Kalyna's Song

by Lisa Grekul

  At least if they were healthier-looking embryos. Chubbier ones.

  When she steps into the shower beside me, my eyes are closed, and I’ve got my back to the sinks. She’s so quiet that I don’t hear her until she’s turned on the taps. The sound of the second shower-head surprises me.

  I jump. We say hello.

  And then nothing. Just the sound of water beating against the tile.

  I’ve never showered with Thandiwe before. She always showers in the early morning, with her friends. I try to shower alone, late at night, or in the afternoon, when there aren’t too many other girls around.

  Standing next to Thandiwe in the shower, I have the sudden urge to talk to her about our encounter at the ironing board, during my first day at the college. I want to say how sorry I am for walking away that day. I should have stayed. I should have made an effort to get to know her right from the start. Maybe we could have been friends.

  My heart races. It’s now or never. This is my chance. Why can’t I speak? Why can’t I just open my mouth and say something?

  Thandiwe soaps up.

  Speak, speak, speak.

  She rinses away the bubbles.

  Or sing.

  I don’t know what the words mean, and I don’t know if she’ll laugh if I pronounce them wrong, but I have to try. I decide to sing one of the songs that I’ve heard Thandiwe sing every morning in the shower.

  Thula, thula mama, thula

  thula mama, thula

  thula mama

  The song is sweet and slow; as I sing it, I keep my eyes straight ahead, focused on the wall of the shower. If I turn to Thandiwe, and she’s frowning, I don’t know what I’ll do.

  Samthatha sambeka ekhaya

  wasuke wakhala

  wathi mama thula

  When I start in on the second round of “thula, thula mama, thula,” Thandiwe joins in.

  I let her take the lead part.

  I let her lead me through the rest of the song.

  From time to time my voice falters and cracks. Her voice gives me the shivers. I can’t believe that I’m finally singing with her. I’m so happy, I could cry. Thandiwe keeps going, solid and strong.

  Thula, thula mama, thula

  thula mama, thula

  thula mama

  Afterwards, when we’re towelling off, side by side, I ask Thandiwe if she can translate the Zulu song for me. What does it mean? I wonder. What were we singing about?

  She explains that it’s a kind of freedom song, in the form of a lullaby. It’s a song of comfort for mothers whose children have been imprisoned. “Thula mama” means “hush mother.” Hush mother, don’t cry. Hush.

  I wish that I could give Thandiwe something in exchange for the gift she’s given me. Something as simple and as beautiful as this Zulu lullaby.

  Later in the evening, after dinner, I walk over to her cubie. I take along my pysanka, my Forty Triangles pysanka that has no white on it, and no black. She cradles the egg in her hands like it’s a baby bird, thanking me with a nod, a smile.

  But it’s me who’s thankful. Something changed today, in the shower. From the outside looking in, it might not seem like such a big thing. Thandiwe and I sang a song together; I gave her my pysanka. It might not seem so important. I feel different, though. What happened in the art room doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I feel warm all over.

  I almost feel – reborn.

  Five

  The smell. Late Monday night, and it’s here already. In my cubie, in the air. In my nostrils.

  In my head, I know. But I can’t get rid of it.

  For three months now we’ve been volunteering at the hospital – Rosa, Carlo, a guy from Brazil, Siya, and me. Not the Raleigh Fitkin Hospital in Malkerns, where well-to-do Swazis go when they get sick; not the private clinic near Manzini, for diplomats and Waterford students and foreigners in general, those who can afford a private bed and a European doctor. We volunteer at the Government Hospital in Mbabane, on the Children’s Ward – once a week, every Tuesday morning. Twelve Tuesdays in total, so far. I should be used to the place, the patients. The smell. I should be at home with all of it.

  I should be used to seeing Rosa and Siya together, too, holding hands as they walk up the wheelchair ramp to the Children’s Ward. Sneaking kisses when they think no one is watching them, and giggling at private jokes. From time to time, though, I still catch myself staring at them. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the oddest couple. Rosa is tiny. She can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. Siya is short and fat. He’s at least fifty pounds overweight. I try not to pay attention to the colour of their skin, but she seems so white next to him, and he seems so black. All of the nurses on the Children’s Ward notice it, too. I know they do. They’re all Swazi women. When Rosa and Siya walk through the corridors of the hospital, the nurses’ heads turn.

  Rosa and Siya don’t care.

  I’m allowed to leave campus again, but I don’t spend as much time downtown. During my blacklisting, Rosa and Siya found a new favourite restaurant in Mbabane. They have a regular table that seats two. On Saturdays, I usually head back up the hill in the afternoon, instead of staying in town until evening. Most Sundays, I don’t leave campus at all. I don’t want to be a fifth wheel.

  Mrs. McBain seems satisfied. She smiles when she sees me eating Sunday dinners with some of the other scholarship students – usually Shelagh and Nikola – or with Thandiwe and her friends from Soweto. During my piano lessons, when Mrs. McBain asks about my E2 composition, I tell her that it’s coming along fine. Should be finished right on schedule.

  In fact, I’m still working on Ukrainian folk songs. So far, my essay is forty pages long, and it’s only half-finished. My pysanka pictures are ready to go, and I have two cassette tapes of folk music recordings to accompany the final draft. I can’t wait to show Mrs. McBain. She’s going to be stunned.

  I just wish that I’d chosen another Community Service. Because Monday nights are starting to take their toll. I dread them. By the middle of August, I’m looking for any excuse not to go to the hospital. When I try to go to sick bay with make-believe migraines, the nurse on duty just sends me away with headache tablets. Homework doesn’t work. Everyone has homework. At the beginning of the term, in June, I tried to use my wardrobe as an excuse. Women have to wear long skirts in all government buildings. I only had one – short – skirt. The nurses on the Children’s Ward didn’t approve the first few times that I wore it. Rosa bought a skirt for me, though, in town – a long, black skirt with white stripes.

  Rosa and Siya aren’t the problem. The skirt isn’t the problem. It’s the smell.

  Late Monday night, and the smell is back again. I’ve noticed that it comes earlier and earlier every week. At first, the smell woke me up; now, it keeps me up.

  Rosa, I know, doesn’t notice the smell. She’s been asleep for hours, dreaming about Siya, I suppose, her eyes darting from side to side beneath their freckled lids. Twice I’ve brought my sleeping bag and pillow to her room, thinking that maybe I would make a bed for myself on her floor. Thinking that I would drift off – peacefully – taking in traces of Rosa’s oil paint, Rosa’s Nivea cream. Anais Anais, Rosa’s perfume. Twice, though, my plan has failed. The hospital smell follows me to her cubie.

  In my cubie, I try incense – a gift from Rosa who uses sticks of it to mask the smell of dagga in her room – and squirts of my own perfume, Sung. On the bookshelf over my bed, I light a scented candle. Apple blossoms and cinnamon sticks.

  And hospital smell.

  A lot of senior girls are Pre-School Playleaders, tending to staff members’ toddlers – two-and three-and four-year-olds who smell of baby powder, Johnson-and-Johnson baby shampoo. Or tutors. I could be a tutor on the Adult Literacy Team, or the Quedusizi Primary School Team. The tutors work with blackboards and chalk. They’re surrounded by the rubbery smell of pink erasers on fresh, clean, white paper. I’m a decent swimmer, I could join the Hot Springs Group, and dip school-aged, water
-winged kids in the Hot Springs, in the Ezulwini Valley, every Wednesday afternoon. I could be bathing in chlorine each week. Breathing in chlorine.

  I chose the Government Hospital because of Rosa. She’s been volunteering at the Children’s Ward for years. She said that it was the most effortless Community Service project. The most effortless, and the most rewarding.

  “Just show up,” she said. “That’s all you have to do. You’ll really make a difference there.”

  Rosa didn’t mention the smell.

  She described to me the sort of Developing World hospital that I’ve seen on World Vision commercials, on hour-long Christian Children’s Fund programs and Foster Parents’ Plan fundraising telethons. A place bustling with men and white women in khaki cotton slacks, white cotton shirts – cheerful doctors, nurses, and volunteers, all bottle-feeding malnourished infants, spoon-feeding children with spindly legs and distended stomachs. Bringing them all back to life. Doling out vaccinations and advice about breast milk. Rosa mentioned cement floors, cracking plaster on cement walls – a rundown building, all in all, but clean, more or less. She didn’t say a word about the smell.

  No. Not the smell. Not the smell, the reek.

  The reek of shit. The reek of piss. The metallic, iron reek of afterbirth and menstrual blood. The toilets on the Children’s Ward – a three-room sub-ward of the Maternity Wing – only sometimes flush, and diapers are hardly ever changed, and if there are showers or bathtubs, I’ve never seen them and I fear that they’re rarely ever used. The sweet rotting reek of open, festering bedsores; of bedsheets rarely washed, caked in dried blood, sweat, pus. The rancid reek of oil from the fried fish – the whole fried fish, complete with heads and tails and fins – that the children never finish at lunch but save in swatches of greasy toilet paper to eat later. The reek of charred human flesh, too; of children rushed in with bone-deep burns from their mothers’ open cooking flames. Children who have no skin left for grafting and who die on the floor, in the hallway, their bodies still feeling the fire.

  Sometime before the sun rises, I fall asleep with the smell.

  When I open my eyes, Rosa is standing over me. Oblivious to the hospital smell still strong in my cubie, she is smiling, telling me that I let my candle burn down in the night, and that a pool of hot wax has collected and cooled on my bookshelf.

  “We’ll have to clean it later,” she says. “We don’t want to be late for the hospital.”

  As I get out of bed, Rosa rummages in my closet for the skirt she bought me in Mbabane.

  I think it isn’t fair that we have to wear skirts. Carlo and Siya don’t have to wear skirts. It isn’t fair that Carlo can bring his soccer ball, either, and bounce it non-stop in the bus on the way to Mbabane and grin from ear to ear the whole time. Carlo is in love with the sport; he signed up for Community Service at the hospital so that he could play it every Tuesday morning. So that he could take the healthiest children from the ward and play football with them for four full hours. Siya usually goes with him. It isn’t fair. Carlo and Siya leave Rosa and me with the sickest and the feeblest.

  Of course, Rosa never grumbles about Carlo. She never complains about the bouncing of his football or the fact that both he and Siya can, and do, wear jogging shorts to the hospital each week. She’s trying to play matchmaker, that’s the problem. And she’s not very subtle about it. Siya and Carlo have started to play soccer on the same team in Mbabane. Rosa wants me to join her in town to watch them play; then she’d like the four of us to go out together, on double dates. So she’s always pointing out Carlo’s best qualities to me.

  “Look at the scar on his knee,” she says. “Isn’t it sexy?”

  “Listen to his accent,” she says. “Doesn’t it just make you melt?”

  Carlo injured his knee playing soccer, and he’s had five surgeries on it. I think it’s about the ugliest, lumpiest criss-crossed mess of scars I’ve ever seen. Looking at it makes me nauseous. Plus he’s almost as chubby as Siya. How can he be serious about soccer when he’s overweight? He probably injured his knee because he’s too heavy. When he opens his mouth, he sounds like Cheech and Chong.

  Forty of us ride the Community Service bus together on Tuesday mornings. Members of the Quedusizi Primary School Team, the Adult Literacy Team, and us, the hospital crew. On her lap, Rosa carries a cardboard box filled with art supplies – her own finger paints, wax crayons, oil pastels and pencil crayons, plus construction paper from the Community Service supply room at the college. Carlo’s got the inevitable soccer ball. This week, for the first time, I’ve brought my guitar. Siya meets us at the hospital.

  Rosa’s got her Extended Essay all planned out, and the hospital kids are part of it. She’s writing about art therapy, how drawing can be a way of healing. That’s why she brings her art supplies to the hospital every week. She encourages the children to draw. They can draw anything, whatever they please. And then, in her cubie back at school, she analyzes the pictures, interprets them. This way, she can learn about the children’s lives without asking them straight out. She can find out about their individual traumas. Rosa compares pictures, too. Comparisons are the main part of her essay. She tacks up pictures on the walls of her cubie – pictures drawn by the same child over a period of weeks, and months, if possible. Then she studies them for signs of progress. Her thesis is simple. The more the children draw, the more they heal. The pictures are supposed to get happier and happier. Figures with smiles on their faces, figures dancing. Figures sheathed in more, and brighter, colours.

  The bus stops first at the base of the Waterford hill, where the Quedusizi Primary School is located. It’s a rundown, one-roomed cement building next to a clay playing field that turns to mud in the rainy season. The tutors from Waterford take groups of students out to the playing field when it’s dry. When it rains, they hold their classes inside.

  Next, we stop at St. Marks School, a few blocks north of main street Mbabane, where the Adult Literacy Team meets their students – Swazi men and women who have never learned to read or write. St. Marks is bigger and newer than Quedusizi – though still nothing like Waterford. Waterford is a five-star hotel compared to other schools in Swaziland. There’s no lawn around St. Marks, no flowers or shrubs. The paint is peeling on the outside of the building.

  Our last stop is the Government Hospital, south of the Mbabane city centre. It doesn’t look so bad from the outside. There’s a patch of grass in front of the main doors, and the outside walls have been freshly painted. But I know what’s inside. I know what it’s really like.

  As the bus pulls up to the front doors of the hospital, Rosa can hardly wait to get out. She searches the parking lot for Siya’s car. Siya greets her at the doors of the hospital with a big hug. I take a deep breath of fresh air – my last, I know, for the next four hours. Rosa, Siya, and Carlo walk quickly up the ramp that leads through the hospital – past the surgical theatres, past the geriatric wing – to Ward Eight. The Children’s Ward. I lag behind, lingering at the doorway of the playroom – where the children also take all their meals, where some of them sleep at night. The smell here is worse than in any other part of the hospital; it makes me dizzy. I have to lean on a wall to steady myself.

  Six or seven little boys run to Siya and Carlo – all under the age of seven and healthy, for the most part. Almost ready to go home. Some are in hospital with fractured wrists, broken arms; some are recovering from minor burns to their faces and chests. One boy grabs the football from Carlo’s hands, the others race down the ramp to the doors of the hospital. I hear their giggles in the distance as they move toward the empty lot beside the hospital, as they move away from the playroom.

  There are healthy girls here, too – at least three of them, between ten and twelve years of age. They are healthier even than the little boys who play football with Siya and Carlo. In fact, the healthy girls are only here because their siblings are ill. Their mothers send them to the hospital to watch over their sick infant sisters and brothers. T
he healthy girls never play football, never join in Rosa’s arts and crafts. They hardly smile.

  The other children, though – the children who are really ill, terminally ill, and abandoned, some of them, and alone, and never going home – they smile. When they see Rosa, they smile so hard that I think they might hurt themselves.

  Rosa has trouble, sometimes, setting her box of art supplies onto the table in the playroom. The children hug her arms and legs, clinging to any part of Rosa they can grab hold of, and refusing to let go. I have to step in, taking the box from her, freeing her limbs. Rosa makes sure to greet all of the children. Kneeling down to them, one by one, she folds them into her arms, kisses their cheeks. Some are too frail to be embraced, so she strokes their faces, gently, and their hair. They like to touch her face, too – her hair, especially. She lets them.

  Over the last five years, Rosa has formed a bond with several of the children on the ward – the permanent residents, the children who are stuck here until they turn eighteen. Or until they die.

  Mbuso isn’t supposed to have lived this long. His face looks to be about ten, maybe eleven years old, and his body seems even younger. But he’s sixteen. He wears a hooped earring in his right ear, shaves his head like a Mohawk. Mbuso is paralyzed from the waist, possibly the chest, down, I’m not sure. He gets around by dragging himself with his arms and hands. There is no money for a wheelchair for Mbuso, or a catheter, or a colostomy bag. Around his waist, and down around his hips, he wraps raggy strips of bedsheets for a diaper. I think that he probably washes the rags himself.

  Rosa knows a lot about spina bifida from her parents. It starts, she says, in the womb, shortly after fertilization. Two or three weeks into the development of Mbuso, something went wrong, and his tiny neural tube – which, in normal embryos, becomes the spinal cord and the brain – didn’t close properly. Rosa says that underneath Mbuso’s clothes, underneath his diaper sheet, there is an open lesion. A hole in his back, with damaged spinal cord protruding. The hospital has no money for an operation that would close it.