My father was charged with assault. The media played and replayed the clip. His opponent cast himself as the victim of a vicious tyrant. Public relations people employed by the opposition party, which my father largely supported, came to his rescue and provided the media with doctors and psychiatrists to properly characterize this for what it was: a breakdown. Dad was never convicted. He issued a public apology and detailed the ways in which he was now getting treatment. It all went away. And so did Dad’s beloved retirement career.
He sold the house and moved to the cabin. I tell you this sad story for a reason. Your grandfather knew how profound it was to be forced to remain solitary. The shame he’d felt was acute. He felt he could never see people again. However, he underestimated the happiness found in memory and imagination. He learned the staying power of it. I know because he allowed some of us to visit him up there from time to time. And on these occasions he let me know what he’d learned about it, about himself. After weeks of not speaking to anyone, no radio or television, a trip into town for food was about all he’d do if he’d completely run out of everything. Was it penance? I don’t think so—he was too much of a crank. He’d simply learned to find pleasure in isolation.
I found pleasure in isolation too, but not until I discarded the notion that I would be saved and that my time here in this cell was temporary. Once I let that hope go, I became free to live. Those were the hours we spent together, my daughter. Those magical years. No one can take them from me. First, moment by constructed moment, they were my imaginings. My inner life kept pace with how it would have, should have, been. And now they are my memories. The broccoli quiche you refused to eat. The first sunfish you caught at the lake. They are no less real to me, no less important, than if they had really happened. Can you accept this? Do you think me as poorly off as my father? I hope not. You are real, and we have lived a rich life. I will die happy. Is that not all a man can ask?
* * *
WHY DID YOU BECOME A doctor? asked Helen. We were on a break between surgeries, the last was a hand amputation of a man who had been attacked with a bush knife. There was no saving it. Not out here. Not with my skills. We had seen enough victims like him on that assignment. Lawlessness and violence played itself out each night in the scrubland surrounding the city. Young men mostly, drunk on the strong yeasty beer and fuelled with the anger only joblessness can incite.
For the money, I said and laughed.
Seriously, she said.
It’s just how I see myself. It started young. I had this urgent desire to take away pain. Does that make any sense?
Yes, it does, she said.
Why did you become a nurse?
When I’m providing care to another person, I am not feeling anything myself and I want that. It’s a narcotic.
That country was in turmoil, its political structure had dissolved. Foreign troops were in place; the peace was thin. We did not stay long, for reasons I never did understand. The needs were real and ever present, but Helen was anxious to be re-posted. I went along with her.
The night before we were to ship out, we ate at one of the still functioning restaurants in the capital. It was in the safe zone, heavily guarded, and Western humanitarian workers were the ones mostly populating the few thriving shops and stalls.
Why do you follow me? she asked as we sat eating.
Are you really asking me that?
My daughter, at first I responded the way you’d expect. Helen was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known. Her dedication to her work and to healing people was profound. I said as much, but then I stopped. She wasn’t asking me something. She was telling me something: her description of nursing as a narcotic against the self, her devotion to God. This work, the rip and tear, the violence of the medicine we were performing. She was running from herself, from some deep wound. Why was I making it harder for her to remain numb? This was her real question.
At that restaurant, steaming bowls on the table, vegetables and spices and meat, the night warm and swirling about us, and the familiar throb of danger in the air, I finally put some of it together. And my instinct was what it always was: to take the pain away. And so I tried. And tried. I did not let her go. I did not respect her deeper wish, to be alone and to forget her pain, her past. I thought I could cure her by loving her. I thought I could fix things, bring her back to a normal life and find happiness. Was that the wrong decision? I have never believed so. Not for one day in that cell did I deny her. How could I, when she gave me you?
* * *
SOME OF US WERE MOVED into new cells after we’d dug the mass grave. I was not. I had long understood that not all cells had a window, that prisoners who spoke the local language were largely not given windows and, I supposed, the opportunity to shout out to villagers passing by. In the past months many of the villagers had returned, women mainly but some children, and their cries of laughter floated through the hole and down to me, to my ears bringing a gorgeous ease, filling me with desire to again be with others.
In the moments driving to and from the village on our way to the dig, I had been too stunned by the raw light for my eyes to make out anything much except the outlines of buildings.
What do you see? I’d asked the ghost soldier. Hector knew my eyesight was poor. He could tell by my urgent voice—I would want to know, for later—what did the village around my jail cell look like? He understood my need, and leaned into me so I could hear him.
There are buildings made of mud, Hector said as we bounced down the hill. There is a stand over there selling fruit and live birds that have been caught in the bush. That is where they would congregate to leave to go to market in the nearest large town. Can you see that white building? That is where they pray.
How many of them are there? I asked.
Not many. Only women and small children, but it’s enough to call a village. There are ruins about too. Former houses and other structures, burned or fallen down, left over from before the war. This was a much bigger place once. Maybe it will be again.
It will take the war to end first.
If there are any men left alive in the whole country, they will come looking for places like this.
Why? I asked him. Because it is safer up here in the mountains? Good hunting?
No, no. Hector was laughing. Because there are so many good women here, man. If I get out, I will come back here. I will father the whole next generation of this village. And he laughed some more at himself, at us, alone, in captivity, helpless.
* * *
WITH THE CELL MOVES THAT followed the digging, I had a new neighbour. He did not have a window like me. I did not know who he was, who the man was that scratched on the floor with a rock or piece of tin. He was trying to communicate with me. But I had a lot on my mind.
It was the rainy season and the winds were coming in stronger than ever before off the sea, hours away. The air was brackish. The concrete dust became damp and stuck to me. I was a portrait of myself in grey watercolour. The guards provided Hessian sacking for us to cover ourselves against the cold at night. I was bitten by the ticks it carried, and hunted them for days. The scratching persisted. At night I called out to him. Stop it, I said. But there was no response.
During the day it was not cold, but the water seeped in and a rust trickle from the rotting rebar in the disintegrating concrete floor wound its way through my cell. The hole where the mouse once entered now allowed in a rivulet that flowed under my cell door.
Still the rains continued, still the scratching continued. The rains came down, pulsing into the night, making rhythms on the corrugated roof. It came down so forcibly at times that there was nothing to do but to concentrate on it, the pelting, with no beginning or end, just more water.
On he scratched. He was trying to teach me his language. A longer pull. A short tap. Two drawn-out taps. Not Morse code. He seemed to have devised his own lexicon; he was insisting I lear
n it. I had a piece of concrete that had come dislodged from my floor. It did not make the same sound as the metal he was likely using. Still, I tried. I began by copying him. I heard two short taps. When I repeated this, my first attempt at participating, he rapped his metal piece against the wall higher up. I took this to mean applause or approval.
I am a two-year-old learning to talk. I am illiterate and respond to positive feedback by repeating success again and again. After some days I have successfully repeated various combinations and patterns back to him. He is patient. We have the time. Tap, drag, drag, tap-ti-tap tap.
I made letters in the wet concrete dust and began to ascribe taps to each. I attempted to spell words. This was not successful. We tried other ways. I believed he had invented a system that he wanted me to learn, and I was willing, but I couldn’t crack the code. I didn’t understand the referent for each noise or series of noises.
Was he tapping words out in English? I had assumed he was a foreigner. I began to doubt this. If he was one of the political prisoners from the South and was working from different phonetics, well, this would never succeed. I was frustrating him. I was frustrated. I just hammered slowly against the wall for a time. I thought of the slow chant of a bored or frustrated crowd at a soccer stadium, hoping for some action in the play. He continued on tapping and teaching. I stopped. Was I trying to learn a language of the mad? With no light, and in this wet, perhaps he had lost his mind. He had a perfectly logical series of sound patterns that meant words, a grammar of understanding—but was all nonsense to me.
He continued for days. So did the rain. Scratching and tapping. Talking and instructing. He copied my slow tapping from time to time, trying to rouse me. I thought of this in general terms, discarding the specifics of what he was trying to say, or teach. He was a man tapping on a wall, desperately. He was utterly alone and believed he had a way out of this. He did, and he did not.
The way outside was to look further inside. The rain, the man tapping—both distracted me from my life with you, daughter. My comfortable, carefully considered life that was more precious to me than managing to exchange a few simple, scratched-out words with my co-prisoner.
Several days later the tapping faltered, and then finally stopped. On my cot I watched the rainwater run through the mouse hole and wind its way along a crack in the cement floor. I climbed off my cot, putting my face right down next to the water so I could see properly. I was right, it had turned red. The rivulet was blood. I cried out for the guard. I screamed and cried out. Eventually he came and I showed him, pointed to next door.
The only scenario I could imagine was that having failed in using the metal against the wall to communicate he used it across his wrists. That night I called out to the ghost soldier.
I do not know who it was, man, Hector said. Maybe they put him in there when we were away digging.
I was never able to find out anything more.
* * *
DAUGHTER, I WANT TO TELL you about a dream. I am at a farm. A large brown cow is alongside a wood fence that is painted bright white. The dream is still. Breeze and time is measured in the breaths I take. Do you think this is an image from when I was young? It is invented, or else it is one of those image dreams that many people have, and means something to those psychologists who study such things. After a time a woman comes in from somewhere and stands beside the cow. She pivots toward me. Her hair is auburn and wet. She smiles and walks toward me. The cow bobs its head down and takes up a mouthful of grass, begins to chew. It all appears completely natural and sure. The woman’s shirt is perfectly ironed. She simply comes toward me. She never arrives but does get closer, staying in the middle distance, purposefully walking.
She talks to me in some versions of the dream. She makes simple, conversational statements that seem unconnected to anything. That’s fine with me. Or, Let’s try that tomorrow. I assume there must be more to our conversation, and that I retained these phrases because I had woken up soon after she’d spoken, for whatever reason. Why the cow? I do think there are other matters she speaks to me about though.
Do you have this dream?
My father had a similar dream to this. His was a horse, but the woman seemed to be the same. We would always tell one another when we’d had it. I always enjoy it because of this connection and if I have it close to dawn, I hold onto the feeling it gives me, let it swim about me freshly in the morning. The tone of her voice is as familiar as snow.
I thought I’d tell you about it, as if you and I were having tea, and you’d shared a story of a dream with me, and it was my turn to respond. And also knowing that your grandfather would want me to see if it was somehow passed along to you.
* * *
THE NOISES FROM THE SURROUNDING village became more frequent. I sensed a change in the country. It began with the sound of a voice. Far off, drawing closer. A conversation began and others joined it. I listened hard, picturing the person from whom the voice was coming. It was a man.
For reasons I did not then know, a few men had begun to move back into the village, joining the women and children. Their deeper voices carried to me through the night especially as they sat in groups around a fire, with talk and the crack and hiss of drying wood.
The men would sing as they worked, perhaps repairing houses or civic buildings. But their presence altered the confidence of the other people. They were able to once again be properly, safely alive. Did this change I felt in the air, the electricity of a new day, mean something for me too? I had no real knowledge, I told myself. Just snippets of laughter and song that floated in on the wind, local people going about their business. Still, I could not ignore that until recently there was no real village life. The settlement had been gradual. Tentative calls from one woman to another, a baby crying. Then more women and children. Then a few men. And the sound of trucks coming and going delivering food or water.
One day I received no food cup at the usual time. Instead, I heard a man’s voice on a megaphone. If I had spoken their language better I might have caught more than the few simple words I did—which did nothing to reveal to me the purpose of the announcement. But as I listened to the faint rise and fall of it, the tones of appalled outrage then of assurance and trust, I knew exactly what was happening. My heart rushed at the recognition. And then, if I was still in any doubt, applause spilled forth from the villagers. This was a candidate. There would be elections. Perhaps there would be change. Then, almost as quickly, I considered the possibility of its opposite being true. Perhaps there would be more of the status quo, or worse, violence. This was all conjecture, but I did have some evidence after all. The guards arrived later in the evening with our food. They appeared no different.
Soon after I’d overheard the speech, the emissary arrived.
My name is Claude, he told me. His English was faltering, but we were able to converse. He asked who I was, where I was from. I drew his face close to my own.
My eyesight is poor, I told him, seeing the first white face in so long, now up close. Blue eyes. A receding hairline. Narrow nose. Thin lips, clean shaven, slightly cleft chin. Claude, I spoke his name several times to myself, to hear the ring of it, to see him nod in agreement, that he was real, that I was speaking it correctly.
I only have a few minutes, he said. We must talk quietly—the guard is listening and will report on what he understands of our conversation. I am with an NGO. We are the only ones who stayed in the field here. We paid the Colonel bribe money. No others would. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
I nodded.
We had heard rumours late last year that there was a white doctor being held. We couldn’t believe it.
There are others too, I said. A few other foreigners.
No, he said. They are no longer here. I have been in all the cells today. There are only four of you here. The others are former leaders of the previous opposition, and a priest.
I saw t
hem before the rainy season. We were forced to dig a mass grave together.
Where?
Two hours down the mountains. Close to the sea.
We found it already. We know about it. How many bodies, do you know?
Fifty, I think. Soldiers. Maybe a few others?
We did research on who had been thought killed when the fighting broke out. You were one of those who we surmised may still be alive—if this rumour we’d heard was true.
I’m glad it was true, I said, and tried on a smile. He returned it.
There are to be general elections next month. The government is a ruling junta. You know this?
Tell me everything, please.
The Colonel no longer has the will of the people. He has spent all the country’s money on munitions. The soldiers have abandoned the army because they are no longer being paid. The opposition is organized and the Colonel agreed to call an election. It will be observed, but most of us think it will be a sham. He is doing all this to secure new money from oil proceeds in the North. We know he wants to mount a new campaign to dampen the growing strength of the southern opposition. That’s where things stand.
The Colonial Hotel Page 9