“What?”
“At least you can now put an end to this fostering nonsense since you can’t possibly still be considering going through with it.”
It’s exactly what I’d been thinking myself, that his status meant all choice had been taken from me, but her arrogant certainty made me cross my arms and challenge her: “Why not?”
“AIDS is a death sentence, Ruth. That child is going to die. It was a ridiculous scheme to begin with, but now . . .” She trailed off and then shook her head before adding, “As though you, of all people, would possibly be equipped to deal with it.”
If her words were meant to dissuade me, they had the opposite effect. Instead, they made me want to prove her wrong. And the only way I could do that was to seek out contradictory information, which is why I’ve signed up for this course.
A young woman with long brown hair strides in and pulls a binder from her bag. She looks like the kind of person who doesn’t take shit from anyone and I like her immediately. “Good morning, everyone. My name’s Courtney and I’ll be your course facilitator.” She walks around the room, thumping thick manuals onto desks. “This is the official course material but I have to warn you that it’s exactly what you’d expect from a bunch of bureaucrats with fancy degrees who push pencils all day and write training programs about things they don’t know the first thing about.
“These manuals are packed full of dense paragraphs with dry descriptions, and the language is so clinical and inaccessible that I wonder if this attempt at formal euphemism is meant to shield you from what awaits you instead of preparing you for it. Luckily, you have me to translate it for you. Now, let’s go around the room so you can all introduce yourselves and tell us why you’re here.”
It turns out that although we’re quite a mixed group, we share the common goal of wanting to learn how to care for HIV-positive people. More than half of the group are health-care professionals, with the rest, besides me, being volunteers. All of them are going out into the field to deal with unknown patients, mostly homosexual men. I’m the only one considering bringing an HIV-positive baby into my home and the only one for whom this is personal.
Courtney fiddles with the overhead projector and cues a slide. “Right, they say that the first rule of war is to know your enemy. So, here it is. Your first look at it. This is a 3-D rendering of the HIV virus. Don’t be fooled by how innocuous it looks. It’s a hateful little bastard.”
The picture branded onto the screen shows what could be a ball of clay with dozens of bolts embedded in it. She’s right, it doesn’t look all that dangerous but I know better. I think back to the emaciated child with his spindly legs and sunken cheeks that I saw in the orphanage that day. Anything that could do that to a baby has to be completely without mercy.
Courtney gives us a moment to look at the slide and then launches into the syllabus. I struggle along with everyone else to keep up with her. Every half an hour or so, she marches to the whiteboard and adds a new term to the growing list. I copy them all down and size them up as I try to figure out who the biggest villains are: HIV, AIDS, TB, opportunistic infections, lesions, diarrhea, pneumonia, cryptococcal meningitis, toxoplasmosis, candidiasis, or Kaposi’s sarcoma.
The terms swarm around my mind, as real to me as fire-breathing dragons and hobgoblins. They’re the stuff of fantasy and nightmares.
“AIDS is no longer a homosexual disease limited to men, it’s now predominantly a women’s and children’s disease. The number of recorded HIV infections in South Africa has grown by more than sixty percent in the past two years and that’s just the recorded cases. With the huge stigma surrounding the disease, deaths are being attributed to TB and pneumonia on death certificates so that funeral parlors won’t refuse to handle the bodies. I suspect the real figures are double the official ones. We’re heading for a pandemic, there’s no doubt about it.”
The only man in the room, Julian, puts his hand up and then speaks before being called on. “So, what can we do to stop it? Everything we’ve talked about is how to manage secondary infections and palliative care. How can we stop this disease?” His question seems apt, considering men think everything can be fixed while women just try to make the best of bad situations.
“It’s easy to stop,” Courtney surprises us by saying, and the young man nods as if he suspected this all along. “Just make everyone in the world stop having sex. You can lead by example,” she says to him with a wry smile.
Julian shakes his head. “What about a cure? Or an inoculation?”
“At the moment, studies are showing positive results in terms of something called AZT, which is helping to drastically reduce mother-to-child transmission. But once you are infected, there is no cure. The US is working hard on medication that HIV-positive people can take, called antiretroviral therapy, but it hasn’t shown very good results just yet. They’re trying their best but it will take time.”
I raise my hand. “What’s the life expectancy for a child who’s born HIV positive?”
“Fifty percent of HIV-positive children will die before their second birthday,” she says.
Mandla is already eight months old. That means he has just over a year left.
“Okay, that’s it for the theory part of the course,” Courtney says. “Let’s look at some videos to help us prepare for what awaits.”
She pulls a television and video machine on a trolley over from a side wall and pops a VHS cassette in. I take deep, steadying breaths and try to stop my hands from trembling as Courtney closes the curtains. We watch instructional videos, which thankfully include the caring for HIV-positive babies as well as adults, and are shown how to treat a severe rash brought on by days of diarrhea and how to prevent bedsores. We’re also taught the correct way to administer medications through plastic syringes. Immediate vomiting means the medication hasn’t gone down, so we’ll have to do it again.
I scribble notes furiously, terrified that a slight lapse in concentration will result in my missing out on some technique that could one day save Mandla’s life. And then we’re told that even though HIV can’t be transmitted through tears or mucus, we should wear medical gloves when touching HIV-positive people.
Just in case.
It’s a jarring thought but one that makes the butterflies stop flitting against my rib cage. It’s the only reassuring thing I’ve heard all day and I’m immediately depressed about what that says about me, that I want to put a latex barrier between myself and a baby that up until a week ago I wanted more desperately than I’d ever wanted anything. And I’m a person of voracious appetites, so that really says something.
When the course is over and everyone has packed up, I can’t bring myself to move.
“Are you okay? You look a bit green,” Courtney says as she ejects the cassette and shoves it into her bag along with the binder full of slides.
I want to tell her I’m fine but what comes out is, “I don’t think I can do this. It’s too much. It’s not what I signed up for.”
She stops fussing with her bag and leans against the desk next to me. “So, what did you sign up for?”
“A healthy baby. One who would cause a bit of a ruckus in the community because he’s black, but nothing I couldn’t deal with since God knows I’ve caused enough ruckuses in my life. What I wasn’t expecting was for . . .”
“Him to be dying,” she finishes for me, and I wince.
“Yes.”
“Because, make no mistake, this diagnosis is a death sentence.” She sighs and reaches into her bag for a pack of smokes and an ashtray. They’re Dumonts, the long brown cigarettes that always make me think of cinnamon sticks. She taps the pack and two cigarettes eject on cue. “You want one?”
Damn right I do.
She lights up my smoke and then her own, taking a long, deep drag. After she exhales, she says, “This is about as real as shit will ever get. And I don’t ju
st mean for you, because you’re all . . . you know . . .” She trails off as she waves her hand to take me in.
“All what?” I try not to bristle.
“Rich and white and privileged,” she says matter-of-factly. She isn’t trying to insult me. She’s just stating the truth. “I don’t know you, Ruth,” she says. “I’ve just known many women like you. Women who didn’t like getting old, so they made themselves younger. Women who didn’t like being alone, so they made sure they weren’t. Women who didn’t like having nothing and so they got themselves everything.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s life, you know? But here’s the thing. You’re someone who’s not used to being helpless, to not being the master of your own destiny. And that’s the worst kind of person to be in the face of this.” She pauses and then asks, “What’s his name? This baby you thought you wanted so badly?”
“Mandla.”
“Mandla.” She breathes out a plume of smoke. “Don’t take him unless you want him more than you have ever wanted anything in your life. Because here’s the thing, Ruth. All that wealth, and your important connections, and your big, perfect tits, and your beauty-school charm? All of that means jack shit going forward.” With that, she stubs out her smoke and holds the ashtray out for me to do the same.
I see her leave through the mist of my tears. I know she’s right. I also know that sitting helplessly by and watching a child die is not something I can do.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Zodwa
17 December 1994
Big Hope Informal Settlement, Magaliesburg, South Africa
Where are you going in such a hurry?” Ace asks, reaching out for Zodwa’s leg and looping his arm around it. “Come back to bed, baby.”
“I can’t. I’m running late for an appointment.” She extracts herself from his grasp and walks to the table, where she opens her purse and counts out the taxi fare.
“Another appointment?” Ace groans, falling back onto the mattress. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were seeing another man behind my back.” He laughs to show he isn’t serious. What woman would need someone else when she’s already been serviced by Ace?
Certainly not Zodwa, who finds his attentions too much as it is. “You know there’s no one else.”
“Where are you going then? Who is this appointment with?” He reaches for his pants, which are lying in a heap on the floor, and extracts his cigarettes from a pocket.
Zodwa throws the box of matches to him before he can ask for them. “Someone my mother wanted to see about Dumisa.”
Leleti kept a detailed journal of everyone she spoke to over the years in her quest to discover exactly what had happened to her son. Zodwa only discovered its existence when Mama Beauty told her about it soon after Leleti’s death.
For some reason Leleti was never able to explain to Zodwa, she didn’t believe the account of Cyril Malema, the man who claimed to have been the last person to see Dumisa alive, and so Leleti had been interviewing all of Dumisa’s ex-comrades in the hope of shaking some kernel of truth loose from one of them. Each person Leleti saw was meticulously crossed off the list, and now only a few names remain.
Zodwa has made it her mission to track each of them down with Mama Beauty’s help.
“And yesterday morning?” Ace asks, blowing a ring of smoke up at the roof. “Where did you go then?”
Zodwa can’t tell him that she’d been to another orphanage where she’d handed a baby photo of Dumisa across to the social worker in case there was a chance her son looked like her brother at the same age.
“One boy here meets your description. He too has a birthmark but the file doesn’t say where it is or what it looks like,” the social worker had clucked in response. “I need to speak to them about being more fastidious in their record keeping.”
Zodwa wasn’t expecting that, that there was a chance her son might actually be there. After so many disappointments, that glimmer of hope felt all at once too much to bear. She’d followed the woman through a series of passages to the baby asleep in the crib, suddenly daring to believe that this might be it, the moment she finally found her son. And it was only then that it occurred to Zodwa that if she did, if her baby was still alive and she took him home, she’d be blatantly flouting Leleti’s wishes.
What had her mother known about Zodwa that she herself didn’t? What had Leleti seen in her that was so flawed that she believed the baby to be better off without her?
She was sick and she wasn’t thinking straight, Zodwa answered herself. She was confused and upset about the rape. She was trying to spare me, not the baby.
And then the social worker was taking the baby’s clothing off and turning him on his side, and Zodwa floated free of herself, looking down at the child, who had a birthmark on his buttock.
But it was on the wrong side and not in the shape of Africa. Zodwa was too disappointed to cry.
“Hey,” Ace says now, snapping his fingers at her. “I asked you a question. Where were you yesterday?”
“I was at the clinic,” Zodwa lies.
“Which clinic?”
“The birth control one.”
“Hhayi ngeke,” Ace says, voiced raised. “Don’t think you’re going to try to make me wear those condom things. Black men don’t wear condoms. Our dicks are just too big.” He smiles lasciviously before his expression turns serious. “Besides, I heard that’s where the AIDS comes from.”
“What?” Although Zodwa was lying about having been to the clinic, it’s somewhere she plans to go soon. The last thing she needs is to fall pregnant again and Ace can’t always be relied on to withdraw quickly enough.
“The AIDS. I heard that the whites put it in the condoms and then force the black man to wear it to make him sick. I’m not falling for that shit.”
Zodwa shakes her head at his faulty logic. Ace refuses to eat meat that isn’t cooked well-done for the same reason: he heard that’s how you get AIDS. She says goodbye to him and leaves, adding a stone to Dumisa’s shrine on her way out, wondering as she does so if she’ll ever discover the truth about what happened to him.
Regardless, it seems the fate of the Khumalo women is to forever be searching for their sons.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Delilah
25 December 1994
Verdriet, Magaliesburg, South Africa
It was Christmas Day as well as my fifty-seventh birthday, and I’d started it the way I’d begun every Christmas since 1955: thinking about Daniel.
When he was still a child, I’d wonder if the nuns had allowed him a tree and if they’d given him gifts. I had no idea how they celebrated Christmas in the convent, though I suspected it would be austere. I hoped that a child’s energy might persuade them to be more frivolous.
And then as Daniel grew up, I wondered if he was happy and if he ever thought of me; if he was well-adjusted or if he simmered with anger over his abandonment. The older he got, the less I worried, though it should have been the other way around. Children, for the most part, are nurtured and protected. Adulthood is the point at which we’re thrown to the wolves. Wasn’t it just as I’d stepped over the threshold of selfhood—at the very moment when I’d expected my life to get easier—that everything had so spectacularly fallen apart?
Since I’d spent every Christmas without Daniel, I wasn’t prepared for how difficult the first one after his death would be; there had always been comfort to be found in the knowledge that he was out there somewhere in the world even though he wasn’t a part of mine.
When I got back from my morning hike, I was expecting to find Ruth still in bed battling her usual morning hangover.
“There you are,” Ruth said as soon as Jezebel and I stepped through the door. “I was worried you’d be late and that lunch would be ruined. Go wash up! You
’re all sweaty.”
“Look who’s talking.” Ruth’s face was more flushed than mine, but it was clear from all the food on the kitchen counter that she’d been slaving over a stove in a beastly hot kitchen for a few hours.
“Hot flushes,” Ruth said. “From menopause.” She waited a beat and then said, “You know, pausing between men.” She looked so desperate for a reaction that I didn’t try to hide my smile. She beamed in response. “I hope you like roasted everything.”
I took a quick shower before returning, my hair still wet when I sat at the table across from Ruth. We didn’t have any Christmas decorations up but she’d laid out festive hats and crackers. “Here, let’s pull a few.”
The first bang sent Jezebel running to hide behind one of the couches, her tail between her legs. After coaxing her out, we opened the rest of the crackers by pulling the wrappers apart and then swapped the trinkets like we used to do as children. Nothing had changed since then. Ruth still went for anything sparkly or girlie, whereas I preferred the magnifying glass and tiny deck of cards.
“I almost forgot,” Ruth said, standing up and going to the kitchen. “I got us the good stuff.” She plucked a bottle of Moët from the fridge and brought it back, looking worriedly at Jezebel as she did so. “Try covering her ears. I’ll go open this outside.”
The pop wasn’t as loud as I’d been expecting but I still had to wrap my arms around Jez to calm her.
“No, thanks,” I said to Ruth when she was back and trying to fill our glasses. I expected her to say, Fine, more for me! but instead her face fell.
“Come now,” she said. “Live a little. It’s your birthday and a good day for me too because you’re now as old as I am!”
I was touched that she’d remembered. My birthday had always faded into insignificance when we were children, mostly because of the religious holiday and also because Ma wasn’t big on celebrating them. Still, I wasn’t in the mood for festivities and told her as much.
If You Want to Make God Laugh Page 16