The Colonial Hotel

by Jonathan Bennett

  I saw the last raw strands of sun leave her body as it set behind that exhausted, naked continent we were on. Later, after some sleep, but still during the night, Helen spoke. Can I do this? she asked as she climbed onto me, easing her body down, more slowly than was necessary. The scars and bruises on her body from the work, the stars through the window in the dark, these gave me the strength to see that this service and my life was bigger than I was.

  Looking up, as if to heaven, she said, I should not be afraid. I know why I am doing this.

  I saw the sun rise over her the next morning, glinting off the city towers, chrome, glass, altering all of my aspects, thoughts, and perspectives. I was taken. I saw a river. I travelled on boats using winds on a reach for the mouth. I saw ruins. I guessed at the history. I fell effortlessly in love.

  Can I do this? she asked again and again.

  Yes, I said. We can, we can.

  By the time we checked out I knew that I would never be going home—that, like her, I had none. We would be each other’s home.

  My daughter, does she remember this as I do? We stole the robes and slippers from the room, gave them to a woman begging in the street. Is this how she weaves it or have the details been altered or embroidered with time and retelling? Take these, we said to the beggar and we laughed the giddy laughter of two people who had changed their minds about what could and could not be done and together were charging ahead to someplace wondrous and unknown.

  * * *

  Helen

  IT IS NIGHT AND WE have stopped. We have passed through the foothills and the large mountains are before us. Oenone tells us that the bus does not have working headlights and the roads ahead are steep and difficult. We will set off again at sunrise. The air is cool and the sky is lighter than usual because of a full, white moon. Some of the women stayed on the bus. Others, myself included, got off and stretched out on the ground, resting on a piece of clothing or luggage. The earth is weathered and old-looking here. I was alone for some time, left to listen to the murmurs of mothers calming their babies. For some moments there was only sleeping. The sounds of the cooling bus engine clicked into the evening. I can see well enough to write if I angle my page skyward at the moon.

  Then Oenone came to me. She was carrying a torch, fire burning on the end of a twist of thick reeds. Her face flickered.

  You are a foreign nurse? The herbs are not working, she said hurriedly. My child is dying. His face is telling me he is dying.

  I recognized the controlled distress of a mother. From my backpack I grabbed my stethoscope and the small first aid kit that I carry. I was brought to her son, a boy of about four or five whom I’d seen sitting up on the bus seat behind her, smiling, only hours before. Now he was lying on dry grass a short walk away from the bus at the edge of some bush. Oenone had a wet cloth on his forehead. I peeled it away. She had put some herb or leaf under the cloth, and the child seemed to have some in his mouth which I saw as he began to cough and vomit.

  This boy was very sick. His pulse was rapid. He then began to have difficulty breathing. I listened to his chest, an erratic heartbeat. Oenone was crying something in her language over and over again, then she began making a sound and waving her arm, first in the air, then along the ground, and just as I realized that she was telling me the boy had been bitten by a snake, I came upon the puncture wound. It was on his left calf. The hugely swollen leg. His pulse thinned. Then his respiratory function collapsed. He arrested. A small body that had no chance. I worked on him for several more minutes but was never able to retrieve him.

  I looked up as I stopped. Oenone’s face opened and I felt, rather than heard, the sound that came from her—a hoarse, angry, terrified scream of disbelief, of self blame, of rage that reached into the mountains, bouncing back and forth with menacing accusation. She scooped up the boy’s body and ran a distance with it until she fell to her knees to begin a keening that is still continuing as I write this now. Other women on the bus have gone to be with her, joining with her, in a rhythmical way that would have an element of song, were it not so painful. They cry and wail, the way blood pumps, the way the days come and go, the way a tide washes in and away.

  Peanut, I have this in store? The risk of enduring such total loss? I would sooner choose myself. I must go to be with her, if I’m allowed.

  Oenone’s mourning cries continued all night. When I went to her, one woman stood to leave as I joined, and the others remained. I followed along, taking two handfuls of dirt, breathing in as they did, allowing the sorrow to come out of me, the completeness of it rushing upward and out, in violent throbs. I cried with them, yes for Oenone’s boy, but also for myself, until I had nothing left but a connection to the earth and God. I left them and slept until the first light came over the mountaintops, finding us down here in these cool foothills.

  Oenone came to me in the morning. She had a calm about her. She did not look tired, or bereft, but instead she reached out her fingers and touched my cheek. She thanked me for trying to save her boy.

  I knew I waited for you to get on the bus for a reason, she said.

  I apologized for not being able to save him. But she stopped me. She said I’d been on the bus to show that nothing could have saved him. Not local cures, not foreign medicine. Without me, she might have always wondered.

  Some of the women and their young boys were gathering wood, dragging dead branches into a pile, gathering long grass. It was lit with a petrol swoosh. The bus was now empty of passengers. We stood gathered around the large fire. Oenone brought her son’s body to the edge of it. She then looked away.

  Another woman used a rock to strike the boy’s mouth and reached into it, bringing out a front tooth. The woman handed it to Oenone, who clamped both her hands around it.

  The child was then doused in petrol and thrown onto the fire. The crowd of us stood for a moment to witness the engulfing.

  We boarded the bus, tired, shaken. With Oenone still at the wheel, we began a slow and difficult trip through the southern mountains bound for the capital city.

  My daughter, I looked back through the open window as we drove away. I suspect that I was alone in this. For some reason, I needed to see the scene without people. By the side of the road I saw a boy’s small body being cremated. The pyre was already burning down, his body lost within it, taken by the smoke, and the flames, and the sparks.

  The sun now streamed through the pass in the mountains ahead, lighting up the plain that extended on to the horizon. I have seen so much death. But it’s really only the dying that I see. The clinical last few days or moments. I do not attend the funerals. I do not weep with the widows or orphans, with the parents, with the community. I write facts on a sheet, seek a doctor’s signature for a chart.

  The smoke trails upward, the wind taking Oenone’s son into the air, into itself. With each breath, peanut, you and I become nearer to death, taking the dead into our lungs. But with you inside me, I bring you toward life.

  I have chosen you. For now, you are in me. When I have you, then you will be only you. And you too will breathe this world’s air, with its agony, its mountain pass beauty and life.

  I do not have her inner strength. Oenone carries the ferociousness of motherhood into her every purpose. She drives, she acts, she consoles others, all with it. Where does this power come from? Can I learn? Can I become so invested in others that I no longer see myself as having an end? This is how she is. She carries a force with her, a burden that she does not question, but rather accepts and uses. She takes on this weight that others would simply fall under, and instead makes it hers, showing us all how to work with it and not against it.

  Oenone adds to the world. I subtract from it.

  Next to her, even though I am a nurse, I am delicate and pretty. My life, one that I considered unfairly difficult and something to escape from, I see now as vain and trivial. I deserve no pity. Peanut, with you though, I
will begin to add. I will try to be like her. I promise. I will ask God for this.

  The bus made the journey slowly although the roads were clear of soldiers. When we arrived, Oenone parked at the sea wall off the main square of the downtown. There was traffic—trucks and buses, cars and bicycles that had travelled from all across the country. We disembarked and most of the women and children gathered beside the bus on some grass and awaited Oenone’s next instructions. I looked into Oenone’s face, searching, I think, for any final words, directions for how I should act in this world. She smiled.

  Goodbye my blind sister, she said. I wish you happiness and good health for the baby you carry. And as she said those words I saw, finally, that she looked tired.

  Get some sleep soon, I said.

  This is not my sea. It is not, but the salt and wind of this place is enough. This afternoon I stood on the top of a hill overlooking the shallow harbour where the capital sits like a bird’s nest. I felt a pull toward home. It was the seagulls. What is it about seagulls that make them native to everywhere? I see them wherever I go. Even in countries that are inland with vast lakes, not oceans, seagulls bob and float about, squawking. Like me, these birds make every place home.

  The sea is easy to read if you know it well enough. If the lost hours of your childhood were spent sitting in front of the sea, watching the wind on it, the weather forecast itself with whitecaps and clouds, with seaweed, the surface schools of fish shimmering in explosive escape, and treacly crimson and ginger sunsets. Then wherever you go, you can read the sea.

  Will you be able to?

  I’d never thought about that before today. Standing there on that hill, taking in the subtle shifts of wind and current, I sensed a change was on its way, a storm. If this was my home then I would know what kind of wind it was, what it had in store—such as the southerly wind that carries cool air, or a dark squalling nor’easter with storm and rain, or else a hot westerly with its dry and awful relentlessness.

  Here I could not tell exactly what was to come. This is not my sea. But I knew the beginnings of movement on the sea. I know how to read change on the ocean because it’s a part of who I am. And, peanut, as my hand rested across my stomach instinctively, I wondered if you will also learn to read change on the sea.

  You will, if I choose it for you.

  At the bottom of the hill two boys were fishing with short lines rolled up around pieces of wood. They were tossing their lines into the water near the rock pools where the last licks of water were ebbing with the gentle current. From time to time one of them would reel in a thin, silvery fish. Without talking he would grasp it in one hand, take out the hook, and toss it into a metal container behind him. There was almost no talk between the boys. Perhaps they were brothers; they looked alike and one was taller than the other. A stray dog looking for food or attention trotted past and stuck its nose into the container. One of the boys turned and stamped his foot; the dog continued on its way.

  Many of the houses along the coast have white walls with pitched terracotta roofs or shiny metal flat ones and either green or blue painted front doors. Palm trees and other low shrubs lined the shore. People came and went easily, as if there were no war happening on the other side of the mountains, the range giving them immunity. The mountains themselves then drifted off into the background haze as I turned and looked inland. This was the direction from where I’d come on the bus.

  Along the short beach at the end of the harbour was a market where merchants sold fruit and carpets, donkeys and tires for trucks and cars. I’d wandered through it before deciding to walk up the hill. The market had an atmosphere to it that I had grown used to, an air that everything was negotiable. I bought a bowl of noodles and meat, which I ate with a plastic fork before walking farther and farther up the hill. Plastic forks—some evidence the world was still functioning properly here, I thought.

  I hadn’t planned on getting all the way to the top of the hill, but was glad I did once I’d arrived and sat to rest. How right and elemental it all felt. The boys fishing, the clouds, sensing the change on the ocean made me feel in control.

  One of the boys caught a squid. The other became animated. This was clearly an unexpected catch. Perhaps it meant money. In any case, the lines were wound in and the metal bucket was filled with enough water to keep the catch fresh. The boys made their way back along the path below me toward the market and the port. I looked back the other way for the dog, to see if it was lurking.

  I was about to stand and make my way down when I spotted a figure walking up the hill toward me. It was a nursing colleague—a newer girl I didn’t know well. I waved as she came closer and she did the same in return.

  I saw you at the market, she said. I tried to catch up, but I lost you. I was about to turn back when I looked up, and there you were, on top of this hill.

  She and the others who had been at the camp were driven in a convoy back to the capital as word of the growing coup reached them. They had been stranded here for three days, awaiting instructions on how they were to get out. She told me that while they knew Paris and I had been on leave in the town, they were unable to take that route due to the insurgency. They had expected to see us here, already in the capital.

  We were jealous of you, she said. You must have gotten out so easily compared to us—still in the camp. Then she asked after Paris. I was not ready to answer her. I did not want to worry her. Perhaps I was concerned how she might take the news, or what she might do with the information.

  He’s alive, I said, waving my arm in a general sweep at the sprawling city and the mountains beyond, suggesting vaguely, he’s there somewhere. She did not press further.

  We talked then about the work, the organization, gossiped about others with whom we nursed. I believe she was looking to strike an alliance. She likely sensed in me a colleague who might help her see through the complicated parts of this work, the politics and the personal conflicts. Normally, I took in stray birds. This time though I stayed detached. I felt unwilling to commit to her. Like this strange sea, I was undergoing change. Committing to something else, someone else would have been in bad faith. So I remained kind, but guarded. She sensed my reserve and respected it. We returned together down the hill, not cementing a secret pact, but commenting on the sea, the difficult life that awaited the people here. I felt in her something of myself when I began this job—an eagerness to impress, to be in the thick of the action. It was her turn.

  I reached the executive director on one of the few telephones still connected in the city. We talked only briefly, her responses and questions colliding into my own words echoing back at me in a frustrating delay that allowed no conversational rhythm to develop. She did, however, grasp what I was telling her. She knew how serious the matter was and I was reassured by her use of the phrases report to the government, and friend of one of the board members will know what action to take. The executive director instructed me to get on the first plane I could and remain with the others. She assured me they were praying for our safe return.

  But I did not want to be with the others at all. They were suffocating me. I wanted to be free from their grip. If I went to them, the questions would mount quickly and I would not be able to deflect them as easily as I had done with the new girl. Eventually, questions of paternity and my physical and mental state would surface through insinuation. My professional capability would be called into question not directly, but through inference or omission.

  They wouldn’t understand. This is all for you. All because of you, peanut. There had been no other option for me there on that mountainside than to follow instructions, no explaining the woman who sought the information from the leather vendor. None of the real story would be admissible. And I have no ability to invent plausible, alternative stories either.

  So I made the decision to hide out and wait here for Paris, and then escape with both of you. I will not get on the same plane as the o
ther nurses. Instead, I’ll lie low another few days and wait. He will come. He must. We’ll use this moment to leave the organization altogether. Despite the obvious danger to me and you, peanut, the way out of my life as I knew it is before me. We can leave the secrets and horrors behind. We have Paris now.

  My peanut, deep inside me, you are changing me with every decision I make. I didn’t meet the new girl and the others at the expensive hotel on the corner of the main boulevard as I’d said. Instead, I went back to Oenone’s bus. I waited for her until the sun set for the evening. She did not return. Unsure of where to go or what to do, I wandered in the opposite direction from that hotel and my nursing colleagues.

  The streets were clearing as the night air rolled down from the mountains. A narrow hotel that had signs in English came into view. Running out of choices I checked in. The porter behind the desk gave me a brass key and I bought two tins of Fanta from him. Off the lobby to one side was a small bar. It had a pool table. About a dozen local men were drinking beer. They were watching a game of soccer on a television.

  My room, though clean, had no electric light, a single bed, and no sheets. There was just a mattress on a metal frame with slats underneath. The window looked onto the street below. I stood at it for a while, taking in the darkening sky. The smell of the sea was in the air. I heard the sounds of a far-off car horn and, closer, the hostile laughter of drinking men. I would not be able to eat this evening—it would be too dangerous to go out after dark. I used my backpack, which I had been carrying all day, as a pillow. I ate a mango and a tin of sardines, what I’d managed to carry in my pack from the Colonial Hotel. While it felt good to stretch across the bed, sleep did not come. I grew anxious. So, I am writing this down, for you, in case.