyone but herself: St Jude’s where patients convalesced, St Anne’s for the women’s ward, St John written in large ornamental script on the wall of the children’s annexe. All within the boundaries of where the bush was cleared, and where a wire fence ran its line as if declaring, one world ends here, and beyond, another begins.
The fence with its double strands of wire was more a concept than a fact. No one expected a raid from any quarter, although the new doctor had not been long at the Mission before she heard stories of other places not far distant, the random angers, the occasional local disputes and tribal pride, a ‘big man’ staking a claim. A story even from ‘over there’, a piece of country which she later learned was in fact a hundred miles from where she lived, where the school of another religion had been burned and vehicles destroyed. The younger sisters liked to watch the doctor as they talked of it, guessing at a fear they did not expect to know themselves, but in the world to which their lives were dedicated, ‘beyond the Compound’ could be a phrase that conjured mystery for Europeans.
Three of the older nuns had trained in Europe; one even spoke of ‘the Mother house’ where she had spent several years, then come back to instruct the local girls whose vocation led them to the white smocks, the veils, their lives of service. They spoke English well, and Lisa felt she was the novice, the learner, the uninformed beginner, as they stood respectfully beside her, handing her instruments, following instructions, the thought inconceivable to them that their competence might indeed outrun the young white woman who so fascinated them. Yet it was with the younger sisters, who became friends as much as helpers, even more than with the French-speaking, splendidly professional Sister Bernard, that Lisa most felt the distance between herself and everything ‘the Compound’ must mean for them. Let alone what lay beyond, the minds, the languages, the thousand ways lives are led beyond our comprehension. They made jokes together, she and these ardent, humorous, kindly girls, with their metal crosses, their singing each evening coming down from the chapel up on the Hill, their gravity and eagerness to learn from whatever they saw her do or explained to them. She liked it when they unselfconsciously touched her hair that they were amused by, or placed their hands on her arm to claim how close they were. And yet lightyears away, wasn’t that the expression her father used to use, when David pestered him about his time in London? No matter how much I know, she thought, I shall never know more than the merest surface of these people. Nor they of me. Lightyears.
In the letters she wrote home she felt the words came to her inadequately and slight. ‘So that then dear Dad is what we call “the Compound” and what happens here. I am good with one body at a time, hopeless on anything else! Don’t ask me what they think, or even what I think myself much of the time. If I’m not dog-tired at night, which I mostly am, I like to lie and think for a while about home, about the Crescent, about the lives we’ve all had there. My own people. This may all sound a simple life, which I suppose it is, and certainly a busy one, too busy for those old luxuries like wondering whether one is happy or not. What a pampered and distant question that even seems.’ And at the end of her letters, often as an afterthought, she would put a sentence to be passed on to her brother, knowing her father would quietly enjoy her teasing him as she did. ‘You might tell David that the women here feel a deep pity for me when they realise I don’t simply not know the prayers they say but have no inkling of “the Faith”. My young friend who helps me in the theatre says, with a certain tone that I think may even be a touch of irony, that the others pray for me. So I thought I might as well give them David’s name while they were at it.’
She would have liked to tell Dad about the older friend who mattered too, but that was simply too hard. How to talk of that without misunderstanding. Instead, she told him that she had a two-roomed, neatly constructed home of her own, ‘the Residency’, that reminded her of the army huts some people had as baches on the road down to his beach house. It was here the visiting doctor lived in what was meant to be an assured privacy, not fifty yards from the buildings she walked to at six in the morning, and crossed back from in the evenings, back from the hospital, the wards, the clinic at their centre, the Admin Block with its two Imperial typewriters, its tin-sided cabinets and its perfectly kept files. Across a long space towards the rise o
f the bush, there was a group of make-do shelters where relatives of the ill slept overnight, where small fires burned at night and the odours of cooking came in layers on the warm still air.
Privacy, she quickly learned, was a flexible notion, something Europeans made so much of, something so much less to the local people, not held in the same webs of self, of isolation. For people to be so at ease among themselves—she was drawn to that, envied it, knew too it was not for her. People sometimes waited to talk with her for no other reason than herself; one of the sisters told her she was family to her. But she valued the gesture towards a life of her own, the two tiny rooms that would be hers and hers alone for the months she spent here in a place of utter strangeness. There was a small veranda on the side of the Residency that made her think of a doll’s house, and a wire screen on the one door that led into it, a window with a dainty lace curtain to either side of the door. A small generator behind the hut mostly functioned but occasionally did not, and then there was the curious sense of sitting in a cave, the oil lamp settling to a pure comforting light, and even the pages of her reference books seeming oddly theatrical, with a hood of shadows above the shining circle. But how difficult to write of even these simplest things: ‘The sky blazes most days, and the redness of the earth seems to take one over, so always there, always foreign,’ did not come anywhere near what she wished to say.
‘There is a strange thing I must tell you, Dad, but the more I feel the distance from almost everything that surrounds me, the look and sound of the people, the words I seldom comprehend, the way they live at such ease in a rigidity of custom and belief that I make so little sense of, the more I feel this particular kind of loneliness is something I would hate not to have had the chance to know. And this side by side with the deep reality of those I can assist and sometimes even cure! The marvellous enduring reality of bodies, where I am at home. Everything but that shades off into uncertainty. The extraordinary adventure of knowing so little about almost everything except the name of a condition, and what I can do about it. I wonder if you see what I mean? As I’ve told you before, being either happy or unhappy, those so over-used words, hardly come into it.’
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